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Created
Thu, 27/04/2023 - 22:01

“If you come across spam on Facebook, report it to us. By doing so, you’ll be playing an important role in helping us protect other people from scams.”
Facebook

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We’re here today asking you to help us remove spam accounts on our platform. Please report any Facebook profiles you think might be bots trying to get you to visit pornography sites, so we can make room for all the real people trying to get you to believe 5G towers are transmitting Chinese pornography into your head.

It’s important we work together on this. In recent years, fake accounts have gotten significantly better at appearing human, while human Facebook users have gotten significantly better at appearing like malfunctioning alt-right drones programmed to say the most insane shit they can think of.

This situation is serious. We need your help eliminating fraudsters that are ruining the Facebook experience.

Created
Thu, 27/04/2023 - 21:59

What if a food that works fine in its original goopy form were deconstructed into its elemental components, dehydrated, and rebranded as a spice? That’s the question that Trader Joe’s can’t stop asking, and the latest incomprehensible answer is Ketchup-Flavored Sprinkle Seasoning Blend.

My own question is, why? Especially given that ketchup already exists. Is it supposed to be astronaut food, like Tang?

No. You can’t sprinkle powder willy-nilly in zero G. (Tang was contained in a vacuum-sealed pouch, after all.) That’s why you never see old footage of astronauts doing lines of coke off the lunar module.

Perhaps the target consumers aren’t spacemen but terrestrial folks who can’t be trusted to squirt ketchup safely. Like maybe a hapless employee at TJ’s product labs was squeezing a half-empty Heinz bottle over her hot dog at the company cookout, causing it to emit a slurpy farting noise in front of her crush. And lo, she went into her lab the next day and created Trader Joe’s Ketchup-Flavored Sprinkle Seasoning Blend (TJKFSSB) in the crucible of her mortification.

Created
Thu, 27/04/2023 - 20:57

It’s late at night on Turin’s Via dell’Arcivescovado. A man with a Southern accent shows up at L’Ordine Nuovo’s office, insisting on speaking with the lead editor. For L’Ordine Nuovo is not only the workers’ daily, but also the paper of Antonio Gramsci. Yet the political climate here in Turin at the start of the 1920s is tense […]

Created
Thu, 27/04/2023 - 19:25

Today marks the 51st  anniversary of the death of Ghana’s first Prime Minister and President, Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah’s Pan-African dream envisioned a united Africa free from neocolonial exploitation and capable of representing itself as an equal on the world stage. While these dreams sadly never came to full realisation, they continue to provide inspiration to […]

Created
Thu, 27/04/2023 - 17:18
Earlier this week (April 25, 2023), I saw a Twitter exchange that demonstrated to me two things: (a) some mainstream media commentators are now understanding some of the principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and relating that knowledge to practical matters that concern them (lens being applied to values); and (b) high profile financial market…
Created
Thu, 27/04/2023 - 17:05
A major, and notorious, problem with this approach, at least in the domain of science, concerns how to ascribe objective prior probabilities to hypotheses. What seems to be necessary is that we list all the possible hypotheses in some domain and distribute probabilities among them, perhaps ascribing the same probability to each employing the principal […]
Created
Thu, 27/04/2023 - 09:30
This truly shows that DeSantis is not ready for prime time. He sounds confused at best and shifty at worst. I’m not sure what he believes but whatever it is he’s communicating it very poorly: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that it’s in the world’s interest for a cease-fire to be negotiated in Ukraine. DeSantis made the comments during a wide-ranging interview with Nikkei Asia on Tuesday while the Florida governor is in Japan on an international trade mission. In the interview, DeSantis warned that an extended war is possible in Ukraine. “You don’t want to end up in like a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate,” DeSantis said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a cease-fire.” DeSantis also called out Europe, and Germany in particular, for allegedly not doing enough to help Ukraine. “The Europeans really need to do more [on Ukraine]. I mean, this is their continent. The U.S. has provided security for them.