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It does seem CA got the data through violating FaceBook's TOS, but as far as harvesting your friends and targeting ads...that's what FaceBook does. And political ads are no different, and Obama did the same thing in 2012 and it was lauded as breaking new ground in political engagement.

Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party.

Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.

"If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your relationships," a digital campaign organiser who has worked on behalf of Obama says.

"And built models to exploit we knew about them and target their inner demons!" Sounds so scary. But when Obama did it it was all amazing friendship technology!!

Every time an individual volunteers to help out – for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president – he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party.

Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.

"If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your relationships," a digital campaign organiser who has worked on behalf of Obama says.

Climate change could easily turn parts of the Middle East from dry to a high humidity. The difference is if it's high humidity you can't sweat and die in the shade even if young and healthy. Suddenly vast areas become uninhabitable, and nuclear powers like Pakistan and India are at high risk. No, a bit of ocean rise won't kill people, but turning a nuclear power into a wasteland that then needs to chose between invading other countries or die off, or even just the changing regions that supply food, is almost guaranteed to cause hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths. It could even start a nuclear war. That's why the military has been taking this seriously as a real cause of instability for the last 30 years.

Technology provides us with the possibility of OBJECTIVE insight and provides framework for OBJECTIVE verification (with mathematics).

If only that were so. Unfortunately, until we can find perfect technology, developed by the Platonic ideal perfectly moral race of beings, technology is going to be used by bad people as a method of control and as a tool for tyrants.

https://www.theguardian.com/ne...

A good example is how we are learning that the best way to secure honest elections is to abandon technology for something much older (paper ballots, counted manually with lots of people watching).

Leaving TPP was a huge win for China, the country that just confirmed dictatorial rule. Just after Trump helped China, he was given a bunch of patents. Like almost all of his decisions, he didn't care about saving anyone from anything, except himself.

I mean nobody else would've been able to mix two common chemicals to produce that poison.

No, because it's not that simple, Ivan.

in particular not since the whole country was engrossed in the huge U.K. government pedophile scandal at the time

Yeah, Ivan. I'm not sure I should actually be helping you with your skills here, but FWIW, when you check the "Include some whataboutary" box on your checklist of things to include in your trolls, make sure it's something that doesn't reveal you're a Russian troll. I'm not going to tell you why, but even if a UK government pedophilia scandal (which has literally been in the news on and off for about 30 years now. No, really.) were somehow a reasonably on-topic thing to bring up in a discussion about Putin trying to murder enemies with chemical weapons on foreign soil, a non-troll wouldn't do it that way.

In other words, busted!

It's as clear evidence as if a pistol of Russian origin had been found at the crime scene -- who else would possibly have a Russian pistol but the Russian government spies? Clear as day.

If it were a common Russian pistol, then yeah. But this is like finding a special model of Russian pistol that only senior Russian agents are allowed to own, that have never been reported lost before, when none have been reported missing before the assassination attempt.

This isn't some simple toxin that can be produced in weaponized form by mixing a couple of household chemicals, no. This is:

- A chemical agent associated with Russia that's difficult to weaponize
- An attack on an enemy of Putin
- An attack in a country apparently considered an enemy of the Putin regime, as evidenced by Putins attempts to interfere with its governance and pit citizens against one another.

The work you're doing, Ivan, is going to lead to calamity. Putin's a punk, he's clearly mentally unstable, and the actions he's taking are likely to lead to war sooner or later. If it comes to war, there's a good chance it'll go Nuclear, and you'll probably die in the aftermath (as will millions on both sides.) Take a long, deep, hard, look at yourself, and ask yourself if that's what you want.

Most of us around the world pay taxes on every liter or gallon of petroleum our cars consume. In some countries it's a pretty high tax.

But not as high as it should be. The current taxes do not cover the full cost of mitigating the pollution that results from burning gasoline and diesel. Furthermore globally we subsidize fossil fuels to somewhere around $5 Trillion per year. The taxes on it aren't even close to being as high as they should be.

If electric vehicles start making up a larger and larger % of vehicles on the road will there come an end where to be fair you need to drop the tax on fuel and instead tax electricity

As I said before the tax on oil based fuels needs to go up before it comes down. It's been a free ride for FAR too long. Your point is a fair one that there should be some usage based balance in how the taxes are assessed but particular how the funding is applied once the government receives it. The easy way to do it is to calculate the cost of infrastructure maintenance in total and then divide by the expected number of kWh used by vehicles with a given fuel source. (the amount of energy per gallon of gasoline/diesel is known) Apply a rate from there to each vehicle regardless of how it is powered. Then it doesn't matter if they use gas or electric plus it has the benefit of automatically forcing inefficient vehicles to pay a higher share of the costs. Pretty easy to do mathematically but probably difficult politically.

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And fear of being Amazoned has become such a defining feature of commerce, it's easy to forget the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years.

WTF?

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013) lays this entire saga out bare. Already, by then, many of Amazon's core tactics were old news.

But apparently, a lot of people out there were somehow living in their own personal reality distortion clouds: somehow perceiving Amazon through their "ah, it's so cute!" man-eating baby-broccoli peril-impervious sun shades.

Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards: Books aren't just commodities — 2014

We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Here's the reference:

Amazon and publisher Hachette end dispute over online book sales — 2014

Since early May Amazon has been locked in a standoff with the French publishing house after Hachette refused to give Amazon pricing control over its ebooks, which would have seen most of their digital titles discounted to less than $10 a book.

Amazon came under criticism for its "aggressive" negotiating tactics, which included preventing customers from being able to pre-order Hachette titles, reducing the discounts it offered on Hachette books and even delaying shipment of some of the publisher's titles for up to a month, all which had a huge impact on sales.

In a recent anthology, Words Are My Matter (2016), she talks about how much she anguished over writing that speech, essentially biting the hand that granted her that award. But she decided, in the end, that she meant every last work of it. Amazon actually had themselves their own table at that ceremony, where they sat stiff and thin-lipped during Le Guin's oratory.

And fear of being Amazoned has become such a defining feature of commerce, it's easy to forget the phenomenon has arisen mostly in about three years.

WTF?

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013) lays this entire saga out bare. Already, by then, many of Amazon's core tactics were old news.

But apparently, a lot of people out there were somehow living in their own personal reality distortion clouds: somehow perceiving Amazon through their "ah, it's so cute!" man-eating baby-broccoli peril-impervious sun shades.

Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards: Books aren't just commodities — 2014

We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Here's the reference:

Amazon and publisher Hachette end dispute over online book sales — 2014

Since early May Amazon has been locked in a standoff with the French publishing house after Hachette refused to give Amazon pricing control over its ebooks, which would have seen most of their digital titles discounted to less than $10 a book.

Amazon came under criticism for its "aggressive" negotiating tactics, which included preventing customers from being able to pre-order Hachette titles, reducing the discounts it offered on Hachette books and even delaying shipment of some of the publisher's titles for up to a month, all which had a huge impact on sales.

In a recent anthology, Words Are My Matter (2016), she talks about how much she anguished over writing that speech, essentially biting the hand that granted her that award. But she decided, in the end, that she meant every last work of it. Amazon actually had themselves their own table at that ceremony, where they sat stiff and thin-lipped during Le Guin's oratory.

That doesn't make sense.

Economics is frequently counterintuitive. I don't even claim to begin to understand it, so at least I'm not lying to you about it.

Of course controversy attracts eyeballs, but who's voices do I hear in the discussion?

If I want to hear from trolls on this site, I just broswse at -1 -- really easy -- I'm choosing who to read.

If I want to avoid trolls on Facebook? To begin with, there's no way to "down mod" anything on Facebook -- you have your choice of love/like/angry/funny -- where as /. has a few options to downmod -- flamebait and troll. To make matters worse, their ranking algorithm picks out the stories with said reactions to feed you -- which you have no explicit control over (since they removed the "order by date posted" option years ago).

Russia scandal is also pretty vague. Are you referring to the one where they doped their Olympic athletes for years or the one where they killed an agent with nerve gas?

There's so much shady behavior coming out of the Moscow, it's hard to keep track.

It's almost as if the wealthy and powerful within China realized, "Oh, shit! I don't have anywhere I can run to, if this all goes to Hell in a handbasket! We better make sure that doesn't happen!"

This is a realization which the rich and powerful of the US and Europe have yet to arrive at.

I'm pretty sure someone linked to this story yesterday.

"The Hero the World Needs" refers to the success of this BOT fighting parking tickets https://www.theguardian.com/te... Parking tickets are a problem that you want to get rid of. BOT fails and you pay the ticket. In contrast, an airplane ticket provides a service that you decided that you want or need. With your ticket and reservation in hand, you are starting with something positive. This will get you there and back. So you send your google information, credit card, and other information to donotpay.com in hopes that your ticket/reservation is not screwed up, your information is not hacked, and you will get a refund. And the fine print on customer service is that it may or may not be available. Many of the tickets on a flight cost more because the traveler needed/used the convenience of purchasing them a few weeks before traveling.

Yes.
"Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security"
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
"... to have cracked the codes used by 15 major internet companies, and 300 VPNs."

The NSA had XKEYSCORE and found problems with digital certificate.

There's a difference between admin and user moderation.

If I were to post on this site about how the Holocaust was faked, I'd be downmodded into oblivion (I hope). On certain subreddits, you could be upmodded for such things. And sure, you can believe that Hillary Clinton is running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor, and that's all fun and games until someone starts shooting a gun inside.

Like many on this site, I'm a proponent of free speech -- but with user moderation to prevent stupidity. One of the problems with Reddit is that subreddit nature creates echo chambers. As many have pointed out before, websites are private businesses and have a right to kick people out whom they don't like. If someone walks into your pizza parlor and accusing you of running a child sex trafficking ring, you can ask them to leave -- and that's not censorship -- any more than it is a bar kicking out a rowdy patron.

Well, at least all those billionaires will have the necessary convenience of flying taxis when they flee to their boltholes in New Zealand after sucking America dry.

Where's Dr Charles Luther when the World really needs him?
MNZGA!

Typical Internet slander from the alt right. Post a big fucking lie 50,000 times and people get confused, start thinking "Well, maybe... who knows what Obama did or didn't do."

In fact Obama was extremely vocal against waterboarding. He banned that practice of the Bush administration.

Cheney was the one who kept calling it "enhanced interrogation techniques" while insisting it wasn't torture.

Isn't Elon one of those people from shithole countries? that Trump wants banned?

I agree with you BTW. Let's not forget that America's CIA has been doing the same thing via different channels for decades. They are perhaps still doing this to this day.

Where's the media outrage? There is an article here affirming trolling by the USA.

USA complains because they can now be beaten [on the cheap] at their own game.

Re "again, assuming it were even possible." "even if it could"
PRISM showed what the security forces like doing to users, computers, networks, OS, brands.
Magic Lantern (software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"... as to whether anti-virus companies could or should detect the FBI's keystroke logger."
Operation Socialist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco" https://theintercept.com/2014/...
SISMI-Telecom_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Greek wiretapping case 2004 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
".... hoped to have cracked the codes used by 15 major internet companies, and 300 VPNs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
DROPOUTJEEP .. ".. remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell tower location, etc. Command, control and data exfiltration. All communications with the implant will be covert and encrypted."

The security services have been deep into most telco tech for decades. The new changes to emerging VPN, OS, crypto, cell phones did not slow the security services down. The security services have a shopping list of contractor products to get into telcos, OS, cell phone brand, cell tower, get past AV.

Since when does The Guardian have a paywall? It offers an optional subscription to ad-free access for $84/year. Slashdot used to offer subscriptions, but this broke years ago.

What the security services could afford in the past is now ready for cyber police in Rhode Island?
"Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security" (Fri 6 Sep 2013)
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

"... By 2015, GCHQ hoped to have cracked the codes used by 15 major internet companies, and 300 VPNs.... "
Rhode Island can ask the NSA for the keys to many of the big VPN brands?

In reality, despite all the affirmative action, all the "free" government funded education especially in Europe, all those attempts to put more girls into STEM courses, etc.

You
may
be
mistaken.

Non-existent?
https://www.theguardian.com/so... disagrees with you, and that doesn't take into account the very high percentage of women that like to play with the penis of male babies when they change a nappy.

Just because the justice system is inherently and excessively sexist doesn't mean that women don't commit crimes.

A woman has sued landlords for refusing to accept DSS tenants - i.e. people whose rent will be partly paid for by the taxpayer - on the grounds that this constitutes sex discrimination because it mainly affects women! https://www.theguardian.com/co...

One thing that always astounds me is that the people who constantly bang on about white or male privilege and how that provides unfair benefits for some always seem to want to enact policy that enshrines unfairness as a fundamental concept. If you think that unfair treatment results in people being dissatisfied or outright disgruntled, then why the hell would you think that actively creating unfair conditions wouldn't result in the same conditions. To some degree I think this is partially (among a great many other things) responsible for the rise in what's been called the alt-right and has played a part in why someone like Trump was able to win the election.

I agree. Affirmative action is supposed to help disadvantaged races and genders by providing them easier access. Instead, it's been turned into a tool to deny access to certain races and genders. Instead of eliminating discrimination, all it's done is replace one form of discrimination with another. Asians are the perfect example of the fialure. In the U.S., they were discriminated against in the past. Yet modern affirmative action polices end up punishing them as if they were the ones who were the ones who perpetrated the discrimination in the past.

The problem IMHO stems from a basic misunderstanding of science. The scientific method as taught to children (through high school) is that you make a hypothesis, think up an experiment to test it, conduct that experiment, then based on the collected data decide if the hypothesis is right or wrong.

It doesn't actually work quite like that. The real scientific method is that you must make a falsifiable hypothesis for testing. You see, you can't prove a negative. If you choose "reindeer cannot fly" as your hypothesis, you can collect a thousand reindeer and push them over a cliff. If all of them plummet to their deaths, you haven't proven that reindeer cannot fly. All you've shown is that those thousand reindeer either couldn't fly or chose not to fly. The hypothesis "reindeer cannot fly" is non-falsifiable, and therefore invalid as a scientific hypothesis.

OTOH if you choose "reindeer can fly" as your hypothesis, then all you have to do is produce a single example of a flying reindeer to prove it. Until you can prove that hypothesis, you assume it's incorrect and operate under the assumption that reindeer cannot fly.

Likewise, you cannot prove a hypothesis that there is no discrimination. The hypothesis must always be that there is discrimination, and the burden of proof must always be upon those alleging discrimination.. If your research and tests fail to show discrimination, you must fall back upon the null hypothesis - that there is no discrimination. What's happened instead is an inversion of the scientific paradigm. People simply assume discrimination is happening without evidence, which gives those arguing against them the impossible task of proving that there is no discrimination.

If you allege that employee composition (or school applicant composition) which doesn't match the composition of the general population is the result of discrimination and not other causes, then you must first prove it. Without such proof, all you're doing is practicing a different, newer form of discrimination (bias against certain groups without evidence).

Ahh, yes. Tell us how Ms. Clinton is so pure for having hundreds of Top Secret and Classified e-mails on an unsecured server, whilst others in the Government are jailed for 6 photos. ANY reasonable person would have concluded she should have at least been charged, if not convicted, of gross negligence for the handling of sensitive information.

Here's an interesting perspective from the man who coined the word meritocracy.

https://www.theguardian.com/po...

"German security services had discovered a breach of the government's IT network in December and traced it back to state-sponsored Russian hacker"

New NSA leaks show how US is bugging its European allies

NSA tapped German Chancellery for decades, WikiLeaks claims

"German security services had discovered a breach of the government's IT network in December and traced it back to state-sponsored Russian hacker"

New NSA leaks show how US is bugging its European allies

NSA tapped German Chancellery for decades, WikiLeaks claims

to change the calculus. So far the administration (who's in charge of the response) doesn't seem to have done anything. Wait, strike that, They actually haven't done anything. It's almost as if they somehow benefited from it...

Did the last one do anything about it? You know, when it was actually supposedly happening?

I mean do anything besides be the only ones to collude, that is.

to change the calculus. So far the administration (who's in charge of the response) doesn't seem to have done anything. Wait, strike that, They actually haven't done anything. It's almost as if they somehow benefited from it...

They're not going to jeopardize that relationship just because they're offended that a very wealthy American who's willing to do business with them and is uncritical of their faith & politics and has political connections but prefers to go in through the out door.

Their faith and politics led to wealthy Saudi's (if not the Saudi government itself) funding the 9/11 attacks. And the consequence for that was....the U.S. went to war on Iraq and the people who offered to hand over Bin Laddin. So if you were a gay man suddenly outed - even a rich assed one - would be blase about it if you were in a country that funded 911, is virulently anti-gay, and chops people's heads off for sorcery? Or would you be offering the nearest cab driver thousands of dollars to get you to the American embassy, stat?

Yes, people choose prostitution as a career and many do so independently and enjoy doing it. Read up on the subject. https://www.washingtonpost.com... and the many posts at https://bebopper76.wordpress.c... and https://www.theguardian.com/co... and http://www.slate.com/articles/... are good places to start on your journey to not blindly buying into the prevailing narrative of bullshit.

Yes, but only up to a point. Global CO2 emissions were essentially constant in 2014,2015 and 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/28/global-carbon-emissions-stood-still-in-2016-offering-climate-hope. Now, they need to be not just constant but declining, but the fact they were constant shows that the trend in question is not just US specific. Obviously, electricity production is also not the only cause of CO2 production, but this is high up on the list.

Pilot miicroscale rainwater collection has been tried and seems to be successful:

capturing rain could save Mexico City from a water crisis

even if it only reduces the load on the tankers and pipes that would help, besides in the wet season it could be used to refill reservoirs rather than being run off into the river.

I think that also includes industrial usage as well as domestic usage, with the total averaged over the population. Mexico City has also long been a poster child for mismanagement and waste of water resources (something like 40% is lost to leaks, and they don't use rooftop collection systems (they actally have flooding when it rains heavily, because the water isn't collected) and so on ...).

mexico city water crisis

mexico water shortage

I find it amusing that every time China takes a step in this direction the news outlets decry fears of human rights abuses. Like, say, Guantanamo Bay, the Collateral Murder [wikileaks.org], and every Snowden revelation have never happened.

You would have a point if not for the fact that China's level of authoritarianism is enough to make even the most security paranoid republican blush and they are pushing toward a dystopian future of new extremes. China is opening new re-education camps and I do point out that they are new because, surprise! They had Re-education through labor from 1957 and only started to shut them down in 2013. China doesn't even release the number of prisoners it executes because "that's none of our business". However, the thousands of people on death-row are "donate" their livers annually but China promises it was all voluntary and they promised to stop doing it.

You should really learn more about China because it has a history human rights violations that should be taken lightly.

In the [UK] The Guardian today https://www.theguardian.com/sc... several letters cast expert light on this highly exaggerated report. For example, blind trials are difficult as anti-depressants have side effects which allow participants to guess whether they are getting the placebo or not. That the tablets considered(!) most effective happen to be those with the greatest side effects also casts doubt - why should that be?

Fantasies?
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...

Fantasies?
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Oil was not the sole reason, but a largest contributer. To say otherwise is to turn a blind eye on motivations behind military-industrial complex.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
http://www.washingtonsblog.com...

By your logic since Iraq was next door to Iran for invading Iraq, we should invade Kazakhstan(or any neighboring state) and China to engage future warfare with Russia and North Korea, respectively? Why not invade Iran directly instead of surrounding it? Also, since Pakistan is also a border state, what's your excuse for leaving that one behind? You know, the one that provided harbor for Bin Laden?

And guess who's the biggest sponsor of terrorism now - Saudi Arabia - but we are allies with them?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com...
https://www.newsbud.com/2017/0...
https://www.salon.com/2016/01/...
http://www.newsweek.com/why-sa...

You see, we see it as what it is. A complete bullshit by neocons running the White House.

because trading oil on a market other than the US Dollar is an excellent way to experience sudden and unexpected violently American Freedom(c) and Democracy(c) in your country. https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Um, what?

That's what you got out of "a communist dictatorship does funky things with fake currency"?

Something bad about completely different countries that are neither communist nor dictatorships?

because trading oil on a market other than the US Dollar is an excellent way to experience sudden and unexpected violently American Freedom(c) and Democracy(c) in your country. https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

We already need US citizens to pick the fruit. They don't want to. Expect fruit prices to rise as either fruit goes unpicked or picker wages increase (or both).

> Is there a strain of the flu going around that reduces emotional maturity to that of an 8-year-old?

Perhaps you thought blind faith in science wouldn't lead to something like this?

Better than blind faith in blind faith to cure/prevent the flu, as recommended by Evangelical Trump adviser tells people to skip flu shots in favor of prayer:

A Texas evangelist preacher and member of Donald Trump’s faith advisory council told parishioners to skip the flu shot in favor of prayer, inviting scorn from concerned medical professionals and epidemiologists.

“Jesus himself gave us the flu shot,” Gloria Copeland said in a video posted last Wednesday that has slowly begun to go viral, no pun intended, after some observers highlighted Copeland’s ties to Trump.

“Just keep saying that ‘I’ll never have the flu. I’ll never have the flu,’” she continued. “Inoculate yourself with the word of God. Flu, I bind you off the people in the name of Jesus. Jesus himself gave us the flu shot. He redeemed us from the curse of flu.”

On the other hand, perhaps they'll all be Darwin Award winners.

Heh. Fully automated luxury communuism made real.

I was just talking about bathroom fixtures. The Guggenheim offered him a solid gold toilet, you know. I just figured he'd gotten interested in plumbing or something -reasonable enough hobby to have- and you know Trump and his love for decorative accents in 24 karats. Seemed a perfect match to me.

Why all this fuss? What, does a golden shower mean something else?