Booktrope

Whoever wrote this article seems to think a strong dollar is fundamental to a strong economy. But, notice where it is on this timeline the only prolonged strengthening of the dollar that shows up. Yep, you've got it, the depth of the great depression. And, notice where the WWII and postwar weakening of the dollar led -- that's right, to in many ways the most prosperous economy the world has ever seen.

Because we try to figure out how things like "strengthening" and "weakening" of the dollar fit in, and we actually have policies much more intelligent than, weaking of the dollar! Collapse is imminent!

Hmm. According to Indiana University, 5.4 million cats are killed by cars every year. https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/2022/11/12/the-perils-of-outdoor-c... Normally none of these make national news.

Each story is probably a sad one, but hmm, an Instagram post about one of these being published on Hacker News because it involved a Waymo? Wow!

Except, all its rulings are reviewable by the courts. In judicial type cases, results can be reviewed by US Court of Appeals, and appeals courts do overrule the NLRB not infrequently. Rule making is reviewed by courts under the Administrative Procedure Act. This has been standard in the US court system historically for administrative actions at all levels, from school boards making the rules and also deciding cases involving employees and students, to the FDA and SEC for example.

Also the president has always had some power to remove board members for cause, not Congress. Congress can change the enabling statutes but only if the President signs the law (or they override the President's Veto). I'm not aware of how Congress can intercede in specific cases.

So I don't think it's actually so that the NLRB not answerable to anything but Congress.

Yeah, and there seem to be at least two ways to measure heat death. One is to measure "excess deaths" meaning, increase in death rate as temperature increases or exceeds some statistical measure of base death rate. The other is to count deaths medically identified as heat-related (such as heat stroke or heat exhaustion, etc) So just by searching the web, you can also easily find studies that listed the EU death rate recently as much lower.

I think of far-centerist as extremely unideological. To me, ideologies are systematically organized collections of ideas, often hierarchically, with core ideas (or assumptions) given a paramount or supreme position. They almost all provide a certain level of insight and huge errors, because no system of ideas describes the world in a complete or fully accurate way. So, a far-centrist in my view is open to using ideas from whatever ideology, or some that associate with no ideology, for what they're worth.

If by far center, you mean unbiased, well, we're all biased to some degree. Actually it's very hard not to be quite biased in some way, whether ideologically or stylistically, or any of the more gross forms of bias most of us have to wrestle with, being human.

A bias scanner can be useful in identifying bias, but you can be ideological and non-biased, in which case, you're just using the bias scanner to reduce your bias. That's a good thing to do, but I'd call it, a kind of self-moderation, which might attenuate partisanship but for sure isn't necessarily centrist at all.

It's a completely generic algorithm. If the school had a uniquely high percentage of any "group" of people, whether based on race, region, hobbies, interests, literally anything, ads for that school would be more likely sent to people in those groups.

Um, oops. There are laws against discriminating on the basis of race, like, steering Black people to different schools on that basis. That's the difference.

When you say, it's a neutral algorithm because it steers people on the basis of other factors as well, you miss the whole point of having anti-discrimination laws. There's no law prohibiting steering on the bases of "hobbies, interests, literally anything". So when you say the algorithm is okay for that reason, you're saying discrimination based on race is okay if you also discriminate on other, lawful grounds. That seems to me like saying, race discrimination ought not be unlawful. If that's your opinion so be it, but an algorithm that steers people based on race is racially discriminatory.

For example, as Meta previously recognized, steering people seeking apartments based on their race was racially discriminatory, even though steering people seeking apartments based on hobbies or interests isn't that kind of discrimination. The argument you're making would apply equally to steering based on race in connection with jobs, housing, education, and all other areas of society, permitting racial steering because there's an algorithm involved that doesn't just include racial discrimination.

Meta hopefully will recognize this was a mistake, and hopefully will do the right thing by adjusting their algorithm to refrain from steering people in this way based on race.

Understandable in this context that comments would be very negative about looking at statistics relating to race, gender, national origin, etc. of how investors place money. After all, the start-up world is economics at its most meritocratic (is that a word? well it should be). And any constraints of this kind on how investors place their money is gonna have some downsides, many of which are discussed here, if at times in a somewhat overwrought way. Plus, yes, we've seen pretty nasty issues with affirmative action in other contexts, which we wouldn't want to replicate here.

But, alas! the cat is out of the bag as it were. Because there's more than one side to an issue like this. So, when leading VCs and investors determined, companies run by Black women weren't getting very much startup funding at all, they lined up to support The Fearless Fund, a significant, though not exactly huge, capital pool for early funding of ventures started by women of color, which they describe as "bridging the gap" by which they mean, the extremely small number of women of color who ever get funding. Yes, probably it's for what they conceive to be PR reasons, but whatever, I would have thought that the goal being equality of opportunity, and there being no law specifically covering it, that would leave it to the realm of politics and bloviating. But not so!

Encourged by the current antipathy of our Supreme Court for anything resembling affirmative action, a conservative legal group has sued, claiming that racial preference of this kind is prohibited. As a former lawyer I would have asked, just what law prohibits discrimination in investing? Because most lawyers up to recently thought, it wasn't covered. But the clever conservative lawyers point to 42 USC 1981, a Reconstruction alway that asserts, all people are entitled to the same right to contract as White people have. (How they talked back then)

Now, say, this lawsuit against The Fearless Fund succeeds. Well, hmm, that would mean every VC investment decision is subject to section 1981, and yes, it would give non-white people the right to sue if they had evidence of bias in the funding decision. In other words, if it actually succeeds, this lawsuit charging discrimination against The Fearless fund, a rather extreme effort to prohibit totally voluntary efforts by some big time investors to remediate a pretty obvious problem of a minority group's lack of access to capital, wow! suddenly,a pretty major new legal issue for VCs and other private capital enterprises to deal with, in every investment decision they make. And if ever there was a deep pocket for lawyers to pursue...I drop a veil over the scene.

So, just to add this to the discussion, this conservative attack on The Fearless Fund seems to me a far more dangerous to VCs than this California law. Because, yes, folks, there are issues with discrimination in how investment firms hand out capital. I've observed some nasty instances first hand. Please don't live in a dream world where you think it doesn't happen. (I personally think, due to the extreme polarization of most people's beliefs on this subject, it's rather less than most liberals think and rather more than most conservatives do.) Nevertheless from my perspective, another set of legal rights is pretty clearly not the best way to address it.

Because, if The Fearless Fund can be challenged as discriminatory, so can any other fund, that's how it works (well more or less, anyway - nobody who knows anything about it would accuse our legal system of being excessively consistent.) And that's a far greater threat to investors than a somewhat voluntary reporting requirement for VCs.

Well, the article says, Amazon already charges this wherever Amazon Publishing Services is available. The change is to extend this charge to places where Amazon Publishing Services isn't available. Then the article provides some background info about how Amazon Fire works economically. So, basically, not much new here.

Big news, automobile manufacturer inflates gas mileage! Really!

If anyone here has had a car that actually got the stated mileage in real world conditions, please let me know.

I live on top of a hill and every single car I've ever owned, including, Honda, Toyota, Ford, Nissan, Dodge, Volvo that I recall right now has gotten oh, about 30% lower mileage than advertised. due to that pesky law of gravity that requires energy to be expended going up and down.

But even when I lived in leveller locales, cars never got the EPA rated mileage, except once, when I drove a Honda with a CVCC engine on a road trip through level countryside at about 45 miles per hour all day. I got terrific mileage. I never did it again.

So, if this project were to be successful, it would replace news media as the outlet where people would look for news, thereby, reducing audience for the news media it's using as the source for it's information, which will provide less information due to reduced resources, and even more interestingly, get ever more sensationalist in trying to attract readers thereby increasing the bias of other media the AI depends on for information.

Whee!

Yeah, bankruptcy basically does not let anyone off the hook who owes the bankrupt company or person a debt. But collection is overseen by a court which definitely can mean that efforts to collect debt owed to the bankrupt party can intensify and are unlikely to end until money is collected.

So, for all the many things in the world that cannot be defined in "a reasonably concrete and provable way" or where a statement cannot be "falsified", no study is worthwhile.

More or less this position: nothing worthwhile from Wittgenstein beyond the Tractatus and specifically, forget about the Philosophical Investigations.

It's not an indictment of a field that the subject matter is not susceptible to description in terms that are definitely falsifiable. Of course, definite terminology can be very helpful where it does apply, but it can also be used to oversimplify complex questions in a way that obfuscates them. But there's no law that nature must always be subject to description in a "concrete and provable way", especially not by human languages. By not taking seriously anything but disciplines that can be boiled down to true-false propositions, we'd miss huge amounts of knowledge that are useful and helpful.

Especially fields like psychology where so many important observations simply cannot be broken down into concrete statements or provable propositions in the way you seem to mean those words.

On the other hand, it's also very important to be careful of misuse of terms such as "true" and "false", for example, they can have very different meanings when we're talking about logic or observation, answers to examination questions, romance or religion. In this particular exchange, by true do we mean scientifically true or logically true?

Or, how indeed would anyone stand up and say whether something is "definitely not damning" or "definitely not unintentional" actually?

Wait! Contingent was just defined as everything that's not necessary. Not contingent with its normal meaning of dependent on something else. Like, a square has 4 sides, that's necessary for it to be called a square, but it might or might not depend on something else for that quality. Or a square is blue, that's contingent (i.e., what's not necessary in this usage for it to be called a square), and it might or might not depend on something else.

If you are using "contingent" with its normal meaning, the idea is absurd. We can divide everything that exists into "necessary" and "contingent", one or the other? We might as well divide everything into edible and picturesque, for example. Words, but more like word salad than meaningful statements.

On the other hand, much of what passes for "reputable" brands is just reselling the crap from the same sellers, but with a "trusted" name on it.

Still the supreme source of free public domain ebooks

https://www.gutenberg.org/

libravox.org

A great source of free (public domain) audiobooks, mostly read very well.

The responsibility is to figure out which is which, if you're the one choosing what to amplify.

Not FB responsibility if they set up and tuned an information spreading system that promotes stuff that's inflammatory over stuff that's informative? Users of FB only see what FB feeds to them, and that's all about how FB aligns the user's activities and characteristics to the content FB is supplying. What a total cop out to say, the problem is what people say, when FB plays such a crucial role in what people see. Before FB (yes and other social media) amped this stuff up, a village idiot standing on a corner shouting conspiracy theories got very little attention. But on FB this kind of stuff feeds engagement, and we know how important engagement is.

Yet the guy who's slated to by FB's CTO says, don't put all this inflammatory stuff on me! Freedom of speech you know and just let us do our job of promoting engagement and building ever more effective ad targeting technology!

One alternative to fluorine that has been shown clinically to be equally or more effective is nanohydroxyapatite, which was developed by NASA some time ago to treat astronauts for loss of tooth enamel and bone density. (Some background info here https://www.oralscience.com/en/ingredients/mhap/

The rights were sold to Japan where a leading toothpaste has for decades used nanohydroxyapatite rather than fluoride. The exclusive rights of the Japanese company have expired, so nanohydroxyapatite toothpaste is not also made in Canada and the US. It's more expensive than fluoride toothpaste but if you'd like to avoid these questions, might be worth it.

I hope the article isn't accurate, because if it's only "tech giants" to be prohibited from store brands, that would mean, Congress has decided, it's only brick-and-mortar giants who can use sales data to grind product sellers and compete using store brands. I mean, it's not as if drug chains (Walgreens, CVS, etc.) and grocery chains (Kroger, Albertsons, etc.) and big box chains (Costco, Walmart, etc.) and pretty much every sort of large retail operation doesn't do just the same thing.

And speaking of using data to grind suppliers, ever since the early days of the NCR Teradata project put them miles ahead of any competitor and made them the largest retailer in the world for decades (sales still a bit ahead of Amazon last time I looked), they've been grinding prices, forcing offshoring of production to reduce labor costs, forcing suppliers to economize (that is, cut corners) on manufacturing to keep prices low. But, hey, it's tech giants selling store brands, that's the big problem!

Whatabout those other flawed journalist? Well, they're flawed. But Wikileaks, high standards? You must have missed the exposes in The Intercept of how they were actually working in 2016!

Nice hypothetical for some political ethics class, but nothing to do with what actually happened. Assange wanted to influence the US election, specifically, to defeat Clinton and elect Trump. He worked with the Trump campaign and the Russians to do everything within his power to make that happen. Meanwhile, Wikileaks was provided with leaked Trump campaign emails and refused to release them, claiming it wasn't important to do that.

To portray this as an difficult decision for poor Assange is just absurd. He made clear in his own emails, his entire goal was to bring down Clinton. She lost the election for many reasons, including Assange's efforts but also a very poorly run campaign and many bad decisions on her own part.

You won't because Wikileaks refused to release them. Their stated justification for this was, so much bad stuff had already been revealed about Trump that there was no need. Reallly.

Small point, but the average household size in the US is 2.5, on half of the 5 people in this household, so you really can't compare their family income to family income statistics for much smaller families.https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...

Yeah, why wouldn't a company want a workforce full of yes-men and engineers who care about nothing but making shareholders money and making executives look good?

Google and FB have a huge share of the internet reading market; polls repeatedly show that over 30% of the population gets its news from Facebook posts, and another large share get info from Google searches. Twitter also plays a huge role, and soon to be added, stuff like Gab where no you will not be served up any liberal stuff. With the market dominated by a few "aggregators" it's not quite accurate to say, oh, news sources can just get their own following. Of course they can get some market share; the NYT has done better than most newspapers at that, and Breitbart even better, due I think to its much better alignment with social media (sensationalism, tribalism, etc.)

Just because you can find CNN(or even MSNBC) on your TV or go to their website, doesn't address the role of FB and Google in dissemination of news. Let me repeat, over 30 percent of Americans get news from their Facebook feeds. Facebook uses these feeds to attract advertising on a scale no media producer can even dream of, and it comes from the same advertising budgets.

I have to say, when you name call people who disagree with you (very stupid or disingenuous), it's a good indicator, your argument doesn't have a very solid foundation. You say, it's "ludicrous" to say news outlets need visibility in Google or FB for people to know what they're saying, you totally miss the point. Yeah, I can set up a web site with my opinions, and anyone can come and find out what I'm saying too. We're talking about how to make economically viable newspapers that provide fact-based reporting (no, not perfectly factual or "true" but a serious effort), and that does require having a presence where a huge share of the potential audience finds their news sources.

If someone could actually build a successful media business on the scale of a serious newspaper without relying on social media to send readers in today's market, why, they'd be the most successful newspaper exec since, oh, I dunno, Joe Pulitzer, who incidentally was famous for something called "yellow journalism," meaning sensationalized, not very factual stuff.

No, NYT isn't some paragon of "truth", but it does make a much more serious effort to report facts than the non-fact based media. Yes there's some slant to its reporting, but its not always the same (news tends to be less liberal than editorial, for example, and they publish quite a few right wing op ed pieces for variety. If you think the quality of journalism on Brietbart and NYT are equivalent, well, you must not think of "facts" in quite the way I do, you know, stuff that actually happened and can be verified.

A shallow, one-sided take on what happened to the news business. I mean, here's a guy who quotes himself (!) saying,

"I’d go further: I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet"

As his example of this, he appears to the New York Times as his exemplar of a company that's been relatively successful online. Relative to newspapers that have basically failed that is. Comparted to Breitbart, Fox News, and other non-fact based journalism, relatively, well, less successful.

Google is in a sense an aggregator but according to algorithms that it's careful to keep secret. Its main financial goal in doing this is to maximize ad revenue it can extract from the feed, and Google is more successful in that regard than any of the sources of the news it aggregates. Leaving other concerns aside, this does drain ever more revenue out of the business of creating news, since advertisers now choose between buying ads from the aggegator or ads from the source, and no, Google's work hasn't doubled marketing budgets of advertisers.

Facebook controls what people see -- it doesn't aggregate, it segregates. You see what Facebook has determined you want to see, and usually they're right (It would be much better for us as a community if they were wrong much more often and showed everyone things they don't want to see.) Facebook financial goal in choosing what to put in user feeds is maximizing ad revenue for Facebook. This has further drained ad revenue away from sources of content.

The piece claims, hey, the internet was making it harder on news sources before the ascendency of Facebook and Google, though as late as the 1990's newspapers were still a very profitable business. Yeah, Craig's List grabbed a huge share of the classified ad business which traditionally was a major part of newspaper revenue, and newspapers stupidly failed to mount any significant effort to get that revenue back. But Google and Facebook have vastly more effective methods of siphoning off revenue as they've dominated market share and therefore become indispensable for all news outlets.

It not only starves news sources of revenue but favors sources that tell people what they want to hear in a way that excites the audience. In other words, the current sorry state of our political world.

A recent study by Ohio State University found that nearly 50% of athletes who'd had mild covid showed some evidence of heart damage (specifically myocardial inflammation) afterwards. It's a small study and so shouldn't be taken as conclusive, but it's worth considering. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

True, these founders are dead. But Ford's family still owns a huge share of the company and has never renounced the patriarch. It's not just testing fraud with Volkwagen, that's just a symptom. Check out, for example, recent reports of their use of forced Uighur labor, for example.

These were only stark examples, but you're not really saying, management of any major auto company has a good role on climate change (well, except Musk) or profiteering from government subsidies, or labor relations (in the USA consider the move to low-wage anti-union jurisdictions by all of them).

I'm not a fan of Musk's social or political views, much less his huckstering. But no way differentiate Musk from leadership of other auto companies on any vector other than the level of attention to Musk's flaws, other than, perhaps he's invited media attention by being so public about it.

All this stuff about Elon Musk. Well, I hope you aren't gonna decide to buy a Ford (Henry Ford, who found time to distribute the world's largest antisemitic newspaper between his auto magnate duties), or Volkwagen (pet project of Adolph Hitler, later leader in emissions testing fraud) or any of those other nice companies that have lent their support and wealth to racism or joined that emissions fraud thing.

And as to social responsibility, if we're talking about buying a different car, let's not talk about this in a vacuum. I mean we're talking about companites who became wealthy by building all those cars that were "unsafe at any speed" while fighting safety regs, or that have been moving factories to low wage low worker protection locations while fighting labor laws, or have happily produced Humvees and their ilk while fighting environmental laws, all in cahoots with our oil industry as it spreads disinformation about climate change and political gifts to those who listen.

As to subsidies from the government for car companies rather than people in need, well, if that bothers you, best not look into any recent factory location decision of a big manufacturing company pretty much anywhere in the world.

So if you're taking the approach suggested in this article, you might want to consider it in context, at least before you feel better about buying on of those cars from one of those companies that hasn't gotten quite as much publicity recently about its leadership or way of doing business.

Or you can buy an inexpensive used car made by Volkswagen and feel good about that.