Re-Enter The Dragon

Only because as a society we've decided that abject poverty is not acceptable. You hear lots of talk about government anti-poverty programs "failing" when in fact they are successes precisely because being poor in America rarely means the same thing it does in any 3rd world country when less than 100 years ago there was practically no difference.

Sounds like bullshit world to me...

Tell you what: the "cloud" hype will come crashing down the minute some big company that invested massively in off-site services and storage loses internet connection for a few hours...

The grand word "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle" hides the very simple concept of an oversized radio-controlled plane. Amateurs have been doing aerial photography - and sometimes very good aerial photography - on the cheap with RC planes for a long time. Nothing earth-shattering here...

Same way those who support murdering doctors who perform abortions rationalize away "thou shalt not kill."

I would like to believe that it is impossible for facebook to do that. I think targeted marketing is just snake oil being sold to snake oil salesmen. I think that whatever success facebook has had with "targeted" ads so far is nothing more than a manifestation of regression to the mean. In other words - facebook ads have worked reasonably well because facebook is new, not because all that of demographic information makes a substantial difference in the effectiveness of advertising. People like new stuff - including new forms of advertisements, but once the novelty wears off they just tune out and response rates fall back to near nominal levels.

And why is that fundamental assumption important?

I'm saying overt discrimination has been significantly reduced while soft discrimination has not, it may even have increased as the bigots learned what they could get away with if they just keep their mouths shut in front of non-bigots.

Why? Specifically to measure if discrimination is occuring. Like the way arrest reports are required to indicate race of the arrestee and that data has shown a disproportionate number of arrests of blacks vs whites.

Unearned privileges are rarely obvious to those who posses them, that's why they get so nasty when they lose them - they don't see it as no longer getting special treatment, they see it as others getting special treatment. Witness all of the pissing and moaning about gay marriage "destroying the sanctity of marriage." It doesn't matter how it happens, those losing their place at the top will always be unhappy about it, so coddling them is not a priority.

Yeah, well, in the best of all possible worlds, that would actually be possible. In the world most of us live in, that's a pipe dream. Quotas - which, if you actually look into it in the USA are rarely actual quotas - don't carve out different groups, they just recognize that society in general already treats members of these groups differently.

Seems to me that you are avoiding the question of WHY discriminiation is wrong. Simply stating that it is fundamentally wrong without a rationalization for why it is wrong isn't particularly useful. Sure, it is nice and simple to say that and ignore the whys, but it isn't really all that helpful to getting us to a place that fixes the problems that discrimination causes.

That there is the problem with your analysis, you think that it is feasible to make discrimination hard. That, I contend, is an unfounded assumption. So unfounded that we even have a name for discrimination that is not feasible to prevent - soft bigotry. The majority of discrimination in the US is the soft kind because it is so incredibly hard to prove.

Emphasizes or recognizes? Your position sounds a lot like "if we ignore it, it will go away." My experience has been that there is no one more bitter than someone facing the loss of unearned privilege. No matter how you do it, any attempt to take away that unearned privilege is going to provoke all kinds of nastiness.

And what if government is unable to ensure that? That the cost of documenting and enforcing penalties against unfair discrimination is too high to be practical. What then? Give up? Or go for an imperfect but affordable solution?

The problem is that advertising has usurped the role of micropayments - visit a page and the owner gets about a tenth of a cent for each ad displayed. We need a ubiquitous system of micropayments in order to cut out the advertiser middleman on the web because everything is so decentralized that the old subscription model doesn't really fit.