thu2111

BTW the EU sucks at peace and settling disputes. If it was good at the whole "peace in Europe" thing it wouldn't be constantly rolling boulders down the hill at the UK and Switzerland but rather, find ways to work amicably with them as productively as possible. It doesn't of course, it just threatens them and tries to force them into the EU's power structures regardless of popularity or the creation of resentment, which is exactly why the "ultra-right" as you put it (lol) is constantly gaining ground. Someone has to care what voters think, after all.

Deep Mind is best understood as the following bet: if we can train an AI that can learn from "its environment" and do the sort of things a human would do in that situation, then we have achieved AGI and from that ... business ... will follow. Hence their focus on video games as a training environment.

This sounds intuitive but is actually a very agent-centric viewpoint and most AI doesn't resemble this type of thing at all. Most AI deployed so far doesn't have anything resembling an environment, doesn't have any kind of nexus of agency and doesn't need to actively make decisions that then feed back to its own learning, only make probabilistic predictions. And in fact you often don't want an ML model to train on the outcomes of its own decisions.

DLR safety - aren't you agreeing with me? The DLR is not perfectly safe but in reality people accept it. Nobody is clamouring in London for the DLR to be shut down on the grounds that it's a death trap. London society has made its peace with the level of safety the DLR provides. Would more safety be nice, of course. Is it actually a hard requirement that blocks other upgrade projects? That's not at all clear and the argument you're making here is the same circular one the article makes - automation upgrades require safety upgrades because the regulator (+other undefined people) say they require safety upgrades, and the regulator says it requires safety upgrades because automation requires safety upgrades. But the link between these things seems rather brittle.

Fortunately, again, one more time. You do not need scientific studies to see the truth here. The goal of mask mandates was to change case curves. That was their only justification. In a large number of places mask mandates were added or removed without the case graphs changing. Therefore, they do not work. Everything beyond that is irrelevant and frequently confused, e.g. studies on masks are not relevant to the question of mask mandates.

Firstly, a big deal is made about the need for PEDs. The justification given is vague - essentially that the regulator would require them, because it's now "known" that PEDs are required, and the DLR doesn't have them because, well, really it should but we don't care enough to actually upgrade it. But new stuff must.

This looks like a case of creeping safetyism. If PEDs are really required for the acceptably safe operation of a railway then clearly both the DLR and LU must be considered unsafe, because the number of passenger-on-track or passenger-in-door situations that only a driver can solve seems very small indeed. In fact it's surely the case that platform attendants are better placed to observe these problems as they can easily look along the entire length of even a busy platform, whereas a driver must rely on a mirror. Saying automation "requires" PEDs is a bold statement given the successful and apparently safe operation of the DLR for decades, yet no evidence is provided beyond the opinion of the ORR, which as a regulator is hardly unbiased - they have zero incentive to make automation happen and every incentive not to.

The arguments about strikes also looks superficially reasonable, but I'm not sure it holds on closer inspection. Drivers have a lot of strike power because there are a lot of them and they require a lot of training, so they are impossible to replace as a bloc. Presumably a well automated railway would require only a much smaller number of people in the control room, and those people would require less training, as the software will be carefully checking their inputs and doing the bulk of the work. So if they did decide to strike then you could probably have teams in reserve or call up the manufacturers of the equipment and ask them to send over some of the engineers who built it, to temporarily operate the equipment and train up a new team of control room staff. The striking power would surely be much lower.

Even for physical maintenance staff, yes they can strike, but they can't immediately paralyze a live railway like drivers can. There's a limited amount of time for which a railway can operate without regular maintenance, and if the equipment is already in good condition, it seems likely that the railway can outlast the strikers. Also a lot of physical maintenance is not especially complex to train people on, so alternate workers could be found more easily.

The main reasons the Tube isn't being automated are clearly not that it's some sort of insurmountable challenge, at least not according to this article, but rather than automation has been conflated with general wide-reaching safety and simplification upgrades, based on a dubious argument that drivers are much safer for passengers than any automated system can be. I'm not at all sure that's true.

Mask mandate doesn't mean people actually wore them.

Well, people do wear them, that's been studied quite extensively. Compliance >95% in the studies I've seen. If mask mandates don't affect the data even with the very high levels of compliance seen during COVID times then they will never work, because compliance won't be higher in future.

But even if "not enough" people wore them or didn't wear them 24/7 or whatever, that still means mask mandates failed. People were forced to wear masks a whole lot, in any crowded space, and they had no impact on the data at all. Affecting the data was the only justification for mask mandates, so their failure to do so is fatal to the concept - why they failed might make for an interesting debate, but given how tiny viruses are, how much airflow can occur around masks and that most transmission happens inside homes, care homes and hospitals where mask wearing 24/7 is not practical, their failure is no big shock.

And honestly, you should be ashamed to link to these type of websites. They don't hold up to any kind of scrutiny.

Look in the mirror, my friend. I've linked to examples of actual case curves, which is what matters. Mask mandates aren't intended to affect opinion polls on obscure news sites, they're meant to affect whole countries. They do not. Therefore they have failed.

Nothing the ACLU ever did blew up in their face. People haven't "started dying" because of the rights they defended. Instead they just got taken over by people who are immersed in your worldview and willing to parasitize and destroy any organization they can get their hands on in a belief that people should be ruled by hard-left "experts", who will make them "happy", even if they don't seem to realize it or agree.

Mask mandates don't work. If they did then the removal of masks would have caused a noticeable spike in cases in Texas, to pick just one example of many. The complete uselessness of masks has been "debunked" in the same vein the lab leak theory was "debunked" - a bunch of people asserting that scientists cannot be wrong, even as they say things that are clearly and very obviously wrong. Anyone can see the truth just by looking at government data sets for a while. It is ridiculous that people still aren't learning to think for themselves, even after all that's happened.

Many people have put together the charts with arrows indicating the dates when things changed, for example

https://rationalground.com/mask-charts/

That site is old now but there have been many since.

You can also find plenty of studies saying the same of course, but you can also find studies saying the opposite - academic research has failed on this topic. Fortunately the question in simple, so you don't need any research papers to see the truth: mask mandates do not work because if they worked, we could see it in the graphs, and we can't.

By the way, sociology is nonsense, surely everyone knows that by now. Their papers are usually pseudo scientific.

There was never a mask crisis. Masks don't work, they have never worked, this had been known for a long time partially because the world went through this exact process with the Spanish flu. And scientists knew that which is why they originally said masks don't work.

This all fell apart quickly because they are collectivists at heart and were being lobbied by political forces that wanted something they could tell everyone to do. The WHO actually admitted this to the bbc! Masks seemed like a good fit, so the scientists promptly jumped on board and started saying masks worked. Problem: how to explain their prior position? So they came up with this double layered lie: we said masks didn't work because it was a noble lie to protect healthcare workers.

But it was never the case. All the documents before March 2020 are consistent on this, including the new Fauci emails.

You make comparison to tech workers. Sure, if someone makes a genuine honest mistake then you can argue they should be retained as they won't make that mistake again. But that does require deep and total honesty. If a tech worker caused an outage and then manipulated management for a year to cover up their involvement, there would be no such leniency.

Yes. Obviously you don't put an arsonist in charge of fighting fires, so if this information had come out early last year then he would have lost not only his role much sooner, but also his social status and career. If what's coming out now came out last year, Trump's replacement of him with Scott Atlas would have been more widely supported (maybe), and Biden may not have dared to put him back in his post.

That would have been a huge financial hit. Fauci does very well out of his position. "Very well" might even be an understatement. He is the highest paid federal employee [1], earning more in 2019 alone than the US President. Despite this fact, he has deflected questions about conflicts of interest by laughing it off and saying he has a "government salary", creating the impression he is paid far less than he really is.

Fauci charges between $50,000 and $100,000 per hour for motivational speeches [2].

Despite being theoretically in charge of a crisis situation in which nobody has time to ask how it started, Fauci has found time to write a book called, "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward". He has also appeared on TV more than 300 times [3].

This is not a man who is too busy to investigate basic questions that may have direct relevance to developing treatments for the virus. And given that knowing where it came from would be of immense scientific value yet he has every incentive to cover it up, he is also not a man who should be running things.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...

[2] https://leadingmotivationalspeakers.com/speakers/anthony-fau...

[3] https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-has-chalked-up-300-media-...

The moratorium, referred to officially as a “pause,” specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. It defined gain-of-function very simply and broadly as “research that improves the ability of a pathogen to cause disease.”

But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”

This seemed to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the exemption in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research, and later to avoid notifying the Federal reporting system of her research.

I tend to interpret many as a relative term, meaning "a high number relative to what you're probably expecting". The dictionary is no help here as it just defines many as "a lot", but that in turn is also a relative term.

I think if you want to argue with this point, a better tack would be to argue that the British PM is underpaid and EU staff are what "normal" compensation should look like. Quibbling over whether 10% of them being paid more qualifies as a lot isn't that worthwhile.

The Oversight Board said the initial decision to permanently suspend Mr Trump was "indeterminate and standardless", and that the correct response should be "consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform".

And the first paragraph says:

Donald Trump's ban from Facebook and Instagram has been upheld by Facebook's Oversight Board.

In particular he bent over backwards to carefully spell out that he was not claiming women are worse at programming than men, perhaps because he knew the dangerous liars he was picking a fight with would also lie about his words - which they did, immediately, across the entire media and with vigor. Damore also tried to keep these views inside the company.

Now this guy made very explicitly offensive comments broadcast to the whole world on his blog, which claims that all Jewish people are the same, that by implication they are morally inferior to people whose hearts are not filled with war, and that they should feel guilt and shame about this.

No comparison, indeed.

And it's not really surprising that the target are Jews. In America this doesn't seem to be the case so much, but in Europe when the left engage in racism, it's always against their own countryfolk or Jews. Diversity programs, however they started, long ago became a left wing movement.

Frankly it's a lot more shocking when someone working in diversity does not turn out to be racist or sexist. Those are very rare people indeed. Oddly, I vaguely recalled the Google head of diversity making some sensible comments some years ago, but I don't recognize this name. It seems he's actually just "a" head of diversity, not "the" head.

Facebook's oversight board disagrees. They ruled that Trump's ban was "indeterminate and standardless", and that the correct response should be "consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform".

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56985583

It's quite obvious he broke no actual rules, but it's interesting that Facebook's oversight board is actually willing to say so. Of course, they nonetheless 'allowed' Facebook to continue the ban.

Such requirements are being driven by governments who don't care at all about user convenience, only extending their control over people whilst blaming the private sector for "making" them do it.

And unfortunately the EU loves coming up with reasons to fine tech firms because they managed to ensure there are none in Europe itself, so it looks a lot like free money, to an organization that's desperate for it (huge budget hole now UK has left + fines go straight into the EU spending pot).