Do you know how big the tip of an iceberg is? About 10% of the whole.
Multiplying the reported stories by a factor of 10, or even by a factor of 1000, would make no real difference in the underlying point, which is that they get everything right the vast majority of times. The cases where things go wrong are such a minuscule fraction as to be negligible, (see "epsilon," above,) and it's highly irresponsible for journalists to paint them as a bunch of habitual screwups when nothing could be further from the truth.
Yeah, horror stories like this come up regularly: you tend to consistently hear about a half-dozen screwups out of PayPal every year.
To put this in perspective, PayPal moves billions of transactions and hundreds of billions of dollars in payments every year, through virtually every country in the world, and amid all that, serious mistakes tend to happen at an average rate of less than one per month!
TLDR: There are far too many sensationalistic journalists out there who do not understand the concept of "epsilon."
What I don't understand is why the tech companies are rolling over and letting this happen.
You know what would have stopped a massive amount of this nonsense in its tracks? If the first time some movie studio or record company had tried to sue Google for frivolous reasons, they'd responded with, "OK, let's settle this like businessmen. Initiating hostile takeover."
11 million victims, $2.7 million in penalties. That comes out to less than 25 cents per victim, after running a scam that made them "mountains of cash" according to the linked blog post. That's not even the proverbial "slap on the wrist!"
ISTM we need a law with real teeth to deal with stuff like this. It would be very simple: Any business that is found to have made money by breaking the law must be subject to a penalty no less than 100% of the gross revenue brought in by their illegal acts.
Since all the laws these days have to have some sort of snappy name, let's call it The Crime Does Not Pay Act.
"Wawa spokeswoman Lori Bruce told the newspaper that the lawsuit is about fulfilling an "obligation to protect consumers from any likelihood of confusion" and protecting "the brand name," symbolized by the Canada goose whose name is a direct translation from the Native American language used in the region."
Oh, is that what it is?
I always thought it was meant to represent the words of a thirsty two-year-old!
Electronically transferring data from a server in a foreign country to Google's data center in California does not amount to a "seizure" because there is no meaningful interference with the account holder's possessory interest in the user data. ... Such transfers do not interfere with the customer's access or possessory interest in the user data.
Wait a sec. Did a District Court judge in Eastern Pennsylvania (where I live) just come out and essentially say, as a key part of an official ruling, that copying is not theft because making a copy doesn't interfere with the owner's use of the original?
A single incident that happened 20 years ago? That's your "evidence" that racism remains a serious problem in our culture today?
(Please note that I'm not denying in any way that what happened to James Byrd was a serious tragedy. I do deny, though, that it has any relevance to this discussion. Please don't go derailing the conversation.)
1) The act of someone who leaps before he looks, going off the handle on an issue that he doesn't have all the facts on. (Like Donald Trump does all the time on all sorts of issues.) If those five had actually done what they were accused of, it would have been completely right to execute them.
2) The act of someone who will believe the worst about his political opponents. Remember that racism isn't treating people of other races badly, it's singling them out for bad treatment, treating them differently because you believe that they are inherently different. Remember this is the same guy who accused Ted Cruz's father of killing JFK, among (many!) other things. If Cruz had been black, and Obama white, people would call him racist for the JFK nonsense and just a weirdo for the birther conspiracism. But it appears he's simply an equal-opportunity offender.
3) The act of a businessman trying not to lose a massive amount of business, because when it happened (remember, this one is not recent) approximately 1/3 of his tenants would have moved out if a black family moved in nearby.
Comparing him to the last two candidates -- who LOST -- is bullshit.
Pointing out that he made major gains among all ethnic groups except whites is not. It shows that what happened is exactly the opposite of what you would expect from a white supremacist.
Of course, if we speak out too hysterically and are wrong, you argue we'll have wasted our voices. That is also wrong. We can protest the next Nazi just as well, even if we're wrong about this one.
No, you can't. That's the whole point of the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. People don't tend to always respond the same way to the same stimuli; they learn and adapt.
In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that that's a big part of why Trump is President today. The hardest of the hard-line Democrats have been crying wolf over false racism for so long that everyone else is sick of it, and when Hillary made the ridiculously tone-deaf mistake of doubling down on it, essentially calling half the country racists and "a basket of deplorables" for disagreeing with her policies, it backfired tremendously.
People who knew they weren't racists bristled at being lumped together with the KKK and the Nazis, and they turned "we are The Deplorables" into a rallying cry, to symbolically reject this nonsense once and for all by rejecting the person at the forefront of it. If she hadn't said that, a lot of people who ended up voting for Trump would have probably stayed home.
It's kind of sad to see that Democrats still have not learned their lesson from that! They've wasted the last few months flailing uselessly, tilting at racist windmills instead of working to accomplish anything actually productive in this time when they need to be productive and effective more than ever!
I've heard it said that every organization works to perpetuate the problem to which it is the solution. Might I suggest two corollaries to this observation?
First, an organization that solves a real problem is (as a general rule of thumb at least) a good organization that is doing good in the world. So this observation applies to "the good ones" too.
Second, civil rights groups are good organizations.
Unfortunately, they're still run by people. People who have a great deal of their personal identity and social status bound up in being valiant crusaders who fight racism. They've become victims of their own success now, and the one thing they can't do, because it would make them redundant, is admit the simple truth that's obvious to almost everyone else: that they've won! They won decades ago!
Racism in the USA is as dead as disco. Now, lest you misunderstand, remember that disco is not 100% extinct. There are still a few people around with horrible taste who think it's cool, but that doesn't mean it's not something that everyone knows is a relic of the past. And so it is also with racism.
Keep in mind that the guy you're accusing is 70 years old! Even if it's true, biologically speaking, he's on his way out, and most likely sooner rather than later. (I wonder if anyone has actuarial data on former Presidents, BTW; it wouldn't surprise me to hear that the stress of the job takes several years off your lifespan.)
Please stop obsessing over something that hasn't been a real problem in a long, long time, so we can focus on the issues of today and actually accomplish something in spite of all the headwinds. If we're going to prevent the Trump administration from wrecking what little prosperity we have left after the last two Presidents, we need to stop wasting our energy and focus!
He's one of the few I've seen so far who's willing to actually look at hard data rather than go all "feelz > reals" and throw around emotional rhetoric that doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
If you take a position that runs contrary to observed facts, and double down on it in the face of the evidence, is that not the very definition of "tragically uninformed"?
Read the article I linked to, where the author looks at actual hard data and facts (as opposed to emotionally-charged rhetoric) that shows over and over again that there is no evidence of racism going on here.
Based on the data available, he estimates that around 3% of voters have racist political leanings. After pointing out how suicidal it would be to throw away the support of voters that outnumber them by an order of magnitude, he follows up with this:
But doesn’t this still mean there are some white supremacists? Isn’t this still really important?
I mean, kind of. But remember that 4% of Americans believe that lizardmen control all major governments. And 5% of Obama voters believe that Obama is the Antichrist. The white supremacist vote is about the same as the lizardmen-control-everything vote, or the Obama-is-the-Antichrist-but-I-support-him-anyway vote.
(and most of these people are in Solid South red states and don’t matter in the electoral calculus anyway.)
Other interesting things that the data shows: compared to the voting demographics of the last two Republican candidates...
Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.
So you kinda have to ask yourself, what do all those minorities know that you don't?
You really should read the article I linked to. The author (a journalist who endorsed Hillary, for the record) completely demolishes the racism-ist nonsense that far too many people are hysterically screaming about lately, specifically because he doesn't want it accusations of racism to be devalued into worthlessness for when an actual racist comes along.
As is almost always the case these days, solid data demonstrates quite clearly that racism is simply not a factor here.
Please stop crying wolf. One of these days a real racist candidate is going to show up, and warning about him won't do any good because people like you have spent decades wasting the relevant terms and stripping them of any and all actual meaning.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised to not only block AT&T's $100 billion acquisition of Time Warner, but even went so far as to claim he'd somehow break up the already completed Comcast NBC merger, completed back in 2011.
Hey, if he manages to pull this off, I'll vote to reelect him. That merger should never have happened in the first place and everyone knows it.
On the post: PayPal Kills Canadian Paper's Submission To Media Awards Because Article Had Word 'Syrian' In The Title
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Multiplying the reported stories by a factor of 10, or even by a factor of 1000, would make no real difference in the underlying point, which is that they get everything right the vast majority of times. The cases where things go wrong are such a minuscule fraction as to be negligible, (see "epsilon," above,) and it's highly irresponsible for journalists to paint them as a bunch of habitual screwups when nothing could be further from the truth.
On the post: PayPal Kills Canadian Paper's Submission To Media Awards Because Article Had Word 'Syrian' In The Title
Yeah, horror stories like this come up regularly: you tend to consistently hear about a half-dozen screwups out of PayPal every year.
To put this in perspective, PayPal moves billions of transactions and hundreds of billions of dollars in payments every year, through virtually every country in the world, and amid all that, serious mistakes tend to happen at an average rate of less than one per month!
TLDR: There are far too many sensationalistic journalists out there who do not understand the concept of "epsilon."
On the post: UK Search Engines Will Sign Up To A 'Voluntary' Code On Piracy -- Or Face The Consequences
What I don't understand is why the tech companies are rolling over and letting this happen.
You know what would have stopped a massive amount of this nonsense in its tracks? If the first time some movie studio or record company had tried to sue Google for frivolous reasons, they'd responded with, "OK, let's settle this like businessmen. Initiating hostile takeover."
This is something that needs to happen.
On the post: GOP Senate Streisands Elizabeth Warren And Coretta King In Attempt To Silence Her
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On the post: Vizio Fined $2.2 Million For Not Telling Customers Their TVs Were Spying On Them
11 million victims, $2.7 million in penalties. That comes out to less than 25 cents per victim, after running a scam that made them "mountains of cash" according to the linked blog post. That's not even the proverbial "slap on the wrist!"
ISTM we need a law with real teeth to deal with stuff like this. It would be very simple: Any business that is found to have made money by breaking the law must be subject to a penalty no less than 100% of the gross revenue brought in by their illegal acts.
Since all the laws these days have to have some sort of snappy name, let's call it The Crime Does Not Pay Act.
On the post: Wawa Versus Dawa: Trademark Dispute Blamed On A Need To Police That Doesn't Exist
Oh, is that what it is?
I always thought it was meant to represent the words of a thirsty two-year-old!
On the post: Pennsylvania Court Shrugs Off Microsoft Decision; Says Google Must Turn Over Emails Stored At Overseas Data Centers
Wait a sec. Did a District Court judge in Eastern Pennsylvania (where I live) just come out and essentially say, as a key part of an official ruling, that copying is not theft because making a copy doesn't interfere with the owner's use of the original?
The wide-ranging implications are staggering!
On the post: Our Humanity
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(Please note that I'm not denying in any way that what happened to James Byrd was a serious tragedy. I do deny, though, that it has any relevance to this discussion. Please don't go derailing the conversation.)
On the post: Our Humanity
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Yeah, I'd say actually doing the stuff the Nazis are infamous for having done is a pretty good standard for being correctly compared to them.
There's a reason Godwin's Law is a thing.
On the post: Our Humanity
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1) The act of someone who leaps before he looks, going off the handle on an issue that he doesn't have all the facts on. (Like Donald Trump does all the time on all sorts of issues.) If those five had actually done what they were accused of, it would have been completely right to execute them.
2) The act of someone who will believe the worst about his political opponents. Remember that racism isn't treating people of other races badly, it's singling them out for bad treatment, treating them differently because you believe that they are inherently different. Remember this is the same guy who accused Ted Cruz's father of killing JFK, among (many!) other things. If Cruz had been black, and Obama white, people would call him racist for the JFK nonsense and just a weirdo for the birther conspiracism. But it appears he's simply an equal-opportunity offender.
3) The act of a businessman trying not to lose a massive amount of business, because when it happened (remember, this one is not recent) approximately 1/3 of his tenants would have moved out if a black family moved in nearby.
Next?
On the post: Mac Repair Company iGeniuses Sends Legal Threats To Unhappy Customers, Demanding $2500 Per Negative Review
On the post: Our Humanity
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Pointing out that he made major gains among all ethnic groups except whites is not. It shows that what happened is exactly the opposite of what you would expect from a white supremacist.
On the post: Our Humanity
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No, you can't. That's the whole point of the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. People don't tend to always respond the same way to the same stimuli; they learn and adapt.
In fact, I'd go so far as to claim that that's a big part of why Trump is President today. The hardest of the hard-line Democrats have been crying wolf over false racism for so long that everyone else is sick of it, and when Hillary made the ridiculously tone-deaf mistake of doubling down on it, essentially calling half the country racists and "a basket of deplorables" for disagreeing with her policies, it backfired tremendously.
People who knew they weren't racists bristled at being lumped together with the KKK and the Nazis, and they turned "we are The Deplorables" into a rallying cry, to symbolically reject this nonsense once and for all by rejecting the person at the forefront of it. If she hadn't said that, a lot of people who ended up voting for Trump would have probably stayed home.
It's kind of sad to see that Democrats still have not learned their lesson from that! They've wasted the last few months flailing uselessly, tilting at racist windmills instead of working to accomplish anything actually productive in this time when they need to be productive and effective more than ever!
I've heard it said that every organization works to perpetuate the problem to which it is the solution. Might I suggest two corollaries to this observation?
First, an organization that solves a real problem is (as a general rule of thumb at least) a good organization that is doing good in the world. So this observation applies to "the good ones" too.
Second, civil rights groups are good organizations.
Unfortunately, they're still run by people. People who have a great deal of their personal identity and social status bound up in being valiant crusaders who fight racism. They've become victims of their own success now, and the one thing they can't do, because it would make them redundant, is admit the simple truth that's obvious to almost everyone else: that they've won! They won decades ago!
Racism in the USA is as dead as disco. Now, lest you misunderstand, remember that disco is not 100% extinct. There are still a few people around with horrible taste who think it's cool, but that doesn't mean it's not something that everyone knows is a relic of the past. And so it is also with racism.
Keep in mind that the guy you're accusing is 70 years old! Even if it's true, biologically speaking, he's on his way out, and most likely sooner rather than later. (I wonder if anyone has actuarial data on former Presidents, BTW; it wouldn't surprise me to hear that the stress of the job takes several years off your lifespan.)
Please stop obsessing over something that hasn't been a real problem in a long, long time, so we can focus on the issues of today and actually accomplish something in spite of all the headwinds. If we're going to prevent the Trump administration from wrecking what little prosperity we have left after the last two Presidents, we need to stop wasting our energy and focus!
On the post: Our Humanity
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If you take a position that runs contrary to observed facts, and double down on it in the face of the evidence, is that not the very definition of "tragically uninformed"?
On the post: Our Humanity
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Read the article I linked to, where the author looks at actual hard data and facts (as opposed to emotionally-charged rhetoric) that shows over and over again that there is no evidence of racism going on here.
Based on the data available, he estimates that around 3% of voters have racist political leanings. After pointing out how suicidal it would be to throw away the support of voters that outnumber them by an order of magnitude, he follows up with this:
Other interesting things that the data shows: compared to the voting demographics of the last two Republican candidates...
So you kinda have to ask yourself, what do all those minorities know that you don't?
On the post: Our Humanity
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Did you completely miss the places in the article where he refutes almost every single point you just made?
On the post: Our Humanity
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As is almost always the case these days, solid data demonstrates quite clearly that racism is simply not a factor here.
On the post: Our Humanity
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Please stop crying wolf. One of these days a real racist candidate is going to show up, and warning about him won't do any good because people like you have spent decades wasting the relevant terms and stripping them of any and all actual meaning.
On the post: Verizon Eyes Charter Megamerger, Because Who Likes Broadband Competition Anyway?
Hey, if he manages to pull this off, I'll vote to reelect him. That merger should never have happened in the first place and everyone knows it.
On the post: Jose Cuervo Loses Bid To Block Trademark Registration For Il Corvo Wine
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