I don't think it does. I think too many people are trying to short circuit real discussion around this issue by either calling people bigots, or taking offense to the term "bully".
109 karma · joined September 12, 2012
Amending the law to force all couples to get the equivalent of a civil unions satisfies both camps.
Further, once marriage holds no rights, the government cannot stop a gay couple from getting married if a nice tolerant church wants to marry them (of which there are plenty). The issue is solely religious at that point. And "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ..."
Just like the government can't force a church to marry someone, or force a very intolerant religious community to accepting that marriage.
I think we solve the problem not by forcing those who are religious to accept gays, or by forcing gay people to accept a different word for the same rights. I think we solve it by acknowledging that marriage should never have had rights, and forcing anyone who wants the rights currently afforded to marriage, gay or straight, to get a civil union. Or hell, if you don't like civil union, call it a taxed co-habitation rights application.
Once the government has no interest in marriage, no one can stop a gay person for getting married if they'd like to. Just like no one can force a very religious community or church to recognize that marriage.
Maybe you're just so busy arguing with everyone else that you can't remember who said what, or what we were even talking about. But you've intentionally walked in circles, and had problems making a consistent argument.
You claim you wanted rights without even knowing that you had them, or acknowledging that my proposed solution also does away with the separate but equal bullshit.
And yes, you insult me every time you make derisive comments like "Yeah, fuck me for wanting equality like blacks and women." That's just a plain lie. There's no lack of equality, and I'm even agreeing with you about the separate but equal statements. You still demand that you're right though, and insist that I must be a bigot.
That's demeaning to me, and it short circuits a real discussion, like you've been trying to do all along. You're JUST as bad as the supporters of prop 8, and that's what I'm trying to call out.
Yo, FUCKHEAD: You claimed appropriating marriage was a band-aid. BUT... you ALREADY HAD THE FUCKING RIGHTS. You JUST WANT TO ARGUE ABOUT WHAT MARRIAGE IS.
FUCK YOU. You don't give a SHIT about the rights, because you don't even know that you already have them. You JUST WANT TO FORCE RELIGION to let you call it marriage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califor...
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And we've already had the separate but equal argument, don't even fucking bother with it. You can't stand that you can't make a coherent argument here, because you're a bully. A fucking FUCKHEAD bully.
The had domestic partnerships, they had the full legal rights marriage granted available. Prop 8's entire quibble was over the word marriage, so was the pro-gay rights movement. Both sides are trying to codify belief into law, both are wrong.
If the state only gave rights and taxed civil unions, the churches cannot, by definition, control if other people get married. All they'd need to do is find a church willing to marry them, or start their own.
To quote from another of my posts: --- I think once the legal implications are removed, churches would lose their control over the word by default. It doesn't have meaning outside of the church at that point, and the government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" So if gay people wanted to get married, no one could stop them.
You yourself claimed that appropriating the word marriage was a band-aid, and yet you ignore that a band-aid was in place, and a much more rational argument would have been to remove rights associated with marriage.
Instead you continue to argue that codifying your beliefs into law was correct, even while you denounce the other side for trying to do that.
Come back when you can intelligently make an argument that is internally consistent. I have to agree with the others commenting on your posts, you have some serious cognitive dissonance.
Making a donation based on private, personal beliefs is ENTIRELY the point of a democracy. The correct action is to speak out in support of your ideas, not to cast hatred on those who disagree.
Instead of sitting here arguing, you could have gone and made a 10 dollar donation to a pro-lbgt group, and done a lot more good. Instead of forcing Eich to resign, you could have used it as a rallying point to get A LOT of other like minded people to make that same 10 dollar donation. You could have chosen to voice your opinions with both words and monetary support, (like Eich did) instead of attacking the opposition. You aren't doing that.
Co-opting the word marriage in law, rather than asking for it to be removed was actively choosing to force religions to accept your personal beliefs.
That's bullying.
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That said, I generally fall much closer on the scale to you than to the supporters of prop 8, but you have to be able to recognize and draw a line as to where your rights end. Attacking a personal donation made as part of a democratic process is not something I can condone. Particularly when the end result cost a man his job.
If your response was to publicly shame him for an opinion to the point where he loses his job, you're a fucking bully.
I've read all my posts, several times. I'm internally consistent, and I almost always favor cautious respect over ignorant bashing.
I'm not even defending Eich, again, I don't know him. I'm stating that a social environment where a man loses a job Mozilla thought he was qualified for because of private personal beliefs and internet outrage is not only actively undemocratic, it's foolish and childish.
Both sides fucked it up. The only proper response should have been to remove all legal rights associated with marriage, and force all couples to get a civil union. Tax that instead. Churches are welcome to marry people all they desire (on both sides, gay or straight as they please according to their beliefs)
It might have been family pressure, it might have honestly been that he's religious and doesn't believe the word "marriage" can be applied to same sex couple (who had Domestic partnerships available in California, which provide the same legal rights as marriage, so I find the "second class citizen" argument entirely lacking. [although now I'll wait to be attacked for simply stating that, even if you have no idea what my personal beliefs on the matter are])
Again, life is filled with shades of gray. Hell, maybe mozilla even benefited from the donation in ways that aren't clear (and they didn't want to put out in the media) You just don't fucking know. Instead you've decided this man should lose his livelyhood based on hearsay and rumor, and outrage on the internet.
That's fucking PATHETIC.
We have some serious issues in this country, and our inability to compromise or respect a person we don't agree with is frightening. Life is filled with shades of grey, compromise is not "that nice thing your kindergarten teacher told you about" it's a critical aspect of a functioning democracy. One we seem to be losing.
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Side note, California had (and still does, as far as I'm aware) domestic partnerships. From the wiki page one it:
It affords the couple "the same rights, protections, and benefits, and... the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law..." as married spouses
That argument in and of itself doesn't cause any harm to anyone.
The harm comes when government institutionalizes marriage in a way that gives it greater rights or scope than someone in a civil union would have. In many states, this isn't the case.
Personally, I don't particularly care what the word marriage means, I'm not religious in any meaningful way. But arguing that the simple inability to use the word marriage does harm to a person is a pretty weak argument in my mind.
Further, your analogy is wrong. From his perspective, imagine you always played soccer with a round ball, and couldn't use your hands. Suddenly a group of people show up with oval spheroid and claim you should be able to use your hands. They then say that not letting them call their sport soccer is unfair and harmful. But ya know, we don't call that sport soccer, because it's different, we call it football.
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As an aside, I think the proper way to handle the marriage debate would have been to remove any and all rights associated with the word, and force all couples to get a civil union. Tax that instead. Churches are welcome to marry people all they desire (on both sides, gay or straight as they please according to their beliefs)
It also comes because many of the people who use the "neo-luddism" grouping are not trying to saliently argue about basic income, or any real policy change (income related or otherwise) but are just looking for an easy way to dismiss the speaker.
It's bullshit. Basic Income does not in any way support or suggest opposition to technology. In general, technology has made life better for everyone. It's not an issue that basic income is trying to solve.
The problem is that technology within a capitalist system allows automation to concentrate wealth. It's very easy for the owner of the machines to become increasingly wealthy, and very hard for anyone else to get a foot in the door.
The answer to this problem is not to get rid of the machines. This is not neo-luddism. The answer is to change social policy to spread the benefit of the automation to a wider group. That's what basic income tries to solve.
People will never be homogeneous in their beliefs, and I think that's a good thing. But when you're unable to interact with another person in any way at all because of their private beliefs, you're being an idiot.
A person's beliefs do not define their contribution to society. Life has a lot of shades of grey, everyone has opinions that run counter to the current societal ideal. It's not ok to shun or denounce that person, all you're doing is spreading hate. It IS ok to speak out about what you believe. Do some good. Instead of getting angry about someone you've read about on the internet, go volunteer somewhere. Spread some love instead.
If the price of those items increases by the cost of shipping, after you've payed the $79, Prime is now a sunk cost of $79 that has ZERO returns.
This is the basis of the lawsuit, this is very easy to understand.
Amazon should be covering the shipping cost associated with Prime items, Instead they collude with sellers to make them "Prime eligible" and those sellers increase prices by the cost of shipping. That's a scam.
I've had prime since it's inception, I have 500+ orders on my amazon account. It used to be a great deal, it's basically just a scam to get you to use their video service now.
Further, the new notice (and it really is new, it came sometime in the last 4 months) does not in any way absolve Amazon from cheating its customers.
They promised me that I could pay an upfront fee of ~59 dollars, and get free shipping on a wide variety of items for a year. Instead they took the 59 dollars, raised the prices of the items by approximately what shipping would have cost, and called the shipping free.
They deserve the lawsuit.
When restraining order laws were written, contacting someone took at least a modicum of effort. You had to write a letter, or type an email, or pick up the phone and dial a number, or take the time to travel to visit someone. It was a process that took premeditation. You simply couldn't contact someone with as little as a button press (that may or may not even make it explicitly clear who you're contacting). In fact, the law explicitly has exemptions for contact that was not premeditated, such as running into someone accidentally in public.
However now we've got systems that intentionally place people in contact because it increases revenue for the service running it. They've made it so easy to contact wide swaths of people in a completely impersonal manner that my cat could "contact" people on Facebook by walking across the keyboard.
So the real question people are asking is: does an automated online service sending an email with my name in it to a person constitute contacting that person. I'm not sure it does. By the general attitude in the thread, it seems a lot of people are also hesitant to call that contact.
So sure, you're right about this constituting contact in current law, but what we're seeing is that current law has not kept up with social perceptions of what people think of as contact. This means the law is probably going to change in the next decade or two. Hell, it might even change right now because of this case.
The sad thing about most of the experiments you list is that we gained a lot of useful knowledge from them. Sure it's easy to now look back and be horrified by them because we have the luxury of being able to do so, a luxury that is (in part) derived from the knowledge those experiments give us.
And yes, I think 100 years from now people WILL look back at us and be horrified about how do experiment on animals. But they'll be able to do so because they can afford that luxury. A luxury that's being built now, using those horrible methods.
Morals are never free of context.
the graph titled "New Gmail, images auto-displayed" makes it seem like the user opening the email will cause the open count, but this is incorrect.
As soon as gmail receives the email, they will cache the image link. All images will always show an open count of 1, and only 1, regardless of whether or not a user ever actually opened the email.
The only concrete thing mentioned is that it might be time to re-evaluate social policies. Which honestly makes a LOT of sense.
Only someone who can't think outside of the current social framework would assume that means we try to lock things down the way they are.
Lets think about some other possibilities:
-Free basic housing (would go a long way towards giving impoverished people the flexibility to move where they need to be to work whatever new jobs pop up)
-Pay people to exercise (yes, I'm serious, we could reduce healthcare costs and several studies show that people who exercise regularly perform better in mental tasks. The same tasks that are likely to become more in demand)
-Provide a basic income (Enough money to allow single parents to reliably put food on the table for their kids and buy simple modest luxuries. This still allows those who want more to climb the social ladder, but doesn't completely screw those who by nature or circumstance are not as equipped to do so)
-Invest heavily in community centers and activities (people are considerably less likely to suffer depression if they attend more community events. Active participation in the community makes democracy more effective)
-Any number of other ideas that challenge our current pre-conceptions of how we should run our society.
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"Only a pessimist can looks at the enormous progress made in productivity through automation, and then confidently declare that from this point forwards, things can only get worse"
This is true, in general technological advances have benefited society, but unequal wealth distribution has almost always hurt it.
Right now automation and capitalization allow those with the resources to become more and more wealthy, and those without resources are increasingly unable to get a foot in the door. Technology isn't the problem, unequal wealth IS. The obvious answer to this is a change in social policy. But like you said: "It might be uncomfortable - change always is".
What IS interesting is the mapping between wealth and obesity. I'd love to see more data on that.
I think the real value of tests is exposing expected behavior to teammates, and then providing quick sanity checks against that expected behavior.
The biggest thing new developers miss about testing is that most times you're not writing tests for yourself, you're writing them as a courtesy to your teammates.