citation needed The BND is legally allowed to evaluate to 20% of internet communications between Germany and foreign countries and only just got granted 100m € over the next five years for additional infrastructure because so far they only manage to evaluate about 5% of traffic.

Seeing how the vast majority of internet services is hosted outside of the US this pretty much allows them to monitor the internet usage of Germans without having to break any laws.

And I'm a big fan of negative theology... I guess that means my god is one bad boy O.o

"positive" and "negative" don't mean what you think they mean. Your post is hilariously uninformed.

The problem is that SMTP TLS is marketed as a solution to a problem - intelligence agencies reading your emails - that it simply doesn't solve. Thus it creates a false sense of security.

In itself and without the misleading marketing its implementation would of course be a very positive development.

As far as we know today that isn't quite true. Jews in Germany were generally integrated extremely well, they felt "German", they had fought for the Reich in WW1, ... They didn't try to hide or run, even long after aggressive rhetoric had already turned into actions. The idea that their own country might try to exterminate them was literally unthinkable to many of them. Rumors about extermination camps were discarded as wild exaggerations and the general mood was to just stay low, try to get along with the nazis as best possible and wait it out.

There is a huge debate among historians whether this attitude (instead of a "fight back or run" attitude) enabled the Holocaust, whether a crime on that scale would even have been possible if the victims had not walked like cattle to the slaughterhouse, deluded by their feelings of patriotism, and if Jewish organizations did commit a grave mistake by not taking reports from concentration camps more seriously and publicizing them instead of trying to get along well with the German authorities and trying not to give any cause for offense.

I think the problem runs a bit deeper as the machinist example shows.

Ellsworth might well be right in saying that a machinist simply doesn't fit into the framework Valve has created for its employees:
you can't just treat the machinist like support staff (cleaners, cooks, accountants, ...) because he/her might well make significant contributions to the project - machinists often do "simple" engineering work (which can be quite sophisticated in practice, incorporating a wealth of practical experience that more theoretically minded engineers might lack) in addition to machining - on the other hand he doesn't have the qualifications to freely move around project teams as other Valve developers are allowed to (he would need a software engineering background or be brilliant enough to start his own projects for that). He would be tied to Ellsworth's hardware team for the foreseeable future, essentially being her minion which is antithetical to the Valve culture.

Maybe there are some things you just can't do within the structure Valve chose for itself (such as hiring not ridiculously overqualified machinists) and that is imho an insight that warrants further thought and investigation (what are the limits of this structure? is there always a way to work around these limits? could one extend/stretch the culture without killing it? ...)

Maybe this is not news to you but as far as I can recall the overwhelming reaction after the Valve Handbook became public was unreflected admiration for the structure-less utopia described therein, not "Wait, maybe the lack of official structure means that the actual structure does not cease to exist but only becomes less visible to newcomers and maybe that is not a good thing." If you read the interview transcript you will see that she is in retrospect quite harsh with herself for having drunk the cool-aid and being sorely disappointed as a result. Of course she could have known better from the beginning but she didn't, just as the vast majority of slashdot commenters apparently didn't after they read the Valve handbook for the first time.

The actually existing elites may have a strong interest in perpetuating the "structureless" myth as their current informal influence may be much larger than what they could reasonably expect as part of any officially acknowledged social structure. So they take recruits that are already attracted by the company's utopian visions, indoctrinate them further to protect their own influence and when at some point the brighter amongst the employees realize the cognitive dissonance between what everyone says and what actually happens and start to lash out in disappointment they get fired to protect the company cult(ure).

Are you for real? in 1941 you froze Japanese assets in the US and put an embargo on US oil exports to Japan - when Japan was completely reliant on US oil (> 80% of their consumption).

You also used the US navy to escort your allies' (who were engaged in war with Germany) convoys that were carrying war materials to Great Britain and the USSR with explicit orders to treat any German ships as hostile. This lead to skirmishes with German U-boats and to German merchant ships being seized by the US navy - all the while you were still pretending not to be at war with Germany.

The reasons for these acts were attacks against your allies (Japanese occupation of French Indochina, German threat to Britain), no threat to the US itself. It's of course nice if you want to help out your allies but helping out your allies in their wars while pretending to be a neutral party in said wars does simply not work out. I don't see how you can in that situation complain that they made a war official that you had already been waging for several months.

It would be just as absurd as today's US complaining about a declaration of war by Iran, labeling them as the aggressor while ignoring any economic sanctions, assassinations of nuclear scientists, stuxnet, ...

Zeitgeist has been a common word ever since the 18th century, it's present-day definition is given by Klotz (who writes about the genius saeculi in 1760) and heavily criticized by Herder (who probably coined the German translation) just nine years later.

Goethe writes of the "Geist der Zeiten" ("Spirit of the Ages") in his Faust I and Hegel made the Zeitgeist an integral part of his view of history.

NS propaganda occasionally used the term but seeing how they intended to be their "thousand year reign" to be the end of history the idea of a relatively ephemeral Zeitgeist wasn't particularly appealing to them.

Get me some citations that link the popularity of the term Zeitgeist (which as I have shown has been around in a well-defined manner that reflects its current usage ever since the mid/late 18th century) to the 1930s-40s or kindly shut the fuck up.

And believe it or not a more pleasant environment makes a customer more likely to return to that restaurant, makes him stay there longer and order more.

Maybe that's because history has proven Orwell wrong (and Huxley right)?

that's exactly what they are doing - first they put a very small team on the project to develop the engine, backend technology, dev tools, ... while the game designers do their magic. then they ramp up the team size massively and start to develop actual art assets, start to write content, design levels, ... (which takes much longer than 6-12 months).

My understanding is that in this case Blizzard had already started production when they decided that they need to go back to phase 1 and rework the game design and the technical underpinnings. So they scaled the team back down (no point wasting money on creating e.g. art assets which later have to be laboriously ported to the rewritten engine, or creating dungeons that will have to be trashed because core game mechanics were rethought in the meantime, ...).

Or you get 6-7 years of super expensive cancer treatments from "healthy" people whereas the obese patient just dies cost-efficiently of his heart condition.

I had this discussion a dozen times with my brother who is a medical student and the tl;dr is "nobody has the time or money for that".

A doctor will always assume the most likely cause for any given combination of symptoms (even if they don't match 100%) and only start thinking about less likely alternatives if his treatment doesn't lead to improvements. Yes, sucks to be someone with a rare disease (that will only be diagnosed correctly very late if at all) but symptoms are often so unspecific and a thorough examination would be so expensive (let's do a blood screen every time you catch a cold because you might have some ultra-rare disease?) that this is the only practicable way.

Hormonal causes for obesity are possible but pretty rare - a much larger share of obese patients claims to suffer from e.g. thyroid issues than statistically possible. "Just eat less" is the right answer for the vast majority of obese patients and as they will lie to you about their food intake and exercise (admittedly often unconsciously, but then they don't tend to cooperate well when you ask them to keep a diary of every single thing they eat to make the more self-conscious) you never know if your original attempt at treatment did work or not. The share of patients who will lie into your face about having tried everything is probably still much larger than the share of patients who have actually followed your advice and it didn't help because they have some underlying physical issue.

The standard medical procedure of most likely diagnosis -> treatment -> in-depth examination if treatment doesn't show results just breaks down as the doctor has no way of knowing whether the treatment ever took place or not.