I've stopped caring about institutions' reputations because I don't need them to gatekeep for me anymore.
If I want to read about finance, I can read Matt Levine. If I want to read about law I can read Eugene Volokh. If I want to read about about security I can read Bruce Schneier. In every category I care about, there are writers who are experts who make their expert opinions known without me having to subscribe to the Economist, FT, or the WSJ, all of which are great, all of which I grew up reading.
But I think I'm done with their gatekeeping now, I don't need it.
WaPo and NYT are trash and that was made nakedly obvious in 2016. It's more blatant now than it was then, but I guess if you didn't notice it then, you won't notice it now.
Ok, so what are your experts on housing policy? On agrarian policy? On international trade? On Newfoundland state politics? On medicine?
The number of areas where you can personally vet your experts is very small. For the rest, you must either choose to be uninformed or you can choose an organization to vet those experts for you. Trust is transitive.
This may be true in general. But the these particular. organizations have demonstrated that they are not trustworthy. So now what? Trusting known liars is a foolish path.
You’ve been downvoted but I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s lots of debate in these comments about how journalism is dying due to various monetization schemes, organization and lower dynamics, etc. But I personally think the issue is that we, as news consumers, are becoming lazier and are simply looking for someone to tell us what to think, rather than a comparatively dry report on the facts that then requires the reader to make do their own analysis. Opinion articles seem to be what dominates traditional media outlets like the NYT and WP, while 24 hour news networks don’t even label it as opinion, they just bring on pundits to comment on every single thing that happens.
Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened. Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the internet has accelerated and further enabled it to the point where it feels like journalism as an institution is collapsing.
Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened
And on the other hand, it's about reporting what might happen. What I'm seeing around me is that "news reporting" is more often than not speculation about tomorrow's events, rather than reporting about today's events. Maybe it's for the same reason, reporters feel that today's events have already been covered to death because of the hype news cycle, so they turn to speculation rather than confirmation and contextualization?
> Journalism has stopped being about reporting what happened, and has become increasingly focused on telling you what to think about what happened.
No, it hasn't become any more about that than it has been for centuries. How it's changed within the recent past is it's become more diverse in the ideological slant of outlets, so every major outlet isn't telling you the same thing to think about what happened, regardless of slight divergences in the information they select to include about what actually happened. So, more of the difference in outlets is on narrative/spin than fact details. This makes the spin more noticeable.
For general news, I would still prefer the common touchstone, and diversity of an Economist, FT, Post or NYT. Each of these papers has their weak and strong points (ie. some have covered tech better than others).
In more specialized fields, sure nothing beats an expert.
Why should someone running a website be able to moderate without fear of litigation when someone publishing a print magazine is not able to moderate without fear of litigation?
Did 230 say anything about that or did the law have no stated reason for that difference?
Print magazines aren't attempting to moderate 2-10 novels per second either. Isn't it much more commonplace for print magazines to exercise editorial control over every piece of content, conferring on themselves in some sense (at least as far as these laws are concerned) a degree of accountability?
It is not just much more commonplace but obligatory for print magazines to exercise that control. A print magazine can't say, send me slander, send me libel, send me copyright violations, send me terrorist threats, if they agree with my personal political slant, I will print them all no questions asked.
Why can't a print magazine do that, but a website can? Did 230 say anything about why those are treated differently?
> Why can't a print magazine do that, but a website can? Did 230 say anything about why those are treated differently?
The law itself doesn't, because laws generally don't. The discussions around the law offered a number of reasons; one basic deontological idea, as I recall, was that a website moderating user content was functionally more like a choosing which third-party publications to offer than actually publishing. But probably the more significant argument was consequentialist, that if companies were liable for everything if they tried to moderate at all, the into viable large scale sites would be completely unmoderated, with no attempt to preemptively identify illegal and offensive content. And that's why it was included as part of the Communications Decency Act.
It's because the user on a website is understood to be representing themselves, not the organization that created the website. The intent of section 230 was to codify this distinction in representation into the law.
On the other hand, a print magazine hires employees to produce a bespoke product sold to the public, so whatever they publish in the magazine is understood to be a representation of the magazine company. In fact, the owner of a website would indeed be liable for posting infringing content if it were understood that the site owner was representing themselves (e.g. if I posted stolen photos from your laptop onto my self-hosted blog).
is a social media site really comparable to a newspaper? a newspaper has an editor who decides what goes into it, there's no "user generated content" outside their control
Here's the Merriam-Webster definition of censored: "suppressed, altered, or deleted as objectionable : subjected to censorship".
Government censorship is a subset of censorship. Private citizens of a private company are perfectly capable of suppressing, altering, or deleting material they consider objectionable, which seems to have been what happened in this case.
Historically the term platform has meant just that, they have a legal requirement to allow all content. Think something like a phone network.
There are rules about what constitutes spam on a phone network - laws limiting robocalls in some situations for example - but it isn't the phone company making those rules.
"Historically, American law has divided operators of communications systems into three categories", he says, and he describes the third category as:
"Platforms, such as telephone companies, cities on whose sidewalks people might demonstrate, or broadcasters running candidate ads that they are required to carry."
His description of the liability rules for platforms:
"Platforms weren't liable at all. For instance, even if a phone company learned that an answering machine had a libelous outgoing message (see Anderson v. N.Y. Telephone Co. (N.Y. 1974)), and did nothing to cancel the owner's phone service, it couldn't be sued for libel. Likewise, a city couldn't be liable for defamatory material on signs that someone carried on city sidewalks (even though a bar could be liable once it learned of libelous material on its walls), and a broadcaster couldn't be liable for defamatory material in a candidate ad."
If you see a difference between that and "common carrier" that is relevant to whether an entity considered a traditional platform would have to carry spam or porn, what is it?
"Hypertension markedly increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases and overall mortality. Lifestyle modifications, such as increased levels of physical activity, are recommended as the first line of anti-hypertensive treatment. A recent systematic review showed that isometric handgrip (IHG) training was superior to traditional endurance and strength training in lowering resting systolic blood pressure (SBP)"
>> I'm not sure how new teams can be formed and new staff onboarded with zero human contact or office interaction
> It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.
It is a problem, because there's more to being on a team than getting a laptop and doing assigned work. Losing workplace human contact may be find for some people, but for me the loss has been palpable. The change is necessary given the circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's fine.
>> Laborers couldn't really ask for higher wages, because that was politically impossible
Not just politically impossible, illegal:
>> World War II disrupted those trends. As demand for everything — particularly labor — climbed, Congress passed the Stabilization Act of 1942, which allowed the president to freeze wages and salaries for all the nation's workers. A day after its passage, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order invoking these powers, which applied to "all forms of direct or indirect remuneration to an employee," including but not limited to salaries and wages, as well as "bonuses, additional compensation, gifts, commissions, fees."
But there was an exemption of massive proportions slipped into a fateful clause: "insurance and pension benefits" could grow "in a reasonable amount" during the freeze."
>> By slapping corporations with tax rates of 80 or even up to 90 percent on any profits in excess of prewar revenue, Congress all but guaranteed a frenzied search for loopholes.
Also interesting to note that the change in question wasn't a switch from workers paying for their own health insurance to it being paid for by employers. Prior to WW2 less than 10% of Americans had any form of health insurance, by the end of the war it was close to 30%.
That's an application-centric view of development, as indicated by the phrase "the application". If an application is successful, its data will likely end up being used by other new applications, and the data will survive the lifetime of the original application that generated the data. The applications themselves will be rewritten many times as technologies evolve. Think mainframe to client/server to EJB to lightweight J2EE to Spring Boot microservices.
If there is logic or metadata that is common across all those applications, there are a couple choices. You could duplicate that logic across all the applications, and rewrite that logic every time you do a rewrite of the application, or you could keep it one place.
If you keep it one place, one way to do that is to have a service in front of the database that every application that uses the data calls instead of hitting the database directly. That has some disadvantages in that it requires upfront design and planning, the service in front of the database will likely be rewritten in new technologies over time, and it has performance implications. And for the developer, instead of having to deal with logic in an application and a database, now they have to deal with logic in two applications.
Another way to do it is to have common logic for the data implemented in key constraints, check constraints, triggers, stored procedures and other similar tools in the database so that any application that uses the data doesn't need to rewrite that logic, and can't intentionally or unintentionally violate the rules of the common domain. That does have its own disadvantages, and it makes things more complicated for developers who will need to be familiar with an additional set of technologies, but it is a valid use case for stored procedures.
Your only positive statements in that whole thing were "I think a job as a quant or something at a finance firm would be interesting" and "I'd really like to consider starting my own business".
Everything else was I don't I don't I don't I don't.
You've got your answer right there. Go make it happen.
If I want to read about finance, I can read Matt Levine. If I want to read about law I can read Eugene Volokh. If I want to read about about security I can read Bruce Schneier. In every category I care about, there are writers who are experts who make their expert opinions known without me having to subscribe to the Economist, FT, or the WSJ, all of which are great, all of which I grew up reading.
But I think I'm done with their gatekeeping now, I don't need it.
WaPo and NYT are trash and that was made nakedly obvious in 2016. It's more blatant now than it was then, but I guess if you didn't notice it then, you won't notice it now.