It's the invasiveness of data searches and the insistence on devices absolute searchability, not law enforcement access to technology for the solution of crime. Of course police should use modern technology to make them more efficient at solving crimes, but that shouldn't enable new powers to strip mine individual devices and technology for the purpose of solving crime.
I may be wrong, but I think some of the motivating factor early on was that MS browser bundling was basically a way for MS to kill web compatibility by not supporting standards and/or implementing their own standards.
I also seem to remember that at the time there was some vague notion of web + java replacing the operating system paradigm altogether by producing "universal" applications which would run in a browser, and this where the anti-trust aspect gained traction -- MS was using the browser "built in" to the OS to kill off this model to keep its operating system relevant.
The bigger problem was that ACA was politically propagandized by its advocates by a short list of incredibly positive attributes, including keeping your insurance, accessible policies through government exchanges, no pre-existing condition exclusions and lower prices through mandated coverage diluting the cost pool. One of those turned out to be true.
What they didn't really explain was that they basically enshrined the awful system we had before, minus pre-existing conditions, permanently into law, and any benefits for consumers were predicated on the cooperation and participation of insurers.
The ACA has turned out to be not much more than a propaganda "win" for Democrats at the time, and has actually done nothing about the *primary* problem of excessive cost of health care, which was the problem all along. No healthcare "fix" will ever work without addressing the cost of services.
I personally accept that part of the result of this is reduced services, but it should also come with absolute caps on private supplier profit margins and mandatory national health service employment periods for doctors and nurses in exchange for free medical school tuition, and probably caps on malpractice awards and subsidized malpractice insurance with invocation maximums that simply revoke credentials for bad medical practice.
Like my dark paver driveway, it only takes a small exposed spot on one of the faces to eventually grow into a giant bare patch.
If we get a large snow, the roof will remain covered completely for some period of time but ultimately the wind blows built up snow away enough for some spot to get uncovered and then grow into a large uncovered spot.
My heat bills are on par with the neighbors, so I'm probably around average for heat loss.
Now up north snow/ice would be an issue in the winter but they could add some heating elements to melt it off I would guess.
Snow and ice tend to melt off due to solar heating. My roof is often exposed and bare when my yard is covered in snow, and I have light colored shingles and good insulation.
Solar panels are dark colored and I would think would tend to warm up and cause heating where they were exposed and fairly quickly melt off, especially if the temperature nosed close or above freezing.
The larger problem is that they were probably suppressing alternative candidates starting in 2008, either overtly through explicit discouragement of candidates thought to be a potential threat to Hillary or simply through the rumor mill by making it known that the nomination was Hillary's and discouraging other candidates.
That's nearly a decade of stunting potential alternatives which I think leaves them in a lurch for 2020, as now they have to quickly try to elevate not just one person but a credible competitive field of potential candidates in 4 years from what is unfortunately a base of relatively unknown figures.
Their most well-known potential candidates, Sanders and Warren, will be dubious due to age. Most of the rest are either unknown, have only regional appeal or are social justice or other ideological advocates who would have weak appeal to the Trump swing voters.
I think one reason Sanders had such appeal was that his campaign seemed relentlessly focused on middle class economics and didn't spend much time pandering to minority interests. Sanders was attacked for his lack of attention to minority voters, but I think this was one of his strengths that made him competitive vis-a-vis Trump, as he wasn't seen as another candidate using race for political ends.
That being said, the jury is out on whether Trump will want a second term, would be able to satisfy his electorate to win a second term if he ran or if the equally shattered Republicans could field a candidate able to build off of Trump's win. I think the usual Republican supporters of corporate interests and the rich won't get the message of this election and will work against the very economic message this election sent, further diminishing their chances in 2020.
I'd wager Clinton agreed to a forced compromise on Obama getting the nod in 2008 based on his popularity in return for a clear path in 2016 and maximum party support.
The Democrats did everything -- suppress alternative candidates who could have risen up since 2008, railroad the Sanders campaign -- they could to clear a path for Hillary and Hillary only. And she presented a candidacy that only promised more of what everyone already had, which was great for the professional, ownership and social welfare classes but absolutely awful for everyone else.
Most commercial storage systems I've worked with aren't really tailored to any specific workload or task, but general block I/O. The one that pops to mind is Compellent, and the newer units I see most often have a mix of read-intensive and write-intensive SSDs. The Compellent tiering system moves frequently accessed data pages in and out of the "read intensive" tier at least daily with a default configuration and most customers have a secondary data progression task scheduled.
I may be wrong (and hey, I probably am, I'm used to it), and data pages that get onto read intensive disks are high read/low change, but I don't know that the Compellent is really that smart and the nature of generic block I/O (especially when the data source is a VM host cluster) and data progression seems to guarantee more churn than is optimal.
I've always found the enterprise category of "read-intensive" drives to be something of a canard. In tiered storage applications there is continual churn in the cache tier based on access frequency, and the read intensive drives take a lot of writes in order to serve frequent reads.
I'm probably overstating it, but it feels like an excuse to gild storage systems with higher margin parts where they're not actually needed with a somewhat fabricated usage distinction.
I was adding a battery to my boat meant to be easily removable and bought a set of Anderson PowerPole DC connectors off Amazon. They were terrible knockoffs that wouldn't create a reliable circuit when properly assembled. It's not hard to see counterfeits from this category causing a fire.
There's maybe a large class of products where counterfeiting may not matter, but outright counterfeiting of legitimate brand named products ought not to be tolerated.
I really wish they would stop the practice of combining a bunch of sellers for a given product. It makes the reviews even less worthwhile because you don't know if a couple of bad sellers pushing fakes are tied to the bad reviews, nor do you know who the legitimate sellers associated with the good reviews.
Those endurance numbers seem pretty low to me. I seem to remember older SATA models surviving endurance tests close to a petabyte of writes. I think the drives themselves weren't rated for that, but they were also older MLC technology, too.
I have 4 850 Pro SATA drives used in two separate systems which use Server 2012r2 tiered storage and they're about 18 months old and have around 40 TB written to them now.
I wonder if the reduced endurance is just due to simply less underprovisioning at the flash level or if its the result of a process change to the flash construction that makes it weaker.
I was kind of hoping the MLC endurance had kind of passed some threshold where endurance wasn't really a factor anymore for all but the most intensive write applications.
A week in a decent Paris hotel would cost something north of $2000 by itself. Airfare for two people is $1400. Meals and incidentals probably another $1000 or more.
Paris done in a civilized manner is $4500, probably $5000 if you were honest. If you're 23 and willing to live like a nomad, I'm sure it's much cheaper, but I'm not willing to stay in hostels or flea-bag hotels in shitty areas and I'm not willing to eat crap street food or canned crap from a hotpot, either.
This happened to me once -- after a 40 minute drive with a 6+ connected to a decent (ie, brand name) USB car charger. I got out, used the phone to take a dozen pictures and when I got back into the car to email them my phone gave me a low power warning and indicated it was nearly dead. I connected it back to the charger and within minutes it was back to the correct charge level.
I've also had a couple of situations where the phone wouldn't go into charging mode at all, acting as if it was not connected to a charge source (and I tried 3-4 different adapters, including two Apple adapters). I finally figured out that powering it off completely and then restarting it resolved it.
Twitter is to discourse what PowerPoint is to information. Short and dumbed down.
Being mischievous, maybe 140 characters should be the minimum rather than the limit.
Now that would be an interesting concept for a forum/social media site -- a requirement for a minimum size of at least 500 characters. If you don't have anything thoughtful to say, you can't say it.
How is Mexican a race? In terms of genetically heritable appearance, Mexicans vary from light-skinned Caucasians indistinguishable from European Spaniards to dark-skinned Mestizos to those more similar to indigenous peoples of North America.
I see a huge variety here in Minnesota with no dominant characteristic beyond shorter than most of the Scandahoovians, a height difference I'd ascribe to something between genetics and poor neo/postnatal nutrition.
Trump's broad brush might best be described as xenophobic if you had to pick a negative label for his description, but racist doesn't stick because Mexican isn't a race.
For me, the bottom line is there really isn't any acceptable level of criminal behavior by undocumented immigrants, and preventing undocumented immigration as much as possible also eliminates the crimes they commit.
It wouldn't surprise me if they just decided that since people are willingly putting permanent audio listeners in their house, nobody would care if they kept the computer mic on too.
I'm a conspiracist, but I'm also something a fatalist and in many cases I kind of shrug my shoulders at the latest privacy dustup. But I really can't grasp why someone would buy an audio device capable of listening in their house all the time and sending it back to who knows where.
1) Congressional delegations aren't winner-take-all. Many states have split congressional delegations, why not split electoral votes? There are several schemes for this which seem to address the principal problem of population skew to a handful of states and cause the electoral college system to better represent the popular vote without totally abandoning the electoral college system.
2) The funny math of electoral votes skews the political process towards a handful of states that are either volatile or have huge electoral counts. That being said, some "swing" states that get attention may get ignored due to renewed emphasis on popular vote, but the upside is that candidates will pay more attention to a larger population.
3) Why have a national election for President at all if its a Federal government? Why not simply make it more parliamentary and have Congress or state legislatures elect the President? In theory you could do this without changing the *powers* of the President, so as to retain the Congress/President balance of power. State legislatures used to elect Senators.
Who would hire someone to come into their home off Amazon?
I could sort of see this work if Amazon had a transparent background check process and some kind of difficult to rig quality rating system.
But really, someone in my home doing personal services? I need more than just 4 stars and an online rating, I need to talk to the people they've worked for in the recent past and a fair amount of personal information.
What I still find very hard to accept is the amount of doublethink required for a lot of this. For example, how both Brexit and electing Trump were thought of as ordinary people sticking it to the establishment and the ruling class. Brexit was championed by two Eton millionaires, two of the toffiest toffs in the country, and Trump literally built his empire using cheap immigrant labour instead of Americans and clearly is pretty far from a common man.
I think that doublethink and doublespeak are so common anymore that nobody really notices, life has generally become a continual stream of paradoxes that produces so much cognitive dissonance that ignoring it is pretty much rational and necessary for sanity.
I think both sides have been guilty of deliberate doublespeak and contortionist logic to try to suppress counterfactual arguments.
The multicultural globalists tend to doublespeak on crime in minority neighborhoods and the nature and role of Islamic fundamentalism in terrorism because it contradicts their goal of optimizing populations and social structures. Conservative globalists tend to doublespeak on capitalism and its contribution to economic inequality.
machine-organized life lacking in individual choice, ultimately dominated by a corrupt elite.
That pretty adequately describes 2016.
The sort of gothic horror reality of it, though, is that humanity was once stuck in the trap of a Mother Nature-organized life, dominated by a corrupt elite. We're passing that sweet spot in civilization where we were produced enough surplus to not be worried about famine or the weather to keep the elite in check.
1) The masses as a whole lack the substantive ability to synthesize facts into a coherent truth. Historically, religions and later political organizations and the media have all served as aggregators and synthesizers of factual information into coherent truths, in many cases suppressing facts to preserve the intellectual integrity of the truth they promoted. Many of these organizations have a long history of internal secrecy and doctrinal opposition to the masses gaining information and structuring their own truth. The Catholic church as a matter of theology believed its priests were the agent of religious belief and it seems not just coincidence that the rise of movable type led to Martin Luther and Protestantism once bibles could be mass produced and it became practical for the literate to read the bible and divine their own relationship with God.
The Chinese *openly* practice this line of thinking. I don't think it's just totalitarianism, but an actual concern that the stability of society depends on information control and the ability of the party to advance its own reality.
That being said, I'd hate for this to be actually *true* because suppression of information and the control of truth is inherently corrupting and diminishes the advancement of science and technology.
2) One of my other major worries I label, somewhat hyperbolically, "species panic". Regardless of what kind of population the planet can technologically support through mathematically optimized application of policy and technology, we have passed some level of resource consumption, ownership, and scarcity and in combination with mathematically suboptimal organization and it is panicking the human species akin to the panic of forest animals in a fire. The global disruptions of Islamic revolution, the Arab spring, mass European immigration, Brexit, and even Trump are all symptoms of species panic.
The various multicultural globalists and environmentalists (which generally include Clinton) are in pursuit of optimization. The problem with optimization, like suppression of information, is that it is inherently corrupting, requiring dominant control over resources (material, political, military) in order to optimize them. And optimizing them is a process of picking winners and losers without regard for any specific category, often paradoxically to their presumed power relationship. Poor whites lose materially because international trade contributes to optimal economic organization. Devout Muslims lose because all significant religious belief needs to be in line with optimal social and political organization.
I hate for this to be true, because it kind of leads to a bleak dystopian future of machine-organized life lacking in individual choice, ultimately dominated by a corrupt elite.
This all goes back to the post-factual nature of our politics. There is no objective truth, facts are whatever you believe is true right now. Journalists are just as guilty, because they switched from factual reporting to opinion and so had to pretend those opinions were valuable and in fact more important than the facts, otherwise why pay for them when the facts are widely available for free?
I would say we're post-truth, not post-fact. Everyone has facts, but even the facts themselves are often a lying-with-statistics variety, fragments of a whole selected to advance a cause. But even when verifiable facts are used, they're used selectively to manufacture a reality that isn't true but gains followers and can't easily be refuted because its assembled from facts.
It's like two photos taken at a zoo. One photo is dominated by people with a few animals, one is photo is dominated by animals with a few people and the argument is about whether the zoo is filled with animals or people.
Journalists used to do something like show both pictures and then explain how they're taken at almost the same spot but pointed in slightly different directions, explaining how the pictures show different views of the same reality.
Now they seem to do a lot more to promote one of the photos and somewhat discredit the other photo, depending on their orientation.
Since they're not actually going to make phones, why not just license the shit out of their keyboard patents to anyone who wants to make an add-on keyboard widget for smartphones?
Maybe their lawsuit against the Typo keyboard made sense back when they filed it and still had dreams of being a smartphone manufacturer, but at this stage nobody wants to buy Blackberry outright and they're not making any phones. So why not make what they can licensing the patent out?
Slashdot Mirror
It's the invasiveness of data searches and the insistence on devices absolute searchability, not law enforcement access to technology for the solution of crime. Of course police should use modern technology to make them more efficient at solving crimes, but that shouldn't enable new powers to strip mine individual devices and technology for the purpose of solving crime.
Is there any overlap there?
My built-in ideology meter says homeopathy people lean way left and Trump people mostly right.
Yet there seems to be kind of a similar level of denial of reality in both camps.
I may be wrong, but I think some of the motivating factor early on was that MS browser bundling was basically a way for MS to kill web compatibility by not supporting standards and/or implementing their own standards.
I also seem to remember that at the time there was some vague notion of web + java replacing the operating system paradigm altogether by producing "universal" applications which would run in a browser, and this where the anti-trust aspect gained traction -- MS was using the browser "built in" to the OS to kill off this model to keep its operating system relevant.
The bigger problem was that ACA was politically propagandized by its advocates by a short list of incredibly positive attributes, including keeping your insurance, accessible policies through government exchanges, no pre-existing condition exclusions and lower prices through mandated coverage diluting the cost pool. One of those turned out to be true.
What they didn't really explain was that they basically enshrined the awful system we had before, minus pre-existing conditions, permanently into law, and any benefits for consumers were predicated on the cooperation and participation of insurers.
The ACA has turned out to be not much more than a propaganda "win" for Democrats at the time, and has actually done nothing about the *primary* problem of excessive cost of health care, which was the problem all along. No healthcare "fix" will ever work without addressing the cost of services.
I personally accept that part of the result of this is reduced services, but it should also come with absolute caps on private supplier profit margins and mandatory national health service employment periods for doctors and nurses in exchange for free medical school tuition, and probably caps on malpractice awards and subsidized malpractice insurance with invocation maximums that simply revoke credentials for bad medical practice.
Like my dark paver driveway, it only takes a small exposed spot on one of the faces to eventually grow into a giant bare patch.
If we get a large snow, the roof will remain covered completely for some period of time but ultimately the wind blows built up snow away enough for some spot to get uncovered and then grow into a large uncovered spot.
My heat bills are on par with the neighbors, so I'm probably around average for heat loss.
Now up north snow/ice would be an issue in the winter but they could add some heating elements to melt it off I would guess.
Snow and ice tend to melt off due to solar heating. My roof is often exposed and bare when my yard is covered in snow, and I have light colored shingles and good insulation.
Solar panels are dark colored and I would think would tend to warm up and cause heating where they were exposed and fairly quickly melt off, especially if the temperature nosed close or above freezing.
The larger problem is that they were probably suppressing alternative candidates starting in 2008, either overtly through explicit discouragement of candidates thought to be a potential threat to Hillary or simply through the rumor mill by making it known that the nomination was Hillary's and discouraging other candidates.
That's nearly a decade of stunting potential alternatives which I think leaves them in a lurch for 2020, as now they have to quickly try to elevate not just one person but a credible competitive field of potential candidates in 4 years from what is unfortunately a base of relatively unknown figures.
Their most well-known potential candidates, Sanders and Warren, will be dubious due to age. Most of the rest are either unknown, have only regional appeal or are social justice or other ideological advocates who would have weak appeal to the Trump swing voters.
I think one reason Sanders had such appeal was that his campaign seemed relentlessly focused on middle class economics and didn't spend much time pandering to minority interests. Sanders was attacked for his lack of attention to minority voters, but I think this was one of his strengths that made him competitive vis-a-vis Trump, as he wasn't seen as another candidate using race for political ends.
That being said, the jury is out on whether Trump will want a second term, would be able to satisfy his electorate to win a second term if he ran or if the equally shattered Republicans could field a candidate able to build off of Trump's win. I think the usual Republican supporters of corporate interests and the rich won't get the message of this election and will work against the very economic message this election sent, further diminishing their chances in 2020.
This was a disaster of the Democrats own making.
I'd wager Clinton agreed to a forced compromise on Obama getting the nod in 2008 based on his popularity in return for a clear path in 2016 and maximum party support.
The Democrats did everything -- suppress alternative candidates who could have risen up since 2008, railroad the Sanders campaign -- they could to clear a path for Hillary and Hillary only. And she presented a candidacy that only promised more of what everyone already had, which was great for the professional, ownership and social welfare classes but absolutely awful for everyone else.
Most commercial storage systems I've worked with aren't really tailored to any specific workload or task, but general block I/O. The one that pops to mind is Compellent, and the newer units I see most often have a mix of read-intensive and write-intensive SSDs. The Compellent tiering system moves frequently accessed data pages in and out of the "read intensive" tier at least daily with a default configuration and most customers have a secondary data progression task scheduled.
I may be wrong (and hey, I probably am, I'm used to it), and data pages that get onto read intensive disks are high read/low change, but I don't know that the Compellent is really that smart and the nature of generic block I/O (especially when the data source is a VM host cluster) and data progression seems to guarantee more churn than is optimal.
I've always found the enterprise category of "read-intensive" drives to be something of a canard. In tiered storage applications there is continual churn in the cache tier based on access frequency, and the read intensive drives take a lot of writes in order to serve frequent reads.
I'm probably overstating it, but it feels like an excuse to gild storage systems with higher margin parts where they're not actually needed with a somewhat fabricated usage distinction.
That's what this guy's vision sounds like.
I was adding a battery to my boat meant to be easily removable and bought a set of Anderson PowerPole DC connectors off Amazon. They were terrible knockoffs that wouldn't create a reliable circuit when properly assembled. It's not hard to see counterfeits from this category causing a fire.
There's maybe a large class of products where counterfeiting may not matter, but outright counterfeiting of legitimate brand named products ought not to be tolerated.
I really wish they would stop the practice of combining a bunch of sellers for a given product. It makes the reviews even less worthwhile because you don't know if a couple of bad sellers pushing fakes are tied to the bad reviews, nor do you know who the legitimate sellers associated with the good reviews.
Those endurance numbers seem pretty low to me. I seem to remember older SATA models surviving endurance tests close to a petabyte of writes. I think the drives themselves weren't rated for that, but they were also older MLC technology, too.
I have 4 850 Pro SATA drives used in two separate systems which use Server 2012r2 tiered storage and they're about 18 months old and have around 40 TB written to them now.
I wonder if the reduced endurance is just due to simply less underprovisioning at the flash level or if its the result of a process change to the flash construction that makes it weaker.
I was kind of hoping the MLC endurance had kind of passed some threshold where endurance wasn't really a factor anymore for all but the most intensive write applications.
A week in a decent Paris hotel would cost something north of $2000 by itself. Airfare for two people is $1400. Meals and incidentals probably another $1000 or more.
Paris done in a civilized manner is $4500, probably $5000 if you were honest. If you're 23 and willing to live like a nomad, I'm sure it's much cheaper, but I'm not willing to stay in hostels or flea-bag hotels in shitty areas and I'm not willing to eat crap street food or canned crap from a hotpot, either.
This happened to me once -- after a 40 minute drive with a 6+ connected to a decent (ie, brand name) USB car charger. I got out, used the phone to take a dozen pictures and when I got back into the car to email them my phone gave me a low power warning and indicated it was nearly dead. I connected it back to the charger and within minutes it was back to the correct charge level.
I've also had a couple of situations where the phone wouldn't go into charging mode at all, acting as if it was not connected to a charge source (and I tried 3-4 different adapters, including two Apple adapters). I finally figured out that powering it off completely and then restarting it resolved it.
Fortunately these have been unusual occurrences.
Twitter is to discourse what PowerPoint is to information. Short and dumbed down.
Being mischievous, maybe 140 characters should be the minimum rather than the limit.
Now that would be an interesting concept for a forum/social media site -- a requirement for a minimum size of at least 500 characters. If you don't have anything thoughtful to say, you can't say it.
How is Mexican a race? In terms of genetically heritable appearance, Mexicans vary from light-skinned Caucasians indistinguishable from European Spaniards to dark-skinned Mestizos to those more similar to indigenous peoples of North America.
I see a huge variety here in Minnesota with no dominant characteristic beyond shorter than most of the Scandahoovians, a height difference I'd ascribe to something between genetics and poor neo/postnatal nutrition.
Trump's broad brush might best be described as xenophobic if you had to pick a negative label for his description, but racist doesn't stick because Mexican isn't a race.
For me, the bottom line is there really isn't any acceptable level of criminal behavior by undocumented immigrants, and preventing undocumented immigration as much as possible also eliminates the crimes they commit.
It wouldn't surprise me if they just decided that since people are willingly putting permanent audio listeners in their house, nobody would care if they kept the computer mic on too.
I'm a conspiracist, but I'm also something a fatalist and in many cases I kind of shrug my shoulders at the latest privacy dustup. But I really can't grasp why someone would buy an audio device capable of listening in their house all the time and sending it back to who knows where.
I guess I have a couple of counter arguments:
1) Congressional delegations aren't winner-take-all. Many states have split congressional delegations, why not split electoral votes? There are several schemes for this which seem to address the principal problem of population skew to a handful of states and cause the electoral college system to better represent the popular vote without totally abandoning the electoral college system.
2) The funny math of electoral votes skews the political process towards a handful of states that are either volatile or have huge electoral counts. That being said, some "swing" states that get attention may get ignored due to renewed emphasis on popular vote, but the upside is that candidates will pay more attention to a larger population.
3) Why have a national election for President at all if its a Federal government? Why not simply make it more parliamentary and have Congress or state legislatures elect the President? In theory you could do this without changing the *powers* of the President, so as to retain the Congress/President balance of power. State legislatures used to elect Senators.
Who would hire someone to come into their home off Amazon?
I could sort of see this work if Amazon had a transparent background check process and some kind of difficult to rig quality rating system.
But really, someone in my home doing personal services? I need more than just 4 stars and an online rating, I need to talk to the people they've worked for in the recent past and a fair amount of personal information.
What I still find very hard to accept is the amount of doublethink required for a lot of this. For example, how both Brexit and electing Trump were thought of as ordinary people sticking it to the establishment and the ruling class. Brexit was championed by two Eton millionaires, two of the toffiest toffs in the country, and Trump literally built his empire using cheap immigrant labour instead of Americans and clearly is pretty far from a common man.
I think that doublethink and doublespeak are so common anymore that nobody really notices, life has generally become a continual stream of paradoxes that produces so much cognitive dissonance that ignoring it is pretty much rational and necessary for sanity.
I think both sides have been guilty of deliberate doublespeak and contortionist logic to try to suppress counterfactual arguments.
The multicultural globalists tend to doublespeak on crime in minority neighborhoods and the nature and role of Islamic fundamentalism in terrorism because it contradicts their goal of optimizing populations and social structures. Conservative globalists tend to doublespeak on capitalism and its contribution to economic inequality.
machine-organized life lacking in individual choice, ultimately dominated by a corrupt elite.
That pretty adequately describes 2016.
The sort of gothic horror reality of it, though, is that humanity was once stuck in the trap of a Mother Nature-organized life, dominated by a corrupt elite. We're passing that sweet spot in civilization where we were produced enough surplus to not be worried about famine or the weather to keep the elite in check.
I have deeper worries.
1) The masses as a whole lack the substantive ability to synthesize facts into a coherent truth. Historically, religions and later political organizations and the media have all served as aggregators and synthesizers of factual information into coherent truths, in many cases suppressing facts to preserve the intellectual integrity of the truth they promoted. Many of these organizations have a long history of internal secrecy and doctrinal opposition to the masses gaining information and structuring their own truth. The Catholic church as a matter of theology believed its priests were the agent of religious belief and it seems not just coincidence that the rise of movable type led to Martin Luther and Protestantism once bibles could be mass produced and it became practical for the literate to read the bible and divine their own relationship with God.
The Chinese *openly* practice this line of thinking. I don't think it's just totalitarianism, but an actual concern that the stability of society depends on information control and the ability of the party to advance its own reality.
That being said, I'd hate for this to be actually *true* because suppression of information and the control of truth is inherently corrupting and diminishes the advancement of science and technology.
2) One of my other major worries I label, somewhat hyperbolically, "species panic". Regardless of what kind of population the planet can technologically support through mathematically optimized application of policy and technology, we have passed some level of resource consumption, ownership, and scarcity and in combination with mathematically suboptimal organization and it is panicking the human species akin to the panic of forest animals in a fire. The global disruptions of Islamic revolution, the Arab spring, mass European immigration, Brexit, and even Trump are all symptoms of species panic.
The various multicultural globalists and environmentalists (which generally include Clinton) are in pursuit of optimization. The problem with optimization, like suppression of information, is that it is inherently corrupting, requiring dominant control over resources (material, political, military) in order to optimize them. And optimizing them is a process of picking winners and losers without regard for any specific category, often paradoxically to their presumed power relationship. Poor whites lose materially because international trade contributes to optimal economic organization. Devout Muslims lose because all significant religious belief needs to be in line with optimal social and political organization.
I hate for this to be true, because it kind of leads to a bleak dystopian future of machine-organized life lacking in individual choice, ultimately dominated by a corrupt elite.
This all goes back to the post-factual nature of our politics. There is no objective truth, facts are whatever you believe is true right now. Journalists are just as guilty, because they switched from factual reporting to opinion and so had to pretend those opinions were valuable and in fact more important than the facts, otherwise why pay for them when the facts are widely available for free?
I would say we're post-truth, not post-fact. Everyone has facts, but even the facts themselves are often a lying-with-statistics variety, fragments of a whole selected to advance a cause. But even when verifiable facts are used, they're used selectively to manufacture a reality that isn't true but gains followers and can't easily be refuted because its assembled from facts.
It's like two photos taken at a zoo. One photo is dominated by people with a few animals, one is photo is dominated by animals with a few people and the argument is about whether the zoo is filled with animals or people.
Journalists used to do something like show both pictures and then explain how they're taken at almost the same spot but pointed in slightly different directions, explaining how the pictures show different views of the same reality.
Now they seem to do a lot more to promote one of the photos and somewhat discredit the other photo, depending on their orientation.
Since they're not actually going to make phones, why not just license the shit out of their keyboard patents to anyone who wants to make an add-on keyboard widget for smartphones?
Maybe their lawsuit against the Typo keyboard made sense back when they filed it and still had dreams of being a smartphone manufacturer, but at this stage nobody wants to buy Blackberry outright and they're not making any phones. So why not make what they can licensing the patent out?