bigger_inside

it's no great conspiracy, it's the normal working of the bureaucratic/legal structure, as any organizational sociologist will gladly tell you:

An emergency approval of the vaccine was only legal if there are no other working remedies. So, it was legally necessary to certify that there were no other working remedies; so this is where the bureacratic attempts were directed,

This directs the legal and business bureaucracy to seek no official confirmation of such an alternative, which means you don't, of course, invest officially in tests that could come to a different conclusion; you invest in those that do (medical tests are famously influencable, but that is for another thread). At the same time, the other remedies remain "unproven" except by evidence presented by doctors who use it, who can be bureaucratically dismissed as "but this is not a proven remedy, and we can't recommend it" - formalspeak, we all know it.

Again, not a conspiracy theory by any means, just the normal, sociological workings of organizations we are all familiar with on smaller scales. (Of course, it does require us to dispense with the childish notion that organizations work for nothing but our benefit, with integrity and honesty; of course they don't, none do, but that also doesn't mean they work AGAINST out benefit. At the time, it was understandable to think "we have to help the vaccine get approved, and diversions would cost lives".)

The fun part about sociology is that we all have implicit knowledge that this is how organizational bureaucracies work. For some reason, we're also castigated when we say this out loud.

I don't trust the encryption, but I especially don't trust the WhatsApp backups - and if I disable cloud backups for my messages, it asks me every few weeks if I don't want to turn it on, and I have to choose "never" every single time. And if the people I talk to back up, it's in their cloud anyway.

Before we make idealizing comparisons between "barbaric pasts" and seemingly enlightened presents (the "arrogance of the present" in which we assume that whatever we do now is knowledgable, good, just, right, at the end point of progess), let's remember that today's "medications" were largely chance discoveries, where the "chance" consisted of the recognition that they would calm patients and make them more manageable - and in this light, they were praised, in their time, as "chemical lobotomy".

Joanna Moncrieff makes this explicit in her book, "The Bitterest Pills". Also elaborated on here: https://www.psycovery.com/images/Postpsychiatrys-challenge-O...

We're still doing the same thing, just without knives (and, as the comment noted, often also WITH knives).

> In a way, it's comforting to know that newspapers back in the 1950's were as susceptible to BS as modern day newspapers.

fixed it.

the frustration part sets in when I start reading the page, and then a whole-page popup interruts that experience and makes me disable cookies. Second frsutration is when I have to go dg for the "no". At this point, I reevaluate whether I really want to read this page or not, and if it's not essential, I close the entire page at this point mouthing a silent "fy".

SO, as others have already said, definitely a "reject all" and be done with it right in the beginning, without the need for any forther clicks. Better yet if the banner is just a sliver on the side that doesn't interrupt my reading experience (clearly, as long as I didn't click "yes" on cookies, it can't set any; so it would be default-no, allows me to read, and if I want to click in the corner for something else, I can. Even better if it has an "X" to close that unintrusive side window, and of course the X gets treated as "reject all".

he existing webcam apps for android, like droidcam, send the signal through the local wifi when the app is installed on the phone and the PC.

yes, both OBS and, as a standalone, DroidCam do this, as android and PC apps. Does this just integrate these apps, or something like it?

unironically. The continued existence of the pirate bay and torrents is like the remaining aqueduct from a crumbling civilization, a reminder of what we once could do, before usurpers gobbled it up to squeeze the last cent out of everything

a CIA claim isn't "proof". I've never seen anything to prove it, just imperialist hysterics

exactly. When I read things I KNOW about, it's incredibly obvious that the news entertainment business (which WP and NYT and CNN and Fox all are) exist to serve the prejudices of their audience. A few times I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed by a newspaper who wanted an "expert" on something (flattering, but meh); something copletely benign and harmless, nothing political. They twisted my words to serve up stuff that fit what their "normal reader" already believed about the world.

this is making this out to seem like some nefarious Iranian scheme, when in fact this was entirely their money, frozen by the US under absolutely no justification in international law. Again and again, it needs to be said that "sancions" are not some neutral legal apparatus that other countries have to abide by; they're unilateral US actions against their enemies which have no base in, and actually run AGAINST, international law. The US is the thief here.

How is this in any way new?

The meme "I can't even choose an option that makes an NPC sad in a video game" is years old. As is the insight that quasi-parasocial relationships with fictional characters are much, much stronger than empathy towards actually existing human beings that are just "concepts" to us, be they in faraway places as victims of war, natural disasters or the everyday exploitation of the global economic system, or members of an outcast class in our own societies, be they homeless or political opponents we classify as "not really human". As the other comment said, we fell with Michael Scott instead.

Is this more than just pattern recognition? I mean, what you're saying is that we're wising up to the fact that "buy this for nature/sustainability/etc" is just another way capitalism gobbles up and resells criticisms against it. Capitalism is destroying the planet? Well, just make more plastic stuff and slap a "sustainable" label on it, we'll sell the good conscience AND the plastic stuff all in one.

The past/elder angle is equally fake, it just sells traditionalism, another anti-capitalist current, as a product, only that.. it's not as played-out yet?

I have a hard time not putting this into the lineup of anti-technology moral panic aided by pseudoscience intent on gobbling up a new field.

Do we all remember how "internet addiction" was, at first, a joke in a newsgroup until a psychiatrist stumbled upon it and thought they could make a name for themselves by transferring - badly - existing elements of addiction discourses on internet use? And we're still suffering from their success, which, in psych terms, means that the found enough people they could convince that, yes, really, what they were doing were "sick" (usually because that was a good way to appease their families)[1]? And usually because "healthy use of time", in puritan-capitalist societies, is always magically time spent productively to make money or support the family, God forbid (literally) that it was recreational?

This smells somewhat related, in the line of "but really, it's stressing you. You don't realize, but it is. Trust me. The bill is in the mail."

[1] https://journals.openedition.org/reset/122

the scientists are not the problem here, PUBLIC science and public institutional structures were, are, and will be. The media takes a scientist, who has a strong tendency to say "this may work, we can't be sure" and "under some conditions, we believe that it might" and turns it into "we know!"... for institutional media reasons. Some scientists like the attention and are willing to play along, to an extent. Public institutions need "certainty rhetoric" for legal and PR reasons. The reason Ivermectin was so clubbed to death wasn't because it ddn't work, it was because the legal process of emergency certification of the vaccine required that there are no working cures, so that could institutionally not be pursued. No evil intention is needed here; "we want to help and this is a legal hurdle", on the one side, meets "we want to sell this thing and need the certification" on the other.

Scientists will always say "wait a minute, were not sure". Institutions and their structures leave little room for this, so scientists get translated to certainty rhetoric, and the gullible public who often has a quasi-religious view of science swallows it, as that's how the media makes it for them.

not the OP, but "government publicizing something" != "transparency". Usually, historically, it's quite often the opposite.

which also brings back the old insight that harvesting greens kills a lot more animals than producing steak does. Though I guess with symbiotic species living inside organisms, that may become debatable? In any case, there is no food consumption without death involved.

Though ultimately, that's not even the point. The larger point is that individual consumer choice does not actually shift the food industry structure, which, again, is neatly exemplified by this entire debate that kicked off these threads: humans don't -choose- bugs. This is a system change. Though of course the change involves better mass production capability and higher rates of profit on the industry side, not "care for nature". Industry doesn't care for anything but profit.

This. I want a brand-unfriendly internet, though of course putting it that way again puts the commercial aspect and the internet's relation to it front and center. I want an internet that isn't built commercially, not with monetization in mind. There are still places - AO3 is completely unsuited to any commercial association, and it is still the fanfiction center of the internet. Places like literotica survived the ages.

Of course, when regulatory moral panics take hold of it, they never say out loud that what they really protect and defend is commercial use...

Exactly. I'm a researcher, and there are maybe two or three things I know a lot about, and some things where I understand, structurally, how they function.

Literally everything on the news about these things is horrible. It either dumbs something down to the point where it supports aggressive misunderstandings, or highlights an element that serves to support some public (misguided) preconception, or it deletes structural context to the point where the thing said isn't per se wrong, but without that context, it's certain to be misunderstood.

I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed once (on more of a "lighthearted" subject, nothing controversial). The journalists twisted my words to make them conform to some feelgood complete misconception, reflecting the things "people like to read about themselves" and how we, in our late modern hyperindividualist societies, imagine the world works: it's all about you in the end! Nope.

The news is a commercial enterprise; its purpose, classically, is to sell your stereotypes back to you. Today, in polarized society, it's there to sell one segment's stereotypes back to that segment while maximally riling up other segments, thus creating engagement through battle. And no, "Publicly funded" ones aren't any better at it, they operate in the same space.

That description goes for college students, too. Though the blandness isn't lack of skill; it's fear and powerlessness.

Michael Berubé has this story where he says, he once came early to class and overheard the students make great arguments about movies and shows they saw last night, discussing them heatedly. Then, when the lesson started, all the arguments turned bland, banal, reproductive.

Obvious conclusion: They -can- very well produce good insight, but the college and school systems discourage it. They reward them for repeating ideas they read in books about their things, or what the teacher said; an original idea is dangerous, because they're responsible for it themselves, and if the teacher doesn't like it, they'll get punished for it. Safer to say, "Miller said..." and shove off accountability to someone published.

If they're pruned and curated enough to not be immediately recognizable, let them have their chatGPT papers. Bad cheating is just a sign of not caring, but good cheating takes effort and smarts...

I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now".

Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated.

The moment a sentence like "it's crucial to remember" pops up, I know what this is. Then, there's also the element that it always sounds like it's speaking to a child, and it avoids actually saying things unequivocally without some sort of disclaimer, as the legal department's CYA filter will ensure.

I remain thoroughly unimpressed by the entire venture. If this is Skynet 1.0, we're all safe for centuries to come.

so, would you say "me caes bien" is 0.5?

Or the computer in Children of Time, also comprised of ants. (Though I also came here to say: Three Body Problem. Pretty well done in the Chinese TV show.)

huh? why? is there a bot checking for this word? will it get someone in trouble?

though it's not giving room in general; if it actually does depends on whether, in this context, it MAY be used or not, which the question itself doesn't communicate. This makes it a hornet's nest to actually use it. A purely ritual "how are you" met with actual emotional expression might make the situation quite awkward.

Thus, there are deeper contextual frames you need to understand in order to know if that "how are you" actually means "please, open up" or it it only means "I'm just checkmarking politeness in this convo before I tell you to stay 3 hours longer today".

we lie all the time to knit people together, yes, of course. The key is in the "culturally specific" part. What kinds of lies are coded as rude and what kinds of lies are coded as glue? This differs, which was all I'm saying. I don't want to take the ritual from the English; I just want to keep them from making it universal (the English are very good at making whatever they do universal around the globe. ahem)

This isn't just different between cultures, it's different between status positions, scenes, relationship levels. If someone I'm just getting to know asks me for lunch and I don't feel like it, I'll say "I'd love to, I can't" if I do want to keep making a relationship with that person. If someone's an old friend, I'll say, "I don't want to", knowing that our friendship won't be hurt by that.

very culturally dependent. In Germany, the first offer is the offer. If you refuse it, there will not be a second one; and making a second, third offer, in turn, would be rude in Germany, as it is pestering and assumes I'm lying with the first answer or I don't know what I want. How dare you assume this? :D

The English always think the Germans terribly rude. In turn, Germans find these English (also Irish, I guess) conventions of running around things fifteen times for ritual terribly exhausting, a complete waste of time and honestly, just an outright lie.

Take email rules. Germans ridicule this "Hi, how are you, how's the family?" loop before the email (or phone call, or meeting) comes to "I need this from you." A German mail is "Hi, I need this. Thanks." That is not rude at all; the contrary, you did not force your family on me and didn't pretend to care about things that you do NOT care about, and you didn't impose on me with private things from strangers that I do not care about. (in the English mail, signified by the fact that there are no actual answers. "Fine!" .... Great, that was useless and just signaled openly that we really do not care and the question was, in fact, a lie.)

< for political reasons

well, and for technical ones. Since this a tech-heavy board, I expect it to be common knowledge here that you can't operate a grid on wind and solar alone, as you can't control the weather-based output (which, in the case of solar, also has a tendency to maximize when it's -not- most needed). A grid needs a controllable baseline source to have any stability. That can be gas or any other fired plant, it could sometimes be hydro, but it can also be nuclear.

Burning things up is a climate nightmare (though still where about 90% of world power comes from), and also very much more expensive in Europe now than it used to be. Hydro can't be built just anywhere you like, and if the river is also a waterway, also can't be controlled based on energy need (as it is controlled based on traffic demands). So until we get a fusion plant, nuclear is just a predictable decision tree outcome.

design credit, absolutely! I'm speaking of Yayo and human leather hats, though. :D