> First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action" MLK
Ultimately the people that don't care enough about a specific reform are the reason it isn't happening in the first place. I'm not trying to advocate for tribalism and polarization or promote a "mindset". I'm just stating a truth.
The point was just to illustrate that inaction is an action. Not taking a political stance is taking a political stance. It is a game you cannot help but play.
Politics is more than government. It's our society, it's how we deal with each other. It's how we approach the economy, the family, the church. It's intrinsically linked to being human, or as Aristotle put it, the "philosophy of human affairs".
If your business does not actively support a reform, they are actively supporting the status quo. Which is fine, humans disagree. But to pretend it's something it's not is disingenuous or naive.
> A passive stance is, by definition, not active support for anything
You are sitting at a bus stop and you see a man having a heart attack in front of you with nobody else around. If you call the authorities and send for an ambulance, you will save his life. If you don't, he will die.
Whether you just passively sit there and wait for the bus, or whether you take action to save the man's life, you are making a decision and that decision will have consequences.
There is no such thing as being apolitical. Not making a choice is making a choice.
I know this isn't books, but let's look at 2 examples of games that came out through community funding, either through something like Patreon were people make donations or something like Kickstarter.
A) Dwarf Fortress. It's an incredibly niche game where the creator has spent literally decades of his life working full-time towards the game. He has a vision for the game and he doesn't compromise. The community funding allowed him to do this. It realistically would not have been possible in the current system.
B) Pillars of Eternity 1 (and 2) were both great games that simply weren't getting funding to be made in the business world. Yet it was successful and both were very good games.
I'm not going to claim they are revolutionary or even that great. But I am going to say that without the process, they wouldn't have been developed. I also think that demand would work the same regardless of the system.
If somebody creates a book like The Jungle, it would become a success anyway and more people would fund the author through consistent or one-time donations.
Really, we've hit the point with technology that we simply don't need the middle men anymore. The creators themselves can work directly with the consumers. I don't see a reason to continue the current system besides inertia.
I don't think it would be effectively any different than right now. Majority of the content is 'pulpy' right now and then there are a million niches filling the demand. It would likely be no different.
Just look at all the types of people that support themselves through patreon. There are many different types of people, and some of them are incredibly niche. Some are technical, some are artistic.
Really, the demand in the market would be same, so there would be similar content. The only real difference is we are killing the middleman who profits needlessly.
Fair enough. Usually when I use "Navigate to the nearest gas station" or "navigate home" or "set an alarm for 8am on Tuesday" it all works perfectly for me, but I concede I don't use the feature that often so perhaps I've just been using it for well-adjusted commands.
Obviously, kids are all going to want to emulate their role models. Whether the role models are Lance Armstrong or Lebron James, they will be influenced in one direction or another because of that.
But there is a very real fact that certain peoples don't have access to computers. My wife grew up in a poor area, and they did not have a computer in their home until she was 16 when got a laptop as a gift.
I grew up poor, but as a foreigner with no real contact with others so I stayed mostly at home. My father used to love buying old cheap computers at garage sales, so I would mix and match hardware from the old computers and I managed to learn a lot.
Both of us grew up poor, but I grew up to be a programmer because I had plenty of access to computers while growing up. It was always natural to me, and it was hard for her.
Neither of us idolized gold chains or expensive shoes. I think what you're saying is a harmful and frankly, racist stereotype. Just because a family buys a $200 pair of shoes for their child on Christmas, doesn't mean that means the child shouldn't have access to computers. Rich families will give their kids expensive things as well as give access to computers.
"A close examination of wealth in the U.S. finds evidence of staggering racial disparities. At $171,000, the net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family ($17,150) in 2016."
Of course not all black people are poor, but that's a very poor understanding of statistics. Just because a black man became President or there are millionaire black men, doesn't mean that institutional racism is suddenly over or economic equality has been established.
While I can't speak for Siri, Google's voice recognition continues to surprise and even frighten me. And if you go online and look up deepfakes or AI generated voice of famous people, it also is freakishly accurate.
Sure, there are some issues and most of them still fall somewhere in the uncanny valley.. but we are just starting to fully exploit this technology. AI that people don't tangibly see but make a giant impact in their lives is for example the Facebook algorithms that decide what shows up on your feed.
When a large subset of the population gets majority of their news from Facbeook, Facebook has effectively created a mechanical system that decides what a large chunk of the population is aware of. I don't think people fully realize what effect that has had on our entire society, including elections. The future will only see more of this type of thing.
In a sense, yes, the engine is too good. If you continue this trend, eventually nobody will have a reason to leave Google because anytime you search for anything Google will have the answer to everything.
Sure, it's convenient but it's also a bit frightening for one company to have that much power and I think that's what people are a little hesitant about.
I don't think the group targeted anything specific. They seem to be mercenaries. Sure, there were some environmental activists targeted but also a long list of targets that have presumably nothing to do with the "left".
> Several international banks and investment firms, as well as prominent corporate law firms in the United States, Asia, and Europe, were targets
> The most prominent targeting of the financial sector concerned a cluster of hedge funds, short sellers, journalists, and investigators working on topics related to market manipulation at German payment processor Wirecard AG .
> We identified targets in multiple energy and extractive sectors, including petroleum companies. Targets ranged from lawyers and staff to CEOs and executives
> We identified a range of targets in Eastern and Central Europe, and Russia, indicative of targeting surrounding the investments and actions of extremely wealthy individuals, including cases surrounding individuals who could be considered oligarchs.
> We identified targets in multiple governments, ranging from senior elected officials and their staff to members of the judiciary, prosecutors, members of parliament, and political parties.
> Many of Dark Basin’s targets were high profile, well-resourced individuals. However, we also found that private individuals were also targeted, which appeared to correlate with divorces or other legal matters.
> no need to invest decades in people, culture, and research equipment when you can just steal the result from others.
This isn't really a new phenomena. The USSR had spies in the Manhattan project and was able to create a nuclear bomb a few short years after the USA. Or the classic story of the British cracking the German radio communications in WW2 (with the help of the Poles, certainly).
I wonder if we're going to get interesting stories about what's happening right now in the future if it ever becomes declassified. Also, I'd imagine there's just as much cyber intrusions by the American government / American companies as there are by Chinese companies although I will admit I have seen no evidence to point to this. I just think we wouldn't hear about it.
> What perplexing is to think about how humans can cooperate effectively on a scale of billion people to solve humanity biggest problems.
I think the opposite is true. We cannot properly cooperate effectively on a large scale to solve humanity's biggest problems. Just look at the attempts for global nuclear disarmament, it has been a failure. Look at the accelerating impact of carbon on the environment, it has been a catastrophic failure.
I think while the article shows an interesting bit about human psychology, that we are all secretly altruists at heart, which I believe is true.. But what governs the important global decisions isn't humanity. They're massive organizations and these massive organizations (whether a nation state or mega-corp) are made of humans, but they're not human.
They operate in another way, just like an ant colony, the emergent behavior of many ants, operates in an entirely different way than an individual ant.
Ultimately the people that don't care enough about a specific reform are the reason it isn't happening in the first place. I'm not trying to advocate for tribalism and polarization or promote a "mindset". I'm just stating a truth.