@icedquinn It wasn't even really "the UN" as I recall, it was just a claim put out by some bureaucrat. Musk publicly called him out on twitter (the bureaucrat also had an account), saying that if the bureaucrat could substantiate the claim with details for how whatever the amount was would actually solve it, Musk would immediately sell the amount of stock needed and provide the cash to fund it.
As you can guess, no detailed plan was ever provided. It was a laughably small amount relative to the scale of the world hunger problem as I recall, waaay less than the USA already provides in foreign aid every year.
I am shamelessly cutting and pasting this from The Atlantic because paywalls suck. https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/04/the-new-rules-of-political-journalism/678101/
The new rules of political journalism
Charles Sykes
This past weekend, I was on a panel at the annual conference of the International Symposium on Online Journalism, in beautiful downtown Austin. Several journalists discussed the question: Are we going to get it right this time? Have the media learned their lessons, and are journalists ready for the vertiginous slog of the 2024 campaign?
My answer: only if we realize how profoundly the rules of the game have changed.
Lest we need reminding, this year’s election features a candidate who incited an insurrection, called for terminating sections of the Constitution, was found liable for what a federal judge says was “rape” as it is commonly understood, faces 88 felony charges, and—I’m tempted to add “etcetera” here, but that’s the problem, isn’t it? The volume and enormity of it all is impossible to take in.
The man is neither a riddle nor an enigma. He lays it all out there: his fawning over the world’s authoritarians, his threats to abandon our allies, his contempt for the rule of law, his intention to use the federal government as an instrument of retribution. Journalists must be careful not to give in to what Brian Klaas has called the “Banality of Crazy.” As I’ve written in the past, there have been so many outrages and so many assaults on decency that it’s easy to become numbed by the cascade of awfulness.
The former White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer points out a recent example in his newsletter: On a radio show earlier this month, Donald Trump bizarrely suggested that Joe Biden was high on cocaine when he delivered his energetic State of the Union address. It was a startling moment, yet several major national media outlets did not cover the story.
And when Trump called for the execution of General Mark Milley, it didn’t have nearly the explosive effect it should have. “I had expected every website and all the cable news shows to lead with a story about Trump demanding the execution of the highest military officer in the country,” this magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told The Washington Post. “If Barack Obama or George W. Bush had done so, I’m sure [the news media] would have been all over it.” (Trump’s threats against Milley came after The Atlantic published a profile of Milley by Goldberg.)
In our digitally chaotic world, relying on the reporting strategies of the past is like bringing the rules of chess to the Thunderdome. There has, of course, been some progress. The major cable networks no longer carry Trump’s rallies live without context, but they still broadcast town-hall meetings and interviews with the former president, which boost ratings. NBC’s abortive decision to hire Ronna McDaniel, a former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a contributor, despite her role in spreading lies about the 2020 election, highlighted the disconnect between this moment and much of the national media.
And then there is the internet. It is certainly possible that richer, more insightful media will emerge from the digital revolution, but we’re obviously not there now. Back in 2016, we worried that social media had become a vector for disinformation and bigotry, but since then, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s extraordinary enshittification of X. In 2016, we worried (too late) about foreign interference and bots. In 2024, we are going to have to contend with deepfakes created by AI.
This year will see some of the best journalism of our lifetime. (You’ll find much of it here in The Atlantic.) But because both the media and their audiences are badly fractured, much of that reporting is siloed off from the voters who need it most. Because millions of Americans are locked in information bubbles, half of the country either won’t see important journalism about the dangers of a second Trump term or won’t believe it.
As Paul Farhi notes in The Atlantic, MAGA-friendly websites have experienced massive drops in traffic, but social media continues to thrive on negativity and providing dopamine hits of anger and fear. And of distraction—last week, the most-liked videos on TikTok about the presidential race included a video of a man singing to Biden and Trump’s visit to a Chick-fil-A.
To put it mildly, the arc of social media does not bend toward Edward R. Murrow–style journalism.
So what’s to be done? I don’t have any easy answers, because I don’t think they exist. Getting it right this time does not mean that journalists need to pull their punches in covering Biden or become slavish defenders of his administration’s policies. In fact, that would only make matters worse. But perhaps we could start with some modest proposals.
First, we should redefine newsworthy. Klaas argues that journalists need to emphasize the magnitude rather than simply the novelty of political events. Trump’s ongoing attacks on democracy may not be new, but they define the stakes of 2024. So although live coverage of Trump rallies without any accompanying analysis remains a spectacularly bad idea, it’s important to neither ignore nor mute the dark message that Trump delivers at every event. As a recent headline in The Guardian put it, “Trump’s Bizarre, Vindictive Incoherence Has to Be Heard in Full to Be Believed.”
Why not relentlessly emphasize the truth, and publish more fact-checked transcripts that highlight his wilder and more unhinged rants? (Emphasizing magnitude is, of course, a tremendous challenge for journalists when the amplification mechanisms of the modern web—that is, social-media algorithms—are set by companies that have proved to be hostile to the distribution of information from reputable news outlets.)
The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal. And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.
The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance. (An exaggerated report about Biden’s memory lapses, for example, should not be a bigger story than Trump’s invitation to Vladimir Putin to invade European countries.)
In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally. (This includes Trump’s trial drama, the party conventions, and even—as David Frum points out in The Atlantic—the debates.) Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.
And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.
I would absolutely love to get my hands on the new @loops Android or iOS app by @dansup to start using it and testing it.
As many of you know, I do beta testing all day everyday since I work for a large Android app and most all of the software I use is beta of some form.
It would make for a great experience to dive in early and see what it's all about and report feedback as much as possible to help make it the best app out there today!
Now - can someone tell me why the hell the base installation of an IDE needs to be 2.6GB?
I refuse to believe that the most common way of building a mobile app involves running software that weighs 2.6GB.
I want computers with 512MB of RAM and 25GB of hd storage again. I want hard constraints again so developers are forced to write better code, and they can’t get away anymore with this crap that occupies whatever amount of RAM and disk you give to it.
As available hardware resources have gone up, code quality has gone down - to the point where your app for writing code weighs more than media-heavy apps like Blender or Reaper, a React/Vue hello world installs 100MB of node_modules, and running a Gradle build of a simple Kotlin project eats more RAM than a graphical-intensive videogame.
@freemo it's worth noting which version of the bible you're referring to, because the KJV's version of Numbers 5 doesn't actually mention anything about the womb or miscarriage. As far as that goes, it only says that if the woman is not guilty of sin after drinking the water she will be given the miracle of childbirth. It also doesn't seem like this is some strange concoction, it's just some holy water with dust so it is implied that it is the work of God who decides what happens in this scenario.
In researching this, it seems that most people who are actually Christians and not just trying to get "gotchas" on them believe that this would either disfigure the woman in conjunction with not being able to bear children, or it was more of a psychological test to show the man if the woman was honest. A woman who was not afraid to drink the water would likely do so quite eagerly, while a woman who had sinned wouldn't be so sure about it.
As always, there are so many different interpretations of what is in the Bible and it is usually best to read and think about it for yourself, some meditation and prayer on things. I have seen criticisms of the NIV, and I personally like the KJV the most as I find that, although it has a bit of a high reading level requirement as well as a certain level of understanding that not everything is meant to be taken so literally, it tends to be accurate and I always fall back on it when I see people posting verses from other versions. Pardon the mildly sacrilegious comparison, but it's sort of like how literal Japanese to English translation of an anime or manga might be harder to understand without a wealth of knowledge over that of the average consumer, but when it is localized it goes through some other person's lens and you can end up with something missing or just outright changed.
https://www.biblestudytools.com/kjv/numbers/5.html
The Jeremiah passage is 100% a "gotcha" because that isn't someone who is suggesting that abortion is a good thing, it is the typical lament of "I wish I was never born."
The passage from Exodus has a lot of people talking about it with different interpretations and opinions as well, but I will just say that in my view, it speaks more about the law of the land than anything else. This is actually how we still do things I believe; if you cause a miscarriage in someone you won't get charged with murder, but if you kill a pregnant woman with a reasonable knowledge that she is pregnant you will get two charges for murder. It is all about the >intent< of what you are doing, not about what has actually been done. In that case, one could make the argument that the intent to end the life of a fetus could constitute as murder.
There are also a lot of pretty wild old world laws in general, and Jesus actually sought to remove/change many of them. The reason the Jews were so upset with Him is because they saw what He was trying to accomplish as blasphemous, as they saw those laws as coming from God. When Jesus said they weren't necessary anymore, claiming He was the Son of God, they were angry. I say this to illustrate that many things in the Old Testament are thus made null and void or changed and it is important to keep that in mind. One of Jesus's disciples, though I forget which one, even taught that circumcision was not necessary.
On a personal note, I do think it is morally bankrupt to terminate a pregnancy willfully when there are no complications. When it comes to something like rape/incest there is a small part of me that is still saddened that the situation exists at all, but I understand why someone would want to abort their child in that circumstance. As far as the law goes, I think it should be legal perhaps through the first trimester, but like many other things that are legal I do still find it horrible to do. As for my religious bias, I am more or less a Christian, but coming from a place where I was raised Mormon and completely left Christianity for several years when I left the church. I have rediscovered Christ since then and reject the notion that I need someone else to tell me how I should interpret His words. I honestly do not think that the bible condones abortion and I think that what is far more important to God is the intent of someone's heart in taking such an action.
If you would like more scholarly dissections of these examples instead of a more opined one from an average dude, you can read these posts:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenChristian/comments/uhk9n2/deleted_by_user/i77ah5c/
@gme @deadsuperhero that's literally what I'm working on at IFTAS. Check the notes from FediForum session 3, did a whole talk on it.
As for collaboration, I work and build bridges with a lot of people, but will not work with people who wish me harm.
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