I’ve heard something to the effect that approximately 80% of all internet traffic passes through Facebook and Google. Unfortunately I can’t find anything to substantiate that claim but it’s sounds plausible.
I remember the early internet. It was a wild place but at least it was fair and balanced. Now every click on every page is designed to serve the for profit attention economy. Kinda sucks in comparison.
It depends on so many factors. My local government is all boomers and older. My voice and lack of experience isn’t as influential as the others. Although we’ve discussed issues like preserving naturally occurring affordable housing, it’s clear that final decisions are at the whims of people who are unaffected by the housing crisis.
The real solution is for many, many, many younger people to get involved. We can’t sit on our asses, complaining on the internet, and expect anything to happen.
Not talking about you, of course. Just continuing on from your comment…
As someone who’s just joined the local government I can say that the trolley murder system is very much entrenched. I’m trying to slow down the trolley but it would probably be best to tear up the tracks, melt the iron and build a monument for posterity.
Michael Dukakis was a Democrat candidate running for President in 1988. He had previously been criticized as being soft on national defense, so in September of that year he orchestrated a photo op in an M1 Abrams tank meant to toughen up his image....
If the rationalist deduces what is logical based on their empirical experience then their reasoning is flawed. We have to accept the axiomatic truth that our senses are limited and cannot account for an absolute truth.
To separate valid perceptions from invalid ones, a person first must assume that the world can be known through the senses. They must also assume that the world is objectively real. These assumptions do not get along well with one other. To say the world is objectively real is to say it is independent of and indifferent to sense perception. Then what in the world can we know? We can know only the effects of the parmesan cheese upon our senses, not the cheese itself.
The UN sponsored report uses a pretty liberal definition of slavery to include things like wage theft (which forces workers to stay at a job until they’re fully compensated), sex trafficking, and domestic servitude where the servant’s documents are confiscated so that they can’t flee.
However, there’s still a hell of a lot whips and chains slavery in Africa and South East Asia. Those slaves serve the excavation and manufacturing industries.
I just heard an NPR story about US Steel Corp using chattel slavery less than a hundred years ago. They worked people to death and buried them in unmarked graves.
I think one of the main problems with Smith’s conception of capitalism is that he didn’t account for how huge and pervasive and intrusive advertising would become. He naively assumed that the best product would dominate the market when actually people will buy whatever is thrust in front of the their eyes a thousand times a day.
And of course corporate lobbying wasn’t such an issue in his time.
We need a few more heroes and a lot more peas to solve some of these other problems:
Horizontal Gene Transfer upsets the conceptual “tree of life”, i.e. if genetics are not exclusively hereditary then it is impossible to determine a last universal common ancestor (LUCA).
Lack of a viable mechanism for producing the complex and specific information required to render the genetic code functional.
Failure of the fossil record to find support for Darwinian evolution (punctuated equilibrium, Cambrian explosion, etc).
Rampant examples of convergent evolution indicate extreme improbability.
Epigenetics cannot be reduced to a mechanism, certainly not natural selection.
“Phenotypic Plasticity” - the correlation between genotypes and phenotypes are no longer 1:1.
Beneficial mutations are impossibly rare. In almost all cases, mutations are degenerative, as demonstrated by Richard Lenski’s bacteria experiment and Molly Burke’s fruit fly experiment - both published in Nature.
Venter is one of the many quacks who promised that he’d find the “aging gene” and switch it off. People threw a lot of money at him about twenty years ago.
Lol at all of the wannabe thirteen year old edgleords on lemmy who are so confident that they understand this extremely complicated and protracted conflict such that they can reduce it to a single generic cause but can’t even be bothered to look up which of the two world wars is the correct one to reference for their edgy meme.
Ketchup alignment (lemmy.world)
I’m a chaotic neutral myself. It almost, but not quite appalls my wife.
The two sides of man (lemmy.ca)
I'm really getting over the enshitification of the internet. (lemmy.world)
Film studios demand IP addresses of people who discussed piracy on Reddit (arstechnica.com)
18+ We can fix it 😌 (lemmy.ml)
Truly the most important stuff is Culture War (lemm.ee)
Nature's dental floss. (lemmy.world)
Michael Dukakis tanks his presidential campaign, 1988 (lemmy.world)
Michael Dukakis was a Democrat candidate running for President in 1988. He had previously been criticized as being soft on national defense, so in September of that year he orchestrated a photo op in an M1 Abrams tank meant to toughen up his image....
deleted_by_author
Kindness over prejudice (lemmy.world)
Love Hurts (lemmy.zip)
The barbieheimer debate rages (lemmy.world)
You may want to sit down (lemmy.world)
More Parmesan? - Existential Comics (existentialcomics.com)
Original: existentialcomics.com/comic/526
Slavery: still a thing (lemmy.zip)
History memes. Fuck yeah. (startrek.website)
People who do know (programming.dev)
Original post here - startrek.website/post/4186125
He did though. (mander.xyz)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Venter?wprov=sfla1
History lives in the present (lemmy.zip)
Context (for those who don’t know): Israel and Palestine