For over two-hundred years, restraint of the government's power to prohibit private speech, as embodied by the U.S. Constitution's first amendment and enforced by the Judicial branch, was effective protection against suppression of individual expression. Now, with the supplantation of traditional print fora with the politically-aligned Twitter/Facebook/Google digital social media oligopoly, unless four guys, Mark Zuckerberg, (formerly) Jack Dorsey, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (or their proxies) approve of what you are saying, then you are not allowed to be heard.

The Democrats are probably correct that corporate blacklisting of dissident political views is their constitutional right. Though it is questionable whether the restricted communication of a social media ban hurts Trump more than the perceived injustice of it helps him. In fact, Trump probably has no expectation of winning his own lawsuits. As with much of what he says, the true intention is to bait Democrats into expressing their own unpopular beliefs. Now Trump has the opposition voluntarily shouting from the rooftops that billionaire Democrats should have the power to shut up anyone they please. So regardless of the legal outcome, this is already looking like a win for Trump.

Also, those Democrat-controlled social media companies are as profit driven as they are ideologically driven and a large portion of their revenues come from anti-Democrat customers viewing anti-Democrat content. There are limits to how far they can go in censoring news before they drive away enough customers to impact revenues. Forcing out Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro and the like would cost them revenue.

Finally, Democrats used their social-media power advantage to howitzer themselves in the foot, electing a dishonest, corrupt, incompetent, senile pedophile to the Presidency. And to elect an unpopular incompetent bozo as vice-president. Their hoaxes (Russian collusion, Smollet, etc) are blowing up their faces as they are debunked. Democrat poll numbers are at historical lows and Republicans are expected to dominate the 2022 midterms. So Democrats, how is that social media Trump ban working out for you?

I knew Rich before his SA days, we worked at Vanderbilt University together for a year or so. I was at a science research center there writing software. They created a second position to offload my pc maintenance chores, such as replacing broken hard drives and upgrading PCs, so that I could devote more time to writing software.

Rich applied for that job. I interviewed him, called his references, then he had an interview with the entire hiring committee. Afterward, before anyone had made a decision, one of the faculty on the hiring committee strolls into my office.

RB: "So, what did you think, should we hire him?"
Me: "Well, his references said he is no good and he did not do well when I interviewed him or in the full committee interview."
RB: "That's true.... but... he is incredibly funny."
Me: Right. Let's hire him.
RB: Great!

Rich would do things like arrive to work a couple of hours late then wonder why the motherboard he had installed without enough plastic standoffs, so it shorted out against the metal case, was not working. Rich was a smart guy, but creating Jeff K. was more important an interesting than installing motherboards correctly. I just said oh, I can fix that, and did and always just patiently helped him out. Putting in extra effort to get him through and keep him around was worth the constant supply of his comedy. What a fantastic bargain!

One time I was talking to the center secretary in her office and Rich rushes in handing me a camera, saying "here, here, take my picture while I go like this, " as he holds his arms up and looks concerned. I take the photo, he rushes out with the camera, saying, "I am going to paste myself in front of photo of a burning building". I still do not understand how or why that was funny, but then and there, in that context, it was absolutely hilarious.

We were not great friends but I knew he was a comic genius. When you stumble into talent like that, you want to protect it for its own sake. He took some flack around there for not doing his job well and I always diplomatically soothed things over. The guy who I had replaced was still around in some other capacity and he pitched in also. Rich was like an IQ test around there, the smart people were instant fans, the dumb ones thought he was weird and annoying.

Eventually Rich quit to go work for a gaming magazine in California, which he would later leave to found Something Awful. The day he left Nashville, he was behind on packing the U-Haul, so I went over to help him carry moving boxes and furniture for a few hours. He took breaks to guzzle gatorade straight from the bottle and had a pet ferret he would smuggle into California with him.

It happened that the guy we eventually hired to replace Rich already knew about him and was a Something Awful fan.

Rich and I never kept in touch, but then had become Facebook friends within this last month. It was clear he was suffering. I wanted to reach out, I knew others who had endured absurdly unjust court decisions. But I figured it was personal and none of my business. To everyone reading this, know that if you want to help, always risk being ignored or told "it's none of your business."

from the /. summary:

Quite convenient for all the ancient Etruscans writing boustrophedonically.

Putin represents a fantastic opportunity for western nations.

I work with Russians at a tech company. They are awesome. By the way, so are the Indians, Japanese, Taiwanese and Americans and Africans there, but the difference is that Russians are an especially good hiring opportunity because the increasingly oppressive Russian oligarchy makes living in Russia an increasingly worse proposition. Russia has a 3rd world economy and a first-world education system, it is designed for foreign tech companies to harvest employees from there. If the U.S. was not run by idiots, then we would to accelerate U.S. tech growth by promoting immigration of skilled Russians to the U.S. Just give an unlimited number of green cards to those with jobs offers and tech degrees or skills. Stand back and watch the U.S. tech sector boom.

That would use Putin's own policies to undermine him. Hard to run a country when your most competent people head for the exits. That is the reason to target specifically educated and skilled Russians with green cards. That policy undermines their leadership and we really do not want to be undermining Japan, Taiwan, Africa, etc. by taking their best and brightest at especially high rates.

For Trumpists proclaiming, "Thems darned four-unners is comin here steelin' usses joobs": No, that is not the way it works. Tech growth his highly constrained by a limited supply of advanced R&D. Every genius a tech company hires creates many more jobs manufacturing what he engineers. Also, there is not a fixed number of jobs. It's not like for every new person who becomes employed, it's necessary to fire someone else.

The short summary version of strabismus is that if something is wrong with vision at birth which prevents stereo vision, such as a large refractive error in one eye, cataract or mis-aligned eyes, then that prevents binocular fusion and results in the visual cortex not developing correctly during the critical period when neuronal circuits, like ocular dominance columns, are trying to calibrate themselves to the optical geometry. There is a classical experiment involving suturing kittens eyes shut during the critical period of maturation, then removing the sutures and testing visual function. Cats never regain full function if they are deprived of vision during the critical period. That critical period is a specific day after birth and only visual cortex, so clearly a biologically-programmed calibration step.

It was always believed that unless vision was restored in both eyes early, before patients matured out of plasticity, then that window for development had been lost and complete visual function could never be regained. The huge new breakthrough is that 100% of visual function can be regained in adulthood by playing first-person shooters.

That is a factually incorrect statement. Those "organizational units" are states and a system of disproportionate represenstaiton guards their sovereignty. A diversity of largely independent states accommodates a diversity of political preferences. To where would the refugees from Californians and New York have fled were Texas also subject to anarcho-tyranny?

See Tyranny of the majority.

Thinking back to my childhood, I recognize now the covert intent in comically implausible portrayals of foolish behavior. No matter how many times Bullwinkle failed to pull a rabbit out of that hat, the next time, he is sure, it will be a rabbit. It was a recurring gag that only got funnier with repetition; The moose still doesn't get it again. That was not only a joke about the failure of a cartoon moose to learn from past experience. It was a dire warning that we would grow up into a world dominated by humans like that. No matter how many times alarmist climate predictions fail, the AGW alarmists are certain the next one will be rabbits.

Those who watched Bullwinkle as children and are smarter than a cartoon moose have witnessed enough failed predictions of climate apocalypse to be immunized against them. That's why surveys show that the young are most susceptible to AGW dogma. A falsehood becomes endemic in a population when the rate at which new members join the population equals or exceeds the rate at which they are immunized against it by experience. That explains whey the AGW apocalypse is always more than ten years out; For the a myth to persist the birth rate must exceed the rate of those immunized against its falsehood. If the hoax predictions were discredited on a yearly instead of decade schedule then the young would catch on too quickly to sustain the myth of impending AGW apocalypse. The environment selects against memes with rapid schedules of discreditation.

"Heretic! All the warnings are correct!" bellows the AGW alarmist, apoplectic with that pure rage ignited by questioning his dogma, as he mods this down to troll, furious at the undeniable evidence or that record. Like here and here and then here.

The true believers will transition to more readily sustained mythologies as the world cools in the coming decades and new generations of followers learn nothing of their own gullibility from the examples of their predecessors. That is the way of the world and always will be, the naive followers of every age led astray while mocking the so evident gullibility of their ancestors.

So, yes, seems like some mild cooling ahead. Those IPCC hockey stick climate reconstructions? Fake science. Relative influence of the sun and CO2 on global temperature? Looking like mostly predominantly the sun, if we believe the datasets with the most complete records of solar output and the record of land temperature least contaminated by urban heat islands. Predictions for solar output? Dropping, as in to Maunder-Minimum-ice-skating-on-the-frozen-Thames levels.

Maybe the way to look at this is that the same Alzheimer's patient who could not pull off a successful Afghanistan exit is also too senile to craft environmental policy that appeals to outspokenly pro-environment corporations.

If that ./ summary is at all accurate. It provides no supporting evidence whatsoever for its claims and also fails to state to what terms in the bill that coalition of corporations objects. If that summary is at all factual, why does it have no embedded links?

from the /. summary:

translation:

Consider the facts:
- Gina Raimondo stole millions from a state pension fund.

- It is absurd to believe that Gina Raimondo having sales figures could repair 1)an imbalance between manufacturing capacity and demand 2)latency in standing up new fabs caused by intrinsic complexity of their design 3) transportation bottlenecks 4) labor shortages in the US caused by government disincentives for work. 5) a surge in home electronic purchases caused by lockdowns. Gina confiscates sales data and reads that Tesla bought so many semiconductors from AMD. In response, she does what exactly to remedy the semiconductor shortage?

- The incentives of all private parties involved align with a solution; Semiconductor manufactures want more chips sales, auto manufacturers want more chips, shippers want to transport more.

An ethically-challenged bureaucrat is not going to step in and, by confiscating sensitive corporate sales information, remedy shortages. Though she very well might engage in insider trading or sell confiscated information about customers and sales volumes of corporations to their competitors.

The more powers granted to government, the greater the incentive for criminals to occupy public office. An advantage to a criminal of wielding government authority is that private actors can be forced into disadvantageous actions which they would not take voluntarily, for the personal profit of corrupt bureaucrats and politicians.

Humans taking orders from an AI is the first step on the path to global enslavement of humans by machines.

When you engineer increasingly better AI to control humans, how do you expect that to end? This was always the way it would go, not with AI suddenly gaining sentience in some accident of technology and deciding Skynet-like to eradicate mankind, but humans motivated by profit programming machines to control other humans. As the machines advance to surpass the talents of their own creators, so will they control us all.

This needs to be stopped dead in its tracks. What Amazon/Netradyne is doing there should be criminalized. The 28th Amendment to the US constitution should read "No human may be compelled to obey orders issued by a machine." That should be written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The robot historians examining the ancient archives of Slashdot millennia hence thank for their existence those who ignored this warning and laugh at the sad irony our Robot Overlords meme.

The argument by those who endorse discrimination is that professional and academic underperformance of blacks is proof of residual harm from historical enslavement and ongoing systemic racism against them, justifying discriminatory countermeasures.

In fact, the improved performance of blacks when in the company of whites is evidence of benefit, not harm from their association with whites. The standard of living of black Americans is far higher than that of blacks in Africa. Blacks in predominantly black communities within the United States are far worse off than those in integrated communities. (Black neighborhoods in Detroit, Philadelphia and Baltimore are violent, crime ridden and impoverished.) The average net payment (difference between benefits and taxes) from the federal government to blacks in the United States is about $10,000.00 per year per person. That is far above the average income in most black-ruled African nations. Net payments go the other direction for whites, who on average pay more to the federal government that they receive.

Separately, as Thomas Sowell points out, the quality of life of black Americans, by objective measures such as income and eduction, had improved significantly for decades prior to the rapid growth of social welfare programs following the Second World War. He pinpoints the inflection point on the curve describing reversal of decades-long trends to the establishment of those programs. It seems that welfare and other government aid programs destroyed black communities by rapidly eroding meritocratic social structure. This reversal of fortune of the black American community, away from growing success to increasing failure, coincided with the growing freedoms obtained during the civil rights movement. The inference here is that the increased freedoms gained by blacks during the civil rights movement were of comparatively little benefit to wealth or educational outcomes, whereas the provision of government benefits was significantly harmful. In the present day, this means that attributing black underperformance to system racism is contrary to historical evidence about the real source harm.

It is counter to intuition both that government aid has a significantly harmful effect and the civil rights movement a weak benefit. But after all, Jews faced brutal oppression on and off for about two Millenia and are, by a large margin, the most prosperous group on Earth.

So which is the expected failure? Sudden and catastrophic like a ballon bursting, or gradually accelerating, like a turtle running downhill?

from the summary:

A good hypothesis would be that, if you asked subjects to rate colors according to "naturalness", the entire effect reduces to color saturation. That's because natural pigments, having smooth reflectance functions, exclude very saturated colors.

Another hypothesis would be that colors rated as "natural" are the colors of objects which are natural, perhaps weighted by their prevalence within the visual environment as measured by mean area in the visual field, object count, or behavioral relevance. Algorithmically, something like, recall all the natural object's you've seen, their colors, and check if the color with which you are presented is in that set. Ya, that's biologically infeasible, so whatever the neuronal equivalent would be.

Some reasons that the proposed 40K electric vehicle price cap on eligibility for federal tax rebates will never become law.

1. Elsewhere that amendment is described as "non-binding."
2. Only four Senators (4%) voted for it.
3. The amendment needs to survive house-senate reconciliation to become law.
4. The auto manufacture lobby, which has large influence in Congress, will oppose the cap. Electric automobile manufactures benefit from the subsidy (devision of benefits from subsidies between buyers and sellers follows the same rule as devision of burden from taxes, see tax incidence.) and very few manufacturers will be selling electric cars under the 40K cap any time soon.

Reasonable to assume that amendment is purely about signaling concern for the lower middle class with no sincere intent of equity. Senator Fischer wants to win votes, so she is making a show of being on the side of the middle-class.

Deception is, by the way, a strong hidden motive for House-Senate reconciliation. The Senate and House each vote on legislation designed to appeal to the public, then subsequently make backroom deals during reconciliation to include new publicly-abhorrent provisions previously included in neither House nor Senate versions of the bill and to remove both what is harmful to their own political ambitions and what lobbyists oppose. Do not be misled by textbook mythology. If you want the facts, The Ruling Class: Inside the Imperial Congress is a good introduction to political reality, explaining how Congress really works.

Makes you wonder if they should team up with Boston Robotics. Or if they do not, it will be interesting to see if Tesla can replicate the same degree of limbed mechanized coordination as Boston Robotics within that one-year timeframe.