stonecraftwolf

This is only true if someone deems you or your experiences credible, and this in turn is highly related to existing biases and relative places in social hierarchies.

“IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”

Doctorow never uses this word, but the dynamic he describes — where tech companies, rather than try to keep customers by offering good products, prefer to keep customers by making it impossible for them to leave — is fundamentally abusive.

The entire essay is a detailed explanation of the ways that tech companies exploit and abuse their customers and society as a whole, but he never uses those words.

I’m in agreement — they are abusive; they are exploitive; they are preying upon society and need to be regulated — but it’s odd that he doesn’t use the words.

IIRC the first prison in the US was established in Auburn, NY specifically because slavery had been outlawed and some sociopath was like “ok, yeah, technically, but if we just convict them of a crime first...”

I get it. But I also don’t have much of a tolerance any more for dealing with abuse, and it’s not possible to be open about this stuff without also making yourself vulnerable to that abuse. I wish there was a solution to that, not least because I wish I could participate more frequently and more openly, but if there is a solution beyond moderation for this purpose I haven’t figured it out yet.

This fails spectacularly when the point of disagreement is one’s humanity, for example. I’m a lot less active here than I would be otherwise, and I know that’s the case for a lot of others who belong to groups that HN considers fair game. I largely consider it a hostile place to me and people like me, and because of this moderation attitude, it’s first mover dominance in certain areas is actively harmful. And no, I’m not going to expose myself by revealing by what aspects of my identity are regularly dehumanized on HN.

Social cooling is just as much a phenomena on HN. By its very nature, it’s invisible unless it affects you directly. HN loses plenty of voices it’s never aware of.

IANAL, but to me it seems like it would be very difficult to convict retail investors of investing in a stock they believe has value and then telling other people they invested in a stock they believe has value. Unless there are chat records of a few redditors coordinating an astroturf campaign while twirling their mustaches or whatever, I don’t see how this could be aimed at retail.

Regulated entities who have access to tools or information not available to retail investors, or who applied financial pressure to manipulate access to the markets, or did not disclose conflicts of interest...that seems like a much easier case to make.

That’s what I get for skimming! Thanks for the correction. :)

I don’t think dismissing this phenomenon as a stock turning into a meme is right. WSB is...something, but there is actually a rationale behind going long GME. If you think that the new CEO, known for turning dead retail into profitable online content and e-commerce businesses (as I understand it), is going to turn GME around, then buying $12 Apr 21 calls for thirteen cents or whatever it was makes sense absent any notion of a short squeeze or market manipulation. That it was one of the most shorted stocks and there was an obvious opportunity for a short squeeze, and that this seems to all be multiplied by HFT, is quite the force multiplier.

It’s not like this is some random event that could happen to any position. There seem to be a number of factors in play, but it’s not random, and it’s not because a meme got popular.

Obligatory, but this really seems to confuse the point: their revenue doesn’t come from their users at all. It comes from selling their users to advertisers.

This seems overly glib. Facebook’s monopoly status means it’s necessary for many people. As per the post, if this person were a small business owner, or simply not well-connected elsewhere, this could be both financially and personally devastating. As it is, he’s only protected because he has other access to business and personal pages.

One company shouldn’t have this sort of arbitrary power over people’s lives.

If you read the article, you’ll see it’s not the same issue.

Just because you failed at crime doesn’t mean you didn’t commit a crime. Attempted murder is still a thing.

And I think you should probably read more about what actually happened. The initial photos were of idiots in horns and face paint and that has colored the public perception of what happened, but the clownshow gave cover to a smaller number of organized militia types compromised of former and active duty military and law enforcement. Those people were armed, came prepared, had intelligence about the layout of the building, and received updates on the location of MOC. They were there to kill and take hostages, and they came within minutes of achieving that goal.

Nothing about this was laughable, and the concern is not overblown.

Not all autoimmune conditions show up in bloodwork, and sometimes they only show up when they’ve progressed to the point of organ damage. Typically this lack of positive tests is used to invalidate the experience of people with those conditions (usually women). This often seems to come from the implicit assumption that we know all the physiological markers and mechanisms of autoimmune disease, when nothing could be further from the truth. We know very little, and how a patient feels matters.

If due to environmental toxins (say, hormonally active “forever chemicals,” plastics, etc), my guess is you’d see the deleterious effects first in women. Women also make (and need) testosterone, just at much lower levels than men, so they have much less to lose. There’s research going back 30 years on the efficacy of low dose TRT in women to treat all kinds of things that tend to hit women in their late thirties on (when natural testosterone has been declining for 15-20 years); I’m on mobile now, but what I recall most from a review paper was the efficacy in treating fibromyalgia pain. The lack of continued research on this seems to be almost entirely due to social pressure. (People lose their minds when you talk about women and testosterone, or men and estrogen.)

It’s hard not to wonder if environmental toxins affecting the testosterone levels of men are also contributing to the rise of health issues in women, especially autoimmune conditions, fibromyalgia/CFS, obesity, depression, etc.

In other words, women might be the canaries in the coal mine for systemic problems arising from environmental endocrine disruptors.

Two zip tie guys, one of whom was a retired Lt. Col. in the Air Force, and there’s video of a large group of men with apparent training and in matching tactical gear moving through the crowd towards the Capitol. One of them has an OathTakers shirt.

These were militia.

They stopped being protestors the second they stormed the capitol looking to kill or kidnap elected officials. They’re insurrectionists, and being charged as such.

I said as much below, and got downvoted for it. Open carry states are in a different position entirely, though I’m not sure any state police department wants to deal with mass arrests of armed criminals. If they show up in Albany armed, for example, they’re already breaking the law. This could get very ugly.

Open carry states might have a rough time.

ETA: maybe a better way to phrase this would be to contrast between open carry states and restricted carry states. IANAL, but in NYS, for example, my understanding is that these people would be breaking the law the second they marched on Albany openly carrying firearms.

ETA2: Downvotes for pointing out reality?

Thanks! I would love to find a copy of that. The Third Man is just...gutting.

Your link 404s

Oh wow. What edition is that?

> Furthermore, granular targeting is no longer the way to scale on Facebook.

Can you elaborate on this? I’m not sure I understand what the alternative is.

“ More than 425 of the US Fortune 500 All ten of the top ten US telecommunications companies All five branches of the US Military The US Pentagon, State Department, NASA, NSA, Postal Service, NOAA, Department of Justice, and the Office of the President of the United States All five of the top five US accounting firms”

What’s the opposite of security through obscurity?

I don’t think this is accurate. People are often frightened of unlikely things so long as they feel they can do something about it. But when a threat seems incomprehensible and they feel powerless to do anything about it (at least partially bc they do not understand it), they will shut it out and shut down rather than confront it, because it overwhelms their ability to cope with it emotionally and paralyzes them.

Incomprehensibility and powerlessness are overwhelming emotions. They flood the nervous system, so people shut them out in order to be able to continue to function on a daily basis. It’s the same reason why people continue to ignore climate change.

It’s not a rational problem, or a probabilistic one. It’s a problem of emotion. It’s a trauma problem.

Facebook can’t be regulated into the ground and then sued into a fine dust fast enough.

It is really hard to overstate the ambient anger out there at a general sense of exploitation. FB have made themselves a lightning rod for that anger.

Couldn’t happen to a more exploitive, manipulative company.

Why would RBC even expose themselves to this liability? What was the point?

With every single one of these companies I am...baffled, that anyone thought this was a good idea, but in this situation especially it makes zero sense. All that liability for what possible upside?

Wondering if this was true for girls as well as boys. Boys tend to be diagnosed at higher rates, though the prevalence is — now — understood to be the same. For years girls and women went undiagnosed with both conditions. It was only after Van der Kolk characterized PTSD in male veterans that he noticed his female patients — who had never been to war, but were subject to many other kinds of abuse - exhibited similar symptoms.

We’re still learning about how different kinds of trauma effect the neuroendocrine system, and gender bias makes it harder to study. I’m very much hoping those biases can be corrected in future medical research (and indeed, I know many younger researchers are acutely aware of the problem and are working to rectify it).

But you also see this in cases of developmental trauma / CPTSD. There is some relation between the two conditions, but it is certainly not simple.

Because they aren’t the canaries at all. Instead they volunteer their kids (and the kids who interact with their kids) as the canaries.

It’s also the explanation for noob gains (getting much, much stronger in the first 6 months of lifting or so, then tapering off as your ability to recruit muscle catches up with the muscle you already have). If you’ve ever lifted, the feeling of learning to use your body more efficiently is pretty obvious.