This is the digital equivalent of political protesting. It's civil disobedience not criminal activity. Nobody was hurt, no damage was done, and nothing was lost. These protesters' actions are not a danger to society and criminalising them removes yet another legitimate outlet for civil disobedience as political protest.
I think I'm the first to post this here, so here goes a very brief (and therefore not strictly accurate) account of what's happening...
Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and Engels predicted this in their books Das Kapital, 1876-1894. They understood the nature of capitalism in that is was a very effective system for increasing wealth inequality, i.e. it helps the rich to get richer by making the poor poorer, by exerting continuous downward pressure on earned income (wages, salaries, and contractual work) and producing ever more extreme mechanisms for the wealthy (owners) to accrue increasing control over capital for their own benefit.
Baby boomers, millennials, the gig economy, precarious employment, anti-union legislation, political and legal corruption, environmental degradation, unhealthy and dangerous working conditions, immoral and illegal wars, racism and police brutality, etc., are all symptoms of capitalism working as it is supposed to. Nothing's broken. This is how our chosen economic system works by design.
The "Golden Age of Capitalism", post WWII until the mid-1970s, was the result of massive wealth redistribution, e.g. tax payer funded public infrastructure building that created millions of jobs, rapid expansion and subsidy of further and higher education, and progressive taxation, whereby the the richest paid the highest rates of taxes in order to fund govt. infrastructure projects, education, etc., starting from after the Great Depression, which itself was caused by massive wealth inequality. In other words, the USA enjoyed a brief period of unprecedented economic prosperity because it adopted a form of socialist policies known as Keynesianism.
What did I miss?
BTW, this guy made a whacky film that runs through the central concepts modern life as we experience them today. It's dense, covering a lot of ground in a very short time, so worth using the pause button while you think through what he's presenting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My guess is that diplomacy between North Korea, South Korea, China, the USA, and a few others had already been quietly ongoing for months, if not years. More than likely without the president's knowledge. Not picking on the stable genius in the White House at the moment. This is pretty much how international diplomacy mostly works; long, slow, quiet, and boring and you never hear about it until right near the end when some politician, by sheer serendipity, takes the credit for it. Yes, you can become a Nobel Peace Prize winner just by not being an asshole for one critical moment and the rest has all been done for you long in advance.
If this opportunity for opening channels of communication and cool, calm, collected negotiation is here, why not take it? If managed well by all sides, many more good things can come of it? Who thinks that nuclear armed countries spending time together, talking about non-proliferation isn't a good thing?
Do you know how cheap and annoying AI bots could make telemarketing? I can see a day when most people maintain a whitelist of callers that they'll accept calls from, i.e. only calls in their address book. AI bots will clog up our infrastructure in the same way that SPAM clogs up email services (~90% of emails sent).
Also expect loads of phone calls from lawyers representing deceased Nigerian princes with amazing offers, IT technicians telling you you phone/computer is infected with a virus, and tax authorities telling you to pay up now or go to jail.
Allows researchers to upload their data, methods, algorithms/calculations, etc.. Allows anyone else to check and report errors/problems and suggest improvements. Open data can also be re-purposed but that may be an open temptation to indulge in p-hacking.
Why should they give up fake news? It makes a lot of money and brings them a lot of free publicity and political attention. That's just what rich and powerful people love.
Google's and Facebook's policies have effectively turned most online news into clickbait. Media outlets have to do this to compete with each other and gain advertising revenue in the environment created by them.
Facebook runs on the same principle: If you can incite/provoke enough indignant moral outrage, you can get your messages out there and make some money.
In an environment like that, do you really think that anyone who's in it to make money is worried about journalistic integrity or the truth?
Inciting/provoking indignant moral outrage has always been a problem in news, i.e. there's always competition for people's attention, which is in short supply. What companies like Google and Facebook have done is to magnify this problem to the point where it overwhelms everything else.
"As more local and state governments and their various agencies seek to use Gmail..."
For an organisation as large, powerful, influential, and as involved in US politics as Google, it sounds like a really bad idea to have sensitive govt. messages flowing through Google's servers. I mean, why not just use a Chinese, Russian, or EU email service for official govt. communications?
National & state govt's should have publicly accountable email accounts with all messages and accesses fully available for audit and those should be the only email accounts that national and state employees and elected representatives use for work related communications.
It's not surprising considering that Trump's message to the world has been about the only thing he's been consistent on: If you're not of white European descent, heterosexual, and Christian, you're not welcome in the USA.
I studied applied linguistics and I've done exhaustive linguisitic analyses of advertising and other genres of language. And yes, while they're technically correct or just plain nonsensical, e.g. "leaves you feeling visibly younger", they still mislead, relying on people's surface reading/listening of the texts. What's important is the communicative intent of the advertisers, which is to mislead/deceive through deliberately engineered texts, and what the majority of readers/listeners understand from it, i.e. not the literal meaning of the text under a critical eye but the 'natural', everyday reading that most people habitually do.
Advertising is not always dishonest, and in fact in most countries advertising that is wrong or dishonest is actually illegal. Advertisers try and create an emotional tie between a person and a product. If you can't do it with honest facts then maybe you should find a company to work for which actually has a product worth advertising.
Technically this is probably true. However, in practice, if there's one thing that advertisers are good at, it's finding ways around laws and regulations about telling the truth. Also, thanks to so called 'light touch' regulation, i.e. no regulation, it means that they can get away with murder.
And... maybe... politicians are reluctant to call advertisers liars, or at least misleading. You know, after all the crap they often spout themselves. Don't want to start any honesty and transparency campaigns that might come back to bite them, do they?
It's as if Silicon Valley created a time machine that takes workers back to the (lack of) labour laws in the USA in the mid 19th century. At least that's what I understand from the ideas espoused as "the gig economy."
It may be that many of the claims made about nootropic dietary supplements are fraudulent because the doses of the active ingredients in popular commercial brands are too small to have any effect: https://www.japha.org/article/...
My guess is that if anything has the effects that they claim, it'd be classified as a pharmaceutical and require extensive research and clinical trials to determine appropriate dosage levels, side-effects, longer-term health effects, etc..
Apparently, the evidence from preliminary studies so far hasn't been promising, i.e. no effect on adults. If you're a strict vegan, it might be advisable to take taurine supplements though - consult with a medical expert on the subject before taking the internet's word for it.
In other words, just another brand of snake oil. There's one born every minute.
Does this mean that the UK might turn Zuckerberg into the USA equivalent of Julian Assange? I wonder which countries might offer Zuckerberg political assylum. Myanmar, Saudi Arabia or any of those oppressive regimes who use Facebook to track down political dissidents and incite violent hatred against minorities perhaps?
If a warrant for questioning is put out in any EU country (and the UK is still in the EU), Zuckerberg can be arrested and extradited from any EU country back to the UK.
We have an expression for when you do things like take security measures after a security breech. It's "closing the door after the horse has bolted." Also, in Facebookese, "clear" probably doesn't mean "delete" either. More likely means "hide it from you but available to anyone else who pays for it."
Are we sure that the stable genius in the Whitehouse didn't just watch an episode of Silicon Valley and think it was a documentary/news? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
From my experience in recording studios (ex-musician who also learned about recording at music college) and working with sound engineers, the major difference between analogue and digital is in the recording medium itself. In a good digital studio setup recording gets near perfect signal recording. In a good analogue studio setup, engineers tend to push the gain levels up to the point where there's a little over-saturation of the analogue master tape. This over-saturation introduces subtle distortion which gives a softer, warmer sound to the ear. another popular strategy for introducing subtle analogue distortion include using analogue valve pre-amps for microphones in otherwise digital recording setups.
At the end of the day, it's the engineer who has the biggest impact on how a recording sounds (I've been lucky enough to sit alongside and observe some talented engineers while they worked and it's impressive what they can do with sound). Vinyl can sound harsh and digital can sound warm if you know what you're doing. But vinyl inevitably introduces rumble and scratch into the audio reproduction mix, no matter how clean and high the quality of pressings are. Some people clearly just like the sound of vinyl for all its properties.
We can't identify feelings or emotions (many people erroneously conflate the two) even with the most advanced and cumbersome brain imaging technologies, e.g. fMRI & PET.
However, it's relatively easy to measure people's levels of cognitive arousal. I think we should introduce these arousal sensor hats for senators, congressmen, members of parliament, etc.. It'd be great to see when they're making evidence-informed rational decisions or just acting out of some incidental state of arousal. It could tell us a lot about the misattribution of arousal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in our political decision-making processes, especially for our current stable geniuses in leadership in the USA and UK at the moment.
Just looked at the 2017 results of OECD PISA test results. China, the origin of Maoism, outperforms the USA in all categories: Maths by 61, Science by 36, & Reading by 20 points.
Sorry, incomplete use of statistics and I can see that my statement is false. The 40% figure is a definition of an impoverished neighbourhood, i.e. areas where 40% or more of the population live on less than $25,100 for a family of 4 per year; that's $6,275 per family member per year.
These are the people who are dragging down the US national average in OECD PISA test scores.
Don't you think it's interesting that you compared spending on public education to Maoism? Do you consider the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Canada to be Maoist?
Syria is still recognised as a sovereign country by the international community. As yet, no legal basis for de-legitimising the Syrian regime or any of its members has been presented in an international court of law. Declarations from poorly informed politicians and pundits are just hot air.
Under a diplomatic framework and international oversight, the Syrian regime agreed to controlled, supervised destruction of all their chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities. That doesn't sound like an illegitimate regime to me, as much as we may deplore their actions in the Syrian conflict.
Additionally, there is insufficient verifiable evidence on what chemical weapons attacks have taken place and who is responsible for them. At the moment, conjecture points to both the Syrian regime and the US/Saudi-backed militias being culpable. Note that the accusations and condemnations from the US and its allies came before any verifiable evidence could be gathered, e.g. hearsay and apparently staged video evidence from the 'white helmets' operating among the US/Saudi-backed militias alone cannot be regarded as reliable sources. They need corroboration.
I also suspect that US intelligence personnel have a good idea of who's culpable but that what they know doesn't align with the US and its allies' public narrative against Syria, Iran, and Russia: "'Truth,' it has been said, 'is the first casualty of war.'" -- Philip Snowden, 1916.
They're going to keep this conflict going at all costs. There's $billions in US tax-payers money to be siphoned off into the US military to support it and US arms suppliers are doing very well, thank you very much.
Yep, there's already millions of tonnes of sequested CO2 in rock form in the UK, AKA "the white cliffs of Dover". It's called chalk (calcium carbonate), was made from decaying coccoliths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., and took about 80 million years to form.
Sea-based microorganisms are probably one of the fastest and most economical ways of capturing massive amounts of CO2 but still not fast enough for our predicament. We haven't got 80 million years to reign in global warming before it severely reduces our food supplies and floods our coastal cities.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the digital equivalent of political protesting. It's civil disobedience not criminal activity. Nobody was hurt, no damage was done, and nothing was lost. These protesters' actions are not a danger to society and criminalising them removes yet another legitimate outlet for civil disobedience as political protest.
No, Trump is, without a doubt, the least competent POTUS in history.
I think I'm the first to post this here, so here goes a very brief (and therefore not strictly accurate) account of what's happening...
Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and Engels predicted this in their books Das Kapital, 1876-1894. They understood the nature of capitalism in that is was a very effective system for increasing wealth inequality, i.e. it helps the rich to get richer by making the poor poorer, by exerting continuous downward pressure on earned income (wages, salaries, and contractual work) and producing ever more extreme mechanisms for the wealthy (owners) to accrue increasing control over capital for their own benefit.
Baby boomers, millennials, the gig economy, precarious employment, anti-union legislation, political and legal corruption, environmental degradation, unhealthy and dangerous working conditions, immoral and illegal wars, racism and police brutality, etc., are all symptoms of capitalism working as it is supposed to. Nothing's broken. This is how our chosen economic system works by design.
The "Golden Age of Capitalism", post WWII until the mid-1970s, was the result of massive wealth redistribution, e.g. tax payer funded public infrastructure building that created millions of jobs, rapid expansion and subsidy of further and higher education, and progressive taxation, whereby the the richest paid the highest rates of taxes in order to fund govt. infrastructure projects, education, etc., starting from after the Great Depression, which itself was caused by massive wealth inequality. In other words, the USA enjoyed a brief period of unprecedented economic prosperity because it adopted a form of socialist policies known as Keynesianism.
What did I miss?
BTW, this guy made a whacky film that runs through the central concepts modern life as we experience them today. It's dense, covering a lot of ground in a very short time, so worth using the pause button while you think through what he's presenting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
My guess is that diplomacy between North Korea, South Korea, China, the USA, and a few others had already been quietly ongoing for months, if not years. More than likely without the president's knowledge. Not picking on the stable genius in the White House at the moment. This is pretty much how international diplomacy mostly works; long, slow, quiet, and boring and you never hear about it until right near the end when some politician, by sheer serendipity, takes the credit for it. Yes, you can become a Nobel Peace Prize winner just by not being an asshole for one critical moment and the rest has all been done for you long in advance.
If this opportunity for opening channels of communication and cool, calm, collected negotiation is here, why not take it? If managed well by all sides, many more good things can come of it? Who thinks that nuclear armed countries spending time together, talking about non-proliferation isn't a good thing?
Do you know how cheap and annoying AI bots could make telemarketing? I can see a day when most people maintain a whitelist of callers that they'll accept calls from, i.e. only calls in their address book. AI bots will clog up our infrastructure in the same way that SPAM clogs up email services (~90% of emails sent).
Also expect loads of phone calls from lawyers representing deceased Nigerian princes with amazing offers, IT technicians telling you you phone/computer is infected with a virus, and tax authorities telling you to pay up now or go to jail.
AC, you beat me to it! :)
Yes, Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/
Allows researchers to upload their data, methods, algorithms/calculations, etc.. Allows anyone else to check and report errors/problems and suggest improvements. Open data can also be re-purposed but that may be an open temptation to indulge in p-hacking.
Why should they give up fake news? It makes a lot of money and brings them a lot of free publicity and political attention. That's just what rich and powerful people love.
Google's and Facebook's policies have effectively turned most online news into clickbait. Media outlets have to do this to compete with each other and gain advertising revenue in the environment created by them.
Facebook runs on the same principle: If you can incite/provoke enough indignant moral outrage, you can get your messages out there and make some money.
In an environment like that, do you really think that anyone who's in it to make money is worried about journalistic integrity or the truth?
Inciting/provoking indignant moral outrage has always been a problem in news, i.e. there's always competition for people's attention, which is in short supply. What companies like Google and Facebook have done is to magnify this problem to the point where it overwhelms everything else.
Doesn't anyone see a problem with this?
"As more local and state governments and their various agencies seek to use Gmail..."
For an organisation as large, powerful, influential, and as involved in US politics as Google, it sounds like a really bad idea to have sensitive govt. messages flowing through Google's servers. I mean, why not just use a Chinese, Russian, or EU email service for official govt. communications?
National & state govt's should have publicly accountable email accounts with all messages and accesses fully available for audit and those should be the only email accounts that national and state employees and elected representatives use for work related communications.
It's not surprising considering that Trump's message to the world has been about the only thing he's been consistent on: If you're not of white European descent, heterosexual, and Christian, you're not welcome in the USA.
I studied applied linguistics and I've done exhaustive linguisitic analyses of advertising and other genres of language. And yes, while they're technically correct or just plain nonsensical, e.g. "leaves you feeling visibly younger", they still mislead, relying on people's surface reading/listening of the texts. What's important is the communicative intent of the advertisers, which is to mislead/deceive through deliberately engineered texts, and what the majority of readers/listeners understand from it, i.e. not the literal meaning of the text under a critical eye but the 'natural', everyday reading that most people habitually do.
So yeah, they're still a bunch of lying scumbags.
Advertising is not always dishonest, and in fact in most countries advertising that is wrong or dishonest is actually illegal. Advertisers try and create an emotional tie between a person and a product. If you can't do it with honest facts then maybe you should find a company to work for which actually has a product worth advertising.
Technically this is probably true. However, in practice, if there's one thing that advertisers are good at, it's finding ways around laws and regulations about telling the truth. Also, thanks to so called 'light touch' regulation, i.e. no regulation, it means that they can get away with murder.
And... maybe... politicians are reluctant to call advertisers liars, or at least misleading. You know, after all the crap they often spout themselves. Don't want to start any honesty and transparency campaigns that might come back to bite them, do they?
It's as if Silicon Valley created a time machine that takes workers back to the (lack of) labour laws in the USA in the mid 19th century. At least that's what I understand from the ideas espoused as "the gig economy."
...when I read that advertisers "...must not promote dishonest activity." What do they think advertisers do?
It may be that many of the claims made about nootropic dietary supplements are fraudulent because the doses of the active ingredients in popular commercial brands are too small to have any effect: https://www.japha.org/article/...
My guess is that if anything has the effects that they claim, it'd be classified as a pharmaceutical and require extensive research and clinical trials to determine appropriate dosage levels, side-effects, longer-term health effects, etc..
Apparently, the evidence from preliminary studies so far hasn't been promising, i.e. no effect on adults. If you're a strict vegan, it might be advisable to take taurine supplements though - consult with a medical expert on the subject before taking the internet's word for it.
In other words, just another brand of snake oil. There's one born every minute.
Does this mean that the UK might turn Zuckerberg into the USA equivalent of Julian Assange? I wonder which countries might offer Zuckerberg political assylum. Myanmar, Saudi Arabia or any of those oppressive regimes who use Facebook to track down political dissidents and incite violent hatred against minorities perhaps?
If a warrant for questioning is put out in any EU country (and the UK is still in the EU), Zuckerberg can be arrested and extradited from any EU country back to the UK.
We have an expression for when you do things like take security measures after a security breech. It's "closing the door after the horse has bolted." Also, in Facebookese, "clear" probably doesn't mean "delete" either. More likely means "hide it from you but available to anyone else who pays for it."
Are we sure that the stable genius in the Whitehouse didn't just watch an episode of Silicon Valley and think it was a documentary/news? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
From my experience in recording studios (ex-musician who also learned about recording at music college) and working with sound engineers, the major difference between analogue and digital is in the recording medium itself. In a good digital studio setup recording gets near perfect signal recording. In a good analogue studio setup, engineers tend to push the gain levels up to the point where there's a little over-saturation of the analogue master tape. This over-saturation introduces subtle distortion which gives a softer, warmer sound to the ear. another popular strategy for introducing subtle analogue distortion include using analogue valve pre-amps for microphones in otherwise digital recording setups.
At the end of the day, it's the engineer who has the biggest impact on how a recording sounds (I've been lucky enough to sit alongside and observe some talented engineers while they worked and it's impressive what they can do with sound). Vinyl can sound harsh and digital can sound warm if you know what you're doing. But vinyl inevitably introduces rumble and scratch into the audio reproduction mix, no matter how clean and high the quality of pressings are. Some people clearly just like the sound of vinyl for all its properties.
We can't identify feelings or emotions (many people erroneously conflate the two) even with the most advanced and cumbersome brain imaging technologies, e.g. fMRI & PET.
However, it's relatively easy to measure people's levels of cognitive arousal. I think we should introduce these arousal sensor hats for senators, congressmen, members of parliament, etc.. It'd be great to see when they're making evidence-informed rational decisions or just acting out of some incidental state of arousal. It could tell us a lot about the misattribution of arousal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in our political decision-making processes, especially for our current stable geniuses in leadership in the USA and UK at the moment.
Just looked at the 2017 results of OECD PISA test results. China, the origin of Maoism, outperforms the USA in all categories: Maths by 61, Science by 36, & Reading by 20 points.
Sorry, incomplete use of statistics and I can see that my statement is false. The 40% figure is a definition of an impoverished neighbourhood, i.e. areas where 40% or more of the population live on less than $25,100 for a family of 4 per year; that's $6,275 per family member per year.
These are the people who are dragging down the US national average in OECD PISA test scores.
Don't you think it's interesting that you compared spending on public education to Maoism? Do you consider the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, and Canada to be Maoist?
Syria is still recognised as a sovereign country by the international community. As yet, no legal basis for de-legitimising the Syrian regime or any of its members has been presented in an international court of law. Declarations from poorly informed politicians and pundits are just hot air.
Under a diplomatic framework and international oversight, the Syrian regime agreed to controlled, supervised destruction of all their chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities. That doesn't sound like an illegitimate regime to me, as much as we may deplore their actions in the Syrian conflict.
Additionally, there is insufficient verifiable evidence on what chemical weapons attacks have taken place and who is responsible for them. At the moment, conjecture points to both the Syrian regime and the US/Saudi-backed militias being culpable. Note that the accusations and condemnations from the US and its allies came before any verifiable evidence could be gathered, e.g. hearsay and apparently staged video evidence from the 'white helmets' operating among the US/Saudi-backed militias alone cannot be regarded as reliable sources. They need corroboration.
I also suspect that US intelligence personnel have a good idea of who's culpable but that what they know doesn't align with the US and its allies' public narrative against Syria, Iran, and Russia: "'Truth,' it has been said, 'is the first casualty of war.'" -- Philip Snowden, 1916.
They're going to keep this conflict going at all costs. There's $billions in US tax-payers money to be siphoned off into the US military to support it and US arms suppliers are doing very well, thank you very much.
Yep, there's already millions of tonnes of sequested CO2 in rock form in the UK, AKA "the white cliffs of Dover". It's called chalk (calcium carbonate), was made from decaying coccoliths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., and took about 80 million years to form.
Sea-based microorganisms are probably one of the fastest and most economical ways of capturing massive amounts of CO2 but still not fast enough for our predicament. We haven't got 80 million years to reign in global warming before it severely reduces our food supplies and floods our coastal cities.