I, for one, want to compliment America in being the world's leader in employing literal super heroes in law enforcement roles. I just wonder why they have be stuck with such lame powers as "super smelling" and why they seem to use their powers almost exclusively to find unlicensed danger plants and constitutionally protected (but unlicensed!) danger objects.
Subsidies never make anything cheaper. It's just a free handout to the telecoms to keep doing the same thing they've always been doing it. If you really think the FCC is going to do something about it this time, Lucy has a football for you to kick.
You can't really fix it. Rich people can always use their wealth to avoid and manipulate the rules. Trying to outlaw one kind of money in politics just makes the other kinds of money in politics more powerful.
Whether you consider it left or right isn't important. The real thing you should be paying attention to is that one group of people is selling two opposing flavors of politics and profiting from the battle between them. Whether you consider the rest of their media properties leftwing or center doesn't matter. THEY (AT&T) considers them leftwing and they are designed, produced, and marketed to appeal to a demographic of people who are enraged by everything OAN stands for, but it's all a marketing gimmick. OAN whips up rightoids to be frothing mad at the libs. Those angry people are created, whole cloth, by OAN to be a villain for CNN viewers to revile and hate... and tune in to CNN to be affirmed in how much smarter they are. Meanwhile viewers tune into OAN to be affirmed in how much smarter they are than wokesters at CNN. The arms filling Punch and Judy are connected to the same man.
It's not going to change until someone shoots a couple no-knock plainclothes cops dead and is then exonerated in the ensuing murder trial. You never want to hope that someone dies so I'm not looking forward to that, but the sad reality is that that is what it will take to really change things. No knock warrants should never be a thing. There is no suspect so dangerous and no evidence so important that such a thing is justified.
Going to a public park every day and documenting what you see there might be many flavors of disrespectful depending on what you decide to document, but it's not stalking.
Does it though? Does it REALLY matter? What's the practical difference between spending the rest of your life in jail, having all your assets seized, your reputation dragged through the mud for decades and spending the rest of your life in jail, having all your assets seized, and your reputation dragged through the mud for decades? I apologize if that last sentence left you cross-eyed but that's very much the point.
Does it even matter at this point? The threats against Backpage have always been procedural. I think it's been very clear since day one that the government had no real case and this is all simply a demonstration of how hard the process can be used as the punishment.
But they also don't want kids cramming for tests. See: the recent bans on test prepping and tutors. You might almost begin to believe that the CCP is simply incompetent, flailing, and self destructive.
I am a programmer by trade. I'm in my mid-thirties now but when I attended college it was hard not to notice a trend among my peers. My college CS department had a very large population of south Asian international students and among them the split between men and women was close to 50/50. Of American-born students I knew of two female students, total, out of hundreds. The reason there are no (non-indian) women in CS is because there are no (non-indian) women getting CS degrees in college. Why they aren't going to college to pursue those degrees is a mystery. Clearly, it's not something particular to women, because non-American women are pursuing technology careers with gusto. It's something about the western cultural zeitgeist that is shunting them away.
What's really interesting is that it wasn't always this way. After graduating I fell into a software career doing COBOL. There's no getting around it, COBOL developers skew old. Really old. The average COBOL developer is 60 years old, so for every 30 year old baby like myself there's a crypt keeper a few seats down. But there are far more women in COBOL than any other CS field, close to half. COBOL was invented by a woman and for many decades programming and computers were seen as good careers for women and it seems to have taken a hard shift in the mid 90s and since then basically zero western-born women have entered the field.
When you hear all these horror stories about toxic male workplace cultures that drive women out I can understand why that's repellent, but it wasn't the stodgy Mad Men good-ol-boys clubs of the past that drove women out of CS. That was prime time for women in technology. I don't know what caused it, since I wasn't in college in the 90s, but that's where it all went wrong.
Hot take: Baseball cards and Magic: the Gathering ARE gambling, they just aren't big enough for regulators to pay attention to. One of the key aspects of trading cards is that the rarest (and in the case of games like MtG, the most powerful) cards are valuable. The companies that produce them are EXTREMELY careful to never ever acknowledge that the cards themselves have value but it's crystal clear in what they choose to print and when that they are fully aware of how valuable certain cards will be and, particularly with reprint sets, much fuss is made about making certain that packs contain a certain amount of "value". Just because you wink and nod and never say the dollar value out loud doesn't mean things don't have value, particularly if you can directly sell the thing you get on a market for dollars.
Of course it's the users who lose. They aren't the customers so social media has no incentive to make them happy. This is the natural and expected result from an advertisement-funded internet. If you want an internet that works for users, you will need users to PAY for it.
This isn't an article about Finnish education in general but a cursory internet search shows that the average Finnish teacher makes around 40k euros a year. This is less than the average American teacher and in a country where living expenses are about 30% higher. I'm not claiming to be an expert on Finnish education and I don't actually know how good their teachers/schools may or may not be, but I strongly doubt any education gap between US and Finnish students can be attributed to teacher pay.
On the post: Can We At Least Make Sure Antitrust Isn't Deliberately Designed To Make Everyone Worse Off?
Government regulation picks winners and losers and does so in an unfair way to benefit the buddies and donors of congress critters? That's unpossible!
On the post: States' 3rd Amended Antitrust Complaint Against Google Looks A Lot More Damning
So much for "Don't be evil."
On the post: Criss Angel Sends Ridiculous Legal Threat After Comedian Creates Parody Menu Of His Restaurant
Say what you want: $100.99 for 500 pancakes with some kind of stripper show and a crane is a pretty good deal.
On the post: Appeals Court Says It's Entirely Possible For Cops To Pinpoint Marijuana Odors In Moving Cars
I, for one, want to compliment America in being the world's leader in employing literal super heroes in law enforcement roles. I just wonder why they have be stuck with such lame powers as "super smelling" and why they seem to use their powers almost exclusively to find unlicensed danger plants and constitutionally protected (but unlicensed!) danger objects.
On the post: FCC Politely Tells ISPs To Stop Abusing Covid Broadband Relief Program To Rip Off Poor People
Subsidies never make anything cheaper. It's just a free handout to the telecoms to keep doing the same thing they've always been doing it. If you really think the FCC is going to do something about it this time, Lucy has a football for you to kick.
On the post: AT&T Set Up And Paid For OAN Propaganda Network; Yet Everyone Wants To Scream About Facebook
Re: Re: Follow the money.
You can't really fix it. Rich people can always use their wealth to avoid and manipulate the rules. Trying to outlaw one kind of money in politics just makes the other kinds of money in politics more powerful.
On the post: AT&T Set Up And Paid For OAN Propaganda Network; Yet Everyone Wants To Scream About Facebook
Re:
Whether you consider it left or right isn't important. The real thing you should be paying attention to is that one group of people is selling two opposing flavors of politics and profiting from the battle between them. Whether you consider the rest of their media properties leftwing or center doesn't matter. THEY (AT&T) considers them leftwing and they are designed, produced, and marketed to appeal to a demographic of people who are enraged by everything OAN stands for, but it's all a marketing gimmick. OAN whips up rightoids to be frothing mad at the libs. Those angry people are created, whole cloth, by OAN to be a villain for CNN viewers to revile and hate... and tune in to CNN to be affirmed in how much smarter they are. Meanwhile viewers tune into OAN to be affirmed in how much smarter they are than wokesters at CNN. The arms filling Punch and Judy are connected to the same man.
On the post: Marvel Hit Once Again By Estate For Some Spider-Man, Doctor Strange Copyright Terminations
7 years and not a minute longer.
On the post: Following Nationwide Police Brutality Protests, DOJ Steps Up To Issue Incremental Updates To Its Chokehold/No-Knock Warrant Policies
It's not going to change until someone shoots a couple no-knock plainclothes cops dead and is then exonerated in the ensuing murder trial. You never want to hope that someone dies so I'm not looking forward to that, but the sad reality is that that is what it will take to really change things. No knock warrants should never be a thing. There is no suspect so dangerous and no evidence so important that such a thing is justified.
On the post: Appeals Court Says The First Amendment Protects Minnesota Woman's Right To Be Super-Shitty About Nearby Islamic School
Re: Re:
Going to a public park every day and documenting what you see there might be many flavors of disrespectful depending on what you decide to document, but it's not stalking.
On the post: Mistrial Declared In Backpage Founders' Trial; After DOJ Ignores Judge's Rules Regarding What It Could Present
Re: Re:
Does it though? Does it REALLY matter? What's the practical difference between spending the rest of your life in jail, having all your assets seized, your reputation dragged through the mud for decades and spending the rest of your life in jail, having all your assets seized, and your reputation dragged through the mud for decades? I apologize if that last sentence left you cross-eyed but that's very much the point.
On the post: Mistrial Declared In Backpage Founders' Trial; After DOJ Ignores Judge's Rules Regarding What It Could Present
Does it even matter at this point? The threats against Backpage have always been procedural. I think it's been very clear since day one that the government had no real case and this is all simply a demonstration of how hard the process can be used as the punishment.
On the post: China's New Youth Online Gaming Restrictions Birth Underground Workaround Industry To Defeat It
Re: Re: CCP will fix this
But they also don't want kids cramming for tests. See: the recent bans on test prepping and tutors. You might almost begin to believe that the CCP is simply incompetent, flailing, and self destructive.
On the post: Sony Music Says DNS Service Is Implicated In Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves
Re:
Yes,... and?
On the post: A Guy Walks Into A Bra
I am a programmer by trade. I'm in my mid-thirties now but when I attended college it was hard not to notice a trend among my peers. My college CS department had a very large population of south Asian international students and among them the split between men and women was close to 50/50. Of American-born students I knew of two female students, total, out of hundreds. The reason there are no (non-indian) women in CS is because there are no (non-indian) women getting CS degrees in college. Why they aren't going to college to pursue those degrees is a mystery. Clearly, it's not something particular to women, because non-American women are pursuing technology careers with gusto. It's something about the western cultural zeitgeist that is shunting them away.
What's really interesting is that it wasn't always this way. After graduating I fell into a software career doing COBOL. There's no getting around it, COBOL developers skew old. Really old. The average COBOL developer is 60 years old, so for every 30 year old baby like myself there's a crypt keeper a few seats down. But there are far more women in COBOL than any other CS field, close to half. COBOL was invented by a woman and for many decades programming and computers were seen as good careers for women and it seems to have taken a hard shift in the mid 90s and since then basically zero western-born women have entered the field.
When you hear all these horror stories about toxic male workplace cultures that drive women out I can understand why that's repellent, but it wasn't the stodgy Mad Men good-ol-boys clubs of the past that drove women out of CS. That was prime time for women in technology. I don't know what caused it, since I wasn't in college in the 90s, but that's where it all went wrong.
On the post: 4 Dems Pushing Game Companies To Drop Loot Boxes Pointing At UK Law That Doesn't Mention Loot Boxes
Re:
Hot take: Baseball cards and Magic: the Gathering ARE gambling, they just aren't big enough for regulators to pay attention to. One of the key aspects of trading cards is that the rarest (and in the case of games like MtG, the most powerful) cards are valuable. The companies that produce them are EXTREMELY careful to never ever acknowledge that the cards themselves have value but it's crystal clear in what they choose to print and when that they are fully aware of how valuable certain cards will be and, particularly with reprint sets, much fuss is made about making certain that packs contain a certain amount of "value". Just because you wink and nod and never say the dollar value out loud doesn't mean things don't have value, particularly if you can directly sell the thing you get on a market for dollars.
On the post: Why Companies Keep Folding to Copyright Pressure, Even If They Shouldn't
Of course it's the users who lose. They aren't the customers so social media has no incentive to make them happy. This is the natural and expected result from an advertisement-funded internet. If you want an internet that works for users, you will need users to PAY for it.
On the post: Brooklyn DA Releases 10,000 Police Misconduct Records To Gothamist, Exposing Cops Prosecutors Don't Want In Their Courtrooms
Re: Re:
This isn't an article about Finnish education in general but a cursory internet search shows that the average Finnish teacher makes around 40k euros a year. This is less than the average American teacher and in a country where living expenses are about 30% higher. I'm not claiming to be an expert on Finnish education and I don't actually know how good their teachers/schools may or may not be, but I strongly doubt any education gap between US and Finnish students can be attributed to teacher pay.
On the post: Brooklyn DA Releases 10,000 Police Misconduct Records To Gothamist, Exposing Cops Prosecutors Don't Want In Their Courtrooms
Public sector unions are the problem. You will never solve the problem by throwing more politicians and more money at it.
On the post: Hacked Facebook Users Forced To Buy $300 Oculus VR Headset Just To Talk To Customer Support
Re:
Pretty much this. Hopefully people start to catch on that users are Facebook's product, not the customer base.
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