Yeah, it was WORSE.

No, it was entirely deliberate, and every party involved knew exactly how much of a lie the "this is Russian disinformation" narrative was, but carefully kept the NY Post's well documented article from being seen (or even searchable!) until after the election. The FBI went to FB and TOLD them to suppress it - you couldn't even link to it in a private message. Twitter knew perfectly well that preventing people from seeing it by shutting down NYP's account was in keeping with the Biden campaign's desperate need to keep the information out of circulation in the weeks before the election.

No, they didn't. They saw a well-written article about material that had been confirmed as legitimate by multiple sources - including people corresponded with in material found on the laptop. The salacious crap highlighting Hunter Biden's idiotic lifestyle wasn't germane (other than we all pay the Secret Service to chase around and clean up after his messes), but the ample documentation of Joe Biden's direct involvement in influence peddling and the movement of millions of dollars of Chinese money into shared Biden accounts, that was (and very much still is) the real issue. And of course Joe Biden had just stood there in a debate and repeated his lie that he had absolutely no knowledge of his son's international entanglements, while his son's own words showed that Joe Biden was knowingly, deliberately lying - he was WELL aware of his son's dealings, personally enjoyed lots of cash from it, helped facilitate it while he was VP, and is very likely in criminal jeopardy from all of that.

All of that was plain from an even casual review of the material on the laptop that third parties (involved in their activities!) confirmed, with documentation. The FBI/DoJ knew that when they sent agents to Facebook to tell them to clamp down on it. Every other media outlet knew about it and - with only a few exceptions - acted in lock step to prevent the Biden family's substantial corruption from being know to voters when it mattered to know it. Multiple polls of people who voted for Biden NOT knowing this now 100% confirmed information show that over 15% of them would have reconsidered and likely changed their votes if they'd know he was looking them in the eye at that debate and lying about it. That would have completely changed the outcome of the election, every other factor not withstanding.

I can't remember which Highlander sequel it was, but obviously doing stuff in the atmosphere doesn't always work. Plus, you can't put some working group of multiple people together, dammit. There can be only ONE!

How is this different than what would come from interviewing a witness about her having been raped, who - in the course of talking about THAT case - says, "Yeah, I know her. I met her when she robbed that store liquor store down on Main Street." Why wouldn't the police follow such a lead?

There's more to it than that. Engineers can romp around in the production system - generally without leaving a trail that could get them in trouble - while doing a LOT more than just looking at web server log files. For example, he pointed out that half the company (some 4000 people) could send tweets from user accounts AS that user, and leave no trail. Multiply egregious stuff like that times dozens of other examples (like .. high level system engineers allowed to work remotely, directly in the production systems, without having to use devices/computers that are patched and up to date, security-wise).

Whew! What a relief that SpaceX is privately owned, then, and NOT publicly traded, right?

Which means abolishing the First Amendment. It guarantees that people can assemble into groups as they see fit (like, say, political parties). It guarantees that you can pay someone to speak on your behalf if they're better at it than you, or can do so on behalf of a larger group in order to be more effective (like, say, lobbyists).

If you think freedom of speech and assembly is no good, all you have to do is get a federal supermajority in the legislature to see your point and kill the entire Bill of Rights (it can't be picked apart on amendment at a time), and then get 37 states to ratify that alteration to the Constitution. Should be no problem.

Or ... you could explore how to get kids a decent education featuring things like critical thinking skills so they aren't as vulnerable to getting their entire world view and their eventual voting patterns set by under- and mal-informed people throughout the media/entertainment complex, to say nothing of higher education's toxicity on this topic.

It's not sweetness you're missing.

It's sourness. Those tomatoes have PLENTY of sweetness, plenty of sugars. They lack the sourness/acidity that would allow you to notice the sweetness.

As an experiment - take some of your bland tomatoes, and add a bit (like a teaspoon) of vinegar or lemon juice to them. Let it gel a bit, wipe them off, and they'll taste sweeter. Cook it into them, and it'll taste super-sweet. Salts can also help, but acid I find is the biggest missing element.

Same thing with bland strawberries, or those horrible red delicious apples. Add a bit of acid/sour to them, get it really into them, and boom - you taste all those sugars.

It's why salad dressing is often acid+fats - the combination comes out sweet on the sugars on the veggies.

It's also why factory farming practices selecting for yield end up with horrible fruit over decades - all that energy goes into producing more sugars for larger fruit, picked earlier. But it's so sweet, it tastes like nothing. Fresh mandarins are getting much worse now for that.

Ryan Fenton

So which is it, .5, .75, or 1 point?

The article also doesn't state what the range started at... the reporting there in general seems like a mess.

Since this is more a general tech nerd site, rather than a industry financial financing nerd site... might want to explain those terms and ranges for folks not focused on needing to borrow at large business levels.

Thanks!

Ryan Fenton

Something tells me that being "highly cited" isn't the only criteria for this. More like "highly cited in a way that aligns with the ideological preferences of the people at Google who tell that how to happen." Which is fine. It's their thing. But they should have the intellectual honesty to proclaim that, proudly.

Because of the way cause and effect work - we could BE that universe, and wouldn't be able to tell.

See - our memories would still be formed at some point, and would have to have been formed, in order to lead back to the past - and in having those memories, we'd still be living the same life as if time were running the other way.

Our lives would be the same.

Reminds me a lot of debates on philosophical zombies. Time being an illusion is a bit like souls being real or not - it's all context that might or might not matter, but doesn't have to be in order to have the world present as we observe it.

Ryan Fenton

Lots of programming tutorials use it as a puzzle game to teach basic programming.

Just don't use the name Wordle (except as prior use, which there is some), and you should be fine.

Unless NYT wants to claim ownership over the very idea - in which case, they've got a LONG haul ahead of them.

Ryan Fenton

The concept is that the world is NOT against the Russian people. They are against their current undemocratic overlords.

The Internet is used for bad uses - but on the people vs. overlords scale, it's still largely balanced towards the people in this scenario. Plenty of weight on the other side, mind you - but also a lot of people able to get around limitations and see a wider world.

And a people cut off from the wider world is a lot less capable of creating change over time.

Part of the problem is that in adapting to a LONG history of despotic regimes is that the people have developed a 'wisdom' of never improving things, and seeing any improvement towards anything they would prefer itself as a curse.

But each new generation does bring its own hope of having a better vision for a future that can be improved - and the internet as imperfect as it is, is part of that process that most modern nations had to go through to get to what we count as 'normal' today.

Ryan Fenton

The entire game of almost every sector - of what has emerged as the 'crypto segment' of the market and discussion spaces - is the 'greater fool' approach to interaction.

Most commonly seen in multi-level marketing and pump-and-dump practices, it's the act of creating a community based on hype and encouraging theory-crafting on when best to get in, and when best to get out of speculation arcs.

Note that this process is inherently self-selecting for a certain kind of 'wisdom' - that is, folks who think they are 'clever' or 'lucky enough to win in high-risk scenarios, with more than a dash of desperation involved in most of the people playing.

That desperation is what makes the high-energy/enthusiasm aspect of these communities self-reinforcing, and very punishing of skepticism and many kinds of consideration, usually with special labels for that kind of talk.

Exactly that selection bias means that members of these communities tend to have a very limited kind of technical acumen. Basically a small pool of shared scripts, a few gurus with specialized knowledge, and a lot of people shopping around for cheap services to scale up those scripts.

The folks with more aptitude have usually found better ways to make more consistent money and never get involved, or the less ethical ones with more skill tend to create automated ways of playing that crowd for access to resources.

So... it's a bit like how a lot of managers end up falling for email scams, after managing technical people and getting overconfident in how 'easy' tech stuff seems.

Spend all your time searching for the greater fool tends to end up with you playing that role.

It's also the core of how most major market crashes play out.

Ryan Fenton