My experience is that one-off human costs tend to be extreme for exceptions at big organizations.
Handling exceptions might require a business day or two of admin time just to handle the baseline exception. Multiply 16 hours by salary, and you're at big bucks.
Plus, you need processes for oversight. That costs /a lot/ more. Ownership sounds great on paper -- where any support rep can grant an exception -- but in practice, that gradually leads to a culture of abuse. It starts little, and once that's part of the culture, increases over time.
Even without the crisis, what upside does the UK have over the EU proper?
I feel like the UK was competitive when it was competing with European countries. Competing with countries in the EU? I just have no idea why anyone would invest in businesses there. It just feels like an inferior option, unless labor costs fall like a rock.
I think over time, the deals the UK gets will get worse and worse, not just on investment, but on everything.
It doesn't help that China still thinks of opium wars when the UK comes up, India things of the British Empire, and much of the rest of the world feels the same way. The UK was always respected, but never loved. If that respect goes away...
These aren't wackos. These are mostly serious scholars, tired of a serious problem with Google. I'm giving this as an example; this has been a problem for a lot of people for a long time.
I seem to remember your former president getting banned? His shtick may have been that he entered politics as an outsider but once he was in he surely was a politician, and a famous one at that.
It certainly does not, it makes it all the more clear that it is foolhardy to rely on these centralised corporate entities to carry your message for you unless that message happens to coincide with the current desired narrative - and even in that case it would be wise to not rely on them given that the narrative can and will change.
Every grain of sand leaking from their hands adds to the viability of a decentralised 'net so the more they censor, the more they'll lose. I say let them lose everything, let Youtube become a wasteland of cat videos interspersed with government broadcasts and kitschy music videos, let it become the online equivalent of a shopping mall past its heyday where elevator music echoes through empty galleries, let interesting material migrate to alternative distribution channels. All that is needed for that is a reliable CDN, a problem which might be solvable using p2p distribution like Peertube and LBRY do. Once this is established there will be another fight, this time led by copyright holders who insist on blocking these channels so the system needs to be robust against such attempts.
Will there be fewer 'Youtube millionaires'? Sure, that was a short-lived fad which is unlikely to survive in a decentralised 'net. Is this something to mourn over? Not in my opinion.
Comparing messy AI that will demonetize/remove historic retellings of traumatic events, wars, and hate crimes to 'censoring' Ron Paul is ridiculous.
Most of them moved to because of demonetization... Where swearing can demonetize a video as well as mentioning rape or murder in contexts explicitly. Yes that is horrible to punish literal historians talking about these events that really happened that we should be educated on but, how do you separate those from actually hateful content so charmin/coke/corporation still will pay you to run ads?
Letting people think the vaccine is dangerous without scientific proof when they could die without it, isn't government regulation friendly.
edit: to day I learned there's a down vote feature lol. Didn't know acknowledging a private company has interests beyond letting people saying w/e when want when it can negatively impact their bottom line would be so controversial. Also banning him for being conservative is very different from banning spreading vaccine misinformation. Then grouping that with removing historians incomes due to messy AI implementation to save YouTube's ad friendliness to keep their bottom line is just a victim complex.
If it's just AI, you separate them with actual human oversight.
From what I understand, they moved less because of demonetization, and more because of the chilling effect it had on free speech. They needed to be super-careful in script writing to make sure they didn't anger the YouTube algorithm.
I'll also mention another darker side of this: Google is almost entirely liberal inside. If a liberal channel is wrongly banned, an army of Googlers quickly rushes to fix it. If a conservative channel is wrongly banned, there's internal snickering. AIs are not neutral, and Google's reflects the biases of the people who keep tweaking it.
I think comparing this to free speech is just a losing argument cause legally free speech is for criticizing the government non-violently.
They are private companies that have a monopoly, making a new platform focused on enabling creator's means of revenue is the ideal approach.
>If a liberal channel is wrongly banned, an army of Googlers quickly rushes to fix it. If a conservative channel is wrongly banned, there's internal snickering.
Conservatives unironically have a victim complex for this because lefties have the same issue because they are saying the centerist thing. Democrats or what conservatives call 'liberal' right now are mostly a centerist party, trying to be palatable to the largest audience. The same social media companies want to keep the largest ad consumer base as well as advertiser pool.
> another darker side of this
I honestly think it is a societal shift of the vanilla of politics, I'm sorry conservatism is no longer vanilla and is actually the rocky road of politics and isn't as friendly.
Edit: I challenge anyone offended by this point of view, to look into conservatives that have been 'cancelled'/'silenced' viewership and numbers before and after. It usually helps them get more of a following across the board, they inflate this issue beyond how bad it is to get more attention for a possible loss in revenue.
I don't care about "legally." I care about whether we live in a society where we have diverse opinions, and people feel free to express themselves. If we have a system where:
- Market forces drive companies to support one point of view in media, and censor everything else;
- Market forces drive everyone to work under draconian NDAs; and
- Market forces drive companies not to hire people who engage in WrongThink
We've got a broken system where no one has free speech, no matter what the laws say.
And no, you can't successfully start a competing company, because market forces mean that companies which optimize to market forces win.
I don't care about conservatives, liberals, or victim complexes. I care about having reason discourse, civic debate, and free speech. If a social, political, and economic system doesn't allow that, we've got a broken system. As a footnote, every conservative I've spoken to thinks I'm a leftwing nutjob, and every liberal, a rightwing nutjob. If you disagree with either party line on anything (even not in the opposing direction), that's how you're viewed. The polarization and stereotyping is crazy.
I agree market forces are largely an issue, just know that when you're saying 'WrongThink' and 'Market forces drive companies to support one point of view in media, and censor everything else;'. Just as a heads up cause I would rather have these conversations than not, just like you said others wouldn't.
It just sounds like the 'reason, discourse and civic debate crowd are more aligning groups known for hate speech or using dog whistles to encourage that type of person to watch their content. For instance a Ben Shapiro, who sounds smart and looks like he wants reasons and facts but really his perfectly crafted throw away statements just take 30 minutes of googling to disprove. Rather than actually providing real fats and logic, it's just the common sense he can placate to and arguments reinforcing a religious agenda. It makes sense why he doesn't notice this as well, because to be cold and analytical it reduces blood flow to the sections of your brain that contribute to emotional thinking which is normally ideal. However, it also turns off your ability to sense when it's seeping into your thoughts regardless. So focusing purely rationality alone, can also dampen your effective rationality because it is harder to tell when you let emotions play a factor in your think
As much as I'm offended by many of the things Ron Paul does and stands for, I'm glad he's there. There's a lot of divergent thinking there. Outliers are good. I'd be terrified of a congress with a dozen Ron Pauls, but one is good to have around.
If I had my druthers, we'd have one of him in Congress. And one of each other extremist point of view, left-wing, right-wing, or just off in another direction.
If American politicians had no outside interests than sure. It's currently a fundamentally flawed system: political games, corporate interests, religion and re-elections all cloud actual discussion and turns it into a show.
Nothing in house is driven by real data, both sides don't see the actual reality of what ever situation they're in. They take random data points to mislead voters to their position, each side having different areas they fudge the numbers on.
* Well, the links on the front page point somewhere random -- to a clipart site.
* There's nothing about who is doing this or why.
* There's no way to actually pay that I could find.
* There's no information about overhead, or if the GratiPay is pocketing the money.
It's just a half-baked half-finished web page. I think a good not-for-profit here might be helpful? But I'm not sure how to structure it so that it is. I don't see why a business would actually want to pay. Most managers believe they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. This doesn't help.
And the money raised? I'm not sure a serious analysis has been done by anyone. As an open source author, I'm not inclined to even deposit a $0.32 royalty check.
The feed on the home page is recommendations. That may, by chance, include things you're subscribed to but it will also include other recommended content and possibly not recommend things you are subscribed to as it's not meant to be a second copy of the subscription feed.
That still doesn't give reliable recommendations of your subscribed channels, it's just a chronological list of their new content.
If I subscribe to a youtuber with a back-catalog of several years of videos, I want recommendations of those prior videos, not only their brand new ones.
Without commenting on China specifically, a few facts:
- The cheapest, safest way to "invade" the US (or any Western democracy) isn't through an army, but through manipulation of news, social media, and elections
- Indeed, if I'm Iran and I want Iraq attacked, it's much cheaper to manipulate the US into doing the dirty work than to attack myself.
- Much of the same is true of corporations -- a million spend lobbying can "buy" hundreds of millions in corrupt (but usually legal) profits.
- The checks-and-balances put in 250 years ago aren't adequate to defend democracy.
As a footnote: The second-cheapest way is through asymmetric attacks, such as cyberattacks, and increasingly, bioattacks. I don't want a debate about COVID19 origins, vaccines, or what-not (please don't), but the fact of the matter is that engineering a virus like COVID19 is within the grasp of most nation-states. That vulnerability went from theoretical to very, very visible. Genetic engineering will only get better. It's not implausible that soon we'll be able to engineer viruses which lead to long-term disability, decrease the IQ of a nation, or are at least somewhat selective by ethnicity (of course, once released, all bets are off). It's definitely possible to have vaccine-in-hand when releasing a bioweapon.
You are right about your points, except that I think even with a vacine in hand you risk too much with an effective bioweapon, and you will look guilty as fuck if you somehow have a vacine in time (with sufficient production) and the rest of the world does not.
I do wonder (and I am not proposing anything here), that without the gatekeepers and with the industrialized spread of information on the internet, that we have reached a point where we can no longer have freedom of speech, simply because it makes it too easy to spread things. Are we forced to got into "information lockdown", and if so what is to stop it from becoming perpetual?
Whether a relatively paltry (harmless compared to conventional bioweapons) virus like COVID was ever considered as a weapon hardly matters at this point. What really scares the absolute poop out of me is that the west has shown its hand, and exposed stress fractures that could easily be exploited by foreign actors.
I'd say that the lines between what you have delineated as first and second cheapest attacks are obscure. Cyber/bio/etc attacks are now a means of accomplishing "informational" attacks.
Perhaps I've been deceived by traditional and social media and the scale of antivax, QAnon, MAGA movements are blown out of proportion, but if a foreign actor ever wanted to deliver a significant blow to the west, it would be to influence and exploitation of theses movements in very slow and deliberate ways. Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.
(It's not just the antivax/QAnon/MAGA movements that scare me either. In my opinion, anti-American whataboutist/hyper-socialist/pro-communist are just as concerning.)
Maybe this is already the case. Then again I might be no less paranoid than the followers of these movements.
I know I'm not the first to point this out and I'm only regurgitating what has already been stated, but I only see a few ways this will/can unfold. The west will...
- become more authoritarian to deal with the civilly insubordinate
- descend into chaos and anarchy as influence dwindles
- i dunno...
While western military defense remains unassailable, there is a huge gaping hole in its ability to deter non-conventionial aggression and encroachment.
That's an interesting hypothesis: The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon.
What's interesting is the dynamic between the epi community and the security community. I'm not sure if I'm naming those correctly:
* The security community does a lot of threat modeling (how might we be attacked? how might we have been attacked?), which is helpful. That doesn't suggest they believe those things actually happened.
* The epi community views this as coded language for believing in bizarre conspiracy theories.
> The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon
Not what I was saying, so apologies if that's how it reads. I'm saying very passive "bioweapons" could be used to cause stress, increase societal friction, disrupt normality, etc over extended periods of time... effectively destabilizing societies from within, causing governments to take their eyes off the ball, letting down their guard, etc...
What's interesting is that the government (forget which department and paper) did have a plan. They had accounted for this scenario. But I guess there's a chasm between having a plan and being able to put it into practice.
Different scientific communities use different scientific methods, and often come to vastly different conclusions as a result. Epi, and related communities, uses frequentist statistical methods. It's an interesting dynamic when two communities have research methods which fundamentally conflict.
> Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.
There's a biological analogy where a predator can't move into a niche if its already populated.
In the USA we already have groups we're not allowed to criticize, we're only permitted to fight with each other about how rabidly we support them more than inferior people whom don't support them as much as we do, look at my halo, etc. Or there are countries with influence over us that we aren't allowed to name much less complain about.
China can't move in to predate us, those spots are already full. Or to put it more explicitly, the 50 cent army can't move in on the turf of the baizuo.
Likewise there is an interesting biological/ecological analogy where the vast majority of the population are pretty sick of the baizuo, but if they were marginalized then we wouldn't enter a golden era of freedom; we'd just rapidly get sick of the 50 cent army after its expansion into the vacuum.
Interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up to even cursory scrutiny. The most obvious counterexample is that the foreign state actors (not China but others) could successfully suborn and control several of these niches, and steer the groupthink of these groups in a direction favourable to themselves: Most obviously the take-over of the NRA in 2015 and the successful influence campaign on the "gun nut" niche by the Russian state; but there are countless other examples.
I once investigated why a PC occasionally turned on all by itself and at first suspected that something on the network might be sending wake on LAN packets. It turned out that the PC was only in sleep mode and not hibernating and that Windows can wake it up from there, e.g. because of scheduled maintenance. What was even more surprising, it will go back to sleep once it is done.
You might want to check the event viewer in cases like that.
This explains why my old windows laptop is constantly out of juice whenever I need to do something with Windows, even though I was sure I set it to hibernate.
The last time I turned it of, I removed the battery. It is pretty silly that my laptop in 2021 can't do what my first laptop could do in 2003. Even worse, it is a Thinkpad. I expect better from those.
Handling exceptions might require a business day or two of admin time just to handle the baseline exception. Multiply 16 hours by salary, and you're at big bucks.
Plus, you need processes for oversight. That costs /a lot/ more. Ownership sounds great on paper -- where any support rep can grant an exception -- but in practice, that gradually leads to a culture of abuse. It starts little, and once that's part of the culture, increases over time.