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shadowprofile76

90 karma · joined February 12, 2019

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shadowprofile76··on Studying the demise of historic civilisations
Low paying jobs in developing economies have to be considered in the context of existing alternatives. If a Vietnamese rice farmer's son previously had only daily hours of backbreaking labor to look forward to on his father's paddies for what amounts to a dollar worth of earnings per day (only paid when they can finally sell the rice after many weeks of toiling) and then one day American McShoe Factory opens in the nearest city offering 3 dollars a day paid biweekly, this is a move up in the world. He'd willingly redirect his physical capacity for the job and trade it voluntarily for the money. Is this ideal? No, and to the labor market sensibilities of people in developed countries it could be seen as "looting" of workers but in relative terms, it's a previously unavailable, voluntarily chosen improvement for the farmer's son.

Yes, human rights have to be seriously improved in many countries and many companies offering jobs in developing markets really need to clean up their worker rights standards, but on a fundamental level, we can't simply compare a given economic change to our ideal of how things should be (because ideals are not limited by any practical constraints). We have to compare it to existing and previous alternatives.

shadowprofile76··on Studying the demise of historic civilisations
Dammed*.though i'm pretty sure they also partly damned the river's ecosystem with millennia human presence.
shadowprofile76··on Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting
I don't think tagging works for people not on FB, though if anyone else here has seen different, i'd love to hear their two cents. As for tagging of people who were on FB but deactivated their profiles. I've seen tags work before and that;s bad enough because even if you try to leave the social network, people can post images or videos of you and associate your name with them regardless. What shadow profiles have to do with these things I don't honestly know, the social network would keep something like that pretty secret I think.
shadowprofile76··on Facebook won’t let you opt out of its phone number ‘look up’ setting
One major difficulty with leaving Facebook in particular over privacy concerns is that it doesn't really stop the social network from violating your privacy, or letting others do it (often without bad intentions on their part). Aside from its now famous shadow profiles, you've got your friends and family or work/business associates posting things with you in them, photos, videos etc and even naming you (don't think they can tag you though if your profile is shut down). And if you've erased your profile you can't even have the minimal safety of monitoring what gets posted by who, so you can ask them to maybe take it down if it's harmful. We get sucked into FB's network effect in all sorts of ways nowadays if we live any kind of normal social life in a connected society.
shadowprofile76··on The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]
I'm not even a programmer, have not the least bit of technical knowledge about programming and I still found this brilliantly hilarious! Excellent rant..
shadowprofile76··on Exposure to weed killing products increases risk of cancer by 41% – study
Very true on the first point. distribution, allocation and use problems with existing food production for all sorts of reasons (political, economic etc) are the much more immediate issue but as to your second point, the above doesn't disqualify the usefulness of even better crop yields or a need to give the technologies behind them a nuanced defense.These things are a long term investment in human development, and they always have been.
shadowprofile76··on How to fight the surveillance economy
Thanks for the reply and caveat though.
shadowprofile76··on Exposure to weed killing products increases risk of cancer by 41% – study
So, assuming the study is at all accurate (and that's probably very debatable), if your lifetime baseline chance of getting X cancer was 1 in 1500, it's now 1.41 in 1500.. And that if you expose yourself to a sufficient degree to these substances. Pretty mild stuff for using things that can dramatically improve how much crop food we save from damage. These headlines are designed to scare people who are just bad at calculating percentages in different contexts.
shadowprofile76··on How to fight the surveillance economy
If it's not too much trouble which VPN would this be? I know of some that offer crypto payments but a real user recommendation is always welcome.
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