Absolutely true, although I'm not sure want the government stepping in and banning all meat production. If water cost something slightly less comically low then we'd see consumption of 'wasteful' products fall due to the price differential. The reason I don't like blanket bans is that in many cases they punish a small subset of negative behaviours. I'd expect the water waste of someone with a huge lawn, or a large open air pool in a hot arid area is wasting vastly more water than someone who eats the odd chicken;)
Stop subsidising water and waste will go down, without restricting personal choice or haphazardly punishing certain negative choices and not others.
Aside from the validity of your satire, one of the issues is that water is too cheap. Corporations wouldn't have the right motives (long term enough) but water should be more expensive because price is one of the best ways to control demand. Perhaps it shouldn't be affordable to grow extremely thirsty crops is areas with water shortages when the land could be used to grow less thirsty crops and more demanding crops could be grown elsewhere.
Poverty does not cause obesity. It causes unhealthy diets which can cause obesity. Stay home and eat a 7 dollar lean steak or a 12 dollar healthy omega3 rich fish fillet with about 4 dollars in trimmings or get filled up with a 6 dollar super sized big mac meal and not have to fix the crap.
Not an overly persuasive argument when thought through. It isn't hard to eat cheap and eat healthily. Swap the massive coke in that McDonalds meal with a sugar free drink (or if you don't trust sugar alternatives stick with water) and for no extra cost you've just made a huge difference.
Poor people tend to be fatter for many reasons, ranging from being less bothered about societies opinion of them to being less educated on the risks. Yes money is relevant (how many poor people can hire personal trainers or decent gym memberships for example) but you could easily take an unhealthy diet and make it vastly better without spending more.
Also, what type of asshole employee would separate a man from his two young children?
What kind of asshole doesn't pay for a premium service then tries to demand it anyway? He could board with his kids as normal or he could have paid for his kids to have priority boarding, nobody was separating him. Any more than a strip club is separating a parent from a child if they don't let children in and the parent goes in anyway.
Obviously doesn't mean he shouldn't be allowed to treat his opinion, or that it is remotely appropriate for the agent to respond to the tweet in that way.
You mean like the urgent notices I get about my accounts at banks I've never done business with or the "invoices" from companies I've never heard of before, let alone done business with?
What exactly's your point? Obviously emails about accounts with banks you don't use aren't going to catch many people (although if they're threatening consequences like fines or rewards it'll catch some of the more naive), but when it gets to someone who does use that bank/business the effectiveness increases considerably. What you're doing is the equivalent of laughing at advertising billboards, roughly 3/4s of the people who see an add for female deoderant aren't the target market but the company knows that and doesn't care because the cost is worth it to reach the 25% it wants.
Or just ban the cunts quickly when they are reported for abuse. It always amazed me years ago when xbox live was invariably filled by racist/sexist/abusive chumps who the reporting system clearly wasn't enforced. Every time a girls voice (or a possibly female gamertag) was heard in a game there'd be 1+ twat making sexual remarks, telling them to get back in the kitchen incessently. People are paying MS decent money for live and MS ignoring that crap was basically a big fuck you to anyone female, asian, black or whatever who wanted to game online without constant abuse.
Or vanish back to the imagination that created. The simplest way for 9/10 men who don't think there's an issue to get a better understanding of the difference in harassment between genders is to think about how much abuse (if any) they get for being male, then ask a female friend to tell them about examples of harrasment they have been subjected to and the effect.
Anecdotals have plenty of flaws but with something as inherently personal as sexual harrasment it's a lot easier to appreciate the importance if you realise the universality of it and the impact on a real person.
If I write a gaming opinion piece called "Mens world: why game devs should ignore all whining women and focus on their main demographic" I'd also get a lot of angry mail and spiteful messages.
And Martin Luther King got a whole lot of shit for highlighting the plight of black people; it doesn't mean he didn't have a point or that threatening to sexually assault or kill him should be brushed off as the inevitable consequence of his actions.
I've seen enough sexist, aggressive or verbal, abuse of women by men which had nothing to do with the woman being a 'feminist' (like that could justify it regardless) to appreciate that sexism is an real issue that needs addressing. Obviously not everything that every man does is sexist, but when women have to put up with orders of magnitude more harrassment just because they're female, us men need to put aside our desire to defend our own reputation and realise that this shit has to stop.
You should know that Israelis mourn Gazan casualties as well. We hate the Hamas, but certainly not the people of Gaza.
Many Israelis don't even if you do, and you certainly don't respond to suffering on both sides in the same way. As a Brit I know the rocket attacks the Israelis are coming under are terrible compared to my cosey little existence, but they're almost comical compared to the suffering of the Palestinians: Hundreds of dead, thousands of injured, hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes and over a million without basic utilities, struggling to find food and water.
People wonder why so many Palestinians support Hamas when they 'bring these attacks upon the Palestinian people' but they're missing the point. The existence of the French resistance during WW2 led to thousands of the French suffering in response, but they considered the resistance as the only way to fight back against an oppressor. In Palestine the Israelies are seen as that oppressor, and even if the resistance is largely ineffective and leads to reprisals, they will be supported because people support those they see as fighting for them against an oppressor.
Israelis constantly make the point that Hamas targets civilians when they don't. Firstly, given the vastly larger number of Palestinian civilians killed it's a pretty arbitrary point and secondly Israel can effectively strike at Palestinian military organisations with minimal risk, how exactly do you suggest that Hamas fights a conventional war agains the IDF? Lastly, look back at the post WW2 period and the founding of Israel and the acts of terrorism, including many targetting civilians, by Jews at the time. Back when your country didn't have overwhelming military power your ancestors were perfectly happy to use terrorism to achieve its goals; which makes this protest agains the same methods 60 years later look more than a little hypocritical.
I'm not saying he's necessarily right, but he didn't disprove him own point.
I said he contradicted his own data source. Which he clearly, and emphatically did. There are certainly arguments that could be made for why Americans need bigger cars for safety, and if they could be backed up with evidence I'd welcome them? I could come up with a dozen reasons why driving in Europe could be more dangerous than the US but without any evidence it's just speculation, which is all your musing on road complexity is unless there's any evidence to support it.
For American cars to be safer than European cars you'd need to demonstrate that driving on the roads in America is roughly 3 times as likely to lead to a fatality in equivalent vehicles to fit with the source he used.
I believe in Climate change, but at the same time, I can completely understand the confusion on the part of the general public. Climate change has no direct evidence and there never will be.
Produce the statistics as a whole, explain them and let the opponents try to fight THAT.
This article isn't about a single observable proof of climate change so I don't get what relevance your rant has. In fact, given that the story is allegedly about climate change deniers mis-using data that shows climate change as 'evidence' there isn't climate change it's pretty fucking obvious that they are able to fight data based arguments.
Visit List of countries by traffic-related death rate [wikipedia.org] and sort by "Road fatalities per 100 000 motor vehicles"... The EU Econobox is a deathtrap by American standards.
I'm not sure how you've managed to so completely contradict your own data source. America 11.6 Road fatalities per 100 000 motor vehicles and the list of countries you've given is basically the best countries. For example, the UK's figure is 3.5 (less than 1/3rd the death rate in america). Even using the more useful deaths per km travelled figures the US has almost twice the fatality rate of the UK with our 'small EU deathtraps'.
This law is actually only enacted because their previous law got invalidated by the EU, and they really really want to still be able to do this!
I disagree with these rules on retention, but the false comments by others who share that view are blurring an important debate. The law that got invalidated by the European court was an EU law not a UK law, so no this isn't because their law was invalidated. There's been a fuss made about this bill being rushed through as though it to hide something; however the bill has come about very quickly compared to most and given the desire of the government to get cross-bench support the timing isn't overly suspicious. They've also added a very short which means which requires a new bill be passed in 2 years which gives time for proper debate.
I'll repeat my assertion that I don't want ISPs to be recording this information for all customers; however making the story about how the bill is being passed (actually very reasonably for the circumstances) distracts from the questioning of whether any such bill should exist at all and isn't helpful.
For one thing, if someone's got a solid work ethic, likes to buckle down and get the job done, takes pride in their work, then how does that coexist with the attitude that college isn't worth the effort? If they think college is stupid, does that mean they secretly think their current job is stupid?
Pretty naive logic. Do you really want to hire someone who stuck at a degree even though they strongly believed it was a unproductive use of their time because of the fear of failure, sheer pigheadiness or irrational risk avoidance? Does that mean they won't challenge poor decisions or provide valueable insights in your company?
I've got a degree and I'm glad I went to university; which doesn't stop me from knowing that judging someone for dropping out without further information is a dumb idea.
So asking for a refund for in-app purchases made by a minor should be legal, they are simply voiding their purchase.
There's no reason to interpret voiding a contract as requiring that a payment be returned. There would also be issues around the fact the child has no contract with the credit card provider, and that the person who does will have a contract with the credit card provider which they almost certainly broke by allowing someone else to use it.
None of the above says in-app purchases are right. I just wanted to clarify that the rules regarding children and contracts probably don't impact in the way you suggest.
Does someone who is only 8 understand that when they are spending what are now "Smurfberries" are actually real money?
Why would you give someone who is 8 a device on which they have all the details they need to spend real money? Also, when they buy in game currency that screen will explicitly say how much real money you're spending. It's misleading to pretend that an 8 year old wouldn't be aware they were spending real money.
The same is true of things like pay-per-view - if some cable company had a big BUY button on the remote control that if you pushed it twice automatically tuned to a PPV station and bought the first thing on the list without an option for a PIN, then you'd see outrage over that as well.
If that was clearly explained functionality then I expect you'd find very quick;y that no one would use that company. If it wasn't defined functionality or was a bug, then you'd see people suing the company for the error. You see outrage from people who order dishes with warnings about hot, then can't eat them and expect refunds; the presence of outrage isn't proof of the presence of something to reasonable to be outraged about.
The only real question to me is whether Amazon have done anything to encourages users to feel safe letting kids use their tablets, and if so has it been secured to a reasonable extent. It sounds like there is some confusing behaviour around unlocking in-app purchases when doing other things, which could mean they fail that test.
Selling an 'expansion pack' containing additional content while users are not playing the game should also be legal, as long as the expansion pack is announced in advance and not prompted for purchase in the game, or given a 'sample' of the expansion.
Why? People can show me adverts for a game I don't own already to make me want to buy it. What is so magically different about showing me an advert in the game for something else that it needs laws creating to stop it?
2.) Selling ability to access something shown or advertised in game, for example as a "locked" mission, "premium" campaign, or "bonus option", should be illegal.
If I go into a bar and order a beer does the bar owner have to hide all the more expensive beers, food etc so that I can't be tempted with it. Should the waitress be locked up if she asks if I'd like another? "on a computer" or "in a game" doesn't make something an entirely new concept. Upselling, expansions, try before buying etc have existed for decades and we don't need a dozen new laws to make doing it in computer games.
The real question is: should the court order such an action, and under what conditions?
There is considerable difference between the two cases. Post is only more controversial because it requires someone to trespass, and potentially break and enter, your physical home. If the post service could 'vanish' your paper letter by pressing a button then I'd suggest that yes it should use that ability when a court decides there is sufficient need rather than involving an innocent third party in a technical legal issue.
If GS can persuade a court that the letter was of no interest to the recipient, and that its distribution breaches the rights of someone else then in 99.99% of cases requiring a potentially global manhunt to find the recipient and order him through the courts to delete the email is a monumental waste of money and a burden on the third party. In the small fraction of cases where the recipient cares then one would hope they would be informed of what has happened and have the chance to appeal the removal.
You might benefit from following your own advice. He's supporting the idea that the correct channel for this is for GS to have to get a court to agree to order the email be removed. He made no judgement on the obvious theoretical issues, which you seem to think are novel insights, because it is self-evident that a court can and should examine these matters before it orders Google to do anything.
And? If a news show notices that it gets better viewing figures when shows are more negative and thus changes shows to be more negative that could have a worse effect. If google changes the pagerank algorithm in a way that makes negative sites score more highly (even if it is inadvertant) then it could have a far bigger effect.
People are getting their noses bent out of shape because Facebook talked about this as a psychological experiment rather than testing a system change; what they did was no worse than what thousands of companies do every day, and considerably better than what thousands of other companies do every day (those who prey on peoples insecurity to drive sales).
None of my examples related to testing systems; they all related to testing how users reacted. Literally the only thing that seems different about this to the thousands of other experiments Facebook and other companies are running constantly is that it had an explicit intention to measure the users state rather than just behaviour. I'm not sure that makes any real difference to the ethics.
Websites are conducting research constantly. When Google moves a letter a pixel in their logo it isn't for shits and giggles; it's because testing showed them that it changed something for their benefit. That testing was an experiment and involved users who will have had no idea that an experiment is going on. When a company tries putting something new in high visibility spots in some of its stores, then uses that data to decide how to place products they are performing an experiment on people who haven't given 'informed consent'.
Literally millions of experiments like this are happening all the time. It isn't viable to inform users of all of them, especially as many people performing them may not even realise they are doing it and it isn't beneficial to stop them all. Read what Facebook actually did, it may be that it crosses a line for you even though it didn't for me, and that's fine; so let's try and come up with a line we can all accept rather than a kneejerk reaction of claiming that any experiment is bad, no matter how trivial, without informed consent.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely true, although I'm not sure want the government stepping in and banning all meat production. If water cost something slightly less comically low then we'd see consumption of 'wasteful' products fall due to the price differential. The reason I don't like blanket bans is that in many cases they punish a small subset of negative behaviours. I'd expect the water waste of someone with a huge lawn, or a large open air pool in a hot arid area is wasting vastly more water than someone who eats the odd chicken ;)
Stop subsidising water and waste will go down, without restricting personal choice or haphazardly punishing certain negative choices and not others.
Aside from the validity of your satire, one of the issues is that water is too cheap. Corporations wouldn't have the right motives (long term enough) but water should be more expensive because price is one of the best ways to control demand. Perhaps it shouldn't be affordable to grow extremely thirsty crops is areas with water shortages when the land could be used to grow less thirsty crops and more demanding crops could be grown elsewhere.
Not an overly persuasive argument when thought through. It isn't hard to eat cheap and eat healthily. Swap the massive coke in that McDonalds meal with a sugar free drink (or if you don't trust sugar alternatives stick with water) and for no extra cost you've just made a huge difference.
Poor people tend to be fatter for many reasons, ranging from being less bothered about societies opinion of them to being less educated on the risks. Yes money is relevant (how many poor people can hire personal trainers or decent gym memberships for example) but you could easily take an unhealthy diet and make it vastly better without spending more.
What kind of asshole doesn't pay for a premium service then tries to demand it anyway? He could board with his kids as normal or he could have paid for his kids to have priority boarding, nobody was separating him. Any more than a strip club is separating a parent from a child if they don't let children in and the parent goes in anyway.
Obviously doesn't mean he shouldn't be allowed to treat his opinion, or that it is remotely appropriate for the agent to respond to the tweet in that way.
What exactly's your point? Obviously emails about accounts with banks you don't use aren't going to catch many people (although if they're threatening consequences like fines or rewards it'll catch some of the more naive), but when it gets to someone who does use that bank/business the effectiveness increases considerably. What you're doing is the equivalent of laughing at advertising billboards, roughly 3/4s of the people who see an add for female deoderant aren't the target market but the company knows that and doesn't care because the cost is worth it to reach the 25% it wants.
Or just ban the cunts quickly when they are reported for abuse. It always amazed me years ago when xbox live was invariably filled by racist/sexist/abusive chumps who the reporting system clearly wasn't enforced. Every time a girls voice (or a possibly female gamertag) was heard in a game there'd be 1+ twat making sexual remarks, telling them to get back in the kitchen incessently. People are paying MS decent money for live and MS ignoring that crap was basically a big fuck you to anyone female, asian, black or whatever who wanted to game online without constant abuse.
Or vanish back to the imagination that created. The simplest way for 9/10 men who don't think there's an issue to get a better understanding of the difference in harassment between genders is to think about how much abuse (if any) they get for being male, then ask a female friend to tell them about examples of harrasment they have been subjected to and the effect.
Anecdotals have plenty of flaws but with something as inherently personal as sexual harrasment it's a lot easier to appreciate the importance if you realise the universality of it and the impact on a real person.
And Martin Luther King got a whole lot of shit for highlighting the plight of black people; it doesn't mean he didn't have a point or that threatening to sexually assault or kill him should be brushed off as the inevitable consequence of his actions.
I've seen enough sexist, aggressive or verbal, abuse of women by men which had nothing to do with the woman being a 'feminist' (like that could justify it regardless) to appreciate that sexism is an real issue that needs addressing. Obviously not everything that every man does is sexist, but when women have to put up with orders of magnitude more harrassment just because they're female, us men need to put aside our desire to defend our own reputation and realise that this shit has to stop.
Many Israelis don't even if you do, and you certainly don't respond to suffering on both sides in the same way. As a Brit I know the rocket attacks the Israelis are coming under are terrible compared to my cosey little existence, but they're almost comical compared to the suffering of the Palestinians: Hundreds of dead, thousands of injured, hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes and over a million without basic utilities, struggling to find food and water.
People wonder why so many Palestinians support Hamas when they 'bring these attacks upon the Palestinian people' but they're missing the point. The existence of the French resistance during WW2 led to thousands of the French suffering in response, but they considered the resistance as the only way to fight back against an oppressor. In Palestine the Israelies are seen as that oppressor, and even if the resistance is largely ineffective and leads to reprisals, they will be supported because people support those they see as fighting for them against an oppressor.
Israelis constantly make the point that Hamas targets civilians when they don't. Firstly, given the vastly larger number of Palestinian civilians killed it's a pretty arbitrary point and secondly Israel can effectively strike at Palestinian military organisations with minimal risk, how exactly do you suggest that Hamas fights a conventional war agains the IDF? Lastly, look back at the post WW2 period and the founding of Israel and the acts of terrorism, including many targetting civilians, by Jews at the time. Back when your country didn't have overwhelming military power your ancestors were perfectly happy to use terrorism to achieve its goals; which makes this protest agains the same methods 60 years later look more than a little hypocritical.
I said he contradicted his own data source. Which he clearly, and emphatically did. There are certainly arguments that could be made for why Americans need bigger cars for safety, and if they could be backed up with evidence I'd welcome them? I could come up with a dozen reasons why driving in Europe could be more dangerous than the US but without any evidence it's just speculation, which is all your musing on road complexity is unless there's any evidence to support it.
For American cars to be safer than European cars you'd need to demonstrate that driving on the roads in America is roughly 3 times as likely to lead to a fatality in equivalent vehicles to fit with the source he used.
This article isn't about a single observable proof of climate change so I don't get what relevance your rant has. In fact, given that the story is allegedly about climate change deniers mis-using data that shows climate change as 'evidence' there isn't climate change it's pretty fucking obvious that they are able to fight data based arguments.
I'm not sure how you've managed to so completely contradict your own data source. America 11.6 Road fatalities per 100 000 motor vehicles and the list of countries you've given is basically the best countries. For example, the UK's figure is 3.5 (less than 1/3rd the death rate in america). Even using the more useful deaths per km travelled figures the US has almost twice the fatality rate of the UK with our 'small EU deathtraps'.
Apologies: It was meant to say it includes a "very short sunset clause"
I disagree with these rules on retention, but the false comments by others who share that view are blurring an important debate. The law that got invalidated by the European court was an EU law not a UK law, so no this isn't because their law was invalidated. There's been a fuss made about this bill being rushed through as though it to hide something; however the bill has come about very quickly compared to most and given the desire of the government to get cross-bench support the timing isn't overly suspicious. They've also added a very short which means which requires a new bill be passed in 2 years which gives time for proper debate.
I'll repeat my assertion that I don't want ISPs to be recording this information for all customers; however making the story about how the bill is being passed (actually very reasonably for the circumstances) distracts from the questioning of whether any such bill should exist at all and isn't helpful.
Pretty naive logic. Do you really want to hire someone who stuck at a degree even though they strongly believed it was a unproductive use of their time because of the fear of failure, sheer pigheadiness or irrational risk avoidance? Does that mean they won't challenge poor decisions or provide valueable insights in your company?
I've got a degree and I'm glad I went to university; which doesn't stop me from knowing that judging someone for dropping out without further information is a dumb idea.
Maybe it's small and used to being picked up ;)
There's no reason to interpret voiding a contract as requiring that a payment be returned. There would also be issues around the fact the child has no contract with the credit card provider, and that the person who does will have a contract with the credit card provider which they almost certainly broke by allowing someone else to use it.
None of the above says in-app purchases are right. I just wanted to clarify that the rules regarding children and contracts probably don't impact in the way you suggest.
Why would you give someone who is 8 a device on which they have all the details they need to spend real money? Also, when they buy in game currency that screen will explicitly say how much real money you're spending. It's misleading to pretend that an 8 year old wouldn't be aware they were spending real money.
If that was clearly explained functionality then I expect you'd find very quick;y that no one would use that company. If it wasn't defined functionality or was a bug, then you'd see people suing the company for the error. You see outrage from people who order dishes with warnings about hot, then can't eat them and expect refunds; the presence of outrage isn't proof of the presence of something to reasonable to be outraged about.
The only real question to me is whether Amazon have done anything to encourages users to feel safe letting kids use their tablets, and if so has it been secured to a reasonable extent. It sounds like there is some confusing behaviour around unlocking in-app purchases when doing other things, which could mean they fail that test.
Why? People can show me adverts for a game I don't own already to make me want to buy it. What is so magically different about showing me an advert in the game for something else that it needs laws creating to stop it?
If I go into a bar and order a beer does the bar owner have to hide all the more expensive beers, food etc so that I can't be tempted with it. Should the waitress be locked up if she asks if I'd like another? "on a computer" or "in a game" doesn't make something an entirely new concept. Upselling, expansions, try before buying etc have existed for decades and we don't need a dozen new laws to make doing it in computer games.
There is considerable difference between the two cases. Post is only more controversial because it requires someone to trespass, and potentially break and enter, your physical home. If the post service could 'vanish' your paper letter by pressing a button then I'd suggest that yes it should use that ability when a court decides there is sufficient need rather than involving an innocent third party in a technical legal issue.
If GS can persuade a court that the letter was of no interest to the recipient, and that its distribution breaches the rights of someone else then in 99.99% of cases requiring a potentially global manhunt to find the recipient and order him through the courts to delete the email is a monumental waste of money and a burden on the third party. In the small fraction of cases where the recipient cares then one would hope they would be informed of what has happened and have the chance to appeal the removal.
You might benefit from following your own advice. He's supporting the idea that the correct channel for this is for GS to have to get a court to agree to order the email be removed. He made no judgement on the obvious theoretical issues, which you seem to think are novel insights, because it is self-evident that a court can and should examine these matters before it orders Google to do anything.
And? If a news show notices that it gets better viewing figures when shows are more negative and thus changes shows to be more negative that could have a worse effect. If google changes the pagerank algorithm in a way that makes negative sites score more highly (even if it is inadvertant) then it could have a far bigger effect.
People are getting their noses bent out of shape because Facebook talked about this as a psychological experiment rather than testing a system change; what they did was no worse than what thousands of companies do every day, and considerably better than what thousands of other companies do every day (those who prey on peoples insecurity to drive sales).
None of my examples related to testing systems; they all related to testing how users reacted. Literally the only thing that seems different about this to the thousands of other experiments Facebook and other companies are running constantly is that it had an explicit intention to measure the users state rather than just behaviour. I'm not sure that makes any real difference to the ethics.
Websites are conducting research constantly. When Google moves a letter a pixel in their logo it isn't for shits and giggles; it's because testing showed them that it changed something for their benefit. That testing was an experiment and involved users who will have had no idea that an experiment is going on. When a company tries putting something new in high visibility spots in some of its stores, then uses that data to decide how to place products they are performing an experiment on people who haven't given 'informed consent'.
Literally millions of experiments like this are happening all the time. It isn't viable to inform users of all of them, especially as many people performing them may not even realise they are doing it and it isn't beneficial to stop them all. Read what Facebook actually did, it may be that it crosses a line for you even though it didn't for me, and that's fine; so let's try and come up with a line we can all accept rather than a kneejerk reaction of claiming that any experiment is bad, no matter how trivial, without informed consent.