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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.
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"?
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.
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.
Anonymous Cowards always lie.
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.
Never ever believe anything you hear... and only half of what you see.
If mass media wasn't such an obvious propaganda machine, there might have been a modicum of trust, and social media could easily be blown off. But now, with all the censorship of war coverage (for example), and shared wire service that only recite government press releases, there is nowhere else to turn.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"People who think correct thoughts like me actually want to make the country a better place. People who think double-plus ungood thoughts unlike me are liars, and spend their days spewing hate, intolerance, and cult-think."
Does that about summarize, you twat?
Congratulations, you're a destructive nitwit who pretends that opposing lunatics is just a disagreement.
People who think persecuting minorities makes the country a better place are objectively bad people. People who think spreading a backward version of Christianity makes the country better are objectively stupid people. People who would vote for a candidate who's running an openly-fascist campaign are objectively fascists.
Modern people and Conservatives don't just disagree like we used to. The Conservatives drifted off into a hate-driven alternate reality, and can't even engage with the real world anymore.
The number was false. In fact it was widely known to be false.
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.
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.
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
The problem is that it's not even clear which side you mean. The side that has Islington wine parties and wants to promote transgender adjustments to primary school and classifies anyone who disagrees with them as racist , or the side that has Kensington wine parties, that want to keep wages down and ensure banks are OK whilst pretending they want to conserve stuff?
and I thought Area 51 was used to test experimental aircraft.
She's probably under two big constraints: secrecy rules and legal risk. Explanations she gives could be used against her in court. Being the GOP has been tenacious about this investigation, she's probably hesitant to inadvertently give them more fuel to burn.
One thing I notice about her style is that in general she rarely uses "disclaimer" words like "mostly", "probably", "as best I remember", etc.
She's been accused of being overly "lawyerly" such that she may compensate by being more direct to project a bold and decisive image.
But it seems to backfire on her, such the Benghazi statements made soon after the attacks. When the intel of the time suggested it was probably planned, she should have used the word "probably" or similar for CYA instead of saying "it was planned". GOP runs that in ads over and over.
Table-ized A.I.
. . . or even "copy-paste."
Well, at least this submission was not encumbered by the editorial process.
No, politicians sometimes lie, if (a) deception in the matter in question would be in their self-interest and (b) they can get away with it. Since "news" sources no longer can "afford fact checking" (i.e., they can't afford to actually do journalism), we can take (b) for granted.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You're trying to change her story.
She and her staff said it wasn't planned and was a spontaneous demonstration related to some dumb video. That was a big fat lie and they all knew it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Agreed - but you haven't described "all conservatives."
Agreed - but you haven't described "all conservatives."
Disagree - my support for Hillary Clinton doesn't make me "objectively a socialist" - in fact, I trend fairly conservative in matters of finance and policy. Hillary, however, is the least-bad alternative available to me, so I choose to support her. I agree with some of her positions, and disagree with others. Overall, I think she'll be a perfectly decent president if she gets elected - however, she's not my "ideal" candidate, nor is she running my "ideal" platform.
The destructive nitwit here is you - the person who insists that everything can be boiled down to only two sides, and that one's position on healthcare, for instance, necessarily comes with a host of other unrelated beliefs about foreign policy, women, religion, and fiscal policy. People vote their conscience, and not a single person voting believes they are doing something evil by doing so. Until you can understand what might motivate people to disagree with you (hint: it's not "stupidity," "ignorance," or "hate"), you are bound to be just another meme-spewing dolt who thinks he's clever because all the people in his little echo chamber agree with him.
Or, to summarize: twat.
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.
See, this is what you don't get. The FACT of 350m was wrong, but that fact you're disputing is not what was encouraging people to vote - the actual sum was completely irrelevant. Your own article says, "This equates to £136m a week, less than 40% of the amount splashed on the battlebus." So, regardless of the specific amount of cash you're "sending to the EU each week," you're still sending a fuckload of money to them.
The point of the slogan on the bus was not "AMG 350 millionz!" It was: "Shouldn't we spend that money on your dear old grampy and disabled uncle Joe instead?" The point being that the money would be *better spent in Britain, on Britons,* than being spent in Brussels, on hookers and caviar dinners for bureaucrats.
You missed the forest for the trees - instead of focusing on "IT'S NOT 350 MILLION," you should have focused on "WE BRITONS GET GREAT VALUE FOR THE MONEY WE SEND THERE." Your attitude is a perfect explanation of why the Remainers lost. You didn't even understand the terms of the argument you were having, and you focused on the little facts that didn't matter, instead of on the emotional realities that did.
You're trying to change her story.
She and her staff said it wasn't planned and was a spontaneous demonstration related to some dumb video. That was a big fat lie and they all knew it.
You know, both sides were right. There was an enormous, spontaneous demonstration that was directly spawned by the release of The Innocence of Muslims video. Terrorists used the demonstration as convenient cover to get close enough to attack without being immediately spotted and caught. At the start, it was difficult to discern whether the attack was related to the demonstration or not, and until terrorists entered the compound itself, it was difficult to tell who was a demonstrator and who was a terrorist. Initial reports were that the demonstrators stormed the compound. Those reports were wrong, and no one disputes that.
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.
Being able to mislead is a skill which is sometimes needed in some of the roles politicians play. Doing it all the time, for the wrong reasons, or to great detriment to the public is of course undesirable, but being either bad at it, or too honest, is something that will turn off voters that actually want you to trick the villainous, so some politicians will try to show off this talent. The more perfect world where the public does not want or need this in a politician is a while away (and if you've ever read any Man-Kzin Wars, might be wise to intentionally preserve even in a higher order of civilization.)
Someone had to do it.
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.
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.
That's... not anything like what she said. She said it was a spontaneous demonstration prompted by a movie nobody had ever heard of. And that was after the career bureaucrats told her it was a planned attack. She lied, and it's a documented lie. As Moynihan said, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
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.
Yeah, the 350M going to NHS wasn't a "fact" that could be checked in any way. That it is currently being sent off to the EU, that is a fact that can be checked, and I believe is still considered to be truthful.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
That amount is not being sent to the EU. The UK sends closer to £150m a week, and that does not include the amount of funding received from the EU. Thatcher worked very hard to decrease the amount of money the UK sent to the EU. The "£350M to the EU" can be checked, has been checked, and is complete nonsense. I sincerely hope you didn't vote in the referendum...
Part of the problem is that they overestimated the amount. Part of the problem is that they made the numbers seem scary (about £6/week/person seems a lot less scary given all of the things that we get in return and the actual amount is closer to £2/week.). The biggest part of the problem is that they claimed that we'd have that money back if the left, but also claimed that we'd retain access to the common market. All of the countries that have access to the common market but aren't members of the EU are paying, per capita, more than the UK after the rebate. If their bus had said 'we send the EU £350 million per week, let's pay more but have no say in how it's spent. Vote Leave.' then that would have been fine.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Thing is, that figure was still not correct, the £350M was shown to be wrong, the actual number is £180M, which is just over half the figure used by the Exit campaign. And people still went for it because it was "truthy", so it played well to their own preconceptions. Similar to the rhetoric about Eurocrats, when the reality is that the EU has less bureaucrats employed in total than the UK has bureaucrats working in Birmingham, their second largest city.
I think one item that made it very clear that people were voting with their feelings rather than weighing positives and negatives, was Cornwall realizing, after the vote, that they get a lot of EU support, and trying to put pressure on London to match this. Whether or not it will happen, who knows, but after the vote probably wasn't the time to bring it up.
I've said before that I believe that much of the negative feeling towards the EU is from governments all over Europe using the EU as a handy scapegoat, and claiming that any unpopular decision was a result of the EU. This has been going on for 40 years in the case of the UK, which was bound to have an impact. It also doesn't help that people find it difficult to distinguish the EU from the ECHR (a separate organization) and EU related immigration from external immigration (in the UK, the largest number of immigrants are from India, for instance). This is a great example of what the article is saying because it shows that the narrative has been prioritized over the reality, and it's really difficult to dispute a narrative now because it's dispersed, rather than having a small number of sources.
Rational thought is the only true freedom
And how about this—is this ambiguous?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/con...
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
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.
There has never yet been a person, barring the seriously mentally ill, who did evil and did not - while doing it - sincerely believe they were doing good.
What you believe about your actions are utterly meaningless - what their objectively measureable effects are - that matters.
If you (generalized 'you' as in 'this is just an example not pointed at a particular individual) vote for a party that favors controlling women's medical decisions because you dislike the other party's tax plan then you have to OWN that you have actively helped sexocrats oppress women. You have to justify to yourself and the world why you feel this was a worthwhile price to pay.
If you vote for a party that actively pursues policies which harms minorities because you like that they want to declare the bible the official state book - then you have to own both those outcomes.
Politics is an art of compromise, ideally you choose the person whose platform most align with your beliefs about what's best for your society and community - and you own the fact that this means you also voted for the things in their platform you don't like and that you decided they were worthwhile compromises.
It gets worse when people vote for the guy whose platform most aligns with their personal desires and beliefs about what's best for themselves.
It all goes to hell when people vote for the guy who says the stuff they want to hear and can't EVEN be deterred by the constant barrage of proof that he lies all the time and tells EVERYBODY what they want to hear.
But whatever path you chose, you are forced to compromise - and that means you are responsible for the compromises. You should own them, so that the next time you vote you can reconsider whether they had truly been worth it.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Except there was no demonstration in Benghazi. It was a planned attack and the demonstration story was a lie.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Do you have evidence of this? If such evidence exists, why didn't the intense GOP bring it up in the 11 hour hearing?
Table-ized A.I.
It's quite possible it was BOTH planned and enlarged by video anger. The main perp admitted to interviewers he was upset by the video. There is a good chance the attack party was enlarged and enraged due to the video even if it started as merely a "plan".
Without reverse engineering neurons, we may never really know how big a part the video played.
Hillary did change her account of the situation over time, but she said it's because the intelligence changed.
For example, a social media message from a group that claimed responsibility turned out to be hoax. I haven't seen clear evidence that she contradicted the actual intelligence handed to her. If you have that evidence, bring it!
She should have put more "disclaimer" words in her statements in my opinion, like "probably" or "probably not", but that's a relatively minor point.
There are bigger issues to focus on; GOP is drama-queening Benghazi.
There's a well-known press photo of an (alleged) attacker waving an AK47 in front of the burning compound. Terrorists typically don't "dance" like that.
Table-ized A.I.
Congratulations, you're a destructive nitwit who pretends that opposing lunatics is just a disagreement.
People who think persecuting minorities makes the country a better place are objectively bad people. People who think spreading a backward version of Christianity makes the country better are objectively stupid people. People who would vote for a candidate who's running an openly-fascist campaign are objectively fascists.
Modern people and Conservatives don't just disagree like we used to. The Conservatives drifted off into a hate-driven alternate reality, and can't even engage with the real world anymore.
You are quite right. However, you accidentily wrote "Conservatives" instead of "Democrats" !! 8-P
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'
Yes, in fact I do.
As to why the Republicans didn't bring it up in the hearings - the Benghazi hearings took place in October, and Clinton managed to delay the release of the transcripts until April. Which is the pattern with this despicable woman - delay, delay, delay and then when the damning information comes out she says "This is old news. Why does it matter any more?" Do you remember the Rose Law Firm documents?
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.
That phone call was brought up in the 11-hour hearing. I do remember it.
Maybe the committee only had a summary of the conversation instead of the actual transcripts, but I don't see how that changes anything here.
Table-ized A.I.
What changes is we have documented evidence she was telling the American people one thing and telling world leaders something else.
I don't understand why she does this kind of thing. If she had told the truth I would have shrugged and said "Meh. Sometimes the other team puts some points on the board. You can't stop every attack." But no, she had to peddle this fantasy that some Egyptian filmmaker caused a spontaneous riot that included mortars and heavy machine guns. It was obviously untrue from the start.
She explained in the hearing. If the explanation was clearly a lie, please present clear evidence of such, not speculation.
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Oh, I must have missed it. What was her explanation?
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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Why should THEIR bus have said that? Jesus, you people really have no idea how to advertise, do you?
In this country, it's generally illegal to place advertisements that you know to be false.
The slogans are painting an EMOTIONAL picture - and the picture painted by the Brexit bus was this: "We're sending a ton of money to faceless bureaucrats across the channel. We should spend that money on Britons, here in Britain, instead!"
That's the point. If that were actually the choice, then they might have my support (though spending an extra £6/week per capita won't actually do much) The accurate picture is that we have the choice between sending money to the EU and having a say in how it's spent, or sending (more) money to the EU and having no say in how it's spent. I doubt many people would have voted for the second if they'd understood that this is what they were voting for.
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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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First, my initial reaction to that: A comment brought to Slashdot from the Karl Rove & Lyton Crosby school of political campaigning. And doubtless also from Democrat and Labour campaign strategists, except they at least seem to have enough sense to remain grey eminces, not become part of the campaign.
Second, what I think after re-reading it and realising what you were actually saying. Yes, you're right. And I very much wish you weren't.
"By 1980 there was no news outlet in the US that would give "fair" coverage to any Republican" - Not even The Wall Street Journal?
That the intelligent assessments (made by professional intelligence analysts) had changed over time. For example, a known terrorist group appeared to claim responsibility on social media, but later it turned out to be a forged claim inserted by a troll.
I have seen no definitive evidence that H's statements were out of sync with (the changing) intelligence reports issued to her.
I could be argued she was sloppy in how she re-conveyed the reports to others, but that's NOT the same as intentionally lying.
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That's not credible at all. There's no way intelligence assessments changed that much between 10 PM on the 11th when she blamed the film and 14 hours later when she told the Egyptian PM "We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film."
Then the next day during a State Dept event to commemorate the end of Ramadan she blamed the film again.
So to recap: Sept 11th Clinton issues statement blaming film. Sept 12th Clinton tells Egyptian PM there's no way it was the film. Sept 13th Clinton issues statement blaming film.
It's not just lying. It's bad lying.
Do you have explicit evidence of this? It appears to be mere guessing on your part, to me.
As I mentioned before, H probably should have attached caveat words like "probably" and "probably not" to her interpretations of the intelligence reports, but that's a sin of poor wording, NOT lying per se.
Innocent until proven guilty.
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Again: Issues press release blaming the film. Tells the Egyptian PM there's "no way" it was the film. Issues press release blaming the film.
There's no way you can construe that as anything other than lying. I guess in theory she could have been lying to the Egyptian PM, but then he would have been able to tell by reading the newspaper.
I don't understand why this is so hard for you.
We seem to be going in circles. I don't know how to clarify myself any further than I have. I question your sanity.
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I have no doubt that's true, as you seem unable to reason logically.
Project much? Most readers can spot your fallacy.
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What fallacy? I'm amused you think "most readers" can spot a nonexistent fallacy. You accuse me of projection... is that what the "most readers" in your head told you to say?
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.
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