Yes, but the part that really pisses me off is the FAKE money they "generate" on top of it. Sticking with the example of the google, the stock price is a total fantasy based on dreams of how much of the consumers' money they can someday control, but the google's CFO-side gamblers can use that fantasy to gamble with vast sums of FAKE value, for example buying other companies and technologies on the dreams of yet more profit.
At some point the house of stock certificates has to crash. And once again the taxpaying consumers will be on the hook to pick up the pieces because the YUGE corporate cancers are "too big to fail". Does anyone actually believe that the death of the big banks or the google is worse than what they are doing to us now?
That was a rhetorical question. Obviously certain people do believe it. The people who get paid for running the FAKE game.
Two basic interpretations seem possible for your so-called reply:
(1) You misunderstood or could not understand what I wrote. In these and related cases, the appropriate response is to ask for clarification. I acknowledge that I often write densely, even tersely.
(2) You deliberately misinterpreted what I wrote. Various possible motivations and tactics might apply, but why would I care? In this case you've already negated your credibility even without a better form of EPR than Slashdot offers. I dismiss you thusly, even without checking your karma.
If I were in a more polite mood, I'd suggest you try again based on what I actually wrote. However as things stand, I think it more reasonable to regard this "discussion" as terminated.
Glad to see you got the insightful mod you deserved, even though your writing is kind of sloppy. In terms of improving your presentation, perhaps you should focus on your Subject: line? That one was not helpful, and less so since your strongest point was your third one, which you apparently added at the end...
Minor disagreement with your first point, because I think we also pay with money, if less directly. If the companies (AKA corporate cancers) were failing to extract our money, then they would not be paying the google for the advertising. Yes, there is individual variation and some of us are bigger suckers than others, but I insist that all of us are paying to some degree.
There is a better solution by using a PUBLIC standard for Android without the google's monopolistic control over it and with REAL competition driving REAL innovation at every level and in every part of the Android platform, not just the low-margin commodity hardware. The only problem is that it would reduce the google's profit.
Whoops. I forgot that would be a religious violation. "There is no gawd but profit, and the EVIL google must become gawd's #1 prophet!"
Actually, it isn't clear if the google is the most evil of the inhuman corporate cancers that are destroying our lives for the greater glory of profit maximization. However it is absolutely clear that the problem of profit maximization is a FAKE problem because there is NO possible solution. There is always a bigger number for a more maximum profit.
Here's my simpleminded solution: A progressive tax on corporate profits based on market share. The data is already there for public corporations that are required to open their books. As a company's taxes increase, it would eventually become MORE profitable to reproduce by fission.
Two lines of response, but I'm trying to keep it short, so the brevity may be unclear. Made worse by references to some private vocabulary, though it has appeared in various public places, including on Slashdot.
I'm quite serious, but detached. I still want to help make the world better, but no longer feel any sense of personal responsibility for the world's state. When I was young, I thought it was merely a matter of finding the right place for the fulcrum and even speculated that a certain gigantic TLC was the place, but I eventually got there and learned otherwise. At this point I regard myself as a "pure solutions researcher" in the same sense as "pure mathematician" or "pure theoretical physicist". I'm interested in "finding" the best solution approaches, but implementation is a problem for the engineers or someone.
Going down your list of funding options:
I regard your "Crowdsourcing" as one of the small donor models. My CSB brokerage is in this category, but with some accountability features from the large donor models.
I file "Patronage" under large donors. The main problems there are the size of the donor's pockets and the donor's bad decisions. Ubuntu is an interesting example here.
The advertising thing is a delusional can of worms that may have outlived its usefulness. The original idea (during AM radio days) was to get something for nothing, and that trick never works. File it under perpetual motion machines.
I have approached Slashdot. Many times. I make extra efforts to suggest constructive ideas whenever the ownership or management changes. This time around whipslash was kind of encouraging, but nothing came of it, as far as I can see.
Open source is a different delusion, but especially pernicious from the perspective of time-based economics (which I call ekronomics). One of the main objectives of the CSB would be to fairly compensate OSS programmers for their time and contributions. In short, I think they deserve market wages, but perhaps with a discount for picking their preferred work and still subject to the willingness of sufficient numbers of donors to support the projects.
Thank you for the interesting discussion, though I think the timing of Slashdot is pretty much shutting it down. Therefore, in what might be the terminal comment, I'll focus on one aspect of your reply because it is clear that you haven't read some of my earlier comments on the topic.
My suggested implementation of EPR would involve a second icon. The first icon, probably on the left side, would be the regular self-selected avatar, and it would link to the usual self-provided information. The second icon would be a standardized representation of the EPR, and it would link to a summary page of the public interactions that defined the EPR, and that page would also link to the actual data. (Access to the actual data is especially important to enable network-based validation of the identities.) Right now I think the best form for the EPR icon would be a small radar diagram featuring a few dimensions. The version you would see would actually have to consider your screen resolution, but I think it should also be user-configurable. For example, if you don't like the default view because it doesn't include a dimension you like, say the politeness dimension, then you should be able to modify it. I would probably put "funny" at 12 o'clock, since it's most important to me, but I might regard politeness as a contender for #2 at 2 (or 3) o'clock. That could let me see 6 (or 4) dimensions in one standard form. The default display might be simpler, with just three or even two of the most popular dimensions. I also think other dimensions of the display could be used, for example making the icon darker and less transparent as it reflects more data, or giving it an overall tint of more green as it approached my own EPR and more red as it reflects the likelihood of greater annoyance.
While I do think there is an evolutionary way to implement such a system, I don't see any way for Slashdot to evolve the kind of financial model that would drive the changes. If you know of such a system, I'd be greatly indebted by the URL.
Gee, I wish I could say something substantive on this topic without revealing my sources. It's not just the censorship, but the self-censorship related to the fear of being punished and the loathing of divergent opinion. Yeah, I'm averse to conflict, but I got nothing on the the Japanese at the systemic level. Or perhaps I should describe it as the level of the mob?
The evidence I wish I could tell you about involves the internal workings of certain Japanese universities as manifested in their computer-system usage guidelines and policies for their students. I think the result is fundamentally antagonistic to creative or innovative thinking, but I feel that I can't say anything just now. I'm not afraid of the Japanese police, but that's because my Japanese wife would kill me first. (Is that a joke?)
The only approach I can think of whereby I might be able to help advance the discussion is to offer to confirm your evidence or to agree with your hypotheses when they agree with mine... That way it isn't really my fault? However that approach is not viable in the context of Slashdot.
The original story? The EFF? They are SO clueless about Japan that it has to make me laugh. The EFF is an excellent example of how good intentions and charity mix poorly. Or maybe not, if you disagree with some of their intentions? I generally regard Libertarians as incredibly naive on their best days.
Since you [iggymanz] were joking in response to an AC I think you should have quoted the original to get the funny mods you deserved. Too bad Slashdot doesn't have a capacity to express "witty". Perhaps as a two- or three-dimension combination? (And of course moot to me, as one of the record-holders for no mod points to give.)
One more thing (as Steve Jobs used to say?): I think the deeper "it" is mostly about the financial models and how they interact and align with the interests of the various stakeholders, even though many of the stakeholders may not be holding financial stakes.
As it applies to the original story attacking wind turbines, the missing information is about the financial model driving that source of those much-too-obvious lies.
As it applies to Facebook, the financial model is more visible to the public, even though the public prefers to ignore most of it: The financial model of Facebook is to generate maximum profit by raping the personal information of the users. In many ways quite similar to the malformed (IMO) financial models of other corporate cancers like the google and Amazon and Apple. [Yes, I think "the google" has special status.]
As it applies to Slashdot, the financial model is again missing or invisible or even nonexistent. Some evidence suggests that Slashdot is more like the charity you described in your "with enough money" paragraph. On one hand, I think charity is a good thing and admirable, but on the other hand I think most charities are fundamentally misguided and unfair in that they are attempting to supply private solutions for public problems. However, that's an entirely different can of worms...
From your response I can't tell if you're an actual mathematician (and I am definitely not) attempting to reply using non-mathematical language or something else. I "felt" a need for some matrix algebra in your reply. There is a difference in the way you write compared to the way most mathematicians of my acquaintance write, but it could be my fault because I lack the ability to express things as precisely as a real mathematician would. However I think I can address two parts of your reply.
The top-post versus first-post thing is largely historical, and you should be aware of that based on your relatively low user ID. However it's possible that you are a sporadic user of Slashdot? Based on my current filtering, I may also have a biased perspective, and mostly I don't even see the actual first posts these years. What I often see at the top of a discussion is a later post, often one that has been modded up, but which seems to be following a direction established by the invisible first post. Sometimes I do back up the thread to see where it started. That research usually feels like a waste of time.
My second reaction was to your comment about running the two interfaces against each other in a giant system-level test. I don't think that is how you can test largely different approaches. I think you have to do things in a more incremental, evolutionary way, and it's even better if you can let some people stay with the old ways they like to do things while letting them be aware of the alternative approaches. However mostly I think you've assumed an injection of large amounts of money. The only way I can imagine that might be as a Kickstarter project that has run amok (as in the case of Diaspora), and I know of no examples where that has worked out well. Rather I think the funding should also be guided by the users' preferences.
Let me try to suggest a possible implementation path. There might be two initial project proposals: (1) A project to make karma more symmetric with the reactions to comments. That project description should make it clear how the new data structure would work alongside the existing structures, essentially as an extension of user identities. (2) A project to restructure the dimensions of rating posts. That project description should describe how the orthogonal and symmetric dimensions will work, including examples that can be compared to the existing dimensions. I think "funny" is a relatively easy example because "unfunny" is relatively easy to understand, but I actually think the dimension should be generalized to something like "made me happy" versus "made me unhappy" on the negative side. Such proposals would then be subject to funding by the members (the users of Slashdot in this case), and after enough members had agreed to chip in, the project would commit. After each project is completed, it would be assessed against its success criteria. Among other aspects, this would help the donors decide if they liked the approach or wanted to try another direction.
The most confusing part of your response was your new terminology. For example, you introduced the term pr_multiplier, which from context would appear to be personal-reputation-multiplier. I would prefer to consider it a weighting factor, but you seemed to be taking age (of the identity) for granted as one of the dimensions of EPR. I have mentioned the importance of that dimension at times, but I usually describe that particular dimension in terms of a "maturity filter", and it is unclear to me if you might be referring to those comments.
Good question. In this context it would be difficult to assess and automate. One approach would be based on a good EPR (Earned Public Reputation) system, sort of karma on steroids. From that perspective, the server might pool all of the early submissions and give first-post position not to the chronologically first comment, but to the early comment from the person with the highest reputation in the dimensions related to insight. Perhaps hourly re-rankings for the first 2 or 3 hours?
However I realize that description reflects my personal bias in favor of insightful comments, even if they seem kind of scarce these days. In response to your question, I now think it should also be related to the reactions to the story. For example, if the story has received a number of "funny" mods, then the featured comments should also be biased in favor of that dimension. (Yes, I know the stories aren't rated at that level, but that's another problem with an obvious solution.)
Unless you've been following my older comments and mumbles, I better clarify that I think EPR (or whatever it's called) should have a dimensional symmetry with the reactions to comments. The dimensions themselves should also be considered more carefully to isolate orthogonal concepts with positive and negative aspects. There should be a simple rating, too, for positive or negative, but that should just affect the magnitude of the direction vector defined by people who were willing to put a bit more effort into clarifying what aspects they regarded as positive or negative. I also think it should be biased in favor of positive reactions over negative, in that you should have to make a bit of extra effort to substantiate a negative reaction...
And all of this should be paid for by the users, but only as enough users agree that a particular feature is worth creating. Not sure why, but you've gotten me to start thinking about the credit for features that get retired...
I think you're oversimplifying and largely misdirecting your analysis. I think that Putin's goals evolved over time. Initially the Russians only wanted to prevent Hillary from winning too strongly and believed that they could weaken her enough so that she would not have a strong mandate to lead in bothersome dimensions. (Much of their clandestine support of Sanders was dedicated to that goal.)
When Putin realized that Trump was a serious contender, he was amazed, and when Trump actually "won" he was happier than Bin Laden when the towers collapsed. Putin knows just how much kompromat the Russians have on Trump. It's not so much that Trump is weak, though that's true, too, but that Trump is a colossal fool and has been owned for decades.
In the form of an elevator pitch, you aren't bankrupt until your creditors pull the plug, and they pulled Trump's plug long ago. The ONLY thing that saved Trump was a pile of dirty money that needed laundering, and the KGB was killing two birds with the one stone. (1) Clean(ish) dollars for filthy rubles. (2) Trump on a leash if they ever needed to jerk it.
At this point, I don't think Putin needs to pull Trump's strings much. I think he has a computer model of Trump that's better than most weather prediction systems. He knows what inputs Trump is getting from FAUX, and he even knows most of the Twitter-based inputs based on when Trump tweets. He probably has sources inside the White House that give him accurate assessments for how little attention Trump pays to such sources as General Kelly and the CIA. From the inputs Putin gets a highly accurate prediction of what Trump is going to do, and if he likes it, then he does nothing. If he doesn't like it, then Putin tweaks the inputs or even the situation until Trump's behavior is back in the "acceptable" range.
My apologies. The first line of my comment (the one to which I am replying now) says "Facebook" where I obviously intended "Slashdot". I hope my mistake was obvious from the context, but still, there's no excuse. However, the comment does apply with some modification to Facebook, though I think it is much less possible that Facebook could adopt, even partially for any aspect of their website, such a non-profit cost-recovery feature-funding model as I am advocating.
The Subject: is based on a kind of joke, but I can't share it on Slashdot without a perversion of the original language. Yet another feature I wish I could help fund, though I doubt that there would be a large enough group on Slashdot such that the feature would ever get the commitment needed for implementation. (In such cases, I'd just have to pick other features or costs that I'd like to help fund.)
One of the things that would improve Facebook would be some kind of quality-based selector for the first visible comment after each story. That "first post" tends to direct the conversation, but more often than not, it directs the conversation in some nonproductive direction, amplified by the brokenness of the moderation system that quite often gives the FP an insightful moderation. (Many discussion systems attempt (halfheartedly) to implement a solution with sort-order selectors.) Yet another example of the kind of feature I would be interested in helping to fund if only Slashdot had such a funding alternative--and if you disagree, then you could fund other features or none at all.
Anyway, returning form meta to my primary reaction to the article, this story is obviously a framing lie (Level 3). You can approach the reality ("machines wear out") from the perspective of a problem that needs to be solved, for example by making wind turbines that last longer and are easier to repair, or from the perspective of a new business opportunity, but this story quite deliberately frames the situation in apocalyptic terms.
Now I'm going to look at the rest of the discussion. Of course I'm seeking "funny", but with the slimmest of hopes these years. I'm also going to look for insights such as the real motivations of whoever published this story. Were I a gambling man, I'd bet on Exxon right out of the gate, but that particular corporate cancer has become rather clever about hiding the money trail...
I think my Subject: for this branch is a typo... Actually the EC should be blamed for failing to do its job...
However, on the subject of Senators, I think their idea was that a separate basis of power would provide another check and balance. On that line of analysis, direct election of the Senators is a mistake, because it's relying on the same basis as the Representatives in the House.
If I got to rewrite the 17th Amendment, it would change the basis of the Senate to wealth, specifically in terms of taxes paid. Each Senator would represent 1% of the tax revenue of the federal government. That would have been difficult until recently, but now we have computers that can solve large knapsack problems fairly rapidly. We don't need perfect solutions, but basically need to start with large taxpayers distributed around the nation and add enough smaller voters to balance things out for each Senator. You'd know exactly who your senator was and exactly why he was ignoring you.
What about corporations? Darn good question and shows you're awake. The only question is whether to allocate certain senators to corporations or just mix them in as though they were actually human beings. Just depends on the federal taxes actually paid.
I don't think these attacks on the EC are well justified because the founders were quite clear that one of the main purposes of the EC was to prevent presidents like Trump, whose only campaign tactic is to make mobs angry. The entire notion of "faithless elector" would be anathema to them, because the electors were NOT supposed to be chained to the voters. If the EC was working as intended, Trump is EXACTLY the president they wanted to prevent.
Perhaps a secret ballot in the EC would help? I really think that a lot of the electors might have voted against Trump if they had been able to do so. Given the dislike of Hillary (regardless of whether that dislike was legitimate or ginned up), it is quite possible the EC would also have been unable to vote for her. In that case, they would have had to fall back on the other mechanisms for picking a president, and they certainly could not have found a worse president than #PresidentTweety.
Just a footnote, but don't forget that they wanted a system that would confer strong legitimacy, something like a mandate to lead, after strongly contested elections. I rather wish that they had been able to innovate all the way to a parliamentary system instead of creating such a winner-take-all system.
If I ever had a mod point to give, then I might give you one on the grounds that it's the only visible mention of "hackers" in this discussion.
In general, I was not made happy by the lack of "funny" comments, even though it's a serious topic with little room for humor. However, it was more saddening to see the dominance of the discussion by obvious trolls and sock puppets. Does it call for a review of the ontology of lies? Or a new ontology of trolls?
The so-called victory of #PresidentTweety was razor thin. What that actually means is that each and EVERY group that can plausibly claim to have influenced about 80,000 voters has an equally plausible claim to be the margin of Trump's residency in the "dump", as he described the White House. Actually, you could argue for 40,000 if they were voters swung away from Hillary and over to Trump.
There are strong and credible evaluations (including some bipartisan ones) that strongly indicate that the tactics of Putin's goons influenced at least that many suckers among the millions of voters they targeted. Ergo, it's rather hard to deny that Trump owes Putin, but it's only a question of degree. My assessment is that Trump is much more beholden to Mike Pence for delivering the votes of the religious lunatics.
Or perhaps it's more significant that the US government is almost surely more guilty of interfering in elections than the Russians? If money does translate into votes, then it would be a sure call. Do you know how much of the Marshall Plan funding was actually diverted to the CIA? And how much of that dark money was used for meddling in elections in places like Italy and Japan?
Still, it feels worse when our own ox has been gored. It might be worse in this case only because of the old KGB kompromat on Trump that Putin inherited. (I still think the Golden Shower rumor is a clever feint created by Putin to make his puppet feel safer.)
Why was that AC tripe moderated into visibility. And "insightful", too? In a flying pig's eye. Or rather in the eyes of a herd of flying sock puppets with mod points to burn. There is a substantive reply, but NOT for AC.
When you "assume", you make an "ass" of "u" and "me". Old joke, but I think it's quite relevant here. (The joke also rendered me quite averse to the word "assume".)
Stock prices have NEVER been based on perfect information. There is no perfect information. Stock prices are just a matter of opinion, but at least they used to be the opinions of human beings, and they used to be based on things the companies actually owned and did and were expected to do in the future. The future is another thing we know almost nothing about.
However, now stock prices are driven by gamesters with computers. The computers have absolutely NO conception of value. They only react to inputs. The computer buys when the program 'says' some other computer will probably pay a higher price in the future and the computer sells when the program 'says' the stock price will fall in the future. There is no relation to reality there, just knee-jerk reactions to selected inputs. I think random numbers would work as well.
Now your mention of network effects is something else. Of course a larger network should have more value than a smaller network.
Oh wait. That's assuming the network is doing something valuable. Near as I can tell, the "value" of Facebook could only be measured in terms of wasted human time. Our most precious and only real asset. Wasted.
Well, I agree with you more than the other reply, but I still think you are seriously underestimating the "coerced" element of the freedom equation. People tend to focus on the stick aspect of personal information, the human mistakes that can be used to threaten you, while mostly ignoring the carrots from knowing your interests, tastes, and even your strengths.
Serrendipitously, I was just reading an old "Wise Buying" guide from the BBB. The first substantive chapter is about advertising, and one of the early topics is superlatives and puffery. Look at the Orange OxyMoron in the White House and tell me again how it's completely harmless.
If you think share price reflects anything about the real value of a company, then you are seriously delusional. The stock market has become a game played among fast computers, each of which is buying shares at insane rates based on some programmed fantasy that some other sucker will buy those shares at a higher price at some moment in the future. There are so many hilarious aspects of the bubble that you can only laugh--and wait for the implosion.
I confess that I own some shares, but only because I'm too lazy to sell them these days.
The top problem with your analysis and the main reason it doesn't deserve "insightful" moderation is that the transaction is crooked. We have no idea what the REAL value of our personal information is. The way it works is that the corporate cancers that harvest our private information can make enormous profits in exchange for bangles and trifles.
I think email is a better example than the ones you [4151743] mentioned. We know that the google is making substantial profits, probably even gigantic profits, from the personal information that they have harvested from our Gmail accounts. Do ANY of us know the real costs of Gmail? On an honest cost-recovery basis, perhaps a Gmail account would actually cost a few dollars per year. (I still think that a CSB-based approach could implement that model, but...)
Anyway, it's too phucking late now. "Possession is nine points of the law", and they already possess all of our personal data, and some more besides. (That's a joke about the derived personal data that we aren't even aware of, even though it's the most insidious kind of data.) Plus they got all the lawyers. We lowly peasants are SOOOO screwed. We might as well just shut up and enjoy our "free" email accounts.
If you don't trust the corporate cancer and agree to love, honor, and obey the ToS, then you'll merely force them to take away your email address. Probably remove your birthday, too.
Actually, I was looking for "funny" in this thread. The obvious jokes were something along the lines of "I caught the distrust virus" or "Too late, it got me!". Couldn't find anything along such lines. *sigh* Sadly typical for Slashdot these days.
The corporate cancers are winning. Or maybe that should be past tense and we're just in the grace period until advances in drone technology and self-driving cars eliminate any need to keep the humans around. Thus endeth the Fermi Paradox?
Solutions? We don't need no stinkin' solutions! Certainly not on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Gosh, you Russian trolls need to get better disguises. Also you forgot to mention your puppet Trump.
"Go away, son, ya bother me."
Yes, but the part that really pisses me off is the FAKE money they "generate" on top of it. Sticking with the example of the google, the stock price is a total fantasy based on dreams of how much of the consumers' money they can someday control, but the google's CFO-side gamblers can use that fantasy to gamble with vast sums of FAKE value, for example buying other companies and technologies on the dreams of yet more profit.
At some point the house of stock certificates has to crash. And once again the taxpaying consumers will be on the hook to pick up the pieces because the YUGE corporate cancers are "too big to fail". Does anyone actually believe that the death of the big banks or the google is worse than what they are doing to us now?
That was a rhetorical question. Obviously certain people do believe it. The people who get paid for running the FAKE game.
Two basic interpretations seem possible for your so-called reply:
(1) You misunderstood or could not understand what I wrote. In these and related cases, the appropriate response is to ask for clarification. I acknowledge that I often write densely, even tersely.
(2) You deliberately misinterpreted what I wrote. Various possible motivations and tactics might apply, but why would I care? In this case you've already negated your credibility even without a better form of EPR than Slashdot offers. I dismiss you thusly, even without checking your karma.
If I were in a more polite mood, I'd suggest you try again based on what I actually wrote. However as things stand, I think it more reasonable to regard this "discussion" as terminated.
Glad to see you got the insightful mod you deserved, even though your writing is kind of sloppy. In terms of improving your presentation, perhaps you should focus on your Subject: line? That one was not helpful, and less so since your strongest point was your third one, which you apparently added at the end...
Minor disagreement with your first point, because I think we also pay with money, if less directly. If the companies (AKA corporate cancers) were failing to extract our money, then they would not be paying the google for the advertising. Yes, there is individual variation and some of us are bigger suckers than others, but I insist that all of us are paying to some degree.
There is a better solution by using a PUBLIC standard for Android without the google's monopolistic control over it and with REAL competition driving REAL innovation at every level and in every part of the Android platform, not just the low-margin commodity hardware. The only problem is that it would reduce the google's profit.
Whoops. I forgot that would be a religious violation. "There is no gawd but profit, and the EVIL google must become gawd's #1 prophet!"
Actually, it isn't clear if the google is the most evil of the inhuman corporate cancers that are destroying our lives for the greater glory of profit maximization. However it is absolutely clear that the problem of profit maximization is a FAKE problem because there is NO possible solution. There is always a bigger number for a more maximum profit.
Here's my simpleminded solution: A progressive tax on corporate profits based on market share. The data is already there for public corporations that are required to open their books. As a company's taxes increase, it would eventually become MORE profitable to reproduce by fission.
ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Two lines of response, but I'm trying to keep it short, so the brevity may be unclear. Made worse by references to some private vocabulary, though it has appeared in various public places, including on Slashdot.
I'm quite serious, but detached. I still want to help make the world better, but no longer feel any sense of personal responsibility for the world's state. When I was young, I thought it was merely a matter of finding the right place for the fulcrum and even speculated that a certain gigantic TLC was the place, but I eventually got there and learned otherwise. At this point I regard myself as a "pure solutions researcher" in the same sense as "pure mathematician" or "pure theoretical physicist". I'm interested in "finding" the best solution approaches, but implementation is a problem for the engineers or someone.
Going down your list of funding options:
I regard your "Crowdsourcing" as one of the small donor models. My CSB brokerage is in this category, but with some accountability features from the large donor models.
I file "Patronage" under large donors. The main problems there are the size of the donor's pockets and the donor's bad decisions. Ubuntu is an interesting example here.
The advertising thing is a delusional can of worms that may have outlived its usefulness. The original idea (during AM radio days) was to get something for nothing, and that trick never works. File it under perpetual motion machines.
I have approached Slashdot. Many times. I make extra efforts to suggest constructive ideas whenever the ownership or management changes. This time around whipslash was kind of encouraging, but nothing came of it, as far as I can see.
Open source is a different delusion, but especially pernicious from the perspective of time-based economics (which I call ekronomics). One of the main objectives of the CSB would be to fairly compensate OSS programmers for their time and contributions. In short, I think they deserve market wages, but perhaps with a discount for picking their preferred work and still subject to the willingness of sufficient numbers of donors to support the projects.
Thank you for the interesting discussion, though I think the timing of Slashdot is pretty much shutting it down. Therefore, in what might be the terminal comment, I'll focus on one aspect of your reply because it is clear that you haven't read some of my earlier comments on the topic.
My suggested implementation of EPR would involve a second icon. The first icon, probably on the left side, would be the regular self-selected avatar, and it would link to the usual self-provided information. The second icon would be a standardized representation of the EPR, and it would link to a summary page of the public interactions that defined the EPR, and that page would also link to the actual data. (Access to the actual data is especially important to enable network-based validation of the identities.) Right now I think the best form for the EPR icon would be a small radar diagram featuring a few dimensions. The version you would see would actually have to consider your screen resolution, but I think it should also be user-configurable. For example, if you don't like the default view because it doesn't include a dimension you like, say the politeness dimension, then you should be able to modify it. I would probably put "funny" at 12 o'clock, since it's most important to me, but I might regard politeness as a contender for #2 at 2 (or 3) o'clock. That could let me see 6 (or 4) dimensions in one standard form. The default display might be simpler, with just three or even two of the most popular dimensions. I also think other dimensions of the display could be used, for example making the icon darker and less transparent as it reflects more data, or giving it an overall tint of more green as it approached my own EPR and more red as it reflects the likelihood of greater annoyance.
While I do think there is an evolutionary way to implement such a system, I don't see any way for Slashdot to evolve the kind of financial model that would drive the changes. If you know of such a system, I'd be greatly indebted by the URL.
Gee, I wish I could say something substantive on this topic without revealing my sources. It's not just the censorship, but the self-censorship related to the fear of being punished and the loathing of divergent opinion. Yeah, I'm averse to conflict, but I got nothing on the the Japanese at the systemic level. Or perhaps I should describe it as the level of the mob?
The evidence I wish I could tell you about involves the internal workings of certain Japanese universities as manifested in their computer-system usage guidelines and policies for their students. I think the result is fundamentally antagonistic to creative or innovative thinking, but I feel that I can't say anything just now. I'm not afraid of the Japanese police, but that's because my Japanese wife would kill me first. (Is that a joke?)
The only approach I can think of whereby I might be able to help advance the discussion is to offer to confirm your evidence or to agree with your hypotheses when they agree with mine... That way it isn't really my fault? However that approach is not viable in the context of Slashdot.
The original story? The EFF? They are SO clueless about Japan that it has to make me laugh. The EFF is an excellent example of how good intentions and charity mix poorly. Or maybe not, if you disagree with some of their intentions? I generally regard Libertarians as incredibly naive on their best days.
Since you [iggymanz] were joking in response to an AC I think you should have quoted the original to get the funny mods you deserved. Too bad Slashdot doesn't have a capacity to express "witty". Perhaps as a two- or three-dimension combination? (And of course moot to me, as one of the record-holders for no mod points to give.)
One more thing (as Steve Jobs used to say?): I think the deeper "it" is mostly about the financial models and how they interact and align with the interests of the various stakeholders, even though many of the stakeholders may not be holding financial stakes.
As it applies to the original story attacking wind turbines, the missing information is about the financial model driving that source of those much-too-obvious lies.
As it applies to Facebook, the financial model is more visible to the public, even though the public prefers to ignore most of it: The financial model of Facebook is to generate maximum profit by raping the personal information of the users. In many ways quite similar to the malformed (IMO) financial models of other corporate cancers like the google and Amazon and Apple. [Yes, I think "the google" has special status.]
As it applies to Slashdot, the financial model is again missing or invisible or even nonexistent. Some evidence suggests that Slashdot is more like the charity you described in your "with enough money" paragraph. On one hand, I think charity is a good thing and admirable, but on the other hand I think most charities are fundamentally misguided and unfair in that they are attempting to supply private solutions for public problems. However, that's an entirely different can of worms...
From your response I can't tell if you're an actual mathematician (and I am definitely not) attempting to reply using non-mathematical language or something else. I "felt" a need for some matrix algebra in your reply. There is a difference in the way you write compared to the way most mathematicians of my acquaintance write, but it could be my fault because I lack the ability to express things as precisely as a real mathematician would. However I think I can address two parts of your reply.
The top-post versus first-post thing is largely historical, and you should be aware of that based on your relatively low user ID. However it's possible that you are a sporadic user of Slashdot? Based on my current filtering, I may also have a biased perspective, and mostly I don't even see the actual first posts these years. What I often see at the top of a discussion is a later post, often one that has been modded up, but which seems to be following a direction established by the invisible first post. Sometimes I do back up the thread to see where it started. That research usually feels like a waste of time.
My second reaction was to your comment about running the two interfaces against each other in a giant system-level test. I don't think that is how you can test largely different approaches. I think you have to do things in a more incremental, evolutionary way, and it's even better if you can let some people stay with the old ways they like to do things while letting them be aware of the alternative approaches. However mostly I think you've assumed an injection of large amounts of money. The only way I can imagine that might be as a Kickstarter project that has run amok (as in the case of Diaspora), and I know of no examples where that has worked out well. Rather I think the funding should also be guided by the users' preferences.
Let me try to suggest a possible implementation path. There might be two initial project proposals: (1) A project to make karma more symmetric with the reactions to comments. That project description should make it clear how the new data structure would work alongside the existing structures, essentially as an extension of user identities. (2) A project to restructure the dimensions of rating posts. That project description should describe how the orthogonal and symmetric dimensions will work, including examples that can be compared to the existing dimensions. I think "funny" is a relatively easy example because "unfunny" is relatively easy to understand, but I actually think the dimension should be generalized to something like "made me happy" versus "made me unhappy" on the negative side. Such proposals would then be subject to funding by the members (the users of Slashdot in this case), and after enough members had agreed to chip in, the project would commit. After each project is completed, it would be assessed against its success criteria. Among other aspects, this would help the donors decide if they liked the approach or wanted to try another direction.
The most confusing part of your response was your new terminology. For example, you introduced the term pr_multiplier, which from context would appear to be personal-reputation-multiplier. I would prefer to consider it a weighting factor, but you seemed to be taking age (of the identity) for granted as one of the dimensions of EPR. I have mentioned the importance of that dimension at times, but I usually describe that particular dimension in terms of a "maturity filter", and it is unclear to me if you might be referring to those comments.
Good question. In this context it would be difficult to assess and automate. One approach would be based on a good EPR (Earned Public Reputation) system, sort of karma on steroids. From that perspective, the server might pool all of the early submissions and give first-post position not to the chronologically first comment, but to the early comment from the person with the highest reputation in the dimensions related to insight. Perhaps hourly re-rankings for the first 2 or 3 hours?
However I realize that description reflects my personal bias in favor of insightful comments, even if they seem kind of scarce these days. In response to your question, I now think it should also be related to the reactions to the story. For example, if the story has received a number of "funny" mods, then the featured comments should also be biased in favor of that dimension. (Yes, I know the stories aren't rated at that level, but that's another problem with an obvious solution.)
Unless you've been following my older comments and mumbles, I better clarify that I think EPR (or whatever it's called) should have a dimensional symmetry with the reactions to comments. The dimensions themselves should also be considered more carefully to isolate orthogonal concepts with positive and negative aspects. There should be a simple rating, too, for positive or negative, but that should just affect the magnitude of the direction vector defined by people who were willing to put a bit more effort into clarifying what aspects they regarded as positive or negative. I also think it should be biased in favor of positive reactions over negative, in that you should have to make a bit of extra effort to substantiate a negative reaction...
And all of this should be paid for by the users, but only as enough users agree that a particular feature is worth creating. Not sure why, but you've gotten me to start thinking about the credit for features that get retired...
I think you're oversimplifying and largely misdirecting your analysis. I think that Putin's goals evolved over time. Initially the Russians only wanted to prevent Hillary from winning too strongly and believed that they could weaken her enough so that she would not have a strong mandate to lead in bothersome dimensions. (Much of their clandestine support of Sanders was dedicated to that goal.)
When Putin realized that Trump was a serious contender, he was amazed, and when Trump actually "won" he was happier than Bin Laden when the towers collapsed. Putin knows just how much kompromat the Russians have on Trump. It's not so much that Trump is weak, though that's true, too, but that Trump is a colossal fool and has been owned for decades.
In the form of an elevator pitch, you aren't bankrupt until your creditors pull the plug, and they pulled Trump's plug long ago. The ONLY thing that saved Trump was a pile of dirty money that needed laundering, and the KGB was killing two birds with the one stone. (1) Clean(ish) dollars for filthy rubles. (2) Trump on a leash if they ever needed to jerk it.
At this point, I don't think Putin needs to pull Trump's strings much. I think he has a computer model of Trump that's better than most weather prediction systems. He knows what inputs Trump is getting from FAUX, and he even knows most of the Twitter-based inputs based on when Trump tweets. He probably has sources inside the White House that give him accurate assessments for how little attention Trump pays to such sources as General Kelly and the CIA. From the inputs Putin gets a highly accurate prediction of what Trump is going to do, and if he likes it, then he does nothing. If he doesn't like it, then Putin tweaks the inputs or even the situation until Trump's behavior is back in the "acceptable" range.
My apologies. The first line of my comment (the one to which I am replying now) says "Facebook" where I obviously intended "Slashdot". I hope my mistake was obvious from the context, but still, there's no excuse. However, the comment does apply with some modification to Facebook, though I think it is much less possible that Facebook could adopt, even partially for any aspect of their website, such a non-profit cost-recovery feature-funding model as I am advocating.
The Subject: is based on a kind of joke, but I can't share it on Slashdot without a perversion of the original language. Yet another feature I wish I could help fund, though I doubt that there would be a large enough group on Slashdot such that the feature would ever get the commitment needed for implementation. (In such cases, I'd just have to pick other features or costs that I'd like to help fund.)
One of the things that would improve Facebook would be some kind of quality-based selector for the first visible comment after each story. That "first post" tends to direct the conversation, but more often than not, it directs the conversation in some nonproductive direction, amplified by the brokenness of the moderation system that quite often gives the FP an insightful moderation. (Many discussion systems attempt (halfheartedly) to implement a solution with sort-order selectors.) Yet another example of the kind of feature I would be interested in helping to fund if only Slashdot had such a funding alternative--and if you disagree, then you could fund other features or none at all.
Anyway, returning form meta to my primary reaction to the article, this story is obviously a framing lie (Level 3). You can approach the reality ("machines wear out") from the perspective of a problem that needs to be solved, for example by making wind turbines that last longer and are easier to repair, or from the perspective of a new business opportunity, but this story quite deliberately frames the situation in apocalyptic terms.
Now I'm going to look at the rest of the discussion. Of course I'm seeking "funny", but with the slimmest of hopes these years. I'm also going to look for insights such as the real motivations of whoever published this story. Were I a gambling man, I'd bet on Exxon right out of the gate, but that particular corporate cancer has become rather clever about hiding the money trail...
I think my Subject: for this branch is a typo... Actually the EC should be blamed for failing to do its job...
However, on the subject of Senators, I think their idea was that a separate basis of power would provide another check and balance. On that line of analysis, direct election of the Senators is a mistake, because it's relying on the same basis as the Representatives in the House.
If I got to rewrite the 17th Amendment, it would change the basis of the Senate to wealth, specifically in terms of taxes paid. Each Senator would represent 1% of the tax revenue of the federal government. That would have been difficult until recently, but now we have computers that can solve large knapsack problems fairly rapidly. We don't need perfect solutions, but basically need to start with large taxpayers distributed around the nation and add enough smaller voters to balance things out for each Senator. You'd know exactly who your senator was and exactly why he was ignoring you.
What about corporations? Darn good question and shows you're awake. The only question is whether to allocate certain senators to corporations or just mix them in as though they were actually human beings. Just depends on the federal taxes actually paid.
I don't think these attacks on the EC are well justified because the founders were quite clear that one of the main purposes of the EC was to prevent presidents like Trump, whose only campaign tactic is to make mobs angry. The entire notion of "faithless elector" would be anathema to them, because the electors were NOT supposed to be chained to the voters. If the EC was working as intended, Trump is EXACTLY the president they wanted to prevent.
Perhaps a secret ballot in the EC would help? I really think that a lot of the electors might have voted against Trump if they had been able to do so. Given the dislike of Hillary (regardless of whether that dislike was legitimate or ginned up), it is quite possible the EC would also have been unable to vote for her. In that case, they would have had to fall back on the other mechanisms for picking a president, and they certainly could not have found a worse president than #PresidentTweety.
Just a footnote, but don't forget that they wanted a system that would confer strong legitimacy, something like a mandate to lead, after strongly contested elections. I rather wish that they had been able to innovate all the way to a parliamentary system instead of creating such a winner-take-all system.
Z^-1
If I ever had a mod point to give, then I might give you one on the grounds that it's the only visible mention of "hackers" in this discussion.
In general, I was not made happy by the lack of "funny" comments, even though it's a serious topic with little room for humor. However, it was more saddening to see the dominance of the discussion by obvious trolls and sock puppets. Does it call for a review of the ontology of lies? Or a new ontology of trolls?
The so-called victory of #PresidentTweety was razor thin. What that actually means is that each and EVERY group that can plausibly claim to have influenced about 80,000 voters has an equally plausible claim to be the margin of Trump's residency in the "dump", as he described the White House. Actually, you could argue for 40,000 if they were voters swung away from Hillary and over to Trump.
There are strong and credible evaluations (including some bipartisan ones) that strongly indicate that the tactics of Putin's goons influenced at least that many suckers among the millions of voters they targeted. Ergo, it's rather hard to deny that Trump owes Putin, but it's only a question of degree. My assessment is that Trump is much more beholden to Mike Pence for delivering the votes of the religious lunatics.
Or perhaps it's more significant that the US government is almost surely more guilty of interfering in elections than the Russians? If money does translate into votes, then it would be a sure call. Do you know how much of the Marshall Plan funding was actually diverted to the CIA? And how much of that dark money was used for meddling in elections in places like Italy and Japan?
Still, it feels worse when our own ox has been gored. It might be worse in this case only because of the old KGB kompromat on Trump that Putin inherited. (I still think the Golden Shower rumor is a clever feint created by Putin to make his puppet feel safer.)
Why was that AC tripe moderated into visibility. And "insightful", too? In a flying pig's eye. Or rather in the eyes of a herd of flying sock puppets with mod points to burn. There is a substantive reply, but NOT for AC.
When you "assume", you make an "ass" of "u" and "me". Old joke, but I think it's quite relevant here. (The joke also rendered me quite averse to the word "assume".)
Stock prices have NEVER been based on perfect information. There is no perfect information. Stock prices are just a matter of opinion, but at least they used to be the opinions of human beings, and they used to be based on things the companies actually owned and did and were expected to do in the future. The future is another thing we know almost nothing about.
However, now stock prices are driven by gamesters with computers. The computers have absolutely NO conception of value. They only react to inputs. The computer buys when the program 'says' some other computer will probably pay a higher price in the future and the computer sells when the program 'says' the stock price will fall in the future. There is no relation to reality there, just knee-jerk reactions to selected inputs. I think random numbers would work as well.
Now your mention of network effects is something else. Of course a larger network should have more value than a smaller network.
Oh wait. That's assuming the network is doing something valuable. Near as I can tell, the "value" of Facebook could only be measured in terms of wasted human time. Our most precious and only real asset. Wasted.
Well, I agree with you more than the other reply, but I still think you are seriously underestimating the "coerced" element of the freedom equation. People tend to focus on the stick aspect of personal information, the human mistakes that can be used to threaten you, while mostly ignoring the carrots from knowing your interests, tastes, and even your strengths.
Serrendipitously, I was just reading an old "Wise Buying" guide from the BBB. The first substantive chapter is about advertising, and one of the early topics is superlatives and puffery. Look at the Orange OxyMoron in the White House and tell me again how it's completely harmless.
If you think share price reflects anything about the real value of a company, then you are seriously delusional. The stock market has become a game played among fast computers, each of which is buying shares at insane rates based on some programmed fantasy that some other sucker will buy those shares at a higher price at some moment in the future. There are so many hilarious aspects of the bubble that you can only laugh--and wait for the implosion.
I confess that I own some shares, but only because I'm too lazy to sell them these days.
The top problem with your analysis and the main reason it doesn't deserve "insightful" moderation is that the transaction is crooked. We have no idea what the REAL value of our personal information is. The way it works is that the corporate cancers that harvest our private information can make enormous profits in exchange for bangles and trifles.
I think email is a better example than the ones you [4151743] mentioned. We know that the google is making substantial profits, probably even gigantic profits, from the personal information that they have harvested from our Gmail accounts. Do ANY of us know the real costs of Gmail? On an honest cost-recovery basis, perhaps a Gmail account would actually cost a few dollars per year. (I still think that a CSB-based approach could implement that model, but...)
Anyway, it's too phucking late now. "Possession is nine points of the law", and they already possess all of our personal data, and some more besides. (That's a joke about the derived personal data that we aren't even aware of, even though it's the most insidious kind of data.) Plus they got all the lawyers. We lowly peasants are SOOOO screwed. We might as well just shut up and enjoy our "free" email accounts.
If you don't trust the corporate cancer and agree to love, honor, and obey the ToS, then you'll merely force them to take away your email address. Probably remove your birthday, too.
Actually, I was looking for "funny" in this thread. The obvious jokes were something along the lines of "I caught the distrust virus" or "Too late, it got me!". Couldn't find anything along such lines. *sigh* Sadly typical for Slashdot these days.
The corporate cancers are winning. Or maybe that should be past tense and we're just in the grace period until advances in drone technology and self-driving cars eliminate any need to keep the humans around. Thus endeth the Fermi Paradox?
Solutions? We don't need no stinkin' solutions! Certainly not on Slashdot.