PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I think we need to do two things:

The US government needs to take a more active role in coordinating hardening of infrastructure, including the networks of private companies. This is analogous to the safety regulations the USG puts on car and airplane manufacturers, chemical plants, etc. This is a case of technology outrunning regulation, plus a dash of Alan Greenspan’s “flaw in my model” thinking that the market will optimize around security.

Second, companies need to be held legally and financially responsible for the data breaches that occur. This would open up an insurance market, which would be motivated to audit the companies accurately in order to set rates.

Honestly, I think we’d be better served by having a department of cybersecurity than a Space Force, since right now there’s only spotty coverage divided among the various intelligence agencies.

Menthol cigarettes were historically and still are targeted at the black community. Menthol was added as a flavor to cover up the harsher taste of cheaper tobacco. There have been some studies that indicate that menthol makes it easier for kids to start smoking, but there’s not been a full consensus on this. It’s also popular in working class white communities, but cigarette makers specifically targeted black communities. In the 1970s, for example, the gains made by the civil rights movement resulted in increased social and economic integration, which was associated with the phrase “Moving up.” Those of you old enough to remember the sitcom The Jeffersons might remember that phrase. Newport came out with an ad campaign targeted at the black community around the slogan “Move up to the great taste of Newport.” At one point they even tried to debut a brand called Uptown.

The US has banned flavored cigarettes for a while now because flavors are associated with inducing smoking. Menthol got a carve-out when that regulation was approved due to political pressure. Without the carve-out, it’s unlikely the regulation would have been approved. This is a move that’s been anticipated for a while, but required time and the decrease in the political fortunes of big tobacco to get passed. I don’t know if this is going to be successful, but we will see.

Women lost their rights to their own bodies because of the 2016 election. What else can a Trump take from us?

Women, the LGBT community, immigrants, and ethnic minority communities have lost considerable ground in both public opinion and in legal rights, particularly at the state level. Loss of abortion rights at the national level. Loss of marriage equality. National level restrictions on the trans community. Just because we lost ground doesn’t mean there’s not more we will lose if they get Congress and the White House.

What? No.

Trump owns (iirc) about 58% of the shares in the company. He wants the price to go up. He at least wants to have the price up when his sell window is open (although a big sell off will crater the price because it both puts more shares on the market and because it signals disinterest/lack of faith).

Short sellers don’t own shares in the companies they’re shorting (with a couple of exceptions for hedging purposes). They borrow shares via their broker to sell XYZ at $50 and then buy the actual shares when XYZ hits $40.

The short interest in the company is insane, from everything I’ve read. It seems like most of the market is betting on it going down in flames probably this year.

Still, Trump’s going to walk away with what’s at least a billion or two. We need better regulation.

Robert Earle Parry (June 24, 1949 – January 27, 2018)[1] was an American investigative journalist. He was known for his role in covering the Iran–Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek, including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (CIA manual provided to the Nicaraguan contras) and the CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking in the U.S. scandal in 1985.

Just some additional additional context.

For the life of me, I cannot imagine why any sane person would worship such an evil god-concept as the one many christians claim to believe in.

Putting abortion rights in as a federal law isn’t stronger than having it as a constitutionally protected right. There are multiple times when the republicans held both chambers to the degree that they could have passed a law that counteracted an abortion rights law. They couldn’t do so because the right was found to be constitutionally protected.

The strongest protection would have been to have the constitutional protection on the broad right and then federal laws establishing individual guidelines ensuring that there wasn’t variability between the states. But simply having a federal law wouldn’t have ensured abortion rights - anything passed by one Congress can be undone by the next.

The mistake was not voting for Hillary in 2016. Anyone who did not vote for her was implicitly saying they don’t care if abortion rights are taken away. I was (and am) a Bernie supporter, and I have been since before he hit the Senate. I still voted for her, even though I’m in one of the bluest districts in a blue state.

Do you just enjoy doing hot takes or trolling?

Nowhere did I imply that the DPRK’s practices justify the attack - that’s left to individuals to think about for themselves. I was saying that their tendency to engage in covert ops against individuals outside of their own borders means that, if I were the hacker, I wouldn’t want my name publicly known. The same goes for the US - even more so. I would expect that someone who managed to disable significant parts of the US internet infrastructure not to then immediately publish their identity.

Negative tip value.

DPRK has a reputation for using assassination and kidnapping on foreign soil. It’s probably not as bad as taking on a Mexican drug cartel, organized crime, or Donald Trump, but it’s still something I’d probably want to keep on the DL.

This will very possibly drive a Biden victory as well as a Gallego (D) for senate victory. Polling is tight right now, but post-Dobbs putting abortion on the ballot has not only served to secure abortion rights but has caused multiple upsets. Polls are based on expected turnout based on historical analysis, and abortion is an important enough subject that it causes a deviation from historical behaviors.

Also, it should count as flipping the seat since Sinema isn’t a Democrat.

Wow - you were NOT kidding. This reads like a freshman paper by a student who just finished Atlas Shrugged.

This is not a student who will pass the class.

Although I’m not a lawyer, I suspect this analysis is correct because it is completely depressing and so matches up perfectly with reality.

Portugal has one of the best golden visa programs in Western Europe.

A 1971 Chrysler Newport.

The thing was a boat. You’d hit a bump in the road, and the car would act like you crested a wave and bob front to back a few times. It was wider than most pickup trucks and probably heavier. Not only could it not fit in most parking spots, it could hardly fit in some lanes. Required leaded gas, which was getting hard to find at that point. If you needed to go uphill you had to build up speed because you would slow down, even with the gas pedal floored.

The best part is that when I finally brought it in for service, the mechanic came out and said “You’ve been driving that thing??” Three out of four motor mounts had broken and the last one was about rusted through.

It did have an 8-track though, and came with a bunch of Elvis tapes.

I hated Elvis, but did manage to find an 8-track of Peter Paul and Mary.

I kind of close with that thought. A “good idea” in evolutionary biology is one that leads to reproductive success. Obviously, it’s possible to have so much reproductive success that you overrun the carrying capacity of your environment. That doesn’t happen as often when we’re looking at them in their natural environments - because species and environments co-evolve, and so each adaptation has time to be matched by other adaptations.

It’s always tempting to look backward through time and interpret a direct causal development from the bow and arrow to industrial manufacturing and spaceflight. But we can see by looking at all of the different societies and cultures around us that any particular path isn’t dictated by the human brain per se. The Yanomami and the Yoruba are populated with people exactly as intelligent as in any other human society. They are adaptable and clever, but never developed mass manufacturing or rocket technology. There are countless other civilizations that arose, gained a high degree of sophistication and power, and then disappeared while others have survived.

I do not believe in free will. That means I believe in strict causality. If you wanted to argue that the development of modern western political economies are a direct result of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment itself was a direct result of the world of ideas that came before it, you’d find a sympathetic ear (although I do believe that determinism is different from predictability, and that this complex system we call our society is more complex than any individual just as a human is more complex and less predictable than an ant).

In any case, it’s possible the “lethal mutation” that might lead to our demise (along with a good swath of the rest of life on earth) might have been a techno-cultural mutation rather than a biological one.

Those are very good questions. First, I was distinguishing between multiple types of intelligence, rather than ranking them. However, there are several aspects of human intelligence that we’d probably be justified in saying something like “By these metrics, humans are more intelligent than any other species on the planet.” Those include the sophistication of technology, the amount and complexity of of information exchanged between persons, the ability to learn, and so on. Other animals can learn through accident or experimentation and adopt a new behavior. Some even exhibit social learning, as when a troop of baboons learned to wash their food by observing the matriarch, who had discovered it on her own. Most other species have languages, whether vocal, visual, or chemical. But most learning occurs over evolutionary time rather than at the individual level, and most of those languages are fairly hard coded.

The answer is definitely yes for the second question, with the eusocial animals like ants and bees being the obvious examples. The queen is not the “brain” of the colony. She is more like the reproductive organ. The brain emerges from of all the ants collectively interacting with each other and the environment. I agree with EO Wilson that humans are also eusocial, and so by extension carry out collective computation - information processing and learning - at the social level using what we might think of as an emergent brain layered on top of your individual brains.

Evolutionary biologist here. I think it’s highly unlikely.

It has taken about 4 billion years for intelligent life to have appeared on our planet (if you include the earth forming part), or 3.5 billion years (if you include when life first formed) to get our first “intelligent life.” By intelligent life here, I’m talking about technology in tool using and civilization building, to be clear. It’s a label I’d apply to our many of our ancestral and most closely related species. I believe much of life on earth is intelligent to the point of having things like theory of mind (the knowledge that one is a thinking individual interacting with other thinking individuals), including some birds and octopuses. The birds and octopuses part is important because it means that ToM evolved multiple times independently. That means that a) it’s a “good idea” (it has potentially significant adaptive value) and b) it’s possible to discover it along multiple pathways. Take eyes for example. Last time I looked, we believe eyes have evolved independently at least 24 times. They also exist at every stage of complexity and in a very wide variety of forms, and even something as as simple as being able to tell light from darkness has value.

However, in that 3.5 billion year history, intelligent life evolved exactly once, from a single line of descent. Intelligence such as ours is obviously a good idea. We went from being relatively unremarkable hominids to being the dominant life form on the planet, for better and for worse. Evolution is not moving all species to intelligence. Humans aren’t the point of evolution, any more than sharks or jellyfish are the point of evolution.

When such a manifestly good idea only evolves once, from a single line, the conclusion is that it’s pretty difficult to evolve. It might require a chain of preliminary mutations, or a particular environment. Being hominids, for example, we can make tools and carry fire, which dolphins and octopuses cannot. Of course, there are other hominids out there who do not do those things, and they’ve been around for millions of years. Depending on where you want to start the clock, they’ve been around for about ten times longer than modern humans - about 400k years, give or take. And the technology and civilization part has only been around for the last tenth of that, and has to evolve along its own, non-biological selection - and even those things differ wildly between different places and cultures. And even will all that, it’s become increasingly obvious that this might be a terminal mutation as the very drivers of our short term success may lead to our extinction.

I believe that extra-solar life probably exists. Whether it exists as bacterial mats or multicellular life, whether it’s discovered its own form of photosynthesis or has some other way of gathering life from its environment, whether it draws a distinction between its informational (eg, dna) and physical components - I have ideas but obviously no data.

In any case, that’s why I don’t believe that anyone has ever seen an extraterrestrial-origin ufo. I don’t believe the universe ever was nor will ever be teeming with civilizations.

All of that said, though, we’re dealing with an n of 1. We can make the best inferences possible based on what we can observe, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong tomorrow. I’m a sci fi nerd - I want there to be aliens. Even the discovery of a bacterial mat would revolutionize biology.

Evolutionary biologist here. I’d argue that, in the same sense as we see homosexuality in animals, we see trans animals.

Some animals physically transition - there are fish that will change their physical gender based on the current gender mixture in their local environment. Some behaviorally transition, with males taking on female roles. Sometimes a whole species is trans - like the female hyena developing male appearing genitalia.

Sexual orientation in the animal kingdom is not strictly analogous to that among humans (which has a much stronger social construct), and the same is true of gender (that is, human gender is a social construct). Because the range of adaptations are so diverse and so widespread, I’m very sure of the fact that they have different causes from each other as well as from humans, but the same is true of animal sexuality.

The term is appropriate. The Texas AG demanded information on trans persons from other states.

“I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down,” he said. “While this was a collective recommendation by some members of our leadership team, I approved it and take full responsibility for it.”

These statements always seem so facile when “taking responsibility” means no consequences apart from issuing an apology.