Is there a tool to undo the extra weight added to paying subscribers? Analysis shows premium subscribers end up with 10x as much reach on average than people not paying.
Pay2Play was toxic enough on gaming, why would we want it in our social media?
You should look at how the US overthrew Guatemala's first elected leader. A self-proclaimed capitalist was labelled a "communist" by even the NYTimes because they wanted the banana companies to pay some minimal taxes.
NYTimes has since admitted to their close partnership with the CIA in its coverage but, crucially, it has never apologized for it.
It's sad to see the modern panic over "fake news" as if it's a new phenomenon. Rather, this feels to me like the "boomerang theory" in action
Specifically, Human Rights Activists in Iran's count is 6,488. Iran International is the main outlet that claimed more (first 10k, then 30k and now 40k). Iran International is actually Saudi-owned and technically based in the UK but, as The Guardian's investigation showed, is not a real journalistic institution. It's just a propaganda outlet for Mohammed bin Salman
I've heard the same from many Iranians I know. Western media presented the protests as an attempt to overthrow the order but it seems many protestors were simply calling for reform.
We don't have numbers after that but I find it hard to believe a large majority in a country with middling approval ratings would suddenly want to completely overthrow their leaders in just a few years.
Generally I agree; i doubt that there is a large contingent of Iranians in Iran who are cheering for bombing and complete collapse of their civilization. However it’s not out of the question that the approval of the government could have plummeted precipitously within a couple of years - there’s lots of precedent for that across the world (UK conservatives come to mind, George W Bush 2nd term as well)
I too find the sharp corners incredibly uncomfortable for my weak sensitive baby wrists but I chose to overcome this by wearing a wrist band. Two very different approaches
Not really. My almost favorite solution was to get gloves with touchscreen finger tips but I couldn't find a good one that has the touchscreen material go all around the tips which makes certain touchpad gestures annoying to do.
Any wrist band has been "good enough" for me so far though
that's violence by the state though. That's exactly the kind of violence GP said are legal (in my reading, no moral stance was taken about this state of matters)
Do you have any evidence that Luigi carried out any violence whatsoever? He's been accused of a murder, but there seems to be no appreciation that people are innocent until proven guilty.
Happy to clear this up for you. Only courts of law are held to the “innocent until proven guilty” standard. Ordinary people are free to form and share their own opinions based on reported facts. Mangione is a murderer. Hope that helps!
I don't think you should be opening yourself up to accusations of libel like that. It's foolish if you don't have any proof to incur the possible threat of being sued without any upside, apart from appearing "edgy".
Opinion based on disclosed facts is not illegal in the US; Mangione would lose the suit, if he bothered to sue. Unlike the UK, we have free speech in the US.
I think more and more Americans have what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination".
We pour tons of effort into punishing visceral, direct violence like a stabbing or shooting. But if white collar crime is being committed that leads to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, it's rare that anyone sees jail time. Maybe you could argue the decisions of Brian Thompson made only account for maybe 10% of why XYZ died but when you scale that out, you could easily argue this to be a form of white collar mass murder.
I think the younger generations are increasingly aware of this disparity in justice. If you find it hard to understand the celebration of violent vengeance but don't feel the same inability to understand the celebration of Jeffrey Doucet's retribution, then perhaps you are lacking the sociological imagination.
Fascinating to see Canada and the US and the opposite extremes of that. Also interesting to see Indonesia, who had a massive genocide within living memory, as second most trusting. Most of all I'd love to see this study replicated in different years to get a sense of how quickly these attitudes can change.
1. Claims of structural harm are far more speculative, and thus harder to establish, than direct violence like a stabbing or shooting.
2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
What is most disturbing in your comment is that it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable". That logic erodes the distinction between disagreement, accusation, and a right to kill.
Once people treat their own ideological conclusions as sufficient moral license for violence, they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process — beyond just the letter of law, as in the Jeffrey Doucet case, but also in its spirit, for we have democracy and due process precisely to tease out the ambiguities that social questions of causation and responsibility are so replete with.
> Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect.
> it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable"
There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions.
I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency.
> they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process
This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other.
I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not.
Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it
The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
More generally, I said there is a major difference between structural harm, white-collar crime, and deliberately killing someone. Your answer was to fixate only on general claims about inequality, underpolicing, social causes, etc, which insinuates that maybe Brian Thompson deserved to be murdered while maintaining plausible deniability.
Yes, the system is unfair, but in what ways it's unfair is up to debate, unlike whether the child predator in the Jeffrey Doucet case abused a child. You are trying to connect the fact there is injustice in the world to how justifiable it is to deliberately kill someone, by using this analogy.
You can deny that you are endorsing it, but your comment still does the same thing: it takes a personal act of violence and places it inside a moral story that makes it sound less straightforwardly wrong. That is exactly the problem.
Also in no moral universe, do you shoot someone in the head in cold blood because they were negligent, let alone negligent in some abstract way related to structural social forces. That is a blanket justification for all sorts of political violence.
On democracy, you are using disappointment with democratic outcomes to erode respect for democratic process. By your standard, every single political faction would argue against respecting the democratic process.
If your argument amount to saying that white collar crime isn't actually proven beyond a doubt for certain people who are the lead images for organizations that result in millions of people suffering, then you have lost the public's support even if you may win a debate.
The axioms for a majority of people right now are 1. Person X is doing bad things or leading an organization that does bad things 2. The government is refusing to address it and is actively abetting it 3. There is no way to stop this evil from occurring besides extrajudicial murder. The only thing you can suggest without breaking one of those axioms is that we must let evil happen because the alternative is worse, and frankly i'm not sure that argument is a good universal standard.
Democracy that produces outcomes advesarisl to the voters intentions, for example massmigration even though voters voted against that - has ceased to be a democracy. Making the government and its cronies as illegitimate as any bannana republic dictatorship.
This is a long comment, but I swear it is going somewhere (new terminology).
Someone once said (I think Kay), that "a change in notation is worth 20 IQ points". Historically, people struggled with presently-mundane basic concepts, such as Darwin's Evolutionary Theory, and Maupertuis' Principle of Least Action, because they lacked the "notation" (concepts, really), that would have allowed them to integrate them into their consciousness (or otherwise were not willing to discard or diminish another pre-existing notation, like biblical stories).
The younger generations have the advantage of being exposed to a much greater variety of notations than any previous generation, thanks to the internet, and its unrestricted nature. There is a lot of alpha in being able to instantly find numbers, and compare them with other numbers. Those aggregations, and second-hand experiences (I did not need to get murdered by federal officers personally, in order to start questioning the legitimacy of the government more aggressively), are a kind of substitute for a few decades of lived experience (by the time you turn 30 or 40, you are old enough to understand a lot of the dynamics, but too old to do much about it).
What this does, in effect, is create an acute awareness of what I like to call "sign-flip institutions" (I have never heard/read this term used before). A sign-flip institution, is an institution, in which a "customer's" minus is their plus, the overwhelming majority of the time.
So for example, a bank is a sign-flip institution (unless you never take out any loans). This is in fact _codified_ in how they do their accounting. To a customer, a loan is (in the accounting terminology), a _liability_, while deposits are _assets_. To a bank (ask any accountant who works at a bank), loans are _assets_, while deposits are _liabilities_. Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans.
Historically, most sign-flip institutions were heavily regulated[0] (to prevent them from impoverishing the populace, or worse). In banking, it used to be the law that they could not give mortgages for housing, unless the purchaser can pay 1/3 of the mortgage up front. This kept housing prices very low. It also kept bank performance low. After decades of bribery (sorry, lobbying), the banks got those regulations removed, and now the housing prices are so high that people _have_ to go into debt to (not own, no), but _have access_ to a home[1], that they may never fully pay off.
Combine this with the fact that we have very aggressive anti-vagrancy laws (you are not even allowed to sleep in your own car/van, in an empty parking lot), and it should be no surprise that people will say that society is rigged, that those who govern (cities, states, federations, corporations, banks, etc), are illegitimate.
Most AI companies, are openly marketing themselves sign-flip institutions! I don't know how true this is in practice[2], but given their round-the-clock FUD-based marketing, one would think that they are designed to turn your time into their money. That they are designed to turn you into money.
The only surprising thing about this story is that it took a nation, known for school shootings, this long to get violent against the executive/governing class. It took them this long, to learn to leave their smartphones at home, and to bring their molotov cocktails instead[3].
[0]: Hospitals, for example, were not allowed to make a profit before 1978.
[1]: Landlords get a lot of hate, but, most of the landlords that I've spoken to, are in the same exact situation as most home-owners (mortgage, debt, inflation), which means that they are really just arms-length employees of the _true_ landlords, the banks. Similarly, if you peel back the finances of most AI companies (maybe even most Silicon Valley companies), I am sure you will banks at the center of that web.
[2]: My big suspicion/fear is that the anti-AI sentiment is being cultivated to scapegoat the nerds, and to protect the bankers/executives.
[3]: Most Americans stereotype the French, as a nation of sad artists, but to the contrary, their protests are glorious.
Try to find an old graph theory proof (eg of the five colour theorem) and be amazed at how describing things in terms of a walk around a zoo is so much less clear than sets of vertices, edges, paths, etc. The history of mathematics is full of examples of good notation making a big difference, though of course this is often because the notation contains some insights about what structures are important.
One of most important things I've learned as I have gotten older is that optimization is all about degree. Is it good that housing prices are higher? No, clearly not. Is it good that I can get a 30-year mortgage when I am 25 and live in a house and eventually pay it off? Yes, it is good (I just paid it off last year.) Does the existence of that 30-year mortgage inflate the housing market? It definitely does if there is not enough housing. And yes I gladly paid 2x the cost of the house in interest, because I got to live in it the entire time vs. paying rent on someone else's asset. Good public policy must have specific aims in mind or there are many unintended consequences.
I can't tell how much of this post is describing/LARPing a point of view, or expressing your actual beliefs. The last few paragraphs make me think it's what you actually think though.
Glorious as a personal sentiment isn't exactly how I'd describe the French Revolution.
Yes, stirring up anti-AI hatred is fine as long as it's directed at your I-Banker/PE friends from school who majored in economics, but totally bad if it's directed at you since you majored in Comp Sci (the source of AI to begin with) and went into tech.
"Just that framing, means that a bank "performs" better, when it minimizes deposits and maximizes loans"- is this how you think finance actually works? Maybe first learn how things work before inventing your own terminology or "notation" like sign-flip institution. It's not worth 20 IQ points if it's wrong. The younger generations (and I am a member) are certainly no smarter or wiser than previous generations. Many sure seem to think they are though.
I won't pretend I had the foresight to purposely make this distinction but I do agree with and stand by this clarification.
The US is a very litigious society and Americans more than any nationality I've met are way too quick to conflate legality and morality. My personal guess is that this derives from a long running lack of class consciousness that is present in most other nations
> Nobody likes how insurance companies do business, but that doesn't make it "crime".
The way they "delay, deny, defend" as a matter of course shows a lack of a good-faith execution of the insurance agreements, to the point that a sane world would understand it as extremely obvious (and documented!) fraud. Sure, it is de facto not fraud, but tell that to someone who didn't get insurance payments which they were owed to pay for life-saving treatments (or, I guess tell it to their grave).
What a crime is is determined by the population. For a very long time, the population has given the idea of a "justice system" to... Well, the justice system.
Things have deteriorated lately, and the population does not see the justice system as effective.
It is completely expected that we see vigilantism, but it is in no way extrajudicial.
There's been many examples of societies where killing or abusing people was legal etc. Law is not math, it can be (and often is) wrong; in many cases a law is just a way for ruling class to make money/keep power etc. It's completely OK to protest laws, and it may be completely reasonable to consider someone a criminal even if they haven't broken any laws.
Pay2Play was toxic enough on gaming, why would we want it in our social media?
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