The problem comes directly from the "pay the bills" mentality
"Pay the bills" means clicks on advertizing, which translates to grabbing eyeballs and attention using any means possible.
"Any means" has descended into outrageous and unsupportable claims intended to promote outrage or interest in the reader. Anything and everything that can make the reader outraged is fair came in the advertizing war.
It's become so obvious that there are specific memes and word phrases which are now *avoided* because of their fake usage. "...using this one weird trick", "top ten some-trivia-thing", "such-and-so you need to know", and so on.
Newspapers have always slanted the truth towards outrage and reader engagement a little, but with the feeding frenzy of internet it's now become a completely unhinged cage fight for reader attention.
Complete and total lies are now allowed, rumor and innuendo can be published without vetting for accuracy, reversal of meaning and impact is commonplace.
Many MSM articles simply report tweets that people make; and no, I'm not referring to Trump either. Some random headlines:
Many in this county are poor and sick, and they voted for Trump. What will happen to their health care?
It's way too soon to panic about Fed rate hikes
Rep. Steve King warns that 'our civilization' can't be restored with 'somebody else's babies'
Is any of this news? Which of these tells us what is happening?
Nothing about the MSM is authentic any more, and neither is twitter or facebook. Journalistic integrity and important freedoms (speech, assembly, and press) have been swept aside in the race for readership, political correctness, and promotion of one partisan side.
It's no wonder people are flocking to other sites.
Current events are far less controversial than the internet makes them out to be.
Trump shoots off mouth about topic with no justification in fact. News at 11.
Which is exactly the point. When he doesn't like the way the news is talking about he changes it by saying something outrageous.
Donald Trump isn't crazy. And he isn't really careless -- not about the things that matter to him. He's manipulative. His supporters understand this, and don't mind when he is factually wrong because they understand he is a bullshit artist. They just think he's their bullshit artist.
The difference between bullshit and a conventional lie is that the bullshitter doesn't lie to deceive, he lies to produce an effect. Bullshitting is often safer and more effective than lying because a lie disproven is neutralized, but disproving bullshit is a waste of time because nobody is meant to believe it.
And here's the specifics about this particular lie:
The MSM has been reporting on Trump's ties to Russia for the past 4 months, mentioning "recorded conversations" and "an ongoing investigation". All of these have mentioned that there is "no conclusive evidence yet" in the investigation. The overall spin has been that Trump is a lackey of the Russian government, we have him under surveillance, and we are slowly gathering evidence which will be conclusive.
Here's an example quote from the NYT before Trump's tweet:
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.
The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.
Based on everything I've seen, I'd have to disagree. Neither Democrats or Republicans walk on water, but Republicans seem intent on rolling back a lot of stuff that favors the people as opposed to corporations. For example, the bill mentioned in this very article.
You're probably swayed by mainstream media bias. They're quick to point out bad conservative actions, and tend to sweep liberal problems under the rug.
For example, Trump withdrew the US from TPP. Slashdot has had several articles about the TPP, everyone was moaning about how bad it was, it was created and promoted by Obama's administration...
...but when the problem was solved by a conservative we didn't hear a peep. Despite there being at least 3 firehose submissions about it.
For another example, Obama ordered the drone-killing of a US citizen, and then drone-killed the son some weeks later. Outside the theatre of war, with no trial, and in a cafe killing 8 others as collateral damage.
Obama then classified the legal justification for why he had the power to do that, so that no one could question it.
That's the sort of thing we don't hear from the mainstream media, it's called the liberal bias and it's well known.
That's why you probably think Democrats are better.
They're still running under the "lesser of 2 evils" model.
"Yesterday, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and 23 Republican co-sponsors introduced a resolution that would overturn new privacy rules for internet service providers."
Seriously question: why are Republican lawmakers so willing to sell out their own constituents? And why do rank and file republican voters go along with it?
They're against anything and everything that would seem to be good for the people of their states and districts- healthcare, privacy protection, consumer protection, environmental protection, financial regulation on banks and mortgage companies, etc etc etc.
I mean, what the fuck?
About 6 months prior to the 2008 election, Barack Obama flip-flopped on telecom immunity.
He was, at that time, the leader of the Democratic party, and he felt comfortable enough breaking a campaign promise that he did it 6 months *before* the election.
Take an unbiased look at politicians and you'll find that both parties work against the interests of the people. Big corporations and moneyed interests give money for reelection, and expect special favors.
We've said for years on this very site how corrupt both parties are, and for this exact reason. We can follow the money, we can show the logical conclusions, we can cite example after example, and we do it for both parties.
Get away from the partisam bickering. Simple "the other side is awful" complaints are misdirecting people into internecine conflict, when we should be banding together as a people to demand better service from our government.
Total race-baiting, dog-whistle propaganda is labeled 'Disputed'?
Cowardly.
English has always been a "living" language: new words come into being, old words suffer from disuse, and meanings change. The syntax and grammer evolves and changes with the times.
We're seeing this right with many of the words in common usage in the media. "Racist", "sexist", "islamaphobe" and a host of other terms are losing their dictionary meaning.
I'm seeing lots of people on gab.ai who are completely blase' about being called racist. Someone will say "that's racist" or "you're a racist", and people are like "yeah, I'm racist. Whatever". I find it astonishing how quickly this has happened. Not 1 year ago the term "racist" meant that you believed a particular race was inferior. Nowadays you are a racist for having a particular body posture - even when you *don't* think some race is inferior.
This is similar to how past words had a stronger meaning. Terms like "you're a jerk" (person who masterbates a lot) and "you suck" (you perform fellatio) have lost a lot of their power and meaning. The phrase "St Paul’s Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial" was once taken as high praise.
So the words "disputed" and "fake" will be taking on new meaning, and in a year or two will come to have colloquial definitions that match their usage, which is not the usage we assign to them right now. "Disputed" will probably come to mean "politically charged", and "fake" will come to mean "from non-mainstream sources" without any of today's connotations of meaning.
Well, go start your own web forum. If you don't like what Twitter does, there's a whole world out there. Go to it. But I guarantee you, if you simply allow the cranks to control your medium, it will fester into nothingness.
Someone did, it's called Gab.ai, and it's specifically a haven for free speech.
Their version of censoring is to let everyone censor what *they* see on the site. An individual can "mute" other users or specific words, so if someone keeps posting things that bother you you can "mute" them so that you don't see them. If individual words trigger an unpleasant memory for you, you can mute individual words and you'll never see them.
The thing about calling people racist/sexist/nazi is definitely real.
Kellyanne Conway typing on her cell phone during a meeting of black dignitaries is definitely racist!
From that facebook post:
I sincerely doubt that Kellyanne Conway would be on the couch, shoes off, on her knees, looking at her phone, if the room was full of white dignitaries or CEOs that she actually actually respected.
Here's the full context which shows that she was setting her phone to take a group photo.
People are seeing racism everywhere right now, even where it doesn't exist!
the tumpanzees will NEVER admit they made a mistake.
as long as they are STIGGINIT to the 'liburals' they are happy.
they could lose their health insurance, be jobless and still think that they 'won'.
we really should have an IQ test for voters. if you aren't at least average, you don't get a vote.
dumb voters are why we are in the shitty state of things. they are so easily manipulated (BUT, HER EMAILS!) and they are entirely the wrong people to decide the future of this country, as a whole.
You do realize that Obama appointed him FCC commissioner in 2012, right?
Welcome to the darkness you've embraced. It will have consequences.
I'm actually an independent, not a conservative.
There's planks in the conservative platform that I don't agree with; for example, I think women should be able to choose abortion and we're probably wrecking the climate. A couple of other positions as well.
The problem is, coming out in favor of either of these puts me in the company of Liberals: People who leak classified information for political assassination, people who call for a military coup, people who riot to suppress free speech... I don't want to be associated with any of that.
I used to be a global warming believer, but I'm now having second thoughts. That "97 percent of scientists" figure people keep throwing around? It's fake. This whole thing about the left has caused me to reexamine my beliefs about global warming, and how I came by them. 'Turns out most of it was passively accepted without a critical thought, because I kept seeing it in the news.
This is troubling, and not in the false sense of the word that Liberals use. Global warming is conceivably the most important decision we'll face, and we need to get it right the first time.
And yet, debate on the issue is stifled by insult and threats. Scientists fear losing their livelihood if they question the dogma. Policies are "our way and nothing else", and always require reducing our standard of living while increasing economic disparity.
No where do I see proposals that would actually help the problem, such as calls to modernize our electrical grid, calls to change tax code to encourage telecommuting (section 1706), tax rebates for rooftop solar, or increased funding in helpful technology.
I'm having a tough time keeping my position about global warming, simply because it's the clarion call of the left.
There's an old saying among geeks: it's not enough to be right, you also have to be effective.
The left is so ineffective that it's tough to agree with them.
But that is likely because Trump is pro-business instead of a anti-business Democrat.
It's because Tesla inked a deal to start selling cars in the middle east, along with the support charging infrastructure.
I'm good with blaming the president for things, but the president really has very little effect on any individual business, and in particular has little effect on a specific business in his first 30 days.
I think the same can be said about Obama. Anything he did was more of a global long-term effect if it was any effect at all. Taking health care as an example, I don't see Obamacare as having curtailed or encouraged the medical industry or the insurance companies - the economics of health care would probably have evolved to the state we are in now with or without it. Military vendors were similarly unaffected over the last 8 years.
In economic terms, I don't see the president having much effect on business.
Considering you don't agree with a liberal law, no you're not. You are actually a centrist. If you believe in private ownership of property, you are center right.
It's apparently all-or-nothing with liberals.
When asked, I immediately had one good thing to say about Hillary Clinton, and had a dozen more after a few moment's thought.
The left can't find one good thing to say about Trump, and it's all-or-nothing. Attack in every possible way: his family, his business, even attack his 10 year old son.
All this earnings losses doesn't mean anything to a expanding company like Tesla. Do we really want them to stall their growth just to be little bit profitable? They have the advantage with big car companies dragging their feet. They have to do everything they can to gain marketshare now before others catch up.
There was a big stink about Amazon during the late 90s and early 00s about how they are posting losses. Where are all those shortsighted investors now.
The amount of Tesla disinformation in the financial news is staggering.
I read an article three weeks ago that said that 38% of Tesla stock was shorted, with a due date a couple of weeks from then. I then read another mainstream financial media was reporting that Tesla was expected to hit zero by the middle of the summer, and you should sell your stock right now!
One financial news report suggests to sell your Tesla stock and take the profits and invest in Twitter. Of course, Twitter has yet to make a profit and no *clear* way to do so, but hey... Tesla will be burning through cash and be bankrupt real soon now - take your profits out of Tesla and run!
I think there's a lot of "self interested" reporting going on. Most analysts want to bring Tesla down because a) they've bet heavily on the stock dropping, or b) have clients who would benefit from the stock dropping, or c) have clients heavily invested in oil and natural gas.
Tesla has been laying a firm foundation on which to build its future, and is posed to dominate a very big section of the economy. It shows every indication of being the next Microsoft or Apple.
If only those pesky financial analysts would stop and look at it objectively.
The solution is not to add another complicated layer on top.
The proposed solution also presents a single point of failure for the cryptographic resource. If one company manages to get hacked, or infiltrated by one agent, or gets betrayed by one employee, everything will be lost.
Bruce Schneier had the analogy of putting $100 into each of 10 safes, versus putting $1000 into one expensive safe. The $1000 in a single place makes it cost-effective for a burglar to try to break in, while $100 in ten safes does not, even if the 10 safes are individually less secure than the one safe.
If the security of IOT devices is managed by one system, all it takes is someone to offer $500,000 to an employee for the root info (root certificate, or whatever the chain of trust originates from) and everything is lost.
This study is racist and xenophobic and slashdot is also for posting it. America is a country of immigrants and Indians have just as much right to a programming job as anyone who was born here.
Racism is usually usually defined as prejudice or antagonism based on race, and xenophobia has something to do with fear.
The problem with your argument is that there is no actual racism or xenophobia involved. No one is "afraid" of people from India, no one "fears" the Indian programmer, and from the looks of things in this country no one tries to keep "the Indian savage" down or prevents them from doing anything a regular citizen could do.
They drink at the same water fountains as anyone else, and no one cares.
This is the typical argument of the left. It's OK to hit a racist, so you start by labelling everything you don't like as racist.
Then when you're caught breaking windows or giving someone a beat-down, you sayl "yeah, but he's a racist!".
In fact, you don't even need to apply the label yourself. So long as someone else calls it racism, you're free to riot and beat people all you want.
That's really the reason the left uses all these silly labels, it's to justify virtuous acts of violence.
The spillway failed due to a construction issue. Had it not failed, its capacity would have been adequate.
I believe you are confusing the [concrete] regular spillway with the [earthen] emergency spillway.
The concrete spillway is gone, but this doesn't seem to be a safety issue.
The earthen emergency spillway eroded almost all the way back to the berm, which would have resulted in a dam breech. That's what everyone is worried about.
The lower half of the spillway is probably completely gone. The raging water might erode up to the level of the dam, but that's not likely.
The actual problem was the emergency spillway, which is an earthen bank to the left (looking up to the dam) of the regular spillway.
You can see the damage in this image. Note that one of the eroded canyons reaches almost up to the level of the water.
If the erosion had reached the emergency spillway it would have burst, releasing a whole lot of water downstream.
Here's a closeup, and note the middle lower portion of the image. We were that close to a breech.
That didn't happen, and the waters are now below emergency levels.
However, the situation is rather precarious and the emergency spillway could still burst. There's still a lot of water still coming in to the reservoir, which is being frantically lowered.
(And yes, I wrote "Hyperloop" when I meant "High Speed Rail" above.)
I just wanted to post some info before everyone spins this as a partisan failure of one sort or another.
1) The dam was built and is owned by California. 2) California was warned about the potential problem (the one we are currently seeing) in 2005. 3) In 2005, as part of the federal re-licensing procedure for the dam, several groups urged federal officials to require that the dam’s [earthwork] emergency spillway be upgraded to concrete. The federal government declined. 4) The dam was built at a time when requirements were less strict in comparison to today's standards. The dam foundations were dug down to "weathered" rock, which is less structurally sound than "bedrock".
And finally,
5) As much as people feel the need for karma or justice or revenge or whatever, we DO NOT punish people's lives and homes over partisan bullshit. The federal government should (and most probably will) assist in any way that they can to help avoid a disaster.
As has been pointed out by many people, California spent several billions of dollars on the hyperloop while letting this particular bit of infrastructure upgrade get ignored. Both California and the Federal government (viz: the licensing mentioned above) can share the blame for this.
It's another Katrina-like situation: both governments (Cali and Federal) were warned, did nothing, and now it's an emergency.
Also of note, and I'm trying to look at the big picture here and not point fingers, it's been pointed out that the infrastructure in our country has been neglected for a long time (especially roads, bridges, and the electrical grid), and we really need to start fixing up things.
Fixing our infrastructure was one of the campaign promises of the party in power, perhaps this will galvanize them to action.
I haven't seen anyone come up with a good reason people wouldn't use basic income to work less and be lazy. I can tell you, if I had guaranteed income for life, I would probably not ever work again.
You have to realize that "work" may not be going out and doing a 9-to-5 job in the traditional sense. Newton made a bunch of his discoveries while on forced leave from Cambridge due to the plague, and there are many historical examples of well-to-do scientists and explorers and artists who made great discoveries because they had the leisure and means to do so.
Stephen King was dirt poor for much of his early life, but he still wrote because he loved writing. Imaging how much more he could have contributed to popular literature if he didn't have to take back-breaking jobs as a young man to make ends meet.
Not everyone will be Newton or King, but anyone who takes up a hobby or minor occupation and becomes really good at it might extend the frontiers of that area. All of this has the potential to enrich our society and further our scientific knowledge.
Too many times people get up on the soapbox of the world and give their opinion about this or that policy, and one can never figure out whether they are experts speaking from experience or just political hacks.
People giving an opinion in public is just noise, and people bolstering their opinion with rationalization and/or analogy is noise masquerading as signal.
We shouldn't give any credence to anyone who tries to sway our opinions about, well... anything, unless they can back it up with facts that are suggestive or studies that can be examined in detail.
I'm especially suspect of the "it will only encourage some people to work less" comment, as if that is a bad thing. It might be perfectly acceptable for some part of society to have to work less, or perhaps not to have to work at all. There's a parallel and opposite rationalization that holds that people will accomplish great things when given enough leisure.
Making that statement ("some people" is an obvious attempt at being divisive, as in "you know the type of people I mean") in the way that he made it is simple emotional manipulation. Also from the article are such gems as "We think it takes social policy in the wrong direction", meaning basically "I don't like it, in an unspecified and indeterminate way".
He's not claiming that it doesn't work, he's claiming that he doesn't like it (and neither should you).
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.
I emboldened one of your words to draw attention to it.
Curiously, as a group Republicans give more to charity than Democrats. Apparently Republicans are more caring and giving than Democrats in general on that score, so long as the giving is voluntary and not mandated.
Also curiously, the party with "free speech" as one of its core values has no problem smashing the venues of a controversial speaker.
This is my way of saying that there's evil on both sides of the aisle. Saying it's one side or the other is a misnomer, we need to identify the stupid bits on both sides and excise them like a cancer.
Come out against the stupidity instead of against the side. There are good Republicans and there are bad Democrats.
We need to stop turning everything into a tribal conflict.
On that point, instead of telling us what "they" actually want, tell us where we should be going.
People would actually support a good plan, if someone should propose it.
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
A good overview of the concepts is in Manna, a short story by Marshall Brain. It's a quick read and gives an easy description of the economic problems we're in the midst of.
In broad terms, we can imagine an automated factory which is capable of producing all the goods needed by everyone in the country.
Such a factory could get its energy from solar cells, and in addition to making everyone's goods it could make enough solar cells to replenish the ones it has when they go bad, and it could have enough energy to recycle all the waste products from goods that people throw away.
That's a the metaphor of course, but it largely sums up where the labor pool is headed in the next 50 years or so: consumption has an upper bound, automation is making huge sections of the labor force unnecessary, and increases in productivity make the labor we have more effective.
As a data point, note that companies are road testing automated trucks *right now*, companies are testing automated last-mile delivery via drones and rolling robots *right now*, and automated farming is coming on line *right now*.
The trucking thing alone will directly eliminate somewhere between 3 and 5 million jobs, and millions more in support structure: restaurants and hotels on the highway, for instance.
We're at the point *right now* where we have too many capable workers and not enough jobs, and improvements in technology will bring us closer and closer to the "completely automated" factory metaphor used above. The actual factory will be a host of factories distributed around the country, "automated" will still require 100K workers for maintenance and upgrades, and energy will be rooftop solar
...but it's still conceptually one big factory capable of producing everything everyone wants, largely for free.
The regular rules of economics are about to break down. It's currently a sort of cycle, where money flows to the people (through salary), the people purchase things from companies, and the cycle repeats.
With no one working, no one has money to purchase anything so the cycle stops. People starve and the economy halts.
UBI is an attempt at a new economic model. People are given money to spend to keep the economy going, and as a side-benefit people don't starve or commit crimes to survive. Society benefits by having reduced crime and an active economy, and people have more leisure time to do things such as raising children or getting educated.
UBI is one of about 5 proposed solutions for the economic transition we're facing.
It's had a couple of small trials to great success, so it seems like it might be a viable option.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem comes directly from the "pay the bills" mentality
"Pay the bills" means clicks on advertizing, which translates to grabbing eyeballs and attention using any means possible.
"Any means" has descended into outrageous and unsupportable claims intended to promote outrage or interest in the reader. Anything and everything that can make the reader outraged is fair came in the advertizing war.
It's become so obvious that there are specific memes and word phrases which are now *avoided* because of their fake usage. "...using this one weird trick", "top ten some-trivia-thing", "such-and-so you need to know", and so on.
Newspapers have always slanted the truth towards outrage and reader engagement a little, but with the feeding frenzy of internet it's now become a completely unhinged cage fight for reader attention.
Complete and total lies are now allowed, rumor and innuendo can be published without vetting for accuracy, reversal of meaning and impact is commonplace.
Many MSM articles simply report tweets that people make; and no, I'm not referring to Trump either. Some random headlines:
Many in this county are poor and sick, and they voted for Trump. What will happen to their health care?
It's way too soon to panic about Fed rate hikes
Rep. Steve King warns that 'our civilization' can't be restored with 'somebody else's babies'
Is any of this news? Which of these tells us what is happening?
Nothing about the MSM is authentic any more, and neither is twitter or facebook. Journalistic integrity and important freedoms (speech, assembly, and press) have been swept aside in the race for readership, political correctness, and promotion of one partisan side.
It's no wonder people are flocking to other sites.
Current events are far less controversial than the internet makes them out to be.
You thought Trump would fulfill his "promises"?
He's only been in office 50 days.
What makes you think that he *won't*?
Trump shoots off mouth about topic with no justification in fact. News at 11.
Which is exactly the point. When he doesn't like the way the news is talking about he changes it by saying something outrageous.
Donald Trump isn't crazy. And he isn't really careless -- not about the things that matter to him. He's manipulative. His supporters understand this, and don't mind when he is factually wrong because they understand he is a bullshit artist. They just think he's their bullshit artist.
The difference between bullshit and a conventional lie is that the bullshitter doesn't lie to deceive, he lies to produce an effect. Bullshitting is often safer and more effective than lying because a lie disproven is neutralized, but disproving bullshit is a waste of time because nobody is meant to believe it.
And here's the specifics about this particular lie:
The MSM has been reporting on Trump's ties to Russia for the past 4 months, mentioning "recorded conversations" and "an ongoing investigation". All of these have mentioned that there is "no conclusive evidence yet" in the investigation. The overall spin has been that Trump is a lackey of the Russian government, we have him under surveillance, and we are slowly gathering evidence which will be conclusive.
Here's an example quote from the NYT before Trump's tweet:
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.
The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.
Suddenly Trump says that he was wiretapped, and all the MSM outlets have been in complete freakout mode disavowing their previous statements.
It was glorious! The alt-right has been laughing at the lefties for the past week or so.
Nope, you lost all credibility when you started shilling for Trump.
I think the word you're looking for is "advocating".
I'm under the impression that a shill is paid by the house. I advocate for free.
Life isn't so easy when you don't find people willing to lie about your naked shame.
Um... OK. I'll have to take your word on that.
> The Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans.
So, do tell, where did the regulations that this bill prevents taking effect come from?
Bipartisan support, of course.
Did you think all the bad stuff from the last 8 years came from one-sided control of government?
Or the 8 years prior to that?
The Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans.
Based on everything I've seen, I'd have to disagree. Neither Democrats or Republicans walk on water, but Republicans seem intent on rolling back a lot of stuff that favors the people as opposed to corporations. For example, the bill mentioned in this very article.
You're probably swayed by mainstream media bias. They're quick to point out bad conservative actions, and tend to sweep liberal problems under the rug.
For example, Trump withdrew the US from TPP. Slashdot has had several articles about the TPP, everyone was moaning about how bad it was, it was created and promoted by Obama's administration...
For another example, Obama ordered the drone-killing of a US citizen, and then drone-killed the son some weeks later. Outside the theatre of war, with no trial, and in a cafe killing 8 others as collateral damage.
Obama then classified the legal justification for why he had the power to do that, so that no one could question it.
That's the sort of thing we don't hear from the mainstream media, it's called the liberal bias and it's well known.
That's why you probably think Democrats are better.
They're still running under the "lesser of 2 evils" model.
"Yesterday, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and 23 Republican co-sponsors introduced a resolution that would overturn new privacy rules for internet service providers."
Seriously question: why are Republican lawmakers so willing to sell out their own constituents? And why do rank and file republican voters go along with it?
They're against anything and everything that would seem to be good for the people of their states and districts- healthcare, privacy protection, consumer protection, environmental protection, financial regulation on banks and mortgage companies, etc etc etc.
I mean, what the fuck?
About 6 months prior to the 2008 election, Barack Obama flip-flopped on telecom immunity.
He was, at that time, the leader of the Democratic party, and he felt comfortable enough breaking a campaign promise that he did it 6 months *before* the election.
Take an unbiased look at politicians and you'll find that both parties work against the interests of the people. Big corporations and moneyed interests give money for reelection, and expect special favors.
We've said for years on this very site how corrupt both parties are, and for this exact reason. We can follow the money, we can show the logical conclusions, we can cite example after example, and we do it for both parties.
Get away from the partisam bickering. Simple "the other side is awful" complaints are misdirecting people into internecine conflict, when we should be banding together as a people to demand better service from our government.
The Democrats are just as bad as the Republicans.
Total race-baiting, dog-whistle propaganda is labeled 'Disputed'?
Cowardly.
English has always been a "living" language: new words come into being, old words suffer from disuse, and meanings change. The syntax and grammer evolves and changes with the times.
We're seeing this right with many of the words in common usage in the media. "Racist", "sexist", "islamaphobe" and a host of other terms are losing their dictionary meaning.
I'm seeing lots of people on gab.ai who are completely blase' about being called racist. Someone will say "that's racist" or "you're a racist", and people are like "yeah, I'm racist. Whatever". I find it astonishing how quickly this has happened. Not 1 year ago the term "racist" meant that you believed a particular race was inferior. Nowadays you are a racist for having a particular body posture - even when you *don't* think some race is inferior.
This is similar to how past words had a stronger meaning. Terms like "you're a jerk" (person who masterbates a lot) and "you suck" (you perform fellatio) have lost a lot of their power and meaning. The phrase "St Paul’s Cathedral Is Amusing, Awful, and Artificial" was once taken as high praise.
So the words "disputed" and "fake" will be taking on new meaning, and in a year or two will come to have colloquial definitions that match their usage, which is not the usage we assign to them right now. "Disputed" will probably come to mean "politically charged", and "fake" will come to mean "from non-mainstream sources" without any of today's connotations of meaning.
It's just the living language, undergoing change.
Well, go start your own web forum. If you don't like what Twitter does, there's a whole world out there. Go to it. But I guarantee you, if you simply allow the cranks to control your medium, it will fester into nothingness.
Someone did, it's called Gab.ai, and it's specifically a haven for free speech.
Their version of censoring is to let everyone censor what *they* see on the site. An individual can "mute" other users or specific words, so if someone keeps posting things that bother you you can "mute" them so that you don't see them. If individual words trigger an unpleasant memory for you, you can mute individual words and you'll never see them.
The thing about calling people racist/sexist/nazi is definitely real.
Kellyanne Conway typing on her cell phone during a meeting of black dignitaries is definitely racist!
From that facebook post:
I sincerely doubt that Kellyanne Conway would be on the couch, shoes off, on her knees, looking at her phone, if the room was full of white dignitaries or CEOs that she actually actually respected.
Here's the full context which shows that she was setting her phone to take a group photo.
People are seeing racism everywhere right now, even where it doesn't exist!
the tumpanzees will NEVER admit they made a mistake.
as long as they are STIGGINIT to the 'liburals' they are happy.
they could lose their health insurance, be jobless and still think that they 'won'.
we really should have an IQ test for voters. if you aren't at least average, you don't get a vote.
dumb voters are why we are in the shitty state of things. they are so easily manipulated (BUT, HER EMAILS!) and they are entirely the wrong people to decide the future of this country, as a whole.
You do realize that Obama appointed him FCC commissioner in 2012, right?
Welcome to the darkness you've embraced. It will have consequences.
I'm actually an independent, not a conservative.
There's planks in the conservative platform that I don't agree with; for example, I think women should be able to choose abortion and we're probably wrecking the climate. A couple of other positions as well.
The problem is, coming out in favor of either of these puts me in the company of Liberals: People who leak classified information for political assassination, people who call for a military coup, people who riot to suppress free speech... I don't want to be associated with any of that.
I used to be a global warming believer, but I'm now having second thoughts. That "97 percent of scientists" figure people keep throwing around? It's fake. This whole thing about the left has caused me to reexamine my beliefs about global warming, and how I came by them. 'Turns out most of it was passively accepted without a critical thought, because I kept seeing it in the news.
This is troubling, and not in the false sense of the word that Liberals use. Global warming is conceivably the most important decision we'll face, and we need to get it right the first time.
And yet, debate on the issue is stifled by insult and threats. Scientists fear losing their livelihood if they question the dogma. Policies are "our way and nothing else", and always require reducing our standard of living while increasing economic disparity.
No where do I see proposals that would actually help the problem, such as calls to modernize our electrical grid, calls to change tax code to encourage telecommuting (section 1706), tax rebates for rooftop solar, or increased funding in helpful technology.
I'm having a tough time keeping my position about global warming, simply because it's the clarion call of the left.
There's an old saying among geeks: it's not enough to be right, you also have to be effective.
The left is so ineffective that it's tough to agree with them.
Even when they're right.
But that is likely because Trump is pro-business instead of a anti-business Democrat.
It's because Tesla inked a deal to start selling cars in the middle east, along with the support charging infrastructure.
I'm good with blaming the president for things, but the president really has very little effect on any individual business, and in particular has little effect on a specific business in his first 30 days.
I think the same can be said about Obama. Anything he did was more of a global long-term effect if it was any effect at all. Taking health care as an example, I don't see Obamacare as having curtailed or encouraged the medical industry or the insurance companies - the economics of health care would probably have evolved to the state we are in now with or without it. Military vendors were similarly unaffected over the last 8 years.
In economic terms, I don't see the president having much effect on business.
I'm a pretty liberal dude -
Considering you don't agree with a liberal law, no you're not. You are actually a centrist. If you believe in private ownership of property, you are center right.
It's apparently all-or-nothing with liberals.
When asked, I immediately had one good thing to say about Hillary Clinton, and had a dozen more after a few moment's thought.
The left can't find one good thing to say about Trump, and it's all-or-nothing. Attack in every possible way: his family, his business, even attack his 10 year old son.
Sad.
10-K's don't lie. Just sayin!
And what do the ones from Tesla say?
Help me out. How should I, as a smart investor, interpret Tesla's most recent annual report?
All this earnings losses doesn't mean anything to a expanding company like Tesla. Do we really want them to stall their growth just to be little bit profitable? They have the advantage with big car companies dragging their feet. They have to do everything they can to gain marketshare now before others catch up.
There was a big stink about Amazon during the late 90s and early 00s about how they are posting losses. Where are all those shortsighted investors now.
The amount of Tesla disinformation in the financial news is staggering.
I read an article three weeks ago that said that 38% of Tesla stock was shorted, with a due date a couple of weeks from then. I then read another mainstream financial media was reporting that Tesla was expected to hit zero by the middle of the summer, and you should sell your stock right now!
Sure enough, Tesla inked a deal to sell electric cars to the middle East, and its stock jumped 10% on that news and has held relatively steady.
One financial news report suggests to sell your Tesla stock and take the profits and invest in Twitter. Of course, Twitter has yet to make a profit and no *clear* way to do so, but hey... Tesla will be burning through cash and be bankrupt real soon now - take your profits out of Tesla and run!
I think there's a lot of "self interested" reporting going on. Most analysts want to bring Tesla down because a) they've bet heavily on the stock dropping, or b) have clients who would benefit from the stock dropping, or c) have clients heavily invested in oil and natural gas.
Tesla has been laying a firm foundation on which to build its future, and is posed to dominate a very big section of the economy. It shows every indication of being the next Microsoft or Apple.
If only those pesky financial analysts would stop and look at it objectively.
The solution is not to add another complicated layer on top.
The proposed solution also presents a single point of failure for the cryptographic resource. If one company manages to get hacked, or infiltrated by one agent, or gets betrayed by one employee, everything will be lost.
Bruce Schneier had the analogy of putting $100 into each of 10 safes, versus putting $1000 into one expensive safe. The $1000 in a single place makes it cost-effective for a burglar to try to break in, while $100 in ten safes does not, even if the 10 safes are individually less secure than the one safe.
We've seen this principle in action recently: losing our clearance info database to the Chinese, and RSA losing its secureid seed database.
If the security of IOT devices is managed by one system, all it takes is someone to offer $500,000 to an employee for the root info (root certificate, or whatever the chain of trust originates from) and everything is lost.
Let's see how quickly the Trumpanzees can blame this on Obama somehow, or call it all fake news :)
Not fake news, but it's certainly non-techie news.
Will we get an article about the Russian pranksters who pranked US Congresswoman Maxine Waters posing as the Ukrainian PM now?
That's not techie news either...
This study is racist and xenophobic and slashdot is also for posting it. America is a country of immigrants and Indians have just as much right to a programming job as anyone who was born here.
Racism is usually usually defined as prejudice or antagonism based on race, and xenophobia has something to do with fear.
The problem with your argument is that there is no actual racism or xenophobia involved. No one is "afraid" of people from India, no one "fears" the Indian programmer, and from the looks of things in this country no one tries to keep "the Indian savage" down or prevents them from doing anything a regular citizen could do.
They drink at the same water fountains as anyone else, and no one cares.
This is the typical argument of the left. It's OK to hit a racist, so you start by labelling everything you don't like as racist.
Then when you're caught breaking windows or giving someone a beat-down, you sayl "yeah, but he's a racist!".
In fact, you don't even need to apply the label yourself. So long as someone else calls it racism, you're free to riot and beat people all you want.
That's really the reason the left uses all these silly labels, it's to justify virtuous acts of violence.
It's OK to hit a racist.
The spillway failed due to a construction issue. Had it not failed, its capacity would have been adequate.
I believe you are confusing the [concrete] regular spillway with the [earthen] emergency spillway.
The concrete spillway is gone, but this doesn't seem to be a safety issue.
The earthen emergency spillway eroded almost all the way back to the berm, which would have resulted in a dam breech. That's what everyone is worried about.
I posted an update response above, with images.
There's actually 2 things going on.
The existing spillway is made of concrete, and suffered some structural damage.
Here is an image of the damage, from a couple of days ago, and here is that same spillway today.
The lower half of the spillway is probably completely gone. The raging water might erode up to the level of the dam, but that's not likely.
The actual problem was the emergency spillway, which is an earthen bank to the left (looking up to the dam) of the regular spillway.
You can see the damage in this image. Note that one of the eroded canyons reaches almost up to the level of the water.
If the erosion had reached the emergency spillway it would have burst, releasing a whole lot of water downstream.
Here's a closeup, and note the middle lower portion of the image. We were that close to a breech.
That didn't happen, and the waters are now below emergency levels.
However, the situation is rather precarious and the emergency spillway could still burst. There's still a lot of water still coming in to the reservoir, which is being frantically lowered.
(And yes, I wrote "Hyperloop" when I meant "High Speed Rail" above.)
I just wanted to post some info before everyone spins this as a partisan failure of one sort or another.
1) The dam was built and is owned by California.
2) California was warned about the potential problem (the one we are currently seeing) in 2005.
3) In 2005, as part of the federal re-licensing procedure for the dam, several groups urged federal officials to require that the dam’s [earthwork] emergency spillway be upgraded to concrete. The federal government declined.
4) The dam was built at a time when requirements were less strict in comparison to today's standards. The dam foundations were dug down to "weathered" rock, which is less structurally sound than "bedrock".
And finally,
5) As much as people feel the need for karma or justice or revenge or whatever, we DO NOT punish people's lives and homes over partisan bullshit. The federal government should (and most probably will) assist in any way that they can to help avoid a disaster.
As has been pointed out by many people, California spent several billions of dollars on the hyperloop while letting this particular bit of infrastructure upgrade get ignored. Both California and the Federal government (viz: the licensing mentioned above) can share the blame for this.
It's another Katrina-like situation: both governments (Cali and Federal) were warned, did nothing, and now it's an emergency.
Also of note, and I'm trying to look at the big picture here and not point fingers, it's been pointed out that the infrastructure in our country has been neglected for a long time (especially roads, bridges, and the electrical grid), and we really need to start fixing up things.
Fixing our infrastructure was one of the campaign promises of the party in power, perhaps this will galvanize them to action.
I haven't seen anyone come up with a good reason people wouldn't use basic income to work less and be lazy. I can tell you, if I had guaranteed income for life, I would probably not ever work again.
Here you go.
You have to realize that "work" may not be going out and doing a 9-to-5 job in the traditional sense. Newton made a bunch of his discoveries while on forced leave from Cambridge due to the plague, and there are many historical examples of well-to-do scientists and explorers and artists who made great discoveries because they had the leisure and means to do so.
Stephen King was dirt poor for much of his early life, but he still wrote because he loved writing. Imaging how much more he could have contributed to popular literature if he didn't have to take back-breaking jobs as a young man to make ends meet.
Not everyone will be Newton or King, but anyone who takes up a hobby or minor occupation and becomes really good at it might extend the frontiers of that area. All of this has the potential to enrich our society and further our scientific knowledge.
How do we measure the economics of the situation?
That's a very good basic question to ask.
Too many times people get up on the soapbox of the world and give their opinion about this or that policy, and one can never figure out whether they are experts speaking from experience or just political hacks.
People giving an opinion in public is just noise, and people bolstering their opinion with rationalization and/or analogy is noise masquerading as signal.
We shouldn't give any credence to anyone who tries to sway our opinions about, well... anything, unless they can back it up with facts that are suggestive or studies that can be examined in detail.
I'm especially suspect of the "it will only encourage some people to work less" comment, as if that is a bad thing. It might be perfectly acceptable for some part of society to have to work less, or perhaps not to have to work at all. There's a parallel and opposite rationalization that holds that people will accomplish great things when given enough leisure.
Making that statement ("some people" is an obvious attempt at being divisive, as in "you know the type of people I mean") in the way that he made it is simple emotional manipulation. Also from the article are such gems as "We think it takes social policy in the wrong direction", meaning basically "I don't like it, in an unspecified and indeterminate way".
He's not claiming that it doesn't work, he's claiming that he doesn't like it (and neither should you).
When it comes to that point, what they really want is for all the useless have-nots to just die and stop nagging them for things. "You didn't work hard enough" becomes just the excuse for why their easily-prevented deaths are justified.
I emboldened one of your words to draw attention to it.
Curiously, as a group Republicans give more to charity than Democrats. Apparently Republicans are more caring and giving than Democrats in general on that score, so long as the giving is voluntary and not mandated.
Also curiously, the party with "free speech" as one of its core values has no problem smashing the venues of a controversial speaker.
This is my way of saying that there's evil on both sides of the aisle. Saying it's one side or the other is a misnomer, we need to identify the stupid bits on both sides and excise them like a cancer.
Come out against the stupidity instead of against the side. There are good Republicans and there are bad Democrats.
We need to stop turning everything into a tribal conflict.
On that point, instead of telling us what "they" actually want, tell us where we should be going.
People would actually support a good plan, if someone should propose it.
Is it to allow people to not work at all, or is it to provide an income floor to allow them to bootstrap their way out of poverty into a truly productive, sustainable lifestyle?
A good overview of the concepts is in Manna, a short story by Marshall Brain. It's a quick read and gives an easy description of the economic problems we're in the midst of.
In broad terms, we can imagine an automated factory which is capable of producing all the goods needed by everyone in the country.
Such a factory could get its energy from solar cells, and in addition to making everyone's goods it could make enough solar cells to replenish the ones it has when they go bad, and it could have enough energy to recycle all the waste products from goods that people throw away.
That's a the metaphor of course, but it largely sums up where the labor pool is headed in the next 50 years or so: consumption has an upper bound, automation is making huge sections of the labor force unnecessary, and increases in productivity make the labor we have more effective.
As a data point, note that companies are road testing automated trucks *right now*, companies are testing automated last-mile delivery via drones and rolling robots *right now*, and automated farming is coming on line *right now*.
The trucking thing alone will directly eliminate somewhere between 3 and 5 million jobs, and millions more in support structure: restaurants and hotels on the highway, for instance.
We're at the point *right now* where we have too many capable workers and not enough jobs, and improvements in technology will bring us closer and closer to the "completely automated" factory metaphor used above. The actual factory will be a host of factories distributed around the country, "automated" will still require 100K workers for maintenance and upgrades, and energy will be rooftop solar
The regular rules of economics are about to break down. It's currently a sort of cycle, where money flows to the people (through salary), the people purchase things from companies, and the cycle repeats.
With no one working, no one has money to purchase anything so the cycle stops. People starve and the economy halts.
UBI is an attempt at a new economic model. People are given money to spend to keep the economy going, and as a side-benefit people don't starve or commit crimes to survive. Society benefits by having reduced crime and an active economy, and people have more leisure time to do things such as raising children or getting educated.
UBI is one of about 5 proposed solutions for the economic transition we're facing.
It's had a couple of small trials to great success, so it seems like it might be a viable option.