Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Twitter gives up fight against COVID-19 misinformation

Re: On Covid Misinformation

If you follow the nonsense far enough, you always end up with antisemitism at its core as well. It's a dead giveaway when you end up finding the person in the middle quoting the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" apparently oblivious to the fact that it was a hoax, and largely copied from a satirical work of fiction from the previous century.

I'm not sure why the Jews get singled out exactly, over any other marginalised group, but if there's this core of antisemitism in there, you can be pretty much entirely sure that the rest of whatever that person is saying is 100% bollocks.

All we need to do now is develop an algorithm that tracks all this shite down, and we could make it into a browser plug-in, so we can concentrate on the bits of the internet that aren't a festering sore.

I'm assuming the dip/tet/polio vaccines I had as a child still have some efficacy *mumble* years later. Tetanus is the only thing there's a realistic, if small chance of getting, and to be fair, I probably still have enough immunity for it to only make me seriously ill, rather than dead.

Apparently if you ask your GP for a tetanus booster, you get given another shot of the combined childhood booster for all three though. Presumably because it's mass-produced and cheap.

Re: @Binraider - There's no "right sort of censorship"

So the whole argument boils down to "moderation of Twitter is censorship because of the Spanish Inquisition"?

Nobody expected that!

Re: further.

It's a pretty good comparison. I think I've had flu maybe twice in what is rapidly approaching five decades. I've also broken one rib, and dislocated one shoulder, so statistically, broken bones and dislocations are about the same level of incidence.

Nobody is saying you should go around wearing a mask to stop you catching influenza. I was suggesting that if you are walking around with an infectious virus (which is unlikely to be the 'flu because it's not what you think it is), you should wear a mask to protect others from you.

The reason people were asked to wear masks during the peak of covid is that a lot of infections were largely asymptomatic, but the carriers could still spread it by coughing and sneezing, and masks offered some protection, for others, from them. Because not everyone would get an asymptomatic infection, and some people would get seriously ill, suffer from long-lasting effects, or die.

That's how public health initiatives work, they protect the public, not you personally.

Do your part, you selfish git.

Re: further.

You probably haven't. I think the stats are that you are likely to get it 2-3 times in your whole lifetime. Let's hope it's not when you're very old, because it'll probably do you in if you're not vaccinated against that strain.

Re: Opinions versus facts (actual, imaginary, and half-truths)

Yes, it was a selective quote, but my point is, that even with the qualifier of "polite questions", you don't have the right to place that obligation onto others. Your questions might be polite, reasonable, and even well thought-through, but obliging others to answer them is an unreasonable imposition. I trimmed off the end of the sentence, because although it gave context, it didn't affect the fundamental essence of what you were trying to justify imposing.

This can be boiled down to you having the right to speak, but others not having the obligation to listen.

I totally, agree, that in a polite discourse, each person should listen to the other and respond, politely, in kind. It must be some other internet you are thinking of where this happens, though.

Re: Cherry picking by the ignorant

Would you care to dig my wife's uncle up and tell him that the infection that killed him, in his mid-50s was harmless?

The sheer audacity of the bullshit some people try to pull...

I've had chicken pox, shingles, measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, all as a child some decades ago.

All of which, I can guarantee you, I would rather have had a vaccination against.

They didn't kill or seriously disable me, but that is largely because I live in a first-world country where I was adequately fed, housed, and cared for whilst sick. Measles, especially, is a risk to life, and mumps can cause sterility. Chicken pox can be serious if you get it as an adult; my wife was unlucky enough to get it both as a child and later as an adult, which is rare, but not unheard of, and wasn't pleasant.

I've also had a real influenza infection a couple of times in my life (not "man-flu"), and if I'd been offered a yearly vaccination as an alternative, I would have jumped at the chance, because spending a week in bed feeling thoroughly rotten is nobody's idea of fun.

As for "us oldies are made of tougher stuff". Well, we're only oldies because if we weren't lucky, we wouldn't have made it. I'd much rather not have been exposed to the rolls of the dice that could have finished me off at any point if I had been unlucky enough to, say, contract both measles and the flu at the same time.

Yeah, I am currently considering whether I should bother my GP to ask for a tetanus booster, as the last one I had was well over 3 decades ago. Apparently, as far as I can work out, you just get given the teenage booster (diphtheria/tetanus/polio) again. AFAIK, diphtheria and polio have been eradicated in the UK (or as near-as), and tetanus can be treated by antibiotics, if you get it early enough, but the risks of tetanus infection when you have an allotment are non-zero...

Of course, I have to balance the risks to myself, with the currently over-stretched nature of the NHS.

Re: @Potemkine! - What does your vital link tell about this

[some link to a youtube video]

Now I'm confused, who is a conspirationist and who is not ?

Answer: it's the person publishing their "research" on youtube.

Next!

Re: Repeal Section 230

Bring back the Moderatrix!

Fluorine oxide is pretty explosive stuff, your link is... a random link that I'm not going to follow.

Re: further.

Well, for influenza, whether you wear a mask or not in a shop is pretty moot, because if you actually have influenza, you will almost certainly be in bed, feeling like aboslute shit.

If you're talking about "man-flu", then I think it's fair to say we probably should adopt a culture where, if someone has an infectious cold, they mask up, to reduce transmission to others, out of sheer common courtesy.

This is common in some countries, such as Japan, and is rare in this country, largely because many people have no sense of social responsibility, and never think of the welfare of others. In some countries, that sort of attitude would be frowned upon, but we seem to have imported the American "cult of the individual" where it's all "me, me, me". I think that's probably an artefact of late-stage capitalism, to be fair, where everyone becomes more mercenary in order to survive those at the top sucking up all the resources.

Re: Opinions versus facts (actual, imaginary, and half-truths)

I reckon the right to free speech should be balanced by a responsibility to listen...

I'll say it again, you have the right to speak, nobody has an obligation to listen.

...I will, of course, add that bullshit can slip past the peer review process and get published in the Lancet. A high-profile example of this is that of Andrew Wakefield, and his paper about the combined MMR vaccine, which, when it was found to be based on flawed and falsified data, was withdrawn, and he was subsequently struck off the medical register and banned from practising medicine in the UK due to his gross professional misconduct.

Sadly, there are so many complete idiots in the world, this revolting excuse for a human being now has a cult following of people who think he was censored, instead of being in a large part personally responsible for all the harm caused by global anti-vax campaigners. Ironically, his original motivation was pretty obviously a financial interest in a rival vaccine, but he has since discovered that a lot of money can be made from just peddling lies instead.

So, in essence, because of sheer greed, and people's gullibility, we now have children dying from measles who otherwise would not have done so, in places where the vaccination level has fallen below the threshold needed to prevent community transmission (which is a high threshold due to the high transmissibility, or "R" rate)

If I set up a web site, let's call it, I dunno, the "Sharp Prick", and position it as a balanced publisher of information, on a par with such erstwhile and long-established publications as the Lancet, and then make up some completely bullshit claims, and dress them up to look like legitimate science, whilst completely ignoring all of the scientific standards, such as reproducibility, not falsifying my data, and peer review, and, when demonstrated to be talking utter shite, reuse to take it down, or publish a retraction or correction, is my web site equivalent to the Lancet?

Hint: the answer should obviously be "no".

The problem is, that this is essentially what is going on, and in some cases, the disinformation is very well funded

Of course, the point of science is not that it gets everything right. Science is a process, and part of that process is to be able to say, "we thought this was right, but it turns out it wasn't, so here is a correction". It also doesn't mean that scientists are automatically trustworthy. They are no more or less so than any other people, because they are... just people. That's why science, as a process, has these mechanisms to correct things, so that, as a whole, science moves towards a more accurate reflection and understanding of reality. Some bloke with a youtube channel is not, as you may be able to notice, the same thing.

Re: Repeal Section 230

Either they are "common carriers" and the people posting stuff are liable for the content, or they are "curators", and if they show someone something that is not true, for example, by "promoting" a post algorithmically that they might not have otherwise chose to see, they are liable for doing so.

Personally, I think the latter should apply as soon as the likes of Facebook and Twitter start doing the "curating" and "sponsored posts" stuff. They started doing this some time ago. If one of my friends posts some utter nonsense, they are liable for its truthfulness, but if an advert from Vote Leave touting false information about all of Turkey planning on moving to the UK is promoted onto my feed during a national referendum campaign, based on profiling of what I might be liable to believe, then the company putting it in my face is responsible.

There's an awful lot of money sloshing about to prevent any comeuppances for the latter from happening though, more's the pity, because social media networks should have already been stomped into the ground for promoting misinformation. IMHO, they are responsible for moderating the content of such, and should be liable for its truthfulness.

Re: "Tackling misinformation" is censorship by another name

It's tricky, though, because mixed in with legitimate debate was an awful lot of dangerous bullshit, like claims that injecting bleach into yourself would protect you, or claims that Bill Gates is injecting you with 5G microchips to reinforce the mind-control rays, so that they can get through your tin-foil helmet.

Re: @Binraider - There's no "right sort of censorship"

If I was to post something that is libellous, and it was removed, would that be censorship?

In what sense would it be a valid debate to discuss whether or not there is veracity in such a claim as, for instance, "Annoymous Coward has sex with dogs"?

There is a clear line between removal of false or defamatory claims, and censorship of legitimate debate. To claim otherwise is to draw a false equivalence and is deeply disingenuous.

Re: Opinions versus facts (actual, imaginary, and half-truths)

Censorship is stopping others from hearing/reading stuff, not ignoring it yourself.

you have a right to an opinion, but you don't have the right to force anyone to hear it.

Re: Opinions versus facts (actual, imaginary, and half-truths)

The problem is that "more discourse" just results in more bots and troll accounts drowning out the sensible discourse.

If you can't tell the difference between an opinion and a fact, try holding the opinion that falling off a building won't hurt you, and then try arguing with the fact of the ground coming up to meet you.

The fact is that the internet is awash with misinformation and just because you can make your opinion widely heard, and voice it convincingly, doesn't make it a fact. If you don't have the skills to critically evaluate sources of information for their veracity, and spot obvious bullshit, maybe you should not be repeating everything you hear as if it is fact, and the internet will become just that tiny little bit less of a cess-pit.

tl;dr: If you don't know what you are talking about, please shut up.

Can I get an $8 a month subscription...

...for all the popcorn I'm going to need, watching this dumpster fire?

Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry

Re: @Elongated Muskrat

Conventional chip fabs are, indeed, pretty nasty in terms of pollution. You can have "green fabs" but they're going to cost more than the polluting ones. It's best for our economy that we essentially export all our pollution to the Far East, but it's not exactly good for the planet, and manufacturing on the sort of scale as goes on in China (and Taiwan) doesn't exactly confine it's waste products to the home nation.

Talking about building large-scale industry in this country is fairly moot anyway, even if you do try and "do it green", which we really should, from a selfish point of view, if it's on our own doorstep, and from a global point of view, because we all live on the same planet, and even the far-offshore stuff will come back to bite us eventually. It's moot, because we don't have the energy or transport infrastructure to support it, because of the same decades of underinvestment and navel-gazing that has led to us having no large-scale manufacturing industry to speak of. The blame can't even be laid wholly at the feet of the current government, it started with Thatcher flogging off everything and closing down state industries, rather than modernising or replacing them with greener ones.

Yup, once Rees-Mogg has got his deregulation bill through the Commons, China can start shipping their polluting industries back here again, so the Chinese can have clean air and drinkable water, and we can all cosplay at being Victorian urchins. I look forward (back?) to times when the principle risk from falling into the Thames is not drowning, because the chemicals in the water will kill you first.

It's a consequence of an adversarial political system, lack of PR and a four-year election cycle. Nobody is planning for five years time, when they have to have something to show for the next election in four. If they do make plans for that length of time, they are usually pie-in-the-sky promises that are uncosted, because the next government isn't bound by them.

Incidentally, notice how all the actual tax cuts and spending rises promised in the recent budget were scheduled for after the next election...

Re: Add it to the pile

British science has depended, in large part, on trans-European cooperation, and, while we were in the EU, Britain was an attractive place for students and researchers. Now we're cut out of Horizon, and have an actively hostile attitude towards students from our nearest neighbours, there is a definite brain drain.

Even our home-grown bing-pharma industry has become multinationalised and is being siphoned away to the US and the continent. GSK is headquartered in London... for now, but the pattern there is very much of smaller companies being borged by larger ones (I can remember when Glaxo, Wellcome, Smithkline and Beechams were all separate entities). It's only a matter of time before the next merger with someone like Pfizer, and all the research is moved to the US or the Netherlands, where they can actually attract researchers.

Rolls-Royce, EasyJet fire up first hydrogen-fueled jet engine

Re: Revert back to airships?

I'm intrigued. Does this happen when going from a higher pressure to a lower one (like filling a small cylinder from a larger one), so the change in pressure is relatively minor in the main cylinder? Where does the heat come from? Energy must be conserved, so if the pipe heats up, something else must be cooling down.

Presumably, when you are using liquid hydrogen as a fuel source, and it is changing phase when going through the pipes, that cooling effect outweights this one? You're always going to have to deal with the phase change heat (going from a liquid to a gas uses that heat, of course), and it's typically much higher than the specific heat required to raise the temperature in the gas phase.

Re: What about the nitrogen?

Only if you burn it in your Mr Fusion™

Re: Revert back to airships?

So, if I'm reading that right, when squeezing those gases through a small aperture, you get a heating effect that outweighs the cooling you get from adiabatic expansion, essentially a "friction" effect. Presumably, that only happens when the aperture is small, and the heat that is generated comes from somewhere (energy isn't free), so whilst the aperture is heated, presumably, the gas is cooled?

Re: Batteries != energy

If you're trying to make a technical point, it's hardly pedantic to question your working when you're using the wrong units, because what you wrote doesn't mean what you think it does, and others aren't going to read it and get the meaning you meant to impart, if that's not what you said...

Re: Hydrogen?!

If oxygen masks used liquid oxygen, those hospitals would be more concerned with treating the freeze-burns of the victims. IIRC, the boiling point of oxygen is about -180°C.

You're right about liquid oxygen being dangerous though. One of the main dangers of using cryogenically cooled moisture-traps on vacuum-lines in chemistry labs (cooled by liquid nitrogen) is that if you open the line to the atmosphere and suck air through it, liquid oxygen will collect in the trap, and if you've got anything organic that has also condensed in there, it will try to blow you up.

Re: Revert back to airships?

Wrong way round, gases cool down on expansion, and heat up on compression. You're going to get some very cold plumbing if you use liquified hydrogen.

Re: I suspect this is most useful as PR

It's pretty obvious that hydrocarbon fuels are the winner in energy density and ease of storage and use, as well as having current technologies that use them. The end game is going to be the production of synthetic hydrocarbons from carbon-neutral feedstocks (e.g. carbon dioxide and water in, hydrocarbons and oxygen out). From a chemical point of view, it's actually not very easy to do, because carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds are relatively weak compared to carbon-oxygen and hydrogen-oxygen bonds, which is why energy is released when you burn them. You have to pump energy in to break those carbon-oxygen and hydrogen-oxygen bonds, and then force it to make carbon-hydrogen bonds instead, without the energetically favourable recombination of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. In nature, the formation of hydrocarbons happens in a multi-step process, which starts with photosynthesis (the energy input here being sunlight), then various biological processes that produce things like fatty acids, burial, and prolonged temperature and pressure causing the oxygen to be removed to form hydrocarbons from that organic material.

If that nut can be cracked synthetically, with a decent energy efficiency, then we could have factories that use electrical energy to pull carbon dioxide and moisture from the air and turn it into fuel that is a drop-in replacement for existing fuels without all the storage headaches of hydrogen, or weight, and life-cycle issues of batteries. Anyone who can solve that will either be a billionaire overnight, or will be murdered.

Re: Batteries != energy

No, it's actually a GJ per second for an hour. It's the difference between multiplication and division, which is a pretty big and fundamental difference. It's a unit of energy, not a unit of power; the total amount of energy stored in a big storage system would be measured in GWh (or, more simply, in GJ), and the rate of consumption in GW. In the same way, your electricity meter measures KWh as the amount of energy you have used, not the rate you are using it.

Syngas sin

The first, conducted at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, found that synthetic gas (or syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon dioxide) can be generated using only moisture and CO2 gathered from the ambient air and reformed in a high-performance solar radiation condenser. 

Not quite. Syngas is hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Carbon dioxide is one of the feedstocks, and one of the products you get from burning it (along with water vapour), making it overall carbon-neutral (assuming the energy input is from a carbon-free source). Not quite as "clean" as burning pure hydrogen, as you can still potentially get soot if you burn too lean, but it does have the advantage that you can actually see the flame (pure hydrogen fires are invisible to the naked eye, which makes for them being a tad dangerous). Of course, breathing a mixture of hydrogen and air won't kill you like CO will either, so safety goes both ways. In general, it's probably best to keep using it as a chemical feedstock in industrial plants, rather than as a commodity fuel.

'What's the point of me being in my office, just because they want to see me in the office?'

Re: Real Estate

The bottom line is that commercial landlords are desperately commissioning studies to "prove" that their real estate is worth renting. In the case of high-profile commercial landlords, like Alan Sugar, they are also frantically tweeting about it, in the vain hope that they can continue to make money off the backs of everyone else without having to change their business model.

Re: It's not necessarily wrong to demand staff spend most days in the office.

So, you admit yourself that some people are most productive when working from home, and others are not. Your conclusion is then that one size fits all and everyone needs to be in the office some of the time? That's one hell of a nonsequitur. The reasoning for this is far from clear.

Some people benefit from "standing round the water cooler" chatting, and some find it to be a distraction. Some can't operate without the hubbub of other people around them, and for others it breaks their concentration.

The obvious conclusion is that some people benefit from an office environment, and for others it is detrimental.

If people prefer to work from home, and are more productive, requiring them to be in the office when they don't want to be is just bullshit. It also depends on what their job is. Touchy-feely stuff is best done face-to-face. Touchy-feely stuff is also the stuff that is, IMHO, most likely to be a waste of time.

Nobody wants to be in the office with a rough stench...

The BOfH will be along shortly to assist you with your verticality issue. From the fourth floor window should do it.

Re: Contract clauses

More and more these days, people are treating their jobs the way they should; as transactional.

My job used to be on the basis of "you do X hours a week," it was 9 am to 5:30 pm, five days a week, if you got in late, you were expected to make the time up as soon as possible. If something needed to be finished today, you worked late until it was done, and if that was significant, you got TOIL. If you went the extra mile, it would be recognised at pay review time.

Now, many years and reorgs later, the company is a different beast. We do timesheets and have to account for all our contracted hours. Pay reviews are standardised, and going the extra mile gives no benefit. The company doesn't expect the extra mile, and you don't get paid extra if you put in extra hours. On the rare occasion that something is required outside of the standard working week, it's agreed in advance, with either TOIL, or paid overtime.

As I said, it's transactional, and that's how work should be. You are contracted for X hours, you get paid for X hours, you put in X hours. If your employer expects more, and tries to sanction you for not delivering it, then take it to a tribunal. Bad employers don't deserve a free ride.

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

Re: ""far left ideology""

To the far right, even the middle ground is far off to the left...

Re: I, for one...

It's very much like "respect", it means different things to different people.

To right-minded people, it means something very much like tolerance and acceptance, and acknowledgement that others might not be the same as you, but still have the same rights.

To bullies and other kinds of arsehole, it's used as a demand, "respect me, respect my opinion, do what you're told, respect your parents, respect the Church, respect your betters, you have no respect for authority", etc.

That's the problem with language, words aren't precise.

Someone has to say it: Voice assistants are not doing it for big tech

Re: My neighbour's got one

"Alexa, order 300 pairs of incontinence pants"

Meta fined $275m after data-scraping fiasco leaked 533m Facebook users' profiles

Re: 533 Million

Do you think that just because you don't have an account on FB, FB doesn't have a profile on you? Interesting.

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

Re: The problem with bad journalism

Indeed. On the rare occasions that I have reported posts, it has been because they are hate speech, and they have been removed. For instance, the poster involved knows who they were when they chose to refer to a well-known lawyer as a "bitch" because he didn't agree with her politics, and I'm sure he knows why that crossed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.

Re: The problem with bad journalism

The "consequences" being a pair of integers? Because that's all the up-votes and down-votes are...

Re: Track record..

I got to the end of your first sentence and saw the good ol' shibboleth "woke". At least you got it in early, so I didn't have to read the rest of your drivel.

Re: Track record..

Well, if he doesn't care about losing $44Bn, can he chuck a couple of million my way? That's literally pocket change.

One billion users?

That's one person in eight, globally.

I'm trying hard to think of anyone I know who is a regular user of Twitter, let alone one person in eight, and I live in a first-world supposedly affluent* country. I don't see anyone flocking** to use it, and I seriously doubt that people in the "Global South" are going to prioritise this over struggling to feed themselves, avoid conflict, and cope with climate change, so you can probably rule out a good four billion people there. So the claim here, is that in first-world countries, every fourth man, woman and child, will be actively using Musk's Twitter which is rapidly becoming an ever more toxic wasteland.

His Muskiness really is bananas, isn't he? Has he decided to do the thing he claimed the former owners were guilty of, and count bots as genuine users?

*mis-government aside

**natch