Philosophically even truth is an opinion. There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from. Say you cover news about a certain group but don't cover news from another group. Or you report the facts only in the rhetoric of commonly held norms, like so and so nation committed atrocities, while our nation bombed insurgents backed by so and so and accidentally killed a bunch of children. You always report in frame even if done objectively, otherwise your journalism would be considered inflammatory and you would find yourself without a job. So yes there is pure propaganda, etc, but in general news is propaganda of stuff as they, whoever they may be, want you to know it.
If you want real news, then go to the country they are talking about and observe it for yourself. You will find things a lot more mundane than they are made out to be for the vast majority of people living there, until that passive propaganda gets them bombed or economic sanctions destroy their livelihoods. The justification of which is made in the objective reporting, even if journalists don't want to change they do so every time they report something. It's in the nature of the frame and the rhetoric they are writing from.
> There is no such thing as truth, just a frame that you are objectively reporting from.
Nah.
“If someone tells you that there is no truth, they are telling you not to believe them. So don’t” - Idr who this is a quote from.
The claim that there is no truth is a pointless one. Well, it is pointless to believe*. There may be uses to making the claim.
*exception: if someone can observe your innermost beliefs and is threatening that if you don’t believe it, then they will do something you don’t want, then it could be worthwhile. But that’s true of any belief.
We're just meat bags with terrible sensory perception and reasoning skills. This is the reason I am more open to claims of "no reality" and the like. Plato's cave but no one sees the whole picture
The claim “we cannot ever know anything with absolute perfect certainty” is a quite different statement than “nothing is true”.
Even “we aren’t able to properly conceptualize any true statements” is, while not plausible, is still better than “nothing is true”. (It may be that many things we think are true are fundamentally confused/slightly-nonsensical in ways that we can’t correct by virtue of how our thought processes work, but I don’t consider it plausible that nothing we can believe is entirely true.)
The problem with this argument is that you are presenting truth and falsity as a binary quantity. While it's correct that there is no statement free of bias, it does not follow that all statements are equally biased. Fox news seems pretty darn biased to me. The NY times is less biased, but it's definitely slipped a lot.
Okay, in grey areas there is even more room for telling partial truths. If something objective as a number can lead to a valid disagreement, then what hope do we have for complicated political issues. To me in the end it breaks down into complicated power relations.
We can tell whichever shade of grey that we want to tell that those who are listening to us what to hear in the frame and the rhetoric which appeals to them. Fox news is biased to tell the partial truth of a certain demographic which feels empowered by that rhetoric. If more people believe reality as told by Fox News it gives them more power within the system to get whatever they think it is that they want. Currently they are going after Cuomo, a democrat, in the sidebars there are criticisms of cancel culture.
Yes I know the difference, I was making a point, you can still know what you are saying but not say everything that needs to be said in order to fit the definition, in fact I am arguing that if you are telling a story, and not writing a book, you can't fit that definition.
That's the great thing about math: It doesn't care how sincerely you believe that 6 and 9 are the same number. In other words, the kind of game you're talking about can only go on for so long before cold reality makes itself known.
Everyone is talking around in circles here about what truth means and how journalists should handle bias. Truth in terms of journalism means, is this a story made of facts that would benefit the average citizen without regard to physical and social factors vs is this a story that skews or withholds facts for the benefit of a small group of elites with an outsized influence.
Average citizen of only your country belonging to the majority, I guess that's what you mean, because the content of the news these days could be very dangerous if you are not a citizen of the country doing the reporting. And if you belong to a minority from a country or an ethnicity that is not favoured it could be even more biased against people's perception of you as a person.
That's exactly right and journalistic standards have been a reflection of the zeitgeist, for better or worse. It's never tended to be fair to those who have no power at all. Historically, the fairness and honesty part has skewed more towards the white middle class, shifting to the upper white middle class. The window has been shifting more toward the upper end. It's almost in the realm of competing propaganda.
> The truth is an ideal and when we pursue that ideal, things go well. When we stop pursuing it, we get "post-journalism".
My response to that is that this idea is subterfuge for resolving complicating political problems with propaganda rather than by proper system design. We are in this situation, because propaganda has lost its power over the masses after 100 years. We need better ways to resolve problems that appealing to ideals while a select elite push their agenda on the people who accept it unquestioningly. In many ways our methods of dealing with this has been akin to religion, which also appeals to religious ideals to gloss over real issues and silence them.
I don't think propaganda has lost its power. To me its more powerful than ever. For a different example, look at advertising. It as well is more successful than ever despite people knowing full well what it is, how it works and how it affects them.
The notion that we can replace ideals with "proper systems design" is called Positivism. We've tried it, and variants like Marxism. None of them work.
Humans are limited animals. Enlightenment ideals, which are (yes) secularized religions concepts, are the best we've been able to do so far. Maybe at some point in the future we'll be able to do better but I'm not holding my breath.
Except when some humans which at the time were more backwards than the leaders of the world tried, they were simply shut down using propaganda and force. So as to deem what they were attempting to do completely feeble... mostly due to them being against this secular religion. It was in many ways a religious war in idealized secular terms. Therefore I would argue that no actual attempt has been made, because the power structure likes it this way. Their secular religious clergy does well for themselves in it and they don't want revolutions to change it. Not that it can't be done. No one has been allowed to actually try in good faith.
If you use terabytes of storage on consumer oriented free or nearly free services you are going to get burned sooner or later. Switch to b2 or s3. Your data will be there for a much longer time. b2 costs $5/terabyte. If you don't access this stuff, it's probably at most $10 - $20/mo.
I'm not really looking for archival storage or disaster recovery. After all, the 80MP scans are just low-resolution copies of the originals. I have hard drives for local storage. Yes, if my house burns down I lose the scans and the negatives, but I don't care enough to spend money on it.
The reason I used Google Photos was for one-click sharing. I could make a link, and viewers could pan and zoom and see all the details through a pleasant web interface. S3 doesn't do per-photo per-user access controls, and doesn't have a user interface for sharing or viewing. It's object storage, not photo sharing. As object storage, it's a lot more expensive than negatives in a binder, but about as useful.
It would not be hard maybe a week or two of hacking to make such an interface on top of an object store if you were motivated. A simple php or python app with a time limited key stored in a db of some sort. There though are already open source free apps that do provide user management, etc. If you are looking for an ideal solution, but you have to pay for it with money or time.
It would be a nice exercise but relying on it doesn't make sense to me.
We had to write a text editor in our first semester of our CS undergrad program. I'm not going to use my own text editor in favor of say MS word or Google doc.
Or you can just spin up Nextcloud, point it at your B2 storage and call it a day.
It really is drop dead simple and you also don’t have to host it yourself. Every hosted provider supports external storages so you’re never locked in with them. And since you’re not actually using any of their storage you can stay in their free tier forever.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if you don't access data often, why not just buy an external HDD of say 10TB or such? Yeah, it's possible that data may fail, but is quite unlikely particular if you're not using it often.
Remote storage, redundancy, and portability. At $5/mo/tb. you can still access any of it anytime you want, you just pay for what you actually download.
You're also paying for spatial distance and independence. Redundant backups in the same location can all fail together. See https://youtu.be/OAI8S2houW4?t=285 for one amusing case.
Society, current society also called capitalism, is designed not for greed but constant growth. When your goal is not satisfaction but constant growth and you already are a billion dollar company, then it makes you look at all the shady shit you can still do and get away with in order to grow. These companies don't need to grow, if anything they actually should be growing smaller and sustainable if we actually wanted to engineer towards goodness rather than money. The fact that the rich are getting richer while having absolutely no need for it says to me our prerogatives are wrong and our engineering about business is wrong. A lot of the common laws rules and norms around which business is built are insane.
That is to say that if the economy is a mirror of nature, then businesses should be engineered to die. Not to be a going concern forever. After a certain amount of profit is extracted and life is lived, into the grave they should go. Not just as a result of competition, but as a result of system design.
This would then lead to a more evolutionary world and better distribution of power and resources rather than continuous monopolizing and consolidation. Also a different mentality of you can't take it with you to the grave, rather than infinite mindset. It would be a cyclical mindset about finite things, not infinite things. Corporations want to be people, so engineer them like people and less like machines.
Umm a large crowd descended on the Capitol and people died as a result. There exist militia groups which saw this. The threat is credible and real. You are delusional to think otherwise. The US probably needs to mass arrest those people or break up their movements like they did other nationalist groups like the Black Panthers, who had similar agendas. And pass gun control laws to keep them from having arms with which they would threaten the government.
It seems like there were no guns brought to the Capitol by the rioters, contrary to initial reporting. So to expand the paranoia to those who were calmly hanging out at home with a shotgun in the closet is just a bit extreme.
You could account for billions of years in terms of money. Where as destroying things in a thousand because that is our business horizon is much more likely, and actually it's more like a year or two from current business practices, maybe a decade for long term thinking. If our business horizon was a billion years, then all the money and economic wealth in the world and quality of life indicators, and jobs would be so minuscule as to be a rounding error.
There is no way to avoid another Cold War. A hot war is impossible. I am glad that the Soviet Union ceased to exist. I will be glad with China being contained. I will also be glad in a multi-lateral world where America does not go unchecked and can be held up by others to its ideals.
A hot war is most certainly not impossible. Just because nuclear weapons might be off the table doesn't mean conventional bombs aren't. And frankly, even nuclear weapons might not be off the table fully.
Desperation leads people to do strange things.
China really is a sort of "early 1900s Germany" stage, which is rather frightening.
China is in some ways like pre-WWI Germany in that it does not have an empire and everyone else does so it wants one to. But Chinese are not starving due to sanctions and have not lost a war, etc. Chinese are doing well. China is just flexing its muscle because it can. That is all. Not because it needs to or that it's people are psychologically in fascism mode.
There's also the whole frightening frame of thought that as people who were alive to see nuclear detonations being performed in the 50s/60s continue to die off, as a society we're going to slowly forget what makes nuclear weapons so awesome (in the original definition of the word), and the willpower around their restraint will slowly be eroded away until it's too late.
A hot war is very likely. Why do you think everyone is building armies, weapons and trying to get nuclear toys (Iran). Just look up what triggered world war I and II.
This might be a bit naive but doesn't a cold war by definition imply the possibility of it getting hot?
Or in other words: Isn't a cold war that is impossible to get hot just peace?
Thiel and his ilk are the reason we can't build cool shit anymore. Look at PayPal, horrible outdated interface that is still a kluge with old functionality glued to new functionality because it's just too big to be too concerned, and horrible customer service too. There is so much corruption and profiteering due to monopolization of various industries that this sort of behavior happens, Thiel is the guy who walks away with all his money before shit from his philosophy hits the fan; society being the bag man. Look at Trump who Thiel supported or his general idea of a monopoly. Monopolies are bad, competition and distribution is good. Thiel does not know what he's talking about. The rich can capture all the value, but what happens after that, they continue to capture all the value and don't have to improve or innovate to continue to exist, you can't hold them up to anything because what are you going to do you are locked in.
Do things 10x better he says, and then you will have so much network effect that you can do things 10x worse and people still have a hard time getting rid of you.
China still needs the US and the world still needs China. But not a powerful China that rivals the US and has an extremely authoritarian ideology and is willing to commit genocide of people that have been there for thousands of years.
To gloss over the effect of introduced disease and how the people of time had no understanding of immunity is to present a disingenuous argument.
The treatment of the first people’s was horrible, and still isn’t ideal. But to act like the USA was responsible for everything since 1492, centuries before the USA existed, while ignoring immunity, is to show that no serious debate will be possible.
US should be ready to do for Taiwan what the UK did for Hong Kong, move their best and brightest to US with Visas and path to citizenship if China were to ever take over.
If it happens, it will be quick. And there are vast numbers of very valuable Taiwanese people.
Setting aside the moral difference that the UK fundamentally had no reason to be governing part of China (except the legacy of their empire), whereas Taiwan arguably has every right to govern itself, I don’t think this would provide much relief if China decides to pounce.
If you want real news, then go to the country they are talking about and observe it for yourself. You will find things a lot more mundane than they are made out to be for the vast majority of people living there, until that passive propaganda gets them bombed or economic sanctions destroy their livelihoods. The justification of which is made in the objective reporting, even if journalists don't want to change they do so every time they report something. It's in the nature of the frame and the rhetoric they are writing from.