gabbygab

It's part of his PR campaign. His political team and the PR firms he hired probably did a lot of research and polling and decided this was a great way to appeal to younger voters.

Politics is all about image and appeal. And it's not just Beto. Every politician from Trump to Beto plays this game. People vote on their image of you rather than who you really are. I think Black Mirror had a great episode on how image and messaging defines a political campaign.

It's not just Germany. It's human nature. Look at the current media and political environment in the US. People with influence want to push us towards fascism or its equally aborrent flip-side - socialiam. And people are naturally drawn to it. There is an excellent book called "Escape From Freedom" by erich fromm which deals with people and their relationship with authority.

No powerful authoritarian countries except for former authoritarian european colonial powers and their former slave colonies?

You act like "just the commonwealth, the EU and nordic" is anything good. The history of the british empire ( aka the commonwealth ) is as horrible as any in human history. Not anything humanity should be aspiring to. And the ICC represents western european domination of the world. That's something I as an american abhor and reject.

The US should be prosecuting our own war criminals. Unfortunately, we haven't been doing a good job of it. But lets not pretend the ICC or the EU is any better. How many EU war criminals have the EU or ICC prosecuted? None.

Most of humanity ( 70% I think ) has rejected the ICC. The world has spoken regardless of what europeans think or want.

It surprises me that so many here are praising or even envying inuit parents and their their child raising habits when suicide rates, depression and substance abuse amongs inuits and their children are so high?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/inuit-suicidal-thoughts...

Maybe NPRs staff should have look at their own article.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/04/21/4748479...

I wish we'd stop fetishizing cultures and start giving people a more realistic and broad perspective of cultures, even if it doesn't align with our agenda. The grass isn't always greener on the side.

Also, we have been teaching kids to "control their anger" for decades now. I wonder if that has anything to do with the rising suicide rates in the US.

There is a world of difference between being an investor of a startup and having your money/property with a company. The former is an owner and the latter is a customer. Also, I find it odd that the top two comments are the same "over his head" and "fair punishment".

Why compare a broad category like arts with narrow category like agriculture?

Why not compare something general like arts and with something general like food? Could it be because the contribution of the food industry dwarfs the arts industry? Or compare something specific like "instrument market" with something specific like agriculture?

Also, isn't contribution defined by how we arbitrarily choose to measure it? Do we ( or should we ) assign the value or portion of the value of the goods transported to the transportation system?

Pretty much every political or corporate sensitive topic has heavy bias. Even biology related topics are subject to external pressure from journalists, politicians and activists. There have been huge fights over how fetus, gender, sex, etc are defined on wikipedia.

And it isn't just wikipedia, it's all of social media and pretty much all of the internet. From silly nonsense like movie reviews to serious matter like war footage, if it has political or financial impact, it is subject to heavy censorship and bias.

That's a bit extreme to call "anti-vax" as a "terrorist organization" "proliferating plagues". This is why we are having problems having a sensible debate in this country. Every side paints the other side as extremists.

It is censorship. Just not government censorship. I wish people would stop trying to defend censorship with that trope. They have a legal right to sell what they want on their platform but that doesn't mean it's right. Especially when Amazon has turned itself into a near monopoly.

And considering their humble and rather "anti-censorship" beginnings, it's rather disappointing to see what amazon has become. Seems like another case of you die a hero or you live long enough to be a villian.

Probably because they are the two most proximate advanced nations to much of siberia where these mammoths are found. Also, korean and japanese universities might have scientific funding and research agreements with their russian counterparts.

30% is a significant drop. It's really unheard of. MySpace and Digg didn't have such ridiculous drops.

And keep in mind that this could be the start of an overall downward trend. If 30% leave, then activity on the platform crumbles. Some of the remaining users notice the decline in activity and so they leave. Rinse, repeat. Once it reaches a critical mass, you can't stop the decline and tumblr is finished.

Or it could be a temperory decline and a new plateau is reached where tumblr can survive at.

It's about the media and political actors getting control over the lucrative and politically important social media platforms.

It's not just facebook. Google, Twitter and Reddit have also faced tremendous media pressure. Facebook gets most of the attention because they are by far the largest social media player.

For all the talk about how powerful tech companies are, traditional media is proving they are no slouches. Of course traditional media has far greater political backing so you could say they have an unfair advantage.

All we can do is have ourselves some popcorn and watch the entertainment. One thing that perplexes me is why the social media companies don't band together and help each other from these politically motivated attacks. There is strength in numbers and they'd be able to fend off these attacks better if they acted together. Maybe the tech environment is just too competitive for that?

That seems a bit deceptive by the researchers. I don't think anyone is saying "short term unemployment" leads to opioids. I think most people assume long term unemployment or lack of long term opportunities lead to hopelessness and drug use.

Certainly there is a difference between I got laid off from Company A and it took be 3 months to land a job at Company B and the only major employer in my area shut down and I have no real prospects.

I may be mistaken, but isn't "lack of participation in the labor force" equivalent to long term unemployment rather than short term unemployment?

Isn't the question whether there is a causative relation between "long term unemployment" and "opioid use"? Short-term unemployment has no bearing on the issue.

As a vegan, you depend on large corporations and the modern industrial society to exist. So it's strange to say you hate large corporations. A vegan lifestyle isn't one that you could maintain without international trade and industrialized life. Without global trade, oil, lab research, pharma companies, etc, you couldn't survive as a vegan. So I don't understand why you hate large corporations.

It's understandable that every parent wants the best for their children and wants to give them a leg up in life and will do almost anything help their children. It's human nature that every parent appreciates and you can't fault them for that. But bribing and cheating isn't fair to other parents and their children.

But then neither is legacy preference of alumni's children. Or giving special treatment to large donors. Or a slew of other preferential admission policies.

How does one even start to fix this? It's structural and natural. The longer you live, the more you realize life isn't ideal. Meritocracy and fairness are wonderful ideals but ultimately impractical and unrealistic. Or maybe we just haven't evolved to that stage in human development?

I recently watched Forrest Gump and this story reminded me of Gump's mother trading sexual favors for school admission for her son. Was that ethical or even legal? I imagine we could argue about it forever and never come to a satisfactory conclusion.

It is censorship. It isn't government backed and hence legal, but it is by definition censorship.

Telling people to divest from facebook is as helpful as telling a chinese citizen to leave china if they don't like government censorship. Especially if facebook becomes entrenched and monopolistic. Also, considering facebook has more power and reach than almost every country in the world, perhaps it's time to think about censorship and corporate power.

After all, government censorship was the norm until we decided that governments have gotten too powerful to allow to exist unchecked. Perhaps it's time to think of large corporations in the same manner.

We aren't talking about objective empirical science. We are talking about partial, subjective and biased media.

NewsGuard was created by media insiders with funding from media insider foundations. There is most definitely cause for worry there. Would you say china's media "experts" should control what the chinese citizens see? Would you say the same about russia, europe or anywhere in the world?

Blind appeal to authority is just as bad as blindly ignoring authority. I'm not saying I have the answers here. I don't know what the solution is. But I'm certain either extreme is bad for society.

Good point. It's always possible that a paradigm shift can change the culture and open up the landscape to paid services. But from a purely anecdotal perspective I'm not seeing the paradigm shift. Instead, I'm seeing the opposite. People are made aware of the privacy violation and data collection and almost welcome it. They don't care if they are constantly monitored as long as they can find the nearest starbucks on their smartphones. Just my experience. but I'd welcome paid services and simply more competition. The centralization and domination of tech spaces by a handful of companies is something we all should be worried about.

This isn't a new idea and though it is interesting and has good intentions, it doesn't solve the problem. As others have pointed out, this will encourage more data collection and less privacy. The exact opposite of what we want. Also, the users are already paid with free service.

The problem is that people value the free service more than their data. And companies value the data more than they value the service.

The tech and hacker community might value our data and privacy more than the service, but that's clearly not the case with most people.

Imagine if there was a company FaceTome that provides the exact same service FaceBook does. But FaceTome charged you a dollar for month and collect no data while FaceBook charges you nothing but collects your data. I guarantee you that most people would use FaceBook and FaceTome will go out of business as most people simply don't care about their data or privacy.

The $200 billion gaddafi wealth was part of the psy-op to take down gaddafi a few years ago. I remember seeing it all over social media and the news before gaddafi was taken out.

Interestingly enough, guess who else has $200 billion?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/20...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/31/financier-bill-browder-says-...

I'm sure they did a study to determine what wealth value was believable and anger inducing? Was $100 billion too low for people to care and $300 billion too high for anyone to take seriously? It'll be interesting to find ou thow they settled on $200 billion.

If I was maduro, I'd look for places to hide if the psy-ops start to mention his $200 billion or starts to focus on his wealth.

"But he is by no means the richest man of all time. That title belongs to Mansa Musa, the 14th Century West African ruler who was so rich his generous handouts wrecked an entire country's economy."

How can anyone, let alone the BBC, make this claim? There aren't any records or any legitimate evidence to seriously compare wealth between eras. But even without records, we can safely say that mansa musa wasn't anywhere near the richest man in the 14th century where the khanates of the mongol empire, the holy roman empire, ottoman empire, etc reigned supreme.

Why make a claim as if it was a statement of fact when it is a conjecture at best?

And is a website called "Celebrity Net Worth" really anything that the BBC should be sourcing? What's the point of this article? It's not news. It's not history. Why did I spend a few minutes reading this article?

The first time I heard of mansa musa was years ago on reddit's TIL, but even there, it was ridiculed as being clickbait nonsense. Now the BBC is at it?