Antibiotics of all sorts, runoff, etc... There's no magic panacea. Thai and Vietnamese shrimp farms have been known to kill of swaths of mangroves. This you can find from a Google search.
On a more anecdotal basis, I've also heard that Norwegian salmon is fed quite a cocktail of antibiotics etc and some people for that reason prefer New Zealand or Scottish salmon. Again this part I have no evidence.
So anyway my point is that it's definitely not as easy as it seems unless I misunderstand what "land based" means, I just assume they're fish farms not in the open sea but somewhere in a lake or an artificially made pool.
The OCR stuff is quite usable. Their models perform good at some very basic tasks, so I use them to diversify. But their current model lineup is really terrible.
N=40. No idea why one would release such bullshit.
The worst part will be the idiotic news outlets publishing the stupid headline followed by the pseudoscience peddlers pushing peppermint oil supplements onto an ever-increasing boomer population by AI-generated Instagram ads. Lovely times we live in.
Even worse, the placebo group drank peppermint cordial. The researchers are arguing there is no peppermint oil in it because it's not a listed ingredient, but the listed ingredients have "flavorings". Which, I'd be shocked if it weren't peppermint oil.
Publish or perish mentality + difficulty funding a larger study is why this gets published. There's nothing particularly wrong with it as an exploratory study, the big problem is the lack of incentive to try to reproduce the results and publish the inevitable null result.
Can someone enlighten me why Flock cameras are worse than the average security camera? How is it such a big topic now when their large network suggests that they've been in operation for quite some time by now?
Louis Rossmann likes to point out that the "CC" in "CCTV" means "closed circuit." Traditional security cameras are displayed maybe in a security booth in real time somewhere, and then recorded onto an on-prem hard drive. When the drive fills up the oldest video is overwritten. They're only ever looked at after recording if there's a reason to look at them.
The Flock cameras, on the other hand, upload all data to Flock which stores all video forever. They also do image recognition to identify license plates as well as other identifiable information (they've claimed to not do facial recognition but the implication is they can).
They then make this searchable so any cop with a flock login can put, say, your license plate into a flock search and it will give him a complete record of all your movements all across the country.
Network effects. Massive difference between police having to go talk to a local business owner or private citizen and say "hey, there was a robbery here, can you please go pull the footage you got last night at 8pm and see if you can share it with us please?" and being able to do a one-click nationwide query.
You'd have to ask the guys putting flock cameras in playgrounds.
Flock apparently know how to sell this stuff to cops because not only did they film children's gymnastics they used the footage as part of their sales pitch to police:
They have not been in operation for quite some time now. The large network is not a product of a long and steady roll out, but instead significant financial investment - much of which coming from people who are on record saying that democracy is a flawed system and other authoritarian soundbytes.
Bob is the town mayor. The police want XYZ. The police request from flock a detail breakdown of everywhere that Bob went in the last 5 years (this example is after flock has been around a while) and then feeds that into AI looking for patterns. The police find a mistress. The police now get everything they want for the rest of mayor Bob's term.
Flock is a large panopticon used to control the population. It became apparent recently how Flock cameras would be used by a new administration to purge law abiding workers and residents whose only crime was their immigration status. Whether you agree or not with the policy of this purge, you still witnessed the frightening efficiency with which authorities could now track and enforce whatever policy would come down the pipe. It made clear through show of force the new threat to a free people.
If it were a single camera or location, there is much less ability to track and attempt to coerce a large population.
the best place to start, if you're legitimately curious, would probably be the many news paper articles and the many recorded city meetings where flock's controversies are brought up.
I was there before 2018, their reliability was never that good.
I still remember that they launched GitHub Actions in 2018 and back then I was thinking: They can't even make the website reliable, surely this will only cause them more problems.
Dropbox pulled the plug on so many good apps. They should have built the full office suite in the browser and eventually slapped an email service on it. As a competitor to Google Workspace, they would have a real chance. Storage as a Service is too little of a moat in the cloud age.
Mailbox, Paper and whatever the photos one was called (Carousel?). I agree. I was hyping them up as the next gsuite and they just dismantled all those apps and the momentum they built along with them.
Paper still exists - Drew refused to kill it. Been heavily underfunded for years and saddled with a codebase that assumed it would be >50 people forever, so still digging out of that hole - hence the apparent freeze on feature development for multiple years and separate mobile/desktop apps disappearing.
Yes, the photos one was Carousel. I'm still sad about that, in some ways it was better than even what Google Photos offers now. The big problem there was Dropbox chicken'ed out about picking a fight with Google Photos - since Google were giving away for free(ish) a comparable product to the whole Android install base, doing the same freemium model as always would've been a challenge with heavy competition for the free users.
Mailbox... was a botched acquisition. Ideologically they aligned, but no real plan for how to keep momentum and turn it into making money, and no real story about how Mailbox was better as part of Dropbox than separate. Even under the hood the infrastructure was all separate (except eventually for login).
A big missing piece of the story: Dropbox tried to be a multi-product company long before building the infrastructure for that. Which I think self-sabotaged many of these new products.
I’m guessing their “momentum” wasn’t on the path of building a sustainable business, particularly given the existence of Microsoft. From a market position standpoint, Paper could have become what Notion is now. Notion even released at around the same time as Paper.
Was it that Notion from early on supported Markdown compatibility, which is a distinguishing feature when selling to software startups? Was Paper too aggressively coupled to Dropbox storage, when Google, Microsoft, and Box already had a large share of that market?
They are not drying up because of AI datacenters and especially not because of European datacenters.
While man-made climate change is undoubtedly real, the yearly "our lakes dry up"-media cycle is not proof of it at all. Check if the return to normal in November will make the news.
I am aware and never claimed that. Though, the global push towards mega factories, data centers and whatnot does not help the situation. Lots of places here in Germany already struggle with having enough water, so the mindset to "lets just build a Tesla mega factory here" is something I never understood. Can't be that different for data centers. We should use our resources smartly, not for profit margins.
Your comment very much implies a strong link between the two however. That you then switch from data centres to factories is also a shift that is not related to the discussion at hand.
Personally, everything I've read on the issue indicates that the water usage, for a product that I hear mentioned daily by people in the street, is insignificant.
I have many qualms with AI, mainly about the politics of AI labs and its effects on inequality, and I am active in this field. But I see its environmental costs as a weak argument and don't use it, despite of how receptive people that I try to convince are to it: it uses much less energy, harms many fewer animals, and serves more of a purpose than animal agriculture, so I prefer to move my environmental actions towards that.
"Our lakes run dry" is a meme at this point. Apparently the doomers entirely forgot their kvetching about Lago di Garda drying out a couple of years ago. Memory-holed doesn't even closely describe this sort of behavior.
Nah, it’s just more visible. It’s not that much of a sea change. And it’s ridiculously naive to pretend that the major countries in Europe don’t have their own mechanisms to regularly and effectively bypass any democratic inconveniences when necessary. They regularly push through things that no constituent would ever want or vote for.
Meanwhile the President sits in the Oval Office and says, in a televised interview, with absolutely no shame, that all of his kids and family are insider trading, all the time.
Meanwhile in Germany insider trading is completely legal for politicians. Well, not insider trading - but it's definition supposedly doesn't extend beyond internal business information.
(At least that's what people keep telling me, im not a lawyer)
Insider trading is it course not legal for politicians in Germany, as you could have found out without being a lawyer.
That being said, transparency/reporting duties for members of parliament/ministers can and should definitely be improved.
The point was that the definition of insider trading does not extend to politicians buying/selling from their "insider knowledge" as it's not internal business knowledge. Hence it is legal (in Germany) for politicians to buy/sell right before passing laws which influence the valuation of companies.
Which I may add: you could've easily found out yourself too if you looked up what I wrote.
> Hence it is legal (in Germany) for politicians to buy/sell right before passing laws which influence the valuation of companies.
Are you sure about that? European legal theory for insider trading implicitly covers more cases than the US without needing to explicitly enumerate them as far as I understand (in a nutshell, trading on insider information is illegal regardless of the source or whether any fiduciary duty was breached), and I'd be surprised if this case were not covered.
Which laws get passed under complete secrecy that politicians can trade based on? They are usually debated for months/years. Even if something is rushed through fast (like during COVID?) it is public knowledge.
The issue in America is the president has more power to act unilaterally (maybe to address his/her own interests, maybe not) than any European politician.
Trump just dropped the part of his lawsuit against the BBC where he claimed it damaged his business because he would have to expose what his business is.
The Trump regime a way more corrupt than anything currently seen in Europe.
He currently attempting to steal Greenland so he can strip it of mineral assets for fucks sack.
No politician in Europe is starting wars for personal gain.
You're right, just the other day our MP lined his pockets to the tune of a couple of billion, pumped his shitcoin, tipped off his friends about about the stock market movements he was going to cause, sent a couple of good deals to his kids and threatened war on a couple of countries just to please his buddies. And that's just the last couple of months... /s
A parliamentary process where a law is being proposed, amended and voted upon isn't "corruption".
Just because you disagree with a law, that doesn't make it "corruption" - it does make you an authoritarian that attacks democracy as soon as other people don't vote like you want.
"Chat control 1" is the deliberately misleading name for "Facebook is not banned from using CSAM scanners on your DMs if it wants to" - I don't think it's worth voting someone out based on that. The one that bans encryption is called "chat control 2". I assume they've both got the same name as part of a deception tactic.
No, he has a point. There are various degrees of democracy, between direct and many degrees of indirection. VDL is certainly not a good level of democracy:
- Elections are so rare (every 5 years) and encompass so many huge life-altering choices (VDL being one of the criteria only) that it's not democratic. The Swiss vote every important law, like "Should we buy fighter jets".
- De facto, party health is part of democracy (look at the Rwanda: It is absolutely possible to have a genocide made by democracies, and it is in fact more frequent than dictatorships) and network effects have made that European parties don't represent the people's will,
- Europe dispatches money to countries that need convincing, like Scottland, while wearing the mature members' citizen to the bone. We can't even have decent roads or internet here, while newcomers are super-happy to join ("I'm happy because Europe brought wealth and economic development!!!" - yeah look in 20 years). Money flushing around Europe trying to bribe citizens groups into staying, which makes opposition impossible. The EU is too chicken to let citizen vote every 20 years on whether we should stay in Europe, because then answer would be a big NO.
- The kill switch didn't even work, countries can't leave, or there is retaliation. Not only UK but France voted against the new treaties in 2005, the president still signed them.
The EU is the most lazy level of democracy. It's a knee-jerk reaction to say that VDL can be removed from office by the citizen.
It is a success. UK leaving the EU is a form of democracy. People should have the means to choose their destiny, just like the Bengladeshi or the Timor people.
What is not a success is:
- The EU taking retaliation against them,
- The EU parties overturning members of the Leave party into the Libdem, AFTER being elected (yes, it happened for 16 members, plus the ones who didn't officially switch but stalled the Leave party's proceedings),
- From the moment they clearly voted NO, it took 3 more votes until they could be allowed to leave. Basically, it was until it was clear the UK citizenry would be entirely blocking the democratic process until the EU-Leave decision was enacted. You can understand people's despair of democracy when a clear LEAVE vote isn't enacted, like in France 2005.
In the rest of the EU, they're too chicken to let us vote. But they will let us vote... one day... only in areas where they're guaranteed a large STAY result.
The EU is only letting us vote when the answer is Yes.
The EU hasn't retaliated against the UK for leaving, and it hasn't messed with UK elections as you allegedly.
Taking several votes for such a big decision is good. It prevents impulsive hotheadedness from making a ruinous decision. The UK did vote to leave and then left.
And it ruined the UK. That's why other people are saying it was a bad idea. Not because they didn't vote, but because the thing they voted for ruined them.
Except the catchphrase of the day was "Brexit means Brexit", because no one bothered to define what we were voting for until we'll after the fact. There were plenty of options such as a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit. Even the hard Brexit kept us in some institutions so what we got was harder than the hardest Brexit discussed.
Rwanda came for help to France 2 years before, and France conditionned its financial help to a democratisation process.
- From here, about 150 parties got born.
- The previous dictatorship, even of the majority, was protecting the minority, because they knew the international consequence on countries who don't protect the minorities.
- Once a democracy, it was a leadership of the majority ethnicity (90% Hutu) so you bet they had no qualms about protecting the Tutsis. Tensions and invitation to violence soared immediately, but in a coveted speech.
- A plane containing half the government was bombed, the country woke up without clear leadership, elections didn't happen fast enough. Citizen acted with their own machetes.
Democracy means the majority owns the decisions. Doesn't mean they'll be good people.
How should EU citizens vote at that next election if they are unhappy with von der Leyen's actions as President of the European Commission in order to remove her if enough other voters agree?
They should vote for parties that are not organized in the EPP (European people's party). The exact party options depend on the country you're voting in.
And what would happen next to ensure that von der Leyen was removed from office?
It is worth remembering at this point how von der Leyen first became Commission President. She was controversially nominated by the European Council - who are not directly elected representatives within the EU system - deviating from the spitzenkandidat convention in a way that surprised and angered many MEPs - who are. Her own national government (Germany) did not support her in the Council voting because one of the parties in the governing coalition opposed her. She was eventually confirmed by a narrow majority in a secret ballot of the European Parliament from which little can therefore be determined about who did or didn't vote for her except that quite a lot of MEPs who were expected to support her candidacy based on public statements did not in fact do so in the secret vote.
So she was essentially proposed by a group of people who aren't directly elected at EU level and in some cases aren't even directly elected by the nations they represent - in violation of the normal convention expected by the only people who are directly elected at EU level - and was then narrowly confirmed by that directly elected group only in a secret ballot from which the vote of each individual representative was not recorded and there is therefore no possibility for their own electorates to hold those representatives to account personally for how they voted. Given that we are talking about the most influential political post in the EU this is not exactly a powerful demonstration of democratic legitimacy and a clear popular mandate no matter how you look at it.
I think the EU should be reformed in a more democratic direction, no question about that.
Still, calling the system undemocratic is a stretch since anyone who pays attention can see how EU policies have shifted after the far right increased the number of their seats in the previous election. Climate ambition has been dialed way down and immigration is being curtailed.
As one of the most openly corrupted Croatian politician is Von Der Leyen's commissioner, it tells me all I need to know about her choices and influence.
In most representative democracies it is the elected representatives who initiate new law. In the EU the elected MEPs have no power to do this and it is the role of the unelected Commission to start the process.
Meanwhile the Commission is also the "executive branch" of the EU. A great deal of what the commissioners do is not directly subject to approval by the European Parliament.
The EU, like most union governments including the USA, was designed to be conservative and not pass things by default. For something to pass the EU, it has to be wanted by both the leaders of all the EU countries (the commission) and the people in all the countries (the parliament). It's similar to the house and senate of the USA
You are misunderstanding the leadership structure of the EU. There are three main bodies that lead it - the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, and the European Parliament.
The Council is the one that generally consists of the leaders of each member state. It has important roles in the system including selecting candidates for key roles and as part of "trilogue" negotiations (which are themselves sometimes controversial for being secretive and unaccountable) but has little formal participation in the normal legislative process.
The Parliament is the one whose members are elected by the citizens of the EU. Its best known role is to debate and vote on new legislation.
The Commission holds much of the real power as it serves as both the leadership of the executive branch and the origin of new legislative proposals - and yet its members are chosen via much less transparent means and have little personal accountability to EU citizens.
Many EU commissioners have been politicians whose national political careers were struggling and - like appointment to the House of Lords here in the UK - they may have been put forward for the Commission by their national political leadership as a position of influence that required less confirmation than winning a popular vote. This is relevant here because von der Leyen herself is arguably in this category.
Of course the EU is not democratic. The sheep, the common people, are only allowed to vote on pre-defined options that are decided entirely in private by the new political nobility, the EU politicians.
Should they happen to vote incorrectly, like when the EU constitution was voted about in ireland and france ,they will just have to vote again and again until by exhaustion, the right result is guaranteed.
The EU has nothing to do with democracy. No, putting a paperslip in a box is not democracy.
I think perhaps switzerland is the country on the planet that is closest to democracy, and they also have the highest incomes ,highest living standards and lowest taxes in europe.
The EU has choose the path of soviet like socialism, and of course the economy will slowly decrease until it collapses, and then we'll get a Hitler 2.0 to "fix" the problems that were caused by the EU dictators.
The best thing you can do if you care about europe, is to move outside of the EU, avoid paying tax, do not feed the beast, and spread the truth, so that fewer and fewer people want to move there. Then it will hopefully collapse in time.
The elitism of direct democracy is a mystery to me, especially in the case of the US where it is not technically direct and the powers and role of the president are deeply modelled after those of the British crown of the times
I'm not sure what that's supposed to imply because if Ursula von der Leyen manages to be less corrupt without being elected by the people that has some uncharitable consequences for the quality of the American electorate, I think HL Mencken had something to say on this
Technically, the US president is also not elected by the people but by the electors, which in many ways is comparable to how the EU elected the EU Commission President.
So? If you're directly elected by the people you can behave how you damn well please? Except trump isn't because you have the electoral college.
I live in the UK, on paper we have an absolutely terrible version of democracy. No constitution, and un elected head of state. Compared to pre pull out Afghanistan it sucks. And yet we are still here. Perfect on paper democracy isn't the be all and end all. It's about institutional culture. The EU has a much better democratic culture than the US does.
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