CONTRARlAN

Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked.

Since you work in advertising, you should know that that kind of thing is more pervasive than ever today.

Focusing on societal efficiency at the expense of other things seems like a good short-term solution, but a lousy long-term one.

Sorry, I was just talking about Stratfor.

Of course it was also revealed that The Interview was a propaganda product aimed at destabilizing North Korea (in anticipation of the upcoming planned unification).

I missed all that–can you point me in the right direction?

These sorts of things can only be found when there's wide access given to journalists.

Sure, but there's an argument to be made that the only way to end domestic violence is to place cameras inside all homes. Obviously that tradeoff is one most people aren't willing to make, and I don't think that leaking the private emails of employees of a private company is ultimately morally defensible.

Whistleblowing is one (very important) thing–bulk dumps of 99% of innocuous stuff became there's 1% of stuff in there that isn't great (but probably isn't all that bad, in the grand scheme of things) is both tactically questionable–leaking something with a 1:99 S/N ratio is a terrible way to get your message across–it's also morally suspect.

If Wikileaks & Co. truly wanted to change the world (and it wasn't about garnering attention and giving indiscriminate anger an outlet), they'd be approaching things differently.

A pretty nasty no-win situation.

It's a pretty easy win-win situation–offer both, inform users appropriately. And then provide a third set: a list of the sanitized files not present in the virus-free dump. I think a quick spot check through those would show whether any editorializing was going on.

I have serious concerns about their publishing the private emails of employees of a private company that, from all I can gather, turned out to be pretty non-evil. But the virus issues, while not Stratfor's or Wikileaks's direct fault, could have been mitigated by Wikileaks pretty easily.

(Disclosure: I've subscribed to them for many years, but have no interest beyond that.)

Asia's a continent.

The character of Jian Yang is a very specific subset of Chinese nationals, namely those who come to work in a very specific industry in a very small part of Northern California.

That's like being upset about a show with a character poking fun at Americans who teach English in South Korea. (Which, I'm guessing, could provide some pretty good material.)

Your syllogism aside, not all cultural satire is racist, even when people want it to be.

So, just how specific does cultural satire have to get before you won't declare it racism?

I ask, because "Chinese" includes about 56 recognized ethnic groups in mainland China. I don't think we can say whether this character is Han, Zhuang, Hui, or necessarily any specific race that happens to exist primarily within the borders of what we call the nation of China.

Seems to me that character is more making fun of the culture of a nation than of a single ethnic group (or even some set of ethnic groups). If they had a character that made fun of, say, British culture, would that be OK with you? Or only if the character was white? (Which would seem awfully racist to me.)

Or is it only safe to satirize culture if the subject of the satire has ethnic roots in the Caucuses?

Or is it not about ethnicity, but appearance? Is it enough if they merely appear white? Because that opens the comedic landscape far beyond the Caucasus. Can we satirize Mexican culture, provided we limit it to Mexicans of European descent? (Again, how racist is that?)

There are some real battles worth fighting, but this really seems like a cosmetic one to me, no matter how much you think it "smells like racism."

It's like some people have a sense of indignation that's only tuned to detect a few things, and throw any sense of nuance or concept of false-positives out the window.

Are you offended by the definition of Jian Yang, or the actual character in the show? That's like being offended by Wikipedia's entry on the KKK because it accurately describes their position.

Anyway–it's not stereotyping Asians, it's stereotyping Chinese-national engineers in Silicon Valley. That's a pretty specific cultural subset.

no one would accept this logic if it were applied to Black people or gays.

No? Because comedies have never had characters like Tracy Jordan or Franck Eggelhoffer?

I don't know, but it's a fascinating experiment, anyone who is not paying for it should be in favor of this experiment -- unless you just hate poor people.

What a bizarre statement. It's really easy to read that as two things:

1. You're totally game to experiment, just so long as it's not your money. 2. Anyone who doesn't agree must hate poor people.

I'm pretty certain you didn't really mean either, but the net result of that sentence is awfully unproductive: "anyone who doesn't like this must either have skin in the game or hate poor people!"

If this wasn't exaggeration, we should study the fortunate circumstances by which this calamity has been avoided for 17 years.

Leaving aside the truth of their claims at the time–because it's irrelevant–your comment makes the fatal error of assuming conditions haven't changed at all in 17 years.

As an aside, it's been my experience that titles are often written not by the person who wrote the article, but by someone who is tasked with writing titles that are intended to attract attention, and not necessarily perfectly reflect the views of the author.

I agree with you that they're a private company so they can do what they want with their business–I actually think private entities don't have enough rights on that front in many regards–but that doesn't mean that it isn't a conversation worth having, and or that they aren't unregulated entities–there are legal limits to what stores can do in their relationships with customers, how is this any different?

And walking in doesn't give implicit permission that I agree for them to store, analyze, sell, leak, publish or otherwise use that data however they please, in perpetuity. Are they allowed to disclose my presence to law enforcement without a warrant? Can they tell my health insurance provider that I spent an unusually long amount of time in the dessert aisle?

I'm sure a lawyer could argue (probably quite successfully) otherwise, but from a let's-address-the-problem-before-it's-fully-mature standpoint, these are the kinds of conversations we're supposed to be having right now.

That it's easy to do is all the more reason to try to establish controls to prevent abuse.

It's trivially easy to sell customer data for profit at the expense of their privacy. It's easy to store personal information without securing it. It's easy to take credit cards without using SSL certs.

It's also easy to lock someone up and deny them due process, or to enter someone's home and seize their effects without a warrant, or to set absurdly high bail.

Etc. Again, it's because this is such an easy thing to do–and it's only going to become easier to collect, store, and analyze this data-that it makes sense to establish definitions of what constitutes fair use, and what constitutes abuse, and to do so sooner, rather than later.

Thanks. Looking forward to reading the reply.

And the Arab Spring was supposed to result in a great liberalization of MENA countries.

I don't know whether it's optimism or naiveté–or likely some mixture of the two–but the western public tends to ignore how large changes in technology and society can (and usually does) tilt the balance of power towards the establishment.

Please ask him more here, so we can all benefit from the discussion.

Guessing you're talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Formula_One_espionage_con...

I think that's one valid way of looking at it, and many technically-inclined people would be inclined to agree, I'd imagine.

But another way of looking at it, and one I suspect most non-technical people would, is that it just takes one motivated person of roughly-average strength to break a doorframe. It takes someone with fairly uncommon technical sophistication to make one of these devices.

Once someone mass-produces them and sells them in real volume that perception could flip, but right now I'm far more concerned about a flimsy doorframe–which leads to where I live and sleep–than I am about someone rigging up a way to open my garage door–which only gets them into a detached garage where insured stuff is kept. The odds of a break-in being by force (whether against a door frame or a window) are just vastly higher.

Did I slight your favorite conspiracy/paranoia/gun rights site?

Again, helpful. I have no particular interest in any sites you'd consider one of the above, but nice rhetoric.

I was about to take the time to reply to your first point–which is fair and worth talking about–but the trolling afterwards leads me to believe it's fairly unlikely you're interested in discussing it on its merits.

Which is only as secure as the door frame it goes into, which usually means: pretty insecure.

Still, I agree with the premise that it's about assumptions, and if people can be made to realize that their garage door openers are inherently pretty insecure, and feel that that presents a substantial, then there's a market there. But until it becomes a problem that's common enough for media outlets to scare people about it, there probably isn't a large market yet.

(Any marketing plan for an endeavor like that should have a PR budget from day one, since that's exactly how such stories tend to become news segments.)

It's being talked about like this is a new finding, but it's been discussed on various fora for the better part of a decade.

For example:

http://forums.radioreference.com/547816-post2559.html

The author's quip (while simultaneously claiming to "scoop" this):

"These forums were usually conspiracy/paranoia/gun rights types of sites, but maybe they were right this time."

Well, that's helpful.

It's way more complicated than that:

http://flighttraining.aopa.org/magazine/1998/November/199811...

Great question!

If you get shafted by your employer during maternity and they pull coverage early, and give you misinformation re: COBRA timing, and it's not an open enrollment window with the state exchange, even if you can convince the state exchange to let you in before the next open enrollment period, the soonest they might do that is at the end of the month.

And if you have any ongoing treatment issues, the temporary/indemnity insurance you'll have to buy won't cover any preexisting conditions.

TL;DR–if you get left in a lurch, you're still stuck on temporary insurance which won't cover preexisting conditions.

That's actually not entirely true, unfortunately.

Ask me how I know.

Yeah, this was a supercar made a couple decades ago, which makes the whole thing all the more impressive. Probably a pretty inefficient starter motor on it, and no start-stop on it, obviously.

I once had a friend show up to help me start a car that wasn't starting–we thought it was the battery but it turned out to eventually be a flaky ignition switch.

It took us a good 20-30 cranks to eventually narrow it down to the ignition switch (when we bypassed it it started). I couldn't believe that little paperback-sized box was capable of doing that.

And it was a relatively big, high-compression engine.

I almost still don't believe it.

We still don't culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing. You don't see the states advertising vodka like they advertise the lottery.

I'm having a hard time with this. Something doesn't have to be endorsed by the state to be culturally embraced, which seems to be what I'm understanding when I view both sentences in tandem. Apologies if I'm getting that wrong.

But if I view the first sentence in isolation:

We still don't culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing.

I'm still baffled, but for different reasons. Alcohol is endorsed, celebrated, and embraced from top to bottom in nearly all corners of contemporary society. It's served nearly everywhere, consuming it is the cultural norm, not consuming it is viewed with suspicion, it's lauded as being crucial to one's enjoyment of an evening, social gathering, sporting event, flight, etc. Entire business models exist that would otherwise be unprofitable if not for alcohol sales. Many establishments are essentially loss leaders but for their alcohol sales (which are supposedly tangential to their primary business offering).

2.5 million deaths are alcohol-related every year. It's a factor in 40% of all violent crimes. 24% of incidents involving police have alcohol as a factor.

And yet, sit around at dinner with a group of guys and order a soft drink, and it's often viewed as abnormal behavior.

Why? Because, for reasons passing understanding, we culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing.

Commercial-grade technology has about 3m accuracy, but different methods can yield down to 10cm accuracy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Prec...

And then there's a whole segment of survey-grade equipment that can get within a centimeter or two:

http://water.usgs.gov/osw/gps/

Are those environmental stats per capita or area? I ask only because it's by far the largest state in the CONUS, which makes me wonder if that doesn't play a contributing role.

Or, perhaps you move there because you care about the environment or the poor, and that's how change happens.