Slashdot Mirror

Apple owns about ten percent of Adobe's shares. Slashdot's community is so fucking clueless.

An you seem to be the most clueless of them all. Apple used to own 16.5% of Adobe back in the 1980s. But in 1989 sold its share of adobe. You are over 25 years out of date.

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/0...

Now days there is no business connection between Apple and Adobe. Infact there is a on going feud between apple and adobe.

Do people not read anything any more?

Firstly: Daily Mail. Not a good idea to cite this if you dislike being shown to be wrong.

Secondly:
This page makes it clear that the Disney actions do not describe the type of action that I challenged Walterbyrd to cite.

In the Disney case, Disney fired the IT employees and contracted their work out to a company that brings in lots of H1B employees. So Disney did not directly replace Americans with H1Bs. Disney used loophole that needs to be fixed.

The State Department has ended an Obama-era program to grant visas to foreign entrepreneurs who want to start companies in the United States.

Because Obama did it. Someone who wanted bright, energetic people who wanted to better themselves and their community must be stopped. Especially since Obama wanted them to come to this country.

Meanwhile, we'll continue to allow the EB-5 visa program to remain even though it is essentially the same thing. The only difference is with EB-5, the money would flow to family members in this corrupt administration.

If you believe that the decline (and eventual disappearance) of a racial group (e.g., Africans in San Francisco [1]) is ethically wrong and that we must create a way to increase the population of the racial group, then you must necessarily support reviving Neanderthals. After we revive them, we should give them preferential treatment via affirmative action.

[1] According to a "report" by the "New York Times", "City officials say they are trying to retain the remaining black population, largely through expanding and improving public housing, and want to lure more affluent blacks to the city."

Two people died because of a computer program.

Just a slight difference between jumping in front of a moving vehicle and alliding with an inanimate barrier. Lumping the two incidents together is Ludacris.

We don't hear much about AI driving success in avoiding crashes just like we don't hear about planes that land safely. We only hear about failures.

Failures are baked into the statistics commonly expressed as a ratio of drivers to accidents or miles driven to accidents.

These features will get better with time and debugging (meaning more failures to come)

Is it even possible to debug "AI"? Can anyone in any meaningful way be assured of correct responses without invoking trial and error? The whole point of "deep learning" it's a black box programmed by example and objective functions rather than hard work of human programmers.

Just as early commercial planes had their problems so does AI self-driving

There is no meaningful overlap between "AI" and design of aircraft control systems.

For now flying is safer than driving no matter who is in control of the car (0 commercial aviation deaths for 2017 in US)

What's worse? Cherry picking outliers to fit a narrative (regardless of merit) or not having your facts straight?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...

So we tailor their class times to their biological rhythms and they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms. Will they ever really grow up?

I've had N24 for the last thirty years, so I can officially blow this smoke back into your face.

Juvenile:

* A prepubescent child.
* A person younger than the age of majority.
* A person younger than the age of criminal responsibility.
* An animal that is not sexually mature.
* A mindless insult that all-too-often passes itself off as intelligent discourse.

Last I checked, college students fuck like rabbits, so we'll dispatch item #1 with extreme prejudice.

Age of majority

Most countries set the age of majority at 18.

What is the normal age for college freshmen in the U. S.?

If someone goes straight to college campus from high school, the typical age of the incoming freshman in a U.S. college is 18 or 19.

So, by sophomore year, juveniles (as defined by a minority criteria) are already a distinct minority.

So what we have here is a juvenile-onset biological rhythm shift which persist well into young adulthood.

Young adulthood having recently become the age during which a majority of the population struggles to acquire a remunerative skillset among the top-three quartiles of career prospects and life outcomes.

Fewer U.S. Graduates Opt for College After High School — April 2014

Last October, just 65.9 percent of people who had graduated from high school the previous spring had enrolled in college, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this week.

(The large chunk of the college admission population enrolled in the humanities starts the race a full quartile back, many drop-outs return to the fray later, and some high school dropouts have intrinsic skills, so even the dismal quartile from 25–50th percentile is by no means guaranteed merely by showing up.)

A really good example of the indirect path was in the news cycle this week:

Wylie was born to parents who were both physicians. At age 6 he was abused by a mentally unstable person, and the school tried to cover it up. In 2000 his father and he won a settlement of CA$290,000 against the school district. As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD.

He left school at 16 without a qualification, but by 17 was working for the Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff. He taught himself to code at age 19. At 20, he began studying law at the London School of Economics.

In 2013 he was introduced to SCL Elections which would later create Cambridge Analytica.

Ignatieff was a catastrophic political leader, but the rest of his bio reads like a Who's Who entry (recent Order of Canada, and back to full professorship at Harvard).

Speaking of physicians, that's surely one profession that's never strayed into sparing the whip.

* How Much Do 30-Hour Shifts Suck for Medical Residents? — 8 March 2017
* No Doctor Should Work 30 Straight Hours Without Sleep — 15 December 2016
* Marathon 24- to 26-hour doctor shifts may be unsafe for patients: experts — 19 February 2016
* A Dangerous Study of Medical Resident

To my mind, providing an on-site service staffed with real people who make real mistakes is way different than collecting money for marketing someone else's product. I can see how Amazon will face the same lawsuit challenges that doctors in America current endure. A client will sue claiming that something got damaged or stolen. And talk about going after deep pockets; none deeper.

On the other hand, we know that Amazon is getting into the health-care biz. Perhaps this is a foot-in-the-door to at-home nursing services for the soon-to-be-senile baby boomers. Now there's a market waiting for exploitation.

Can I have some citation on this. It isn't that I don't believe you, I just hadn't heard that particular statistic before and would like to understand the details on such information.

The statistic is from a NYT article (there was a Slashdot story about it a few days ago), that is, from leaked internal Uber company data obtained by the NYT.

Also, not all self-driving cars are the same. Google's tend to have a good safety record thus far, Uber seems to try and piggy back on this (like they tried to "piggy back" on Google's technology, too...) to assure everyone that testing self-driving cars is safe, while refusing to release their own testing data. The information obtained by the NYT suggests the performance of the Uber cars is terrible in comparison to Google.

Uber deserves no trust and no benefit of the doubt, I mean they were kicked out of California because they didn't apply for a $150 licence for autonomous car testing. If they can't be bothered to fill out some paperwork, I wonder where else they are cutting corners.

Assuming you mean the 13 miles figure:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...

As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona, according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times and two people familiar with the company’s operations in the Phoenix area but not permitted to speak publicly about it.

And OF COURSE "the guy monitoring the automated car didn't know she was crossing" (or was it a girl, I thought guy when I saw the video but I've heard it reported that was a female). HE/SHE WAS LOOKING AT HIS/HER FUCKING PHONE!

on Anderson Cooper - "a waste"
on Ruth Bader Ginsburg - "Her mind is shot"
on Alec Baldwin - "impersonation just can't get any worse", "portrayal stinks"
on LaVar Ball - "just a poor manâ(TM)s version of Don King, but without the hair", "Ungrateful fool!", "unaccepting of what I did for his son", "Very ungrateful!"
on Samuel L. Jackson - "cheats"
on Penn Jillette - "goofball atheist"
on Bobby Jindal - "lightweight"
on Adam Schiff - "sleazy"
on Chuck Schumer - "Cryin' Chuck", "Fake Tears Chuck Schumer", "clown"
on Ben Schreckinger - "major lightweight with no credibility"
on Tony Schwartz - "Dummy writer"
on Paul Singer - "Mr. Amnesty"
on Tavis Smiley - "hater & racist"
on Stuart Stevens - "a zero", "sad!", "a clown!", "can't get a job!", "arrogant", "made some of the dumbest political decisions of all time"
on Tom Steyer - "wacky", "totally unhinged"
on Chris Stirewalt - "dope", "really dumb puppet"
on Meryl Streep - "Hillary flunky who lost big"
on John Sununu - "couldn't get elected dog catcher", "dummy"
on Don Lemon - "I never watch Don Lemon, who I once called the 'dumbest man on television!'", "a lightweight", "dumb as a rock"
on Clare O'Connor - "dummy", "dummy writer"
on Frank Luntz - "a total clown", "clown", "a low-class slob"
on Alicia Machado - "disgusting (check out sex tape and past)", "a con", "my worst Miss U."
on Rand Paul - "truly weird", "reminds me of a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain"
on Rick Perry - "needs a new pair of glasses", "He should be forced to take an IQ test"

(citations with links to twitters, etc)

and some consider both to be unsightly.

More unsightly than a coal plant? More unsightly than a mountain in Kentucky that's been leveled, ground up, and re-deposited on the same spot as a giant pile of gravel? More unsightly than a nuclear plant on a river? (there are lots of them)

I call BS. If "unsightly" is really the objection to renewable energy, I think I would like to kindly invite you to go fuck yourself.

We are comparing relative performance. Uber's vehicles needed hundreds of times more human interventions over the same distance compared to Waymo's.

You do realize that it's kind of silly to bring up the specter of "criminal negligence" when the Tempe police cleared them of wrongdoing, right?

And if the Tempe police say it, it must be true. /s

The video shows a situation in which a human would have at least tried to react. Uber's car didn't even start slowing, and it has LIDAR. Contrary to what you seem to believe, no current self-driving car technology employs computer vision using a visible light camera to guide the car. Instead, they use IR-band LIDAR, detailed mapping data, and other sensor packages common in existing assisted-navigation / crash avoidance systems (e.g. small RADARs).

Anyway, it's confirmed - Uber's program is far less safe, and less advanced, than Waymo's.

He blew up two black people, two white people, and one Asian with four mail bombs and one trip-wire trap.

If he was racially motivated, he had a very odd way of showing it - not targeting a specific race and all.

You are misleading people. Only TWO people were killed. They both are black and were targeted (2 different bombs). The two white people were injured and were NOT targeted but rather by chance because it was left at a sign with trip-wire trap. The so called "Asian" in your post is NOT Asian but Hispanic. She was injured. Actually another person who is FedEx employee was injured and that was ALSO not targeted but the bomb discharged accidentally. The last kill is HIMSELF and yes this kill is WHITE. Along the process of the last kill, a SWAT team officer was blasted by the bomb.

Stop spreading your BS that attempt to misleading others.

Sources -- here and here.

Well, maybe we should ask our cops in America to just look the other way and pretend crimes aren't happening, like your UK cops do.

How about instead we ask them to stop committing crimes, especially while on duty. They should especially stop raping so many women, and killing us at unprecedented rates even though it's the safest time in history to be a cop in America.

Dropbox already appointed Bushâ(TM)s National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, to their board. How much more warning do you want that Dropbox is Spook central?

Carol Davidsen, Director of the 2012 Obama campaign's Media Analytics group, got data on almost all American voters. In a telling quote, she said:

Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.

They got the data from an estimated 190 MILLION people in the United States. There's no way 190 million people gave permission to the Obama campaign. Instead, they used the 1 million Obama app downloaders to scrape all of their Friend's personal information - which is exactly what CA's professor did.

Here's an article from 2013 that has Obama campaign analysts reporting that Facebook knew the campaign was breaking the rules, but allowed it "as long as you stop on Nov. 7th".

There is no doubt that the Obama campaign did at least everything Cambridge Analytica did, and more.

Well if you are waiting for Stephen Hawking to comment on this, it's going to be long wait...

No people don't regard this as a positive.

They certainly used to. How Obama’s Internet Campaign Changed Politics

“Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

And Barack Obama and the Facebook Election

This election [2008] was the first in which all candidates—presidential and congressional—attempted to connect directly with American voters via online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. It has even been called the "Facebook election." It is no coincidence that one of Obama's key strategists was 24-year-old Chris Hughes, a Facebook cofounder. It was Hughes who masterminded the Obama campaign's highly effective Web blitzkrieg—everything from social networking sites to podcasting and mobile messaging.

Sometimes it takes a company doing something unsavory at a moment when people are sensitive to it for the problem to get fully recognized.

True. And people are waking up to the degree that the Silicon Valley technocracy and their platforms (Google, Twitter, Facebook) are trying to manipulate them, are trying to influence elections, etc. Glad it's finally starting to sink in.

The bakery sold cakes to people they didn't know were gay.

According to the news reports:

Phillips made it clear to the gay couple that he would happily sell them other items: birthday cakes, cookies, and so on. He welcomes LGBT customers; he is simply unwilling to use his artistic talents in the service of a message that he deems immoral.

So, no, that statement of yours is wrong. So are all your other assertions about being abusive. No one (well, except you) claims that the bakery was abusive.

As far as reasons go, no one should provide a good reason for refusing to publish a message. When you ask someone to write a message on your behalf and they refuse, should they need a reason?

It's compelled speech, it's compelled by the state. It's evil. Why bother with a court case if the state can compel speech? Just force them to write "I am guilty" and get it over with.

You misspelled Republican.

Facebook also dragged down the rest of the stock market Since its illegal to hire foreign nationals to run your campaign, not to mention the rest, looks like we are really in store for some serious #winning.

Something nobody has accused the Russians of.

Of course they have.

It's very easy to pretend that there's no scandal if you pretend the scandal is something other than what it is.

1) There is no scandal

2) Russiagaters keep moving the goalposts. First it was hacking the DNC servers, then it was hacking electric grids, then it was spreading "discord" amongst Black Lives Matter activists. That minorities live in a murderous police state was a big shocker to them until Russia said it was happening.

The Mueller investigation is on-going.

With zero probable suspison of any Russian hacking or colluding with Trump to do so. And he's never bothered to subpoena the DNC servers, the alleged hacking of which is only the foundation for the entire Russiagate narrative. Which either means this "investigation" was a farce from day one, or Mueller is so incompetent he couldn't find his ass with both hands and a couple of interns. Pick one.

a very real concern given he has a reputation for telling people things and then denying he said them afterwards

Muller's reputation is of a professional liar and propagandist. But people like yourself just love getting fooled again and again.

The available evidence that's been made public suggests some degree of collusion took place

Not even remotely close. This is one of the many plot holes with Russiagate - how is it that Putin would be so clever to see that a failed businessman, racist, sexist, WWE character could be president years in advance - yet at the same time was dumb enough to collude with someone as dumb as Trump or any of his equally dumb inner circle?

Trump has committed numerous impeachable offenses since gaining office.

Trump could kill and eat a human baby on the White House lawn - and it wouldn't change the fact that Russiagate is the dumbest and most baseless conspiracy theory of all time.

it's fairly obvious Putin has tried to influence the election

Plot hole #3,478 of Russiagate: why would Putin try to influence an American election between two parties that have both been virulently anti-Russian for over a hundred years. It's like accusing MLK of trying to swing a primary election between George Wallace and Strom Thurmond in the 50's. It's just asinine on its face when both sides hate your guts.

So sit tight, and quit it with the partisanship. If you care about America, you'll want Mueller to do his job.

When your grandkids ask you how anyone could possibly believe a story with more plot holes than Chem Trailers, are you going to get red in the face and stay quiet, or fess up?

they argued, successfully, that they weren't a "News" organization and were in fact an entertainment network. That's how they get away with running opinion pieces and news stories side by side without notice or a pause.

No. Much as I loathe Fox News, I'd rather see them strung up for actual, documented abuses rather than an urban legend that was debunked years ago. First, it was a single station rather than the entire network. Second, it was a management dispute with a particular employee, not a dispute over the station's truthiness in general. And finally, while the court awarded the plaintiff damages, it made a specific note that it was not a question of the station's truthfulness but a personal dispute between station management and the employee. Absolutely, network news -- including both Fox and CNN -- tilt their news to favor their POV, but you can't pin it all on Fox and pretend the others are objective.

Point us to the details about how Obama supposedly did this, otherwise stop trolling.

The NY TImes fucking celebrated Obama's campaign shitting all over privacy - and Obama didn't limit it to Facebook data. He also strip-mined cable TV boxes:

Data You Can Believe In

The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In

...

The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”

...

But Gershkoff had come upon a cache of data that all the strategists would come to appreciate. She had contracted with a relatively new firm called Rentrak that was competing with Nielsen and was buying up real-time, raw viewing data directly from cable and satellite companies that had nearly 20 million set-top boxes in eight million homes. When Gershkoff told Grisolano, he was thrilled. Rentrak’s huge new trove of data, he surmised, could help him find out with relative certainty what shows were being delivered to the homes of the roughly 15 million persuadable voters Wagner’s department had identified.

...

But there was the potentially politically explosive matter of privacy. Unlike Facebook, where users were at least giving the campaign explicit permission to collect personal data even if they had not read the fine print, television watchers were making no such agreement.

Haspel took over months after the tortures had ended

Yeah, you appear to be lying - or, to be charitable, just misinformed... The various articles mention the names of two tortured people. It's true that she wasn't there for the first, but she was there for the second. More precisely, she was the chief of the Thailand prison between October and December 2002. The second person in the article was tortured between mid-November and December 2002, so during her tenure.

Original post by Puffin Fitness: https://np.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/85p30j/deletefacebook_movement_gains_steam_after_50/dvz4y6o/

* * *

In 2009, Russian social-media mogul Yuri Milner invested $200 million into Facebook at a valuation of $10 billion dollars without voting rights or a seat on the board. To understand this investment, at the time the world was going through a global recession and Facebook's general valuation had dropped from the $15 billion from the year prior to $4-$6 billion in 2009.

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebooks-valuation-the-cheat-sheet/

One company did offer a valuation of $8 billion, but with a seat on the board, which Zuckerberg was strongly against. In other words, Yuri Milner invested in Facebook when they were strapped for cash and at an inflated price without voting rights or a seat on the board. That's an amazing deal for Zuckerberg!

Here's Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg hanging out for an interview: https://techcrunch.com/2009/05/26/mark-zuckerberg-and-yuri-milner-talk-about-facebooks-new-investment-video/

The deal was coordinated by Alisher B. Usmanov, a Russian oligarch that earned his fortune managing steel mill subsidiaries for Gazprom.

Usmanov spent six years in prison for fraud and embezzlement in the 80's.

In 2008, Usmanov fired a publisher and editor at one of Russia's most respected news paper after it published detailed accounts of Russian election fraud.

It is said, "His ties to the Kremlin and Facebook have stirred concerns that he might influence the companyâ(TM)s policies in subtle ways to appease governments in markets where Facebook is also an important tool of political dissent, such as Russia." This was in 2009.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/technology/a-russian-facebook-bet-pays-off-big.html

Usmanov is close friends with Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alisher_Usmanov

Ivanka Trump and Wendi Deng are good friends with Abramovich's then wife, Dasha Zhoukova. Here they are watching a tennis match.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3784716/Ivanka-Trump-Karlie-Kloss-Wendi-Deng-Murdoch-watch-Open.html

The leak of the Paradise Papers revealed the money Yuri Milner used to invest into Facebook came from Gazprom, a US sanctioned Russian oil and gas company, at one point owning 9% of the company.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-the-paradise-papers-leak-facebook-yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia

Soon after, Zuckerberg and Milner became friends, meeting monthly:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-got-early-business-advice-194957335.html

And even spoke together in November 2015 at the 2016 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-the-paradise-papers-leak-facebook-yuri-milner-facebook-twitter-russia

In May 2012, Milner attended Zuckerberg's wedding. In 2014, Milner moved to California home he paid 100% above value on.

http://time.com/5011000/paradise-papers-tax-ha

NYT's correction appears to be at odds with ProPublica's correction.

NYT: "While Ms. Haspel oversaw the site during the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at the site"
via https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

ProPublica: "It is now clear that Haspel did not take charge of the base until after the interrogation of Zubaydah ended."
via https://www.propublica.org/art...

Interesting.

The NYT ran a story about how [Trump's CIA pick] Gina Haspel had a role in torture during her admin of a Thailand black site.

That was later shown to be completely false (Haspel took over months after the tortures had ended). Pro Publica printed a retraction of their story, but the NYT did not.

For comparison, Infowars is widely decried (*) as fake news for publishing the "Spirit Cooking" article, which is completely accurate in all its claims.

Now congress-people are falling over themselves saying they will block Haspel's appointment to the CIA.

What are the chances that these congressmen get their information from the NYT, are well-meaning, and yet misinformed?

(*) That exact article is listed as an example of fake news in at least one scientific study of fake news! It's also debunked as "false" on Snopes.com

Trump does it again!

Thanks, Obama!

Literally - Obama did just that, and he did worse - strip mining private data from cable TV boxes.

Data You Can Believe In
The Obama Campaign’s Digital Masterminds Cash In

...

But Gershkoff had come upon a cache of data that all the strategists would come to appreciate. She had contracted with a relatively new firm called Rentrak that was competing with Nielsen and was buying up real-time, raw viewing data directly from cable and satellite companies that had nearly 20 million set-top boxes in eight million homes. When Gershkoff told Grisolano, he was thrilled. Rentrak’s huge new trove of data, he surmised, could help him find out with relative certainty what shows were being delivered to the homes of the roughly 15 million persuadable voters Wagner’s department had identified.

...

But hey, it was all OK four years ago because Obama did it.

Here's an article from NYT discussing Obama's use of facebook data during his 2012 campaign.

The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ”

Also, this quote from [Obama’s former director for media analytics] Carol Davidsen:

[Facebook] came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.

Backing up your post with link and quotes:

So the firm [Cambridge Analytica] harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission, according to former Cambridge employees, associates and documents, making it one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history.

In the United States, Mr. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a board member, Mr. Bannon and Mr. Nix received warnings from their lawyer that it was illegal to employ foreigners in political campaigns, according to company documents and former employees.

documents viewed by The Times indicate that the firm’s British affiliate claims to have worked in Russia and Ukraine. And the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, disclosed in October that Mr. Nix had reached out to him during the campaign in hopes of obtaining private emails belonging to Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Well as more and more jobs are taken by AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans?

Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?

This misses the point; companies are embracing automation (and "increased productivity") as a way of getting people off the payroll and the pension scheme. Who is going to pay people to retire in their 40s and 50s? Who is going to pay people an income they can live on for working part-time? Even today in the UK there are millions of people on "zero hours" contracts which do not guarantee them any work (and therefore any pay) in any given week/month. These people are technically not unemployed, but they have to rely on welfare to survive.

A future where we all somehow live lives of comfort and leisure while machines do all the work is a utopian fantasy.

Well as more and more jobs are taken by
AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs
will be left for humans?

Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?

Well as more and more jobs are taken by AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans?

The idea that technology will magically create vast numbers of new jobs to compensate for the ones lost - the so-called luddite fallacy - doesn't work in a world where employers are deploying automation specifically to reduce their expensive human head count.

Let it not be forgotten that the primacy of information remains, but the gatekeepers of primary information are becoming increasingly specialized and dispersed throughout the social graph. One of the problems here is not that information is waning, but that the social internet deluge refuses to wane.

The Purpose of Mathematics in a Classical Education — 1 March 2017 by Thomas Treloar

In approximately 300 B.C., Euclid brought together much of what was known in mathematics up to that point in 13 volumes. He systematically organized this material, beginning with a short list of first principles and piecing together a body of knowledge as an extended chain.

The Elements became the standard textbook in geometry for the next twenty-two hundred years. It is only in the last one hundred years that it has been discarded as required reading for all educated people.

The expectation used to be that an educated person could somehow manage to cram the essential information working-set into their brain's as a young adult, and that would provide a solid (and shared) operational basis throughout adulthood. In modern mathematics, one often sees Poincare mooted as the last universalist.

No longer do we even cram the essence of one field into our brains all at once.

One approach to this conundrum is just to accept that you're working at second (or third, or fourth) hand most of the time. The other is to dump the knowledge itself, and turn your brain into a glorified index-card compendium: rarely to have the knowledge, but to have the Knowledge about where it lives (which is rarely more than three inspired search keywords and a click or two away).

The Knowledge, London's Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS — November 2014

Actually, "challenge" isn't quite the word for the trial a London cabbie endures to gain his qualification. It has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine.

It is without question a unique intellectual, psychological and physical ordeal, demanding unnumbered thousands of hours of immersive study ... a process which, on average, takes four years to complete, and for some, much longer than that.

PBS's edumentary The Brain with David Eagleman (2015) has a segment on neurological change induced by this learning process (not a small effect, either). The specific subject of this giant, journalistic wall-of-text from turns out to be a crazy man:

He sold his engineering outfit and devoted himself full-time to the Knowledge, living off the savings he'd gained from the sale of his business.

Nevertheless, I relate to his endeavour. Half of the time on the Internet, I feel like a "butter boy" endlessly committing to mind the knowledge graph. Not the knowledge itself, just the graph, with just a little help from my own personal wiki.

Strangely, the key organizational principle in my wiki is a social graph: the names of people who discovered or wrote things. People make for the best landmarks. This was reinforced for me by a remark in a Bryan Cantrill video, where he said "corporations don't innovate, people do". I've borne this maxim in mind ever since. When a corporation talks about corporate innovation, ask yourself who the people are. If you don't know, you're being sold a bill of goods. Why is clang so great? Because it was Chris Lattner, as supported by Apple, and not some generic Apple product team. And usually when the key people leave, the innovation does, too. So my social graph consists of the people

According to this article from the NY Times in 1981 the neutron bomb has been known by the public since the 1950s.

Q: "Did Cambridge Analytica Harvest 50 Million Facebook Profiles?"
A: TFA money quote: "hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use"

which implies that friend lists of 'hundreds of thousands' of participating (paid) users were used to issue an automated flurry of direct access to related profiles by user ID... and the rabbit hole went as deep as default 'public' profiles would permit. Like sheeple-product publicly declaring their family members and supplying relation codes because, they were asked, like it's all a fun computer game.

Some where past the 2 million mark or so Facebook (if they gave a damn) would have had tripwires snap and bright red flags dropping in front of their faces. Flags like direct and obvious API access abuse, access from one or a few accounts/networks faster than humanly possible, direct profile access by ID with no referrer page pointing to it, a 404 floods (if they were guessing). White hat 101 stuff. They do not care. They are on the verge of completely monetizing their APIs anyway to (finally!) inject real portfolio value into their company and want to hook institutional data junkies first.

But if anyone thinks data mining might have helped Trump win the election, it must be evil and frightening. Any data mining efforts to 'network' and oppose are kewl and just. This is as transparently duplicitous as Mayor Swivel-Head from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

I find it ironically hilarious -- without laughing -- that the same political contingent that blanches at the thought of a physical wall at the border of our sovereign country, is so easily duped into characterizing any IP access from the former Soviet bloc as the propaganda of Putin puppets, and not entrepreneurial enterprises for hire founded by young clever people like anywhere else in the connected world. The very same data games data mining Silicon Valley startups use to schmooze money from jargon-hypnotized investors or politically fueled troll farms like ShareBlue, when applied by clever Ukranian teenagers who are waiting for their Putin paycheck like I'm waiting for my Big Oil paycheck... becomes manipulative evil. It's almost even racist.

And when a Russian server farm operator tries to alert the world that Obama's FBI showed zero interest in obtaining logs from his rented servers that (he claimed) would illuminate another hop back to the attackers, you are forced to speculate that his Russian IP address was what the FBI was politically after.

Isn't it strange how this county map is so sharply delineated at the boundaries between populous urban centers and rural areas? Pretty precise to be a map of evil hacker influence, and funny how those (alleged) manipulated voters were targeted so completely and populous counties with their more centralized and automated voting systems, were not. Heck, it looks more like an actual grassroots uprising that won by a few hairs, assisted by the electoral college. A routine upset election, welcome to reality.

involving foreign nationals is a criminal enterprise

Oh, wow... Would hiring a British spy, who then engaged his contacts among Russians, qualify?

Fine, arrest everyone who is guilty of such a crime

There is no crime described in TFA... At the most, there is a violation of Facebook's TOS...

...steel tariffs... Sure he's kinda fulfilling a promise, but he's actually harming the people he was supposed to help.

Again, "You may disagree on what he is doing and disagree on whether his policy will help". I think we both agree that it does count as "fulfilling a promise". Whether it achieves the goal or not is debatable.

There were two parts to your claim, first he's trying to fulfill promises, and second, he's trying to help people.

With the tariffs I think it's fulfilling a promise, but I don't think he actually believes it will help people as much as he thinks a trade war will be exciting and good for his poll numbers.

"tax cut" which was effectively just a massive wealth transfer to the rich

Taxing less is a wealth transfer? That doesn't make sense. Keeping more of the money you earned is a wealth transfer?

The money to fund the tax cut is coming from the treasury and massively raising the debt. Sooner or later that money has to be paid back, either through inflation (everyone is a bit less wealthy), raising taxes down the line, or cutting back on other programs.

The tax cut doesn't make the nation wealthier, it just transfers more of that wealth to the richest.

I guess if you feel entitled to other peoples money.

You're assuming that people create wealth in a void and the only role of government is to take from group A and give to group B. Once you acknowledge just how many external factors affect how much money you earn that statement is meaningless from a taxation perspective.

However, can you explain: "When upper-income Americans prosper, so do middle-income and lower-income Americans. Conversely, when high earners are stagnating, so are income-earners in all other categories."

You're citing a paper from a libertarian think-tank, publish in 1996, arguing that the middle class was growing in 1991.... Why do I care about an off-topic publication looking at wealth distribution 27 years ago?

Why don't you look at what's happened in the subsequent decades.

Economics is not a zero sum game. Taxing a person more doesn't help someone else. Just as taxing a person less doesn't hurt another person. Your choice of words "wealth transfer" is odd to me when talking about a tax cut.

I agree economics is not a zero sum game, and in some circumstances corporate tax cuts help the economy as a whole, but these are not those circumstances. If the cut was helping you'd see evidence in the form of raises and investments, instead they're giving out dividends and buying back shares.

The minuscule amount of economic activity generated is not sufficient to pay the cost, hence a wealth transfer.

nonsensical promises on healthcare and then pushed for a healthcare bill that broke all of them?

He did make a good faith effort and he did succeed in ending the forced mandate. He can't repeal healthcare without Congress.

A good faith effort to do what? Show me his good healthcare bill? Heck, show me any good GOP healthcare bill.

The Congressional bill sucked because their ideas suck, the only viable GOP healthcare plan was mandates, and Obama took those. Now all the other things that could improve healthcare are "liberal" ideas they won't touch.

But I don't think for a moment he really cares about helping his base.

I think he is an idiot that likes the country. I think he does care more so than the average politician. Just my opinion.

Evidence?

This. People need to pay attention. Trumpers will almost admit they favor authoritarianism. Ask them if they think it's ok that Trump does X thing that's traditionally outside of classical presidential power. Nepotism, back room deals, emoluments, willful blindness, constant open about-faces/outright lying, etc. The answer is always deflection or denial.

Seemingly, it was designed as a cable-stayed bridge. This means the deck's main support is a central pylon and the cables attached to it. Except they only built one half of the bridge and no pylon. It was supported by literally nothing.

"After Surgery in Germany, I Wanted Vicodin, Not Herbal Tea"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/surgery-germany-vicodin.html

Every day, my body felt a little better. I drank mint tea. I drank fennel tea. I drank homemade chai with ginger, cardamom and pepper. I drank coffee slowly, enjoying every sip. I lingered in that in-between space.

After a week, I took the tram to the doctor’s office to have my stitches removed. My doctor, with her usual cup of chamomile tea in hand, remarked on my progress. “I rested,” I told her. Normally, I would have said, “I did nothing,” but I didn’t say that. I had been healing, and that’s something.

I did say that this story is not about the benefits of universal health care, but for the sake of accuracy, let me add that this hysterectomy was not without cost. After my surgery, I had to pay $25 for the taxi ride home.

The viking farms were not under ice.

"What does seem to have contributed to the abandonment of the Western Settlements, archaeologists said, is climate change. The onset of a ''little ice age'' made living halfway up Greenland's coast untenable in the mid-1300's, argues Dr. Charles Schweger, an archaeology professor at the University of Alberta, who has studied soils around the Farm Beneath the Sand.

Dr. Schweger said the Norse were no match for cooling temperatures, which caused a glacier several miles up a valley to expand. As this glacier grew, it also released more water every summer into the valley, causing turbidity in drinking water and raging floods that blanketed meadows with sand and gravel. Today the edge of Greenland's ice cap is only six miles from the old farm site. But in the mid-14th century, it probably was far closer."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05...

Can it translate a Chinese Reporter's "eye-roll"? 'Cause one apparently broke China's Internet

With a fellow reporter’s fawning question to a Chinese official pushing past the 30-second mark, Liang Xiangyi, of the financial news site Yicai, began scoffing to herself. Then she turned to scrutinize the questioner in disbelief.

Looking her up and down, Ms. Liang rolled her eyes with such concentrated disgust, it seemed only natural that her entire head followed her eyes backward as she looked away in revulsion.

Captured by China’s national news broadcaster, CCTV, the moment spread quickly across Chinese social media.

...

On Chinese social media, GIFs and other online riffs inspired by Ms. Liang’s epic eye roll quickly proliferated, and by evening they were being deleted by government censors. Ms. Liang’s name became the most-censored term on Weibo, the microblogging platform. On Taobao, the freewheeling online marketplace, vendors began selling T-shirts and cellphone cases bearing her image.

This is yet another symptom of Americans not wanting to spend money (e.g. higher taxes) on infrastructure. The maddening thing is nearly all of those tax cuts went to the top 1%ers. Enough already. They get the best civilization has to offer. Make them pay their bloody God damned dues.

BS. New Yorkers pay lots of taxes, they just don't get much value for money.

New York has the highest construction costs in the world.

Compare that to other large modern cities and you see that there is no excuse for that (aside from graft, incompetence, and kickbacks from unions & contractors).

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...

https://jalopnik.com/heres-the...

The Navy uses (used?) the traffic light system - so if she says 'Yellow light' it means that you are edging on the unacceptable and should tone it down, change topic or whatever as you're making her uncomfortable. 'Red light' means you are being completely unacceptable and you should stop and walk away. And of course, 'Green light' means that your advances are welcome and please proceed.
Navy Traffic Light System

Perhaps this would help simplify things as unsocial geeks may not see or understand non-verbal communication that indicates that the other person is uncomfortable with the interaction.

Bullshit. Per capita inflation-adjusted government revenue may dip occasionally during a recession, but it's up tremendously over time. Can't blame this on a lack of revenue. The MTA has it's own sources of funds, anyway. It's not supposed to depend on the Federal government.

Even The New York Times acknowledges that this is a political issue, one which Democrat Cuomo is mostly to blame for.

The real scandal is that NY's Subway costs more to build an operate than just about anywhere else. Their labor cost is $140K/year/worker on _average_. They also run two people per train, compared to one pretty much anywhere else and they still manage to have their crews spend less time working vs. deadheading.

Face it, this is the natural result of government worker unions combined with complicit politicians. The politicians and their cronies and allies make money and the public gets screwed as they suck the subway system dry.

If you want to fix it, then remove all the union rules and privatize it. I know, will never happen, because certain folks have too much political power in NYC.

There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse.

So it's OK for her to be the Deputy director, but once she gets to climb one rung of the ladder that's a big problem?

It wasn't okay. That's the point. But with all the other crazy Trump appointments it probably got lost in the news. The NY Times covered it when she was appointed Deputy Director.