Where are all the Trump/Pai supporters to tell us how this is really a good thing and the invisible hand of the market will make everything all right? Is it possible there is some level of corporate cronyism that even they can't justify?
We're right here, and we don't necessarily agree with everything the administration does.
For example, I'm completely in favor of allowing women the ability to choose to have an abortion, with minimal government oversight (regulate the safety, not the right to choose).
But I also know that there are larger issues at hand, the two most obvious ones being the economy and immigration.
I accept that some of the smaller issues won't be handled in the way I think is optimal, but the bigger issues seem to be working out OK. For example, I really like the new economy, and I think illegal immigration needs to be reined in. (Legal immigration, to the tune of 1.1 million a year, is working out just fine - no problems with that.)
It's a question of priorities.
Would you quit a job over issues that you view as relatively minor, if the pay was good and had good benefits?
For all the good things coming out of this administration (and admit it, lots of people see the things coming out of the administration as good*), FCC and internet related issues seem to be severely anti-populist.
In the run-up to the midterm elections, it sounds like this could be a wedge issue, a prominent plank in the Democratic platform.
How come we never hear any Democrat candidates harp on this issue?
How come Democrat candidates never say "if elected, I'll be for *this* and *that* specific reform, to address these problems?
(We never hear Republican candidates do this either, but Republicans are in power right now and are the ones ignoring the problems so there's no need to bring it up.)
(*) Much better economy, end of ISIS, getting our allies to pay more for their own defense, renegotiating trade deals with EU and Mexico (with Canada and China coming up), defunding terrorism by defunding Iran, tax rebates, the list goes on...)
There's a problem with all these court orders that few people realize, which is the separation of the three sections of government.
Consider the current situation: net neutrality was a policy created by a government agency without the force of law, in the sense that the policy didn't come from the legislative branch, and the same agency could choose to reverse its decision.
If the courts step in and order the policy reinstated, they are effectively enacting law from their own branch and circumventing the normal rules of how law gets enacted.
So far the executive branch has been very "polite" about these court orders by deferring to the order and possibly filing appeals, sometimes going as far as the supreme court.
A more serious situation happens with things like DACA and DAPA: these policies were implemented by the executive branch in direct contradiction of established law. These did not even have the weight of executive orders, they were "policy memos" issued from the executive branch.
If the courts step in and order the executive branch to reimplement DACA we have the special situation where the legislature wants the executive branch do one thing, and the courts want them to do the opposite.
The term for this situation is "constitutional crisis", and again the executive branch has been polite in obeying the orders (even the really obviously bad ones), but this doesn't necessarily have to happen. They could push the issue and it would have serious ramifications about the government in this country, most of which no one would like.
Honestly - using the courts to force your agenda is a really bad idea, and while it may *seem* like you are winning small points, the larger point keeps looming larger every day.
This is mentioned every. single. time. NN has come up on this forum, which is that NN was *not* axed due to technical merits, it was axed because it wasn't proper law. And people mention every. single. time. that the right way is to have the legislature pass a NN law, and the executive branch would happily implement it as written.
Similarly, for DACA and DAPA, Trump has been asking the legislature (clearly and explicitly) repeatedly for immigration reform, yet none is forthcoming.
Pass NN laws at the state level, let the carriers sort it out with the states.
But please stop asking the courts to implement your political agenda.
It's a run-around of the legislative branch, and literally threatens the stability of government.
When I was 5 years old I figured out that if everyone has $1,000,000 dollars everyone would be rich.
I realized when I was 10 why if everyone had $1,000,000 nobody would be rich.
Sure, this experiment will work because the source of the money isn't other people's money and it isn't inflation.
When the source of the money is inflation or other people's money, that $12,000 a year will be sunk into rent increases and increased home prices, amongst other things.
When I was 25 years old I figured out that $1,000,000 invested in an index fund would increase in value enough to account for inflation and give an income of $2000 a month in perpetuity.
Also when I was 25, I figured out that any reduction of the workforce would push wages up and make jobs better by way of competition from supply and demand.
Also also, I noted that you don't need to give everyone the income immediately. Having a lottery will take people out of the workforce gradually, which could be funded over time in a reasonable way. Each $1 billion spent this way takes 1,000 people out of the workforce.
I noticed many things when I was 25, including that if you took all the entitlements programs and simply gave the money out with no regulatory oversight, you could have 5 times as many people using entitlements.
Looking at the cost of entitlements, it's clear that we *could* start moving people off of welfare and related services and eventually get to UBI or something close to it, with no increase in taxes.
Individual productivity keeps rising, and it's pretty easy to see that UBI has to happen.
Or if it doesn't, then we're in for a world of hurt as all the goods and services needed by everyone are made by fewer and fewer people, while the people who can't find a job either starve or revolt.
A personal anecdote: I have a GMail account I use at home, everything works well enough (despite the awful interface).
I sometimes want to use it at the local hackerspace, I try to log in, and after I enter my password it tells me "we don't recognize this computer, give us your phone number and we'll send you an SMS message to continue"(*).
I absolutely do not want to give Google my phone number, but there's no way around this.
My account is not compromised, I've got a respectable password, and this didn't used to be a requirement.
Basically, they've lured everyone in with a free service, and now they're drawing in other personal information in order to continue to use it. I fear that one day they will simply decide to require a phone number from my home computer, and then I'll be fucked because I will have to give it to them or else lose all functionality of GMail.
It sucks. They don't tell you how to get around it, they only give explanations of "this is for *your* security!".
Giving google my phone number doesn't increase security, but they've drawn everyone in with the free service.
(*) Also, I have no idea how they "recognize" my home computer, since I regularly delete cookies from my system and re-login. Perhaps the "delete cookies" feature doesn't do what they say it does.
"Outside of the Russian trolls, virtually no real Twitter users actually responded to the messages"
An obvious response comes to mind.
Why not pick a political agenda (such as vaccination) and engineer a bot army that argues for the correct position?
Specifically in this case, why doesn't a group of 40-or-so people get together and agree to play the analogous "troll" position, build a couple of hundred bots, and sow complacency and agreement (instead of divisiveness)?
It sounds like bot trolling is an effective and disruptive way to sway many things - an election, regime satisfaction, and scientific belief.
Why doesn't someone use that technique for the purposes of good?
You should have sold at 320. Tesla is a liability even at $4.20. And the free ride is gone, the competition both at the top and at the bottom has come and is better.
As you wrote that, Tesla had closed at $322.
Pray, why do you think that selling at $320 would have been a good idea?
I'm sure the persuasiveness of Cathy Wood of ARK on CNBC today convinced Musk and the board that Tesla is worth $4K a share and should stay public. Even to a six year old it's plain Musk is a conman and fraud.
It's a good thing that us investors aren't 6 years old then.
It all boils down to one thing: a black-box extrapolation of Tesla's existing capital and burn rate indicates that they will need additional funding.
Musk says categorically that they *won't* need additional funding.
The outside analysis of whether Tesla will need financing is ambiguous - it might or it might not, it'll be close. (Different results depending on the model assumptions.)
The answer will come in about 5 weeks, when Tesla releases Q3 financials, and 3 months later for Q4.
For all the hype and hand wringing in the stock market, virtually nothing moves the stock outside of really obvious direct information. Musk could have a nervous breakdown on twitter, and it wouldn't affect the stock at all, contrary to MSM reports. If you actually follow the Tesla stock you'll see lots of stock reporting that (to my great surprise) simply isn't true!
A major fire destroying the factory would affect the stock. A random analyst trash-talking the company will not.
(I read one news report last week that said "Tesla down 4% on <such-and-so>" and the stock at the moment of posting was up 1% from previous close. Market reporting is insane!)
Tesla stock shot up due to the privitization announcement, it crashed a little after, and it's been steady at around $320 ever since.
By the way, that $4000 estimate was Cathy Wood talking about a completely new industry: transportation on demand. She proposes a fleet of automated vehicles which could be summoned on demand (in a heavily populated area, such as a big city) when needed to take you someplace. She speculates that Tesla is uniquely positioned to create and dominate that industry, and if it happens their stock would be worth $4000 per share.
(She comes to this conclusion based on Tesla's new AI chip. She claims that puts Tesla years ahead of other automated driving companies.)
So she's not talking about Tesla stock per-se, only how it might foster a new industry. The same algorithms that Amazon uses for stock robots, only moving people using Teslas.
For all the hype about needing more financing, *if* Tesla needs more cash it certainly won't need much. If they miss the mark it will be by very little, and they *should* be able to get that from almost anywhere.
Here's hoping -- she's a national treasure and deserves a good, cushy job after being railroaded for doing her civic duty and reporting election fraud to the media.
No, you don't get to misuse classified information just to score political points.
(Well, unless you are already a major Democrat politician.)
I'm ambivalent about this.
On the one hand, leaking classified info should be punished. I agree, and that part is fine.
Also, her intent wasn't "civic duty", it was apparently hatred of the president.
On the other hand, James Comey did *exactly* the same thing as Reality Winner, for *exactly* the same reasons, and hasn't been charged and got a book deal out of it. (Comey admitted to doing the leaking under oath. No need to cite here, it was in all the news and google is your friend.)
It's one of those "don't agree, but defend your right to do it" things. The law is nothing if it's based on social class. Either Comey should be charged, or Reality Winner should go free.
I don't think it's likely, but President Trump *should* pardon Reality Winner. Whistleblowers serve an important check on the workings of government, and should be encouraged within reason.
I don't normally like the "point by point" refutation, but this post is so completely whacked... here goes:
> with no bases in truth
"Truth" (or lack of) is not a reason for censorship. Deleting things based on truth is subject to all kinds of bias and misrepresentation.
> Alex Jones pushed violent attacks on innocent individuals
Then he should be arrested. Was he arrested? I'm now wondering if your assertion is, in fact, true. The legal system has very explicit rules on what is legal speech, and a public forum for appeal with well-known rules and restrictions.
> To defend him makes you a nutter,
Insults are not arguments. I'll bet you're a liberal - because insults are all they have.
> giving him das boot.
"Das Boot" was a movie, originally in German ("The Boat", about a German U-boat during WWII), and you use the phrase as a pun of "the boot", meaning "to kick out".
I don't see how this works in any comedic, ironic, or literal way, unless you're casting the social media as nazis? Which I suppose they are, but it looks like the opposite of what you intended.
> Kendall happily defends traitors and dangerous people
A jab at Trump and Kendall. People are waking up to the fact that extreme rhetoric is simply noise in the public dialog. We get it, you're full of hatred, you have to throw insults because you have no arguments.
> [Kendall, Trump] so long as ideologically they agree with him. Otherwise he's for the opposite.
Someone who defends a position they agree with, and argues against a position they disagree with is... what?
If you have an argument that's not based on emotion, I'd like to hear it. Saying that social media "can run their business the way they want" is starting to wear thin, as social media invited everyone to participate and built a huge base and following, only to suppress certain viewpoints in the run-up to an election.
The term "anti-American" has been tossed around lately, but actually that previous sentence 'kinda fits. By suppressing one political viewpoint, those companies are using their built-up power to influence the results of an election.
Back when I frequented Drudge Report, if a link took me to infowars.com I would navigate away. It's a little crazy over there.
I agree with you completely. After the ban, I've been looking at his site occasionally to see what all the fuss is about, and just can't get interested in any of it.
Problem is, free speech means everyone gets to have their say. Banning Infowars was wrong, it was the 3rd click of the censorship ratchet, and it needs to be discussed in the arena of civil rights.
I think the second one(*) was taking away DailyStormer's domain registration and not letting them use it.
Even the Electronic Freedom Foundation worried over censoring DailyStormer.
We're well into the 3rd line of that "first they came for..." poem, and we really need to get this sorted out before the internet turns into a leftist utopian playland, where everyone agrees and speaking out is prohibited.
We really need to get this sorted out.
Maybe the government will step in and impose regulations.
It seems like we're headed that way.
(*) First one was MasterCard and Visa dropping Wikileaks simultaneously after posting the "collateral murder" video, isolating Wikileaks from $11 million in donations that were coming in.
What Musk did over Twitter is first and foremost unbecoming of a CEO and is outright manipulation of the stock price.
In your opinion.
That's the problem with all the Tesla news nowadays - there's actually very little going on, what we see in the media is opinion dressed up as news. And if it's bad, the shorts will run with it.
.) The Saudis had approached Musk multiple times about taking Tesla private over the past two years .) During that time, Musk has been telling shorts to get out .) The Tesla board was informed about Musk's intent before the infamous tweet, and discussed the merits .) The board decided the next step was to contact and discuss with the largest shareholders .) Musk decided that he couldn't legally contact *only* the largest stockholders, so he publicly announced on twitter .) Stock goes up .) Stock goes down
Really, there's nothing in the news anyone can trust about Tesla nowadays. After the NYT interview I saw these competing headlines:
"Musk says Tesla had an excruciating year, and the worst is yet to come" (one source, among many)
"Musk says Tesla had an excruciating year, and the worst is over" (one source, among many)
Which of these is an accurate portrayal of Tesla's future?
Don't believe any of it. Given the timeline above, it's really hard to see how Musk could be charged with a crime - SEC is civil, not criminal, the FBI would have to get involved for that. It's also hard to see how the SEC could impose a fine. There *might* be an issue with the exact definition of "secured", but it's a) moot, b) can be argued either way, and c) it took the SEC 5 years to bring down [Theranos CEO] Elisabeth Holmes for much more severe problems, they aren't likely to move any faster with Tesla. Five years from now we can worry whether this has made any difference to Tesla.
It's clear that Tesla only has to weather the next 4 months or so, and then be clear of all this nonsense.
Until then, just ignore the rabble - it's only noise anyway.
2) The social media sites have always pushed a liberal agenda. 3) They are just more open and brazen about it now. 4) If someone thinks "Good. They should", don't get too comfortable. They'll be coming for you next. Always happens.
This is about to come to a boil - Trump just tweeted about the problem and saying:
"[...] Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen."
Bill Maher tried to support free speech using Alex Jones as his example, and got shot down by his panel. Apparently, the left thinks that suppressing speech is OK when it promotes their cause. Bill also mentioned the recent Charlottesville protests, implying that the violent counter-protests from last year (Antifa and the like) are having a chilling effect on dissent in the nation.
If the "social media giants" are not scrambling in panic right now, they should be. Their attempts at midterm meddling is going to cause the government to crack down on them with regulation.
And when it comes, it will be regulation they won't like.
In several instances, Facebook ignored repeated requests by users to delete hateful content that violated its guidelines. At least a dozen people, as well as the Anti-Defamation League in 2012, lodged protests with Facebook to no avail about a page called Jewish Ritual Murder. However, after ProPublica asked Facebook about the page, it was taken down.
Yep. "Jewish ritual murder" isn't hate speech, but a pro-gun-ownership political candidate is.
The "Russians are in our systems" is a nice misdirect that hides what's really going on.
There's no evidence any votes were changed in the last election, but by making unsubstantiated claims and going from hackers to Russian hackers to state-sponsored Russian hackers they can gin up enough fear and outrage to justify censorship aimed at affecting the midterms.
For example, Facebook recently banned [conservative blogger and political candidate] Avi Yemini for ‘Hate Speech’, won't tell him why he was banned, and denied his appeal. (You can view the banned page here.)
Lots and lots and lots of conservative viewpoints are being purged online in the runup to the midterm elections, and really scary things are coming up in the news every day.
Two terms that frequently come up in discussion are "midterm meddling" and "street fight". The first refers to all the suppression of conservative viewpoints, the second refers to the mob-mentality of striking back at people who don't toe the Liberal line.
We need more home grown doctors. I don't know about the rest of/. but I'm getting older. Right now we've been able to poach doctors from poorer countries but those countries are modernizing so that's not going to last forever.
I think there's a larger point here that people are missing.
The school is putting aside enough money to fund the scholarships in perpetuity.
If you have enough wealth gathered in one spot, you can use it to fund things forever. We could gradually extend this model to cover other universities and other disciplines, and eventually reach the point where all university education is funded this way.
(Would require a *lot* of invested money - probably more than the current GDP - but we could do it incrementally over time; say, over the next 100 years.)
The model could also be extended to other societal benefits. Hypothetically, the return from $2 million in an investment account can keep pace with inflation (roughly 2%) as well as provide an income for one family: varies depending on assumptions, but a 5% return minus 2% inflation would yield $60,000 in perpetuity.
This could be the way to get UBI and universal health care: start putting away chunks of wealth to be used for funding projects in perpetuity.
It neatly side-steps the counter argument "eventually you run out of other people' money".
What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).
It's free, and it wants to become an actual journal with all the rigor and benefits of the mainstream journals.
It also wants to navigate away from some of the problems we see with current journals, such as publishing negative results (which is allowed), citation inflation, and so on.
It currently has one issue with one paper, and has an open call for more papers.
It targets citizen science, and we're seeing a lot of that in the hacker community, but would welcome and accept submissions from more mainstream researchers.
There's an opportunity here to start something new and avoid all the pitfalls we keep hearing about.
Anyone who would like to join that community, get in on the ground floor and help make a better type of journal can contact the editors.
(Disclaimer: I'm one of their reviewers. I'm particularly interested in structural rigor such as statistical methods: logical fallacies such as p-hacking, reversed conditional errors, and so on.)
In the recent elections, 6500 voters in NH were "non-resident" voters, using same-day registration.
(In NH you can register on the day of voting, and you don't need to be a resident - only that you are in the process of moving. Basically you "pinky swear" that you will be a NH resident real soon, and they let you vote.)
Of the 6540 people who voted as non-resident, only about 1000 of these actually moved to NH.
The difference between the Republican and Democratic senate election was about 1000 votes.
Neighboring states are predominately democratic, so with a statistical certainty the non-resident vote changed the NH senator from an "R" to a "D" this last election.
This really happened, voter fraud flipped a senate seat, and that senator does not properly represent the interests of her state.
Also, at least 196 of those non-resident voters have voted in more than one state.
I was under the impression that forest fires are natural in a healthy forest, and in fact some trees need forest fires to germinate properly (the cones are heavy with resin, the heat of the fire causes the cone to fully mature and then go to seed after the fire has passed.)
Also, by preventing fires the deadwood that would normally be burned accumulates, to the point where when a fire inevitably starts you get a torrentially large fire instead of the typical small fire (of a healthy forest).
And so one way to prevent large forest fires is to frequently start smaller fires, to clear out the accumulating deadwood.
I'm not a forestry expert, so I'm asking the question: has that explanation (and rationale) been disproven?
If it hasn't, is there some reason why smaller "management" fires aren't periodically set?
1. Decentralised DNS. The DNS crew have shown they cannot be trusted to 100%, which is a really bad thing when it comes to free speech online. Perhaps a bitcoin style ledger could be of help here.
2. A decentralised social network solution with monetisation options. Think about it, Youtube and Facebook rolled into one for all sorts of content imaginable, a pay-as-you-go buffet where you can choose whether to pay with your eyeballs, your time, or your money. Awesome stuff if it ever get started.
3. The realisation that the web of the nineties, where everyone and their grandma could make a website, is pretty much dead. And no, I do not mourn those Geocities webpages, I rather mourn the fact that it is way too hard to get stuff online without selling your firstborn son to one of the big dragons (Google, Facebook etc).
Guess I'll keep dreaming of these things forever though...
All fine and good.
In an attempt to start a meaningful dialogue, how do you feel about The Daily Stormer having a website available on the internet, having a site name entry in the distributed DNS system, and having a home page and videos on your decentralized social network?(*)
This is the choice you will have to make when implementing the next internet: in order to make it truly open for everyone, you will have to accept that there are people whose opinion you don't agree to and who have just as much right to free speech. Management of such a system has to be completely decoupled from mob rule, else we'll be back to where we are now.
A completely open internet would allow distasteful speech and people you don't agree with to have a voice.
Are you willing to take the bad with the good?
(*) For those who don't know, Daily Stormer is an actual nazi website that lost their original website name after registrars dropped them as customers while keeping the original name, disallowing them from using the name at another registrar.
China is waging an all out war on the West, stealing every bit of IP it possibly can, while militarizing the South China Sea as part of its "One belt, one road" initiative, along with its 2025 and 2050 roadmap. It's about time America started recognizing that and responded appropriately.
Firstly, it's not an "all out" war, that phrase is trying to use extreme rhetoric to gin up divisiveness. It's the same thing that the Russians (and others) are accused of doing in the US. An "all out" war would include military actions; in fact, a true "all out" war would include nuclear strikes.
Dial back the rhetoric into a more accurate description.
Secondly, the employee disputes the charges, and frames his explanation in a credible way. We have essentially two conflicting stories: the FBI and the employee, and we have no idea who is right.
Jumping to conclusions, in this case espionage, is unwarranted at this time. It's calling for "mob rule" based on perception of guilt or innocence, said perception being made (by the FBI, and the employee) with no standards of accuracy.
We have "innocent until proven guilty" for a reason, it's one of the basic rights, and we need to get back to those.
People keep talking about "fake news" and "divisive tribalism", and we only get that when people have an emotional reaction to something they take as un-skeptically true and rhetorically pushed to the limits of outrage.
Let the evidence be introduced and examined in the legal process, where a much higher standard of accuracy and relevance is enforced, and let a court decide.
We don't need to get all outraged and mob-like about this incident, at least not yet.
This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.
The per-person productivity of the US(*) is now about $58,000.
This means that if everything were distributed equally, every man, woman, and child could be given $58,000 to spend. And they would get another one next year. If you restrict it to adults, that figure goes up by another third.
The rise appears to be exponential, with the "doubling time" roughly 16 years, more or less depending on the growth rate of the economy in past decades. You can easily see this in the Google chart by tracking down to half the current amount (1995), half that amount (1981), and so on.
A few moments though should convince you that exponential rise is the expected outcome - increases in productivity tend to beget more increases in productivity.
For a sense of the time periods involved, note that the US has about 4% of the world population, so if the per person GDP continues to rise as shown, the US will be able to supply the world population with twice that amount in four doublings, or 64 years from now.
Also: other countries are on this same curve and are not accounted for.
By the end of this century we will be at the utopian ideal seen in many science fiction novels, and kids today will live to see it.
...if that wealth can be equally distributed.
As mentioned, we could distribute $58,000 to everyone in the country today, or we could wait 16 years (one doubling) and distribute $58,000 to everyone and still be on that exponential curve.
At some point we will simply have so much wealth and so few jobs that it makes sense to reinvent our economy to compensate.
UBI seems inevitable.
(*) I realize the OP is talking about Canada, but US is the info I have at hand. It should be the same there as here.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are all the Trump/Pai supporters to tell us how this is really a good thing and the invisible hand of the market will make everything all right? Is it possible there is some level of corporate cronyism that even they can't justify?
We're right here, and we don't necessarily agree with everything the administration does.
For example, I'm completely in favor of allowing women the ability to choose to have an abortion, with minimal government oversight (regulate the safety, not the right to choose).
But I also know that there are larger issues at hand, the two most obvious ones being the economy and immigration.
I accept that some of the smaller issues won't be handled in the way I think is optimal, but the bigger issues seem to be working out OK. For example, I really like the new economy, and I think illegal immigration needs to be reined in. (Legal immigration, to the tune of 1.1 million a year, is working out just fine - no problems with that.)
It's a question of priorities.
Would you quit a job over issues that you view as relatively minor, if the pay was good and had good benefits?
For all the good things coming out of this administration (and admit it, lots of people see the things coming out of the administration as good*), FCC and internet related issues seem to be severely anti-populist.
In the run-up to the midterm elections, it sounds like this could be a wedge issue, a prominent plank in the Democratic platform.
How come we never hear any Democrat candidates harp on this issue?
How come Democrat candidates never say "if elected, I'll be for *this* and *that* specific reform, to address these problems?
(We never hear Republican candidates do this either, but Republicans are in power right now and are the ones ignoring the problems so there's no need to bring it up.)
(*) Much better economy, end of ISIS, getting our allies to pay more for their own defense, renegotiating trade deals with EU and Mexico (with Canada and China coming up), defunding terrorism by defunding Iran, tax rebates, the list goes on...)
What a Patriot. I'll bet he going to be protecting our freedoms real soon now.
Actually, he pretty-much is.
You don't see that because you're on the other side of the issue, on the side of speech you don't like.
We often say that freedom of speech means freedom for others to say things we don't like.
You don't like it, I get that.
Do you believe in free speech or do you believe in suppression of speech?
There's a problem with all these court orders that few people realize, which is the separation of the three sections of government.
Consider the current situation: net neutrality was a policy created by a government agency without the force of law, in the sense that the policy didn't come from the legislative branch, and the same agency could choose to reverse its decision.
If the courts step in and order the policy reinstated, they are effectively enacting law from their own branch and circumventing the normal rules of how law gets enacted.
So far the executive branch has been very "polite" about these court orders by deferring to the order and possibly filing appeals, sometimes going as far as the supreme court.
A more serious situation happens with things like DACA and DAPA: these policies were implemented by the executive branch in direct contradiction of established law. These did not even have the weight of executive orders, they were "policy memos" issued from the executive branch.
If the courts step in and order the executive branch to reimplement DACA we have the special situation where the legislature wants the executive branch do one thing, and the courts want them to do the opposite.
The term for this situation is "constitutional crisis", and again the executive branch has been polite in obeying the orders (even the really obviously bad ones), but this doesn't necessarily have to happen. They could push the issue and it would have serious ramifications about the government in this country, most of which no one would like.
Honestly - using the courts to force your agenda is a really bad idea, and while it may *seem* like you are winning small points, the larger point keeps looming larger every day.
This is mentioned every. single. time. NN has come up on this forum, which is that NN was *not* axed due to technical merits, it was axed because it wasn't proper law. And people mention every. single. time. that the right way is to have the legislature pass a NN law, and the executive branch would happily implement it as written.
Similarly, for DACA and DAPA, Trump has been asking the legislature (clearly and explicitly) repeatedly for immigration reform, yet none is forthcoming.
Pass NN laws at the state level, let the carriers sort it out with the states.
But please stop asking the courts to implement your political agenda.
It's a run-around of the legislative branch, and literally threatens the stability of government.
When I was 5 years old I figured out that if everyone has $1,000,000 dollars everyone would be rich.
I realized when I was 10 why if everyone had $1,000,000 nobody would be rich.
Sure, this experiment will work because the source of the money isn't other people's money and it isn't inflation.
When the source of the money is inflation or other people's money, that $12,000 a year will be sunk into rent increases and increased home prices, amongst other things.
When I was 25 years old I figured out that $1,000,000 invested in an index fund would increase in value enough to account for inflation and give an income of $2000 a month in perpetuity.
Also when I was 25, I figured out that any reduction of the workforce would push wages up and make jobs better by way of competition from supply and demand.
Also also, I noted that you don't need to give everyone the income immediately. Having a lottery will take people out of the workforce gradually, which could be funded over time in a reasonable way. Each $1 billion spent this way takes 1,000 people out of the workforce.
I noticed many things when I was 25, including that if you took all the entitlements programs and simply gave the money out with no regulatory oversight, you could have 5 times as many people using entitlements.
Looking at the cost of entitlements, it's clear that we *could* start moving people off of welfare and related services and eventually get to UBI or something close to it, with no increase in taxes.
Individual productivity keeps rising, and it's pretty easy to see that UBI has to happen.
Or if it doesn't, then we're in for a world of hurt as all the goods and services needed by everyone are made by fewer and fewer people, while the people who can't find a job either starve or revolt.
A personal anecdote: I have a GMail account I use at home, everything works well enough (despite the awful interface).
I sometimes want to use it at the local hackerspace, I try to log in, and after I enter my password it tells me "we don't recognize this computer, give us your phone number and we'll send you an SMS message to continue"(*).
I absolutely do not want to give Google my phone number, but there's no way around this.
My account is not compromised, I've got a respectable password, and this didn't used to be a requirement.
Basically, they've lured everyone in with a free service, and now they're drawing in other personal information in order to continue to use it. I fear that one day they will simply decide to require a phone number from my home computer, and then I'll be fucked because I will have to give it to them or else lose all functionality of GMail.
It sucks. They don't tell you how to get around it, they only give explanations of "this is for *your* security!".
Giving google my phone number doesn't increase security, but they've drawn everyone in with the free service.
(*) Also, I have no idea how they "recognize" my home computer, since I regularly delete cookies from my system and re-login. Perhaps the "delete cookies" feature doesn't do what they say it does.
"Outside of the Russian trolls, virtually no real Twitter users actually responded to the messages"
An obvious response comes to mind.
Why not pick a political agenda (such as vaccination) and engineer a bot army that argues for the correct position?
Specifically in this case, why doesn't a group of 40-or-so people get together and agree to play the analogous "troll" position, build a couple of hundred bots, and sow complacency and agreement (instead of divisiveness)?
It sounds like bot trolling is an effective and disruptive way to sway many things - an election, regime satisfaction, and scientific belief.
Why doesn't someone use that technique for the purposes of good?
You should have sold at 320. Tesla is a liability even at $4.20. And the free ride is gone, the competition both at the top and at the bottom has come and is better.
As you wrote that, Tesla had closed at $322.
Pray, why do you think that selling at $320 would have been a good idea?
I'm sure the persuasiveness of Cathy Wood of ARK on CNBC today convinced Musk and the board that Tesla is worth $4K a share and should stay public. Even to a six year old it's plain Musk is a conman and fraud.
It's a good thing that us investors aren't 6 years old then.
It all boils down to one thing: a black-box extrapolation of Tesla's existing capital and burn rate indicates that they will need additional funding.
Musk says categorically that they *won't* need additional funding.
The outside analysis of whether Tesla will need financing is ambiguous - it might or it might not, it'll be close. (Different results depending on the model assumptions.)
The answer will come in about 5 weeks, when Tesla releases Q3 financials, and 3 months later for Q4.
For all the hype and hand wringing in the stock market, virtually nothing moves the stock outside of really obvious direct information. Musk could have a nervous breakdown on twitter, and it wouldn't affect the stock at all, contrary to MSM reports. If you actually follow the Tesla stock you'll see lots of stock reporting that (to my great surprise) simply isn't true!
A major fire destroying the factory would affect the stock. A random analyst trash-talking the company will not.
(I read one news report last week that said "Tesla down 4% on <such-and-so>" and the stock at the moment of posting was up 1% from previous close. Market reporting is insane!)
Tesla stock shot up due to the privitization announcement, it crashed a little after, and it's been steady at around $320 ever since.
By the way, that $4000 estimate was Cathy Wood talking about a completely new industry: transportation on demand. She proposes a fleet of automated vehicles which could be summoned on demand (in a heavily populated area, such as a big city) when needed to take you someplace. She speculates that Tesla is uniquely positioned to create and dominate that industry, and if it happens their stock would be worth $4000 per share.
(She comes to this conclusion based on Tesla's new AI chip. She claims that puts Tesla years ahead of other automated driving companies.)
So she's not talking about Tesla stock per-se, only how it might foster a new industry. The same algorithms that Amazon uses for stock robots, only moving people using Teslas.
For all the hype about needing more financing, *if* Tesla needs more cash it certainly won't need much. If they miss the mark it will be by very little, and they *should* be able to get that from almost anywhere.
What are you basing this statement on? The same testing authorities that certify gambling machines also certify voting machines.
And what are you basing *that* statement on?
Here's hoping -- she's a national treasure and deserves a good, cushy job after being railroaded for doing her civic duty and reporting election fraud to the media.
No, you don't get to misuse classified information just to score political points.
(Well, unless you are already a major Democrat politician.)
I'm ambivalent about this.
On the one hand, leaking classified info should be punished. I agree, and that part is fine.
Also, her intent wasn't "civic duty", it was apparently hatred of the president.
On the other hand, James Comey did *exactly* the same thing as Reality Winner, for *exactly* the same reasons, and hasn't been charged and got a book deal out of it. (Comey admitted to doing the leaking under oath. No need to cite here, it was in all the news and google is your friend.)
It's one of those "don't agree, but defend your right to do it" things. The law is nothing if it's based on social class. Either Comey should be charged, or Reality Winner should go free.
I don't think it's likely, but President Trump *should* pardon Reality Winner. Whistleblowers serve an important check on the workings of government, and should be encouraged within reason.
Give it a break liberals. Hacking isn't new nor is it infrequent.
So because it's not new nor infrequent, there's no value in reporting it?
Pretty much.
Can you think of anything that's common and has happened for a long time that's newsworthy?
You *might* get by with "not commonly known", but I think reports of hacking don't qualify for that - especially on this site.
I don't normally like the "point by point" refutation, but this post is so completely whacked... here goes:
> with no bases in truth
"Truth" (or lack of) is not a reason for censorship. Deleting things based on truth is subject to all kinds of bias and misrepresentation.
> Alex Jones pushed violent attacks on innocent individuals
Then he should be arrested. Was he arrested? I'm now wondering if your assertion is, in fact, true. The legal system has very explicit rules on what is legal speech, and a public forum for appeal with well-known rules and restrictions.
> To defend him makes you a nutter,
Insults are not arguments. I'll bet you're a liberal - because insults are all they have.
> giving him das boot.
"Das Boot" was a movie, originally in German ("The Boat", about a German U-boat during WWII), and you use the phrase as a pun of "the boot", meaning "to kick out".
I don't see how this works in any comedic, ironic, or literal way, unless you're casting the social media as nazis? Which I suppose they are, but it looks like the opposite of what you intended.
> Kendall happily defends traitors and dangerous people
A jab at Trump and Kendall. People are waking up to the fact that extreme rhetoric is simply noise in the public dialog. We get it, you're full of hatred, you have to throw insults because you have no arguments.
> [Kendall, Trump] so long as ideologically they agree with him. Otherwise he's for the opposite.
Someone who defends a position they agree with, and argues against a position they disagree with is... what?
If you have an argument that's not based on emotion, I'd like to hear it. Saying that social media "can run their business the way they want" is starting to wear thin, as social media invited everyone to participate and built a huge base and following, only to suppress certain viewpoints in the run-up to an election.
The term "anti-American" has been tossed around lately, but actually that previous sentence 'kinda fits. By suppressing one political viewpoint, those companies are using their built-up power to influence the results of an election.
On the face of it, that seems anti-American.
Back when I frequented Drudge Report, if a link took me to infowars.com I would navigate away. It's a little crazy over there.
I agree with you completely. After the ban, I've been looking at his site occasionally to see what all the fuss is about, and just can't get interested in any of it.
Problem is, free speech means everyone gets to have their say. Banning Infowars was wrong, it was the 3rd click of the censorship ratchet, and it needs to be discussed in the arena of civil rights.
I think the second one(*) was taking away DailyStormer's domain registration and not letting them use it.
Even the Electronic Freedom Foundation worried over censoring DailyStormer.
We're well into the 3rd line of that "first they came for..." poem, and we really need to get this sorted out before the internet turns into a leftist utopian playland, where everyone agrees and speaking out is prohibited.
We really need to get this sorted out.
Maybe the government will step in and impose regulations.
It seems like we're headed that way.
(*) First one was MasterCard and Visa dropping Wikileaks simultaneously after posting the "collateral murder" video, isolating Wikileaks from $11 million in donations that were coming in.
What Musk did over Twitter is first and foremost unbecoming of a CEO and is outright manipulation of the stock price.
In your opinion.
That's the problem with all the Tesla news nowadays - there's actually very little going on, what we see in the media is opinion dressed up as news. And if it's bad, the shorts will run with it.
(source)
Really, there's nothing in the news anyone can trust about Tesla nowadays. After the NYT interview I saw these competing headlines:
"Musk says Tesla had an excruciating year, and the worst is yet to come" (one source, among many)
"Musk says Tesla had an excruciating year, and the worst is over" (one source, among many)
Which of these is an accurate portrayal of Tesla's future?
Don't believe any of it. Given the timeline above, it's really hard to see how Musk could be charged with a crime - SEC is civil, not criminal, the FBI would have to get involved for that. It's also hard to see how the SEC could impose a fine. There *might* be an issue with the exact definition of "secured", but it's a) moot, b) can be argued either way, and c) it took the SEC 5 years to bring down [Theranos CEO] Elisabeth Holmes for much more severe problems, they aren't likely to move any faster with Tesla. Five years from now we can worry whether this has made any difference to Tesla.
It's clear that Tesla only has to weather the next 4 months or so, and then be clear of all this nonsense.
Until then, just ignore the rabble - it's only noise anyway.
2) The social media sites have always pushed a liberal agenda.
3) They are just more open and brazen about it now.
4) If someone thinks "Good. They should", don't get too comfortable. They'll be coming for you next. Always happens.
This is about to come to a boil - Trump just tweeted about the problem and saying:
"[...] Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen."
Bill Maher tried to support free speech using Alex Jones as his example, and got shot down by his panel. Apparently, the left thinks that suppressing speech is OK when it promotes their cause. Bill also mentioned the recent Charlottesville protests, implying that the violent counter-protests from last year (Antifa and the like) are having a chilling effect on dissent in the nation.
If the "social media giants" are not scrambling in panic right now, they should be. Their attempts at midterm meddling is going to cause the government to crack down on them with regulation.
And when it comes, it will be regulation they won't like.
Such as forcing them to support free speech.
And PraegerU, a conservative non-profit group that produces educational videos on conservative issues, was just banned by Facebook.
Meanwhile, leftist hate-speech is suspiciously ignored, until it's pointed out by the media:
In several instances, Facebook ignored repeated requests by users to delete hateful content that violated its guidelines. At least a dozen people, as well as the Anti-Defamation League in 2012, lodged protests with Facebook to no avail about a page called Jewish Ritual Murder. However, after ProPublica asked Facebook about the page, it was taken down.
Yep. "Jewish ritual murder" isn't hate speech, but a pro-gun-ownership political candidate is.
Scary times indeed.
The "Russians are in our systems" is a nice misdirect that hides what's really going on.
There's no evidence any votes were changed in the last election, but by making unsubstantiated claims and going from hackers to Russian hackers to state-sponsored Russian hackers they can gin up enough fear and outrage to justify censorship aimed at affecting the midterms.
For example, Facebook recently banned [conservative blogger and political candidate] Avi Yemini for ‘Hate Speech’, won't tell him why he was banned, and denied his appeal. (You can view the banned page here.)
Lots and lots and lots of conservative viewpoints are being purged online in the runup to the midterm elections, and really scary things are coming up in the news every day.
Two terms that frequently come up in discussion are "midterm meddling" and "street fight". The first refers to all the suppression of conservative viewpoints, the second refers to the mob-mentality of striking back at people who don't toe the Liberal line.
(For example, the judge in the Manafort case has received threats, and because the jury hasn't reached a verdict yet the MSM filed a motion to reveal the identities and home addresses of the jury members. Yikes!)
We live in a scary time, reminiscent of the run-up to nazi Germany.
Dissenting opinion is being suppressed, sometimes violently.
We need more home grown doctors. I don't know about the rest of /. but I'm getting older. Right now we've been able to poach doctors from poorer countries but those countries are modernizing so that's not going to last forever.
I think there's a larger point here that people are missing.
The school is putting aside enough money to fund the scholarships in perpetuity.
If you have enough wealth gathered in one spot, you can use it to fund things forever. We could gradually extend this model to cover other universities and other disciplines, and eventually reach the point where all university education is funded this way.
(Would require a *lot* of invested money - probably more than the current GDP - but we could do it incrementally over time; say, over the next 100 years.)
The model could also be extended to other societal benefits. Hypothetically, the return from $2 million in an investment account can keep pace with inflation (roughly 2%) as well as provide an income for one family: varies depending on assumptions, but a 5% return minus 2% inflation would yield $60,000 in perpetuity.
This could be the way to get UBI and universal health care: start putting away chunks of wealth to be used for funding projects in perpetuity.
It neatly side-steps the counter argument "eventually you run out of other people' money".
What's the answer then? I don't know. Nobody does. BioXiv (and others like it) offer an interesting possibility but that isn't without pitfalls (not the least of which is that a paper there that gets rejected in a journal is somewhat more difficult to resubmit elsewhere).
Hackaday has started its own journal
It's free, and it wants to become an actual journal with all the rigor and benefits of the mainstream journals.
It also wants to navigate away from some of the problems we see with current journals, such as publishing negative results (which is allowed), citation inflation, and so on.
It currently has one issue with one paper, and has an open call for more papers.
It targets citizen science, and we're seeing a lot of that in the hacker community, but would welcome and accept submissions from more mainstream researchers.
There's an opportunity here to start something new and avoid all the pitfalls we keep hearing about.
Anyone who would like to join that community, get in on the ground floor and help make a better type of journal can contact the editors.
(Disclaimer: I'm one of their reviewers. I'm particularly interested in structural rigor such as statistical methods: logical fallacies such as p-hacking, reversed conditional errors, and so on.)
Voter fraud actually does happen.
In the recent elections, 6500 voters in NH were "non-resident" voters, using same-day registration.
(In NH you can register on the day of voting, and you don't need to be a resident - only that you are in the process of moving. Basically you "pinky swear" that you will be a NH resident real soon, and they let you vote.)
Of the 6540 people who voted as non-resident, only about 1000 of these actually moved to NH.
The difference between the Republican and Democratic senate election was about 1000 votes.
Neighboring states are predominately democratic, so with a statistical certainty the non-resident vote changed the NH senator from an "R" to a "D" this last election.
This really happened, voter fraud flipped a senate seat, and that senator does not properly represent the interests of her state.
Also, at least 196 of those non-resident voters have voted in more than one state.
We totally need voter ID to prevent abuse.
I was under the impression that forest fires are natural in a healthy forest, and in fact some trees need forest fires to germinate properly (the cones are heavy with resin, the heat of the fire causes the cone to fully mature and then go to seed after the fire has passed.)
Also, by preventing fires the deadwood that would normally be burned accumulates, to the point where when a fire inevitably starts you get a torrentially large fire instead of the typical small fire (of a healthy forest).
And so one way to prevent large forest fires is to frequently start smaller fires, to clear out the accumulating deadwood.
I'm not a forestry expert, so I'm asking the question: has that explanation (and rationale) been disproven?
If it hasn't, is there some reason why smaller "management" fires aren't periodically set?
Is this a California thing?
1. Decentralised DNS. The DNS crew have shown they cannot be trusted to 100%, which is a really bad thing when it comes to free speech online. Perhaps a bitcoin style ledger could be of help here.
2. A decentralised social network solution with monetisation options. Think about it, Youtube and Facebook rolled into one for all sorts of content imaginable, a pay-as-you-go buffet where you can choose whether to pay with your eyeballs, your time, or your money. Awesome stuff if it ever get started.
3. The realisation that the web of the nineties, where everyone and their grandma could make a website, is pretty much dead. And no, I do not mourn those Geocities webpages, I rather mourn the fact that it is way too hard to get stuff online without selling your firstborn son to one of the big dragons (Google, Facebook etc).
Guess I'll keep dreaming of these things forever though...
All fine and good.
In an attempt to start a meaningful dialogue, how do you feel about The Daily Stormer having a website available on the internet, having a site name entry in the distributed DNS system, and having a home page and videos on your decentralized social network?(*)
This is the choice you will have to make when implementing the next internet: in order to make it truly open for everyone, you will have to accept that there are people whose opinion you don't agree to and who have just as much right to free speech. Management of such a system has to be completely decoupled from mob rule, else we'll be back to where we are now.
A completely open internet would allow distasteful speech and people you don't agree with to have a voice.
Are you willing to take the bad with the good?
(*) For those who don't know, Daily Stormer is an actual nazi website that lost their original website name after registrars dropped them as customers while keeping the original name, disallowing them from using the name at another registrar.
China is waging an all out war on the West, stealing every bit of IP it possibly can, while militarizing the South China Sea as part of its "One belt, one road" initiative, along with its 2025 and 2050 roadmap. It's about time America started recognizing that and responded appropriately.
Firstly, it's not an "all out" war, that phrase is trying to use extreme rhetoric to gin up divisiveness. It's the same thing that the Russians (and others) are accused of doing in the US. An "all out" war would include military actions; in fact, a true "all out" war would include nuclear strikes.
Dial back the rhetoric into a more accurate description.
Secondly, the employee disputes the charges, and frames his explanation in a credible way. We have essentially two conflicting stories: the FBI and the employee, and we have no idea who is right.
Jumping to conclusions, in this case espionage, is unwarranted at this time. It's calling for "mob rule" based on perception of guilt or innocence, said perception being made (by the FBI, and the employee) with no standards of accuracy.
We have "innocent until proven guilty" for a reason, it's one of the basic rights, and we need to get back to those.
People keep talking about "fake news" and "divisive tribalism", and we only get that when people have an emotional reaction to something they take as un-skeptically true and rhetorically pushed to the limits of outrage.
Let the evidence be introduced and examined in the legal process, where a much higher standard of accuracy and relevance is enforced, and let a court decide.
We don't need to get all outraged and mob-like about this incident, at least not yet.
This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.
The per-person productivity of the US(*) is now about $58,000.
This means that if everything were distributed equally, every man, woman, and child could be given $58,000 to spend. And they would get another one next year. If you restrict it to adults, that figure goes up by another third.
The rise appears to be exponential, with the "doubling time" roughly 16 years, more or less depending on the growth rate of the economy in past decades. You can easily see this in the Google chart by tracking down to half the current amount (1995), half that amount (1981), and so on.
A few moments though should convince you that exponential rise is the expected outcome - increases in productivity tend to beget more increases in productivity.
For a sense of the time periods involved, note that the US has about 4% of the world population, so if the per person GDP continues to rise as shown, the US will be able to supply the world population with twice that amount in four doublings, or 64 years from now.
Also: other countries are on this same curve and are not accounted for.
By the end of this century we will be at the utopian ideal seen in many science fiction novels, and kids today will live to see it.
As mentioned, we could distribute $58,000 to everyone in the country today, or we could wait 16 years (one doubling) and distribute $58,000 to everyone and still be on that exponential curve.
At some point we will simply have so much wealth and so few jobs that it makes sense to reinvent our economy to compensate.
UBI seems inevitable.
(*) I realize the OP is talking about Canada, but US is the info I have at hand. It should be the same there as here.