The protests you mentioned didn’t halt commerce for huge swaths of your, and our country, did they? Severity and ubiquity of impacts matter.

Lemme ask you, did this protest ask for dialog, or outright refuse it?

None of the other protests intentionally caused as much collateral damage as possible. It’s not their cause, it’s their methodology and severity of the results.

It’s not about their cause du jure, it’s about their methods, causing economic damage as deep and widespread as possible. I’ll ask, did the other protests you mentioned try to shut the country down for their cause, or were they targeted against the industries/entities they were protesting?

I’m pretty certain that, had they not blocked freeways, border crossings, cities, and industries their protests wouldn’t be being broken up and protesters wouldn’t be arrested. Again, it’s not the why, it’s the how that’s an issue. Their methods aren’t the same as other tolerated protests in severity nor focus.

BUT…there is a significant difference, morally, ethically, and logically between protesting being murdered by police or protesting your last tiny bit of sovereign land or water sources being taken and permanently destroyed by oil companies, and protesting not getting a shot to have the privilege of traveling to another country. I’m far more prepared to be patient for life and death causes than ignorant inconvenience causes.

Edit: P.S. also, “fuck your feelings” goes both ways. These are the same people that took that stance for 4 years here (some still do). When you tell people “fuck your feelings” in response to any subject, any complaints, it’s pretty ridiculous to expect those same people to respect your feelings, especially while you honk a truck horn in their back yard all night for weeks. In my neighborhood, there would have been burning trucks night one, and peace night 2….but I’m a native Texan, kind of the opposite of a Canadian.

How are any of their drivers not aware of the ubiquity of residential surveillance?

hits type of behaviour is so uniquely american. unfortunately, with the ubiquity of american culture, it has now spread to most english speaking countries.

I disagree. Pinpointing the problem isn't very hard if you have some idea of where to look.

As someone who was 'coming of age' in my profession when No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its successor the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), I can provide some insight into how these policies have been enacted and how both have been detrimental to the public education system as a whole. The former is a GWBush policy, and the latter is an Obama policy meant to mend the original law, so both liberals and conservatives are to blame to some degree, but both are based on the same philosophy of education and teacher-accountability.

There are some other mitigating factors and outside influences at work that should be noted: gun violence, the rise & ubiquity of the internet, and universal cell phone availability, all mostly concentrated in the past 10 years that play a large role. Cell phones, for example, are probably the worst thing to happen to education ever. They distract, they assist in cheating, they perpetuate arguments which can lead to physical altercations, and parents themselves advocate for their use "what if there's an emergency?!?!"

The idea of "teacher accountability" is the biggest culprit though.

Anecdotally, I've caught people cheating on papers. A girl in my honors English class basically plagiarised her entire final paper that we worked on for close to a month. The zero tanked her grade, which was already floundering, and the parent wanted to meet. I'd rather not go into detail to protect both the girl and my own anonymity, but suffice to say, all of the blame for this was aimed directly at me. How? Well I (apparently) "should have caught this sooner and intervened." Now, the final in that class is 8 pages long, I have ~125 students all working on it at the same time. but my ability to check something like that and my workload are beside the point. I'M NOT THE ONE WHO COPY PASTED A WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE AND DOCTORED IT UP SO IT COULD SQUEAK BY THE PLAGIARISM DETECTOR (shows she knew what she was doing, IMHO). Yet, I'm still the one being told that I was responsible for what happened.

Teacher-accountability SOUNDS like the right thing to do, but consider the following analogies

--Students are earning poor grades, therefore teachers should be demoted; put on probationary programs; lose some of their salaries; and if they do not improve their test scores, grades, and attendance; be terminated from their positions.

as to

--Impoverished people have poor oral hygiene/health, therefore their dentists should be forced to take pay cuts from insurance companies. If the patients continue to develop cavities and the like, the dentist should be forced to go for further training, and possibly lose his practice.

I have no control over attendance.
I have no control over their home life.
I have no control over children coming to school with holes in their shoes, having not eaten breakfast.

@Mordhaus the part about money grubbing could not be further from the truth.

I'll be brief b/c I know this is already too long for this forum, but Houton Mifflin, McGraw Hill, Etc. Book Company is facing a shortfall of sales in light of the digital age. It may be difficult to blame one entity, but that's a good place to start. They don't sell as many books, but guess who produces and distributes the standardized tests and practice materials? Those same companies who used to sell textbooks by the boatload.

When a student does poorly, they have to retest in order to recieve a diploma. $$$ if they fail again, they retest again and again there is a charge for taking the test and accompanying pretest materials. Each of which has its own fees that go straight to the former textbook companies. See: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/testing/companies.html

In short, there is an incentive for these companies to lobby for an environment where tests are taken and retaken as much as possible. Each time a student has to retest that's more $ in their pocket.

How can they create an enviorment that faccilitates more testing? Put all the blame on the educators rather than the students.

That sounds a little tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory-ish, but the lobbying they do is very real: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions-lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/?utm_term=.
9af18f0d2064

That, combined with exceptions for charter/private schools where students have the option to opt-out of said testing is skewing the numbers in favor of all of these for-profit companies: http://sanchezcharter.org/state-testing-parent-opt-out/ << one example (you can't opt-out in a public school, at least in my state)

@bobknight33 idk if i'd call business-minded for-profit policies "liberal"

To be honest, except for a few of her movie rolls, I've never been a fan, and I totally agree about Dr Oz etc., but between the shows, channel, production company, magazine, and movie rolls her contributions to entertainment are pretty outstanding in their ubiquity if not quality.

They claim the headphone jack was a roadblock to water resistance and that they have used the space for more important things. I'm...not convinced.

The cynical me thinks its just apple trying to undermine the 3.5mm jack with their proprietary overpriced shit. The less cynical part of me sees it as a continuation of their minimalist design philosophy. This is a company that would give you just one button to control your computer with if they could (whether it makes sense or not). Also, aesthetically it is more in line with their sort of "magic box" thing - they don't want you to see it as a machine with working parts and the familiar 3.5mm jack kind of breaks that illusion.

I go through a lot of headphones every year. The point of failure is almost always the wire or the connection at either end, so while I know I'd lose those earpods or w/e the fuck they are calling them in a heartbeat, and I do love the ubiquity of the 3.5mm jack, I must admit I do quite like the idea of not having the wire.

[Updated at 10:00 a.m.] On Twitter, the teen clarified that he was never kicked off the football team—that story was "made up" by the media, he said. The school district also denied that he would be suspended; whether the petition influenced that decision is unclear. For me, the fact that 20,000 people expected the hero to get unfairly railroaded by the system is still quite a testament to the ubiquity of zero tolerance.

Yeah, it was way too easy to believe he'd get treated unfairly. I'm glad the cops are trying to charge the bully though. That shit, no matter WHAT the blind kid could of said or did, is just fucking troglodytic.

@harlequinn

I see the root of the problem in the US simply being existing gun availability (incomparably high to any other developed country) which makes them cheap, plentiful and relatively easily obtained without a license. I'm sure that better mental health and poverty programs would help in the US but those would surely only chip at the problem and many would fall through the cracks. To me, a more trusted, reliable and locally available police force is more the answer. I guess the relative geographic dispersion in the US is a factor here, and probably why guns took off like they did in the first place.

Comparing to here in Australia, I would much rather bans kept a lid on availability so that we never have the problems the US does. Not that any other country is ever likely to match the US (89 guns per 100 people, versus 15/100 here in AU), but better safe than sorry. I think that statistic better than anything describes why so many Americans have the attitude to gun bans of 'well then only the criminals will have guns'. The ubiquity and accessibility is highly apparent in the US, whereas here in AU and probably most parts of Western Europe they are a rarity and that argument seems bizarre.

Sam Harris has some interesting thoughts in this blog post: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-riddle-of-the-gun

"We could do many things to ensure that only fully vetted people could get a licensed firearm. The fact that 40 percent of all guns in the U.S. are legally purchased from private sellers without background checks on the buyers (the so-called “gun show loophole”) is terrifying. Getting a gun license could be made as difficult as getting a license to fly an airplane, requiring dozens of hours of training. I would certainly be happy to see policy changes like this. In that respect, I support much stricter gun laws. But I am under no illusions that such restrictions would make it difficult for bad people to acquire guns illegally. Given the level of violence in our society, the ubiquity of guns, and the fact that our penitentiaries function like graduate schools for violent criminals, I think sane, law-abiding people should have access to guns. In that respect, I support the rights of gun owners."

I think this is the first time I listened to this whole song.

1. This is a pretty boring and unremarkable song. Not a bad song, just nothing special that I can detect. Why is it such a sensation? Is it a social grassroots thing? Is there always some song that's this popular? Because I can't remember the last time there was such total ubiquity from a pop song.

2. People... you don't make the phone sign with your hand until she says "Call me maybe." Everyone in the damn videopulls out the phone at "here's my number". On "here's my number" you should pretend to text with your thumb or pretend to write something down. Or do nothing. IT'S BASIC COMMON SENSE.

Which is part of the story behind Colonel Sanders and the racism behind KFC.


>> ^Zifnab:

@ant, they toss fried chicken into his case. Here is some info from Wikipedia on fried chicken and it's relationship to African American stereotypes.
Since the American Civil War, traditional slave foods like fried chicken, watermelon, and chitterlings have suffered a strong association with African American stereotypes and blackface minstrelsy. This was commercialized for the first half of the 20th century by restaurants like Sambo's and Coon Chicken Inn, which selected exaggerated depictions of blacks as mascots, implying quality by their association with the stereotype. Although also being acknowledged positively as soul food today, the affinity that African American culture has for fried chicken has been considered a delicate, often pejorative issue. While the perception of fried chicken as an ethnic dish has been fading for several decades, what with the ubiquity of fried chicken dishes in the US, it persists as a racial stereotype.

>> ^Zifnab:

@ant, they toss fried chicken into his case. Here is some info from Wikipedia on fried chicken and it's relationship to African American stereotypes.
Since the American Civil War, traditional slave foods like fried chicken, watermelon, and chitterlings have suffered a strong association with African American stereotypes and blackface minstrelsy. This was commercialized for the first half of the 20th century by restaurants like Sambo's and Coon Chicken Inn, which selected exaggerated depictions of blacks as mascots, implying quality by their association with the stereotype. Although also being acknowledged positively as soul food today, the affinity that African American culture has for fried chicken has been considered a delicate, often pejorative issue. While the perception of fried chicken as an ethnic dish has been fading for several decades, what with the ubiquity of fried chicken dishes in the US, it persists as a racial stereotype.


Thanks.

@ant, they toss fried chicken into his case. Here is some info from Wikipedia on fried chicken and it's relationship to African American stereotypes.

Since the American Civil War, traditional slave foods like fried chicken, watermelon, and chitterlings have suffered a strong association with African American stereotypes and blackface minstrelsy. This was commercialized for the first half of the 20th century by restaurants like Sambo's and Coon Chicken Inn, which selected exaggerated depictions of blacks as mascots, implying quality by their association with the stereotype. Although also being acknowledged positively as soul food today, the affinity that African American culture has for fried chicken has been considered a delicate, often pejorative issue. While the perception of fried chicken as an ethnic dish has been fading for several decades, what with the ubiquity of fried chicken dishes in the US, it persists as a racial stereotype.

>> ^MikesHL13:
Awful. It's everywhere. Police everywhere are on a power trip. Sad.


I'm not entirely convinced that this sort of behaviour is on the rise, so much as awareness of it has. The ubiquity of cameras and Internet access is helping expose more criminal activity that was not as visible or recordable before.

>> ^Janus:
Seems a bit similar to Greasemonkey, but with more typing involved.


Not really. Greasemonkey only works after you install a specific script to handle a specific task on a specific webpage. For example, the De-ad Facebook strips ads from Facebook feeds. You, the user need to be proactive to use it.

Ubiquity has a list of commands you can use (which can be auto-updated) to handle useful things. Email this to someone. Map this place. Translate this. Calculate 339/108. Ubiquity is reactive to what you, the user, want at that moment.

The key is that it combines webpages or webpage actions together.