I don't, but regardless the US doesn't seem very close to direct democracy to me. So I disagree with OP when they say we're getting a glimpse of what direct democracy looks like right now.
To clarify, I don't mean to say the US is looking like a direct democracy. I mean to say that maybe we can think of social media as a microcosm that shows what direct democracy might look like.
Topics going viral are sort of like issues coming up for a vote, and the result is that you see different consensuses emerge and different real world consequences (companies changing policies and making phony apologies for things, for example).
Are you a machine? This is how machines act. "NO BOUNDARY DETECTED - PROCEEDING!" without any context awareness.
Why not instead be considerate and respectful for others' work by not ruining it? Road workers don't always have perfect boundaries and yet I hope you don't just go step into their paint while reciting your constitutional rights. This is the same thing without the paint.
The work was not ruined. The film crew were working in a public space that the blog's author apparently had every right to be in. If they wanted to avoid any possibility of interaction with the public then they could have built a private set, but filming on a public street was presumably cheaper. I don't see why an uninvolved third party should have their rights curtailed just to save some corporation money.
Public areas can be very easily closed off if you ask the local government, most have a form ready for it, it's very usual - and at that point you have absolutely zero rights to be there, it's trespassing. It's most likely this was the case there as well, they wouldn't be able to setup the whole shop there otherwise. And it's not cheaper, it's actually much more expensive - but the result is better.
Corporations aren't the only ones making movies, btw. And the whole "but my rights" talk when it's about a person who could've just taken a different street makes me laugh, nothing else. Is that really how you think about your day to day life, or is it just a post-facto rationalization?
Exactly. The film crew should have had the contextual awareness to block off the area and respectfully inform people to go around if they didn't want people walking through. It seems like they didn't have at least the contextual awareness. From the pictures, I doubt I would realize it's a film set.
I've accidentally wandered onto a film set before. When it's in a public space it's not always obvious what's going on or that you shouldn't be there. I had no idea why a generally quite busy part of town was almost entirely devoid of traffic that day. There were no clear signs or ways for me to know what was going on until I talked to a random guy and he told me.
Perhaps your ability to detect and understand context is simply vastly superior to mine.
Especially when they're shooting on one side of a street near dusk (quite common for the good light) in downtown... yea, it's easy to assume you can walk on the other side of the street before realizing that the crew has shut down the entire block since they're capturing shots across the open street and all those randos walking on the other side of the street are extras.
That said, they'll often just let you wander across as long as you're not wearing distracting clothing.
Accidents happen, and I am not perfect too. I live in a city where film sets in public spaces are an (almost) everyday thing, so I also wandered into a film set few times. But I'd never do it on purpose - when you meet them at a bar you'll see they really do work hard, and that random strangers at the set are a really big problem they face daily.
It's funny how the robot argument can apply to anything and the contrary: are all filming crews overworked robots unable to willingly decide to engaging in casual conversation with a stranger who happened to be in a public area before it was cordoned off?
It's not about the film crew being overworked robots who can't talk, it's about accidentally ruining their work without even realizing it by walking into the middle of filming. This dude got lucky that he didn't ruin anything. The next 1000 dudes who will try based on his blogpost won't be so lucky - and I bet the film crews won't be as happy talking to them.
The film crew got lucky that they didn't ruin anything by failing to secure the location for their shoot. If a film crew wants to exclude the public from a public space, it is on them to make that happen. J. Random Bystander has no responsibility to know or care what a film crew is hoping to accomplish.
Seems like he's a professional dev. I think there's a lot of kinds of software you could make that would be way too hard for someone learning while doing it.
... there are millions of other professional developers in the world. There are almost 0 new products you could develop right now that many many other developers can't.
Sure, but there might be a lot of products that people who are not developers yet won;t be able to develop. Todo lists are easy to develop even for beginners, PaaS cloud platforms not so much, for example.
No it's not. Russia has cut supply to Europe, that's a fact. That they have some leaks doesn't change that they're not letting through enough even for summertime.
What do you mean, they're paid for by public money? I don't think that's true at all - at least in EU. Some of them get public donations (to support the independence of the authors, usually), and some of them are written by people paid by a university, but there's so much more completely independently funded textbooks...
I might be reading into the previous poster's comment more than originally intended, but basically, most US textbooks, are basically written for use by US public schools. They are effectively being paid for by public money, because the only customer buying those textbooks are public schools funded by public money.
> For the years ended March 31, 2020 and 2019, K-12 traditional print represented 59% ($353 million) and 63% ($357 million) of total K-12 revenue, respectively.
> In the K-12 market in the United States,...We sell our learning solutions directly to school districts across the United States.
This is less true at the university level, since students typically have to pay for their own textbooks, but scholarships, grants, and loans, and other public money sources that go to students are used to cover those costs.
I don't think this is the correct view of the system.
Individual schools in Portugal (as well as where I live, and in the US) are buying books on the market, and the books are competing on it - just writing a textbook doesn't guarantee any school will buy it, it's a risk - and that's great because it means the writers have to make good books and there's a lot of choice and many different styles and price levels.
That's very different from "textbooks paid for by public money" as if the state funded its creation and thus owned the copyright while de-risking it for the authors - meaning paid their salary. EU occasionally provides funding to authors and they're explicit about the writers owning their copyright, because the point is to support their independence. So suggesting moving a work into public domain just because a public school bought it is... weird. Why books and not other education equipment, e.g. chemistry/physics/electronics sets? What about educational software?
Imagine a school bought a book you wrote about programming/whatever you do (the school where I went did that a lot with many different books from small-time authors that were used as textbooks during lessons), should it suddenly become public domain just because some of the money someone spent on it came from taxes? I think that's very broken.
Public schools aren't the only ones buying textbooks anyways. There's a very healthy market of private schools, and I know of textbooks catered specifically to them, some of them even funded by them, that are then also bought by public schools. There's also homeschooling, alternative non-public non-profit schools, etc. Sometimes people buy textbooks by themselves, e.g. adults who want to (re-)learn, parents who think the books provided by school are inadequate, children who destroyed the copy they received at school...
That textbooks are "paid for by public money" is reductio ad absurdum. The system is much more complex. However, I think that the state/EU (or US) should also fund textbooks and put them into the public domain, as long as using them isn't mandatory - that's a great idea and it never hurts to have one more option.
Yeah, you're right. Even my reaction at Google software finding it's way into public schools is too extreme.
I guess that my knowledge of these companies manipulative business practices does fire me up.
As long as there is a public competition, and the decision is well formed, intended and transmitted transparently, there shouldn't be a problem.
That's cool, but you can't give out mailboxes for free like you can give away computers. It needs to run somewhere, the servers maintained by someone. Do you have a better solution than Gmail? I know only about Microsoft, is that even an improvement?
It's great that you do, but that's not a typical school admin skillset. People who know this have zero reason to slave for a school.
> Schools classically self hosted their network services
Back when encryption wasn't even needed, hackers were a curiosity and deliverability wasn't a concern. This is never coming back. School is a very important part of people's lives (parents, children, teachers, other staff), deliverability and security must be perfect.
Schools also manage loads of very private data. As a parent, I don't want the school admin to touch it with a 10-meter pole, I want them to use a managed service that they can't screw up even if they tried very hard (and sometimes school admins look at data themselves - the less opportunity they have the better).
> It is a good opportunity to mentor future sysadmins too.
The point is to have working email that everyone can rely on, not to groom kids/teachers to become sysadmins. It's better for everyone if the school admin focuses on solving things no one else can solve (e.g. handing out the free computers and installing Linux on them) rather than wasting time tinkering with email hosting for public money.
The point here is data privacy. Freemail means you explicitly hand over your (meta)data as a payment. Students are not going to go for Protonmail, they're going to use their already existing Gmail.
You can't rely on students having their own inboxes anyways. They will claim they forgot the password, it doesn't work, they are not getting teacher's messages, etc etc. You need a place where you can deliver critical information and be sure it arrived, and have a way of proving it was/wasn't read, a way of restoring lost access (without losing the messages), a way of proving that access is possible and happened, a way of recovering deleted messages...
They can _choose_ to use whatever they want, as long as the school doesn't force them to use proprietary stuff. It is responsibility of the school system to create an ethical learning environment and not to promote proprietary service providers. Gmail probably doesn't finance schools in Denmark either, so even less of a reason for schools there to do no-cost promotion of Gmail. And that is just one example.
Edit: After choosing something different than the school suggests, the pupils then themselves become responsible for making sure it is a suitable alternative to the non-proprietary ethical solution, that the school suggested.
Email inboxes are one of the many services schools buy, it's not about any promotion and of course Google doesn't promote them, this is a service they provide for money, not some barter. This is like saying they promote a catering provider, furniture manufacturer or paper factory by buying from them... It's not like people aren't capable of using other email providers after using Gmail - email looks just the same regardless of the company (usually works worse though), and people have their own email too, their school inbox is usually not their first nor last contact with it.
Pupils' personal email inbox is their own stuff and completely out of the question. We're talking about school-managed inboxes with addresses ending with the school's domain.
>not about any promotion
You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there. I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school).
In university, we had our own servers for various services such as email, until Microsoft came wavering their money around and literally "offering for free" their products for that university.
The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition, and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve. In the case of Texas instruments, parents will have their pockets robbed. Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.
Anyways, I didn't mean to throw private contracts out the window completely. And, have since clarified that in another reply to this thread.
> You sure? Last I checked Google, Microsoft, and Texas Instruments have aggressive business deals with the educational sector to make sure no other company gets an edge there.
That's because it's a lucrative market you can take with much less negotiation than individual small companies. Every company does that, only few are dealing with the government on the level of Microsoft/Google though.
> I had to buy a nspire calculator for example, since teachers received commissions for the damn things (while in obligatory school).
That sucks, but this is about schools buying Gmail for students' school managed inboxes on the school domain, not about students being forced to use Gmail. This is just like internal company email for example. Students still have their own personal inboxes at whatever service they please.
> The sheer market manipulation these companies do is obscene, there really isn't competition
If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market.
> and our kids aren't offered the high quality and respectful services they deserve
Gmail (and Outlook365) is the highest quality service currently on the market, and since the school is paying for the inbox, Google is not reading the data for ads. You can go for smaller companies with worse offers and much less software included in the subscribtion... But I don't think that's going to be a benefit to the students.
> Thing cost my parents 200 bucks, and the only thing it was used for, was rendering some fancy parabolas.
Again, that sucks, but this is not about parents paying Gmail.
>If there isn't competition, then it's not market manipulation, it's just that they're the only market.
The USA, Europe, and some European countries are already filling antitrust cases against Google and others like it. It's unfair competition. And if you can't see it, then I'm sure that there's nothing I can say to dissuade you.
This isn't just like an internal company email, and I am not saying this is their personal email. Like you're trying to imply.
These companies are trying to create habits and gain trust from naive kids. Making them their future clients.
This creates a neverending circle, and the ones inside of it are so blinded, that'll always turn an eye to alternatives. In a space like this, its near impossible for other companies yo gain an edge, even if their product is better.
It forms a rather powerful emotional allegiance to them, and their products.
Our kids should never be their clients, simply by the fact that their moral compass doesn't adhere to the simplest of market rules, and common sense. They undermine capitalism, they undermine freedom. And if you can't see this, you're blind.
> I hope you're not thinking about forcing people into this
Of course not. Forcing people to volunteer is... not effective long term.
Anyway, I long since left that Texas city which gave me the idea. I know amateur and professional sporting happens all around, but I don't encounter it much (so I forgot about the idea until now). I'm onto other things, although I still think this is a good idea. I know some churches organize their members to do good community services periodically, so I don't think it's a stretch to imagine sporting communities to make a routine of doing the same.
> Huber contrasts the relative anonymity of the “ban private jets” movement—such as it is—with the widespread press coverage of flight shaming, which seeks to make people feel bad for flying and the resultant emissions, as “blind on the social side of the issues.” The common approaches to curtailing commercial flying, such as taxing flights more, will hurt the people who rarely more than the wealthy who can already afford to fly often. It’s an issue sensitive to him personally, since his mother is Colombian but lives in Europe. The only way she can realistically see her family is to fly. He doesn’t understand why people like her are being nudged to fly less or not at all while the most polluting people in the world aren’t even being urged to travel commercially.
OK, so turboprops are okay then? I'm asking because that'd just mean the problem got worse - the rich still have something to fly, only it's much more inefficient and noisy (it also flies lower and slower).
I don't think banning private jets solves the problem - there's much bigger fish to fry, orders of magnitude (container shipping). This is like trying to move an ocean with a bucket.
Anyways, I think the idea of private jets being replaced by luxury airliners is good, I just don't think this sort of rule ("ban private jets") is going to work well and result in a better world.
For example, it's notoriously hard to separate business and personal jet usage - the common scheme is having an Air Operator company manage your jet (provide maintenance, airport operations, crew, supply, etc) and provide it to other clients of the Air Operator when you're not using it. You're the nominal owner of the jet, but it's leased to the Air Operator and you have a contract that specifies how much usage of your jet is free. Thus every flight is a business flight - because the Air Operator is using it for the business of transporting people, sometimes the owner.
Regulators have given up and just treat business and personal usage the same (from owner perspective, there are differences in pilot licensing and crew/ops requirements).
Yes, I think "ban private jets" means turboprops are okay.
Just because someone wants to ban the private ownership of machine guns doesn't mean they want to ban all gun ownership. Someone wanting to have a minimum drinking age might not want to ban all drinking.
> only it's much more inefficient and noisy (it also flies lower and slower).
Doesn't "lower and slower" (and with less range) mean that more people are likely to fly first class rather than biz jet?
> This is like trying to move an ocean with a bucket.
Addressed in the article. "Huber says the impracticality of it happening misses the point. To him, arguing for the banishment of private jets is a powerful symbolic issue, something the political Right has already figured out."
> Regulators have given up
Personally, global wealth tax and extremely high tax on high yearly earnings would solve much of those issues. It would decrease the opportunity and pay for regulatory oversight.
But your question was "What's your limit?", and I think that's well answered in the linked-to article.
I see one mistake in my calculation. That Piaggio Avanti has a cruising speed of 360kts vs. 0.85 mach = 547kts for the cruising speed of Gates' G650ER.
(360 nautical miles / hour) / (130 gal / hour) = 2.76 gal / nautical mile
(547 nautical miles / hour) / (226 gal / hour) = 2.4 gal / nautical mile
And I thought my old car was a gas guzzler at 20 statute mi/gal.
No we wouldn't, if the debt caused destruction of the local environment (which it did) there's no way how they could've started making money. Just importing food and other basic goods would starve their resources and give them no room for investment.
Looking into the stats, Haiti had 60% of forest cover in 1923 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Haiti. If the debt made deforestation inevitable, why did Haiti have so many forests far into the servicing of the debt? I feel there MUST be something which happened in the 20th century which really accelerated deforestation aside from the debt.
I just don't buy the "debt destroyed all future economic/agricultural output" angle at all. If you just showed people a bunch of chart of different countries economic information and agricultural output devoid of broader context, nobody would probably EVER come to the conclusion that the debt led to the stagnation in agricultural output in Haiti from the numbers alone. If you compared the debt vs deforestation, again, nobody would conclude the debt caused the deforestation from the actual data. People would only ever conclude that if they're being shown unblinded data.
Let me stress here - I'm not even saying this must all be Haiti's fault, or that debt didn't have a profound impact which have shrunk Haiti's economy many times over. I'm saying the debt doesn't explain what happened. I feel like I'm getting a fraction of the picture here. All sorts of wild shit happened in Haiti in the 20th century, the United States occupied the country for instance and the deforestation correlates MUCH more strongly with this occupation than it does the debt.
