There's a world outside web dev, you know! I have used Qt in many companies (some examples: forming a major part of the UI for a unified comms client, UI for screen/interfaces for an embedded system, desktop app for analysing/processing finance stuff).
I can imagine people honestly believing that. So many jobs today are utter bullshit, and so many more are enough layers of abstraction away from anything useful than it's hard to find any motivation other than paycheck. And there are many people who would like to feel they're contributing to something, not just selling their time for currency.
I think this view is very wrong. Lots of people take pride in the fact that they're doing some socially valuable job. That might not be their primary motivation but it's an important one.
A lot of people get into jobs to help people, or help society. But to help "the economy"? I'm skeptical (in the sense of doing a day job because markets need it, not a job that's making the economy as a whole more efficient). If the market doesn't pay for a job, then "the economy" doesn't need that job.
Most of those are in the service, police, fire, or rescue. being a delivery driver (pilots are a form) and making such statements is just an odd romanticism or at least a bad attempt at making the job seem more important than it is.
You're confusing fungibility for importance. While one particular delivery driver or pilot may be less important than one particular "rockstar programmer," society is much more reliant on delivery drivers and pilots as a group than on programmers. That may change with automation but we're not there yet.
> WikiTribune is 100% ad-free, no one’s relying on clicks to appease advertisers; no one’s got a vested interest in anything other than giving you real news.
Ha! Oh c'mon, anyone who's experienced the activistism of certain groups on Wikipedia knows there's plenty of people with a vested interest in this kind of thing.
A friend of mine was shocked when I told him how things are looking for a job in the software world. He's a civil engineer. I guess it makes it easier in their world owing to accreditation and certs. He just found it astounding the amount of prep time it takes your average dev to get ready for an interview.
> The church said its "police officers would be restricted to the church's campuses and be able to respond to emergency situations while coordinating with local authorities."
How's this any different from the various University police forces? In terms of numbers, seems about similar (4000 people). They're not going to be enforcing religious law from reading that, so... what's the problem?
Because in many parts of the US, the major universities were plunked down in a 10km by 10km square of wilderness, with literally nothing else around.
Sometimes a big town grew alongside.
Sometimes it didn't.
Given that universities are non-profits, and therefore are not required to pay any municipal property tax, there were many that simply could not be patrolled by the neighboring towns. So they had to hire their own police forces.
Ok. So here's an example from Canada. The university of British Columbia technically had its own government. It has to do with the history of the land grant. They have a police force but this police is RCMP (royal Canadian mounted police). They are a federal police force but contracted to smaller towns and cities that don't develop their own. In Ontario many small towns have OPP (Ontario provincial police). Is there a reason why universities simply couldn't contract from a state police force?
Historically, land-grant universities predate state police forces. In fact, in most of the US, state police forces are there primarily to enforce traffic safety laws on the highways, because out in the countryside, drivers cross county lines too quickly for the sheriff's police forces to fill that role.
Also, regardless of the formal chain of command for a university police department, the licensing of police officers (i.e. certifying someone as eligible to wear a badge) is a state matter. A university cop doesn't draw his salary from any government, but he can still get his badge taken away by the state if he misuses it.
A university police force has police powers within a university campus--it can arrest people. I will add that in my college days, the university police did not carry firearms, though now many do.
I imagine that the custom arose because Anglo-American universities tended to be rural or at least in small towns, unlike the continental ones. Remember that universities until about 1900 were exclusively male, so that one was gathering a large number of young men at prime hell-raising age. A college of 500 students might generate more work for police than a town of 2000 citizens might otherwise have, or care to pay taxes to police.
The university that I went to has ~40,000 students between undergraduate and graduate students, and an additional ~20,000 faculty, staff and other people there at any given day. There were thousands of people living in student housing on campus and tons of sporting events that could draw crowds near the six figures.
They have a deputized police force of people available 24/7 for things as mundane as walking people home safely and as complicated as enforcing local/state/federal laws. They are sworn officers that have an agreement with the city they operate in that allows their jurisdiction to bleed into the city proper.
I never interacted with them when I was a student, but it's not out of this world to have a small police force for the campus - there were more people there on the average weekday than the city that I grew up in, which also had it's own police force.
Many/most laws in the US are selectively enforced. A university police force is a prudent way for many/most universities to have university matters taken care of in a way that suits the university. Typically this means doing a lot of menial things (e.g., dealing with underage drinking, esp. in public) that might create liability or a PR nightmare for the university that the local police might not be inclined to deal with. The university police can often be more likely to de-escalate certain matters than local police, and this is generally a good outcome for the school.
At wealthier universities, this is also a way to convince parents that their kids are safe. Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Stanford (off the top of my head) are all in or near not-so-safe neighborhoods -- although gentrification of those areas are making this less of an issue these days.
A big school in a small town could completely overwhelm the local police department. So schools and towns work together to have a campus police department.
Hiring off-duty police officers to provide security for events is very common. Without their own police departments, universities would be doing this constantly and would likely not be able to find sufficient numbers of off-duty officers for all events for which they wanted to provide security. It also allows universities to provide a higher concentration of law enforcement officials on their campuses than would otherwise be provided by the police departments in the surrounding municipalities. There are definitely problems with policing in the US, but notable exceptions notwithstanding, campus police tend to be among the more community-minded LEOs.
Was sceptical of this myself until I experienced it. Scott Adams completely disappeared from my feed for, well I'd like to say months but can't pinpoint when it started. I assumed he had just given up his account/been banned. Until one day I searched for him, and there he was still posting. He had actively tweeted while I was logged on yet it was no-where on my timeline! I scrolled back a bit collarating tweets that appeared for me on the homepage versus times that he had posted, he was no-where to be seen and presumably under some sort of shadow block by Twitter itself. Before someone comes in and says it was due to preferences etc, I don't follow a huge bunch of accounts, I don't like/retweet or even tweet.
Scott Adams has blogged that he thinks it's about his politics and trollishly pro-Trump tweeting/blogging, and I've never been certain whether or not to believe it was true at all (he needn't even be lying for it to be false: it's possible to get quite confused going through these things with many followers, doubly so with any reason to be suspicious or paranoid).
But in light of an incident like this it seems far more plausible to me that they have a more general-purpose algorithm at work that, in a few cases like United and @ScottAdamsSays, misbehaves radically. At a guess, some anti-spam thing gone terribly wrong. (A missing tweet identified in this incident is basically "United training video as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade blimp scene". Do viral-joke tweets like this have similar enough dynamics to Scott Adams tweets and spam that they'd trigger similar filters?)
(But hey, maybe I'm not paranoid enough :b)
postscript: hey, why the downvotes? am i being too speculative? too paranoid? not paranoid enough? it's okay to downvote but do help me out here.
He's blogged about it several times. According to his blog posts, he can track which posts get "shadowbanned" by blog analytics. Apparently, his posts regarding Trump or climate science aren't showing up in a lot of his followers' feeds. Even more remarkably, he seems to have gotten around it for now with code words - tweeting that the post is about kittens when it's really about a supposedly shadowbanned subject, which has supposedly restored his normal blog traffic rates from Twitter.
Sure looks like Twitter is in the business of censoring content that doesn't fit their political views. If they'll do that, there's no telling what else they'll censor.
Hmm. I'd say Scott is the only vaguely political account I follow. Next up would be one BBC News and a local newspaper account. Apart from that I follow mainly sports teams (my main use for it is scores and fantasy football) and some selected ones for tv shows. Less than 40 accounts in total.
If anyone can explain how Twitter uses that information to decide to hide Scott Adams from my timeline, I'd love to know. It seems to me that there's one obvious explanation.
In short, because they think you'd engage less with Scott Adams' content.
Filter bubbles are an algorithmic attempt to give you the content that you want the most. For example, Twitter might have identified at some level that you like and retweet sports related content more often than political content. Or even further, that you like left-leaning content more than right. So, they'll do everything they can to serve you what they think you want. If it keeps you scrolling, then they make more ad dollars.
All of these nuanced inputs impact what you see on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
The problem is, there IS a difference between what you want to see and what you should see. Just because you love cat photos, doesn't mean that the NY Times should be filled with them.
I've seen that and I'm sorry, but I really don't accept your explanation. I've never retweeted/liked/replied or tweeted, ever. I'm a passive consumer. I don't follow political accounts, or search out political views there. If anything, I reckon I was clicking a lot on his blog links via tweets, so (presumably) he should have been showing up more... rather than not at all.
I don't mean to sound like I'm holding you accountable for this! It's just, well this kinda thing is well dodgy and I want to assure people I'm not just cribbing about this without a basis.
Just a thought, but even of clicking his blog links means you're engaging more, perhaps twitter is guiding their users to engagement in the form of scrolling through their feeds, since that's what twitter makes their money from. Thinking about it that way, maybe it makes sense to filter out tweets that are more likely to take you away from the site
The entire point of Twitter was that there was no such filter, it would just show the tweets of everybody you followed in a chronological order. That's why we are all pissed.
I don't know if that was the "entire point" of Twitter. I am certainly glad that there is a bit of filtering. I recall the old days where most of my feed consisted of noise, today I actually get some value out of it.
Sure. But my Twitter feed is not important enough for me to do something about that. As it is, it's somewhat entertaining (I check it perhaps once a week) whereas if it was unfiltered I never would. So I am at least one person for whom it makes business sense for Twitter to filter in order to keep me engaged.
That changed a long time ago, I'm surprised people are only noticing now. The change was not borne out of malice: like Facebook, they try to filter out accounts with too much noise or which you don't really interact with, to show you only stuff you're really interested in. In the past you'd see all @-replies and a single noisy account could basically flood your timeline, that's hardly the case nowadays.
In the case of Scott Adams mentioned above, it happens to me regularly with tons of people who are absolutely unthreatening. There is certainly real censorship going on inside all these centralized platforms (like deleting content), but Occam suggests this is just Twitter trying too hard.
The shadowbanning and bubbling only started like two years ago. That thing about seeing all replies was changed... I don't know, eight years ago? And that made all the sense in the world and it's in no way censoring or anything... My friends talking to people I don't know is not something I care about. But my friends talking to me and me not seeing it because they are shadowbanned? That's a new low.
You can also see this in action with replies. Certain shadowbanned accounts will only show up in threads if you follow them. If you open the thread in an incognito window, certain people disappear.
"Trust and Safety" is just Orwellian newspeak for controlling who gets to hear which opinions.
And how many were hired in the previous December? When it comes to The Guardian, I find that numbers can be very "flexible" when the narrative demands it.
Similar to yourself, I'm an EU citizen living in the UK. The sheer hysteria from certain quarters is getting a bit much and my social media use has definitely changed in the past few months (not going on it as much due to the sheer bile on display).
As to work and the economy, I guess we'll see. My company is expanding at a good rate, and if worst came to worst then I could up sticks and bring my family home.
This isn't the end of history. It's one country leaving a political block, one that has it's pros and many cons. The majority decided they want out. That's the way it is.
