I don't think the public education system is terribly interested in teaching critical thinking skills. From what I've seen over the last several decades it feels like its gone in the opposite direction (or perhaps I'm just more aware of the problem and it was always there) and engenders notions such as not questioning authority and adhering to whatever is taught from the textbooks. I don't think it's any kind of overarching conspiracy on the part of the government or anything like that, but just a lot of overall intellectual laziness or pettiness from individual teachers that want to push their own dogma on students whether it's anti-scientific stuff like creationism or some new kinds of idiocy like white privilege.
Also, I think a lot of people don't really want to think critically. Actually doing so eventually means your mind is going to cast its critical eye inward and few people are comfortable with confronting that their own deeply held beliefs aren't entirely correct. It's far more pleasant for them to turn off their brain and live in their own misconstrued reality where they never have to change those beliefs. I think a lot of people eventually get stuck in some kind of cognitive trap where an idea becomes a sacred cow and no amount of evidence will move them from their beliefs.
I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that many of these wealthy people will take out large loans and default on them and pay it off with stock, which doesn't count as a sale. Essentially it allows them to get around the taxes. There may be more to it than that, or it may have been some loophole that's since been closed, but it seemed like the type of scheme bankers would dream up.
You don't need a billion dollars (or really even a million for that matter) in cash for any reason. What the hell would you actually buy with it? Perhaps you could perform a (hostile) takeover of some other company that's publicly traded or just for sale by the owner, but the kinds of people who'd do that would be looking at it as an investment instead of like buying a car.
You don't even need to be cash rich at all as long as you're just rich. Banks will always be willing to lend you money when you have billions of dollars worth of assets.
This kind of reminds me of an old Microsoft project that didn't pan out. The "commercial" is pretty cringe inducing and not terribly interesting, but it gives you an idea of what it's supposed to do. The real fun was when people fed vocal tracks for popular songs into to see what it would do, often to comedic results: Queen, Johnny Cash, and Motörhead produce some amusing outcomes.
I don't listen to much black metal, but these results seem a bit better, or perhaps just far less silly.
I would imagine that for most of us alive right now that our existence is only temporary whether we ever develop sophisticated AI or not. I suspect most of us would strongly prefer a choice to transfer our consciousness to an AI as there's not much guarantee of continued existence outside of that at this point.
Any advanced AI would be far better at running things than people. For all we know it might like to keep us around as pets. A sheltered existence with some pampering, exercise, and the occasional treat seems like an absolute bargain for most of the people currently living on the planet.
If no one is dying, who cares if the conflict goes on and on and on? I suppose there's an obvious economic hit to both sides as resources are devoted away from whatever else they would normally be used for in order to build more robots, but you have to compare that to the economic hit that already exists from human armies merely existing as well as the loss of human life that they invariably lead to in some capacity. If that's economically cheaper, then I don't see a reason why we should care.
There will always be conflict, it's in our nature. If you can ultimately make war incredibly civilized, there's very little reason not to. Ultimately I think any such attempts would be futile as if you're willing to fight the kind of war that doesn't result in any human casualties because it's so damned civilized, there's not a lot of incentive to ever surrender because there's no penalty for losing if the robots won't actually kill any people.
You act like that's a bad thing. If anything were binding you'd see plenty of states trying to use the UN as a cudgel, as in "Me and this army" types of approaches. Most countries don't have the political will for such things to begin with and even if enough did, the UN would tear itself apart in short order and likely lead to large scale conflict, the type of thing it was meant to prevent.
It's far better that it's utterly toothless. At least it allows the world's countries to come together and air their grievances before everyone else.
As of last month I progressed from not reading articles to not reading summaries. Now I don't even read the headlines before commenting, so if my comment made any sense at all it was purely a coincidence.
Either that or it was just all an elaborate ruse to see how many [other] people didn't read the summary [either]. Yeah, that's it. I got you good.
You don't need the source code to determine if it's any good or not. We don't have the source code of the universe, but have been able to make steady scientific process regardless.
Having access to the source code would no doubt make it much easier to verify, but if they refuse, you can still run a series of studies aimed at testing whether or not the program actually does what it claims. If you have some known DNA samples, you can have the program analyze them in order to produce estimates and see how closely they align with reality.
I was under the impression that people who are actually suicidal don't often post about it on Facebook. If you really want to kill yourself, bringing more attention to yourself isn't a good way to accomplish this. Don't get me wrong, the petty narcissists that try to get attention by acting suicidal clearly need help as well, but I don't think this will do much to deter those who are actually suicidal.
If Facebook really cared about the mental health and wellbeing of their users, they'd kick people off after more than fifteen minutes of daily use or just outright pull the plug on the whole works.
Net neutrality is difficult enough to get people to understand as is and I don't think stringing this albatross round its neck helps that cause at all. Nevermind that there are also some devices that we (society) definitely don't want people to tinker with at all such as catalytic converters, electrical wiring, etc. for various reasons.
That and I can't really see companies getting on board with such an idea at all unless you include some language that means tinkering voids the warranty because they don't want to get stuck fixing junked kit after someone's tinkering tankered the device. Oddly enough the only way to possibly enforce that kind of situation is with a detection mechanism that no one can tinker with.
I'd suggest not buying products that don't let you tinker. Businesses don't exist without customers and if enough people want a thing, there will be plenty of others lining up to provide it.
You don't even need a degree to do that if you keep records to show that hiring isn't disproportionate to the ratio of applicants applying for positions. You don't need a college degree to go be a roughneck on an oil rig, but none of those companies are getting sued for sexual discrimination because almost all of the workers are men because there are almost no women that apply for those jobs.
I don't think that every critic looks at comic book movies and expects them to be Citizen Kane or some kind of avant-garde arthouse movie, but even within the realm of popcorn blockbusters, there are obviously degrees. There are comic book films like those in Raimi's Spiderman or Nolan's Batman trilogies that stand head and shoulder above most of what is being trotted out today. Those offer far better spectacle and storytelling than a lot of the more recent DC films, many of which get more flak from comic book fans than film critics because they fail miserably to accurately characterize the subjects of their films.
Snyder is a terrible director and really proves how little Hollywood understands about movies. His early success road heavily on the back of stories by acclaimed writers like Alan Moore and Frank Miller where anyone could have had a great film by adapting those properties. His only real skill is in creating spectacle, but he does so at the expense of everything else including the characters in his story or the logic of the movie's world. Both Watchmen and 300 already had plenty baked into their narratives as a result of being graphic novels so Snyder only needed to bring that to the screen. Once he got the ability to add his own ideas to existing scripts, it all just went to hell because now the film existed in service to a few choice scenes rather than spectacular scenes supplementing the rest of the movie.
"May you live in interesting times". This surely is true from a sociologist/anthropologist point of vew, but this is certainly not the kind of world I feel confortable raising my children in.
But is there really a different time you'd want to raise your children in? I can't really think of any time in history better than now. A large part of the world are capitalist democracies that allow you to accumulate wealth for yourself rather than handing it all over to your lord, master, etc. Even if you're not born there, most of them are willing to let you move there and even become citizens.
There's far less war than previously and the odds of a Mongol horde or something similar destroying your village are so much less. If you're a woman, you'll probably not get carried off, die in childbirth, and if you can make it to that western world you're just as free to pursue your dreams as anyone else instead of being stuck as a house keeper or baby factory.
Knowledge is readily available to anyone with an internet connection which is rapidly expanding to almost everyone as smart phones become ubiquitous and are bringing computers to parts of the world that never got them before. There's so much knowledge available that the bigger problem is filtering it and picking the best stuff out. There's typically a youtube video showing you how to do just about anything you could care to learn, never mind access to manuals, etc. that might have been much harder to get your hands on previously.
I could probably go on for another five or six paragraphs about how good shit is now. Hell, you can lose limbs or have plenty of other terrible accidents that would have been a death sentence previously, but are entirely manageable today. People who are more interested in intellectual pursuits can find work in them whereas in the past, they were probably limited to manual labor unless they were born into the aristocracy. The internet has eliminated serious barriers to entry for artistic people in a similar manner. Just about everything is better today and there aren't too many things that you can't do if you aren't willing to work for it.
If things seem tough or difficult now, it's because they always are. There are always going to be extremists of some sort. In the 80's and 90's it was the religious right, now its the authoritarian left. It doesn't really matter, because in a few decades it will be something else. But the world is only going to get better if you stand up to the difficulties and work to change the world for the better or keep the evils from spreading. Your ancestors had to stand up to barbarian hordes, but you can't handle some idiots yelling at you about burning in hell or how you're causing microaggressions? Seriously?
I think that part of the problem with the MBA is that for a while it seemed like everybody was fucking getting one. Laws of supply and demand suggest that would cause the value to diminish unless the demand was increasing similarly. I think the market is just coming around to this realization and reacting in accordance to establish a new equilibrium around what everyone believes is closer to the real value of an MBA.
The problem is that no one really wants to die. Even people who jump off of bridges that manage to survive often say that they regretted the choice to jump afterwards.
However, eventually you will start dying in a every real and immediate sense of the word and at that point you're gladly willing to do just about anything to prolong your life. That makes you incredibly easy to take advantage of in such a situation and why the government has clamped down not only on homebrew medicine like this, but even imposes limitations on clinical trials for new medications.
I guess I don't really care personally if people want to do this, and ultimately people are responsible for their own decisions no matter how much the government tries to get in the way, but I'm also not going to pretend that making it easy to do things like this won't result in some utterly heinous behavior on the part of society.
Housing is an area where the market fails. The most profit is made by causing social problems, i.e. to the detriment of the rest of society. As such, most places have extra levels of regulation.
This explains why housing projects are such great places to live.
The housing market works fine, it's government intervention that screws everything up or makes it way more complicated. You're not going to find many well regarded economists that think rent control is a good idea or doesn't cause all manner of problems in turn. It also turns out that guaranteeing home loans to people who can't possibly afford them wasn't a good idea other. The market did exactly what the people wanted it to, but if you have a lot of racist people, the market isn't going to magically create racial harmony for you. Of course neither is government intervention, so it hardly matters.
I'd even be fine with the proposals from people who want to completely remove the government from the market, even when it includes no protection for minority groups and businesses could actively discriminate based on race. It just lets all the peckerheads that care about crap like that segregate their own selves away from everyone else. And if someone wants to create their own little ethnic enclave where only black Jews from the Maldives can live then they're just as welcome to that. The people and businesses that like money more than prejudices are going to be the ones to survive and thrive.
It's not even a hard question to answer if you bother to stop and think about it, but most people don't like to because they don't like the answers. But if you are poor, it's incredibly likely that your parents were poor, and their parents in turn. You don't have to trace back too many generations to see that in the United States you had the vast majority of blacks in chattel slavery where there was no ability to accumulate generational wealth, and even after that ended, a long period of time where the government had laws (Jim Crow) designed to disadvantage blacks. Since then, the welfare system is poorly designed and does not incentivize the type of behavior that will result in the impoverished improving their condition (this applies to any racial group) and the war on drugs has essentially destroyed the family unit in black communities which is another huge impediment to creating generational wealth.
The same goes for Latinos as well. A lot of them are or had parents who were poor immigrants. If you look back historically, the same was true for a lot of Irish, Italian, German, etc. immigrants who came to the U.S. decades or centuries ago. The only real difference is there used to be land that the government would hand out to anyone who would show up and live on it so it was a bit easier to get started even if you had nothing if you were willing to at least try and make something of yourself. If you expect some arbitrary person who just came to the United States whether legally, illegally, or even as a refugee to have as much wealth as the average person living in the U.S., I'm not sure why you believed that way to begin with.
As to the other points you raise, again just stop and think about it. Do you yourself live in an area with a lot of poor minorities? If you don't, then you probably already know the answer to why other people with more wealth don't either. There's your clusters right there. And when minority groups do get more wealth, they don't stick around in poor neighborhoods either.
This has nothing to do with the internet itself and is merely a byproduct of European countries having economies of varying strength. You could get the exact same situation without an internet and people placing orders over the phone or through the mail.
Personally I don't mind the move. I think trying to create artificial barriers to commerce is just as silly for essentially the same reasons you suggest. Yes, there will be some short term pain and grumbling as things change, but it's not the end of the world.
I don't use any of the voice assistants, but are they smart enough to know who they're talking to? Assuming that the purpose of having one is so that it can do useful things for you, I can think of a lot of those useful things that I wouldn't want guests to be able to do. I'm sure the idea of a device not needing to be unlocked sounds great right up until someone adds a bucket full of dildos to your shopping list or orders a half dozen pizzas to your account.
Indeed. The last time this came up, I actually spent a little time reading into the policies of Hitler's Nazi Germany and they were a grab bag of left and right policies. Hitler had no problems nationalizing certain industries, especially if they had some vital importance to the military and there were instances where he privatized government services. There was not particular pattern of caring for free market ideals or capitalism just as there wasn't any strong case that he was erecting a Marxist society either. It seemed more like he was just paying enough lip service to any particular ideal in order to consolidate support behind the Nazi party. It was capitalist enough for the business leaders and socialist enough for the union leaders and so everyone fell into line.
I think that people are far too one-dimensional with their classification of governments. Nazi Germany sits rather close to the center in terms of economic right and economic left. I think what people are trying to do (whether consciously or not) is to try to brand the strong authoritarianism of Nazi Germany as some inherent aspect of the economic systems of the left or right. It doesn't really make sense to do so and you can find examples of governments that were far left (Communist China, U.S.S.R., etc.) that were similarly authoritarian in their treatment of their populations as well as governments further to the economic right of Nazi Germany (Chile under Pinochet for example) as well as countless examples of countries falling on both sides of the economic spectrum that are far more liberal (in the non-economic sense) or perhaps less nationalistic.
I suppose you could speculate how Nazi economic philosophy would have morphed if they had been successful, and that might be an interesting line of thought, but based on what they actually did, they were quite centrist. I don't think Hitler really cared as long as his choices helped further his ambitions or the German war effort. Everyone considers them so evil, that just associating them with a group of people you don't like is an effective tactic for debate or political discourse, even if as you mention its incredibly sloppy thinking at best or terribly intellectually dishonest at worst.
Probably because it gets more attention. There are plenty of people who wouldn't care about it otherwise that might pay attention when "solar" enters the conversation. You see the same kind of thing in the tech world where all kinds of stuff gets rehashed, but now it's "on the internet" or has "augmented reality features" or whatever other buzzword helps it sell better.
Sometimes the exciting part of a discovery isn't that it does something we've never seen the like of previously, but that it does something that was previously very expensive to do quite inexpensively. I'm not saying that this is the case here, but it seems like you can't go more than a few months without hearing about some amazing new battery technology that you know we won't see anytime soon because it's prohibitively expensive to manufacture.
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I don't think the public education system is terribly interested in teaching critical thinking skills. From what I've seen over the last several decades it feels like its gone in the opposite direction (or perhaps I'm just more aware of the problem and it was always there) and engenders notions such as not questioning authority and adhering to whatever is taught from the textbooks. I don't think it's any kind of overarching conspiracy on the part of the government or anything like that, but just a lot of overall intellectual laziness or pettiness from individual teachers that want to push their own dogma on students whether it's anti-scientific stuff like creationism or some new kinds of idiocy like white privilege.
Also, I think a lot of people don't really want to think critically. Actually doing so eventually means your mind is going to cast its critical eye inward and few people are comfortable with confronting that their own deeply held beliefs aren't entirely correct. It's far more pleasant for them to turn off their brain and live in their own misconstrued reality where they never have to change those beliefs. I think a lot of people eventually get stuck in some kind of cognitive trap where an idea becomes a sacred cow and no amount of evidence will move them from their beliefs.
I don't know how true this is, but I've heard that many of these wealthy people will take out large loans and default on them and pay it off with stock, which doesn't count as a sale. Essentially it allows them to get around the taxes. There may be more to it than that, or it may have been some loophole that's since been closed, but it seemed like the type of scheme bankers would dream up.
You don't need a billion dollars (or really even a million for that matter) in cash for any reason. What the hell would you actually buy with it? Perhaps you could perform a (hostile) takeover of some other company that's publicly traded or just for sale by the owner, but the kinds of people who'd do that would be looking at it as an investment instead of like buying a car.
You don't even need to be cash rich at all as long as you're just rich. Banks will always be willing to lend you money when you have billions of dollars worth of assets.
This kind of reminds me of an old Microsoft project that didn't pan out. The "commercial" is pretty cringe inducing and not terribly interesting, but it gives you an idea of what it's supposed to do. The real fun was when people fed vocal tracks for popular songs into to see what it would do, often to comedic results: Queen, Johnny Cash, and Motörhead produce some amusing outcomes.
I don't listen to much black metal, but these results seem a bit better, or perhaps just far less silly.
I would imagine that for most of us alive right now that our existence is only temporary whether we ever develop sophisticated AI or not. I suspect most of us would strongly prefer a choice to transfer our consciousness to an AI as there's not much guarantee of continued existence outside of that at this point.
Any advanced AI would be far better at running things than people. For all we know it might like to keep us around as pets. A sheltered existence with some pampering, exercise, and the occasional treat seems like an absolute bargain for most of the people currently living on the planet.
If no one is dying, who cares if the conflict goes on and on and on? I suppose there's an obvious economic hit to both sides as resources are devoted away from whatever else they would normally be used for in order to build more robots, but you have to compare that to the economic hit that already exists from human armies merely existing as well as the loss of human life that they invariably lead to in some capacity. If that's economically cheaper, then I don't see a reason why we should care.
There will always be conflict, it's in our nature. If you can ultimately make war incredibly civilized, there's very little reason not to. Ultimately I think any such attempts would be futile as if you're willing to fight the kind of war that doesn't result in any human casualties because it's so damned civilized, there's not a lot of incentive to ever surrender because there's no penalty for losing if the robots won't actually kill any people.
You act like that's a bad thing. If anything were binding you'd see plenty of states trying to use the UN as a cudgel, as in "Me and this army" types of approaches. Most countries don't have the political will for such things to begin with and even if enough did, the UN would tear itself apart in short order and likely lead to large scale conflict, the type of thing it was meant to prevent.
It's far better that it's utterly toothless. At least it allows the world's countries to come together and air their grievances before everyone else.
As of last month I progressed from not reading articles to not reading summaries. Now I don't even read the headlines before commenting, so if my comment made any sense at all it was purely a coincidence.
Either that or it was just all an elaborate ruse to see how many [other] people didn't read the summary [either]. Yeah, that's it. I got you good.
I forget which comedian said it, but I recall a bit where compared glitter to herpes. Once you've got it, you can't get rid of it.
You don't need the source code to determine if it's any good or not. We don't have the source code of the universe, but have been able to make steady scientific process regardless.
Having access to the source code would no doubt make it much easier to verify, but if they refuse, you can still run a series of studies aimed at testing whether or not the program actually does what it claims. If you have some known DNA samples, you can have the program analyze them in order to produce estimates and see how closely they align with reality.
I was under the impression that people who are actually suicidal don't often post about it on Facebook. If you really want to kill yourself, bringing more attention to yourself isn't a good way to accomplish this. Don't get me wrong, the petty narcissists that try to get attention by acting suicidal clearly need help as well, but I don't think this will do much to deter those who are actually suicidal.
If Facebook really cared about the mental health and wellbeing of their users, they'd kick people off after more than fifteen minutes of daily use or just outright pull the plug on the whole works.
Net neutrality is difficult enough to get people to understand as is and I don't think stringing this albatross round its neck helps that cause at all. Nevermind that there are also some devices that we (society) definitely don't want people to tinker with at all such as catalytic converters, electrical wiring, etc. for various reasons.
That and I can't really see companies getting on board with such an idea at all unless you include some language that means tinkering voids the warranty because they don't want to get stuck fixing junked kit after someone's tinkering tankered the device. Oddly enough the only way to possibly enforce that kind of situation is with a detection mechanism that no one can tinker with.
I'd suggest not buying products that don't let you tinker. Businesses don't exist without customers and if enough people want a thing, there will be plenty of others lining up to provide it.
You don't even need a degree to do that if you keep records to show that hiring isn't disproportionate to the ratio of applicants applying for positions. You don't need a college degree to go be a roughneck on an oil rig, but none of those companies are getting sued for sexual discrimination because almost all of the workers are men because there are almost no women that apply for those jobs.
I don't think that every critic looks at comic book movies and expects them to be Citizen Kane or some kind of avant-garde arthouse movie, but even within the realm of popcorn blockbusters, there are obviously degrees. There are comic book films like those in Raimi's Spiderman or Nolan's Batman trilogies that stand head and shoulder above most of what is being trotted out today. Those offer far better spectacle and storytelling than a lot of the more recent DC films, many of which get more flak from comic book fans than film critics because they fail miserably to accurately characterize the subjects of their films.
Snyder is a terrible director and really proves how little Hollywood understands about movies. His early success road heavily on the back of stories by acclaimed writers like Alan Moore and Frank Miller where anyone could have had a great film by adapting those properties. His only real skill is in creating spectacle, but he does so at the expense of everything else including the characters in his story or the logic of the movie's world. Both Watchmen and 300 already had plenty baked into their narratives as a result of being graphic novels so Snyder only needed to bring that to the screen. Once he got the ability to add his own ideas to existing scripts, it all just went to hell because now the film existed in service to a few choice scenes rather than spectacular scenes supplementing the rest of the movie.
"May you live in interesting times". This surely is true from a sociologist/anthropologist point of vew, but this is certainly not the kind of world I feel confortable raising my children in.
But is there really a different time you'd want to raise your children in? I can't really think of any time in history better than now. A large part of the world are capitalist democracies that allow you to accumulate wealth for yourself rather than handing it all over to your lord, master, etc. Even if you're not born there, most of them are willing to let you move there and even become citizens.
There's far less war than previously and the odds of a Mongol horde or something similar destroying your village are so much less. If you're a woman, you'll probably not get carried off, die in childbirth, and if you can make it to that western world you're just as free to pursue your dreams as anyone else instead of being stuck as a house keeper or baby factory.
Knowledge is readily available to anyone with an internet connection which is rapidly expanding to almost everyone as smart phones become ubiquitous and are bringing computers to parts of the world that never got them before. There's so much knowledge available that the bigger problem is filtering it and picking the best stuff out. There's typically a youtube video showing you how to do just about anything you could care to learn, never mind access to manuals, etc. that might have been much harder to get your hands on previously.
I could probably go on for another five or six paragraphs about how good shit is now. Hell, you can lose limbs or have plenty of other terrible accidents that would have been a death sentence previously, but are entirely manageable today. People who are more interested in intellectual pursuits can find work in them whereas in the past, they were probably limited to manual labor unless they were born into the aristocracy. The internet has eliminated serious barriers to entry for artistic people in a similar manner. Just about everything is better today and there aren't too many things that you can't do if you aren't willing to work for it.
If things seem tough or difficult now, it's because they always are. There are always going to be extremists of some sort. In the 80's and 90's it was the religious right, now its the authoritarian left. It doesn't really matter, because in a few decades it will be something else. But the world is only going to get better if you stand up to the difficulties and work to change the world for the better or keep the evils from spreading. Your ancestors had to stand up to barbarian hordes, but you can't handle some idiots yelling at you about burning in hell or how you're causing microaggressions? Seriously?
He also said the study revealed a difference between men and women's emotional relationship with different alcoholic drinks.
He doesn't work for Google does he?
I think that part of the problem with the MBA is that for a while it seemed like everybody was fucking getting one. Laws of supply and demand suggest that would cause the value to diminish unless the demand was increasing similarly. I think the market is just coming around to this realization and reacting in accordance to establish a new equilibrium around what everyone believes is closer to the real value of an MBA.
The problem is that no one really wants to die. Even people who jump off of bridges that manage to survive often say that they regretted the choice to jump afterwards.
However, eventually you will start dying in a every real and immediate sense of the word and at that point you're gladly willing to do just about anything to prolong your life. That makes you incredibly easy to take advantage of in such a situation and why the government has clamped down not only on homebrew medicine like this, but even imposes limitations on clinical trials for new medications.
I guess I don't really care personally if people want to do this, and ultimately people are responsible for their own decisions no matter how much the government tries to get in the way, but I'm also not going to pretend that making it easy to do things like this won't result in some utterly heinous behavior on the part of society.
Housing is an area where the market fails. The most profit is made by causing social problems, i.e. to the detriment of the rest of society. As such, most places have extra levels of regulation.
This explains why housing projects are such great places to live.
The housing market works fine, it's government intervention that screws everything up or makes it way more complicated. You're not going to find many well regarded economists that think rent control is a good idea or doesn't cause all manner of problems in turn. It also turns out that guaranteeing home loans to people who can't possibly afford them wasn't a good idea other. The market did exactly what the people wanted it to, but if you have a lot of racist people, the market isn't going to magically create racial harmony for you. Of course neither is government intervention, so it hardly matters.
I'd even be fine with the proposals from people who want to completely remove the government from the market, even when it includes no protection for minority groups and businesses could actively discriminate based on race. It just lets all the peckerheads that care about crap like that segregate their own selves away from everyone else. And if someone wants to create their own little ethnic enclave where only black Jews from the Maldives can live then they're just as welcome to that. The people and businesses that like money more than prejudices are going to be the ones to survive and thrive.
It's not even a hard question to answer if you bother to stop and think about it, but most people don't like to because they don't like the answers. But if you are poor, it's incredibly likely that your parents were poor, and their parents in turn. You don't have to trace back too many generations to see that in the United States you had the vast majority of blacks in chattel slavery where there was no ability to accumulate generational wealth, and even after that ended, a long period of time where the government had laws (Jim Crow) designed to disadvantage blacks. Since then, the welfare system is poorly designed and does not incentivize the type of behavior that will result in the impoverished improving their condition (this applies to any racial group) and the war on drugs has essentially destroyed the family unit in black communities which is another huge impediment to creating generational wealth.
The same goes for Latinos as well. A lot of them are or had parents who were poor immigrants. If you look back historically, the same was true for a lot of Irish, Italian, German, etc. immigrants who came to the U.S. decades or centuries ago. The only real difference is there used to be land that the government would hand out to anyone who would show up and live on it so it was a bit easier to get started even if you had nothing if you were willing to at least try and make something of yourself. If you expect some arbitrary person who just came to the United States whether legally, illegally, or even as a refugee to have as much wealth as the average person living in the U.S., I'm not sure why you believed that way to begin with.
As to the other points you raise, again just stop and think about it. Do you yourself live in an area with a lot of poor minorities? If you don't, then you probably already know the answer to why other people with more wealth don't either. There's your clusters right there. And when minority groups do get more wealth, they don't stick around in poor neighborhoods either.
This has nothing to do with the internet itself and is merely a byproduct of European countries having economies of varying strength. You could get the exact same situation without an internet and people placing orders over the phone or through the mail.
Personally I don't mind the move. I think trying to create artificial barriers to commerce is just as silly for essentially the same reasons you suggest. Yes, there will be some short term pain and grumbling as things change, but it's not the end of the world.
I don't use any of the voice assistants, but are they smart enough to know who they're talking to? Assuming that the purpose of having one is so that it can do useful things for you, I can think of a lot of those useful things that I wouldn't want guests to be able to do. I'm sure the idea of a device not needing to be unlocked sounds great right up until someone adds a bucket full of dildos to your shopping list or orders a half dozen pizzas to your account.
Indeed. The last time this came up, I actually spent a little time reading into the policies of Hitler's Nazi Germany and they were a grab bag of left and right policies. Hitler had no problems nationalizing certain industries, especially if they had some vital importance to the military and there were instances where he privatized government services. There was not particular pattern of caring for free market ideals or capitalism just as there wasn't any strong case that he was erecting a Marxist society either. It seemed more like he was just paying enough lip service to any particular ideal in order to consolidate support behind the Nazi party. It was capitalist enough for the business leaders and socialist enough for the union leaders and so everyone fell into line.
I think that people are far too one-dimensional with their classification of governments. Nazi Germany sits rather close to the center in terms of economic right and economic left. I think what people are trying to do (whether consciously or not) is to try to brand the strong authoritarianism of Nazi Germany as some inherent aspect of the economic systems of the left or right. It doesn't really make sense to do so and you can find examples of governments that were far left (Communist China, U.S.S.R., etc.) that were similarly authoritarian in their treatment of their populations as well as governments further to the economic right of Nazi Germany (Chile under Pinochet for example) as well as countless examples of countries falling on both sides of the economic spectrum that are far more liberal (in the non-economic sense) or perhaps less nationalistic.
I suppose you could speculate how Nazi economic philosophy would have morphed if they had been successful, and that might be an interesting line of thought, but based on what they actually did, they were quite centrist. I don't think Hitler really cared as long as his choices helped further his ambitions or the German war effort. Everyone considers them so evil, that just associating them with a group of people you don't like is an effective tactic for debate or political discourse, even if as you mention its incredibly sloppy thinking at best or terribly intellectually dishonest at worst.
then why include the "solar" angle
Probably because it gets more attention. There are plenty of people who wouldn't care about it otherwise that might pay attention when "solar" enters the conversation. You see the same kind of thing in the tech world where all kinds of stuff gets rehashed, but now it's "on the internet" or has "augmented reality features" or whatever other buzzword helps it sell better.
Sometimes the exciting part of a discovery isn't that it does something we've never seen the like of previously, but that it does something that was previously very expensive to do quite inexpensively. I'm not saying that this is the case here, but it seems like you can't go more than a few months without hearing about some amazing new battery technology that you know we won't see anytime soon because it's prohibitively expensive to manufacture.