Republicans haven't been conservative in their actions since the 90s. The Establishment, most Dems and Most Republicans, is a small group of huge donors who always gets their way. Democrats and the GOP put on this kabuki theater ritualized show where they make a very public show of disagreeing on things like gay marriage, things with no financial consequence to the big donors, but they agree on everything important. (And even on issues like gay marriage, the outcome is as scripted as professional wrestling).
Well, he did tweet that the only good reason to buy a MAGA hat is to burn it. Clearly he was radicalized by Trump-haters on Twitter. Also, this proves that Twitter is anti-Semitic.
Has anyone called for the banning of the brand of car he drove to the shooting?
Republicans do. Conservatives don't. It's still mostly the Establishment Uniparty in charge, which is why so little changes.
and nearly all of the media (they dominate talk radio, Fox News' ratings are much higher than MSNBC and, well, as a lefty I can safely say that MSNBC is right wing on economics
80% of people are just tired of political correctness. This partitioning is being driven by progressive extremists, for the express purpose of destroying America. They are slowly achieving their goal, but I do think the pendulum will swing back eventually. Most Americans left and right actually like America and want it to continue, after all.
The "manufacturing of rules" is precisely what I'm advocating for. Perhaps you were missing that? The allegedly conservative majority in the legislature needs to fix this problem with new law. My point is that this is similar to how other media works, but we haven't thought through how "social" media should be allowed to work. Publisher? Platform? Some hybrid?
Social security and medicid/care are unsustainable as they are today. One way or another, they will end. The interesting question is: what's a good program that we can actually afford.
Social security could certainly be replaced by a government-managed 401k. You could still put all your money in treasuries if you like (and even the safest investments would outperform individual return on SS by a quite significant margin).
Health care is just expensive at the level we like to consume it in the US. Medicare today, if you go with the plan where it's effectively single payer (no supplemental insurance needed) is $22,000/yr. No joke. And that's just your share, the government's share is similar. Obviously, that expense can't be sustained for very many years.
What percentage of people should work to provide healthcare? In the past 10 years it's gone from 10% of jobs to 12%. At some point it gets silly.
Economic studies always seem to "prove" whatever benefits the politcs of the group doing the study. That's why economics has never had the credibility of real science. For just about any idea imaginable, you can find studies "proving" it's the best idea ever, and the worst idea ever.
Don't forget that this money is already in the system, but now instead of going to the top of the economic food chain where it mostly sits static or in stocks, bonds, or off shore accounts where it does absolutely nothing for the economy, it's now flowing through many hands at the base of the economic chain where it actually does good.
The very rich don't much own fast-food joints, you know? And most people of any economic status in America don't meaningfully save. Money gets spent as fast as it is earned at just about every tier.
The rich don't create jobs, they stifle the economy.
Now you're just making shit up. There's no way for the rich to make money except by engaging in economic activity of some sort. Starting new bushiness or loaning money to businesses is just as vital to the economy as spending. The few rich people who don't make money are taken care of by inflation, or eventually, death.
When we're talking about political ads, it's pretty clear that it's disagreement with the position being advocated that's the cause for the ad being removed. That's why this nebulous idea of "objectionable" doesn't work out. Whatever the excuse, if you are significantly more political ads blocked from one side than another, then you're making an in-kind donation to one party. This is outlawed for radio and broadcast TV, even while allowing their original content to be as biased as they like.
What you cited doesn't really back up what you said, unless you want to abuse the notion of "otherwise objectionable" to include "any content I disagree with". Of course, that's exactly what many social media sites do: e.g., we find ads supporting the pro-life position objectionable, so we ban them. They're pretending to ban on "objectionable" instead of "political speech we disagree with".
Seems like a great time for the legislature to fix that. Remove that option, force large social media sites (those that are effective monopolies of their space) to either accept content from all political positions, or be considered a publisher, at the choice of the site.
Yes, that's my point. There's a legal spectrum: on the one end, the rights of the owners win, on the other, the rights of the customers win, with most businesses in the middle somewhere.
If I ran a website with a political bias, would that be breaking any laws?
There's a difference between a publisher and a common carrier. Social media companies of course want to have it both ways. But that's not good for society, and shouldn't be allowed. Either be a publisher, with total control over (but also total responsibility for) what you publish, or be a common carrier (you can't discriminate, which means any legal problems are those of your users).
Europe is starting to come down on the side of treating social media like publishers, gradually ratcheting up the degree to which they hold these corporations responsible for their content. I'm not sure that's the right side to come down on, but they don't get to be on the fence.
An anecdote is solid evidence when it comes to the behavior of algorithms. When you're talking about a group of people, individual examples don't mean much because they aren't very predictive. An algorithm is different. Once you know how to beat a PacMan level, you know how to beat it every time.
That point of evidence proves that, at that point in time, Twitter's algorithms only banned people for criticism of some races, but not others. Can we agree that's not cool? That code that is capable of e.g. banning criticism of Aryans while allowing the same criticism of Jews should be made incapable of doing so?
Nope. They lost any such protection the moment they went public.
A partnership or closely held corporation has most of the rights of the owners. If the owners share some religious belief, they get some degree of protection from being compelled to act against that belief, as it should be. But a publicly held corporation is nothing like that. The act of opening up ownership to anyone with money renounces any protections for being a group of people united in faith.
Which, by the way, is the right answer to balance free speech with preventing campaign donations. Public corporations (i.e., almost every big one) should just be banned completely from donating to politicians or PACs. Including donations in kind, like only allowing ads from one political side (just as e.g. radio stations are barred from doing).
Twitter is not a government entity. They can do what they damn well please.
That's not how it works in America (or anywhere, really). They can't e.g. ban you because you're Black. The more you open your business to the public, the more you have to bake that gay cake, like it or not. And there's a spectrum defined in law, from "group of people who all know each other" to "common carrier". For the former, the rights of the owners dominate, for the latter the rights of the customers dominate, and there are several stops in between.
Twitter needs to be held to some legal standard. Are they a common carrier? Then they must respect the first amendment rights of their users. Are they a publisher? They they get 100% control of content, and are 100% legally responsible for what they allow. So what are they?
Bruce Lanphear, one of the paper's co-authors, said: "Government officials around the world need to listen to science, not chemical lobbyists."
The moment a "scientist" mouths off about politics, he's a politician and loses any credibility (unless you think politicians have any credibility). As Feynman said, a scientist must bend over backwards to prevent his preconceptions from tainting his work. When someone does the opposite, and uses his work instead as a political tool, he's not doing science any more - self-deception is just too easy.
but we're not going to build another ISS or JWST or GPS system because of it
Why not? Well, America probably won't that's true. Satellite phones could become something reasonable, though. I can't guess what new sort of business would be enabled (if I were good at that sort of predictions, my investments would be doing way better), but there's always something.
It's a fair point that lowering launch costs only helps where launch was the dominant cost, but I'm sure there are ways to make money with cheap sats somehow. Less expensive stuff becomes worth launching when launch costs fall. Get launch costs low enough, and asteroid mining will happen, which changes everything.
They probably do need to grow the market though, of 27 US launches so far this year the Falcon has had 17. Even if SpaceX steals some Soyuz launches to the ISS through the Commercial Crew program and a few more from Atlas/Delta there's not a lot of growth potential, unless China/Russia/ESA/Japan/India want to give up their own rocket programs.
If launch costs fall by half, the number of launches will more than double. If launch costs fall to 10% (wasn't that a SpaceX goal?), launches will increase by far more than 10x, probably 100x. We've seen that with just about every technology. Entire new industries are enabled when costs get low enough.
The problem is with Microsoft Data Sharing Service, present in Windows 10
See, MS can be fine, you just need to upgrade to Windows 7 from that crappy Win10 legacy junk. It's hardly MS's fault if people refuse to upgrade to the good version of Windows.
So now they have a couple of choices: A. Release software updates that can slow older phones down B. Release software updates only for newer phones
Back in the day, the norm for software was: * All old versions ever sold are in some way maintained * Current verson and one version back get features and quality-of-life fixes * Older version only get security or crash fixes.
That was just was what "professionalism" in software meant. You don't force people to upgrade, though hopefully they'll want the new version.
These days each new version has a worse UI than before, people are forced to change, and old versions are flatly abandoned. This is not a better way.
I don't find seeing people fall to their deaths comedic. Most new housing construction in China is empty, but people dying when their recently-built building collapses happens all to often. There are a couple of reputable builders, but much new construction there is unsafe.
If the owners of all the homes, stores, streets, and sidewalks were unanimous in their opposition to the distribution of religious literature, they could each ban the distribution of such literature on their own property, which the effect that such literature could not be distributed anywhere inside the town.
No: they couldn't ban it on the road (or sidewalk in most states), or public areas like in front of the post office. That's government land, in this example.
And that's the point: a street used just to get to your house, and your house alone, has different rules than a street used by the public, even if that "public" is just the neighborhood. You'll find quite a few laws treat the two differently.
If you build a road on your property, but it's open for people moving between two public roads (e.g., lots of toll roads), you're restricted just as if it were a government-owned road. You lose some of the ownership rights you might otherwise have had because you opened it to the public.
But they are not being denied freedom of the press or religion. What is being denied is access to someone else's property. If they want to exercise their freedom of the press or religion they are welcome to do so on their own property.
Well, it turns out that the protection for First Amendment rights trump ownership rights in some cases. Thank goodness. It is pretty narrow though: it doesn't apply to e.g. a shopping mall.
It's debatable where on this spectrum Facebook lies, but if you're arguing that the tradeoff between ownership rights and constitutionally-protected rights of the public doesn't exist, you're in fantasy land. You do have to serve black people in your privately-owned bar, and you do have to bake that gay wedding cake in the bakery that you own on your land, even though you may have other rules.
This is nothing more or less than the taking of private property for public use without compensation. If the government doesn't care for the restrictions a property owner sets for the use of their own private property the government can very well buy the property from them on behalf of the public at a fair market price acceptable to both parties.
Nice libertarian fantasy there, but it has little to do with the USA I live in.
I think we're talking about different things here. You seem to be talking about a nightclub, a "private club" as distinct from a "public house". That distinction isn't important in most states (I think there's a few where you can stills serve alcohol to 18-year-olds if it's a "private club".)
You can form a club that excludes any protected class you like. You can form a club open only to members of your own family, or just the 6 guys you went to high school with, or just your friends from church, or anything like that. That's the right of free association. But, as I said, it's construed very narrowly.
A private club can require that everyone show ID and agree to a list of house rules. And, they can decide when you have violated their terms of service and kick you the fuck out.
That applies to any club at all, not just a "private club". But, as the SCOTUS said, that right is not absolute. The more you're providing public access, the more your rights as an owner are trumped by the people's constitutional rights. If you want your house rules to include "no black people", you probably need to all know one another before forming the club. If you want your house rules to ban certain political speech, you can't be a common carrier.
There's a spectrum of "how public" vs "owner's rights", and the argument is about where the big social media companies fall on that spectrum. But you can't argue that "FB is private, so it can can have any rules it wants", as that's clearly false.
It's not. People on Facebook are not "the public" who are just happening through. Each of them has had to register for an account and agree to Terms of Service, and every time they visit they must log in with credentials. It's much more of a private club (albeit a large one) than a public square.
Nah, that doesn't fly at all. Facebook could not ban black people from using its service. It's open to any member of the public who cares to sign up, even though there are some rule, no different from the toll bridge example from the case. "Private club" is very narrowly construed when it comes to protecting constitutional rights, as it should be.
Spam is not (generally) political or religious speech, which is a relevant here.
A key point in Cyber Promotions v. America Online was that AOL wasn't any sort of monopoly. The opinion pointed this out several times: that AOL does not by itself have enough control of "internet access" to deny it's users the ability to communicate with Cyber Promotions. I think it's a different story if we're talking about a modern ISP with a local monopoly.
That's why I think it matters whether Facebook is effectively a monopoly (and BTW I think it's borderline and unclear whether it is.)
Slashdot Mirror
Republicans haven't been conservative in their actions since the 90s. The Establishment, most Dems and Most Republicans, is a small group of huge donors who always gets their way. Democrats and the GOP put on this kabuki theater ritualized show where they make a very public show of disagreeing on things like gay marriage, things with no financial consequence to the big donors, but they agree on everything important. (And even on issues like gay marriage, the outcome is as scripted as professional wrestling).
yeah social media made him do it, riiiight.
Well, he did tweet that the only good reason to buy a MAGA hat is to burn it. Clearly he was radicalized by Trump-haters on Twitter. Also, this proves that Twitter is anti-Semitic.
Has anyone called for the banning of the brand of car he drove to the shooting?
The right wing own all 3 branches of government
Republicans do. Conservatives don't. It's still mostly the Establishment Uniparty in charge, which is why so little changes.
and nearly all of the media (they dominate talk radio, Fox News' ratings are much higher than MSNBC and, well, as a lefty I can safely say that MSNBC is right wing on economics
You're very high right now.
80% of people are just tired of political correctness. This partitioning is being driven by progressive extremists, for the express purpose of destroying America. They are slowly achieving their goal, but I do think the pendulum will swing back eventually. Most Americans left and right actually like America and want it to continue, after all.
And correlation is obviously causation.
Any excuse to de-platform conservatives will be takes. Any. Excuse.
This requires a legal fix. Political views must be made a protected category.
The "manufacturing of rules" is precisely what I'm advocating for. Perhaps you were missing that? The allegedly conservative majority in the legislature needs to fix this problem with new law. My point is that this is similar to how other media works, but we haven't thought through how "social" media should be allowed to work. Publisher? Platform? Some hybrid?
Social security and medicid/care are unsustainable as they are today. One way or another, they will end. The interesting question is: what's a good program that we can actually afford.
Social security could certainly be replaced by a government-managed 401k. You could still put all your money in treasuries if you like (and even the safest investments would outperform individual return on SS by a quite significant margin).
Health care is just expensive at the level we like to consume it in the US. Medicare today, if you go with the plan where it's effectively single payer (no supplemental insurance needed) is $22,000/yr. No joke. And that's just your share, the government's share is similar. Obviously, that expense can't be sustained for very many years.
What percentage of people should work to provide healthcare? In the past 10 years it's gone from 10% of jobs to 12%. At some point it gets silly.
proven by many economic studies
Economic studies always seem to "prove" whatever benefits the politcs of the group doing the study. That's why economics has never had the credibility of real science. For just about any idea imaginable, you can find studies "proving" it's the best idea ever, and the worst idea ever.
Don't forget that this money is already in the system, but now instead of going to the top of the economic food chain where it mostly sits static or in stocks, bonds, or off shore accounts where it does absolutely nothing for the economy, it's now flowing through many hands at the base of the economic chain where it actually does good.
The very rich don't much own fast-food joints, you know? And most people of any economic status in America don't meaningfully save. Money gets spent as fast as it is earned at just about every tier.
The rich don't create jobs, they stifle the economy.
Now you're just making shit up. There's no way for the rich to make money except by engaging in economic activity of some sort. Starting new bushiness or loaning money to businesses is just as vital to the economy as spending. The few rich people who don't make money are taken care of by inflation, or eventually, death.
When we're talking about political ads, it's pretty clear that it's disagreement with the position being advocated that's the cause for the ad being removed. That's why this nebulous idea of "objectionable" doesn't work out. Whatever the excuse, if you are significantly more political ads blocked from one side than another, then you're making an in-kind donation to one party. This is outlawed for radio and broadcast TV, even while allowing their original content to be as biased as they like.
What you cited doesn't really back up what you said, unless you want to abuse the notion of "otherwise objectionable" to include "any content I disagree with". Of course, that's exactly what many social media sites do: e.g., we find ads supporting the pro-life position objectionable, so we ban them. They're pretending to ban on "objectionable" instead of "political speech we disagree with".
Seems like a great time for the legislature to fix that. Remove that option, force large social media sites (those that are effective monopolies of their space) to either accept content from all political positions, or be considered a publisher, at the choice of the site.
Yes, that's my point. There's a legal spectrum: on the one end, the rights of the owners win, on the other, the rights of the customers win, with most businesses in the middle somewhere.
If I ran a website with a political bias, would that be breaking any laws?
There's a difference between a publisher and a common carrier. Social media companies of course want to have it both ways. But that's not good for society, and shouldn't be allowed. Either be a publisher, with total control over (but also total responsibility for) what you publish, or be a common carrier (you can't discriminate, which means any legal problems are those of your users).
Europe is starting to come down on the side of treating social media like publishers, gradually ratcheting up the degree to which they hold these corporations responsible for their content. I'm not sure that's the right side to come down on, but they don't get to be on the fence.
An anecdote is solid evidence when it comes to the behavior of algorithms. When you're talking about a group of people, individual examples don't mean much because they aren't very predictive. An algorithm is different. Once you know how to beat a PacMan level, you know how to beat it every time.
That point of evidence proves that, at that point in time, Twitter's algorithms only banned people for criticism of some races, but not others. Can we agree that's not cool? That code that is capable of e.g. banning criticism of Aryans while allowing the same criticism of Jews should be made incapable of doing so?
Nope. They lost any such protection the moment they went public.
A partnership or closely held corporation has most of the rights of the owners. If the owners share some religious belief, they get some degree of protection from being compelled to act against that belief, as it should be. But a publicly held corporation is nothing like that. The act of opening up ownership to anyone with money renounces any protections for being a group of people united in faith.
Which, by the way, is the right answer to balance free speech with preventing campaign donations. Public corporations (i.e., almost every big one) should just be banned completely from donating to politicians or PACs. Including donations in kind, like only allowing ads from one political side (just as e.g. radio stations are barred from doing).
Twitter is not a government entity. They can do what they damn well please.
That's not how it works in America (or anywhere, really). They can't e.g. ban you because you're Black. The more you open your business to the public, the more you have to bake that gay cake, like it or not. And there's a spectrum defined in law, from "group of people who all know each other" to "common carrier". For the former, the rights of the owners dominate, for the latter the rights of the customers dominate, and there are several stops in between.
Twitter needs to be held to some legal standard. Are they a common carrier? Then they must respect the first amendment rights of their users. Are they a publisher? They they get 100% control of content, and are 100% legally responsible for what they allow. So what are they?
This isn't about politics. It's about science.
Except
Bruce Lanphear, one of the paper's co-authors, said: "Government officials around the world need to listen to science, not chemical lobbyists."
The moment a "scientist" mouths off about politics, he's a politician and loses any credibility (unless you think politicians have any credibility). As Feynman said, a scientist must bend over backwards to prevent his preconceptions from tainting his work. When someone does the opposite, and uses his work instead as a political tool, he's not doing science any more - self-deception is just too easy.
but we're not going to build another ISS or JWST or GPS system because of it
Why not? Well, America probably won't that's true. Satellite phones could become something reasonable, though. I can't guess what new sort of business would be enabled (if I were good at that sort of predictions, my investments would be doing way better), but there's always something.
It's a fair point that lowering launch costs only helps where launch was the dominant cost, but I'm sure there are ways to make money with cheap sats somehow. Less expensive stuff becomes worth launching when launch costs fall. Get launch costs low enough, and asteroid mining will happen, which changes everything.
They probably do need to grow the market though, of 27 US launches so far this year the Falcon has had 17. Even if SpaceX steals some Soyuz launches to the ISS through the Commercial Crew program and a few more from Atlas/Delta there's not a lot of growth potential, unless China/Russia/ESA/Japan/India want to give up their own rocket programs.
If launch costs fall by half, the number of launches will more than double. If launch costs fall to 10% (wasn't that a SpaceX goal?), launches will increase by far more than 10x, probably 100x. We've seen that with just about every technology. Entire new industries are enabled when costs get low enough.
C'mon, just read a few more words:
The problem is with Microsoft Data Sharing Service, present in Windows 10
See, MS can be fine, you just need to upgrade to Windows 7 from that crappy Win10 legacy junk. It's hardly MS's fault if people refuse to upgrade to the good version of Windows.
So now they have a couple of choices:
A. Release software updates that can slow older phones down
B. Release software updates only for newer phones
Back in the day, the norm for software was:
* All old versions ever sold are in some way maintained
* Current verson and one version back get features and quality-of-life fixes
* Older version only get security or crash fixes.
That was just was what "professionalism" in software meant. You don't force people to upgrade, though hopefully they'll want the new version.
These days each new version has a worse UI than before, people are forced to change, and old versions are flatly abandoned. This is not a better way.
WTF? It's a comedy video.
I don't find seeing people fall to their deaths comedic. Most new housing construction in China is empty, but people dying when their recently-built building collapses happens all to often. There are a couple of reputable builders, but much new construction there is unsafe.
China can lock out descent
If only that were true. China can't even keep its buildings from descending (warning, graphic), let alone its society.
If the owners of all the homes, stores, streets, and sidewalks were unanimous in their opposition to the distribution of religious literature, they could each ban the distribution of such literature on their own property, which the effect that such literature could not be distributed anywhere inside the town.
No: they couldn't ban it on the road (or sidewalk in most states), or public areas like in front of the post office. That's government land, in this example.
And that's the point: a street used just to get to your house, and your house alone, has different rules than a street used by the public, even if that "public" is just the neighborhood. You'll find quite a few laws treat the two differently.
If you build a road on your property, but it's open for people moving between two public roads (e.g., lots of toll roads), you're restricted just as if it were a government-owned road. You lose some of the ownership rights you might otherwise have had because you opened it to the public.
But they are not being denied freedom of the press or religion. What is being denied is access to someone else's property. If they want to exercise their freedom of the press or religion they are welcome to do so on their own property.
Well, it turns out that the protection for First Amendment rights trump ownership rights in some cases. Thank goodness. It is pretty narrow though: it doesn't apply to e.g. a shopping mall.
It's debatable where on this spectrum Facebook lies, but if you're arguing that the tradeoff between ownership rights and constitutionally-protected rights of the public doesn't exist, you're in fantasy land. You do have to serve black people in your privately-owned bar, and you do have to bake that gay wedding cake in the bakery that you own on your land, even though you may have other rules.
This is nothing more or less than the taking of private property for public use without compensation. If the government doesn't care for the restrictions a property owner sets for the use of their own private property the government can very well buy the property from them on behalf of the public at a fair market price acceptable to both parties.
Nice libertarian fantasy there, but it has little to do with the USA I live in.
And neither could any private club.
I think we're talking about different things here. You seem to be talking about a nightclub, a "private club" as distinct from a "public house". That distinction isn't important in most states (I think there's a few where you can stills serve alcohol to 18-year-olds if it's a "private club".)
You can form a club that excludes any protected class you like. You can form a club open only to members of your own family, or just the 6 guys you went to high school with, or just your friends from church, or anything like that. That's the right of free association. But, as I said, it's construed very narrowly.
A private club can require that everyone show ID and agree to a list of house rules. And, they can decide when you have violated their terms of service and kick you the fuck out.
That applies to any club at all, not just a "private club". But, as the SCOTUS said, that right is not absolute. The more you're providing public access, the more your rights as an owner are trumped by the people's constitutional rights. If you want your house rules to include "no black people", you probably need to all know one another before forming the club. If you want your house rules to ban certain political speech, you can't be a common carrier.
There's a spectrum of "how public" vs "owner's rights", and the argument is about where the big social media companies fall on that spectrum. But you can't argue that "FB is private, so it can can have any rules it wants", as that's clearly false.
It's not. People on Facebook are not "the public" who are just happening through. Each of them has had to register for an account and agree to Terms of Service, and every time they visit they must log in with credentials. It's much more of a private club (albeit a large one) than a public square.
Nah, that doesn't fly at all. Facebook could not ban black people from using its service. It's open to any member of the public who cares to sign up, even though there are some rule, no different from the toll bridge example from the case. "Private club" is very narrowly construed when it comes to protecting constitutional rights, as it should be.
Spam is not (generally) political or religious speech, which is a relevant here.
A key point in Cyber Promotions v. America Online was that AOL wasn't any sort of monopoly. The opinion pointed this out several times: that AOL does not by itself have enough control of "internet access" to deny it's users the ability to communicate with Cyber Promotions. I think it's a different story if we're talking about a modern ISP with a local monopoly.
That's why I think it matters whether Facebook is effectively a monopoly (and BTW I think it's borderline and unclear whether it is.)