I see the ACLU as an organization that isn't blind to all constitutional entitlements, and I don't believe they have any responsibility to be that. I see them as particularly interested in civil rights defense for the powerless against the powerful and untouchable, who are particularly antagonistic at the moment.
Firearms interests have their own highly influential advocacy already from more than one entity, so it puts this argument in the "all lives matter" category of flawed defenses.
A portion of the the First Amendment is protected by media litigators. It's got more than a few important protections that deserve defense. Besides, are you really complaining that there are too many organizations working to protect our civil liberties. Seems an odd complaint. If Second Amendment rights matter to you then, by all means, donate to the NRA or others fighting to protect that right. Doesn't mean the ACLU and others don't do important work as well.
I donate to a state-level 2nd Amendment rights organization, GeorgiaCarry.org, rather than the NRA. Why? Because GeorgiaCarry stands strongly against racial discrimination and is working hard to end Jim Crow era Georgia laws that to this day attempt to thwart non-white citizens voting and asserting their 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendment rights. By contrast, the NRA has a consistent record of remaining silent on race issues when they intersect with 2nd Amendment challenges.
There is a large difference in power and knowledge between these two sides, which is the heart of the ethics argument.
The people living on top of the resources may have legally relinquished their rights to it and the intact land it's buried beneath, but the drafters of those contracts have a lot of room and leverage to act in bad faith in order to exploit them. This can prevent these people from escaping a cycle of subjugation because they are given mere subsistence instead of wealth in return for their resources.
Legality of things like this are often just procedural facades to release mineral extraction companies from accusations that they are doing something wrong, harming someone or, sadly, indirectly enslaving vulnerable people.
There is a large difference in power and knowledge
between these two sides, which is the heart of the
ethics argument.
This is exactly the point where these conversations break down. The natives negotiated a contract for fixed rates, not proportional rates of payment. The advantage of fixed rates is that you know what you are going to get, the advantage of proportional rates are that you get more if they get more.
Had the Lithium extraction here turned out to be really really hard and the payment to the communities was nearly all of the profit the mining companies were making after extraction, the natives would not complain. But when it is a small fraction of the profit, it is "unfair".
So what is the right answer? Well in one view of the world the correct answer is to build a mining company with the indigenous population so that they can start providing a commodity that the rest of the world wants to buy. That creates a local boost to the economy and employs as many native people as want to be employed.
That seems great until the lithium runs out. Then you end up with a derelict mining town.
I think people who clap back like this assume the indigenous groups were able to negotiate with full, symmetrical information and legal leverage. The article reflects history in this regard, suggesting that they did not.
I don't know if you can draw that conclusion from the article. The questions I would look into would be whether or not the agreements were negotiated pre-Tesla or post-Tesla. If they were negotiated pre-Tesla I could see both sides with a very different picture of lithium demand than has emerged in the post-Tesla market place. The other question I would look into was the legal leverage. Generally these contracts are negotiated at the governmental level (which is pretty much all the legal leverage you can get) and while there are cases where the government negotiations might be questioned (like alleged Copper rights in Africa going to China[1]) it isn't clear that there is a ethical lapse in the Lithium case.
Finally of course there is the "So what" aspect of it, I don't think anyone seriously argues that the US or other strong powers simply mow down the sovereignty of countries because they abuse their own citizens. If you want to advocate for a single world government that is another issue entirely.
Having a conservative politic is a choice. That person probably has a lot of intersecting workplace difficulties that go along with being the type of person who wants to police which bathrooms people use.
To charge the device while using the audio output? That my mother can continue to use her card swipe reader for her small hair salon? I'm not sure what it's like to have an imagination that cannot conceive even one very common use case where this adapter concept falls short.
This dismissiveness is the reason we need influential voices to speak for the user in the design process.
You're not wrong about that. But your mom's Stripe reader will still work. It's just a microphone. The adapter will support it. The concern over charging is merited, but it will not be long before a dual adapter hits the market.
I believe that reliance on the hypothetical arrival of adapters is bad design. Most especially in the case of those adapters relying on a single proprietary connection standard that has the potential to change or deny compatibility in software at the will of the vendor.
I strongly dislike this direction of Apple's design, seen also in the new MacBooks. You ask, "What is the point of doing away with all of the ports and support electronics if you need an big, ugly, cumbersome adapter to make the device useful again?" and in response hear judgmental sneers that you aren't their target customer anymore, you power user.
But I guess that's par for course for the consumers that clad their fantastically stylish sci-fi pocket supercomputer marvels of manufacturing in neon Croc-rubber.
Why include things that take up space, weight, and cost, things which most users won't use, when users seem to most want less space, weight, and cost?
Users have gone wireless on nearly everything else, and are about to buy more wireless headphones than wired. The dongle is just an interim fix until you switch other devices to matching wireless; we've done it many times before, and we'll do it again.
Users that want the thinnest phone possible so they can wrap it in a Fisher Price box.
Users that want cheaper phones so they can pump more money into the accessory ecosystem the functionality back.
You have fun charging 2 or 3 things every few hours and having horrible device interop or none at all with your headphones and other accessories. I'll keep my headphones.
The basic Apple dock also has a headphone jack. So, if you have one at your desk you can charge and listen at the same time. It's been this way for years.
One could say that this engineering degree finally put him into the place where he belonged all these years. It illustrates that there are unfair barriers that prevent people from making themselves and their families happy and healthy. Giving them the resources to succeed and provide for their families is a net good not just for their own selfish interests but for their surrounding economy and society as well.
I think the takeaway should be more about what we can give to the average working class person who is probably more intelligent and motivated than society is willing to give them credit for. What can we do for them instead of grinding them down in undignified, barely productive poverty wage jobs.
There is a deep difference of power and control between the average consumer and a multinational food processing corporation. The argument of the burden being on individual responsibility you are trying to make can only be made if the consumer is not being aggressively misinformed about the limited choices of products available to them for the prices they can afford. The company in question has the resources to make their relationship with the target consumer a very asymmetrical one, and they are always positioned with more information and more leverage.
Surely if you're taking the dry, deterministic outlook on this discussion you'd take this into consideration.
This is terrorism. Given what we all know based on past events about how the FBI conducts their activities, there is no way any reasonably aware citizen can conduct their life normally after such an encounter.
The last discussion thread on this topic had more than a few people complaining that Isis (the given name of the developer in the article) is overreacting and paranoid, which is a saddening response to see. It exposes the privileges and unfortunate circumstances citizens find themselves in because these agencies refuse to prosecute their anti-terror investigations in well-thought out ways, instead pursuing facile leads without regard to the external effects they cause.
We've even seen evidence that these agencies deliberately manipulate otherwise innocent people into behavior that implicates them in their "terror suspect" criteria, so it's hard to believe that anyone in this situation could be somehow too cautious.
It /is/ terrorism, but the FBI is not the agent of terror. Rather, they are reacting to terrorist boogeymen in the shadows, exactly how the terrorists want them to.
Terrorism is successful when our society becomes more of an authoritarian police state.
You're asking whether it's sincere or not? Not sure. But the political support from the public that they need to have power is, i think, sincere because the public is legitimately afraid of all this "risk" they're exposed to.
Firearms interests have their own highly influential advocacy already from more than one entity, so it puts this argument in the "all lives matter" category of flawed defenses.