Are we going to get rid of every word that a plantation owner ever used to insult the slaves? For words that specifically have no purpose other than conveying hate, I can understand stamping them out. But master has quite a few other meanings, most of which I would think existed before institutionalized slavery of black people existed. Seems a bit unproductive to target it. They had supervisors - should we stop using the word supervisor? What about boss? Or plantation? Could not the entire BDSM culture be considered in the same way, with its themes of bondage and servitude? Somehow I doubt that every time a sub asks a dom to crack a whip over their head they are celebrating slavery. How close does a word have to be to an issue relative to its other usages in order to be considered a symbol of that issue above all else?
It wasn't intended to be. It's an actual question - where does the cutoff point lie for something standing on its own vs it being considered a problematic and irredeemable symbol of an atrocity and how do we define it? How do we differentiate between when someone is an asshole or not?
I came across an example of this the other day after seeing the word used in a historical text for a class [0,1]. I was fairly certain it did not mean what it sounded like it meant so I looked into it. While the word does not have a definition associated with slavery (that I know of) and is thus arguably further away from the issue than the word master, its phonetics are enough for its usage to result in condemnation.
Lives can be ruined, either from an accusation over a misunderstanding or a failure to recognize actual harmful intent. Vagueness creates friction. To solve a problem there needs be a thorough and precise understanding, and when it involves multiple people there also needs to be a sufficiently common definition.
This is the conclusion I think I am coming to on this issue. So long as only verifiable facts are presented as a counter point, then it isn't really even editorializing, let alone censorship. Editorializing is defined as presenting an opinion - if you present a verifiable primary data source and nothing else, you are by definition not editorializing.
Seems to confirm, 28% increase in the past month overall in tests performed per positive. But this graph doesn't give any regional focus unfortunately - all we can say is that on a national scale, the positive test rate is decreasing. It is entirely possible that there is an increase being hidden by a larger decrease in the hot spots, but the next month should give us the answer.
How would someone build a physical filter that only works in one direction? I'm having some trouble finding good sources on air filter design, I did see some mentions of differing porosity on different sides looking at HVAC filters but unfortunately no details on the mechanisms/principles behind it. Most of the information I have seen regarding lack of mask effectiveness comes from mask type, improper use, and conservation of supply for those most in need, not the actual mask itself, implying that masks are in fact effective if they are used properly, with effectiveness depending on mask design - your comment appears to be referring to use in general.
I would think however that placing any physical barrier in the path of an airflow is going to have an effect regardless of direction, as some non zero portion of particles are always going to impact the barrier.
Edit: It appears from other comments you may in fact be referring to improper use of masks that are also not specifically designed to maximize filtration ability. I would still submit that some degree of mitigation is better than none, but I can see how a false sense of safety could outweigh the benefits of the mask.
> Also maybe wages have stagnanted in the US for this generation, but keep in mind the wealth improvements in the rest of the world have been staggering. Billions of people in India or China have been lifted out of poverty.
So, your premise here seems to be that even though your own life may be going downhill as long as everyone else is doing better you shouldn't bother with exploring the reasons behind or even trying to fix your own backwards slide. Is that correct?
It's about keeping things in perspective. Sure explore the reasons or try to fix the backward slide, but maybe we should have a basic posture of gratitude. I suspect most of us have it pretty good in life.
Also the consequences for policies are not always easy to predict. As an example, making college free seems great for the children of the upper middle class. But what about the majority of people who don't go to college?
Every time I see someone bring up that others have it worse, everyone else has seen huge improvement, etc I've always gotten the impression that they are somehow trying to minimize the issues people are talking about as not being worthy of consideration because of the other. From your reply it seems like I may be missing something because I can't see how anyone's level of gratitude or acknowledgement/lack of acknowledgement re the improving status of others is relevant to the concerns they have regarding their own situation or productive in resolving said concerns. And thus, I usually conclude that the only reason it is brought up is to minimize whatever issue the original poster brings up.
But I'm really curious as to what the underlying reasoning here is. I can sort of understand when it comes down to obvious luxuries, so long as those luxuries are not in fact mandatory for being a productive member of the corresponding society (eg complaining about not being one of the 100 people to have one of those newfangled telephones vs complaining about not having a telephone in an age where having a telephone is the default expectation).
How would having a basic posture of gratitude aid someone in resolving issues they face that deal with what may be seen as luxuries in areas that are improving but which may be necessities in their own area? What relevance does the improvement of others have to resolving or mitigating the backwards slide of another? Is it not better for everyone to be experiencing improvement? Is there some fundamental mechanism that requires some areas backslide in order for others to improve?
I'm genuinely curious - you aren't the first person I have met that makes the assertions you have, and I have experienced the same sense of bafflement every time.
I do exactly this, but with the sticky notes application. I find it easier to shuffle and tweak the raw text than moving around and editing discrete todo items, and I have it covering the next 2-3 weeks at any given moment with longer term stuff noted at the bottom. I've also started carrying around a small notepad that acts sort of like a buffer for the todo list, both incoming items that occur when I'm not at the keyboard and outgoing data/thoughts for meetings. It feels more like a natural extension of my memory than any todo app I've tried.
For awhile at work I used Windows' sticky notes extensively. My wallpaper at the time was an image of old fence boards, so the two combined to make a little kanban on my desktop.
This...does not seem as bad as I originally thought. Just a prompt bar to use Office instead of WordPad. I was thinking it would look like the start menu does. Admittedly I would be more concerned if it was advertising something other than a product most consumers regard as the default way to edit text.
Agreed. Most of my Windows-using family members wouldn't be able to tell the difference between WordPad and Word... until they go to share the file and discover that RTF looks different on every other person's machine. This is entirely a positive for the tech-illiterate portion of Microsoft's userbase, who probably intended to be using Word anyway.
It will also train them to further ignore the presence of these bars if they see them and close them without reading - these same bars that usually contain security warnings in Office products.
They probably have a very different idea of "paid" from the companies creating the software. Even though you "bought" a piece of software, it's more accurate to say you "licensed" that software. Buying something in a box doesn't change this in the eyes of the law and companies take advantage of this.
What can be done to change this perception? If "software is eating the world" then it's hard to see where this ends. Soon you'll have ads in your car, or on home appliances.
Only if you're inured to this kind of corporate intrusion on your machine that you paid for with your money.
My toaster barking, "Hey, wouldn't you like a nice Thomases' English Muffin instead? Nooks and crannies!" is also fairly low-key, but not something I want.
> My toaster barking, "Hey, wouldn't you like a nice Thomases' English Muffin instead? Nooks and crannies!" is also fairly low-key, but not something I want.
On the bright side, my kids would get to (briefly) see a reproduction of After Dark's "Flying Toasters" screensaver.
Maybe more like you rent an apartment that comes with a basic toaster, and has a sticker on the said that says "full feature toaster available, inquire with the landlord if you are interested".
Mildly annoying and silly, but maybe some people wouldn't even consider the possibility if you didn't tell them about it.
If done well, it could just be a way to inform customers of an improved product.
Lets say Apple launched iTunes2 as a separate product and one day you opened iTunes and saw the banner "Try iTunes2!" would that be equally upsetting? Or you go to gmail.com and see a banner for "Try Inbox!" etc.
This isn't candy crush in WordPad, it's an ad for an enhanced text editor
> Lets say Apple launched iTunes2 as a separate product and one day you opened iTunes and saw the banner "Try iTunes2!" would that be equally upsetting
It would, actually. I don't want to be sold to, at all.
I honestly can't imaging who this could be "done well".
> Lets say Apple launched iTunes2 as a separate product and one day you opened iTunes and saw the banner "Try iTunes2!" would that be equally upsetting?
It could surely be worse, but it's still bad. I often pick Wordpad because I want more capability than a mere text editor can provide, but don't want to get bogged down with the overhead or complexity of the full Office offering. It's not appropriate for the OS to be second guessing my choices.
But, I would guess that it has to do with wiggles in space-time, since they do say it's from the vibrating of the atoms. Energy is transferred through a medium via imparting of wiggles to that medium, so I think it would be reasonable to guess that it's either the vibrations moving through space-time or maybe some other field related to mass.
Even if we still had the Library of Alexandria, it may have shed zero light on the actual lives of citizens. Archiving content on the internet means capturing thousands of individual level perspectives and experiences. We don't know what will end up being important to historians 50 or 100 years from now. I would bet there are dozens if not hundreds of historians that would give anything for a record of their favorite time period that contains even a fraction of the amount of content today's archive efforts are storing.
It's also not horrendously expensive - we are getting better and better at storage as well data analysis techniques, so stuff that seems useless today may be useful 50 years from now and cost less to store than it does now. The key thing again being that we can't benefit from hindsight.
Even graffiti can give insight into a time period, even if that insight is that that time period had an unusually high number of graffiti artists.
Not to mention that historians of the future will be able to sort and characterize massive amounts of data and draw conclusions that couldn't be made without that data.
For a time period where data is more valuable that oil, that the wealthiest companies are trying to grab every piece of data they can, and on a site where this is frequently discussed and many work for said companies, I find the question "why do archivists want to archive data?" a little silly. Date might not be useful to us now, but might be to future historians (though this is a similar argument made by that companies that do mass surveillance).
What about people who don't want stupid comments they made online when they were 14 permanently indexed and searchable for all of time by the Archive Team? Yes, they may have posted to Yahoo! Groups back in 1999 when they didn't know better, but now it's 2019 and you have people digging up decades-old dirt on people to try and destroy their reputations and careers.
Given that search engines have zero ethics when it comes to removing embarrassing (but not illegal) content, sometimes the loss of information is a small blessing for some.
Yes, it's their fault, but I also don't think it's fair that something a child said at 14 should haunt them their entire professional careers, either.
The stuff stored in the Yahoo groups is material from the beginning of the internet. When people explored what could be possible and how easy is was to connect globally.
You have a valid point, but it's also one of these things in our generation that we have to live with. We explored and tried things. Only now we look back and see what those explorations of our younger selfes really are; sometimes funny, sometimes embarrassing. However, if you are cautious, you may be able to delete your stuff or at least make it anonymous by deleting that said account. If not, you have live with it.
Those of all these people can now learn from it and can educate their kids in being careful with the internet. (Or at least this is what it should be)
The dogma, that "everything posted to the internet will stay on the internet" , may not be entirely true for this first generation, because now large parts are already gone. But I am certain that this will be very true for the current generation, because I really doubt that Facebook and others will ever freely delete large datasets of user content.
Hypothetically, yes; but right now all this stuff is available on the clearnet and searchable. So obviously any potential harm of the present situation, is decreased. And, unless your argument is that we should delete all fora on the web because someone may have said something embarrassing on them, then I think you'd probably want to come down on the side of preservation.
Withhold wide-scale, anonymous access for a few decades maybe? (Though presumably there is a middle ground that doesn't involving leaving _everything_ inaccessible for a few decades.)
For example: World War two groups where many of the the members have passed away by now.
There could be first hand accounts of history that has already been lost to time.
YES! It's like preserving ecological diversity. It's a store for later learning. Verizon is working in cold hard capitalism, and you can bet your lunch that they did NOT use Google Groups to hold their shared wisdom/history, and they would never let it be lost.
But many don't have the pockets for better systems, and so their earned knowledge lived on Google Groups. And when you think of all the people and groups that might have had needs to store their history, and what tools they might have used, what do you expect the skew of Yahoo Groups was. Certainly no Fortune 500 companies, but rather nonprofit and grassroots and all sorts of domains that are already getting the short end of the stick in our world :)
Well of course it is. How are you supposed to learn about how to integrate into society without, you know...learning about it?
I wish people would be more specific - it's not that education in of itself is bad, it's that the way it is currently implemented in this specific society has these specific flaws. I strongly dislike when a discussion disparages an entire concept when it's really just our implementation of that concept that is flawed. It rules out potential solutions simply because they are associated with ones that failed, when the differences between them could result in success.
Not saying that's what's in the video - I get the impression that they are in fact talking about specifically the implementation and not ripping on education itself, but I've seen and heard stuff like this used as the foundation not only of attacks on being educated but also on anything else where some implementations of an ideal failed and so the ideal and all possible solutions stemming from that ideal are dismissed as unworkable. And it bothers me a bit how that approach is popular among many sides of many arguments that I have seen. I would in fact suggest that it is in fact a marker of a failed education - using an example of a failed implementation to argue that the concept itself is inherently flawed is itself an example of a failure in critical thinking.
