I don't really like the faux-investigative tone of the article either, but it's misleading to accuse him of calling for vigilantism. He drove around a rich neighborhood, concluded that he would not be able to knock on anyone's door and talk about water, and then suggested a tiered tax system so that luxury use of water is discouraged, while also noting that there are additional externalities such as runoff that aren't being accounted for.
I'd love to see what those exact same students would say if the prevailing attitude changed and a massive wave of right-wing ideology took over campus politics. I'm sure that they'd be crying about how their self-evident right to self-expression was being horribly violated. Poor things.
This kind of attack is completely unnecessary. How is anyone supposed to respond to this comment when you've already constructed a straw man for your opponent and trivialized it?
It's not an attack, it's what's happening to the public discourse right now. There are areas of the internet that are right wing. Left wing people go to those areas to debate ideas, but when they see the comments sections aren't on their side, they claim harassment. This harassment may or may not come with requests for the moderators to make the comments a "safe space".
But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.
This base-shoring piece ironically panders to people who've already made up their mind and are uninterested in engaging in any kind of meaningful discussion. You can't possibly write something like that and expect to convince anyone that you're arguing in good faith.
There is UberX in Philly now, although as far as I know there were no regulatory changes (and Black still operates legally). The PPA actually did a handful of "sting" operations against UberX drivers when the service started, calling an Uber and then impounding the vehicle (http://www.phillymag.com/news/2014/10/26/uber-philadelphia-u...).
As far as I am aware (I use uber quite a bit), Uber X is only available in the suburbs. In the city, it's not available; I've only ever gotten the Uber black sedans.
EDIT: This is no longer true, apparently my statement about using uber quite a bit is also no longer true.
I agree with your first point. Personally, I draw the line at the ability to suffer. It is well understood that dogs, pigs, cats, cows, orangutans, lambs, and many other animals feel pain the same way we humans do. Just like humans, I think they have a right not to be forced to suffer unnecessarily, by nature of being capable of it. For that reason I don't eat meat, nor do I go to zoos.
As for the second, I think that's an unfair and paralyzing comment but I don't think you mean it in bad faith. We all have different capacities to help alleviate suffering in different ways, with different impacts. The fact that there are "bigger" injustices does not mean that small ones should be ignored, especially when they are within your community and you have the ability to fix them yourself.
Or - if you're interested in stepping a little outside mainstream opinions - what makes animal suffering any less important than human suffering? Are we really special in some way that other animals aren't?
I don't think this sort of empty, dismissive comment helps anyone. Besides, is there even that much difference between someone who is genuinely hateful and someone who's just saying hateful things because they enjoy making other people upset? If it looks like a duck...
There is a rather huge difference in the psychology of the two. A committed racist is dangerous, while your average troll has some internal issues that have a low danger level. Trolls can escalate, but the type of people they talk about in the article are already there.
"If it looks like a duck..."
I would be interested where you fall on zero tolerance.
IMO there is an enormous difference. I've always defined hatred in terms like "motivated to kill, for real." Less serious is anger. Far less serious is mischief, which is where I feel most trolling sits.
Put another way, if a person is being irritating (in text, at that), and you find yourself feeling terrorized, there's a massive failure of communication occurring.
Agreed. Trolling, in the classic/historical internet sense, is trying to irritate others by baiting them into an online argument that they take very seriously. Trolls are generally pests, but not hateful.
Both pilots became so preoccupied with a burnt-out landing gear indicator light that they didn't notice the autopilot had become disengaged, and crashed into the Florida Everglades.
The recent crash at SFO was caused by mistakenly thinking the airplane was working a different way than it was actually working. The pilots thought the autothrottles were engaged when they weren't and were fixated on trying to land the plane manually; something they hadn't done in a long time.
Which is the sort of problem we'll likely see more of as "mostly autonomous" systems become increasingly common. For example, it's easy to imagine that it will become possible (whether or not we elect to go down that route) to design cars that can be self-driving most of the time but which will require a human to take over in some scenarios. The good news is that those scenarios will presumably be mostly low speed ones--the handoff timeframe pretty much has to be of minute rather than second magnitude--but you could still end up with an increasing number of drivers who have very little actual driving experience.
Consider reading Breaking the Mishap Chain by Peter Merlin [1]. It's a pretty fascinating series of case studies where human error was a primary factor. Chapter 5 discusses the crash of M2-F2 during testing for NASA and the role that task saturation had in the incident.
Honestly, that's not entirely true, and not very respectful to the pilots in that crash.
AF447 was caused (partially) by the pilot's misunderstanding that holding the control stick all the way back was gonna make the aircraft go up at the best rate of climb, and not put the control surfaces all the way back.
The AP (autopilot) was off for quite some time when the crash happened. What was supposed to be on though, as always, is the Airbus Fly-by-wire system in normal law, that is in between the pilot's controls and the actual commands sent to the control surfaces (ailerons, elevators...). This system was off (in it's direct control law, more precisely) due to the pitot tubes sending non accurate data, because of the icing problem. The pilot didn't notice that.
Yes, sorry, that's what I meant. They had turned the system to direct control law and one of the pilots was pulling back, and they were ignoring the "stall" warning blaring in the background.
Honestly, first of all, who averages two sticks? Like, when is averaging the input of the two sticks ever a reasonable thing to do? This is a major design flaw, in my opinion.
Second of all, why was the "stall" warning even on when the system was in normal law, and thus impossible to stall? All that did was desensitize the pilots, who learned to just ignore the warnings.
I suspect he was. I used to take Radio Shack R/C cars and re-purpose them into robots. The best ones used treads as that would allow for differential steering which was much easier on the inverse kinematics than the front wheel steering. And Radio Shack always had a 'closeout/clearance' junk table that said R/C cars would end up on.
That experience lead me to understand that a common failure mode was that the radio receiver circuit had some tuning caps on it that would get jostled about, causing the car to cease responding. Not sure why they went with trim caps other than it meant everything else could be wider tolerances if they just tuned it once fully assembled. It did lead to a lot of fallout though.
