Something equivalent that teen boys "adore" like girls and boy bands and twilight?
I can only think of video games.. perhaps anime, possibly comics.
All of which are widely mocked.
Its not that girl's interests are taboo - its that when any gender gets too wrapped up in something that it becomes part of their identity society should mock to encourage adoption of other interests.
Video games, anime and comics (and comic-book movies) are not widely mocked. They're wildly popular.
Getting too far into anime and becoming a "weeb" is widely mocked. A specific video-game, comic or anime series might be mocked, but in the general sense all these things are well liked.
I think you're just revealing your bubble. Depending on the crowd anime and video games can be the thing only losers partake in, whereas high school romcoms and riding horses are considered normal.
I suppose anyone can say "Your argument is coming from your bubble" without saying much else. It's not a great argument. But I think I'd like to hear why you think your read on the situation is better than mine.
Here's why I think I've got a good read on this: I'm in my 40s and I have friends, family and acquaintances from all walks of life. I specifically live my life so that I don't have a bubble or a lot of dependencies. I just hang out a lot online and I'm reporting what I see.
My 10 year old niece loves anime and video games. I have some friends in their 20s and 30s who love anime and video games. I hang out on Twitch, Reddit or 9gag and almost exclusively peruse these sites using the "popular" firehose - I always see lots and lots of references to anime, video games and comic-book movies. Actual comics/comic-books do not come up quite as often - but cos-play does.
I don't really like anime. I enjoyed some classics when I younger - titles such as Akira, Ninja Scroll and uhhh Blood: The Last Vampire. I play one video game: Rocket League. Other than that, I'm not what you'd call a "gamer".
On Twitch though, I definitely see high school kids with tons of viewers playing all sorts of games and talking about anime.
Twitch, 9gag and Reddit are most definitely a bubble. I mean, there are even the jokes in the various subreddits about how they'd never get someone with that belief system here, or on 9gag about how there aren't actually any women.
I'm in my 30s and for me the biggest grounding point for what is and isn't my bubble has come from online dating. Let me just say, being into Star Trek, owning a 3D printer and knowing your way around even the basics of a shell terminal are all, even individually, something only a small fraction of the population would identify with. These are pretty independent things, however, inside of these there is quite a large overlap. Hence, it's a subculture and the modern world which lets us choose our human interactions based on our interests automatically turns that into a bubble.
I believe a similar thing happens to those who descend into the redpill movement, or join the military, or get involved in Twitter activism, or do mountaineering, or base jumping, or Instagram fitness, or eat at a different restaurant every night, or so many other things. Everybody thinks their own worldview represents a much larger population cross section than it actually does. And everyone can find someone with a more extreme perspective, making them feel moderate in their position.
Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know from @CrimeADay on Twitter
26 USC §5674(b) & 27 CFR §25.144(a) make it a federal crime for a brewer to remove beer from a brewery in a keg that has the name of more than one brewer on it.
21 USC §§331, 333 & 21 CFR §169.115(a) make it a federal crime to sell French dressing if less than 35% of its weight is vegetable oil.
43 USC §1733 & 43 CFR §6302.20(e) make it a federal crime to pick someone up from a federal wilderness area using a hot air balloon.
7 USC §8303, §8313 & 9 CFR §93.318(b) make it a federal crime to bring an American horse back into the United States after being in a Canadian rodeo without a health certificate.
42 USC §6928 & 40 CFR §257.3–8(b) make it a federal crime to start a dangerous garbage fire.
21 USC §331, 333, 343 & 21 CFR §155.201(a)(2)(v) make it a federal crime to sell canned "random sliced" mushrooms unless they were sliced in a random manner.
"Have you ever clogged a toilet in a national forest? That could get you six months in federal prison. Written a letter to a pirate? You might be looking at three years in the slammer. Leaving the country with too many nickels, drinking a beer on a bicycle in a national park, or importing a pregnant polar bear are all very real crimes, and this riotously funny, ridiculously entertaining, and fully illustrated book shows how just about anyone can become—or may already be—a federal criminal."
> Some juicy federal crimes we're all expected to know
No, we are not all expected to know them.
The first one is from a part of the tax code that covers taxation on alcohol sales. If you are not involved in the commercial beer brewing industry, you do not need to know it.
The second one is part of the rules on interstate commerce in food, drugs, and cosmetics. Again, most of us have no need to know it. Same with the sixth one.
The third is from the laws governing public lands. If you aren't going to fly your hot air balloon into a Federal wilderness area, there is no need to know it.
There are some stupid laws on the books, but you have picked awful examples. Only one of those laws is something a non-specialist would ever encounter, and that one is common sense.
Everyone should know that burning garbage can be dangerous.
Anyone who operates a hot air balloon should know how to use it safely.
Anyone who works with animals should know about the risks of spreading disease.
Anyone who works with food should know about food labelling laws.
One could make a fairly good argument they already do.
Especially if you watched the testimony from that professor explaining how Google shifts search results to push GOTV in certain distinct counties while excluding others.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSTHgoaVtSw
So is the UK, last time I checked they're not doing so hot either. You can add this kind of argumentation to the list of ailments. Geographic or some other sort of fatalism as an excuse for what is social failure.
Where you're located when a disease hits gives you either an advantage or a disadvantage, fair enough. But it doesn't explain away repeated and continuous inability to act. If NZ had acted like the UK, they'd look just the same. Once you've got community spread the virus doesn't care if you're on an island.
> So is the UK, last time I checked they're not doing so hot either. You can add this kind of argumentation to the list of ailments. Geographic or some other sort of fatalism as an excuse for what is social failure.
Exactly. If the US population (for instance) had the community spirit to voluntarily comply with virus control measures, and the social cohesion to support those who couldn't work during that time, we probably would have gotten it under control and life would be something close to normal.
The people who make lockdowns necessary (and the subsequent economic damage) are the ones that fight them tooth and nail.
>So is the UK, last time I checked they're not doing so hot either. You can add this kind of argumentation to the list of ailments. Geographic or some other sort of fatalism as an excuse for what is social failure.
not taking health precautions. Not following guidelines. Politicizing the response to the virus, putting individual interests above the interests of society, not listening to health experts, politicians not following their own rules, the list of dysfunction goes on.
If there was actual compliance with relatively modest rules, that just demand that everyone acts with some sense and makes some small concessions, life could have gone on normally, with a lot of people still alive.
This sounds like the thoughts of someone recently born.
This was inevitable in atomized western societies with relatively high rates of health issues like obesity and diabetes. And how were you to muster people in these fractured societies to "comply"? There is no national identity or Philia. Consumerism only brings us so close. Diversity is our strength, remember?
>If there was actual compliance with relatively modest rules, that just demand that everyone acts with some sense and makes some small concessions, life could have gone on normally, with a lot of people still alive.
You can add Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to the list, none of which are surrounded by ocean.
As for China, I don't think anybody trusts their figures, but it's also quite clear that they do have the outbreak well under control. If their ICUs were full, we'd know about it.
Vietnam got it under control quite well despite a land border with China. Key to success likely were:
- a population that had experience with prior pandemics and was thus willing to play along
- a strong centralized government (this is a guess, and I'm not just talking about the power, but specifically the centralization - other nations that have states/provinces each implementing their own policies showed the dangers of that approach, e.g. USA, Switzerland, Germany)
- extremely aggressive contact tracing and enforced quarantine (for high risk cases, they were put in hotels or barracks, not told "please stay home"). Not just contacts but also contacts-of-contacts (the latter were only ordered to home quarantine).
AFAIK they didn't even have much of a shutdown, because the quarantining was so effective.
Reminds me when the EU "Fixed" Cookies and now we have these stupid click-through warnings everywhere that have pretty much ruined the user experience. Root cause: people passing laws they have idea what about.
But they all choose to do that, so that's the actual outcome of the legislation.
I don't understand why I keep seeing this argument. We all have to deal with cookie dickbars regardless of whether or not your armchair lawyer argument is technically correct. If this is what the law does in practice, and the behavior is generally seen as compliant, then it's a dumb law.
Lots of websites seemingly actually break the law, with full page "can't see the page unless you click accept" etc. The problem seems to be under-enforcement, and then we're right back at the point of TFA.
I agree that (under) enforcement is part of the equation, but I don't think it's the primary issue.
The problem starts when legislators write vague or ill-posed laws because they don't understand the underlying technical issues. If your understanding of the problem is that "cookies are some sort of tracking token and tracking is bad," you will not be able to write effective legislation. You need to have a basic understanding of HTTP, you need to know how cookies fit into HTTP, and you need to be aware of some basic cookie usage patterns. You need to be able to identify that some things that certain companies build using cookies are problematic, and other things are totally benign and are required for basic functionality. You need to be capable of understanding that a user's "allow/deny cookies" preference usually can't even be saved without a cookie.
When the law actually comes out, it's so vague and seemingly self-contradictory that lawyers at these companies are going to say "We have no clue WTF they meant here, or how they intend to enforce this law, or if they even intend to enforce it at all, but just to be safe, let's just do it this way that's obviously stupid, but appears to be what everyone else thinks will pass the sniff test."
Then the law isn't actually enforced, because the enforcers don't understand the law either, so the lawyers are like, "Well, no guidance based on patterns of enforcement, in fact, they don't seem to be enforcing this thing at all, so let's just do whatever we want," which is how you get your laundry list of obviously non-compliant websites.
Legislation needs to be clear, enforcement needs to actually happen, and needs to happen consistently in order to reinforce the clarity of the original law. If you don't have these things, your legislation is going to fail. Cookie law used in this example, but the same thing applies to GDPR. So far, very little enforcement, and enforcement has been extremely inconsistent. It's a really bad start.
> You need to be able to identify that some things that certain companies build using cookies are problematic, and other things are totally benign and are required for basic functionality. You need to be capable of understanding that a user's "allow/deny cookies" preference usually can't even be saved without a cookie.
But they did all that. Functional cookies (shopping carts, preferences, etc.) all need no consent. This is not some kind of complicated thing. It only gets complicated if you want to try to trick users into allowing other cookies and/or hope that whenever those things get enforced, they’ll start with bigger fishes than you.
The worst part is that all alternatives to cookies are worse privacy wise... Or at least it would have been if every single browser didn't tacitly accept and keep all cookies. It's getting better, but making cookies permanent should really count as an additional privilege (I mean it does for browser extensions, so why on earth not arbitrary webpages?), also session cookies should really just go away when the tab closes, and first party isolation should probably be the default.
You know what cookies are and made your informed decision to accept them in your browsers. I do not, for example, and block most of them.
99% of internet users do not had that knowledge before those "stupid click-through warnings everywhere".
So if you want to write off the outcome of the EU cookie law, it is not "entitled Californian software engineers got a little annoyed", but instead "the whole world woke up to the fact advertising companies are tracking everything they do online via cookies".
That's actually a good idea. It's really frustrating how (in other types of news) a lot of buzz can be generated and then just silence and we forget it all and move on. But it's not really something that would sell well. Not many people care about yesterday's news, people want to know what's coming next and not what came out of some magazine's prediction several years ago.
It’s a great idea, but I doubt it would succeed. Human nature tends to include not admitting fault. Also, many readers seem to choose their news (at least political news) for confirmation bias (whether intentional or not), so a news site/paper saying they were wrong would defeat that.
Not saying that retractions don’t happen, but they seem to be always buried under the headlines.
That is something I considered. Many partisan sites love to point out the errors of the other side. I know Fox News loves to call out CNN all the time. However, if every site did it, I fear that would just lead to more confirmation bias. And why report that the other side was right? That hurts your viewpoint.
What we need is a non-partisan non-profit to do it. But then there’s the problem of funding (which results in conspiracy theories).
Seems like the best way now is for the reader to make notes to themselves and regularly check back to them and see how things changed, compared to where the hive mind was earlier.
Since we're talking about ideas for news services: I would love to be able to get a list of the most important news in a month or a year. Not a top 10 list but simply a way to try to catch up if you miss a few months.
There is a bit deja vu, since at that time we were pointing out similar flaws in the DPD (lack of enforcement, lack of clarity, govt inefficiencies, the inability for proponents to separate intent from reality, etc).
Sadly, there is an absolute "for or against" mentality out there. You can't make it clear that the implementation of such a law would be poor enough to not justify it being enacted in the first place lest you are told "well, should we do nothing?". We can easily start with easy-to-understand/implement transparency requirements (maybe even just as guidelines or requirements for a form of certification at first while encouraging technical solutions in the meantime). Never-realized scary fines might as well have never been brought forth.
Do nothing is an untenable position. Software companies have become so brazen and scummy that even a law which is unevenly enforced is absolutely necessary.
The GDPR brought privacy to the front and into the attention of software companies. It gives us individuals at least a chance to control our data.
I think the reason why these situations boil down to "for-or-against" is because people craft narratives about these measures/changes to law. If the narratives are pushed hard enough then they end up overpowering nuanced discussion.
"If you don't agree with GDPR then you must want to steal my data". It's difficult to make nuanced arguments against it when you get shouted down by statements like that. These narratives are used to label someone and it seems to be common in modern politics.
I thought that’s what everyone thought back then. At least all my friends were like, the lawyers will have a good time and be the only ones benefiting from this
That's a pretty default thing that most educated people know though. Regulation and bureaucracy usually benefit the established behemoths with enough lawyers, while gray zones, sluggish laws or easy processes benefit new players or small ones without all the legal armor.
No wonder that Facebook is lobbying for getting regulated and Microsoft proposed regulating some computer vision uses (faces) etc. Some people of course eat it up and think it's because they are just mature now and understand their responsibility and want to benefit the public etc. In reality it's because they have armies of lawyers who can follow all the legal minutiae, have the internal processes for compliance and documentation, audits etc. Which allow them to do whatever they did before (obviously they lobby for laws that allow their use cases) but make it difficult for others to enter. It's the "kicking the ladder" idea.
Most of my Euro friends didn't think this. There's a huge difference in approach to regulation between the EU and the US.
I would guess that this article is written from a US viewpoint - the "isn't it strange how everyone is approaching enforcement of this differently?" attitude isn't even remotely strange to a European.
As lots of people pointed out at the time, GDPR in Europe isn't that groundbreaking - almost all EU countries had/have data privacy laws that approach the GDPR (not least because the GDPR itself is a continuation of EU regulation in this area). It came as a shock to US companies because of the sudden "well, none of you paid any attention when we didn't give this regulation teeth, so here's the fangs" enforcement change.
And yeah, I'd love to take part in retrospective reviews of old news to work out who was right :)
A person commented and asked me about suggestions, but deleted his comment before I could answer so here it is anyways:
Super quickly (I'm sure you have heard of, or can quickly use a search engine to find the commonly listed issues):
Damages: damages need to be scaled according to the company size, severity and amount. GDPR was created to punish Big Players, but the wording that would have fit them is equally (and should be, laws should be equal) applied to small companies resulting in an impedance mismatch. Frankly, the damages are too small for the Big Players, but insane to the small ones. GDPR also does not apply to the state, but holy shit it fucking should!
Enforcement: it needs to be equally enforced and you need to be able to sue by yourself over it instead of just limiting it to a state organisation.
Data: it should be data that is directly tied to you, ie leave the normal web logs etc out of it. PII is just a sham as it's defined today. A factor of usage also needs to play into it, ie normal web server ip logs that are separate and don't feed into a user specific connection into a database should not be a consideration.
Access: access _needs_ to be able to be done online if the data is collected or transferred online. Ie no this "you need to physically mail us a certified mail with your id" shit. GPDR is a fucking failure in this aspect. Also no required strong authentication: access should be just directly through your account you can access normally without strong authentication.
Usage: GDPR does not allow you to trade tracking for access (ie monetisation of content is almost impossible if you care about user privacy): this is insane. GDPR also supposedly does not allow for those complicated "accept all or modify your preferences" windows, but it should have no saying in that: if a site wants to make the experience painful, that's up to them. It is up to the user to select if they want to use that site or not.
I have been habitually sending "I have finished using your service, could you please delete my account" emails since around 2008 or so.
Prior to GDPR, 9 replies in 10 would be polite but dismissive responses, basically telling me that I'm making an unreasonably burdensome request.
Post GDPR, everyone responds with a message stating they have followed my request in a timely fashion.
Am I disappointing that GDPR has not fined Facebook into oblivion? Yeah. I was hoping for global scale schadenfreude as much as the next person.
However, GDPR has fundamentally normalized the notion that peoples relationships with companies need not be permanent, and that submitting to eternal spam is not the accepted price of buying a flight online. GDPR has established in law that it's totally reasonable for people to not want to give their local gym an iris scan in order to enter the gym and work out, and it is indeed the gym owner who's the arsehole in that situation. This grants leverage against the arsehole.
In that respect, it's been a smashing success. There is much we could improve on, but on the statement "it only benefited the lawyers"...hard disagree.
That might be how you feel. For me, GDPR and the “Cookie Law” have been amazing, as they make it incredibly easy to detect which websites and businesses you should avoid.
I do however wish they’d be a lot more aggressive with the fines.
The best analogy I use for logical errors such as this is -
If you have a dependent - ie a child - whom you are a primary source of care. Should you qualify for a bigger helping hand than say, the 25 year old with no children?
If you agree - then now imagine you have 500 dependents. Or in the case of some corps 500,000.
You have half a million dependents who rely on you every other week for a paycheck.
Do you qualify for a larger helping hand than the 25 year old who lives alone?
I'm not saying bailout is wrong, but taxpayers should be handsomely rewarded for those bailouts (at least 20% APR) as those bailout companies were making a lot of money on taxpayers and never shared any profits with them (they even avoid paying taxes though various financial means).
Agreed - which is why I strongly support the administration demanding equity in the companies that are receiving money.
And I only support money given as loans which must be paid back. Any kind of grant money must be exclusively used for payroll or other qualifying operating expenses.
The current stimulus is not perfect but its pretty good and FAR better than 2008
It's not a "logical error," it's an "ideological error," at least from your perspective. Banks are not parents, and small businesses are not "dependent children," so I'd say you're making a bigger logical fallacy called a false equivalence.
> Do you qualify for a larger helping hand than the 25 year old who lives alone?
No, because the "helping hand" you're getting is not helping the "children" eat in this situation. None of this $10B is going to small businesses, is it? It's literally just a payday for the bank. If you give a parent $400 extra a month, that is going towards daycare, food, etc. for their child. Your metaphor misses the mark completely.
His post is not addressing this issue of bank fees hes making a wider point about bailouts in general.
I am simply reminding him that airline companies who did nothing wrong have people depending on them for their paychecks. Exactly the same as a child depends on their parent.
And in this case the money given to AIRLINES helps a lot of parents feed their children
...just give them money directly to those parents instead. When you give money to the airlines, those airlines like handing out bonuses to their execs, and initiating stock buybacks with the confidence that they'll get bailed out in case hard times hit. Airlines are not parents, and they are not invested in their employees wellbeing. It's a false equivalency because an employer-employee relation is nothing like a parent-child relation.
> airline companies who did nothing wrong
Airline companies did do something wrong. They didn't prepare for this situation when they had cash reserves, instead they initiated buybacks to enrich board members and executives. Greed should not be rewarded, wisdom and caution should.
Grants for employee salaries and benefits like health insurance, low interest loan to be paid back, and a stake in the company in the form of equity. And all with strings attached so they can't hand out bonuses or lobby congress.
Businesses operate on revenue and margin and companies like airlines can't justify using even 1% of its revenue to "save" for rainy days. Their tickets have to be as cheap as possible and they have to market to as many people as possible. Its unreasonable to ask them to lay out millions on the chance an act of god rolls through.
As a company they have plenty of ways to raise capital to weather major events, including selling stock, which is what they are doing - to the government in exchange for favorable loans and a grant.
But to sum up: if you are a company with $1 million on hand at the end of the year you have to disperse it somehow.
- If you put it in a bank account you'll earn 0.2% interest on your "investment"
- If you pay out dividends your shareholders will earn 1-2% (estimate) on their investments
- If you buy back your own stock your shareholders can see 4-5% (estimate) on their investments + you have shares you can award to employees in the form of options or direct without diluting the market
The number 1 factor in your decision? Taxes. Which option pays the least tax? Option 3
> doctors are not working for free, why should bank employees?
Are rank-and-file bank employees getting a big chunk of those increased earnings? Seems like both doctors and bank employees are simply continuing to earn their regular paychecks, as they should. It's the banks' shareholders that are making way more money for basically zero risk. And execs, who get paid mostly in stock. That's the problem here.
But as I pointed out in the original post - the 10B in fees is in line with revenue the banks receive during normal times. And going off the earnings the banks posted last week, they are losing millions every day just keeping the lights on.
There is no increased earnings there is in fact very big losses. Which is another thing people tend to forget when discussing exec pay. The execs take a hit when business is bad, but the majority of employees continue getting paid.
Exec pay is high but you can't forget that much of the risk / responsibility should the business do poorly is on their heads not the majority of the workforce.
> you can't forget that much of the risk / responsibility should the business do poorly is on their heads
The worst outcome for any employee, exec or lowly serf, is the loss of their job. But it's far more devastating for a rank-and-filer to lose their job than for a highly-paid exec to lose theirs. So...no the majority of the workforce also takes on most of the risk should the business do poorly.
Not true actually. The majority of employees do not get fired. Only a minority do
And the minority that is let go get 3-6 months of severance and unemployment benefits until they inevitably find a new job - which btw is far easier to do when you are not an executive of a floundering business.
> The majority of employees do not get fired. Only a minority do
A minority end up fired but all of them potentially can be.
> And the minority that is let go get 3-6 months of severance
This is not written into any employment contract. 3-6 months sounds absurdly generous.
> unemployment benefits until they inevitably find a new job
UI benefits only offer partial wage replacement.
> which btw is far easier to do when you are not an executive of a floundering business.
Part of the reason execs get paid highly is to take on that risk. They have no excuse for not building up a healthy nest egg to get through periods of unemployment. Execs don't live paycheck-to-paycheck, or if they do, surely they should know better about managing money wisely. Otherwise why did they even have their jobs?
Execs also have way better personal networks for finding new jobs. Their friends are other execs in other companies. So it's not at all obvious that they'll be unemployed for longer than average Joe Pink Slip.
So businesses are not a charity, but the US taxpayer is? Why do we keep sending money into the banking system with no strings attached? In 2008 as well as now, banks have collected billions of dollars with no strings attached, and engaged in fraud and corruption with no consequences.
Doctors are not working for free, no, but they also didn't just vacuum up 10B of cash meant for patients either. Only the banking system has the tenacity and lack of shame to do such a thing.
> why should bank employees
I don't think anyone in this thread is talking about bank employees.
This program is vastly different from the 2008 bailouts. The banks collected a modest fee for doing work spreading money around to people who need to pay employees and rent.
In this situation the banks are simply a truck driver and small businesses are your local grocery store.
Im not going to fault the truck driver for asking to be paid to do work.
The 10B they collected was not from the government - it was paid by businesses applying for loans.
Except, if the truck driver consistently fails to deliver the goods, the truck driving company usually goes out of business. It is generally referred to as having actual skin in the game.
There has been no general business failure during this crisis. The government is mandating businesses be closed and businesses and employees are suffering because of it.
If you are only talking about 2008 then yes - that bailout was fucking dumb
If you know of a better way to spread 600 billion amongst 5-10 million small businesses without going through the local banks these businesses use please share with the class?
It seems apparent that the government could’ve distributed these loans to qualifying businesses if they wanted to. The government was able to distribute individual checks to people. It does not seem far fetched to extend this to business accounts.
Maybe someone else can describe technical blockers as to why the government couldn’t have done this. It seems mostly political.
The banks have a preexisting relationship with these businesses and know what they would need / qualify for. Plus provide boots on the ground for vetting.
The best the government could do was send a paltry check to pretty much EVERY american. I'm sure you'd object if they decided to send 1 million dollars to EVERY small business.
That's the best a fed government run program could accomplish with only a couple of weeks.
> The banks have a preexisting relationship with these businesses and know what they would need / qualify for. Plus provide boots on the ground for vetting.
Seems to me that the government has a comparable relationship with business. Companies report to the IRS same as individuals, and corporations are required to file annual reports with their state. You’re telling me they cant maybe slice up the market due to higher or lower risk (restaurants probably taking a way bigger hit than tech, for instance) and qualify companies according to trends in their tax filings and other data points?
Its not necessarily a question of what they could do. Its an emergency and time was valuable.
Banks have thousands if not millions of employees capable of performing basic due diligence before sending out money. A fed task force tasked with processing applications from millions of businesses would be capable of handing out money maybe summer 2021
Demand a refund not a handout