It’s about all our data in aggregate, not about your friend’s data in particular.
And yet it still affects your friend. How? Through other people. By having access to all that data the IT powers-that-be can easily build data models to manipulate people into many things, without them even realising it. Making political topics trend, encouraging harmful habits (like doom scrolling) and so on. That all leads to worse people getting elected, which leads to worse roads, worse taxes (higher/lower, whatever your friend thinks), more pollution and so on. That all affects your friend.
Also, what your friend said is that they basically don’t care if other more vulnerable people get manipulated into all those things he said (wasting time, money, time is money btw, etc…) because they themselves aren’t affected. Do they think of themselves as a person that’s that self-absorbed/selfish? Probably not.
And your friend might also say, yeah fine, whatever, but I’m also just a fish in the sea, me changing my approach won’t change anything for society. But do they vote?
You have to lead by example. It has to start from somebody, it has to start from all of us. That’s how black people no longer had to sit in the back of the bus in the US. It started small. That’s how gay people get to marry. It started small. And that’s how people won’t get manipulated by their online feeds. It starts small.
And if your friend is still, yeah, whatever, it doesn’t affect me, tell them about the: first they came for x, but I wasn’t an x, then they came for y, but I wasn’t a y, then they came for z, but I wasn’t a z, then they came for me, but there was nobody left to stand up for me.
Your friend is encouraging behaviours that will bite either them in the ass, or their descendants one day. It will be a war, it will be a law, it will be climate change and a forest fire, that could have been prevented if people cared.
And all it takes is a new messenger, new browser, a single add-on in it, and maybe a new website or two. They’re not being asked to be a superhero, just to use a different computer programme. And that’s all.
That’s what Bhutan does. It’s enshrined into their constitution as the goal of governance, as GNH, and it takes precedence over GDP.
It’s not without its problems tho, but it is a noble approach, worthy of pursuing imo.
Those are called context-based ads or contextual targeting.
The downside is it needs human intervention. It’s hard to automate it online, without it preserving the typical track-y nature of online ads (the ads would still be getting served from an ad server to the browser directly, and therefore still no privacy.
It works if the ads are hard coded into the webpage by the publisher server-side, but then the advertiser has no idea how many views the ad got, and therefore how much to pay for the ad space… which means the advertiser needs human intervention to decide how much to pay by a guesstimate, which means this whole scheme can’t work for small random websites in an automated fashion.
It might, and that’s a mighty precarious might, work with some kind of crazy blockchain scheme (y’know, that whole distributed consensus thing… lol… an actual use for blockchain for once?!), but unlikely, very unlikely…
Basically , I’m all for it as an alternative to donations or volunteering if they aren’t possible , but you need to actually attract advertisers that want to advertise on your website first.
“The average is calculated by adding up all of the individual values and dividing this total by the number of observations. The median is calculated by taking the “middle” value, the value for which half of the observations are larger and half are smaller.”
So for example, in a country with 99% poor people, and 1% insanely rich people, the median person’s wealth is actually really small (like the poor people), but the average person’s wealth is kinda big (except a person with that mid-ground wealth doesn’t actually exist in the country).
In the case of voters, this means that in a country of highly polarized views and power, so of imbalanced sides, the median and average voter can be very different. One is what the people want, the other is what the power wants.
Emphasis mine.
Just one. The traffic gets randomly routed through the nodes. Gather your stats over a single exit node and you’ve got your stats for the whole network. The longer you gather your stats over the node the closer they are to the precise stats for the whole network.
Just like you can poll 1000 random people and have a good, almost accurate, guess who’s the entire country gonna vote for.
Does playing chess puzzles on lichess.org count? :D
I’d say yes. On the same note:
Should the study of non-Western history be a requirement for a history degree in the UK?
Also yes.
Even if it were specialized as a western history/philosophy degree, and not just a general history/philosophy degree, some level of knowledge should still be required (and probably is already, I wouldn’t know).
I’d just like to take this one step further and say that color has nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation and its wavelengths. Not at its core.
You could easily have a robo-eye that reacts to water waves or anything else that might carry similar information and converts it into a bio-chemical signal that goes into the optical nerve and into the brain and you’d see color. In fact, you can see color in your sleep/dreams with no input from outside the brain. Or less abstractly, you can see flashes of color with your eyes closed after going in a dark room after being in a bright space, because of the state of the ”irritated” chemicals in the back of your eyes. The subjective perception of color, the qualia as it is called, is something that correlates in the physical world, or has its physical correlate (noun) only to something in the brain. The EM waves are just carriers of information that supply us with information that gets experienced as color once it finds it’s appropriate home in the information structures of the brain, and the mind.
Another example of this is how people with amputated limbs can feel “phantom pain” sometimes in the non existent body parts, because the stump nerve is being appropriately irritated to send a signal to the brain, that becomes pain in the brain, independently of the existence or non-existence of the body part.
Same with irritating the ear bones, without any air waves, as with tinnitus. The air waves just carry the info usually, they’re not sound itself.
You can indeed hear EM waves’ info too, not see it, just listen to a radio.
Shape is something we experience because of the existence of space, the perception of the “category”, the concept of space in the mind.
Which one is more fundamental depends, I guess, which one you believe is more fundamental, if any, quality or concepts, perception or reason.
This would be of equal true value, whether you label things as a materialist or as an idealist, just label it then as, let’s say, matter arrangement, or laws of arrangement. Or maybe simply, matter and spacetime.
I’d say they’re of equal footing, and don’t quite go, one without the other, in the human mind, or the physical world, as we know them.
Done with this simple trick! Desertification hates it!
That’s human-powered right? I think i can see the chain there (plus why else have that seating setup if not for pedaling).
Judging by the size of that cargo section it must be pretty hard pedaling all that stuff in the back, assuming it’s heavy packages. Seems like a workout. But then again, it’s sort of like a rickshaw I guess, so doable? I hope the driver is paid extra accordingly. I assume it also has some gearing system that makes it easier on the legs but extra slow.
If it has an extra electric engine somewhere in there tho, why even have the pedals? Maybe the pedals are just for the empty trip back.
Overall I don’t hate it (let me rephrase that: I like it!), but I’m not the one pedaling. :D
KDE Neon also doesn’t have a snap Firefox, it comes out of the box with a Mozilla PPA Firefox (despite being Ubuntu based).