if you say it out who you mean they'll call you a terrorist and lock you up, regardless if you're right. this is why this can't be solved peacefully or via "voting the right people". You essentially have a gulag that is somehow endorsed by all those who are voting either democrat or republican today. And to fix it would mean the current system is being taken down. But this remains unthinkable for most of the deeply propagandized general (US) public.
All republics are democracies. Not all democracies are republics. Some people seem to get confused about this and think that "democracy" means "direct democracy" only, and not any of the various sorts of indirect democracy.
To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is something poli sci departments break their freshmen of every single year.
The colloquial, broad sense of “democracy” is also how political scientists employ the term in most contexts. That is: the people who study this for a living are entirely OK with that usage. If they didn’t use that sense of the word they’d need another one to mean the same thing, because it’s very useful.
> To make this point crystal clear, “correcting” someone with “ackshually the US isn’t a democracy” is ...
it's not a democracy, when a large part of the population is barred from voting, and / or if your idea of a vote is giving power to legal persons more than to natural persons during the voting process.
but fine, let me rephrase, the US is not more a democracy than China, North Korea, Russia, or any other clown state that says "wE aRe dEmoCraCy". Having large swathes of your mostly illiterate and poverty-stricken population so badly brainwashed that they fly their flag in their personal LinkedIn Profile, or pride themselves as "patriots" with a red cap, does not make the country "democratic".
To put it even more bluntly: the way the US sees its population in Appalachia is how the rest of the world views the US.
On the upside it all makes great entertainment (see Sacha Baron Cohen's "Who is America" which first and foremost is a documentary and only secondly is Satire).
I'll do you one better, it's always been a bureaucracy, but even moreso following the end of the 1960s, after the beginning of the "meritocracy" myth within academia. In reality, the incoming well educated migrants (usually European) in the mid 1950s were extremely nepotistic to their own groups, such as the Irish entering Wall street, and hiring only other Irish stockbrokers, or Italian small business owners in New York. They essentially replaced or married the old money and became a noveau riche that's still in the American status quo to this day. There is a new clique of sorts acting as a nepotistic noveau riche, mostly stemming from South or East Asia. Nepotism affects everyone and everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in the United States.
Also the great entertainment has been declining in quality, and it was always funded directly by the U.S. Government and Military to support their ideologies and agendas abroad. The Koreans are recently doing this to great success, and possibly China as well.
I see. I thought you meant "under Trump the US is not a democracy". Which I think is a pretty common opinion. But now I understand you meant "the US has never been a democracy".
> People who advocate paying the higher cost ahead of time to perfectly type the entire data structure AND propose a process to do perform version updates to sync client/server are going to lose most of the time.
that's true. But people also rather argue about security vulnerabilities than getting it right from the get-go. Why spend an extra 15 mins effort during design when you can spend 3 months revisiting the ensuing problem later.
> The culture of AI is imperialist and seeks to expand the kingdom of the machine. The AI
community is well organized and well funded, and its culture fits its dreams: it has high
priests, its greedy businessmen, its canny politicians. The U.S. Department of Defense
is behind it all the way. And like the communists of old, AI scientists believe in their
revolution; the old myths of tragic hubris don’t trouble them at all.
-- Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow (1985, pp. 13–14)
this article feels like the authors were trying to pander to those few people working in AI research telling them how crucial philosophy is "to the future of humanity". When in reality it has always been important long before AI came along and not only for AI but also for anyone working in Tech or any subject in Tech. so it is nothing more than news-jacking (or buzzword jacking) of a topic that has always been important but probably not in the isolated / cherry-picked manner that it is being done (isolating the topic to AI, or Nietzsche).
And the only thing that this article highlights if anything, is that we we should have never defunded the humanities.
> hey, tell me what are some of the recent laws in Germany that make it a crime to call politicians out on social media
in Germany, calling a politician certain derogatory names or mocking them in a way that is considered a "public insult" (and reasonably likely to impair their ability to do their job) can lead to criminal liability under §188 StGB. The scope includes online social media posts. The trend of enforcement appears to be increasing.
Section 188 of the German Criminal Code "insulting public officials" - This section makes it a crime to insult ("Beleidigung"), defame ("Verleumdung" or slander ("Üble Nachrede" a person in public life (politicians at all levels) if the insult is "likely to significantly impair the ability of the person concerned to perform their public duties"
Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) – social media platform liability; It obliges large social-media platforms operating in Germany to remove "clearly illegal" content quickly (within 24 h) and illegal content within 7 days, report transparency, store removed content for 10 weeks. This law creates an environment in which platform-moderation is under pressure. Content that may lead to criminal liability (such as insults under §188) may be more likely to be flagged/removed by platforms.
General "insult" (§185 StGB), "slander" (§186 StGB) and "defamation" (§187 StGB) apply to any person, not just public officials. Conditions and penalties are higher under §188 when public officials are involved. Also, laws on dissemination of personal data (doxing) (§126a StGB) were enacted in 2021. While not specific to insulting politicians, they add further online-speech liabilities
LMAO. Kevin Beaumont roasted that "80% of ransomware attacks are now powered by AI" paper² so hard that MIT appears to have deleted it (link was working as recently as a day ago). The paper was so absurd I burst out laughing at the title. Then when I read their methodology I laughed even harder.
They basically took a sample of ransomware attacks then tried to figure out how many "used AI". Their definition of "used AI" was basically "the threat actors are known to use AI for anything in any capacity".
Their definition of "AI powered" was already dubious. But what's even more hilarious, they never even explained how they concluded that a threat actors was "using AI".
Many of the threat actors they cited as "using AI" were ones I personally tracked as part of my day job and can testify did not use AI.
Furthermore, they claim to have analyzed attacks across 2023-2024, but several ransomware groups they cited as "definitely using AI" died out prior to 2023. One even died out before the first GPT model was released.
While this specific claim and incident is especially egregious, it's only a small part of a growing trend. For a while now, tech companies have been disguising marketing blog posts as academic research, sometimes even publishing it via respected journals.
It's very hard to get people to take cybersecurity seriously when we have a bunch of cracked out corporate marketing bozos posting nonsense "research" to scientific journals.
I'd go back to the office in a heartbeat provided it was an actual office. And not an "open-office" layout, that people are forced to try to concentrate with all the noise and people passing behind them constantly.
The agile treadmill (with PM's breathing down our necks) and features getting planned and delivered in 2 week-sprints, has also reduced our ability to just do something we feel needs getting done. Today you go to work to feed several layers of incompetent managers - there is no room for play, or for creativity. At least in most orgs I know.
I think innovation (or even joy of being at work) needs more than just the office, or people, or a canteen, but an environment that supports it.
Personally, I try to under-promise on what I think I can do every sprint specifically so I can spend more time mentoring more junior engineers, brainstorming random ideas, and working on stuff that nobody has called out as something that needs working on yet.
Basically, I set aside as much time as I can to squeeze in creativity and real engineering work into the job. Otherwise I'd go crazy from the grind of just cranking out deliverables
We have an open office surrounded by "breakout offices". I simply squat in one of the offices (I take most meetings over video chat), as do most of the other principals. I don't think I could do my job in an office if I couldn't have a room to work in most of the time.
As for agile: I've made it clear to my PMs that I generally plan on a quarterly/half year basis and my work and other people's work adheres to that schedule, not weekly sprints (we stay up to date in a slack channel, no standups)
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