I'm not surprised that Twitter / Facebook and so on are used like this, the Bot Nets have been using them for Command and Control for ages. But why use the "official" NSA Twitter Twaddle? It's pedestrian to discover who accesses specific sites... Why not something more benign like Britney Speers Twitter?
Because it's the official NSA Twitter account.
Think about it from the Russian's perspective, are you talking to some low level spy who doesn't actually have the authority to send the money you're after? An ex-spook like Steele? A Russian counter-intelligence operative?
An official NSA tweet tells you that a very powerful person at the agency is backing the operation. That it's important enough that they're willing to screw with their Twitter account. And you're still relatively indistinguishable from all the other people who read the NSA Twitter account (which in the Russian intelligence community is probably a lot of people).
the "Pinty's Grand slam of curling" offers over $2 million in prize money, and there are a ton of other cash spiels and tournaments. curling is extremely popular on TV in Canada, and these guys and girls are celebrities wherever they go.
Total prize money over multiple events maybe, but the top earning team on the tour last year got $190k, Canadian. That's less than $50k a person when you divide by 4.
The top skips might be minor celebrities but they still walk down the street in relative anonymity (which they probably prefer).
There's a lot of curlers who've retired from top teams while they were still at the top of their game so they could focus on their non-curling careers.
Inb4 all the comments of Telsa being a failure for the amount of money they are losing. But, in reality, that money isn't a loss. It is investment. Look how long Amazon lasted before they turned their first profit.
There is a difference with Amazon in that their expenses were largely fixed (building out their infrastructure) and their per-transaction cost was very low. It was fairly clear that at any point they could just tune down the investments and R&D and profit off their ecommerce margins.
Tesla's problem is that building a car is still really expensive, especially when you take into account things like recalls. And the R&D and factory construction are huge sunk costs. There's a real risk they can't sell enough cars at enough of a markup to pay off their capital expenses.
Of course, there's also a possibility they'll scale up production and suddenly be insanely profitable.
and the team that was losing broke out the old-time straw brooms. Not because they're better in any way, but because they tend to leave debris on the ice that might mess up subsequent shots, aka 'the other team'. It was a bit controversial and the sportscasters discussed the strategy, which is how I knew what was going on. I'm guessing those old brooms have now been outlawed.
Banned, after broomgate they severely restricted what kind of brush head you're allowed to use in competitive events.
The fabric is a specific colour, comes from a specific manufacturer, and the broom actually has to be signed by an official.
I've never tried it, but I can imagine it being fun to do. Like you say, there's plenty of challenge and skill.
To watch though? Not so much.
Throwing the rock is a similar sensation to hitting a golf ball, the actual play has a lot strategy, teammates, and if you're a skilled sweeper you can get a bit of exercise there.
As for watching, you might need to need to play to appreciate it. But I find the strategy adds a lot to the game, a very small difference is rock placement have a massive effect, and there's a lot of rock arrangements where it's very uncertain if a certain shot is even possible.
You also get a lot of individual shots during the game where a minor mistake can put your team in huge danger and maybe cost you the game.
Sport used to be something you played just for fun. Now only those competitors whose sponsors have the deepest pockets stand a chance. Sport should not require kids practicing 12 hours a day from age 6 to be competitive, and then in some sports be over the hill by their early 20s. Kids should be allowed to play sports for fun, not to become some short term corporate or national asset. Parents who permit or force their kids into such training regimens should be strung up for abuse. The Olympics haven't been about sport for a hundred years and this is just a another sign of that.
I agree... but it doesn't really apply to curling.
First this broom is $3k, and $3k isn't much when you're talking elite sports.
And second, curling still is an amateur sport. Almost all of the top players have full-time jobs and I suspect most of the top-20 teams spend more on equipment and travel than they make in winnings and sponsorship.
And most elite curlers don't actually hit the elite level till their late 20's and they stay there into their late 30s. Up until a few years ago three of the best skips (most critical player on the team) were all in their mid-to-late 40s. Fitness matters, but skill and experience are huge.
I don't think you can stop people from absurd amounts of training because people fundamentally like to win, but curling isn't really suffering the issues you're complaining about.
This index score is only relevant is it can only be achieved by skilled, proper sweeping. Otherwise you are just having people train to get a high score, not to sweep properly to win. Someone with an alternative method might score very poorly on the index but do well for rock control.
Agreed, are they measuring pressure? Energy transferred into the ice? Do they account for the area the broom covers (no point sweeping outside the path of the rock)? You might be able to sweep harder if your broom is farther away from the rock, but that tradeoff might not be worth it.
I've tried my own controlled experiments with sweeping in the past and it's really hard to actually figure out what works, there's a huge variance from shot-to-shot, and even if you throw the exact same path the surface still changes between shots. Even the directional sweeping from a couple years ago, although elite teams could do crazy stuff neither myself, nor some of the sub-elite guys I knew, could do anything definitive.
I know the elite teams claim to see some fairly subtle differences in how much difference a particular sweeper makes. At the club level I don't think sweeping does much more than cleaning, half the time people don't even sweep the path of the rock.
Is there a filter to screen out useless PR-driven articles about the Olympics?
This kind of stuff is is only a step above the Olympics commercials Coke and McDonalds crap out every two years (as if any athlete would get near those brands except to collect the check).
This is literally a story about hobbyists hacking together hardware and software to make a training device now used by national teams.
AI getting into the trough (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle) again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)?
Prominent people seem to fear AI (http://time.com/3614349/artificial-intelligence-singularity-stephen-hawking-elon-musk/), but isn't this just Fear of the Unknown? I mean, Elon and Stephen are really smart people, but do they know that most NN:s come down to linear algegra and spiced with non-linearities in the end, just simulating neurons? I mean neurons are common-place on the planet already, equipped with malice and stuff...
Smart outsiders overestimate the risks because they don't really understand the limitations of current AI tech and don't realize how far away hard AI actually is.
Smart insiders underestimate the risks because they see the field in terms of incremental advancements of the current state-of-the-art. They're overly skeptical of the possibility of hard AI and when they do think about it they rely on their expertise and tend to assume it has the same limitations as current AI tech.
Sanders represented something new, at least in living memory; a politician who wants to help people, and who knows Washington.
I don't know, I still remember a guy named Obama.
Sure he went in a little naive, but he certainly knew Washington by his second term. And I think he was easily as empathetic and idealistic as Sanders, as competent as Clinton, and a better speaker than either.
The problem Obama discovered is that the simple response to "yes we can" is "no, we won't let you".
I think Clinton played the game well enough that she could have circumvented Republican resistance, probably better than Obama.
Sanders was not good at the game, he wasn't even able to stop the DNC from turning on him. If he won the Presidency I think the GOP would have eaten him alive.
What's the point of this whole Alphabet thing if they're just going to start merging companies into Google anyway...
Synergies?
When possible Google wants to split off companies as much as possible to avoid anti-trus^H^H^H^H to let each independent company focus on it's own product.
But for something like Nest they probably think it can benefit from really close integration with Google's other services.
This is the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. If you actually believe this, just spend 30 minutes at a college campus. You'll change your tune real quick.
Every liberal millennial I've met. Every. Single. One. was completely incapable of thinking for themselves. They did exactly as their professors indoctrinated them to do and think, without question. Talking to a group of liberal millennials about social issues really is like trying to talk to a flock of sheep.
Within an ideological homogeneous group you're probably going to see a strong correlation between education and IQ.
But Liberals and Conservatives are anything but ideologically homogeneous.
Given two equally intelligent individuals I'd expect the Liberal to be far more likely to seek additional education than the Conservative for the sole reason that Liberals place more value on education and educational institutions.
So I don't think those stats tell us anything about the IQ of Liberals vs Conservatives.
At a basic level the right celebrates authority (everyone in the tribe works together) while the left embraces individuality (everybody free to be themselves). This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
You haven't visited a college campus in this century, have you?
Have you? It's hard to say hello without getting in an argument about something.
Yes, there's a current trend where left-wing student groups protest and try to exclude speakers whom they consider to be particularly objectionable. But that's based on more on perceptions of hate-speech than the ability to ask questions. I think it's a different discussion.
If you have a chance to take a look at some of the archived Slashdot discussions about Hillary's e-mail server debacle, yes the news outlets took it in a ridiculous direction, but there was far more to it. First off, the fact that she individually selected e-mails for submission instead of turning over the server wholesale showed her as being 'above the law' - if you or I had an e-mail server that was the subject of an investigation, we'd never see it again.
I think that part was actually properly done. Initially it wasn't an investigation, it was just 'sort out the emails'. The rule is that when you use a private account for something you're responsible for sorting them out and giving the government your official emails.
When asked if she wiped it, her response of "with a cloth?" showed either a problematic level of ignorance for someone in a position to be making policy on topics of net neutrality, cyber terrorism, right-to-repair, DMCA extensions, and whether Apple should be compelled to put a back door in iOS, or Hillary was being willfully dismissive of something that ultimately happened.
She was an old lady, I don't mind that she was ignorant about technology, a POTUS doesn't have to be knowledgeable about everything. Though it is concerning that she didn't recognize the importance of the issue and get up to speed.
it would have been in her best interest for her to hand over the server, have everyone see there was nothing there, and have that as ammo to use against the people performing the witch hunt...unless, of course, she wasn't as innocent as she claimed.
Here I disagree. The GOP and Fox News were doing everything they could to find or create dirt. Do you really want your worst enemies digging through your personal email looking for ammo?
Her best strategy was to release as little as possible, it was just a strategy that wasn't well executed.
"First woman president" was an oft-touted thing that she brought to the table regardless of whether it was relevant. I would argue that this paradigm is what made the "I'm with her" slogan make sense - it was less about policy and more about identity. By extension, it made her a tough sell for those who didn't share that identity.
The problem was two fold. First, it seemed egotistical because instead of making her campaign about a message or a value it made it about her individually. Second, saying "I'm with her" really emphasizes the idea that you're following a woman, and even for a very forward thinking guy it sounds kinda dorky. It's basically daring guys to be a little bit misogynist.
"The victims often had mixed kratom with other substances, including chemicals taken out of inhalers and found in over-the-counter cold and flu drugs."
So flu drugs and inhalers 'contributed' to their deaths as well as the child laxative used to dilute heroin.
The idea of an FDA approved drug is has an actual pharmacological effect, and the moment you have an effect you also tend to have side effects. And these side effects, even fatal ones, are documented on the medicine itself.
Herbals and other alt-medicines usually avoid side effects by being generally useless. If one is actually doing something significant it should be treated as a drug because it now has the potential to seriously harm someone if misused.
Best to forbid everything.
People had taken up to _9_ different things and only 44 cases?
44 deaths is a lot for something I've never heard of, especially when you consider that you could easily have 10x as many unreported cases.
That's not science, that's anecdotes.
It's activating opiod receptors, that's science. And what happens when you activate too many opiod receptors is also known, that's death.
Stand down, there. You weren't conned into funding Bernie. Bernie was the better candidate in almost every way. We should vote for the better man. We should fund the better man.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Bernie was a fantastic speaker but he had three big flaws. First, his ideas were far-left, even for the Democratic party, that really can scare off voters. Two, he was naive in the sense that he oversold how much he could get accomplished. Three, a lot of his policy was very hand-wavy, now some of that was Clinton denying him top-end advisors, but he didn't have the same policy chops.
Now Clinton was outrageously competent and was much closer policy-wise to the average voter, but she had her own flaws. Other than the email thing (which was massively overblown) she had a bad relationship with the media and she never figured out the art of coming up with a coherent campaign message. Oh, and "I'm with her" was a TERRIBLE campaign slogan.
Honestly, the one things that did give me pause about her executive abilities is how incompetent some aspects of her campaigns were.
There's fake news and there's problematic news. The bots will push both if they think either is useful, but that doesn't make problematic news fake news. The Democratic party really did shoot itself in the ass by intentionally hamstringing Bernie.
This was a big mistake, I don't know if Bernie would have won, but Clinton never really learned how to win a competitive race. She played defence the whole time against Bernie instead of defining herself or establishing a vision, and bringing that to the general election is what cost her.
And there's no way Trump could have beaten Bernie -- He was shown in multiple polls to be significantly further ahead of Trump than Clinton. (The polls had a systematic anti-Trump bias, but in a Trump vs. Bernie vs Clinton poll that would even out and so doesn't matter for these polls.)
Really there's no way Trump could have beaten Clinton either. It took an email investigation that already had way too much media focus and compounded it with a pair of Russian hacks that involved the word "email". Then you had the freak occurrence of the FBI "reopening the investigation" days before voting and some really weird voter patterns.
Bernie could have had his own series of bizarre misfortunes. Republicans (and Russians) were rooting for Bernie because they thought he'd be the weaker candidate in the general election. They may have been wrong, but it's not obvious they were.
So accusing Donald Trump of being a Russian agent isn't extremist leftist globalist fake news?
Except I see very few people on the left accusing Trump of being a Russian agent, I won't say no one, but I haven't seen anyone on my FB feed claim it, and I have a lot more FB friends on the left than the right. And I've seen a ton of claims on the right that are at least as conspiratorial as that.
Now there's suspicion it's possible, it was alleged by the Steele Dossier, and people discussed the possibility at the time, but when no evidence of that accusation turned up people generally stopped talking about it.
Nothing that they try to throw at this guy can stick
You mean nothing aside from 4 members of his campaign already being charged (and two pleading guilty), including his campaign manger and National Security advisor.
Not to mention proving multiple instances of members of the Trump campaign contacting or seeking contact with Russian officials and lying about that contact, including Trump's Attorney General and his son.
And we know there are active investigations into money laundering that involve Trump's son in law, obstruction of justice involving Trump, and probably a lot of other things that, like the Papadopoulos plea, we haven't heard about yet because it's being kept secret.
and even Wikileaks has come up dry on him.
What do you think Wikileaks is? They're not an elite investigative body, they post documents that people give them. How is them not having been given dumps on Trump exculpatory in the slightest?
Hell, they haven't posted his tax returns despite those being one of the single most sought after documents out there. Does that mean you think Trump never got tax returns?
This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
So what you're saying is that the Left, which has adopted a policy of "Listen and Believe" and "Lived Experience > Facts" is actually the side that tends to question everything?
"Tends to", I'm describing human behaviour, there's obviously some oversimplification. The left generally backs institutions that embrace skeptical questioning, like Universities and the legal system. And they're more trusting of institutions that seem to have checks built in.
I'm not sure where you get "Lived Experience > Facts" from, that's hardly an ethos I'd associate with the left, in fact I'd weakly associate it with the right.
The only way this could possibly be true is if you assume that all the "classical liberals" pushed out of the left by the rise of Progressive Culture Communism aren't really right-wing even though the "Right" only exists in terms of "The people Leftists don't like," so I'm not sure how you plan on getting that to work out logically.
Again, oversimplification. But classical liberals would have been better fits as conservatives. Either way I'm talking about people who currently make up the main blocks of the political left and right and I don't think there's many classical liberals left in the GOP. Some are rebranding to libertarian, some moderate or even democrat, and some abandoning classical liberalism and embracing trump.
Furthermore, if you really think that authoritarian thinking exists solely on the right... well, I don't know what to say to someone who believes something so absolutely ludicrous.
I'd say take the argument seriously rather than dismissing it through oversimplification. I hardly think you would have bothered to stick around for the series of books where I made sure asterix was fully explored.
I don't accept that there's a significant IQ gap between left and right, but even if there is there's a massive amount of overlap and it doesn't predict susceptibility to conspiracy theories.
Heck, I just saw a guy I went to High School with on FB, he was the smartest guy in his year and he bought the Nunes memo hook, line, and sinker. His intellect didn't do squat to stop him from being taken in by a smear job.
At a basic level the right celebrates authority (everyone in the tribe works together) while the left embraces individuality (everybody free to be themselves). This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
That alone doesn't advantage the left or right with finding the truth. But mainstream religion is a thing that really hates being questioned, so religion and the political right eventually merged. And religions' antipathy to intellectual authorities spread to the right as a whole. You don't even need to be religious, if you're on the right you're taught to accept your authorities without question and reject opposing authorities outright.
And once the right declared intellectually rigorous authorities to be part of the left then the left started to embrace them. Hence the right became prone to conspiracy theories as they rejected intellectual authorities and the left became resistant as they embraced them.
It's easy to build a social network, Google+, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.
The hard part is becoming the default "I want to get hold of this random person, on which service do I look for them".
Facebook became that default by feeling less sketchy than MySpace. But if Facebook starts feeling sketchy another service is going to become the new default and Facebook will become the modern equivalent of Hotmail.
I don't know if he's planning on a run for President, but the pollster (and all the other campaigning stuff) would still be a good idea from a business sense.
Of the big three (Apple, Google, Facebook) Facebook is both the most vulnerable and the most closely identified with its CEO. Facebook's biggest asset is the "everyone is on it" network effect, but it's a lot easier to find someone online than it was 5 years ago, and it's a lot easier for someone to find a new social network than it is to build a new Google or iPhone.
If Zuckerberg becomes genuinely unpopular the company could be in major trouble very quickly.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Sexual reproduction is critical for spreading favorable genes like resistance to predators, poisons, etc. Since these are all clones they aren't going to have those advantages and sooner or later will encounter some factor that wipes them out. Apple farmers face a similar problem since each variety is a single genetic variant that is grafted onto other trees.
I suspect things like this have happened in the past but the resulting species are evolutionarily unstable since they can't evolve quickly enough to escape threats and eventually die out. Sexually reproducing predators will figure out how to make them an easy meal and competing species will out specialize them in their niches.
Of course this might take a few hundred or thousand years, in the meantime it can wreak havoc on whatever ecosystem it's screwing with.
I'm curious to know why it's so successful right now, maybe it's just different enough from current species that current predators don't know what to do with it?
How do you deploy a single virus to every crayfish?
And they're "clones", but like a virus they're still undergoing their own slow asexual evolution. The virus needs at least some broad targeting to get most of the population. But once you make it more general you now have to deal with other complications like the virus mutating into something more harmful that harms other species, or something less harmful and not killing the crayfish at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not surprised that Twitter / Facebook and so on are used like this, the Bot Nets have been using them for Command and Control for ages. But why use the "official" NSA Twitter Twaddle? It's pedestrian to discover who accesses specific sites... Why not something more benign like Britney Speers Twitter?
Because it's the official NSA Twitter account.
Think about it from the Russian's perspective, are you talking to some low level spy who doesn't actually have the authority to send the money you're after? An ex-spook like Steele? A Russian counter-intelligence operative?
An official NSA tweet tells you that a very powerful person at the agency is backing the operation. That it's important enough that they're willing to screw with their Twitter account. And you're still relatively indistinguishable from all the other people who read the NSA Twitter account (which in the Russian intelligence community is probably a lot of people).
the "Pinty's Grand slam of curling" offers over $2 million in prize money, and there are a ton of other cash spiels and tournaments. curling is extremely popular on TV in Canada, and these guys and girls are celebrities wherever they go.
Total prize money over multiple events maybe, but the top earning team on the tour last year got $190k, Canadian. That's less than $50k a person when you divide by 4.
The top skips might be minor celebrities but they still walk down the street in relative anonymity (which they probably prefer).
There's a lot of curlers who've retired from top teams while they were still at the top of their game so they could focus on their non-curling careers.
I wonder if Jeff Weninger happens to own any bitcoins...
Inb4 all the comments of Telsa being a failure for the amount of money they are losing. But, in reality, that money isn't a loss. It is investment. Look how long Amazon lasted before they turned their first profit.
There is a difference with Amazon in that their expenses were largely fixed (building out their infrastructure) and their per-transaction cost was very low. It was fairly clear that at any point they could just tune down the investments and R&D and profit off their ecommerce margins.
Tesla's problem is that building a car is still really expensive, especially when you take into account things like recalls. And the R&D and factory construction are huge sunk costs. There's a real risk they can't sell enough cars at enough of a markup to pay off their capital expenses.
Of course, there's also a possibility they'll scale up production and suddenly be insanely profitable.
and the team that was losing broke out the old-time straw brooms. Not because they're better in any way, but because they tend to leave debris on the ice that might mess up subsequent shots, aka 'the other team'. It was a bit controversial and the sportscasters discussed the strategy, which is how I knew what was going on. I'm guessing those old brooms have now been outlawed.
Banned, after broomgate they severely restricted what kind of brush head you're allowed to use in competitive events.
The fabric is a specific colour, comes from a specific manufacturer, and the broom actually has to be signed by an official.
I've never tried it, but I can imagine it being fun to do. Like you say, there's plenty of challenge and skill.
To watch though? Not so much.
Throwing the rock is a similar sensation to hitting a golf ball, the actual play has a lot strategy, teammates, and if you're a skilled sweeper you can get a bit of exercise there.
As for watching, you might need to need to play to appreciate it. But I find the strategy adds a lot to the game, a very small difference is rock placement have a massive effect, and there's a lot of rock arrangements where it's very uncertain if a certain shot is even possible.
You also get a lot of individual shots during the game where a minor mistake can put your team in huge danger and maybe cost you the game.
Sport used to be something you played just for fun. Now only those competitors whose sponsors have the deepest pockets stand a chance. Sport should not require kids practicing 12 hours a day from age 6 to be competitive, and then in some sports be over the hill by their early 20s. Kids should be allowed to play sports for fun, not to become some short term corporate or national asset. Parents who permit or force their kids into such training regimens should be strung up for abuse. The Olympics haven't been about sport for a hundred years and this is just a another sign of that.
I agree... but it doesn't really apply to curling.
First this broom is $3k, and $3k isn't much when you're talking elite sports.
And second, curling still is an amateur sport. Almost all of the top players have full-time jobs and I suspect most of the top-20 teams spend more on equipment and travel than they make in winnings and sponsorship.
And most elite curlers don't actually hit the elite level till their late 20's and they stay there into their late 30s. Up until a few years ago three of the best skips (most critical player on the team) were all in their mid-to-late 40s. Fitness matters, but skill and experience are huge.
I don't think you can stop people from absurd amounts of training because people fundamentally like to win, but curling isn't really suffering the issues you're complaining about.
You get what you measure.
This index score is only relevant is it can only be achieved by skilled, proper sweeping. Otherwise you are just having people train to get a high score, not to sweep properly to win. Someone with an alternative method might score very poorly on the index but do well for rock control.
Agreed, are they measuring pressure? Energy transferred into the ice? Do they account for the area the broom covers (no point sweeping outside the path of the rock)? You might be able to sweep harder if your broom is farther away from the rock, but that tradeoff might not be worth it.
I've tried my own controlled experiments with sweeping in the past and it's really hard to actually figure out what works, there's a huge variance from shot-to-shot, and even if you throw the exact same path the surface still changes between shots. Even the directional sweeping from a couple years ago, although elite teams could do crazy stuff neither myself, nor some of the sub-elite guys I knew, could do anything definitive.
I know the elite teams claim to see some fairly subtle differences in how much difference a particular sweeper makes. At the club level I don't think sweeping does much more than cleaning, half the time people don't even sweep the path of the rock.
>> Yada yada Olympics yada yada
Is there a filter to screen out useless PR-driven articles about the Olympics?
This kind of stuff is is only a step above the Olympics commercials Coke and McDonalds crap out every two years (as if any athlete would get near those brands except to collect the check).
This is literally a story about hobbyists hacking together hardware and software to make a training device now used by national teams.
I think it handily qualifies as "News for Nerds".
AI getting into the trough (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle) again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter)?
Prominent people seem to fear AI (http://time.com/3614349/artificial-intelligence-singularity-stephen-hawking-elon-musk/), but isn't this just Fear of the Unknown? I mean, Elon and Stephen are really smart people, but do they know that most NN:s come down to linear algegra and spiced with non-linearities in the end, just simulating neurons? I mean neurons are common-place on the planet already, equipped with malice and stuff...
Smart outsiders overestimate the risks because they don't really understand the limitations of current AI tech and don't realize how far away hard AI actually is.
Smart insiders underestimate the risks because they see the field in terms of incremental advancements of the current state-of-the-art. They're overly skeptical of the possibility of hard AI and when they do think about it they rely on their expertise and tend to assume it has the same limitations as current AI tech.
Sanders represented something new, at least in living memory; a politician who wants to help people, and who knows Washington.
I don't know, I still remember a guy named Obama.
Sure he went in a little naive, but he certainly knew Washington by his second term. And I think he was easily as empathetic and idealistic as Sanders, as competent as Clinton, and a better speaker than either.
The problem Obama discovered is that the simple response to "yes we can" is "no, we won't let you".
I think Clinton played the game well enough that she could have circumvented Republican resistance, probably better than Obama.
Sanders was not good at the game, he wasn't even able to stop the DNC from turning on him. If he won the Presidency I think the GOP would have eaten him alive.
What's the point of this whole Alphabet thing if they're just going to start merging companies into Google anyway...
Synergies?
When possible Google wants to split off companies as much as possible to avoid anti-trus^H^H^H^H to let each independent company focus on it's own product.
But for something like Nest they probably think it can benefit from really close integration with Google's other services.
This is the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time. If you actually believe this, just spend 30 minutes at a college campus. You'll change your tune real quick.
Every liberal millennial I've met. Every. Single. One. was completely incapable of thinking for themselves. They did exactly as their professors indoctrinated them to do and think, without question. Talking to a group of liberal millennials about social issues really is like trying to talk to a flock of sheep.
Welcome to young people since the dawn of time.
I don't accept that there's a significant IQ gap between left and right . . .
I do.
Within an ideological homogeneous group you're probably going to see a strong correlation between education and IQ.
But Liberals and Conservatives are anything but ideologically homogeneous.
Given two equally intelligent individuals I'd expect the Liberal to be far more likely to seek additional education than the Conservative for the sole reason that Liberals place more value on education and educational institutions.
So I don't think those stats tell us anything about the IQ of Liberals vs Conservatives.
At a basic level the right celebrates authority (everyone in the tribe works together) while the left embraces individuality (everybody free to be themselves). This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
You haven't visited a college campus in this century, have you?
Have you? It's hard to say hello without getting in an argument about something.
Yes, there's a current trend where left-wing student groups protest and try to exclude speakers whom they consider to be particularly objectionable. But that's based on more on perceptions of hate-speech than the ability to ask questions. I think it's a different discussion.
If you have a chance to take a look at some of the archived Slashdot discussions about Hillary's e-mail server debacle, yes the news outlets took it in a ridiculous direction, but there was far more to it. First off, the fact that she individually selected e-mails for submission instead of turning over the server wholesale showed her as being 'above the law' - if you or I had an e-mail server that was the subject of an investigation, we'd never see it again.
I think that part was actually properly done. Initially it wasn't an investigation, it was just 'sort out the emails'. The rule is that when you use a private account for something you're responsible for sorting them out and giving the government your official emails.
When asked if she wiped it, her response of "with a cloth?" showed either a problematic level of ignorance for someone in a position to be making policy on topics of net neutrality, cyber terrorism, right-to-repair, DMCA extensions, and whether Apple should be compelled to put a back door in iOS, or Hillary was being willfully dismissive of something that ultimately happened.
She was an old lady, I don't mind that she was ignorant about technology, a POTUS doesn't have to be knowledgeable about everything. Though it is concerning that she didn't recognize the importance of the issue and get up to speed.
it would have been in her best interest for her to hand over the server, have everyone see there was nothing there, and have that as ammo to use against the people performing the witch hunt...unless, of course, she wasn't as innocent as she claimed.
Here I disagree. The GOP and Fox News were doing everything they could to find or create dirt. Do you really want your worst enemies digging through your personal email looking for ammo?
Her best strategy was to release as little as possible, it was just a strategy that wasn't well executed.
"First woman president" was an oft-touted thing that she brought to the table regardless of whether it was relevant. I would argue that this paradigm is what made the "I'm with her" slogan make sense - it was less about policy and more about identity. By extension, it made her a tough sell for those who didn't share that identity.
The problem was two fold. First, it seemed egotistical because instead of making her campaign about a message or a value it made it about her individually. Second, saying "I'm with her" really emphasizes the idea that you're following a woman, and even for a very forward thinking guy it sounds kinda dorky. It's basically daring guys to be a little bit misogynist.
"The victims often had mixed kratom with other substances, including chemicals taken out of inhalers and found in over-the-counter cold and flu drugs."
So flu drugs and inhalers 'contributed' to their deaths as well as the child laxative used to dilute heroin.
The idea of an FDA approved drug is has an actual pharmacological effect, and the moment you have an effect you also tend to have side effects. And these side effects, even fatal ones, are documented on the medicine itself.
Herbals and other alt-medicines usually avoid side effects by being generally useless. If one is actually doing something significant it should be treated as a drug because it now has the potential to seriously harm someone if misused.
Best to forbid everything.
People had taken up to _9_ different things and only 44 cases?
44 deaths is a lot for something I've never heard of, especially when you consider that you could easily have 10x as many unreported cases.
That's not science, that's anecdotes.
It's activating opiod receptors, that's science. And what happens when you activate too many opiod receptors is also known, that's death.
Stand down, there. You weren't conned into funding Bernie. Bernie was the better candidate in almost every way. We should vote for the better man. We should fund the better man.
I'm not sure I agree with this. Bernie was a fantastic speaker but he had three big flaws. First, his ideas were far-left, even for the Democratic party, that really can scare off voters. Two, he was naive in the sense that he oversold how much he could get accomplished. Three, a lot of his policy was very hand-wavy, now some of that was Clinton denying him top-end advisors, but he didn't have the same policy chops.
Now Clinton was outrageously competent and was much closer policy-wise to the average voter, but she had her own flaws. Other than the email thing (which was massively overblown) she had a bad relationship with the media and she never figured out the art of coming up with a coherent campaign message. Oh, and "I'm with her" was a TERRIBLE campaign slogan.
Honestly, the one things that did give me pause about her executive abilities is how incompetent some aspects of her campaigns were.
There's fake news and there's problematic news. The bots will push both if they think either is useful, but that doesn't make problematic news fake news. The Democratic party really did shoot itself in the ass by intentionally hamstringing Bernie.
This was a big mistake, I don't know if Bernie would have won, but Clinton never really learned how to win a competitive race. She played defence the whole time against Bernie instead of defining herself or establishing a vision, and bringing that to the general election is what cost her.
And there's no way Trump could have beaten Bernie -- He was shown in multiple polls to be significantly further ahead of Trump than Clinton. (The polls had a systematic anti-Trump bias, but in a Trump vs. Bernie vs Clinton poll that would even out and so doesn't matter for these polls.)
Really there's no way Trump could have beaten Clinton either. It took an email investigation that already had way too much media focus and compounded it with a pair of Russian hacks that involved the word "email". Then you had the freak occurrence of the FBI "reopening the investigation" days before voting and some really weird voter patterns.
Bernie could have had his own series of bizarre misfortunes. Republicans (and Russians) were rooting for Bernie because they thought he'd be the weaker candidate in the general election. They may have been wrong, but it's not obvious they were.
So accusing Donald Trump of being a Russian agent isn't extremist leftist globalist fake news?
Except I see very few people on the left accusing Trump of being a Russian agent, I won't say no one, but I haven't seen anyone on my FB feed claim it, and I have a lot more FB friends on the left than the right. And I've seen a ton of claims on the right that are at least as conspiratorial as that.
Now there's suspicion it's possible, it was alleged by the Steele Dossier, and people discussed the possibility at the time, but when no evidence of that accusation turned up people generally stopped talking about it.
Nothing that they try to throw at this guy can stick
You mean nothing aside from 4 members of his campaign already being charged (and two pleading guilty), including his campaign manger and National Security advisor.
Not to mention proving multiple instances of members of the Trump campaign contacting or seeking contact with Russian officials and lying about that contact, including Trump's Attorney General and his son.
And we know there are active investigations into money laundering that involve Trump's son in law, obstruction of justice involving Trump, and probably a lot of other things that, like the Papadopoulos plea, we haven't heard about yet because it's being kept secret.
and even Wikileaks has come up dry on him.
What do you think Wikileaks is? They're not an elite investigative body, they post documents that people give them. How is them not having been given dumps on Trump exculpatory in the slightest?
Hell, they haven't posted his tax returns despite those being one of the single most sought after documents out there. Does that mean you think Trump never got tax returns?
This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
So what you're saying is that the Left, which has adopted a policy of "Listen and Believe" and "Lived Experience > Facts" is actually the side that tends to question everything?
"Tends to", I'm describing human behaviour, there's obviously some oversimplification. The left generally backs institutions that embrace skeptical questioning, like Universities and the legal system. And they're more trusting of institutions that seem to have checks built in.
I'm not sure where you get "Lived Experience > Facts" from, that's hardly an ethos I'd associate with the left, in fact I'd weakly associate it with the right.
The only way this could possibly be true is if you assume that all the "classical liberals" pushed out of the left by the rise of Progressive Culture Communism aren't really right-wing even though the "Right" only exists in terms of "The people Leftists don't like," so I'm not sure how you plan on getting that to work out logically.
Again, oversimplification. But classical liberals would have been better fits as conservatives. Either way I'm talking about people who currently make up the main blocks of the political left and right and I don't think there's many classical liberals left in the GOP. Some are rebranding to libertarian, some moderate or even democrat, and some abandoning classical liberalism and embracing trump.
Furthermore, if you really think that authoritarian thinking exists solely on the right... well, I don't know what to say to someone who believes something so absolutely ludicrous.
I'd say take the argument seriously rather than dismissing it through oversimplification. I hardly think you would have bothered to stick around for the series of books where I made sure asterix was fully explored.
Tomayto, tomahto though.
It's not IQ.
I don't accept that there's a significant IQ gap between left and right, but even if there is there's a massive amount of overlap and it doesn't predict susceptibility to conspiracy theories.
Heck, I just saw a guy I went to High School with on FB, he was the smartest guy in his year and he bought the Nunes memo hook, line, and sinker. His intellect didn't do squat to stop him from being taken in by a smear job.
At a basic level the right celebrates authority (everyone in the tribe works together) while the left embraces individuality (everybody free to be themselves). This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
That alone doesn't advantage the left or right with finding the truth. But mainstream religion is a thing that really hates being questioned, so religion and the political right eventually merged. And religions' antipathy to intellectual authorities spread to the right as a whole. You don't even need to be religious, if you're on the right you're taught to accept your authorities without question and reject opposing authorities outright.
And once the right declared intellectually rigorous authorities to be part of the left then the left started to embrace them. Hence the right became prone to conspiracy theories as they rejected intellectual authorities and the left became resistant as they embraced them.
Of course, one can easily imagine an alternate universe where the right embraces the authority of serious scholars while the left embraces crackpot skepticism.
a new social network
Righto. So easy, even Google can't do it.
It's easy to build a social network, Google+, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.
The hard part is becoming the default "I want to get hold of this random person, on which service do I look for them".
Facebook became that default by feeling less sketchy than MySpace. But if Facebook starts feeling sketchy another service is going to become the new default and Facebook will become the modern equivalent of Hotmail.
I don't know if he's planning on a run for President, but the pollster (and all the other campaigning stuff) would still be a good idea from a business sense.
Of the big three (Apple, Google, Facebook) Facebook is both the most vulnerable and the most closely identified with its CEO. Facebook's biggest asset is the "everyone is on it" network effect, but it's a lot easier to find someone online than it was 5 years ago, and it's a lot easier for someone to find a new social network than it is to build a new Google or iPhone.
If Zuckerberg becomes genuinely unpopular the company could be in major trouble very quickly.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Sexual reproduction is critical for spreading favorable genes like resistance to predators, poisons, etc. Since these are all clones they aren't going to have those advantages and sooner or later will encounter some factor that wipes them out. Apple farmers face a similar problem since each variety is a single genetic variant that is grafted onto other trees.
I suspect things like this have happened in the past but the resulting species are evolutionarily unstable since they can't evolve quickly enough to escape threats and eventually die out. Sexually reproducing predators will figure out how to make them an easy meal and competing species will out specialize them in their niches.
Of course this might take a few hundred or thousand years, in the meantime it can wreak havoc on whatever ecosystem it's screwing with.
I'm curious to know why it's so successful right now, maybe it's just different enough from current species that current predators don't know what to do with it?
Wait. They're all clones, right ?
I bet a single virus could wipe them all.
How do you deploy a single virus to every crayfish?
And they're "clones", but like a virus they're still undergoing their own slow asexual evolution. The virus needs at least some broad targeting to get most of the population. But once you make it more general you now have to deal with other complications like the virus mutating into something more harmful that harms other species, or something less harmful and not killing the crayfish at all.