I'm actually quite sympathetic to moral absolutism/moral arc arguments. I'm a moral realist.
What I find hilarious is people suggesting America or most american companies are in any position to export values to anybody.
2,752 karma · joined May 21, 2013
What I find hilarious is people suggesting America or most american companies are in any position to export values to anybody.
You seem to have a problem with my observations because they make you feel bad and you feel alluded to. This isn't my problem, if you feel like it doesn't apply to you and your circles, you do you. I know people that fit those cartoonish stereotypes. It's not meant to be a statistical overview, just a possible trend Canadians could be sliding into.
I also do not understand at all that little hobby list you made. I could make a similar one, as a Japanese learner boxer who likes board games, reading, and hiking. I still find time to cook and clean.
I get my perception of people who pay for menial services from people I know who pay for menial services. So do many journalists, probably. If you feel this doesn't apply to you, just skip along.
It's important to make sure that inoffensive sites are behind the same barrier, to make that a poor signal.
It's weird to see so many super wealthy people dedicating so much time to super luxurious forms of meditation with gurus, wearing white spandex or whatever, when one can achieve a pretty solid trance-like state and think about their day while doing rote mechanical chores like cleaning and cooking. You also learn to try to avoid messes, since you're the one cleaning them up (gratuitous, "someone else will take care of it" messes are one of the things I miss the least about Peru). You also feel a bit humbled, which is good, especially when everyone around you is an obsequious yes-person.
I guess I'd do something I rarely do, and borrow an old-fashioned baby-boomer phrase, and say that maybe it "builds character"? Self-sufficient people were a breath of fresh air.
Bit of a rant, but I came from South America to Canada 10 years ago, and was super impressed by how independent people my age were. They cooked for themselves, they moved around using public transit, they had part-time jobs, etc. People in my HS just lived luxurious lives while they prepared for luxurious jobs.
I couldn't wait to see Peru, where most wealthy families have one or multiple live-in servants, drivers, and maids, develop along those lines. I was hearing stories that the availability of good jobs meant that young "high society" families were finding it super hard to find people to clean their toilets and rear their children for them.
Little did I know that shortly thereafter the "sharing economy" would start to boom in North America, and wealthy white-collar workers everywhere would start to gush about cheap cabs, an ability to hire maids and people to do their laundry and cooks, people renting their houses out to them, etc.
It feels like a total regression to me. I once heard Silicon Valley described "an assisted-living community for people in their 20s funded by venture capital", and it felt quite apt. I hope the craze ends sooner rather than later.
I'm more concerned with the family of a daring journalist being safe regardless of their investigations, than with the actual remuneration of the journalist.
Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.
However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via "the free market", and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.
It'll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.
For example, Safari.
Millions of infected people, with zero idea what an "ad-blocker" is, just wondering where all the YouTube ads went. And then, hopefully after a month or so of infection, companies realizing that their bottom-lines were unaffected, pulling out of digital advertising altogether. Previously-thought-of-as-invincible giant behemoths like Facebook and Google, just crumbling to dust over a short span of time.
Just a dream though.
??? I just gave you a ton of arguments you can read through.
You want me to copy-paste them here?
Ultimately, your "arguments" are refuted with a simple "There's zero reason to be afraid of what you're afraid of".
1) The Myth of a Superhuman AI (https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/)
2) The Terminator Is Not Coming. (https://www.recode.net/2015/3/2/11559576/the-terminator-is-n...)
3) idlewords : Superintelligence - The Idea That Eats Smart People (http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)
The frustrating thing is that people with insane amounts of resources and disposable income get swallowed up by these Basilisk-ian non-concerns, while very real pressing issues like Police Brutality, Wealth Inequality, Lack of HealthCare, etc. are deemed too boring for enthusiastic action.
François Chollet nailed it with the following comparison, mocking LHC alarmists:
> It's not that turning on the LHC will create a black hole that will swallow the Earth. But it could! Albeit no physicist thought so.
"Different races are strange for kids, it may cause them stresses firing off their innate biological danger senses, maybe best to keep 'em separate if the other task at hand is too important"
The only thing required to challenge the status quo about a discriminatory practice is the absence of proof. I don't agree that I need to do extra legwork just because I want to change things up.
However, I'm Canadian. And in Canada, scouts don't discriminate. So I don't really have to do anything, other than explain that the American attitude towards this seems very backwards to me.
WebRTC support is arriving soonish so I'm getting what I want despite the downvotes :)
PWAs are a great idea for me. Getting an Apple developer license is not.
Cultural momentum. They inherit the habit from older generations. May as well ask why Swedes love saunas, or why asian cuisine uses chopsticks.
My friend crowds have not had anything resembling those segregated nights out in forever, and in fact, headway is being made insofar women have men in their bridal parties and vice-versa.
> These sorts of things have basically no relevance or importance to social relationships.
You haven't made a case for why the physiological differences between men and women have relevance.
I have a buddy who's been a scout from youth til college, and the net impact of gender-segregated scouting in the USA vs. most other countries in the world is that american kids were clueless and out of place at the global jamboree he went to, since other countries have correctly obsoleted the stupid divide.
If puberty is a salient point for you, maybe you need to group slightly older boys with slightly younger girls. However, before that, you'd need to justify why these developmental differences matter at all for the vast majority of socializing kids do.
And ultimately that's my problem with your post. You are very scared about the idea that some of these cultural gender barriers may be torn down, and you have some biological facts in hand, but you haven't actually made a case for why these biological facts necessitate the erection of cultural barriers. The burden of proof is on you, despite the american status quo lagging behind.
> gender emancipation should not come at the cost of emasculation
Your compassionate/benevolent/mild/well-meaning sexism is still sexism.
I'm curious if you can come up with a definition of "masculinity" that doesn't exclude women from basic human virtues and duties.
I disagree. In fact, I think this kind of stuff is very harmful for development.
Imagine telling someone that they need "white-only" time, to unburden themselves from the special requirements imposed by hanging out in mixed company. It only serves to perpetuate out-sized notions of existing differences between genders.
> The Economist is not, therefore, an honest examiner of the facts. It is constantly at pains not to risk conclusions that may hurt the case for unregulated markets. This tendency reached its absurd apotheosis in the magazine’s infamous 2014 review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The magazine objected to Baptist’s brutal depiction of the slave trade, saying the book did not qualify as “an objective history of slavery” because “almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” When outraged readers pointed out that this is because, well, the victims of slavery tended to be black, The Economist retracted the review. But as Baptist observed in response, there was a reason why the magazine felt the need to mitigate the evils of slavery. Baptist’s book portrayed slavery as an integral part of the history of capitalism. As he wrote: “If slavery was profitable—and it was—then it creates an unforgiving paradox for the moral authority of markets—and market fundamentalists. What else, today, might be immoral and yet profitable?” The implications of Baptist’s work would have unsettling implications for The Economist. They would damn the foundations of the very Western free enterprise system that the magazine is devoted to championing. Thus The Economist needed to find a way to soften its verdict on slavery. (It was not the first time they had done so, either. In a tepid review of Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity with the hilariously offensive title of “Slavery: Not Black or White,” the magazine lamented that “the horrors in Mr Grandin’s history are unrelenting.” And the magazine’ long tradition of defending misery stretches back to the 19th century, when it blamed the Irish potato famine on irresponsible decisions made by destitute peasants.)