Did his ragdoll physics flip the fuck out? What the hell happened? That can't have thrown him that far...

Anyway, great example of the paranoia and defensiveness the police have to work with. Wish the officer had opted to move instead of shoot, but glad he's okay.

You can go back to using the old format if you like. At the bottom of the pages of the new format there is a place to 'opt out'.

Just to let you know you can go to the bottom of any page in the new design and 'OPT OUT'.

If you would rather use the old videosift layout you can 'OPT OUT' of the new one at the bottom of most any page thats using the new version. You can always opt back in again if you so desire.

What were you expecting, a Susan Boyle moment? Just wait for Kanye or Miley or some other douche to co-opt it, then 2 years from now you will be saying how much you despise what it has become and how much you appreciated it before it started trending.

Not torn at all here. They utilize the resources of a stable society then they have to provide their services to all their members without basis of discrimination. The other way of looking at it is this. Do gays and lesbians have the option to avoid paying taxes on this business owner's benefits? Ie., he probably went to public school, his water bills are artificially low, the roads that are serviced so people can get to his place, the police provided to protect and prevent crime in his area, etc.

If gays and lesbians can opt out of paying taxes for anyone who could potentially deny them services (ie, as of right now everyone) then they wouldn't have a problem.

If you're in a place where you are required to have legal identification and to produce it upon request by a peace officer and you refuse to do so and refuse to speak, I think it's justifiable for them to arrest you. I think it'd obviously be better to opt to cite the criminal (yes, if this is the law and he isn't abiding by it, he's a criminal), but they aren't able to cite you if you don't identify yourself.

Again, that's just if you're legally obligated to present your identification. If that's not the case and there's no suspicion of criminal activity, the cop went way overboard.

All the comments: TLDR. Does anyone know if providing your ID is required where this happened?

If you are seeing single videos in the new design you can go to the very bottom of the page and click opt out. Although i think you have to be logged in to do so.

Is there any way to opt out of the strange current single video view or maybe opt-in to something else? Is it part of that beta?

"I must say, as well, I don't like the beta layout of the site - since I get to see that every time I go on here, since the opt-out is only when I'm logged in. I think that if you force the issue on that design, it will be the final deathblow to the site, since it essentially hides the community."

I totally agree @gwiz665

Greece accumulated debt in a foreign currency (Euro). Had they been using a free-floating currency with Greece as the sovereign issuer, it would have been much less of a problem. But that's a different discussion.

You brought up retirement benefits. These benefits have been a major talking point over here in mercantilistic Germany. Unfortunatly, a lot of inaccuracies crept into the debate over time. A closer look reveals that it's not as black and white as it is made out to be. One point at a time...

The effective retirement age, if we look at OECD stats, is basically the same for men in Greece and Germany. The age of 56 is often thrown around as the expected average retirement age for workers in Greece, but that's only for the totally messed up public sector. The average for the private sector is significantly higher, as the OECD numbers indicate.

Yet the size of retirement benefits is even more controversial. There are, in fact, some very dubious practices going on in Greece, which result in rediculous retirement benefits for a select group of people, even at very young ages. Decades of nepotism, that's what it produces. But even so, pension expenditure as a % of GDP was not significantly higher in Greece before the GFC than in Germany. When Greek GDP collapsed, expenditures as a % increased, naturally. Some have gotten absurd benefits, but the majority got a pittance. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Greece doesn't have a social safety net, unlike Germany. There is no welfare. Many people have to take early retirement at reduced benefits to have any income at all.
So I'll say it's bad in Germany. Last decade's changes to our retirement system have a metric fuckton of people (~40% of workers) heading straight into poverty when they retire. It's social security for them, and nothing else. Still, it's bliss compared to what the plebs in Greece now ended up with.

However, even all those beautiful OECD stats have to be taken with a grain of salt. Germany has a working bureaucracy. Everything is documented. Greece is a mess. Therefore, all comparisons are guesstimates at best.

Finally, as long as the Greek economy produces enough goods and services, it is for them to decide how to distribute their wealth. If they want a lavish retirement system, so be it. Our governments opted to create a true underclass of the working poor, and gutted a retirement system that made it through two world wars unscathed. If German retirees want to bitch about their benefits, it should be aimed squarely at our governments and their intentional deconstruction of our social welfare state.

FYI at the bottom of the videos page you can click the 'opt out' button and not have to mess with the new design.

Opt-in would be an improvement in many cases, but I've changed my mind on it over the years and no longer see it as a working concept.

Let's put aside all the issues on the corporate end of things: even on the consumer end, it only ever works with competent consumers. Choice becomes a farce if you don't understand the different options, especially if any detrimental effects are indirect in nature, as is the case with the vast majority of information-related issues. The tiniest incentive is enough to sway folks towards pressing the fucking "Accept" button, so to speak.

In the same manner, transparency is all fine and dandy, but nobody's going to read anything longer than a single paragraph, everybody wants the paperwork out of the way so they can get the cookie.

Most folks don't have the time or the motivation to go into the nitty-gritty of personal data sovereignty. Put it up against convenience, and people don't give two shits about their data.

So there it is, the concept of a sovereign consumer is an illusion. The question is: do you take the decision away from the consumer for his/her own sake? Do you manipulate the decision making process by making it massively more inconvenient to give away your data?

Bad options all around...

too bad they opted for crude over funny

The really tricky part about all this is that, though the wages and conditions are frequently horrible, the workers there do at least have jobs and that makes them much better off then they would likely be otherwise. You don't frequently see reporters asking the workers "Are you glad you have this job?" With the exception of the rare cases of actual forced labor, they are free to quit. They can't, though, because the alternative is worse.

It's not really individual western consumers fault that this is the situation, nor even the global corporations commissioning the work, nor the local factory owners. We are all under the pressure of capitalism. If the factory owner decides to install fire extinguishers or whatever or increase his workers' wages, the contract will go to another factory owner who didn't. If the corporations insist on only doing business with factory owners like the former, one of their competitors will opt for the latter and put them out of business. If we as consumers decide to only purchase from companies who treat their employees well, we will have to buy less and there will be fewer manufacturing jobs in the third world, and the people will be out of work.

There is no solution. Capitalism and overpopulation are at the root of all this, but the alternatives to capitalism have all proven to be even worse so far and overpopulation may well be insoluble.

Aw. Now I'm all depressed. Still. Bad as things look, in most ways they're better on the whole then they were in previous centuries. True, the population continues to grow exponentially, but literacy and education are on the rise worldwide too, and hopefully they will hold the key.