Off-topic, but dogs and rage aren't really a healthy (or necessary) combination...
611 karma · joined November 28, 2016
Over at Twitter, the story is the same. Of the company’s nine most senior executives, only four tweet more than once a day on average."
in https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/23/never-get-high...
I've seen this happen some 8 years ago, when the financial "crisis" hit, as the (larger) company that I worked for managed to not only stay afloat, but actually acquire at a very steep discount some of the smaller and more "efficient" competitors that went under as soon as reality diverged from their market assumptions.
Like with drug labs in the jungle, all this cool technology is great for detection but ends up hitting a brick wall of corruption when it comes to actually solving the problem.
Yes, because such "subsidies" would create competition for companies from more developed EU countries, the same countries that drive the acceptance of new EU members. Removing these obstacles crushed local industry, which is why less developed countries ended up with close to zero industrial production after joining the EU (thus starting the social, employment and competitiveness problems most smaller EU nations are facing).
Nevertheless, EU nations keep subsidizing "selected" businesses, especially for big foreign companies outsourcing their operations, using tax benefits.
I don't believe this story concerns citizens fighting for their freedom from opression, it's actually related to private entities fearmongering and spreading falsehoods, and media companies (FB) facilitating their work. Maybe you'd need to have a referendum to be convinced, but I think most people will agree that hate speech and lies are damaging to virtually any society, especially because these tactics are well known throughout history.
Why you are conflating those two issues is beyond me, perhaps even beyond you, but I decline the bait...
The quality, timeliness and enforcement of the laws that establish regulation will determine the outcome.
Current regulation is weak, but society is better off with it than it was without it. A brief look at the history of the US financial system and its "crashes" may shed some light over this, perhaps even demonstrating that, if anything, regulation needs to improve (both in terms of coverage and enforcing).
The point is that this should be regulated and/or disallowed, much in the same way that you (fortunately) can't go on TV to call for violence against specific groups of people or to run false advertising, or, in a developed/civilized country, you'll be facing consequences.
One way of doing this would be for FB and other media to be forced to provide authorities with official (and validated) company information regarding the entities that are using their service for this end, much in the same way as would happen to a company running false advertisements on TV.
This is also, more broadly, something I've been thinking about recently. It feels (to me) like industry knowledge is getting lost somewhere, because you see people trying to reinvent the wheel in a lot of technical areas. One of them is data: there are proven approaches to most problems faced by the average organization, especially when it comes to designing and managing a data platform. Yet, you see people rolling their own approaches/designs/methodologies to basic things like ingestion, ETL and data modelling when the traditional approaches would suffice and would take half the time to implement and one third of the effort to maintain. It's great that people try to innovate, but what I see regularly is more like people trying to solve a solved problem without bothering to educate themselves on how it was solved so far.
"The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the short-time movement, was started by James Deb and had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories transformed working life. The use of child labour was common. The working day could range from 10 to 16 hours for six days a week." in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
A gentle introduction enough to solve basic ignorance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_rights#Labor_Background
You can also look up the fact (and wonder why) that the USA is one of the very few countries in the world that doesn't assure paid vacation time and, right up there with Papua New Guinea and Suriname, is one of the three countries where there's no assured right to parental leave.
It appears that societies at large have a "narrow interest" in not working (for breadcrumbs, mostly) from cradle to grave.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2582668/ , https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/are-antidep... , https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592645/
But the "rest of the world" (meaning mostly the UK in that time period) did have something that was "in demand" in china: opium.
It was the imbalance between imports and exports - china wasn't interested in buying/importing what europeans were selling/exporting - that prompted the uk to start smuggling opium against chinese law, thus paving the way to the opium wars.
To me, this seems more like reasonable regulation than oppression, although some people confuse these concepts, or have a financial interest in conflating personal freedoms with market deregulation.
The german government is asking for Facebook to promptly remove content that is obviously illegal in Germany (and most of the world), like murder videos, hate speech, etc. Sounds reasonable to me.
TV stations in some (most?) European countries can be held legally responsible for the content they air. This is (fortunately) happening right now where I live, where a private TV station is being investigated for repeatedly airing a program where a psychologist spreads hate speech and fake science like "people who use marijuana have gay sex" and "gipsies don't work and live off the rest of us"; the person's professional license has been revoked as a consequence, so the TV station are being held responsible for airing blatantly illegal content by a disaccredited "psychologist".
That's why media needs basic regulation, IMO.
After reporting numerous posts for hate speech and personal insults has zero, Facebook's response is always "no breach of our terms". But it's a breach of our society's terms, and fortunately we are still (mostly) held to the rule of law.
I'm asking because I'm curious of how job hunting and networking goes for you without LinkedIn.
It's probably the basis of their business model, in order to monetize conversations people have with the chatbot.
It's even more absurd given the fact that conversations between patient and therapist should be guaranteed to be private, otherwise the necessary trust will never be established.
Thinking that a chatbot can do a therapist's job is, for me, either a clear display of massive ignorance, or a deliberate attempt to make a buck off people that can't afford proper therapy.
Psychological therapy focuses (not only, but mostly) on basic aspects of humanity: feelings and reasoning, and the actions that transpire from these.
Everything is important in such an engagement: the language used, the topics discussed, the best approach to a specific topic. And all of these depend on who the patient is (his feelings, outlook over life, language used to express these), but also on how the therapist reads/understands the patient and acts/dialogues over this.
I can't see how someone can honestly think this is something a chatbot can do, how could a piece of software reason over what the person is saying and feeling. But I think it's a well established fact that therapy can actually be nefarious or even dangerous if done improperly.
Someone certainly stands to gain from it and it certainly isn't society at large, as you can easily grasp from the results on the "war on drugs"... [3]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Arrests_and_incar...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture
I also wonder if this person procured authorization from the parties involved before publishing their e-mail responses on the Web, especially given the fact that it's rather easy to identify some of these (unwittingly?) "challenge participants"...
Another perspective would be to check the nationality of the largest weapons manufacturers, 6 US companies in the Top 10, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companies_by_arms_sales
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry#World.27s_larges...
If you think a minute about that sentence, I think you'll realize that that depends on where those engineers live.
100K€ can allow 2-3 people to quit their jobs to work (for a year on low pay) on the features requested by their paying customers, or hiring an offshoring firm to build what they can't, or just having money to apply for government grants or cover real-world business expenses (provisional patents, technical infrastructure, lawyers, accountants, promotion).