What grinds my gears

Many western companies, especially clothing companies, manufacture their products where the labor is the cheapest, ie. the developing countries mainly in south Asia and many parts of Africa. This is the reason why you can buy those products for a tenth of their normal price, compared to if they were produced normally. For the past 20 or so years it has been brought to public attention that many of those factories in those developing countries, which are subsidiaries (or subsidiaries of subsidiaries) of big western megacorporations, use children as their workforce, and they often work in absolutely horrible environments (and this is how they can keep their production costs so low.) This was true 20 years ago, and it's still true today. It's a constant problem that has no end in sight. Many companies go out their way to rectify this. Their position is (and it's probably true in many cases) that they do not directly allow the employment of children, and that they always de...

People have, and always have had, all kinds of superstitions. Here, however, I'm not talking about superstitions like "the number 13 is unlucky" or "walking under a ladder is bad luck". Rather, I'm talking about the worship and idolization of the past, so to speak. This takes several forms. One of the most common ones is the notion that life was somehow better in the past. Somehow people seem to think of the past as an utopia, where people were one with nature, stress free, frolicking among flowers on the meadow, rural landscapes with carefree farmers cultivating fields at their leisure, windmills producing flour from their grains, and bakers making bread, and everything being sunny and shiny, and people being happy and nice. This is contrasted with a picture of the modern world with people making long hours in dark factories and office buildings, always being busy and stressed, always having to hurry everywhere, with crime and violence rampant, in a dark ...

The original purpose of patents is to entice technological innovation. By giving inventors exclusive rights to their own inventions for some amount of time, this entices people to invent, develop and improve on new ideas and new technologies. After all, money is often a very good incentive. This original intent becomes more muddled when a patent owner can transfer this ownership to another person or company. Sure, the original owner (usually) gets money for it, which is the point... but now that other person or company is making money from an invention they did not develop. It's still in the realm of acceptability when the intent of that patent buyer is to improve on the invention. After all, it makes sense. A lone inventor might not have the resources (or motivation) to improve further on the invention, so if a richer person or company wants to improve on it, that's only beneficial overall. The result is further technological progress. Even though the patent was transferre...

I know I have been pounding on this narrow subject time and again, but I just can't get over how amazingly stupid it is. Anita Sarkeesian is the perfect media darling. She's a young woman who has media appeal, seems smart, talks about social issues (ie. the media's favorite subject, ie. feminism) and, like any other celebrity, gets her share of hate and threatening messages from internet trolls. And she's not shy about playing the role of the damsel in distress because of it. This, it seems, is the perfect storm for being an absolute media darling. The media by large accepts anything she says as gospel, and hurries to try to save the damsel in distress. She gets amazing amounts of media attention, and she gets showered with awards and pity money. All of this because of a grand total of 6 YouTube videos she has made (for which she has got almost half a million of dollars of donations, over 300 thousand of them being pity money she has been donated after she cancelled a...

Many sociopolitical analysts and commenters have presented the claim that the United States has pretty much stopped being a democracy, or even a republic, and become a de facto oligarchy. (An oligarchy is effectively a dictatorship where the power lies in a small minority of powerful people rather than a single individual dictator.) Both the two-party system and the fact that rich corporations and rich people have so much influence in the government, as well as a large amount of other characteristics of the government system, lead to this conclusion. There is also the fact that the United States has the largest national debt in the world, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars, and it only keeps growing at an alarming rate each year. This is something that cannot keep growing forever. Since it cannot grow forever, something is going to happen sooner or later. It's most probably going to be an unprecedented economic crash. Parallels have been drawn to similar situations in ...

Pollution has been the bane of the entire world for the past century. For a good portion of the previous century nobody cared at all about pollution; it simply was something that nobody thought of or cared about. The world is huge, what would a few puffs of smoke do to it? Of course today we know better. Industry is one of the biggest polluters in our modern society. So are private vehicles. Many countries have imposed strict laws to try to limit the pollution of these two things (some countries so successfully that they are in fact amazingly clean). But there are two major pollutants in our world that produce staggering amounts of pollution, and which get little to no attention. A passenger airplane burns through thousands of liters of fuel on a single flight. There are thousands of passenger and cargo airplanes on air at any given moment. In other word, several thousands airplanes fly significant distances every single day. Which in turn means that literally millions of liters...

The concept of "hate speech" can be divided into its colloquial/sociological meaning, and its legal meaning. These two meanings overlap, but are not identical; something that can be considered hate speech is not necessarily considered illegal by law (in the same way as, for example, the concepts of "slander" and "defamation" may be quite different in colloquial terms than in legal terms.) However, all dictionary definitions of "hate speech" I could find seem to pretty much agree on the definition of the term. I'll include all of what I could find, to make absolutely sure of said definition. "speech that attacks, threatens, or insults a person or group on the basis of national origin, ethnicity, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability." — Dictionary.com Unabriged. " speech disparaging a racial, sexual, or ethnic group or a member of such a group...

How do people get enthralled in Scientology? After all, it's a religion invented by a sci-fi author, their claims are rather ridiculous, and they milk money from their members like there's no tomorrow. Why would anybody become a member? Well, it works like this: New potential members are drawn in by offering them free "auditing" sessions. "Auditing", as they call it, is basically just a fancy name for a form of light psychotherapy, which contains a form of light psychological manipulation. The "patient" is subjected to somewhat standard psychotherapy: They are instructed to remember the most negative events in their early lives, and relive them in their minds as clearly as possible. They are then told that they are now clear of that negative memory. This is immediately followed by instructing them to remember one of the most positive early memories they have, to contrast it with the negative one. This is a form of light psychological manipulati...

Suppose you are developing a project, like a video game, and you would want (or need) to translate and localize it to another language, one that you have no understanding of whatsoever. How exactly would you assure the quality of the translation? (If you are wondering why I'm using "translation and localization", and what the difference is, it's this: Translating text from one language to another is to reflect as accurately as possible the things that were said in the original language, with as few changes as possible. Localizing the text, however, requires more than simply translating it. Pure translations are more proper for things like legal documents, documentaries, and even some forms of fiction. However, this is not always suitable for all forms of fiction. The most typical thing requiring localization (rather than blind translation) are jokes, puns, wordplay and certain things that are extremely culture-specific in the original language, and wouldn't tra...

Smallpox was one of the most widespread and deadliest diseases, and had existed for almost as long as human civilization has. It's estimated that by the 18th and 19th centuries the disease killed approximately 400 thousand people each year in Europe alone , not to talk about the entire world. Smallpox was responsible for an estimated 300–500 million deaths during the 20th century. The majority of them were children. Today smallpox is gone. Completely eradicated. It will never kill a single person again (unless it gets somehow stolen from the few labs it's still preserved in.) This happened thanks to an aggressive world-wide vaccination campaign. In some cases people were even forcefully vaccinated. This campaign has literally saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people, who would have certainly died from the disease if it still existed. Yet ask the average person if they agree with forced vaccinations, most of them would answer in the negative. They find it abhorrent....