Open Discussion standards are those which protect the user from censorship and deletion of their work on the site. They generally permit removal of illegal material or grossly offensive images and slurs, but do not permit censorship by content type or topic.
Will Minds.com adopt one of these, and if so, will that make it hard for it to become a popular social network since most people "seem" to want a steady stream of inoffensive palaver and kitty pictures instead of substantive issues, debates, articles, discussions, etc.?
There is nothing wrong with the five-paragraph essay once you understand that it is a structure which expands to fit the topic as necessary. Trying to impose sentence limits is sort of like demanding that people write their thesis in haiku form.
However, what we are seeing here is teachers dumbing down this formula in order to teach it to people who are congenitally unable to write. We keep dodging this in our egalitarian society, but: some are born to be writers, and some to be ditch diggers. Gosh, that sounds harsh, doesn't it? And yet it's reality.
A better question would be to ask who should be in our English classes, and why we no longer teach English through classical literature, which shows application instead of dry theory alone. Maybe to look into these "reaction essays" which are basically congenial emoting about a topic.
We teach form over content because not everyone can understand the content. As a result, we have generated a flood of nonsense from people who have no business writing.
This requires you knowing what you want, instead of randomly shouting out song titles because they appeared on social media, as most people seem to do.
I think of this as "The Metallica Problem" referring to what this band faced after they first started to get big (Master of Puppets era).
They could sell out, and get huge instantly, or keep making material in line with their past efforts, and be niche.
The advantage to being niche is that you do not then have to maintain huge band status, and get more of a chance to do what you wanted to without being obligated to the desire of your audience for your music to always become simpler, dumber, and more exuberant.
Either way, they would have ended up rich. Perhaps not mega-rich with the second, but when you are counting in millions, does anyone really care that much?
Throwing money at the homeless problem has not solved it. Clearly most of these people have mental health issues or drug/alcohol dependency issues. That means that appeals to rationality are not going to work, but relocation might. Allow cities to exclude people for bad behavior, and suddenly this becomes a non-issue.
In the meantime, every tax that we spend just makes government more intrusive in our lives, and puts us farther down the path that the Soviet Union explored. The more we depend on government, the weaker we get as individuals, until you end up with a lot of clueless people shrugging their way through life.
"People" are not a fungible quantity; they differ greatly as individuals, groups, and even between regions. Instead of trying to make a movie to make a generic consumer happy, make a quality movie that people who like quality cinema can recognize. Others will emulate them.
In my view, and I state this in addition to your excellent points, we are heading toward "Brave New World": our desire to be important, successful, experience pleasure, etc. will make our consumer society into a soulless empty hell in which there is no escape. We're already mostly there. The movie Idiocracy began as satire, became prophecy, and now is basically a documentary, and that's in a dozen years.
Since 2007, as a species we have been playing with slightly improved versions of stuff invented in the 1970s. Our actual innovation has stagnated, and the result is that we are more focused on entertainment products than anything with long-term potential. Signs of the decline.
Rome fell for the same reason that Athens fell: it lost its ability to coordinate itself. Diversity was both a symptom and a factor in that decline. As Plato pointed out, unstable republics import foreigners in order to have allies for their tyrants, and this accelerates instability to crash.
Tell me all about the diverse republics in history that have done well by themselves and not crashed shortly after diversity was introduced. Yes, it takes them many centuries to reach The Bitter End, but in the meantime, they become abusive and dystopian places. Is that the future you want?
If we feed everyone today, soon we will have ten billion people on Earth. We have already reduced wilderness by a radical degree and are killing off natural species as a result. Letting humans starve now prevents both ecocide and having to let more starve later. Gates' plan will work about as well as Windows 10...
Species die when they lose habitat and their numbers fall below a certain threshold. At that point, they become inbred and lose vitality, then perish. This is happening to the Tasmanian Devil:
Once abundant throughout Australia, Tasmanian devils are now indigenous only to the island state of Tasmania....Efforts in the late 1800s to eradicate Tasmanian devils, which farmers erroneously believed were killing livestock (although they were known to take poultry), were nearly successful. In 1941, the government made devils a protected species, and their numbers have grown steadily since.
Approximately 600 years ago, the devil went extinct on Australia’s mainland, which is thought to be due to its predation by dingoes and indigenous Australians....Since the Tasmanian Devil population has been nearly decimated by several previous population bottlenecks, all devils are very genetically similar. Consequently, the genes that normally confer the ability to differentiate between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’ (e.g. the MHC genes) are so similar between individuals that it is believed that their immune systems can no longer differentiate between tissues from themselves and other devils. Similarly, this is thought to be a cause behind why devils cannot recognize the DFTD cancer, they cannot distinguish the DFTD cancer.
Air pollution affects everyone, so a much larger group is at stake, and air pollution is impossible to escape, even if you move to the rapidly diminishing wilds. Further, most smokers who die of these diseases do so at the end of life, which makes it unclear whether smoking was the sole cause.
Not to be an unreasonable skeptic, but these things offer little that anyone needs. You can listen to music by playing MP3 files. These gadgets seem like a way of further dumbing down the internet instead of pushing people to be better than they are right now.
People have been dying from industrial pollution for a long time. If a smoker gets lung cancer, was it the diesel exhaust he lived surrounded by, the chemicals he used on his farm, or the smokes?
Before the war against tobacco, most smokers used pipes and cigars. These are not inhaled. They are inherently less dangerous than cigarettes which clot the lungs with soot.
It was always a scapegoat. We blamed a behavior we could force to change and ignored what we could not change. How do you overnight stop industry from using diesel, or keep people from driving around in their cars? We are dependent on these technologies, but we can afford to lose smokers.
Now that people are dying of air pollution related diseases at an increasing rate, we see that smoking was a scapegoat all along. Sure, someone who smokes two packs a day and gets zero exercise will eventually manage to kill themselves. For most, however, the risk is not that great, but we all suffer from air pollution, since like the air, it travels the globe.
Since this landmark study came out, the internet industry has been in a low-grade panic because the data shows that its ads do not work and thus, its numbers are all fake. People online do not respond to ads as people on television or reading a newspaper do; they simply tune out the noise. Ever since then, these companies have been directly or indirectly faking their numbers, because they know when the real numbers come out, the Big Tech game is up and they all go back to managing Windows networks at donut shops in small midwestern cities.
"I know we don't see eye-to-eye, but if we work together, you'll understand where I'm coming from." Then they will also depend on him, and be more loyal, instead of dissident critics.
Most codes of conduct now are being used in the same way political correctness is: to prohibit certain types of thinking, forcing everyone to think in the ways that are left, which conveniently benefit one group attempting to take over what's left of Western Civilization.
Having a positive goal like this, and basing it on civility and not political alignment, is intelligent. It nurtures rather than censors.
When the public internet was new, we all feared spam because those unsolicited commercial messages would clog up dialogue, obstructing meaning.
Since that time, humanity has worked diligently to convert that dialogue into spam by making it as standardized as possible. The new Gmail, which automatically suggests insincere boilerplate responses to messages from others, is the first step.
Once we get AI phones to mimic the most basic functions of human interaction, the whole of human communications will have become spam. Then we can rest in complete vapidity on top of a pile of money of dubious actual value, and wait for the inevitable end.
Slashdot Mirror
Open Discussion standards are those which protect the user from censorship and deletion of their work on the site. They generally permit removal of illegal material or grossly offensive images and slurs, but do not permit censorship by content type or topic.
Will Minds.com adopt one of these, and if so, will that make it hard for it to become a popular social network since most people "seem" to want a steady stream of inoffensive palaver and kitty pictures instead of substantive issues, debates, articles, discussions, etc.?
There is nothing wrong with the five-paragraph essay once you understand that it is a structure which expands to fit the topic as necessary. Trying to impose sentence limits is sort of like demanding that people write their thesis in haiku form.
However, what we are seeing here is teachers dumbing down this formula in order to teach it to people who are congenitally unable to write. We keep dodging this in our egalitarian society, but: some are born to be writers, and some to be ditch diggers. Gosh, that sounds harsh, doesn't it? And yet it's reality.
A better question would be to ask who should be in our English classes, and why we no longer teach English through classical literature, which shows application instead of dry theory alone. Maybe to look into these "reaction essays" which are basically congenial emoting about a topic.
We teach form over content because not everyone can understand the content. As a result, we have generated a flood of nonsense from people who have no business writing.
I love Imprecation, but that's probably not what you mean.
Oh well. Bummer.
This requires you knowing what you want, instead of randomly shouting out song titles because they appeared on social media, as most people seem to do.
I think of this as "The Metallica Problem" referring to what this band faced after they first started to get big (Master of Puppets era).
They could sell out, and get huge instantly, or keep making material in line with their past efforts, and be niche.
The advantage to being niche is that you do not then have to maintain huge band status, and get more of a chance to do what you wanted to without being obligated to the desire of your audience for your music to always become simpler, dumber, and more exuberant.
Either way, they would have ended up rich. Perhaps not mega-rich with the second, but when you are counting in millions, does anyone really care that much?
Throwing money at the homeless problem has not solved it. Clearly most of these people have mental health issues or drug/alcohol dependency issues. That means that appeals to rationality are not going to work, but relocation might. Allow cities to exclude people for bad behavior, and suddenly this becomes a non-issue.
In the meantime, every tax that we spend just makes government more intrusive in our lives, and puts us farther down the path that the Soviet Union explored. The more we depend on government, the weaker we get as individuals, until you end up with a lot of clueless people shrugging their way through life.
"People" are not a fungible quantity; they differ greatly as individuals, groups, and even between regions. Instead of trying to make a movie to make a generic consumer happy, make a quality movie that people who like quality cinema can recognize. Others will emulate them.
I have an old laptop with 200 gigabytes of MP3 files. I can waddle over to it, hold the donut I am eating with my teeth, and click on whatever I want.
Is Alexa that much easier?
In my view, and I state this in addition to your excellent points, we are heading toward "Brave New World": our desire to be important, successful, experience pleasure, etc. will make our consumer society into a soulless empty hell in which there is no escape. We're already mostly there. The movie Idiocracy began as satire, became prophecy, and now is basically a documentary, and that's in a dozen years.
This time, let's learn a lesson from history and not destroy our civilization.
Since 2007, as a species we have been playing with slightly improved versions of stuff invented in the 1970s. Our actual innovation has stagnated, and the result is that we are more focused on entertainment products than anything with long-term potential. Signs of the decline.
Rome fell for the same reason that Athens fell: it lost its ability to coordinate itself. Diversity was both a symptom and a factor in that decline. As Plato pointed out, unstable republics import foreigners in order to have allies for their tyrants, and this accelerates instability to crash.
Tell me all about the diverse republics in history that have done well by themselves and not crashed shortly after diversity was introduced. Yes, it takes them many centuries to reach The Bitter End, but in the meantime, they become abusive and dystopian places. Is that the future you want?
If we feed everyone today, soon we will have ten billion people on Earth. We have already reduced wilderness by a radical degree and are killing off natural species as a result. Letting humans starve now prevents both ecocide and having to let more starve later. Gates' plan will work about as well as Windows 10...
Species die when they lose habitat and their numbers fall below a certain threshold. At that point, they become inbred and lose vitality, then perish. This is happening to the Tasmanian Devil:
and
(Note to doubters: the people during the fall of Rome couldn't see it, either.)
Air pollution affects everyone, so a much larger group is at stake, and air pollution is impossible to escape, even if you move to the rapidly diminishing wilds. Further, most smokers who die of these diseases do so at the end of life, which makes it unclear whether smoking was the sole cause.
Not to be an unreasonable skeptic, but these things offer little that anyone needs. You can listen to music by playing MP3 files. These gadgets seem like a way of further dumbing down the internet instead of pushing people to be better than they are right now.
People have been dying from industrial pollution for a long time. If a smoker gets lung cancer, was it the diesel exhaust he lived surrounded by, the chemicals he used on his farm, or the smokes?
Before the war against tobacco, most smokers used pipes and cigars. These are not inhaled. They are inherently less dangerous than cigarettes which clot the lungs with soot.
It was always a scapegoat. We blamed a behavior we could force to change and ignored what we could not change. How do you overnight stop industry from using diesel, or keep people from driving around in their cars? We are dependent on these technologies, but we can afford to lose smokers.
Now that people are dying of air pollution related diseases at an increasing rate, we see that smoking was a scapegoat all along. Sure, someone who smokes two packs a day and gets zero exercise will eventually manage to kill themselves. For most, however, the risk is not that great, but we all suffer from air pollution, since like the air, it travels the globe.
"create new value and user experience" => a new gee whiz gadget for you to express your personal uniqueness, drama, and quirks by owning.
Since this landmark study came out, the internet industry has been in a low-grade panic because the data shows that its ads do not work and thus, its numbers are all fake. People online do not respond to ads as people on television or reading a newspaper do; they simply tune out the noise. Ever since then, these companies have been directly or indirectly faking their numbers, because they know when the real numbers come out, the Big Tech game is up and they all go back to managing Windows networks at donut shops in small midwestern cities.
"I know we don't see eye-to-eye, but if we work together, you'll understand where I'm coming from." Then they will also depend on him, and be more loyal, instead of dissident critics.
Good thinking on his part.
Most codes of conduct now are being used in the same way political correctness is: to prohibit certain types of thinking, forcing everyone to think in the ways that are left, which conveniently benefit one group attempting to take over what's left of Western Civilization.
Having a positive goal like this, and basing it on civility and not political alignment, is intelligent. It nurtures rather than censors.
The future of American policing will be robots that follow suspects until they can be identified.
In the future, you will face robots moving at 30 mph through pedestrian traffic to tail you on foot.
They will listen in to all conversation for politically incorrect thought.
They may even sniff out illicit substances and chase down the users.
Is this "freedom"? We'd better get our act together before then.
People are growing interested in these things, so they type them into search engines.
If we really live in an open society, the only response is to ignore this and publish your own views instead.
When the public internet was new, we all feared spam because those unsolicited commercial messages would clog up dialogue, obstructing meaning.
Since that time, humanity has worked diligently to convert that dialogue into spam by making it as standardized as possible. The new Gmail, which automatically suggests insincere boilerplate responses to messages from others, is the first step.
Once we get AI phones to mimic the most basic functions of human interaction, the whole of human communications will have become spam. Then we can rest in complete vapidity on top of a pile of money of dubious actual value, and wait for the inevitable end.