>* Freezing meat twice and eating it will make you sick
Uh, every frozen meal I have ever seen has come with the printed warning not to freeze it again after it has melted?
Freezing does not kill microbes, and additionally formation of ice during the freezing breaks the internal structure of foodstuff making it better medium for bacterial growth. So repeated freezing-unfreezing, especially if the product is taken into room temperature and back allows unwelcome microbes to proliferate. Like with all food poisoning hazards, it will not make you sick with 100% certainty, but increases the risk enough that it is not recommended.
This is near word-by-word translation of the guidelines of Finnish medical society [1] and food safety authority [2].
It is difficult to call "do not freeze stuff again" an unfounded superstition equal to fan death if it is the common recommendation by national authorities.
This piece of information just amplified my depression when I learned about it, because of past not-income-optimized life decisions (okay, probably even more because of limited abilities and capabilities), I know know for sure that with a high probability I won't plausibly have ability to buy my way into that kind of world and yet I'm regularly reminded that it exists and not only that, but how it exactly looks like.
Of course, in the past, the equivalent me still wouldn't have had access to the world of magnificent parties and elite courtesans either. But I believe that the whole of that kind of social strata would have been much more distant, and thus less traumatizing in that particular psychosocial way. Sure, you'd see carriages passing by (or passing over you if unlucky) now and then, and maybe you'd buy a ticket to see the King have his breakfast (and it would be once in a year event to satisfy your curiosity), but that lifestyle wouldn't be marketed to you. There wouldn't be the constant visual reminders that if you'd done something differently, how different your life could be.
Giving it another name ("homophobia", "insecure about their own sexuality") does not make the issue go away for the people who suffer from it.
You don't magically grow more confident about your sexuality (or your whatever) by hearing that you are insecure about it. Or at least, I don't know how.
Elsewhere in the world, FB is assumed as to be the standard. My romantic life has been very disappointing, so some time ago I tried creating a Tinder account (it is the only dating [yes you read it right, dating, not hookup] app that has entered the popular consciousness in this country and thus has a significant amount of female users). Last time I checked, they still required a FB account.
>Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status
Of course we do. What does, exactly, the level of wealth and status we are talking about entail?
Owners and executives of a large multinational firm can wield more than enough power to influence governments. Some of these people of wealth and status are the governments. (The names revealed in the Panama papers toppled the government of Iceland.)
That's at least one order of magnitude different power dynamics than in case of your regular person charged with robbery or DUI. (Also, we might view the case of hacker revealing conversations of people charged with DUIs if the conversations constitute evidence about that particular part of machinery of justice system not to be working as intended.)
One fascinating question is which country should be responsible for nationalizing them. According to the Snowden leaks, the US government is already more than happy to cooperate with FB and Google and alike to spy on non-US citizens; handing the private data to the US government bureaucracy appears to be not much of an improvement from a point of view of an EU citizen
Maybe these megaliths should be split according to the national boundaries, not unlike how the AT&T / Bell System was structured as a combination regional telephone companies.
I otherwise agree, but I don't know if Apple is a moral agent - that discussion will into quite complex philosophical issues. But certainly each individual person making decisions at Apple is a moral agent.
>I find it fundamentally strange that we expect our corporate overlords to do anything other than maximize their profits.
There is difference between what we can realistically expect people to do (often, not much, and even after accounting for that, still disappoint) and what they should do and we should expect them do (do what is right).
To continue with the illustrative examples from fiction. Nobody expects Theoden to do much anything useful after listening to all that poison of pouring out of mouth of the Wormtongue. But is it what he should be doing?
As many others commented elsewhere, moral relativism is not very robust ethical system in a global community.
If you ever have kids, why would you teach them some morals over others? Would you teach that some moral standard (pick any! say, "it's not generally okay to steal others' stuff") would just stop by the virtue that they just happen move to different jurisdiction where the government is not interested in e.g. property rights? Or it is okay that just the natives of Thiefmark have their stuff stolen by others? Can you go and take their stuff with you to Hobbiton, given they live in Thiefmark and King Thiofden is not going to punish you for that? What if the raiders of Rohan move to your neighborhood?
This is a different issue whether it makes sense or is productive in the long term to fight against the Chinese law in some particular way. But sensible ethical systems are universal.
Sure, if you are an US citizen, you can argue that it should be US government's job to represent your ideals in the wider world.
But your government is not the only party responsible for representing your moral or political positions in the world.
For example, the US government collectively is not particularly famous for 100% morally upstanding behavior.
Granted, the US behaves often better than other great powers, and certainly it represents many ideals of democracy and liberty more than other contending powers. But consider the mess that was Iran-Contra affair or the various regimes ranging from unsavory authoritarianism to sheer terrorism (with "disappearances" and torture) CIA supported in Latin America in the name of anti-communism. (God forbid someone propose an idea of land reform in South America or advancing workers' and natives' rights against UFC, despite that's how numerous European countries avoided communism.) Did these actions (and various other questionable shenanigans the US government has been partial to) represent your ethical positions?
It's everyone's job to do it, and what any government does is only part of that. For example, you mentioned AAPL stock owners. According to any sane ethical system, the moral duty of any individual CEO or a member of board or stock owner as a human person with rights and corresponding duties to act ethically overrides their financial or legal duty to maximize corporate profits.
On the contrary, the culture and the society very much influences how various mental issues develop and manifest and how they are interpreted.
You can't explain writing emails impersonating someone simply as result of "chemical imbalances in the brain" (except if you reduce every kind of human behavior to that, but then the phrase "chemical imbalance" does not explain anything). Brains and their chemical imbalances are much older than the technology of emails, or even writing.
>The guy is an active stalker. Let's stop making excuses for horrible behavior. He's not "confused". He's malicious. He's threatening. He's trying to destroy her livelihood.
I did not read the root comment as an excuse, but rather an attempt at understanding what kind of twisted psychology would lead into this kind of horrible stalking behavior. Most often, people are not consciously driven by some kind of desire to be evil just for evilness' sake.
If the Hollywood romance concepts like "persistence will lead to romantic happiness" is a partial reason how people can rationalize this kind of behavior, that's an issue that hopefully can be tackled.
Some things I consider quite glaringly fake / unrealistic.
The maps that show the progress of the invasion in the Eastern Europe: the area taken by the advancing Russian army is shown with just a bit too much precision. This is supposed to be real time broadcast, and everything is happening under just an hour. I doubt the BBC graphics staff would have enough information to produce such maps (certain areas neatly colored in red); the military command might supply such information, but later in the day, not immediately, and in any case, they would probably be too busy and there is such a thing as a fog of war. At best, you'd have a list of towns where there have been reports of fighting by the local media and confirmation by the authorities that invasion is happening.
Also, live video feed of fighter jets and bombers leaving RAF bases? I find it unlikely that BBC could obtain such a thing, and then decide to broadcast it.
Likewise, the NATO stock footage (especially the press conference) is out of place at places. Nobody is going to talk with mild words such as "sabre-rattling" if there's major fighting going on.
Actually, the whole thing going down in just one hour. While I can believe that things can escalate very quickly if tactical nuclear weapons are used (maybe even in a matter of minutes), I can't help but think that it's too short timeframe for the conventional fighting to even begin. (My guess is that the people who created this didn't have resources to create similarly realistic 48 hour long broadcast).
10 pages a week might be fine and well in a mathematics course and related fields, as it's a field famously characterized by it's use of a concise notation. You can state lots of things in a 10 pages. You can spend several hours working with a proof that you can fit on one page. The softcover edit of Rudin's Real and complex analysis is a small book of 400 pages, and and is supposed to a full-year course.
What about a less-mathematical course, say, history or philosophy? Well, lots of depends how dense and difficult the text is, and how many courses the student is assumed to be taking the same time.
But on the other hand, looking the bare page count, that's not much higher than the reading assignments we had when I was in high school (Finland, 00s), and there I was absolutely bored with the slow pace and had enough free time to read approx. 1 - 1.5 full-length / short-ish novels in a week. (edit. in retrospect, this feels like an overestimate, but I also read the Potters in less than 48 hours / one weekend when they were published, so maybe not.) Because the article mentions "professors", this is supposed to be about university level students: the selected few who actually are academic inclined and moreover, have chosen their field of study out of their free will. I have habit of reading books on my daily commute train trip, most recently Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow: I average around 4-5 pages per 20-30 minute trip. I'm mediocre student in internationally mediocre university, so I assume my mental faculties are not exceptionally high.
If there's is a problem of students simply not being able to find enough time to study (because they are working 2 jobs), this is an external problem which is not solved by changing curriculum but introducing financial support. If the problem is that students are not willing to find time to study preferring other activities, this is a problem solved by having different students.
Not much. Probably not. I don't know the particular instance because I don't follow US Twitter politics that closely. First time I heard about M. Y. was when he has blocked from giving speech at some college campus.
However, as a general argument, things that are cultural values include 1) trusting people to recognize the few who say stupid things by the virtue of those things being stupid and wrong things to say, and 2) in the public sphere of life the disputes are to be resolved with discussion. Words either fought with words, or ignored for their sheer stupidity, not by removing the words from the arena. (And Twitter is big enough that it counts as a "public sphere". It resembles more a public park where people can yell at each other than a newspaper.)
In general, it is about respect: that one respects their fellow humans to believe that there's enough civilization in left in humans that the civilization will prevail if one acts civilized. And these values can be furthered only be leading by example, because you can't make people into some mold, you can only make them realize who they can be.
Now, of course the line between free speech and speech that can't be allowed constantly muddy: one is not allowed to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, one is not allowed incite people to commit crimes. But the culture where people are allowed to say stupid and wrong things is necessary for a liberal democracy, and it does not hinge only on what kind of censorship government enforces. Why, history has plenty of examples where the government only quietly nods in the background when the private individuals enforce the censorship.
But this is a tangent to the main topic. From what I read, in this particular case Twitter is for once doing the right thing by fighting this order. It might look like somewhat hypocrite in the process of doing so, but that does not matter: While it's bad for the culture if Twitter shuts people down because that kind of thing slowly erodes cultural values of free speech, it's by a magnitude worse if the government does it as that could not only erode but crush those values into pieces.
Uh, every frozen meal I have ever seen has come with the printed warning not to freeze it again after it has melted?
Freezing does not kill microbes, and additionally formation of ice during the freezing breaks the internal structure of foodstuff making it better medium for bacterial growth. So repeated freezing-unfreezing, especially if the product is taken into room temperature and back allows unwelcome microbes to proliferate. Like with all food poisoning hazards, it will not make you sick with 100% certainty, but increases the risk enough that it is not recommended.
This is near word-by-word translation of the guidelines of Finnish medical society [1] and food safety authority [2].
It is difficult to call "do not freeze stuff again" an unfounded superstition equal to fan death if it is the common recommendation by national authorities.
[1] https://www.terveyskirjasto.fi/terveyskirjasto/tk.koti?p_art...
[2] https://www.evira.fi/elintarvikkeet/valmistus-ja-myynti/elin...