(like closing or failing to provide public restrooms)

Which usually stems from another first-world problem, homeless people.

If you're effectively making a cable that costs maybe $10 to manufacture, but selling it for $340, you don't need many "audiophiles" to make a significant profit. If you have a few hundred of them, you're already making 6-figure profits. (Obviously some cables may cost a little more to manufacture, but certainly not anywhere near as much as they are charging.)

It's kinda like wine. There have been studies that show that if you serve cheap wine in expensive bottles, people like it better. There have been studies that show that many wine prizes are awarded so haphazardly that you might as well choose them at random. There have been studies that show that actual wine judges at a major competition could barely rate the same wine with consistency above random chance on consecutive days.

And yet, people still will pay hundreds of dollars for some bottles. Recent studies have even shown that people literally get a better "pleasure" response in their brain when they are told a wine is expensive, compared to when it is supposedly cheap. It's more than a casual "placebo effect" -- it's something that people will pay hundreds of dollars to experience, even if most of that effect comes from the act of paying the hundreds of dollars rather than the product itself.**

I'm sure most audiophiles have a similar experience -- they literally receive more pleasure when they listen through an expensive cable. They want to pay more for that experience. So why not let them, I suppose? It's not like faith healers or psychics, who might do real damage with their charlatanism... the only damage these cable dealers could do, I suppose, would be with some obsessed audiophile who goes and throws his money away on expensive cables while his family starves. Maybe there's a couple people like that in the world, but it's certainly not a common problem.

And these sorts of "tests" won't convince anyone. I'm not sure what the point is anymore. It's like James Randi going after Uri Gellar -- true "believers" don't give a crap what the tests of "skeptics" say... they'll just keep believing. Let 'em enjoy their magic cables.

[**NOTE: To be clear, I am NOT saying all wine is the same. There are a lot of different varieties and flavors. But I do believe you should just buy what you like. There are $5 wines that have easily beat out $100 wines at blind tastings. So, if you like a wine and discover it's only $5, keep buying and enjoying it. If you like the $100 wine, and you like the taste enough to pay $100, fine.]

If companies that provide auto insurance are smart and see the writing on the wall (I have to assume so, since they are entirely about risk/benefit analysis), they will gradually transform into a different kind of entity. While they'll still provide insurance, they'll turn into a "subscription" version of a car rental company: Customers with the proper plan can request a self-driving car for certain periods, and may even receive a discount for doing so over using their traditional vehicle.

As autonomous car adoption rates increase, these hybrid companies will move more towards being an "auto club", where people pay a monthly fee (likely comparable to the combined cost of a loan payment+insurance) and will be able to order up self-driving cars. Depending on their plan, it may only be with advance planning and an extra charge for on-demand, or it is unlimited on-demand. They use the vehicle as necessary, then send it back.

They might only get so much time to allow it to sit idle, so if they're going to spend a day at Disneyland they have a car that will bring them, send it away, and order another when they go home. In fact, such "clubs" will likely have garages right outside of amusement parks. After all, if your car can drive itself, and you don't need to leave anything in the vehicle, why bother with parking? You could send it home, or to a far-off lot. And if you're going to do that, why bother with owning a vehicle at all? You can avoid all the maintenance of ownership, the cost of having a garage, and registration fees by just using one of these clubs.

The companies will still offer insurance: there will always be people who want to own their own car, self-driving or not. But that will become a "side" business, and the remaining portions of existing businesses may be sold off until you have only a handful of national auto insurers. I doubt the companies that focus on consumers would sell insurance to car companies, as the car companies have their existing liability insurance that will just increase if/when there's added risk from autonomous cars.

Even with the loss of the generators and distribution panels there was still a backup option. They used pump trucks to inject water into the system for emergency cooling. They were in place and operating in time to avert a major disaster, but a critical valve was in the wrong position so the pumped water ended up in storage tanks instead of the reactor cooling system. The valve could not be checked because the monitoring equipment was damaged, and damage to the plant made physical inspection difficult.

The real heart of the issue is that there was both inadequate tsunami resilience and due to management being cheap, and mistakes made by operators due to lack of experience, understanding and proper procedures thanks again to management being cheap.

No, the right to be forgotten only refers to the usual way that communities forget past actions because they don't spend much time checking microfiche at the local library for dirt on their neighbours. Search engines fundamentally change how easy it is to access that information - it goes from being a case of searching millions of articles in decades of newspapers manually to typing in someone's name.

Google pulled out of China due to the censorship demands. I somehow doubt that they will pull out of the EU though, they are too heavily invested.

STV produces a more representative government, if you group regions together so that votes are for a number of MPs rather than just one.

https://youtu.be/l8XOZJkozfI

Maybe "sensible" people recognize that distinction.

But, be honest here -- if you were a young woman, and you searched for a guy you were considering dating and saw he had been "accused of" rape, would you go out with him? Would you even bother asking for his story? Or would just say, "Uh... no thanks"?

If you were in charge of hiring someone for a position, and you did a search and saw a guy was "accused of" rape, would you think twice about hiring the guy? If you had 50 applicants for the job, wouldn't you just skip to the next guy? Even if you'd be okay hiring him, if you were at a prominent company, would you be concerned that people looking up your employees might come upon such a record about this guy? Maybe you'd be okay working with him, but would your customers be? Is the risk worth it?

Is it legal to discriminate on this basis? Probably not. But if you have 50 other candidates for a job, you'll probably just move onto the next candidate... and no one will know why you passed this guy over.

And if your response is to say, "Well, you should find out the whole story" -- well, most "sensible" people probably have other things they need to do with their lives other than researching someone else's past in detail. They look for the most prominent stuff that comes up in a search engine hit -- "ooh, he was a suspected rapist." Boom. Why go further? And it might not even be easy to go further, since news media sources are much more likely to report prominently when someone is arrested for some heinous crime... when the charges are dropped a few weeks later, you're lucky to see a few sentences on page 10, if that.

I do NOT think the current implementation of "right to be forgotten" laws work right, but just acting like there is no problem and "it's all part of history that sensible people should understand" is just ridiculous... particularly if it comes to inaccurate or misleading accusations of something particularly egregious. Facts taken out of context are often misleading. Most of those facts just would disappear from the public eye a couple decades ago (unless you specifically went digging in an archive), but now they can be instantly available for many years. Our public morality and ethics have not caught up with this.

Actually, that's not at all true, at least in the meaning of "history" before the internet. History is traditionally a narrative created about the past, usually derived from reliable sources (or at least what were considered reliable by the author of the narrative). A random recollection of some dude about some other dude was not "history" -- it was "gossip" at best. It only became "history" if someone wrote down the account and gave it credibility.

In the past, reliable records about the vast majority of events and people were scant. There are major figures of medieval Europe, for example, where we have almost no actual records from their lifetime -- maybe a baptismal record, or a record that they were paid once by some guy at some point, but that might be it.

The fact that little Jimmy went pee in his pants during gym class in 3rd grade didn't used to be "history." Maybe a few of the kids in his class might remember that incident a couple decades later, but it was generally forgotten by everyone else. Nowadays, one of those kids might take out a cell phone and take a picture of little Jimmy's wet pants, text it to some other kids, and the picture might end up on the internet if it's sufficiently entertaining to some stupid kid.

Now Jimmy's pee-filled pants are an official durable record that might persist on the internet for decades, available to anyone with sufficient skills at searching.

We used to have a historical "filter" that would get rid of the random quotidian minutiae of our lives, simply because it wasn't recorded in durable form. "History" would only record "important" stuff.

Now just about any event can be photographed, videotaped, or otherwise documented to become a "meme" or at least passed around among hoards of people (and thereby become a somewhat permanent record).

The problem here is that we ALL do crap in everyday life that would look bad out of context. And once that crap "bubbles up" somewhere on the internet, it really does become a part of "history" in the old sense, because search engines are our new machines that curate historical records... rather than historians digging in archives and collecting records which would be turned into a narrative.

I'm NOT saying any of this is "bad," only that is VERY different from what "history" was even just a couple decades ago.

You have a good point, though I doubt that anyone can succeed these days in having something "forcibly erased" from the entire internet AND all public databases AND all paper records.

What some people are proposing -- and what people are asking for in the "right to be forgotten" -- is to consider that some information be removed from prominent locations in major search engines, which (as I said) have become our default curators of "history." Note that it is "curating," not merely keeping records -- search engines need to decide what the top links are. And the algorithms they use may bring undue weight to random events that would largely have been forgotten a couple decades ago.

To be clear: I think the "right to be forgotten" actions against Google are NOT a good solution to this problem. I don't have a better solution myself either. But we do need to recognize that we live in a different world, where "history" is very different than it was just a few years ago. How we deal with that is yet to be determined, but our social mores and standards certainly haven't caught up yet in how to evaluate the new kind of "history" available to us.

And making some rant and slippery slope argument that making search engine hits less prominent will necessarily lead to the "forcible erasure" of history is just ridiculous, especially in the age where anyone can duplicate and store information in multitudes of places on the internet.

Districts would have to be grouped together to implement STV. It only works properly if there is more than one seat available.

I've been trying to think of a way we can get the Single Transferable Vote introduced. It's going to be difficult, especially since the people with the power to do it would be giving up some of their power. Also, most of the British public claim they are too thick to understand it.

Anyone have any ideas?

Their goal was to get these animals one of the legal protections afforded to humans, so the argument wasn't that they were people exactly. They were arguing that they should get some of the legal protections afford to persons, specifically the ones that prevent them being used for medical experiments without consent.

It's a subtle distinction, but as you pointed out in your own post most experts do agree that some animals experience emotions and suffering in a similar way to people. If the emotions and suffering are the same or very similar, it could be argued that laws protecting a person from suffering should apply to them as well.

Some of Cameron's friends of pornographers of one sort of another. From soft-porn in "newspapers" to "lad's mags" to soft child porn (e.g. the Daily Mail).

Age versification would seem to require entry of credit card data, unless they are going to accept a simple "I am 18 years old" tick box (Facebook uses that technique to "prevent" children under 13 from using it, LOL). Let's assume credit card, that means that free sites will die or be forced overseas. Pay sites won't be able to give much away as a preview either. So the competition for his friends in old media is reduced.