The honorary degrees I've seen locally aren't necessarily underserved, but it's often about universities tripping over each other to be the one to award the degree. Even without a speech, they get free publicity just from a newly relatively famous person splashing that institution as part of their credentials.

On the contrary, only the US taxes corporations on income earned abroad. American companies are asking for normal treatment rather than special double taxation.

I also don't understand the rationale of taxing citizens who are living and working overseas completely outside US jurisdiction. Requiring overseas spouses of citizens to provide tax info to the US Feds, even if they've never set foot there, seems even weirder.

That said, for US-owned corporations, what's the ethical argument against taxing income earned abroad when owners are in the country of the tax jurisdiction? If most profits of a company come back to owners situated in the US, doesn't not taxing those profits (or at least to the level that they've not been taxed already) create a perverse incentive for US-run companies to shift their operations overseas, not for operational efficiency reasons, but merely to avoid a tax that competing companies which keep their operations in the local area have to pay?

If most shareholders want to live in Ireland or Bermuda or wherever else then maybe it's different, because the profits are staying in the tax jurisdiction where those who benefit from the profits also have to live.

I deleted my Facebook account and so far it's been worthwhile in a limited way, despite some isolation from some friends and organisations who tend to do most things through Facebook because that's where everyone else is. I'm still, however, living in a world where large populations of people are influenced to levels of accuracy that were unprecedented before Facebook entered the scene. This affects how populations interact, how they perceive each others opinions, what they buy or don't buy, how they see each other as threats or otherwise, how they perceive leaders and challengers and governments generally, and (in a democracy) how they vote. It's not that we didn't have an advertising industry before with radio and TV and banners and billboards, but most advertising was public and visible and could be challenged and given context. With social media, and particularly Facebook, advertising can be so targeted and privately linked to personal profiles that it's often not clearly visible to anyone except the person being affected, or outside of groups that are already strongly polarized and unlikely to be objective. Maybe this is inevitable in modern times. There's plenty of arguing to do about what's acceptable, but there's also a strong argument that simply deleting a Facebook account won't change much for the person who deletes it, besides isolate them in a world where so many other people assume you use Facebook, unless large numbers of others also delete their accounts.

Some children are also smokers. That doesn't make it a good idea to give them a kids' product designed to ease them into the addiction without technically breaking laws.

I think it comes down to what you're used to and how you're thinking about what you're trying to do. Grid patterns are great if you have an address and know where you are. They sometimes sacrifice the ability to go efficiently between two important points because there might be no way to move diagonally so you just have to go further. Cities that developed organically often have very easy ways to get between important places, but if you don't know the place then it can be more difficult to work out where things are.

As I read it, the FBI didn't acknowledge having a way to read Signal communications at all. The suspect merely used Signal to communicate with someone they trusted, but who happened to be an FBI informant, and duly informed the FBI.

I haven't had first-hand experience with RMS in this either, but I have noted (for example) that the Ars Technica thread on this is attracting some very different comments about RMS than Slashdot.

Why would you assume that someone who has had first-hand experience would file a police report in an adversarial system which typically causes ongoing stress and re-victimises victims of sexual harassment, abuse, rape, or worse for a long time, and all along with a low chance of achieving any conviction? Why would you assume the victims want to have their names put out there to be paraded in front of a crowd like Slashdot? The alternative option of just doing nothing and coping with it, getting on with life, maybe talking to friends in a safer space as an outlet, makes a classic prisoners' dilemma for the victim.

It's not fair that people get accused of stuff for which they don't always have an adequate chance to defend themselves, but it's also unfair that we have systems which end up creating a big imbalance in favour of perpetrators getting away with certain types of crime.

We live in an era when smart TVs can automatically recognize what you're watching, and TV makers are building nice ad businesses for themselves with all of the data that gets funneled in. But this felt pretty egregious even by today's standards. A random, full-on commercial just popping up in LG's app store? Is there no escape from this stuff? We're just going to cram ads into every corner of a TV's software, huh?

It's not nice, but individuals who care enough will always find ways to block or obfuscate this stuff for themselves, which is what lots of people are already talking about in this thread.

What concerns me more about seeing this stuff is how most people won't avoid it. Most people have more directly important stuff happening in their lives. Ad sellers don't care if a niche group goes out of their way to obfuscate the data collection or block the ads.

Advertising is getting increasingly personal for everyone. Data about people used to be very widely distributed, but marketing is now changing with a very small number of global corporations storing a person's email, getting into the business of watching the physical locations where people go, tracking when and where they spend their money, making the OS which run in the screens that get used to watch media and interact with others. Most or all of this data was collected previously by the banks and maybe satnav manufacturers and ISPs and phone companies and retailers and many other entities, but it was rarely or never collated so clearly against a single personal profile until recently. Then these global corporations place themselves in the industry of selling highly targeted advertising against their massive and intensively profiled user bases.

Ads being broadcast are highly targeted and less visible. Marketers can provably change society's behavior with targeted advertising in ways that simply weren't possible even a decade ago, and the ability to make use of it goes to anyone willing to pay for it. Ads don't have to be widely broadcast TV or radio commercials or giant billboards on the side of the road any more. They can as easily be specific custom messages being shown to specific groups of people whom experts reckon are most likely to respond in the wanted way to that message. It's hard for anyone to challenge ads, or even to have a chance to understand that targeted marketing might have influenced others' behavior or opinions. It's harder to realise that you own behavior might have been influenced because nobody else sees what you've seen, so criticism is less available. We argue against each other in more polarised ways because we're living in more polarised realities from each other. Is there any escape from all of this?

Apparently it's possible, although I expect it's not as simplistic or efficient as simply turning the vial upside down, as this article implies. https://www.stuff.co.nz/nation...

I'm not sure where the study is, but the BBC article links to what seems to be its publicity website . It's not presented very objectively, which isn't to say there's not something to the findings but it'd be helpful to have a presentation enshrouded in less marketing.

For me, one of the big things to take from this is that outdated colonialism, in ways that impose on and take advantage of its global territories, is still alive and well with France. Maybe I'm biased because I grew up in New Zealand in the 1980s when French agents committed a terrorist attack in response to anti-nuclear protests, then France doubled down on threatening to embargo NZ's exports to all of Europe after NZ arrested two French agents and tried to hold them to account.

I think this gets to the real issue, though. Individual fears about being advertised at are really only a minescule issue compared with the modern ability for certain corporations to provably influence whole populations in ways that aren't always obvious, because advertising can be so direct and personally targeted rather than where everyone can see and comment on it, and which were simply not possible until maybe they past decade. We're now all stuck living in this new world whether we choose to avoid the likes of Google or not.

Google doesn't care a jot if an individual resists its collection and collation of data. It knows that 99% of people won't, because most of us have more direct problems and concerns we're busy dealing with. Its business model relies on talking revenue in exchange for manipulating the remaining 99%. Presently it's being sold to whoever wants to pay for it, whether it's for commercial reasons or political reasons or some other reason.

I haven't been following the CDC or whatever wacky consequences might have come from Trump's political appointments, but most expert advice globally in the early stages was that there wasn't enough information about how the virus spread. Advice was urgently needed and the balance of probabilities at the time was, rightly based on existing knowledge, that cloth mask use by non experts was more likely to spread it through infecting hands from faces and so on. The advice wasn't just suggesting people about masks, though. Typical advice still included other recommendations like frequent hand washing and distancing, in part because on balance of probabilities they were most likely to prevent spread.

Since then there have been countless studies building on each other. There's now lots more data which now demonstrates that widespread use of masks DOES make a positive difference in preventing spread.

This is how science works. Just because something is more likely based on available information doesn't make it definitely correct. Once you have more data, though, it becomes possible to narrow things down into more accurate and reliable understandings.

I don't agree with ffkom's line here. NZ's borders are presently and very effectively shut for good strategic reason. It's nothing personal and recent history shows that NZ is definitely not isolationist. If a serious-enough disaster came along then I think potential help would be considered on balance, just as today's press conference confirmed that advice to evacuate took priority over Covid-19 level 2 and 3 restrictions. Also, all these countries send help because they also benefit - not just because of an agreement. U-SAR teams get major experience and training from travelling to and helping in real-time disaster zones which they could never get any other way.

That said, the USA of Feb 2011 still sent a disproportionate amount of help to Christchurch. From memory (I can't immediately find a reference) it also left behind a lot of valuable and expensive hardware for the benefit of NZ's local rescue services generally, I guess because it was inefficient to take it back. The USA is a big and diverse and polarised country which NZ doesn't always agree with and which might sometimes act very differently depending on whatever's happening internally at the time, but I think it's a fair call that on that occasion it really helped NZ.

Advertisers aren't going to pay for ads that are not targeted.

They're sort of targeted, though, in that they're targeted at a person who'd go out of their way to use something like Brave. I'd presume that Brave's own user-base is a reasonably predictable niche demographic, and it's probably at least as enticing for some advertisers as (for example) placing an ad in a magazine that covers some kind of specialist topic.

And maybe that's representative, in a way, of the bigger problem. I go out of my way to take various steps to not be overly tracked around the web. I'll tolerate a bit here and there if I can see good reasons for info to be held about me, but where possible I try to block the obvious wholesale tracking and collection of everything I do. In the overall scheme, though, companies like Google and Facebook that collate massive amounts of highly detailed data on billions of people don't care in the slightest that I take measures to hinder their efforts to profile me specifically. They don't care because they don't need me. They know that probably 99% of their users don't take these measures. Their business models, and the reason for most of their revenue relies on retaining influence over the behavior of that 99% rather than the 1% who are hanging out in this Slashdot discussion.

Being followed around and having data about me collated concerns and annoys me, but nowhere near as much as the concern of now having to live in a world where, increasingly, nearly everyone is having data collated about them on a massive scale... to the point that the whole population can be marketed at in very targeted ways and manipulated for commercial or political or whichever other agenda, to provably change behavior of large numbers of people in ways that have never really been possible up until now.

Of course I would. But that doesn't mean I like the idea of a world where people get mega-rich in questionably ethical ways, where they end up with so much money that they're capable of doing the kinds of things that governments normally do, and then society's priorities end up being shaped by the casual opinions of those benevolent multi-billionaires. They might or mightn't have welfare of the population in mind, and if they have a whim of incompetence without process to vet themselves against expertise then they might be just as likely to set priorities which end up harming everyone as helping everyone.

I appreciate much of what's come out of the Gates Foundation, and yet if it's genuinely good then so much of it is due to luck of money falling into the hands, for arguably dubious reasons, of someone who ended up eventually putting some of it into an optimal place.