Disqus - Latest Comments for tilgovi

Re: Brown to eliminate loans from financial aid packages, replace them with grants

tilgovi — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 16:06:04 -0000

Banks, yes. Government, no. Let's get the profit motive out of education funding.

Re: Brown to eliminate loans from financial aid packages, replace them with grants

tilgovi — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 16:05:50 -0000

True. I'm an alum and while I'm delighted to see this step I want to see free higher education for everyone in the country. We should have a strong public university system. People painting this as private vs public miss the point. This is students vs everything else. This is a private institution that has the means to provide a benefit for their own students, but we should collectively be providing that benefit for all students.

Re: AP: Avoid using "alt-right" without defining the movement's racist beliefs

tilgovi — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 16:41:33 -0000

Perhaps in the midst of this discussion about responsible media and guidelines you might want to link to said guidelines, like a good journalist.

https://blog.ap.org/behind-...

Re: Pro-development group seeks to take over local Sierra Club

tilgovi — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 12:40:58 -0000

Actually, it's about ethics in political organizing. #SierraGate

Re: Italian astronaut brews, sips first fresh espresso in space

tilgovi — Wed, 06 May 2015 21:09:39 -0000

Yes, and here on earth we absolutely, totally, in no way get any collective productivity gains from drinking coffee. There's definitely no way the scientists could possibly justify consuming coffee.

Okay, end sarcasm.

There's also a case to be made that little things like this are effective as PR stunts and are helpful for keeping the public excited about space and funding NASA to continue doing scientific research.

In this case, it seems to have backfired for you, but if you take a step back and consider that this article is being shared all over the world, it's possible you might just be in the minority, and the average reader's reaction is "cool!"

Re: Apple's ban on felons for construction project draws criticism

tilgovi — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 14:13:15 -0000

These people did the time and now they are out and working.

Re: A new global economic system | Mitar's Point

tilgovi — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 19:58:05 -0000

In what sense is this different from loan markets and credit scores?

Re: Millennials Invent New Religion: No Hell, No Priests, No Punishment | Culture | Religion Dispatches

tilgovi — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:35:19 -0000

I like this comment a lot for its recognition that punishment is meted out by humans to serve human needs of control and for pointing out that community is really the most important thing.

What's very difficult is to define what community is, or what its relationship with spirituality is, in the world of 2014. Once upon a time mass was the only thing that brought everyone in from the outskirts of town. It was actually the only time many people saw one another! Now... I mean look what we're doing right here! *This* is a community, right here on this web page.

So if my generation thinks about spirituality as an individual practice it may be because we have community in spades in our secular lives.

And there we see what I think some people in my community have been calling out as the real spiritual challenge of our day. Just because there's community doesn't mean there's compassion. If we can't bring spirituality into our community practices then maybe our communities are communities of loathing, self-hatred, consumption, or exceptionalism.

In a world where people will not accept metaphysical indoctrination because facts about the origin of religion are a click away we run the risk of community excluding spirituality, and some people not adopting a useful individual practice with good values.

I don't have answers, though.

Re: Millennials Invent New Religion: No Hell, No Priests, No Punishment | Culture | Religion Dispatches

tilgovi — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:22:10 -0000

The best part of the Christian God is the unconditional love. Hell is a perverse and manipulative tool of pedagogical control. One does not end up spoiled by 'lack of consequences', one is spoiled by a need for approval created by either consequences or rewards equally (as rewards are just consequences in disguise -- the consequence is not receiving the reward).

Re: Millennials Invent New Religion: No Hell, No Priests, No Punishment | Culture | Religion Dispatches

tilgovi — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:18:53 -0000

The price to pay is a non-eternal life of a society that shuns and hates you. But never mind any of that. If someone can't internalize a notion of justice and compassion then punishment, or the threat thereof, is not going to fix it. Since Hell is only after life, sins in reality are punished by parents and clergy. The child who sins and receives a penance or a punishment will learn not to confess and not to get caught, but will not learn to stop sinning.

Re: Millennials Invent New Religion: No Hell, No Priests, No Punishment | Culture | Religion Dispatches

tilgovi — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 13:12:54 -0000

"Perhaps it's the millennials and their issues that have been abandoned by religion and not the other way around."

I would +1 this a thousand times.

Re: AngularJS: ngView

tilgovi — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 03:47:46 -0000

Yes. See http://docs.angularjs.org/a...

Re: Unbreakable crypto: Store a 30-character password in your brain’s subconscious memory

tilgovi — Wed, 14 Aug 2013 20:27:01 -0000

One could just employ this as a 2nd layer in a 2-factor authentication system, using a normal password to encrypt/decrypt it. Then it would be resistant against anything except an attacker who has the ability to both torture you *and* access the password database. To denounce this as weak because the password is stored in the clear is too much skepticism, I think.

Re: On Going to Burning Man For the Art

tilgovi — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 16:29:18 -0000

Yes. You certainly don't have to avoid it.

Re: On Going to Burning Man For the Art

tilgovi — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 16:19:34 -0000

I agree with Jonah in many ways. I've felt that Burning Man is hyper-sexualized at times. It's even made me uncomfortable. In fact, I had my only bad psychedelic experience ever at Burning Man because the super sexual atmosphere drove me to repeatedly attempt to meet and hook up with people one night when I was too incoherent to really even talk effectively. I ended up walking between the Green Gorilla Lounge and the deep playa and back, over and over, talking myself into going back to the dance floor and getting overwhelmed again and again. It wasn't that I wanted to dance. It's that I had put on a costume that was really sexy and felt like I had to play that role, even though I really just wanted to wander around and look at art.

I think it's great that people have a place to explore all these things, but going to burning man "for the art" is absolutely *not* a problem. In fact, seeing some of the fetish activity as something other than art is probably the wrong lens anyway. We're all going "for the art", at least that's what I hope.

Re: Is the Media Reacting Fairly To The BART Strike?

tilgovi — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 12:46:23 -0000

Who do you think makes these improvements you want? The workers. Pay them better and they'll do it better.

Re: Is the Media Reacting Fairly To The BART Strike?

tilgovi — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 12:39:45 -0000

I pay increase of ~4% a year seems hardly ridiculous. It's keeping up with inflation. Even less ridiculous given that they took a pay cut when BART was struggling and now there's surplus. Reward them.

Re: The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage

tilgovi — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 13:45:43 -0000

You totally misunderstand me. I'm claiming you need to force people to do what's *not* in their best interest. It's in the interest of the manager to squeeze as much work out of her employees for as little pay as possible without them rage-quitting, flipping cars, or organizing to bargain for better treatment. I claim it's not in the long-term interest of the business, but if the manager won't be there (changes jobs, gets fired, retires, etc) then the long-term interest of the business is not aligned with the manager's interests.

If a business optimizes for the short term and fails it's not a guarantee that it will be replaced by a better business. You could argue that, over time, if business that plan for the long term last longer then they should become the majority, but we've already gone down a derailing tangent here. The point is that the people making business decisions are not necessarily acting in the interest of the business. It's sort of like how we, in America, continue to shove terrible foods into ourselves because they taste good even though we end up obese and diabetic later in life. We have to be taught (forced) by our parents to eat fruits and vegetables. If we continue to do so in adult life it's not because we've graduated into some magical adulthood of ultra-rational thinking, it's because we internalized it at a young age. Large latency in the feedback loops mean we can optimize for the short term and not even realize the harm we're doing in the long term until it's too late.

Finally, your outsourcing story is clearly fallacious. We're not talking about skilled factory workers here. Those jobs already left. We're talking about the waiters and cooks who cannot bring food to your table from the other side of the world. The local service economy cannot be outsourced because it is, by definition, local.

Re: The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage

tilgovi — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 03:57:58 -0000

Like raising the quality of life for the majority of Americans? Sounds like a terrible consequence...

Re: The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage

tilgovi — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 03:56:10 -0000

But we've been watching a trend where the wage gap is increasing. That means there's plenty of room to raise wages for the fry cook without raising wages for the manager.

Re: The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage

tilgovi — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 03:54:05 -0000

Did you read the article? The evidence is on the other side. What evidence makes you think this is what would "most likely happen"?

Re: The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage

tilgovi — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 03:52:08 -0000

Want to try to argue for dismantling anti-trust laws next? The fact is that we don't live in a free market society for really good reasons. What is in the interest of a business in the short term is not necessarily in the interest of business (at large) in the long term. Products and services need buyers and buyers need money. What part of this is unclear?

Re: The Danger of Copying Music Is Not What You Think It Is

tilgovi — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:43:35 -0000

The person hosting it, though... is likely in violation, or would be if anyone who didn't have a copy already accessed it or this was the intention of the poster.

Re: The Danger of Copying Music Is Not What You Think It Is

tilgovi — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:42:56 -0000

I'm really not sure this is true, since you are not redistributing the copy you downloaded and you *already* have a copy of this work (you are not creating another, unless we argue that the digital version is a distinct creative work). But, as above, IANAL.

Re: The Danger of Copying Music Is Not What You Think It Is

tilgovi — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:40:45 -0000

IANAL but I think copyright law (at least in the US) does work this way. A slightly different case where it could be read differently is if the digital version was digitized by someone other than the original author/publisher, e.g. by scanning the hard bound book, in which case there's a more debatable question as to whether that constitutes a new work subject to its own copyright. But making copies of anything for personal use is supposed to be within your fair use rights.