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Progressives don't object to keeping things the same, we just want to verify assumptions are backed with accurate data. What assumptions are being carried forward that are based on bad (intentionally?) data and then used to form a basis for keeping the status quo?

For example.

This is hardly the first report of kids' smartwatches being insecure tracking devices. We've heard that in 2017, in 2018 again, quite bluntly, if you haven't heard it by now, you probably don't give a rat's ass about your kids' privacy.

Then again, buying such a watch is already a pretty good indicator that you don't give a fuck about your kids' privacy, so...

He fought extradition all the way to the UK supreme court and lost at every stage.

For perfectly valid reasons, toolbag. Which is why Ecuador granted him aslylum in the first place, and why the UN declared his de facto detention unjust and arbitrary. And he only lost appeals in the UK because the country is as much a poodle of the United States today as it was during the the Bush Administration. But there's even precedent for the UK to block extradition for alleged hackers because the United States has a medieval prison system.

Look, this isn't hard. If this was ever really about alleged rape allegations, all Sweden had to do was promise not to hand Assange over to the United States. Even if you think Assange was lying about returning to Sweden upon such a promise, Ecuador would no longer have a reason to give him asylum, meaning Sweden would have him back one way or the other.

Heads you're wrong, tails you're wrong.

This is a opinion piece by a US law professor: How likely is an Assange conviction in the USA.

The thing that Assange will be extradited for, is the password thing with Manning. The professor says this is no different than a journalist setting up a drop point for information.

Never the less, Assange will be convicted, and most likely new charges will magically appear once he is on US soil.

The issue here is not whether Assange has bad personal hygiene, or whether he is a self serving narcissist. The issue is freedom of the press in Western democracies, and the willingness to make an example out of him to deter others.

Outside of Europe he was a horrible person and very nearly himself a war criminal.

So, like both Bushes, or like Obama? Or Trump, of course, drone strikes have actually increased under Trump, to a secret extent. Obama promised the most transparent administration in history, and delivered the least; Trump's is even more opaque.

The BBC and other sources are saying that Assange is being charged and that he is facing extradition to the US. From the Justice Department:
WikiLeaks Founder Charged in Computer Hacking Conspiracy
From the BBC:
Julian Assange: Wikileaks co-founder arrested in London
Both the Clinton's and Obummer really want his ass since WikiLeaks showed what kind of ass clowns they all were.

We do this. In Finland, speeding ticket are linked to income: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs...

It was definitely explosive and the headline is entirely correct.

"The explosive device, called the Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI), was released from Hayabusa-2 on Friday. The SCI, a 14kg conical container, was packed with plastic explosive intended to punch a 10m-wide hole in the asteroid.

Because of the debris that would have been thrown up in this event, Hayabusa-2 manoeuvred itself before the detonation to the far side of 800m-wide Ryugu - out of harm's way and out of sight." (BBC article)

First, for anyone wishing to read the full study, here is the link.

Second, for those claiming the study may be biased, either through the researcher or its funding, I see no evidence of such. The study came from Amy Orben, a researcher at the University of Oxford, and Andrew Przybylski, a research professor at the University of Oxford.

That being said, here's the problem with this study: it used an open data set. In other words, the researchers did not gather and collect the data themselves, but rather looked through and analyzed publicly-accessible statistical data sets. The two data sets used were "Growing up in Ireland", collected in Ireland between August 2011 and March 2012, from students aged 12-14. The other came from "United States Panel Study of Income Dynamics", collected between 2014 and 2015, where the data contained statistics from children ages 8-17, though the study isolated the data to students ages 12-15 to match the other data set. (More thorough description of the data set can be found in the study, page 6-7.)

Now, in statistics, open data sets -can- be useful. When done correctly, the data can be unbiased, as the data collection is separate from its analysis. Researchers can focus more attention on data analysis and conclusion. But, it has some major downfalls. In particular, if a researcher is not disciplined in understanding what the data sets are measuring, and the data measurements don't align with what the research is trying to measure, well, you're comparing apples and oranges. Such is the case here.

So, let's look at the data sets in this study. "Growing up in Ireland" stats were collected in 2011 through 2012. The most glaring problem is the period of time in the data set. The digital universe was very different eight years ago; far fewer percentages of children had smartphones, modern social media website designs didn't exist (in particular, the infinite scroll), and there was less digital-engagement per day. With the other data set, ""United States Panel Study of Income Dynamics", the data set itself is flawed, because it is not randomized. From the study: "The sample was collected by involving all children in households already interviewed by the PSID who descended from either the original families recruited in 1968 or the 1997 new immigrant family sample. Those participants in the child supplement that were selected to receive an in-home visit, were asked to complete two time-use diaries on randomly-assigned days." So, the data sample was collected from families who were already involved in a previous data sample. I don't have the time to look for an explanation as to how this PSID organization recruited families back in 1968, but my hunch says that there's a strong chance there's serious bias in who they recruited for their study. (I'm picturing white middle-class suburbia.) So, limiting your data sample to descendants of a biased sample leads to another biased sample.

And if the data is corrupt, so goes the study.

In fact, I find it so humorous how the study cities multiple studies that go against this studies conclusions. From the study: "Previous
research found negative effects when adolescents engage with digital screens 30 minutes (Levenson, Shensa, Sidani, Colditz, & Primack, 2017), 1 hour (Harbard, Allen, Trinder, & Bei, 2016a) and 2 hours (Orzech, Grandner, Roane, & Carskadon, 2016) before bedtime. This could be due to delayed bedtimes (Cain & Gradisar, 2010; Orzech et al., 2016) or difficulties in relaxing after engaging in stimulating technology use (Harbard et al., 2016a)." That much research does indicate a s

The fact that Fortnite and other games with similar in-app purchases are not legally "gambling" is merely an accident of "gambling" being poorly defined in US law. Belgium decided loot boxes are gambling and illegal under the law they already had. If that's not the case in the versions in other countries, then those countries should consider fixing the loophole.

It's not clear from the original source (this BBC article, but it's certainly seems possible he's actually saying this is something that parents should do - /not/ something that governments should do.

The only quote bit I can find is "That game shouldn't be allowed. Where is the benefit of having it in your household?". There's not a lot of other context. By 'your household' I'd argue he's talking to parents and householder owners.

i.e., on the surface this seems like a yet another massive non-story hugely blown out of proportion by the (especially gaming) media.

drug deaths per year in the UK: 247 in 2015 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34...

alcohol deaths per year in the UK: 5,843 deaths in 2017 https://www.independent.co.uk/...

number of kids having died from the fortnight dance: none.

*the total count of entitled celebrity pseudo-rulers riding the coat-tails of an increasingly wasteful and arrogant theatrical monarchy into the apocalypse of Brexit remains uncounted, yet is at least 1.

Here the article from BBC.com

I'm sure that this will work out perfectly fine and absolutely no unintended consequences will arise as a result.

Yep ...

But it argued that the public information message, simply asking people to register to vote, should not count as a "political campaign".

What the "good" people want is never politics, of course. It's just plain common sense, ya know.

Exactly, what could possibly go wrong?

I'm sure that this will work out perfectly fine and absolutely no unintended consequences will arise as a result.

A warmer world might mean more rains.
But not necessarily at the spots you want it, see: https://www.bbc.com/news/world... or https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/...

Assuming that the upcoming climate change has anything *good* in it, is just idiotic.

> 1) Locked cabin doors so any hijacker can't easily gain control of the plane

Sometimes its not the highjackers we need to worrry about

I'm pretty sure we're the LARGEST arms dealer.

According to the BBC

The US's arms exports are 58% higher than those of Russia, the world's second-largest exporter. And while US arms exports grew by 25% in 2013-17 compared with 2008-12, Russia's exports fell by 7.1% over the same period.

It is Middle East states that have been among the US's biggest customers - Saudi Arabia tops the list - with the region as a whole accounting for almost half of US arms exports during 2013-17.

Why exactly are we arming Saudi Arabia to fight a war in Yemen? Trump says the US cannot survive without arms sales to Saudi Arabia so we must accept all their violations of human rights and war crimes. And yet most Americans can't even find Yemen on a map. I fancy myself to be up on the news, but I can't imagine why the poorest Arab country is of any consequence to us. Is it because Abu Rasasa owns Trump?

And we wonder why we're constantly at war with the Middle East. Maybe it's because we keep selling them weapons! But wait. That's the intent. "War's good business" and "The business of America is business". Grace Slick said the former. Calvin Coolidge said the latter.

Steven won't give his arm
To no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
But I'd rather have my country die for me

It is even easier to just install the battery packs on the roof since you don't need to rebuild the bus stops to fit the trailer and you won't need to do any swapping.
They would probably have gone for a solution like that if getting the buses to go electric was the end game.

The thing is, Norway already have carbon neutral power generation and it is pretty clear that their end goal isn't just to make the buses carbon neutral.
With the previous reporting of electric planes it should be evident that they intend to become completely carbon neutral.
Getting the technology for wireless charging of cars to a mature state is important to make electric vehicles more attractive for everyone.

With the goal of getting the country to be completely carbon neutral switched to 2030 instead of the previous target of 2050 they must be in a hurry to get the infrastructure there.

Sounds convincing, until you realize it completely it completely ignored immigrants who are not born in the EU.
That is exactly the point. Most immigrants in the UK are from the comonwealth, people who have super easy immigration rules.

All those "Syrian" refugees that people keep complaining about? Not counted.
They are counted. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43...

You took less than 10k ... (* cheers *) (* hurray *)

The petition website has data of the signatures by county (the "Get petition data (json format)" link). I downloaded that file just before writing this comment and I see that are currently 123 signatures marked as coming from Russia. According to this 2015 news article, there are (were?) 1688 British expats living in Russia.

Of course, we're all technical people here. We know that foreigners could be using VPNs or botnets (so all the requests wouldn't obviously be coming from the same VPN endpoint) to proxy their requests so they appear to be coming from inside the UK.

Since it's a petition, not a poll, there's an actual list of names (i.e. not just IPs or whatever) associated with it. You could do QA on the data by simply sampling the names, confirming they're real people, contacting them, and asking them if they really did sign the petition at the timestamp on their signature. (Needless to say, doing this for all 4+ million would be a lot of effort, but a statistically, you should be able to get fairly high confidence on your measure of accuracy with a properly designed random sample of thousands.)

Last, we have a good proxy for how many signatures we expect: there's a protest today and we can count the crowd. It's on the order of a million (the group organizing the protest says slightly over a million, BBC says "hundreds of thousands"). If a quarter of the people who signed the petition showed up for the march, that would be incredibly high turnout for the march; if anything, given that information, we should be surprised the petition signature count isn't higher (probably best explained by it having started very recently) not looking for reasons the real count should be lower.

I posted this comment. It has been modded down: The British government is VERY poorly managed.

One example: The EU leave campaign has dishonesty at its core-- and it hasn't convinced us. (Mar. 11, 2016, not 2019)

Brexit: All you need to know about the UK leaving the EU (Jan. 31, 2019)

In general, the British government has presented low-level details, and not generally helped citizens have a serious, in-depth understanding.

Or are you suggesting playing in the dirt was not beneficial and this superbug killer bacteria that was found when looking for the explanation of the benefit is just a coincidence?

It would only be a coincidence if the dirt from the next town did not have similar properties. However, it is quite common for soil bacteria to make anti bacterial toxins. Most of our antibiotics are based on them. The problem is not so much finding them, but rather finding the ones that we can safely ingest or apply to open wounds, while still maintaining their effectiveness.

According to folk tradition, people would not "play in the dirt", rather they would wrap it in cloth, and place it under their pillow:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-no...

I struggle to imagine how the anti bacterial properties would work in that case.

Playing in the dirt is probably effective to train our immune system, not as a way to ingest anti-bacterial chemicals (which would only be effective if you were actually infected, making it less likely that you would actually go outside to play in the dirt)

Here's the BBC misquoting a Reddit user. Here's the user spotting it and calling it out.

The BBC admits Aleppo Boy was propaganda.

BBC lied about women coding.

If the market could punish, the BBC would be begging for donations much like The Guardian. But with taxpayer support, this will never happen.

Here's the BBC misquoting a Reddit user. Here's the user spotting it and calling it out.

The BBC admits Aleppo Boy was propaganda.

BBC lied about women coding.

If the market could punish, the BBC would be begging for donations much like The Guardian. But with taxpayer support, this will never happen.

The overwhelming majority of news coverage of Trump was negative (92%).

https://www.westernjournal.com...

Even Fox news had more negative (52%) coverage than positive (48%).

This stands is sharp contrast to his approval rating by the public which ranges from 38% to 48% based on which poll you want to use.

https://www.realclearpolitics....

Having that large of a disparity between the media and the masses shows that the public isn't buying what the media is selling. My point stands that the public doesn't trust the media. If you don't trust someone you will try to avoid paying for their services. The impact is that media outlets are going out of business in large numbers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

Seriously, Wikipedia is a site where everyone posts what they think with little oversight but UD it's a joke site, that doesn't even try to be a serious definition.

A crackdown on the open Internet in Russia continues unabated. Soon, RosKomNadzor will introduce state issued mandatory SSL certificates for opening websites and forbid all the instant messengers which sport unbreakable encryption. Yes, they failed banning Telegram but it was only because there's no law to deal with fast moving targets - Durov revamped the entire servers network and logging in process to allow the Russians to communicate past the prohibition introduced last year.

It's the fourth such news piece in the last several months. Also most western media neglected the protests in regard to the Internet in Russia which happened just two days ago. It's still astonishing how few people participated. Looks like Putin has truly become the Tsar of The Grand Duchy of Moscow and the people are content with each atrocity he does. A dictator, a tyrant, Godfather of the Russian mafia state.

.CNBC is reporting that "US households see biggest decline in net worth since the financial crisis"
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/0...
The fall amounted to a drop of 3.4 percent.

And the Beeb yesterday reported that the US trade deficit is highest now than in the past 10 years.

Wonder why CNN, CNBC, Fox, et al did not report this, at least not in the front page. Probably buried way back, behind the obits and the "buy turnips" ads.

https://www.bbc.com/news/busin...

Learn economics and facts before you speak...

Oh, this is going to be good.

- Volatility is COMPLETELY NORMAL and EXPECTED process of adoption of a new distributed currency into a free and open market.

Citation needed.

Fiat is only "stable" due to manipulation to target, see the Fed's own whitepapers on that.

So if you abandon all pretense of manipulation to target, you get volatility. Nice own-goal.

IN FACT, Fiat is extremely volatile when priced in cryptocurrency.

Yes, due to the volatility of the cryptocurrency. Now price either of those in real world goods, like a pizza.

- Blockchain design model itself has NEVER been "hacked". Only the shitware and shitcorps and shitcoins surrounding it has been.

Counterpoint. Unless your "blockchain design model" manages to exclude every cryptocurrency deployed to date.

- NOT your keys, NOT your Cryptocurrency. Read the news... banks get "hacked" ALL THE FUCKING TIME MATE.

Not as frequently as cryptowallets, not without recourse (insurance because thank you state banking laws), and not with the ability to disappear with nary a trace because thank you Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation).

Sounds plenty learned to me.

of how China oppresses it's people in creepy ways. I'm actually a bit surprised this didn't make /..

One thing I haven't seen is so much as a peep about this from main stream media or a single politician. Calling out China's gov't is up there with showing a picture of Mohammad or pissing off Vladimir Putin in the list of "Shit you don't do".

What annoys me is seeing folks call for "Regime Change" in Venezuela and Iran while they ignore China (and Saudi Arabia while we're at it). Hell, Xi has basically declared himself emperor for life and Trump didn't just say it was OK, he said we should do that too. Not a peep I tells ya.

I know it's all about money (oil and cheap labor), but damn it pisses me off. Not the hypocrisy (pay a man that much and he doesn't care if you call him a hypocrite), but how they always get away with it.

The fraud involved hundreds of thousands of vehicles tuned or modified to enable emissions controls when being tested, but turn off emissions controls when in normal use. See https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... .

Already is...
https://www.bbc.com/news/busin...

It is not much different in the US. . The owners of the large corporations set the government agenda and policies, and the public at large has no influence over it.

An example of why America needs more regulation. This doesn't happen in other western nations.

Sweden - https://www.bbc.com/news/techn...
Germany - https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
France - https://techcrunch.com/2018/12...
Spain - https://www.theinquirer.net/in...

He's giving nuclear technology to a nation that hates Israel

I guess you are kind of behind the times, Saudi Arabia has had a bit of a leadership turnover and now at the prompting of the U.S. supports Israel.

Sure they do LOL.

He's giving nuclear technology to a nation that hates Israel

I guess you are kind of behind the times, Saudi Arabia has had a bit of a leadership turnover and now at the prompting of the U.S. supports Israel.

China buys 50% of the world's EV production. That doesn't mean that 50% of Chinese cars are EV. https://www.bbc.com/news/busin...

I'd still want an ad blocker. It's optional anyways. Don't like the performance? Don't install the extension.

Well, given that ads typically increase page load time significantly (for example ~2.5 seconds for Wordpress WordAds), you are probably still coming out ahead by using a blocker.

I too use Alt+Tab to switch keyboard focus between applications, be they maximized or not. But at least for me, keeping the unfocused application at least partly visible provides a visuospatial cue that improves my thought process, reducing the possibility of doorway amnesia.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

"In 1942, the Spanish dictator General Franco moved Spain onto Central European Time to follow Nazi Germany." ...and they remain there today. That is, Spain is West of Greenwich, but on the time zone one East of Greenwich. And its a 2013 article about this costing productivity, but they remain there today.

...as the United States currently has in total.

For greening, take a look at the natural reforestation that has occurred in New England over the last century.

Want to help the environment? Capitalism works. Socialism doesn't.

here's a citation for you
https://www.bbc.com/news/stori...
much more relevant don't you think
although your downstairs neighbors described the sound of you coming home as
https://www.drunkelephant.com/

Their prices have gone up dramatically. Apple have lost the plot lately.

They seem to have finally woken up to that: https://www.bbc.com/news/busin...

First we were told cockroaches were the only things that were survive a nuclear war. Now we are to believe that insects are super fragile? I don't think so, they have a super short lifespan and prodigious replication rates so as to be able to out-evolve any threat and take over any exposed ecological niche.

SuperKendall, you are making incorrect logical steps. I'll spell out for you where.

The popular press article said "More than 40% of insect species are declining". That relates to a sentence from the original academic paper, "Our work reveals dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world's insect species over the next few decades." https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Obviously that means that 60% of insect species AREN'T declining.

Your faulty logic was (1) from the figure that 40% are declining you understood that all insect species are fragile, and (2) you know that cockroaches are robust and assumed they must be in the 40% of declining species, rather than in the 60% of non-declining species.

If we abandon that faulty logic and instead think how to reconcile the data which suggests decline in some species, with the knowledge that cockroaches are robust? Here's one obvious resolution, building as it does upon your own statement about fast-breeding and adaptability:

https://www.bbc.com/news/scien...
"Fast-breeding pest insects will probably thrive because of the warmer conditions, because many of their natural enemies, which breed more slowly, will disappear, " said Prof Dave Goulson from the University of Sussex who was not involved in the review.

"It's quite plausible that we might end up with plagues of small numbers of pest insects, but we will lose all the wonderful ones that we want, like bees and hoverflies and butterflies and dung beetles that do a great job of disposing of animal waste."

Prof Goulson said that some tough, adaptable, generalist species - like houseflies and cockroaches - seem to be able to live comfortably in a human-made environment and have evolved resistance to pesticides.

... of those who contract measles, and their insurance fees should reflect that added risk.

Only by making the costs or either decision transparent, you can address both the unfounded and the founded fears of vaccinations risks versus non-vaccinations risks.

While the benefit of the measles vaccination seems obvious to most, actual scandals surrounding other vaccinations have cast shadows of doubt on just every vaccination, especially for those who do not differentiate.

One tragic contemporary example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world... /
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Here is some more info: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/wo...

So, did it work? That depends what you mean by 'work'. Did it help unemployed people in Finland find jobs, as the centre-right Finnish government had hoped? No, not really. Mr Simanainen says that while some individuals found work, they were no more likely to do so than a control group of people who weren't given the money. They are still trying to work out exactly why this is, for the final report that will be published in 2020.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
This only tells us that it won't effect unemployment one way or the other compared to their control group.
Of course that still calls into question how effective UBI would be in helping jobless people in finding a job, because apparently it makes no difference.

Now what's left is other data that would be interesting. For example how much did the UBI test group cost in bureaucratic overhead for the state compared to conventional social programs (if applicable)? Because this is also an argument that I frequently hear from UBI proponents. It's supposed to reduce costs that stem from tracking social program eligibility among the citizens.
I haven't done the math myself, but I would be interested to see where or even if there is a break even point between those two systems.

The worse problem is power can be easily turned into money. Clintons are a perfect example. Neither ever held an honest job.

Compared to Trump, Bill worked his ass off (but only if you count the many hours of the day and night he was wearing his reading glasses). Whatever the honesty of being POTUS then, it hasn't gotten better since.

Trump's daily schedule v Obama and Bush

A true social order where all the top jobs are honest jobs is called "socialism" (but only when armed with a large can of DDT++ to prevent outbreaks of Stalin or Mao fever, and an eternal regimen of diligent application which so far seems to exceed human capacity).

So we're left with leaders doing hard jobs, if not honest jobs.