Good luck with that. As unstable as it seems right now, there is much worse brewing there than ISIS. If we leave, something is going to fill that vacuum, and that something will likely be inimical to our interests and safety.

There's limitations to what we can do. We want to make sure and keep the hostages alive, but if we have no idea they were there, we can't prosecute someone for that mistake unless there was a criminal level of negligence.

And don't forget, the hostages were not kidnapped from their beds in Cleveland. They got to the Middle East somehow. If they were in the military, they got deployed, but they signed up for that. If they were in an NGO, they went to help people, but you don't go to the ME without understanding the risks of going there. If you're an American or Westerner in Iraq or Syria right now, you better have accepted the reality that you could be a hostage in a house about to be hit with a laser guided bomb, or you probably shouldn't be there.

It's not a war when the other government doesn't mind you being there. They do get to make that decision as a sovereign state. And it was known to be a military operation, so that was approved as such. If the civilians were collateral damage in a legitimate military operation with legitimate military objectives where they tried but failed to ascertain the presence of the civilians, then it sucks, but it's not illegal.

Of course, strangely, I'd suggest that the operation for getting bin Laden was more of an act of war because it is clear that the Pakistanis were not clued in on it and could not have therefore approved it. However, on that point, they could go fuck themselves. If some part of their government knowingly let him stay there, a mile or so from their military academy, us simply going in and killing him is probably the best could have expected.

I'm not sympathetic to the government in the sense that I like the shit that they do. However, there are some things that the government does that we effectively have asked them to do.

My problem with Snowden is that he embarrassed the country, caused National Security breaches, and he did it in the manner least likely to actually cause actual change to occur.

Sure, sound and fury and we all know what that signifies.

So we spied on allied leaders for instance. Really? No shit. They all know we're spying on them and we know that they're spying on us. The Israelis? Spying on us. The Germans? Spying on us. The UK? You get the idea.

All you do by releasing the proof is forcing those leaders to have to act as if this is some sort of outrageous affront to their country, as opposed to business-as-usual. Half the time in an alliance, you know that the other guy's a jerk, but you need him to help you against that bigger jerk. That's international relations 101.

And the government spying on US citizens? Was that actually something that no one believed was happening? And what is the effect of that? Did we blackmail any journalists into writing softball stories? Did we run people out of office with that material? Have they shut down human right's activists with that?

No? Oh, they looked at my email. Who the fuck cares? My ISP probably does that five times a day. There's more threat from some pimply faced kid stealing nudes from some celebrity than the government coming to tell me to stop reading the New Republic.

Do you know why many people over a certain age dislike him? Because we already understood that all this was happening. So we get to have our intelligence activities dragged through the mud, activities that you should know that *every* country does, and we got zero in return except hyperventilating.

Of course, I am not at all surprised that this happened, it was bound to happen eventually. The information wants to be free and all of that. I just feel like Snowden decided to let off a bomb and then let the rest of us see if we could sort it out, and it will all be somehow "okay" in the end. I may not think he's the Antichrist, but I can't think very highly of him.

A lot depends on how much the resource extraction did to actually cause the quake at that moment.

Most geological features are extremely massive and not so precariously balanced, but there are exceptions to that like faults.

If the quake was going to happen eventually anyway, and all we did was hasten it a few years or a few decades, the reality is that the extraction determined the time of the incident, but did not cause the actual build up of energy. All you did was move up the quake schedule.

In that way, you may have caused it to go off with less energy and that could be helpful. An example would be much like those folks who use surplus artillery pieces to cause controlled avalanches so that an inevitable avalanche is allowed to come down predictably and with a little bit of control.

Do I think resource extraction is working that way? Certainly not, because we're not planning extraction in that way. What we're doing now is shooting artillery at the snow pack for other reasons and not really caring where it comes down or when. If they even believe that it will come down at all to begin with.

Still, I would be careful about assigning blame to extraction companies for big killer earthquakes. The fact is that your big earthquakes are dealing in colossal forces. If they were balanced so finely that extraction could set them off, you can be pretty sure that that earthquake was coming anyway. It's sort of like drilling a well and accidentally releasing buried Cthulhu. Sure, you released a Great Old One, but let's face it, if he was that close to the surface, *somebody* was going to do it eventually. You can't just stop drilling wells just because you might possibly release unfathomable forces from outside of Time and Space. Such forces tend to take care of themselves.

Did anyone else initially think that this official's title was actually, "Chief Postal Inspector Guy"?

Actually considering ethics in science isn't what I'd call a waste of time. If we'd done that more in the past, we might not have walked into some of the shit we have to worry about today.

And as for the start of life argument, I don't see what conception has to do with death. I presume you're talking about the issue of determining if someone is really "dead" who is in a vegetative state and how that's the same as being a non-thinking bunch of cells.

It's actually not really all that difficult to separate the cases. We are all a "Ship of Theseus". A human isn't a single three dimensional object or set of objects, defined by immutable characteristics, a human is a process. We have a beginning, middle, and end. In that process we look different and are probably composed of significantly different matter, but we are still a "human" if we proceed from beginning to end as a human. When that process terminates beyond our the ability to restart it, then that human is dead.

As a human if you're irreversibly brain dead at any point after the development of an actual brain, you're not going to turn back the process. Not only that, but your brain needs to continue to operate for your fully-differentiated body to survive. You cannot go back to being able to live without the organs you have developed.

An embryo may not yet have a brain, or differentiated organs yet, but unlike a brain-dead individual, it can continue the process or living normally, if allowed to continue to develop. The fact that an embryonic form of a human needs to depend on the internal environment of a mother at that point is no more unusual or special than the fact that we need to live in an oxygen-rich atmosphere that protects us from radiation and other hazards of deep space. We are just in a form that requires that sort of environment to live in until we can transition out of it.

We remain an individual human process proceeding normally though our "execution". Humans may look like the inputs and the outputs, but what we really are is the running instance of a program that manipulates our environment. Although that may have connotations of a "soul", the idea is nothing more than what we see running on our computers every day in another form and while it does not disallow this from being a "soul", it doesn't require that religious element to be involved for it to be real.

So, very simply if the process can no longer be maintained in a running state, then that person is well and truly dead. If that process proceeds down even what appears to be abnormal lines, but it is able to continue, they are "alive", albeit outside optimal parameters. No matter the stage of development, or the result, I'd argue you should consider such a process to be a living human and ethically treat them as a human.

It is important to state that "ethically treating someone as human" doesn't preclude ending that life in extreme cases, or making alterations, but it does require us to at least make that decision about a person as if they are a person, and not as an un-person or as a "thing". That is the key point. You can use or dispose of a "thing" almost at will. There is a higher standard for disposing of or making use of a "person". Historically, most cultures have tended to want to make this distinction, and for understandable reasons.

The concept of starting "life" at conception is simply the logical place that an individual human process begins. A human sperm or an egg will not become an individual human. Nor will the dead matter that used to be a human nor will that matter which is the castoff of the process of human life. When it ceases to continue to contribute to the process, it is no longer "human". Cut your arm off, that arm isn't a human because it can't maintain human life on its own apart from the rest of its body. An embryo, though many, many times smaller than an arm or even a fingernail, is fully capable of maintaining the normal processes of life as a human in that state.

In the context of this situation, life beginning at conception simply means we need to treat genetic modification with the same ethical care we would for any other human. You can still suggest that the ethical considerations would allow the procedure, but you should start with the consideration of the subject embryo/cells as a human, and not as a thing.

There is the "soul" debate and that does up the ante for many people.

Scientifically, however, a fertilized egg is the first point in the process where you have a new individual. That's a rather solid line to use, even if it is rather inconvenient for certain purposes. Of course, depending you your point of view, that may be a benefit of the line, not a problem.

A lot of ethical considerations stem from what you consider to be a "human". While you can set that point anywhere you want to, the problem is also that you can set that point anywhere you want to. With the ability to genetically engineer humans, it's far too convenient to state that they're not human until you're done altering their genome at the most obvious point of intervention.

It's the sort of loophole that can be very easily exploited to alter humans in any way you wish without hindrance. Trying to set anything but the strongest legal framework against this sort of behavior will likely fail because the ability to profit is considerable. You will always have your stereotypical mad scientist or perfectly rational "Chinese scientist" who simply does not accept your ethical position as persuasive.

Right now, under our current legal understanding of "personhood", widespread genetic modification of humans for any purpose whatsoever is entirely possible, and frankly, it's likely. The Chinese researchers here show that if something is possible to do, it is going to be made to happen, which should surprise no one. The only real question is, how do we deal with that reality and what does that mean for humanity? Genetic modification of humans can go either way, I just would not expect it to go without issues.

I'm sorry did you actually mean:

KHAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!

I get the idea that Yahoo isn't actually turning around. They're doing worse and they're going to continue to do worse and they will need to continue to lay off.

AOL had this thing in 2010 when that other Google person became CEO there where they were planning to just have one big layoff so that they could get on with life. That would have worked, if they hadn't kept fundamentally sucking ass.

Being laid off sucks. You may well be relatively confident that you have a new job in the works, but all the capital you might have gained in that company is over, save for perhaps, some references you can get if you didn't piss off your managers or co-workers and maybe some non-worthless options.

It also can come at inopportune times for your financial situation. It is a pain in the ass to get a loan for a new house when you haven't been in a new job for very long, and that's even when you chose to move jobs for a bigger paycheck, and so should be able to be more capable, rather than less capable of paying the bills.

More to the point, despite it being just "business", you wonder how you ended up on the selection list. Even if you're relatively sure that it wasn't merit-based retention, layoff time is when managers remove people who they couldn't justify outright firing, but are more than happy to throw to the wolves when the reaper requests his quota.

And of course, finally, while there may be many jobs out there on average, it is very possible that you're too expensive or too old, or your skills were too specific to get you a comparable position elsewhere. And it is known you were laid off and need a new job, there is a real chance you'll get lowballed. You can be up shit creek if that happens and you have a family to support who were relying on every last dime you made to support them.

tl;dr Having more job opportunities available only makes being laid off suck slightly less. If you had wanted a new job, you'd have gone and gotten one yourself.

People at that level are advised by groups who are retained to aid with a particular sort of image or messaging. When your words to your staff can affect an entire company's stock price, and thus, affect the company at a fundamental level, you learn quickly to never talk off script.

To be fair, saying the wrong thing and torpedoing a company's stock price can negatively affect not only the bottom line, but it also opens an otherwise good company up for "activist investors" or raiders who might be worse for your company in the long term than having to adhere to an inhuman script filled with euphemisms. A company in the hands of raiders ends up becoming a company split up or sold at a fire sale. That would mean the loss of *all* employees.

Of course, there is a line where that can go from prudence to moral cowardice or even indifference. It is not always clear where that line really is. Few who have been laid off are really able to appreciate the bigger picture, given their current catastrophe.

I do know of one CEO of a small company who personally called everyone he laid off down to a meeting, and explained the situation while in tears. I'm sure it made an impression on them, but in the end, they were all still out of a job. I can't imagine being someone in charge of a bigger company who might have to do that for hundreds of people for multiple layoffs. Admittedly, I also have trouble believing that they could relate to hundreds of people under them as individuals.

If you work for a company over around 100 or so people, and you are an "individual contributor", you can pretty much expect that you will start having upper management become remote unless they make an increasing effort. Humans in general can only maintain only a certain number of relationships realistically, and a CEO probably has just as many outside the company as in it. Don't go to work for a big company and expect a personal touch from anyone but your manager or possibly their manager. They suffer from human limitations as much as anyone. You're going to be treated as a number which only works if the management is run by someone like The Count, who rather fancies numbers.

Honestly, you're absolutely right that I have no first-hand proof of bin Laden's killing. I really have no first-hand proof of much of anything outside of my personal experience.

You have to trust someone to give you facts, or failing that, you have to accept that the world outside your own experience may well be a shifting reality which is almost entirely out of your control. Which in fact, it is, but probably not to the extent that the conspiracy theorists out there believe.

It's entirely possible bin Laden is a figment of everyone's imagination. He didn't do anything, and the WTC was blown up by someone else: the US Government, Hamas, Halliburton, the Walt Disney Company. It doesn't even matter really. This is all mostly a movie that's happening on the wall of Plato's Cave for me. I accept that there is a reality out there, of course, but I wonder how far we're going to get by reading so far into the material that we see overarching conspiracies.

I already know it is possible for the US Government to act like a pack of assholes. They already do that domestically. I'm just wondering what people want us to do about it. What sort of world do these people envision? I imagine that it looks much like the world we tried to live in before the first two world wars. Pretending that our prosperity isn't built on the backs of intervention, when we were regularly in banana republics intervening for our own interests. Pretending that we tamed the Wild West, when taming the Wild West was a decades long war of conquest against the native population to make it slightly safer for the settlers to overcome the elements.

I don't believe what I am fed by the government or the media 100%, but I'm not sure what the world looks like at when I believe it 0% of the time. Probably just as bad.

The Halliburton reasoning is as tired as the WMD reasoning. The real reason we went into Iraq is because sanctions were failing, countries were wanting to pull out of them after a decade of them failing to cause Saddam to be overthrown, and we wanted to take a mulligan and try again.

The reason we went into Iraq is that our government regretted leaving Saddam Hussein in power and were determined to correct the mistake. 9/11 provided the best possible cover for that. Contrary to popular opinion, politicians aren't exactly the same as marionettes that dance on the strings of corporations. There is definitely conflict of interest, but the politicians had a very specific idea of how they think the world needs to look. That is why they got into politics to begin with. The ability to exercise power by politicians who were hoping to change the world is why we went into Iraq, and don't let anyone convince you otherwise. That's worth more to a politician than a billion dollars in campaign funds, because they only take the billion so that they get the chance to do things like start wars or make a name for themselves as peace brokers.

They thought that they could overthrow Saddam and realign the Middle East more firmly in the US camp by dint of freeing the population, who would be duly grateful. The miscalculation was that even if such a thing was possible in 1991, it wasn't going to happen in 2003. Sadly, I think the problem with the war and its outcome was that it was insufficiently cold-blooded in approach. We didn't do the math, and we clearly didn't understand the facts on the ground. It has every hallmark of the use of a professional military to create a situation that was completely bungled in the hands of the politicians it was handed off to. As a conspiracy, it was a poor one. As some politician's wish fulfillment, it makes perfect sense.

I don't know, it sure is driving up real estate prices near the exchanges, buying up high powered computer equipment and networking, employing coders, mathematicians, network engineers, and etc.

Oh you meant, how is it funding the businesses whose stock is being traded?

Not at all. Unless those businesses happen sell services to HFT houses, of course.

That said, the market develops these various services/parasites because it serves a real purpose, mitigating the risk of the initial primary risk of investment in a company's stock. Combining a set of stocks in a basket can even out the risk, for instance. That basket then has its own characteristics and risk, which might be mitigated in a different way.

All of that is a meta-game which has nothing to do with the business behind the stock and everything to do with what you can do with instruments that have an variable value and their own characteristics.

It is unclear how HFT helps anyone, and frankly, it feels more than a little abusive, especially if it can take out the rest of the market in an escalating arms race of faster trading and even lower ethical values than an already pretty ethics-free environment. It now feels like they will get to a point where their trades are actually so fast that they will no longer actually act on data, and become expensive, very fast, but approach randomness.

That does not mean, however, that HFT serves no valid purpose, and there are suggestions that it adds liquidity to the market or something. The problem is that the automatic and high speed nature of the trading algorithms magnifies errors and allows fraud like this to get out of hand, so any positive value may be marginal or even overcome by negatives.