offby37years
Congress Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively
Oakland will give low-income families of color $500 a month, no strings attached
U.S. intelligence community increasingly involving itself in domestic politics
Re:Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed
on Monday March 22, 2021 @03:47PM (#26545840)
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology is one of only two BSL–4 labs in China.
Re:Neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 variants after infection...
on Sunday March 21, 2021 @06:58PM (#26534938)
Every offical that was selling the initial lockdown. Just have to get the R0 below 1, remember? You really think the masses would have been OK with a year of lockdowns and the despair that entails up front?
Your conclusions don't match reality. States like Florida have open stadiums and are fairing the same as states like California that insist on totalitarian overreach.
Re:Neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 variants after infection...
on Sunday March 21, 2021 @04:55PM (#26533927)
Lockdowns were just meant to be for two weeks to “flatten the curve”, remember?
Re:Neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 variants after infection...
on Sunday March 21, 2021 @04:49PM (#26533855)
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — John Dalberg-Acton
Re:As U.S. schools shuttered, student mental health cratered, survey f...
on Sunday March 21, 2021 @04:21PM (#26533611)
California COVID death rate: 0.146%
Florida COVID death rate: 0.155%
These numbers are statistically tied.
Yet, FL's economy is open, kids are in school, Disney World entertaining tourists.
CA's business are closed & kids are depressed and falling behind.
(Bad) leadership matters.
Re:What can we tell from the evolution of Han Chinese names?
on Saturday March 20, 2021 @07:55PM (#26526990)
“Westerners with PC leanings” are considered ridiculous by most every culture in the world. If there is any ideology that has a “power grab over language and definition” it is the modern, Western left.
Re:Mouse plague grows to biblical proportions across eastern Australia
on Saturday March 20, 2021 @06:38PM (#26526583)
When you only have a hammer...
Square: Crypto Book of Bitcoin Mythology
Re:Greenwald: Yesterday Journalists Spread a Significant Lie All over ...
on Friday March 19, 2021 @04:58PM (#26518093)
Before the internet you could have two local newspapers in every town, each profitably reporting facts.
Then the internet came and commoditised facts. New facts are disseminated immediately across social media. Open Google News and you can find thousands of articles covering the same event.
Suddenly, just reporting facts was no longer a viable business. Being a newspaper of record was no longer economically viable. Only the news media that shifted to reporting opinions, outrage, and entertainment survived.
NYT was fading into irrelevance up until mid-2016, it is now more relevant than ever: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NYT/
This resurgence was driven by a conscious shift to peddle tribal propaganda: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...
Greenwald: Yesterday Journalists Spread a Significant Lie All over Twitter
Re:José Epita Mbomo, a Spanish electrician who sabotaged the Nazis
on Thursday March 18, 2021 @04:11PM (#26507050)
There are only two ways to coordinate human societies at scale: free markets and physical power.
Any ideology rejecting free markets is just advocating for power.
Re:Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online
on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @05:14PM (#26496860)
Bombholing.
> The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed.
> As George Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history.
> The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers.
> Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes.
Re:GitHub, fuck your name change
on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @05:06PM (#26496786)
"It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States." — Thomas Sowell
Russia threatens to block Twitter in a month as content dispute escalates
Re:GitHub, fuck your name change
on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @06:23AM (#26488997)
The idiotic culture war is media led: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...
> In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.
Re:The auction that set off the race for AI supremacy
on Tuesday March 16, 2021 @09:03PM (#26485313)
Re:Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'
on Monday March 15, 2021 @11:46PM (#26472771)
What's the COVID-induced death rate among children again?
Re:Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'
on Monday March 15, 2021 @11:41PM (#26472734)
It is impossible to study the long-term effects of any vaccine within a year. Impossible. Unless you are elderly or immunocompromised you are almost certainly exposing yourself to more personal risk by being vaccinated.
Re:Germany suspends use of AstraZeneca vaccine, along with Italy, Fran...
on Monday March 15, 2021 @05:36PM (#26469448)
Now halted in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Thailand, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, Congo and Bulgaria.
Meanwhile Trudeau has the gall to assure the AstraZeneca vaccine is "safe and effective": https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-astrazeneca-safe-1....
UK parliament to debate requiring verified ID to open a social media account
Re:Why we’re removing comments on most of Inquirer.com
on Sunday March 14, 2021 @09:35PM (#26461628)
The US won't even mandate ID for voting, requiring verification for internet comments is a stretch.
Amazon's Profits, AWS and Advertising
Re:Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account
on Sunday March 14, 2021 @06:50PM (#26460286)
The US is already at Soviet levels: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-sovietization-of-the-ameri...
Re:Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account
on Sunday March 14, 2021 @06:43PM (#26460217)
Why would big tech voluntarily surrender the unprecedented power to shape worldwide discourse?
"Power intoxicates men. It is never voluntarily surrendered. It must be taken from them." — James F. Byrnes
Re:Tweeting “Memphis” autolocks your Twitter account
on Sunday March 14, 2021 @04:56PM (#26459080)
Thankfully, as seen in Russia and India, those thousands of cultures have no wish to be moderated by the self-anointed SV elite.
Re:Bitcoin Is Dead – Tracking all notable Bitcoin skeptics since 2010
on Saturday March 13, 2021 @05:20PM (#26450620)
The ability for individual actors to divorce themselves from MMT driven inflation.