If you want argue with a conspiracy theorist, then you have to use facts to refute their claims.
You're making a mistake in assuming I want to argue with him.
Once the conspiracy is something as ridiculous as claiming that the biggest orchestrated genocide did not happen and is all an elaborate hoax by all historians and academics, facts will do no good. I know 'cause I have debated these people before, and just like debating with hardcore creationists they will not believe any evidence you throw at them, because they're operating in an entirely different reality. They will ignore any evidence presented and then just move on to their next ridiculous claim in a Gish gallop, and I have better things to do with my time than to waste my time arguing with someone like that.
It failed back then and it is failing now: trying to restrict speech only energizes extreme voices. And in the day of the Internet, widespread encryption, and international connectivity, such censorship won't even reduce undesirable speech.
As I said I'm not in favour of the laws myself because I tend to agree that the martyrdom status that it grants to those it affects is in many ways making the problem worse. However especially in Germany since the laws have been in place pretty much since the 2nd world war, their reversal in the near future is unlikely because of the highly politically charged nature of the topic.
Plattner isn't proposing to criminalize more hate speech, he is proposing to criminalize "fake new" and propaganda that deviates from government propaganda.Regardless of what you think of the anti-Nazi laws, that is both qualitatively and quantitatively very different.
Well that depends on what is actually done, but in essence the principle behind such mentality is the same: since the (social) media can be used to disseminate false and misleading information which can then be used to manipulate people when it comes to politics, he seems to want more control of what kind of information can be shared. Needless to say I'm not in support of this either, even though at the same time I do believe that the social media sites themselves are free to set rules on what kind of content they wish to allow on their platforms. That is, I do not believe the government should legally mandate these things, but that doesn't mean that Facebook & al have to allow any type of content to be shared via their services.
When I said 'what has been happening in Germany' I wasn't referring to Plattner's (very vague) proposal (should have been clearer on that, my bad), but rather the recent laws that imposed more duties on social media sites to take down content that violates existing German laws.
Not that you're going to read it since you're probably a troll either in their mom's basement or the troll brigade of st. Petersburg, but on the off-chance that you're an actual holocaust denier I have 2 pieces of advice for you:
1. Stop drinking bleach, it's not good for you. 2. Read this XKCD
Given Germany's history, for a German to propose criminalizing speech is a sign of profound historical ignorance and irresponsibility.
You're obviously not up to date on German history. Hate speech has been criminalized in Germany for a long time, precisely because of the 2nd world war. It's one of the few countries where you can get fined or imprisoned for denying the holocaust, or wearing any nazi insignia in public etc. And the Americans should not take the moral high ground here, because this behavior has its roots in post-war Allied control of West Germany. The occupational forces exercised censorship to control what could and couldn't be said about them:
During the post World War II period, the West German media was subject to censorship by the Allied occupational forces. Criticism of the occupational forces and of the emerging government were not tolerated. Publications which were expected to have a negative effect on the general public were not printed. A list of over 30,000 titles, including works by such authors as Carl von Clausewitz, was drawn up. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order in principle was no different from the Nazi book burnings, although unlike the burnings, the measure was seen as a temporary part of the denazification program. [4]
When the official government, the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) took over, these limits were relaxed. The new German constitution guaranteed freedom of press, speech, and opinion. Since Germany kept the West German constitution after East Germany joined its jurisdiction, the same protections and restrictions in West Germany apply to contemporary Germany. However, continued globalization and the advent of Internet marketing present a new host of complications to German censorship and information laws.
Publications violating laws (e.g., such promoting Volksverhetzung or slander and libel) can be censored in today's Germany, with authors and publishers probable subjects to penalties. Strafgesetzbuch section 86a rather strictly prohibits the public display of "symbols of unconstitutional organizations" such as the NSDAP and affiliates. Materials written or printed by organizations ruled to be anti-constitutional, like the NSDAP or the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang), have also been placed on the index. Public Holocaust denial is also prohibited and may be severely punished with up to five years in prison.[5] A decision of a court that assumes that a publication is violating another person's personal rights may also lead to censoring (a newspaper for example can be forced not to publish private pictures).
'Volksverhetzung' is the German hate speech law prohibiting targeting of racial and ethnic groups. Quoting the translation from the wiki:
Whosoever, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace:
1. incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them; or
2. assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning an aforementioned group, segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population, or defaming segments of the population,
shall be liable to imprisonment from three months to five years.
Similar (though usually less strict) laws exist in other European countries, including my own (Finland), the UK, Ireland and Sw
What's your next guess? Guns are used defensively about two and a half million times a year in the USA
And yet the USA has a higher homicide rate and a higher rate of mass shootings than any other first world nation,
It's clear that people can and do use guns for self-defence, but simply stating the number of times that has been done, or even saying as the article does that they're used more often for defence than attacks does not tell you whether or not they make you safer as a whole.
Guns are very rarely used for self-defence by civilians here in Finland (mainly because most of the guns are for hunting, and carry permits are not issued except to cops) and yet I'm still on average less likely to become the victim of a homicide or violent crime here than in the US.
The point here is not to say that guns are the only explaining factor for these differences, they're obviously not. The point is just to highlight that a stat like 'the amount of times guns are used for defence' does not by itself tell you anything about their effect on overall safety.
Google doesn't give a shit about freedom of speech. They (via Youtube) were part of the coordinated, multi-platform purge of Alex Jones.
Freedom of speech is about preventing censorship by the government (meaning: the stuff that China for example is doing), it's does not mean that private corporations cannot choose which content they allow on their platforms. In other words: no-one is limiting Alex Jones' freedom of speech by blocking them from their platforms as his nonsensical bullshit is deemed damaging to their brand(s). That's the free market at work for you. Arguing otherwise is like saying that if I write a column on how the moon landings were all faked by the lizard-illuminati-freemasons and newspapers refuse to publish said column because it's unscientific conspiratorial BS my freedom of speech is being limited, which is a moronic argument.
So once again, repeat after me: private entities are not required by law in any western country to allow anyone to use their platform to spread their opinions.
How this can be so hard for some people to understand is beyond me.
They also refuse to work with the US government but happily work for the Chinese government.
If you have evidence that Google has refused to follow the laws of the US, I'd be interested to see that. What I've gathered as a European following the events in the recent years, it seemed pretty clear to me that all the major tech companies were involved with the security apparatus of the US, based on the information leaked by Snowden, and I also do not remember seeing cases where Google wouldn't provide the authorities with required information when they're legally required to do so, so frankly I have no idea what you're referring to here, but then again neither do you probably, as you're not even aware of the definition of free speech.
Also leftists: we need to import a hundred million migrants from high birthrate countries into low birtrate countries. We also need to spend trillions of dollars and euros to improve living conditions in high birthrate countries so high birthrate countries can have even more children.
This is one of the most moronic statements I've seen anyone make here in a good while. You do understand that globally birth rates are in decline and a rising standard of living lowers them faster, right? The reason people in poorer regions are having more children is because those children are needed to work at the family farms to produce food, and because high child mortality means that you're going to likely lose a few of them at an early age. Hpwever declining absolute poverty and rising level of technology in poorer regions has contributed and is still contributing to the global birth rate falling from 37,2 births per 1000 people in the 50s to 19,2 in the late 2000s, and it's going to keep falling, because birth rates are plummeting even in the poorest of regions as their conditions slowly improve.
In other words: you're a god damn idiot with zero understanding of facts. Please do humanity a favor and never spread your own genes further.
Your delusion is that the U.S. needs the world. Not that I hate the others but we are diverse enuff to make it on our own.
Depends on what you mean by 'need' here. I mean sure, the US is large enough and wealthy enough that you could survive on your own, but with both China and the US the thing is that exporting goods and services is deeply integral to the economy and society. The US is the second largest export economy in the world. And that's only counting stuff you directly export to other countries. When you factor in the fact that most of the top US companies do business globally via subsidiaries which - depending on how the corporations and sales are structured - may not show up at all as exports, it becomes even more clear just how connected you and everyone else is to the global economy.
So could you 'make it on your own'? Absolutely, and moreso than most other western countries, including for example my own small country (Finland) that's more heavily dependent on exports because the domestic market is small. Buuut at the same time seizing exports would cause a significant dent in your economy, lead to shrinking of the economy, loss of millions jobs which in turn would lower the incomes of Americans leading to reduced domestic demand, and in general diminished influence on the global stage. It would be survivable, but it wouldn't be pleasant 'business as usual' stuff. Same goes with China who exports even more than you do.
So that being the case I'd say the US does in fact need the rest of the world, not in terms of survival, but in terms of maintaining your current economic status and the quality of life it brings.
Long story short is people on the Youtube platform, who have built an ongoing living and income can be destroyed at the drop of a hat, due to algorithm changes and censorship.
This is true, the 'adpocalypse' has indeed made a huge dents in the income of many youtubers. But keep in mind that's what's behind this: the advertisers themselves.
Google is an advertising company that happens to own a video platform and a search engine and a bunch of other stuff to help spread those ads, but at the core of the revenue is ads. What's happened with Youtube is that they got instantly scared when they lost advertisers because companies that are strict about their imagine do not want to be affiliated with content that they deem damaging to their brand. This is why they apparently chose to be extra-paranoid and demonetize everything that's could be perceived as 'problematic', but not by themselves or even the consumers but the advertisers. That's who their paying customer is, and that's who they care the most about.
Behind all of this is a conflict between the way advertising has traditionally been done and the way it's evolved online. If I buy ad-space on a tv-network or a newspaper, I have a good amount of control over what kind of content my ads are shown. However online the targeting is done based on the audience and not the content itself. So instead of saying: 'I want this ad to run for 3 weeks in this timeslot" companies can now say: 'I want to show this ads to men aged 20-35 who're interested in X, Y and Z." This is obviously better in the sense that it allows for a more fine-grained targeting of the campaign, but the tradeoff is that it surrenders all control of the content the ads are played next to. A person in your target demographic might be watching music videos and cute cat videos or they might be watching some radical political content and this is scaring the marketing people who want to protect their brand and avoid 'Coca-cola advertising next to ISIS videos' -'scandals'. This is in fact close to what started the so called 'Adpocalypse' last year: a bunch of big.brand advertisers got spooked because their ads were being run over racist content. Quoting from the link:
The YouTube Adpocalypse is a site-wide term emerging from the March-May 2017 advertiser boycott on YouTube.
The boycott arose from advertisements being played on the video, "Chief Keef dancing to Alabama N*gger", and other extremist content, leading to the UK Government, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Johnson & Johnson, and many major brands pulling their advertisements from YouTube.
Know what that meant? Revenues dropping across the board, money being lost. And with big brands like these, we're talking about more than just a few bucks.
This is why it has to be understood that this problem is not Google/Youtube-specific, it's advertiser specific. Obviously Google or any online platform would like to run as much ads on whatever content that they could, because more ads=more money. If you think the guys over at Youtube are excited about decreasing monetization think again. But the customer is always right, and if the hand that feeds you says either you do something about policing the kind of content the ads are getting played next to or you lose their business, what do you think they're going to do? A competing service on its own will not help because it will run into the same problem once it becomes big enough: if you want your platform to be profitable and ad-supported, you're going to have to kiss the ring of the advertisers or see them take their business elsewhere.
Before advertisers start trusting consumers to understand that they have not hand-picked the videos that the ads are played next to, this will not change. In the meanwhile, what Youtube could at least do is give the advertiser the choice of opting-in to the algorithm. There are plenty of companies out th
But entertain me on this thought experiment. Why is having a police force use such a system so different from if they had on their payroll someone who was really really good at remembering faces? Or someone who knew everyone in town?
Okay I will try my best. I Just recently I warthed the documentary about automated surveillance systems sold to and used by the police both in the US and here in Europe called Pre-crime after the concept from Minority Report. The doc itself was alright, not the best, I would have liked more details and practical examples but it gives some insights into the kinds of systems currently in use and in development. Essentially these kinds of systems can be divided into 2 main categories:
1) The kinds that use open and public data about crimes and do not involve personal factors like face-recognition. These systems are meant to help the police to figure out which areas should be patrolled in more, and where the crime is currently clustering. 2) The kinds using both private and public information. These take personal information from different sources, including but not limited to social networks, financial systems and for example state services like social security, past arrests etc and 'score' individuals to try to give a number to them indicating how likely it is that said individual will either perpetrate or be the victim of a crime. Such systems are currently in use at least in Chicago, parts of the UK and parts of China.
Okay so, take your example and assume you have an officer on duty with supreme photographic memory that's capable of remembering a lot of faces. He sees someone on the street that he thinks is a fugitive or a suspect and they pursue him. If something goes wrong and the guy's injured or killed and turns out to be a different individual, the cop can be held accountable legally. However what's happening with these type 2 systems and what the documentary describes is that it takes and unknown number of variables, and then uses an unknown algorithm to come up with a score that's supposed to tell the officers who is a danger or who might be in danger. In the doc they mention one of the guys who's in the 'heat list' of around 400 individuals in Chicago that has a 'high threat score', not because of his own past criminal history but because of who some of his friends are. Now, with such a system if you happen to end up on such a list there really is no way currently to get of it. This means whenever these guys are walking out in public if the police pull up information on them from the system they're far more likely to be stopped.
Now imagine someone like him, who doesn't have an extensive criminal history but is on the list due to his personal connections gets into an interaction with the police. Do you think the cops will treat such a guy in the same way as they would any other normal individual? Even if the guy's doing nothing wrong a the moment, the system is there to remind them that this is a 'high risk' target. Do you think that increases or decreases the chances that officers will resort to use of force because their algorithm is telling them this guy might be dangerous?
That's the problem core of the problem. It's not the same as some guy seeing a face he remembers from a past case on the street or knows to be a gang-member. These estimations seem objective, but the fact is we're still dealing with probabilities at best. What the scores generated by such systems are telling you is that there's an N percent change according to them that this guy might at some point commit a crime. But there's essentially no way of telling whether those probabilities are accurate for a given individual, yet the police trust the score gioven by the system. One example mentioned in the doc was that a woman had been tweeting about a card game by the name of 'Rage' often, which the system interpreted as a sign of aggressive behaviour which raises her score. But the cops on th
Oh hello Ivan, I was wondering when you guys would show up in defense of your man in Washington.
As for that article you tried to troll with: poor attempt. The way Finnish criminal law works is that when the victim of a sex crime as a minor, it's always prosecuted as (aggravated) sexual assault of a minor and not under the tittle of rape. Aggravated sexual assault of a minor carries the same maximum penalty as aggravated rape, and even in that case the offender was sentenced to jail time.
You guys really need to amp up your game man, your talking points are old, out of date, and easily refuted. Pathetic, really.
Basically that candidate would be doing their job rather than spending all his time obsessing about what the person who lost the election was allegedly doing years ago and extorting foreign leaders into bailing out his son in law's real estate company and investing in his own resort projects in as a prerequisite to getting things done.
Yup. I'm a Finn so I have no direct stake in this, but following the Trump presidency from the outside has been like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion. This is the man who railed against corruption, the Washington elites, 'the swamp' and China. What has he done in his first year? Amp up nepotism by appointing his own friends and family into positions of power (never mind that they're not really fit to handle those positions), give massive tax-cuts to his own class to the tune of billions without any solid plan to fund them (and the republicans love this, even though it will cause a massive increase in the deficit), entangled your position in the middle-east even more than it already was by walking back on the Iran deal and with the Jerusalem embassy.move, and basically made himself the Swamlord.
The Chinese have the man figured out, and why wouldn't they, he's easy to read. All it took to bend the man to their will was a few hundred million to his project and suddenly the Chinese went from 'stealing so many jobs to nice people that need to be helped because 'too many jobs in China lost'. Beijing took one look at the tariffs he was planning, hit back with counter-tariffs that hurt the critical areas of the Trump-base in the midterm and the man folded instantly like a house of cards. The fact that he even thought he could win a 'trade war' is indicative of just how beyond clueless the man is of the structure of the global economy. And this man fancies himself a negotiator or a strongman of some kind? He's not playing 4d chess, he's not even playing chess, he's eating the pieces and calling himself a genius for doing so. But the base cheers for him, and that's all that he cares about.
Trump is weakening the US reputation and position globally on pretty much all fronts because he's so easy to manipulate, so impulsive, egocentric and frankly, so damn dumb. And that being the case, you can be sure that many of the major geopolitical players, likely China included, will do what they can behind the scenes to keep the man in power, because he might just be the best thing that's happened to your global competitors in a good while. Besides being relatively easy to control and influence from the outside with pocket change and praise, the amount of sheer incompetence and chaos he causes in the US domestic politics is a godsend to them. I mean, the fact that we're over a year into his presidency and the 'b-b-b-b-ut Hillary!" -card is still being thrown about as a counter whenever Trump does something that's just objectively moronic is proof of that.
Totally irrelevant to the fact that it's still gambling. It's a slot-machine mechanic that allows people to put money in and get in return something that may or may not be worth anything at all. In the case of CS some of the rarer skins are worth thousands, which has created a whole economy of its own where people and streamers are not in fact playing the game itself at all but simply acquiring/opening boxes in the hopes of getting rare loot that can then be sold for money. Hell, there have even been gambling sites like 'CS:GO Lotto' set up in which people can trade their skins in for essentially a chance of winning better/higher value skins. In 2016 this caused a controversy because it turned out that 2 of the guys that had been promoting said site heavily on youtube turned out to be the owners of said site without disclosing that fact. From the link:
Two prominent YouTube stars, ProSyndicate and TmarTn, have been embroiled in an ongoing scandal regarding the rise of 'gambling' with weapon skins won in the Valve-operated online shooter CS:GO, having been revealed to be the owners of a gambling site which they've been promoting heavily via their YouTube channels.
The site, CSGOLotto.com, is one of many which allows players to use the skins they've unlocked in the game as chips, assigning them a value based on rarity and desirability. In many cases, these skins are then bet against other players, with a slot-machine style random number generator picking a winner who then keeps the pot. On other sites, the pot is bet against the outcome of other games of CS:GO. The keys used to open loot crates in the game must be bought with real money via Steam, and because the skins can be resold via the platform's trading system and 'cashed out' by buying games as gifts and selling the codes via various marketplaces, many such operations have already faced accusations of enabling unregulated real-money gambling, resulting in a class-action lawsuit being filed against Valve itself.
This is not a small industry, nor a new one. A recent Bloomberg report estimated that around $2.3 billion worth of skins were wagered on CS:GO related websites in 2015 alone. Already, several calls had been made to investigate the legality of such operations, especially in the US, where gambling is heavily restricted, especially given that many of the sites don't restrict participation based on age or location, and even those which do are usually at odds with laws surrounding real-money gambling.
However, the most recent development, as discovered by YouTuber HonorTheCall and promulgated by H3H3 productions, is that CSGOlotto.com was joint founded by TmarTn and ProSyndicate, who have both posted videos with titles such as WINNING BIG $$$$!!! (CS:GO Betting), showing them using the site and winning considerable amounts. Not only does that contravene YouTube guidelines about the disclosure of interests and payments, there's now considerable suspicion surrounding the veracity of the bets screened by the pair, with the suggestion emerging that, given their privileged access to the back-end mechanics, both could easily have fixed the outcomes in their favour in order to make for more persuasive footage.
These guys were essentially making videos about how they won soooo much money by playing on the site that they happened to own (without telling that they own the site and can therefore affect the odds of the slot machine). That's the textbook definition of marketing gambling to children.
The reality is Counter strike would have died if it weren't for these 'loot boxes';
Total bullshit. CS:GO is one of the most popular FPS games with a huge scene of professional teams and tournaments and a fan-base that follows said teams
The trillionaire owners and rulers of the future who will be asked to fund UBI will dodge that responsibility like they do taxes today, so certainly don't expect UBI to pay any better than welfare today.
You're missing something quite important here: consumption. Companies need customers, and if and when due to automation a significant chunk of consumers can no longer work because they have no marketable skills, consumption will come crashing down, which will hurt the companies and thus the bottom lines of the trilionaires. Think about the major tech companies for example: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc. In a world where the majority of people would be making just enough money to survive these companies would collapse, because the goods and services they're selling all require consumers that can actually be marketed to effectively, meaning consumers with disposable income.
Put another way: the benefits of automation (reduced manufacturing & logistics costs) will help no-one if as a result of automation and reduced purchasing power the consumer-base will collapse and is replaced with a massive amount of people living on just the bare necessities because that will slash demand for most consumer products and services and cause a lot of these companies to go under which in turn will reduce the demand for B2B products and services.
This is not a matter of empathy for the poor, this is a matter of game theory. The economy is essentially a giant game that requires people to be buying things for it to stay viable. The more corporations embrace automation and cut the amount of jobs, the more inevitable it will be that the amount of UBI/income transfers per person will have to go up in the future. That is unless one maintains that the rich will suddenly stop caring about making money and will be fine with seeing their profits collapse.
Note that HBO and Netflix have very different models, HBO is an add-on to an existing cable package
This is only partially true, and even then mostly in the US as far as I can tell. Here in the Nordics the majority of people who watch HBO content (myself included) do it through their streaming service HBO Nordic , their localized streaming service with a price point of 10 euros a month, essentially a direct competitor to Netflix. They also release plenty of stuff there that they've not produced themselves like Vikings, etc to keep up on the content race with Netflix & al.
The models are slightly different in that HBO concentrates far more on series rather than movies (they mostly have older classics and not very many recent movies).
I could get a cable but honestly with Netlifx, HBO and Amazon all being cheap as streaming services there's practically no need for me to ever even consider it.
What a retarded definition. I want to hurt you based on what you said, so you must have been hate speaking?
You shouldn't be throwing the word retard around when you clearly don't know how to read. What he said:
Hate speech is the one which make the reader consider illegal actions against a group of some persuasion or inheritance. It might not contain a single offensive word but still fill the reader or listener with anger towards its target.
That's not the same as 'if you said something that makes me want to hurt you you're engaging in hate speech', in fact that miles from it. What he said is that it's possible to rile hatred against a group of people without outright saying stuff like 'Members of [group X] are all subhuman and deserve to have their rights taken away/assaulted/killed/whatever". In fact the vast majority of hate speech works like this, and has always worked liked this. You take a racial/ethnic/religious/political group and then you make statements like: "Members of [group X] are all [criminals/dangerous/against western values]" and you use those kinds of arguments to instill fear and hatred in people against said group. Look at the way 'race theory' developed a few centuries back and how it's since been used (and still is used by some). It was propagated by this notion that they're being 'objective' and that it's simply a fact that certain races are inferior to the others, which was then used as a handy justification for not granting equal rights to these people. Looking at slavery for example, the argument was never presented as 'Enslavement of Africans is alright because we should hate them", rather it was wrapped in pseudo-scientific argument of: 'The africans are less intelligent and less capable and more violent than us, so therefore slavery is the natural order of things."
Looking at more recent examples this is the way all ethnic cleansings have always been prepared. The third reich did not arise out of a democratic platform where the guys just yelled: 'Kill all the jews!" and got widespread support. That was preceded by a years long propaganda campaign which painted the jews as criminals that seek to undermine the society. And as the mastermind behind the propaganda machine (Göring) said of this tactic during the trials: "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
This is still the modus operandi of groups that wish to stoke hatred between no matter where they come from or what their motivations are: it's never 'we should all hate/kill [members of the opposing group(s)] just because we should hate them', but 'We're just spreading around facts about the [opposing group(s) are being dangerous, we're being objective here!"
Even with false advertising there are fringe cases and cases wherein even obvious false advertising is still not a crime because the internet allows people and companies to loop around the laws. For example: it's illegal to advertise a homeopathic 'medicine' as being effective against cancer, because homeopathic 'medicines' are just water and there's no scientific backing to support them being effective. However it's not illegal for someone to write a blog post about how they personally think these 'medicines' cure cancer and then promote that post on say Facebook because the 'product' being promoted is not the pills themselves, but an opinion piece about the pills. Still the effective end result for the consumer that sees the promoted post is the same: they're left with a misleading picture of what the product does and may be fooled into buying it under false assumptions.
Now I don't think it should be illegal for anyone to write such opinions, but just as I'd support facebook curbing the spreading of pseudo-scientific nonsense like homeopathy or
I live in Sweden and its getting increasingly difficult to communicate with government run services with out a "mobile ID"
Finn here; we use e-banking credentials (all of which are required by law to use 2-step authentication) lo log in and identify to government services like filing taxes etc. There's a notable difference between requiring a trustworthy method for people to identify themselves in order to access their own personal information stored and handled by the government and requiring fingerprints and facial ID to buy food or taking an exam.
I quite like the fact that I can handled my taxes (both personal and those of my startup) online using 2-step identification instead of a less secure method.
Strangely you can still fly in Europe without showing an ID, its easier to get on a plane incognito than a local bus...
So wait, have they stopped selling single-use tickets at kiosks and stores? Last time I was in Stockholm I happily rode the metro with complete anonymity using these. Again, just because a service is offered (you can buy mass transit tickets with the phone here as well) does not mean said service is mandatory. You're comparing apples to oranges here.
Secondly: no you can't be on the plane incognito. Even though you won't have to show your ID necessarily, your name is still on the passenger manifest. Obviously you can book a flight under a false name, but this is actually not allowed. That is, if they do decide to check your ID (which they are allowed to do) and find that your ticket is booked under a different/false name you will not get on the flight.
Testing is also done (or should be done) in controlled environments until you get way past the alfa and beta stages. Putting the autonomous car on the road can be justified when the car doesn't need human supervision and it can deal with normal traffic conditions in day and night with the same performance as that of a human driver.
What's your proposed model for testing an autonomous car driving amidst normal traffic conditions that does not include actually having it drive among normal road traffic?
Secondly measured in terms of accidents and fatalities, autonomous cars have already caused less accidents per miles driven than your average human driver, so if that's your metric, the argument can be made that said bar has already been passed, although that obviously does not mean that the safety cannot and should not be further improved until the fatalities drop to zero.
And we know how software engineers think.. Throw the alfa software to the public and fix mistakes afterwards.
We should also know all know that alpha or not, there's no bug-free software. You can do all the simulations and all the testing you want, bugs and accidents will still happen. However, once they do and are fixed, the vehicles will not do the same mistakes again, which is not true for most human drivers. Human drivers also do not learn from the mistakes of other human drivers that they've never met. Autonomous cars do.
I fail to see what the problem is here. We all knew this was going to happen because it always happens with new transportation technologies that are in the process of being perfected. Plane safety has gone up dramatically as a result of tens and hundreds of accidents in both software and hardware, and the same's true with 'regular' cars. Your standard seems to me to be an illogical 'unless it's completely failsafe it should not be used at all', and if we followed that principle we'd still be using horses.
Thank you for saying that, anonymous MI-6 person! After all, no one else seems to know *for certain* who is responsible for that chemical attack.
I'm so glad you know 100%. Otherwise, we might attack or economically sanction a country that didn't do it.
I know this is offopic, but still. Think about the situation: a Russian ex-intelligence officer who's been giving lectures in Britain about Russian intelligence services after being released by the Russians in a prisoner exchange is poisoned with a nerve agent in public. Russia is the only country that has both the motivation and the capability to do something like this.
Keep in mind that there are way more discrete and efficient ways of assassinating someone (a car 'accident' or a heart attack, a robbery 'gone wrong', or the good old fashioned 'self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head by a drunken depressed man' that's an all-time favorite of Russians) that have been used ever since the cold war For those interested here's a list of 'car accidents' and 'suicides' and other deaths that have happened in the top leadership of the Russian military since the collapse of the Soviet Union. You'll note there was a bunch during Yeltsin, but then it was pretty quiet up until the end of the second Chechen war, when 11 officers had accidents or shot 'themselves' in the head. After that the beginning of the Georgian war coincided with the start of a 'reform' in the Russian military which happened to coincide with another bunch (25) of such deaths in the following 2 years. Is it possible that some of these are genuine accidents or suicides? Sure, at least one of the officers had cancer. But all of them? No way. The point here is that when publicity doesn't matter, the Russians know how to get rid of people opposed to Putin without making a big spectacle out of it.
However Putin's an ex-KGB guy and has made it a point to make the killings of traitors to be very public and visible in order to send a message (see: the polonium poisoning of Litvinenko for example), this is very clearly a personal matter for him, compounded likely by the fact that him and mr. Skripal are the same age (well, Putin's a year younger), so he's from the same generation of spies as Putin himself.
If they wanted plausible deniability over this he'd just have gotten a heart attack or a stroke at home. Even that would have left chemical traces which could've pointed towards an assassination, but at least then the Russians could have somewhat credibly feigned ignorance and blame 'fake news' and 'Russophobia'. But nope, dude gets poisoned with a nerve agent out in broad daylight. They want the world to know it's them. This is basically the equivalent of Vlad leaving his calling card next to the body with a 'snitches get stitches' message, as well as serving another purpose which is giving the British agencies the finger by saying: "yeah, we can operate on your soil and there's nothing you can do about it!".
How many former intelligence officers do you think will consider giving lectures about their knowledge of the Russian system after this in Europe? If there were any before this, you can bet that the line just got a whole lot shorter.
I used to be amused by THGTTG, and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, but that it is a long time ago.
Aha, found the guy working for the complaints department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation!
The Hitchhiker's Travel Guide describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:
"A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which conveniently fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:
"A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
Only their complaints department survived the general economic implosion of the company as a whole.
I'm not going to say that is impossible for AI to do what I do, but AI is itself another layer of technology, subject to both failures in the underlying layers and failures in its own implementation. AI might be better at sorting-out some of its own problems, but there comes a point when the platform upon which its implemented is broken enough that it requires someone external to fix it.
Of course AI will for a long time at least take people to maintain it. However, this is a sort of red herring in this argument, because the question is not 'does AI produce new jobs' but 'Does AI produce more jobs than it removes', and the answer to that is no. As in, you take a factory that employs say 300 people and you increase the automation, chances are you'll remove something like 50 jobs and create 5.10 new ones. Even i you pay those new guys 3-4 times as much as you used to pay the guys doing manual labor that the system made obsolete, you're still saving money. Here's an actual example from China from last year
The factory recently replaced 90 percent of its human workforce with machines, and it led to a staggering 250 percent increase in productivity and a significant 80 percent drop in defects.
Changying Precision Technology Company’s factory used to need 650 human workers to produce mobile phones. Now, the factory is run by 60 robot arms that work around the clock across 10 production lines. Only 60 people are still employed by the company — three are assigned to check and monitor the production line, and the others are tasked with monitoring computer control systems. Any remaining work not handled by humans is left in the capable hands of machines.
According to Luo Weiqiang, general manager of the factory, the number of people employed could drop to just 20, and given the level of efficiency achieved by automation, it won’t be long before other factories follow in their footsteps.
Same thing on the office side: large amounts of data entry jobs are fast becoming automated. So you may have something like 30 people doing nothing but paying/sending invoices. Move to an fully electronic system, and you're left with maybe 5 people who oversee that everything goes alright and handle the cases wherein the system fails.
You miss the point where those laws were not enforced because they weren't necessary.
This is simply not true. There have been hate speech convictions in Germany and elsewhere prior to the current refugee crisis. A Finnish far-right politician whose only talking point throughout the years has been opposing immigration got sentenced to fines for calling all muslims pedophiles way back in 2012. Here's a story of a drunk neo-Nazi being fined for doing the Hitler salute in 2011. Etc, you can find many more examples using google.
Again, do I agree with these laws? No. Do I agree with the far-right? No, but saying that these laws have never been used before is simply not true.
After Merkel decided to let in anyone who arrived, Germany started to have a problem with racism - aka the natives bitching about the bad behaviour of the new arrivals.
If you think this situation started with the refugee crisis, think again. Germany has had such laws in the books long before the current refugee crisis, up to the point that using nazi-symbolism is punishable by law, as is denying the holocaust. These laws prohibiting 'incitement of violence' or hatred against ethnic grouops have been on the books for decades, the recent law regarding social media is just the latest development. Even prior to the passage of the law, someone posting hate speech online could be fined in Germany and elsewhere, the only thing that the law changed was make it possible for the platforms to be fined for failing to remove such content.
Now granted, the recent influx of refugees has made the situation a lot more heated, but the general point is that Germany has been using censorship and hate-speech laws to control the (mostly) far-right groups in the country long before the last couple of years.
Note that this is not to say I agree with their laws, I think they're hastily implemented and essentially make the problem worse, not better. But the general point is that this sort of attitude within Germany (as well as other European countries) is not something they just recently came up with. The 2nd world war left its mark on the law(s) in many places, including here in Finland, Austria, Ireland and the UK.
Most important: The lead economist for Uber then made a bunch of assumptions when recalculating data. But the thing is Uber knows exactly how much each driver makes, how long each driver is working, exactly where they are, etc. If he wanted to correct the record, he could have. That he elected to use alternate assumptions to argue for a result indicates that result is overly optimistic.
Exactly, I'd mod you up if I had points. The fact that the lead economist of the company is performing "estimations" instead of providing even ball-park figures that they must know of because they're at the core of their business should be a clear enough indication that this is a smokescreen and nothing else.
I get that they do not want to give out detailed numbers due to competition being so tight, but it's ridiculous to read the man playing guessing game instead of giving even a range inside which the actual median and average hourly incomes falls. I can bet you the guy has these numbers memorised, because they're directly tied to how much the company is making.
And that tells you the true reason he's doing this. He saw the study pushed out and, like any good tactician, saw an opportunity to use it against their competition. Even though what he's really said is only 'Our drivers maybe making as much as this, the signal he's sending to their competitors is 'Look at how much more money than you we are making.", while also simultaneously trying to lure drivers to switch from the competition to their service. And instead of doing any actual journalism and confronting them about this, Fortune plays directly into their hands giving them essentially free advertising space by running his claims without any criticism of his motivation for not providing any actual numbers.
it doesn't put raw patties on the oven, it doesn't season it, it doesn't put cheese on it. And I doubt it's got any capacity to tell when something's wrong and stop and/or fix it. It doesn't come close to doing the full job
That was not my point. My point is that looking at the wage made by the guy who's replaced (or partially replaced) by the machine is not an argument really. Put another way: saying that 'if people were just satisfied with making less they'd be safe from having their jobs automated' is a false statement.
but this "we'll all be out of a job in five years" hyperbole is too much. - - But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do we're not going to have "I, robot" style assistants in my lifetime.
To be clear, I'm not saying we'll all be out of jobs going ahead, but especially unskilled or lowly trained labor will be disappearing, and it's happening at a rate faster than you probably realize already. The factories that are moved from Asia back to the west employ a fraction of the people they used to, because automating as much as possible is the economically sound option, and this trend will only keep going, and it will get faster the more commonplace these systems become.
I'm not saying we'll get to 'I robot' -level even within my lifespan as someone who's soon 28, but we don't need to get that far for most non-university educated people to have trouble finding work when most of these menial tasks are automated, which will lead to major issues unless we're prepared.
Slashdot Mirror
You're making a mistake in assuming I want to argue with him.
Once the conspiracy is something as ridiculous as claiming that the biggest orchestrated genocide did not happen and is all an elaborate hoax by all historians and academics, facts will do no good. I know 'cause I have debated these people before, and just like debating with hardcore creationists they will not believe any evidence you throw at them, because they're operating in an entirely different reality. They will ignore any evidence presented and then just move on to their next ridiculous claim in a Gish gallop, and I have better things to do with my time than to waste my time arguing with someone like that.
As I said I'm not in favour of the laws myself because I tend to agree that the martyrdom status that it grants to those it affects is in many ways making the problem worse. However especially in Germany since the laws have been in place pretty much since the 2nd world war, their reversal in the near future is unlikely because of the highly politically charged nature of the topic.
Well that depends on what is actually done, but in essence the principle behind such mentality is the same: since the (social) media can be used to disseminate false and misleading information which can then be used to manipulate people when it comes to politics, he seems to want more control of what kind of information can be shared. Needless to say I'm not in support of this either, even though at the same time I do believe that the social media sites themselves are free to set rules on what kind of content they wish to allow on their platforms. That is, I do not believe the government should legally mandate these things, but that doesn't mean that Facebook & al have to allow any type of content to be shared via their services.
When I said 'what has been happening in Germany' I wasn't referring to Plattner's (very vague) proposal (should have been clearer on that, my bad), but rather the recent laws that imposed more duties on social media sites to take down content that violates existing German laws.
Not that you're going to read it since you're probably a troll either in their mom's basement or the troll brigade of st. Petersburg, but on the off-chance that you're an actual holocaust denier I have 2 pieces of advice for you:
1. Stop drinking bleach, it's not good for you.
2. Read this XKCD
You're obviously not up to date on German history. Hate speech has been criminalized in Germany for a long time, precisely because of the 2nd world war. It's one of the few countries where you can get fined or imprisoned for denying the holocaust, or wearing any nazi insignia in public etc. And the Americans should not take the moral high ground here, because this behavior has its roots in post-war Allied control of West Germany. The occupational forces exercised censorship to control what could and couldn't be said about them:
'Volksverhetzung' is the German hate speech law prohibiting targeting of racial and ethnic groups. Quoting the translation from the wiki:
Similar (though usually less strict) laws exist in other European countries, including my own (Finland), the UK, Ireland and Sw
And yet the USA has a higher homicide rate and a higher rate of mass shootings than any other first world nation,
It's clear that people can and do use guns for self-defence, but simply stating the number of times that has been done, or even saying as the article does that they're used more often for defence than attacks does not tell you whether or not they make you safer as a whole.
Guns are very rarely used for self-defence by civilians here in Finland (mainly because most of the guns are for hunting, and carry permits are not issued except to cops) and yet I'm still on average less likely to become the victim of a homicide or violent crime here than in the US.
The point here is not to say that guns are the only explaining factor for these differences, they're obviously not. The point is just to highlight that a stat like 'the amount of times guns are used for defence' does not by itself tell you anything about their effect on overall safety.
Freedom of speech is about preventing censorship by the government (meaning: the stuff that China for example is doing), it's does not mean that private corporations cannot choose which content they allow on their platforms. In other words: no-one is limiting Alex Jones' freedom of speech by blocking them from their platforms as his nonsensical bullshit is deemed damaging to their brand(s). That's the free market at work for you. Arguing otherwise is like saying that if I write a column on how the moon landings were all faked by the lizard-illuminati-freemasons and newspapers refuse to publish said column because it's unscientific conspiratorial BS my freedom of speech is being limited, which is a moronic argument.
So once again, repeat after me: private entities are not required by law in any western country to allow anyone to use their platform to spread their opinions.
How this can be so hard for some people to understand is beyond me.
If you have evidence that Google has refused to follow the laws of the US, I'd be interested to see that. What I've gathered as a European following the events in the recent years, it seemed pretty clear to me that all the major tech companies were involved with the security apparatus of the US, based on the information leaked by Snowden, and I also do not remember seeing cases where Google wouldn't provide the authorities with required information when they're legally required to do so, so frankly I have no idea what you're referring to here, but then again neither do you probably, as you're not even aware of the definition of free speech.
This is one of the most moronic statements I've seen anyone make here in a good while. You do understand that globally birth rates are in decline and a rising standard of living lowers them faster, right? The reason people in poorer regions are having more children is because those children are needed to work at the family farms to produce food, and because high child mortality means that you're going to likely lose a few of them at an early age. Hpwever declining absolute poverty and rising level of technology in poorer regions has contributed and is still contributing to the global birth rate falling from 37,2 births per 1000 people in the 50s to 19,2 in the late 2000s, and it's going to keep falling, because birth rates are plummeting even in the poorest of regions as their conditions slowly improve.
In other words: you're a god damn idiot with zero understanding of facts. Please do humanity a favor and never spread your own genes further.
Depends on what you mean by 'need' here. I mean sure, the US is large enough and wealthy enough that you could survive on your own, but with both China and the US the thing is that exporting goods and services is deeply integral to the economy and society. The US is the second largest export economy in the world. And that's only counting stuff you directly export to other countries. When you factor in the fact that most of the top US companies do business globally via subsidiaries which - depending on how the corporations and sales are structured - may not show up at all as exports, it becomes even more clear just how connected you and everyone else is to the global economy.
So could you 'make it on your own'? Absolutely, and moreso than most other western countries, including for example my own small country (Finland) that's more heavily dependent on exports because the domestic market is small. Buuut at the same time seizing exports would cause a significant dent in your economy, lead to shrinking of the economy, loss of millions jobs which in turn would lower the incomes of Americans leading to reduced domestic demand, and in general diminished influence on the global stage. It would be survivable, but it wouldn't be pleasant 'business as usual' stuff. Same goes with China who exports even more than you do.
So that being the case I'd say the US does in fact need the rest of the world, not in terms of survival, but in terms of maintaining your current economic status and the quality of life it brings.
This is true, the 'adpocalypse' has indeed made a huge dents in the income of many youtubers. But keep in mind that's what's behind this: the advertisers themselves.
Google is an advertising company that happens to own a video platform and a search engine and a bunch of other stuff to help spread those ads, but at the core of the revenue is ads. What's happened with Youtube is that they got instantly scared when they lost advertisers because companies that are strict about their imagine do not want to be affiliated with content that they deem damaging to their brand. This is why they apparently chose to be extra-paranoid and demonetize everything that's could be perceived as 'problematic', but not by themselves or even the consumers but the advertisers. That's who their paying customer is, and that's who they care the most about.
Behind all of this is a conflict between the way advertising has traditionally been done and the way it's evolved online. If I buy ad-space on a tv-network or a newspaper, I have a good amount of control over what kind of content my ads are shown. However online the targeting is done based on the audience and not the content itself. So instead of saying: 'I want this ad to run for 3 weeks in this timeslot" companies can now say: 'I want to show this ads to men aged 20-35 who're interested in X, Y and Z." This is obviously better in the sense that it allows for a more fine-grained targeting of the campaign, but the tradeoff is that it surrenders all control of the content the ads are played next to. A person in your target demographic might be watching music videos and cute cat videos or they might be watching some radical political content and this is scaring the marketing people who want to protect their brand and avoid 'Coca-cola advertising next to ISIS videos' -'scandals'. This is in fact close to what started the so called 'Adpocalypse' last year: a bunch of big.brand advertisers got spooked because their ads were being run over racist content. Quoting from the link:
Know what that meant? Revenues dropping across the board, money being lost. And with big brands like these, we're talking about more than just a few bucks.
This is why it has to be understood that this problem is not Google/Youtube-specific, it's advertiser specific. Obviously Google or any online platform would like to run as much ads on whatever content that they could, because more ads=more money. If you think the guys over at Youtube are excited about decreasing monetization think again. But the customer is always right, and if the hand that feeds you says either you do something about policing the kind of content the ads are getting played next to or you lose their business, what do you think they're going to do? A competing service on its own will not help because it will run into the same problem once it becomes big enough: if you want your platform to be profitable and ad-supported, you're going to have to kiss the ring of the advertisers or see them take their business elsewhere.
Before advertisers start trusting consumers to understand that they have not hand-picked the videos that the ads are played next to, this will not change. In the meanwhile, what Youtube could at least do is give the advertiser the choice of opting-in to the algorithm. There are plenty of companies out th
Okay I will try my best. I Just recently I warthed the documentary about automated surveillance systems sold to and used by the police both in the US and here in Europe called Pre-crime after the concept from Minority Report. The doc itself was alright, not the best, I would have liked more details and practical examples but it gives some insights into the kinds of systems currently in use and in development. Essentially these kinds of systems can be divided into 2 main categories:
1) The kinds that use open and public data about crimes and do not involve personal factors like face-recognition. These systems are meant to help the police to figure out which areas should be patrolled in more, and where the crime is currently clustering.
2) The kinds using both private and public information. These take personal information from different sources, including but not limited to social networks, financial systems and for example state services like social security, past arrests etc and 'score' individuals to try to give a number to them indicating how likely it is that said individual will either perpetrate or be the victim of a crime. Such systems are currently in use at least in Chicago, parts of the UK and parts of China.
Okay so, take your example and assume you have an officer on duty with supreme photographic memory that's capable of remembering a lot of faces. He sees someone on the street that he thinks is a fugitive or a suspect and they pursue him. If something goes wrong and the guy's injured or killed and turns out to be a different individual, the cop can be held accountable legally. However what's happening with these type 2 systems and what the documentary describes is that it takes and unknown number of variables, and then uses an unknown algorithm to come up with a score that's supposed to tell the officers who is a danger or who might be in danger. In the doc they mention one of the guys who's in the 'heat list' of around 400 individuals in Chicago that has a 'high threat score', not because of his own past criminal history but because of who some of his friends are. Now, with such a system if you happen to end up on such a list there really is no way currently to get of it. This means whenever these guys are walking out in public if the police pull up information on them from the system they're far more likely to be stopped.
Now imagine someone like him, who doesn't have an extensive criminal history but is on the list due to his personal connections gets into an interaction with the police. Do you think the cops will treat such a guy in the same way as they would any other normal individual? Even if the guy's doing nothing wrong a the moment, the system is there to remind them that this is a 'high risk' target. Do you think that increases or decreases the chances that officers will resort to use of force because their algorithm is telling them this guy might be dangerous?
That's the problem core of the problem. It's not the same as some guy seeing a face he remembers from a past case on the street or knows to be a gang-member. These estimations seem objective, but the fact is we're still dealing with probabilities at best. What the scores generated by such systems are telling you is that there's an N percent change according to them that this guy might at some point commit a crime. But there's essentially no way of telling whether those probabilities are accurate for a given individual, yet the police trust the score gioven by the system. One example mentioned in the doc was that a woman had been tweeting about a card game by the name of 'Rage' often, which the system interpreted as a sign of aggressive behaviour which raises her score. But the cops on th
Oh hello Ivan, I was wondering when you guys would show up in defense of your man in Washington.
As for that article you tried to troll with: poor attempt. The way Finnish criminal law works is that when the victim of a sex crime as a minor, it's always prosecuted as (aggravated) sexual assault of a minor and not under the tittle of rape. Aggravated sexual assault of a minor carries the same maximum penalty as aggravated rape, and even in that case the offender was sentenced to jail time.
You guys really need to amp up your game man, your talking points are old, out of date, and easily refuted. Pathetic, really.
Yup. I'm a Finn so I have no direct stake in this, but following the Trump presidency from the outside has been like watching a trainwreck in slow-motion. This is the man who railed against corruption, the Washington elites, 'the swamp' and China. What has he done in his first year? Amp up nepotism by appointing his own friends and family into positions of power (never mind that they're not really fit to handle those positions), give massive tax-cuts to his own class to the tune of billions without any solid plan to fund them (and the republicans love this, even though it will cause a massive increase in the deficit), entangled your position in the middle-east even more than it already was by walking back on the Iran deal and with the Jerusalem embassy.move, and basically made himself the Swamlord.
The Chinese have the man figured out, and why wouldn't they, he's easy to read. All it took to bend the man to their will was a few hundred million to his project and suddenly the Chinese went from 'stealing so many jobs to nice people that need to be helped because 'too many jobs in China lost'. Beijing took one look at the tariffs he was planning, hit back with counter-tariffs that hurt the critical areas of the Trump-base in the midterm and the man folded instantly like a house of cards. The fact that he even thought he could win a 'trade war' is indicative of just how beyond clueless the man is of the structure of the global economy. And this man fancies himself a negotiator or a strongman of some kind? He's not playing 4d chess, he's not even playing chess, he's eating the pieces and calling himself a genius for doing so. But the base cheers for him, and that's all that he cares about.
Trump is weakening the US reputation and position globally on pretty much all fronts because he's so easy to manipulate, so impulsive, egocentric and frankly, so damn dumb. And that being the case, you can be sure that many of the major geopolitical players, likely China included, will do what they can behind the scenes to keep the man in power, because he might just be the best thing that's happened to your global competitors in a good while. Besides being relatively easy to control and influence from the outside with pocket change and praise, the amount of sheer incompetence and chaos he causes in the US domestic politics is a godsend to them. I mean, the fact that we're over a year into his presidency and the 'b-b-b-b-ut Hillary!" -card is still being thrown about as a counter whenever Trump does something that's just objectively moronic is proof of that.
Totally irrelevant to the fact that it's still gambling. It's a slot-machine mechanic that allows people to put money in and get in return something that may or may not be worth anything at all. In the case of CS some of the rarer skins are worth thousands, which has created a whole economy of its own where people and streamers are not in fact playing the game itself at all but simply acquiring/opening boxes in the hopes of getting rare loot that can then be sold for money. Hell, there have even been gambling sites like 'CS:GO Lotto' set up in which people can trade their skins in for essentially a chance of winning better/higher value skins. In 2016 this caused a controversy because it turned out that 2 of the guys that had been promoting said site heavily on youtube turned out to be the owners of said site without disclosing that fact. From the link:
These guys were essentially making videos about how they won soooo much money by playing on the site that they happened to own (without telling that they own the site and can therefore affect the odds of the slot machine). That's the textbook definition of marketing gambling to children.
Total bullshit. CS:GO is one of the most popular FPS games with a huge scene of professional teams and tournaments and a fan-base that follows said teams
You're missing something quite important here: consumption. Companies need customers, and if and when due to automation a significant chunk of consumers can no longer work because they have no marketable skills, consumption will come crashing down, which will hurt the companies and thus the bottom lines of the trilionaires. Think about the major tech companies for example: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc. In a world where the majority of people would be making just enough money to survive these companies would collapse, because the goods and services they're selling all require consumers that can actually be marketed to effectively, meaning consumers with disposable income.
Put another way: the benefits of automation (reduced manufacturing & logistics costs) will help no-one if as a result of automation and reduced purchasing power the consumer-base will collapse and is replaced with a massive amount of people living on just the bare necessities because that will slash demand for most consumer products and services and cause a lot of these companies to go under which in turn will reduce the demand for B2B products and services.
This is not a matter of empathy for the poor, this is a matter of game theory. The economy is essentially a giant game that requires people to be buying things for it to stay viable. The more corporations embrace automation and cut the amount of jobs, the more inevitable it will be that the amount of UBI/income transfers per person will have to go up in the future. That is unless one maintains that the rich will suddenly stop caring about making money and will be fine with seeing their profits collapse.
This is only partially true, and even then mostly in the US as far as I can tell. Here in the Nordics the majority of people who watch HBO content (myself included) do it through their streaming service HBO Nordic , their localized streaming service with a price point of 10 euros a month, essentially a direct competitor to Netflix. They also release plenty of stuff there that they've not produced themselves like Vikings, etc to keep up on the content race with Netflix & al.
The models are slightly different in that HBO concentrates far more on series rather than movies (they mostly have older classics and not very many recent movies).
I could get a cable but honestly with Netlifx, HBO and Amazon all being cheap as streaming services there's practically no need for me to ever even consider it.
You shouldn't be throwing the word retard around when you clearly don't know how to read. What he said:
That's not the same as 'if you said something that makes me want to hurt you you're engaging in hate speech', in fact that miles from it. What he said is that it's possible to rile hatred against a group of people without outright saying stuff like 'Members of [group X] are all subhuman and deserve to have their rights taken away/assaulted/killed/whatever". In fact the vast majority of hate speech works like this, and has always worked liked this. You take a racial/ethnic/religious/political group and then you make statements like: "Members of [group X] are all [criminals/dangerous/against western values]" and you use those kinds of arguments to instill fear and hatred in people against said group. Look at the way 'race theory' developed a few centuries back and how it's since been used (and still is used by some). It was propagated by this notion that they're being 'objective' and that it's simply a fact that certain races are inferior to the others, which was then used as a handy justification for not granting equal rights to these people. Looking at slavery for example, the argument was never presented as 'Enslavement of Africans is alright because we should hate them", rather it was wrapped in pseudo-scientific argument of: 'The africans are less intelligent and less capable and more violent than us, so therefore slavery is the natural order of things."
Looking at more recent examples this is the way all ethnic cleansings have always been prepared. The third reich did not arise out of a democratic platform where the guys just yelled: 'Kill all the jews!" and got widespread support. That was preceded by a years long propaganda campaign which painted the jews as criminals that seek to undermine the society. And as the mastermind behind the propaganda machine (Göring) said of this tactic during the trials: "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
This is still the modus operandi of groups that wish to stoke hatred between no matter where they come from or what their motivations are: it's never 'we should all hate/kill [members of the opposing group(s)] just because we should hate them', but 'We're just spreading around facts about the [opposing group(s) are being dangerous, we're being objective here!"
Even with false advertising there are fringe cases and cases wherein even obvious false advertising is still not a crime because the internet allows people and companies to loop around the laws. For example: it's illegal to advertise a homeopathic 'medicine' as being effective against cancer, because homeopathic 'medicines' are just water and there's no scientific backing to support them being effective. However it's not illegal for someone to write a blog post about how they personally think these 'medicines' cure cancer and then promote that post on say Facebook because the 'product' being promoted is not the pills themselves, but an opinion piece about the pills. Still the effective end result for the consumer that sees the promoted post is the same: they're left with a misleading picture of what the product does and may be fooled into buying it under false assumptions.
Now I don't think it should be illegal for anyone to write such opinions, but just as I'd support facebook curbing the spreading of pseudo-scientific nonsense like homeopathy or
Finn here; we use e-banking credentials (all of which are required by law to use 2-step authentication) lo log in and identify to government services like filing taxes etc. There's a notable difference between requiring a trustworthy method for people to identify themselves in order to access their own personal information stored and handled by the government and requiring fingerprints and facial ID to buy food or taking an exam.
I quite like the fact that I can handled my taxes (both personal and those of my startup) online using 2-step identification instead of a less secure method.
So wait, have they stopped selling single-use tickets at kiosks and stores? Last time I was in Stockholm I happily rode the metro with complete anonymity using these. Again, just because a service is offered (you can buy mass transit tickets with the phone here as well) does not mean said service is mandatory. You're comparing apples to oranges here.
Secondly: no you can't be on the plane incognito. Even though you won't have to show your ID necessarily, your name is still on the passenger manifest. Obviously you can book a flight under a false name, but this is actually not allowed. That is, if they do decide to check your ID (which they are allowed to do) and find that your ticket is booked under a different/false name you will not get on the flight.
What's your proposed model for testing an autonomous car driving amidst normal traffic conditions that does not include actually having it drive among normal road traffic?
Secondly measured in terms of accidents and fatalities, autonomous cars have already caused less accidents per miles driven than your average human driver, so if that's your metric, the argument can be made that said bar has already been passed, although that obviously does not mean that the safety cannot and should not be further improved until the fatalities drop to zero.
We should also know all know that alpha or not, there's no bug-free software. You can do all the simulations and all the testing you want, bugs and accidents will still happen. However, once they do and are fixed, the vehicles will not do the same mistakes again, which is not true for most human drivers. Human drivers also do not learn from the mistakes of other human drivers that they've never met. Autonomous cars do.
I fail to see what the problem is here. We all knew this was going to happen because it always happens with new transportation technologies that are in the process of being perfected. Plane safety has gone up dramatically as a result of tens and hundreds of accidents in both software and hardware, and the same's true with 'regular' cars. Your standard seems to me to be an illogical 'unless it's completely failsafe it should not be used at all', and if we followed that principle we'd still be using horses.
I know this is offopic, but still. Think about the situation: a Russian ex-intelligence officer who's been giving lectures in Britain about Russian intelligence services after being released by the Russians in a prisoner exchange is poisoned with a nerve agent in public. Russia is the only country that has both the motivation and the capability to do something like this.
Keep in mind that there are way more discrete and efficient ways of assassinating someone (a car 'accident' or a heart attack, a robbery 'gone wrong', or the good old fashioned 'self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head by a drunken depressed man' that's an all-time favorite of Russians) that have been used ever since the cold war For those interested here's a list of 'car accidents' and 'suicides' and other deaths that have happened in the top leadership of the Russian military since the collapse of the Soviet Union. You'll note there was a bunch during Yeltsin, but then it was pretty quiet up until the end of the second Chechen war, when 11 officers had accidents or shot 'themselves' in the head. After that the beginning of the Georgian war coincided with the start of a 'reform' in the Russian military which happened to coincide with another bunch (25) of such deaths in the following 2 years. Is it possible that some of these are genuine accidents or suicides? Sure, at least one of the officers had cancer. But all of them? No way. The point here is that when publicity doesn't matter, the Russians know how to get rid of people opposed to Putin without making a big spectacle out of it.
However Putin's an ex-KGB guy and has made it a point to make the killings of traitors to be very public and visible in order to send a message (see: the polonium poisoning of Litvinenko for example), this is very clearly a personal matter for him, compounded likely by the fact that him and mr. Skripal are the same age (well, Putin's a year younger), so he's from the same generation of spies as Putin himself.
If they wanted plausible deniability over this he'd just have gotten a heart attack or a stroke at home. Even that would have left chemical traces which could've pointed towards an assassination, but at least then the Russians could have somewhat credibly feigned ignorance and blame 'fake news' and 'Russophobia'. But nope, dude gets poisoned with a nerve agent out in broad daylight. They want the world to know it's them. This is basically the equivalent of Vlad leaving his calling card next to the body with a 'snitches get stitches' message, as well as serving another purpose which is giving the British agencies the finger by saying: "yeah, we can operate on your soil and there's nothing you can do about it!".
How many former intelligence officers do you think will consider giving lectures about their knowledge of the Russian system after this in Europe? If there were any before this, you can bet that the line just got a whole lot shorter.
Aha, found the guy working for the complaints department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation!
Of course AI will for a long time at least take people to maintain it. However, this is a sort of red herring in this argument, because the question is not 'does AI produce new jobs' but 'Does AI produce more jobs than it removes', and the answer to that is no. As in, you take a factory that employs say 300 people and you increase the automation, chances are you'll remove something like 50 jobs and create 5.10 new ones. Even i you pay those new guys 3-4 times as much as you used to pay the guys doing manual labor that the system made obsolete, you're still saving money. Here's an actual example from China from last year
Same thing on the office side: large amounts of data entry jobs are fast becoming automated. So you may have something like 30 people doing nothing but paying/sending invoices. Move to an fully electronic system, and you're left with maybe 5 people who oversee that everything goes alright and handle the cases wherein the system fails.
This is simply not true. There have been hate speech convictions in Germany and elsewhere prior to the current refugee crisis. A Finnish far-right politician whose only talking point throughout the years has been opposing immigration got sentenced to fines for calling all muslims pedophiles way back in 2012. Here's a story of a drunk neo-Nazi being fined for doing the Hitler salute in 2011. Etc, you can find many more examples using google.
Again, do I agree with these laws? No. Do I agree with the far-right? No, but saying that these laws have never been used before is simply not true.
If you think this situation started with the refugee crisis, think again. Germany has had such laws in the books long before the current refugee crisis, up to the point that using nazi-symbolism is punishable by law, as is denying the holocaust. These laws prohibiting 'incitement of violence' or hatred against ethnic grouops have been on the books for decades, the recent law regarding social media is just the latest development. Even prior to the passage of the law, someone posting hate speech online could be fined in Germany and elsewhere, the only thing that the law changed was make it possible for the platforms to be fined for failing to remove such content.
Now granted, the recent influx of refugees has made the situation a lot more heated, but the general point is that Germany has been using censorship and hate-speech laws to control the (mostly) far-right groups in the country long before the last couple of years.
Note that this is not to say I agree with their laws, I think they're hastily implemented and essentially make the problem worse, not better. But the general point is that this sort of attitude within Germany (as well as other European countries) is not something they just recently came up with. The 2nd world war left its mark on the law(s) in many places, including here in Finland, Austria, Ireland and the UK.
Exactly, I'd mod you up if I had points. The fact that the lead economist of the company is performing "estimations" instead of providing even ball-park figures that they must know of because they're at the core of their business should be a clear enough indication that this is a smokescreen and nothing else.
I get that they do not want to give out detailed numbers due to competition being so tight, but it's ridiculous to read the man playing guessing game instead of giving even a range inside which the actual median and average hourly incomes falls. I can bet you the guy has these numbers memorised, because they're directly tied to how much the company is making.
And that tells you the true reason he's doing this. He saw the study pushed out and, like any good tactician, saw an opportunity to use it against their competition. Even though what he's really said is only 'Our drivers maybe making as much as this, the signal he's sending to their competitors is 'Look at how much more money than you we are making.", while also simultaneously trying to lure drivers to switch from the competition to their service. And instead of doing any actual journalism and confronting them about this, Fortune plays directly into their hands giving them essentially free advertising space by running his claims without any criticism of his motivation for not providing any actual numbers.
That was not my point. My point is that looking at the wage made by the guy who's replaced (or partially replaced) by the machine is not an argument really. Put another way: saying that 'if people were just satisfied with making less they'd be safe from having their jobs automated' is a false statement.
To be clear, I'm not saying we'll all be out of jobs going ahead, but especially unskilled or lowly trained labor will be disappearing, and it's happening at a rate faster than you probably realize already. The factories that are moved from Asia back to the west employ a fraction of the people they used to, because automating as much as possible is the economically sound option, and this trend will only keep going, and it will get faster the more commonplace these systems become.
I'm not saying we'll get to 'I robot' -level even within my lifespan as someone who's soon 28, but we don't need to get that far for most non-university educated people to have trouble finding work when most of these menial tasks are automated, which will lead to major issues unless we're prepared.