That "non-technical" person from "outside the US" has done a better job of explaining Edward Snowden to the masses than most news networks.
His target demographic is Millennials, and he's very popular.
OP said "We need every single non-technical person in the world to understand this clearly." You are talking about one non-technical person, from outside the US, who reads, writes and speaks English fluently, lives in NYC with his American wife and has an above average income because of the wildly popular television show on HBO that he hosts. John Oliver is hardly representative of the other billions of non-technical people from outside of the US.
> Yeah - This carries some weight.
A February poll by Reuters has 46% of Americans supporting Apple, the number jumped to 64% for people 18-39 years of age and a more recent WSJ/NBC poll of registered voters puts the number at 47%. What percentage of John Oliver's audience do you think changed their opinion after seeing the show and now support Apple? Or do you consider comedic reinforcement of a previously held belief is "carrying some weight"?
Seems pretty straight forward - pretend you signed up for a Google account and also had that account connect to your other email addresses (Like people have been doing for years, and arguably one of gmail's best features)
Now just rebrand it without the visible requirement of having a Google Account. I wouldn't be surprised if you're still getting a Google account in the process, it's just not advertised.
When you go through the sign up flow you can select whether you want to Gmailify your address into an existing or a new Google account. We make it very explicit that all your mails are being copied into Google servers.
By the way, while Gmail always has offered ways to just "import" your messages from a third party address, with Gmailify you get a full two way sync, so you can e.g. keep using the Yahoo UI and your changes will show up in Gmail.
I do not seem to have the option to gmailify my address. Is the feature restricted to specific providers? If yes, are there any plans to support Office365 addresses?
Further - I would say it needs to happen. Not because I'm excited about the loss of privacy - but because until we lose that privacy, encryption won't become something relevant to the average person.
Encryption is a solution that expects "bad actors". When government succeeds in overtaking privacy, better encryption will prevail.
Is it a terrible thing that massive amounts of money can't be promised and taxed? If that kind of lending is in fact good business(I'm not convinced it is) Couldn't the same loan be made through multiple smaller share holders?
I don't think billion dollar loans are a requirement for society to function, or the best option.
It could but that's the wrong perspective. In "free" system that respects private choice, what can and cannot be achieved isn't as important as what deciders decide on.
A large bank will perform risk analyses and consult with their data and math people, consult their legal people, consult their insurance people, and will choose what they think is best.
So your option can be totally feasible and never chosen by a large bank- a similar fate to many new technically feasible ideas.
But then again, if you were a large entity, would you prefer to be indebted to one large entity, or a thousand small ones? All things equal, I'd rather owe 1 person 1000$ than 1000 people 1$, and I imagine their lawyers and insurance people agree.
I understand why you would only want to owe 1 person $1000, but I think you see more ideas funded as the number of funding providers increases. My dislike of large banks is totally a bias here, but I'd like to think more funding options = superior to a single decision maker.
If Intel is sourcing a billion dollar factory, shouldn't their revenue be multiple times that? If you're telling me the factory they need costs $1 billion, my response is that the cost is only that high in a market full of banks that make billion dollar loans...
Intel's factories cost billions of dollars (actual cost is around $5 billion now, not a mere $1 billion) because they're unbelievably advanced. This isn't the housing bubble applied to factories. They're building a facility that uses the most advanced technology in the world on an industrial scale.
Their revenue is many times that, certainly, but that doesn't mean they just have billions of dollars lying about doing nothing, waiting for the company to need a factory.
Sometimes it's not so simple. I recall Google issuing bonds because it was cheaper than repatriating non-US revenue from abroad to fund US investments (it would have been taxed twice, albeit at an extremely low rate on it's non-US revenue).
> Is it a terrible thing that massive amounts of money can't be promised and taxed? If that kind of lending is in fact good business(I'm not convinced it is) Couldn't the same loan be made through multiple smaller share holders?
Sure, in fact, the same loan probably will be with the existing system. Large (hundreds of millions of USD) bond offerings to the public, from either a state agencies or private firms don't end up with only one purchaser in many cases, even if they have a big financial firm facilitating the offering.
The question is how do alternative mechanisms do this as well or better?
Dawkins has never struck me as being particularly intellectual. The stance he takes on his definition of science often comes across as extreme as many religious fundamentalist perspectives.
From an article linked elsewhere in the comments, a comment by Dawkins:
"I greatly admire EO Wilson & his huge contributions to entomology, ecology, biogeography, conservation, etc. He’s just wrong on kin selection."
I get that you can slam someone like that about very, very well established stuff like physics; if someone says F = M * a * v then rip into them all you want (there is no v in the eq.). That stuff is well established, I think in physics you have to get 5 sigma to claim "significance" ( p = 0.0000003 ) which is pretty hard to do on accident.
But when you're dealing with biology thus far significance is still a p value of around 0.05 which means there's a 5% chance it could have happened by accident. That's a pretty substantial risk, at least relative to the world of physics.
So for someone to proclaim certainty on a subject which is inherently much, much less certain you have to wonder what's going on. How did a person get so confident of something without the data telling them to be that confident? Is it possible that they're choosing to believe something further than what the data show? If they're willing to exaggerate their confidence on one subject, who's to say they aren't doing it elsewhere?
Unfortunately in a lot of realms of science people end up with beliefs about how things work that aren't rigorously backed up. That doesn't make said beliefs inherently wrong, but pretending that they're provably correct when they're not smacks of charlatanism.
You seem to think that because it's more likely for someone to be wrong in Biology versus Physics that they can't have a strong, confident opinion backed by science. Dawkins holds a PhD and is a really smart guy who has contributed to science in general and, more specifically, the theory of evolution. I don't see the problem here.
As far as I can tell they were both being asshats to each other in the media (Wilson calling him a Journalist then Dawkins saying to throw Wilson's book hard). Reading Dawkin's response[1] I think it has merit and it refers to plenty of science (which doesn't come across at charlatanism to me) though I'm not going to say he's right because I don't know.
Yeah - This carries some weight.