But it won't get really bad until he fills Obama's last Supreme Court pick with the most enthusiastic kisser he can find. He needs that additional insurance against what happened to Nixon. However, my recollection was that their key ruling against Nixon was unanimous. Hard to believe it could happen these years...
Just checked. It was United States v Nixon in 1974. Unanimous that he had to turn over the tapes.
Was that a question or an attempted clarification? If a question, then I have to guess the answer might be "I absolutely do not support Citizens United and regard it as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions, competing with Bush v Gore and Dred Scott."
Went through all of the visible comments moderated insightful or funny, and I think yours may have been the best of the lot. However, still lots of room for improvement.
With regards to your closing question about turnout, I think you should consider it more broadly. Why did roughly 45% of ALL the voters not bother to vote? I think it's because they are right to believe that their votes don't matter. I think the main reason is because their districts are gerrymandered, and the politicians pick their voters first, so the voters know they have no chance to affect the outcome. Also significant is that the ONLY thing that the two parties can actually work together on is making sure that incumbents are favored as much as possible, which is why so many of the politicians in the weaker party may still support the gerrymandering. They wind up in sacrificial districts that are saturated with the excess voters.
Overall disappointment with the discussion was lack of consideration of the potential of hackers. Or maybe those topics simply got dragged into invisibility by the professional trolls? I certainly can imagine Putin ordering the attempt as long as he was certain it couldn't be traced. I don't think he could be convinced it was certain, however, and it would be an act of war if he'd gotten caught.
However, I still think the decisive factor that tilted the enthusiasm and the election in Trump's favor was Comey's letter--and that it may have been instigated by a Russian mole. Trump was getting battered on 20 fronts, but after that letter was publicized, suddenly all the focus was on Hillary's email again.
Then Comey sends the never-mind letter, and now Trump also says he was just kidding the mob while they chanted "Lock her up!" More fun than a barrel of monkeys. On fire.
Still no "funny" mods? If I ever saw a mod point to give, I think I'd have been more likely to give "funny" to some of the "insightful" ones.
Minor substantive reply on this comment: The Secretary of Education is much more powerful than most people realize. A LOT of Trump's votes came from people indoctrinated by the public schools, which were largely reoriented by Bennett back in the Reagan days. Yeah, the same hypocrite who wrote books about "virtue" while losing millions of dollars due to his gambling habit. He's still around, he's still a right-wing lunatic, and he supported the Donald, too. Back in the Reagan days he helped divide the public schools into a tiny elite track, basically a new kind of lottery that sustained the hopeful fantasy of parents too poor to afford the good private schools, while most public schools were reoriented as obedience training for future wage slaves, prison inmates, or worst of all, Trump voters. (He also boosted the bad private schools of religious stripes.)
Reminds me of the Trump-era investment advice. Plastics are for losers. You should invest in makers of wife-beater T-shirts, anti-anxiety medications, and the for-profit prisons.
Pretty sure we've already had this discussion, but if my memory is correct, then I didn't use this version of it:
If the American political system is broken beyond repair, then it's just a question of when it implodes. I'm not fully joking when I say that Trump might convert it into a monarchy, even though Nixon failed in that ambition. Trump wants it more and the party discipline of today's so-called Republican Party is like the Bolsheviks, somewhere between Lenin's time and the end of Stalin's purges.
If the American political system can still be repaired (for example by clarifying that corporations are NOT human beings, but only legal fictions that must sometimes have limited treatment as juridical persons), then I favor evolutionary repair over the revolution. The outcome is uncertain in either case, but I don't like the human corpses that a real revolution must produce. Our capacity for carnage has become too great.
Who appointed you the language police? Is that some special privilege of 5-digit user IDs?
Strong language shows strong emotion. Fortunately for your precious eyeballs, I don't feel that strongly about language police. I'm too busy pondering the Email Inquisition...
Yeah, I know I risked triggering another low-user-ID-arms race. Some of the little numbers still lurk around, I think. Either that or whipslash should raise money for Slashdot by selling the small numbers to the highest bidders. "What am I bid for the user ID 731?"
Eh? Not an AC comment? Why are you trying to bury it?
Anyway, I wanted to react to the Subject: because I think it is unfair. I doubt that many Slashdot members who could vote actually voted for Trump. If they hate email, they probably voted for the Libertarian. The Slashdot members who can't vote are probably paid trolls from Russia and Macedonia, and the one good thing about voter ID laws is that it's much harder for illegal aliens to vote now. Therefore, "some of you [who] voted for this" may be a null set.
Do you expect anyone to get in a serious scientific discussion with such hilarious math? Do you have ANY idea how anything actually works?
Come on, tell us the truth. Who's paying you for that tripe? You cannot possibly be so ignorant or crazy by accident.
Just my personal annotation that this branch should be regarded as "pointless and closed" and that the questions were rhetorical. No intention to feed the trolls and even less expectation of an honest answer to ANY question. You can't provide food for thought in such a case.aRe:Polit
How to work an "elephant in the room" joke into the Subject:?
This article seems to belong in the anti-news category. News is supposed to be surprising or at least interesting. At this point I see no grounds for interest.
Will Trump survive to 2020, or will the cognitive dissonance of sometimes having to say rational things set his spray-tan on fire before that? Will he live long enough to dump Pence for Ivanka? If he makes it that far, he could abdicate the throne at any time and keep it in the Family, surely the richest and most powerful in America by that time.
I'm not trying to be funny anymore. Reality has exceeded the capacity of my imagination. Climate does not exist, as I sit here watching the earliest snowfall in more than 50 years. Climate change? There is no climate to change. It's all random ostriches and orange and pink striped elephants.
I agree that a certain amount of oscillation is normal, but I think there are cases when the oscillations go so far as to destroy the pendulum. I'm prefer to use an example from the financial markets, however. Easier to follow in some ways.
The lack of any transaction charges in the stock market has created a kind of friction-free money machine. Flash Boys is a good introduction. The trading has no relationship to anything except the perception that the price of the shares will increase before they are sold, even if the time interval of holding the shares is measured in seconds or microseconds. Perhaps the main point of the book is how some cunning bastards rigged the game by jumping between the bids, so they could buy faster than the higher bidder could, and then turn around and sell the same shares to the higher bidder while pocketing most of the difference. The risk is that you can't sell at a higher price, but they already had the higher price in the bag because they could move faster. Worth billions, but... This sort of thing can only be done by computers, and so the engine of the stock market spins faster and faster, with the oscillations always threatening to go out of control. Nearly happened in 2007. The rational response would have been to prevent it from happening again, but obviously they didn't. Maybe the engine is accelerating out of control again on the rumors? ("Buy on rumor, sell on the news.") At some point a sufficiently low-friction engine under continual acceleration has to destroy itself.
Don't get me wrong. I'm NOT arguing against change. I just prefer evolutionary change rather than revolution. There is no guarantee on the outcome in either case, though the long-term average is for things to get better. The problem is that we always live on the short term, and lots of people die in any revolution worthy of the label. At least in the case of evolution you can usually wait for the losers to die off peacefully. China in Ten Words is an interesting discussion of the revolutionary mentality in China...
Amusing comment, and if I ever saw a mod point to give, I think your comment deserves an "interesting" or "funny", even though I think I mostly disagree with you.
For example, I think President Obama's main legacy will be to have been the last president. I think Trump is about to turn America into a monarchy, and with the full control of the government from his personal and rebranded so-called Republican Party, he might succeed. The real test will be in 2020, when I expect Trump to dump Pence and nominate Ivanka as his VP. If he wins that election, then he can abdicate at any time and still keep it in the Family (sic). By that time the Trumps should certainly be the richest and most powerful Family in America.
Back in the days of yore when Slashdot had a sense of humor, I must have gotten more funny mods?
Another example of "insight" on today's Slashdot. *sigh* Still missing the "funny" posts more, but perhaps your post deserved that mod for the joke that Trump has ever been anything but a stupendous liar. Again, I have to note that I am not criticizing you [presidenteloco] or your writing, but just the atmospheric decline.
The ride should be interesting, in accord with the most cursed Chinese interpretation of "interesting". I suspect a lot of people are going to get off now--or get pushed off.
Insight on today's Slashdot, eh? Not intended as a personal criticism, though I personally miss the "funny" posts more.
No, the Donald's past actions are quite clear. Trump loves crushing his opponents. The "You're fired" bit on TV was just a way to personalize Trump's personal preferences and make them more marketable.
If Trump avoids impeachment, then I predict that Trump will dump Pence in 2020. He will pick Ivanka as his VP, to replace him in the White House in 2024. How's that for America's first female president, AKA queen? Things will be perfectly clear by then, but we'll get a lot of clarity as soon as he names his Supreme Court justice in a few days. Even as I write, I'm sure he is interviewing his deplorable list of candidates in search of the one with the highest degree of personal loyalty to the Donald.
Notwithstanding the Electoral College, the will of the voters was clearly expressed in 2012 for President Obama to pick that justice, and by the largest number of the voters in 2016 that Trump NOT pick that justice.
Not sure if I'm supposed to thank you for the request for favorable mods because I'm not sure which post you were referring to. The long thread still bears my Subject: line, but mostly it has diverged widely from the two points I was attempting to make (and I also had a typo of "Facebook ads" for "Facebook adds"). The OP did wind up with a favorable mod (as of now), for what little that is worth on today's Slashdot.
Mostly I have little to contribute to the discussion as it diverged. As usual, most of the noisiest participants were apparently trolls attempting to prevent any serious consideration of any of the real issues.
The most important issue I was trying to focus on was deliberately manufactured fake news, with emphasis on the motivations for creating it. I guess that should have led to some mention of the Macedonians and their gullible targets, but from looking over the discussion here, it seems like that topic would have to start with square one, and I don't want to spend the time this morning...
Anyway, I definitely agree with you [shaitand] that objective truths do exist, but they are pretty much irrelevant in today's politics as practiced in America. Perhaps you were also the contributor who focused on the reality that each person, even a supposedly objective news reporter, has viewpoints and personal perspectives on every issue. Again I agree, but we've reached the point where attempting to be honest about your starting point is already a disqualification to say anything that might offend people with differing perspectives--no matter how false they are.
Votes (and polls) are a different kind of thing. Public opinion is a fact of sorts, but it is a mutable thing that can be manipulated for fun and profit. Some of the trolls might be in it for fun or personal conviction (especially the religious ones), but I'm increasingly convinced the serious long-term ranters must have a business model. Like the Macedonians or the guy with the pineapple pen.
It seems like a wonderful way to export only real news approved by the despotic government of your choice.
Can you say doubleplusgood?
Didn't you mean "doubleplusungood"?
You know, like today's Slashdot. Not intended as a personal criticism, but just a comment on the state of today's Slashdot. Your comment could only be regarded as "insightful" for the weakest and smallest values of insight. Ditto the other "insightful" posts. No funny posts at all, whereas there was a time when they were the main motivation to visit Slashdot. These days? Apparently the primary motivation nowadays is just having too much free time on my hands.
Anyway, on the article itself, there are two lines of analysis. One is whether or not bad information can be overcome by good information. That's what some people used to claim. Something along the lines of "Censorship is always bad, but the truth shall prevail over their scurrilous lies!" Seems so piquant in TrumpWorld, eh?
However, I'm going to focus on the second line of analysis. Can REAL news and the truth compete with fake news, lies, and propaganda on economic terms? Evidently not. The production costs are much lower, and the limitations are completely in favor of the bad stuff. Fake news is only limited by imagination, lies are only limited by the gullibility of the suckers, and propaganda is only limited by the RoI of the scammers and kleptocrats who are paying for it.
The notion of news as a public service required as a loss leader in exchange for monopolies of certain bandwidths was just a phase America went through. You know, back when the country was great, if there is any speck of sanity in Trump's rantings. Funny, I must have missed his tweet about the new Ministry of My Truth or ELSE.
Slashdot is a (minor) part of the problem, but I think I'm ready to withdraw my suggestion of the broadly democratic funding model focused on solutions. I can already see where it won't work because the same scumbags who pay for the propaganda would just hire hordes of sock puppeteers to flood the system with counter-features. For example, if a bunch of the nice folks got together and tried to fund a feature to improve the moderation on Slashdot, then the sock puppets would fund a counter-feature to subvert it.
In social contexts most people don't like to trigger disagreements. People always believe what they want to believe, but the dynamics of Facebook just make it worse. Rather than computerized and automatic self-brainwashing through "personalization" of your search results, the better to keep your eyeballs from wandering away from the ads, Facebook ads the human power of (Facebook-debased) "friendship" to propagate the BS--but who can argue with making the "members" happier in their delusions?
Another way to view it is as a glut of information. In a technical context, none of us can read all of the new research being published in our own field of expertise. You could spend 24 hours a day and still fall behind. But if you flip the coin and prefer to believe the earth is flat, then the google is perfectly happy to stuff your eyeholes and earholes with that "evidence", 24/7 as long as you keep clicking on the ads.
News and truth should not be profit centers. Fake news and lies are much more profitable and will always crush them. The only limit on fake news is human imagination, and the only limit on lies is the gullibility of the suckers.
That's the only bit that you vaguely cared about? You don't see any differences in anything?
Nothing I can see to respond to in your reply. Perhaps you should simply shoot yourself now? Avoid the rush.
Well. I guess that I can see one point of agreement upon reflection. Slashdot is no part of any solution to any problem. Probably never was.
Currently reading my second psychology book on the vagaries of memory. Probably just deluding myself to imagine that Slashdot was ever any better or worse than it is now, though the new ads seem memorably annoying (unless I've just forgotten about them).
Question mark in the Subject: because I want to cling to optimism, but I personally think it's too late now. Would it make you feel any better if I blamed Al Gore? You see, by just giving them the money to create the Internet, he helped them ignore the financial models. Now the resulting mess has become so huge that we're struggling to figure out the boundaries between abuse of our privacy by huge companies, abuse of our privacy by criminal hackers, and abuse of our privacy by criminal hackers in the names of the huge companies.
I think SMTP is a good example to start with. If some financial model had been built into the protocol, then the email spam problem might not have gotten out of hand. For example, imagine if the original email protocol had just tracked sending versus receiving between servers to support possible billing later on. With a wrinkle like that, you wouldn't even need to charge money to deter spammers. You could charge them in delay times penalizing servers that originate too much email. Have to keep the marginal cost away from zero... (Delusional as I am, I still think email could be saved, but it won't be because the big companies have decided that "Live and let spam" is cheaper.)
I confess that I don't really have much to say about Twitter. Spammers' natural heaven if ever there was one.
Wouldn't you prefer to make the spammers' lives hellacious?
Interesting in that I just had a recent experience along these lines. Around here most of the electronics shops are overrun with maker's reps, and it's a really bad idea. This example might be illustrative.
The maker was ASUS and the product was a dual-SIM Zenfone Go. Turned out to be useless for my specialized application, though I'm probably going to keep it as a backup for regular use. The ASUS reps were completely clueless about the problems, though it turned out the Huawei and Freetel reps knew exactly what was wrong.
My initial intention had been to buy a Huawei or Freetel, but that's where maker's reps in the stores distort things. Of course they are trying to latch onto the floating customers and direct (or misdirect) them to buying their employer's products.
My confusion is why the stores think they are saving money when they are actually destroying their own business. The reason you go to a multi-brand electronics store is to compare the various brands, hopefully with the support of a salesperson who knows all the brands and the differences between them. If you want to be bamboozled by a particular maker, you'd just go to the website and skip the store.
As for the google, I think their main business model these days is do-it-yourself brainwashing. They call it personalization, but what it really means is showing you what you want to see, including evidence of what you want to believe, no matter how misguided. Things that might offend you and drive you away from their ads are to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of Trump's so-called victory.
Time for investment advice: You should buy the makers of anti-anxiety drugs and wife-beater t-shirts. For-profit prisons look hot, too. Plastics, smastics. You should have bought your google years ago. Invest in big poverty NOW.
There's a difference of degree. Of course politicians want to win elections, but there is actually a rational argument to be made that your beliefs don't matter unless you can win the elections. However, during the period between elections, you are supposed to work for the good of the nation, not be solely focused on maximizing the bad outcomes you can blame on the other party. President Obama actually thought he could appeal to the so-called patriotism of the so-called Republicans. I found this most offensive in the case of foreign policy. There was a time when both parties could at least pretend to agree that politics stopped at the water's edge.
My opinion of the Donald is becoming more and more clarified now that the excuse of the election has been removed. I think Trump is Putin's puppet and no president of mine. I was unable to conceive of any circumstances that would make me consider my citizenship, but several of Trump's nominees are already beyond my conception. If there are plausibly legitimate elections in 2018 and 2020, I might change my mind, but I think the American experiment in representative government has died. I think your position is just saying "It doesn't matter whether democracy jumped out the window or was pushed." In contrast, I think the election was massively rigged, the riggers (barely) won, and I expect them to tighten down the screws, and HARD. Or maybe you have some other explanation how Hillary won the popular vote while the so-called Republicans wound up with total control of all three branches of government? (Jumping the gun a bit on the judicial branch, but Trump's list of candidates is gawdawful, and I think that his pledge to the list is in the 5% of his statements that are true.)
Trying to close with the joke, so here's some investment advice. Stocks to buy include makers of anti-anxiety medications and wife-beater t-shirts, as well as for-profit prisons. Plastics are dead. You want to get in on the ground floor of big poverty now!
I was going to report the scores, both for this discussion as it times out and for this particular branch that I started. Oh yeah, I was also looking for any interesting comments that justified a reply. Sort of found one, though it was unmoderated. Nothing relevant to anything that I wrote that seemed to merit any comment, and the overall score was too low to be worth reporting in detail.
I remember finding one comment moderated funny. I think it was supposed to be based on Trump's small hands, but as jokes go it was quite lame. However, I didn't really expect much humor since the topic of murder isn't too good for jokes.
The so-called insightful comments again failed to strike me as insightful for the most part. Tiny bits and pieces.
Lots of ad hominem attacks in the replies. Little reliable evidence to be found anywhere. In terms of classic debate, no one seems to have met the burden of proof or the burden of rejoinder. Sad.
Why am I still wasting time on Slashdot? Unable to remember the last time Slashdot provided any useful technical knowledge or interesting discussions. Once in a while there are some breaking news items, but that's also pretty rare these years. At what point does optimism cross into stupidity or even insanity? Or am I somehow amused by watching the clowns dance? I guess that must be it.
Slashdot Mirror
But it won't get really bad until he fills Obama's last Supreme Court pick with the most enthusiastic kisser he can find. He needs that additional insurance against what happened to Nixon. However, my recollection was that their key ruling against Nixon was unanimous. Hard to believe it could happen these years...
Just checked. It was United States v Nixon in 1974. Unanimous that he had to turn over the tapes.
Just agreeing with you, but sadly.
I will say that the resistance is futile. That's why I recommend investing in for-profit prisons.
Was that a question or an attempted clarification? If a question, then I have to guess the answer might be "I absolutely do not support Citizens United and regard it as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions, competing with Bush v Gore and Dred Scott."
Went through all of the visible comments moderated insightful or funny, and I think yours may have been the best of the lot. However, still lots of room for improvement.
With regards to your closing question about turnout, I think you should consider it more broadly. Why did roughly 45% of ALL the voters not bother to vote? I think it's because they are right to believe that their votes don't matter. I think the main reason is because their districts are gerrymandered, and the politicians pick their voters first, so the voters know they have no chance to affect the outcome. Also significant is that the ONLY thing that the two parties can actually work together on is making sure that incumbents are favored as much as possible, which is why so many of the politicians in the weaker party may still support the gerrymandering. They wind up in sacrificial districts that are saturated with the excess voters.
Overall disappointment with the discussion was lack of consideration of the potential of hackers. Or maybe those topics simply got dragged into invisibility by the professional trolls? I certainly can imagine Putin ordering the attempt as long as he was certain it couldn't be traced. I don't think he could be convinced it was certain, however, and it would be an act of war if he'd gotten caught.
However, I still think the decisive factor that tilted the enthusiasm and the election in Trump's favor was Comey's letter--and that it may have been instigated by a Russian mole. Trump was getting battered on 20 fronts, but after that letter was publicized, suddenly all the focus was on Hillary's email again.
Then Comey sends the never-mind letter, and now Trump also says he was just kidding the mob while they chanted "Lock her up!" More fun than a barrel of monkeys. On fire.
Still no "funny" mods? If I ever saw a mod point to give, I think I'd have been more likely to give "funny" to some of the "insightful" ones.
Minor substantive reply on this comment: The Secretary of Education is much more powerful than most people realize. A LOT of Trump's votes came from people indoctrinated by the public schools, which were largely reoriented by Bennett back in the Reagan days. Yeah, the same hypocrite who wrote books about "virtue" while losing millions of dollars due to his gambling habit. He's still around, he's still a right-wing lunatic, and he supported the Donald, too. Back in the Reagan days he helped divide the public schools into a tiny elite track, basically a new kind of lottery that sustained the hopeful fantasy of parents too poor to afford the good private schools, while most public schools were reoriented as obedience training for future wage slaves, prison inmates, or worst of all, Trump voters. (He also boosted the bad private schools of religious stripes.)
Reminds me of the Trump-era investment advice. Plastics are for losers. You should invest in makers of wife-beater T-shirts, anti-anxiety medications, and the for-profit prisons.
Pretty sure we've already had this discussion, but if my memory is correct, then I didn't use this version of it:
If the American political system is broken beyond repair, then it's just a question of when it implodes. I'm not fully joking when I say that Trump might convert it into a monarchy, even though Nixon failed in that ambition. Trump wants it more and the party discipline of today's so-called Republican Party is like the Bolsheviks, somewhere between Lenin's time and the end of Stalin's purges.
If the American political system can still be repaired (for example by clarifying that corporations are NOT human beings, but only legal fictions that must sometimes have limited treatment as juridical persons), then I favor evolutionary repair over the revolution. The outcome is uncertain in either case, but I don't like the human corpses that a real revolution must produce. Our capacity for carnage has become too great.
Who appointed you the language police? Is that some special privilege of 5-digit user IDs?
Strong language shows strong emotion. Fortunately for your precious eyeballs, I don't feel that strongly about language police. I'm too busy pondering the Email Inquisition...
Yeah, I know I risked triggering another low-user-ID-arms race. Some of the little numbers still lurk around, I think. Either that or whipslash should raise money for Slashdot by selling the small numbers to the highest bidders. "What am I bid for the user ID 731?"
Eh? Not an AC comment? Why are you trying to bury it?
Anyway, I wanted to react to the Subject: because I think it is unfair. I doubt that many Slashdot members who could vote actually voted for Trump. If they hate email, they probably voted for the Libertarian. The Slashdot members who can't vote are probably paid trolls from Russia and Macedonia, and the one good thing about voter ID laws is that it's much harder for illegal aliens to vote now. Therefore, "some of you [who] voted for this" may be a null set.
Remember, nobody expects the Email Inquisition.
Do you expect anyone to get in a serious scientific discussion with such hilarious math? Do you have ANY idea how anything actually works?
Come on, tell us the truth. Who's paying you for that tripe? You cannot possibly be so ignorant or crazy by accident.
Just my personal annotation that this branch should be regarded as "pointless and closed" and that the questions were rhetorical. No intention to feed the trolls and even less expectation of an honest answer to ANY question. You can't provide food for thought in such a case.aRe:Polit
How to work an "elephant in the room" joke into the Subject:?
This article seems to belong in the anti-news category. News is supposed to be surprising or at least interesting. At this point I see no grounds for interest.
Will Trump survive to 2020, or will the cognitive dissonance of sometimes having to say rational things set his spray-tan on fire before that? Will he live long enough to dump Pence for Ivanka? If he makes it that far, he could abdicate the throne at any time and keep it in the Family, surely the richest and most powerful in America by that time.
I'm not trying to be funny anymore. Reality has exceeded the capacity of my imagination. Climate does not exist, as I sit here watching the earliest snowfall in more than 50 years. Climate change? There is no climate to change. It's all random ostriches and orange and pink striped elephants.
I agree that a certain amount of oscillation is normal, but I think there are cases when the oscillations go so far as to destroy the pendulum. I'm prefer to use an example from the financial markets, however. Easier to follow in some ways.
The lack of any transaction charges in the stock market has created a kind of friction-free money machine. Flash Boys is a good introduction. The trading has no relationship to anything except the perception that the price of the shares will increase before they are sold, even if the time interval of holding the shares is measured in seconds or microseconds. Perhaps the main point of the book is how some cunning bastards rigged the game by jumping between the bids, so they could buy faster than the higher bidder could, and then turn around and sell the same shares to the higher bidder while pocketing most of the difference. The risk is that you can't sell at a higher price, but they already had the higher price in the bag because they could move faster. Worth billions, but... This sort of thing can only be done by computers, and so the engine of the stock market spins faster and faster, with the oscillations always threatening to go out of control. Nearly happened in 2007. The rational response would have been to prevent it from happening again, but obviously they didn't. Maybe the engine is accelerating out of control again on the rumors? ("Buy on rumor, sell on the news.") At some point a sufficiently low-friction engine under continual acceleration has to destroy itself.
Don't get me wrong. I'm NOT arguing against change. I just prefer evolutionary change rather than revolution. There is no guarantee on the outcome in either case, though the long-term average is for things to get better. The problem is that we always live on the short term, and lots of people die in any revolution worthy of the label. At least in the case of evolution you can usually wait for the losers to die off peacefully. China in Ten Words is an interesting discussion of the revolutionary mentality in China...
Amusing comment, and if I ever saw a mod point to give, I think your comment deserves an "interesting" or "funny", even though I think I mostly disagree with you.
For example, I think President Obama's main legacy will be to have been the last president. I think Trump is about to turn America into a monarchy, and with the full control of the government from his personal and rebranded so-called Republican Party, he might succeed. The real test will be in 2020, when I expect Trump to dump Pence and nominate Ivanka as his VP. If he wins that election, then he can abdicate at any time and still keep it in the Family (sic). By that time the Trumps should certainly be the richest and most powerful Family in America.
Back in the days of yore when Slashdot had a sense of humor, I must have gotten more funny mods?
Another example of "insight" on today's Slashdot. *sigh* Still missing the "funny" posts more, but perhaps your post deserved that mod for the joke that Trump has ever been anything but a stupendous liar. Again, I have to note that I am not criticizing you [presidenteloco] or your writing, but just the atmospheric decline.
The ride should be interesting, in accord with the most cursed Chinese interpretation of "interesting". I suspect a lot of people are going to get off now--or get pushed off.
Insight on today's Slashdot, eh? Not intended as a personal criticism, though I personally miss the "funny" posts more.
No, the Donald's past actions are quite clear. Trump loves crushing his opponents. The "You're fired" bit on TV was just a way to personalize Trump's personal preferences and make them more marketable.
If Trump avoids impeachment, then I predict that Trump will dump Pence in 2020. He will pick Ivanka as his VP, to replace him in the White House in 2024. How's that for America's first female president, AKA queen? Things will be perfectly clear by then, but we'll get a lot of clarity as soon as he names his Supreme Court justice in a few days. Even as I write, I'm sure he is interviewing his deplorable list of candidates in search of the one with the highest degree of personal loyalty to the Donald.
Notwithstanding the Electoral College, the will of the voters was clearly expressed in 2012 for President Obama to pick that justice, and by the largest number of the voters in 2016 that Trump NOT pick that justice.
Not sure if I'm supposed to thank you for the request for favorable mods because I'm not sure which post you were referring to. The long thread still bears my Subject: line, but mostly it has diverged widely from the two points I was attempting to make (and I also had a typo of "Facebook ads" for "Facebook adds"). The OP did wind up with a favorable mod (as of now), for what little that is worth on today's Slashdot.
Mostly I have little to contribute to the discussion as it diverged. As usual, most of the noisiest participants were apparently trolls attempting to prevent any serious consideration of any of the real issues.
The most important issue I was trying to focus on was deliberately manufactured fake news, with emphasis on the motivations for creating it. I guess that should have led to some mention of the Macedonians and their gullible targets, but from looking over the discussion here, it seems like that topic would have to start with square one, and I don't want to spend the time this morning...
Anyway, I definitely agree with you [shaitand] that objective truths do exist, but they are pretty much irrelevant in today's politics as practiced in America. Perhaps you were also the contributor who focused on the reality that each person, even a supposedly objective news reporter, has viewpoints and personal perspectives on every issue. Again I agree, but we've reached the point where attempting to be honest about your starting point is already a disqualification to say anything that might offend people with differing perspectives--no matter how false they are.
Votes (and polls) are a different kind of thing. Public opinion is a fact of sorts, but it is a mutable thing that can be manipulated for fun and profit. Some of the trolls might be in it for fun or personal conviction (especially the religious ones), but I'm increasingly convinced the serious long-term ranters must have a business model. Like the Macedonians or the guy with the pineapple pen.
It seems like a wonderful way to export only real news approved by the despotic government of your choice.
Can you say doubleplusgood?
Didn't you mean "doubleplusungood"?
You know, like today's Slashdot. Not intended as a personal criticism, but just a comment on the state of today's Slashdot. Your comment could only be regarded as "insightful" for the weakest and smallest values of insight. Ditto the other "insightful" posts. No funny posts at all, whereas there was a time when they were the main motivation to visit Slashdot. These days? Apparently the primary motivation nowadays is just having too much free time on my hands.
Anyway, on the article itself, there are two lines of analysis. One is whether or not bad information can be overcome by good information. That's what some people used to claim. Something along the lines of "Censorship is always bad, but the truth shall prevail over their scurrilous lies!" Seems so piquant in TrumpWorld, eh?
However, I'm going to focus on the second line of analysis. Can REAL news and the truth compete with fake news, lies, and propaganda on economic terms? Evidently not. The production costs are much lower, and the limitations are completely in favor of the bad stuff. Fake news is only limited by imagination, lies are only limited by the gullibility of the suckers, and propaganda is only limited by the RoI of the scammers and kleptocrats who are paying for it.
The notion of news as a public service required as a loss leader in exchange for monopolies of certain bandwidths was just a phase America went through. You know, back when the country was great, if there is any speck of sanity in Trump's rantings. Funny, I must have missed his tweet about the new Ministry of My Truth or ELSE.
Slashdot is a (minor) part of the problem, but I think I'm ready to withdraw my suggestion of the broadly democratic funding model focused on solutions. I can already see where it won't work because the same scumbags who pay for the propaganda would just hire hordes of sock puppeteers to flood the system with counter-features. For example, if a bunch of the nice folks got together and tried to fund a feature to improve the moderation on Slashdot, then the sock puppets would fund a counter-feature to subvert it.
In social contexts most people don't like to trigger disagreements. People always believe what they want to believe, but the dynamics of Facebook just make it worse. Rather than computerized and automatic self-brainwashing through "personalization" of your search results, the better to keep your eyeballs from wandering away from the ads, Facebook ads the human power of (Facebook-debased) "friendship" to propagate the BS--but who can argue with making the "members" happier in their delusions?
Another way to view it is as a glut of information. In a technical context, none of us can read all of the new research being published in our own field of expertise. You could spend 24 hours a day and still fall behind. But if you flip the coin and prefer to believe the earth is flat, then the google is perfectly happy to stuff your eyeholes and earholes with that "evidence", 24/7 as long as you keep clicking on the ads.
News and truth should not be profit centers. Fake news and lies are much more profitable and will always crush them. The only limit on fake news is human imagination, and the only limit on lies is the gullibility of the suckers.
Welcome to TrumpWorld, eh?
That's the only bit that you vaguely cared about? You don't see any differences in anything?
Nothing I can see to respond to in your reply. Perhaps you should simply shoot yourself now? Avoid the rush.
Well. I guess that I can see one point of agreement upon reflection. Slashdot is no part of any solution to any problem. Probably never was.
Currently reading my second psychology book on the vagaries of memory. Probably just deluding myself to imagine that Slashdot was ever any better or worse than it is now, though the new ads seem memorably annoying (unless I've just forgotten about them).
Question mark in the Subject: because I want to cling to optimism, but I personally think it's too late now. Would it make you feel any better if I blamed Al Gore? You see, by just giving them the money to create the Internet, he helped them ignore the financial models. Now the resulting mess has become so huge that we're struggling to figure out the boundaries between abuse of our privacy by huge companies, abuse of our privacy by criminal hackers, and abuse of our privacy by criminal hackers in the names of the huge companies.
I think SMTP is a good example to start with. If some financial model had been built into the protocol, then the email spam problem might not have gotten out of hand. For example, imagine if the original email protocol had just tracked sending versus receiving between servers to support possible billing later on. With a wrinkle like that, you wouldn't even need to charge money to deter spammers. You could charge them in delay times penalizing servers that originate too much email. Have to keep the marginal cost away from zero... (Delusional as I am, I still think email could be saved, but it won't be because the big companies have decided that "Live and let spam" is cheaper.)
I confess that I don't really have much to say about Twitter. Spammers' natural heaven if ever there was one.
Wouldn't you prefer to make the spammers' lives hellacious?
Interesting in that I just had a recent experience along these lines. Around here most of the electronics shops are overrun with maker's reps, and it's a really bad idea. This example might be illustrative.
The maker was ASUS and the product was a dual-SIM Zenfone Go. Turned out to be useless for my specialized application, though I'm probably going to keep it as a backup for regular use. The ASUS reps were completely clueless about the problems, though it turned out the Huawei and Freetel reps knew exactly what was wrong.
My initial intention had been to buy a Huawei or Freetel, but that's where maker's reps in the stores distort things. Of course they are trying to latch onto the floating customers and direct (or misdirect) them to buying their employer's products.
My confusion is why the stores think they are saving money when they are actually destroying their own business. The reason you go to a multi-brand electronics store is to compare the various brands, hopefully with the support of a salesperson who knows all the brands and the differences between them. If you want to be bamboozled by a particular maker, you'd just go to the website and skip the store.
As for the google, I think their main business model these days is do-it-yourself brainwashing. They call it personalization, but what it really means is showing you what you want to see, including evidence of what you want to believe, no matter how misguided. Things that might offend you and drive you away from their ads are to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of Trump's so-called victory.
Time for investment advice: You should buy the makers of anti-anxiety drugs and wife-beater t-shirts. For-profit prisons look hot, too. Plastics, smastics. You should have bought your google years ago. Invest in big poverty NOW.
Z^3
There's a difference of degree. Of course politicians want to win elections, but there is actually a rational argument to be made that your beliefs don't matter unless you can win the elections. However, during the period between elections, you are supposed to work for the good of the nation, not be solely focused on maximizing the bad outcomes you can blame on the other party. President Obama actually thought he could appeal to the so-called patriotism of the so-called Republicans. I found this most offensive in the case of foreign policy. There was a time when both parties could at least pretend to agree that politics stopped at the water's edge.
My opinion of the Donald is becoming more and more clarified now that the excuse of the election has been removed. I think Trump is Putin's puppet and no president of mine. I was unable to conceive of any circumstances that would make me consider my citizenship, but several of Trump's nominees are already beyond my conception. If there are plausibly legitimate elections in 2018 and 2020, I might change my mind, but I think the American experiment in representative government has died. I think your position is just saying "It doesn't matter whether democracy jumped out the window or was pushed." In contrast, I think the election was massively rigged, the riggers (barely) won, and I expect them to tighten down the screws, and HARD. Or maybe you have some other explanation how Hillary won the popular vote while the so-called Republicans wound up with total control of all three branches of government? (Jumping the gun a bit on the judicial branch, but Trump's list of candidates is gawdawful, and I think that his pledge to the list is in the 5% of his statements that are true.)
Trying to close with the joke, so here's some investment advice. Stocks to buy include makers of anti-anxiety medications and wife-beater t-shirts, as well as for-profit prisons. Plastics are dead. You want to get in on the ground floor of big poverty now!
Didn't I already mark this "pointless and closed"?
ZZ
I was going to report the scores, both for this discussion as it times out and for this particular branch that I started. Oh yeah, I was also looking for any interesting comments that justified a reply. Sort of found one, though it was unmoderated. Nothing relevant to anything that I wrote that seemed to merit any comment, and the overall score was too low to be worth reporting in detail.
I remember finding one comment moderated funny. I think it was supposed to be based on Trump's small hands, but as jokes go it was quite lame. However, I didn't really expect much humor since the topic of murder isn't too good for jokes.
The so-called insightful comments again failed to strike me as insightful for the most part. Tiny bits and pieces.
Lots of ad hominem attacks in the replies. Little reliable evidence to be found anywhere. In terms of classic debate, no one seems to have met the burden of proof or the burden of rejoinder. Sad.
Why am I still wasting time on Slashdot? Unable to remember the last time Slashdot provided any useful technical knowledge or interesting discussions. Once in a while there are some breaking news items, but that's also pretty rare these years. At what point does optimism cross into stupidity or even insanity? Or am I somehow amused by watching the clowns dance? I guess that must be it.