When you look at these types of things, does it bother you that, e.g., when you look at the "by country" view, that there is all kind of noise in the categories? For example, looking at the USA, under the "Region" class, hundreds of regions are listed that have nothing to do with the USA, let alone are relevant.
Just seeing that kind of thing makes me immediately question the accuracy and precision of the data if the creators didn't even conduct that rather basic due diligence. Which is also related to my inherent general concern regarding the data because it seems that everyone simply just accepts that data is not only accurate and precise, but that it has also not been manipulated and tampered with, even though currently there is very little way to verify the integrity of the data, let alone have it certified as accurate or even honest. What is considered a political ad? Is there any skullduggery going on where Facebook and others classify things they don't like incorrectly in order to manipulate things? etc
It's not like that is an unfounded concern and really should be a basic measure of journalistic integrity whether the data was evaluated or provenance was certified. There are some obvious and intentional distortions manipulative and abusive distortions that come to mind, ironically the most prominent one from the A D L that classified all manner of unrelated incidents as "right wing white supremacist extremism" in testimony to Congress an in general in public; including classifying two black people as white supremacists, classifying a domestic dispute as white supremacist, a murder of a cheating spouse as white supremacist, etc. all in order to pump up and manipulate data and impressions for political purposes. The A D L propaganda was discovered rather easily because their data set was rather limited and could be reviewed in mere seconds, but how do you have any confidence whatsoever in the data of this type of site, regardless of any kind of specific intention, let alone even unintentional manipulation and corruption of data?
The reality that is not going to be well received by people here is that you don't seem to understand that the H1B visa is not some exercise in globalist altruism for foreigners over native people in their own homes; it is a ruse, a scam to masquerade the wealth pillage by the ruling class from their own nature middle and working class, by driving down wages and salaries, while also using it to cover up the reality that they are utterly illegitimate and incompetent rulers that did not adequately mange the country and resources to produce the supply of workers they would have needed to meet the demand domestically.
What that translates to the H1B loving crowd here, is that the second the H1B visa and all the other ponzi scheme tactics are no longer profitable to the ruling elite, like if the cost of an H1B were doubled and tripled, as they should be (e.g., must pay the H1B holder triple what a domestic employee would receive, and tax the employee at double the going tax rate, while also paying a $200,000 employment tax along with $200,000 annual visa maintenance costs), you would not see any H1Bs or any immigration. The ruling class are pillaging the working and middle class USA through a kind of leveraged buyout type of con job where they are getting their own people to finance and support their own pillage. It's why the ruling class is so in support of "immigration" because "immigration" makes the ruling class wealthier and more powerful as a matter of marginal increase through every "immigrant" that is imported to pillage wealth and opportunities from the native population.
But I get it, as long as people here are largely benefiting and getting wealthy from the exploitation, the exploitation is invisible to most. Not even to mention the detrimental effects of skill concentration by extracting and draining the most driven and motivated and educated from their respective countries, whether they are Nicaragua or France. All but the centralizing power are degraded by immigration and no rationalization or delusion will change that reality.
It's quite ironic you say that, because all across the formerly "democratic" world, a kind of facade or sham self-governance is washing over societies and governments everywhere, which constantly and consistently infringes upon and chips away at actual self-governance and actual democracy as leftist authoritarians impose their will and trying to corral and suppress and contain freedom and liberty and self-governance.
I am not even certain though that most cases they actually realize what they are doing if their paternalistic language ... of imposing their will on others for our/my/your own good ... can be taken as an honest indication. It's very much the same kind of authoritarians/abusive mindset and action that is common among western "liberals"/leftists and the CCP. Ironically too is that as most here are left leaning, if not largely leftists (whether they realize it or not), they also don't realize that this situation with HK is only a petri dish of what is to come due to leftist/liberal/globalist delusions of world wide kumbaya and hand holding amidst global world peace and tranquility. On the contrary actually, the liberal/leftist/globalist actions and values are a black swan that struts around right before us, but none are permitted to see, and even the supposed smartest people around dismiss off hand out of idle narcissism.
What part of massive floods of plane and bus loads of Chinese "tourists" is going to lead to the naive notion that "people meet each other, talk and learn"? I am not asking this condescendingly, but have you at all traveled anywhere? How many times did you meet and talk and learn from a Chinese/mass tour group? THAT is unfortunately the future, NOT some fantastical notion of cultural interchange talking to a local Parisian in a corner cafe. There will soon not even be any actual Native French people in Paris at the rate things are going, and that's just one of the pernicious and dark aspects of this globalism that is utterly destroying the planet and humanity.
Sadly, it seems you suffer from the common mentality that seems rather pervasive among European people's overall, a sense of a kind of self-righteous ignorance, of presuming an equality mirrored on one's own culture, values, ideals, nature, and character; essentially the manifestation of the delusional belief that "we are all the same" and that muddling and mixing falsely equates to diversity.
Reality simply is that not all humans share the characteristics or values and ideals that have emerged from the rotten and pernicious western experience of abundance combined with various other cultural and traditional characteristics. No, the combined 3 BILLION people of India and China are not going to "meet each other, talk and learn" as they swarm and swamp Europe and the USA's measly combined <1 billion population, nor will the 4.5 Billion Africans somehow just want to talk and learn and meet in 2100 when the combined crush of humanity starts really gripping.
We are seeing these articles just now, as a relatively small subset of each of those populations has any means whatsoever to travel and become tourists, just wait until the exponentially rising numbers of them have the means to travel to swamp Europe and the USA, when citizens won't even have the ability to see their own cultural sites or artifacts in anything like peace or focus as billions of "tourists" flood into the relatively few places of interest.
no, this is just the beginning of far greater consequences of ill guided, self-righteous tyranny that is always common to the self-appointed authoritarian ruling class. This is the future you and we have condemned our children to, being overrun and dissociated with our own cultural heritage out of misguided delusional co-dependent and enabling policies of overpopulation of the planet.
> There will soon not even be any actual Native French people in Paris at the rate things are going
I visited Venice in December '04. We stayed at a proto-Air-BnB (Air BnB didn't exist yet, but it was something very similar). Talking to the host we learned that she was from Moldova. The owners of the apartment lived elsewhere in Italy and only visited rarely. We went out to a restaurant and again, the people running it were not Italians - Eastern Europeans. It seemed very similar wherever we went in Venice.
The whole Venice experience seemed a lot like a sort of ancient Disney Land. It was the real old stuff, but somehow it just didn't seem real. Drunk tourists stumbling about getting their pics taken with people dressed up as masquaraders. It was kind of a bizarre experience. I much preferred the other out-of-the way, small Italian villages we visited on that trip.
Surprised this hasn’t been flagged as racist, taken down or downvoted.
I’m from the African continent and there is incredible culture to be found there.
While I agree that mass tourism is damaging, the Indians, Chinese and Africans can’t all be painted under the same brush of mass tourism. That is to miss the details. To assume that everyone coming from those places is like that. We used to think that all Americans were as you described: ignorant and willing to consume African culture with their dollars. How wrong I was.
I live in a popular tourist destination in the UK and there are busloads of Europeans damaging the city centre, leaving trash in the parks. Who are they and what right do they have? They’re probably from some European town suffering the same fate.
My point is that this kind of argument is inciteful and labels only a particular set of people as the ones to blame. This world has become consumerist. The whole world is at fault. You only see the newest emerging groups and blame them.
Let’s rather shift the conversation to the “culture of mass tourism” and not the “culture of the others” coming on their buses.
I get that you demand all that you don't like or disagree with is "racist" but reality this has nothing to do with racism, regardless of whether you can identify that or not, it's purely a quantitative issue. I would be saying the very exact same thing if the crushing numbers were an other or even all people. It's simply inescapable, and ignoring the reality is a black swan event that will destroy all of humanity, that African and Asian reproduction rates are utterly out of control, when among the top reproductive rates the first 29 countries are all in Africa and the lowest among them stands at 4.41 and the top rate is at 7.13. I trust you know what compounding means?
I do agree with you that there are beautiful parts of Africa, and interesting cultures to some degree, but even you don't want to be there, declare the white country you live in as the far superior to all others, including Africa, so it's not exactly like you are a good argument for why anyone would want to go to Africa ... especially if you don't want to be there ... as you try to be primitively manipulative in trying to slander people as "racist" for pointing out the reality of the destruction of the very engine that has driven all of humanity for thousands of years now.
I guarantee you are lying, or at the very least, exaggerating that "Europeans damaging the city centre". The difference is that Europeans traveling in Europe and the functioning society being able to handle sustainable levels of European tourists is not the same thing as mass Chinese tour busses or millions of Africans invading their continent and cities and then becoming burdens on the rest of society, just like they were unsustainable burdens where they came from in Africa. Reality is that by 2100 there will be about 9 BILLION Asians and Africans for the rest of the whole world's 1.5 billion ... There is simply no way but the way to hell to ignore the reality that this will lead to nothing but disaster no matter how any sane and intelligent person looks at it. It will end poorly no matter how an intelligent person looks at it, one way or another, if this insane LARPing continues that assumes that people who have not produced or contributed anything of value yet make up the crushing mass of humans on earth are somehow equal to the people who have essentially produced everything of value while being an actual tiny minority on the planet are somehow the same and equal. Exceptions as yourself simply don't make the rule, regardless of whether you are proving white supremacy by living in a white country or not.
>What part of massive floods of plane and bus loads of Chinese "tourists" is going to lead to the naive notion that "people meet each other, talk and learn"? I am not asking this condescendingly, but have you at all traveled anywhere? How many times did you meet and talk and learn from a Chinese/mass tour group?
Not sure why you'd single out the Chinese tourists.
Most American/English/German/Australian/Russian etc tourists are just as ghastly and vacuous - to the point of there being several idioms and cultural artifacts in Europe about that...
It's all the shoving, mostly, for me. Their group leader banners/umbrellas are a sight to be feared and avoided. Not behavior I see from others, (relatively) few of whom form so many large travel groups of that sort anyway.
Disagree. The masses of Chinese tourists do well to be exposed to the rest of the world. Where in your reply do you offer solutions? People have been giving some form of your complaint since the beginning of time. We will continue to innovate and find solutions just like we always have. Overpopulation and overtourism are not intractable problems.
That massive flood of Chinese tourists is a one time thing. China is prosperous enough that middle class mainland CHinese can now go on tours of the world just for recreation. There was a first wave of Americans doing that a few decades ago, and they acted just as this wave is acting now. The succeeding waves of Americans was different.
Right now, Boston gets Chinese tour groups who are visiting just to enjoy cleaner air than they have at home. So it's true that they're not engaging with us locals at all. But when they go back, they'll be part of the pressure to clean China's air.
I don't disagree, but I also feel like the current climate in the digital space, including in the "cloud", has significantly put the brakes on the whole notion of placing your business in the hands of some self-righteous tech company full of fanatics that wield their company's power like tyrants that could role the dice one day and all the sudden what you do and did for years is now "evil" and must be remove from their infrastructure at short or no notice.
I don't quite understand this sentiment. Maybe it's because I or the company I worked for haven't experienced this kind of situation. Can you shed some light on what big corps like AWS, Google, MSFT did to other people?
The Daily Stormer was kicked off Google's domain registrar following the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Microsoft's Azure cloud was the host for Gab.com, and threatened to kick them off unless Gab.com deleted several anti-semitic posts.
These kinds of hateful websites have always been around, but we didn't have registrars and hosts trying to censor them until 2016 or so.
Something that is not at all addressed in any seriousness, even though it is probably the most pertinent issue that faces Reddit in particular, especially in something called a transparency report; is the clear abuse and misuse of both removal of content and banning of user accounts to censor things, usually for political reasons, but often also simply out of convenience or maybe due to conflict of interest, or any other number or reasons. The whole premise of Reddit was public discussion, and today the very notion of the self-moderation and good ideas percolating up and bad ideas being deprioritized through voting is utterly broken as moderators and administrators operate like little feudal lords and wield their control in the most arbitrary manner with rather loose, if any, serious adherence to even their own sub's rules.
There are some rather notable examples of that in the past even though they somewhat escape my mind right now, but I believe there was a case of a moderator using the power to mod in order to suppress mention of some rival product, just as one example. I think there have also been quite notable instances of whole threads just being "nuked" where pages and pages of comments are simply deleted, sometimes due to corporate or even founder ego reasons ... spez
I get that some things, especially illegal things and even things like doxing or real spam need to be removed, but that does not mean that just because something is removed by dictate of mods or admins, it should never ben seen again or invisible to anyone. Make the unapproved thoughts that are not illegal visible to users, maybe even classify them based on the reason for mod/admin flagging, i.e., spam, wrongthink, etc. It would serve to keep mods and admins ethical and accountable and... transparent.
I think it is a rather significant and overlooked issue. Sure you don't want, e.g., one political group being able to spam another, but that doesn't mean that retaining such an event and the comments, just alone for their scientific and historical reasons, is not rather valuable.
There is also another even more significant reason, the pareto effect, which would indicate that it is far more likely that the one outlier solution is snuffed out because the conventional thinking deemed it as an unacceptable outlier and snuffed the account or user out. Think of those who opposed the Iraq war or even the Afghan war, or warned about the tech or housing bubbles, or any number of people who warned about the things that were obvious in hindsight, but the conventional thought persecuted before it became painfully obvious.
When you start digging into the details of this phenomenon, it is quite unsettling actually just how likely it is that the spark of genius we are all hoping for regarding any particular matter under consideration, may have been snuffed because it or the person that could have provided the solution was declared an personal non grata and were essentially put in a digital concentration camp or buried in a digital mass grave of accounts, executed by some fanatic moderator or administrator that did not tolerate wrongthink or free speech as ever broader rubrics of language are falling under ever harsher persecution.
Just think of all the outliers that have produced essentially most major discoveries, now imagine if they had been making their controversial points today in a forum. They would have been shunned and immediately shadow banned, fully banned, or summarily had their voice snuffed out in any number of ways, maybe even just by one moderator or administrator with a dictatorial chip on their shoulder with far more control and power than any one person should have over another person's voice and speech ... no matter how much you are self-convinced that they are wrong and you are right and therefor no one else should be able to hear what you don't approve of.
That applies to this forum too by the way. I know, this is the dominion of the technocratic elite demigods and wrongthink will not be tolerated from mere inferiors, but just think about it all for a second ... if you even get to see this point being made and some mod hasn't deemed it unacceptable for others to see. But you wouldn't have ever known that it was even made, because there would be no trace of it, on orders of the mod executioner.
Just seeing that kind of thing makes me immediately question the accuracy and precision of the data if the creators didn't even conduct that rather basic due diligence. Which is also related to my inherent general concern regarding the data because it seems that everyone simply just accepts that data is not only accurate and precise, but that it has also not been manipulated and tampered with, even though currently there is very little way to verify the integrity of the data, let alone have it certified as accurate or even honest. What is considered a political ad? Is there any skullduggery going on where Facebook and others classify things they don't like incorrectly in order to manipulate things? etc
It's not like that is an unfounded concern and really should be a basic measure of journalistic integrity whether the data was evaluated or provenance was certified. There are some obvious and intentional distortions manipulative and abusive distortions that come to mind, ironically the most prominent one from the A D L that classified all manner of unrelated incidents as "right wing white supremacist extremism" in testimony to Congress an in general in public; including classifying two black people as white supremacists, classifying a domestic dispute as white supremacist, a murder of a cheating spouse as white supremacist, etc. all in order to pump up and manipulate data and impressions for political purposes. The A D L propaganda was discovered rather easily because their data set was rather limited and could be reviewed in mere seconds, but how do you have any confidence whatsoever in the data of this type of site, regardless of any kind of specific intention, let alone even unintentional manipulation and corruption of data?