rexgallorum2

Nope, by a German speaker in good but imperfect English

I would argue the bomb was only part of it though--the other hazard was area bombing. All of those planners had seen (or participated in) the aerial bombardment of Europe and Japan during the war, and one take-away was that areas with different uses should be separated (like in the sim game Cities Skylines), e.g. industrial zones should be separate from residential zones, and all of the above should be as sprawling and low-density as possible to minimise damage from the air, be it nuclear or conventional. And yes the US highway system started out as a civil defense project as well, modelled on the German 'Autobahnen'.

Very good observation. The significance of an apology is entirely dependent on the cultural context.

The fallout from BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill comes to mind. British executives failed to provide the gushing (but meaningless) apology the Americans expected until it was too late, and they were skewered in the American press for it. And that particular example concerns two closely related cultures. The results are often more jarring when quite dissimilar cultures are involved.

This shouldn't have been voted down. It is actually a sound question and one that should be examined.

Edit: I looked at the previous replies. All of this talk of 'society' this and 'we' that is of no use whatsoever when you are talking about global phenomena and companies like Facebook/Twitter/etc. Under the given circumstances, the ethical questions are much larger. The problem is probably totally intractable.

Ultimately I think the best solution will be universal 'deamplification', i.e. disabling all features that facilitate virality/contagion. It is unfortunate that Facebook, Twitter, et. al. have tweaked their entire platforms and business models to profit from phenomena that appear to be almost without exception socially corrosive and destructive. Modern soc med platforms work like factories for the memetic reproduction and dissemination of bad ideas, half-truths, and other rubbish, as well as for disturbing mob behaviour. Regarding the article, providing 'mea culpa' tools would only reinforce the dictatorship of the online mob, who would invariably bully users into issuing apologies.

It might seem like a stretch, but I suspect that ultimately all of these platforms are going to end up being carved up by regulators, co-opted by governments, subjected to national firewalls, etc. on account of their potential for mischief, misuse, disinformation, misinformation, open source intel gathering by hostile powers, meddling, etc.

In agrarian societies, children are economically productive. In urbanised industrial/post-industrial societies, children are expensive and thus an economic liability.

Many of the conditions that accompanied falling fertility rates in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are now evident in the developing world.

There is a fundamental problem with claims that the infection fatality rate (fatality rate for all infections, including undetected infections) is ridiculously low.

New York City has seen over 18,000 deaths directly attributed to Covid-19. The actual number may be higher, but probably isn't lower. How many actual (including undetected) cases would there have to be in NYC to produce the given number of deaths at any given IFR? Figures at the low end suggest a number of cases far in excess of the total population, so they are naturally impossible. The real IFR is somewhere between the lowest plausible number based on the total population and the implausibly high case fatality rate (based on detected/confirmed cases).

Anyone want to do some math on that?

I think this company is selling panic and hysteria to make a quick buck. The whole thing could well be made up, pure fiction. Their claims aren't worth a discussion.

I don't doubt that this stuff happens. The web is full of filth and excrement. But using the language of moral panic to sell a dubious service is just crass.

If we must wade into the debate about whether kids should have access to it, my answer would be a resounding no. I know of ten year old girls with smartphones. I try to tell people that those things are portals to hell, and they look at me like I have two heads.

The web has morphed into a raging monster, and 'mobile devices' are the devil incarnate.

We should step back from the abyss, or at least refrain from looking into it, lest we discover that we are but monsters ourselves, and the abyss is only a mirror.

Even discussing this issue has become a serious taboo in itself. An anthropologist would say you are correct.

I'm glad at least a few people here can recognize a blatant advert using scaremongering to sell a product.

This is nothing but covert advertising. Almost everyone here seems to have missed this fact. Re-read the 'article' carefully. This text was carefully crafted to go viral by scaring parents.

Again, this is not about a 'police sting' or anything like that. It is about a 'project' (stunt) carried out by a private company that sells software for monitoring kids. The author works for the same company.

Correct.

Surveillance has historically had three chief purposes.

- taxation, the expropriation of property or surplus value

- manpower, conscription

- maintaining order and control, eliminating threats, etc.

You can go all the way back to the dawn of agriculture and the rise of the first grain-based proto-states. The fundamentals remain much the same.

1. Not exactly, no. The opposite of a federal state is a unitary state (like France or Ireland), not an authoritarian state (like Saudi Arabia). Interestingly, what you described (moving power upward) has been another major feature of American governance since the early post-war era.

2. I generally disagree with regards to the seizure of property. You say that the seizure of criminal assets is seen as an effective crime deterrent. Who sees it as such? Is there any evidence that it works? Are you familiar with the debates surrounding 'civil forfeiture'? If not, it is worth looking into. There are jurisdictions in the US(primarily at the municipal and county level) that derive a large part of their total operating budgets from the seizure of 'criminal' assets without any sort of due process. The example of drug kingpins parking their money in real estate is a particularly lurid and unrepresentative example--there might indeed be a place for criminal asset forfeiture in the fight against organized crime--but at the very least the threshold should be rather high and not include petty infractions or minor unpaid debts.

3. I see your point here, and you are correct on checks and balances, but I think you are naive with regards to the role of the press and the efficacy of simply voting out incumbent officials. Having said that, I will concede that the strategy actually works best at the lowest possible tier of government, but of course that requires adequate civic engagement in local politics.

More on the free press issue. Here's a story for you. In the early 1970s, my dad worked for a couple of local newspapers in the southern US. They would send him to cover city council meetings. He commented that the reporters from the big papers would show up for about 10 minutes and leave, and then write reports as if they had been present the entire time. And that was yearly 50 years ago, when the American newspaper landscape looked very different from today. Today most of those local papers are gone altogether and the press in general has undergone a total transformation. Beyond the occasional outrage story, I wouldn't automatically assume that the press is going to do its job.

Please don't take offense at my comments and fire back an angry rebuttal. This is not meant as criticism of you or your positions. Just thoughts and debate, nothing more.

One of the more important yet most overlooked and misunderstood features of American government and governance is the fact that a vast amount of power resides at the very bottom, and local officials often have discretionary powers that would be vested in higher level officials in other countries. This is a good thing in many respects, but the other side of the coin is that you have totally incompetent yokels wielding the power of petty kings.

The case in question is an absolute disgrace and an excellent example of the failings of the American system of government in its present state of (dys)function. I would argue that it should be much, much harder to evict people for any reason, and that seizing private property for trivial reasons should be near impossible. Many here would agree, but in this specific case it is purely a local matter.

Sub/exurban Detroit cannot be compared to Singapore. And the problem has little to do with global population or overpopulation, but it is curiously linked to population density. Jürgen Habermas and others have written extensively about the phenomenon of 'Verrechtlichung' or 'juridification', i.e. the process by which an ever increasing amount of human interaction and social and economic life is subjected to legal regulation and codification, corresponding roughly to increases in population density that came with urbanisation, industrialisation, and the advent of urban modernity from the late 19th century on. But that is really not directly related to the given issue exept in a rather abstract way.

Maybe we need a special place where we can discuss highly unpopular and 'heretical' ideas that strongly contradict perceived wisdom or popular opinion. Any ideas?