Sapere Aude
Tag: stupid
#blessed
A 18-year-old woman from Carinthia is suing her parents for posting photos of her on Facebook without her consent. She claims that since 2009 they have made her life a misery by constantly posting 100s of photos of her, including embarrassing and intimate images from her childhood.
Just before 8 on Monday morning, New Yorkers got a message on their mobile phones: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.” The news came through the same emergency-alert system, with its disorienting buzz, that government agencies use to send news of a flood, and so it suggested some uncanny Pynchonian transference, in which terrorism had become as mundane and as universally affecting as the atmosphere. By 11:30, the alert had made a “significant contribution,” as Mayor Bill de Blasio put it at a lunchtime news conference, to the capture of Rahami, who was found sleeping in the doorway of a bar in his home town of Linden, New Jersey. The alert had an “extraordinary effect.” His new police commissioner, James O’Neill, called it the “future.”
in reality, the message was incredibly dumb & vague, due to unreasonable implementation of this system. plain text, no photos. we can do way better.
The day Ahmad Khan Rahami planted 2 bombs in Chelsea, 2 thieves accidentally helped to disable his second pressure cooker bomb left inside a rolling suitcase on West 27th Street
ruined by wankers
LinkNYC has announced that it is removing web browsing from all the tablets attached to the kiosks because people are hogging them, sometimes even pulling up chairs. This comes after reports surfaced of people “inappropriately” using the public kiosks to watch porn.
There’s no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible. 65% of the time, workers at the tracing center are able to successfully trace a gun used in a crime back to the original purchaser. A routine trace takes ~1 week, but they can turn an “urgent” around in 24 hours. The San Bernardino case was an urgent. The Boston Marathon bomber case was an urgent. Gabby Giffords: urgent. Charleston. Aurora. Fort Hood. Columbine. Washington Navy Yard. Sikh temple. Just figure every crime you ever watched endless horrifying footage of on TV involved somebody here in Martinsburg searching through a rat’s nest of records and then experiencing a moment of jubilance upon seeing that, yes, this is it, here is the 4473 that belongs to that lunatic. (Or his mother. Or his uncle. Or the pawnshop dealer who sold it to someone else. Tracing the gun beyond the initial point of purchase is on the cops.) This is the maddening, inefficient way gun tracing works, and there is no effort afoot to make it work any better. For all the talking we do about imposing new limits on assault weapons, or stronger background checks, nobody talks about fixing the way we keep track—or don’t keep track—of where all the guns are.
If you’re against GMO, you’re part of the problem killing 1m / year. Are your luddite anxieties really worth that much to you?
Modified rice has 5x the zinc and iron and could help eliminate micronutrient deficiency to save over 1M lives each year and boost GDP of poor nations over 20%
the anti gmo arguments are mostly fraudulent
Greenpeace and its partners weren’t fighting the Bt industry. They were protecting it. They were trying to convince the public that the Bt protein was dangerous when produced by plants but perfectly safe when produced by bacteria and sprayed by farmers. The anti-GMO lobby says Bt crops are worse than Bt sprays, in part because Bt crops have too much of the bacterial toxin. In 2007, for instance, Greenpeace promoted a court petition to stop field trials of Bt eggplant in India. “The Bt toxin in GM crops is 1000x more concentrated than in Bt sprays.” But Greenpeace’s internal research belied that statement. A 2002 Greenpeace report, based on Chinese lab tests, found that the toxin level in Bt crops was severely “limited.” In 2006, when Greenpeace investigators examined Bt corn in Germany and Spain, they got a surprise: “The plants sampled showed in general very low Bt concentrations.”
2022-05-04: Sri Lanka is paying the price for scientific illiteracy.
Sri Lanka imposed a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2m farmers to go organic.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20% in just the first 6 months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450m worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by 50%. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. Soon enough, advocates will surely argue that the problem was not with the organic practices they touted but with the precipitous move to implement them in the midst of a crisis. But although the immediate ban on fertilizer use was surely ill conceived, there is literally no example of a major agriculture-producing nation successfully transitioning to fully organic or agroecological production. The European Union has promised a full-scale transition to sustainable agriculture for decades. But while it has banned genetically modified crops and a variety of pesticides as well as has implemented policies to discourage the overuse of synthetic fertilizers, it still depends heavily on synthetic fertilizers to keep yields high, produce affordable, and food secure. It has also struggled with the disastrous effects of overfertilizing surface and ground water with manure from livestock production.
In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, there is no shortage of problems associated with chemical-intensive and large-scale agriculture. But the solutions to these problems—be they innovations that allow farmers to deliver fertilizer more precisely to plants when they need it, bioengineered microbial soil treatments that fix nitrogen in the soil and reduce the need for both fertilizer and soil disruption, or genetically modified crops that require fewer pesticides and herbicides—will be technological, giving farmers new tools instead of removing old ones that have been proven critical to their livelihoods. They will allow countries like Sri Lanka to mitigate the environmental impacts of agriculture without impoverishing farmers or destroying the economy. Proponents of organic agriculture, by contrast, committed to naturalistic fallacies and suspicious of modern agricultural science, can offer no plausible solutions. What they offer, as Sri Lanka’s disaster has laid bare for all to see, is misery.
Dead people tend not to be very creative so I suspect that the retroactive extension of copyright will not spur much innovation from Eames. The point, of course, is not to spur creativity but to protect the rents of the handful of people whose past designs turned out to have lasting value.
europe importing a very bad law.
A majority of Americans would be “very” or “somewhat” worried about gene editing (68%); brain chips (69%); and synthetic blood (63%), while no more than 50% say they would be enthusiastic about each of these developments.
Who is the man who dies in every terrorist attack?
To verify this story, FRANCE 24 managed to contact the man pictured in all these photos. We decided not to publish his real name. When speaking to our team, he didn’t deny being caught up in legal proceedings. My photo is everywhere because of someone who started it as a prank after a legal dispute. I never reported the people who did this to me because, in Mexico, nothing ever happens in these kind of cases. Now, my photo has appeared in several stories that were widely shared on Twitter. I contacted several media outlets like the BBC and the New York Times and asked them to delete my photo but they never responded.
The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.” There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 