Reply With QuoteDeath toll in Turkey earthquake linked to shoddy building violations specifically endorsed by Erdogan:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/13/11565...uilding-safety
Don't look back. You can never look back.Originally Posted by PigLick
Death toll in Turkey earthquake linked to shoddy building violations specifically endorsed by Erdogan:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/13/11565...uilding-safety
There is always some reason we can save doves but not children isn't there? Oh look a trick shot artist can do a backflip and reload enough to kill a busload of kids in three seconds so obviously nothing can be done. Bullshit. You forget you are talking to a hunter and a marksman. When someone disobeyed the rules their gun was confiscated and if it was in their truck their truck was confiscated. Make the penalty harsh enough and folks will comply. They do it for hunting already. I still have a plug in my shotgun.
But sure, make it so they have no chance whatsoever between reloads. 30 rounds, a hundred, make it so they have no chance at all. It could be kept to five like the old carbines but that would impinge on my ability to play Rambo and we can't have that. Why, they can just make a plastic one with 3-D printing that will jam on the second bullet so we can't ban any size. If we ban large magazines then only criminals will have them. Yeah. And if we ban robbing banks only criminals will rob them.
So much for the precious lives banning abortion saves huh? If we can't play pow pow to feel like a man then it's a no go kid. Biden said something which wasn't accurate because he does not worship guns and so we can't do anything. Now go and die like a good little tyke.
But all this is just going over the same old ground. Have we found the same old fears? Wish you would hear.
Lobbying: an American horror story:
Some interesting episodes on the QAnonAnonymous podcast recently.
Super villain origin story for Tulsi Gabbard. Turns out her family are part of a cult, and high up in the cult, and tasked with pushing the cult narrative in politics. The whole family is in this pseudo-Hindu scientology level cult, and Tulsi just happens to be the member who had the best luck with their attempts to infiltrate politics.
It's a two-parter. First episode is the history of the cult, it's pretty messed up shit, the leader likes fucking with people's minds, big time. Second episode gets into the Tulsi stuff more:
Ep 211 https://podbay.fm/p/qanon-anonymous/e/1670796896
Ep 212 https://podbay.fm/p/qanon-anonymous/e/1671332935
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Turns out the magical data analytics of Cambridge Analytica merely *never existed*. It was a scam / vaporware basically, and the media bought into the hype by the hype master:
Ep 213 https://podbay.fm/p/qanon-anonymous/e/1671825993
Ep 214 https://podbay.fm/p/qanon-anonymous/e/1672863843
You'll get a good laugh at how the algorithms were supposedly supposed to work, if you know even the smallest amount about machine learning.
They were taking "Facebook likes" and then trying to shoehorn users into the "five factor" personality model, then from that, they were trying to make some sort of meaningful predictions about people.
None of that worked. The "five factors" is junk science for a start, and how would you even know if you correctly grouped the people? So there's no feedback loop to correct the algorithm. Then, how do you even know that anything useful can be predicted, assuming you even got the people correctly assigned to groups?
The big problem is that they didn't HAVE the data for the stuff they were trying to predict, so there's no way to create a machine learning algorithm for that. For example, you can't just take facebook likes, shoehorn people into some made-up "model" then predict from that how likely they are to vote for Trump. But what you could conceivably do is survey those same people, ask them about how likely they are to vote for Trump, THEN train a model based on that data that tries to predict how likely people you didn't survey yet are to vote for Trump. But the point is that if you have to phone survey a lot of people to get the data to train a model, you're not actually saving any money and might as well just spam ads at everyone.
So basically it was nonsense the whole time, didn't work, couldn't conceivably work, but was being hyped to sell services (which ended up being regular micro-targeting ads that any agency can do for you).
Last edited by Cipheron; 6th Mar 2023 at 22:22.
Some more Hollywood news, courtesy of Betteridge's law of headlines
Elon Musk has been at it again, this time going off on a Twitter employee who publicly inquired about his work status in an attempt to figure out whether he had been fired or not after not being able to get access from his work computer and not receiving any replies from HR or private e-mails. Musk then proceeded to ask him to explain what he had been doing at Twitter and proceeded to mock his answers, posting Office Space memes etc, said the guy was claiming to be disabled as an excuse to not do work, that he couldn't be fired because he wasn't doing any real work anyway, that guys like him were the worst, etc, clearly having a grand old time as his loyal followers piled on the guy. After a while, the guy said he had been sent a confirmation from Twitter HR that he had indeed been fired and inquired whether Musk would be honoring his contract and paying him what he was owed.
Well, it turned out the guy is an Icelandic entrepreneur and designer whose company was acquired by Twitter and who had been elected person of the year in his country last year for his numerous philanthropic pursuits. As for his "excuse", he has muscular dystrophy that has been getting progressively worse, forcing him to stay in a wheelchair and making it hard for him to type for extended periods of time. He had chosen to take his payout not as stocks, but as wages over an extended period of time, even though it would cost him more in taxes, saying that he would be happy to do so, as he himself had benefited from Iceland's social systems.
Musk probably started to gather something was wrong when several powerful and influential people started to chime in, praising the guy's talent and work ethic and being appalled by Musks treatment of him, so he deleted some of his worst tweets, publicly apologised for "misunderstanding the situation", said he hopes the guy will consider staying on in the company and that Twitter was one of the worst means of communication.
On one hand, it must be said that the sudden turnabout is probably more due to the fact that the guy had apparently been on an internal "do not fire" list, because doing so would be prohibitively costly, with some people speculating it could be something in the ballpark of 100 million dollars based on the size of his company that Twitter had acquired. On the other hand, you have to give it to mr Musk for his dedication and work ethic, because how many billionaires would bother to spare any of their time to personally go and mock their disabled employees? It really is that personalised approach that sets him apart from others.
A couple of the relevant Twitter threads:
https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/stat...43191773716481
https://twitter.com/iamharaldur/stat...82707835080705
Last edited by Starker; 12th Mar 2023 at 00:36.
Twitter's immolation by Musk is going even better than I hoped.
A part of me is sad to see Musk go down this way because he's clearly suffering from a mental illness that he is less and less able to control over time.
On the other hand, he's the one who isn't getting help to manage it.
I'm not sure pathological narcissism combined with a lack of filter is a mental illness per se, but he should definitely get help inasmuch as Twitter needs someone else to run it.
Then what do you think "pathological" means? Lol.
I was expecting a funnier riposte in the inevitable post that pointed that out, to be honest.
Here's a dictionary entry:
The fun part of language is reconciling how meaning drifts over time and a term can come to mean multiple things.
That's still describing mental illness. And for the record, "pathological narcissism" is a thing and so is more specific than just pathological, anyway. And finally, using a colloquialism to argue against the root of that same colloquialism is, uh, let's just say it undercuts your argument.
Last edited by Pyrian; 17th Mar 2023 at 19:35.
If I thought Musk had full-blown NPD, you better believe I'd mention exactly that. Pathological as an adjective in the colloquial sense above very obviously means you still attach a noun to it - so of course it has to be specific. I'm not 'arguing against the root of it', good grief. There exist colloquialisms, and there exist the original terms, and the two don't have to mean the same thing in everyday speech; I'm sure you can judge what was meant by context alone. So maybe that's confusing, but semantically these constructs have different usage features. If we'd been talking about someone as 'pathologically silly', I doubt we'd be having a discussion about that as a mental disorder.
I think the problem here is that things like pathological lying or pathological narcissism are mental health conditions that are widely known, whereas someone being pathologically silly is so rare, you need to borrow a German word to describe it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witzelsucht.
Last edited by Starker; 18th Mar 2023 at 03:49.
When does another person's behavioral configuration, which does not compliment one's own configuration, become a pathology? Are ADHD and autism illnesses or just variations on a sliding scale? What we call pathology often seems to be just preference or a value judgement.
To me, pathology is when that configuration creates a solitary predator, as opposed to a social carnivore.
Even then, solitary, humanoid predators are not entirely broken, they are just a danger to society, because they can masquerade as humans. To them, socialized humans are the malfunctioning ones, therefore deserving of consumption. But unlike social humans, they cannot survive without us (assuming that I am one of us and not one of them).
Perhaps the real disease is why socialized humans either love people with dangerous configurations or simply cannot identify them until it is too late. History is a parade of these adorable monsters. The present shows us that we can't seem to shake them. We even lavish them with titles, the most common being So&so The Great.
Perhaps real pathology is when a person cannot function in either world.
If you want to get into the brass tacks, I believe the line is neurodivergence, as in a condition within the neurotypical boundaries of neuroplasticity is not a mental illness but a cognitive profile, even if it reaches a harmful level.
Would that also depend on whether the harm is to the affected individual or if it is a danger to others? Considering that some people feel threatened just by the existence of divergent individuals, historically the definition of pathology seems to be largely a function of social fashion than any sort of objective measure.
The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has ballooned since its first edition. Is that because of increased awareness, increased reporting, reduction of stigmas, a finer diagnostic resolution, an increase in actual disease or as a marketing tool for psychiatric drugs?
Homosexuality is no longer listed but that doesn't mean that, in a less tolerant future, it will never be included again.
The real pathology is the friends we didn't make along the way
OMG. I am sicker than I thought.
In latest not the news, here's a video about the state of Wisconsin's attempts to become a democracy:
A sneak peek into the lives of main characters and how much more weird they tend to be compared to regular NPCs:
https://www.wonkette.com/qanon-psych...and-dirty-bums
Mexicans are putting 5G in jalapenos.The deep state has teamed up a taken over the wireless providers such as Verizon and they are hijacking the wireless technology 5G. It has been used as tool for surveillance, mind control, and tracking. People are getting harassed by all sorts of technology.
For instance, they make people hear voices. So in those hot peppers, jalapeno peppers from Mexico, what I discovered is there’s a coating in there like graphene, it’s some sort of nanoparticles. And it makes people hear voices.
You also get the "5G" by wiping your ass:
https://twitter.com/2022_Karma/statu...83625861976064And I told people, stop eating that and then it goes away. Toilet paper has it in it too. You can have it sitting – the toilet paper – in your bathroom and the 5G gets in the air.
It gets everywhere, the graphene. You don’t even have to use the toilet paper. So that regular toilet paper, Quilted Northern, I would not buy any further. I would look for maybe organic, maybe a recycled one. And also paper towels, they have graphene in them as well.
You can't make this shit up. *smh*
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