6,105 karma · joined July 25, 2011
In all these years, the only actual existential danger to society to materialize are precisely the entities that are now being deplatformed.
Excuse me if I don't take all this hand wringing on behalf of unstable insurrectionists seriously.
For what it's worth I live in Norway. Neither of those domains are DNS blacklisted, nor have they ever been - with the possible exception of on one specific corporate ISP (CATCHCOM). If you disagree, feel free to show some evidence to the contrary.
The mandate to block torrent sites came about as a result of a court order following a lawsuit brought forth by Hollywood studios against Norwegian ISPs [2]. I tried to find the specific text on lovdata, but came up empty as they don't have a comprehensive list of local court decisions. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway#Internet_ce...
[2] https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/the-pirate-bay-stenges-i-nor...
> Norwegian politicians from the Christian People’s Party are shocked that there is porn on the Internet, and want it eliminated – censored off all the Internet pipes as though the pornography doesn’t exist.
There's some truth here, but it's presented in a shoddy way. Yes, KrF (Christian People's Party) has at various times made noises about pornography DNS filters. I don't recall all the specifics, but various proposals have included opt-out DNS filter and/or filters in schools and such. While I don't support these proposals, I think the language used really exaggerates the reality (and few or none of these measures have ever gained much headway, either at the national or local level)
> If you read the Norwegian Christian paper, though, it is expressing itself very positively toward this censorship (which is somewhat weird for a newspaper, any newspaper – those generally oppose censorship vehemently and defend any and all freedom of the press).
They really dug deep on this one. The paper in question (Dagen) has a circulation of slightly over 10,000. That's not even among the top 20 in the country [1]. I'd be skeptical of assigning much weight to their coverage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Norway
All that said, I don't see why accessibility has to be a dirty word. Purposefully difficult game design does exclude players. For every inspiring story of someone completing a challenge while suffering from a disability, there are 10 more who completely miss out on what are - difficulty aside - genuinely interesting games. I personally know soulsborne fans who mainly like exploring the world, and for whom boss encounters are just a necessary evil.
That's honestly fair - these are rich worlds with interesting lore and a unique form for storytelling, so I totally get just enjoying the game(s) on those merits alone. It then follows that I think others who are similarly inclined but perhaps not quite as able should be able to enjoy the same experience.
As always, it's best to read the source material directly but these are relevant excerpts from the abstract :
"Case studies have revealed neurological problems in severely affected COVID-19 patients. However, there is little information regarding the nature and broader prevalence of cognitive problems post-infection or across the full spread of severity...
...People who had recovered, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group and pre-existing medical disorders. They were of substantial effect size for people who had been hospitalised, but also for mild but biologically confirmed cases who reported no breathing difficulty."
The last part directly contradicts the idea that this study is limited in scope to severe cases.
Hardly an interpretation, it's stated in black and white :
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
This makes me think you misunderstand the first amendment. It concerns freedom of expression from government interference. Free amplification on private platforms is not covered.
You can further reduce this to "all humans will lie and manipulate when it suits them". As a statement it's just as true, but it obfuscates the concept of scale : some people lie more, more deliberately and more frequently than others.
By declaring everyone an offender without further distinction, you are effectively excusing the behavior of the worst actors while minimizing the good faith efforts put forward by others.
If you were to take the above at face value, would this change your perception about the value of moderation in online communities?
BBC coverage routinely, and correctly, classifies publications like the Daily Mail as tabloids - yet the NY Post is a "mainstream newspaper"? That's inconsistent.
This is an overly dramatic comparison that trivializes the Chinese surveillance state.
Living in Europe I have the pleasure of hearing these kinds of naive comparisons on a regular basis. Somehow it's always "the US is basically China and/or Saudi Arabia".
It's exhausting having to explain to people who are seemingly only capable of operating with a binary black and white worldview that there is a massive difference between certain shades of grey.
Your argument is that we can't prove the absence of a conspiracy.
Hence, a better analogy would be
"why should i stop sawing this branch? just because gravity has never left me suspended in thin air doesn't mean it can't or won't happen in the future"
Nothing about Amazon hiring a former NSA director to its board is "tinfoil hat crazy". It's in fact perfectly rational, since Amazon is literally in the business of selling services to the federal government.
I'm not aware of any organized campaigns to this effect, but the idea that Asians aren't "real" minorities / PoC is one that sometimes gets tossed around in progressive circles.
e.g.
https://www.insider.com/the-internet-is-debating-who-to-call...
Arguments put forth range from the purely visual ("some asians are fairer than white people") to the socioeconomic ("asians don't give back to the black communities in which they own businesses"), or variants thereof.
I guess it's a gentle reminder in these relatively polarized times that relations between minority groups in the US have historically been tense, be it black-latinx, black-asian or black-jewish. It might feel like there's a detente right now due to the focus being on the state and the white power structure et al - but the underlying animosity is real enough. Humans are tribal to a fault, and that will never change.
At some point in the mid-to-distant future, most human labor (certainly white collar labor) will potentially be automated away, with remaining blue collar labor not far behind (the physical interface, e.g. general purpose robots that are superior to humans in non-static environments will probably come last).
Until that point, the demand for a technically literate workforce will continue to grow, simply because the number of potential areas of application will also continue to grow. With every new digital encroachment on our analogue lives, we find new business verticals that previously simply didn't exist. I don't see that trend abetting anytime soon. Put differently, it's not like software development ends with webapps. For every domain that gets commoditized, there will almost guaranteed be new ones in need of hands on skilled labor. There will of course be some developers who aren't as effectively able to reposition themselves for new verticals (we've all probably heard some anecdote of a C programmer who simply couldn't grok OOP, etc.), but by and large it's difficult for me to see the demand for human-generated bespoke software development dissipating until we get close to that mythical land of general AI.
Now, on the payscale side I do agree with the author that the push towards remote work will definitely have an impact on many of our salaries that are currently tightly bound to geography. That seems fairly evident, to be honest. I live in northern Europe where our salaries are quite good relative to other parts of the continent, but you can still find high quality engineers for <$100k USD - many of whom are on par with FAANG developers being paid >$200k in SFBA or Seattle and the like. The further east / south you go, the lower the current salaries are. It seems logical that decentralization of work will lead to a flattening of the income curve - raising some incomes, lowering others - as we increasingly all enter the same digital playing field. That said, wages - like housing prices - are to use econ parlance 'sticky downwards' so if I were still a SV developer I wouldn't start losing sleep yet.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30061507/
"Conclusion: Dependence to traditional cigarettes and snus seem to be relatively similar while NR (nicotine replacement) was rated lower and coffee lowest."
From my perspective as a quote-unquote power user, it feels like Apple just constantly insists on shooting themselves in the foot with unnecessary and ill conceived innovations. Either way, I'm happy with my new setup and probably won't go back to macbooks anytime soon.
https://nypost.com/author/michael-goodwin/
"Susan Rice's email exposes Team Obama's 'by the book' treachery"
"Shameful media still slamming Donald Trump during coronavirus crisis"
"Trump passes coronavirus test with flying colors"
"Deep State snakes slither back after FBI, CIA swamp draining"
yeah, definitely not a right leaning columnist.
You're missing the more germane point that the relevant metric for "built" in this context are roads, not living accommodations. More people live in Oslo than in the 50s, but the roads and city blocks within ring 3 are what they are from prewar times, i.e. tons of small 1-way streets and the like.
Case in point : many, if not most, of the apartment buildings in "Gamle Oslo" (literally "Old Oslo" - the downtown area to the east of the railway station) were built in the 1980s or later, but the roads around those new constructions are still narrow 1-way prewar streets.
To my mind the parents point was pretty clear - Oslo is an older city, particularly from an American perspective, and you have to travel pretty far out from the city center to find an urban infrastructure that accommodates cars in the way the younger and generally more modern cities in the US (outside the northeast) do. This is 100% related to the city center being built before the dawn of ubiquitous private vehicles, and not to choosing some arbitrarily different urban planning "path".
Another comment mentioned the underground highways that have in fact done wonders to move traffic away from the over-congested city streets, which only reenforces the idea that the city proper was not designed to accommodate even a modest volume of car traffic.
> But the answer your question: Vienna. Vienna has smaller population today than it did in 1910.
That's interesting, but it's noteworthy that it has a higher population today than it did in 1950, so yours is an incomplete answer. The geopolitical reasons for Vienna's population in 1910 are unique, what with being the capital of a sprawling trans-national empire that ceased to exist.
That's a weird supporting argument. Can you name any urban centers that have not seen significant population growth since 1950?
I havent ordered many fresh salads or sushi.