It's disconcerting that this — the most thorough public study of the machines' effectiveness — is a simulation. In a sane environment, we'd be allowed to know what happens when you actually, you know, test the machines.
2,406 karma · joined July 30, 2007
The policies, good or bad, coexist with the country's strongest private sector, but that doesn't mean they caused it.
This is an argument over the precise extent to which bad policies are bad. Seems more useful to discuss what genuinely good policy looks like.
In the long term, it's obviously disastrous. At some point, companies will have to refuse en masse to pay the protection money. In the areas where it has a monopoly, Comcast could stomach losing Netflix, but not another 10 or 20 big sites on top of it. There are antitrust issues with collective refusal to pay, but there's got to be a way around that.
You're required to present proof of citizenship and allow a "routine" search of your belongings for contraband. A "non-routine" search requires them to have a reasonable suspicion about you specifically. My own reading is that a backscatter scan or s search of your body would count as non-routine, but of course a court may disagree.
The good news is that it's very hard to win a libel judgement against somebody in the U.S. — as far as I know, you have to show that somebody said something they knew to be false and did so with the malicious intent of harming you.
Among web sites:
http://www.optoutday.com is probably the most notable.
http://wewontfly.com is another biggie.
http://www.imadethetsafeelmyresistance.com (disclosure: I made it) has gotten a bunch of traffic too.
There are lots of others. This whole thing has heated up a lot in the last week or two. And I suspect the next week or two are going to be a lot bigger.
You're right that it's a little information-deficient. Some of that was on purpose, but I just added an "about" blurb to help clear things up.
I get that every single time I fly, and even so, I would never opt for a backscatter machine. It's far more invasive. Having been through dozens of patdowns, I feel pretty sure that someone looking at a naked picture of me is a worse option.
There was a ruckus when people discovered that a lot of the worst teachers were making the most money. Your salary was basically determined by how frequently you had the nerve to ask for a raise, plus some consideration for how long you'd been at the school. Not exactly a winning compensation scheme.
If your compensation scheme is well-reasoned and defensible, it's a lot less of a problem when people figure out how much everyone else is making. If your compensation scheme sucks, expect outrage.
The level of attention young couples pay to one another is probably just so high that it's unsustainable and fades with time.
I have less sympathy for this exploited bot, though, since you go in knowing the stock market can be a ruthlessly zero-sum kind of place.
I'm not asserting that cell phones cause cancer, and I'm not asserting that the precautionary principle is wise to apply here. The author writes that the model of carcinogenesis he's selected predicts that cell phones will not cause cancer. He asserts that this is proof that cell phones cannot cause cancer. I'm taking issue with his confidence in making that assertion.
Knives are proven to cause stab wounds. A sharpened stick is not a knife. That is not proof that sharpened sticks cannot cause stab wounds.
Edit: apparently the meaning of what I've written varies depending on what you think my motives are. That means I've been unclear. I'm not advocating the precautionary principle. Kind of the opposite, actually. You cannot prove a negative, which means that it is unscientific to use a model (especially one as poorly understood as the one for carcinogenesis) to "prove" that something cannot happen.
This sort of stuff has been around for a while. One of the big Supreme Court rulings on the copyrightability of datasets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) concerned a company that got sued for copying 4000 entries from a competitor's phone book. They got busted because they'd unknowingly copied fake entries.
The other thing worth remembering is how the person of interest to whom the kid is linked became a person of interest. He posted a comment on reddit speculating about how easy it would be for terrorists to wreak havoc by hitting arbitrary soft targets throughout the country.
Like hiring, catching terrorists is a game where you should be willing to take a lot of false positives to avoid one false negative. But it can go too far, and people's worry is that it has done here.
Brutal hours produce burnout, and I suppose the idea when doing a startup is to work hours that you know will eventually burn you out badly, but just hope that your company makes the big time before then. But in a bunch of ways, especially if you're going for a lifestyle business, that doesn't seem advisable.
The part about discarding capital requirements is a clear win, but why not go further and scrap the idea of having the SBA screen the business plans? It's an obvious place for the process to go Kafkaesque, and as step to keep people from gaming the system, it's easy to defeat. How about a visa for anybody who wants to come start a business here, period. (Maybe with the proviso that they're not allowed to draw welfare while on the visa.)
Dustin Curtis wrote a fascinating piece a while ago about similar behavior in newborn seagulls: http://dustincurtis.com/how_niko_tinbergen_reverse_engineere...
You did a very nice job with the receipt vibe.
Lawyers have it especially good for a couple reasons. First, they (and thus their interests) are well-represented in the ranks of people who make laws, so the laws on who gets to practice law are very restrictive. Second, legal services are one of a small handful of things that you can be forced to spend money on. Nobody forces you to buy an iPhone. But getting sued is something that happens against your will, and when it happens you have little choice but to spend money on a lawyer.