Andrei Zisu

“We are aware that raising the possibility of a prior industrial civilization as a driver for events in the geological record might lead to rather unconstrained speculation,” Schmidt and Frank write. “One would be able to fit any observations to an imagined civilization in ways that would be basically unfalsifiable. Thus, care must be taken not to postulate such a cause until actually positive evidence is available.”

Pe cat de mica e comunitatea pe atât e de diferita în interior.

Pe de o parte îl avem pe domnul care ne spune:
"Umblați și spuneți peste tot să nu fie proști, că viața e frumoasă!"

Pe de alta parte avem cazul romilor care sunt din ce în ce mai izolați de restul societății:

"Romii musulmani nu merg la școală fiindcă nu au bani să le pună copiilor ghete în picioare. Și chiar dacă ar merge, renunță repede, pentru că mulți vorbesc acasă limba turcă. Ce să înveți în română, când tu o auzi prima dată la șase ani? Mai mult, nu au nici acte de identitate. Și nici exemple pozitive în comunitate nu văd. Nimic. Beznă.

„Dacă vecinii nu-și dau copiii la școală, de unde să ia ei obiceiul? Și ce poate să facă un om care nu a cunoscut niciodată educația? Dar o comunitate? La ce vă așteptați?”"

Whoopsie

Good read on Mind/Body identity theory, physicalism, functionalism and consciousness.

A middle way that may be more palatable is that of the SRO (self-regulatory organization). SROs are industry-funded, industry-established voluntary-participation frameworks that exist in dozens of industries, including medicine (the American Medical Association), legal (BAR associations), and real estate (Realtor associations). One of the main goals of an SRO is to keep the industry well-functioning, in order to avoid systemic problems that could lead to crises and wipe out trust. There are numerous industry SROs for consumer protection.

When it became obvious that malicious HFT strategies were threatening the integrity and resilience of the financial markets, the financial industry’s largest SRO, FINRA, worked alongside the SEC to address the problem. FINRA began to require specific licensing and other requirements of HFT firms. Some exchanges banned specific HFT strategies outright from their platforms. Governments around the world, regulatory bodies, SROs, and exchanges all took steps to protect the integrity of the system, fix the loopholes, and maintain the trust of market participants.

By contrast, the tech industry attempts largely uninspired, isolated tweaks despite the fact that the exchange-platforms have both a business case and a moral case for doing more.

Long read but provides a good context for what happened in the last 2 years inside facebook.

Also explains the wave of out-of-context censorship language policing that is affecting Romania nowadays.

Other governments also are grappling with the merits of virtual currencies. Enel, the largest European power company, said earlier this month it would not sell electricity to a virtual miner, citing environmental concerns.

“Enel has undertaken a clear path toward decarbonization and sustainable development and sees the intensive use of energy dedicated to cryptocurrency mining as an unsustainable practice that does not fit with the business model it is pursuing,” the company, partly owned by the Italian government, said in a statement.

The way this cognitive dissonance is resolved is absolutely amazing and judged with an incredible double standard. The keyword in this paragraph is "generally". Which is leeway to argue that, you know, democratic or not is not a factor when enforcing American interests.

But in recent decades, both Mr. Hall and Mr. Johnson argued, Russian and American interferences in elections have not been morally equivalent. American interventions have generally been aimed at helping non-authoritarian candidates challenge dictators or otherwise promoting democracy. Russia has more often intervened to disrupt democracy or promote authoritarian rule, they said.

Dureros

As the historian Sean McMeekin wrote in his 2015 “The Ottoman Endgame”, Sykes-Picot had moved to the realm of cliché, “a shorthand explanation for the latest upheaval in the Middle East that rolls easily off every tongue.”

He suggested it was time to move beyond the Sykes-Picot myth to gain a better understanding of the developments that shaped the modern Middle East.

Imagine, Mr. Harris said, if Facebook's app delivered all your notifications at once, at a given time of day, like the mail. Prof. Wu, meanwhile, has suggested that tech companies should develop a phone designed to protect users' attention and time.

Why is our generation laughing over dancing hot dogs and sheriffs made of of emojis? In part, it is, like most social media, escapism: a way to collectively disengage from the unending horror of politics by laughing at meaningless internet jokes that mirror the nonsensical global state of affairs. Like earlier forms of Dadaism, internet memes deconstruct and scramble all coherent thought into incoherent brain goop, left open for you to take what you want from them as you will. For some, that means eating a Tide Pod.

În consecință, am întrebat oficial Ministerul Educației dacă a făcut vreo cercetare pentru a afla cauzele analfabetismului funcțional și dacă are vreo strategie de combatere a acestui fenomen.

Ministerul nu are așa ceva.

Declar cu franchețe că sunt pentru îmbunătățirea soartei țăranilor, că în această îmbunătățire văd fundarea naționalității române. Până când țăranii nu vor fi cetățeni, noi nu vom avea o nație. Da, domnilor! Am voit ca să se creeze o așa stare de lucruri încât cel din urmă țăran să aibă conștiița datoriilor și drepturilor lui. Cât timp îl vom lăsa în poziția în care se găsește, asuprit, bătut, tratat ca un dobitoc, nelegat către țară prin nimic, ce sprijin vom avea de la dânsul în ora pericolului? Este timpul ca înaintea interesului privat, să gândim la cel obștesc, ca înainte de a ne ocupa de moșiile cele mici, să ne ocupăm de moșia cea mare, România, cum făceau părinții noștri.

To preserve its social model, the EU needs to establish common progressive fiscal rules and relieve younger generations of debts they are not responsible for.

Very good little story on AI and neural networks coming from Andrej Karpathy, the head of Tesla AI. Raises many interesting questions and problems.