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intopieces

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intopieces
·hace 6 años·discuss
I know the market is small but the Segway was a fantastic upgrade for some people with limited mobility. A classmate of mine in college (2007 or so) who has cerebral palsy got one and it totally changed her ability to get between classes. More maneuverable than a wheelchair, faster than walking with crutches.
intopieces
·hace 6 años·discuss
I too learned that the best way to get your problem solved with Amazon is to resort to threats. It took ages to get my account closed -- I was sent by 5 different chat agents to the same "click here and send an email to confirm" page -- until I threatened to complain to the California Attorney General under CCPA. Then suddenly the agent had all the power in the world to close my account.
intopieces
·hace 6 años·discuss
There's a follow on question that I'd like to raise, which is: "Are you rich enough to care"? In the race to the bottom on prices, it becomes a mark of wealth when you have the time and money to verify your own purchases, or to shop at more reputable retailers. I'm in that category, but could easily see myself being too cash strapped / too busy to do anything about a fake product being shipped to me from Amazon. I'd probably shrug.
intopieces
·hace 7 años·discuss
I want content and I want to pay for it and I don’t want to think about it.

When this system is build into iOS and abstracted into a dollar amount that I use my face to pay, I will consider it.
intopieces
·hace 7 años·discuss
I don’t want BATs and I don’t want ads. I want to be able to donate to content creators through Apple Pay instantly.
intopieces
·hace 7 años·discuss
>When you block ads you are explicitly signalling that you are receiving something of value by visiting the website.

This is not the case. I have visited thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of websites in which the content was not valuable to me, and I blocked those ads, too.

When I block ads, I send the signal that my attention is not for sale, and moreover, the content creators' business model is not my concern. Eventually, if they get the enough of these signals, they'll find a new way to make money.
intopieces
·hace 7 años·discuss
> I'll gladly accept those on a webpage so that the content creator can make a bit of cash.

Why do you feel like your attention should be for sale? There should be no advertising on the web. Content should be free or cost money, and the cost should be transparent. Advertisements are just socially accepted psychological manipulation. We can do better.
intopieces
·hace 7 años·discuss
The soy thing is long disproved.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/soy/
intopieces
·hace 8 años·discuss
Is this something I can put next to my parents’ router and not kill their internet experience? They like Facebook.
intopieces
·hace 8 años·discuss
I'd like us to take a moment to recognize how excellent his website is:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/

Straight to the point. Easy to navigate. The most modern addition is the facebook like button, but even that is unobtrusive.
intopieces
·hace 8 años·discuss
If you have not seen it, the documentary “A Brief History of Time,” which is not an adaptation of the book but interviews with Hawking and his colleagues, and family, is excellent and worth your time.
intopieces
·hace 9 años·discuss
>in a lot of cases, it doesn't make sense.

If you are right, what data can we rely on to determine when it makes sense for a person to go to college and when it does not make sense for a person to go to college?

"In a report released Monday, the Census Bureau said 33.4 percent of Americans 25 or older said they had completed a bachelor’s degree or higher. That’s a sharp rise from the 28 percent with a college degree a decade ago." [0]

66.6% of Americans don't have a bachelor's degree or higher. So what is the appropriate percentage of Americans to have a college degree? Which other countries in the world are too educated?

[0] http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/326995-census-more-a...
intopieces
·hace 10 años·discuss
If this topic interests you, Tim Wu's latest book, "The Attention Merchants," might also. He chronicles the rise of attention-monetizing by the media and the various rebellions against them.
intopieces
·hace 11 años·discuss
>"Mostly I pin the blame for the flourishing of ISIS collectively on the Middle Eastern countries which themselves have epically failed to confront the rising threat of ISIS on their own turf, while doing seemingly everything possible in their own domestic policies to in fact encourage ISIS recruitment"

ISIS formed in the power vacuum created by the United States toppling Saddam Hussein. [0,1] So yes, the country that had its leader and military demolished was unable to combat the rise of ISIS, you're right. But pinning the failure on them is to ignore the reasons they failed to do so.

>The Middle East has been facing endemic war between Islamic sects basically for the entire history of Islam itself. The "holy wars" (call it barbarism or medievalism) being carried out in the name of Islam (by so-called "Islamic terrorists") is evidence enough that this is not actually problem of foreign policy, but a deep seated and historically pervasive domestic problem.

To collapse the rise of ISIS into the same civil wars that have been raging for the past millennia and a half is the same willful ignorance of the complex cultural history that you deride in your first paragraph. The roots of ISIS are in Wahhabism, a faction that existed mainly in Saudi Arabia. It wasn't until Roosevelt met with King Ibn Saud in 1945 (following the discovery of oil there in 1938) that this nation had any serious ambition at exporting their brand of Islam further in the middle east. Then, with the Oil Crisis of 1973, Saudi Arabia proved its political power and was able to leverage it against the United States. When it came time to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, the United States armed the Mujahadin, a proudly Wahhabist faction.

The US being the reason that ISIS has flourished is not an opinion, it's the conclusion made over and over by analysis of historical facts.

[0]http://www.cfr.org/iraq/islamic-state/p14811 "The group that calls itself the Islamic State can trace its lineage to the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in 2003. The Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi aligned his Jama’at al-Tawhidw’al-Jihad with al-Qaeda, making it al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)."

http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-inte... [1]"More pertinent than Islamic theology is that there are other, much more convincing, explanations as to why they’ve fought for the side they did. At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

ISIS is the first group since Al Qaeda to offer these young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe."
intopieces
·hace 11 años·discuss
Whether you believe it personally or not, the US involvement in the Middle East - namely, support for Israel, funding of the Saudi regime since 1945 and the arming of Wahhabis during the first gulf war - is the reason ISIS and similar groups have flourished.
intopieces
·hace 11 años·discuss
In 2014, net imports accounted for 27% of the petroleum consumed in the United States. 37% of that comes from Canada, followed by 13% from Saudi Arabia. [0]

Our dependence on foreign oil is no longer an excuse for our meddling in the Middle East.

[0] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=727&t=6