Zuck waved the white flag, settled the frivolous Trump libel lawsuit, and made several trips to kiss Trump's ring - now he is getting skewered anyhow. Deliciously ironic.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
I wouldn’t write off a leniency due to their aforementioned arse kissing. A trial doesn’t mean a they’ll be found guilty, let alone given any tangible consequences.
Yeah, for reasons I still don’t understand — probably because it’s driven by Peter Thiel’s Deep Incel Thoughts — JD Vance and co. were big fans of Lina Khan’s FTC antitrust moves during the Biden administration.
Those who were in prison and paid for a pardon got their money's worth. No take backsies on those. The one grifter was released from paying back millions to the people he defrauded - he made money by paying Trump if looked at as simple arithmetic. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/donald-trump-pardons-ni...
The judge is an Obama appointee and is the same one who ordered Trump to halt illegal deportations to El Salvador. Trump has publicly called for him to be removed. If the administration wanted a lenient ruling, he is the last judge they would rely on.
That's the point. Big tech kissed Trump's arse in the hopes that he would end the antitrust investigations. Meta literally bribed him to do so. Now Trump is just doubling down on them.
Kind of ironic that Facebook+Cambridge Analytica seem completely forgotten despite being a coordinated, successful effort to push for swings towards Trump.
Roko's Basilisk might be hitting us faster than we thought.
This whole entire industry is a racketeering scheme.
The medical industry justifies their excess profits as necessary for supporting the "free market" in "generating innovation".
In reality:
1. Their "free market" is anything BUT a free market.
2. "Generating innovation" is not a substitute for generating positive health outcomes.
3. Their excess profits are primarily used for propaganda and bribery to justify their own existence and protect their racket.
Just look up the laws restricting Medicare from bargaining on medical care and prescription drugs to understand just how much of a racket this whole industry is. It is criminal in every way - aside from the written law, since the people who make the laws are co-conspirators in the scheme.
It's so much worse than the "most expensive" healthcare in the world. This nauseatingly overinflated healthcare is further subsidized by US taxpayer funds from the shit medical care and extortionate drug prices that Medicare is legally obligated to pay. It actually adds trillions to our Federal Deficit each year... so we get the worst health outcomes WHILE driving the US government into bankruptcy.
This whole system maximizes profits for a limited number of players at the expense of our doctors, our patients, the fiscal health of Medicare, and the future of our republic.
Physics & Mathematics - Anyone who seriously pursues these fields learns to embrace the challenges as beautiful and the struggle to unravel their nature as fulfilling. To do this, we embrace the beauty in nature and see the connection with everything around us. Four books come to mind.
Physics:
1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman
2. The Universe in a Nutshell by Steven Hawking
Mathematics:
1. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by J.A. Paulos
2. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by D. Hofstadter
These books brilliantly illuminate the beauty in these fields. They show you that underneath all of that complex notation and "math speak" are beautiful ideas about life, the universe, and the nature of reality. These fueled me, even in to my PhD research. I still love them today.
GEB really doesn't have much complicated math. If you're willing to spend a bit of time thinking about the (logical) concepts presented, you should read it just fine.
I actually thought of GEB and did a search over all comments because I thought it might be mentioned.
I'd love to hear a non-programmer/non-mathematician's take on it because I kinda didn't like it at all. I found it very elaborate and slow-developing with no real insight (maybe because the concepts weren't new or maybe because I'm more someone who prefers reading an encyclopaedia over watching a historically correct movie about something).
Gödel, Escher, Bach is an artistic appetizer over the stimulating world of structures, - not a manual.
They young mind is opened by being shown relations it did not yet see.
Read the extreme in that direction:
Italo Calvino - Le città invisibili
(which not only masterfully connects ideas, but most of the realm of existence and experience) - you should be able to see that principle at its apex. And there is no technical teaching: just an education to see the subtle.
Non-mathematician here (psychologist now doing work in data science & machine learning). I was told this book had interesting insights about AI, consciousness, and the like. But I read it last year and found it the most tedious, absolutely unfocused book I've ever read.
Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person, a polymath. He clearly loves wordplay and classical music. But his ramblings are so often tangential and self-indulgent that probably half the book could be trimmed out without cutting anything insightful. Gödel is important to the book. Escher...makes pictures that, if you squint real hard, could be construed as kind of relevant. Bach...well, the author just likes Bach and decided that he needed to be present. The latter two figures are essentially just used for some examples that could probably have been explained more clearly without using music as the context, given that it then requires him to delve into all the details about how fugues are different from canons, etc. etc.
Let's just say, reading the author's introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of the book states his main premises much more succinctly, to the point where you can skip the rest of the 700+ pages of the book.
> Hofstadter is clearly a brilliant person...but his ramblings are so often tangential and self-indulgent that probably half the book could be trimmed...
When you consider how much worth-while reading remains for each of us and how little time we have, I've come to think such prolix authors have bad manners of the self-indulgent kind.
This whole argument is wildly misunderstanding the problem. Andy Ngo frames this as a black & white issue - when by all reasonable measures, it is not.
It’s not all free speech or none. I don’t see Andy protesting that it is a crime to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater when there isn’t one. I also don’t see Andy protesting when that teenage girl was sent to prison for verbally abusing her boyfriend and verbally encouraging him to commit suicide - which he eventually did. Where are his protests? Where are the guardians of free speech here?
The thing is, there is speech for the purpose of communicating, speech for the purpose of convincing, and speech for the purpose of manipulating. The first two categories are always protected and should be under most conditions. The last has heavy restrictions. You are not allowed to use the platform someone else built to manipulate the audience they built if they do not want you to. Period.
Trumps endless lies aren’t speech. They are a blatant attempt at manipulation with a reckless disregard for the truth. That needs to be restricted urgently. We’ve seen too many minds manipulated by this category of non-speech.
That’s also the entire problem with the “conservatives” - especially under Trump. They abused platforms to manipulate people into following them because they didn’t actually have persuasive points. They abandoned their commitments to fidelity, fiscal responsibility, and morality. All they had were lies that they repeated until they became undistinguishable from the truth.
This isn’t about speech. It never was. It is about manipulation and one particular political segment trying to use our core values against us.
Stop trying to muddy the waters. This whole argument is a straw man.
Stop trying to pretend this was ever about speech.
Here’s the problem: Free speech rights are intended to protect speech. They are not intended to protect propaganda. Nor would we want them to. Propaganda is relatively easy to identify and is not speech.
Take Trump, for example. He does not lie in an attempt to convince you of the truth of his perspective. He lies to show you who has power in the situation. He knows that you know that his excuses are shallow and dumb - that’s the whole point.
He is asserting that he can create his own reality and say whatever he wants and you cannot stop him. The majority of his supporters do the same thing. When they repeat his lies, they are not attempting to convince you of their truth. They are showing you their allegiance.
This is similar with QAnon and a myriad of other right wing groups. After repeating their lies over and over, their supporters begin to get confused about what is actually real. They originally bought in to the scheme to be part of the group, but the scheme took and and they lost their grasp on any truth. There is no truth once this takes over.
This is not speech. This is a caustic type of control that uses honest people to spread by confusing their sensibilities. They protect the exercise of these lies, in their quest for morality and justice, and allow its venom to spread. Soon, it kills both host and victim. Leaving all powerless to the purveyor of the propaganda.
This is easily identifiable. We must not protect this. It is not speech.
Getting pulled into a quasi-logical debate where this is confused with speech is exactly what the purveyors want. They want us to confuse this with speech so it can be protected while it erodes the minds of its consumers.
Uhhh... last time I checked, Assange colluded with Russia to give us Trump. Whoever nominated him, probably himself, is a deranged motherfucker. They actually think his actions resulted in peace?!?
We are wildly less safe worldwide in every possible way. Climate change was neglected. All environmental standards became toilet paper. Iran now has nukes. North Korea has nukes. Russia is seizing neighboring countries with the blessing of Trump. China has gone rogue. And the US is locking up children in cages. Which part of that sounds like resounding peace?
If Assange were American, I’d nominate him for treason.
You’re telling me that baby chicks are arriving dead to farmers across the Midwest. Food and medicines are spoiling from being stored in facilities that are not designed for storage. Old people and vets on VA plans are being forced to wait for their prescriptions sometimes for over 1 week after they are due.
All because this critical infrastructure lost $6B last year?!?!
The DoD’s base annual budget for 2020 was $633B - and they will spend every single penny of it.
The USPS spends less than 1% of our base DoD budget to deliver timely mail to every single registered household in the US.
Oh, by the way, this corrupt administration PLANNED TO LOSE $1.06T BEFORE THE PANDEMIC.
And, taxes collected from individual citizens make up approximately 60% of our Federal budget. Taxes on corporations make up just 7%. The rest is a smattering of funds that come from trade, interest from the Fed, and other sources.
If you ever wondered who this American government works for... it is not “We the People”.
The citizens are not treated like they directly pay for more than half of government expenses. They don’t even matter enough to support consistent communication infrastructure.
Your elderly grandparents can’t have your medicine on time because it costs the postal service an average of $0.033 above their collected revenue to mail each item...
...while each Javelin missile we fire at some poor goat herder in Afghanistan costs the same as a small house in the suburbs of a major US city.
The level of corruption in this administration and this entire government is more than nauseating - and the fact that they are doing with my tax dollars adds insult to injury. The shock is wearing off - and below it is nothing but rage.
Isn't payroll tax kinda like a 'per employee' corporate tax? In most cases, what is the point of looking at your pre-tax salary? It just seems like creative accounting between the company and the government(s). In most cases, all of the decisions you or your company make around salary deal with take-home pay. Companies must be paying people more specifically to account for payroll taxes. That amount is effectively the corporate per-employee tax.
- When there's a rise in payroll tax across the board, I'd be extremely surprised all companies across the board raise their salaries. By default, a payroll tax hike will go out of the employee's cut.
- There are many huge companies whose payroll and profit are largely decoupled (as in, employee salaries are not a great indicator for company profit). Think McDonald's, Amazon, Walmart.
There are a lot of missing components here. The article makes it sound like the simple solution to increasing motivation is the glutamine to glutamate ratio. Isn’t that the result of internal neurological and biochemical processes not the causative element?
I think they are confusing correlation with causation.
It seems clear that it is a correlation effect and the authors make no argument to conceal that point. But it is definitely interesting to invest more work in studying this phenomemon causally by developing therapeutic strategies based on targeting metabolism to ameliorate deficits in effort engagement.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.