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Many people who are in their teens and 20s today process information in a way which makes them unable to understand the concept of humor. I'm not trying to be facetious when I say this, I genuinely believe that, for whatever reason, they genuinely cannot distinguish between sarcasm and sincerity.
TL;DR: Baker in Washington (state) makes cookies each year around Valentine's day which resemble giant versions of those horrid, chalk-like little candies that have a word or phrase on them. They tend to be a bit silly. This year, he made one cookie which said "Build that wall." And, predictably, he's now suffering.
Actual things people have written or said in response:
“A cookie like this does represent that there is some hate coming out this bakery, whether he chooses to admit it or not.”
“Hatred and racism is NOT a joke. Not even on a cookie, If you say it was a ‘mistake’, it shows us who you are to your core — a racist. If you truly weren’t a racist you would have never even made that cookie or thought it would be a joke.”
“Really Edmonds Bakery? Really?! Your racism is so ‘cute’. Lost my business.”
Also, signs suggesting that the town boycott the bakery. And threats. The usual.
Respondeth the baker:
“Some are a little risqué, some are nice. I try to be funny. If I wanted to make a political statement, I'd put it on a sign. And march up and down the street. But I put it on a cookie for heaven's sake."
This might seem like an over-reaction. That was my initial thought. But now I understand that these people do not perceive writing "build that wall" on a cookie as a harmless, flippant joke. They genuinely believe that it represents the baker's actual political opinion, and that, in turn, means that the baker is functionally indistinguishable from Hitler.
(I think I'm clear on Godwin's Law here. I am not making a comparison to Hitler, I am pointing out the fact that other people have done so.)
So, yeah. Within a few generations, I expect that the concept of humor will have all but disappeared from American English.
We've been researching less populated places that we can still have decent enough internet to get our work done.
Even in Nov 2016, the latency in Satellite internet is still not fast/stable enough to work in the 25th largest metro area in the country.
It may even be here in Oklahoma. 50 acres with some farming and a few animals. Yeah, I'm sick of what has become "US Culture" which is a disgrace to the word culture.
Even in Nov 2016, the latency in Satellite internet is still not fast/stable enough to work in the 25th largest metro area in the country.
Serious response:
Unless someone figures out a way to make radio waves travel faster than the speed of light, the latency of satellite-based data connections is never going to improve.
Geostationary satellites are 22,236 miles above the equator. Orbital mechanics dictates that they have to be at that altitude. To bring them lower would require that they continuously expend fuel to accelerate themselves relative to earth, and that's not practical.
The speed of light (and also radio waves in space) is 186,000 miles per second. That means a delay of .12 seconds for each leg of the journey. From the point of view of a packet which has to travel from the client, up to the bird, (ignoring transcoding delay), back down to the host, (ignoring terrestrial delay), then from the host back up to the bird, (ignoring transcoding delay again), and back down to the client, that's a minimum ping time of 0.48 seconds. This is a hard limit, which will never be exceeded, given our present understanding of physics and relativity.
Originally Posted by z31maniac
It may even be here in Oklahoma. 50 acres with some farming and a few animals. Yeah, I'm sick of what has become "US Culture" which is a disgrace to the word culture.
What we are describing as "culture", in this context, is the antithesis of culture as described by generations millennia ago.
Unless someone figures out a way to make radio waves travel faster than the speed of light, the latency of satellite-based data connections is never going to improve.
Geostationary satellites are 22,236 miles above the equator. Orbital mechanics dictates that they have to be at that altitude. To bring them lower would require that they continuously expend fuel to accelerate themselves relative to earth, and that's not practical.
The speed of light (and also radio waves in space) is 186,000 miles per second. That means a delay of .12 seconds for each leg of the journey. From the point of view of a packet which has to travel from the client, up to the bird, (ignoring transcoding delay), back down to the host, (ignoring terrestrial delay), then from the host back up to the bird, (ignoring transcoding delay again), and back down to the client, that's a minimum ping time of 0.48 seconds. This is a hard limit, which will never be exceeded, given our present understanding of physics and relativity.
What we are describing as "culture", in this context, is the antithesis of culture as described by generations millennia ago.
Not serious response, but someone will probably think:
predictive analytics will predict your next move on the internet and close the latency gap.
And to your comments above on the latest generation having no sense of humor, I completely agree. I’m a pretty sarcastic guy, and I often get stone-faced stares when I try to laugh things off that go wrong. The kids these days are just like “that’s not funny.” I’m like “yeah, it’s ******* hilarious, and now I’m going to fix your **** up.”
“It doesn’t matter that he sexually assaulted two women in a women’s prison.”
A feminist activist complained Monday that she was kicked off a city queer rights-initiative for using the wrong pronoun to describe a transgender convicted rapist.
Julia Beck made the allegation during a discussion panel at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. She addressed it toward the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ Commission, of which she was the only lesbian co-chair. She called the experience “as unbelievable and absurd as it is common place.”
“I got kicked off of the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ Commission as the only lesbian, simply for stating biological facts,” she said. “After a months’ long witch hunt, I was found guilty of ‘violence.’ My crime? Using male pronouns to talk about a convicted male rapist who identifies as transgender and prefers female pronouns.”
Beck went on to complain that the commission seemed to care more about the trans woman’s pronouns that about what Beck herself saw as the real danger: the rapist’s placement in a women’s prison.
This is kind of interesting. I'm posting it here, since my own generation (which is at the heart of most present-day vaccine conspiracy theories), is directly responsible for the creation of Gen Wu, and the same mindset which has produced all of those snowflakes is at work in this.
(Maybe someday I'll create a specific "freedom to lie" thread.)
Anti-vaxxers are spreading conspiracy theories on Facebook, and the company is struggling to stop them
A medical worker holds a measles-rubella vaccine in 2018. (Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP/Getty Images)
By Taylor Telford, February 13 at 1:22 PM
As a disturbing number of measles outbreaks crop up across the United States, Facebook is facing challenges combating widespread misinformation about vaccinations on its platform, which has become a haven for the anti-vaccination movement.
The World Health Organization recently named “vaccine hesitancy” as one of the biggest global health threats of 2019. But on Facebook, in public pages and private groups with tens of thousands of members, false information about vaccines — largely stemming from a debunked 1998 study that tied immunizations to autism — is rampant and tough to pin down. In the bubble of closed groups, users warn about alleged dangers of vaccinations, citing pseudoscience and conspiracy theories.
Facebook has publicly declared that fighting misinformation is one of its top priorities. But when it comes to policing misleading content about vaccinations, the site faces a thorny challenge. The bulk of anti-vaccination content doesn’t violate Facebook’s community guidelines for inciting “real-world harm,” according to a spokesman, and the site’s algorithms often promote unscientific pages or posts about the issue. Parents are left to wade through the mire, and as the viral spread of fake news has shown, many users have trouble distinguishing between reliable sources and unreliable ones.
The rise of “anti-vaxx” Facebook groups is overlapping with a resurgence of measles, a disease that was declared “eliminated” in the United States in 2000 because of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. But cases have increased in recent years, and at least 10 states have reported cases since the beginning of 2019. Last month, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) declared a state of emergency after 25 cases of measles cropped up in a single county, where nearly a quarter of kids attend school without measles, mumps and rubella immunizations. The WHO has named the highly contagious disease a leading cause of death for children.
Although the spread of misinformation about immunizations has potentially fatal repercussions, a Facebook spokesman said the company doesn’t think removing such content helps to increase awareness.
“While we work hard to remove content that violates our policies, we also give our community tools to control what they see as well as use Facebook to speak up and share perspectives with the community around them,” Facebook said in a statement emailed to The Washington Post. “If the content they’re posting crosses the line and violates our policies, we would remove the content as soon as we become aware of it.”
The company is considering options to make accurate information about vaccinations more accessible to users, but these efforts are in the early stages. In the meantime, Facebook sees factually accurate counter-speech by users as a possible safeguard, he said.
Wendy Sue Swanson, a pediatrician at Seattle Children’s Hospital and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently met with Facebook strategists about dealing with public health issues, including misinformation about vaccines, on the platform. Swanson said it’s not Facebook’s job to police dialogue about immunizations, but rather to make sure users have ample access to scientifically valid content.
“You wouldn’t go see a pediatrician who doesn’t hold medical certification, but on the Internet, you might listen to them,” Swanson said. “Facebook isn’t responsible for changing quacks, but they do have an opportunity to change the way information is served up.”
But Facebook’s algorithms often promote anti-vaccination content over widely accepted, scientifically backed posts or pages about vaccinations. A recent investigation from the Guardian found Facebook search results regarding vaccines were “dominated by anti-vaccination propaganda.” Facebook did not respond to questions from the Guardian about its plans for dealing with the issue.
“Using a new account with no friends or likes, the Guardian used Facebook’s search bar to begin typing the word ‘vaccine’,” the investigation said. “Facebook’s autofill quickly began suggesting search terms that would steer a user toward anti-vaccine misinformation, such as “vaccination reeducation discussion forum,” “vaccine reeducation,” “vaccine truth movement” and “vaccine resistance movement."
Facebook also accepted advertising revenue from Vax Truther, Anti-Vaxxer, Vaccines Revealed and Michigan for Vaccine Choice, among others, according to another investigation from the Guardian.
A recent study from the Credibility Coalition and Health Feedback, a group of scientists who evaluate the accuracy of health media coverage, found the majority of the most-clicked health stories on Facebook in 2018 were fake or contained a significant amount of misleading information. The study looked at the top 100 health stories with the most engagements on social media, and it had a network of experts assess their credibility. The study found less than half were “highly credible.” Vaccinations ranked among the three most popular story topics.
“Considering that the number of shares for neutral and poorly-rated articles amount to almost half the total shares, this indicates that more work needs to be done to curb the spread of inaccurate health news,” experts wrote in the study. “Much of the spread is facilitated by Facebook, which accounts for 96 percent of the shares of the top 100 articles.”
Health-related content is eligible to be reviewed by Facebook’s fact-checking partners, meaning content that’s found to be misleading or false will be demoted in users’ feeds and appear along with related articles from fact-checkers. But this doesn’t work in groups, where the bulk of anti-vaccination material is spread.
A working paper published in November by the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the role of Facebook in spreading false information about vaccines. The paper found Facebook’s ban on ads that linked to fake news stories did lead to a decrease in shares of anti-vaccination content. But in anti-vaccination circles, ads aren’t the primary issue — people are. They found that anti-vaccination groups on Facebook tend to pass around the same misleading links and junk science, then end up spreading the information to the broader public through likes, shares and word of mouth.
“The majority of misinformation about vaccines is spread by individuals — and the majority of that misinformation by a few individuals — sharing the message organically,” Catherine Tucker, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the NBER paper, said in an email to The Washington Post. “That is a far harder problem to solve, as trying to clamp down on that kind of social sharing has tensions with trying to preserve free speech.”
It's kind of interesting. we listen to these same celebrities who tell us not to take vaccines and who to vote for, then wonder why everything sucks....
It's kind of interesting.we listen to these same celebrities who tell us not to take vaccines and who to vote for, then wonder why everything sucks....
US airline passengers who don’t identify as “male” or “female” will soon have more gender options to choose when booking tickets.
Airlines for America (A4A), the industry trade group, made the announcement that A4A and International Air Transport Association members recently approved a new international standard for non-binary passengers effective June 1.
US airline passengers who don’t identify as “male” or “female” will soon have more gender options to choose when booking tickets.
Airlines for America (A4A), the industry trade group, made the announcement that A4A and International Air Transport Association members recently approved a new international standard for non-binary passengers effective June 1.
And people make fun of others who take the Bible literally...
02-01-2019, 04:26 PM
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