1,663 karma · joined May 19, 2015
Both approaches look rather impossible to me: the former would mean allowing stuff that might even be illegal in the U.S., the latter would mean that e.g. all videos showing alcohol would have to disappear.
What is your specific example here?
Also note that this is not about allowing videos onto the platform, but only about next to which videos to show ads. And I would guess that most ad customers would want rather strict rules, so it makes sense for YouTube to listen to their customers here.
Of course, they also provide a lot more services - in a way, they manage bookkeeping etc. for you. So if you want or need those services, they can be very interesting, but if you are just looking for a cheaper alternative to Patreon they are not.
Similarly, having a (relatively low) limit on maximum donations I imagine is done to avoid running into anti-money laundering regulations (which are particularly strict in France).
I don’t know what happened along the road to lead us to the current tracking and spying mess.
However, my understanding is that IPFS will publish the file hash to adjacent notes, so unless they are encrypted people can listen for your provider records and look at your (presumably privately shared) files: https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/is-it-possible-to-store-private-ob...
What I understand from the rule change is that it would allow the DHS to search for you on Google and look at your Facebook and Instagram profile before granting you a greencard. Frankly, every potential employer will most likely do the same. I'm not at all anti-immigration, but this seems to be reasonable "vetting" even in my book. Or am I missing something here?
Maybe it would help to make it more explicit that Mastodon works more like email than Twitter in that respect, but to be fair joinmastodon.org and also the new user onboarding tutorial do try hard to make that very clear.
What does this mean? That these staggeringly high numbers (if true) do not necessarily mean doom but "merely" that at some point people will find out that the pensions they have been promised won't be there when they reach retirement. (I.e. what the people in Greece are currently painfully experiencing will eventually hit others, too - one pension cut after the other until little is left.)
This doesn't necessarily affect "future" generations, though: Those that will pay for it is the generation that lives through the cut, i.e. which has paid into the system before the cut but was due to receive money only after the cut. This can very well be a generation that is alive today.
Edit: Just to clarify - the article conflates these financial liabilities with environmental damage. Just to avoid confusion: obviously, environmental degradation cannot be erased with the stroke of a pen, the above is only talking about the financial side of things.
The software writes all key presses to a debug logfile on your own machine (which is overwritten on each reboot), it doesn't send them anywhere. This is bad enough, especially given that the file apparently is readable by any user on that machine. But it's not really a malicious spying tool, it's "only" really sloppy programming.
There are thousands of pieces of intelligence being gathered every day from various sources about potential new terror plots. They aren't black or white and most of the time very hard to interpret. In the end, it will always come down to interpretation of the actual factual evidence at hand. What is "strong" evidence for one person can be "pretty weak" for someone else. Even if everyone agrees about the actual pieces of evidence you can arrive at very different conclusions about what is actually going on. And even if you were to arrive at the same conclusion on what is going on, you can still have very different opinions on what the best course of action in this situation is.
Nothing of this is "making up a terror threat", "lying", "fraud" or "conspiracy".
All I am saying is that in my opinion the intel isn't that strong, because otherwise a) other countries would have acted on it as well and b) you would implement the ban in such a way that it isn't trivial to circumvent.
This has nothing to do with conspiracy or fraud. Faced with the same evidence, different people can come to different conclusions and cost/benefit trade-offs, and apparently the U.S. government (for whatever reasons) has come to a different conclusion than most of the rest of the world. Is this a sign of a conspiracy? No. Does this mean these new U.S. policies are per se reasonable and a good idea? Also no.
a) I would assume the U.S. would share such intelligence at least with their allies. So why has no other country except the U.K. implemented similar measures? Do they all willingly risk their citizens lives?
b) Why only flights from certain countries (until now Middle East, starting now apparently also Europe)? Don't you think a plane bomber from the Middle East would just put their bomb-infused laptop into the cargo hold, fly to the U.S. and then take it out there and into carry-on on a domestic flight?
The counterargument to b) is that the countries on the ban list have lower carry-on security measures in place than the countries not on the list. I personally would doubt this, especially given the variety of countries not affected by the ban, but I don't have hard data on that.
(Opens up new questions for speculation, though: If that was the case, why didn't the Bundesbank disclose that as the reason for melting them?)
a) Until 1971, gold was regularly moved between central banks. The United States exchanged U.S. Dollars against gold and Germany made use of this. Obviously, it was easiest to just leave the gold where it was bought - in the United States. This was also where a lot of other central banks had (and still have) their gold, so it also made exchanges easier.
b) After 1971, trading gold might have become less frequent, and at the moment the Bundesbank states it does not sell or buy any gold at all. But still: Look at Switzerland who has sold a lot of their gold after they joined the IMF. By selling gold out of the US Fed vault, they could offer delivery at the US Fed, avoiding a lot of logistical hassle. Maybe the Bundesbank just wants to keep this option open, even though they don't use it right now. It would be stupid to ship all the gold to Frankfurt, then decide to sell it in a couple of years from now, and then having to ship it back to the U.S. for the buyer.
c) Until 1989, it made sense to store gold outside of Europe to avoid it falling into the hands of the Soviet Union should they decide to invade (as suggested elsewhere in this discussion).
d) After 1989 and until recently, no one really cared about this topic. So it was easiest to just leave the gold where it was. Moving gold is a complicated business. The Bloomberg article linked above really makes it seem easier than it is. Yes, gold doesn't take up much space, but because it is so valuable you can't just put tons of gold into one plane / ship / truck - no one will sell you insurance for such a huge risk. You need to transport it in smaller batches, organizing secure transport and insurance for them, keeping the transports as secret as possible for security reasons. Also, you need to have sufficient storage available at the location where you want the gold to end up. And - again - you don't want to store all of the stuff in a single space because you won't get insurance for too much gold in one building.
I am not sure which explanation is the right one. I also find it a bit strange that they seemed to go through a lot of effort in melting these bars to make sure no one can inspect the originals. But this doesn't mean that there is no innocent explanation for all of this.
Do you care to elaborate on that? If I look at the Times Higher Education ranking for Teaching, I see e.g. Heidelberg University on world rank 43:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...
(Just picked because it's the first university in Baden-Württemberg I found; obviously, for specific subjects the rankings might vary a bit.)
That's not MIT or Harvard, but if that's your standard of "quality" than very few people in the world will have "quality" education.
For German universities, having to select foreign students is a new development and it will take time and a bit of trial & error to get it right. It's the same in Switzerland: every Swiss high school graduate can attend university, so an "admissions process" just didn't exist there. And now that many international students want to attend Swiss university, you get a lot of students in master's courses who don't have the required pre-requisities. But I'm confident the universities will learn and build up these capabilities.
Note that Elon Musk is still dreaming about building tunnel boring machinery, while at Herrenknecht you can already innovate in this field today.
A constantly sneezing worker will be unprofessional, prone to making errors, much less productive and endanger his/her co-workers. Now, granted, this is Amazon so no client will see those warehouse employees and I guess their processes are so airtight that one employee making mistakes won't have such a big impact (four-eyes principles or whatever). But it still seems pretty inefficient to me.
In Switzerland, some companies have insurance that covers sick days for employees - if your employee is sick, the insurance company will pay the wage during that time. This is mainly meant to cover longer sicknesses in smaller companies, who otherwise might get into real financial issues, but it also has the (in my opinion) desirable side-effect that a company is actually better off sending you home than having you at your desk as a half-productive zombie.
The majority of people does not seem to have a problem with being "locked-down" by Apple: they just buy an Android phone and Windows PC instead.
Google is very different - it has the by far largest mobile OS share and in some markets more than 90% search share. If you are a web (or -- thanks to Google Maps -- physical) business, Google can make or break you and there is nothing you can do about it. If Apple doesn't like your app, you can just develop it for Android. If Google doesn't like your webpage, no one will find it.
This would address the idea that Internet search has become a monopoly because Google is so dominant and building up your own index and algorithms has become so expensive that no one on the free market can challenge it. (This assumes that Bing is a huge loss maker for Microsoft, Yandex and Baidu can only exist because of government interference against Google in their home markets and all the others like DuckDuckGo are relying on API access provided by these three.)
I am not sure how true this second paragraph really is and I also think there would be quite big efficiency losses by such an approach (e.g. knowing how to search the web might also be helpful for searching your email etc. and such an API model would make it very difficult to use knowledge about the user to influence search results; which is something all the privacy conscious search engines such as DDG struggle with), but at least that's what I have heard people suggest when they want to see Google broken up.
This is just a proxy statement, meaning it includes all proposals shareholders will be asked to vote on at Twitter's next annual meeting (on May 22nd). Everyone can submit shareholder proposals who owns at least 2000$ of stock [1]. This does not mean that anything will actually happen: The board of Twitter recommends voting AGAINST the proposal and I doubt large institutional investors will vote against the board on this, so the measure will most likely fail.
And even in the quite unlikely case the measure would be approved, it is only asking for a "report" on what selling Twitter to its users would mean. It does not argue for such a sale to actually take place.
[1]: http://theshareholderactivist.com/shareholder-activism-spotl...
So to get the "emissions per GDP", you have to read the table backwards, which means the United States is (among Australia, Israel, Canada) emitting more CO2 than most other developed countries, in particular Western European ones. For example, Germany produces roughly 60% more economic output (3,612 USD / ton of emissions) per CO2 emitted than the United States (2,291 USD / ton) and the United Kingdom (4,284 USD / ton) almost twice as much.
In any case, maybe a better figure would be "emissions per capita", which paints a similar picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...
[Update: Of course, all of these figures are not that helpful because they ignore how much CO2 emissions one "outsources" by buying products manufactured elsewhere. If you are primarily a service-driven economy, you will have much lower CO2 emissions in your country, but you will most likely still buy a lot of stuff from China etc. which will produce CO2 emissions there. That's e.g. why Switzerland is not as green as it would seem from this table.]
What I gather from the article, though, and which I do find in a way even stranger than the copyright question, is this: Apparently Georgia has made the annotated version of their law "official"! Can this be right? For me, this sounds far worse than the copyright question - it would mean that you give an official stamp of approval to privately prepared annotations?
The article is not that clear on this question. Wikipedia [1] has some more on it, but not being a lawyer, I also can't answer the question I would have about it, which is this: What's the role of these privately prepared annotations for the judiciary process? Are they treated like law, because they are published together with the law? Or are they treated like any other private comment / annotations out there would? This, for me, seems to be the crucial question. If it is the former, they should be freely available (and, more importantly, not be written by a private company!). If it is the latter, then I think LexisNexis has some point claiming their copyright, no?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Code_of_Georgia_Annot...