"Only 3% of people who use google have actually read the terms and conditions that they agreed to. "

3%?? I would have been amazed if it was as high as 0.3%.
3% would be (conservatively) over 10 million people. I doubt it's anywhere close to that.

I am not sure that privacy as a concept is even possible in a world with machine learning algorithms and big data. That's not a value judgment; I don't think privacy is worthless, I just find it increasingly untenable.

Machine learning has gotten so good, that even if you anonymise data, it's now pretty easy to tell a lot about you. Your digital fingerprint is there and an AI will be 99% correct about your age, gender, politics, sexual orientation, etc, even without you giving up that data.

He's clearly mad.... but he's not wrong.

Why WOULDN'T you want your most profound beliefs enshrined in law? Everyone wants that.

I believe that discrimination on the basis of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc is wrong and I want that in law. I believe women have a right to control their reproductive cycles and I want that in law.

His core concept isn't wrong, it's just the beliefs that he espouses are wrong. And yes, they're fucking WRONG. Not different, not a matter of personal belief, they're flat out wrong and should be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Liberals need to stop tip-toeing around the right and stand up for what they believe in.

@Ickster
"That we're equating that with something like gay people being refused service because of who they are says a lot about how skewed our perception of balance is."

This is the fundamental point. I DON'T equate the two at all.

But as soon as we open this door, we have to deal with the permutations of it.

Let's say that for the sake of argument, gender identity and sexual orientation are now protected classes (legally, they're not, but let's assume they are).

Ok, you can't discriminate against someone for being LGBTQ. Great, that is obviously correct.

But we're making the argument here that you CAN discriminate against someone based on their political affiliation. Would you be ok with someone refusing service to Obama? Hillary? Bernie? What about an employer in a Republican town who finds out their employee is a prominent local democrat?

I get the argument and honestly, I agree with most of what you've said. If any of Trump's cronies had shown up in my (completely imaginary) restaurant, I'd probably have turfed them out with a lot less civility than SHS was shown.

But I'm just not sure that the world following my example is a good idea....

2018 and people still don't understand how recording orientation works.

"A twin study of self-reported psychopathic personality traits"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886902001848

Perhaps the above is more to the point. Similar twin study showing identical twins having similarly significant genetic component to psychopathy as the prior studies show for sexual orientation.

Should we be similarly upset at people assigning morality to psychopathic behaviours?

"Genetic and Environmental Influences on Religious Interests, Attitudes, and Values: A Study of Twins Reared Apart and Together"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062599?seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents

Religiosity shows the same thing, strong correlations for identical twins, raised apart from one another, and much weaker correlations for non-identical twins also raised apart.

If Tom Cruise claims his belief in Scientology is a birth right and how dare we judge him, is he really backed by the science?

Where I am coming from, is insisting that for all the factors involved in human decision and behaviours, I still want to conduct ourselves as though free will exists.

More importantly, the freedom to discriminate against people based upon their behaviours must be defended as strongly as the right to discriminate based upon purely in born, unchangeable attributes like race, gender and ethnicity must be opposed.

As promised, the most promising results when polling google scholar:

"Genetic and Environmental Influences on Sexual Orientation and Its Correlates in an Australian Twin Sample"

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/J_Bailey2/publication/12572213_Genetics_and_Environmental_Influences_on_Sexual_Orientation_and_Its_Correlates_in_
an_Australian_Twin_Sample/links/0deec518bc0435c0cd000000.pdf

Probably one of the better studies, it breaks down orientation to a scale versus straight binary, though the results are then statistical correlations and my stats classes are too long ago for me to work that back into something resembling my claims above.

"Sexual Orientation in a U.S. National Sample
of Twin and Nontwin Sibling Pairs"
http://ioa126.medsch.wisc.edu/findings/pdfs/47.pdf

19 identical twins in the study with at least one twin with non-hetro orientation, within those 19 pairs, 6 showed concordance. So 6 of 19 identical twins sharing orientation, 13 of 19 not. This supports my statement above that in studies identical twins more often than not don't share homosexual orientation. This study also lists the statistical correlation of this result as 0.68, the previous studies statistical correlation was lower at 0.51(1.0 would be perfect correlation). If I'm reading the statistics remotely right, the above study then is similarly in keeping with my statement.

"Homosexual Orientation in Twins: A Report on 61 Pairs and Three Triplet Sets"
http://hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/1961to1999/1993-homosexual-orientation-in-twins.html

Smaller sample size and different polling methodology, specifically sought out respondents of non hetro orientation. Shows a higher correlation, 25 of 38 identical twins being concordant. That's 66% concordance so opposite of my claim that more often than not they are discordant.


Running out of time here to post results. If you keep digging though it's more of the same, identical twins don't come close to showing 100% correlation, highest study of the samples I've pulled is 66%, and it's by far the highest. This is in contrast to race and gender, where you fully expect 100/100 identical twins to match.

, I said it was more controversial.

I dare say even agreeing that we don't solely choose our sexual interests, when it comes to our actions I insist we treat those as the result of free will, aka choice.

When I'm not typing from a 4in screen I can pull up the references, but the peer reviewed studies on genetics hardly illustrate that sexual orientation and identity are dominated by it. Twins studies do show that identical twins more often share orientation than non-identical, which gives a correlation to genetics. However, I'll pull up the studies but last I reviewed them, more than half the identical twins in the studies did NOT share the same orientation. That is an arguably compelling indicator that genetics does not solely determine orientation.

Other twin studies comparing other behaviours like religion show a similar pattern. Studies with twins on violent and aggressive behaviour show an even stronger "genetic" component than the orientation studies, and nobody has any qualms about being politically incorrect declaring that violence is a choice and not a birth attribute...

Do you recall the day you chose to be heterosexual? ;-)

While far from settled, there are indications sexual orientation may be genetically influenced at least, if not genetically determined.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/speculative-genetic-link-to-homosexuality-found

There's more conclusive evidence of a genetic component to transsexuality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_transsexuality

Glad to hear you stating things as you did, I largely agree with you.

The trick playing out in Canada now is that because we've expanded the definition of protected classes more quickly than the US, the protected classes rights are interfering more and more.

I do not believe that religion should be a protected class in the same way as race, gender or ethnicity. Similarly sexual orientation and gender identity shouldn't be either. Race, Gender and ethnicity are all assigned at birth and can largely be determined by blood test and demonstrated to be something entirely outside an individuals control, choice and behaviour.

Religion is the most easily demonstrated as deserving a different status of protection than the others in that most religions ALL hold the others as heretical. Declaring other faiths immoral is necessary to religious freedom and I take as the very positive basis of America's freedom of religion notion being a wonderful agreement between Catholics and Protestants to agree to disagree over war.

More controversially, I would also class your sexual preferences and identity in with religion as a different degree of protected class. There is an element of behaviour and choice here that can not be determined at birth with any manner of blood test or parental bloodline.

More simply, the right to discriminate should not exist for immutable things people are born to and remain beyond their choice or control, while the right to discriminate based upon behaviours is entirely necessary and important. If you want to believe Scientology can help you heal broken limbs and transcend the world your free to it, but I'm gonna treat you differently than a sane person. To similarly treat someone different based upon race or gender though is unacceptable.

Honestly, I really don't care what the beliefs of any church are.

If a church wants to take the stance that gays are evil and people with green eyes are demons... well, they're idiots, but as long as they don't do anything illegal, they're entitled to their stupid beliefs.

But religious beliefs shouldn't grant you any special privileges under the law. Basically, I believe you should be free to have whatever religion you want, as long as it's within the confines of the law that applies to everyone. No special exemptions.

So, no, a baker doesn't get to decide whether they can refuse service to a gay couple because of their religious beliefs. They can potentially refuse service if the LAW says they can refuse service to anyone for any reason, but religion shouldn't enter into it.

Why should a religious bigot get some special treatment that a regular bigot doesn't?

Now, after all that, the question of forcing businesses to provide service under the law is a tricky one as you and @newtboy have discussed. But generally, there are specific "protected classes" (not sure about the exact term), that you are not allowed discriminate on (i.e. gender, ethnicity, disability, religion, etc). I would be in favour of adding sexual orientation to that list.

So yes, you can refuse a nazi or a cop or a pedophile, but you can't refuse a native american lesbian in a wheelchair.

But it does prioritize freedom of choice...the customers. Freedom to discriminate against others based on race, sex, sexuality, age, or religion in public business is a freedom most people don't want to foster.

I do agree, there are exceptions, like the one you mentioned. Forcing a women only spa area (or any other business where group nakedness is part of the service) to allow people with a penis to enter is touchy (pun intended)....far more than allowing them in a rest room....and above my pay grade, so I won't be opening a women only spa, at least until that's well settled.

Edit: no one is forced to participate in a lifestyle, period. First, creating an object used by someone who's 'lifestyle' differs from yours is not participating in it, second, you are not forced to remain in business. If you CHOOSE to have a public business you are required to operate it according to the law and not discriminate against customers based on race, age, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, .... with very few specific exemptions.
Bigots got over having to make cakes for interracial couples, they'll get over this bigotry too.

Can be! It depends on the contents of the container and how air-tight its construction and materials are. Generally materials packed for transport are supposed to be strapped or otherwise held in place so that they don't shift and upset the transport vehicle (see the 747 that crashed in the Middle East when its cargo shifted...). But that's just the stuff that was meant to be in the container. Every ship has to contend with the risk of water ingress. Un-contained water in a vessel forms a "free surface" and the so-called free surface effect applies. That's where that material can and will move based on gravity, often making a bad situation much much worse. Imagine water in a tank (itself a free surface) vs. water sloshing around the cabin of a plane. This is what usually causes ships to capsize: water gets in and isn't contained, so it can move tremendous amounts of mass anywhere it wants to go -- usually in the direction it's already going. Calculations of ship stability for things like cargo loading and ballast assume minimal free surface in the ship, because you have to. That's how ships stay upright and afloat.

How does this apply to lost containers? Depending on how watertight the container is and how well strapped in the contents are, some amount of water may get in and form a free surface. This free surface will move around until the container finds its equilibrium which may or may not be watertight and less dense than the water around it, which defines whether it floats or sinks and what direction it faces when it does.

A container with a lot of weight on one side but otherwise watertight will stand upright and perhaps still sink (like the one at the end of this video). A container with well-distributed weight would tend to end up flat. Whether it sinks or not depends on whether it's watertight and what its density is -- the weight of the container displacing ocean vs. the weight of the ocean it displaces.

Sadly, a significant number of containers end up at the worst possible density/displacement where they float just at or near the surface and lay in wait to devastate passing ships, regardless of the orientation of the container itself.

I like that they've changed the standard orientation of the bill

I carry a 5$ Canadian bill that depicts kids playing hockey on a frozen pond and also has a poem on it

I wish the US could be more like CA

I asked you how you can possibly think it's never been near the middle, you replied with essentially '100 years ago it wasn't close'.

That question, 'when have I had to fight for my right to vote', was either rhetorical or idiotic, I chose to give you the benefit of a doubt and assume rhetorical, but if you insist you're an idiot.....I have had to fight for my right to vote only once when my registration was not updated, which isn't the fight for women's suffrage but few alive fought that fight and none who still run marathons....it's not applicable. No woman involved (at least not the white women) has had to fight for that right personally.

I don't have time to answer that fully, because it's happened repeatedly. Specifically, there have been several classes I've wanted to take that were women only, I'm a pure honkey who lived in East Palo Alto, on more than one occasion I was turned away from stores/restaurants...usually by customers not the owners, and once chased by a group of men due to my race, sexual orientation, never, the gays I've known love me and I'm totally cool with them...and they're pretty all inclusive with events....but on reflection I'm sure there have been "girls trips" I would have been invited on had I been gay, if that counts.

Now, I asked you 4 questions you ignored completely, so which are you, exceptionally dumb or a troll X4? ;-)

You asked me to explain why the "Equality Pendulum" wasn't anywhere close to the middle. I responded and asked you a question. The fact that you ignored all of that means you are either exceptionally dumb or a troll.

I'll just leave this question with you, answer it if you want, or not.

When in you're life has your gender, race, or sexual orientation ever held you back you from doing something?

If you want to have an actual conversation about equality in the world, answer that question. If you want to troll away, have at it.

In conclusion:

https://youtu.be/Qu8QiK7cBEY

You can do whatever you want. =)