At the risk of playing devils advocate, are they not allowed to subscribe to newspapers without a warrant? This is publicly purchasable information bought by a (checks notes) agency with the expressed mission if gathering as much data as possible.
If Rep Wyden wants to prevent this, the first - and most important - legislative action is to prevent its collection and sale, not some anti-TLA circle jerk about the NSA buying it on the open market.
lol - I love when this gets (re-) posted periodically. The first time I read it I was thinking “out in the desert” when it said it was outside Phoenix. It’s not. It’s a single block (1 street x 1 ave) of space *in the middle of Tempe Arizona * with a 4 lane highway on one side. This is not a “no car utopia,” it’s a more-profit apartment complex that is using the “walkable city” greenwashing to cover the entire parcel with dense apartments (and limited, doomed retail) and not have to set aside mandatory parking to cut into profits. Last I looked, a 3BR rental was something like $35k-40k a year in rent.
Don’t get me wrong - the concept is nice, with good massing around the alleys and public spaces. This took planning. And it’s ~1/2 or 3/4 mile walk to a pretty major shopping area (across said 4 lane highway and a massive parking area at the mall). And that last part is good because there aren’t enough units in this development to support more than 1-2 restaurants and a bodega…it’s only about 1/4 to 1/3 the population needed to support a standard grocery store. And - as advertised- there’s no parking and Tempe isn’t walkable so you’re not getting any substantial outside customer traffic.
There’s a lot of really engaging shot-form content on the platform; most people assume it’s just a firehose of what you see when you log in anonymously.
and people actually get their news from there
It’s a poor substitute for a healthy set of reading, but it’s also a way people put things happening “now” online. Not unlike choosing your broadcast or print media, the results can be really interesting or really misleading (or both; okay, often both)
The problem is not TikTok, it’s people who are easily influenced and distracted by sensationalist content. I will tell you that TikTok is nothing but vocal and instrumental entertainment with some stand-up comedy and British sit-com style clips, but that’s because I don’t follow or wander off into political discourse or “news” areas.
Barbershop. I know, weird, right? It gets weirder. This is a weekend event - a “brigade”. The best way to describe it is like a pick-up basketball tournament. 100 guys show up, they get randomly (by position forward/center/guard or bass/bari/lead/tenor) into 25 “teams”. Instead of basketball plays and general sport, we all learn - note perfect - twelve fairly complex songs. Each team gets assigned one of the songs and, after an hour of rehearsal, compete against one another (we have voice judges, like the Olympics have gymnastics judges). It’s all for shits and grins, but mostly for the brotherhood* of shared song. We split up and do programs for local school music departments, and all get together to form a 100 man chorus for a benefit concert the second nite. Unlike most choral events, we all know the same songs, so you find three others and go. All day and all night for two days. Lunches or dinners at local restaurants often turn flash-mob performance.
Again, it’s weird from the outside. From the inside it’s like 99 friends best friends or family members, but without the family discord.
*There has almost always been women in barbershop, but we were officially separated into our own societies/organizations until recently. Falling numbers will do that - it’s an old art form and the men who were around when it is popular are passing on. Anyway, several of these weekends are now gender inclusive and, from what I understand, awesomer as a result. I’ll get to go to my first in two months. We’re also adding semi-modern repertoire. Sugar (maroon 5) and Feel it Still (Portugal The Man) are on the song list, for example. Last weekend they threw in a Garth Brooks and Joe Diffy songs. Not 2023/24, but not 1923/24 either.
ALL media is easily and continually manipulated to social engineer your world view. If you can name an outlet which is free of sociopolitical bias on sociopolitical topics I’m all ears. Every act of commentary is exposing a position, whether it be left, right, corporate, status quo, centrist, or any other area of ideology. Not recognizing that every source has a bias is dangerous.
I’ve heard of that in Portugal! Barbershop is actually an art form that was appropriated from African slaves who brought an oral tradition with them to America and morphed from the spirituals they sang; it was developed more though the Vaudeville practice and modern barbershop (the organization and preservation of the art form) started as a lark in the 40s. The less I sing it, the more I enjoy it when I do - it’s very distinctive, so a little goes a long way.
5000 civilians (women who have borne children) killed is just a statistic; 2 mothers killed each hour is horrific and brutal. Love the intent, hate the headline. I’m with you, I’d prefer they not attempt to ply me with “think of the children mothers” rhetoric. This is a humanitarian disaster; it’s a shame so many humans have been immunized to destruction and empathetic grief by religion.
I’m going to start out with the obvious- that most of these arguments are copypasta from a decade and a half ago when smartphones got cameras. Distracting. What about the gym? Easy for bad actors to abuse (OMGWTFBBQ!)
The glare from headlights comment was weird. Do the lenses not include an AR coating, or perhaps the author doesn’t normally wear glasses? I decided to check on that last one and was surprised that there was no by line, just a generic nyt link - not even to the article. Of course Brian X Chen appears to be a real NYT journalist, but in no other online pictures does he wear glasses, so I presume he doesn’t wear corrective lenses or he wears contacts. Not too surprising then that the glasses - and a big, black, fat-rimmed resin model at that - would be distracting, even outside of the decisions to record or not.
Which brings up the last bit - to record you have to initiate it. I presume this is for battery life, as powering the sensor, processing, and transmission to a storage device all take non-trivial amounts of power for a device that small. For the panicky fear of constant surveillance the article has I expected it was an always-on live-stream to the Meta servers that was occurring. Color me unimpressed.
Every for-profit platform does this. Every product package on the shelf does this. It works because someone always finds a way around the prohibition, and we are shirking it responsibility of teaching others-everyone- how to identify it. Magic tricks don’t become uninteresting by making them illegal, they become uninteresting by telling everyone how they work.