marinuso
1yr ago
Well, I doubt that.
The editors aren't there of their own accord, even the chief editor isn't there on his own behalf. They're people doing jobs. Of course any of them could go rogue and maybe manage to get something published once or twice, but they would be swiftly removed from their positions. If their loyalty was in question they wouldn't have been hired in the first place.
The owners could reposition the paper, but then again, no one doubts that the Sulzbergers are anything but elite.
marinuso
10mo ago
Banning child porn is something different from banning a bunch of other things under the pretext of banning child porn.
If you're going to actively try to ruin the lives of 17-year-olds taking pictures of each other, or going after people witnessing a rape rather than the rapist, you are acting in bad faith, and the same holds if you're trying to set up a censorship regime under the pretext of tackling child porn. That doesn't mean you can't ban child porn without doing these things. Changing the law so that intent does matter is trivial and obvious. Yes, that means you might occasionally let someone off, but that tradeoff is worth it, exactly the same as for any other law. As far as this is not the case for child porn, that is the result of politicians acting in bad faith.
Censorship or encryption bans also don't follow from a child porn ban. We don't after all open letters to see if there's child porn in there. People may be getting away with mailing child porn, but the secrecy of letters is such an old established right that nobody would think of trying to violate it. That same attitude should've been carried over to modern forms of communication, but this never happened, and so now bad people can get away with doing bad things under the guise of "think of the children". That's the problem.
marinuso
1yr ago
The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.
To be fair, I think that Floyd was much more similar to this than you'd first think. It was completely supported by the mainstream media and institutions.
The power balance in the West is different from that of China; there isn't a single Politburo, the media and institutions are power centers in their own right. But there's still a group of people you can more or less draw a circle around and say, these people are the people who actually decide what happens. And those people supported Floyd, even not-so-subtly stoked it, and if they hadn't it would've never happened.
marinuso
1yr ago
I got one too. I don't even qualify. I'm not an US resident, I have never even been to the US. They could've figured that out automatically from the IP addresses associated with my account that they're no doubt logging, or they could've looked at the subreddits I post in. Yet they didn't even bother with that bit of obvious filtering. They must've sent it to literally everyone.
marinuso
2yr ago
They 'pedestrianized' the area. It's been a few years, I don't recall any reason being given apart from the usual platitudes about safety and livability. The place does get thronged on the weekends - or did, prior to the Covid lockdowns bankrupting half the shops.
Official taxis being exempt is a citywide thing, they also get to go on bus lanes, and it's been that way since forever.
marinuso
11mo ago
but the null hypothesis here still seems to be "she just made something up in the middle of an investigation", which would mean it's at least some evidence of malice
I mean, not necessarily. Probably she spun a tale literally on the spot, just to have something to say. She failed the speech check this time. But when it does work, you don't notice. That's PR. No spokesperson is ever going to honestly say "we can't do our jobs well and I have no explanation."
Perhaps such an attitude technically is malicious, but no more so than any other PR in the history of PR.
marinuso
1yr ago
This song isn't new, it's been going around for at least a year, and I'm neither German nor hip to the latest social media, so my guess is that by the time I saw it it'd been going around for a while.
marinuso
2yr ago
After all that programming meetup was hosted in an LGBT space.. which might just answer your question
This would be plenty of reason for me not to attend an event I otherwise might. Not even out of 'hatred' or whatever. Foremost I'd feel like an intruder in another's place.
marinuso
2yr ago
OTOH, owning India or most of Africa doesn't set you ahead in terms of natural resources per person, in the way owning Siberia might.
marinuso
9mo ago
On a completely unrelated note, it still keeps surprising me how rich Americans are. People just drive around with V8 engines.
the guidance and computers are the expensive parts.
Computers aren't at all expensive anymore in the grand scheme of things.
In the 1960s they custom-built a computer to send people to the moon. In the 1980s you could buy a more powerful computer for kids to play games on for a few hundred dollars. By now you can buy a much more powerful computer on a tiny chip for 30-40 cents.
marinuso
1yr ago
I'd say it's less bad that one evil parent hurt his own kids, than that the cogs of bureaucracy chew up countless children who would've had loving homes, all the while the evil parents still hurt their own kids too.
Of course neither is perfect, but you're not getting perfection.
marinuso
1yr ago
It would probably be legit less of an escalation if Trump just had an "accident". At least you're not setting precedent that way. And he certainly wouldn't be the first one either.
marinuso
2yr ago
It's not a surprise to me, which is why I can't but assume that it isn't a surprise to the policymakers either.
Therefore, importing "fungible economic units" can't be the real reason.
marinuso
2yr ago
This causes everyone's cars to rust.
It'd be legitimately better to just dump the salt in a hole, should they really need to waste it.
marinuso
2yr ago
You don't accept the crown in Britain. He was next in line, he got it automatically the moment Queen Elizabeth died. They're never without a monarch. If he wants to give it to his son, he'll have to abdicate.
marinuso
1mo ago
There is an ongoing argument among non-American car nerds about whether they are unexportable because they are crap products produced for a protected domestic market, or if they are unexportable because they target a market segment (people who drive clean pickups to the office) that does not exist outside the US.
In most other countries, large personal cars are heavily discouraged through taxation, both of the cars and the fuel. If fuel is $8/gallon and the car tax is based on weight and engine displacement, a Ram is not a practical commuter car, for reasons of economy alone.
But I do see people driving gray-import Rams around. People are willing to pay easily double the American price, for a car that they know beforehand won't fit in any parking garage or even down the road in some places. (They get converted to run on LPG to save on fuel costs.) And they do drive their clean pickups to the office. I bet if it weren't for the regulations there'd be much more of them around.
marinuso
7mo ago
In the UK they had someone try to walk off with the magic mace.
marinuso
8mo ago
If you really want federalism, the federal government should be made to raise less taxes. Ideally the federal government shouldn't be able to tax citizens directly and should tax only the states. States would raise their own money to e.g. build roads.
Of course that's not really feasible either, not even if everybody really wanted it, because the federal government can print money or get loans from abroad, whereas the states cannot.
marinuso
9mo ago
They're still around, in recognizable form even, and there are few from Western or Middle-Eastern antiquity who can say that. (East Asia has had a lot more continuity though.)
How many Latins have you seen around lately? Even though they were the founders of Rome and nobody tried to genocide them (well, not anymore than anyone else back in the day), by the time of Augustus they were already gone and forgotten as a people and a culture, and nothing of theirs survived. The only thing that has endured in some form is their language. Rome still exists, but its people have been entirely genetically replaced several times over, just by people moving in and out.
Meanwhile the Jews have maintained their distinct culture and even genetics, even though they were in exile for give or take 2000 years.
marinuso
10mo ago
90% of everything is shit, that doesn't mean nothing good is produced.
To add to that, we see everything that is vomited onto our market, but we don't see the Chinese market (or other East Asian markets). There's a big cultural and linguistic gap, the only things from over there that make it over here despite that are almost by definition the good things. We're not showered with crappy Chinese phone games or CCP propaganda or what have you. We do get showered with our own crap.
marinuso
1yr ago
A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media.
And industrialisation.
Whether you were a peasant in India in 1750 or a peasant in Britain in 1750 didn't matter all that much as far as living standards go. Whether you're a peasant in India in 1980 or even have a minimum wage job in Britain in 1980 however, matters a great deal.
You don't want that anyway.
Someone's got to clean the toilets, and it would be better if that person weren't an 150 IQ would-be rocket surgeon who only isn't a rocket surgeon because he lost a politics game. After all, only so many people can be rocket surgeons, and if everyone is smart then the losers will have to lose for a different reason.
It wouldn't even be a good reason. Then you have a mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top. You think it's bad now, you just wait.
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