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In France (for instance), retirement is mostly paid by taxation on the next generation. In many places, the community will take care of you. If my future well being is not based on market investment, why would I even need to understand it. This would be a purely academic skills.

The United States is supposed to have a system like that. The politicians are now telling everyone the retirees are a bunch of deadbeats taking money from the government. It's really messed up.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

Yeah, the accumulation at the tippy top is pretty disgusting...

How we spent 1 billion overthrowing Libya

Obama's worst mistake The Atlantic

The us ruined Libya

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

Agreed, something doesn't smell right...

If you are too lazy to click on the chart, it shows that the Federal guilty plea rate is 97%. Only 3% go to trial.

So your position is that all the drug dealers, bank robbers, con artists, kidnappers, tax cheats, money launderers, counterfeiters, smugglers, mad bombers, interstate sex traffickers, etc were railroaded because "Indictments don't mean shit if you don't get a jury trial".

It's great to know that you support a cause that has been taken up by liberal advocacy groups all over the county. I know how hard it is to stand up for liberal causes on Slashdot because of all the right wing trolls, and I salute your commitment to freedom.

I don't recall a lot of people being okay with Obama's drone policy.

Of course, you don't — passive acquiescence is not memorable. So, please, cite anything by NYTimes or Washington Post denouncing Obama for the far graver offense of killing suspects, that's more passionate than this, or this, or this...

Heck, not only was he not denounced, his side praised him for killing Osama bin Laden, instead of arresting him... Online and IRL, Left were taunting "RethugliKKKans" with: "who is tougher on terrorism now?"

The only guy objecting was this maverick. Every single other "progressive" is a hypocrite...

If you really want to argue with that, you should at least give some statistics that show the differences. Here is one example. However, it is not the best evidence because it is not specific to the U.S. but rather the whole world. It shows that the income isn't one of reasons for rich people to commit suicide.

"How can a movie that grossed $475 million on a $32 million budget not turn a profit? It comes down to Tinseltown accounting. As Planet Money explained in an interview with Edward Jay Epstein in 2010, studios typically set up a separate "corporation" for each movie they produce. Like any company, it calculates profits by subtracting expenses from revenues. Erase any possible profit, the studio charges this "movie corporation" a big fee that overshadows the film's revenue. For accounting purposes, the movie is a money "loser" and there are no profits to distribute.

Confused? Imagine you're running a lemonade stand with your buddy Steve. Your mom says you have to share half your profits with your sister. But you don't wanna! So you pretend your buddy Steve is actually a corporation -- call him Steve, Inc -- charging you rent for the stand, the spoon, etc. "Dang, mom, I don't have any profits, I had to pay it all to Steve, Inc!" you say when you come home. But the money isn't gone. It's as good as yours -- in your best friend's pocket."

https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

Nonsense! Solo will never be profitable because neither were most of the original trilogy.

Trump is not an ideologue in the traditional sense, yes, but the problem with your statement is who his hunches are telling him are benefiting from the impulsive action. It is not what is beneficial to the country as a whole, it is what is beneficial to Trump personally and to his political allies. Perhaps he is such an extreme narcissist that he conflates those two together, but that doesn't make it any better.

Propping up the coal industry should make this point plain as day to rational observers. Coal has a load of negative externalities, it imposes a cost on society far higher than is paid in the price paid by the end electricity consumer. The old economic excuse for coal, that it's cheap, rooted in a laissez faire or free-market capitalist ideological justification, is moot since coal is decreasingly competitive on price, particularly in comparison to natural gas. It wouldn't need these subsidizes otherwise.

All that remains is naked use political power for self interest and the interest of political allies. Much like coal itself, that is very old and very dirty.

At least not all of them, and I hear there are some very fine people on both sides.

Here's another interesting article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

The diamond industry for wedding rings is bullshit -- it was created in by US advertisers in the 1930s to prop up South Africa's failing economy.

Indeed. The story is well known. Here is a good account from 1982(!).

There's a reason this product is deliberately targeted at women...

Actually, it isn't.

De Beers determined that when men and women shop for diamonds together, they will usually make a much smaller purchase.

Women are far more likely to think, "This much for a tiny shiny rock? I can pay for all my living room furniture (or renovating my kitchen, etc.) for the cost of this rock."

Men are far more likely to spend more on diamonds when they shop alone.

One of the best De Beers marketing campaigns was spending two months' salary on a diamond ring - they changed the question from "Are you getting her a diamond ring?" to "How much are you spending on a diamond ring?"

Now, there is nothing wrong with spending money on a shiny rock that you find attractive - people buy attractive cars, clothes, houses, apple products, etc.

But be aware that you're buying a shiny rock.

Some more info:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

https://www.theatlantic.com/in...

There's a reason this product is deliberately targeted at women...

Actually, it isn't.

De Beers determined that when men and women shop for diamonds together, they will usually make a much smaller purchase.

Women are far more likely to think, "This much for a tiny shiny rock? I can pay for all my living room furniture (or renovating my kitchen, etc.) for the cost of this rock."

Men are far more likely to spend more on diamonds when they shop alone.

One of the best De Beers marketing campaigns was spending two months' salary on a diamond ring - they changed the question from "Are you getting her a diamond ring?" to "How much are you spending on a diamond ring?"

Now, there is nothing wrong with spending money on a shiny rock that you find attractive - people buy attractive cars, clothes, houses, apple products, etc.

But be aware that you're buying a shiny rock.

Some more info:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

https://www.theatlantic.com/in...

Actually Gender equal nations see bigger STEM gender gaps than sexist hellholes do.

e.g. in nations which don't provide many social avenues or financial support, such as *Algeria* you have near-equality in STEM graduates (41% female). That drops off a lot in nations with good social welfare systems. *Because* women have more choice. More women doing STEM classes isn't necessarily a sign that the society is providing well for women in general. Mainly because things like Engineering and Computer Science aren't just a course you do, they're a lifelong commitment to keeping your skills up to date. e.g. a Comp Sci person is going to be dedicating unpaid hours FOR LIFE to keep up. Women generally want more work/life balance than that allows. e.g. doing a job where you can't "clock out" and have to keep studying after-hours for your whole life, just to tread water, isn't a great idea if you plan to start a family later. Computer Science is the kind of thing that completely dominates your life if you choose it as a career path, you have to be 100% focused on that or you fall behind. e.g. you have to be near-autistic about it to even think about starting. Women are just more *balanced* than men and less of them are one-track obsessive idiots, so less women go into obsessive niche careers. That's not a "problem" for women.

Oh, I don't know. These maybe:

http://www.babyboomerradio.com...
https://www.theatlantic.com/en...

Popular music has always been 99% suck. The only reason you think music was better in the 60s is because you only remember the good songs, it's blatant survivorship bias.

From what I can read this alleged bias has been rebutted:

https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

https://www.technologyreview.c...

Life is objectively, scientifically going downhill. I don't blame the boomers for anything, but they did live their lives on the top of the hill, being born after a long ascent from badness, and dying just before a clear and obvious descent into badness that will probably span hundreds of years.
This is reality:
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
And this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/in...
And I could give you loads more from reputable government, scientific and military sources detailing coming food security crises, mass refugee chaos and other hell coming from perfect storm of global problems. The unique stress young people today face doesn't come from badness in the present moment, but rather well justified anxiety of what the future holds.

Here's an article on that "fire in a crowded theatre" cliche:

https://www.theatlantic.com/na...

ANY mention of Libya to ANYONE who can remember the last 10 years of global politics will immediately bring to mind how the "Libya Model" ended - with the country in chaos and Gaddafi's ugly death. Putin took note, and so did Kim:

"our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fates."

"In order not to follow in Libya’s footstep, we paid a heavy price to build up our powerful and reliable strength"

You guys are the ones who elected a con-man who implied he was the devil at every rally and then literally told you he was a snake that would viciously devour you if you invited him in. And just as soon as he got in he put an "America: Going Out of Business" sign on the whitehouse lawn and started collecting every bribe that came his way.

But yeah, you guys are the smart ones.

So which one of these is you?

`It’s Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled’

or

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
—LBJ

Technically the issue with the email server is that it violated the law in terms of maintaining records. Goverment mail servers are archived, hers was not. And she deleted data before handing it over. I can't read that as anything but a cynical and knowing attempt to violate the law and maintain her privacy. I can sympathize with her goal, but it wasn't her choice to make.

A more sober assessment is that only gov business emails are legally required to be archived. So any emails to/from a .gov account were already covered. And what she did had lots of precedent, many others in top positions, like the preceding SecState, also used private email accounts.

As for deleting, you have to recognize that if she handed over the entire server she would have no reasonable expectation of privacy for any of the non-government emails. Judicial Watch would have FOIA'd the shit out of it and if that didn't work chances are somebody would have leak anything that could possibly be spun against her because so many people hate her so passionately.. So she hired a law firm to make arms-length decisions about what messages were considered gov business and to delete anything else.

But all that is nuance that got lost in the hyperpartisan screaming match around the issue. In large part due to there being nothing worse to scream about. So the screamers had to amp it up because screamers gonna scream. But, not unexpectedly, none of the screamers seem to care about all of the unarchived messaging going on between employees in the current whitehouse. Its just another boring news story that came and went.

The salient feature of an engineer is not his or her bits and bobs.

Correct. The salient feature of an engineer is that they complete an engineering education, something that women tend to do less than men. The reasons for that are not historical but women's preferences and interests. How do we know that? Because those preferences are cultural universals. In fact, "in countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions".

Whereas the gender and age of a human engineering population is merely an artefact of history, albeit a patriarchal colonial history that recently remade much of the world in its own image,

That's a belief you hold and it happens to be an incorrect belief with no supporting evidence. It is not surprising that you draw incorrect conclusions from incorrect beliefs.

I didn't RTFA but I hope it is as ridiculous as the summary suggests.

It's not easy to read since it's paywalled. However one of the authors Judea Pearl, so I assume it's fairly informed on the issue. Here's a recent article which I assume is related: https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

With reinforcement learning (which is a basic pillar in much of current AI), Charlie would notice that the price increase and sales decrease had some correlation in the wrong direction and would try to adjust for that.

So how would you cast this as a reinforcement learning problem? What is the state space, set of actions, and reward function?

The "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" argument. Instead of putting people in mental hospitals, we now put them in prisons.

Cook County Jail in Chicago is the country's largest mental health facility.

An opinion piece from the WSJ isn't exactly a useful citation. It's paywalled - do they ever get around to comparing the US to other countries or do they just whine about the term 'mass incarceration'?

It's not difficult to find articles and studies that contradict the whole 'incarceration reduced crime' theory. This one includes this bit:

Fortunately, there is a real-time experiment underway. For many reasons, including straitened budgets and a desire to diminish prison populations, many states have started to cut back on imprisonment. What happened? Interestingly, and encouragingly, crime did not explode. In fact, it dropped. In the last decade, 14 states saw declines in both incarceration and crime. New York reduced imprisonment by 26 percent, while seeing a 28 percent reduction in crime. Imprisonment and crime both decreased by more than 15 percent in California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Texas.

Yeah, that’s how you run a secretive conspiracy: on Twitter.

Stop pretending the prezidunce is a genius. Trump can't keep his mouth shut when he's excited about something - he says exactly what's on his mind. This is the guy who admitted on camera that he fired Comey because of "the russian thing."

The guy has zero impulse control which is why his people have prevented him from doing press interviews with anyone other than the knob-gobblers at fox. Even then, Fox & Friends had to rush him off the air because he was revealing too much:

Finally, Kilmeade stepped in to politely cut Trump off and to offer him a graceful closing. “We could talk all day but looks like you have a million things to do,” Kilmeade said, and brought the interview to an end. Trump has only one event listed on his public schedule for the day.
— Donald From D.C. Calls in to Fox and Friends

So, why couldn't the Clinton campaign counter that by, I don't know, having policies that people liked and cared about?

Because the idea that policies matter is a liberal fantasy. And I say that as a liberal who really cares about policy.

What matters most is whether people like the candidate. Remember all that bullshit about which politicians people would like to have a beer with? Who gives a fuck? Turns out waaaaay too many people care about that kind of shit than they do about policies.

One example: Support for gay marriage in the black community. When Biden first said he supported gay marriage somebody did a poll immediately afterwards and among the results were that roughly 70% of black people opposed it. Then a week or two later Obama announced his support for gay marriage. Within the next month another poll was conducted and now roughly 70% of black people supported gay marriage. Policy preferences are overridden by leader preferences.

Clinton had all kinds of good policies. Seriously, she is a policy wonk and her campaign website had tons of detailed stuff. But a combination of right-wing outrage media doing things like lying about her policies for helping coal miners and the subsequent pick-up of those lies by the mainstream media reporting 'both sides of the controversy' made it seem like she had abhorrent policies.

She also had the likeability problem that faces all successful women in serious jobs - when men are successful their likeability increases, but when women are successful their likeability decreases. Note that it only applies to people who don't work for those women, which in the case of an election is basically the entire electorate.

No, you don't. That's some kind of pseudo-religious woo you picked up as a child reading sci-fi written by Space Nutters.

Space is dead, deadly, empty, hostile, and barren. It's not like the movies.

Contemplate the enormous chasm of nothing that is space. Then ask yourself how many times you have to breathe in a minute. Or eat in a day.

It's apparently not enough for at least one of Netanyahu's predecessors as PM, either.

(BTW... Barak has also served as Defence Minister under Netanyahu, and is quite possibly Israel's most highly decorated soldier, ever. One set of his grandparents were killed in a pogrom in Lithuania, and the other set died in Treblinka. So not exactly a dove-ish sort.)

I'm genuinely curious as to whether you read and comprehend all the privacy policies that are presented to you on the internet for every site that you interact with... and whether you think that that can be a reasonable thing to expect people to do.

I mean they are deliberately written to be long and hard to understand https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

No, I generally don't read any of them. But without thoroughly reading them you should simply assume all of the data you share can be shared with anyone. You should always assume the first time you type a phone number, address, etc. into a web form it is now public information, just like sending a nude selfie over SMS. Even payment methods such as credit cards are only possible because the card companies cancel / reimburse for fraudulent activity and send new cards, because you would be foolish to assume your credit card number is safe either.

You can certainly expect a higher level of privacy if you wish, but it will take significant effort on your part every time to interact with a new service to thoroughly understand their privacy policies. If you don't put in that time, then assume no privacy if you freely give information to a 3rd party.

People who end up in jail are typically not people who have a couple thousand dollars to spare they've saved up. They're not going to bail themselves out in most cases, though they do have that option.

Then bail is obviously too high.

Since people who end up in jail are typically not the most reliable people, putting up $2,000 cash and hoping to get it back a year later if your drunk brother shows up to all his court appearances doesn't seem like a good idea.

If people are that unreliable to actual show up for their court appearances, they shouldn't be let out at all. Conversely, it shouldn't take anything close to a year to get your money back because it shouldn't take a year to resolve a criminal dispute.

I HAVE $2,000 in savings, I could *afford* to put $2,000 to bail someone out, but I'd rather just pay the bondsman $200 and not have to worry about it.

And when you go to jail instead of family, you'll pay that $200 or spend the $2000? It sounds like you're accepting that people who go to jail should have family that pay out large sums of money so people can keep committing crimes? Or are you aiding people who you know commit crimes so they can become fugitives?

The bondsman isn't making some outrageous profit. If they were, more people would go into that line of business.

Uh, no. They make plenty. By your logic health insurance isn't a good business because there's so few insurers. Obviously, consolidation in finance (like in many markets) is king.

I can understand reasons people might point to problems with the bail SYSTEM, but bail is much older than bail bondsman. Bondsmen didn't create the bail system. Bondsmen make it possible for people who aren't rich to get out on bail.

No, they created the system that made it appear that bonds were acceptably low while taking a substantial cut on people not quite rich enough to de-invest several thousand dollars for a year or more. The also lobby against any attempts to rectify the problem by either getting rid of bond altogether or making it proportional to wealth/income. Of course, just about any sane person with wealth who committed a crime would flee if they knew there were was sufficient proof of their crime. And any sane petty criminal that was in a system that was fair--time served and a speedy trial--wouldn't bail out.

So, any effort to thwart the efforts of bondsmen is good IMHO.

It protects society in general by giving an incentive for professionals to make sure people charged with a crime actually show up to court, including tracking down fugitives who run.

Uh, really? Privatizing fugitive retrieval is a good thing? If it's so important to retrieve fugitives, we as a society fund it. Private bounty hunters are not a good thing.

PS - Just accepting the status quo because you have no imagination for the alternatives nor any desire to look at other countries and how they do things is why America is such a shithole in a lot of areas. Health care (relying on insurance) and education (relying on student loans) are good examples.

I'm genuinely curious as to whether you read and comprehend all the privacy policies that are presented to you on the internet for every site that you interact with... and whether you think that that can be a reasonable thing to expect people to do.

I mean they are deliberately written to be long and hard to understand https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

well I asked and I got a reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

and

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

answer's been around forever

well I asked and I got a reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

and

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

answer's been around forever

I'm just going to leave this here... And the wage disparity may not be as big as the perception is, though I don't have the articles at my fingertips. (As I recall, the ones that show the largest gaps did not do a proper apples-to-apples comparison of the positions held by the women in the study.) But I still fail to understand why there's this dire need to get more women and more non-"caucasian"-cisgender men in this specific field. The lack of them is not in of itself a problem any more than a lack of male nurses is in of itself a problem either. I grew up as more or less an outcast among my peers due to my interest in computing. I'm sure many others who are my age or older that work in this field had similar experiences, at least in certain countries.

The freer the society, the fewer women in STEM. Are we to force women to study things that they aren't interested in?

https://www.theatlantic.com/sc...

Where are the programs to get more males into teaching? Shouldn't that also be a big problem that we need to discriminate to solve?

Why does this door swing only 1 way?

Here's some data: by an informal count of gender-recognizable top 1000 kernel contributors to Linux kernel I did several years ago, there were 8 women (I recognize western and slavic names, first names I didn't recognize were skipped). A more thorough count of all "key" packages (as defined by testing migration criteria) in Debian Stretch, where I tried to guess gender based on first name, ldap, ~60 seconds of web search for that person -- shown 0.9% of last uploaders being female, with each female having only 60% packages on the average (although, with low population of data, this last figure might be not significant enough).

your data is interesting. You go on to make a conclusion, however, that is not based in any way on that data. You conclude "Thus, I believe this is approximately the natural gender ratio of skilled software engineers." However, your data would just as reasonably fit a conclusion "Thus, I believe that there are things in the software community that discriminate against women and drive women away from the community."

Like, perhaps, constant and unrelenting harassment:
http://fortune.com/2018/02/06/brotopia-emily-chang-tech-sexual-harassment/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/28/google-lawsuit-sexual-harassment-bro-culture
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-silicon-valley-so-awful-to-women/517788/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/02/23/google-bro-culture-led-to-violence-sexual-harassment-against-female-engineer-lawsuit-alleges/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/technology/women-entrepreneurs-speak-out-sexual-harassment.html

Since one of the things he was objecting to was a code of conduct saying
Harassment and other exclusionary behavior aren't acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to: Violent threats or language directed against another person. Discriminatory jokes and language. Posting sexually explicit or violent material. Posting (or threatening to post) other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”). Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms. Unwelcome sexual attention. Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.

I think he doesn't have any interest in solving this problem.

So your statistics about the demographics of all voters who voted for Trump and Clinton show us nothing about the factors which led to his victory.

Oh, that was just a tiny little taste. You want some hard core facts? Buckle the fuck up.

"The individual data do not suggest that those who view Trump favorably are confronting abnormally high economic distress, by conventional measures of employment and income," ...

"People living in zip codes with disproportionately high shares of white residents are significantly and robustly more likely to view Trump favorably," he writes. "Those living in zip codes with overall diversity that is low relative to their commuting zone are also far more likely to view Trump favorably." Put another way: If you're in the whitest suburb in your area, you're likelier to back Trump. ...

Areas with more manufacturing are significantly less likely to support Trump. An increase in the level of manufacturing employment from 2000 to 2007 predicted higher Trump support — which is the opposite of what you'd expect, given the narrative around this campaign.
Donald Trump's supporters are LESS likely to be affected by trade and immigration, not more

You can ask just one simple question to find out whether someone likes Donald Trump more than Hillary Clinton: Is Barack Obama a Muslim? If they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.

That’s more accurate than asking people if it’s harder to move up the income ladder than it was for their parents (54 percent), whether they oppose trade deals (66 percent), or if they think the economy is worse now than last year (81 percent). It’s even more accurate than asking them if they are Republican (87 percent).
The easiest way to guess if someone supports Trump? Ask if Obama is a Muslim.

Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class were more likely to prefer Clinton over Trump. Besides partisan affiliation, it was cultural anxiety—feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment—that best predicted support for Trump.
It Was Cultural Anxiety That Drove White, Working-Class Voters to Trump

A study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that Trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. White, Christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to Mr. Trump because they felt their status was at risk.

“It’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said Diana C. Mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics. “It’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.”
Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety

Not enough for you? This guy summarized even more studies: Donald Trump won the GOP primary and the presidency because campaigning on whiteness-first messaging still has potency in the 21st century.

In one of the most progressive industries

Sure, for old, white and male values of 'progressive'.

in one of the most progressive countries in the world

You're number 20 on this list and the number of first world countries you're ahead of isn't that high.

That you believe what you typed is one of the problem with systematic biases. They are hard to identify and confronting when they are.

Here's a study that takes a stab at 'why'. It's a small sample, but among other factors female directors who have been successful on short films find it harder to attract funding or investment in feature films.

Here's a list of successful female directors talking about the problems they have experienced based solely on gender.

I've found those from a quick google search and memory of some similar articles. You raise mechanics, but a similar search shows females interested in being a mechanic facing even more overt cultural pressure to not. You imply that maybe women don't want to be directors, but a trivial search shows considerable evidence that counters this.

Culture is self re-inforcing. Biases are hard to identify. There's a massive difference in gender among feature film directors. There's a marked difference in the usual path of successful directors (from short films and documentaries, to longer, feature films) based on gender. Small wonder that this means that less females choose a path where an equal amount of work does not result in an equal outcome, or have to have a backup plan for when they can't pick up funding or have to spend another decade getting 'experience' that their male colleagues don't seem to need.

But the evidence that "hunting elephants saves them" is thin.
https://www.theatlantic.com/sc...

The science is clear, lion populations decline where there is hunting.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...

First link is denialist bunk. Not surprised, I mark Slashdot users as foes as a way to keep track of the denialists. Accumulated cyclone energy hasn't increased but it sure as hell hasn't decreased either:

https://www.skepticalscience.c...

Of course you had to cherry pick for your second argument. "Last year's Santa Ana fires in particular weren't made worse by global warming! Everything's fine, nothing to see here, pay no attention to all the other wildfires linked in the same article!"

Accumulated cyclone energy has been trending down for 25 years. Global warming didn't burn Ventura County (where I live). Santa Anas, and a delayed rainy season (because of La Nina - and which we've already more than recovered from, it's been a wet and cold fall, winter, and spring) combined with some extremely difficult terrain that hadn't burned in a decade (lots of fuel) to create the fire.

I mean, six months ago there weren't these constant drumbeats of anti-facebook stories. Now they're everywhere. Is this tied to the idea that Zuckerberg wants to run for President? The well is being poisoned so he won't pose a threat?

There's no conspiracy, it's just how the media works.

2 years ago everybody knew that organizations were mining FB data to push agendas and the News Feeds were rife with misinformation, but it just looked like some weird geek issue and nothing had happened to demonstrate why that might be a problem.

But now we've seen a major electoral upset, and both data mining and misinformation played a role, so people now understand how these abstract FB problems can have real world effects.

So now the news orgs want to send reporters to look into FB and ordinary people want to read about it, and that's why all these stories are coming out.

I mean, six months ago there weren't these constant drumbeats of anti-facebook stories. Now they're everywhere. Is this tied to the idea that Zuckerberg wants to run for President? The well is being poisoned so he won't pose a threat? After all, he's an outsider with no political experience. Trump was a total outsider, Sanders was a Democrat outsider, and look at all the dirty tricks that were played against them. Personally, I think insiders are the problem as they run our system for the benefit of themselves, not us. Plus, it would be very interesting to have Zuckerberg as America's first Jewish president.

The idea of Merit-based immigration has a rather interesting history here in the US:
https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

tl;dr is that in the early 1960's, civil-rights proponents (from the progressive faction of the Democratic party) were once the champions of a merit-based immigration system. Opponents (mostly the southern Democratic party faction) championed the blood-tie / family-reuinification system, assuming that since the USA demography was at that time overwhelmingly white and of Western and Northern European descent, a blood-tie based system would serve to preserve the status quo. What they did not anticipate was the collapse in Western/Northern European emigration, as their birth-rates fell and their economies improved.

Not really covered in the article above, is that afterwards the Southern Democrats would flip to the Republican party during the "Southern Strategy" shift, resulting in a scrambling of ideological alignments of both the Democrats and the Republicans that contributed to the modern day mess.

Human right to free speech [...]

But not CNN's right to talk about prostitutes peeing on Trump?..

You can't pick and choose. The links I cited claim, that the First Amendment protects everybody's right to publish whatever they feel like publishing. To wit:

The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments

The only possible exception to the above are things, one explicitly promised (such by signing an NDA, or giving an oath) not to publish... Which Facebook did not.

What happens when you Give Poor People Cash? They spend it on the things that it makes the most sense to them to spend it on. Things like livestock, tools, and housing repairs. Things like health care and education.

It's almost as though the idea that helping people is bad comes from miserable SOBs who are only ever happy when other people are miserable, too.

There is nothing to apologize for. If newspapers assert the right — both legal and ethical — to publish state secrets they obtain as a result of somebody's felony, and the courts agree, how can Facebook (or anyone else) be denied the right to or even reprimanded for publishing personal information given to it willingly?