cool, finally we get some real antichristians, christians carrying guns to church....

First off : if this is not news for nerds, news that matters, I frankly would like to know what is. /

Let's count the ways. 1) it is an analysis and critique of the functioning of social media in our world, social media being the premier application of computing technologies in existence today. Social media exists only because of computing technologies, computing technologies being the sum of the physical existence of social media. Not merely computing devices, but also programming, is what renders the conditions of possibility for the existence of such.

2) it is targeted at the premier technology companies in existence, whether by virtue of financial value, number of tech workers, or amount of technology used in their functioning.

3) the deleterious effects of social media around the world and their usefulness as propaganda tools and viral sources of misinformation, not to mention as tools for autocratic regimes to hunt down and murder critics and generally spy and inform on citizens of the world, the world over, cannot be underestimated-there is currently know other known issue in exstence which simultaneously effects so many people in so many different places, with perhaps the exception of climate destruction, which also is at least in part fueled by said tech companies which create and maintain the physical and programmatic existence of social media.

A couple of foot notes:

When "Borat" first came out I hated the sense of humour he exhibited, it boggled my mind that people found him so funny, fast forward 15 years, look at the the state of our electorate and who is sitting in the White House and it all makes sense, I have, thanks to this speech, come to a much greater appreciation of his comedy, given that he was primarily, by his own admission, simply lampooning his own audience-comedy only works when it pushes the bounds of embarrasement, laughter being the release from ones own self-embarassment. I have a much deeper apppreciation now of what he was trying and succeeding in doing.

Secondly I remeber crying inside the first time I saw an advertisement on the interenet, by the time "Al Gore invented the internet", the internet that I knew and loved was already being buried and replaced by the commerical shit we see today. What Sacha decries about these Silicon Six is exactly this development, or rather perversion, the innate wish of so many to share with one another, has been marshalled and turned into an infiinite money making machine, our desire to share and know *IS* their commercial interest, they have become one and the same, which is also why none of them really have any interest in limiting what they publish. There simply is no room left to insinuate that they are not publishers at this point in time and they should be held liable for that which they publish. Since the dawn of the modern era, with the advent of the printing press, the goal of publishers has been distribution, getting their works into the hand of readers around the world in every language imaginable. With the advent of ubiquitous computing devices, most saliently in the form of smartphones, which Android/Google dominates, apps like Facebook and Twitter, and search engines like Google, publishers now have the possibility to reach 2/3 of humanity instantaneously around the world, tracking every click, of everyone all the time.

Granted there has been scurrilous stuff on the internet since it's inception, it used to be you had to look really hard to find it, now this shit is being fed to billions of people in real time with no effort on your part required at all, because Twitter, Facebook and Google automagically serve it up on the page you are visiting without you even having to look. This nightmare is the result of allowing for-profit corporations to utterly surplant the commons and the time has come for this to end.

PCRE?

Not studying something means you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. A smart person who studies something may grasp certain things quicker, may find somethings to be quite intuitive, may not have to struggle as much with certain concepts as some other people do. But without study, "smart" means basically nothing at all.

Now study can take many different forms: some people, usually referred to as autodidacts, study things on their own, absent "formal" study, others study "formally", ie. taking classes where one is taught, and yet others go through the motions of formal study, without actually learning anything, other than regurgitating what they are supposed to know, to sound "smart".

Unfortunately the "smarter" someone is, ie. the quicker they grasp things, the more they tend to be prone to make shallow and superficial judgements, easily dismissing things as obvious, which are not obvious to all, and such smart people rarely fully develop an understanding of things, because who gives a fuck if you can actually articulate to others what is so fucking obvious to you, others are just fucking idiots.....

Nah that's Libya

The idea that you could/should rely on instantaneous, real-time feedback from a software button on a smart phone running an app to control the motion of a moving vehicle, wow, let me count the near infinite number of possible points of failure....

I am not an engineer, but I cannot imagine a real engineer signing off on something with so much likelihood of failing. Perhaps, with a dedicated hardware control, point-to-point communication between controller and vehicle, one might have a prayer of something like this working, except for the unseen two-foot tall toddler walking about between the cars in the parking garage. The reliability simply isn't there for smart phone-cell tower connections, or for apps running on smart phones, or that the smart phone properly polls the touch sensitive screen on the smart phone for pressure.

And I'm not even talking about the drunk asshole wanting to show off his cool toy, who is so impaired as to not notice the little girl looking for her mommy.

"incredible vehicle....the most inspiring thing I've ever scene" sade sumone that kant spael.....

ROFL

Reading comprehension fail, time to go back to the third grade....

Calling this attack by the Houthis on Saudi oil production "terrorism" is the height of hypocrisy. Saudis' are not cowering in terror, the Saudis are not facing starvation or facing the worst cholera outbreak in recorded history. It is the Yemenis who have been terrorized, in part due to the civil war between those in the north and those in the south, but primarily by the hell being reigned upon them by American, British and other European weapons, wielded by Saudi Arabia and the foreign born mercenaries bought and paid for by the United Arab Emirates. The U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia are by far the largest "exporters of terrorism" in that region of world, bought and paid for, in large part, with American taxpayer dollars.

What the Houthis have done is to hit them "where it hurts", their pocketbook

Given the David vs. Goliath general situation, the Houthis have been remarkably restrained towards the Saudis, given that the Saudis, have been reigning terror from above for 6 years now, killing thousands, upon thousands of Yemenis. My heart goes out to the those caught up in this hellacious civil war, by virtue of nothing else of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As for the Saudi leadership, the day when their wealth comes burning down around them, cannot come a moment to soon.

I'll bite. Please spell out exactly what you believe are the "underlying reasons". And don't start with mental illness. Let's hear what those reasons are, let's see if any of those "underlying reasons" are things that we as a a society would be willing to change. My hopes aren't high though, because we, as a society, have failed to address these issues my entire lifetime, solely due to the intransigence of a tiny minority of gun fetishists and a massive multinational weapons industry.

Delusional. The number of people who would be prepared to carry a gun for the sole purpose of taking your gun away from you is a whole lot higher that the "come and take it" variety. Perhaps the greatest freedom that Americans have is the freedom we have to live in our own delusions. Americans are kind of nice that way, we generally have no problem with others living in their own delusional little worlds. That is, till we don't. One delusion is that there is some kind of natural brotherhood amongst gun fanatics, even though you don't know each other, haven't met one another, and have nothing other in common than a fetish about guns, kind of like a foot fetish. Your culture of gun fetishism is exactly as deep as the advertising dollars spent by the weapons manufactures.

You have no principles, for you certainly don't believe that everyone should have a gun. Your revisionist misreading of the constitution is a product of a bad fairy tale taught by people who have no clue about American history. Militias served two purposes in our history- one to slaughter the native Americans who failed to flee the onslaught of settlers in time, and the other, to capture and punish runaway slaves, which later became what we now call the police. At no point in time were militias supposed to defend against the government. What a crock of bullshit. Yet for the all the bs about one defending themselves via guns from the government, you still embrace the States right to murder people, which means any pretense of seeing guns a ways of balancing power vs the government is just that, a pretense. If you had any real interest in limiting the power of government you wouldn't consistently support the death penalty, American foreign wars, or an arms industry which supplies the lions share of weapons in existence to every two-bit dictatorship in the world.

Oh and please do go and quote me the federalist papers, or our founding fathers, as if anyone is stupid enough to believe in the infallibility of these men, men who did not consider native Americans and Africans to even be human beings, men who felt it was their right and privilege to hold ungodly amounts of power over countless human beings, who loathed and detested self rule by the people so much that the actually already existing democracy, which was happening all over the northern colonies, was overthrown by a new federal government which never gave a fuck about people having any say so whatsoever in the actual conditions that determine their lives.

The American so-called revolution, was at best a counter revolution, hoisted by the wealthy and powerful on the masses, who were, and to this day are, utterly powerless, sold to them with the promise of freedom and democracy. The only rights our government has ever cared about are property rights, the only rights that our gun fetishists care about. In fact the current tragedy of the commons is a result of common cause between gun fanatics and our government. And this is the only reason that the our supreme court bought into and championed the insanity of modern gun laws: The governments single highest necessity, is the establishment and maintenance of a monopoly of force, any other group in society with the power of force, which is not subservient to the government, is perceived as a threat by said government. The entire gun culture of the US of A, fellates Uncle Sam daily, particularly those "founding fathers". The real clever part was convincing the gun fanatics that they were serving some kind of patriotic duty against a tyrannical government, all the while, they were merely doing it's bidding....

I do really wonder if we are actually a minority. Given how vocal the reactionaries are one would be inclined to think that they represent some kind of majority, but I suspect it is the same as the moral majority of the 80's, which in fact were never anything other than a immoral minority. If it truly is the case that the majority of college graduates, hated their studies, resent their debts, and only saw college as job prep, maybe it truly is the end of the university. For the life of any institution rests in it's ability to inspire new generations to continue the mission of the institution. For a couple of thousand years people understood that universities were a place for academics, things generally considered useless compared to practical trades, but that these academics were still invaluable for their production of culture. Now where virtually every aspect of culture has become commodified, perhaps there no longer is a place for culture, perhaps the university is already dead.

The expression "educated idiot" is common nowadays, but idiot, which is latin for someone who thinks only of themselves, is precisely that which "higher education" was supposed to transcend, to bring people beyond themselves, to bring forth that which enriches societies and communities, where people learned to appreciate things beyond their personal utility. It seems as if a really large percentage of college graduates were never even exposed to "higher education", and if that's the case then it is an abject failure of our universities, but of course most what call themselves universities today, are simply for profit scams, which are undeserving of the title. Perhaps we have become an idiocracy, such a shame...

And in turn I would park the cab, leave the meter running and call the police to remove this nuisance from my cab. My cab, my service, don't like it, don't use it. Welcome to America. I am not your servant, I drive a cab and provide services to those who want it.

What an entitled asshole.

I would hang a sign in my car stating:
Any Passenger who makes use of Google maps to verify the route that I choose to take, to take you to your destination, shall
immediately be dumped at the curbside and forced to walk, regardless of where that may be. You are free to exit my cab upon
entrance if you do not like my policy.

Well in more civilized countries it is illegal for the police or prosecutors to lie to those they have in their custody. Having spent 15 years living abroad, I was really taken aback by how backwards America's justice system is. I had never been a fan of our justice system before I moved abroad, but then after spending 15 years in Germany, and learning about how their justice system works, I came back to a country, the U.S., which has has one of the most disgustingly perverted justice systems in the world. Nothing shy of complete and utter abolishment of our current justice system will every yield any real improvements in America's justice system. Scrap the whole damned thing and start over, nothing even worth salvaging.

here is my suggested order of deconstruction:

1.Revocation and replacement of 13th Amendment, in a way that doesn't recreate slavery, in the same breath as supposedly eliminating it.

2.Elimination of electoral systems for electing judges, prosecutors, and district attorneys, all such positions should be appointed by the local legal bar, based on merit and experience, subject to public hearings, with community veto rights.

3.Elimination of private prisons and detention centers.

4.Abolition of bail bond system and bounty hunter profession.

5.Creation of national federal tax to provide all persons in the U.S. with access to free legal representation, and creation of a mandate that all states, counties and municipalities must impose their own taxes to properly finance local law enforcement, imprisonment and court systems.

6.End all property seizure by local law enforcement, establishment of court system for adjudication of properties for those incarcerated.

7.Elimination of all financial punitive measures by local law enforcement, no fees, no fines, and no financial penalties, policing cannot be allowed to be corrupted by allowing itself to be financed by means of force.

8.Elimination of all financial punitive measures by local justice system, no fees, no fines, and no financial penalties, courts cannot be allowed to be corrupted by allowing itself to be financed by means of force.

9.Require all members of the police and the judiciary to be held to a standard of truthfulness, any police officers, attorneys, prosecutors or judges who knowingly lie to any one under their jurisdiction should be suspended, and upon repeated offence barred from serving.


I could go on, but that's enough for now...