Where and how is free speech being denied to anyone?
The page is still there (I just checked the link and then searched for it using Duck Duck Go which found it) so its speech is freely available to anyone who wants to view it.
What am I missing?
That it's no longer monetised owing to stupid algorithms? Sure, but that's not an infringement of free speech, that's a different issue.
I'd challenge that, as sure, that reflective panels in rear facing lights (in my country that's centre and on the edges of the cars) are only about as reflective, in total, as a large rego plate mounted in the centre bottom of the car. Based on the last 3 or 4 cars I've owned in the last 20 or so years.
Seeing red light reflected back at you is helpful, sure.
Seeing white light of a rego plate reflected back at you is also very helpful.
Seeing BOTH?
Really helpful in avoiding driving into the back of a car. In my almost 35 years of driving, at least.
You don't need to read rego/number plates to see them and go "ooh, let's not drive into the back of a parked car".
Well, I don't...
I'm of the opinion that the reflectiveness is not for ease of cops reading the plates so much helping as numpty drivers paying little attention to the road in front of them going "OMG there is a car between those red reflections of the tail-lights, I'd better steer so as to avoid running up the back of it!".
Your mileage, may, of course, vary.
Along with your insurance premiums...
Hmm, re-reading this shows some grammatical and other errors but I'm drunk and I'm sure most readers will understand that I'm trying to say more visibility for other vehicles in your path is a good thing, as you see them you (in theory) steer to avoid crashing into them.
Agreed, my rego for my 1.4 litre econocar is almost AU$700, up from what was only AU$400ish what seems like 5 years ago... Though admittedly $100 of that is for an insurance system that pays out to victims of no-fault accidents (like when someone stumbles and falls onto the road and gets run over, the driver isn't at fault, and arguably, at law, neither is the stumbling pedestrian).
God only knows how the unemployed keep their cars registered so that they can drive to job interviews:(
The roads I drive on are nice, though, and getting better, I will admit that. It seems that car revenue money is being spent on making the driving experience better.
Huh, I kinda assumed that licence plates have been reflective for decades simply for the added visibility and safety that offered for next to no price (certainly at a cost far less than an emergency response to a collision).
We (Western Australia) got rid of rego stickers about a decade ago:) About a decade before that we got rid of useful into like the make & model of the car that used to be on the rego sticker, handy if you were wondering 'what the hell kind of car is THAT?' when gazing at a parked Iso Rivolta.
Given that over 6 BILLION people on the planet live in places where it NEVER gets over 45 degrees, I suspect you are living in the last remaining country that uses British Imperial temperatures in Fahrenheit???
So... we can ignore your comment as ignorant, backwards, retarded, antique, historical and amusing.
Umm, the coldest day of June was yesterday. As I backed out of my (unheated) garage my car told me it was 12.5 C. Outside it was about 4C.
And in summer the garage, at 6am, is easily 20+C. Outside it is likely to be warmer (the garage is insulated).
How is this useful? It's NOT cold!
Ooooh, it might be useful to those people who, for some strange reason, choose to live in places where water actually freezes OUTSIDE of a refrigerator freezer???
That is, in bugger all parts of the world?
Yeah... great advance I'm sure.
[Yes, I'm being deliberately obtuse, as I know that for some reason/s large numbers of humans insist on living outside the comfortably habitable range of climate suited for humans, but I still do not know why they choose this].
There are MANY other examples as to how the amount of gun deaths in the USA, by 100,000 population, is... unusually high for a nation not at war, shall we say?
"Even though it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the United States accounted for 82 percent of all gun deaths. The United States also accounted for 90 percent of all women killed by guns, the study found. Ninety-one percent of children under 14 who died by gun violence were in the United States. And 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed by guns were in the United States, the study found."
If you don't think that is a problem, I'd be quite worried about you.
And while pumped hydro is certainly well proven, you'd still be getting planning permission and building approval at this stage, assuming you've acquired a suitable site, and yes, water. Yet the battery has been up, running, and earning money for many months now.
Now all we need is more lithium (or a high performance, safer and cheaper alternative...:)
There was also Elon's bet with South Australia, and the fact that it's using largely proven technology, and it is quite fast to set up (Elon didn't lose his bet).
I suspect if Australia can do it (in theory) then other, more uppy/downy-ground nations could do it also?
So it's not all bad news, Australia could, in theory, become 100% renewable in a very short time. It's not like there is a lack of space for PV panels, solar thermal, geothermal, wave, wind or alt-nuclear generation. As a very geologically stable continent it could even charge (up front...) to store other nations nuclear waste, enabling it to fund renewable power construction.
This must worry those heavily invested in traditional power generation.
I'd think I'd rather be paralyzed and unable to breathe after being bitten by a blue ring ocky.
And yes, I've seen one in the wild - at a children's beach. How do I know it was a real blue ring? Well, I was a kid, so I poked it, of course, it lit up with blue rings and I lit up the beach at very high speed.
But mauled by a huge vicious animal? And then eaten? No thanks...
PS, at least our many scorpions won't kill you - they are just painful.
It was 11C (positive!) when I went to work this morning, brrrrrr, with a high of about 24C, niiiiice.
Why do people live in places where you NEED heating simply to stay alive?
Seriously, what is it about people who choose to live where ice is something that exists in nature, and not just inside a freezer?
What's the worth of living in a place where you can die of exposure (or get eaten by a moose*/bear/wolf)?
Here I just stay out of the ocean and I'm safe from sharks. I stay out of rivers if they are north of the tropic and I'm safe from crocodiles. Kangaroos or emus may kill me but at least they won't eat me!
I don't need heating in winter (though I do have it if I feel decadent) and I don't need cooling in summer (though this room and one other in my house are air-conditioned, and most others have ceiling fans). And it's quite pleasant here. I could ride my bicycle to work all year round, and some people do.
* I understand that moose don't actually eat people but they are massive big critters that look as if they'd like to try...
I, and pretty much everyone else Downunder, get 20 paid recreation days of leave.
Plus 10 paid sick days (may or may not need a doctors note to prove you're not just taking a "doona day"). And these accumulate - for most people - if not used. If I have a serious illness I have over 30 weeks of paid sick leave I can use (I've been with my employer a few decades).
Plus the long weekends we get about 10 times a year (New Years Day, Australia Day, Easter (Good Friday and Easter Monday, so a 4 day long weekend), ANZAC Day, Queen's Birthday (which amusingly varies by which state you are in), Royal Show day, some places have the local big horse race day as a holiday, ie Melbourne Cup Day, and... there are others as well.
My employer just closes down between Xmas and New Year, no point in staying open as more than half the staff are on holiday anyway, and it enables software and hardware updates, serious building maintenance and costs less than opening (lower security costs, aircon and other power costs etc).
Then there is the long service leave, kicking in at generally either 7 or 10 years of constant employment, and being a full 3 months of paid leave.
I don't know what USAnian workers unions have been doing, but making workers better off doesn't seem to be their aim, that's for certain. Because pretty much all of these conditions - and many more that millions of Aussie workers enjoy - are the result of Australian unions & workers standing up to the employers and demanding better conditions for the workers.
And getting them.
Reading this thread has just been one jaw dropping moment after another...
Both Jane Q. Public and AC make good and interesting points, now that I reply 8 days later... (oops). As an outsider it has fascinating reading - over the years - how various US voters happily vote for parties whose policies will literally hurt them, total cognitive dissonance. Or maybe it's utter wilful ignorance, it's hard to tell, really.
I think a quote from the US president best sums it up, "Sad".
"The Obama campaign created a Facebook app for supporters to donate, learn of voting requirements, and find nearby houses to canvass. The app asked users’ permission to scan their photos, friends lists, and news feeds. Most users complied.
The people signing up knew the data they were handing over would be used to support a political campaign. Their friends, however, did not.
The people who downloaded the app used by Cambridge Analytica did not know their data would be used to aid any political campaigns. The app was billed as a personality quiz that would be used by Cambridge University researchers."
and another relevant bit of info from the same article:
"Obama operatives used Facebook data to get users to send their messaging for them, according to Eitan Hersh, a Tufts professor who wrote Hacking the Electorate, a book on Obama’s microtargeting strategies.
Facebook friends lists, tags and photos allowed Obama operatives to identify a person’s close friends, which they then matched with offline public records. (Was this person likely to vote for Obama, but unlikely to get out to vote?) They then told the app users which of their friends they should send campaign messages to.
Cambridge Analytica dialed up what Karpf called the creepiness factor. They combined the survey results with the Facebook data to create psychological profiles they then sold to campaigns. The idea was, if the firm could discover how these people thought, they could target ads toward them.
They then sent targeted ads to the users on the database. The friends of the app users weren’t being targeted by their friends, but by the campaign itself. In other words, the consenting middle man was gone."
So, the differences are significant, in that Obama was being open about it and getting people to contact their friends with messages, whereas Trump was being secretive (it was data from a personality quiz, not a political app) and using targeted advertising, not friends messages.
Go on, read the article. It's one of many that explain why Obama isn't copping the same flak.
So, no, it's not the ONLY reason, it's not even a reason.
"As of 2016, only about half of Americans have more than one option for broadband internet. In rural areas, this number drops to just 13%."
That's the bit that I always find so curious. I have a choice of dozens of ISPs and mobile phone providers and no longer have a land line, here in an Australian city (I use fixed wireless internet to avoid the debacle called the NBN).
Why does "the land of the free" have so little choice?
Lack of government regulations requiring sharing of equipment, I suspect? So everyone has to duplicate networks or... just go somewhere else where there is no network and build your own monopoly?
Slashdot Mirror
Their 10th anniversary?
2018 - 1998 = [number larger than 10]
Perhaps you never graduated maths clbutt? :)
Where and how is free speech being denied to anyone?
The page is still there (I just checked the link and then searched for it using Duck Duck Go which found it) so its speech is freely available to anyone who wants to view it.
What am I missing?
That it's no longer monetised owing to stupid algorithms? Sure, but that's not an infringement of free speech, that's a different issue.
That is all true, hence my use of the word 'choose'. Many don't choose to live in location X, it's just where they were born/grew up, etc.
I still find it somewhat puzzling that many of those able to move - don't.
Humans, eh?
I'd challenge that, as sure, that reflective panels in rear facing lights (in my country that's centre and on the edges of the cars) are only about as reflective, in total, as a large rego plate mounted in the centre bottom of the car. Based on the last 3 or 4 cars I've owned in the last 20 or so years.
Seeing red light reflected back at you is helpful, sure.
Seeing white light of a rego plate reflected back at you is also very helpful.
Seeing BOTH?
Really helpful in avoiding driving into the back of a car. In my almost 35 years of driving, at least.
You don't need to read rego/number plates to see them and go "ooh, let's not drive into the back of a parked car".
Well, I don't...
I'm of the opinion that the reflectiveness is not for ease of cops reading the plates so much helping as numpty drivers paying little attention to the road in front of them going "OMG there is a car between those red reflections of the tail-lights, I'd better steer so as to avoid running up the back of it!".
Your mileage, may, of course, vary.
Along with your insurance premiums...
Hmm, re-reading this shows some grammatical and other errors but I'm drunk and I'm sure most readers will understand that I'm trying to say more visibility for other vehicles in your path is a good thing, as you see them you (in theory) steer to avoid crashing into them.
+1 for Vaudevillian drama!
Agreed, my rego for my 1.4 litre econocar is almost AU$700, up from what was only AU$400ish what seems like 5 years ago... Though admittedly $100 of that is for an insurance system that pays out to victims of no-fault accidents (like when someone stumbles and falls onto the road and gets run over, the driver isn't at fault, and arguably, at law, neither is the stumbling pedestrian).
God only knows how the unemployed keep their cars registered so that they can drive to job interviews :(
The roads I drive on are nice, though, and getting better, I will admit that. It seems that car revenue money is being spent on making the driving experience better.
Huh, I kinda assumed that licence plates have been reflective for decades simply for the added visibility and safety that offered for next to no price (certainly at a cost far less than an emergency response to a collision).
Pay EXTRA for reflective paint?
Here (Australia) that's been mandatory and standard since the 70s! And measurably reduced night time collisions with parked cars.
Or do you mean some other kind of super reflective paint, perhaps?
We (Western Australia) got rid of rego stickers about a decade ago :)
About a decade before that we got rid of useful into like the make & model of the car that used to be on the rego sticker, handy if you were wondering 'what the hell kind of car is THAT?' when gazing at a parked Iso Rivolta.
45 or 50 degrees???
Given that over 6 BILLION people on the planet live in places where it NEVER gets over 45 degrees, I suspect you are living in the last remaining country that uses British Imperial temperatures in Fahrenheit???
So... we can ignore your comment as ignorant, backwards, retarded, antique, historical and amusing.
[yes I'm drunk /.ing and am not a USAnian]
Umm, the coldest day of June was yesterday. As I backed out of my (unheated) garage my car told me it was 12.5 C. Outside it was about 4C.
And in summer the garage, at 6am, is easily 20+C. Outside it is likely to be warmer (the garage is insulated).
How is this useful? It's NOT cold!
Ooooh, it might be useful to those people who, for some strange reason, choose to live in places where water actually freezes OUTSIDE of a refrigerator freezer???
That is, in bugger all parts of the world?
Yeah... great advance I'm sure.
[Yes, I'm being deliberately obtuse, as I know that for some reason/s large numbers of humans insist on living outside the comfortably habitable range of climate suited for humans, but I still do not know why they choose this].
Phoenix laws soon put a stop to that.
Your country DOES have Phoenix laws, doesn't it?
You should think again.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/h...
There are MANY other examples as to how the amount of gun deaths in the USA, by 100,000 population, is ... unusually high for a nation not at war, shall we say?
"Even though it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the United States accounted for 82 percent of all gun deaths. The United States also accounted for 90 percent of all women killed by guns, the study found. Ninety-one percent of children under 14 who died by gun violence were in the United States. And 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed by guns were in the United States, the study found."
If you don't think that is a problem, I'd be quite worried about you.
Yes, it seems so.
That battery is making money and saving more, apparently it's been very effective in load or frequency balancing, or whatever it can do.
https://247wallst.com/energy-b...
And while pumped hydro is certainly well proven, you'd still be getting planning permission and building approval at this stage, assuming you've acquired a suitable site, and yes, water. Yet the battery has been up, running, and earning money for many months now.
Now all we need is more lithium (or a high performance, safer and cheaper alternative... :)
There was also Elon's bet with South Australia, and the fact that it's using largely proven technology, and it is quite fast to set up (Elon didn't lose his bet).
Pumped hydro takes years to set up, not weeks.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whic...
Apparently they do.
Australia is the driest *inhabited* continent.
That said, even South Australia has 185 potential pumped hydro sites that may be able to store 500GWh of energy:
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all...
I suspect if Australia can do it (in theory) then other, more uppy/downy-ground nations could do it also?
So it's not all bad news, Australia could, in theory, become 100% renewable in a very short time. It's not like there is a lack of space for PV panels, solar thermal, geothermal, wave, wind or alt-nuclear generation. As a very geologically stable continent it could even charge (up front...) to store other nations nuclear waste, enabling it to fund renewable power construction.
This must worry those heavily invested in traditional power generation.
Recently I saw a new icon on my weather app.
Smoke Haze, it turned out to be.
My city has been covered in smoke from the hazard reduction burn offs in the nearby bush.
They do this in various places very regularly, have done for decades.
Welcome to Australia's west coast :)
I think this Facebook photo post I just saw pretty much sums up Australia?
https://www.facebook.com/TheBe...
Comments to the FB post are largely by Aussies, may be worth reading. Or not.
I hope I don't ever slip and fall, knocking myself unconscious, while getting into the spa!
Can you imagine the soup I'd be when found days later? :(
It really comes down to fate, I suppose?
Perhaps we'll all simply die in a flash of heat and light, if things on a certain peninsula or in a desert country (or countries) don't turn out well?
Ideally everyone dies peacefully in their sleep, at home, though, at a ripe old age :)
Pfft, that's mainly on the east coast.
So stay in the west and out of the ocean and she'll be apps, mate!
Oh, and before putting them on, bang your shoes upside down the shake the spiders and scorpions out. And the burrowing wasps.
Shake the towel as you take it off the towel rail, too, Huntsman spiders like hiding in their cool shade. Yes, I mean in the bathroom.
Fires? Pfft, that was a piddly one in, again, Sydney (or at least NSW).
If you want bushfires, go back 9 more years and head south to the state of Victoria.
http://www.nma.gov.au/online_f...
I'd think I'd rather be paralyzed and unable to breathe after being bitten by a blue ring ocky.
And yes, I've seen one in the wild - at a children's beach. How do I know it was a real blue ring? Well, I was a kid, so I poked it, of course, it lit up with blue rings and I lit up the beach at very high speed.
But mauled by a huge vicious animal? And then eaten? No thanks...
PS, at least our many scorpions won't kill you - they are just painful.
The paid holidays do accrue, though, if you don't use them?
So if you get 10 days holiday per year but take none, next year you have 20 days holiday to use?
It was 11C (positive!) when I went to work this morning, brrrrrr, with a high of about 24C, niiiiice.
Why do people live in places where you NEED heating simply to stay alive?
Seriously, what is it about people who choose to live where ice is something that exists in nature, and not just inside a freezer?
What's the worth of living in a place where you can die of exposure (or get eaten by a moose*/bear/wolf)?
Here I just stay out of the ocean and I'm safe from sharks. I stay out of rivers if they are north of the tropic and I'm safe from crocodiles. Kangaroos or emus may kill me but at least they won't eat me!
I don't need heating in winter (though I do have it if I feel decadent) and I don't need cooling in summer (though this room and one other in my house are air-conditioned, and most others have ceiling fans). And it's quite pleasant here. I could ride my bicycle to work all year round, and some people do.
* I understand that moose don't actually eat people but they are massive big critters that look as if they'd like to try...
Yep.
I, and pretty much everyone else Downunder, get 20 paid recreation days of leave.
Plus 10 paid sick days (may or may not need a doctors note to prove you're not just taking a "doona day"). And these accumulate - for most people - if not used. If I have a serious illness I have over 30 weeks of paid sick leave I can use (I've been with my employer a few decades).
Plus the long weekends we get about 10 times a year (New Years Day, Australia Day, Easter (Good Friday and Easter Monday, so a 4 day long weekend), ANZAC Day, Queen's Birthday (which amusingly varies by which state you are in), Royal Show day, some places have the local big horse race day as a holiday, ie Melbourne Cup Day, and... there are others as well.
My employer just closes down between Xmas and New Year, no point in staying open as more than half the staff are on holiday anyway, and it enables software and hardware updates, serious building maintenance and costs less than opening (lower security costs, aircon and other power costs etc).
Then there is the long service leave, kicking in at generally either 7 or 10 years of constant employment, and being a full 3 months of paid leave.
I don't know what USAnian workers unions have been doing, but making workers better off doesn't seem to be their aim, that's for certain. Because pretty much all of these conditions - and many more that millions of Aussie workers enjoy - are the result of Australian unions & workers standing up to the employers and demanding better conditions for the workers.
And getting them.
Reading this thread has just been one jaw dropping moment after another...
Both Jane Q. Public and AC make good and interesting points, now that I reply 8 days later... (oops).
As an outsider it has fascinating reading - over the years - how various US voters happily vote for parties whose policies will literally hurt them, total cognitive dissonance.
Or maybe it's utter wilful ignorance, it's hard to tell, really.
I think a quote from the US president best sums it up, "Sad".
Umm, there are a few differences in HOW Facebook and user data was used by Obama, Hillary and Trump.
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
A relevant summary from that site:
"The Obama campaign created a Facebook app for supporters to donate, learn of voting requirements, and find nearby houses to canvass. The app asked users’ permission to scan their photos, friends lists, and news feeds. Most users complied.
The people signing up knew the data they were handing over would be used to support a political campaign. Their friends, however, did not.
The people who downloaded the app used by Cambridge Analytica did not know their data would be used to aid any political campaigns. The app was billed as a personality quiz that would be used by Cambridge University researchers."
and another relevant bit of info from the same article:
"Obama operatives used Facebook data to get users to send their messaging for them, according to Eitan Hersh, a Tufts professor who wrote Hacking the Electorate, a book on Obama’s microtargeting strategies.
Facebook friends lists, tags and photos allowed Obama operatives to identify a person’s close friends, which they then matched with offline public records. (Was this person likely to vote for Obama, but unlikely to get out to vote?) They then told the app users which of their friends they should send campaign messages to.
Cambridge Analytica dialed up what Karpf called the creepiness factor. They combined the survey results with the Facebook data to create psychological profiles they then sold to campaigns. The idea was, if the firm could discover how these people thought, they could target ads toward them.
They then sent targeted ads to the users on the database. The friends of the app users weren’t being targeted by their friends, but by the campaign itself. In other words, the consenting middle man was gone."
So, the differences are significant, in that Obama was being open about it and getting people to contact their friends with messages, whereas Trump was being secretive (it was data from a personality quiz, not a political app) and using targeted advertising, not friends messages.
Go on, read the article. It's one of many that explain why Obama isn't copping the same flak.
So, no, it's not the ONLY reason, it's not even a reason.
"As of 2016, only about half of Americans have more than one option for broadband internet. In rural areas, this number drops to just 13%."
That's the bit that I always find so curious. I have a choice of dozens of ISPs and mobile phone providers and no longer have a land line, here in an Australian city (I use fixed wireless internet to avoid the debacle called the NBN).
Why does "the land of the free" have so little choice?
Lack of government regulations requiring sharing of equipment, I suspect? So everyone has to duplicate networks or ... just go somewhere else where there is no network and build your own monopoly?
Aren't monopolies supposed to be bad?