Quanttek

Very cool website! However, I am not sure if ad fontes media is a good source of media bias ratings. Their methodology doesn't even name all the dimensions used to rate sources and their "training manual" provides very little useful guidance (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...). It doesn't seem like they are doing any inter-rater reliability testing.

I don't find any peer-reviewed journal articles using the rating either.

Maybe you could check out https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 instead.

Not sure if you are affiliated with https://newscatcherapi.com/ but I just wanted to note that the "privacy bot" is horrible from a UX standpoint and likely brakes the GDPR as well. 1) if you decline, it pops up separately on every website. 2) it doesn't allow users to separately opt-in and opt-out to tracking 3) the wording is not clear on the privacy aspect 4) it's linked to a chat nad newsletter

Your comment is in the surface a rebuttal of the proposal but it really does not address international criminal law (ICL). ICL is also the result of a treaty between sovereign States that agree to criminalize certain behaviors by individuals and, in the case of the International Criminal Court, agree than an international tribunal will prosecute those crimes when national authorities were unable or unwilling to do so. This complementarity aspect has led to the widespread national criminalization of international crimes and thousands of prosecutions against war criminals or perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Arguably, it has shown effective.

But ICL goes beyond the Rome Statute and includes e.g. treaties on terrorism or piracy that include "prosecute or extradite" clauses.

Polly Higgins proposed the following definition to the International Law Commission:

"Ecocide is the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished” [1]

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257552825_Protectin...

This comment overlooks the fact that the ICC can exert it jurisdiction (power) over two kinds of people:

- nationals of State parties committing a crime anywhere (which would exclude Americans)

- perpetrators committing a part of the crime on the territory of a State party (which includes e.g. Americans in Afghanistan, Myanmar soldiers deporting Rohingya to Bangladesh).

Thus, American CEOs not cleaning up an Oil spill in Canadian waters could be investigated and, if taken into custody, tried.

The ICC is not allowed to hold trials in absentia. It would wait for a State party to take the accused into custody and transfer them to the ICC

The problem is that far-right extremism is by far the biggest violent threat, a multiple of Islamist extremism or far-left extremism. This applies not only to the US but most of Europe as well.

Feel free to check out any of the pieces below

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/27/in-ameri...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-gro...

https://cco.ndu.edu/PRISM/PRISM-Volume-6-no-2/Article/839011...

https://www.europol.europa.eu/activities-services/main-repor... (p. 11)

It wouldn't be post about far-right extremist attacks without someone in the comments trying to "whataboutism" it about leftists.

> I was also warned by people “in the know” that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them. ... Predictably, the NYT piece came out soon after, and predictably, it was very negative

Not sure if we all read the same piece, but I wouldn't call it very negative. Pointing out the neoreactionary affiliations of the Rationalist community is neither something new nor "hit piece"-like. But apparently criticism of Silicon Valley's favorite darling cannot be tolerated here.

Mr. Siskind's name was already very public beforehand (literally a Google search suggestion). Also, the right to free speech does not include the right to be freed from criticism and stay anonymous. Scott took his blog down voluntarily. The fact that his name didn't matter much is clear, when you consider he didn't mind publishing it openly on his new Substack blog.

> I hope big tech buries the NYT.

Interesting that the people rallying so much against cancelling that they believe you can never even publish names want a tech cartel to form and drive a publication out of business for being vaguely critical of a movement popular with Silicon Valley people.

> _[The defendant] did not attend the online hearing or send a legal representative_

That might be one of the main reasons why the case was decided in favor of the law firm. Otherwise, he could have defended himself against the libel charge (one possible defense is the truth)

Similar hosting solution but with support: https://uberspace.de/en/

> How does Disqus sell your visitors' data with thirdparties without your consent?

> Actually, you give them the consent when you agree to their privacy policy.

I doubt that this is legal according to the GDPR.

Also, didn't Mozilla also have a commenting system? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/09/06/mozilla-washington-...

Yes: it's Myanma, so it's the Myanma government.

Vegetarianism outside such regions might be more wasteful, but it is still mich less wasteful and has a much smaller environmental impact than an omnivore diet

> According to the regulator, cameras recorded employees in workplaces, salesrooms, warehouses, and common areas. NBB claimed the aim was to prevent and investigate criminal offenses and to track the flow of goods in the warehouses.

> However, in order to prevent theft, a company must first use “milder” methods, such as random bag checks when employees leave the premises. Moreover, the LfD said video surveillance is only lawful if there is “justified suspicion” against specific persons, and even then, video monitoring may only be used for a “limited” time.

> The data authority found NBB’s video surveillance was neither limited to a specific period of time nor to specific employees. The recordings were saved for 60 days in many cases. Customers were also filmed in seating areas without their knowledge or consent.

> The regulator said “the allegedly deterrent effect of video surveillance, which is repeatedly put forward, does not justify a permanent and unprovoked interference with the personal rights of employees” in a translated press release.

> “We are dealing with a serious case of video surveillance in the company,” said Barbara Thiel, head of LfD Lower Saxony, in a translated statement. “Companies must understand that with such intensive video surveillance they are massively violating the rights of their employees.”

> Thiel added video surveillance is “a particularly intensive encroachment on personal rights” because it can pressurize employees “to behave as inconspicuously as possible in order not to be criticized or sanctioned for deviating behavior.”

Finally! It always amazes me how computer monitoring and video surveillance at the workplace have become so widespread.

Also, the idea of focussing on widespread breaches of the right to privacy is a great one. It helps spread a better understanding of the meaning of the right to privacy.

HN moderators love to drank what they seem "controversial" topics, aka whatever doesn't align with their political views which are deemed the default/neutral view. Basically, you're allowed to discuss the latest iphone release but not how it's made.

English CC is available.

The idea of using AR to have an artist perform on a stage for TV is pretty cool, especially during a pandemic

Watch the actual performance here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTVa1OCs9M0

Better article: https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-digital-markets-act-s...

I do agree with your point overall but I find it so peculiar that the GP's tone-policing comment was the top one when I posted because, as you point out, her substantive point is so fantastic.

Yes, you might not have seen her gender beforehand. But countless others have. I'm not saying GP went "oh a woman, better tone-police her". Rather, the gender of the author entered into our (mine as well) subconsciousness and combined there with implicit assumptions about gender roles and the 'proper' behavior of women. Any behavior that then doesn't fit the stereotype of diplomatic, kind, etc., elicits a stronger emotional reaction in us and makes us more like to write or upvote such a comment.

It is not that HN doesn't already have a "baseline obsession" with tone or that male authors never fall victim to this. But rather, one can observe a trend where such tone-policing comments are more likely to occur and get upvoted if the author is a woman. And on the flip-side, comments commending a harsher, "more" honest or rant-y tone are more likely to occur when the post was written by a male author.

Maybe it's just my observation, but I find it quite interesting that only finds such tone-policing comments as yours when the author is a woman. Daily, I see much more abrasive blogs on HN: instead of lampooning them for asking GitHub to be better, they are not rarely lauded for their "brutal honesty" while often straight-up insulting the blog's target.

This is not meant to criticize you, OP, personally. Rather, I just want to point out a structural double standard.

Ctrl+F "spirit level", "anxiety", "social status", "social evaluative threat" = 0 results

I feel like you cannot really discuss the "self-esteem craze" without the larger underlying societal forces at play. When psychologists observe high self-esteem scores you roughly notice two categories of people:

1. a healthier kind linked to positive outcomes: it centers on a fairly well-founded sense of confidence, with a reasonably accurate view of one's strengths in different situations and an ability to recognize one’s weaknesses.

2. an unhealthy, insecure narcissism: it is primarily defensive and involved a denial of weaknesses, i.e. an internal attempt to talk oneself up and maintain a positive sense of oneself in the face of threats to self-esteem.

At the same as we saw a rise in self-esteem scores, we see a surge in anxiety and depression. This apparent paradox is solved by considering that the second kind and the rise in anxiety are linked to an increase in social evaluative threat: threats which created the possibility for loss of social esteem. They are the main source of stress in experiments since they are closely linked to the primary sources of stress in modern society: low social status, lack of friends, and stress during one's early life.

In short, our social status is closely linked to how we define our worth and how much we are valued. In our increasingly-mobile world where we do not have settled communities but are surrounded by strangers, our social status becomes even more important. The greater the social status differentials in our society, the bigger the potential social evaluative threat.

Hence, greater inequality seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. And our society has only become more unequal.

This is one of the reasons why higher social inequality among rich nations is so closely linked to a range of health and social problems and is uncorrelated to the average income among those rich nations.

This is discussed much more cogently in The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

This thread is quite embarrassing. The science is clear (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8,)yet HN still argues against it. But, unlike others, I don't think this very surprising.

Many (not all) HN readers, being software engineers, have a high level of pretentiousness that comes from being good in one field, and then carry over that arrogance into areas where they have no clue.

Suddenly, you see software engineers pretending they know more than sociologists who have studied the topic for years and dismissing their evidence out of hand or merely responding to the title of the article, without engaging its substance.

We see it quite clearly whenever any topic from the social sciences is discussed, be it discrimination, social inequality, government regulation, taxes or the welfare state.

This looks fantastic and I like the focus! I am not sure if it's so great to have the getting-started info spread out over multiple site - joinmobilizon.org and mobilizon.org - though

Governments are still (largely) accountable to the people, in contrast to corporations, which are not accountable whatsoever (except through gov regulation). Your comment is just detraction

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this supposed price increase in Stjema's analysis only based on the maximum reimbursement allowance for lawyers? Hence, this only pertains to the potential for increased costs, not actual increased costs. Also, the obvious advantage of a European court is that one does not need to enforce one's patent in all State jurisdictions separately, right? Stjema shows how this duplication is actually lower than assumed (bc most companies choose to only enforce it in one country) but wouldn't the assumption be that the need for enforcement in more than one jurisdiction increase as the internal market for knowledge products becomes ever-more integrated? Although I see how it could be more expensive right now (and software patents still suck)

I would mainly love to see a response regarding the legal side.

I am not an expert on international law but I am 99% sure that the legal arguments in the text are partially wrong. Yes, some aspects of the UPC are not great but it should rather be opposed on public policy grounds, i.e. negative effects software patents and increased cost of litigation (and maybe that should've been done during the negotiations on the treaty).

It's a bit difficult to discern their argument as the text is filled with errors and, seemingly, some words were jumbled around.

1. Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT): The text of the treaty has already been agreed upon and states have signed (or even ratified) it. They are not negotiating the treaty anymore, so the UK (as former negotiating state) not agreeing to the treaty has no bearing on its entry into force or violates Art 24(1) VCLT. As the para. states: "A treaty enters into force in such manner and upon such date as it may provide or as the negotiating States may agree." This is just about how the date is set, i.e. either it is laid down in the text or the States agree - and that has already happened. Somewhat regularly, states will de-ratify treaties or exit negotiations on treaties and the treaty can and will still go into force.

2. Art 6 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) [1]: According to the case law on "tribunal established by law", the "law" part must ensure its impartiality and independence and, thus, primarily governs its composition (i.e. appointment of judges, assignment to cases (where latter cannot "solely depend on the discretion of the judicial authorities")) [2]. Note that, even in the quote cited in the article it is the object of the clause that "the judicial organisation … is regulated by law emanating from Parliament", i.e. it concerns their composition (also: "object" = aim of article which does not necessarily speak to the specific obligations). The composition and the independence and impartiality of the Court are provided for in Articles 15 to 19 (esp. Art 17: "Judicial independence and impartiality" [3]). Only beyond those rules (as well others), can the Administrative Committee establish rules of procedure (which may not contravene the treaty [4]), after consulting with the Commission on compliance with EU law (Article 41). Regarding fees, it should at least be noted that the treaty provides for the possibility of financial aid for SMEs in Art 36(3) [5].

[1]: Case-law guide https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Guide_Art_6_ENG.pdf#page=...

[2]: Quoting generously from the guide:

> 209. The phrase “established by law” covers not only the legal basis for the very existence of a “tribunal”, but also compliance by the tribunal with the particular rules that govern it (Sokurenko and Strygun v. Ukraine, §24). The lawfulness of a court or tribunal must by definition also encompass its composition (Buscarini v.San Marino (dec.)). It is the role of the courts to manage their proceedings with a view to ensuring the proper administration of justice. The assignment of a case to a particular judge or court falls within their margin of appreciation in such matters. However, to be compatible with Article 6 § 1, it must comply with the requirements of independence and impartiality (Pasquini v. San Marino, §§ 103 and 107). The judge assigned to a case must be independent of the executive,and the assignment cannot be solely dependent on the discretion of the judicial authorities (ibid., § 110).

…

> 212. In principle, a breach by a court of these domestic legal provisions gives rise to a violation of Article6 §1 (DMD Group, A.S., v. Slovakia, §61). The Court may therefore examine whether the domestic law has been complied with in this respect. However, having regard to the general principle that it is, in the first place, for the national courts themselves to interpret the provisions of domestic law, the Court finds that it may not question their interpretation unless there has been a flagrant violation of the legislation (ibid.; Biagioli v. San Marino(dec.), §75; Pasquini v. San Marino, §§ 104 and 109). A court which, without any explanation, oversteps the usual limits of its jurisdiction in deliberate breach of the law is not a “tribunal established by law” in the proceedings in question (Sokurenko and Strygun v. Ukraine, §§27-28).

> 213.The object of the term “established by law” in Article6 §1 is to ensure that the organisation of the judicial system does not depend on the discretion of the executive but is regulated by law emanating from Parliament (Biagioli v.San Marino(dec.), §74; Savino and Others v.Italy, §94).

> 214. Nor, in countries where the law is codified, can organisation of the judicial system be left to the discretion of the judicial authorities, although this does not mean that the courts do not have some latitude to interpret the relevant national legislation (ibid., and case-law references cited).

> 215.Furthermore, delegating powers in matters concerning the organisation of the judicial system is permissible provided that this possibility is enshrined in the domestic law of the State, including the relevant provisions of the Constitution (ibid.).

[3]: https://www.unified-patent-court.org/sites/default/files/upc... [4]: https://www.unified-patent-court.org/sites/default/files/upc... [5]: https://www.unified-patent-court.org/sites/default/files/upc...

Tbh, the EU can only do so much: there are plenty of press releases, press conferences, and social media posts about their legislative proposals. However, the gatekeepers of information are different actors: Mostly the media or whoever you follow on social media. And, not without reason, such a technical debate hasn't really engaged interest in the general public. If you are actually interested in the topic or in EU law, you will likely heard about it because the gatekeepers in that field believed it might interest you

Summary from the press release:

> In an order published today, the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional § 113 of the Telecommunications Act (Telekommunikationsgesetz – TKG) and several ordinary federal laws, which govern the manual procedure for obtaining information on subscriber data. They violate the complainants’ right to informational self-determination and their right to the privacy of telecommunications (Art. 10(1) of the Basic Law (Grundgesetz – GG). The complainants are subscribers of telecommunications and internet services. The manual information procedure enables security authorities to obtain information from telecommunications enterprises, in particular, information on subscribers of telecommunications services or an IP address assigned at a certain point in time. The information that is provided includes personal customer data that is linked to the conclusion or performance of a contract (so-called subscriber data). Information on data that relates to the use of telecommunications services (so-called traffic data) and the actual content of telecommunications is not provided.

> In principle, providing information on subscriber data is permissible under constitutional law. Yet, similar to the image of a double-door, the legislature must create a proportionate legal basis for both the transfer of subscriber data by telecommunications providers and the retrieval of such data by the authorities. Provisions on transferring and retrieving data must adequately limit the purposes of the utilisation of data, particularly by establishing thresholds for the use of powers as part of the constituent elements of the provision and by providing for sufficiently meaningful protection of legal interests. The First Senate clarified that, in principle, despite the moderate weight of the interference, using the general powers to transfer and retrieve subscriber data in the context of maintaining public security and the activities of intelligence services requires there to be a specific danger in the individual case, and an initial suspicion of criminal conduct (Anfangsverdacht) in the context of the investigation and prosecution of offences. Where dynamic IP addresses are matched, this must additionally serve to protect or legally reinforce legal interests of at least considerable weight given the increased weight of the interference. Where, with regard to maintaining public security or activities of intelligence services, the thresholds for the use of powers require less than a specific danger, this must be compensated for by establishing stricter requirements for the weight of the legal interests meriting protection. For the most part, the challenged provisions did not satisfy these requirements. For the rest, the First Senate again held that information on login details may be provided only if the statutory requirements for its use are met.