World News Random, Random

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Re: World News Random, Random

#526

Post by ponchi101 »

the Moz wrote: Sat Sep 25, 2021 1:51 pm ...

As for China, they don't subscribe to truth or transparency. So their words and actions can't carry much credence.
From the business point of view. I have worked enough with purely Chinese companies. They operate in a mentality that if they lie to you, and you do not realize it, it is YOUR fault. Very difficult to negotiate with them as there is never a concept of trust or good faith.
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Re: World News Random, Random

#527

Post by the Moz »

ponchi101 wrote: Sat Sep 25, 2021 3:15 pm
the Moz wrote: Sat Sep 25, 2021 1:51 pm ...

As for China, they don't subscribe to truth or transparency. So their words and actions can't carry much credence.
From the business point of view. I have worked enough with purely Chinese companies. They operate in a mentality that if they lie to you, and you do not realize it, it is YOUR fault. Very difficult to negotiate with them as there is never a concept of trust or good faith.
Absolutely. Cultural nuance has many forms.
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Re: World News Random, Random

#528

Post by ti-amie »

In plain sight, Boris Johnson is rigging the system to stay in power
Jonathan Freedland

Fri 1 Oct 2021 11.35 EDT

If this wasn’t us, how would we describe it? If this was Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or Poland, what language might we use? Would an announcer on the BBC World Service declare: “Amid fuel and food shortages, the government has moved to cement its grip on power. It’s taking action against the courts, shrinking their ability to hold the ruling party to account, curbing citizens’ right to protest and imposing new rules that would gag whistleblowers and sharply restrict freedom of the press. It’s also moving against election monitors while changing voting rules, which observers say will hurt beleaguered opposition groups … ”

It doesn’t sound like us. We like to tell ourselves that we live in a mature democracy, our institutions deep rooted. Political competition is brisk, never more so than at this time of year, as one party conference ends and another begins. This is not a one-party state. All it would require is Labour to get its act together – to which end it made a decent start this week – and, with a fair wind, the Conservatives would be out.

It’s a consoling thought, but not a reliable one. Almost unnoticed, perhaps because it’s done with an English rather than a Hungarian accent, our populist, nationalist prime minister is steadily setting out to weaken the institutions that define a liberal democracy: the ones that might act as checks and balances on him. And he’s moving, Orbán style, to make it ever harder for his government to lose power.

Start with the courts. After all, that’s what Boris Johnson did. It seems petty to suggest that he is out for revenge after the supreme court delivered an 11-0 humiliation over his unlawful suspension of parliament in 2019, but Johnson is acting like a man determined to settle a score.

He set his sights early on a bill to reform judicial review, the process by which courts can overturn unlawful decisions by the government and others. The language is less overt than it was, but that bill stays true to its initial aim of declaring entire categories of government action off limits to judges – and it explicitly bans a particular, 11th-hour form of judicial review often used in immigration cases. No wonder the Law Society has been sounding the alarm, warning of a threat to essential curbs on “the might of the state”.

If that enrages you, think twice before taking to the streets. Under the new police bill, ministers will have the power to suppress pretty well any protest they don’t like. It makes it a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in jail, merely to cause “serious annoyance” to the public. The police will be able to clamp down on a demonstration, or ban it altogether, on the flimsiest basis. If they deem a demo sufficiently loud to cause someone in the vicinity “serious unease”, that would be enough.

Of course, no one goes on a march unless they know about whatever outrage the government or others has committed. That can take a whistleblower or journalist or both, and Johnson is moving against them too. He wants to widen the scope of the Official Secrets Act, applying it to more areas of government activity and increasing the punishment for breaking it. Crucially, he refuses to add any kind of public interest defence for journalists or their sources. Even the Sun calls the move a “licence for cover-up”, adding that a society where journalists and whistleblowers face jail even over leaks that are clearly in the public interest is “in the grip of oppression”.

But Johnson is bent not only on preventing his government from being held to account. More sinister, he is taking steps to ensure it can’t easily be replaced. He wants to tilt the playing field of electoral competition permanently in the government’s favour, and his first target is the referee.

The Conservatives’ elections bill hands ministers powers over what has, until now, been an independent Electoral Commission. Suddenly, ministers will be able to deploy the commission as they see fit, using it to define what counts as election campaigning. A minister could order the commission to impose a criminal penalty on a group that had been campaigning for, say, higher NHS pay, six months before an election was called, by retroactively defining that effort as election spending. It’s not hard to imagine ministers using that power selectively to hurt their opponents. Little wonder that an alliance of charities and trade unions, convened by the Best for Britain group, has called the change “an attack on the UK’s proud democratic tradition and some of our most fundamental rights”.

The same bill would require voters to show photo ID before being handed a ballot, a remedy for the nonexistent problem of voter fraud – and a practice known to exclude poorer voters less likely to back the Conservatives. Meanwhile, note who got the money from a £1bn fund set aside by the government for struggling towns: in a remarkable coincidence, 39 of the 45 towns chosen are in constituencies with a Conservative MP, even when that meant cash going to a Tory-held seat rather than the poorer place next door. That looks a lot like using public money as an electoral war chest to keep Tory seats Tory.

And let’s not forget a trick straight out of the Orbán or Donald Trump playbook. Ofcom, like the Electoral Commission, is meant to be independent. But Johnson persists in his determination to install in the chair an ideological ally: the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre.

There is a pattern here, if we’re only willing to see it. A populist government hobbling those bodies that exist to keep it in check, trampling on democratic conventions and long-held rights, all to tighten its own grip on power. We need to recognise it, even when it wears a smile and tousled hair, and speaks in the soothing cadences of Eton College.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -elections
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Re: World News Random, Random

#529

Post by ponchi101 »

They are springing all over the place.
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Re: World News Random, Random

#530

Post by Suliso »

I've felt for some time that among the Silicon valley giants Facebook is the weakest link. Below NYT article saying essentially the same.

Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew

A trove of leaked documents, published by The Wall Street Journal, hints at a company whose best days are behind it.

By Kevin Roose

One possible way to read “The Facebook Files,” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent series of reports based on leaked internal Facebook research, is as a story about an unstoppable juggernaut bulldozing society on its way to the bank.

The series has exposed damning evidence that Facebook has a two-tier justice system, that it knew Instagram was worsening body-image issues among girls and that it had a bigger vaccine misinformation problem than it let on, among other issues. And it would be easy enough to come away thinking that Facebook is terrifyingly powerful, and can be brought to heel only with aggressive government intervention.

But there’s another way to read the series, and it’s the interpretation that has reverberated louder inside my brain as each new installment has landed.

Which is: Facebook is in trouble.

Not financial trouble, or legal trouble, or even senators-yelling-at-Mark-Zuckerberg trouble. What I’m talking about is a kind of slow, steady decline that anyone who has ever seen a dying company up close can recognize. It’s a cloud of existential dread that hangs over an organization whose best days are behind it, influencing every managerial priority and product decision and leading to increasingly desperate attempts to find a way out. This kind of decline is not necessarily visible from the outside, but insiders see a hundred small, disquieting signs of it every day — user-hostile growth hacks, frenetic pivots, executive paranoia, the gradual attrition of talented colleagues.

It has become fashionable among Facebook critics to emphasize the company’s size and dominance while bashing its missteps. In a Senate hearing on Thursday, lawmakers grilled Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, with questions about the company’s addictive product design and the influence it has over its billions of users. Many of the questions to Ms. Davis were hostile, but as with most Big Tech hearings, there was an odd sort of deference in the air, as if the lawmakers were asking: Hey, Godzilla, would you please stop stomping on Tokyo?

But if these leaked documents proved anything, it is how un-Godzilla-like Facebook feels. The documents, shared with The Journal by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, reveal a company worried that it is losing power and influence, not gaining it, with its own research showing that many of its products aren’t thriving organically. Instead, it is going to increasingly extreme lengths to improve its toxic image, and to stop users from abandoning its apps in favor of more compelling alternatives.

You can see this vulnerability on display in an installment of The Journal’s series that landed last week. The article, which cited internal Facebook research, revealed that the company has been strategizing about how to market itself to children, referring to preteens as a “valuable but untapped audience.” The article contained plenty of fodder for outrage, including a presentation in which Facebook researchers asked if there was “a way to leverage playdates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?”

It’s a crazy-sounding question, but it’s also revealing. Would a confident, thriving social media app need to “leverage playdates,” or concoct elaborate growth strategies aimed at 10-year-olds? If Facebook is so unstoppable, would it really be promoting itself to tweens as — and please read this in the voice of the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme — a “Life Coach for Adulting?”

The truth is that Facebook’s thirst for young users is less about dominating a new market and more about staving off irrelevance. Facebook use among teenagers in the United States has been declining for years, and is expected to plummet even further soon — internal researchers predicted that daily use would decline 45 percent by 2023. The researchers also revealed that Instagram, whose growth offset declining interest in Facebook’s core app for years, is losing market share to faster-growing rivals like TikTok, and younger users aren’t posting as much content as they used to.

“Facebook is for old people” was the brutal verdict delivered by one 11-year-old boy to the company’s researchers, according to the internal documents.

A good way to think about Facebook’s problems is that they come in two primary flavors: problems caused by having too many users, and problems caused by having too few of the kinds of users it wants — culture-creating, trendsetting, advertiser-coveted young Americans.

The Facebook Files contains evidence of both types. One installment, for example, looked at the company’s botched attempts to stop criminal activity and human rights abuses in the developing world — an issue exacerbated by Facebook’s habit of expanding into countries where it has few employees and little local expertise.

But that kind of problem can be fixed, or at least improved, with enough resources and focus. The second type of problem — when tastemakers abandon your platforms en masse — is the one that kills you. And it appears to be the one that Facebook executives are most worried about.

Take the third article in The Journal’s series, which revealed how Facebook’s 2018 decision to change its News Feed algorithm to emphasize “meaningful social interactions” instead generated a spike in outrage and anger.

The algorithm change was portrayed at the time as a noble push for healthier conversations. But internal reports revealed that it was an attempt to reverse a yearslong decline in user engagement. Likes, shares and comments on the platform were falling, as was a metric called “original broadcasts.” Executives tried to reverse the decline by rejiggering the News Feed algorithm to promote content that garnered a lot of comments and reactions, which turned out to mean, roughly, “content that makes people very angry.”

“Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits,” said Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman. “To say we turn a blind eye to feedback ignores these investments, including the 40,000 people working on safety and security at Facebook and our investment of $13 billion since 2016.”

It’s far too early to declare Facebook dead. The company’s stock price has risen nearly 30 percent in the past year, lifted by strong advertising revenue and a spike in use of some products during the pandemic. Facebook is still growing in countries outside the United States, and could succeed there even if it stumbles domestically. And the company has invested heavily in newer initiatives, like augmented and virtual reality products, that could turn the tide if they’re successful.

But Facebook’s research tells a clear story, and it’s not a happy one. Its younger users are flocking to Snapchat and TikTok, and its older users are posting anti-vaccine memes and arguing about politics. Some Facebook products are actively shrinking, while others are merely making their users angry or self-conscious.

Facebook’s declining relevance with young people shouldn’t necessarily make its critics optimistic. History teaches us that social networks rarely age gracefully, and that tech companies can do a lot of damage on the way down. (I’m thinking of MySpace, which grew increasingly seedy and spam-filled as it became a ghost town, and ended up selling off user data to advertising firms. But you could find similarly ignoble stories from the annals of most failed apps.) Facebook’s next few years could be uglier than its last few, especially if it decides to scale back its internal research and integrity efforts in the wake of the leaks.

None of this is to say that Facebook isn’t powerful, that it shouldn’t be regulated or that its actions don’t deserve scrutiny. It can simultaneously be true that Facebook is in decline and that it is still one of the most influential companies in history, with the ability to shape politics and culture all over the globe.

But we shouldn’t mistake defensiveness for healthy paranoia, or confuse a platform’s desperate flailing for a show of strength. Godzilla eventually died, and as the Facebook Files make clear, so will Facebook.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/tech ... files.html
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Re: World News Random, Random

#531

Post by ponchi101 »

In which movie did Godzilla eventually died? :shock:
I heard all this about Microsoft. It was old, it could not withstand Apple's newer, faster designs, it was "for old people", it would not be able to beat Google's Chrome OS, Linux would run it into the ground.
None of that happened.
I would not miss it ever. I don't use it. But it may end up being like beer companies too. They are selling less beer. But are selling water, seltzers, cocktails, etc.
To Kevin Roose: Yes, I have seen this movie before. The movie in which somebody wrote about the end of a company, and it never happened. When companies die, they die like Blackberry. Of a heart attack, not slow cancer.
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Re: World News Random, Random

#532

Post by ti-amie »









“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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Re: World News Random, Random

#533

Post by ti-amie »

“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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Re: World News Random, Random

#534

Post by ponchi101 »

Great. No mention that it is a Ponzi scheme. That helps.
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Re: World News Random, Random

#535

Post by ti-amie »

ponchi101 wrote: Thu Oct 07, 2021 7:36 pm Great. No mention that it is a Ponzi scheme. That helps.
I've listened to three Slate Money podcasts on crypto and every time I do I come away thinking that it's a scam. They had an Israeli woman on last week and all she did was spout Libertarian-esque slogans about freeing yourself from the tyranny of big banks. When asked about criminal use of this "currency" she went into her rant about "freedom to do what you want".

All that to say that ponchi is right.
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Re: World News Random, Random

#536

Post by ti-amie »

Austria’s Kurz, Inner Circle Ensnared in Corruption Probe
By Jonathan Tirone and Boris Groendahl
October 6, 2021, 10:35 AM EDT Updated on October 6, 2021, 12:55 PM EDT
Chancellor implicated by prosecutor in a bribery investigation
Government denies wrongdoing, says it’s victim of witch hunt

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and members of his inner circle were implicated in a sprawling corruption investigation that threatens to open a new chapter of political turbulence in the Alpine nation.

Offices at Kurz’s Chancellery and several other locations were raided on Wednesday, according to an emailed statement by anti-corruption prosecutors.

The 35-year-old leader of Austria’s conservative People’s Party and others are under investigation for their alleged role in funneling federal funds to a newspaper publisher to orchestrate his rise in government, according to a separate 106-page legal document seen by Bloomberg, which summarizes the investigation and was filed with a criminal court in Vienna.

Kurz rejected the allegations, and said they were falsely constructed by taking text messages out of context, the chancellor said in an emailed statement.

It’s the second investigation to involve Kurz within the last year. Last month, a judge questioned the chancellor about the veracity of statements he provided to parliamentary investigators looking into the collapse of his previous government. During five hours of questioning, Kurz said that any allegations of perjury were baseless.

Prosecutors are now probing messages shared between Kurz, his chief strategist and media advisers, according to the recently filed document seen by Bloomberg. The communications occurred from 2016, when Kurz was Austria’s foreign minister, and allegedly detail how polling data and stories were strategically placed in newspapers to facilitate his rise to power.

Austria’s opposition parties called for an extraordinary parliamentary session in response to the prosecutor’s investigation while warning Kurz’s party not to interfere with the judiciary.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” said Joerg Leichtfried, a senior Social Democrat in parliament.

Message Control
In their court filing, prosecutors said evidence suggested Kurz knowingly collaborated in efforts to plant political advertising camouflaged as poll data.

“Sebastian Kurz is the central figure: all criminal actions are primarily done to further his interests,” read the document.

Since rising to power as Europe’s youngest head of government in 2017, Kurz’s administrations have been dogged by a string of controversies.

His first government with the country’s far-right populists disintegrated in 2019 after a lurid video shot on the Spanish island of Ibiza showed his coalition partner offering government contracts to a woman posing as a Russian oligarch’s niece. Subsequent parliamentary probes zeroed in on job postings and political favors.

The latest allegation “hits at the base” of Kurz’s current coalition with Austria’s Green Party, said Thomas Hofer, a political analyst and consultant in Vienna.

“Message control is one thing,” he said. “But if those allegations are true, this was not only manipulating the media, but also misleading the public.”

(Adds comment from Chancellor Kurz in 2nd paragraph.)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ce=twitter
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Re: World News Random, Random

#537

Post by JazzNU »

Anytime I've been on a forum or something and people are talking about cryptocurrency, I think man, this sounds shady AF and why am I the only one who thinks this has epic potential to blow up? Don't get me wrong, I wish to God I had bought some Bitcoin when it was like $40 back when I saw a discussion on it. But say I owned 10 Bitcoins into 2021, the only thing I'd have done is figure out the 20 steps necessary to turn it into actual cash so that I could actually buy something with it and I don't know how that all doesn't feel like you're trying to get out of a scam.
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Re: World News Random, Random

#538

Post by ponchi101 »

Remember, I AM NOT SAYING IT. I wish I were that smart. I have read smart people calling it that: Nassim Nicholas Taleb was the latest one (although initially he was for it). I found this on line:
QUOTE
Right now, Bitcoin is a textbook Ponzi scheme:

It has no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, wear it, or heat your house with it. Unlike gold — which at least feels nice and looks shiny on your spouse’s ring finger — you can’t even see Bitcoin.
It is not a productive asset. It’s not a factory that produces an item. It’s not a field that produces cucumbers. It’s not a firm that offers a service. It contributes nothing to society.
It has zero underlying value. None. It’s not backed by land or commodities or — as with national currencies like USD or GBP — the threat of violence (in the form of wage garnishment, asset seizure, and imprisonment.)
It has minimal utility. Because the price fluctuates so wildly (what healthy currency doubles in a month?), it’s virtually ineffective as a safe representation of value or means of trade.
Its value is solely derived from the trust that the price will continue to rise indefinitely. That there will always be new investors to buy out the old ones.

The evidence is crystal clear, and don’t trust any online Bitboy who tells you otherwise:

Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme… for now.
END QUOTE

I like the end. FOR NOW. We could be open to it becoming legit. But right now, it is being pushed here in Venezuela as an option to the Bolivar, and that is telling, as that currency is basically worthless, even WITHIN the country.
I don't know. I like the fact that if one were that crazy, one could go to a bank and ASK to see your money. "Put it all HERE. Let me see it. Then, deposit it again".
(Because, after all, when have you really SEEN your money?).
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Re: World News Random, Random

#539

Post by dryrunguy »

My head hurts.
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Re: World News Random, Random

#540

Post by ti-amie »

ponchi101 wrote: Thu Oct 07, 2021 10:22 pm Remember, I AM NOT SAYING IT. I wish I were that smart. I have read smart people calling it that: Nassim Nicholas Taleb was the latest one (although initially he was for it). I found this on line:
QUOTE
Right now, Bitcoin is a textbook Ponzi scheme:

It has no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it, wear it, or heat your house with it. Unlike gold — which at least feels nice and looks shiny on your spouse’s ring finger — you can’t even see Bitcoin.
It is not a productive asset. It’s not a factory that produces an item. It’s not a field that produces cucumbers. It’s not a firm that offers a service. It contributes nothing to society.
It has zero underlying value. None. It’s not backed by land or commodities or — as with national currencies like USD or GBP — the threat of violence (in the form of wage garnishment, asset seizure, and imprisonment.)
It has minimal utility. Because the price fluctuates so wildly (what healthy currency doubles in a month?), it’s virtually ineffective as a safe representation of value or means of trade.
Its value is solely derived from the trust that the price will continue to rise indefinitely. That there will always be new investors to buy out the old ones.

The evidence is crystal clear, and don’t trust any online Bitboy who tells you otherwise:

Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme… for now.
END QUOTE

I like the end. FOR NOW. We could be open to it becoming legit. But right now, it is being pushed here in Venezuela as an option to the Bolivar, and that is telling, as that currency is basically worthless, even WITHIN the country.
I don't know. I like the fact that if one were that crazy, one could go to a bank and ASK to see your money. "Put it all HERE. Let me see it. Then, deposit it again".
(Because, after all, when have you really SEEN your money?).
What is a Ponzi scheme? See highlighted sentence.
“Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.” Albert Einstein
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