Forum Replies Created
- Discussion
-
Ha ha ha (LoL):
They also apologized to Australia and wished the country good luck in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.
You are right – but, surprisingly, they don’t get snow in Paris:
December and January see an average of 16 or 17 wet days each. The weather is generally very similar to that found in the UK. Snow is sometimes seen, though it is uncommon. When snow does fall, Paris looks truly beautiful, as indeed it does on any clear crisp winter’s day.
I don’t either – every once in a while I will hear some of Rush Limbaugh when it comes on after something else I was listening to; but he’s just getting worse and worse – I “just say no” and turn it off.
Also see this New Republic article about “click farms:”
The Bot Bubble – How click farms have inflated social media currency
Google “buy Facebook likes” and you’ll see how easy it is to purchase black-market influence on the Internet: 1,000 Facebook likes for $29.99; 1,000 Twitter followers for $12; or any other type of fake social media credential, from YouTube views to Pinterest followers to SoundCloud plays. Social media is now the engine of the Internet, but that engine is running on some pretty suspect fuel.
Celebrities—and more minor personalities, like bloggers trying to get endorsement deals—have increasingly found their value measured in Facebook fans and Twitter followers, the payments they receive proportionate to their social media clout. Khloé Kardashian reportedly earns around $13,000 every time she tweets things like, “Want to know how Old Navy makes your butt look scary good?” to her 13.6 million followers. Politicians desire large followings for obvious reasons. Even ordinary people have discovered perks to having an extensive social media presence. Some employers, for instance, now require social media savvy for jobs in marketing, PR, or tech. All these logical incentives aside, the imperatives are not always rational. A growing body of research has begun to unpack the envy and insecurity that social media can generate—the pernicious sense that your friends are gaining Twitter followers much faster than you.
To help companies, celebrities, and everyday people boost their social media standing, onliners set up Internet stores—“click farms”—where customers can buy social media influence. Click farms can be found across the globe, but are most commonly based in the developing world.
But the stakes are much larger than pocket money. Researchers estimate that the market for fake Twitter followers was worth between $40 million and $360 million in 2013, and that the market for Facebook spam was worth $87 million to $390 million. Italian Internet security researcher Andrea Stroppa has suggested that the market for fake Facebook likes could exceed even that. International corporations like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, and Louis Vuitton have all been accused of employing click farms, and celebrities such as 50 Cent, Paris Hilton, and LeAnn Rimes, have been implicated in buying fake followers.
Oh No! More Global Warming!
Isn’t this amazing?
Yes, and Obama was not necessarily better…
President Obama is criticizing President-elect Donald Trump for failing to attend what The Post calls “the most exclusive, and arguably most important, daily meeting in Washington” — the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) — warning his successor that without the daily intelligence brief, “you are flying blind.”
This coming from the same person who skipped more than half of his daily intelligence briefings in his first term. As I reported in this space in 2012, during his first 1,225 days in office, Obama attended his daily meeting to discuss the PDB just 536 times — an attendance record of 43.8 percent. In 2011 and the first half of 2012, his attendance dropped even lower, to just over 38 percent of the time.
Interestingly, New Hampshire has been able to achieve this ranking with a 0% state income tax rate, no sales tax, and no capital gains tax. The state does have a 5% tax on interest and dividends earned, but clearly the state is very attractive from a tax standpoint. With low taxes, low unemployment, a highly educated population, and access to great healthcare, New Hampshire is clearly a favorable choice for businesses looking to establish or relocate their operations. …, it is just an “easy” place to live and work.
I’m glad to see they’re trying to do at least something to lessen the burden, but why aren’t they eliminating the requirement altogether??? Even with the reduced requirement, these restaurants are still being forced to throw away and replace all of their menus… and go through the expense of calculating…
I was recently watching a video about the Berlin wall, in which the narrator was discussing Stalin’s reign. It seems there was once a meeting at which someone made a tribute to Stalin and the audience began a standing ovation and applause. Then, aware they were being watched, nobody dared stop — the applause went on for a minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, ten minutes. Finally, after eleven full minutes, one local farmer stopped and sat down, after which everyone else stopped. Reportedly, that one person was later arrested and executed. And Stalin was not even present.
I’m not making any comparisons, I’m “just sayin…”
Hard to believe that this was so long ago:
“Mr. Gorbachev – tear down this wall.” – Ronald Reagan, Berlin, 1987
Yahoo Finance sez:
Let’s take a step back and assess the situation. The stock market isn’t crashing — not yet, anyway. In fact, even after this week’s ugly market action, the Dow and the S&P 500 are both still positive for the year by more than 3% each and are up by more than 20% since the beginning of 2017. All we’ve really done is lost the past few weeks of gains. In a nutshell, at this point, it’s a minor market correction, not a crash. We’re just not used to seeing corrections lately.
Quite a move! Ended today down 4.6% – but compared to Black Monday in 1987 when it dropped 22% in one day, it’s not the worst ever. Could we be in for more???
The crash on October 19, 1987, a date that is also known as Black Monday, was the climactic culmination of a market decline that had begun five days before on October 14. The DJIA fell 3.81 percent on October 14, followed by another 4.60 percent drop on Friday, October 16. On Black Monday, the Dow Jones Industrials Average plummeted 508 points, losing 22.6% of its value in one day. The S&P 500 dropped 20.4%, falling from 282.7 to 225.06.
The Crash was the greatest single-day loss that Wall Street had ever suffered in continuous trading up to that point. Between the start of trading on October 14 to the close on October 19, the DJIA lost 760 points, a decline of over 31 percent.
Wow
This is really amazing — truly mind-boggling. Trying to take in and understand all this is overwhelming.
Regardless how much of the campaign was “American” and how much was “Russian”, it’s clear there was a massive effort to game social media and put the Nunes memo squarely on the national agenda—and it worked to an astonishing degree.
We need to understand how computational propaganda & coercive information operations are changing face of US politics. Because they are.
And this, ultimately, is what everyone has been missing in the past 14 months about the use of social media to spread disinformation. Information and psychological operations being conducted on social media — often mischaracterized by the dismissive label “fake news” — are not just about information, but about changing behavior. And they can be surprisingly effective.
“Surprisingly effective,” “changing the face of politics,” “worked to an astonishing degree” — This is ominous…
Interesting — I see that they are facing a different set of constraints by not carrying people:
Nuro expects to face fewer challenges because it doesn’t carry passengers. Nuro’s narrow size may also be helpful when navigating streets and avoiding pedestrians. It could even sacrifice itself to protect a pedestrian by crashing into a parked car or tree, according to Ferguson.
They also claim to be creating, not eliminating, jobs. I wonder how this will work out…
Although a common concern with automation is the replacement of jobs, Ferguson said he doesn’t believe Nuro’s role will have a negative impact on employment.
“We feel by creating this new technology that’s going to enable this last mile delivery, we’re going to be creating new markets and doing things that previously weren’t possible,” Ferguson said. “This is not swapping out jobs with robots. It’s creating new markets. There will definitely be new employment opportunities.”
Well, they’ll have to find a different way to hand out political favors…
The two most famous sets of ears in Washington?
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/photo-highlights-from-obamas-presidency/42/
They also might be tapping them.
See The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/“What a character…!”
