トランプ氏の発言は米国内はおろか、共和党内でも批判を浴びています。突飛な考えではなく、本音を表したものだから危険だと警鐘をならしているOpEdがありました。そのタイトルがThe slippery slope to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslimsと先日紹介されていたslippery slopeが使われていました。意味をしっかり取らない多読は効果がないと英語教師はいいますが、情報を取る、語感を磨くという観点からは、たくさんいろいろな媒体に触れるのはいいことです。
Thus, Trump’s embrace of a religious test for entry to our country did not come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it simply brought us to the bottom of a slippery slope created by the ongoing exploitation of anti-Muslim feeling for political purposes.
You don’t have to reach far back in time to see why Trump figured he had the ideological space for his Muslim ban. Last month, it was Jeb Bush who introduced the idea of linking the rights of Syrian refugees to their religion. He said he was comfortable granting admission to “people like orphans and people who are clearly not going to be terrorists. Or Christians.” Asked how he’d determine who was Christian, he explained that “you can prove you’re a Christian.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) took a similar view, saying , “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror.”
Trump took limits on Muslim access to our country to their logical — if un-American and odious — conclusion. Vice President Biden said that Trump was serving up “a very, very dangerous brew,” but the brew has been steeping for a long time. This is why the “Ground Zero Mosque” episode is so instructive.
締めの部分でslippery slopeの議論をOnce the door to bigotry is opened, it is very hard to shut.と別の表現で言い換えて再度危険性を訴えています。
You can’t be “just a little” intolerant of Muslims, any more than you can be “just a little” prejudiced against Catholics or Jews. Once the door to bigotry is opened, it is very hard to shut.
As automakers and tech companies talk up self-driving vehicles and the chance to bring their benefits to the world, plenty of questions are being raised about the technology. One that’s attracted much attention is what’s called “the trolley problem.” The issue is this — do you flip a switch and divert a trolley from killing two people, so that it instead kills only one person? In the case of cars, should your vehicle drive off a bridge to avoid hitting a Boy Scout troop, sacrificing your life to save a dozen? Should a self-driving car veer away from the pedestrians in a crosswalk with a baby stroller and instead hit a lone pedestrian on a sidewalk?
“It’s not possible to make a moral judgement of the worth of one individual person verse another — convict versus nun,” he said. “When we think about the problem, we try to cast it in a frame that we can actually do something with.” Urmson added that the system is engineered to work hardest to avoid vulnerable road users (think pedestrians and cyclists), then other vehicles on the road, and lastly avoid things that don’t move.
Blofeld: Information is all, is it not? For example, you must know by now that the double o program is officially dead, which leads me to speculate exactly why you came. So, James, why did you come? Bond: I came here to kill you. Blofeld: And I thought you came here to die. Bond: Well, it's all a matter of perspective.
C: In the light of the new information I have given him, he has decided to close down the double-o program with immediate effect. M: You don't know what you' re doing. C: It's not personal. It's the future, and… you're not. M: You're a cocky little bastard are you? C: I'll take that as a compliment. M: I wouldn't. This isn't over yet.
The discussion of security policy proceeds from there along two tracks. In the first, “Spectre” suggests that government reliance on surveillance plays into the hands of potentially evil data-hoarding corporations. And in the second, the film suggests that someone like James Bond is ultimately more moral than a drone program because he can exercise moral authority and is closer to the facts on the ground. Neither amounts to much.
“Spectre” doesn’t really have thoughts on privacy or the unnerving ends to which a more benign government could put large stores of data. Instead, the movie’s ideas mostly come down to a sentiment M voices early in the movie. “I know surveillance is a fact of life. It’s how you use it and who’s using it that concerns me,” he tells C. Surveillance technology is bad when bad people use it. It’s dandy when it means Q (Ben Whishaw) can put nanobots in Bond’s blood to track him in ways with satisfying operational implications, or when it means that M can outflank C (who, of course, turns out to be working for the bad guys) and tell him smugly, “Not a good feeling being watched, is it?”
The argument that James Bond himself is a more morally sophisticated tool of the British government than drone strikes doesn’t advance further. “To pull that trigger, you have to be sure,” M argues. “A license to kill is also a license not to kill.” He suggests that double-0 agents have to look the people they kill in the eye, which is true, but, perhaps wisely given Bond’s body count, doesn’t argue that 007 can avoid collateral damage that drone strikes cannot.
“A license to kill is also a license not to kill.”というのは印象的なセリフとして他のサイトでも紹介されています。データをもとにコンピュータで遠隔処理するのではなく、人間が現場に立ち会って判断するんだというセリフは一般人にとってはうなづきたくものですが。ポストのこのエッセイはドローンの方が巻き添え被害を避けられるケースもあるのではないか。007は敵を必要以上に殺害しているのではないだろうか、となんとも真っ当な意見を述べています。
どちらがいいのかは難しい議論でまさにit's all a matter of perspective.だと思います。でも、スパイ活動だけでなく、データ分析にしても、ドローン操作にしても、今の段階では、どれにしてもまぎれもなく人が操作しているには変わりありませんので、関わっている人の資質が問われるという点ではどれも共通ではないでしょうか。大きな転機が来るのは、人工知能にそのような判断を委ねることかもしれません。
G is for Google As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.” From the start, we’ve always strived to do more, and to do important and meaningful things with the resources we have.
We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about.
We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.
Our company is operating well today, but we think we can make it cleaner and more accountable. So we are creating a new company, called Alphabet. I am really excited to be running Alphabet as CEO with help from my capable partner, Sergey, as President.
最後の方にAlphabetという会社名を選らんだ理由を二つあげています。
For Sergey and me this is a very exciting new chapter in the life of Google—the birth of Alphabet. We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search! We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark), which we strive for! I should add that we are not intending for this to be a big consumer brand with related products—the whole point is that Alphabet companies should have independence and develop their own brands.
言語を学んでいる者としては、投資家向けのAlpha-bet というリップサービスよりも、We liked the name Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search!（Alphabetという名前を気に入ったのは、文字の集まりを意味し、言語を象徴しているからです。言語は人類の発明で最も重要なものの一つです。それに、Google検索での結果表示の核となるものです。）という主張が気になります。
アルファベットを学ぶ時に G is for Gorillaのように学んでいくことは以前ブログで紹介しました。だからこそ、プレスリリースのタイトルがG is for Googleとなっているんでしょうね。下記に紹介している動画Learning ABC AlphabetやAlphabet Songでは、G is for Gorilla / G is for Girl / G is for GrapeのようにGを紹介していますが。。。
Google's new parent company has a clever name: Alphabet. It's a term designed to evoke the ingenuity of the human spirit. And it makes no secret of Alphabet's expansive ambitions: It wants to guide humanity forward, to connect everything and everyone, to wrap its arms around the world's people and bring them all into the future. All of them, it seems, except for the more than 1.3 billion people on earth who don't actually use an alphabet as their primary writing system.
この記事ではアルファベットを使っていない国もあり、その最大の国が中国だと指摘します。
Some cultures employ alternatives to fully fledged alphabets, such as the syllabary-using Cherokee. Others, such as the Japanese, mix syllabaries with complex logographic characters. But the biggest country to use something other than an alphabet that you or I might recognize is China.
Intentionally or not, Larry Page and Sergey Brin effectively wound up glossing over China when they rolled out their new corporate brand and said "it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity's most important innovations."
The Chinese might object by saying their writing system represents language, too, even if it doesn't use letters. You see, China's use of a logographic script is pretty much the complete opposite of an alphabet. You can think of an alphabet as a set of individually meaningless building blocks that, when you put them together, create sounds, words and meaning. In Chinese, every character, every building block, already has its own self-contained sound and meaning. Imagine if the letter "b" referred to the sun.
The idea that there is a "best" writing system naturally implies that others are inferior, and critics of this theory have argued that this is an unhelpfully Western-centric bias.
"The alphabetic literacy theory has asserted the West's permanent superiority over the East due to the psychological and cultural effects of the alphabet," wrote Paul Grossweiler, a professor of communication at the University of Maine, in 2004. "Science, philosophy, logic, rationality, democracy, and monotheism are said to be inextricably linked to the alphabet in this theory."
個人的にはこういった「西洋VS東洋」の対立を煽るような内容よりも、記事冒頭にあったようなGoogleの並々ならぬ野心の方を解明してもらいたいです。Alphabetが言語を表すなら、世界中の全員が言語を使っているように、世界中の人にAlphabet社を浸透させたいということかもしれないのですから。英語にはfrom A to Zというイディオムもありますからねえ。
（オックスフォード） from A to Z including everything there is to know about something He knew his subject from A to Z.
TPP In this way, prosperity was fostered first by the U.S., and second by Japan. And prosperity is nothing less than the seedbed for peace. こうして米国が、次いで日本が育てたものは、繁栄です。そして繁栄こそは、平和の苗床です。
Involving countries in Asia-Pacific whose backgrounds vary, the U.S. and Japan must take the lead. We must take the lead to build a market that is fair, dynamic, sustainable, and is also free from the arbitrary intentions of any nation. 日本と米国がリードし、生い立ちの異なるアジア太平洋諸国に、いかなる国の恣意的な思惑にも左右されない、フェアで、ダイナミックで、持続可能な市場をつくりあげなければなりません。
In the Pacific market, we cannot overlook sweat shops or burdens on the environment. Nor can we simply allow free riders on intellectual property. 太平洋の市場では、知的財産がフリーライドされてはなりません。過酷な労働や、環境への負荷も見逃すわけにはいかない。 No. Instead, we can spread our shared values around the world and have them take root: the rule of law, democracy, and freedom. That is exactly what the TPP is all about. 許さずしてこそ、自由、民主主義、法の支配、私たちが奉じる共通の価値を、世界に広め、根づかせていくことができます。 その営為こそが、TPPにほかなりません。
Furthermore, the TPP goes far beyond just economic benefits. It is also about our security. Long-term, its strategic value is awesome. We should never forget that. しかもTPPには、単なる経済的利益を超えた、長期的な、安全保障上の大きな意義があることを、忘れてはなりません。
The TPP covers an area that accounts for 40 per cent of the world economy, and one third of global trade. We must turn the area into a region for lasting peace and prosperity. That is for the sake of our children and our children's children. 経済規模で、世界の4割、貿易量で、世界の3分の1を占める一円に、私達の子や、孫のために、永続的な「平和と繁栄の地域」をつくりあげていかなければなりません。
As for U.S. - Japan negotiations, the goal is near. Let us bring the TPP to a successful conclusion through our joint leadership. 日米間の交渉は、出口がすぐそこに見えています。米国と、日本のリーダーシップで、TPPを一緒に成し遂げましょう。
The United States is in the final stages of negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive free-trade agreement with Mexico, Canada, Japan, Singapore and seven other countries. Who will benefit from the TPP? American workers? Consumers? Small businesses? Taxpayers? Or the biggest multinational corporations in the world?
One strong hint is buried in the fine print of the closely guarded draft. The provision, an increasingly common feature of trade agreements, is called “Investor-State Dispute Settlement,” or ISDS. The name may sound mild, but don’t be fooled. Agreeing to ISDS in this enormous new treaty would tilt the playing field in the United States further in favor of big multinational corporations. Worse, it would undermine U.S. sovereignty.
ISDS would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court. Here’s how it would work. Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions — and even billions — of dollars in damages.
This isn’t a partisan issue. Conservatives who believe in U.S. sovereignty should be outraged that ISDS would shift power from American courts, whose authority is derived from our Constitution, to unaccountable international tribunals. Libertarians should be offended that ISDS effectively would offer a free taxpayer subsidy to countries with weak legal systems. And progressives should oppose ISDS because it would allow big multinationals to weaken labor and environmental rules.
Giving foreign corporations special rights to challenge our laws outside of our legal system would be a bad deal. If a final TPP agreement includes Investor-State Dispute Settlement, the only winners will be multinational corporations.
