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overkill28

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I'm anyways skeptical of those who refer to "the media" or "the West" as a single entity.

"Much of the press saw U.S. troops as defending a pro-Western populace against a deeply unpopular Taliban insurgency. But Blue quickly realized that, in the insurgent heartlands, which lie in rural areas, the story was much more nuanced. To begin with, U.S.-occupied Afghanistan had been a divided realm; Afghans living in areas of relative calm tended to oppose the Taliban, but those living in war-racked regions often saw the Taliban as a better alternative to the corrupt U.S.-backed government. The Western media missed this story."

Is there an example of such a story (that describes near universal support for the US backed Afghan government and ignores the attitudes of rural areas) from any of the newspapers he mentions (WSJ, New York Times, Washington Post)?

I tried searching for "NYTimes rural Afghanistan 2019" and this is what I got:

"As American diplomats push for a peace deal with the Taliban to end the 17-year war, a strong voice of protest, largely coming from urban centers, has been cautioning against a rushed deal that could endanger some of the gains of past years. Those include women’s right to work and education, as well as an independent news media.

On the other hand, however, is the nearly half of the country that is caught between the two sides of the seesawing conflict. The constant fighting has deprived these rural Afghans of most of the improvements — schools and institutions — at the center of concerns over peace negotiations. And the voices of those Afghans are notably underrepresented in the debate."

Yeah my first guess on #74 was 7.7 miles away (!) so I thought for sure I would get it. But it turns out that the flag location is actually 14 miles away according to Google Maps, and the multiple photos "of the same place" are over 6 miles apart. So I kept getting weird numbers for my guesses that didn't line up with the geography.

There was one problem, though: Hua knew that G.E. would deny permission to give the talk if he asked, which he was supposed to do. “Since G.E. is a high-tech company, it is difficult to get approval even to present at conferences in the United States,” he says. The company was concerned about giving away proprietary information.

If a foreign country invites you to come give a talk on your work and you're afraid to ask your employer for permission, do not go.

That country is not operating in your interest.

I'm considered a "young worker" by this articles definition, and have worked in the tech industry my whole life. Like many of my generation I came of age and entered the workforce during America's worst economic crisis since the great depression. Watching people around me lose their jobs and their homes and leaders fret over the near-collapse of the financial system is burned into my conscience.

I may have never personally been laid off, but I have always saved, invested carefully and lived within my means, in anticipation of the next crash. So have many of my peers.

So this article does not ring true for me, unless it's simply saying "twenty-something gets laid off for first time, older person says welcome to the club', which isn't exactly news.

BlockFi has said it had “significant exposure” to FTX and its sister company Alameda Research LLC, including taking a $400 million credit line from FTX U.S. that also gave FTX an option to buy the company. BlockFi was one of several struggling crypto firms that signed deals to be rescued by FTX in the past months. The agreement is now in jeopardy as FTX itself sorts through its financial trouble and is subject to federal and state investigations. It also holds assets at FTX.com and made loans to crypto trading firm Alameda partly secured by FTX’s FTT tokens.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blockfi-files-for-bankruptcy-as...

So FTX lent money to BlockFi, and BlockFi lent money to Alameda, and Alameda owed money back to FTX? And BlockFi's money was stored on FTX and denominated in a "currency" that relied on FTX's performance for value?

This all lends credence to the theory that we instinctively knew was true: SBF was just doling out money to crypto firms in the spring to prop up the system a little longer, but ultimately it all relied on users injecting new money into the system.

The medium article omits it, but the per the NY Times all the employees were actually hired by a contractor:

He said ASG, not Google, hired contractors for the GDS team, adding that it was fine for him to “encourage people to apply for those roles.” And he said that in recent years, the team has grown to more than 250 people, including part-time employees.

The problem is that "first past the post" voting systems inevitably lead to two party dominance.

Change the voting system across a super majority of elections and we will likely get additional parties. But until then third party votes are wasted, and the Republican and Democratic parties are against changing the system

There are some serious caveats here:

seven out of every eight cars bought and sold in Norway a used car. The NAF’s numbers show that of the 357,176 ownership registration changes so far in 2021, electric vehicles only accounted for 12 per cent.

And their definition of electric cars includes hybrids (whereas I think most people interpret it to mean fully electric). So they're obviously doing great but the vast majority of the vehicles in Norway are still ICE only.

The way I describe it to friends and family is that there are basically two levels of protection:

- Protecting yourself from rub of the mill malware that is looking to make money off of you. You can do this pretty effectively by always updating your software as soon as you can and avoiding sketchy and unnecessary apps and websites

- Protecting yourself from an attack by a nation state level agency. I don't think there is any way to be safe from this, and people who are targeted like this need to use protection that go well beyond the choice of cell phone or chat app

You're patching over problems with short term solutions instead of investing the time and effort to fix it "the right way".

Like when you need to fix all the support columns in your building, but instead of spending millions to take them down one at a time and replace the corroding rebar inside, you just patch over the exterior cracks. They will look fine from the outside and get the job done on a day to day basis, but they hide structural problems and one day that debt will come due. Most of the time it's in the form of a giant project to finally fix everything, but sometimes it's catastrophic failure.

And the first, relatively mild warnings on cigarette packages probably didn't convince many to quit, nor did posting calorie counts on fast food menus make everyone switch to salads. But hopefully it's the start of a drumbeat where this type of content becomes less and less acceptable in society.

It's not the perfect analogy of course, but I think the solution to divisive, negative, nasty online content is largely a social one not a technological one.

"For years, urban developers have been talking about “15-minute cities”—accessible downtown neighborhoods where residents can satisfy just about every food, drink, beauty, entertainment, and fitness need with a short walk or bike ride. Logically, as more 30-somethings relocate to the suburbs, real-estate developers will chase their needs by pouring money into a constellation of 15-minute suburban town centers. The downtown office building’s loss will be the suburban developer’s gain."

Nobody I know who's moving to the suburbs is doing it to buy a loft apartment and bike everywhere. They're all entering or already in child rearing years and buying houses with yards and cars. As much as people talk about wanting to live in dense walkable neighborhoods, and as much as I wish we could build denser suburbs, the American dream of a lush lawn and big comfortable car is very much alive with millennials.

And more practically, where are you going to build these walkable suburbs? All the prime space of of the inner ring is already built out, and existing "street car suburbs" have already been popular, affluent and expensive for years.

The odd thing about this situation though is the geographic location of Brooklyn: on an island. Why would a significant amount of traffic from outside Long Island be going across the harbor to Brooklyn, especially given all the major switching facilities in Manhattan (closer to shore).

I still don't know why they stuck the "Java" name on JavaScript. Very confusing when the two languages are completely unrelated.

Java programs and JavaScript scripts are designed to run on both clients and servers, with JavaScript scripts used to modify the properties and behavior of Java objects, so the range of live online applications that dynamically present information to and interact with users over enterprise networks or the Internet is virtually unlimited.

Was this level of integration ever achieved? Did Java applets actually have a JS API? Or is this just corporate double speak.

I wonder if instead of it being a technical solution it will be a social one. That maybe in the future we will look at people constantly hooked on their phones and posting on social media the way we now look at smoking.

E.g where it was once totally normal to light up a cigarette in the elevator, the subway, the theater, etc, it is now acceptable to spend every moment of down time staring at your phone, scrolling.

If there is wider recognition of the negative (mental) health effects of that it will be less acceptable to do it in public, and less acceptable to espouse views or information learned from such a source.

That may be true but it's not relevant to this accident. It was a British made plane using British standard screws. The mechanic just used the wrong size bolt from the same standard. It's not like he was trying to find a metric equivalent to an imperial size or vice versa.

The Gaetan Dugas thing seems to dominate every discussion about And The Band Plays on which is too bad because the book is like 600 pages long, tracks dozens of real life individuals, has tons of incredible primary source material, and gives a very touching, grounded, contemporary look at AIDS in the early 80s.

And out of the small portion of the book that talks about Dugas, I never got the impression that Schilts was trying the blame him for causing the pandemic, but rather that he was using him as a real life example of the type of man that existed in that era, who flew around the country having sex with thousands (yes thousands) of other men, whose behavior doubtlessly and unknowingly sped the spread of AIDS.