There's very low value to the Chinese state to having detailed floor plans of a random person's house. Or even a prominent person's house. A lot of this stuff is semi-public domain regardless as many real estate listings will include a floor plan.
I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this stuff out on their own accord, that's great.
The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.
Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the right thing to do. Not everything can be improved through top-down intervention, and many things can only be made worse.
The comment you’re replying to raised the idea of empowering the users. That’s probably the way to look, but the danger is always if we do that using top down enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm, including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.
My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA was our original sin. The Internet was better when it wasn’t divided into a few centrally managed private social media silos. It’s better to have a vibrant, messy, competitive, and very grass roots public square.
Ah yes, the genocides, fascists and blackmail are just delightful parts of that awesome internet that any kind of cooperative governance would simply _ruin_
The genocides would have happened with age verification or not, don't conflate the two.
Ironically, the solution to both the proliferation of genocide and social media causing harm to kids is the same, and it's a solution that helps everyone: legislate the source of the problem, the product itself and what we colloquially call "the algorithm".
Algorithmic optimization and manipulation that causes harm needs to be banned wholesale, across the board, from advertising to social media.
Instead, we get legislation that not only makes it easier to identify everyone as verifiably monetizable users to platforms, it also makes it easier to keep the proles in their place.
Seems like a bad example. The problem with Episode 8 was not lack of creativity. Episode 7 was a complete retread of "A New Hope" and a bigger offender. At least blue Jedi milk is new.
Episode 8 was a retread of Empire Strikes Back (ships chase through empty space while the main character trains with the old master on a wild planet). It seemed subversive just because ESB was subversive relative to ANH.
Episode 8 was subversive because it had self aware moments "trolling" the audience throughout like Luke mocking the idea Rey (and the audience) thought he would pick up a lightsaber again.
It also has weird "subversive" dialogue about sacrifice being bad that doesn't really fit what's happening in the movie itself where sacrifice of two characters saves the day. Which is "subversive" in the sense that a movie with dialogue saying "this is a shitty movie plot" is subversive.
It also rips off the ending of Return of the Jedi by killing the main bad guy so is "subversive" in that it trolls whoever was stuck making episode 9 without a functional villain.
Canada is in a similar situation. A lot of high-minded talk about peacekeeping and neutrality, but constantly benefitting from being implicitly protected by US defence policy. The real test will come if/when Russia decides to challenge Canadian arctic sovereignty.
> The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans)[14] throughout Europe during the 1840s.
Vs.
> While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture.
You could've read a bit more of the article. Proximate cause != ultimate cause.
> Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some assumed that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character,[20
Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?
On pretty much every "culture war" issue the "left" fails to adequately grapple with bad actors and those that abuse empathetic policies to harm others or unfairly advance themselves. Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.
Edit: If you want a recent example of this coming full circle, take a look at service animals. Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public. At first this was tolerated or even welcomed by businesses but increasingly animals are being banned from these spaces because of badly behaved pets. Those with genuine need for a service animal are caught in the crossfire.
> Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?
Of course it's terrible for the genuinley disabled. That said, I would rather accidently assist an able person than accidently fail to provide the required accommodations for a genuinely disabled person. The default should be acceptance.
Those who abuse these systems should be given an all expense paid trip to the surface of the sun. Ripping off the disabled is about as low as a person can get, and that is what they are doing.
> Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.
Where I'm from there are hardly any accommodations offered for those who are marginalized yet they're stigmatized for using the little help that there is. Also it's usually a loud minority that's against it, as I haven't seen any majority form to abolish it via voting.
Aside from that those who are tasked with executing these policies broadly agree that going after every bad actor is not worth the false positive rate.
I know a couple who became parents young and are now going through college as a family. When they applied for scholarships in their respective universities, one institution accepted immediately, the other is still dragging out the process because for some insane reason there's both an upper and lower income limit for those who apply.
Someone somewhere figured this would somehow deter bad actors so now those who genuinely need help need to jump through additional hoops.
> Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public.
Ridiculous comparison. First, neither I nor anyone I know had a room where we could lock our parents out. Second, your parents actually care about you and if you spent 24+ hours in there without coming out they'd check on you (probably much sooner actually). No such luck in a dorm.
This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.
> Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.
Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.
It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you.
I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution.
But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/against-their-will-the-sit...
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