gharding

This misses the whole point of Brexit, even so many years later. You don't have to look at tabloid covers to understand Brexit, you have to understand the fundamental grievances of the opposition that were ignored and even inflamed for decades.

It is rather ironic that the "democracies" which are by all objective measures not self-governing democracies at all, are being consumed by an inherently anti-democratic organ of sham and facade democracy called the EU that has utter contempt for the people it lies about representing; while the monarchical system of the UK is choosing self-governance and a form of democratic governance that at least purports to respect the people.

Like a lot of other political relationships today, the whole EU/UK Brexit situation reminds me of co-dependent, toxic, manipulative, and abusive relationships.

So now after berating and abusing and insulting and sabotaging the UK, and various stints of unhinged begging interspersed with threats; the depraved, abusive ego of the technocratic authoritarians of EU Brussels has to rationalize itself with "well, leave, you whore, you were dead to me a long time ago."

It's really rather sad, how toxic and evil the EU has become under that shiny veneer of fake gallantry and suave confidence. It is a shame that the EU was form the start imbued with an existential and systematic flaw that turned it into the authoritarian, anti-democratic, anti-self-governance body that loathes actual diversity that inherently requires separation.

The EU could have been such a great thing if it had just followed and adopted the original US Constitution, roughly pre-Civil War; a social compact reliant on mutual understanding and willing and voluntary participation, rather than on coercive authoritarianism.

Although not on topic, I think you point highlights a rather unaddressed issue with data and systems relevance. As you imply, not only is it inherently not possible to track a whole population's "wellbeing", doing so in "real-time" is even more ludicrous. So many measures and metrics are really nothing more than utter fabrications that are totally incompatible in spite of being named similarly, and no, that hardly ever seems to dissuade anyone from hooking up to anything but the most obviously egregious offending systems and their garbage data/information.

Just a single aspect of this issue is, what does real-time mean for aggregate, global measures? Days? Hours? Is it somehow more useful to have 100% accuracy at either interval? And what are the criteria that even determine accuracy at all, let alone precision. This is all a kabuki dance with approaching no relevance, especially in the case of the pandemic when there is also approaching zero confidence in the Chinese numbers at all, and it does not matter how many fancy dashboards are put together by "hooking up to such a system", when the numbers could be 2x as high, 5x, 100x, or who knows because they very system of governance and ideology actively evades honesty and responsibility.

ALL of these numbers should be fundamentally caveated every single time any of them are provided with "that they are Chinese data and the Chinese lie about lying, while lying about the fact that they lied. At the very least currently, trusting any Chinese person is an act of insanity, regardless of whether any given individual Chinese person is honest 100% of the time. How much more do people have to be lied to, deceived, cheated, stolen from, plundered, spied on, and infected with communicable diseases that could crash all of civilization by killing millions before we realize there is a mentally ill manic insanity going around that starts with the insanity of not having a common framework for data and information collection, processing, and conveyance.

I unfortunately did not see your comment until now and it seems this forum does not lend itself to actual in depth discussions of any substance, with a clear intent of attracting and harvesting technical skills and knowledge from gullible tech people; but I think you misunderstood something.

I am not referring to "corporate slaves" as being the well paid equivalent of the nobility or and even lower aristocracy of the past, or their equivalent in different times. I am referring to the fact that the "kings and emperors" of today developed a new model for "slavery", or, to generalize, exploitation of some by others to support their excessive and parasitic life. You are misunderstanding the relational nature of the system. What it comes down to is that the ruling psychopaths realized they could become extremely wealthy by simply shifting the "slavery" aspect to a kind of nickel and diming of everyone under a threshold that breaks their willingness to freely engage, rather than forcing unproductive and unwilling slaves that you also have to take care of. It is actually what is referred to when "economists" stalk about taxation stifling production or willingness to be productive … what they really mean or should be saying is that it is the rate at which you deprive the slave of their willingness to work, relative to coercive force required to overcome that innate will. There are dependencies; profit, free will, force … largely two will go up as one goes down, but not at the same rate, even though the ruling psychopaths keep trying to manipulate things, thinking they can have all of it … until things invariably break and snap.

I used to hold that position too, but then I realized a couple things that could fill several books. It boils down to the fact that the USA was essentially first to build a road network based on assumptions of low population density, high abundance and first to access requisite resources; and assuming a civilized society with a baseline of standards, culture, and customs that were essentially tacit and implicit to the system without having to be regulated or explicitly managed.

If you are European, although the significantly increased government control of its population will mitigate things somewhat, reality is that as Europe has now imbued itself with third world people and the customs and proclivities they carry, the road behaviors will also change even more than they clearly have, as anyone who has driven in Europe for more than 20 or so years, can attest to.

And before anyone gets triggered on some conditioned and well trained pavlovian assumptions, what I described above was equally observable when East Germans started meshing with West Germany, where after 55 years of having been exposed to relentless psychological engineering to break East Germans of their German-ness and proclivities and identity, they lacked what are commonly understood to be certain German traits and preferences for methodical order, systematic structure, and social courtesy; all of which the East Germans had far less of a connection to. That led to a lot of poor driving on roads and that has really not changed all that much either since as anyone who spends any distinct time on West German Roads and East German roads can attest to, even though the impact is being muddled by things like Polish drivers in East Germany and increasingly foreign drivers from all over the place.

Essentially it also comes down to the fact that now people with drivers licenses from various other European countries with lower driving standards, are also just allowed to drive in Germany without having to meet the far higher German driving class standards. It's yet another way in which democracy itself is being utterly disassembled, as foreign minorities are advantaged over native majorities … a total in version of democracy and even basic morality and ethics.

As for the USA, things have gotten so bad in many states that just ignoring the overcapacity of most of the road system due to unfettered and uncontrolled invasion by foreigners driving on US roads, you now have a whole ethnic driving license racket going on where an ethnic communities pass their own in spite of essentially not passing or being safe drivers.

I know that is not what people here want to hear, but reality simply is that this whole system is failing and it is failing due to deliberate bugs intentionally injected, and instead of fixing those bugs, people are just covering them up and making excuses and using ever mounting number of hacks to obscure and hide the ever more brittle system. It's quite telling that even in this kind of forum no one seems to understand that they are looking at a totally broken system and one that is failing at every increasing speed; all while willfully ignoring the inevitable cascading and total failure.

I wish people were able to think about what is really doing on here for themselves for a few seconds instead of swallowing whole the prepackaged rhetoric from either side; on one side we have "corporations are evil and must be taxed just as heavily as we want to tax the life out of all citizens to support others against their will", and on the other side we have "corporations are benevolent angels who are constantly persecuted and hunted for their life blood while only ever having the most pure intentions and thoughts any angel could ever have.

Reality though is quite a bit in the middle-ground … corporations are enterprises headed by purely selfish and overwhelmingly people that are living embodiments of the dark triad of personality traits (narcissism fueled by psychopathy enacting machiavellianism), but on the other hand they are also very much not wrong in simply wanting to preserve and keep what they have, regardless of whether they got it illicitly and immorally in the first place, largely enabled by the other tribe of the dark triad that only carry a different banner, while also being corporatists, but feigning "concern for the common man" while devising ever more elaborate schemes for how to disposes people who actually earn things through productive and hard work of the fruits of their labor in order to support themselves and those who empower them.

What it all can be reduced down to when you start disassembling the various shields, force fields, lies, misdirection, and deception to get to the core of things; what we are really facing is an actual, real, objective new form of the parasitic exploitation model humanity has known in many forms, but most often refers to its most obvious incarnation as slavery … we have a system of modern slavery, one that long ago realized it is way more profitable to not have to worry taking care of unproductive slaves you physically control, but rather you simply take a huge chunk of most people who are productive and your net profit is wildly higher. It's precisely one of the reasons that oligarchs make sure to push everyone's attention to the trope of slavery, so most people do not realize that "slavery" (a term referring to the systematic exploitation of the slavs … a European people … even far and beyond feudal serfdom that was also a "slavery" business model) pivoted its business model.

If you are Google, would it be in your interest to support a supposed competitor, who really is only just aggregating Google search results mashed up with others like Bing, that appear to basically produce the same results as Google; in order to at least be able to make the claim that you are not a monopoly?

Does your answer change when you consider that Google gave the duck.com domain to DDG a few months ago?

If that does not change your opinion, why would a competitor that controls a rather pivotal assets like an extremely valuable domain like duck.com to what is presented as a competitor to Google?

Although I have never been there, but I don't think the street view makes your point. If you take the monitors out that cafe does not look any different than any other rather run of the mill cafe with stock furniture.

I wonder if this is a bit of a perception is 9/10ths of reality thing where the fact that the furniture looks too "office like" with the separated meeting table with an wall hung TV and other office-feel things; rather than cafe-like with exposed wood and pipes, Edison bulbs, copper stuff, monitors that are built into an enclosure instead of free standing, etc. the bureaucrats found a probably already biased/influenced position and finding easier to rationalize.

I know that may seem silly to some, but if you have ever worked with or in a bureaucratic and especially a political office, you will surely know what I mean when I am describing the use of any and all excuses and tiniest little reasons to rationalize a preconceived or forgone conclusion. It's really a major scourge on every single aspect of government and leads to these kinds of decisions.

My theory is that it largely stems from the fact that bureaucrats, including most politicians these days, simply have no real accountability or consequences for their actions and decisions, so some tiny technical violation can invalidate everything else on precept.

I’m not sure why this is here, but what I found most interesting about this is the depth of the nested “fake news” or propagandistic distortion it represents. The reason Benghazi is being retweeted so much is because Democrats are trying to associate the Iranian action against the Baghdad embassy as “Trump’s Benghazi” in an effort to make an attack against him by means of trying to turn Benghazi against him (Alinsky tactics 101), while also deflecting and polluting what happened in the Benghazi incident.

What this “twitter storm” really represents that most people have seemingly not yet come to understand, is that it is a skirmish or battle in a new generation of warfare for the “hearts and minds” of the unaware masses of “voters”.

War used to mostly be about log lines and materiel and throwing men against each other to die for the ruling class, but in the psychological warfare battlefield of the nuclear world of {current_year}, it’s all about moving the minds of the masses of “democratic voters”. The new weapons are volleys of deflection and gaslighting that will commence until regular people can’t make heads from tails anymore and they basically go insane and can easily be moved and herded by a global ruling class to serve their interests, as we have increasingly been witnessing over the last few years. It’s an effect caused by even the most “educated” people not being able to make rational, observable sense of, integrate or reconcile things anymore as effects are so pervasive now that they have caused the willful deconstruction of the very foundation of logic, order, and structure itself; mass gaslighting.

Everything has become intentionally more noise than signal to evade and provide cover while also destroying from within by those whose aim is precisely that, destruction from within.

Does anyone have any insight into how this relates to the Obama administration’s push to relinquish American control over ICANN?

I am starting to get the sense that the sale of the .org TLD is not just coincidental. It’s starting to smell like any number of the massively corrupt international organizations like the IOC (Olympics) or FIFA (Soccer/football).

Maybe it’s just my cynical side, but all this seems way too convenient and sequentially timed to be coincidental. But please, I welcome anyone to assuage my concerns with rational argument.