542 karma · joined December 8, 2015
lol
There is [a small propaganda war being waged by transphobic conservatives][] to create the illusion of a large percentage of trans people that regret their transition, but just look at their references. You'll find every link is either to the Daily Mail or some other hate group referencing even more hate groups in a big web of circular reasoning.
Generally, there's not a lot of hard data to work with on issues relating to the trans community right now, which is a little frustrating, but hopefully there will be more soon as the scientific community is finally starting to recognize the LGBT community and conduct real science on this stuff.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/search?q=regret&rest... [2]: http://www.sexchangeregret.com/
So first off, what if you applied the same question to sexuality? We could easily argue that gay people are 'mentally ill' and need to be 'treated.' In fact, for years in the United States, that's exactly what we did. Gay people (and trans people) were frequently [subjected to electro-shock therapy to 'cure' them][]. We can even take it further than that. If I come by my political beliefs by reason, then surely anyone who disagrees with me politically must therefore be insane. So maybe we should give those damned INSERT_POLITICAL_PARTY_HERE electro-shock too, right? Just until they see our way of looking at things.
Clearly, there's a line somewhere between treating someone's disease and treating _who they are_. Some argue that that line is 'posing a danger to oneself or others,' but that brings up the confusing subject of assisted suicide, which is a whole other discussion. There's also some that argue that we only treat 'abnormality' and 'normal' is simply whatever the majority of people are, but that doesn't really solve either of the cases above, because trans people, gay people, and political dissidents are generally speaking the minority everywhere. There's also lots of other possible rules that don't really makes sense either.
Personally, I'm inclined to believe that there currently aren't any good answers to these questions and there won't be any until the field neuroscience advances. When we can look at people's brains and genuinely study how they work, a lot of stuff becomes more clear. In the case of transsexuality, [some brain structures have already been identified][] that exhibit one pattern in women and another in men and tend to match along a person's _identified_ gender rather their _assigned_ gender. That provides some evidence for the concept of _neurological sex_ which was already a topic of discussion among researchers in the area of gender studies even before these structures were identified.
So, what do these structures mean? How does gender work in the brain? How does anything work in the brain? Where is the line between sane and insane? Honestly, I don't know, but I think we'll have a better idea in a few decades, and until then, let's just try to be understanding and compassionate with our fellow human beings.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Whipping-Girl-Transsexual-Scapegoatin... [2]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-scot/shock-the-gay-away-... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexualism#Brain...
It's not as hard as you'd think. I previously worked for a start up that sold Walmart on a POS system that was absolutely terrible (the codebase didn't even have any tests). The big retailers like Walmart have a sort of "throw money at everything and see what sticks" approach to technology. They regularly sign contracts to try out new tech but only in one or two stores. If it works well, they scale up to more stores, but that almost never happens.
This is the exact opposite of what Apple should do. App startups in their first year need all the revenue they can get. After the first year, most of those companies have either reached profitability or gone out of business.
This policy is going to mean more revenue for the large, established app companies, like Instagram or Snapchat, and less revenue for any potential usurpers. They're effectively suppressing innovation and locking in any monopolies they've helped to build.
As for the median, I can't seem to find that statistic, but I would argue that it's actually a less accurate picture than the average.
[1]: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/abigail-wilkinson/pew-69... [2]: http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/economy/middle-class-we... [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-i...
You really don't understand how bad it is these days. The average family does not have $2,000 in savings, much less 5 to 10. In fact, [the average American household with debt owes an average of $130,922][1]. Over $15,000 of that is in credit card debt alone.
Being broke is actually doing pretty well nowadays. We live in a world built on debt, where the financial sector makes up over 30% of the economy and almost everyone is beholden to large banks. In a few decades, we'll be right back to feudal system, if things don't change.
[1]: http://www.fool.com/retirement/general/2016/05/08/the-averag...
It sounds like a problem to me for the simple fact that replacement parts are near impossible to find, and it's clearly costing the taxpayer a lot of money. That alone should be reason enough to upgrade.
It's also a huge security problem because many of these machines were designed before modern security procedures were invented. How am I supposed to maintain a cryptographically secure password system on a machine with a processor too slow to run a hashing algorithm?
> I'm skeptical that building a modern system would really save money since the temptation for feature creep is too great.
So, because we might be tempted to add a few features, we shouldn't upgrade technology? I don't understand where this weird pseudo-luddite mentality in the tech world comes from. I see it all the time in tech forums, and I just don't get it.
"If it's not broke, don't fix it" is a fun, catchy phrase, but it really breaks down as soon as you try to apply it anywhere. "Hey, you should really change the oil in your car." "If it's not broke, don't fix it."
I mean the current owner of clinton.com is some investment firm that could probably do just as well something like ClintonGroup.com or ClintonInvestments.com. If I was her, I would fight for the email address "hillary@clinton.com."
Then again, I'm a programmer, not a politician.
Every few years or so, a bunch of these articles come out shouting from the roof tops, "Rails is dead!" and "Long live Rails!" They often like to praise some new framework, like Hanami, as the answer to all our woes, but they never seem to address documentation.
In my opinion, documentation is where Rails blows every other framework away. I have never been forced to read Rails' source code to understand how something works (I have read some of the source, but for fun, not out of need), and I can't say that about any of the other framework I've worked with. There's always some obscure method or class somewhere in them that does something unintuitive that I always have to look up. In Rails, finding the documentation on that method is as simple as a Google search, but in django, expressjs, or any of the others I've encountered, that documentation usually doesn't even exist at all.
Efficiency, scalability and reliability are all great, but when I'm starting a web app from scratch, they're really not that important. I can worry about those things once I have funding. In the meantime, I only need them to be good enough, and Rails defaults are usually good enough.
What I really need when I'm starting a new project and I'm working on a shoestring budget, is speed. I need to build something fast so I can get funded. Once I'm funded, then I can think about implementing JRuby or splitting code out into microservices or rewriting with another framework, but by then, I'll have the money to take my time. Until then, Rails is the perfect framework for me and I'll keep using it until it's not.
Apple has leaderboards? For what?
> Problem 1: Transportation will load the grid and generating capacity in rather nasty ways
Electric cars are not a _complete_ solution on their own. They are _part_ of the solution, along side more renewable power sources like solar and wind. I drive an electric car and I charge it almost exclusively with solar panels at a local free charging station provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority. (I live in Chattanooga, TN.)
Also, as for putting load on the electric grid, electric cars actually help with that. Many can be configured to feed power back into the grid, and as a result, they can balance out the grid load throughout the day with their batteries.
> Problem 2: Rapid charging is actually not so rapid, highway re-charging stations will have to be much larger than current gas stations
Shift your thinking! Electric cars won't be charged at gas stations like gas cars of the past. Most electric drivers charge at home in their own garages or driveways. I have neither, but I still manage to charge my car in street parking with an extension cord, an exterior wall outlet, and a few of those little safety mat things so strangers don't trip over my cord.
Charging stations will still be important for cross-country trips, but the average driver doesn't travel that far often enough for it to clog up charging stations across the country.
> Problem 3: Gas stations are not generally in the neighbourhood of electricity generation stations.
See above.
> Problem 4: Re-charging will not work nearly as well when vehicle utilization goes up due to sharing
See above.
> Problem 5: We don’t actually have all this infrastructure yet
Well, duh. That's why we need to build it. That's not an issue with electric cars themselves. That's a problem with our infrastructure that we need to fix.
> Problem 6: Range
This is something we need to work on, but it's not as big of a problem as people realize. More than 90% of US drivers drive far less than 100 miles per day. The few times I do need to travel farther than that, it's actually kind of relaxing to stop at a mall or restaurant with a charger, plug in, and have a 30 minute lunch while I charge.
> Problem 7: Trailers
Really? This is problem for most drivers? This is a niche problem for the few people that actually need to haul trailers. So those people can just use regular cars.
> Problem 8: Service
I drive a Nissan Leaf, and I am very active in the Leaf driver community. I have never heard of a Leaf having major maintenance problems. Chevy Volt's are known for having some issues, but in my opinion, that's your fault for buying something from GM.
> Problem 9: Tax Breaks
How is this a problem? Tax breaks will eventually go away? So what? The whole idea is to make these cars cheaper now until manufacturing gets cheaper and the prices start to go down on their own. This is really grasping at straws.
Note that none of those checks went to the poor or middle class, at least not with a value as high as $1000. All the $1000 checks were reserved for the relatively wealthy.
http://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-signs-1-3-trilli...
Certain unnamed three letter organizations and nation states have the computing power to crack HTTPS encryption if they really want to, but using that power is expensive. Making sure all your traffic is encrypted makes it a lot harder for potential snoops to decide which traffic is worth spending the time and money decrypting and which isn't.
By using strong encryption for everything, even just reading wikipedia pages, you're doing everyone a favor by helping to make user privacy that much harder to violate.
I don't think perfect encryption is an impossible dream. I think it will be very hard to achieve, and we have a long way to go to getting there, but it's important work, and right now companies, governments and people should be pouring everything they can into making it a reality. We need a lot more research into encryption, especially [information theoretic secure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_security) algorithms.
> A trickier issue is presented by the encryption deployed by Apple, Facebook, Google and a range of smaller services that thwart law enforcement’s ability to access a target’s communications, even with a court order.
Why do they describe it as 'thrwarting' law enforcement? It's not thrwarting anything, it's just not providing them a back door.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but this article feels like it has something between the lines.
Sorry, I don't have any better links or sources right now. I'm on mobile.