If you think studying literature is to teach you literature, you're sorely mistaken. Similar to if you think you study mathematics to learn mathematics.
You are taught literature so you can better communicate with other people. What is the author's intention with this passage? What are they trying to say? What might their motivations be? Now apply this to a letter from a potential business partner or a politician's tweet and you might begin to see how what you were taught becomes relevant.
Why are you taught grammar? Who cares whether you use the Oxford comma or not? Who has the need to know what mood, theme, and figurative language are? Apply this in the context of trying to write a professional email to your boss or trying to tell a story to engage other people, and maybe you'll start to see that it wasn't worthless.
Why do we need to know the way to prove that the angles of a triangle add up to 180? Who needs to know the Quadratic formula and how to apply it? It's so you know how to think rationally and apply logic rigourously, so you don't fall into familiar logical traps that we see on the evening news and the Internet every day.
Why do you need to know how cells reproduce? Why do we need to know how the pH scale works? It's so when people on Facebook claim that vaccines erase your DNA or that alkaline water prevents cancer, you'll know better.
I think the balance between "sovereign communities", benevolent (?) dictatorships with one super-admin, or democratic collectives needs to be found. Ultimately this is something that needs to be hammered out, but any solution would be better than none.
Three possible solutions (just spitballing, not much thought put into them):
What I described before as "federated collectives". New communities can join a collective by asking the others. Maybe there will be a user-weighted vote on this or some other governance mechanism, or maybe it will be consensus-based. Communities can be kicked out of collectives by the same mechanisms or leave on their own. The collective can decide whether mutual mod actions are allowed or not.
"Colonial-style" relationships. One "empire" community has powers over other "colony" communities. The empire's mods can (maybe) perform mod actions on colony communities but not vice versa. Colonies can declare independence or the empire can kick them out. Colonies can join only by asking the empire to accept them.
"Roman Republic collectives": Mods (or active users?) of communities elect a board of prefects for the collective. Prefects (maybe) get mod powers on all communities. The prefects can vote to accept new communities or kick others out. Maybe they can get other management powers too. The "benevolent dictatorship" case is just a special case of Roman Republic where the number of prefects is 1
Of course, in all cases, an instance refusing to honour the powers of governance authorities would be interpreted as the instance admins withdrawing the community from the collective. Sort of like automatic defederation.
Make it like a collective: mods can remove their community from a federated collective if they want. Mods can only moderate stuff posted on their community, not in other communities in the collective. But unified rules or just some space for text in a collective will make it seem much nicer and coherent even if it is still a bunch of different communities behind the scenes.
Yep. Anyone can do that, actually. I can declare you a terrorist. It's totally my right to do so, but the question is–so what? What am I going to do about it?
The US government has declared the Iranian organisation a terrorist organisation. What have they done about it?
The amount of outrage on this thread is just ignorant people learning how international geopolitics and the concept of absolute state sovereignty work for the first time. Yes, it is the case that big countries get to stick their fingers into the business of little countries. Yes, it is unfair. But that's how it is and that's how it's always gonna be for the foreseeable future. That's how it always has been for all of human history. From Ur to Rome to Vienna to London to Washington. From Chang'an to Beijing to Nanjing to Tokyo and now back to Beijing. In the next century maybe it will be some other country kicking around everyone else instead of the US. But I can practically guarantee that there will be kicking and there will be people continuing to complain about how unfair it is, because it is and always has been.
I'd like to say we should do better as a species, but in reality, what we have now is really fucking amazing compared to when Genghis Khan would come romping around town destroying your villages and murdering your people, or the Romans coming and demanding fifty talents of silver by sunset or else, or the Belgians planting rubber trees in your backyard.
It can save people. I'm saying it doesn't always do that and occasionally it works the other way around. It is not a binary "yes" or "no".
But if we have the opportunity to trade a robber for an evangelist, then I'll take that trade any day. Robbers actively hurt society as their dayjob. Evangelists at most just talk and vote annoyingly (depending on your political views)
You can call it misplaced, unfunny, or naïve but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it. Plenty of people in prison use religion as a means of self-improvement and then wrench themselves back onto the straight path after their release.
(I feel that if I don't say "an equal number of people use religion as a justification for evil deeds" someone will mention it. Religion doesn't make you a good person in itself. It's your actions that decide that and religion is a means to that.)
Not for the shipping company. It's not their oil. The Iranians can ask the shipping company for compensation, which they could easily refuse and there isn't much recourse that the Iranians would have. The Chinese could demand compensation but if the company again refuses or claims insolvency or whatever, it's easier for the Chinese to just stiff the Iranians with payment instead.
I hate that "confirmation bias" have become moo words with people nowadays.
The logic is pretty sound:
A company that does business in the United States must comply with American laws.
It is forbidden under American law for a company that operates from the United States to do business with Iran.
The company, through its child, shipped oil from Iran.
American authorities, enforcing American law, ordered the company to divert the ship and turn over the oil for confiscation because the shipment was illegal.
Oil is confiscated.
I remark that sanctions do not require the approval of the United Nations. Under customary international law, it is an application of sovereign authority. Any country can apply sanctions and can do so in any way you like. What the USA has said is that "if you want to do business here, we forbid you from doing business with Iran".
The legal grounds: The oil was shipped by a US company in violation of US law. American companies can't do business with an organisation that the US government has designated as a terrorist organisation. Thus American authorities siezed the ship and its cargo.
They are not. I do not refer to the package called "LibreOffice". If you search for "office" on the Windows Store, you'll see a bunch of LibreOffice clones that are not branded as such and are not free of charge or contain advertisements.
I watched a few episodes of a Beyblade anime with my younger brother and it felt a lot like a dry attempt to make a product more popular by thinking that they can just do a similar thing to Pokemon and get similar results.
I agree completely. I think this is the best solution to the AI replacing human artists problem. Big companies can't use AI to replace humans because if they do, whatever they make will be ineligible for copyright and everyone will be free to rip them off.
Real answer: Religion in the United States is protected by Amendment I of their constitution. There isn't much the Government can do without infringing on or appearing to infringe on this protection.
This is a classic repost.