to go pay $15 dollars to watch a movie meant primarily for the Chinese. Start making movies for America again and I might show up. And that means more complex plots and dialog (which are harder to dub) few or no foreign product placements (which make no sense and break the movie flow even worse than regular product placements) and stop randomly including Chinese actors (I'm lookin' at you Rogue One).
Hollywood stopped making movies for me so I stopped going. Go figure.
Disclaimer: I'm white.
It's not often we get such unabashed racism here at Slashdot. Just so you know, Donnie Yen from Rogue One is a huge star in Asia, just about on the same level with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Donnie also lived in Boston as a teen and speaks excellent English. Asians are very badly underrepresented in Hollywood right now along with Hispanics and Native Americans. I like Asian films and Donnie has made a lot of interesting films over the years, perhaps being best known for playing Ip Man, Bruce Lee's martial arts teacher in Hong Kong. I'd like to see more Asian faces in Hollywood and greater appreciation for Asian cinema in general here, so no problem for me what Rogue One did. The reality is that Chinese money is backing a lot of Hollywood films and they're going to demand spots for Asian actors, so you're living in the past.
As pointed out elsewhere, the 5th Pirates In The Caribbean movie was a world wide box office smash and disappointing only in the USA. But it still turned in what I think was the 2nd best US box office performance this year of a non-super hero movie.
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like.
I can only speak specifically to in the USA, but I'm sure it would be the same in Canada. You simply can't disable a car someone is driving whenever you like. Your statement implies that the dealership could do this for any reason at all including the amusement of the people at the dealership. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where the car is disabled in the middle of a high speed road or highway or intersection and a fatality results. That certainly would involve liability issues for the dealership and possibly jail time for the disabler. The law is not going to be amused that you acted irresponsibly and got people killed over a $200 debt you tried to recover.
And yet again the problems that are unique to massively large metropolitan areas that have a lot of rich people living there is extrapolated to become an "everywhere in the USA" issue when it isn't. Maybe next they can tell us about how data analytics can help with caviar, which just simply must be a problem every restaurant in the country has to deal with.
Curious people can look up the now defunct company CleanFlicks which in the previous decade tried a different variation of this approach. They bought movies and edited them themselves to remove objectionable content (as they and their customers defined it) and sold those edited DVDs and VHS tapes. They lost in court and went out of business. I get that VidAngel isn't actually selling physical copies, which is their way to try to sneak around the CleanFlicks ruling, but a Fair Use argument was almost never going to fly. If you use, for example, 10 seconds of a movie, you can probably get away with Fair Use. If you use almost the entire movie, no, you can't get away with Fair Use. Fair Use has never been legally defied as to exactly what it is and isn't, but previous cases suggested that this argument was going to fail here.
Plot twist: FaceBook can't tell her, because they don't know. They've long ago given control of this functionality to machine learning algorithms and primitive AI and they have no idea what it's doing either.
Yes. Very likely this. Or it could be blind luck and nothing more. Facebook is estimated to have over 2 billion users. They periodically suggest I may wish to know people who aren't related to me in any way, they just happen to know somebody I know. It could just be that maybe the author and this aunt both like, say, the same TV show and follow it on Facebook and that led to a connection that was pure luck and had nothing really to do with a family relationship.
I wish Facebook could find my relatives as I've got cousins on one side of the family that I've lost touch with. I found 2 of them by spending some time searching. Facebook didn't find them at all. And to show you how "nice" that side of my family is, both rejected my friend request on Facebook. The author probably doesn't know how incredibly lucky they were to get a message through to the aunt. If you aren't friends with someone on Facebook and send them a message, by default you go to a spam part of Facebook messages that doesn't open by default and the vast majority of users never look at because they don't know it exists. I've also found cousins on the other side of my family who did accept my friend request and in no way did Facebook help us to find each other. It actually took the blind luck of a cousin I am in touch with finding an entry on Find A Grave that another cousin none of us knew how to contact had placed there for a common relative. The Find A Grave listing had an email address that we used to ultimately get back in touch with 6 family members we'd all lost track of. So yeah, I am not convinced that Facebook really knows the author's family connection as much as they just suggested a connection for another reason and it was just pure lack that there was a family connection.
What the article should have said is this:
I use GarageBand and only GarageBand and this is how GarageBand works.
For what it's worth, CoolEdit and Audacity don't work that way. I've never used GarageBand so I can't speak to what it does that you apparently can't live without and/or think that nothing else can do, but I've used Audacity for editing and CoolEdit for sophisticated transformations and neither of them look anything like GarageBand does.
The article linked to raises questions about speech codes of conduct, especially at universities, and points out that some people may have neurological diseases like Tourette's Syndrome that don't make them dangerous but may make them unable to comply with such codes. How exactly this is a "Men's Rights Activist" article is beyond me, although I guess men and men in IT may have more tendencies towards these issues. So some SJW got butt hurt because a writer dared to suggest compassion for people with different neurological wiring and this led to the vote and fork. Know what I find most disturbing? That 40% of the people agreed with the SJWs. If this is all it took to make them lose their minds, it's truly a sad day.
I would imagine that they'll label it in some way just because I can't imagine vegetarians or vegans objecting to eating it.
You must be new to this planet. Of course some of them, maybe even most of them, are going to object to this. People who are vegetarian for religious reasons (ie. Hindus, Buddhists, etc.) may not object to it. The main religious objection is that meat comes from killing a creature with a soul and you incur a karmic debt by participating in the killing it took to get you the animal flesh. This doesn't mean you can't find people with religious beliefs that oppose eating animal flesh that will do so anyway at times, but the main religious objection should be taken away. Still, don't be surprised if some of these folks still object because they will likely claim that the original source of the cells came from a killed animal.
Some vegetarians and vegans are going to object but not for religious reasons. There are plenty of people who are vegan and vegetarian because they think that eating animal flesh is a really bad idea from a health standpoint and this isn't going to change that kind of belief at all.
Does nobody consider the possibility that consumers may consider such meat to be inferior in terms of taste? If so, unless it's really cheap it may not sell very well. I wouldn't be surprised if this idea fails in the developed world and only finds an audience where cost is the number one factor. And if they price it higher than regular meat, yeah, that's just never going to work.
I can't mod up Gravis Zero because this excellent post is already rated at 5 points, but I totally agree with it. I've spent a little time in China this decade and had a couple of girlfriends who were from there and I can tell you that there are plenty of people who would love to leave it and move to America with all of America's "problems". Some people do care a lot about political freedom and safety issues. Can you imagine going to the grocery store in the USA, Canada, the EU, Japan, Australia, etc. and wondering if the powdered milk you want to buy is going to kill you if you drink it? That's a real fear in China. Just a few years ago Hong Kong had such a run on powdered milk that the local government had to actually put limits on how much non-residents could buy while traveling there.
One of my girlfriends lived in Shanghai and she was absolutely terrified of the high speed trains and flat out refused to ride on any of them. She told me that she felt that they were unsafe and she wasn't going to get herself killed in an accident on one of them. I can also tell you that her parents lived in a typical apartment that they got back in the 1970s after getting married and the value of it now was just insanely expensive compared to what it cost when they moved in. They could never afford to leave it. Shanghai may have among the worst property values in China but to a certain extent all Chinese property values are like those in California, the UK, Tokyo and Hong Kong - far higher than makes any sense and so high that many people who get mortgages will never be able to pay them off. Any place in China that is a city and not a village is like that. And Gravis correctly mentions the ghost cities that nobody or almost nobody lives in that apparently were built just to give workers something to do. They've even got some malls in some places that are empty and have never had stores in them or were built to hold 50 or more stores and maybe have 1 or 2 in the whole place.
The stock market, which Gravis mentioned, does seem to be on shaky ground. I can tell you that the average Chinese person is a very unsophisticated investor. I live in the USA and sure, lots of people here don't know much about the stock market and may even admit so, but in China there seems to be a general consensus that you can't lose - ever - if you buy stocks. On some level they have to know that some stocks certainly lose money, but there still remains this idea that the stock market will only go up forever for all stocks in China and if you don't invest in it, you are wasting your chance to make big money.
There have been cases in the USA where airlines made a huge pricing mistake and sold very expensive long distance flight tickets for unrealistically low prices and then the airline woke up after hundreds of people bought them and fixed the error. They've refused to honor the prices and the tickets, customers sued, and the customers lost.
I talked some years ago with a friend who is an attorney about a case where a guy on Ebay was selling a plasma TV for something like $1000, which at the time was actually a very low price. Well, the guy was actually selling a photo, not a real TV. He got arrested and charged with a felony. I asked my friend about it and he explained that even though the guy had used tricky wording in his Ebay ad that if you paid careful attention made it clear you were buying a photo and not a TV, that the law covers this and nobody would be expected to pay $1000 for a photo and this was clearly fraud. I'm not a lawyer but I suspect that this kind of behavior crossed the line into fraud because of the scope of the purchases. Yes, Lowes should have been smarter than shipping all this stuff. But as someone who has actually served multiple times on a jury in the USA I can tell you that the DA will frame this in terms to make it look like willful thievery, like someone forgetting to lock a back door and then having somebody walk in and grab everything they can carry. This is not going to be an easy case for the defendants to win, especially with the type of legal help I suspect they'll get. My guess is they'll get convicted. Believe it or not, the law doesn't really want to see people get ripped off because of mistakes and there are various laws on fraud and theft that can cover this situation for the benefit of Lowe's.
Chris Gillespie sued and lost so he appealed to the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), which is his right. However, the justices have not yet ruled on whether they'll even hear his appeal. My guess is they won't hear it and will let the previous ruling (against Gillespie) stand. I do know that one of the ways you can lose a trademark is not to defend it and nobody can accuse Google of doing this.
A guy with no significant source of income brags online about how loaded he is. Yeah, that never raises a red flag.
That might work in the USA though. The CIA apparently didn't pay a lot of attention when (now convicted spy) Aldrich Ames suddenly was rolling in money and living a pretty extravagant lifestyle way beyond his pay grade. He said that his wife's family basically gave them the money but still it took years before anybody in the CIA could be bothered to look into it and even once they started looking, there were various other delays in the process.
I find it very surprising that the black boxes in airplanes don't communicate with a satellite in this day and age. The technology has been around for 30 years at this point.
True, but the airlines are all crying poverty because it would cost money they don't want to spend to do it and the governments don't want to pay for it either, so end result - nothing gets done.
Aside from the cost it will still be difficult to find the wreckage as the black box beacons are long dead and even if they do find the wreckage after all this time there won't be much to salvage or to reconstruct what possibly happened aside from the data recorders.
That's not necessarily true. People said the same thing about Air France flight 447 but by the time they finally found it, the black boxes were in perfect working order still and they know exactly what happened to cause the crash as a result (extremely short version - pilot error caused it).
If there is a queue at a restaurant, then I certainly wont be going, and anyone joining the queue will either be waiting forever, or have to be told its a fake?
I have to wonder what type of people would be spending their time doing this.
They have enough money for a smartphone, and to look 'smart' in some demographic way, however their time is worthless enough that they can afford to be paid (I assume not much) to stand around doing nothing...
A million times this. There are definite limits to how long I'm willing to wait to get seated at a restaurant and these days anything over 30 minutes is probably going to result in me going elsewhere immediately. The longest I've ever waited to be seated was 2 and a half hours and that was a long time ago under very unusual circumstances. I can't imagine I'll ever break that record. A few years ago I was in Chicago with family and we wanted to go to Rick Bayless' Frontera restaurant. They told us that they estimated the wait at FOUR HOURS and told us we were welcome to wait at the bar and drink for those 4 hours. They were pretty shocked when I told them that we would instead simply leave and not wait at all. Do people really agree to wait 4 hours to eat? The staff there sure seemed to think that a 4 hour wait wasn't unreasonable or unusual. We had a very different opinion.
Then I am looking forward to my Congressional Rep not being allowed to block me on a whim.
While I don't call people names, etc. I can only imagine what my US House Rep's FB feed is gonna look like when she is required to leave stuff she doesn't like up there.
You don't understand how the law works. Trump is in a very different position than your rep since he is president. Any restrictions on him could just be restrictions on him and nobody else. Furthermore, it depends on what court places the restrictions, assuming they get placed. Trump could just appeal and send it back into the courts for years to come. Also your rep could block you and argue that the Trump ruling only applied to Trump and not them and invite you to sue if you don't like it. Anything can happen when you go to court. It depends on the political biases of the judge(s), the skill of the lawyers, and so on. I can promise you that your rep would have a way to assign lawyers to this to fight you at tax payer expense while you are forced to spend your hard earned dollars and time on it.
Some are sure it will heal the environmental woes caused by American agriculture while protecting the welfare of farm animals.
Really? If something like vat-grown meat ever takes off, every farm animal in the country will be dead within a few years. Because farmers don't raise cows and pigs and chickens because they enjoy their company, they raise them for income. Once the animals become unsellable, they're going to be exterminated.
Not only that, but I have a sneaking suspicion that vegans may refuse to eat it and backers of this plan are going to be shocked when they do so. On top of that, there are people who have religious objections to eating animal flesh such as Hindus and Buddhists because they believe that doing so makes you a participant in the death of a living creature and gives you bad karma. I'm not a member of those groups so I can't speak for them, but I can certainly guess that some of them may end up having problems with this. Buddhists in particular aren't consistent about meat eating prohibitions with many eating it and even some religious leaders suggesting that under certain circumstances it may actually be OK and not incur bad karma. I also suspect that it's going to be inferior in taste to that which comes from killing and while some won't care, others will care a lot. Add to this you'll have some people who will simply be deeply suspicious about anything that comes out of a lab that a big company told you was OK.
Sadly Canada takes a less the friendly view to American visitors. Something like 17-20% of Americana has been convicted of driving under the influence making them ineligible for entry into Canada. The overwhelming majority of these cases are misdemeanor offenses. Felony DUI is a fairly rare and serious crime, but Canada treats misdemeanor offenders of this type as ineligible felons.
The US is only marginally better. Official US government policy is that one DUI isn't a problem for visitors, but 2 or more can get your entry denied. Conviction on any drug offense is grounds for denying admission, although potential visitors do have the ability to ask for a waiver in advance. As always, there are no guarantees that a waiver will be given if applied for.
It's neither legal not ethical for a company to"offer" services on an opt-out basis, but why does this rant focus on Wells Fargo (scummy though they also be)?
I see you just outed yourself as not reading the link, because had you done so, your question would have already been answered. So since you were too lazy to look, I'll do you a favor and summarize. Various Wells Fargo mortgage customers went over their monthly statements and found a mysterious charge (about $43 a month) for a service they never agree to or asked for, namely the home warranty from AHS. And when customers tried to get Wells Fargo to take it off their bills, they failed. So Wells Fargo fully participated in billing customers for a service they never chose to receive and that's why the rant focuses on them.
We might want to determine who was behind the attack first, rather than simply assuming it was the Cuban government. For one thing, I can't imagine what motive the Cuban government would have for attacking American diplomats at a time when Cuba is trying to normalize relations with the USA. (I can imagine other parties wanting to sabotage that relationship, though)
Yep. It would definitely be in Russia's interests to perpetrate this and it fits with their disregard of health damages to those they view as their enemies. Russia would love to re-establish military bases in Cuba and Cuba has resisted this so far, despite Trump's attempts to make them as angry as possible, in the hopes of improving relations with the USA. A bunch of misdirected anger at Cuba while the Russians laugh in the background totally seems plausible. I'd put the Canadian problems as collateral damage. After all, this is the same country of geniuses that carried a highly radioactive material on a commercial flight to the UK simply to poison a dissident with no regard for how doing so might impact the carriers or the passengers of that flight.
What pensions? What companies still give pensions? I'm not aware of any US companies that give pensions.
Some of it depends on what you define as a pension. For example, retired military and US civil service workers get something that pretty much is a pension, even if they don't use those terms. Typically true pensions have been a part of very heavily unionized industries such as automobile plants and the airline industry. But as people have found out to their horror, it's possible to get pension obligations slashed or removed via bankruptcy. People over the age of 70 may possibly be getting pension payments because 401K plans didn't exist when they were younger so they weren't ever forced to contribute to those, but now pretty much everybody has a 401K plan if they offer anything because pension plans are too costly to keep supporting.
I remember very well some years ago we had a lawyer who did represent clients in lawsuits against their employers post about it. He said his standard advice was not to sue, even if the client had a really strong case. He pointed out that such lawsuits are almost always won by the employer and the client just ends up wasting a lot of time and money when they could just move on to a new job and get on with their lives. I'll point out that the infamous Ellen Pao case is a perfect example of this. I felt like she very likely was in the right to sue, but the vast majority of Slashdotters strongly disagree with me. The jury standards for her trial only required 75% or more of the jurors to agree on all the counts to reach a verdict. 9 out of 12 jurors favored the employer in this case, but 25% of them felt like she was wronged. This just shows you how difficult it is to win these kinds of cases. Google may have little choice but to defend themselves simply to make the point that they don't agree with what Damore said. And Damore was really stupid to write a 10 page or so diatribe about this subject and share it with co-workers, one of whom clearly ratted him out, and believe that there would no repercussions from sharing opinions he had to know that Google was not going to like or agree with.
no, he was fired for intentionally creating a hostile working environment.
Talk about hyperbole, Mr. alt-left. This isn't even remotely accurate..
Google's own CEO thinks it's accurate. From CNN today: But Pichai said that sections of the memo violate the company's Code of Conduct, which requires "each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."
Furthermore - and please pay attention to this part - A company undergoing an exponential scaleup is not supposed to be returning profits. They're supposed to be investing every last penny they take in in order to minimize how much additional capital they have to raise to fund the scaleup.
Correct. I'd like to point out that when Amazon started in the 1990s that Wall Street types said it would never be profitable and their business model couldn't be sustained. I'm not saying that Tesla is Amazon, but you're quite right in pointing out that the time to complain about profits is not right now.
You think that texting while driving is a problem? Try being by yourself and having to drive and consult a map while driving. It can be just as dangerous. OK, maybe if you have someone riding with you who can play navigator it's not too bad, but I can only tell you in my experience I definitely remember being incredibly frustrated with passengers completely unable to read a map. I can read a map and I remember in the early part of the 2000s being in Spain and playing navigator with a really good map while a friend drove and you would not believe the nightmare we had trying to leave Sevilla. Almost none of the roads had street signs on them, so while I had a map that showed exactly how to get out of town and on a main highway, it was impossible to track our progress on the map and get to the exit, which required a few road changes. After an hour of basically driving in circles (it was late at night by the way) and trying desperately to find our way out, I spied a road sign to an exit road and it took some driving heroics but we got on it. I don't miss the pre-GPS days at all. Might as well take a horse and buggy trip to another state as far as I'm concerned. The old pre-GPS days weren't all that great.
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to go pay $15 dollars to watch a movie meant primarily for the Chinese. Start making movies for America again and I might show up. And that means more complex plots and dialog (which are harder to dub) few or no foreign product placements (which make no sense and break the movie flow even worse than regular product placements) and stop randomly including Chinese actors (I'm lookin' at you Rogue One).
Hollywood stopped making movies for me so I stopped going. Go figure.
Disclaimer: I'm white.
It's not often we get such unabashed racism here at Slashdot. Just so you know, Donnie Yen from Rogue One is a huge star in Asia, just about on the same level with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Donnie also lived in Boston as a teen and speaks excellent English. Asians are very badly underrepresented in Hollywood right now along with Hispanics and Native Americans. I like Asian films and Donnie has made a lot of interesting films over the years, perhaps being best known for playing Ip Man, Bruce Lee's martial arts teacher in Hong Kong. I'd like to see more Asian faces in Hollywood and greater appreciation for Asian cinema in general here, so no problem for me what Rogue One did. The reality is that Chinese money is backing a lot of Hollywood films and they're going to demand spots for Asian actors, so you're living in the past.
As pointed out elsewhere, the 5th Pirates In The Caribbean movie was a world wide box office smash and disappointing only in the USA. But it still turned in what I think was the 2nd best US box office performance this year of a non-super hero movie.
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like.
I can only speak specifically to in the USA, but I'm sure it would be the same in Canada. You simply can't disable a car someone is driving whenever you like. Your statement implies that the dealership could do this for any reason at all including the amusement of the people at the dealership. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where the car is disabled in the middle of a high speed road or highway or intersection and a fatality results. That certainly would involve liability issues for the dealership and possibly jail time for the disabler. The law is not going to be amused that you acted irresponsibly and got people killed over a $200 debt you tried to recover.
And yet again the problems that are unique to massively large metropolitan areas that have a lot of rich people living there is extrapolated to become an "everywhere in the USA" issue when it isn't. Maybe next they can tell us about how data analytics can help with caviar, which just simply must be a problem every restaurant in the country has to deal with.
Curious people can look up the now defunct company CleanFlicks which in the previous decade tried a different variation of this approach. They bought movies and edited them themselves to remove objectionable content (as they and their customers defined it) and sold those edited DVDs and VHS tapes. They lost in court and went out of business. I get that VidAngel isn't actually selling physical copies, which is their way to try to sneak around the CleanFlicks ruling, but a Fair Use argument was almost never going to fly. If you use, for example, 10 seconds of a movie, you can probably get away with Fair Use. If you use almost the entire movie, no, you can't get away with Fair Use. Fair Use has never been legally defied as to exactly what it is and isn't, but previous cases suggested that this argument was going to fail here.
Plot twist: FaceBook can't tell her, because they don't know. They've long ago given control of this functionality to machine learning algorithms and primitive AI and they have no idea what it's doing either.
Yes. Very likely this. Or it could be blind luck and nothing more. Facebook is estimated to have over 2 billion users. They periodically suggest I may wish to know people who aren't related to me in any way, they just happen to know somebody I know. It could just be that maybe the author and this aunt both like, say, the same TV show and follow it on Facebook and that led to a connection that was pure luck and had nothing really to do with a family relationship.
I wish Facebook could find my relatives as I've got cousins on one side of the family that I've lost touch with. I found 2 of them by spending some time searching. Facebook didn't find them at all. And to show you how "nice" that side of my family is, both rejected my friend request on Facebook. The author probably doesn't know how incredibly lucky they were to get a message through to the aunt. If you aren't friends with someone on Facebook and send them a message, by default you go to a spam part of Facebook messages that doesn't open by default and the vast majority of users never look at because they don't know it exists. I've also found cousins on the other side of my family who did accept my friend request and in no way did Facebook help us to find each other. It actually took the blind luck of a cousin I am in touch with finding an entry on Find A Grave that another cousin none of us knew how to contact had placed there for a common relative. The Find A Grave listing had an email address that we used to ultimately get back in touch with 6 family members we'd all lost track of. So yeah, I am not convinced that Facebook really knows the author's family connection as much as they just suggested a connection for another reason and it was just pure lack that there was a family connection.
What the article should have said is this:
I use GarageBand and only GarageBand and this is how GarageBand works.
For what it's worth, CoolEdit and Audacity don't work that way. I've never used GarageBand so I can't speak to what it does that you apparently can't live without and/or think that nothing else can do, but I've used Audacity for editing and CoolEdit for sophisticated transformations and neither of them look anything like GarageBand does.
The article linked to raises questions about speech codes of conduct, especially at universities, and points out that some people may have neurological diseases like Tourette's Syndrome that don't make them dangerous but may make them unable to comply with such codes. How exactly this is a "Men's Rights Activist" article is beyond me, although I guess men and men in IT may have more tendencies towards these issues. So some SJW got butt hurt because a writer dared to suggest compassion for people with different neurological wiring and this led to the vote and fork. Know what I find most disturbing? That 40% of the people agreed with the SJWs. If this is all it took to make them lose their minds, it's truly a sad day.
I would imagine that they'll label it in some way just because I can't imagine vegetarians or vegans objecting to eating it.
You must be new to this planet. Of course some of them, maybe even most of them, are going to object to this. People who are vegetarian for religious reasons (ie. Hindus, Buddhists, etc.) may not object to it. The main religious objection is that meat comes from killing a creature with a soul and you incur a karmic debt by participating in the killing it took to get you the animal flesh. This doesn't mean you can't find people with religious beliefs that oppose eating animal flesh that will do so anyway at times, but the main religious objection should be taken away. Still, don't be surprised if some of these folks still object because they will likely claim that the original source of the cells came from a killed animal.
Some vegetarians and vegans are going to object but not for religious reasons. There are plenty of people who are vegan and vegetarian because they think that eating animal flesh is a really bad idea from a health standpoint and this isn't going to change that kind of belief at all.
Does nobody consider the possibility that consumers may consider such meat to be inferior in terms of taste? If so, unless it's really cheap it may not sell very well. I wouldn't be surprised if this idea fails in the developed world and only finds an audience where cost is the number one factor. And if they price it higher than regular meat, yeah, that's just never going to work.
I can't mod up Gravis Zero because this excellent post is already rated at 5 points, but I totally agree with it. I've spent a little time in China this decade and had a couple of girlfriends who were from there and I can tell you that there are plenty of people who would love to leave it and move to America with all of America's "problems". Some people do care a lot about political freedom and safety issues. Can you imagine going to the grocery store in the USA, Canada, the EU, Japan, Australia, etc. and wondering if the powdered milk you want to buy is going to kill you if you drink it? That's a real fear in China. Just a few years ago Hong Kong had such a run on powdered milk that the local government had to actually put limits on how much non-residents could buy while traveling there.
One of my girlfriends lived in Shanghai and she was absolutely terrified of the high speed trains and flat out refused to ride on any of them. She told me that she felt that they were unsafe and she wasn't going to get herself killed in an accident on one of them. I can also tell you that her parents lived in a typical apartment that they got back in the 1970s after getting married and the value of it now was just insanely expensive compared to what it cost when they moved in. They could never afford to leave it. Shanghai may have among the worst property values in China but to a certain extent all Chinese property values are like those in California, the UK, Tokyo and Hong Kong - far higher than makes any sense and so high that many people who get mortgages will never be able to pay them off. Any place in China that is a city and not a village is like that. And Gravis correctly mentions the ghost cities that nobody or almost nobody lives in that apparently were built just to give workers something to do. They've even got some malls in some places that are empty and have never had stores in them or were built to hold 50 or more stores and maybe have 1 or 2 in the whole place.
The stock market, which Gravis mentioned, does seem to be on shaky ground. I can tell you that the average Chinese person is a very unsophisticated investor. I live in the USA and sure, lots of people here don't know much about the stock market and may even admit so, but in China there seems to be a general consensus that you can't lose - ever - if you buy stocks. On some level they have to know that some stocks certainly lose money, but there still remains this idea that the stock market will only go up forever for all stocks in China and if you don't invest in it, you are wasting your chance to make big money.
There have been cases in the USA where airlines made a huge pricing mistake and sold very expensive long distance flight tickets for unrealistically low prices and then the airline woke up after hundreds of people bought them and fixed the error. They've refused to honor the prices and the tickets, customers sued, and the customers lost.
I talked some years ago with a friend who is an attorney about a case where a guy on Ebay was selling a plasma TV for something like $1000, which at the time was actually a very low price. Well, the guy was actually selling a photo, not a real TV. He got arrested and charged with a felony. I asked my friend about it and he explained that even though the guy had used tricky wording in his Ebay ad that if you paid careful attention made it clear you were buying a photo and not a TV, that the law covers this and nobody would be expected to pay $1000 for a photo and this was clearly fraud. I'm not a lawyer but I suspect that this kind of behavior crossed the line into fraud because of the scope of the purchases. Yes, Lowes should have been smarter than shipping all this stuff. But as someone who has actually served multiple times on a jury in the USA I can tell you that the DA will frame this in terms to make it look like willful thievery, like someone forgetting to lock a back door and then having somebody walk in and grab everything they can carry. This is not going to be an easy case for the defendants to win, especially with the type of legal help I suspect they'll get. My guess is they'll get convicted. Believe it or not, the law doesn't really want to see people get ripped off because of mistakes and there are various laws on fraud and theft that can cover this situation for the benefit of Lowe's.
Chris Gillespie sued and lost so he appealed to the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS), which is his right. However, the justices have not yet ruled on whether they'll even hear his appeal. My guess is they won't hear it and will let the previous ruling (against Gillespie) stand. I do know that one of the ways you can lose a trademark is not to defend it and nobody can accuse Google of doing this.
A guy with no significant source of income brags online about how loaded he is. Yeah, that never raises a red flag.
That might work in the USA though. The CIA apparently didn't pay a lot of attention when (now convicted spy) Aldrich Ames suddenly was rolling in money and living a pretty extravagant lifestyle way beyond his pay grade. He said that his wife's family basically gave them the money but still it took years before anybody in the CIA could be bothered to look into it and even once they started looking, there were various other delays in the process.
I find it very surprising that the black boxes in airplanes don't communicate with a satellite in this day and age. The technology has been around for 30 years at this point.
True, but the airlines are all crying poverty because it would cost money they don't want to spend to do it and the governments don't want to pay for it either, so end result - nothing gets done.
Aside from the cost it will still be difficult to find the wreckage as the black box beacons are long dead and even if they do find the wreckage after all this time there won't be much to salvage or to reconstruct what possibly happened aside from the data recorders.
That's not necessarily true. People said the same thing about Air France flight 447 but by the time they finally found it, the black boxes were in perfect working order still and they know exactly what happened to cause the crash as a result (extremely short version - pilot error caused it).
If there is a queue at a restaurant, then I certainly wont be going, and anyone joining the queue will either be waiting forever, or have to be told its a fake?
I have to wonder what type of people would be spending their time doing this. They have enough money for a smartphone, and to look 'smart' in some demographic way, however their time is worthless enough that they can afford to be paid (I assume not much) to stand around doing nothing...
A million times this. There are definite limits to how long I'm willing to wait to get seated at a restaurant and these days anything over 30 minutes is probably going to result in me going elsewhere immediately. The longest I've ever waited to be seated was 2 and a half hours and that was a long time ago under very unusual circumstances. I can't imagine I'll ever break that record. A few years ago I was in Chicago with family and we wanted to go to Rick Bayless' Frontera restaurant. They told us that they estimated the wait at FOUR HOURS and told us we were welcome to wait at the bar and drink for those 4 hours. They were pretty shocked when I told them that we would instead simply leave and not wait at all. Do people really agree to wait 4 hours to eat? The staff there sure seemed to think that a 4 hour wait wasn't unreasonable or unusual. We had a very different opinion.
Then I am looking forward to my Congressional Rep not being allowed to block me on a whim.
While I don't call people names, etc. I can only imagine what my US House Rep's FB feed is gonna look like when she is required to leave stuff she doesn't like up there.
You don't understand how the law works. Trump is in a very different position than your rep since he is president. Any restrictions on him could just be restrictions on him and nobody else. Furthermore, it depends on what court places the restrictions, assuming they get placed. Trump could just appeal and send it back into the courts for years to come. Also your rep could block you and argue that the Trump ruling only applied to Trump and not them and invite you to sue if you don't like it. Anything can happen when you go to court. It depends on the political biases of the judge(s), the skill of the lawyers, and so on. I can promise you that your rep would have a way to assign lawyers to this to fight you at tax payer expense while you are forced to spend your hard earned dollars and time on it.
Really? If something like vat-grown meat ever takes off, every farm animal in the country will be dead within a few years. Because farmers don't raise cows and pigs and chickens because they enjoy their company, they raise them for income. Once the animals become unsellable, they're going to be exterminated.
Not only that, but I have a sneaking suspicion that vegans may refuse to eat it and backers of this plan are going to be shocked when they do so. On top of that, there are people who have religious objections to eating animal flesh such as Hindus and Buddhists because they believe that doing so makes you a participant in the death of a living creature and gives you bad karma. I'm not a member of those groups so I can't speak for them, but I can certainly guess that some of them may end up having problems with this. Buddhists in particular aren't consistent about meat eating prohibitions with many eating it and even some religious leaders suggesting that under certain circumstances it may actually be OK and not incur bad karma. I also suspect that it's going to be inferior in taste to that which comes from killing and while some won't care, others will care a lot. Add to this you'll have some people who will simply be deeply suspicious about anything that comes out of a lab that a big company told you was OK.
Sadly Canada takes a less the friendly view to American visitors. Something like 17-20% of Americana has been convicted of driving under the influence making them ineligible for entry into Canada. The overwhelming majority of these cases are misdemeanor offenses. Felony DUI is a fairly rare and serious crime, but Canada treats misdemeanor offenders of this type as ineligible felons.
The US is only marginally better. Official US government policy is that one DUI isn't a problem for visitors, but 2 or more can get your entry denied. Conviction on any drug offense is grounds for denying admission, although potential visitors do have the ability to ask for a waiver in advance. As always, there are no guarantees that a waiver will be given if applied for.
It's neither legal not ethical for a company to"offer" services on an opt-out basis, but why does this rant focus on Wells Fargo (scummy though they also be)?
I see you just outed yourself as not reading the link, because had you done so, your question would have already been answered. So since you were too lazy to look, I'll do you a favor and summarize. Various Wells Fargo mortgage customers went over their monthly statements and found a mysterious charge (about $43 a month) for a service they never agree to or asked for, namely the home warranty from AHS. And when customers tried to get Wells Fargo to take it off their bills, they failed. So Wells Fargo fully participated in billing customers for a service they never chose to receive and that's why the rant focuses on them.
We might want to determine who was behind the attack first, rather than simply assuming it was the Cuban government. For one thing, I can't imagine what motive the Cuban government would have for attacking American diplomats at a time when Cuba is trying to normalize relations with the USA. (I can imagine other parties wanting to sabotage that relationship, though)
Yep. It would definitely be in Russia's interests to perpetrate this and it fits with their disregard of health damages to those they view as their enemies. Russia would love to re-establish military bases in Cuba and Cuba has resisted this so far, despite Trump's attempts to make them as angry as possible, in the hopes of improving relations with the USA. A bunch of misdirected anger at Cuba while the Russians laugh in the background totally seems plausible. I'd put the Canadian problems as collateral damage. After all, this is the same country of geniuses that carried a highly radioactive material on a commercial flight to the UK simply to poison a dissident with no regard for how doing so might impact the carriers or the passengers of that flight.
What pensions? What companies still give pensions? I'm not aware of any US companies that give pensions.
Some of it depends on what you define as a pension. For example, retired military and US civil service workers get something that pretty much is a pension, even if they don't use those terms. Typically true pensions have been a part of very heavily unionized industries such as automobile plants and the airline industry. But as people have found out to their horror, it's possible to get pension obligations slashed or removed via bankruptcy. People over the age of 70 may possibly be getting pension payments because 401K plans didn't exist when they were younger so they weren't ever forced to contribute to those, but now pretty much everybody has a 401K plan if they offer anything because pension plans are too costly to keep supporting.
I remember very well some years ago we had a lawyer who did represent clients in lawsuits against their employers post about it. He said his standard advice was not to sue, even if the client had a really strong case. He pointed out that such lawsuits are almost always won by the employer and the client just ends up wasting a lot of time and money when they could just move on to a new job and get on with their lives. I'll point out that the infamous Ellen Pao case is a perfect example of this. I felt like she very likely was in the right to sue, but the vast majority of Slashdotters strongly disagree with me. The jury standards for her trial only required 75% or more of the jurors to agree on all the counts to reach a verdict. 9 out of 12 jurors favored the employer in this case, but 25% of them felt like she was wronged. This just shows you how difficult it is to win these kinds of cases. Google may have little choice but to defend themselves simply to make the point that they don't agree with what Damore said. And Damore was really stupid to write a 10 page or so diatribe about this subject and share it with co-workers, one of whom clearly ratted him out, and believe that there would no repercussions from sharing opinions he had to know that Google was not going to like or agree with.
no, he was fired for intentionally creating a hostile working environment.
Talk about hyperbole, Mr. alt-left. This isn't even remotely accurate. .
Google's own CEO thinks it's accurate. From CNN today:
But Pichai said that sections of the memo violate the company's Code of Conduct, which requires "each Googler to do their utmost to create a workplace culture that is free of harassment, intimidation, bias and unlawful discrimination."
Furthermore - and please pay attention to this part - A company undergoing an exponential scaleup is not supposed to be returning profits. They're supposed to be investing every last penny they take in in order to minimize how much additional capital they have to raise to fund the scaleup.
Correct. I'd like to point out that when Amazon started in the 1990s that Wall Street types said it would never be profitable and their business model couldn't be sustained. I'm not saying that Tesla is Amazon, but you're quite right in pointing out that the time to complain about profits is not right now.
You think that texting while driving is a problem? Try being by yourself and having to drive and consult a map while driving. It can be just as dangerous. OK, maybe if you have someone riding with you who can play navigator it's not too bad, but I can only tell you in my experience I definitely remember being incredibly frustrated with passengers completely unable to read a map. I can read a map and I remember in the early part of the 2000s being in Spain and playing navigator with a really good map while a friend drove and you would not believe the nightmare we had trying to leave Sevilla. Almost none of the roads had street signs on them, so while I had a map that showed exactly how to get out of town and on a main highway, it was impossible to track our progress on the map and get to the exit, which required a few road changes. After an hour of basically driving in circles (it was late at night by the way) and trying desperately to find our way out, I spied a road sign to an exit road and it took some driving heroics but we got on it. I don't miss the pre-GPS days at all. Might as well take a horse and buggy trip to another state as far as I'm concerned. The old pre-GPS days weren't all that great.