It doesn't bring a lot of comfort to the Mexicans in that situation. When I lived in Guadalajara, I was a short walk from a row of luxury car dealerships: Porsche, Lexus, Audi, BMW, etc. And I was a short bus ride from people living in dirt floor houses and not eating enough (I was involved in a Christian ministry to some of them).
I'm pretty conservative in general, but that doesn't seem like a healthy economy. It's not encouraging to think that the world's wealthiest person got that way through monopoly deals with a corrupt government whose citizenry is mostly poor.
I don't even understand what it means to "partially oxidize" the fuel ahead of time. Isn't oxidizing fuel, by definition, burning it, since fire is an oxidation reaction? If so, why isn't "pre-oxidized fuel" like "pre-eaten food?" In other words, wouldn't it mean wasting fuel?
Surely my pathetic chemistry knowledge is at fault here, right?
I find Schmidt's comments refreshing; perhaps we could have a rational discussion about security without needlessly ratcheting up the fear machine. Traditionally wars had beginnings and endings -- that is to say, they had structure (not to be quaint). When we're eternally at war with concepts, it numbs the sentiment.
I agree, but the fear machine has a short battery life. I was in the airport recently and saw that the terror threat level was orange. Ho hum, I thought. Orange should mean "more than usual." If the level is always something close to red, the whole system is meaningless. (Besides which, what the heck am I supposed to do if there's a code red - grab a gun and look for bombers?) I read "The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!'" as a kid. Didn't everyone?
What you really mean is if we wanted specific options (those that aren't available for iPhone, but are for Android), we'd have gone Android. So what it really comes down to is whether one really wants (in this case) a WiFi finder.
No, what he really means is if you wanted freedom from someone arbitrarily removing options or preventing you from creating them yourself, you would have gone Android.
Maybe lots of people picked iPhone based partly on having a WiFi finder. But now they don't. What favorite app will disappear next? Nobody knows.
What it really comes down to is whether one really wants the final say about one's own device.
...or, if the crackers don't care about being absolutely precise, they could just put the health packs and weapons wherever they want them, or write some code to randomize them. I don't see how that would cripple the game.
The notion that anyone can arbitrarily impose a "correct" way of doing something simply because they have power, influence and authority went out with the Victorians. Those of us living in the Age of Empricism require objective, measureable effects to distinguish the (usually mulitple) correct way(s) of doing something from the multitude of incorrect ways.
It's not the same. The button pushers are deliberately tricking themselves. I have thought carefully and concluded that something is actually true. The fact that I find that truth satisfying is secondary.
If you experience the feeling of love, does it matter whether it's directed toward another human or toward a mannequin? I think so, and I have a system of values in which to frame that difference. If you think that we're only atoms, then a feeling is just a feeling.
What you just said PRESUMES that a feeling is just a feeling, then implies that believing otherwise is silly. That's not an argument; it's a snub.
My argument was that you can't have it both ways. If "the universe is all there is" as Carl Sagan has said, then the rest of his statements in the intro to Cosmos that spiritualize our discovery of it are rubbish. If you're going to be a strict materialist, you have to say that curiosity and censorship, love and rape, heroism and murder are all equal and irrational: just complex movements of some atoms that will one day be cold and motionless.
Of course, I don't believe that. But I have a framework of thought that allows for intrinsic value. Which is why I have reason to reject a "utopia" of perfect earthly happiness if it has no moral basis.
Or to pose a more interesting question: What is utopia if not happiness, and if you don't care how does an invasion of privacy (in and of itself) affect your happiness?
Your question actually exposes a very interesting difference between materialists and religious people. Let's put it another way: if you could push a button and feel deliriously happy the rest of your life, would you?
If the universe is meaningless and your only desire is to be happy until you die and rot, you should absolutely do it. If you object with statements about "justified happiness" and larger meaning, you'd better have a worldview that confers objective meaning.
A Christian like me, for example, would say that such happiness would be cheap, morally empty, and brief compared to eternity, and that you would have wasted your chance at doing anything significant during earthly life.
But when someone like Richard Dawkins talks about things like meaning, I say "pshaw. By your reckoning, meaning must be an illusion created by your genes to help you survive." You can't have it both ways.
If their trains are like the ones that go past our office, they could do a lot more aerodynamic good by making the train cars rounder, smoother and pointier than by coating their surfaces with something like glass. Why worry about microscopic roughness when you've got ridges an inch deep?
Too late. I already have holes in my roof from this irksome Chrome behavior, and the rain that came in shorted out my computer and ruined the delicious cake I was making.
I am not sure whether this indicates a lowering of level or just a change in the way the world works.
Good point. My question: how did we get all the English grammar rules we have now, considering that English itself evolved haphazardly? I suspect that it was like this: some people wrote things that were clear and easy to understand, and others imitated them. Still others observed and codified their practices into rules, then taught them to students.
If that's the case, every generation can do the same. Language is a means to an end. Writing that is confusing and unclear will tend to be less influential, and something like natural selection will do the rest.
Yeah. I think it's important to consider how a well-intentioned policy can hurt the economy and the people it's trying to help. But you are right about employers having way more power than employees, and it may be that the laws you've endorsed here are the best policies.
It is and should be illegal to fire an otherwise good employee because of their gender, race, religious beliefs or non performance affecting disabilities. While you have at will termination, you can't really protect against that fairly.
If a company shows a pattern of always firing people when it learns they are Muslim, you could draw some conclusions, but yes, this would be hard to prove, particularly for small employers.
The second is that when employees have a reasonable certainty that if they perform well they will have a job tomorrow, they are more likely to retain consumer confidence and put money back into the economy.
OK, but if companies have a reasonable certainty that if they hire someone, then later realize that they suck, it will be a huge hassle to fire them, maybe they just won't hire them in the first place, which hurts the economy.
I just heard a story on the radio about how hard it is to find a place to live in Paris. The reason? Tenant protection laws make it nearly impossible to evict someone. So landlords set ridiculous requirements for their renters, preferring to have an empty apartment than to have a deadbeat they can't evict. Some tenant protection is probably good (I want to have it, personally), but it's an example of how laws that sound good have unintended consequences for the people they aim to protect.
There's already a natural incentive for employers to keep GOOD employees. If Microsoft fires its best people when times get tough, Google or Apple will hire them and Microsoft will get out-competed as punishment for their shortsighted actions.
To a certain extent it also protects companies too. Your boss may or may not represent the best interests of the company he or she works for. The fact that they personally hate you might have nothing to do with your performance or value to the company.
So you're protecting companies against their own incompetent promotion practices? Again, if a company chooses bad managers, their profits will suffer. And red tape might not help anyway. If a manager hates you personally and wants to get rid of you, he/she can nitpick your performance and create a sufficient number of complaints, or else make you miserable while you try to ensure you're never 1 minute late, use your TPS report covers, etc, in order to avoid having enough marks to be legally fired. You can't make a bad manager good by passing laws.
I know, in the real world, there are lots of examples of bad managers, but there are also lots of examples of regulations that hurt good businesses. Given that nothing will be perfect, it seems that a simpler system is better.
I'm not saying all regulation is bad, but generally speaking, natural motivations are better than artificially imposed ones, because rules create unintended side effects and gaming of the system.
...frequent comments like "any monkey can make a web page" and "I can make a web page in Word"... like "making web pages" was what my job was actually about (and, yes, those are actual quotes from high-level professionals).
Yes, very annoying. But really, yes, you can make a web page in Word. What you can't make is a site that supports multiple languages, authenticates users, withstands hackers, processes orders, stores data in a database, scales to support heavy traffic, can run on multiple servers, uses AJAX to speed page loads and minimize bandwidth use, looks great in all browsers, is easy to navigate and accessible to the disabled, has a content-management system usable by non-coders, etc etc.
In short, you can't make a site that's suitable for a business in Word. You need a crapload of knowledge and skill.
What they're saying, effectively, is "I can build a doghouse in my backyard. How hard can skyscrapers be?"
Being able to sack at any time without question seems to be a much more business oriented law than a people oriented law.
Seems reasonable to me. I can quit anytime I want; why can't they fire me anytime they want? I'm selling them my labor. They're free to buy labor from whomever they want, and I'm free to sell to whomever I want.
What complicates it is the weird parental relationship we've set up in the US where employers provide health insurance. That should change.
Free market folks would say that any entanglements - where I can't quit because I need the insurance, or the company can't fire me because the law or a contract prevents it - serve to keep people in sub-optimal jobs and drain productivity, which leads to fewer and lower-paying jobs overall.
I'm not an economist and I'm sure there are counterarguments, but it seems pretty straightforward to me. It sucks when you're the one who is fired. But that doesn't make it immoral.
1) They don't work on every device 2) They can do stuff that web sites and email already do better 3) They compromise your privacy and possibly your security 4) Like all DRM, they can misidentify you as a thief and disable your music
If they fail, we don't have spammers anymore and if they win, well we have spam, but we also have strong AI! Win-win, I say.
Imagine you get lots of calls from clever con artists, along with your regular business calls. Imagine you've got a secretary who always has to deal with these people, distinguish social engineering attempts from legit calls, notify the cops, etc.
But what if they are just using those AOL or hotmail addresses as their personal spam box? Maybe they are old email addresses that they give out to unknown people/companies?
I sure wouldn't be giving someone I don't know my personal email.
See, that may sound perfectly reasonable to you, but think about what it implies. "I'm giving you this address because, until you prove differently, I assume you're on the level of a spambot." Not a great first impression for your potential employer.
"Unfriendly" isn't necessarily better than "clueless."
Besides which, you don't have to give them your personal email address. If your name is Reginald B Sanchez, your personal address could be 'reggiesanchez@example.com', and your business one could be 'reginaldbsanchez@example.com'. There's no reason to give a potential employer 'hack3rp4rtyd00d3495@aol'.
And, by the same token, copyright itself is a permission granted, by the public, to the copyright holder, for the sole purpose of benefiting the public (by encouraging the creation of works). The universe doesn't require it, and in some cases, its usefulness is debatable.
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Personally, I just poke a stick in my eye and listen for new rattlings in the tin-can-on-a-string.
It doesn't bring a lot of comfort to the Mexicans in that situation. When I lived in Guadalajara, I was a short walk from a row of luxury car dealerships: Porsche, Lexus, Audi, BMW, etc. And I was a short bus ride from people living in dirt floor houses and not eating enough (I was involved in a Christian ministry to some of them).
I'm pretty conservative in general, but that doesn't seem like a healthy economy. It's not encouraging to think that the world's wealthiest person got that way through monopoly deals with a corrupt government whose citizenry is mostly poor.
I have. One of the best developers I know uses one, and loves it. (He's mainly a Rails developer, and Macs are popular with that crowd.)
Because hot fuel explodes harder inside an engine cylinder?
Technically, yes, but the bees didn't digest it and burn the calories out of it, or we'd call it 'poop' instead of 'honey.'
I don't even understand what it means to "partially oxidize" the fuel ahead of time. Isn't oxidizing fuel, by definition, burning it, since fire is an oxidation reaction? If so, why isn't "pre-oxidized fuel" like "pre-eaten food?" In other words, wouldn't it mean wasting fuel?
Surely my pathetic chemistry knowledge is at fault here, right?
I agree, but the fear machine has a short battery life. I was in the airport recently and saw that the terror threat level was orange. Ho hum, I thought. Orange should mean "more than usual." If the level is always something close to red, the whole system is meaningless. (Besides which, what the heck am I supposed to do if there's a code red - grab a gun and look for bombers?) I read "The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!'" as a kid. Didn't everyone?
No, what he really means is if you wanted freedom from someone arbitrarily removing options or preventing you from creating them yourself, you would have gone Android.
Maybe lots of people picked iPhone based partly on having a WiFi finder. But now they don't. What favorite app will disappear next? Nobody knows.
What it really comes down to is whether one really wants the final say about one's own device.
...or, if the crackers don't care about being absolutely precise, they could just put the health packs and weapons wherever they want them, or write some code to randomize them. I don't see how that would cripple the game.
So imposing standards is incorrect, then?
Got any data to show that it's harmful?
It's not the same. The button pushers are deliberately tricking themselves. I have thought carefully and concluded that something is actually true. The fact that I find that truth satisfying is secondary.
If you experience the feeling of love, does it matter whether it's directed toward another human or toward a mannequin? I think so, and I have a system of values in which to frame that difference. If you think that we're only atoms, then a feeling is just a feeling.
What you just said PRESUMES that a feeling is just a feeling, then implies that believing otherwise is silly. That's not an argument; it's a snub.
My argument was that you can't have it both ways. If "the universe is all there is" as Carl Sagan has said, then the rest of his statements in the intro to Cosmos that spiritualize our discovery of it are rubbish. If you're going to be a strict materialist, you have to say that curiosity and censorship, love and rape, heroism and murder are all equal and irrational: just complex movements of some atoms that will one day be cold and motionless.
Of course, I don't believe that. But I have a framework of thought that allows for intrinsic value. Which is why I have reason to reject a "utopia" of perfect earthly happiness if it has no moral basis.
Your question actually exposes a very interesting difference between materialists and religious people. Let's put it another way: if you could push a button and feel deliriously happy the rest of your life, would you?
If the universe is meaningless and your only desire is to be happy until you die and rot, you should absolutely do it. If you object with statements about "justified happiness" and larger meaning, you'd better have a worldview that confers objective meaning.
A Christian like me, for example, would say that such happiness would be cheap, morally empty, and brief compared to eternity, and that you would have wasted your chance at doing anything significant during earthly life.
But when someone like Richard Dawkins talks about things like meaning, I say "pshaw. By your reckoning, meaning must be an illusion created by your genes to help you survive." You can't have it both ways.
If their trains are like the ones that go past our office, they could do a lot more aerodynamic good by making the train cars rounder, smoother and pointier than by coating their surfaces with something like glass. Why worry about microscopic roughness when you've got ridges an inch deep?
Too late. I already have holes in my roof from this irksome Chrome behavior, and the rain that came in shorted out my computer and ruined the delicious cake I was making.
Good point. My question: how did we get all the English grammar rules we have now, considering that English itself evolved haphazardly? I suspect that it was like this: some people wrote things that were clear and easy to understand, and others imitated them. Still others observed and codified their practices into rules, then taught them to students.
If that's the case, every generation can do the same. Language is a means to an end. Writing that is confusing and unclear will tend to be less influential, and something like natural selection will do the rest.
Yeah. I think it's important to consider how a well-intentioned policy can hurt the economy and the people it's trying to help. But you are right about employers having way more power than employees, and it may be that the laws you've endorsed here are the best policies.
If a company shows a pattern of always firing people when it learns they are Muslim, you could draw some conclusions, but yes, this would be hard to prove, particularly for small employers.
OK, but if companies have a reasonable certainty that if they hire someone, then later realize that they suck, it will be a huge hassle to fire them, maybe they just won't hire them in the first place, which hurts the economy.
I just heard a story on the radio about how hard it is to find a place to live in Paris. The reason? Tenant protection laws make it nearly impossible to evict someone. So landlords set ridiculous requirements for their renters, preferring to have an empty apartment than to have a deadbeat they can't evict. Some tenant protection is probably good (I want to have it, personally), but it's an example of how laws that sound good have unintended consequences for the people they aim to protect.
There's already a natural incentive for employers to keep GOOD employees. If Microsoft fires its best people when times get tough, Google or Apple will hire them and Microsoft will get out-competed as punishment for their shortsighted actions.
So you're protecting companies against their own incompetent promotion practices? Again, if a company chooses bad managers, their profits will suffer. And red tape might not help anyway. If a manager hates you personally and wants to get rid of you, he/she can nitpick your performance and create a sufficient number of complaints, or else make you miserable while you try to ensure you're never 1 minute late, use your TPS report covers, etc, in order to avoid having enough marks to be legally fired. You can't make a bad manager good by passing laws.
I know, in the real world, there are lots of examples of bad managers, but there are also lots of examples of regulations that hurt good businesses. Given that nothing will be perfect, it seems that a simpler system is better.
I'm not saying all regulation is bad, but generally speaking, natural motivations are better than artificially imposed ones, because rules create unintended side effects and gaming of the system.
Yes, very annoying. But really, yes, you can make a web page in Word. What you can't make is a site that supports multiple languages, authenticates users, withstands hackers, processes orders, stores data in a database, scales to support heavy traffic, can run on multiple servers, uses AJAX to speed page loads and minimize bandwidth use, looks great in all browsers, is easy to navigate and accessible to the disabled, has a content-management system usable by non-coders, etc etc.
In short, you can't make a site that's suitable for a business in Word. You need a crapload of knowledge and skill.
What they're saying, effectively, is "I can build a doghouse in my backyard. How hard can skyscrapers be?"
Who cares? I want a planet with oceans of liquid chocolate, topped with icebergs of delicious candy.
Mmmmm, Candy Planet.
Seems reasonable to me. I can quit anytime I want; why can't they fire me anytime they want? I'm selling them my labor. They're free to buy labor from whomever they want, and I'm free to sell to whomever I want.
What complicates it is the weird parental relationship we've set up in the US where employers provide health insurance. That should change.
Free market folks would say that any entanglements - where I can't quit because I need the insurance, or the company can't fire me because the law or a contract prevents it - serve to keep people in sub-optimal jobs and drain productivity, which leads to fewer and lower-paying jobs overall.
I'm not an economist and I'm sure there are counterarguments, but it seems pretty straightforward to me. It sucks when you're the one who is fired. But that doesn't make it immoral.
Wow, this just takes MP3s to a whole new level!
Why MP3s are great:
1) They work on every device
Reasons to use these new MP3s:
1) They don't work on every device
2) They can do stuff that web sites and email already do better
3) They compromise your privacy and possibly your security
4) Like all DRM, they can misidentify you as a thief and disable your music
Wait, something is wrong with that second list...
Imagine you get lots of calls from clever con artists, along with your regular business calls. Imagine you've got a secretary who always has to deal with these people, distinguish social engineering attempts from legit calls, notify the cops, etc.
That's the spam wars with clever AI.
[Pours glass of milk] [Turns on sun lamp] Game on.
See, that may sound perfectly reasonable to you, but think about what it implies. "I'm giving you this address because, until you prove differently, I assume you're on the level of a spambot." Not a great first impression for your potential employer.
"Unfriendly" isn't necessarily better than "clueless."
Besides which, you don't have to give them your personal email address. If your name is Reginald B Sanchez, your personal address could be 'reggiesanchez@example.com', and your business one could be 'reginaldbsanchez@example.com'. There's no reason to give a potential employer 'hack3rp4rtyd00d3495@aol'.
You won't have to. He'll gladly settle out of court and give you nothing for your trouble.
And, by the same token, copyright itself is a permission granted, by the public, to the copyright holder, for the sole purpose of benefiting the public (by encouraging the creation of works). The universe doesn't require it, and in some cases, its usefulness is debatable.