It will probably improve our lives in many ways, make them worse in many others. Complicate some things and simplify others.
In other words like every other technology.
Also like every other technology that has come out way in the past, there will be doomsayers who are wrong and there will be Utopians who are also wrong.
Every generation goes through the "kids these days" phase, everything new isn't as good as it was "back in my day." Add to this, as the author points out, a neo-ludism around the technology being used and the affect is magnified.
Overall, communication technology has made us more connected not less. What throws people is that those connections are no longer geographically bound. So that person you see staring at their phone isn't disconnected to those locally, they are very well connected to an international community.
Of course, one quibble. The author states:
"Maybe your friend has taken his smartphone out of his pocket because he has gotten a message that he needs to reply now. Or maybe it’s just that he feels a bit uncomfortable and is using his phone to try and avoid the awkwardness of the moment because he has social anxiety and you should respect that."
But I don't think it's neo-ludism to think it's rude to treat conversations you are in fact having locally as less valuable simply because they are local. Of course there are emergencies but when someone is constantly checking to see if there is a better interaction to be had, I'd still call it rude.
That aside, and I should point out the author concedes that there are rude people and situations involving technology, the points raised by the author are well stated and all to frequently missed.
I'm sure those wise people you mentioned would also be wise enough to see through a false choice like that.
Good thing for us all that it isn't an either/or.
Fortunately some people can work on the good and needed. And some people can work on the hard, maybe even the too hard to see at first that it's even possible.
"In the short term the market is a popularity contest; in the long term it is a weighing machine."
So to answer the question posed, if you are trying to make money off guesses about who wins the popularity contest - that's gambling. If you are trying to asses which company to be a part owner of, to meet your own particular financial goals (income, growth, etc) - that's investing.
I think the author of this article kind of missed the points being made by Hoffman. For instance, he asks:
"But how did the icon come to look like a snake in the first place?"
Sort of presupposes that it does look like a "real" snake. The icon doesn't necessarily have to look like anything ... we just have to evolve in a way that gets us to jump out of the way. It's the jumping out of the way that is adaptive, not the similarity to anything outside the system trying to survive.
To use Hoffman's analogy, it's like asking why do files on a desktop look like the files in the computer. They don't, they are useful interfaces however.
There are many reasons to use a representation that is "similar" in some way to the real thing. These include sharing inference mechanisms to predict characteristics like physical movement, affordance, etc among a number of entities when they are represented consistently. (e.g., snakes are represented with an elongated shape; eggs, circular.)
In theory, it could be possible to devise a system of representations that have such desired properties despite their differences from reality. But I suspect that in practice the most efficient choice would be to mimic certain essential features of reality.
Taking the graphical user interface idea a step further, even the best user interface can't help but "leak" some details about what's going on under the hood.
And I'd argue that given the high-level general processing ability of our brains--Turing machines can simulate anything computable--we actually have a tendency to recognize that leakage and build better models of reality, if only a small step at a time.
Most of the time, the "interface" presented to us by our senses is very workable and lets us survive without needing to know too much. But as we keep trying to integrate new pieces of data, we do come to realize that our models are too simplistic, and we have to revise our models. So we do, slowly, over the course of our own lifetimes and over the course of of civilization, dig deeper into the reality behind things. That's what I consider intellectual progress.
Think about how some people develop critical thinking capabilities even though they live in regimes that basically feed them comforting lies 24/7. On the one hand, we often want to hide from reality to stay in our comfort zone, but when reality as currently handled becomes too painful, we do exhibit the ability to learn a better model.
To revisit the 'file' idea: the 'save' icon is an idealized floppy disk. But generations(!) have passed who never saw one. So now its just an icon.
This seems to happen to all written symbols. They quickly lose representative form, and become symbols only. I don't think most Chinese characters look anything like a house or a sun any more; the question is moot.
The 'save' icon is fading away pretty quickly in common usage. Modern software is trending toward changes saved in realtime (driven by phones, also seen on OS X and web). When I write a note, I just make a new note, type in it, and close the app.
Well, 20 years, maybe 2? The kids I know have no idea what those icons mean; the young adults I know may have some idea but have never seen the items pictured outside of an old movie.
"The icon doesn't necessarily have to look like anything ... we just have to evolve in a way that gets us to jump out of the way."
Well, the icon does have to look like _something_, if we're going to see it. So seems good question of why it looks like a snake, rather than something else, whether there's something about the "real" snake that constrains how we must see it if we're to use icon to successfully adapt our behavior. E.g., an icon of a snake that was shaped like, e.g., a sphere or a box, would not be very helpful if we wanted to pick the snake up with a stick to move it out of the way.
This same case involved, in addition to Wikimedia, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, PEN American Center (a writers group), Global Fund for Women, The Nation Magazine, The Rutherford Institute, and the Washington Office on Latin America (a social justice group).
With all those groups, with all that's at stake, the decision essentially reads that no matter how much traffic they can't use statistical likelihood to overcome the bar to standing created by Clapper v. Amnesty.
In the end, this means the NSA will never have to face overview as long as they don't tell anyone what they are doing. If we can't in court say they are definitely capturing someones traffic, they can't even use the courts to conduct discovery on what is happening.
Not that long ago people tried to argue that marriage equality wasn't needed to protect basic rights of individuals involved. They just needed to use contracts/adoption/etc.
This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was.
> This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was.
I'm not sure what you mean. At no point does it indicate that the adoption tactic ever failed; in fact, the article seems to be at pains to show that adoption routinely and reliably secured most or all of the rights that marriage would have, and swapping adoption for marriage now is little more than a change of paperwork. Based on this article, you would have to say that marriage equality wasn't needed to secure the basic rights like inheritance, hospital visitation, etc.
Military members' adult children receive no benefits. Consequently, a US military member who used this method may have secured certain visitation and inheritance rights, but would not have qualified their spouse for access to the base, base hospital, insurance, and many other things.
Hell, no one using this method would be able to cover their adult partner (over age 26, now, variously 18 or 21 in the past) under company health insurance.
They wouldn't have qualified for any tax benefits of marriage (or penalties, for that matter).
Combining property in joint accounts or joint ownership was slightly easier, but still not as straightforward as it is for married couples.
> At no point does it indicate that the adoption tactic ever failed
The adoption technique did not fail in that it achieved what it intended to achieve (primarily the basic legal rights and access of family members). But it did not achieve a marriage substitute, as it did not give them access to everything that marriage entailed.
> ; in fact, the article seems to be at pains to show that adoption routinely and reliably secured most or all of the rights that marriage would have, and swapping adoption for marriage now is little more than a change of paperwork.
It secured some of the rights, it did not secure all or anywhere near most of them.
The article details the gymnastics required, required only of gay couples, to approximate those rights.
And after all the gymnastics, they and only they had to endure, they ended up with approximation of what heterosexuals were able to accomplish with a conversation at a Justice of the Peace.
The article details the patchwork quilt of rights, the limits, the variation among States, that resulted from this sort of "solution."
It only seems successful to those who didn't need to do it.
Lets not pretend that gay marriage is the last marriage equality that will have to be fought for, even if the ones to come seem as crazy to use as gay marriage seemed to many of those who fought for interracial marriage.
I think this is wrong. As Dan Savage pointed out, heterosexuals had ALREADY changed marriage long before the gays came along. Forgive the bluntness, but marriage used to basically be a property transaction where a woman was transferred from her family to her husband. Long ago, though, marriage in the US has legally been viewed as a merge of equals. In fact, ALL states AFAIK had already gotten rid of parts of their laws where husbands had different rights/responsibilities from wives. Allowing gay marriage was just replacing husband or wife with "spouse" in any legal document.
With 3 party marriage, the vast majority of laws related to financial transactions would fundamentally have to change. Some simple examples
1. Survivor benefits: If someone is in a >2 person marriage, does that mean all of their spouses can continue to collect survivor benefits until the last person dies?
2. Tax-free inheritance: Similar to the above, but does a >2 person marriage mean everyone gets tax free inheritance?
3. Healthcare benefits: Could you put 5 spouses on one employee-sponsored health plan?
4. Tax laws: Tax laws would need a total rewrite because all brackets/amounts just support a single person or a 2-person marriage.
>2 person marriage has huge legal and financial implications that gay marriage did not.
Perhaps simpler would be allowing one person to be in multiple 2 person marriages at once. Even if one of these must be set as the primary, for which all tax benefits, etc. apply to. So while a 3 person marriage would leave one person with no primary, a 4 person marriage would really be 6 marriages, only 2 of which are primary and which function mostly the same. Any special cases like power of attorney could work through the primary marriage unless a legal document was drafted that changed the functionality.
I'm sure a think tank can form a much better option than the one I crafted in under 5 minutes.
1. Survivor benefits: If someone is in a >2 person marriage, does that mean all of their spouses can continue to collect survivor benefits until the last person dies?
Survivor benefits continue as long as there is a surviving spouse. It doesn't matter if there are 1 or 3.
2. Tax-free inheritance: Similar to the above, but does a >2 person marriage mean everyone gets tax free inheritance?
Every surviving participant in the marriage inherits tax free. Just like now.
3. Healthcare benefits: Could you put 5 spouses on one employee-sponsored health plan?
Yes.
4. Tax laws: Tax laws would need a total rewrite because all brackets/amounts just support a single person or a 2-person marriage.
Married or Single are the current choices. That wouldn't be any different. It would actually incentivize multiple person marriage.
And your answers are fundamentally why >2 person marriage isn't coming anytime soon. All of these solutions are basically break the entire slew of existing financial setups around marriage. Do you think a company would be willing to put 5 married people on the same spousal health plan? Do you think Social Security is going to be OK with 1 person's benefits potentially outliving them for decades as they carry on to multiple spouses?
>2 person marriage is fundamentally different from existing marriage laws in a way gay marriage is not.
> It avoids incest taboos and the groundwork has already been done.
It actually hasn't; any two-party marriage uses the same infrastructure without problems, the differences are simply at the front door.
Multiparty marriages need ground up redesign of the rights and privileges, which are all based on exclusive dyadic relationships.
There's quite usable outlines of how the legal infrastructure might support many aspects of multiparty marriages (especially in terms of things like dissolution) in, e.g., the law of business partnerships, but the context and details of the rights and privileges tied to marriage are sufficiently different that there is a lot of work to do define even what a multiparty marriage would mean legally.
Its not a simple equality step that can be addressed largely at the front door like interracial or even same-sex marriage.
The fundamental change (ignoring issues with the religious) for same-sex marriage really was just the genders specified/described in most legislation and regulations related to marital rights, privileges, obligations.
For multi-party marriage one major issue will be based on this assumption: members can enter into and leave a marriage without dissolving the rest of the union. If 4 people are married and wish to add a fifth, and later one wants to leave, this should be feasible. How will the various assets be combined and removed from the other parties when people enter into and leave this plural marriage?
It's not as straightforward as the current two-person marriage. (Ha! It's not clean for two-party marriages either.) It'd be interesting to see, but it'll require a bit more structure to be set up, or at least more deliberation to ensure that it's not a complete clusterfuck the first time someone wants to divorce their two wives and husband (see also the issue with civil unions before same sex marriage was legalized and the issues faced when trying to dissolve those).
> "Equitable division of marital assets and liabilities."
> This doesn't require anything special.
Right, and how to mechanically achieve this in multiparty relationships on dissolution is what I referred to as having a particularly good model in partnership law, because its done there a lot, and the wrinkles in how it works out have been pretty heavily hammered on over several centuries.
The non-dissolution aspects of marital rights and privileges and how they would apply to multiparty relations (and whether existing explicit rules and legal presumptions built on the premise of a dyadic relationship work, or even make any sense, in multiparty relationships needs to be considered, area by area; for some aspects of this, again, partnership law probably has good models to follow as to how things might be generalized.)
E.g., there's lots of things where spouses have either decisive rights or are necessarily included parties that must each consent, written based on the dyadic nature of existing marriage structure. Whether these generalize to every spouse having the same powers and requirements as a single spouse does now, or whether those powers require a majority of the members of the multiparty relationship, or some other rule in a multiparty case probably needs separate analysis for each of the areas.
Something similar could've been said about both interracial and same-sex marriage.
If the relationship type (interracial, same-sex, poly) is considered in some manner deviant or otherwise unacceptable, the number of people openly engaging in it will be small. As race relations in the US improved, as attitudes on same-sex relationships improved, the number of people openly engaged in these relationship types increased.
As poly relationships become more acceptable, more people will admit to being in them. Then we can examine what percentage is impacted by not being able to marry.
The funny thing about human rights is that one can never justifying denying them because the minority who wants them is too small to count as important.
Indeed, the number of people being tortured at Guantanamo were a tiny, tiny portion of the global population - doesn't mean they should have been subjected to that, regardless of what they were accused of.
> The article details the gymnastics required, required only of gay couples, to approximate those rights.
Now you are moving goalposts. First you were all 'look at how total a failure this is and how this is proof marriage is the only possible option'; when I point out that it worked out just fine for all the people who did it, now you're backpedaling to complaining about 'gymnastics'.
And as gymnastics go, having a parent fill out a form, enduring a rubberstamp social worker visit, and filling out some more paperwork is hardly an Olympic-level feat; especially when one consider what this gets you (a clever legal hack to secure a very large set of legal rights that would be unobtainable otherwise for 40 years or more, going by the mentioned years). The surprising thing is that it wasn't more common.
> The article details the patchwork quilt of rights, the limits, the variation among States, that resulted from this sort of "solution."
The article details how this worked out quite well for them. I don't see much of a 'patchwork' or discussion of the limits, or how the variation was a serious problem. (If you read OP, the biggest problem described seemed to be a hypothetical legal conundrum about some incest laws that the lawyers were still arguing between themselves about.)
> I've seen it counted that marriage confers over 1000 contracts or rights
Way over 1000 in fact, back in 2004, at the federal level alone, the GAO identified "1049 federal statutory provisions […] contingent on marital status or in which marital status is a factor"
How about joint adoption of children and spousal privilege for two really obvious flaws that come off the top of my head.
The other thing is it requires someone's actual parents to sever family ties. Removing someone's parents entirely from the next-of-kin hierarchy.
You're also missing something very very important from the article:
>They married 10 days later. After 52 years, marriage is “anti-climactic,” Novak said. But, he added, “psychologically, it makes you feel better. Like you’re a part of the human race.”
> The other thing is it requires someone's actual parents to sever family ties. Removing someone's parents entirely from the next-of-kin hierarchy.
No, you don't. That's just more paperwork. You don't need to sever relationships any more than the adoptee needs to look up to the adopter as a father rather than lover.
> You're also missing something very very important from the article:
Oh right, feeling like you are being treated humanely and respectfully is "weaksauce."
>No, you don't. That's just more paperwork. You don't need to sever relationships any more than the adoptee needs to look up to the adopter as a father rather than lover.
Legal family relationship.
From TFA:
> First, his biological mother had to legally disown him.
Meaning the mother isn't a legal next-of-kin anymore and also the reverse. So then you'd apparently have to have more legal paperwork to "fix" that I guess.... Mother would have to make sure her will/paperwork was perfect to not leave out child and child would make sure their will/paperwork was perfect so as to not leave out mother.
One example
If my mom died tomorrow my siblings and I would inherit her estate. If my mom had to disown me so I could be adopted by my spouse then the estate would go to my siblings only and not me. So my mom would have to first create a will and "add" me back in. Then I'd hope the siblings wouldn't try to challenge that in court or anything. After all that I still can't add my spouse (who is now legally my parent) to my health insurance! Sounds like a bum deal.
> Oh right, feeling like you are being treated humanely and respectfully is "weaksauce."
Yes, it is. When the best one can say for the culmination of a multi-generational civil rights struggle is that it makes you feel a little better, then that's not much of a improvement.
> Mother would have to make sure her will/paperwork was perfect to not leave out child and child would make sure their will/paperwork was perfect so as to not leave out mother.
Your parents should already be drawing up a will because the problems with dying intestate go well beyond accidentally leaving out a child. (You're worried about siblings challenging a will? Enjoy what will happen without a will!) Your hypothetical is only relevant in a situation in which people have already screwed up big time. As downsides go, this is very small compared to what one gained.
> After all that I still can't add my spouse (who is now legally my parent) to my health insurance
Children usually go on the health insurance, so you could have done it the other way around. I would also point out that in the relevant time period, employer health insurance was not as critical as it is now. (I don't know how Obamacare would enter in here.)
> Sounds like a bum deal.
The question is not whether it was worse than regular marriage, since it is. The question is whether adoption is so futile and useless a strategy that it was not worth doing at all. And that's not supported by OP at all.
"adopting each other" is meaningless and the citation is vague. Some googling of The Advocate's website suggests this is probably a reference to Baker and McConnell, where the regular adoption did succeed: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/the-same-sex-couple-who...
So? The point remains the article specifically cites a situation where the adoption process fails, which directly contradicts the previous statement, and lends credence to the theory that the commenter hadn't actually read the majority of the article.
> The point remains the article specifically cites a situation where the adoption process fails
No, it doesn't. The article vaguely alludes to a third-hand description of the failure of a legal tactic which taken literally is nonsensical; and as far as I can tell, when those two people tried in the sensible standard manner used by everyone else (the manner in which the article is about), did succeed.
SCOTUS decisions don't change hearts and minds, that's true. But SCOTUS decisions tend to follow long-term changes in public opininion. Gay marriage wouldn't have passed 50 years ago. SCOTUS acts like a classic common law court: the law exists independently of the courts, in the people, and the task of the court is to discover it.
> SCOTUS acts like a classic common law court: the law exists independently of the courts, in the people, and the task of the court is to discover it.
That's true in many important Constitutional areas, in many cases because parts of the Constitution are generally read in a way which incorporates that view (its particularly true, e.g., of things like 8th amendment "cruel and unusual" standards, 4th amendment reasonableness, 9th amendment nonenumerated rights, and 5th and 14th amendment due process.)
That is, the ways in which the Supreme Court "acts like a classic common law court" are because certain written sources of law like the Constitution or particular statutes are understood to require the court to do that to apply the law as intended, because the text itself invokes considerations that require consideration of the social context to apply.
Not necessarily. While SCOTUS legalized gay marriage after public support for it passed 50%, it wasn't until decades after SCOTUS legalized interracial marriage that public support for it passed 50%.
You are right. I don't think SCOTUS looks at gallup polls and decides to endorse anything that meets a 50% threshold. It's more about recognizing a change in opinion and a consensus in the making. Interracial marriage was not at 50% but firmly on the way up.
And I mean that literally. I started typing about five different responses, each beginning differently. None of them seemed to work, and besides I would've probably ended up typing too much anyway.
This is another issue where the definition of "right" is somewhat complicated.
It's more of an issue where you didn't read the article, and are talking about something irrelevant to its points. Presumably because you thought you knew what it was about from the title or a quick skim. What purpose does that serve?
I very much agree with Tim's points here. Susan's points in the original article seems to boil down to some kind of... nostalgia... for what taxis once were or could be.
The fact of the matter is that taxis tend to suck. Bad cars, poor technology, expensive fares, rude drivers. It's only recently that I haven't been routinely hassled for cash because of a "broken meter". The only benefit to traditional taxis is that I can hail them on the street or find them at a taxi stand (downtown).
We as a country and a people need to crack the "gig" economy for other reasons, but there's no denying that Uber is a breath of fresh air.
I can only be a sample size of one, but I've lived in countries where tipping is the norm and in countries where it's non-existent.
My own experience is that service is more average when tipping isn't an issue. That is it's always OK, or even good, but very rarely excellent or horrible.
Where tipping is the norm, there is more variability. In both directions - sometimes excellent but sometimes horrible. Ok and Good are still the more common, but there are more experiences in those extremes.
I'm not sure why this is.
I couldn't tell from this article if the studies discussed caught that (or could refute it). That is, they all talked about average tips and service, did they measure volatility.
Your experience seems to be wrong. In controlled experiments, the quality of service increases when tipping is banned, assuming the employee can expect a decent wage.
There are some fairly entertaining podcasts which will give you a rundown of several decades of research into this topic[1][2].
In your examples, you are certainly a sample size of one, and there are too many variables. The culture of the US, where tipping is the norm, is not much like any country where tipping is never expected.
I may have misread. But what I took from it was the assertion that because of how hyperlinks work, the act of following them to sites we have no relationship creates the needs for ads.
I took that as a moral case, but you are right, he never states the word morality.
It will probably improve our lives in many ways, make them worse in many others. Complicate some things and simplify others.
In other words like every other technology.
Also like every other technology that has come out way in the past, there will be doomsayers who are wrong and there will be Utopians who are also wrong.