While at one time, the bank's proprietors may have been clever, I suspect that these days they are much more accustomed to getting what they want by throwing their weight around.
"Emergency relief is necessary to avoid the risk of inflicting a needless and massive privacy violation upon Goldman Sachs' clients, and to avoid the risk of unnecessary reputational damage to Goldman Sachs," the bank said.
"By contrast, Google faces little more than the minor inconvenience of intercepting a single email - an email that was indisputably sent in error," it added.
"Emergency relief is necessary"
"We are a big powerful bank, we are going to ask you nicely to do us a favor. Our employees fucked up. Please help us hide the fact that our employees fucked up, so we don't get a reputation for having employees that fuck up." the bank said.
"What we are asking them to do is technically speaking very simple. Whether or not it would open them up to many more such requests, we don't really care(unless one of our employees fucks up again,) fuck you we're goldman sachs." it added.
And why do you think that is? Maybe because it is intrinsically a bad thing to do. For civilization as we know it at least.
Better outcomes for children from 2 parent households have been established through scientific investigation.[1]
Why do you think a virgin bride is such a prized thing throughout cultures and ages?
Greater numbers of premarital sexual partners are associated with higher rates of divorce.[2]
It is kind of crazy how in a certain segment of the population's rush to rectify past wrongs they overlook the fact that maybe some things were as they were for sound reasons. You can even surmise that if there is any genetic component to the typical monogamous relationships of human societies then men have a genetically encoded aversion to sluts when seeking a mother for their children.
The normalization of sluttiness is always going to be a losing battle if our civilization is to survive and thrive.
What exactly is the improvement feminists think they are after by trying to normalize sluttiness?
So we've seen, on average two parent households produce "better" children, better children produce better societies, and a higher sexual partner count for a woman prior to marriage produces a higher incidence of divorce.
Anyone care to articulate any reasons why promoting sluttiness is beneficial for the future of humanity?
[1]
"Children from two-parent families are better off emotionally, socially and economically"
How is being promiscuous bad? You've just talked about how it's bad for children to go through a divorce. Or are we talking about slutty children? What about male sluts? In fact who is talking about marriage at all?
Sounds like you have a preconceived notion and then try and justify it.
To those of you downvoting the above post, thank you. I'm always happy to have my perceptions improved, and I take the downvotes to indicate that you have forthcoming a carefully citationed rebuttal, countering and demonstrating the falseness of the above post and therefore of it being worthy of downvoting.
While it's possible that you got downvoted for having a point of view that others disagree with, I like to think that you're downvoted mainly for bringing this up at exactly the wrong time.
Imagine you wanted to discuss, as objectively as possible, the role of clothing in relation to sexuality, and the different perspectives people have on that. It's quite possible that people would not downvote you for expressing that you think that, generally speaking, there's something to be said for modesty in clothing (unless of course it'd be just about women dressing down). Even if they disagreed.
But imagine posting that opinion in the context of a post on rape and sexual abuse. It would immediately be linked to the surprisingly and unfortunately wide-spread view that 'those women were asking for it by dressing like a slut'. Regardless of whether your points have merit or should be accepted, the context makes it unacceptable and, quite frankly, a bit suspect.
Who are the people negotiating and agreeing to these 'agreements'(this, ACTA, etc) and what could their justification for keeping them secret possibly be?
Elected government officials from democratic countries and non-elected from non-democratic countries together. This is decided by politicians or bureaucrats representing government. I believe advisors from universities, think tanks and businesses are invited to speak.
The term "democracy" is kind of a fuzzy and abused word but if we limit its definition to include only the governments run by civilians voted in by fair enough, regularly occurring elections you could do worse. Democracies can have secrets, and in fact must if they want to achieve their interests. I am not sure why this would surprise anyone.
"Democracies can have secrets, and in fact must if they want to achieve their interests."
I can see how certain things can be justifiably kept secret in a democracy, like matters related to national security (military, intelligence, etc.). But secrecy in business and financial regulation is just corruption. Especially when the interests in question are those of private businesses and may not be in the best interests of the country as a whole - and if the deliberations are secret, how can we and our elected representatives decide whose interests are actually being promoted?
This. Wish i could upvote 10x. When the negotiations are secret, it's one thing. When the agreement itself is secret for longer than a (usa) president's term, that's another.
It's the draft that will be secret, not the final agreement.
I don't understand why this is so confusing: It's much easier for negotiators to propose a series of concessions and trade-offs in private, knowing that they'll only face political heat for those that actually make it into the final agreement.
It's also much easier for them to propose a series of trade-offs and concessions that primarily benefit their rich donors/friends rather than their electorates.
"""Declassify on: Five years from entry
into force of the TISA
agreement or, if no
agreement enters into
force, five years from the
close of the negotiations."""
WHy do you say "must have secrets"? What part of "democracy" (or even "representative democracy", a republic perhaps) axiomatically requires secrets of any sort? Trade agreement negotiations almost axiomatically do not require secrets. If they're "negotiations" then everything ends up coming out in the wash, eh?
Without secrecy concerning the details during negotiation, it would be very very hard to make trade agreements. Negotiation involves a lot of give and take. If that was all public, then as soon as our negotiators conceded on, say, some term that was going to help our automobile industry in order to gain some term that will help our garment industry, there would be a huge outcry from the automobile industry, and soon the negotiators would come under intense pressure to get that pro-automobile industry term back.
Secrecy, at least concerning the details, during negotiation gives the negotiators a better opportunity to work out a deal that best serves the interests of the country as a whole.
Note that I'm only talking about secrecy during negotiation. The result of the negotiations should be made public well before Congress votes on it, to give the country time to decide on whether to accept or not.
But as instantiated, the secrecy that the US Trade Reprentative uses and imposes is not this kind of secrecy at all. At least as near as those of us outside the TPP/ACTA negotiations can tell. The treaties do not become public until after they're negotiated and signed.
From leaked documents, it appears that inside the negotiations, there's really not the kind of secrecy you're imagining. Every part to ACTA, for example, just marked it up as they thought it should be, and then there was a lot of something (not public) to get to a final draft. That's not keeping a maximum (or minimum) position secret in order to gain advantage, that's just deciding how much of something can be foisted upon the global public without causing a revolution.
From my standpoint, the secrecy we get is of no use to anyone but corporate fat cats and insiders.
Secrecy is just incompatible with the democratic process.
People cant do informed choices and elect other people that represent them if the people in power make choices behind close doors.We are not talking about 2 corporations which are negociating something.
So no,"democracies" need no secrets. Or it says a lot about what the people in power think about their constituent.
Secrets protect those who are in power,secrets never protect the people.
You'r right. In a Democracy a secret trade deal could never happen because in a Democracy everything is decided on by its citizens, not elected officials.
However in the United States these decisions are not made by citizens but by elected officials voted in by citizens. Hence the United States is not a Democracy, but a Democratic Republic.
You can play with words as much as you want, the substance here is that citizens are purposely kept uninformed, and without information there is no such thing as informed consent, a core principle of democracy regardless of the technical details.
Marine life has dealt with particles in the water for a billion years.
Precisely, and that actually potentially works against the organisms' defenses. It's like the Trojan Horse, it looks okay on the outside. The particles being dealt with for a billion years I imagine have varied little in their molecular construction and bio-reactivity.
Your idea is that we can introduce tons of new plastic particles into the environment having all the disruptive properties plastics have been shown to have, but it's okay because there are already 'particles' in the environment.
Elsewhere you question what studies have been conducted to quantify damage done by these particles.
As you may know, the earth is an immensely complex system. Sometimes it is relatively easy to draw a causal line from A to B. Other times the effects of something are no doubt there, but the interworkings of so many factors make it hard to precisely quantify the effects of any one factor.(see Honeybees and Colony Collapse Disorder[1])
So your idea that we should go ahead and saturate the environment with this substance that has been shown in other realms and at other scales to be detrimental, and then if someone happens to take an interest in precisely quantifying damage that it is doing, then we can do something about it, seems wrongheaded.
Maybe you're just playing the reflexive contrarian like worklogin, "shouldn't we avoid laws?" This is precisely what laws are for, to protect the common good! And it isn't a stretch to infer damage being done based on what we know about plastic.
I hope this is satire. "It might royally fuck up the environment, but I've been so manipulated by marketing, that if I don't rub microscopic plastic on my body, I just feel so... unclean... guys, guys? Where are you going?"
The 'sterilized' sand bit at the end was a nice touch too, alluding to the dominant scorched earth policy we have in regards to shaping the environment in ways we (mistakenly, deludedly) think will be most conducive to our well-being.
People wonder what happened to great nations of the past. When you have men(you'll understand my assumption,) whining about cosmetic products instead of plotting courses to the moon, there's your answer.
Oh but the two aren't mutually exclusive you say? I beg to differ.
It was a serious question, and it received many excellent answers. Yours was not among them.
Abrasive elements are commonplace in soaps for auto shops and other places where most conventional soaps have a hard time with the gunk accumulated from automotive grease and such. The particulates help to actually scrape off that gunk (in a manner that doesn't cause skin injuries), rather than rely on the hope that soap's chemical properties alone will suffice.
Might be a good idea as well to flesh out the issue in a blog post in a comprehensible and accessible way. Explaining the importance of the right to organize, why civil disobedience is important, et cetera.
Then spread it around the social news sites and get other bloggers to blog about it.
