word-reader

At least for me social media was hardly less "mandatory" in the halcyon years of the late 2000s, the thing to have was just Facebook on your computer and not Instagram, which is allegedly the worst type of social media for mental health. Smartphone adoption was clearly rising very fast in 2012-2013 [1] (unfortunately no breakdown by sex / age / income).

It is frustrating to see these issues blamed on "smartphones" at large and not particular usages (Instagram, Tinder, Twitter stand out). I suspect if everyone used their smartphones to read e-books, lookup recipes, text their friends and family, or even just play video games there wouldn't be such a problem.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/201183/forecast-of-smart...

The venerable New York Times significantly changed their editorial focus in the very year 2013 (scroll up for frequency analysis of more news topics): https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133822312606777346

It didn't have to be someone at Project Zero. Anyone with a bunch of network logs could have searched for some of the fingerprints or URLs that were publicly available and deduced the target from associated traffic.

So we now know that drive-by rooting of even "locked-down" and "secure" user devices like the iPhone is possible and in active use by state actors. What are the odds that other governments, even the US (which has the additional advantage of being able to gag Apple and Google), are doing this? Seems like it would become a more important way to do surveillance as more data and networks become encrypted.

One of the pellets in this scattershot is basically, because sometimes beards are associated with being a man, and sometimes being clean-shaven is associated with being a man, there are surely no cross-cultural or cross-temporal ideals about masculinity at all and being a man can be completely redefined by lecturers in early modern masculinity or whoever.

That being said, as someone who can't grow a great beard, I'll always have the Romans; can't blame it on gas masks or TV ads back then.

People put their lives and their children's lives in danger to illegally enter the United States, frequently paying human traffickers substantial money in the process, because the border and enforcement is weak. They know that if they can get past the border they have a very good chance of spending as long as they want living and working in the US.

This is absurd. Where on earth are these "racist and horrible" Pepe memes coming from? In reality, 90% of uses of the Pepe character (which is now a fading meme) are as an avatar or highlight of a post's emotion. Seriously, the majority of all Pepes ever posted have been either a sad frog, a smug frog, or a happy frog. People use the meme to help express themselves along with their text, and then people spazz out worse than a bored housewife hearing about D&D in 1985 or NWA in 1995.

Peterson may not even be able to see the flag in the photo, but he has known about Pepe for a while, and even mentioned the meme in his livestreams as "interesting", possibly because as a Jungian psychologist he sees some association with Abraxas, which is a kind of "god of nature" / good+evil archetype in some of Jung's writing.

FICO scores are definitely worth comparing to this new emerging system, but there are key differences. The input data to FICO scores is broadly public (but not the exact weighting), and they only relate to financial and credit history. They are also regulated by the FCRA, making it so people can see the data that is being held about them and requiring negative information to be removed after a certain amount of time. People can and do receive damages from credit agencies and creditors if they don't correct erroneous information or violate other parts of the law.

It's regrettable that they're are used for things like employment, but on the other hand, you won't be prohibited from using a taxi (Uber), hotel (Airbnb), entering a restaurant (PatronScan), or using a phone or the mail (WhatsApp) because of your FICO score.

Nobody knows what data goes into the reputation systems of tech companies, where it's collected, or who it's shared with. You usually can't look at it. You usually have no recourse as there is no regulatory oversight and no contract to use their services besides "we can kick you off at any time for any reason or no reason at all".

Exactly; let's say you have a social media record or even a browsing history that indicates labor activism (or drug use, or health issues, or any other kind of activism). That data is saved somewhere, associated with you directly or just assembled into a behavioral profile for ad targeting purposes -- at least for now and as far as we can tell. And like racial bias, this data can be dumped into a neural net with a score at the end to launder what exactly is going on.

You can tell it's not a fluke if you look at the copyright claims that are sometimes available in the "Show More" section. Frequently, it will show claims that recordings of the same piece by other performers are part of the video.

Here is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxDCgFFBk20

Two of the movements have correct copyright claims for the performance, but another of the movements has a claim for a recording by a different conductor and orchestra. I see this all the time.

Like another person said here, we don't know how Content ID works or what exactly it's looking for, but it's clearly not an "exact match" of sound waves or something: it has to catch covers of compositions that are still under copyright, for example [1].

[1] https://diymusician.cdbaby.com/youtube/posting-cover-songs-o...

Just imagine how bad the rent would be (for everyone, student or no) if they hadn’t built up West Campus. It is easily the densest neighborhood in Texas, comparable to Queens in terms of population density. The student loan credit supply definitely bumps up rents around any campus, but please.

To put this in perspective, the key “problem” example in this article is that median rent in a safe, popular neighborhood with relatively new housing stock, in one of the country’s fastest growing cities, is a whopping $916 a month. (And you can still make it less than that if you live with a roommate in a slightly older building)

Muslims aren't a race, the affected countries were about 10% of global Muslim population, and the countries of concern listed in the travel ban were designated in late 2015 under a different administration.

How has immigration policy in the US become "explicitly racist"? Immigration law has essentially remained unchanged. DACA was repealed, but DACA was an executive action not partial to country of origin. H-1B denials have increased, but based on pre-existing requirements and quotas. Administrative changes in asylum rules and public charge requirements affect every immigrant regardless of country of origin or race.

Over 50% of Border Patrol officers are Hispanic; 20% of all ICE employees are Hispanic, with much higher percentage (e.g. 40%) in subsets such as field agents in Southern California.

It's demonstrated later in the article that he continued to take advantage of short-term business thinking with probable bad externalities all the while and after he was trying to repair his reputation with his Harvard donations and conciliatory speeches.

In particular, the argument is that the critiques offered in conferences like this are insincere and aimed at preserving the insiders' status rather than actually changing any of the things they're talking about: "His career tells us how he would advise those beginning their careers to navigate these challenges: Loudly criticize political dysfunction, but make no effort to explore its structural causes or remedies...[his] prominence conveys that incongruence between words and actions is tolerable, even desired." And further, that it would be "foolish to listen" to said finance people's self-serving political solutions.

A closer equivalent in the tech community would be more like "this guy has spent decades running shady adtech and addictive gaming companies, and continues to traffick personal information and addict kids to pay-to-play games, but is now also running an organization dedicated to digital privacy and is building a reputation as an expert in parenting in the digital age and voluntary gaming regulation".

Yes, big time, because their natural predators have been reduced along with reduced hunting. See [1] for more details about the deer issue in New York. The tick population in the Northeast is absolutely insane. I went camping in one of the "overabundance" areas in that link and killed no less than 10 ticks crawling on me and ripped another 5 or so out of my skin in about a 24-hour period. Compare this to a similar (well-hunted) forest in Texas where I've spent 5-10 days and seen approximately 3 ticks and been bitten once.

[1]https://www.dec.ny.gov/animals/104911.html

It's really not that strange for a chemical to have different effects on girls and boys, anything that affects sex hormones at all or sex-specific development is going to have a different effect.

I predict this research will receive reasoned and appropriate appraisal by the press and public officials.

This logic doesn't apply well to manufacturing (or agriculture, extraction, or arguably a lot of research and engineering). You use a stainless steel fork, because you... don't want to use your hands? You eat Idaho potatoes so you... don't want to starve? Or you use double-pane windows and gas heating because you... don't like freezing to death in the winter? People worked real hard for all of that, but that doesn't mean they're all making less money than the users.

It really is shocking how much has changed in the past 10 years. This post could have been mainstream late-night comedy, but it's not just that the targets have shifted: it's still OK, good even, to attack Sarah Palin, you just can't do it using certain words. The bigger change seems to be this obsession with words having some kind of incantatory, emanating power (even 9 year old words on a Twitter account), along with the associated fiending about the private thoughts of whoever posted.

It's not just about it "being green", the contrast between the text and the background is lower with the green SMS bubbles than the blue iMessage bubbles, making it harder to read. I guarantee you if the SMS bubbles were a shade or two darker green people wouldn't care as much.

For all the people concerned about Amazon's business ethics here, stop buying your stuff on Amazon too. It used to be that Amazon had solid products and eBay was just a bunch of random sellers selling random things of unknown quality. Now Amazon is more like the latter than eBay is.

I love using eBay; it puts a bit of excitement back into e-commerce when you get packages from overseas -- the stamps, the names, the exotic goods. This year I ordered from 4 different countries things that weren't available in the US. But most products on eBay are shipped domestically, and they won't slow-roll your shipping for a week because you didn't pay for Prime.

These are some cool bunkers, but it reminds me of an article from a few years back, maybe from HN? An expat had a nice house in some Central American country back in the 70s or 80s when there was a coup with a lot of rioting and looting of the more well-off. Some people start freaking out, grabbing golf clubs and such, but the owner is able to get in touch with his army friend who just sends a jeep with a 50 cal and a couple soldiers to park near his house. He wasn't looted.

It seems like these sort of connections will matter more in a doomsday situation than how deep your bunker is. How do these people living in various states plan on even getting to their bunkers in Kansas if the "shit hits the fan", as they say? I think a fair benchmark is Mexico today, where it isn't safe to drive between many cities at night, and on some roads during the day. Not like, "you might hit a deer", but "you might hit a cartel roadblock and be robbed, raped, or murdered". And everybody already knows approximately where the bunkers are. These people had better plan on getting their timing exactly right, or they'd be in for the same.

I doubt that selling Dasani water in aluminum cans in the Northeast US is going to move the needle on global plastic pollution, with the entire US accounting for less than 1% of plastic pollution (below countries such as North Korea and Algeria [1]) despite having 4% of the population and 24% of GDP.

[1] https://www.iswa.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Calendar_2011_03_...

BPA in infant formula and bottles is banned for safety reasons in the EU and Canada. So, would you mind if I believed the European Comission or Health Canada instead? Even in the US, BPA is not permitted in infant formula and bottles in an industry-voluntary way that avoided the FDA making an explicit safety judgment on the levels of BPA present in the containers. The CDC warns against storing breastmilk in BPA-containing plastic.

BPA is not the end-all be-all of endocrine disruptors, of course: there are other classes of compounds banned in most of the developed world with solid evidence of harmful effects, like phthalates. It would be useful to check various established OECD health authorities and reputable research before dismissing the danger of endocrine disruptors as "rumors spread by know-nothings".

If you choose metal containers because you think plastic is bad, remember that all aluminum food and beverage cans have plastic liners which usually contain BPA or other endocrine disruptors.

That article is from early 2017, with the data right after the Trump inauguration, when immigrants and traffickers were unsure what (if any) changes there would be in enforcement. More recent apprehension data from this year shows a ten year high [1].

Also, only 12% of asylum claims in the US are approved and about half of the rest do not show up to court [2].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/border-apprehensions-2019-have-alre... [2] https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1161001/download

Domestic surveillance by ICE of everyone, both citizens and those without papers, wouldn't even be necessary if either the border was properly controlled, or if employers were made more liable for employing workers illegally. But somehow we simultaneously have these billions of dollars in surveillance, associated chilling effects, the whole police-industrial complex, and no effect at all on the rate of illegal immigration, which is higher than it was under the Obama admin by some metrics.

Sometimes it seems like the purpose of these contracts is just to give taxpayer money to contractors to put a boot on said taxpayers' faces, rather than whatever is listed.

In your reading, guns used to be able to preserve liberty, but now they're irrelevant because the state security forces can just brutally crush any resistance with their superior firepower? That's not good rhetoric, and it's not even true! Just look at the success all those tanks and airplanes and trillions of dollars had in Afghanistan, for example. I also disagree with the finer points of "guns means freedom", but I don't think yours is a valid argument.