> Cybernetic Hate Crime
Are you fucking kidding me? That is not a thing. And if it were, the thing that happened at McDonald's would not qualify.
Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
111–120 of 126 posts
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just ignored 90+% of what I wrote as answers to your strange opinions. Sigh... OK. Wiki page says " outspoken critic of the Nigerian government ... hanged in 1995 by the military government " 1995 is not "today" -- and the whole execution might even have been done by the military dictatorship, without Shell even directly asking them to do it. (From what I've read about Nigeria, this doesn't seem unlikely.) If She…
"Initially as spokesperson, and then as President, of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Saro-Wiwa led a nonviolent campaign against environmental degradation of the land and waters of Ogoniland by the operations of the multinational petroleum industry, especially the Royal Dutch Shell company. He was also an outspoken critic of the Nigerian government, which he viewed as reluctant to enforce…
>>Shell was implicated as having leaned on the Nigerian government to get rid of this troublemaker which they promptly did.
I can't find that in the Wikipedia article? Can you?
I wrote: "If Shell was involved (why would they murder internationally known critics -- the resulting sh-t storm is obvious) -- was any higher up Shell people involved?"
That was just not enough to condemn Shell in a court of justice.
Two witnesses much later claimed Shell people helped buy their perjury. They could have lied or where it really Shell layers. E.g. did they get the promised jobs?
>>I purposefully selected something that should clearly register as an outrage on your spectrum and the only thing you bring up to defend it is that it wasn't 'today'.
Where did I write it wasn't an outrage?! I wrote that I couldn't see proof in the WP article that Shell was in on it. (See above.)
I wrote "Any of the tyrants worth his own weight in human ears have done worse than most any corporation since 1995." So I have not denied company misbehaviour, which of course is rampant where companies can get away with it, same as with all human organisations.
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>>And no, I don't limit my criticism to corporations but if you look back a bit then you'll notice that this thread started about corporations so that is the topic.
I started my previous comment "You just ignored 90+% of what I wrote as answers to your strange opinions. Sigh... OK."
Enough, you lack defense for what I brought up -- your strange positions of judging (just) western society over the last 600 years by the present moral code.
If you insist on changing the subject to the exact content of wikipedia re an irrelevant old killing in Nigeria and claim I don't think corporate murder is an outrage -- don't complain if it is called trolling.
Edit: If you have a coherent point in what you wrote re western society's unique guilt over the last 600 years because we have corporations, please tell me. (It seems you went from (1) a general point to (2) your personal history to (3) that corporations can do bad stuff (which no one will argue against.))
Edit 2: Clarity
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#113Hurricane Sandy was a Category 1 hurricane at landfall. That's pretty much the opposite of a SUPERSTORM. Much larger hurricanes have hit New England before. For example, the "Great New England Hurricane of 1938" made landfall on Long Island as a Category 3 storm, killing over 600 people. The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 also was Category 3, killing 390 people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Hurricane_of…
You realize that hurricane category is only one measure of a storm, and not necessarily even the most important one? "Superstorm" Sandy is not called that because if its wind speed (which is all that "category" is about) but because of its size , as in physical extent.
Also Sandy was no longer strictly just a storm of tropical origin, but had combined with an arctic storm front, producing a hybrid storm, referred to as a "frankenstorm" initially though this was considered not a sufficiently serious term, hence the adoption of the term "superstorm".
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?en...
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57540360/hurricane-sandy...
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#114I hadn't thought of these individual achievements as being that big until I saw them all together in one place and now I can say that this has truly been a breakthrough year all across the technology sector. Every year we seem to be accelerating our speed of development when it comes to technology, I'm only 19 and in my life I've seen us go from 56kb/s internet to 1gb/s internet, go from the rare NASA launch to regul…
In what way are virgin galactic in the UK?
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, it's not. It's mostly about making money. No business cares about "improving the quality of human life and alleviating suffering" (they might pay lip service to that on their brochures though). Shareholders don't care about "alleviating suffering", only about return of investment. Umm, not all businesses are in the business of providing happiness to people. Some are in fact in the business of providing misery t…
> While I can easily sympathize with your position, rich western corporations don't owe jack shit to third world people. Wow that is so wrong it is terrible. Rich western corporations are rich western corporations because of the 1400s to date absolute rape of the rest of the world by the west. We, collectively including our corporations owe third world people in a way that we will likely never be able to make good on…
http://reddit.com/r/askhistorians is very good, btw (although I don't think they would like people taking normative positions)
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exponential growth in some areas. I don't think peoples lifestyles have changed all that much in the last 30 years. In 1982 you could point to computers, networks, and cellphones and say these are going to get far more popular. But, medicine, car millage, and battery power while improved are not that much better. PS: What's so striking to me is how little science fiction has changed over that time span.
Agree on sci-fi, but medical imaging has really been born in the last 30 years and may prove to be a game-changer in diagnosis and localized treatments over the next 70. Also, the invention of PCR techniques allow much better testing and drug development. So I think we'll look back 70 years from now and make the same claim about medicine.
MRI's is another 'old' tech, and PCR is barely inside that 30 year window as it was developed in 1983. In 1952, Herman Carr produced a one-dimensional MRI image as reported in his Harvard PhD thesis. Meanwhile, Paul Lauterbur expanded on Carr's technique and developed a way to generate the first MRI images, in 2D and 3D, using gradients. In 1973, Lauterbur published the first nuclear magnetic resonance image.[25][26] and the first cross-sectional image of a living mouse was published in January 1974. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_resonance_imaging
Granted, improve things enough and you end up with qualitative differences. AKA wind power is near parity with coal which is a game changer.
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you are correct; the beauty of exponential growth is that at any point you can make the same observation about the previous 100 years.
There were long periods of world history where growth and development were anything but exponential, and for significant periods were reversed. The period since the Italian Renaissance has been pretty spiffy though.
The period since the Italian Renaissance is actually more interesting than "pretty spiffy". While science improved by leaps and bounds, living conditions for ordinary people (in Europe) deteriorated quite significantly. Crop yields plummeted, leading to starvation, disease and decreasing populations all over Europe. Only in the 19th century did things improve again.
The moral of the story being, I guess, that improvements in science and technology, do not necessarily go hand in hand with improvements in living standards.
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those things go hand in hand. Ideally, you can't make money without improving human life in exchange. That's ideology. Specifically, an Adam Smith style ideology. You can very well make money without improving human life in exchange. Heck, you make tons of money without improving human life. Like being an arms dealer. Or an African warlord. Or a crack dealer. Or a huge money seeking corporation selling sugar water.…
Well, our best understanding of what generates wealth is that it comes from trade. Trade involves two parties exchanging resources for their mutual benefit. Adam Smith was one of the first to write about this, and yes, he thought that trade and wealth for all was a good thing. > You can very well make money without improving human life in exchange Notice that I said "ideally," and that all the counter-examples you gi…
> There's a big, important difference between piracy and trade
Not really. What the British called "free trade" seemed pretty much like piracy to the Egyptians, the Indians and the Chinese they imposed it on.
And lest you think trade has become more civilized since the nineteenth century: I'm sure farmers in Jamaica are none too fond of having their livelyhood destroyed because their country imports cheap European dairy in the name of free trade. Which is just one example out of many.
Heck, even free trade loving Americans complain about their country getting swamped with cheap Chinese products.
As with most things, it's complicated.
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, our best understanding of what generates wealth is that it comes from trade. Trade involves two parties exchanging resources for their mutual benefit. Adam Smith was one of the first to write about this, and yes, he thought that trade and wealth for all was a good thing. > You can very well make money without improving human life in exchange Notice that I said "ideally," and that all the counter-examples you gi…
"The Belgians wouldn't be able to get away with that today." You're right. Today, it's probably only the U.S. that can get away with such behavior.
Nice try, but no. In fact at the time even the Belgians couldn't get away with what they did. When word came out about what the Belgians were doing in the Congo it caused an uproar throughout Western Europe and it stopped.
Re: Futuristic Predictions That Came True in 2012
#120> Cybernetic Hate Crime Are you fucking kidding me? That is not a thing. And if it were, the thing that happened at McDonald's would not qualify.
I agree with you. Once everything became clear, it seemed that the conflict was partly fuelled by the wearer of the "cybernetics" being belligerent.
The "hate crime" was simply the wearer being asked to leave, and responding haughtily. Consequently both sides behaved immaturely, but not in "hate".