Given what is known about China and how they literally have pulled the biggest heist since in human history I do not understand why Apply is doing this. The annual losses in IP that the US experiences are comparable to the current annual level of U.S. exports to Asia—over $300 billion. According to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, If IP were to receive the same protection overseas that it does here, the American economy would add millions of jobs. Countless companies have moved to China and within a decade seen competitors steal their trade secrets and come out with almost identical products. What is even more baffling is that Apple is obsessed with secrecy. Does it not care that both the Chinese government and industry are hellbent on nullifying it?
Its iBooks and movies were disallowed early in 2016. The Chinese government uses 'security audits' to hack both Apple and the US government. In Beijing, a municipal tribunal issued an injunction earlier this year barring the sale of its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Beijing's Intellectual Property Office ruled against Apple in a patent dispute brought by a smaller Chinese handset maker. Both cases were fictitious. As a matter of fact (something monumentally unimportant to the Chinese government) it was clear that Apple developed the technology first.
Perhaps this is some attempt to stop the Chinese state from openly discriminating against Apple? I very much doubt this will work over the long run. I highly doubt that in 2026 Apple will be flourishing commercially in China.
I once had a lengthy conversation with a member of China's elite. She came from a wealthy family and her fiance had been a Harvard engineering grad student. She was exceptionally well read and well traveled. She even knew about the contributions of Otto von Bismarck . (How many Americans would know the same?) I asked her whether the US could come to some arrangement with China and even cede the South China Sea and East Asia as a sphere of influence including the artificial islands in it. And that after each country had satisfied each others needs they could cooperate for world peace and stability. She responded that China was a rising power and the US was a declining one, that it was for China to 'take' whatever it wanted, that war was inevitable between such nations, and that she had no wish for dialogue. She exemplified the ruthless determination for hegemony that is widespread throughout the Chinese elite, be it economic, political, cultural, or military.
I wish American companies would get with reality on this issue. People in 100 years will look back at the Monroe Doctrine in the nineteenth century or even the brief period of US hegemony from 1989 through 2003 and perceive those periods as golden ages when compared with the ruthless Chinese subjugation that is only just beginning.
Signal (recommended by Edward Snowden) works over both Wifi and SMS. It's completely secure (as much as anything can be) and they don't keep a copy of your message on their servers. The message is encrypted to point that even the NSA cannot read it. Total privacy. I don't understand why more people don't use it. Maybe because teens want to use 'cool' stuff like WhatsApp?
While there a good reasons to be wary of paying to publish where there is an incentive to publish lousy articles because the publisher wants the money, the current system is abusive and is tantamount to theft. I worked part time in a lab for 3 years. I was not paid - and yes I asked for money but they said they could not afford to pay me. However I did get a paper out of it! Yay! Except that even though it was my research, my labor, my stressing out over repeating the experiments many times to convince my PI that my results were legitimate, if I want a legal copy of the paper, I have to pay for it. Just because I was an undergraduate does not mean that I lacked basic civil rights or the right to property. So at the very least the people who busted their asses should be able to get a free copy of the paper and that should be a legal property right.
Then I went to graduate school and of course I was able to get access to journal articles. Later on after grad school I was working and lost access. But I was still interested in some research ideas. And eventually I talked to some people and that led to me going back to do research at a university. But in that interim I had no legal way of getting papers. I paid for them. Some cost around $25 to $30 each. Some cost $80! - the medical ones. But I used that to do research to help humanity for which I was paid very little and I had to pay money for the right to do the groundwork for that research. That is complete crap! At the very least I should get my money back which adds up to a few hundred dollars.
As to university libraries - even elite institutions are finding it ever harder to afford the costs of for profit journals that force secrecy in their contracts. So one college literally often pays 4 or 5 times what another pays for exactly the same subscription in the same country. The price of journal subscriptions has been rising ahead of inflation for decades and the higher the impact factor the worse the problem. And because copyright grants a monopoly, the publishing industry has been able to collect extreme amounts of economic rent. Normally the answer would be to regulate natural monopolies such as what happens in the power industry. It's quite obvious to me that this is what needs to happen in academic publishing.
We also need a way for people who are outside of academic institutions to gain access to journal articles. I am not saying that for profit drug companies should not have to pay. But if I am a tax payer and paying for the research then it is not alright for me to have to pay twice. And realistically at $25 - $50 per article that means that it's just impossible to read or merely peruse 10 or 20 articles a month. And often I might need to look at referenced articles in the footnotes of another article and so I might need to look briefly at another 100 articles in a month. I and indeed 99% of people do not have $50,000 a year to spend on that. And often someone might want to help the economy out with a start up idea. I did ask around if there was a way to buy in to a university's subscription or to get similar mass access by paying a realistic annual fee of say $500 and was told such a concept did not exist.
If someone has a rare disease and wishes to peruse the literature, they typically cannot. And often sick people are quite poor anyway. What if someone serves on a local school board or is a member of municipal government and want to affect improvements in public policy. This happened to me when I was trying to assist my town in making some important fiscal decisions. There was no legal mechanism to obtain the 50 papers I wanted without paying out of pocket. And my position was unpaid. The sheer cost of paying a la carte makes reading the literature prohibitive. You might say that you could go to a university. The problem is that in recent years it has become almost impossible to do so without a valid university ID. And just getting there and finding a place to park is complicated if you are not affiliated with the institution.
In short, individuals who are not using the research for a for profit organization need a legal mechanism to access peer reviewed research. The current system is immoral.
Comparing the salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful.
Your argument is very worrying not only because it is tautological but because we can never stop ever increasing income inequality if people 'accept it'. The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is about 350. In 1965 it was 20. The committee that decides executive compensation is stacked so that people serve on each others compensation committees guaranteeing extravagant salaries. They also prevent a more meritocratic search going out to the general population. It also is one of the reasons why average pay has fallen or stagnated for most people in the US - money spent on executives means less cash for the workers.
And you might also want to think about pay in terms of productivity. Since 1973 it has gone up by about 100% in the US. And yet wages for many people have fallen in real terms. Median household income should be double what it is and perhaps more given that the number of working adults per household has increased as women have gone to work full time.
In terms of finding 'good people'. I have personally met outstanding people who not only are smart and well educated but have excellent communications and people skills. They made good money - mid six figures. I am certain they could have done a better job than Marissa Mayer running Yahoo and they would have agreed to do it for a mere $1 million. Yet they are never seriously considered because of the tight knit and self referential world of executives.
What's so sad is that this is a bum deal for shareholders - even if you are capitalist and don't have any compassion on people getting poorer you should at least be bothered by the fact that awful CEOs like Marissa Mayer and Steve Ballmer get to destroy value at a company and get paid 8 figures to do so. Imagine that instead of hiring Steve Ballmer, Microsoft would have merely hired an average MIT PhD engineering graduate in their 30s or 40s with some business and management experience. Think about how much better off Microsoft would have been in 2013 when Ballmer did finally leave.
I agree that capital gains should be inflation adjusted. So if you buy $100,000 of stock and sell it for $300,000 and in inflation adjusted terms it's only worth $250,000 then you should only pay capital gains on $150,000. But you should pay the full income tax even if you held the stock for 3 years. And you should pay Social Security and Medicare. And I don't care about the whole notion of double taxation because there we have a 35% rate in name only - they only pay 12.6% of worldwide income and Amazon, Google and Apple get away with murder. For example:
An investigation by the U.S. Senate showed Apple had paid just 2 percent tax on income of $74 billion over 2010-2012, largely by exploiting an unusual loophole in Ireland's tax code. In 2011 Google paid a rate of 11.9 percent, while Yahoo paid 11.6 percent and Microsoft paid 18.9 percent. Xerox paid 7.3 percent of its income in taxes, while Amazon paid only 3.5 percent.
In 1952, corporate taxes accounted for 5.9 percent of GDP, a figure that has fallen to 1.6 percent today. We need to have them start paying 5.9 percent again because if they don't pay it, then we will and we certainly don't have the cash.
Please correct me if I am wrong but whale populations in the world havebeenrecovering. And multiple species are less than a decade away from not being endangered any more. So the opposition to whaling is from people who don't want to kill whales per se. I am not arguing for premature killing of whales that leads to extinction and I know that has been as issue in the past. But that problem for most areas is going away. And it really only remains a big problem in Oceania. But if you eat meat and your culture eats whales why not eat them? I know that many people here don't eat meat and that is increasing in the Bay Area but consider that not everyone lives in that cultural bubble.
And using whale products for other purposes such as for their skins and oil is much better for the environment than making synthetic products from crude oil. Generally animal products produce fewer allergies and have fewer carcinogens than synthetic materials.
So isn't all the griping here just a matter of people who never want sustainable whaling to resume. But they don't have that right. If they don't want to eat whales or use their skins - that's fine - but they don't have the right to ram down their viewpoints down everyone else's throats, particularly other countries. It reminds me of abortion - if you don't like it, then don't have one but leave other people alone.
This is what happens when extraterritoriality expands unchecked. If you are not a citizen of Germany, you did not consent to be governed by the German government. Their laws should not apply to you. If they want to rule you they should give you citizenship along with all the rights of a German citizen and have you consent to that arrangement.
Of course the USA is no different. In 2009, Gary Kaplan, the boss of London-based gambling company BetOnSports, fell foul of a US law that bans Americans from placing bets online even on websites outside the US. He was jailed for four years. In 2006, three British former NatWest bankers were extradited to the US to face fraud charges, in a case that frieked out the British business community. At the time, the bankers said their crimes had taken place in the UK and the victim was a UK bank hence they wanted to be tried in Britain.
Of course to some degree you need jurisdiction preventing piracy at sea and so international treaties are needed in this case that allow countries to consent to having their citizens tried in another country.
Here, perhaps Facebook could block content using IP addresses, but in the case of the EU 'Right to be forgotten', the European Commission wants Google's search results censored throughout the world. That is absurd! And claiming that "It doesn't matter that we, because of historical reasons, have a stricter interpretation of freedom of speech than the United States does" is a legitimate legal argument for limiting free speech means that for all practical purposes the first amendment is gutted. China could ban the Wikipedia page on Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent mass killings by the Chinese army. Christian sites could be banned by Islamic regimes. Anything to do with psychology or science that offends any regime would be censored. We would be back in the dark ages.
I think there is another point. Some rights are inalienable - meaning they are incapable of being alienated and surrendered. Free speech is one of those rights. The fact that the EU fails to recognize this fact, does not change it. Indeed this concept was hinted at during shortly after founding of the UN when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was unanimously agreed. The preamble states:
Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.
I completely disagree with the premise that early-age sex is either psychologically or physically healthy behavior.
1. We are all descended from hunter gatherers who had sex as teenagers and then bore children. You imply that the entire genesis of the human race was psychologically and physically unhealthy. We evolved that way, it is the way we are designed. Of course it's healthy.
2. If you look at data looking at the ease of child birth and the health of semen, if is obvious that people biologically should be having children from their mid to late teens to early twenties. Pregnancies are easy in a 18 year old body. By age 30, they are a lot harder. Semen is of a much better quality at age 18 than at age 30.
3. Teens desire sex because nature evolved that way. They are supposed to have sex. They are not supposed to be practicing abstinence. Doing so is psychologically unhealthy!
When I read statements like the one from I quoted from I really think humanity is f@@@ed. No amount of science, logic, data or common sense can help us - saying that teens should not have sex is unscientific, puritanical crap.
IMHO this impacts digital recording of people. Imagine someone is arrested and while that happens if the police decide to beat the the arrestee up. Or imagine if they commit another crime like stealing their stuff, or planting evidence, or admitting that they are going to lie to a judge to secure a conviction. This happened recently and the arrestee was prosecuted for illegally recording someone without their permission. Well how are you going to get permission from the police while they secretly beat you up in a can or a police station?
We need to have a broad exception for recording without permission when either a law is being broken, a government official is engaging in corruption, a law enforcement officer or judge is abusing their authority or activity that undermines the justice system, a government agent is engaging in extra judicial activity such as 'rendition', when a private company is violating its employees rights, or when a person needs to collect information to protect themselves against someone trying to defraud them.
I also think that this story reflects the fact that a significant minority of people out there get way more outraged by cruelty to animals that cruelty to humans. I find this attitude quite sickening.
I am intrigued by what you say. What would you say are the useful areas of mathematics that average and above average high school students should know beyond pre-calc. Are there other math subjects that you would rather college students (in STEM and econ) learn other than calculus? I know many benefit from a course in a probability and another in statistics. What else would you suggest?
There was an article in the economist about how statisticians also served in WW II. They were indispensable to making sure that Britain did not starve. Before WW II the country imported most of its food. They enabled it stay in the war undefeated until the entry of the USA.
Among the instances of their success was their analysis of the distribution of German bombs falling on London each day. They concluded that the Germans were trying to destroy the docks but missing. They conducted quality-control in the manufacture of aircraft components, and the calculation of the distribution of stresses on aircraft in flight. The aimed to load planes up to the point that the wings were about to drop off. The research meant the RAF dropped more bombs, and brought more pilots safely home, than it would have otherwise.
They used sequential methods for the first time in trials of medical treatments. Analyzing the results of a trial bit by bit, rather than all at once when it was finished, meant it could be stopped straight away if it became clear that the new treatment was so good that everyone should be getting it, or indeed useless or even dangerous. This simple-sounding idea, now standard in medical trials, requires great statistical sophistication—and saved many lives.
But after the war, so much of this was not integrated into the British educational system. I remember taking a GCSE in math and having to do a project. We had to figure our how to calculate the area under a curve. I asked almost every adult I ran into if they could help me and give me some ideas. No-one had a clue and this included college educated people. It was so sad that no-one recognized this as as the primary question behind integration and half of calculus. British people had forgotten all that Newton and Leibniz (albeit that he was not a Brit) had accomplished.
No-one told us that 60 miles up the road DNA's structure had been discovered at Cambridge by Watson and Crick on 1953. No-one talked about Allan Turing and his Turing Machine. No-one would teach me anything about electronics in high school despite my begging and interest beyond a basic physics class. No-one talked about James Clerk Maxwell and his relations in thermodynamics. No-one had a clue about statistics. No one screamed off the rooftops the central dogma of biology - we merely had to memorize the names of bones and muscles in the human body. The phrase 'normal distribution' was not used. People in the USA at least have a vague sense of what 23 and me is. In the UK so many people I know have no idea. They see genetics as so foreign - oh the irony. The math and science teachers were mean and the books not very helpful. I learned all about British STEM history but only when in the USA.
There was a time when inventors, manufacturing, science, technology and innovation was celebrated in Britain. Now the only time you hear about science is when people are discussing global warming. They spend their energy in opposition to building anything new. There are parts of London where 1/3 of the buildings are listed and cannot be torn down and rebuilt. People oppose new high speed rail projects. They oppose new home building despite the data showing the UK being short of 1 million homes. They axiomatically oppose genetically modified crops disregarding that at least some of them are helping to alleviate malnutrition. Where has your sense of innovation gone, United Kingdom? You argue now about whether to be in the EU, whether Scotland should leave, and whether more spying will solve your Islamic extremist problem.
Why not aim to spend 1% of GDP on R&D and build institutions like the NIH and NSF? Why not have almost all school children complete the equivalent of pre-caclulus, Calc I and Calc II, and intro to statistics by age 16? Why not set aside land to allow high end manufacturing using 3D pri
Working hard since 2003 to preserve your right to consume media without the annoyance of paying.
Intellectual property was created for the benefit of society. There have been numerous studies showing that IP has massively overreached and it no longer does that. Those who have benefited have resorted to rent seeking behavior by ever expanding its scope. They can legally bribe elected officials by using campaign finance contributions. In effect they get to write the laws. So how about they pay back all the money they took beyond what reasonable IP would look like. Seven years copyright protection is enough for most movies and music. And 14 years for almost everything else.
And how about we expand fair use back to what it was and should be so that students can get greater access to copyrighted works? How about we also repeal the Copyright Term Extension Act.
It really is the case that the movie and music industries are trying to steal from everyone else. But because they have politicians in their pocket books you don't call it theft. Piratebay was merely evening an unfair playing field.
Legality aside, what would be the "moral" thing to do. The data was taken 'wrongfully', and belongs to Sony. So, morally it seems the correct thing to do would be destroy the data.
Just because you can do something does not mean you should.
What about the 'wrong' things that Sony has done that the documents show? Why is it that so many people side with corporations? Do they not have to be moral, just their customers? And why is it that people expect corporations to be immoral and say 'that is the way the world works', but are outraged when little people do the same thing?
Here are some immoral things that Sony does that they would not soon change if these documents would not have been leaked:
1. Sony corruption of the media - Emails between Amy Pascal (the co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment) and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd suggest Dowd promised to show Pascal's husband a copy of a column before publishing it. Pascal's husband is former Times reporter Bernard Weinraub.
2. A series of emails between Pascal and movie producer Scott Rudin showed an ugly side to the beautiful business of Hollywood. Rudin called Angelina Jolie a "minimally talented spoiled brat" in an email exchange with Pascal. Pascal and Rudin also made racially charged jokes about President Obama's taste in movies.
3. Breaking the privacy of patients medical records - Sony's human-resources department had detailed medical records of three dozen employees and their family members. One internal memo revealed a staff member's child with special needs, including the child's type of treatment. The memo talked about the employee's appeal of insurance provider Aetna's denial of thousands of dollars in medical claims. Another HR document detailed the medical costs for 34 Sony employees and their family members who had very high medical bills. Medical conditions included premature births, cancer, kidney failure and alcoholic liver cirrhosis.
4. Men are paid more than women. Sony paid Jennifer Lawrence less than it paid Christian Bale or Bradley Cooper, her co-stars in last year's hit movie "American Hustle." Lawrence was paid 7 percent of the movie's profit, while Bale and Cooper received 9 percent, according to emails sent to Pascal. Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment is the only woman earning $1 million or more at the studio.
5. The documents legitimate accusations that Sony colluded with other firms to keep VFX empoyees wages down. This is illegal and immoral.
This reminds me of when people say that walking away from your mortgage is immoral. But what about when the banks do it? Morgan Stanley decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. When they walk away, then it's OK. This is so messed up, and yet people's minds are so brainwashed they think this way!
I have used both MIT's, Berkeley's, and Yale's audio lectures. They are awesome. I have used them when I have taken a class for supplemental instruction and when I wanted to learn a new subject but could not afford to take an extra class. They are invaluable. And physics is probably the hardest subject to master. They have helped me overcome my fear of math and physics and have given me the courage to work practice problems.
Of course I in no way am condoning any of his personal behavior. But he made physics accessible and fun on the college level. This is so rare! To remove his lectures mean you are punishing innocent people around the globe and degrading their education. And better educated people usually make better citizens who pay more in taxes (and yes of course this professor may have done something bad but there is still a strong correlation between education and not committing crime.)
We need to accept as a society that we have a lack of talented physics instructors and we cannot afford to remove important videos just because the person committed an antisocial act. And I would like to see what kind of due process he was given in the determination of his guilt. (He has not been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.) Is MIT going to find someone similarly talented and replace the lectures? And what about the lecture notes, practice problems with solutions and exams?
And it's funny how as someone else pointed out Bill Cosby's shows are still available. And many rap artists have committed violent felonies and yet their work is still shown. Roman Polanski's movies have not been withdrawn. Woody Allen still is able to make movies and has been accused of much more horrific acts. And yet they withdraw the stuff that is most needed, not the frivolous comedy.
My experience is that most companies do NOT check. I have worked for half a dozen tech companies, over several decades, and have been involved in hiring over a hundred people. Except for a couple cases that involved security clearances, we never did a criminal background check. Why should we? Studies have shown that people with criminal backgrounds tend to do no worse on the job. You are better off screening out people that use MSIE to fill out their application, since that is actually correlated with poor job performance.
From the economist article:
"For instance, firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance."
That implies that for some or most jobs, having a criminal record does correlate with doing a worse job.
I feel really sorry for the original poster. I hope he/she can find a good job. However as someone who has had to hire people I can attest to the fact that even relatively minor criminal offenses seem to indicate irresponsibility. I can't say I have a big enough statistical sample. However recently I hired someone who had previously committed a DUI. That was their only criminal offense.
It became quickly apparent that they should never have been hired. I had to deal with someone who regularly took time out of work to carry out personal errands. I had to stop them from going home in the middle of the day to pick something up - and they had no expectation of making up the time. I asked them to carry out a task in a specific way, aware of the pitfalls of the alternatives. They were obstinate and as a consequence wasted a lot of my time. They were a little dishonest about the time they put in at work. On their first day they forgot to bring necessary items to work.
I had a similar experience with someone else. IMHO the issue with breaking the law is not so much the act itself. Rather, it is indicative of someone who does not think about the consequences of their actions, does not responsibly think through whether something is a good idea and not just act on an impulse, does not think about how an action will effect other people, and lacks a sense of what is appropriate social behavior. It also often indicates a lack of respect for other people's property. Finally they often lack the inability to coherently think about a problem and then formulate a plan that addresses it considering possible things that might go wrong. This is also why credit scores are so useful - they often communicate in might finer detail the degree to which someone grapples with these issues.
The last point is quite salient. Quite often if the criminal would have considered how their action addressed their problem, they would have realized that the long term consequences of the action don't justify the action as a solution to their problem. For example: stealing from a store may get you the iPad but it isn't worth going to jail over. And indeed those who have occasionally broken the law and gotten away with it due to precise and intricate planning may not have that problem. (Not that I am in any way condoning such behavior.)
At this point, if I was hiring someone with a drug abuse history, I would be somewhat forgiving about their being an addict. But I would want to know why they took their first puff or drink or injection. They weren't addicted at that time. There is no 'right answer' to that question but I think it might allow me to see what sort of person I am dealing with. If they say 'I don't know', then clearly I cannot hire them - they lack insight and probably cannot think about their actions and their repercussions. If they say that they were pressured into it by a group of their peers who called them a pussy for not taking a smoke at a party - well I would be a lot more understanding.
1. iPad Man, for not actually paying attention to his surroundings.
2. Airport security (obviously) for freaking out over the oblivious iPad Man.
Nope, the full extent of the dumbarsery is entirely on number 1.
He was walking in the opposite direction to everyone else and in order for the doors at to be open somoene had to be walking the right way (at an airport, this would likely be dozens of other people). If he didn't notice this, he is the idiot.
The AFP (Australian Federal Police) who secure our airports cant take chances. They cant tell whether dumb Ipad man is just Dumb Ipad man or Disgruntled Steve who wants to beat up Bill in the airside cafe until they talk to him. Now the AFP did just that and released the man without charge (they could have charged him, but under the circumstances they chose not to), so good on them for that but it is a real shame that this kind of idiocy isn't a crime... or painful.
Ipadguy made a mistake! There was no mens rea. Do you really have to blame someone who just spaced out and not just leave the blame on the security guards and the police force. Why is it the we must always punish the little guy. Talk about bias. I am sure there are people who would imprison someone who accidentally brought in a bottled water across airport security or who forgot about a metal pen in his/her pocket. For once, just for once, can we just NOT advocate putting someone is prison for an honest mistake. Can we hold the those who really messed up accountable. The statement above just gets at how we punish the tiny infraction and ignore the huge calamity.
This why the bankers that caused the worst economic crisis in 80 years are not in prison. Because we focus on some tiny potatoes. And we want to punish people for making a mistake we all could make. I am sure plenty of people have spaced out and tried to walk the wrong way into a secured area. They were just politely stopped. But it's not enough for some people and we sleepwalk into a police state.
Jealousy and other issues as well. The Vice article seems to have strong opinions as to what sort of conditions other people may live in. It just states that it is dystopian without much evidence. And as to the poor in Dubai, they are already richer than many of their compatriots back home (many are immigrant workers) and given time and further economic development they no doubt will get richer themselves. The United Arab Emirates are the one most forward thinking areas in the Middle East. They are slowly going through what the West did in the reformation and enlightenment. Of course it will take time but I am sure they will be much more progressive societies in 300 years.
Then there is the issue that some people simply fetishise nature and assume that everything 'natural' must be beautiful. It simply is not the case. Most 'natural' places are ugly. The ones that we photograph are the elegant and interesting ones. A lot of the time those people who enjoy extreme temperatures and who are in excellent shape imagine that rest of humanity has the same take on their surroundings. It's so easy to forget that without keeping out the heat or cold many people would be miserable - particular in an extremely hot desert which is where Dubai is located. The heat is simply oppressive. And of course by allowing this dome, it means people can venture out of their homes and get more exercise - something that is otherwise not possible.
I can imagine that some people would say that humans should not be living there to begin with. To which I answer: someone gave birth to them and once there here on planet earth they have to live somewhere. And most people living in the middle east don't have much choice as to where to live particularly if they don’t want to live in absolute poverty. (So unless you want to stop Bangladeshi and Pakistani mothers from getting pregnant and/or prevent men there from impregnating them, you really cannot complain. I am always amazed at people who are shocked when they hear others moralize about women giving birth when they are very poor. They pontificate about every women having the 'right' to have children. Often these same people then later complain about the environmental consequences of such children when they reach adulthood.)
What about assuming that there is simply no way to ever travel faster than the speed of light (or use a worm hole to achieve the same effect) and thus different civilizations in different star systems are never even able to find each other, let alone visit each other.
Any well trained military unit will be trained and equipped to deal with them.
I don't accept that this point always holds. And not all armies are well trained and equipped.
During the cold war the Soviets developed the Novichok agent - something that the US could not necessarily defend against. If soldiers are wearing gas masks and protective suits, they are less agile and less effective in using regular conventional weapons. This provides the enemy with a tactical advantage. And given that chemical weapons have not been used in a major war by industrialized nations since WW1, much of the technology may have changed. It may be in fact that they do have significant strategic value.
The chemical weapons in Syria worked. The opposition is not well trained and equipped.
And how would bombing Assad help? He is a dictator fighting for his survival and therefore has little to lose. But bombing Syria would kills Syrians, both soldiers and civilians. It would destroy people's homes (why not be empathetic and imagine your own home blown up by a bomb from Syria and the regime shrugging it off as collateral damage). It would destroy people's livelihoods (not to mention that we tend to target infrastructure such as power stations which mean people may lack electricity for months or years and even sewage systems may fail). It would wound people and inhibit their receiving appropriate medical care. It would in short inflict huge suffering.
In short people say that chemical weapons are really bad because they inflict lots of human suffering. So what is their proposed response to their use? Dropping bombs and missiles that will also inflict lots of human suffering. What then is the point?
And why if we have so much moral outrage, do 1000 deaths from chemical weapons necessitate a response, despite the fact that 100,000 deaths from conventional weapons do not?
I really hope they don't put up ever more cameras. We don't need them. Crime has been falling since 1988 and the US murder rate is around 5.4 / 100,000 people. And that is close to its all time low. And terrorism is rare and unlikely to kill or hurt anyone. When can we start rolling out policy based on data and evidence not on fear?
As far as cameras looking at police officers. We need a lot more of that. Police routinely 'beat people up' and conduct illegal searches. They need to be put on a short leash.
You provided the per-capita murder rate. Can you also provide the per-capita for people beat up by police and for illegal searches?
Well that's the point isn't it. We can't collect data because police lack effective oversight. If there was an an agency whose job it was to only oversee the police, who could not arrest civilians, and who had access to cameras, microphones and general surveillance of the police - then we could get an idea what kind of stuff goes down.
You only have to look at the cases coming out of the Innocence project to see the incredible abuses by the criminal justice system.
I really hope they don't put up ever more cameras. We don't need them. Crime has been falling since 1988 and the US murder rate is around 5.4 / 100,000 people. And that is close to its all time low. And terrorism is rare and unlikely to kill or hurt anyone. When can we start rolling out policy based on data and evidence not on fear?
As far as cameras looking at police officers. We need a lot more of that. Police routinely 'beat people up' and conduct illegal searches. They need to be put on a short leash.
That's not the whole story either. If you read your own link carefully, it points out that Giuliani predicted the quakes using a method that has never been proven scientifically and has had no peer reviewed papers published. In other words, he's a crackpot who just happened to get lucky;
If you read this article ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/05/laquila-earthquake-prediction-giampaolo-giuliani ) you will see that Giuliani was no crackpot - in fact he presented his research to an American conference. Just because someone does not have a PhD does not mean they cannot carry out scientific inquiry. All you need is brains and money. He has some financial backers. It seems, and this happens so often, that because he didn't have the right credentials his work was ignored in Italy and he wasn't allowed to publish. It wasn't until he came to the USA that he was given a fair hearing.
It is correct that literacy tests were used in the past to deny voting rights to citizens of color. However that does not mean that any test we apply in the future will be motivated by the same intent. Imposing a test in a vacuum is not desirable, however we now have very serious problems - long term problem of debt, healthcare costs, entitlement spending, a crumbling infrastructure, obsession with futile wars, income inequality, a failing k-12 educational system, the taking away of civil liberties and out of control intellectual property.
It appears probable that those problems can only be dealt with by a wise and knowledgeable electorate. Indeed only those who did not understand macroeconomics would have believed that the Bush tax cuts would have 'paid for themselves' as was claimed at the time. Now we have to deal with the consequences of those stupid actions. And that is why we need a rigorous examination for future voters,
[And there is nothing to prevent the imposition of safeguards in federal law to prevent the new exams being abused by those with racial malintent. For example the exam centers and grading system should be closely monitored.]
Slashdot Mirror
It does have SMS capability, just not encrypted.
From their own FAQ:
Signal users can
privately message other Signal users for free over the internet
send insecure SMS/MMS to contacts, which incurs costs as set by mobile plans
Given what is known about China and how they literally have pulled the biggest heist since in human history I do not understand why Apply is doing this. The annual losses in IP that the US experiences are comparable to the current annual level of U.S. exports to Asia—over $300 billion. According to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, If IP were to receive the same protection overseas that it does here, the American economy would add millions of jobs. Countless companies have moved to China and within a decade seen competitors steal their trade secrets and come out with almost identical products. What is even more baffling is that Apple is obsessed with secrecy. Does it not care that both the Chinese government and industry are hellbent on nullifying it?
Its iBooks and movies were disallowed early in 2016. The Chinese government uses 'security audits' to hack both Apple and the US government. In Beijing, a municipal tribunal issued an injunction earlier this year barring the sale of its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Beijing's Intellectual Property Office ruled against Apple in a patent dispute brought by a smaller Chinese handset maker. Both cases were fictitious. As a matter of fact (something monumentally unimportant to the Chinese government) it was clear that Apple developed the technology first.
Perhaps this is some attempt to stop the Chinese state from openly discriminating against Apple? I very much doubt this will work over the long run. I highly doubt that in 2026 Apple will be flourishing commercially in China.
I once had a lengthy conversation with a member of China's elite. She came from a wealthy family and her fiance had been a Harvard engineering grad student. She was exceptionally well read and well traveled. She even knew about the contributions of Otto von Bismarck . (How many Americans would know the same?) I asked her whether the US could come to some arrangement with China and even cede the South China Sea and East Asia as a sphere of influence including the artificial islands in it. And that after each country had satisfied each others needs they could cooperate for world peace and stability. She responded that China was a rising power and the US was a declining one, that it was for China to 'take' whatever it wanted, that war was inevitable between such nations, and that she had no wish for dialogue. She exemplified the ruthless determination for hegemony that is widespread throughout the Chinese elite, be it economic, political, cultural, or military.
I wish American companies would get with reality on this issue. People in 100 years will look back at the Monroe Doctrine in the nineteenth century or even the brief period of US hegemony from 1989 through 2003 and perceive those periods as golden ages when compared with the ruthless Chinese subjugation that is only just beginning.
Signal (recommended by Edward Snowden) works over both Wifi and SMS. It's completely secure (as much as anything can be) and they don't keep a copy of your message on their servers. The message is encrypted to point that even the NSA cannot read it. Total privacy. I don't understand why more people don't use it. Maybe because teens want to use 'cool' stuff like WhatsApp?
While there a good reasons to be wary of paying to publish where there is an incentive to publish lousy articles because the publisher wants the money, the current system is abusive and is tantamount to theft. I worked part time in a lab for 3 years. I was not paid - and yes I asked for money but they said they could not afford to pay me. However I did get a paper out of it! Yay! Except that even though it was my research, my labor, my stressing out over repeating the experiments many times to convince my PI that my results were legitimate, if I want a legal copy of the paper, I have to pay for it. Just because I was an undergraduate does not mean that I lacked basic civil rights or the right to property. So at the very least the people who busted their asses should be able to get a free copy of the paper and that should be a legal property right.
Then I went to graduate school and of course I was able to get access to journal articles. Later on after grad school I was working and lost access. But I was still interested in some research ideas. And eventually I talked to some people and that led to me going back to do research at a university. But in that interim I had no legal way of getting papers. I paid for them. Some cost around $25 to $30 each. Some cost $80! - the medical ones. But I used that to do research to help humanity for which I was paid very little and I had to pay money for the right to do the groundwork for that research. That is complete crap! At the very least I should get my money back which adds up to a few hundred dollars.
As to university libraries - even elite institutions are finding it ever harder to afford the costs of for profit journals that force secrecy in their contracts. So one college literally often pays 4 or 5 times what another pays for exactly the same subscription in the same country. The price of journal subscriptions has been rising ahead of inflation for decades and the higher the impact factor the worse the problem. And because copyright grants a monopoly, the publishing industry has been able to collect extreme amounts of economic rent. Normally the answer would be to regulate natural monopolies such as what happens in the power industry. It's quite obvious to me that this is what needs to happen in academic publishing.
We also need a way for people who are outside of academic institutions to gain access to journal articles. I am not saying that for profit drug companies should not have to pay. But if I am a tax payer and paying for the research then it is not alright for me to have to pay twice. And realistically at $25 - $50 per article that means that it's just impossible to read or merely peruse 10 or 20 articles a month. And often I might need to look at referenced articles in the footnotes of another article and so I might need to look briefly at another 100 articles in a month. I and indeed 99% of people do not have $50,000 a year to spend on that. And often someone might want to help the economy out with a start up idea. I did ask around if there was a way to buy in to a university's subscription or to get similar mass access by paying a realistic annual fee of say $500 and was told such a concept did not exist.
If someone has a rare disease and wishes to peruse the literature, they typically cannot. And often sick people are quite poor anyway. What if someone serves on a local school board or is a member of municipal government and want to affect improvements in public policy. This happened to me when I was trying to assist my town in making some important fiscal decisions. There was no legal mechanism to obtain the 50 papers I wanted without paying out of pocket. And my position was unpaid. The sheer cost of paying a la carte makes reading the literature prohibitive. You might say that you could go to a university. The problem is that in recent years it has become almost impossible to do so without a valid university ID. And just getting there and finding a place to park is complicated if you are not affiliated with the institution.
In short, individuals who are not using the research for a for profit organization need a legal mechanism to access peer reviewed research. The current system is immoral.
Comparing the salaries of people in completely different classes of society is not very useful.
Your argument is very worrying not only because it is tautological but because we can never stop ever increasing income inequality if people 'accept it'. The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is about 350. In 1965 it was 20. The committee that decides executive compensation is stacked so that people serve on each others compensation committees guaranteeing extravagant salaries. They also prevent a more meritocratic search going out to the general population. It also is one of the reasons why average pay has fallen or stagnated for most people in the US - money spent on executives means less cash for the workers.
And you might also want to think about pay in terms of productivity. Since 1973 it has gone up by about 100% in the US. And yet wages for many people have fallen in real terms. Median household income should be double what it is and perhaps more given that the number of working adults per household has increased as women have gone to work full time.
In terms of finding 'good people'. I have personally met outstanding people who not only are smart and well educated but have excellent communications and people skills. They made good money - mid six figures. I am certain they could have done a better job than Marissa Mayer running Yahoo and they would have agreed to do it for a mere $1 million. Yet they are never seriously considered because of the tight knit and self referential world of executives.
What's so sad is that this is a bum deal for shareholders - even if you are capitalist and don't have any compassion on people getting poorer you should at least be bothered by the fact that awful CEOs like Marissa Mayer and Steve Ballmer get to destroy value at a company and get paid 8 figures to do so. Imagine that instead of hiring Steve Ballmer, Microsoft would have merely hired an average MIT PhD engineering graduate in their 30s or 40s with some business and management experience. Think about how much better off Microsoft would have been in 2013 when Ballmer did finally leave.
I agree that capital gains should be inflation adjusted. So if you buy $100,000 of stock and sell it for $300,000 and in inflation adjusted terms it's only worth $250,000 then you should only pay capital gains on $150,000. But you should pay the full income tax even if you held the stock for 3 years. And you should pay Social Security and Medicare. And I don't care about the whole notion of double taxation because there we have a 35% rate in name only - they only pay 12.6% of worldwide income and Amazon, Google and Apple get away with murder. For example:
An investigation by the U.S. Senate showed Apple had paid just 2 percent tax on income of $74 billion over 2010-2012, largely by exploiting an unusual loophole in Ireland's tax code. In 2011 Google paid a rate of 11.9 percent, while Yahoo paid 11.6 percent and Microsoft paid 18.9 percent. Xerox paid 7.3 percent of its income in taxes, while Amazon paid only 3.5 percent.
In 1952, corporate taxes accounted for 5.9 percent of GDP, a figure that has fallen to 1.6 percent today. We need to have them start paying 5.9 percent again because if they don't pay it, then we will and we certainly don't have the cash.
Please correct me if I am wrong but whale populations in the world have been recovering. And multiple species are less than a decade away from not being endangered any more. So the opposition to whaling is from people who don't want to kill whales per se. I am not arguing for premature killing of whales that leads to extinction and I know that has been as issue in the past. But that problem for most areas is going away. And it really only remains a big problem in Oceania. But if you eat meat and your culture eats whales why not eat them? I know that many people here don't eat meat and that is increasing in the Bay Area but consider that not everyone lives in that cultural bubble.
And using whale products for other purposes such as for their skins and oil is much better for the environment than making synthetic products from crude oil. Generally animal products produce fewer allergies and have fewer carcinogens than synthetic materials.
So isn't all the griping here just a matter of people who never want sustainable whaling to resume. But they don't have that right. If they don't want to eat whales or use their skins - that's fine - but they don't have the right to ram down their viewpoints down everyone else's throats, particularly other countries. It reminds me of abortion - if you don't like it, then don't have one but leave other people alone.
This is what happens when extraterritoriality expands unchecked. If you are not a citizen of Germany, you did not consent to be governed by the German government. Their laws should not apply to you. If they want to rule you they should give you citizenship along with all the rights of a German citizen and have you consent to that arrangement.
Of course the USA is no different. In 2009, Gary Kaplan, the boss of London-based gambling company BetOnSports, fell foul of a US law that bans Americans from placing bets online even on websites outside the US. He was jailed for four years. In 2006, three British former NatWest bankers were extradited to the US to face fraud charges, in a case that frieked out the British business community. At the time, the bankers said their crimes had taken place in the UK and the victim was a UK bank hence they wanted to be tried in Britain.
Of course to some degree you need jurisdiction preventing piracy at sea and so international treaties are needed in this case that allow countries to consent to having their citizens tried in another country.
Here, perhaps Facebook could block content using IP addresses, but in the case of the EU 'Right to be forgotten', the European Commission wants Google's search results censored throughout the world. That is absurd! And claiming that "It doesn't matter that we, because of historical reasons, have a stricter interpretation of freedom of speech than the United States does" is a legitimate legal argument for limiting free speech means that for all practical purposes the first amendment is gutted. China could ban the Wikipedia page on Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent mass killings by the Chinese army. Christian sites could be banned by Islamic regimes. Anything to do with psychology or science that offends any regime would be censored. We would be back in the dark ages.
I think there is another point. Some rights are inalienable - meaning they are incapable of being alienated and surrendered. Free speech is one of those rights. The fact that the EU fails to recognize this fact, does not change it. Indeed this concept was hinted at during shortly after founding of the UN when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was unanimously agreed. The preamble states:
Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.
I completely disagree with the premise that early-age sex is either psychologically or physically healthy behavior.
1. We are all descended from hunter gatherers who had sex as teenagers and then bore children. You imply that the entire genesis of the human race was psychologically and physically unhealthy. We evolved that way, it is the way we are designed. Of course it's healthy.
2. If you look at data looking at the ease of child birth and the health of semen, if is obvious that people biologically should be having children from their mid to late teens to early twenties. Pregnancies are easy in a 18 year old body. By age 30, they are a lot harder. Semen is of a much better quality at age 18 than at age 30.
3. Teens desire sex because nature evolved that way. They are supposed to have sex. They are not supposed to be practicing abstinence. Doing so is psychologically unhealthy!
When I read statements like the one from I quoted from I really think humanity is f@@@ed. No amount of science, logic, data or common sense can help us - saying that teens should not have sex is unscientific, puritanical crap.
IMHO this impacts digital recording of people. Imagine someone is arrested and while that happens if the police decide to beat the the arrestee up. Or imagine if they commit another crime like stealing their stuff, or planting evidence, or admitting that they are going to lie to a judge to secure a conviction. This happened recently and the arrestee was prosecuted for illegally recording someone without their permission. Well how are you going to get permission from the police while they secretly beat you up in a can or a police station?
We need to have a broad exception for recording without permission when either a law is being broken, a government official is engaging in corruption, a law enforcement officer or judge is abusing their authority or activity that undermines the justice system, a government agent is engaging in extra judicial activity such as 'rendition', when a private company is violating its employees rights, or when a person needs to collect information to protect themselves against someone trying to defraud them.
I also think that this story reflects the fact that a significant minority of people out there get way more outraged by cruelty to animals that cruelty to humans. I find this attitude quite sickening.
I am intrigued by what you say. What would you say are the useful areas of mathematics that average and above average high school students should know beyond pre-calc. Are there other math subjects that you would rather college students (in STEM and econ) learn other than calculus? I know many benefit from a course in a probability and another in statistics. What else would you suggest?
There was an article in the economist about how statisticians also served in WW II. They were indispensable to making sure that Britain did not starve. Before WW II the country imported most of its food. They enabled it stay in the war undefeated until the entry of the USA.
Among the instances of their success was their analysis of the distribution of German bombs falling on London each day. They concluded that the Germans were trying to destroy the docks but missing. They conducted quality-control in the manufacture of aircraft components, and the calculation of the distribution of stresses on aircraft in flight. The aimed to load planes up to the point that the wings were about to drop off. The research meant the RAF dropped more bombs, and brought more pilots safely home, than it would have otherwise.
They used sequential methods for the first time in trials of medical treatments. Analyzing the results of a trial bit by bit, rather than all at once when it was finished, meant it could be stopped straight away if it became clear that the new treatment was so good that everyone should be getting it, or indeed useless or even dangerous. This simple-sounding idea, now standard in medical trials, requires great statistical sophistication—and saved many lives.
But after the war, so much of this was not integrated into the British educational system. I remember taking a GCSE in math and having to do a project. We had to figure our how to calculate the area under a curve. I asked almost every adult I ran into if they could help me and give me some ideas. No-one had a clue and this included college educated people. It was so sad that no-one recognized this as as the primary question behind integration and half of calculus. British people had forgotten all that Newton and Leibniz (albeit that he was not a Brit) had accomplished.
No-one told us that 60 miles up the road DNA's structure had been discovered at Cambridge by Watson and Crick on 1953. No-one talked about Allan Turing and his Turing Machine. No-one would teach me anything about electronics in high school despite my begging and interest beyond a basic physics class. No-one talked about James Clerk Maxwell and his relations in thermodynamics. No-one had a clue about statistics. No one screamed off the rooftops the central dogma of biology - we merely had to memorize the names of bones and muscles in the human body. The phrase 'normal distribution' was not used. People in the USA at least have a vague sense of what 23 and me is. In the UK so many people I know have no idea. They see genetics as so foreign - oh the irony. The math and science teachers were mean and the books not very helpful. I learned all about British STEM history but only when in the USA.
There was a time when inventors, manufacturing, science, technology and innovation was celebrated in Britain. Now the only time you hear about science is when people are discussing global warming. They spend their energy in opposition to building anything new. There are parts of London where 1/3 of the buildings are listed and cannot be torn down and rebuilt. People oppose new high speed rail projects. They oppose new home building despite the data showing the UK being short of 1 million homes. They axiomatically oppose genetically modified crops disregarding that at least some of them are helping to alleviate malnutrition. Where has your sense of innovation gone, United Kingdom? You argue now about whether to be in the EU, whether Scotland should leave, and whether more spying will solve your Islamic extremist problem.
Why not aim to spend 1% of GDP on R&D and build institutions like the NIH and NSF? Why not have almost all school children complete the equivalent of pre-caclulus, Calc I and Calc II, and intro to statistics by age 16? Why not set aside land to allow high end manufacturing using 3D pri
Working hard since 2003 to preserve your right to consume media without the annoyance of paying.
Intellectual property was created for the benefit of society. There have been numerous studies showing that IP has massively overreached and it no longer does that. Those who have benefited have resorted to rent seeking behavior by ever expanding its scope. They can legally bribe elected officials by using campaign finance contributions. In effect they get to write the laws. So how about they pay back all the money they took beyond what reasonable IP would look like. Seven years copyright protection is enough for most movies and music. And 14 years for almost everything else.
And how about we expand fair use back to what it was and should be so that students can get greater access to copyrighted works? How about we also repeal the Copyright Term Extension Act.
It really is the case that the movie and music industries are trying to steal from everyone else. But because they have politicians in their pocket books you don't call it theft. Piratebay was merely evening an unfair playing field.
Legality aside, what would be the "moral" thing to do. The data was taken 'wrongfully', and belongs to Sony. So, morally it seems the correct thing to do would be destroy the data.
Just because you can do something does not mean you should.
What about the 'wrong' things that Sony has done that the documents show? Why is it that so many people side with corporations? Do they not have to be moral, just their customers? And why is it that people expect corporations to be immoral and say 'that is the way the world works', but are outraged when little people do the same thing?
Here are some immoral things that Sony does that they would not soon change if these documents would not have been leaked:
1. Sony corruption of the media - Emails between Amy Pascal (the co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment) and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd suggest Dowd promised to show Pascal's husband a copy of a column before publishing it. Pascal's husband is former Times reporter Bernard Weinraub.
2. A series of emails between Pascal and movie producer Scott Rudin showed an ugly side to the beautiful business of Hollywood. Rudin called Angelina Jolie a "minimally talented spoiled brat" in an email exchange with Pascal. Pascal and Rudin also made racially charged jokes about President Obama's taste in movies.
3. Breaking the privacy of patients medical records - Sony's human-resources department had detailed medical records of three dozen employees and their family members. One internal memo revealed a staff member's child with special needs, including the child's type of treatment. The memo talked about the employee's appeal of insurance provider Aetna's denial of thousands of dollars in medical claims. Another HR document detailed the medical costs for 34 Sony employees and their family members who had very high medical bills. Medical conditions included premature births, cancer, kidney failure and alcoholic liver cirrhosis.
4. Men are paid more than women. Sony paid Jennifer Lawrence less than it paid Christian Bale or Bradley Cooper, her co-stars in last year's hit movie "American Hustle." Lawrence was paid 7 percent of the movie's profit, while Bale and Cooper received 9 percent, according to emails sent to Pascal. Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment is the only woman earning $1 million or more at the studio.
5. The documents legitimate accusations that Sony colluded with other firms to keep VFX empoyees wages down. This is illegal and immoral.
This reminds me of when people say that walking away from your mortgage is immoral. But what about when the banks do it? Morgan Stanley decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. When they walk away, then it's OK. This is so messed up, and yet people's minds are so brainwashed they think this way!
I actually watch video lectures usually for most science, engineering and math subjects, The audio part above was a typo.
I have used both MIT's, Berkeley's, and Yale's audio lectures. They are awesome. I have used them when I have taken a class for supplemental instruction and when I wanted to learn a new subject but could not afford to take an extra class. They are invaluable. And physics is probably the hardest subject to master. They have helped me overcome my fear of math and physics and have given me the courage to work practice problems. Of course I in no way am condoning any of his personal behavior. But he made physics accessible and fun on the college level. This is so rare! To remove his lectures mean you are punishing innocent people around the globe and degrading their education. And better educated people usually make better citizens who pay more in taxes (and yes of course this professor may have done something bad but there is still a strong correlation between education and not committing crime.)
We need to accept as a society that we have a lack of talented physics instructors and we cannot afford to remove important videos just because the person committed an antisocial act. And I would like to see what kind of due process he was given in the determination of his guilt. (He has not been found guilty of a crime in a court of law.) Is MIT going to find someone similarly talented and replace the lectures? And what about the lecture notes, practice problems with solutions and exams?
And it's funny how as someone else pointed out Bill Cosby's shows are still available. And many rap artists have committed violent felonies and yet their work is still shown. Roman Polanski's movies have not been withdrawn. Woody Allen still is able to make movies and has been accused of much more horrific acts. And yet they withdraw the stuff that is most needed, not the frivolous comedy.
My experience is that most companies do NOT check. I have worked for half a dozen tech companies, over several decades, and have been involved in hiring over a hundred people. Except for a couple cases that involved security clearances, we never did a criminal background check. Why should we? Studies have shown that people with criminal backgrounds tend to do no worse on the job. You are better off screening out people that use MSIE to fill out their application, since that is actually correlated with poor job performance.
From the economist article: "For instance, firms routinely cull job candidates with a criminal record. Yet the data suggest that for certain jobs there is no correlation with work performance."
That implies that for some or most jobs, having a criminal record does correlate with doing a worse job. I feel really sorry for the original poster. I hope he/she can find a good job. However as someone who has had to hire people I can attest to the fact that even relatively minor criminal offenses seem to indicate irresponsibility. I can't say I have a big enough statistical sample. However recently I hired someone who had previously committed a DUI. That was their only criminal offense.
It became quickly apparent that they should never have been hired. I had to deal with someone who regularly took time out of work to carry out personal errands. I had to stop them from going home in the middle of the day to pick something up - and they had no expectation of making up the time. I asked them to carry out a task in a specific way, aware of the pitfalls of the alternatives. They were obstinate and as a consequence wasted a lot of my time. They were a little dishonest about the time they put in at work. On their first day they forgot to bring necessary items to work.
I had a similar experience with someone else. IMHO the issue with breaking the law is not so much the act itself. Rather, it is indicative of someone who does not think about the consequences of their actions, does not responsibly think through whether something is a good idea and not just act on an impulse, does not think about how an action will effect other people, and lacks a sense of what is appropriate social behavior. It also often indicates a lack of respect for other people's property. Finally they often lack the inability to coherently think about a problem and then formulate a plan that addresses it considering possible things that might go wrong. This is also why credit scores are so useful - they often communicate in might finer detail the degree to which someone grapples with these issues.
The last point is quite salient. Quite often if the criminal would have considered how their action addressed their problem, they would have realized that the long term consequences of the action don't justify the action as a solution to their problem. For example: stealing from a store may get you the iPad but it isn't worth going to jail over. And indeed those who have occasionally broken the law and gotten away with it due to precise and intricate planning may not have that problem. (Not that I am in any way condoning such behavior.)
At this point, if I was hiring someone with a drug abuse history, I would be somewhat forgiving about their being an addict. But I would want to know why they took their first puff or drink or injection. They weren't addicted at that time. There is no 'right answer' to that question but I think it might allow me to see what sort of person I am dealing with. If they say 'I don't know', then clearly I cannot hire them - they lack insight and probably cannot think about their actions and their repercussions. If they say that they were pressured into it by a group of their peers who called them a pussy for not taking a smoke at a party - well I would be a lot more understanding.
1. iPad Man, for not actually paying attention to his surroundings. 2. Airport security (obviously) for freaking out over the oblivious iPad Man.
Nope, the full extent of the dumbarsery is entirely on number 1. He was walking in the opposite direction to everyone else and in order for the doors at to be open somoene had to be walking the right way (at an airport, this would likely be dozens of other people). If he didn't notice this, he is the idiot. The AFP (Australian Federal Police) who secure our airports cant take chances. They cant tell whether dumb Ipad man is just Dumb Ipad man or Disgruntled Steve who wants to beat up Bill in the airside cafe until they talk to him. Now the AFP did just that and released the man without charge (they could have charged him, but under the circumstances they chose not to), so good on them for that but it is a real shame that this kind of idiocy isn't a crime... or painful.
Ipadguy made a mistake! There was no mens rea. Do you really have to blame someone who just spaced out and not just leave the blame on the security guards and the police force. Why is it the we must always punish the little guy. Talk about bias. I am sure there are people who would imprison someone who accidentally brought in a bottled water across airport security or who forgot about a metal pen in his/her pocket. For once, just for once, can we just NOT advocate putting someone is prison for an honest mistake. Can we hold the those who really messed up accountable. The statement above just gets at how we punish the tiny infraction and ignore the huge calamity.
This why the bankers that caused the worst economic crisis in 80 years are not in prison. Because we focus on some tiny potatoes. And we want to punish people for making a mistake we all could make. I am sure plenty of people have spaced out and tried to walk the wrong way into a secured area. They were just politely stopped. But it's not enough for some people and we sleepwalk into a police state.
Someone sounds jealous...
Jealousy and other issues as well. The Vice article seems to have strong opinions as to what sort of conditions other people may live in. It just states that it is dystopian without much evidence. And as to the poor in Dubai, they are already richer than many of their compatriots back home (many are immigrant workers) and given time and further economic development they no doubt will get richer themselves. The United Arab Emirates are the one most forward thinking areas in the Middle East. They are slowly going through what the West did in the reformation and enlightenment. Of course it will take time but I am sure they will be much more progressive societies in 300 years.
/or prevent men there from impregnating them, you really cannot complain. I am always amazed at people who are shocked when they hear others moralize about women giving birth when they are very poor. They pontificate about every women having the 'right' to have children. Often these same people then later complain about the environmental consequences of such children when they reach adulthood.)
Then there is the issue that some people simply fetishise nature and assume that everything 'natural' must be beautiful. It simply is not the case. Most 'natural' places are ugly. The ones that we photograph are the elegant and interesting ones. A lot of the time those people who enjoy extreme temperatures and who are in excellent shape imagine that rest of humanity has the same take on their surroundings. It's so easy to forget that without keeping out the heat or cold many people would be miserable - particular in an extremely hot desert which is where Dubai is located. The heat is simply oppressive. And of course by allowing this dome, it means people can venture out of their homes and get more exercise - something that is otherwise not possible.
I can imagine that some people would say that humans should not be living there to begin with. To which I answer: someone gave birth to them and once there here on planet earth they have to live somewhere. And most people living in the middle east don't have much choice as to where to live particularly if they don’t want to live in absolute poverty. (So unless you want to stop Bangladeshi and Pakistani mothers from getting pregnant and
What about assuming that there is simply no way to ever travel faster than the speed of light (or use a worm hole to achieve the same effect) and thus different civilizations in different star systems are never even able to find each other, let alone visit each other.
Any well trained military unit will be trained and equipped to deal with them.
I don't accept that this point always holds. And not all armies are well trained and equipped.
During the cold war the Soviets developed the Novichok agent - something that the US could not necessarily defend against. If soldiers are wearing gas masks and protective suits, they are less agile and less effective in using regular conventional weapons. This provides the enemy with a tactical advantage. And given that chemical weapons have not been used in a major war by industrialized nations since WW1, much of the technology may have changed. It may be in fact that they do have significant strategic value.
The chemical weapons in Syria worked. The opposition is not well trained and equipped.
And how would bombing Assad help? He is a dictator fighting for his survival and therefore has little to lose. But bombing Syria would kills Syrians, both soldiers and civilians. It would destroy people's homes (why not be empathetic and imagine your own home blown up by a bomb from Syria and the regime shrugging it off as collateral damage). It would destroy people's livelihoods (not to mention that we tend to target infrastructure such as power stations which mean people may lack electricity for months or years and even sewage systems may fail). It would wound people and inhibit their receiving appropriate medical care. It would in short inflict huge suffering.
In short people say that chemical weapons are really bad because they inflict lots of human suffering. So what is their proposed response to their use? Dropping bombs and missiles that will also inflict lots of human suffering. What then is the point?
And why if we have so much moral outrage, do 1000 deaths from chemical weapons necessitate a response, despite the fact that 100,000 deaths from conventional weapons do not?
I really hope they don't put up ever more cameras. We don't need them. Crime has been falling since 1988 and the US murder rate is around 5.4 / 100,000 people. And that is close to its all time low. And terrorism is rare and unlikely to kill or hurt anyone. When can we start rolling out policy based on data and evidence not on fear?
As far as cameras looking at police officers. We need a lot more of that. Police routinely 'beat people up' and conduct illegal searches. They need to be put on a short leash.
You provided the per-capita murder rate. Can you also provide the per-capita for people beat up by police and for illegal searches?
Well that's the point isn't it. We can't collect data because police lack effective oversight. If there was an an agency whose job it was to only oversee the police, who could not arrest civilians, and who had access to cameras, microphones and general surveillance of the police - then we could get an idea what kind of stuff goes down.
You only have to look at the cases coming out of the Innocence project to see the incredible abuses by the criminal justice system.
I really hope they don't put up ever more cameras. We don't need them. Crime has been falling since 1988 and the US murder rate is around 5.4 / 100,000 people. And that is close to its all time low. And terrorism is rare and unlikely to kill or hurt anyone. When can we start rolling out policy based on data and evidence not on fear?
As far as cameras looking at police officers. We need a lot more of that. Police routinely 'beat people up' and conduct illegal searches. They need to be put on a short leash.
That's not the whole story either. If you read your own link carefully, it points out that Giuliani predicted the quakes using a method that has never been proven scientifically and has had no peer reviewed papers published. In other words, he's a crackpot who just happened to get lucky;
If you read this article ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/05/laquila-earthquake-prediction-giampaolo-giuliani ) you will see that Giuliani was no crackpot - in fact he presented his research to an American conference. Just because someone does not have a PhD does not mean they cannot carry out scientific inquiry. All you need is brains and money. He has some financial backers. It seems, and this happens so often, that because he didn't have the right credentials his work was ignored in Italy and he wasn't allowed to publish. It wasn't until he came to the USA that he was given a fair hearing.
It is correct that literacy tests were used in the past to deny voting rights to citizens of color. However that does not mean that any test we apply in the future will be motivated by the same intent. Imposing a test in a vacuum is not desirable, however we now have very serious problems - long term problem of debt, healthcare costs, entitlement spending, a crumbling infrastructure, obsession with futile wars, income inequality, a failing k-12 educational system, the taking away of civil liberties and out of control intellectual property.
It appears probable that those problems can only be dealt with by a wise and knowledgeable electorate. Indeed only those who did not understand macroeconomics would have believed that the Bush tax cuts would have 'paid for themselves' as was claimed at the time. Now we have to deal with the consequences of those stupid actions. And that is why we need a rigorous examination for future voters,
[And there is nothing to prevent the imposition of safeguards in federal law to prevent the new exams being abused by those with racial malintent. For example the exam centers and grading system should be closely monitored.]