You've got an excuse to shut down social media because people post 'hate speech' on it, aka complaining about the bad effects of diversity.
See also Singapore, China etc. And it's coming to Europe too. After Merkel decided to let in anyone who arrived, Germany started to have a problem with racism - aka the natives bitching about the bad behaviour of the new arrivals.
The solution was to threaten social media companies with massive fines unless they remove 'hate speech' within 24 hours
"WHAT the hell is wrong with this country?" fumed Beatrix von Storch to her 30,000 Twitter followers on December 31st: "Why is the official police page in NRW [North Rhine-Westphalia] tweeting in Arabic?" The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force's multilingual new-year greeting a bid "to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men". The next day her tweet--and, for 12 hours, her entire account--vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch's defence: "Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs," she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.
Germany's memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi undergird its commitment to free speech. "There shall be no censorship," decrees the constitution. Even marches by Pegida, an Islamophobic and anti-immigrant movement founded in 2014, receive police protection. But the country of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust also takes a punitive attitude to what it deems "hate speech". Inciting hatred can carry a prison sentence of up to five years, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is available only in annotated form, and it is illegal to single out any part of the population for insult or other abuse that could "breach the peace". Irmela Mensah-Schramm, a Berlin pensioner who spray-paints over swastikas and other racist graffiti, is a national hero.
Reconciling these two convictions--for free speech and against hate speech--is becoming harder, particularly since Angela Merkel's refugee gambit in 2015. Opening Germany's borders to some 1.2m mostly Muslim migrants has fuelled the rise of nativist outfits like the AfD and Pegida. Racist propaganda and sensationalist reports (some, though not all, fake) of criminal and rapist immigrants have rippled across social media. In 2016, for example, the number of criminal investigations into online hate speech in Berlin rose by 50%. A number of the newcomers from the Middle East and Africa are anti-Semitic. Confronting such ills without encroaching too much on freedom of expression is tricky.
The most prominent example of the balancing act is the new Net Enforcement Law (NetzDG), of which Ms von Storch's and Ms Weidel's tweets were early victims. Inspired by the rise of fake news and a report suggesting that only a minority of illegal posts on social media were being removed within a day (and just 1% or so on Twitter), the law cleared the Bundestag last June and came into force on January 1st. It sets out 20 things defining a comment as "clearly illegal", such as incitement to hatred or showing the swastika. Once posts are flagged by users, a social-media firm has 24 hours--extended to a week in complex cases--to check and remove those that contravene the rules, or face a €50m ($60m) fine. In the first week, Facebook's over 1,000 German moderators have had to process hundreds of thousands of cases.
Overwhelmed by the volume and wary of incurring such huge fines, social-media firms are erring on the side of censorship. On January 2nd Titanic, a satirical magazine, joked that Ms von Storch would be its new guest tweeter. Two of the subsequent tweets mocking the AfD politician were censored. When Titanic republished them, its account was suspended for two d
As a medical health professional I usually tell people that talking to your computer doesn't mean you're crazy, it's when the computer starts talking back that you might have a problem.
Jesus' teachings in the gospels do say killing is wrong, even capital punishment (e.g. the adulterous woman, "he who is without sin cast the first stone"). That does not help a rabbi who sticks with the Torah, but it is there in the bible.
NB - I'm not a Christian, many Christians do support capital punishment and you'll have to take up the compatibility of that with the Bible with them. I do know that the notion that capital punishment is incompatible with Christianity is not one that Christians universally accept.
I see nothing wrong with a person being a pacifist, but at least justify your stance with "I think killing is wrong no matter what" instead "this book says killing is wrong no matter what" (even if the book did say that). One is your own opinion, the other quickly falls into a discussion of etymology and logic because that person is building a cause on a faulty foundation.
It's fairly easy to make up examples where killing is justified - if someone attacks you, I'd say you're allowed to defend yourself. If your country is attacked, I'd say it would be legitimate to use force to defend it. Similarly if your home is invaded, I'd say it is legitimate to use force to fight off the invaders.
When it comes to capital punishment you can make a somewhat chilly argument that a society with capital punishment would kill fewer innocent people than one without. E.g. in the UK the homicide rate has risen since capital punishment was abolished.
The UK executed relatively small numbers of people in the 20th Century and even if every single one was innocent that is still less than the additional number of people who are murdered due to the increase in the homicide rate.
Now would I support reintroducing capital punishment in the UK? I'm not sure. I do definitely support the notion that killing in self defence or a just war is not murder.
To be honest I've never used one. Still even if McDonalds have messed up the implementation it doesn't doom the idea. It'd be like saying 'Well the [first automobile] is unreliable. Let's stick to horses'.
Technology will move on. I'm sure in the long run you'll see restaurants where you order at a console and the food is prepared by unseen humans. In fact I went to one in NYC
The notion that not all killing is incorrect is not a new one.
E.g. the sixth commandment is often incorrectly translated to 'thou shalt not kill' but is more accurately rendered as 'thou shalt not murder', as a Rabbi complains here :
For me, one of the most irksome cases has always been the rendering of the sixth commandment as "Thou shalt not kill." In this form, the quote has been conscripted into the service of diverse causes, including those of pacifism, animal rights, the opposition to capital punishment, and the anti-abortion movement.
Indeed, "kill" in English is an all-encompassing verb that covers the taking of life in all forms and for all classes of victims. That kind of generalization is expressed in Hebrew through the verb "harag." However, the verb that appears in the Torah's prohibition is a completely different one, " ratsah" which, it would seem, should be rendered "murder." This root refers only to criminal acts of killing.
It is, of course, not just a question of etymology. Those ideologies that adduce the commandment in support of their gentle-hearted causes are compelled to feign ignorance of all those other places in the Bible that condone or command warfare, the slaughter of sacrificial animals, and an assortment of methods for inflicting capital punishment.
The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay.
In business it's a lot easier to justify an investment that pays off in one year than one which pays off in 3 to 5. So increasing the costs of human labour or decreasing the cost of machines leads to humans being replace with machines. I.e. your calculation actually proves the OP's point rather than disproving it.
It's no coincidence that McDonalds and co decided to start installing kiosks in addition to the workers taking orders at counters. Firstly it enables them to sell more stuff. Secondly it enables them to move some people from counter service to the kitchen. It's a lot easier to replace a human taking orders with a touchscreen than it to replace someone cooking and assembling burgers.
Still as a malicious AI would no doubt observe "Relax. It's not like we're grinding up the dead meatsacks to make the food for the ones we currently need to keep alive. Even though, come to think of it, that's a really good idea".
GNAA trolled CNN into running a report based on their very obviously spoof website. This was back in the days getting CNN to run nonsense wasn't so trivial that anyone could do it.
Look at the image of the plane with a massive star of david on it and and even bigger magnifying glass to expose it. And it never occurred to CNN that it was a joke.
I liked it. It was kind of slow and thoughtful but that's no bad thing.
Then again I'm a Bladerunner fanboy and I'm easily pleased. Hopefully they don't run the Bladerunner franchise into the ground they way that Star Wars and Star Trek have been with loads of unnecessary subpar sequels.
Hey I'm all for mocking slashdot. However now is maybe not the time to troll them into implementing changes which will wreck the site given they seem to be circling the plughole.
Currently, all the redpill/MGTOW channels have been hit hard with many channels being outright terminated and not returning evidently.
The dumb thing is that most people in my experience don't find MGTOW/Red Pill a particular compelling viewpoint - they've always seemed to me to be a mirror of the radical feminists and just as bonkers. Both groups are telling young people not to have long term relationships with the opposite sex, and that comes across as something you believe before you've had any good relationships and quietly discard later.
Still ban them and it seems like they'll acquire a cachet that they wouldn't have acquired from their arguments. Now I don't think more people becoming MGTOW, Red Pill or radical feminists is going to lead to the death of civilisation but it certainly won't help with society polarising into left and right. Which is an issue.
Or look at Daily Stormer. They had their own website and it was pulled. They got another website and that was pulled. Their domain name has been seized.
Now I don't like Andrew Anglin one bit but the argument 'if you don't like how Google run their platform, get your own' is dishonest. If all the tech companies discriminate in the same way what you've got is something much more analogous to the pre civil rights era were all businesses in an area refused to serve black people than a normal free market where you can always get service somewhere.
Now historically there's certain amount of irony here. Andrew Anglin is a white supremacist who'd have supported the right of all businesses in an area to discriminate against a race to the point that race could not get service. However he opposes that happening to him. Meanwhile the left now claims to have always opposed discrimination on the grounds of race. That's not quite accurate though - the KKK was a Democrat organisation opposed by the Republicans.
Although there was little organizational structure above the local level, similar groups rose across the South and adopted the same name and methods. Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement promoting resistance and white supremacy during the Reconstruction Era. For example, Confederate veteran John W. Morton founded a chapter in Nashville, Tennessee. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes.
The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives. It seriously weakened the black political establishment through its use of assassinations and threats of violence; it drove some people out of politics. On the other hand, it caused a sharp backlash, with passage of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of "restoring order, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling blacks to exercise their rights as citizens". Historian George C. Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded by the Democratic leaders of the South. He says:
the Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses; its lack of central organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists. More fundamentally, it declined because it failed to achieve its central objective -- the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South.
After the Klan was suppressed, similar insurgent paramilitary groups arose that were explicitly directed at suppressing Republican voting and turning Republicans out of office: the White League, which started in Louisiana in 1874; and the Red Shirts, which started in Mississippi and developed chapters in the Carolinas. For instance, the Red Shirts are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina. They were described as acting as the military arm of the Democratic Party and are attributed with helping white Democrats regain control of state legislatures throughout the South. In addition, there were thousands of Confederate veterans in what were called rifle clubs.
Jim Crow laws were a response to the Republican imposed reconstruction era regime.
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. Enacted by white Democratic-dominated state legisl
America seems to be heading to the place that the UK has been in for some time where class isn't defined by your salary or your job but your education and cultural attitudes.
So went to trade school and have a business you're 'blue collar'. Meanwhile if you went to an expensive liberal arts college and work as a barista you're 'white collar'.
I.e. it's like the UK model where you can be poor but middle class or rich but working class. Class is about attitudes not income. In the US I bet you'd find a massive difference in cultural attitudes between the trade school/small business types and the liberal arts college/Starbucks ones and it's that difference in cultural attitudes that has come to define class.
It's very different from what Brits have seen as the traditional American ideal where it mattered if you were successful much more than whether you went to the right school - blue collar and white collar after all literally mean the job you do, and not your social class. However I think that has changed.
But perhaps Brits have always romanticised America in that way - it's clear if you spend time there that America very much has British style class - someone with an expensive liberal arts degree but a minimum wage job isn't *seen* as being a member of the 99% despite their protestations to the contrary, and probably they never have been.
In November 2014 Fiona Mactaggart MP added an amendment to the bill concerning prostitution, aimed at criminalising the purchase of sex. In the bill's debate in the House House of Commons, John McDonnell MP argued against the amendment. He highlighted the lack of evidence for any correlation between the Swedish sex purchase ban and a reduction in numbers of sex workers or their clients, and cited findings "that not only do such measures not work, they actually cause harm". McDonnell quoted Reverend Andrew Dotchin, a founding member of the Safety First Coalition: "I strongly oppose clauses on prostitution in the Modern Slavery Bill, which would make the purchase of sex illegal. Criminalising clients does not stop prostitution, nor does it stop the criminalisation of women. It drives prostitution further underground, making it more dangerous and stigmatising for women." The amendment was subsequently dropped.
The Modern Slavery Act is aimed at stopping people being trafficked - some of whom end up forced to work as sex workers.
It doesn't criminalise buying or selling sex, and nor should it. It's the people being forced to work in the sex industry who are the problem.
As Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out anti Communist regimes tended to be authoritarian - if you didn't get involved in politics they'd mostly leave you alone. Communist regimes tended to be totalitarian - they wanted to reformat the culture.
Surely it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the present governments of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos are much more repressive than those of the despised previous rulers; that the government of the People's Republic of China is more repressive than that of Taiwan, that North Korea is more repressive than South Korea, and so forth. This is the most important lesson of Vietnam and Cambodia. It is not new but it is a gruesome reminder of harsh facts.
From time to time a truly bestial ruler can come to power in either type of autocracy--Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot are examples--but neither type regularly produces such moral monsters (though democracy regularly prevents their accession to power). There are, however, systemic differences between traditional and revolutionary autocracies that have a predictable effect on their degree of repressiveness. Generally speaking, traditional autocrats tolerate social inequities, brutality, and poverty while revolutionary autocracies create them.
Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re- sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill. Such societies create no refugees.
Precisely the opposite is true of revolutionary Communist regimes. They create refugees by the million because they claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands in the remarkable expectation that their attitudes, values, and goals will "fit" better in a foreign country than in their native land.
The former deputy chairman of Vietnam's National Assembly from 1976 to his defection early in August 1979, Hoang Van Hoan, described recently the impact of Vietnam's ongoing revolution on that country's more than one million Chinese inhabitants:
They have been expelled from places they have lived in for generations. They have been dispossessed of virtually all possessions--their lands, their houses. They have been driven into areas called new economic zones, but they have not been given any aid. How can they eke out a living in such conditions reclaiming new land? They gradually die for a number of reasons--diseases, the hard life. They also die of humiliation.
It is not only the Chinese who have suffered in Southeast Asia since the "liberation," and it is not only in Vietnam that the Chinese suffer. By the end of 1978 more than six million refugees had fled countries ruled by Marxist governments. In spite of walls, fences, guns, and sharks, the steady stream of people fleeing revolutionary utopias continues..
There is a damning, contrast between the number of refugees created by Marxist regimes and those created by other autocracies: more than a million Cubans have left their homeland since Castro's rise (one refugee for every nine inhabitants) as compared to about 35,00
You even refute your own claim with your own citations in that post; the charges of pimping where dismissed, so the legal system has already tossed out that claim completely.
The criminal case brought by the California Attorney General's Office against Backpage was two-fold.
One set of charges accused the website's operators of profiting from sex trafficking and setting up elaborate schemes that allowed the site to take in money from illegal prostitution transactions. That part of the case stayed intact on Wednesday.
The other part accused the website of acting as a virtual pimp. Those charges were tossed out because the judge ruled that the website did not have a hand in actually writing the ads that sold the services; it merely hosted the ads.
The judge said the allegations of financial crimes are not subject to protection by the Communications Decency Act or the First Amendment.
I.e. there were two sets of charges. Financial ones and virtual pimping. The virtual pimping ones were tossed because of the CDA and First Amendment but the financial ones were not.
I.e. with SESTA in place they would not have been able to use the CDA as a shield. Which meants they would have been prosecuted for both sets of charges. Without SESTA in place they could only be prosecuted for the financial crimes.
I.e. the CDA blocked them from being prosecuted for the virtual pimping.
Look at it from their point of view. Conservatives hate them because FB bans them for no reason. The left blames them for OMGRUSSIAFAKENEWSSTOLETHEELECTION. Kids won't use FB because they think their parents use it and all their friends are on Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram. Their parents don't actually use FB because they only wanted to use it to see if their kids were up to no good. Retired people don't actually use any social media. There are few troll/meme groups left, but FB hates them and is trying to shut them down because anything funny is hate speech. If you live in the UK people have actually been arrested for FB posts.
I think most people use it as as yet another free IM service but it's hard to make any money out of that.
It's like in the Tripods trilogy where the aliens breathe a gas that sounds like chlorine and like room temperature and baths much hotter than humans can tolerate. The food they eat seems to be quite different from anything humans can eat too
Slashdot Mirror
You've got an excuse to shut down social media because people post 'hate speech' on it, aka complaining about the bad effects of diversity.
See also Singapore, China etc. And it's coming to Europe too. After Merkel decided to let in anyone who arrived, Germany started to have a problem with racism - aka the natives bitching about the bad behaviour of the new arrivals.
The solution was to threaten social media companies with massive fines unless they remove 'hate speech' within 24 hours
https://www.economist.com/news...
"WHAT the hell is wrong with this country?" fumed Beatrix von Storch to her 30,000 Twitter followers on December 31st: "Why is the official police page in NRW [North Rhine-Westphalia] tweeting in Arabic?" The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force's multilingual new-year greeting a bid "to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men". The next day her tweet--and, for 12 hours, her entire account--vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch's defence: "Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs," she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.
Germany's memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi undergird its commitment to free speech. "There shall be no censorship," decrees the constitution. Even marches by Pegida, an Islamophobic and anti-immigrant movement founded in 2014, receive police protection. But the country of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust also takes a punitive attitude to what it deems "hate speech". Inciting hatred can carry a prison sentence of up to five years, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is available only in annotated form, and it is illegal to single out any part of the population for insult or other abuse that could "breach the peace". Irmela Mensah-Schramm, a Berlin pensioner who spray-paints over swastikas and other racist graffiti, is a national hero.
Reconciling these two convictions--for free speech and against hate speech--is becoming harder, particularly since Angela Merkel's refugee gambit in 2015. Opening Germany's borders to some 1.2m mostly Muslim migrants has fuelled the rise of nativist outfits like the AfD and Pegida. Racist propaganda and sensationalist reports (some, though not all, fake) of criminal and rapist immigrants have rippled across social media. In 2016, for example, the number of criminal investigations into online hate speech in Berlin rose by 50%. A number of the newcomers from the Middle East and Africa are anti-Semitic. Confronting such ills without encroaching too much on freedom of expression is tricky.
The most prominent example of the balancing act is the new Net Enforcement Law (NetzDG), of which Ms von Storch's and Ms Weidel's tweets were early victims. Inspired by the rise of fake news and a report suggesting that only a minority of illegal posts on social media were being removed within a day (and just 1% or so on Twitter), the law cleared the Bundestag last June and came into force on January 1st. It sets out 20 things defining a comment as "clearly illegal", such as incitement to hatred or showing the swastika. Once posts are flagged by users, a social-media firm has 24 hours--extended to a week in complex cases--to check and remove those that contravene the rules, or face a €50m ($60m) fine. In the first week, Facebook's over 1,000 German moderators have had to process hundreds of thousands of cases.
Overwhelmed by the volume and wary of incurring such huge fines, social-media firms are erring on the side of censorship. On January 2nd Titanic, a satirical magazine, joked that Ms von Storch would be its new guest tweeter. Two of the subsequent tweets mocking the AfD politician were censored. When Titanic republished them, its account was suspended for two d
As a medical health professional I usually tell people that talking to your computer doesn't mean you're crazy, it's when the computer starts talking back that you might have a problem.
I can hear the song in my head already.
Jesus' teachings in the gospels do say killing is wrong, even capital punishment (e.g. the adulterous woman, "he who is without sin cast the first stone"). That does not help a rabbi who sticks with the Torah, but it is there in the bible.
That's disputed.
https://www.christianity.com/b...
NB - I'm not a Christian, many Christians do support capital punishment and you'll have to take up the compatibility of that with the Bible with them. I do know that the notion that capital punishment is incompatible with Christianity is not one that Christians universally accept.
I see nothing wrong with a person being a pacifist, but at least justify your stance with "I think killing is wrong no matter what" instead "this book says killing is wrong no matter what" (even if the book did say that). One is your own opinion, the other quickly falls into a discussion of etymology and logic because that person is building a cause on a faulty foundation.
It's fairly easy to make up examples where killing is justified - if someone attacks you, I'd say you're allowed to defend yourself. If your country is attacked, I'd say it would be legitimate to use force to defend it. Similarly if your home is invaded, I'd say it is legitimate to use force to fight off the invaders.
When it comes to capital punishment you can make a somewhat chilly argument that a society with capital punishment would kill fewer innocent people than one without. E.g. in the UK the homicide rate has risen since capital punishment was abolished.
https://fullfact.org/news/has-...
The UK executed relatively small numbers of people in the 20th Century and even if every single one was innocent that is still less than the additional number of people who are murdered due to the increase in the homicide rate.
Now would I support reintroducing capital punishment in the UK? I'm not sure. I do definitely support the notion that killing in self defence or a just war is not murder.
To be honest I've never used one. Still even if McDonalds have messed up the implementation it doesn't doom the idea. It'd be like saying 'Well the [first automobile] is unreliable. Let's stick to horses'.
Technology will move on. I'm sure in the long run you'll see restaurants where you order at a console and the food is prepared by unseen humans. In fact I went to one in NYC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Also in the long run someone's going to work out a way for those meals to be mixed by machines with humans just loading the ingredient hoppers.
And increasing the minimum wage will drive this process faster. To be honest things like Eatsa are going to happen anyway.
The notion that not all killing is incorrect is not a new one.
E.g. the sixth commandment is often incorrectly translated to 'thou shalt not kill' but is more accurately rendered as 'thou shalt not murder', as a Rabbi complains here :
https://winteryknight.com/2010...
For me, one of the most irksome cases has always been the rendering of the sixth commandment as "Thou shalt not kill." In this form, the quote has been conscripted into the service of diverse causes, including those of pacifism, animal rights, the opposition to capital punishment, and the anti-abortion movement.
Indeed, "kill" in English is an all-encompassing verb that covers the taking of life in all forms and for all classes of victims. That kind of generalization is expressed in Hebrew through the verb "harag." However, the verb that appears in the Torah's prohibition is a completely different one, " ratsah" which, it would seem, should be rendered "murder." This root refers only to criminal acts of killing.
It is, of course, not just a question of etymology. Those ideologies that adduce the commandment in support of their gentle-hearted causes are compelled to feign ignorance of all those other places in the Bible that condone or command warfare, the slaughter of sacrificial animals, and an assortment of methods for inflicting capital punishment.
Meaning there cases where killing is not murder - capital punishment,, justified wars, and killing an intruder in your home.
Those ancient hebrews were pretty damn based!
The machine costs 60 000. Assume a pay of 5 dollars an hour and you're running the place 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. That comes down to 17280 a year. The machine will still be more cost-efficient that a human being., it will just take 3,5 years to pay for itself rather than the less than a year it will take on a 15 dollars an hour pay.
In business it's a lot easier to justify an investment that pays off in one year than one which pays off in 3 to 5. So increasing the costs of human labour or decreasing the cost of machines leads to humans being replace with machines. I.e. your calculation actually proves the OP's point rather than disproving it.
It's no coincidence that McDonalds and co decided to start installing kiosks in addition to the workers taking orders at counters. Firstly it enables them to sell more stuff. Secondly it enables them to move some people from counter service to the kitchen. It's a lot easier to replace a human taking orders with a touchscreen than it to replace someone cooking and assembling burgers.
Still as a malicious AI would no doubt observe "Relax. It's not like we're grinding up the dead meatsacks to make the food for the ones we currently need to keep alive. Even though, come to think of it, that's a really good idea".
GNAA trolled CNN into running a report based on their very obviously spoof website. This was back in the days getting CNN to run nonsense wasn't so trivial that anyone could do it.
https://encyclopediadramatica....
Look at the image of the plane with a massive star of david on it and and even bigger magnifying glass to expose it. And it never occurred to CNN that it was a joke.
If only US megacorps had a sense of humour.
I liked it. It was kind of slow and thoughtful but that's no bad thing.
Then again I'm a Bladerunner fanboy and I'm easily pleased. Hopefully they don't run the Bladerunner franchise into the ground they way that Star Wars and Star Trek have been with loads of unnecessary subpar sequels.
... until morale improves
Hey I'm all for mocking slashdot. However now is maybe not the time to troll them into implementing changes which will wreck the site given they seem to be circling the plughole.
Don't kick 'em when they're down!
can I ask that you come up with some sort of plan to stop the haemorrhaging of projects on Sourceforge?
Barrier troops?
Currently, all the redpill/MGTOW channels have been hit hard with many channels being outright terminated and not returning evidently.
The dumb thing is that most people in my experience don't find MGTOW/Red Pill a particular compelling viewpoint - they've always seemed to me to be a mirror of the radical feminists and just as bonkers. Both groups are telling young people not to have long term relationships with the opposite sex, and that comes across as something you believe before you've had any good relationships and quietly discard later.
Still ban them and it seems like they'll acquire a cachet that they wouldn't have acquired from their arguments. Now I don't think more people becoming MGTOW, Red Pill or radical feminists is going to lead to the death of civilisation but it certainly won't help with society polarising into left and right. Which is an issue.
Or look at Daily Stormer. They had their own website and it was pulled. They got another website and that was pulled. Their domain name has been seized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now I don't like Andrew Anglin one bit but the argument 'if you don't like how Google run their platform, get your own' is dishonest. If all the tech companies discriminate in the same way what you've got is something much more analogous to the pre civil rights era were all businesses in an area refused to serve black people than a normal free market where you can always get service somewhere.
Now historically there's certain amount of irony here. Andrew Anglin is a white supremacist who'd have supported the right of all businesses in an area to discriminate against a race to the point that race could not get service. However he opposes that happening to him. Meanwhile the left now claims to have always opposed discrimination on the grounds of race. That's not quite accurate though - the KKK was a Democrat organisation opposed by the Republicans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Although there was little organizational structure above the local level, similar groups rose across the South and adopted the same name and methods. Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement promoting resistance and white supremacy during the Reconstruction Era. For example, Confederate veteran John W. Morton founded a chapter in Nashville, Tennessee. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Enforcement Acts, which were intended to prosecute and suppress Klan crimes.
The first Klan had mixed results in terms of achieving its objectives. It seriously weakened the black political establishment through its use of assassinations and threats of violence; it drove some people out of politics. On the other hand, it caused a sharp backlash, with passage of federal laws that historian Eric Foner says were a success in terms of "restoring order, reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling blacks to exercise their rights as citizens". Historian George C. Rable argues that the Klan was a political failure and therefore was discarded by the Democratic leaders of the South. He says:
the Klan declined in strength in part because of internal weaknesses; its lack of central organization and the failure of its leaders to control criminal elements and sadists. More fundamentally, it declined because it failed to achieve its central objective -- the overthrow of Republican state governments in the South.
After the Klan was suppressed, similar insurgent paramilitary groups arose that were explicitly directed at suppressing Republican voting and turning Republicans out of office: the White League, which started in Louisiana in 1874; and the Red Shirts, which started in Mississippi and developed chapters in the Carolinas. For instance, the Red Shirts are credited with helping elect Wade Hampton as governor in South Carolina. They were described as acting as the military arm of the Democratic Party and are attributed with helping white Democrats regain control of state legislatures throughout the South. In addition, there were thousands of Confederate veterans in what were called rifle clubs.
Jim Crow laws were a response to the Republican imposed reconstruction era regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. Enacted by white Democratic-dominated state legisl
America seems to be heading to the place that the UK has been in for some time where class isn't defined by your salary or your job but your education and cultural attitudes.
So went to trade school and have a business you're 'blue collar'. Meanwhile if you went to an expensive liberal arts college and work as a barista you're 'white collar'.
I.e. it's like the UK model where you can be poor but middle class or rich but working class. Class is about attitudes not income. In the US I bet you'd find a massive difference in cultural attitudes between the trade school/small business types and the liberal arts college/Starbucks ones and it's that difference in cultural attitudes that has come to define class.
It's very different from what Brits have seen as the traditional American ideal where it mattered if you were successful much more than whether you went to the right school - blue collar and white collar after all literally mean the job you do, and not your social class. However I think that has changed.
But perhaps Brits have always romanticised America in that way - it's clear if you spend time there that America very much has British style class - someone with an expensive liberal arts degree but a minimum wage job isn't *seen* as being a member of the 99% despite their protestations to the contrary, and probably they never have been.
You mean this?
In November 2014 Fiona Mactaggart MP added an amendment to the bill concerning prostitution, aimed at criminalising the purchase of sex. In the bill's debate in the House House of Commons, John McDonnell MP argued against the amendment. He highlighted the lack of evidence for any correlation between the Swedish sex purchase ban and a reduction in numbers of sex workers or their clients, and cited findings "that not only do such measures not work, they actually cause harm". McDonnell quoted Reverend Andrew Dotchin, a founding member of the Safety First Coalition: "I strongly oppose clauses on prostitution in the Modern Slavery Bill, which would make the purchase of sex illegal. Criminalising clients does not stop prostitution, nor does it stop the criminalisation of women. It drives prostitution further underground, making it more dangerous and stigmatising for women." The amendment was subsequently dropped.
The Modern Slavery Act is aimed at stopping people being trafficked - some of whom end up forced to work as sex workers.
It doesn't criminalise buying or selling sex, and nor should it. It's the people being forced to work in the sex industry who are the problem.
You're a liar and a pedo apologist.
Costa Gavras was a self proclaimed Communist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out anti Communist regimes tended to be authoritarian - if you didn't get involved in politics they'd mostly leave you alone. Communist regimes tended to be totalitarian - they wanted to reformat the culture.
https://www.commentarymagazine...
Surely it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the present governments of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos are much more repressive than those of the despised previous rulers; that the government of the People's Republic of China is more repressive than that of Taiwan, that North Korea is more repressive than South Korea, and so forth. This is the most important lesson of Vietnam and Cambodia. It is not new but it is a gruesome reminder of harsh facts.
From time to time a truly bestial ruler can come to power in either type of autocracy--Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot are examples--but neither type regularly produces such moral monsters (though democracy regularly prevents their accession to power). There are, however, systemic differences between traditional and revolutionary autocracies that have a predictable effect on their degree of repressiveness. Generally speaking, traditional autocrats tolerate social inequities, brutality, and poverty while revolutionary autocracies create them.
Traditional autocrats leave in place existing allocations of wealth, power, status, and other re- sources which in most traditional societies favor an affluent few and maintain masses in poverty. But they worship traditional gods and observe traditional taboos. They do not disturb the habitual rhythms of work and leisure, habitual places of residence, habitual patterns of family and personal relations. Because the miseries of traditional life are familiar, they are bearable to ordinary people who, growing up in the society, learn to cope, as children born to untouchables in India acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for survival in the miserable roles they are destined to fill. Such societies create no refugees.
Precisely the opposite is true of revolutionary Communist regimes. They create refugees by the million because they claim jurisdiction over the whole life of the society and make demands for change that so violate internalized values and habits that inhabitants flee by the tens of thousands in the remarkable expectation that their attitudes, values, and goals will "fit" better in a foreign country than in their native land.
The former deputy chairman of Vietnam's National Assembly from 1976 to his defection early in August 1979, Hoang Van Hoan, described recently the impact of Vietnam's ongoing revolution on that country's more than one million Chinese inhabitants:
They have been expelled from places they have lived in for generations. They have been dispossessed of virtually all possessions--their lands, their houses. They have been driven into areas called new economic zones, but they have not been given any aid. How can they eke out a living in such conditions reclaiming new land? They gradually die for a number of reasons--diseases, the hard life. They also die of humiliation.
It is not only the Chinese who have suffered in Southeast Asia since the "liberation," and it is not only in Vietnam that the Chinese suffer. By the end of 1978 more than six million refugees had fled countries ruled by Marxist governments. In spite of walls, fences, guns, and sharks, the steady stream of people fleeing revolutionary utopias continues..
There is a damning, contrast between the number of refugees created by Marxist regimes and those created by other autocracies: more than a million Cubans have left their homeland since Castro's rise (one refugee for every nine inhabitants) as compared to about 35,00
So you concede that they successfully used the CDA to get off one of the two sets of charges?
E.g. look what they've done to wan4sui4. Simplified Chinese stripped down version on the left, Traditional Chinese version on the right
https://translate.google.com/?...
You even refute your own claim with your own citations in that post; the charges of pimping where dismissed, so the legal system has already tossed out that claim completely.
Bullshit
https://www.azcentral.com/stor...
The criminal case brought by the California Attorney General's Office against Backpage was two-fold.
One set of charges accused the website's operators of profiting from sex trafficking and setting up elaborate schemes that allowed the site to take in money from illegal prostitution transactions. That part of the case stayed intact on Wednesday.
The other part accused the website of acting as a virtual pimp. Those charges were tossed out because the judge ruled that the website did not have a hand in actually writing the ads that sold the services; it merely hosted the ads.
The judge said the allegations of financial crimes are not subject to protection by the Communications Decency Act or the First Amendment.
I.e. there were two sets of charges. Financial ones and virtual pimping. The virtual pimping ones were tossed because of the CDA and First Amendment but the financial ones were not.
I.e. with SESTA in place they would not have been able to use the CDA as a shield. Which meants they would have been prosecuted for both sets of charges. Without SESTA in place they could only be prosecuted for the financial crimes.
I.e. the CDA blocked them from being prosecuted for the virtual pimping.
I would stop worrying about standards, quotes and Wikipedia articles. We're going to kill you in your fucking sleep. Worry about that instead.
Good luck with that.
Look at it from their point of view. Conservatives hate them because FB bans them for no reason. The left blames them for OMGRUSSIAFAKENEWSSTOLETHEELECTION. Kids won't use FB because they think their parents use it and all their friends are on Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram. Their parents don't actually use FB because they only wanted to use it to see if their kids were up to no good. Retired people don't actually use any social media. There are few troll/meme groups left, but FB hates them and is trying to shut them down because anything funny is hate speech. If you live in the UK people have actually been arrested for FB posts.
I think most people use it as as yet another free IM service but it's hard to make any money out of that.
It's like in the Tripods trilogy where the aliens breathe a gas that sounds like chlorine and like room temperature and baths much hotter than humans can tolerate. The food they eat seems to be quite different from anything humans can eat too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...