The criticisms of these polls is broadly correct. But I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion.
Nate Silver was bitterly attacked for weeks before the 2016 election for giving Trump a 20% chance of winning when most other (mainstream) pundits were giving him ~1%. It was bizarre to watch; they might as well have straight up told people not to bother voting.
It was Dem complacency that lost that election and thinkpieces like this do little but encourage more complacency. Trump fans will turn out. Biden-haters will turn out. People who would otherwise be holding their nose and voting for Biden will only turn out if they believe it matters. As they would have in 2016 if they'd known Trump had a realistic chance of winning.
Dems should be thanking biased Republican pollsters because Biden will only win this if a big chunk of eligible voters realise that they're going to have to hold their nose and vote for him.
Cork insulation would usually be skimmed over with plaster. You could have a look at insulatiing plaster too, but I think that needs to be thicker than cork to work well. Less munchable by critters though.
In an old building, you need to use breathable insulation, breathable plaster, and breathable paint (and breathable mortar, if you're repointing the outside). The moisture needs an escape route.
Jewish fascism, not Nazism.
Nazism is, in part, defined by its anti-semitism and, while many of Israel's supporters are anti-semitic (notably Christian Zionists but also those who insist that 'real' Jews support Israel regardless) it's just not appropriate to identify Nazism as the form of fascism practiced by Israel. It is authoritarian and supremacist but it is not specifically Nazi.
Ur-Fascism is a good read.
It's not supposed to help you spell the word? It's a comment on the danger of assuming things.
Executives likely to use such a device aren’t using public transit.
Yes they are. Probably not in the country that calls it transit, mind. And lots of people would like to be able to have more private conversations in public, whether or not they're travelling at the time.
Plus, I've seen a lot of threads over the years from gamers, or the people who have to live with them, looking for something exactly like this.
They vote for nobody. Electoral turnout in the UK plummeted from 1997 on.
Low turnout is a feature (not a bug) of neoliberalism.
Install HP Smart without permission.
I checked when I saw this story a few days ago, and there it was. I uninstalled it. Today it asked for permission to install itself again. I suppose at least this time it asked and could be refused.
Stochastic terrorism is spreading hatred and fear that is likely to make someone, somewhere, commit a violent act against the targets (or individuals within the targeted demographic). In this case, specific eBay employees were told to target this specific couple to shut them up. I don't know how precise the instructions were but the targets, and the people told to target them, were not random.
The fact that there was invisibilised third party access to the accounts used as the basis for prosecutions is important in and of itself. But I'm not seeing much about the underlying reasons for it.
Fujitsu knew that Horizon didn't work properly before it was rolled out to the Post Office. They were told by their own engineers that parts of it had to be rewitten because they were so shoddy. They chose, instead, to have a team of people correcting errors in the background, without disclosing this to subpostmasters or, apparently, the Post Office.
The concern is not that Fujitsu's trouble-shooters might be deliberately falsifying accounts, there is no obvious motive for them to do so. But it does make it clear that the ramshackle system did not work properly, that Fujitsu knew that it did not work properly, and that the only errors which could be corrected were the ones that got picked up centrally, with the process for correcting them creating the potential for more human error.
Fujitsu bosses knew about Post Office Horizon IT flaws, says insider
There's an interesting report on the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance site also: Origins of a disaster (and long form version).
It is well-documented that the Post Office’s Legacy Horizon was a reconfigured version of a disastrously flawed parent project, the Benefits Payment Card. The impression given by three Secretaries of State to a Parliamentary Select Committee in July 1999 was that, once the BPC was thought to be irredeemably faulty by autumn 1998, all efforts were then focused on the reconfiguration into the Horizon project as we know it. But their evidence was far from complete. In late 1998 the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who had been warned of the system’s instability, was asked to decide the future of Horizon. The No.10 Policy Unit had advised on cancelling the BPC and the Law Officers had given a clear view on how the public sector might terminate the project. Blair’s steer, however, paid no heed.
Many extremely well-paid heads need to roll.
He is also banned from making contact with her for two years
Why on earth would they put a time limit on it? He's displaying very concerning behaviours, which are known to escalate in a high proportion of cases.
It should be a lifetime ban on initiating contact with a substantial indefinitely suspended prison sentence if he breaks it. He needs to get a fucking grip, not spend two years stewing over it while planning his revenge.
Thank you! Surprised the report didn't mention that (I was too lazy to do a search).
If he were said to be omnipotent, this would be an interesting conundrum. But he isn't so it doesn't really work?
It does not matter whether he personally knew. The prosecutions were “so egregious as to make the prosecution of any of the “Horizon cases” an affront to the conscience of the court.”
The CPS are responsible for the vast majority of prosecutions in this country and they brought at least three "egregious" Horizon cases. It raises into question how they proceed against other defendants, most of whom are not sympathetic, middle-class pillars of the community and have even less chance of fighting it that the subpostmasters did.
Starmer headed up the CPS and he was responsible for prosecutorial conduct at the time. He cannot claim ignorance as a defence. He should be committing to finding out what the hell went wrong and making sure it can never happen again, to anybody.
The subhead misses out the worst stuff. How on earth?
Criminal charges still in the works, I would hope.
Is this another thing that the rest of the world didn't know the US doesn't have?
Why could that possibly be?
(Hint: The answer is in the article you didn't continue reading the moment you found an excuse for inaction.)
The drivers in these two cases were 60 and 23, respectively. I'm not sure why this rant fits here?
Every driver was once a new driver. They all have to learn to drive on real roads. There's no way around that. The stickers are intended to encourage other cars to not harass them in situations they may already be finding stressful. They exist precisely because not-new drivers are often impatient and are prone to making the situation worse because of it. If the stickers raise your blood pressure, take a step back and give yourself a good talking to.
Driver training should be better, of course. A compulsory 1000 miles by bicycle and another 2000 on a motorbike before being allowed behind the wheel would be the simplest place to start. Cyclists and motorcyclists make safer drivers.
Boosting birthrates to protect racial identity has a long and shameful history
"There are good reasons for expanding affordable childcare and funding proper parental leave; not because this might increase the fertility rate but because such policies are good for women, for children and for society. There are good reasons for thinking more concretely about the consequences of falling birthrates and the policies needed to respond to it; and to acknowledge, too, that immigration cannot be the sole answer, but is likely to be part of it.
"There are, though, no good reasons for using concern about birthrates to exacerbate hostility to immigration, to project divisive notions of identity and to restrict the rights of women and gay people. That is to enclose iniquity in a “family friendly” wrapping"
The popular Crooked House at Himley, near Dudley, is completely destroyed by a blaze.
Oh look, another historic building going up in flames shortly after it was bought by developers. Coincidence, I'm sure.
Elon Musk’s lawyers are threatening the Center for Countering Digital Hate with legal action for exposing Twitter’s failure to tackle hate speech. Here’s CCDH’s response.
"Last week we got a letter from Elon Musk’s X. Corp threatening CCDH with legal action over our work, exposing the proliferation of hate and lies on Twitter since he became the owner. Elon Musk’s actions represent a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research in the desperate hope that he can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild his relationship with advertisers."
[With apologies to anyone who dislikes endless Musk/Huffman spam in this community. I put it here because misusing the law to silence independent tech researchers this has wider implications.]
Trialling ActivityPub and the federated model for social media and it's possibilities for the BBC.
"As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point."
Fewer than 20 Black women physicists in the U.S. have earned tenure. This scholar just joined the club.
And, at the risk of crossing subLemmy boundaries, here's Mekka Okereke (@[email protected]) on that achievement, and Mastadon's loss:
"And when she tried to join the Fediverse, she was greeted with a barrage of hate, sexism, racism, and anti-semitism that should have never been allowed to happen.
"So now no one on Fediverse gets to interact with her directly about her work on here. Our loss. 😢
"Which is why we'll make it so that this type of terrible welcome is unlikely to happen again. Allowing it to happen to her was a choice. We will make better ones."
#BlackMastodon
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110793385293203842
Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t
"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird.
"My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space."
Tesla’s Dieselgate
Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn't its cars, it's Tesla's business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:
Joan Scott, 83, had her legs amputated after she was trapped under a bus when the driver drove off.
This is a staggering story. This jobsworth closed the doors on her because she forgot her bus pass the week before. Despite knowing that she definitely has a bus pass because all pensioners in the UK get one. Just a total loss of humanity.
The mum of a teen boy with autism has filed a lawsuit against a cinema chain after the pair were removed after using toilet together.
More toilet hysteria.
A manufactured panic about trans people using the toilets they feel safest in, making them (and any other gender non-conforming individual) unsafe regardless of which choice they make, also makes it unsafe for parents to take their young or disabled children to the toilet if the child happens to be a different sex from the parent.
We need to bury these establishments in costly litigation that force these laws to be repealed. Ridiculous people.
Aaron Hewson's sentence is increased after appeal judges conclude it was unduly lenient.
Charles Burton, who represented Hewson, had argued that the sentence was not unduly lenient and should not be increased.
Appeal judges heard that Hewson had convictions for violence and, when a juvenile, had been convicted of sex offences.
He had also admitted possessing an "extreme" pornographic image.
Lady Justice Macur said appeal judges had concluded that there had been "significant flaws" in Recorder Hardy's approach to sentencing.
She said he had indicated when passing sentence that evidence suggested Hewson was a "Jack the lad character".
"We deplore the judge's description as indicating that the defendant was 'Jack the lad'," she said.
"This offending was predatory."
A surprising number of far-right extremists have been caught with some of the worst content imaginable, is this a trend or is child sexual abuse material just distressingly more commonplace than most realize?
Every right-wing accusation is a confession.
Internal battle between ministers leaving schools in England isolated, says headteachers’ representative
"Kemi Badenoch, the minister for women and equalities, is said to be pushing for the non-statutory guidance to include a ban on social transitioning by pupils, meaning that transgender children would not be able to use another name and pronoun or wear uniform of the opposite gender.
"But the Times said legal advice from Victoria Prentis, the attorney general, found that a ban on social transitioning in schools was unlawful under the Equalities Act and would require the government passing new legislation..."
"New legislation could delay the guidance until the 2024 general election. Alternatively, the government could issue guidance that drops the controversial clauses.
"On Sunday Badenoch told the BBC that the guidance would compel schools to inform parents if their child was questioning their gender. “What is right is that parents know what is going on with their children at school,” she said.
"But on Monday the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, declined to tell MPs when the guidance would be published, saying that she was working with Badenoch to produce it “in the near term”."
The BBC has been accused of “selling the public’s trust” by producing “totally biased” documentaries on the future of sustainable food sponsored by Corteva, one of the world’s largest pesticide firms, potentially in breach of the broadcaster’s editorial guidelines. The “Follow the Food” documentarie...
"The BBC claims that it had “full editorial control” over Follow the Food. However, an award submission by BBC StoryWorks – a studio that produces paid content for commercial clients – shows that the Follow the Food was tailored to hit key performance indicators and meet specific “objectives” for Corteva, potentially in breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines.
"The award submission claimed that the BBC applied its “lens” to the project, which “[focused] on the client’s objectives and what our audiences would want to know about a sustainable food future, to create an end-to-end strategy for Corteva Agriscience”.
"The BBC’s editorial guidelines state that editorial content must not become “a vehicle for the purpose of promoting the sponsor”.
"Environmental journalist Amy Westervelt told DeSmog that these sort of partnerships are “selling the public’s trust”. Corporations are able to piggyback on the BBC’s reputation to “lend them credibility”, she said.
"The BBC and other publications increasingly need to raise money from corporations, she said, “making it possible for the media to be used as a disinformation tool”."
With our food systems on the verge of collapse, it’s the plutocrats v life on Earth
"What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. As well as the traditional approach of buying media outlets and pouring money into the political parties that favour them, they devise new ways of protecting their interests.
"Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class."
Can AI writing detectors be trusted? We dig into the theory behind them.
Male malaise in the United States goes back to the founders, and it is a preoccupation of elites in particular. They might teach us something about this current wave of manliness panic.
"Hawley typically cites Big Tech, Hollywood and academia as the unholy trinity of elites that has laid masculinity to waste. He likes to quote the titles of old feminist essays from obscure journals to imply that all college professors and all Democratic politicians hate men. But even as he blames this ruling-class syndicate for depriving men of their ancient reason for being, his own fears sync with ruling-class fears from time immemorial. Elite men are anxious that their wives, workers and children will gain financial and intellectual independence, take their property and flee. And then the unkindest cut: Someone new — a lowly outsider who has been waiting in the wings — will take their place at the top of the social order."
We have 2-3 months to compile a Threads block list
With the upcoming #meta #Project92 Fediverse service, there has been a, well, robust discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it. ➡️ To avoid data mining … However, defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scr...
It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:
-
Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)
-
Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)
-
Defederate (wait and see)
-
Defederate with the intention of staying defederated
-
Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too
It's all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.
In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?
I'm not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.
False and misleading claims about the war in Ukraine are being widely shared.
False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia's invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days.
Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.
If you'd like to draw some conclusions about ActivityPub from this, it should not be that a network should disallow supernodes ...
I am not open to your ahistorical take on Google Chat and XMPP. Google didn't do anything wrong by using an open standard. They didn't do anything wrong by building a good interface that people liked to use. And they didn't do anything wrong by disconnecting from the network when the spam and har...
Useful Masto thread on strategy.
Exclusive: Experts say fall in funding caused ‘turning point’ in standards in health service in England
"The research refutes Rishi Sunak’s insistence that the pandemic caused the record number of 7.2 million people waiting for treatment – for example for hip and knee replacements – that hospitals are facing. Covid has simply exacerbated a decline in quality of care, especially in access to urgent and emergency care, that was evident before the virus emerged in early 2020 and was also closely linked to staff shortages.
"“Most indicators suggest that the pandemic has heaped unbearable pressure on services that were already struggling to meet expectations for quality and access prior to the pandemic,” Morris said."