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Perhaps that's a valid point, but if it was as widespread a problem as people are attempting to portray, it wouldn't be a viable company. The millions of people who use the service speak more to merit than the handful of people complaining on internet in my mind.
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The hotel industry will soon be organizing the same response to Air BnB. Already FUD articles coming out like how an Air BnB apartment can make an owner $2500 a month when renting it would only make $1000 - $1500 and that people are being kicked out of their homes so the landlord can go Air BnB.  Already is organizing seems more likely. I've already seen tons of press about how you can't trust individuals to rent their property out because of such and such standards are not up to par and yada yada. Bunch of excuses to deprive people the right to use their property in a way they deem fit. I have no desire to use Air BnB on either side of it, but I don't see the merit in denying people who want to that ability. |
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I will never buy a self-driving car, because I like the act of driving too much. I don't understand the appeal to a car that drives itself. It takes all the joy out of cars.
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I guess now even the standard US citizien knows that their homeland is not much better then russia, china, iran and north korea.
Hello good old world
Please. You think any of those countries would tolerate a lawsuit over abuse of its citizens? |
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I cannot believe how in the year 2015 can there be so many friggin' retarded sheeple on the planet that they still depend on Painpal to make payments??!! How can people depend on that criminal organization? Painpal is just one method of payment, there are so many others and there is always Bitcoin... Hopefully in a few years, Painpal will have become unimportant and no longer be able to blackmail businesses...  If Paypal was nearly as bad as you make it out to be, there would be a huge market opportunity for anyone to replace them with a 'less evil' business offering the same services. Any business that feels wronged by Paypal obviously won't use them. But far more businesses apparently see the value they offer, which is why Paypal has grown to the size it has. Bitcoin maybe has an opportunity to reduce fees even further, but as long as the price is so volatile, no business will want to deal in bitcoins. The biggest hurdle to bitcoin supplanting something like Paypal as a payment processor is bitcoin itself. No Paypal exists only because US banking is massively disturbed. In Germany a bank wire is free, even 20 years ago it was free, nobody would use a scam service like Painpal to pay someone, but a simple free bank transfer.  Due to the sick and twisted paper check based dinosaur US banking, Painpal could become powerful and finally, Ebay bought them and forces their users to offer Painpal in the US. Painpal is terrible but they are a winner-takes-it-all sort of company Bitcoin vola is not an issue if it is hedged or converted to fiat right away. From a CUSTOMER perspective BTC is much better because Painpal freezes accounts and steals money all the time whereas Bitcoin wallets don't. https://www.aboutpaypal.org/And Paypal is disrupting the massively disturbed US banking system. They've identified a market opportunity and have seized it, and people see the value in it, which is why they use it. If the market opportunity is so huge and obvious to replace Paypal, why hasn't anyone done it yet? |
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Don't take Inforwars seriously.
I don't but I do like the poster. Pinocchibitch! Lying fucking disgrace that got Americans killed in Benghazi to cover up selling weapons to ISIS. You don't take Infowars seriously, but repeat the same type of information you'd find there? |
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A couple weeks ago, there were about 150 taxis circling city hall near where I work and beeping incessantly to protest Uber. They had signs in their windows and were being extremely disruptive to all the offices in the area. I couldn't think of a more perfect example of a special interest group that just didn't get it. Rather than adapt, they were ignoring customers and being obnoxious in an effort to convince the public to support regulations to keep Uber out and protect their racket.
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unintelligibletextunintelligibletextunintelligibletext I HATE JEWS unintelligibletextunintelligibletextunintelligibletext -Every saddampbuh post ever. It’s most likely a result of corruption and unintended consequences, combined with a foreign policy that makes it impossible to determine who are our friends are and who are our enemies.
This is the theory I subscribe to. Nobody wants these weapons to go to the "bad guys" but it is rather inevitable when the US wants so desperately to fight these groups to achieve a larger foreign policy goal, but knows the population is unwilling to support ground troops. That leaves the only course of action as airstrikes with proxy ground troops who are inept and not committed to our cause, so they abandon the battlefield and the weapons they receive from us pretty quickly. The advantage that the "bad guys" have is they are ideologically sound. They are prepared to die for their cause, and that makes them formidable. Even more so when they recover our abandoned weaponry. One would think that so many failures in arming others to do our bidding in our effort to control an empire would awaken our leaders and the American people and prompt policy changes.
Lol.  |
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I disagree somewhat with the premise. Technological obsolescence is inevitable, it is not planned. It is the result of competition and the profit motive, and the constant innovation is good. No one forces anyone to upgrade their devices; to the extent there is any "pressure" to do so, it is self-inflicted by a vanity driven populace. This contrasts to the other type of obsolescence, of the manufacturing kind. Perhaps there is something there. Generally, I take everything that comes from Zerohedge with a large grain of salt because they tend to cater to readers who tend towards alarmist. Their conclusion is a perfect example of this: America is headed for planned obsolescence by a shortsighted, uneducated and careless society that values the enjoyment of cheap trinkets and quick fixes rather than the solid value of time tested products and customs. America is about to be changed forever and just like the older durable products that made their way to the landfills, America may someday find itself covered with dirt to be remembered only in history books.
Just like with our cars, houses, appliances and money, our current form of government that has provided us with prosperity, freedom and liberty for so long is now being engineered for premature destruction. The question is, will the people embrace the new version or will they fight to keep the older model a little longer. Only time will tell.
(Bolding is theirs.) Basically, America is doomed because nobody cares. It's an old trope, and it only convincing to people predisposed to already believe it. |
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"Robots in the future will have constitutional rights and even "cyber psychiatrists" who will ease the cyber's anxiety of not being completely human, she said."
The idea of robots having constitutional rights is ridiculous. For one thing, animals have a consciousness and do not have constitutional rights. They have a consciousness, but are still property. A machine is also property. But I also don't buy that computers can acquire a consciousness, as opposed to merely being programmed to act like they have a consciousness. Those are two very different things.
That might indeed be the case for now; but assuming consciousness can one day be perfectly replicated by a program (so, taking a materialistic view here), what difference would remain between naturally arising biological consciousness and artificial consciousness? Provided the program was self-aware, aware of its environment and able to learn from and adapt to it, would there really be any practical point in distinguishing it from any other consciousness? Also, it's true animals don't have constitutional rights, or course; but they can't very well make a case for themselves, either through reason or force - a true AI, with human or higher level intellect, would probably fare better 1. Which leads me to the part I disagree with her: one of the likely advantages a true AI would have over life as we know it would be its ability to more quickly evolve its program; unlike us, with our biological limitations. So, I tend to doubt "cyber psychiatrists" dealing with "cyber's anxiety of not being completely human" will be a thing - as well as the idea of a slow, progressive merging between humans and cyberspace; at least after true AIs are created. 1 - assuming its values even resemble ours; I'm reminded of the Paperclip Maximizer here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer.  The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.
—Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk
These are interesting distinctions you raise, but on the one hand, there are plenty of people who don't have the mental capacity to understand their rights (e.g. dementia, retardation, Alzheimer's) and these people retain their constitutional rights, so it cannot merely be that having the mental capacity to elucidate or defend your rights is what grants them to a person. And by the fact that animals are clearly conscious and sentient, and yet do not have constitutional rights but are property, that these attributes either grant rights. So while it is the case that rights do not come from an ability to understand them, I would probably side with you that possessing an ability to actually understand them (as opposed to mimicking an understanding of them) should probably grant a being constitutional rights. |
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You're again trying to say the EPA is proposing a policy based on a research grant they made. This is not true. Further, your bolded statements are not from anyone from the EPA, but the guy doing research.
EPA does not want to monitor anything. EPA encourages hotels to monitor water usage. Note they do not require it, but encourage it, as in a suggestion. Do you see the difference?
Since nothing about any of these programs listed are mandatory, I don't see the harm in advocating for conservation efforts by the EPA. That's far better than passing mandatory rules. Where conservation makes financial sense for hotels, I trust they're happy to have suggestions or programs that will help them cut down their energy or water expenses.
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She used her personal email because it was already in her phone and she didn't want to walk around with two devices, because that's how email accounts work, one email account per device! Blackberry did not actually adopt a system to carry multiple email addresses in a secure fashion until 2013, after she had left office. So yeah, that was actually exactly how it worked at the time. I did not know that, but I'm sure there were a lot of devices that could do that. Perhaps, iPhone I think might have been one of the first, but that's rather irrelevant. All government employees were (and maybe still are) issued Blackberry phones because it has the highest security protocols. It is the only thing that makes Blackberry relevant as a phone manufacturer. The security of its communication protocols is unparalleled, and obviously makes it the preferred device for all government employees. |
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I wish you would click through to the source material once in awhile.
The picture OP painted was an EPA regulation threatening grilling. Omgz, the gub'ment is a coming fo yo grillz! In reality, this is not a regulation or a proposed regulation or even a proposed policy. It is a grant the EPA gave some school in California to do some piddily research project as part of that university's need to justify itself as a research university. The "objective description" isn't the EPA's policy objective, it's the university's pitch made to the EPA to get the grant.
OP is presenting this as a brand new liberty-threatening EPA emergency, but that's a joke. The EPA wasted $15,000 making such a dumb grant, but that's the end of the story.
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I cannot believe how in the year 2015 can there be so many friggin' retarded sheeple on the planet that they still depend on Painpal to make payments??!! How can people depend on that criminal organization? Painpal is just one method of payment, there are so many others and there is always Bitcoin... Hopefully in a few years, Painpal will have become unimportant and no longer be able to blackmail businesses... If Paypal was nearly as bad as you make it out to be, there would be a huge market opportunity for anyone to replace them with a 'less evil' business offering the same services. Any business that feels wronged by Paypal obviously won't use them. But far more businesses apparently see the value they offer, which is why Paypal has grown to the size it has. Bitcoin maybe has an opportunity to reduce fees even further, but as long as the price is so volatile, no business will want to deal in bitcoins. The biggest hurdle to bitcoin supplanting something like Paypal as a payment processor is bitcoin itself. |
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So, here are the facts as we understand them: Mars One has almost no money. Mars One has no contracts with private aerospace suppliers who are building technology for future deep-space missions. Mars One has no TV production partner. Mars One has no publicly known investment partnerships with major brands. Mars One has no plans for a training facility where its candidates would prepare themselves. Mars One’s candidates have been vetted by a single person, in a 10-minute Skype interview.
Damn, this is really disappointing. I was hopeful this wasn't going to be some crackpot venture, but it's really in far worse shape I would have thought. Some guy's pipe dream that grabbed media attention it didn't deserve. |
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This was a policy started under the Bush administration, Obama is just taking it to a new level. From what I've seen, "liberal" groups regularly skewer the president over his transparency record, and rightfully so. I can't think of a bigger discrepancy between what was promised and what has been than on the topic of transparency.
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FOIA is dumb. I mean, why is everyone trying to watch the government so much anyway? Not like they ever do anything wrong. [/s] White House office to delete its FOIA regulations
WASHINGTON — The White House is removing a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, making official a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that office.
The White House said the cleanup of FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the transparency law. The office handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the archiving of e-mails.
But the timing of the move raised eyebrows among transparency advocates, coming on National Freedom of Information Day and during a national debate over the preservation of Obama administration records. It's also Sunshine Week, an effort by news organizations and watchdog groups to highlight issues of government transparency.
"The irony of this being Sunshine Week is not lost on me," said Anne Weismann of the liberal Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW.
"It is completely out of step with the president's supposed commitment to transparency," she said. "That is a critical office, especially if you want to know, for example, how the White House is dealing with e-mail."
Unlike other offices within the White House, which were always exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, the Office of Administration responded to FOIA requests for 30 years. Until the Obama administration, watchdog groups on the left and the right used records from the office to shed light on how the White House works.
"This is an office that operated under the FOIA for 30 years, and when it became politically inconvenient, they decided they weren't subject to the Freedom of Information Act any more," said Tom Fitton of the conservative Judicial Watch.
That happened late in the Bush administration, when CREW sued over e-mails deleted by the White House — as many as 22 million of them, by one accounting. The White House at first began to comply with that request, but then reversed course.
"The government made an argument in an effort to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the lawsuit in order to stop the archiving of White House e-mails," said Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has used similar requests to shed light on foreign policy decisions.
More: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/16/white-house-foia-regulations-deleted/24844253/ |
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I'm interested to know your take on Putin's admission that the soldiers in unmarked uniforms who took control of Ukrainian military facilities in Crimea were actually Russian troops
Admission of what? Maybe, admission of the Black Sea Fleet existence? Well... Maybe it sounds surprising but these troops are stationed there since 18 century. despite denying for months that this was the case during and after the events.
Denying? Are you serious or it's just some kind of weird joke? Sorry, I'm asking because I really can't understand your intentions. If you're serious then tell me, please, what do you see on this picture.  I bet you've never seen it in the BBC reports. You can't just dismiss this as propaganda when the the statement comes from his own mouth.
Don't invent the propaganda and there won't be a necessity to dismiss it. Yep, it's really simple as the piece of cake. It's time to read The 1997 Black Sea Fleet Agreement, which obliges Black Sea Fleet to assist the local authorities in case of emergency situation. Another recommendation is to follow something except BBC or Gazeta Wyborcza. Then you would know what's really happening behind your window. I am talking specifically about the instance referred to in the news report posted in the OP about the documentary that aired on a Russian state TV. See, the problem is if it doesn't prove you right, you don't read it. That's why you stopped reading your own source that ultimately proved you wrong about Russia invading Sweden's airspace- because you thought it proved you right, so you didn't bother to read the rest of it. I'm not talking about the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, I'm talking about those soldiers who were wearing ambiguous green uniforms and were hoisting Russian flags up at the military installations as Ukrainian forces abandoned them. As the West was saying those were Russian soldiers, Putin at the time said they weren't Russians. A month later, he said they were Russians, and he sent them there. My only motivation is trying to gain a perspective other than what is commonly portrayed in the western media, as you keep asking people to do, that's why I asked your take on it as someone who is clearly pro-Russia. but you're so concerned with spinning this into something else to prove you're right about everything that it's clear that if I want an understanding of the other side, I need to get it from someone who is more level-headed or doesn't have so much invested in proving everything critical of Russia is propaganda. There was no propaganda here to dismiss, there was Putin saying "those guys aren't Russians" only to later say "Yeah, they were Russians and I sent them there," and then me asking you how do you reconcile what turns out to be lies ("those guys aren't Russians") with what is currently coming out of the Kremlin in order to get to the truth? |
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So that's what 22 Billion dollars looks like. Now I know what to look for! I wonder if drugs were legal if they'd be as rich.
Actually, that's only 207 million dollars. 22 billion would be, literally, 100 times more impressive. And I think they certainly wouldn't have had that much money if drugs were legal. The illegality of drugs creates the black market for them, and their willingness to use violence in an unregulated market is what gives them market share. Without drug laws, there would be open competition and prices would fall, cutting profits for the cartels. In this sense, it is prohibition which creates violent drug cartels, the same way it did with bootleggers during alcohol prohibition in the US, where Capone and his gangsters made his riches doing the same thing. |
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