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How Technology Disrupted the Truth (theguardian.com)
A day after the Brexit, former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage admitted he had misled the public on a key issue. He admitted that UK's alleged 350M Euro weekly contribution to the EU would not be directed to the National Health Service, and that this commitment was never made official. Journalists worldwide tweeted photos of the campaign ads -- posted in conspicuous places like the sides of buses -- debunking the lie. This incident illustrates the need for more political fact-checking as a public service, to enable the voters to make more informed and rational decisions about matters affecting their daily lives. Fact-checking is supposed to be a part of the normal journalistic process. When gathering information, a journalist should verify its accuracy. The work is then vetted by an editor, a person with more professional experience who may correct or further amend some of the information. A long-form article on The Guardian today underscores the challenges publications worldwide are facing today -- most of them don't have the luxury to afford a fact-checker (let alone a team of fact-checkers), and the advent of social media and forums and our reliance (plenty of people get their news on social media now) have made it increasingly difficult to vet the accuracy of anything that is being published. From The Guardian article:When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and "facts" that are not.Global Voices' adds:But the need for fact-checking hasn't gone away. As new technologies have spawned new forms of media which lend themselves to the spread of various kinds of disinformation, this need has in fact grown. Much of the information that's spread online, even by news outlets, is not checked, as outlets simply copy-past -- or in some instances, plagiarize -- "click-worthy" content generated by others. Politicians, especially populists prone to manipulative tactics, have embraced this new media environment by making alliances with tabloid tycoons or by becoming media owners themselves. The other issue is that many people do not care about the source of the information, and it has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not. This, coupled with how social networking websites game the news feed to show you what you are likely to find interesting as opposed to giving you news from trustworthy sources, has made things even worse. As you may remember, Facebook recently noted that it is making changes to algorithms to show you updates from friends instead of news articles from publications you like. The Guardian adds:Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook's news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want -- which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. [...] In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same -- whether they come from a credible source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible sources are also publishing false, misleading, or deliberately outrageous stories.
Anyone that believes anything they say is clearly a moron.
So now that this revelation has taken place, when are they locking up Hilary?
He did not admit misleading the public. He did say that somebody else "made a mistake". Not him. Somebody else. In short, he lied, then lied about lying. He admitted nothing.
Rather ironic that this kind of article would be published in Guardian, considering that it is pretty much a progressive echo chamber that has no trouble to distort the truth whenever it is needed to push a narrative.
Whenever anyone throws out these terms, recall the line in that Indiana Jones move: (paraphrased) This class is about the search for facts, if you want to search for the truth then the philosophy class is down the hall.
Are journalists supposed to be searching for facts or for the truth? When they say they are "fact-checking" how often is it more like "truth-checking"?
Speaking of editors...when is Slashdot going to hire some, it has been, what nearly 19 years?
Attack the experts - that's the first thing you do. Without experts that people trust, you can spread pretty much whatever BS you want. So you undermine them. You accuse them of political bias, of being on the take, whatever works.
This stuff was all explained before, but nobody listened. Why? Because they trusted people like Farage more than the 'experts'. 'Experts' say the economy will tank? No way, that's just fearmongering, the Leave campaign says things will be fine.
That was on the Leave campaign bus, Farage was campaigning for Leave but was not part of the Leave campaign.
Blame Boris not Nigel.
An article combining fact-check with media is indeed a fine irony. I would rather news have a biased sample of facts than a biased sample of experts trying to convince me that they know better because they've hid the troublesome facts.
You can't fact-check something a politician says they're going to do. You just have to wait and see whether they actually do it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That 350 million a week was analysed and proved to be wrong _during_ the campaign but unfortunately there's more people around who believe what they are told than there are who do their own research and as such then realise the figure is bollocks.
The problem with democracy is that both types of people get the same number of votes per person so appealing to prejudices was enough to swing it for Leave.
Signed,
A pissed off Brit who did his own research and voted Remain as a result.
Or perhaps it's the other way around. A generation or two have been raised to question any "authority", to the point that science and technology are matters of opinion.
People have always gravitated toward "news" that confirmed their biases. And although news outlets may have smaller budgets for fact-checking, the cost of fact-checking - not to mention the ability of individual consumers to fact-check - has become incredibly low. You no longer have to plod down to the library or news office and spend days (or weeks, or months) tirelessly pouring over articles on microfiche. You can do a LexisNexis search. Want to vet a claim made about economic growth? Pop on to the Federal Reserve economic research site and have instant graphs of hundreds of thousands of metrics.
The problem is people don't want truth; they want validation. If they do stumble across truth, they'll cherry-pick the pieces that agree with them and find some way to dismiss the rest.
In relying on a fact checker, one simply substitutes another's confirmation bias for their own, and in the process moves further from the raw facts than they were before. What people need is the intellectual curiosity to seek out a broad array of opinions and the humility to actually consider them in good faith. Good luck with that.
"[I]t has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not"
Easy. Don't get your news from Facebook.
Did anyone fact-check this slashdot story about fact-checking ?
Confirming your prejudices.
The public needs to really punish politicians for being misleading. If the politicians are not punished by the public then the politicians have nothing but rewards for being misleading.
The politicians should metaphorically live for the truth. Democracy really depends on the public being properly informed.
Is it too much to ask that a post about fact checking get its facts right?
The "350m to the NHS" billboards were created by the Vote Leave campaign.
Nigel Farage was not part of that organization, he joined the separate Leave.EU organization.
When Farage himself spoke about the money to be saved by leaving the EU, he gave a 34 million a day figure, which is 238m a week, 32% less than what Vote Leave claimed.
In the video, Farage also says the money saved should be spent on both schools and hospitals, as opposed to all of it going to the NHS.
Blaming Farage for lying for things said by Vote Leave is like blaming Bernie Sanders for things Hillary Clinton said. They are roughly on the same side, but they are not the same people, and do not support the exact same policies.
What promise was made? All the bus advertisement said was that "we send the EU £350 million per week, let's fund our NHS instead. Vote Leave". How is that misleading in the least? It's a suggestion on how to better spend British taxpayer money. It's not a promise, not a guarantee, not a commitment. There's no fact checking required here, unless the £350 million per week number is false. Why did this even get posted? Stupid crap.
The Hillary email issue often shows how sloppy the reporting process is. Here are common facts or issues that the media and pundits consistency foul up or fail to consider:
1. Receiving classified info doesn't necessarily mean one also sent classified info.
2. One may not know that received classified info is actually classified. Whether it's realistic one should have known is often not addressed and/or not considered in the press.
3. Sometimes there are "external" sources of facts that have been classified. A given worker may get info from the foreign press or another source independent of the same fact being classified by another person. That worker may not know about, or even be allowed to know about the classification of that fact. Inclusion of a fact by itself is not evidence of copying of a classified source. Ideally there should be a reviewer with enough access to check, but that can be tricky, kind of like Slashdot (not) catching duplicate story submissions: blunt word-matching alone is often not sufficient; it takes a human with eidetic-like memory to get it right all the time.
4. Existence of "classified" markers doesn't necessarily mean that email content actually contains classified info and vice versa. The existence of markers and existence of classified materials (facts) can be independent issues.
5. The "regular" State Department email server was NOT designed for classified materials, and is thus not necessarily "safer" than a private server. (A separate system, not usually called "email", was typically used for classified content.)
6. Hillary claims "remove the headers" is short-cut shop-talk to scrub the ENTIRE document of classified material and markers. Whether that was actually done or not is rarely confirmed or verified by the press. It's fair to give someone the benefit of the doubt, in my opinion, until it's shown that ONLY the headers were actually removed for a specific document subject to the "remove the headers" request.
I'm not defending Hillary here, only saying coverage of important details is very poor, and we are getting only a sliver of reality and/or fuller analysis.
https://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9373301&cid=52497801
Nobody saw it coming at all.
The Truth with a capital T is Jesus Christ is the Light of this world.
The truth with a little t is Slashdot is CIAdot. Pro-tip: expand all -1 comments and skip long sideshow summary "stories".
Trustworthy sources like the MSM? The bank? Government press releases? Corporate quarterly earning reports?
There is an old story about a boy who cried wolf. I read "unreliable" media, not because I "feel it's true", but simply because I have stopped trusting you, dear Media.
Only an idiot, would say checking the facts, is a luxury.
GreekGeek.
it has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not.
Not hard at all. Every media publisher, editor, reporter, and blogger has an agenda. Read a variety of news sources on both sides of the political spectrum and draw your own conclusions, but don't trust any of it.
When you can just quietly """publish""" a retraction later.
Social Media has become the fact-checker, so you really don't need centralized fact checking anymore. Now that people can challenge articles we can have more democratic discussions. "Populism" is the cry of a dying centralized power losing the influence to shape people's opinions. The solution to the social ills of populism isn't newspaper-religion, it's universal high quality education. Get people to *reason* as opposed to *believe*.
Everyone is getting so delusional these days. Nigel Farage can't remember his own campaign promises and I can't remember why I once thought slashdot was a source of amusing comments and even a bit of insight. (My searches in the comments so far came up completely dry.)
I've never been able to earn many funny points, and the more insightful and thought-provoking my comments, the more they attract the game-playing trolls and their sad little mod points (trying to compensate for their small penises and inability to respond with stronger ideas).
Anyway, in this case the article is typically misleading. The problem isn't technology, but the will to believe as amplified by technology. The truths are out there, and you can use search technologies to find them, or you can go on believing exactly what you want to believe, and the search technologies will help you do that, too. Since most people already know EXACTLY what they prefer to believe, they can search for "proof" of exactly that, and thanks to today's google ("All your attention are belong to us.") they can find as much evidence as needed. However much "research" time you have, the google can stuff it with the evidence you like while allowing you to ignore any evidence you don't like. (If the google didn't do that, you might run away, which would be terrible for the google's advertising revenues.)
"Believing what you want to believe" might not be a fatal flaw of democracy. It would depend if most people are nice and want to believe nice things--but there's no profit in encouraging that sort of thing. Not sure of the best example for England, but in America we have the Second Amendment and it's hard to believe nice things when that's probably a gun in his pocket, even if he is pretending to be happy to see you.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The "truth" often depends on your assumptions. I typically find this to be true about social issues. Both the right and left often have facts to back up their narratives, but the way they interpret those facts or the priorities given those conclusions differ. For example is the US deficit because of welfare and illegals or because the rich pay little in taxes? Both sides have lots of facts and both are factors. Yet both sides seem to ignore the other and not admit that *both* of these are causing problems. Unfortunately the media seems to live in a world of XOR, never admitting that multiple reasons is sometimes the correct diagnosis.
So BrExit is a natural, like baseball and apple pie! Who wants to be told what to do by NAZIs? Hm? Greeks? Spaniards? Degos? Make that Wops. Make that Italians.
How can you tell a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.
That is why we should elect Jeff Dunham President of the United States.
Walter can run for Vice President. Plenty of precedent for having a dummy for VP.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"
"You'll have to approve the bill to see what's inside the bill."
Some liberal cretin downvoted your post. "Slashdot kills the truth".
. . . or even "copy-paste."
Well, at least this submission was not encumbered by the editorial process.
Firstly you write like a cunt - it's not a blog and you add nothing but mite shit. I was for remaining in the EU but even I know Farage was part of a different 'leave' group. Please stop being a cunt
Never ever believe anything you hear... and only half of what you see.
It would be nice if we were all capable of being skeptics to the truth. Unfortunately, we're not physiologically built for that. As Wired Magazine explained so well in an article back in 2009, our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex filters out information it determines to be unnecessary, including information that does not agree with our perception of the world. The vast majority of people do not understand this, so they naturally prefer to listen and associate themselves with information that only reinforces their world view, rather than challenge it.
So, yes, if the leader of a British political party says that being an EU member has a bad return on investment, and enough people feel that is true, then the society will not challenge that viewpoint. Even when individuals like John Oliver thoroughly debunk those perceptions, those opposing viewpoints are dismissed quicker than you can type "> /dev/null". And it's why, no matter how many times Donald Trump praises the leadership qualities of despots, he still has a much stronger chance than he should at becoming president. All it takes is enough people to "feel" that he's the better candidate.
On the Media had a good segment about the 70s, when being a bearer of bad news was in vogue and facing frank truths was fashionable. Beginning with Nixon and Agnew's charges of journalists being a bunch of 'nattering nabobs of negativism' and culminating in Reagan's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, it paints a good picture of where we are now. Finding unbiased facts now is not only difficult, but further undermined by the fact politicians are more than happy to freeze out journalists that disagree with them (see: Trump and the news orgs he doesn't like).
Call your senator and ask them to bring the fairness doctrine back.
Somehow or other I doubt that politicians deliberately lie all of the time. They do deliberately lie at times, but I suspect that a lot of what seem like lies are the result of sloppiness by the speech-writers, as well as the echo-chamber effect within the campaign teams.
... why they are doing this. Sure, more than 50% voted for it, but it didn't even get 52% of the vote, and while 48.2% against is technically a minority, it's one mother of a fucking huge one. If voter turnout had been within a heck of a lot closer to a hundred percent then I could see allowing this to pass with such a slim margin, but with only 75% turnout, I see results this close as being about as inconclusive as if it had actually been a pure tie vote.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The Donald's real plan is completely orthogonal to any public policy including concerns about the national debt:
!. Win the so-called Republican nomination. Easy to fool some of the (stupid) people all of the time.
2. Pick a VP who loves Ford's pardon of Nixon.
3. Win the election by fooling most (51%) of the people some of the time (one election day).
4. Phuck up, get impeached, resign, get pardoned. (Step 2 was important.)
5. PROFIT.
Talk about building your brand recognition.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Wow media. First of all, he mentioned a potential option of what to do with the money instead, didn't make any sort of campaign promise. When asked about the leave campaign's advertisement, he responded that it wasn't promised outcome of the brexit and they shouldn't have done that.
That isn't him "misleading" anyone. It's other people.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
In this particular case you could at least point out the fact that the money the UK pays to the EU, minus the money the EU pays to the UK is about 4.7B/year, or 90M/week, which is kind of not the same as the claimed 350... Now the fact that even that will not go to the NHS is an other matter entirely...
The problem is very much driven by technology - the focus of journalism has changed in the past years from proper journalism towards click-bait, with journalists judged by the number of shares they get. At the same time, Google News, Facebook and other players are filtering what you see into a personal echo-chamber that doesn't challenge your personal opinion.
The ad on the bus says "350 million pounds sent per (time unit) to the EU, let's fund our NHS instead."
Now this doesn't say to me that 100% of the 350million is promised to be spent on the NHS, it only suggests that some of the money could go to fund the NHS. It isn't worded as a promise, it's just indicating how it could be better spent, to portray what a shedload of money is going to the EU.
But maybe I've read too many requirement specs, or been through too many elections?
No, you are confusing technology with economics, which is why I think (1) We need to use new economic models to drive better journalism, and (2) We need to completely rethink the field of economics in terms of time, which is truly more important than money, but harder to count. I think the new field of study might be called ekronomics, but for now, let me focus (just a bit) on one possible economic model that could motivate better comments and even let slashdot support real journalism (if it wanted to).
Imagine that an article about a problem was followed with some short solution project summaries. If you click on one of those links, you would be able to read all of the details (such as the schedule, the budget, the resources (including humans and their compensation), and the success criteria. If enough people want to fund the project, then it gets funded and all the donors get included on the donor page, and later on they get to read how well it actually satisfied the criteria. The project might be an internal project to support journalism or an external project to something in the real world. My working hashtag is #CharityShares, and if slashdot were acting as the "charity share brokerage", then I think they would earn an agent's commission for making sure the proposals are complete, for publicizing the projects, for holding the money, and then for evaluating and reporting on the results.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Argentinian president only get to the presidence by lies published on the main journals of the country. Fact checkin? What is that?
That was an atrocious bit of garbage that was supported by the political establishments in BOTH PARTIES. Those politicians and the bureaucrats they picked and hired got to decide if something was "fair" or not (there were no subjective standards). Politicians on the left or right who were "outside the mainstream" had little access to the public. Subjects deemed to be "not mainstream" got no coverage. The broadcasters, always in fear for their licenses, chose to shovel truckloads of pablum rather then honestly covering things and often simply avoided controversy. Under that warped scheme, Bernie would have had trouble getting coverage. The news media would have only covered the candidates party elders wanted covered, which would have been Hillary and Jeb, plus pehaps Rubio and Chaffee to pretend there was a race.
The so-called "fairness doctrine" was hard to manage in the era when most people got their TV from antennas and could only get one ABC affiliate, one NBC affiliate, one CBS affiliate, and the local government run and funded channel (PBS). There was no internet. There was no satellite TV or cable TV.
In the 1960s with the federal government sliding left, the broadcasters joined the regulators in sliding the standards for what was "fair" to the political left, and nobody disclosed their biases. Wlater Cronkite never told his audiences that he was a close personal friend of John Kennedy and was a regular at the Kennedy compound. He just covered the Kennedy administration very glowingly. The public was not told that guys like Dan Rather were Kennedy sycophants. The public was NEVER told about any of the cross-pollination between the Democrat party and the four TV channels. The rubicon was probably crossed when Cronkite used his news broadcast to criticize (from the left) the Vietnam War, angering Johnson and dooming his presidency. By 1980 there was no news outlet in the US that would give "fair" coverage to any Republican and therefore most Republicans gave up on "the fairness doctrine", and with the establishment Republicans unable to keep defending the scheme to their own base voters the bi-partisan DC collaboration crumbled. THAT is why the left so desperately wants to return to "the fairness doctrine"; the version they long for was the tainted one where only left-wing political opinions are broadcast.
Incidentally, this is why the AARP is always freaked-out about anybody changing Social Security to made it more financially-stable: if you take the benefits from the rich who do not even need them and would not miss them then the AARP fears that you undermine the bipartisan consensus for paying-in (the super-rich might say "why must I pay in when I get nothing back?"). Some programs cannot survive in DC once their fragile support fractures. No actual Republican would ever again support the fairness doctrine after watching how it was used against them in the past, and in light of how the IRS was used against them much more recently. That's a side-effect of weaponizing a government agency and aiming at political opponents - you destroy any chance at bipartisan cooperation.
The only way for "the fairness doctrine" to work in this modern era which includes hundreds of channels of satellite and cable TV, a vast number of radio stations and streaming video sites and web sites, would be to introduce a massive new array of government powers over all media and the internet. The requited bureaucracy would be bigger than the TSA and the rules would make lawful communication into a minefield. Just look at the massive stack of FAA rules that recently hit drone operators (a subject that no politicians have a personal stake in) and imagine the thousands of pages of regs that would be created to control all political speech that might affect elections. If you are a fan of Goebbels-style controls on the flow of information, then "the fairness doctrine" is for you.
Hillary violated the plain text of the act. She and her most-devoted supporters are the only ones denying this reality.
Comey cited her violations, but then said he found no examples of previous prosecutions. Later, however, it was admitted that all the examples anybody could easily find by Googling were not even looked at by Comey. You cannot logically cite Comey's recommendation not to prosecute as evidence in Hillary's favor and then deny everything else he said. He pronounced her guilty of a number of violations of law.
Hillary never got her day in court because she did not want her day in court, and she had the political connections to block it. Her husband Bill met privately with the head of the Justice Department (a woman Bill Clinton appointed to her 1st big federal government position thus starting her government career, and who had been previously been employed by Bill and Hillary's lawyers, and whom Hillary promised would keep her job at DOJ if Hillary is elected President) just before she decided to not drag Hillary into court.
The fact that Hillary was not prosecuted does not change the FACT that the FBI has certified publicly that she is guilty and that anybody else would get prosecuted for it.
the faux-fact checker run by Democrats, you're not gonna see any honest "truth detecting" going on.
They often strategically choose what to check or not check, or put their own spin on something and then fact check the spun version rather than the original. It's like asking the New York Times to honestly report on Stalin's massacres of millions of innocent unarmed civilians - the NYT actually helped cover it up and later justify it while claiming the mantle of "the paper of record"
Give it a break people. These self-appointed fact checking cabals are nothing but paid sock puppets for their influence groups. What is truly pathetic is their continual insistence in their "independence" and "journalistic integrity" when everyone can see them for the liars supporting liars that they are.
Since Mr Farage held or holds no executive power, he cannot say that the money saved will go to the NHS, or that it be spent on growing daisies, for that matter. Those are not his political promises to make, or break. He _can_ say that it might be used for the NHS, and he _can_ say that it might not.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
There was another article last week pointing out that under both UK and EU law it is illegal to deprive people of their citizenship without due process. There's a legal challenge being mounted as a result. 17,410,742 people voted to leave the EU. The estimated UK population is 64,088,222, so that leaves 46,677,480 people who will be deprived of their EU citizenship without having either committed a crime for which removal of citizenship is a valid legal penalty or having explicitly disclaimed it. There's an interesting catch-22 if the challenge is upheld, because the UK can't remove EU citizenship from these people without repealing a load of laws, but it can't repeal those laws unless it first leaves the EU.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Politics is about VALUES, as is making policy decisions. Administration -- getting it to WORK - is where truth comes in. Politics is about PEOPLE"S FEELINGS which have absolutely nothing to do with facts. AND THAT IS GOOD!
We have red and blue facts, green facts, purple (thanks, Prince, RIP), green, and rainbow facts, black, white, and brown facts, and facts of every hue and shade.
We have hard facts, soft facts, explicit or vague facts.
We have facts carefully crafted from rumors, innuendo, insinuation, and accusation. For an additional fee, we can even turn outright lies inside out and make them into facts.
We have statistics.
Our team of fact experts will work closely with you, together shaping whatever truth you want using the most provocative, eye-catching, and outrageous facts to capture and hold the attention of your audience.
If you are interested in actual factual facts, in learning, listening to other viewpoints, digging out truth, or thinking, then please get off our planet--you're making it uncomfortable for the rest of us.
Just to point out, the "350m a week" claim was made by the 'Official' leave campaign. Farage was the head of a separate unofficial leave campaign (He's a divisive figure so the official leave campaign didn't want him on board).
Farage's campaign never made the 350m a week claim, that's why he was so candid about admitting that it was a mistake, he was criticising the official campaign lead by Borris Johnson, which was separate from his own.
Believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see.
"Fact-checking is supposed to be a part of the normal journalistic process."
Not so very long ago it used to be considered one of the requirements for personal survival. No longer it seems - just believe whatever appeals to your current emotional state, as all truth is relative anyway.
I see results this close as being about as inconclusive as if it had actually been a pure tie vote.
... and I see you as a pro-EU cretin instead. Given the fact that you're quite used to lose referendums (Greece, Denmark, the Netherlands, and now the UK, all in one year), you've developed this bizarre rethoric about not recognizing your usual defeats.
Nope, you don't have to repeal EU-mandated laws for leaving the EU, they have become national legislation and they can be cancelled or modified whenever the Parliament wants to. For example, EU-mandated industrial standards can be used also by non-EU countries. Plus, the exit from the EU is disciplined by the EU main treaty itself, hence, by definition, it cannot be "illegal" to leave the EU, and no other EU legislation can be an obstacle to the process.
You might moan like a "multicultural" whore for as long as you want, but as soon as article 50 of the Lisbon treaty is invoked, the process will be legally irreversible, and all your fake bot-powered "petitions", all your immigrant-packed rallies, all your frivolous lawsuits and all your twitter hashtags will go to the Landfill of History, where they belong.
"Alleged" $350M a week, as if a national budget shouldn't be fully visible to the general public and it's completely impossible to even find out where money goes. http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-britain-sending-350m-week-brussels/21733 - just some blog, but apparently, the 350 million was real, and only half came back to Britain, and that amount wasn't decided on by British leadership, so obviously people not being served by the economy were being separated from their money.
It would have been equally inconclusive if the vote had gone the other way with the results this close.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't think a winning vote of less than about 60 to 65 percent should have been taken as finally decisive.
Nowhere on the planet a "rule" like this exists. And everywhere on the planet it is accepted that if you don't vote, you're willingly letting other voters decide for you. That's how democracy has always worked for centuries, otherwise no election or referendum result would ever be valid.
Thanks for the correction, but I couldn't find anything along the lines of ekronomics in his recent posts. So I decided to look at his journal instead and he immediately blew his credibility. As usual, I want to find a constructive approach, so it seems to call for a slightly longer intro to what I regard as ekronomics. These are just a few of the areas I've been thinking of.
The essential notion of ekronomics is that time is much more important than money and needs to be analyzed carefully. Focusing on working time, there are three basic kinds: (1) essential time to produce (and sustain) the goods and services we need to survive, (2) investment time that improves the productivity (equals reducing the required amount of essential time), and (3) recreational time, which actually includes both the production and consumption of recreational goods and services such as music, novels, and movies. That's not to say the division is always easy, but I think that's where we need to start. An obvious example of a complexity is education. A certain amount of education is essential to sustain any society, but the rest of it has to divided between investment and recreation time, and that's going to take some thought.
One application involves comparing national development. In a developed country (where almost all of the members of slashdot live) the productivity is high and the amount of time is low. Based on productivity figures that I've read and the demographic categories of the working population, I estimate that the value is on the order of 2 hours per week, averaged over the entire population. Remember that some people spend all of their working time in the essential work while other people are not doing any of it, but just buying what they need based on other work they are doing. In contrast, in a less developed society, almost everyone may be working 40 hours per work just to grow the food, while in the least developed societies (such as hunter-gatherer tribes or failed states) people may spend all of their time just struggling to survive. Looking at the future trend of national development from an ekronomic perspective, it is the balance between the other two categories that is crucial. If two countries start at the same level, but one country guides more time into investment while the other allows more time to be spent on recreation, then the first country is pretty sure to wind up more productive. Perhaps Singapore is an interesting example of this approach?
Another application involves determining proper and appropriate salary levels. From an ekronomic perspective, it is reasonable to try to evaluate jobs in terms of the amount of time people want to spend on them. I haven't yet been able to find much hard data in this area, but the research approach is obvious. You would ask a large number of people who have worked in different areas how they feel about the two kinds of jobs. A simple example question would be "How many hours of typing would you prefer instead of 1 hour of collecting garbage?" Of course the results will vary widely from person to person, but the averages will give a reasonable indicator of the desirability of different types of work and what the proper salary differentials ought to be, though you have to adjust for other factors, such as the educational time (investment time) required to qualify for the work and the prioritization of essential work. However, if you come to the conclusion that garbage collectors deserve relatively high pay and you happen to be a person who actually enjoys collecting garbage, then more power (and pay) to you and other people are unlikely to complain that they can use more of their time in other ways.
Recreational time is interesting in several ways. As a quasi-joke, I wrote a piece called "Couch potatoes of the world, unite." The URL is http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... and that was back in 2013, so I've been thinking about these ideas for a while... The i
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Nope, you don't have to repeal EU-mandated laws for leaving the EU, they have become national legislation and they can be cancelled or modified whenever the Parliament wants to
You're missing the point. You have to repeal the law that says that you can't deprive people of their EU citizenship without their consent to be able to legally invoke Article 50, because Article 50 mandates that the country invoking it must follow its own constitutional requirements before invoking it. You can't repeal these laws as long as you are a member of the EU, because the EU guarantees these rights.
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You have to repeal the law that says that you can't deprive people of their EU citizenship without their consent to be able to legally invoke Article 50
Wrong. EU directives are ranked lower than treaty norms (like article 50): the former cannot trump the latter. And the UK doesn't even have a real constitution. Your desperate whinings - whether in the form of fake petitions or frivolous lawsuits - are going to be wiped out the day May invokes article 50.
And the UK doesn't even have a real constitution
And that's the point at which I'd suggest that you pick up a politics textbook before you continue your rants. The phrase to search for is 'written but not codified'.
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The phrase to search for is 'written but not codified'.
No, it's actually: "You lost the fucking referendum, nobody cares if you whine like a whore". Once article 50 of the Lisbon treaty is invoked, the process becomes legally irreversible, and after no more than 2 years the 27 EU members, as well as Bruxelles' institutions, will consider the UK officially out of the EU, even if no exit deal is reached, and even if some alcoholic judge rules that you're still a "EU citizen" (whatever that means, given that the ruling would have no jurisdiction outside the UK).
That you are so certain what intelligence experts do or don't do without offering a teeny smidgen of actual evidence beyond personal speculation.
I'm curious why that gap is not blatantly obvious to you. What logic processes are flowing through your mind to accept such non-evidence so strongly?
Don't you think in a court-room if one made a claim about what intelligence experts do or don't do (or actually did in this case), the other side and the jury would want to know how you determined such patterns or events beyond "I guess that they..."?
View this as a logic debugging session instead of political argument and let's see what comes of it this time around.
Table-ized A.I.