It’s a pun to discreetly signal that I welcome our new French overlords.
SatanicNotMessianic
joined 1 year ago
I’d vote to create the EAU. I think there’s a real thirst for having some sanity over here.
I’m blocked from the article, but as someone who used to work in the industry I’m going to hazard what I think is a safe guess, and which is an under discussed aspect of intelligence.
If you put 5 cctv cameras in the worst parts of the city, you can pay someone $20/hour and have them monitored 24/7. The person’s one job is to call in a crime when it occurs and vector in police. As long as they’re not terminally addicted to instagram, you have that area covered.
Bump that up to 10,000 cameras and you run into a problem. You’re not going to hire 2000 people to watch them. You’re going to try to come up with something clever, maybe, that allows you to track back to a crime that was otherwise reported, but real time responses are out the window.
Even those that supported the development of the levels of surveillance that Snowden exposed have to acknowledge that looking at everything means you’re looking at nothing. The signal to noise ratio goes to absolute shit. It’s actually worse than useless because you’re thinking you’re monitoring, but you’re really not because you’re drowning in noise. It’s like they teach every yuppie in B school - if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. There’s a known phenomenon in defense and intelligence to center in on the gee whiz aspects of technology and lose sight of the actual mission.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist and as much as I dislike the current government of Israel, I don’t think this was some kind of nefarious plot. I think it was a massive fuck up thats going to have a body count in the tens of thousands and that will change the history of the region for a decade.
- It has nothing to do with bots. Bots were his way of trying to get out of being forced to make good on his legally binding offer to buy Twitter. He goes on and on about bots, but he’s stopped reporting metrics about monetizable users and just started reporting made up metrics like number of user-seconds and crap like that.
- The funny thing would be to use a VPN to simulate traffic from NZ so it looks like they try accessing it and then just give up.
That’s the one we call the Boebert.
Honestly, it’s even stupider than that. Everyone who works for me or that o work with is a professional making 6 figures, ranging into the mid-six range. They’re great at their jobs, and prior to Covid we had all kinds of flexibility for who worked where. Now it’s a one size fits all, and I’d honestly be shocked if the company wasn’t losing more money in policing and attrition than it was gaining in some hypothetical bonus of being in the office.
Great! Most people feel the same way!
The problem is that most of us who go into scientific research involving human subjects have about a decade’s worth of increasingly specialized education on a specific subject, have worked in a junior capacity in study design, execution, and analysis, and were generally not billionaires trying to become the first trillionaire.
There’s a reason why academic research works the way it does - because we learned the hard way.
The Tuskegee experiment carried out by the US Public Health Service and the CDC was a program in which black American males were deliberately infected with syphilis and left untreated, so that researchers could watch the profession of the disease. The program didn’t officially end until 1972. Just yesterday I read a news story about a doctor successfully being sued for giving prisoners, without their consent, high doses of Ivermectin to treat Covid, going off of his intuition and the idea that he was qualified to do medical research.
When I was doing this kind of work, I had to go through something called a Human Studies Board. Every university has one. The HSB is a team of senior researchers which will review your proposal to make sure what you’re asking to do is both justified and does no harm to your subjects. If they say “no,” you’re going back to the drawing board. I have had PhD students whose thesis research had to go through multiple revisions because the HSB felt that they weren’t properly controlling for potential harm. Bit there were not billions of dollars on the line, and I didn’t have billions in personal wealth and the ability to influence the HSB.
Another example: About ten or so years ago, Facebook decided to run an experiment in which they promoted sad news stories to some people, and happy news stories to others. They then followed up on those individuals’ posts to see if the former group became noticeably depressed. They did. Facebook did this without the users’ consent, and didn’t make provisions for followup with any human subjects who did become depressed. Some of their subjects may have committed acts of violence or self-harm because of pre-existing psychological states. They have no idea. They just came up with the hypothesis that sad news might make people sad, and ran with it. It was unethical. I do not believe they faced any consequences other than the researchers and the company being universally berated in the academic community.
We are researching brain implants. That’s already underway in universities around the world. Elon wants to move fast and break things to make it go faster, but in this case the “things” are people.
So you have Elon, who is legendary in the industry for thinking he’s very much smarter than he is and pushing his experts into screwing things up. You have his vast wealth as well as a drive to create more wealth (academic researchers very rarely grow wealthy from their discoveries and rarely have wealth as a driving factor).
We are already doing what you’re asking for. I have a colleague at one of the top US university that’s specifically researching telomere repair and other aspects of DNA-focused methods to prevent some of the effects of aging, and I’ve personally done modeling on the molecular biology associated with deregulation and cancer in grad school.
We would be better off if the government would just take Elon’s money and use it to fund actual scientific research.
I’m not the other person, but I think you might be confusing the term “determinism.” I think you might also have a bit of an over-enthusiastic understanding of quantum mechanics, which is a very common problem when people have QM explained in lay person terms I’m not going to get into the QM stuff because I’m a biologist and not a physicist, and I think your world just became more interesting with your new information. I’d just say hold off on the conclusions until you read a bit more, and start sliding towards the actual science books rather than the pop science books as you get your feet under you. You’ll have a different appreciation once you can read an advanced undergraduate textbook on modern physics.
Determinism as used here means behavioral determinism. There is significant evidence that a large number of our actions and reactions aren’t thought through, but rather are “automatic” responses. In fact, some neuroimaging work on decision-making has indicated that we reach a conclusion and then reverse-justify it by thinking we’re thinking about it. My subconscious mind has already decided to buy the bagel, but my conscious mind is still talking itself into it.
Again, people can take that kind of thing to an unjustified extreme. I think free will exists in a limited sense, but that it is highly constrained. In this case (the original question, not the person to whom you’re replying) is using their own misunderstanding of behavioral determinism to excuse their misbehavior. It’s a self-indulgent philosophy that you can probably pick apart if you really wanted to spend the time and effort in making them meticulously explain every step and aspect of their position, but it’s probably easier to just drop the person or to deal with them while remembering they’re possibly clinically psychotic, but almost definitely at least an asshole.
It’s the two recliners, side by side, staring directly at the bed/doll/giant ass rosary thing that’s absolutely bizarre to me. Any single part of it would make me say “Okay, they’re either old, weird, or perhaps Italian.”
But those chairs, man. How long are you going to sit there just staring at that setup that you need not one but two La-Z-Boy chairs?
There has been a long fight to get academic papers whose funding sources came from the government to be made open access, with the justification that the people who literally paid for the research should be able to read it. We’re not talking national security here - we’re talking about fruit flies and black holes and such.
The last time I checked, they agreed to make all government funded research open access after (I think) one year. I still think that’s ludicrous, but o see that as being analogous to what is being proposed here.
If we were to check the average number of times the average news article is accessed after publication, I bet it would fall off a cliff after the first couple of days at most. Some might have more staying power, but I bet 90-95% of them basically never get touched again. I’m sure you could take the number of people who buy a subscription on the basis of needing to read a three month old article and figure out a different way to make back the $100/month or whatever they’d lose on just opening access.
As a Californian, I am fully used to being horrifically underrepresented proportionally in national politics, danke. Tax our billionaires. Give us healthcare. Make us use public transportation and drive on better roads. Do your worst. I triple dog dare you.