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Braggadocious

64 karma · joined October 31, 2019

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Braggadocious··on Illegal Pot Grows in America's Public Forests Are Poisoning Wildlife and Water
One more reason for me to stop smoking pot.
Braggadocious··on Uber CEO calls Saudi murder of Khashoggi “a mistake,” scrambles to backtrack
You dont know, maybe the Saudi Royal Prince had a couple of drinks with his head of security, maybe said a few things under the influence. The head of security also had a few drinks, made a few drunk dials. You know how it is to be a Royal Prince, shit happens.
Braggadocious··on AI-generated fake content could unleash a virtual arms race
One key thing here is that the sheer quantity of deepfake content will proliferate exponentially quicker than anything user-generated, and continue to be generated faster, and faster, faster, and faster... on all levels, articles, media, AI will be taught to program and create its own websites and social media and apps etc. So while users may be able to tell what fake is from real (although I doubt it since a decent chunk of the population can't even tell what's fake and real now) the amount of BS everyone will have to sift through online will be insurmountable. You'll have AI sifting through the trash for you, which means your feeds and search rankings will be more, and more contrived and curated with less and less feedback from you or other users. THere was a time when exploration of the internet and discovery of websites was a natural experience. There were no ads giving everyone the same five websites for everything, the same solution for every problem. If people had a question, or needed a solution for something, they had to find it themselves and so the function of social media, message boards, google, etc was that everyone on the internet was in the process of finding their own way, their own solutions. So you'd find crazy inventive solutions and websites for things. That's been disappearing slowly. Once 99.9999999% of the content on the internet is AI created, that experience will never come back. It begs the question: what is the innate value of the internet and what would have to be lost for everyone to stop using it?

Maybe someone will create an amish version of the internet whereby every user must be verified as human by another human who was verified by another human etc. before they can log on, and everything on it was user generated, and user programmed, etc.

Braggadocious··on The U.S. military, algorithmic warfare, and big tech
It's society deciding who breeds and who doesn't. It's a belief that's existed since Francis Galton that we can quantify the traits of humans, and that, like Gregor Mendel controlled the color of flowers, we can quantify and control those human traits.
Braggadocious··on When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals
The progressive era was between the start of the industrial revolution and the start of WWII.

>even white racists don't tend to think white people are all great.

You are so committed to this modern liberal partisan revisionist historiography that you are willing to admit the narrative doesn't make any sense, and yet equally willing to keep at it. That's commitment.

Irish, Italians, russians, and other "inferior" whites were always considered white. "White" has never and will never be the barrier to entry into this country or into the american hierarchy. Looks, charm, stature, sharpness of mind, focus on meaningful pursuits like work, not being too interested in "meaningless pursuits" like art and music. Not being promiscuous, no criminality, no epilepsy, no "feeble-mindedness" or imbecility. This is what race was about. Virginia aristocracy, the Boston Brahmins etc, were spurred on by the leading science and technology of the day, to believe these attributes were genetically inherited and "selected" by nature, which meant they could also be selected with Mendelism. We were not interested in a "white race." Since race was something you could control, we were interested in a "superior american germplasm" a genepool of the best of the best while the rest were sterilized, aborted, deported, or imprisoned in jails, asylums, or reservations. American eugenicists were interested in "building a race." A concept Hitler adopted and was quoted talking about fairly often.

Racism was not white vs black. Its nowhere near that simple

Braggadocious··on When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals
California sterilized more Americans under the eugenics movement than any other state. Virginia is second. This was not a small movement. I suggest reading the book "Imbeciles" by Adam Cohen. Most historical societies downplay a lot of what happened, so you can find things on wikipedia but to get a full picture, books are better. I'm right now looking to find what exactly the eugenics curriculum was at UC Berkeley and Stanford since it was an entire area of study at many universities at the time.
Braggadocious··on When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals
I respect your decision to be completely and utterly wrong. The progressive movement was the movement of eugenics. We were going to improve the human race through science, technology, and industrialization. Rockefeller Foundation funded eugenics research. Carnegie and Stanford created the scientific studies that would help support hundreds of new eugenics laws. UC Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, etc would teach eugenics to students. We wiped the history clean of all this during WWII, but if you do some keen wikipedia'ing, or go oldschool and read some books, it's all there for you.

And no, there was no group of white people saying white people are all great, stick together, etc. That wouldnt happen until the 60's and 70's, after eugenics was taboo.

Braggadocious··on When America Tried to Deport Its Radicals
>“to restrict citizenship by birth within the United States to the children of parents who are of a race which is eligible for citizenship”—i.e., whites

White was also not considered a race in the 20's. There were Nordics, Jews, Irish, Eastern Europeans, and Southern Europeans. American eugenicists also were very much into "building" a race. They would have family breed competitions at fairs where families would compete like dogs or livestock for who were the best breeding stock. It wasnt a white vs colored, it was a tall, intelligent, hard-working, disease-free, group of mostly northern europeans vs anyone short, stalky, diseased, epileptic, mentally deficient, criminal, promiscuous, obsessed with art, etc. For instance, Irish were considered a problem because they didnt work hard, were obsessed with art and music, were short, and susceptible to tuberculosis. Mind you, this is not scientific fact, this is just the nonsense they spouted at the time. They also believed in a thing called "Germplasm" which roughly translated to gene pool, but of course even today we're not exactly clear on what's genetically inheritable and what isnt.

I should also mention, this is the deeply disturbing origin of the progressive movement in america. Using what they thought was superior scientific understanding of the natural world, the IQ test, birth control, the gifted student program, the use of performance metrics in school and workplaces to justify glass ceilings, firings, mass deportation, and mass sterilizations of anyone deemed deficient in any way by society. The work americans did to create a legal framework for eugenics would be borrowed by the Nazis to create their own legal framework for the deportation and final solution of the jews.

Braggadocious··on ‘Sexual’ use of eggplant and peach emojis banned on Facebook, Instagram
Puritans wouldnt let kids be marketed to, at all.
Braggadocious··on AT&T to pay $60M over U.S. allegations it lied in 'unlimited data' pledge
A refund for anyone affected and asks for one. At $100/mo, 60 million dollars translates to 25,000 pay periods. AT&T has 25 million subscribers. I think its fair to say they got away with lying here.
Braggadocious··on Googlers Are Protesting Company’s Deals with Big Oil
Not just google but there's a significant market across silicon valley for employees who don't have so many ethical dilemmas, if any. For instance,there are employers partnering with specific coding bootcamps that develop a complete personality/IQ overview on each of their students before they graduate which can be used later by employers. It also helps bootcamps predict which of their potential graduates will be more likely to remain employed and kick out students who are likely to have problems obtaining or holding jobs BEFORE they graduate and affect their job placement statistics.
Braggadocious··on Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead
Tech companies aren't regulated at all. Nobody knows how to regulate them. They're also afraid of making google and other american tech giants noncompetitive with entirely unregulated chinese companies all vyying for AI/quantum computing supremacy.
Braggadocious··on ‘Sexual’ use of eggplant and peach emojis banned on Facebook, Instagram
It's not puritanism. They're trying to get younger and younger audiences hooked on facebook and instagram without their parents worrying too much about unknown forces corrupting their kids.
Braggadocious··on Zuckerberg doubles down on Facebook political ads policy after Twitter ban
I would argue facebook isn't a 100% opt in service at all. When political advertising on facebook won Trump the election, that changed the global landscape for everyone, regardless whether they were on facebook or not. It's like saying the automotive industry or the oil industry are a 100% opt in service, so why regulate them either? Facebook has as much of a tailpipe as any other commercial enterprise with effects felt by everyone.
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