You're assuming that it can't possibly hope to adapt over a shorter time span. While it's certain true that some species will die out, I don't think there will be any great difficulty in the grand scheme of things. Otherwise previous, even more rapid onset ecological catastrophes in the past would have destroyed everything. Take a look at Chernobyl which has plants growing in an environment that was previously regarded as too inhospitable for life. Life as a whole is quite resilient.
That's not to say that climate change is going to be a rose garden and won't cause other problems that we can't anticipate, but I'm more worried about those than I am about the possibility of life being unable to adapt, especially when we can genetically engineer some of it ourselves. I'm far more concerned with war and massive instability that's likely to result when large populations of people need to move due to desertification or other changes that upset their previous ways of life.
global temps are rising by a few degrees and that will have far reaching impacts on weather, droughts and our ability to grow food.
No one really knows what the actual impact will be, but the doom and gloom scenarios make no sense. All of the carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere came from somewhere, mostly plants and other lifeforms buried under ground in ages long past and since pressed into coal or oil. Somehow life managed to survive in a time when the amount of carbon must have been much higher, having yet to be sequestered underground and all, or we wouldn't be able to extract it in the present time.
Perhaps the locations where crops can be grown will change, but it's quite unlikely that we'll run into problems any time soon. We already have enough land to easily supply the world's population with food, but there's a big part of the world that can't afford it, and even when we give it away for free it doesn't get distributed well.
I'm not particularly worried. Technology will continue to improve, society will transition to greener energy, start extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and eventually we'll probably figure out how to control the climate and weather to some degree. Someday we'll look back and find this all every bit as silly as the Malthusian scare and other similar crises.
If you bothered to read the link, it isn't the AEI themselves doing the research, just reporting on it. The research was actually done by the Urban Institute, so if you want to try to lazily slander someone as right-wing, it will need to be them. Since it was established by LBJ, I'm sure you'll have a fun time with that.
Depending on how you run the numbers 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck
That number is either bogus or misleading, as to hit 80%, you'd having upper middle class families living paycheck to paycheck. Even at 60%, you're covering well over half of the middle class. I would hazard a guess that even if your figures are true, a serious percentage of those people don't need to live paycheck to paycheck, but choose to consume far more than they need to instead of saving any money.
If you want to know how most people become rich, it's by saving money and investing it. You don't even need to be a financial wizard to do it, and realistically, you're probably far better off if you don't. Just invest in an index fund and you'll get good returns.
I don't think that UBI hands necessarily have to be idle hands. Attach a 10 hour community service requirement to it if you have no other employment and it will probably help. Even then there are going to be a subset of people that are too worthless to do that. Unless you're willing to legalize killing them outright or some other action that's probably heinous to some degree, you have to deal with those people one way or another.
I think the balance ultimately comes down to requiring more police and more prisons which become an entity unto themselves and I'd rather avoid it as once you create more government power like that, it's hard to get rid of it. Maybe it would just be cheaper to find an island to banish people to, but even that is tyrannical to a degree and ripe for abuse.
I think we try to frame the problems of 20 years from now too much through the lens and limitations of today. Maybe we'll have really good VR in 20 years so that the incapable people can and will just stay home and not cause societal issues. Perhaps we'll have really good genetic engineering that allows us to ensure that no one is going to be born incapable of contributing to society and a UBI isn't even necessary.
Since the Fed is currently trying to nudge inflation up, then wouldn't it have been much better if that money had gone into the pockets of people who would spend it?
Do you think rich people don't spend money? Technically it's not they themselves who spend it, but they do invest it in companies or other people who do spend it. Inflation means that money devalues as time goes by, so there's a natural incentive to put it to use. Bank interest rates are never going to be above inflation, so you need to invest extra money in order for it to retain its value. This is essentially how an IRA works and even if you know fuck all about individual companies in the market, and index fund is a pretty safe bet.
they'll have time to better themselves through education, training, reading, etc should they desire to.
That's really the key part right there. There are a large number of people who have no such desire and would just be a sponge. I'd argue that it's probably less expensive to just let them be sponges than to deal with the other unwanted outcomes of just leaving them in abject poverty, but that's just my view. Basically I can either pay for a UBI or I can pay for police, prisons, etc. when these people end up on the street and turn to crime to survive.
Also, when I'm talking about the least productive members of society, I'm talking about people who are probably moderately mentally disabled and doing cleaning work as a part of some program that subsidizes their employment to some degree. They may not be able to read (though with video services that might not be a necessity anymore) and there are likely limits to their attainment. As computers become more powerful and AI more capable, the aptitude floor just increases.
Fortunately, I don't believe that this is a large issue. There will be some people who just choose to become useless, but I believe that most people do want to better themselves or do something useful. Perhaps there could be a stipulation that people who get a UBI and don't gain new employment within some duration have to do 10 hours of volunteer work per week. Even if it's not cost effective, it's still something. I also think that having people do volunteer work would do a lot to prevent withdrawal from society as it's precisely the kind of work that's easy to take some pride in or let's people feel as though they're making a difference in the world.
Increased demand doesn't matter and there's always going to be more regardless of how rich or poor a country is since human want is essentially unlimited. What's needed is more supply, because that's what drives prices down. Increase demand as you want without increasing supply and prices go up, though not immediately by the time it comes close to the same level, the same people would just give a higher UBI to try avoiding the problem. Increasing supply means there's more wealth go around, even if the people at the bottom get disproportionately less of it.
Also the U.S. has undergone steady inflation so I don't know what you're on about with this not leading to inflation. Since 1980, it's been about 200%, which means that it takes about $3 to buy what you could for $1 in 1980. There are some who would argue that inflation is bad, but there are other arguments that is has benefits such as encouraging investment since it's the only way to keep your money from becoming worth less over time. Also, precious metals aren't immune to inflation, though it's less likely. Spain famously experienced it after hauling gold and silver out of the Americas and it wreaked havoc on their economy. In today's economy a gold standard would be terrible since supply of goods and services would rapidly outpace supply of new gold or silver, leading to massive deflation which means you're likely better off just hoarding your precious metal instead of trying to invest it in something.
As opposed to the social democratic systems that just tax the hell out of people? Or the outright Soviet-style socialist systems that seize private property and nationalize it, usually to disastrous results?
If you think that profit is immoral, you should probably give back some of your salary to your employer. Wouldn't you agree that anything you earn above what you need to live is a profit on your part?
The world is better off as a whole eliminating the work done by the least productive members of society, even if it means subsidizing them through something like a UBI, which is probably the least terrible form of wealth redistribution, but that's an aside. It fails to consider that as the world becomes more productive, the cost of goods and services decreases, which actually means that it becomes cheaper and cheaper to subsidize someone to a basic level of living. You can even see homeless people with smartphones and internet access these days and that's because they both became incredibly inexpensive relative to what they previously were.
Some people like to complain that as this wealth is created that a disproportionate amount of it goes to the wealthiest people, but it misses the point. It doesn't matter if the wealthiest are getting a disproportionate amount of it as long as everyone is moving up, and if you look at the world, poverty has been declining globally at massive rates. Even in the U.S. which is already wealthy, people are moving up. You often see people complain about the shrinking middle class, but what they fail to mention is that it's because the upper middle class is growing.
If anything is a problem with UBI, it's that humans seem to need some purpose in order to function well and for a lot of people that's a job that they feel gives their lives meaning. Many proponents like to think that most UBI recipients will learn new skills, etc. but I think a large number either won't or there might be a few at the bottom who won't be able do any kind of productive labor that wouldn't be better done by a machine. Even though further industrialization will continue to drive productivity higher and make goods more affordable, people without purpose tend to fall victim to substance abuse or other forms of behavior with similar consequences and outcomes. I think that's going to be the harder problem to crack, because I'm not sure if technology can do anything about it.
It doesn't really matter how much money you throw at something if what you're doing with it doesn't actually help. Perhaps some of these private charities that they are donating to are doing something useful, but San Francisco's approach in general doesn't seem to be at all effective. They were just named the poop capital of the U.S. this last week.
Also, I generally think people that brag about charity are kind of asshole glory hounds. It's a good thing to do, but you don't need to tell everyone else how great you are, especially if it devolves into a public fight like this. Now they both look like jackasses even for all the good that they're doing.
Wouldn't the camera count as observation and result in the same pattern that's seen with the detectors that are currently used? It's an interesting idea, but I suspect that it would just capture the electrons behaving as expected without being able to provide any additional insight into what's really going on.
It's also the case that Google (Alphabet) is rapidly becoming one of the most valuable companies ever. If they've had trouble sleeping at night, I'm sure that they can buy a really comfortable mattress to help out with that.
I believe that a failure to point out falsehoods and show them for what they are lends far more credence to them than they might gain from the additional attention. If attempts to point out the folly in something are only helping it, that would seem to suggest the arguments aren't as good as the people making them would like to think they are, or that the people making those arguments are incapable of conveying their message effectively.
If something rests on a whole mountain of falsehoods, it's even easier to topple because there's maybe only perhaps the smallest grain of truth remaining if there is any at all. If other people want to continue spouting those falsehoods after they've been pointed out as false, you've done your part. You might not convince everyone to shun those beliefs or the people to disseminate them, but even one person is better than none. Nothing false can benefit from prolonged exposure to the light of truth. To suggest otherwise would imply that you can somehow hoodwink reality to behave in accordance with the falsehood. It's far better to drag it out and hold it up to face reality instead of leaving it in the dark where misinformation seems to grow unbounded.
Not all media is biased, there are some main media that offer both sides.
No, all media is biased. It's just that not all media is biased in the same way. Some media may be less biased than others, but none are perfectly objective. If you think that as long as "both sides" of the issue are presented it must mean the media is unbiased, you've fallen into one hell of a trap. There's an entire world of possibility outside of "both sides" of issue. You can sample "both sides" of the same turd, but you're eating shit either way.
I found no mention of anything that you claim in your post, which is kind of funny given that you're bemoaning people for not reading something. I checked the version history in case someone had recently edited the Wikipedia page, but it was last edited on September 29, so it would not have changed between when Kartu wrote his/her post.
The quote that the original poster provided is at the very end of the section on her writing. Earlier in that section it mentions some of her more recent fictional work: "She wrote two books as part of the Earthkeep trilogy, The Kanshou, published in 2002, and The Magister, published in 2003. Both stories explore a dystopian world where women outnumber men, and humans are the only beings on the planet." It would seem that her later writing explores some of those same themes. Her bibliography on Wikipedia does not list other works after those, but it likely does not include everything she's written.
Perhaps she really has distanced herself from those ideas, but the Wikipedia page makes no mention of it, so I don't understand how you can fault someone for not reading information which isn't there. Also, the quoted has a reference indicating it was taken from "The Future—If There Is One—Is Female" which was published in 1982, which while quite some time ago, is not 1950 as you describe. Even if you want to argue that these were made prior to publication, the Wikipedia article indicates that she did not move to San Francisco until 1970 and only started teaching there in 1973. All of that is plainly stated in the Wikipedia article, but none of what you claim. I cannot find a digital copy of "The Future—If There Is One—Is Female" online with a quick Google search so I cannot verify myself that the purported claims in there, but several other sources of information on the internet seem to corroborate the idea.
And you've been modded "informative" which suggests that at least some people accepted it without checking. That's a great demonstration of bullshit is used to discredit a post, when the original information is exactly what it was purported to be. The existence of completely unfounded criticism makes people think the original claim is bunk, so they don't bother to check.
I generally don't bother to pirate most media anymore. I'm perfectly fine with paying for it, especially if I get a DRM-free digital copy or I get access to a streaming service that doesn't include any commercials. If you make it easy for consumers to pay for what they want (i.e. don't insist on bundling content with things I don't want) most people are more than willing to pay.
As you get older, your time becomes more valuable and you have a higher income. Paying $5 on Amazon or Apple, or $10 a month for Netflix is ultimately less expensive than trying to a functional pirated stream somewhere else online or dredging through seedy websites to find warez that isn't a malware-infested mess.
Perhaps it is because as they continue to transition towards selling subscriptions to their software and the like, it doesn't hurt them to join, especially if it means that they get free use of all of the IBM patents that might be useful in expanding into other service areas without having to worry about litigation. Perhaps these companies are waking up to the fact that the billion dollar lawsuits over technology patents drag on for years, often to a point where the technology isn't even relevant and that the only people who actually get anything after the smoke clears are the lawyers. Those are two easy guesses, but not necessarily good.
After doing some additional reading, I'm not even sure if the summary is correct. If you look at the OIN website it just talks about Linux. The do have a list of all of their owned patents which does include some that were developed by Microsoft. Perhaps they tossed a few out there as a show of goodwill, but I'm not certain that this gives every member royalty-free licenses to all of Microsoft's (or other member companies) patents.
Why would you believe the hacker's guarantee that the original owner cannot get it back? That seems like the kind of bogus claim a person would make if they want to unload a stolen account, because who would buy stolen property that could magically be returned to the original owner at any time? Given that the summary ends with an indication that the original owner did get his/her account back, it would seem that the hacker was full of shit.
Also, I'm not sure if the account people can get the full credit card number so I'm not sure if your proposed solution would work. Even if it were possible I don't think it would be a good idea since I don't want customer service people to be able to see my full credit card number when they have no business or need to know it. I also would never want to give it out to anyone who isn't immediately going to charge it for something even for the purposes of verification. Typically you only get the last four digits of the card being used for that purpose.
There are a lot of people who don't eat any fresh produce (which is probably not great from a health perspective, but that's another matter entirely) for whom it makes no difference whether they pick out their items or someone else does it. I suppose a few of them might be worried that the store employees will give them the dented cans, but my guess is that the kind of people who leave eating from them all the time probably wouldn't mind since it means not having to go to the store.
Humanity never ceases to amaze me. The strive to persevere even in the face of adversity and the dedication to advancement even after countless defeats is impressive. But on the other hand, the shear abject laziness is remarkable. One would have thought that the thousands of years prior to the modern era where people had to work all day to avoid starving would have removed whatever genes lead to people who would rather vegetate themselves as opposed to steam a raw vegetable for supper, but apparently it didn't get them all.
They must be pretty desperate as Hardware Unboxed just found that the report includes results where the AMD chip had one of the CCX modules disabled making it essentially a quad-core (as opposed to 8) chip. That's on top of the other shenanigans mentioned in the summary or in other posts.
I think it needs to go both ways. Citizens need to record their own encounters with the law or it's entirely too convenient for recordings to go missing or for malfunctions to occur. Don't ever count on police evidence to exonerate you. Even if they're not being malicious, spiteful, etc. they're still human and just as capable of lazy mistakes as the next person. Record your interaction with the police.
I don't mind the cops having a camera on me any more than they should mind me having a camera on them. If it's a sketchy situation, I expect that their evidence will go missing, so I'd better have my own. That aside, the number of incidents like this are a tiny minority of all stops. Cops are human and subject to all manner of human shortcomings and fuck-ups even if they're not actively evil. You're probably being overly paranoid if you expect that to happen to you, as it's probably within an order or two of magnitude of pulling down a huge lotto jackpot.
Who are you going to trust for information then? It's certainly not going to be the company's PR department. The trustworthiness of the government is dubious at the best of times, and few here would trust the current administration. A random anonymous blogger on the internet more likely to be a paid shill than a journalist.
I don't think there are better options here. Maybe it's a sad reflection on the state of journalism that it's come to this, but even if you weren't so cynical (or perhaps too much of a realist if I'm allowed to be cynical) I would say that getting your news from a single source is a bad idea regardless of how much trust you put into journalism. Fortunately, there's a wide variety of news sources and while each might have their own individual biases or way of framing the story, there are probably a set of facts that can be shaken out of the different narratives they are all weaving.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming that it can't possibly hope to adapt over a shorter time span. While it's certain true that some species will die out, I don't think there will be any great difficulty in the grand scheme of things. Otherwise previous, even more rapid onset ecological catastrophes in the past would have destroyed everything. Take a look at Chernobyl which has plants growing in an environment that was previously regarded as too inhospitable for life. Life as a whole is quite resilient.
That's not to say that climate change is going to be a rose garden and won't cause other problems that we can't anticipate, but I'm more worried about those than I am about the possibility of life being unable to adapt, especially when we can genetically engineer some of it ourselves. I'm far more concerned with war and massive instability that's likely to result when large populations of people need to move due to desertification or other changes that upset their previous ways of life.
global temps are rising by a few degrees and that will have far reaching impacts on weather, droughts and our ability to grow food.
No one really knows what the actual impact will be, but the doom and gloom scenarios make no sense. All of the carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere came from somewhere, mostly plants and other lifeforms buried under ground in ages long past and since pressed into coal or oil. Somehow life managed to survive in a time when the amount of carbon must have been much higher, having yet to be sequestered underground and all, or we wouldn't be able to extract it in the present time.
Perhaps the locations where crops can be grown will change, but it's quite unlikely that we'll run into problems any time soon. We already have enough land to easily supply the world's population with food, but there's a big part of the world that can't afford it, and even when we give it away for free it doesn't get distributed well.
I'm not particularly worried. Technology will continue to improve, society will transition to greener energy, start extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and eventually we'll probably figure out how to control the climate and weather to some degree. Someday we'll look back and find this all every bit as silly as the Malthusian scare and other similar crises.
As for the AEI, they're a right wing think tank.
If you bothered to read the link, it isn't the AEI themselves doing the research, just reporting on it. The research was actually done by the Urban Institute, so if you want to try to lazily slander someone as right-wing, it will need to be them. Since it was established by LBJ, I'm sure you'll have a fun time with that.
Depending on how you run the numbers 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck
That number is either bogus or misleading, as to hit 80%, you'd having upper middle class families living paycheck to paycheck. Even at 60%, you're covering well over half of the middle class. I would hazard a guess that even if your figures are true, a serious percentage of those people don't need to live paycheck to paycheck, but choose to consume far more than they need to instead of saving any money.
If you want to know how most people become rich, it's by saving money and investing it. You don't even need to be a financial wizard to do it, and realistically, you're probably far better off if you don't. Just invest in an index fund and you'll get good returns.
I don't think that UBI hands necessarily have to be idle hands. Attach a 10 hour community service requirement to it if you have no other employment and it will probably help. Even then there are going to be a subset of people that are too worthless to do that. Unless you're willing to legalize killing them outright or some other action that's probably heinous to some degree, you have to deal with those people one way or another.
I think the balance ultimately comes down to requiring more police and more prisons which become an entity unto themselves and I'd rather avoid it as once you create more government power like that, it's hard to get rid of it. Maybe it would just be cheaper to find an island to banish people to, but even that is tyrannical to a degree and ripe for abuse.
I think we try to frame the problems of 20 years from now too much through the lens and limitations of today. Maybe we'll have really good VR in 20 years so that the incapable people can and will just stay home and not cause societal issues. Perhaps we'll have really good genetic engineering that allows us to ensure that no one is going to be born incapable of contributing to society and a UBI isn't even necessary.
Since the Fed is currently trying to nudge inflation up, then wouldn't it have been much better if that money had gone into the pockets of people who would spend it?
Do you think rich people don't spend money? Technically it's not they themselves who spend it, but they do invest it in companies or other people who do spend it. Inflation means that money devalues as time goes by, so there's a natural incentive to put it to use. Bank interest rates are never going to be above inflation, so you need to invest extra money in order for it to retain its value. This is essentially how an IRA works and even if you know fuck all about individual companies in the market, and index fund is a pretty safe bet.
Yes, but I wanted to eat again the next day. Rather, I needed to eat again eventually, but I still wanted to before that point.
they'll have time to better themselves through education, training, reading, etc should they desire to.
That's really the key part right there. There are a large number of people who have no such desire and would just be a sponge. I'd argue that it's probably less expensive to just let them be sponges than to deal with the other unwanted outcomes of just leaving them in abject poverty, but that's just my view. Basically I can either pay for a UBI or I can pay for police, prisons, etc. when these people end up on the street and turn to crime to survive.
Also, when I'm talking about the least productive members of society, I'm talking about people who are probably moderately mentally disabled and doing cleaning work as a part of some program that subsidizes their employment to some degree. They may not be able to read (though with video services that might not be a necessity anymore) and there are likely limits to their attainment. As computers become more powerful and AI more capable, the aptitude floor just increases.
Fortunately, I don't believe that this is a large issue. There will be some people who just choose to become useless, but I believe that most people do want to better themselves or do something useful. Perhaps there could be a stipulation that people who get a UBI and don't gain new employment within some duration have to do 10 hours of volunteer work per week. Even if it's not cost effective, it's still something. I also think that having people do volunteer work would do a lot to prevent withdrawal from society as it's precisely the kind of work that's easy to take some pride in or let's people feel as though they're making a difference in the world.
Increased demand doesn't matter and there's always going to be more regardless of how rich or poor a country is since human want is essentially unlimited. What's needed is more supply, because that's what drives prices down. Increase demand as you want without increasing supply and prices go up, though not immediately by the time it comes close to the same level, the same people would just give a higher UBI to try avoiding the problem. Increasing supply means there's more wealth go around, even if the people at the bottom get disproportionately less of it.
Also the U.S. has undergone steady inflation so I don't know what you're on about with this not leading to inflation. Since 1980, it's been about 200%, which means that it takes about $3 to buy what you could for $1 in 1980. There are some who would argue that inflation is bad, but there are other arguments that is has benefits such as encouraging investment since it's the only way to keep your money from becoming worth less over time. Also, precious metals aren't immune to inflation, though it's less likely. Spain famously experienced it after hauling gold and silver out of the Americas and it wreaked havoc on their economy. In today's economy a gold standard would be terrible since supply of goods and services would rapidly outpace supply of new gold or silver, leading to massive deflation which means you're likely better off just hoarding your precious metal instead of trying to invest it in something.
As opposed to the social democratic systems that just tax the hell out of people? Or the outright Soviet-style socialist systems that seize private property and nationalize it, usually to disastrous results?
If you think that profit is immoral, you should probably give back some of your salary to your employer. Wouldn't you agree that anything you earn above what you need to live is a profit on your part?
The world is better off as a whole eliminating the work done by the least productive members of society, even if it means subsidizing them through something like a UBI, which is probably the least terrible form of wealth redistribution, but that's an aside. It fails to consider that as the world becomes more productive, the cost of goods and services decreases, which actually means that it becomes cheaper and cheaper to subsidize someone to a basic level of living. You can even see homeless people with smartphones and internet access these days and that's because they both became incredibly inexpensive relative to what they previously were.
Some people like to complain that as this wealth is created that a disproportionate amount of it goes to the wealthiest people, but it misses the point. It doesn't matter if the wealthiest are getting a disproportionate amount of it as long as everyone is moving up, and if you look at the world, poverty has been declining globally at massive rates. Even in the U.S. which is already wealthy, people are moving up. You often see people complain about the shrinking middle class, but what they fail to mention is that it's because the upper middle class is growing.
If anything is a problem with UBI, it's that humans seem to need some purpose in order to function well and for a lot of people that's a job that they feel gives their lives meaning. Many proponents like to think that most UBI recipients will learn new skills, etc. but I think a large number either won't or there might be a few at the bottom who won't be able do any kind of productive labor that wouldn't be better done by a machine. Even though further industrialization will continue to drive productivity higher and make goods more affordable, people without purpose tend to fall victim to substance abuse or other forms of behavior with similar consequences and outcomes. I think that's going to be the harder problem to crack, because I'm not sure if technology can do anything about it.
It doesn't really matter how much money you throw at something if what you're doing with it doesn't actually help. Perhaps some of these private charities that they are donating to are doing something useful, but San Francisco's approach in general doesn't seem to be at all effective. They were just named the poop capital of the U.S. this last week.
Also, I generally think people that brag about charity are kind of asshole glory hounds. It's a good thing to do, but you don't need to tell everyone else how great you are, especially if it devolves into a public fight like this. Now they both look like jackasses even for all the good that they're doing.
Wouldn't the camera count as observation and result in the same pattern that's seen with the detectors that are currently used? It's an interesting idea, but I suspect that it would just capture the electrons behaving as expected without being able to provide any additional insight into what's really going on.
It's also the case that Google (Alphabet) is rapidly becoming one of the most valuable companies ever. If they've had trouble sleeping at night, I'm sure that they can buy a really comfortable mattress to help out with that.
I believe that a failure to point out falsehoods and show them for what they are lends far more credence to them than they might gain from the additional attention. If attempts to point out the folly in something are only helping it, that would seem to suggest the arguments aren't as good as the people making them would like to think they are, or that the people making those arguments are incapable of conveying their message effectively.
If something rests on a whole mountain of falsehoods, it's even easier to topple because there's maybe only perhaps the smallest grain of truth remaining if there is any at all. If other people want to continue spouting those falsehoods after they've been pointed out as false, you've done your part. You might not convince everyone to shun those beliefs or the people to disseminate them, but even one person is better than none. Nothing false can benefit from prolonged exposure to the light of truth. To suggest otherwise would imply that you can somehow hoodwink reality to behave in accordance with the falsehood. It's far better to drag it out and hold it up to face reality instead of leaving it in the dark where misinformation seems to grow unbounded.
Not all media is biased, there are some main media that offer both sides.
No, all media is biased. It's just that not all media is biased in the same way. Some media may be less biased than others, but none are perfectly objective. If you think that as long as "both sides" of the issue are presented it must mean the media is unbiased, you've fallen into one hell of a trap. There's an entire world of possibility outside of "both sides" of issue. You can sample "both sides" of the same turd, but you're eating shit either way.
I found no mention of anything that you claim in your post, which is kind of funny given that you're bemoaning people for not reading something. I checked the version history in case someone had recently edited the Wikipedia page, but it was last edited on September 29, so it would not have changed between when Kartu wrote his/her post.
The quote that the original poster provided is at the very end of the section on her writing. Earlier in that section it mentions some of her more recent fictional work: "She wrote two books as part of the Earthkeep trilogy, The Kanshou, published in 2002, and The Magister, published in 2003. Both stories explore a dystopian world where women outnumber men, and humans are the only beings on the planet." It would seem that her later writing explores some of those same themes. Her bibliography on Wikipedia does not list other works after those, but it likely does not include everything she's written.
Perhaps she really has distanced herself from those ideas, but the Wikipedia page makes no mention of it, so I don't understand how you can fault someone for not reading information which isn't there. Also, the quoted has a reference indicating it was taken from "The Future—If There Is One—Is Female" which was published in 1982, which while quite some time ago, is not 1950 as you describe. Even if you want to argue that these were made prior to publication, the Wikipedia article indicates that she did not move to San Francisco until 1970 and only started teaching there in 1973. All of that is plainly stated in the Wikipedia article, but none of what you claim. I cannot find a digital copy of "The Future—If There Is One—Is Female" online with a quick Google search so I cannot verify myself that the purported claims in there, but several other sources of information on the internet seem to corroborate the idea.
And you've been modded "informative" which suggests that at least some people accepted it without checking. That's a great demonstration of bullshit is used to discredit a post, when the original information is exactly what it was purported to be. The existence of completely unfounded criticism makes people think the original claim is bunk, so they don't bother to check.
The summary doesn't indicate that it was user submitted, so I'll assume that msmash found and posted it.
I'll grant you that this is pretty lame. This is the kind of story that should have been tossed into idle.
I generally don't bother to pirate most media anymore. I'm perfectly fine with paying for it, especially if I get a DRM-free digital copy or I get access to a streaming service that doesn't include any commercials. If you make it easy for consumers to pay for what they want (i.e. don't insist on bundling content with things I don't want) most people are more than willing to pay.
As you get older, your time becomes more valuable and you have a higher income. Paying $5 on Amazon or Apple, or $10 a month for Netflix is ultimately less expensive than trying to a functional pirated stream somewhere else online or dredging through seedy websites to find warez that isn't a malware-infested mess.
Perhaps it is because as they continue to transition towards selling subscriptions to their software and the like, it doesn't hurt them to join, especially if it means that they get free use of all of the IBM patents that might be useful in expanding into other service areas without having to worry about litigation. Perhaps these companies are waking up to the fact that the billion dollar lawsuits over technology patents drag on for years, often to a point where the technology isn't even relevant and that the only people who actually get anything after the smoke clears are the lawyers. Those are two easy guesses, but not necessarily good.
After doing some additional reading, I'm not even sure if the summary is correct. If you look at the OIN website it just talks about Linux. The do have a list of all of their owned patents which does include some that were developed by Microsoft. Perhaps they tossed a few out there as a show of goodwill, but I'm not certain that this gives every member royalty-free licenses to all of Microsoft's (or other member companies) patents.
Why would you believe the hacker's guarantee that the original owner cannot get it back? That seems like the kind of bogus claim a person would make if they want to unload a stolen account, because who would buy stolen property that could magically be returned to the original owner at any time? Given that the summary ends with an indication that the original owner did get his/her account back, it would seem that the hacker was full of shit.
Also, I'm not sure if the account people can get the full credit card number so I'm not sure if your proposed solution would work. Even if it were possible I don't think it would be a good idea since I don't want customer service people to be able to see my full credit card number when they have no business or need to know it. I also would never want to give it out to anyone who isn't immediately going to charge it for something even for the purposes of verification. Typically you only get the last four digits of the card being used for that purpose.
There are a lot of people who don't eat any fresh produce (which is probably not great from a health perspective, but that's another matter entirely) for whom it makes no difference whether they pick out their items or someone else does it. I suppose a few of them might be worried that the store employees will give them the dented cans, but my guess is that the kind of people who leave eating from them all the time probably wouldn't mind since it means not having to go to the store.
Humanity never ceases to amaze me. The strive to persevere even in the face of adversity and the dedication to advancement even after countless defeats is impressive. But on the other hand, the shear abject laziness is remarkable. One would have thought that the thousands of years prior to the modern era where people had to work all day to avoid starving would have removed whatever genes lead to people who would rather vegetate themselves as opposed to steam a raw vegetable for supper, but apparently it didn't get them all.
They must be pretty desperate as Hardware Unboxed just found that the report includes results where the AMD chip had one of the CCX modules disabled making it essentially a quad-core (as opposed to 8) chip. That's on top of the other shenanigans mentioned in the summary or in other posts.
I think it needs to go both ways. Citizens need to record their own encounters with the law or it's entirely too convenient for recordings to go missing or for malfunctions to occur. Don't ever count on police evidence to exonerate you. Even if they're not being malicious, spiteful, etc. they're still human and just as capable of lazy mistakes as the next person. Record your interaction with the police.
I don't mind the cops having a camera on me any more than they should mind me having a camera on them. If it's a sketchy situation, I expect that their evidence will go missing, so I'd better have my own. That aside, the number of incidents like this are a tiny minority of all stops. Cops are human and subject to all manner of human shortcomings and fuck-ups even if they're not actively evil. You're probably being overly paranoid if you expect that to happen to you, as it's probably within an order or two of magnitude of pulling down a huge lotto jackpot.
Who are you going to trust for information then? It's certainly not going to be the company's PR department. The trustworthiness of the government is dubious at the best of times, and few here would trust the current administration. A random anonymous blogger on the internet more likely to be a paid shill than a journalist.
I don't think there are better options here. Maybe it's a sad reflection on the state of journalism that it's come to this, but even if you weren't so cynical (or perhaps too much of a realist if I'm allowed to be cynical) I would say that getting your news from a single source is a bad idea regardless of how much trust you put into journalism. Fortunately, there's a wide variety of news sources and while each might have their own individual biases or way of framing the story, there are probably a set of facts that can be shaken out of the different narratives they are all weaving.