You have to be careful, though. In the wrong hands, philosophy can be a dangerous thing.
Keep promoting ideas like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", "Keep the Sabbath Holy", and "Don't Worship False Idols", and people might start thinking all our wars, our insane work schedules, and our fetishistic consumer culture aren't good.
Given the habits of your average Louisiana legislator, you might want to scrap the Seventh Commandment entirely.
Wouldn't even be the first time this month that a bunch of religious zealots and government thugs stormed a school full of peace-loving hippies and dragged them off by their hair.
The Big Ten were written at a time when paganism/animism was the dominant religious view and the idea of monotheism was weird and foreign. You really had to hammer those home early on, because one minute you're up on a mountain having the acid trip spiritual moment to define a millennium and the next you're down in the valley watching all your friends jerk off to a big bronze bull just like you told them not to!
When your parish flock is that prone to stray, I'm almost surprised they don't have a few more.
The bill spends enormous amounts on carbon capture projects that have historically produced lackluster results. It throws even more good money after bad on "clean hydrogen", an absolute sinkhole of R&D over the last two decades. And then there's the large investment in battery technology that's... definitely better than the first two, but still relies on the kind of enormous strip mining and chemical processing projects that got us in the fossil fuels mess to begin with.
$12B on various kinds of carbon capture and $9.5B on hydrogen and another $6.5B on battery advancements, relative to the $0.4B spent on new renewable energy projects. Even our deplorable bankrupt nuclear programs get $2.5B, relative to technologies that have seen some of the best ROI on energy production since the ICE was invented.
Like, sure. Blah blah Trump Worse. But the Infrastructure Reinvestment Act is not a good bill by any other standard than "Better than what Republicans wanted". Its the same bad California Tech Sector pipe dream ideas we've been flushing money down the toilet on since Bill Clinton was President.
I want to see another country or region beat us
You'll find a line around the block. Spain's sinking $89B in a renewable overhaul of its grid. France has been doing donuts around the US on nuclear power since the 70s. Italy's completely overhauling its rail infrastructure (something Americans rip up more often than they rebuild) to use HVDC power.
Where the US tends to lead the pack is in private investment and that's largely because Solar and Wind power built using cheap foreign imported steel and photovoltaics, have turned our decrepid electricity infrastructure into a gold mine of overpriced retail power. (Something new trade war restrictions may curtail in the next presidency).
The paradox in this is the threat that public investment and efficiency improvements in the grid threaten those profits. If you go around hooking up the fifth-gen molten salt nuclear power stations to an updated smart-balanced American grid, you're going to tank the incomes of a litany of energy companies.
Nobody with a revenue stream coming from sky high auction-priced electricity coming of the Texas ERCOT system, for instance, wants us to slaughter the golden goose that is $3000 MWh peak electricity prices.
Until renewable energy inputs approach the base load, there's nothing to store.
After that, hydrogen is an awful storage medium because it's so permiable. Even if you're focused on long term energy storage needs, sodium and nickel batteries are proving far more efficient than hydrogen cells. We've known that since the 90s, but continue to invest wasted billion after wasted billion in a dead end technology.
There is no freedom of speech guarantee in private or public enterprise.
And the consequence of this policy is a back-door path to censorship. A combination of surveillance, selective-admittance, and media saturation allow certain ideological beliefs to suffice the "marketplace of ideas" while others are silenced.
“I want to force people to listen to my bullshit.”
Its more that privatized media infrastructure allows for a monopolization of speech.
Big media companies still force people to listen to bullshit, by way of advertising and algorithmic promotion. Go on YouTube, click through their "recommended" list a few times, and you'll quickly find yourself watching some Mr. Beast episode or PraegerU video, simply because these folks have invested so heavily in self-promotion.
But there's a wide swath of content you won't see, either because YouTube's algorithm explicitly censors it for policy reasons, because the media isn't maxing out the SEO YouTube execs desire (the classic Soy Face thumbnail for instance), or because you're not spending enough money to boost visibility.
This has nothing to do with what the generic video watcher wants to see and everything to do with what YouTube administration wants that watcher to see.
RFK Jr is a nasty little freak with some very toxic beliefs. But that's not why he's struggling to get noticed on the platform, when plenty of other nasty freaks with toxic beliefs get mainstream circulation.
I mean, regional coding makes sense from a language perspective. I don't really want to see a bunch of foreign language recommendations on my feed, unless I'm explicitly searching for content in that language.
But I do agree there's a lack of transparency. And I further agree that The Algorithm creates a rarified collection of "popular" content entirely by way of excluding so much else. The end result is a very generic stream of crap in the main feed and some truly freaky gamed content that's entirely focused on click-baiting children. Incidentally, jesus fucking christ whomever is responsible for promoting "unboxing" videos should be beaten to death with a flaming bag of nalpam.
None of this is socially desirable or good, but it all appears to be incredibly profitable. Its a social media environment that's converged on "Oops! All Ads!" and is steadily making its way to "Oops! All scams!" as the content gets worse and worse and worse.
The shadowbanning and segregation of content is just a part of the equation that makes all this possible. But funneling people down into a handful of the most awful, libidinal content generators is really not good.
Shadowbans help prevent bot activity by preventing a bot from knowing if what they posted was actually posted
I have not seen anything to support the theory that shadowbans reduce the number of bots on a platform. If anything, a sophisticated account run by professional engagement farmers is going to know it's been shadowbanned - and know how to mitigate the ban - more easily than an amateur publisher producing sincere content. The latter is far more likely to run afoul of an difficult-to-detect ban than the former.
It wastes bot’s time
A bot has far more time to waste than a human. So this technique is biased against humans, rather than bots.
If you want to discourage bots from referencing their own metrics, put public metrics behind a captcha. That's far more effective than undermining visibility in a way only a professional would notice.
This just means privatizing public spaces becomes a method of censorship. Forcing competitors farther and farther away from your captured audience, by enclosing and shutting down the public media venues, functions as a de facto media monopoly.
Generally speaking, you don't want a single individual with the administrative power to dictate everything anyone else sees or hears.
The problem is with unneeded people making unneeded decisions for you anonymously (for them), centrally and obviously with no transparency.
In business, it's described as a kind of Principal-Agent problem. What happens when the person you're working with has goals that deviate from what you contracted with them to do?
A classic "unsolved problem" of social relationships.
Wasn't a big part of the Jedis' problem their standoffishness?
Far from wielding power, they played at peacemaker and diplomat long after open war had erupted, resorted to questionably sourced mercenaries to do their dirty work, and relied enormously on prophecy to save them without properly understanding what it implied.
"Too Little, Too Late" might as well have been the motto of the late Jedi Order.
The power structure is the problem.
The lack of structure was a recurring problem for The Old Republic and the Jedi Order. The Trade Federation's greed went unchecked early on, because the Jedi-as-space-cops presented no material threat. The Senate routinely dithered in the face of adversity, as it was easily subverted by staling tactics and backstabbing. No standing military meant a reliance on an assortment of killer robots, mercenaries, clones, and bureaucrats-turned-shock-troops, none of whom proved to be particularly reliable.
Far from "power corrupts" as the theme of the Prequels, I might argue the real moral was "power abhors a vacuum". If you're not willing to occupy the center of political gravity, someone else will.
I don't recall the "NSA plan to track women's periods" in the Snowden dump. And so many gun sales are cash-and-carry that it's not something they can manage easily.
For any given person, I'm sure the FBI could figure it out with time and effort. But there's no national tracking database for all guns and pregnancies
Investing in a license plate from Maine that just says "Event" and driving around at low speeds while smoothly sliding on and taking off my sunglasses was also probably not helpful.
I can understand hitting the lottery and spending six figures on a luxury sports car. I cannot image why anyone would have voluntarily submitted themselves to this vehicle. Its the automotive equivalent of lighting six figures on fire.
Definitely a difference between living beyond your means and simply pissing the money away.
Admittedly, this vehicle was made by a guy who wrecked his McLauren inside a year. When you're a billionaire, I guess you just see everything as disposable.
Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina lead the nation in arresting and criminally punishing women for allegedly posing a danger to their fetuses, according to a report released by advocacy group Pregnancy Justice.
Nationwide, nearly 1,400 people were arrested or subject to disparate bail, sentencing and probation for conduct related to their pregnancies between 2005 and the Supreme Court decision in June 2022 dismantling abortion rights, the report found. The vast majority were poor, white women, although poor Black women were disproportionately represented.
...
Advocates pointed to two key drivers in criminalizing pregnancy: the expansion of so-called fetal rights or “personhood” laws and a more punitive approach to substance use among pregnant women — even as many states move to decriminalize drug abuse in line with evolving approaches to addiction. The majority of criminal cases documented by Pregnancy Justice related to substance use, including marijuana, cocaine or methamphetamines. In about one-quarter of these cases, the substance was legal: such as nicotine, alcohol or prescription opiates.
The idea of the Network State is one in which The Grays - a cabal of tech industry insiders - wage war against The Blues - California liberal democrats - by freezing them out of domestic infrastructure.
The macro task is to take back the city. The micro task, or the meso-task, is to take back individual streets and buildings and clearly mark them as under Gray control ... For example, if you had Gray owners of every single building in San Francisco or even every single building on a block, you could set it up such that the Gray login will get you into the building. I mean, this already kind of happens. You have to swipe your key card to come in because the streets are so dangerous. Like near Twitter HQ, for example, that you'd like or run inside and you swipe your key card and you go up the elevator or whatever. Sometimes I've seen people do that. So that's already something that exists but the difference is you'd network it between buildings. And you have something of a Gray tribe membership gets you into the buildings, gets you into certain floors. That is already legal and already practical, under current law. Okay, so that's good, where you have a foothold of private property. And you have a group membership of Gray tribe membership and private property. You also issue T-shirts, and T-shirts are, let's say, the similar Gray color and it's just got different logos and patches on it.
Take total control of your neighborhood. Push out all Blues. Tell them they're as unwelcome as ... just as Blues ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, push out all blues. And then you'll easily win.
...
Reds should be welcomed there and people should wear their tribal colors. No Blues should be welcomed there. And in addition to celebrating celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses. For example, there's this guy who's addicted to drugs, who was addicted to drugs he posts on Twitter about how the Blue government helped him get addicted to drugs. You should have an interview with him. There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.
...
Elon, in sort of classic Gray fashion ... captures Twitter and then, at one stroke, wipes out millions of Blues' status by wiping out the Blue Checks and, another stroke, you know, where it does cause some damage, renames Twitter as X, showing that he has true control, and it's his vehicle, and that the old regime isn't going to be restored.
I then had people try to tell me that Biden was too old to debate, that Trump ran circles around Biden, and that Trump had taken the win for the debate.
That's every debate. You show up to cheer for your team and then you compete to see who can say "You fucking idiot, my guy won!" the loudest.
Why did anyone think MAGA would come out of that fight saying anything less?
Maybe this time, Biden will actually get to use his time to talk without the orange fucking idiot opening his.
Only if he gives Trump a stiff punch to the throat.
Apparently it’s easier than y’all thought, to manipulate voters.
Invoking prior bias is a classic method for social manipulation. If you're already predisposed to believe or agree with a statement, I can manipulate you by framing my message as being supportive of said statement.
"Don't be weak and gay" plays into a chauvinist attitude common to American conservatives. Bots that identify you as an American conservative can feed you these messages while attempting to sell you consumer products or influence your understanding of politics. Meanwhile, a bot that identifies you as an American liberal can queue up a different pro-LGBT or anti-bullying pastiche to advocate for the same product or political message.
In the end, we can give everyone their own unique lobbying campaign intended to get them to rally around the same identical set of consumer choices and policy views.
Take Israel. Conservatives can support Israel because of the Based Chad IDF destroying those weak soy Arab losers. Liberals can support Israel because they've got Girl Power LGBT officers taking the fight to the hateful ultra-macho Hamas terrorists. Centrists can appreciate the rational technocracy of the World's Most Efficient Military. Far-Left can support the Kibitzes. Far-Right can support the white nationalists. Even people who hate one another can agree they all love Israel.
Can I opt out of the LLM bullshit “articles” in the results?
Of course not. Hell, the entire "AI Opt-Out" is pure pastiche. Just the illusion of choice, in a system that exists to maximize the number of ads you see no matter what you do.
A day later, Gomes emailed Fox and Thakur an email he intended to send to Raghavan. He led by saying he was “annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.” in a long email, he explained how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically added that they could “increase queries quite easily in the short term in user negative ways,” like turning off spell correction, turning off ranking improvements, or placing refinements — effectively labels — all over the page, adding that it was “possible that there are trade offs here between different kinds of user negativity caused by engagement hacking,” and that he was “deeply deeply uncomfortable with this.” He also added that this was the reason he didn’t believe that queries were a good metric to measure search and that the best defense about the weakness of queries was to create “compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.”
Google's Execs have been degrading the quality of search to increase engagement with ads.
Google wants these hyper SEO optimised results with lots of advertising
Its a bit worse than that, because the goal is to get you to scroll around and look at multiple search result pages trying to find what you want. Every new page you visit contains new ads. So Google doesn't want you to click the first thing you see. The goal is to show you a bunch of bad results and force you to test more and more links, hunting around for what you used to find easily.
Chinese police hunting international corruption targets were allowed into Australia by the federal police and subsequently escorted a woman back to China for trial, in a major breach of Chinese-Australian police protocols....
Oasis agriculture in the Tarim Basin occupies a large part of the population
In the Tarim Basin, July temperatures average about 80 °F (27 °C)
...
After the Cultural Revolution, political and economic policies were moderated, leading to widespread improvement in the livelihood of farmers and pastoralists and to relative stability and economic growth in the region. This was accompanied—especially from the late 1990s—by increased economic investment in Xinjiang, as well as by an influx of Han from other parts of China.
The Chinese prison system. Whereas the Australian prison system that kills people with heat stroke isn't a problem, because...
the Chinese prison system is preferable is laughable
Of course. Its doing all the progressive-y policies that big liberal states like California rolled back under the Reagan Era. Rehabilitation, job training, quality health care, and public reintegration are all policies the US system dismantled a generation ago, because it was seen as "Hugs for Thugs" and "Soft on Crime".
The New York Penal Law Sections 130.25, 130.30 and 130.35, define statutory rape. This crime is defined as having consensual sex with a minor that is under the age of 17 years old.
Louisiana becomes 1st state to require the Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms ( www.nola.com )
Do they want Baphomet in their schools? Because this is how you get Baphomet in your schools.
bUt BoTh SiDeS dA sAmE ( lemmy.world )
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban ( arstechnica.com )
OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts ( www.theverge.com )
Sucks to suck! ( lemmy.world )
Found in the wild in Tennessee
As conservatives put religion in schools, Satanists want in, too ( www.nbcnews.com )
Oh no, I'm being converted... ( lemmy.world )
But but... If gun owners are tracked, we can be targeted! 😭😭😭 ( lemmy.world )
Maine Cybertruck Owner Sad Everyone Hates His Truck ( jalopnik.com )
Get rid of them. ( lemmy.world )
Pathetic Trump Already Trying to Weasel Out of Debating Biden ( newrepublic.com )
Prepare to Get Manipulated by Emotionally Expressive Chatbots ( www.wired.com )
Mississippi governor signs bill to let cis people sue trans people if they use the bathroom ( www.lgbtqnation.com )
First they tried to "cure" gayness. Now they're fixated on "healing" trans people. ( www.motherjones.com )
Google now offers ‘web’ search — and an AI opt-out button ( www.theverge.com )
Chinese police were allowed into Australia to speak with a woman. They breached protocol and escorted her back to China ( www.abc.net.au )
Chinese police hunting international corruption targets were allowed into Australia by the federal police and subsequently escorted a woman back to China for trial, in a major breach of Chinese-Australian police protocols....
Jerry Seinfeld’s Teen Girlfriend Saga Resurfaces After Duke Walkout ( www.thedailybeast.com )
"LiNuX uSeR iNsTaLlInG A BrOwSeR haha" meanwhile : ( lemmy.world )
Terminal > Windows Registry.