Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Farmer Green,
It's certainly a radical idea that I shouldn't be able to consume cars or electronics, or bananas.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to andin,
I'm less concerned about how cray democracy is than how cray Trump personally is. But except where it affects us outside of the USA, I do rather feel America deserves what they voted for. Sometimes the hard way is the only way to learn. I don't think deliberately disenfranchising the population even more than what it has voluntarily already done to itself is the way to improve matters.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Napoleon turned out to be quite benign, as dictators go
Yes, only 3.5 - 7 million people died in the wars that resulted from his actions.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Dennis Frank,
The left, having recently tired of demonising Trump
I’m not seeing that abating much. Nor do I expect to. Demonization of the President Elect is pretty much normal in the USA, if you voted against them.
ETA: Which clearly, is not a good thing if any actual demons do get the Presidency. But hey, that's how it always goes. I mean I read War and Peace recently, and they have serious discussions in their Soirees about whether Napolean is the Antichrist (a few years after having discussions about whether he is the Saviour of Europe and an all round top bloke).
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Uber's losses show the unsustainability of the model. They took a good idea, the app they built for streamlining booking, delivery and payment, and fucked it up with a business model based on exploitation. It didn't have to be this way, and it won't continue to be forever. I suggested that we passed D-Day before. If this is an accurate analogy then there is a long, bitter, struggle ahead that can only go one way. No one can take on the whole world and expect to win, but for some reason hubris so often takes hold of people who have high initial success and leads them down crazy pathways.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
That's how it looks. I'm fighting this for a reason. It's an important cause, no matter how little people give a crap about the drivers. Under a decent compliance framework with a genuine enforceable contract they're a positive force in the industry. The way it is at the moment it's everything you say, and more. I feel that the political inaction is symptomatic of a particularly scary emerging pattern that reaches well beyond the passenger transport industry. It's a breakdown of the rule of law in this country, and the political will to enforce it. It's a breakdown of the government's willingness to even be involved in setting the rules of employment.
It has to end. I also predict, strongly, that it will end. The UK ruling is a huge victory, extremely heartening around the whole planet to drivers in the same position. As James Farrar (one of the complainants) has repeatedly said, the systems are in place to deal with this, and it's just a matter of having the bottle to use them. They did have that bottle and they struck a massive blow for Uber drivers against their employers. That ruling is, IMHO, D Day against Uber.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Brent Jackson,
I'm pretty sure Rich posted it as a joke. The whole point was that this test was written by someone carelessly, or with poor English, or taking the piss. Many of the questions are ironic self referential jokes. Question 10 is particularly bad - it does not tell you what collection of words to select the word from to select the letter from.
His point being that half of the people in this thread could fail this particular test, even though it would seem to be pitched at about 10 year old comprehension levels.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Farmer Green,
No zero is not a number, or was not a number. No 5 is asking for the first “a” . . . so a comprehension test.
These are clearly the important questions when deciding if a person should have access to democratic participation.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Rich Lock,
LOL. I fail on question 1. Question 10 is curly. For 11, crossing out the 1 makes the number below one million (zero is below one million). 2 is some kind of figure of speech, to underline the word line in this line. 5 is cunning, looks like a typo. Again it's some kind of cunning figure of speech that the first first letter of the alphabet happens to be the first letter in the word alphabet. To solve 12 you need to obviously either accept that a line can be not straight, or tear the paper accordingly.
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to get full citizenship you have to take exams and write essays to show your ability at critical thought.
I'd be very much against that. Obviously teaching those things is important, but I don't think something as arbitrary as the luck you have in upbringing and natural intelligence should be the basis for access to power. That's how it already is, to a highly significant extent. But no amount of intelligence gives you moral authority, as so many clever evil bastards have shown throughout the ages.