"In 2012, Brown similarly pored over millions of emails hacked by Anonymous from the private intelligence company Stratfor. It was during his work on the Stratfor hack that Brown committed his most serious offence, according to US prosecutors – he posted a link in a chat room that connected users to Stratfor documents that had been released online.
The released documents included a list of email addresses and credit card numbers belonging to Stratfor subscribers. For posting that link, Brown is accused of disseminating stolen information – a charge with media commentators have warned criminalises the very act of linking."
Citizen policy juries, selected by random sampling of the electorate, with access to experts making public recommendations on policy.
Even if they don't have formal authority to legislate or execute policy, politicians enacting laws in conflict with those recommendations would have to at least explain why.
The real value of an MBA is the signalling it provides future employers - that you are sufficiently smart, diligent & focused to get into a B school, and prepared to do long & arduous hours for the company in order to get ahead.
The content is beneficial but inconsequential - not much more than a broad survey of intro/mid level undergrad stuff - and certainly nothing that a mildly dedicated auto-didactic couldn't learn with a local library card.
The tech world is one in which there are many ways to signal competence, and I'd argue that an MBA is a highly inefficient way of doing that. And even if you do find a tech company that does value MBAs, do you really want to work for one that values inefficient mechanisms or academic pedigree highly over say, competent contribution to open source?
That said, I don't regret doing an MBA - it was the seed that lead me to where I am now - doing a PhD in Philosophy
And that brings us back to the critical point: Of the people who are smart and have 12+ years experience, a significant portion will (A) be wise as to the going rate for good people, and (B) have families so that a below market salary has a clear negative impact on their daily lives.
Is it really worthwhile to choose to avoid hiring ~50% of the best people in the industry at the outset, on a vague fear that personal happiness will doom the startup? Is that a winning recruitment strategy?
Rights are the correlative of duties and obligations. If people have a duty not to X, then who ever that duty is owed to now has a right to X.
As a being capable of moral reflection, I think I have a duty not to inflict, or support the infliction upon, other beings capable of feeling pain and suffering. Thus, other beings have a right not to be inflicted with pain and suffering, from me at least.
If I am about to demolish a house, it is my moral duty to ensure that the house contains no occupants. It is not sufficient to claim "as far as I know the house is empty, therefore I needn't check".
Similarly, if you make any moral claim predicated on the assumption that animals do not experience pain (or experience it to a lesser degree than humans), the burden is on you to demonstrate as much.
If you do not take religion or the supernatural as an axiom, you face a very difficult proof due to the physiological and evolutionary similarities between humans and other animals.
No, just as it's not immoral to eat animals. It's about how you treat animals.
Anyway, you're going to have a problem proving that plants feel pain since they lack all of the elements that cause the experience of pain in animals, such as nerves and brains.
Read my comment more carefully. I didn't make that claim.
I claimed that if you make a distinction in your morality between animals and plants based on their ability to feel pain, you have that duty. (Note that this is a claim about the consistency of a morality, not about one particular moral system.)
If on the other hand your morality does predicate your moral right to eat something based on its ability to feel pain (as our ancestors did), then there is no such duty.
(Of course there is also a grey area between these -- a morality based on a creature's ability to express an experience of pain is more broadly accessible.)
Instead of defending our current habits with theoreticals, shouldn't we determine our actions based on the information we have available to us, with respect to the alternatives?
I know your joking, but the premise of your original comment was that morality is black and white. If this is true for you, then yes, you'd have to voluntarily stop eating. :)
Personally, I take the position that everything I do probably has a negative impact somewhere. Taking the car, bus, train, or staying at home all have consequences for the environment. While I don't lock myself in my apartment, I do regularly review my lifestyle choices and see if they align with my values.
The same is true of the food I eat, both from an environmental point of view as well as how much suffering is involved.
Nice to see an explanation video that isn't just stick figures and animation. It was really slick - informative, humorous, and on brand (love that your socks match your brand's colour).
Agree that dropbox for wi-fi is confusing. Why not something like 'easy wi-fi sharing' or the like.
I started my PhD last year and was shocked at how intentionally broken academic e-books are. A few examples of daily experiences that send me into fits of frustrated rage and incredulity.
- ebook substitute for a text that only allows online perusal and restrict download for offline use.
- ebooks that only allow access to one user per institution at a time (in an institution with 30k+ students)
- ebooks that can only be viewed by adobe digital editions.
- journal article pdf downloads that only display bitmap images of text so that copying quotes is impossible.
I'd much rather use electronic resources as physical storage of 200 texts per years is just nuts, but sadly, publishers would rather extract rent from a broken system.
You can generally solve the DRM problem through bookwarez. I have ~no problem pirating to format shift. I'm fortunate that all the academic stuff I care about is available as pdf preprints directly from the author (cs/crypto vs. bio, I guess)
The released documents included a list of email addresses and credit card numbers belonging to Stratfor subscribers. For posting that link, Brown is accused of disseminating stolen information – a charge with media commentators have warned criminalises the very act of linking."