On the campaign trail he has sounded optimistic about his prospects, despite saying that the political field is tilted against the CCC, with little access to state media, and an electoral commission he says is staffed by ruling party supporters.
He says he has faced threats to his life, which have made him extremely cautious and mistrustful - including escaping an alleged assassination attempt in 2022 when his convoy came under attack during by-election campaigns.
An ordained church pastor who graduated from Living Waters Theological Seminary in 2016 and a practising lawyer, Mr Chamisa’s social media timeline is filled with political commentary and biblical references in almost equal measure.
He thinks the opposition candidate has missed opportunities to wage a robust campaign in the face of allegations of rampant government corruption and public discontent at the spiralling cost of living.
During the last presidential campaign, he boasted he had met Rwandan President Paul Kagame and been central in crafting a digital strategy that had been key to Rwanda’s economic success.
In the 23 August poll, Mr Chamisa is hoping to emulate the victory of long-time Zambian underdog Hakainde Hichilem, who lost every presidential election since 2006, until he finally won in 2021.
“Big data is this vast mountain,” says former Netflix executive Todd Yellin in a video for the website Future of StoryTelling.
Facebook had been keeping track of other websites I’d visited, including a language-learning tool and hotel listings sites.
Netflix told me that what a user has watched and how they’ve interacted with the app is a better indication of their tastes than demographic data, such as age or gender.
“No one is explicitly telling Netflix that they’re gay,” says Greg Serapio-Garcia, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge specialising in computational social psychology.
According to Greg, one possibility is that watching certain films and TV shows which are not specifically LGBTQ+ can still help the algorithm predict “your propensity to like queer content”.
For me, it’s a matter of curiosity, but in countries where homosexuality is illegal, Greg thinks that it could potentially put people in danger.
US health officials are investigating the death of a three-year-old Venezuelan girl travelling with her parents on a bus carrying asylum seekers from Texas to Chicago.
Before it left the state, passengers had their temperature assessed and were asked if they had any medical conditions, Texas officials said.
Officials said when it was noticed that the girl’s health appeared to be deteriorating, the bus “pulled over and security personnel on board called 911”.
Republican governor Greg Abbott of Texas has sent more than 30,000 migrants to cities controlled by the Democrats since last year under his “Operation Lone Star” policies.
Last month, the US department of Justice sued Mr Abbott for his refusal to remove a floating barrier placed on the Rio Grande river aimed at stopping migrants from entering the US from Mexico.
The latest tragedy comes weeks after an eight-year-old girl died at a US border patrol site in Texas.
Ms Gonzalez, 36, whose career has mainly focused on environmental issues, is due to take part in Sunday’s presidential debate in the capital.
Mr Villavicencio, 59, a former journalist and member of the country’s national assembly, was shot three times in the head as he left a public event in the capital on Wednesday.
His death has shocked a nation that has largely escaped the decades of drug-gang violence, cartel wars and corruption that has blighted many of its neighbours.
Mr Villavicencio’s campaign focused on corruption and gangs, and was one of only a few candidates to allege links between organised crime and government officials in Ecuador.
Interior Minister Juan Zapata said on Thursday that six suspects had been arrested, adding that were Colombians who were members of organised criminal groups,
Patricia Villavicencio, his sister, said “this crime can’t go unpunished… We are hurting, with a broken soul, there is no justice, there is no protection”.
So I looked up the price of a menstrual cup in Ghana. I converted the price to USD, since that’s what the article is in.
Asking someone to pay $14 out of their $26 monthly salary when they’re already struggling with paying $3 per month is both an unhelpful and ridiculous suggestion. Do you want these folks to bleed all over themselves for five months while they save up for an option that might or might not work for them? They deserve more dignity than that.
That’s quite a reach there. Of course I don’t think that. But just saying ‘duh use menstrual cups’ is a classist response. Where resources are more scarce they need to be prioritised, and so some people may not have water or fuel to spare to boil a menstrual cup, or the privacy to do it in eg if a stove is shared. Let alone access to menstrual cups’ in the first place (which cost around £30 in the UK and so are already priced out of the range of a lot of people on low incomes).
But someone fucked up of he didn’t have proper equipment, and it was her expedition, so If any of their partner organisations were this careless, she should name and shame. Stuff like this should not be ignored.
It’s been proven over and over remote work retains top talent and makes people better at their work. And the “productivity loss” is covered by the fact that people maybe get less done in eight hours, but work longer to make up for the productivity they lost to taking more breaks.
But American capitalism has to remind the workers that their misery is part of the point.
Plus there's a multitude of studies showing that people work far less than 8 hours a day, even if they are physically present at the job. I doubt productivity actually drops at all.
I worked in a government office that supported a very seasonal industry.
My coworker had an 8:30 start and would be done her work by 9.
Other times we wouldn't have time in the day to finish, but the slow season was hell.
My kids are less distracting than the folks who walk into my office to chat while I’m in a working session. “Are you in a meeting? Yes? Oh well, You should have seen…”
Especially with the expansion of the open office… Ugh. I’ve avoided it for most of my career and I hope to never go back to an official office unless it has a door on it.
Same. Guy that sits behind me in the office has an average speaking volume of 78 decibels. Yes, I pulled out a sound meter one day because he is so goddamn loud. And I’m stuck in an open floor plan with him.
The productivity loss takes place at the office. You go from being able to solve problems all day to having Susie Homemaker and Joe Blob wanting to talk to you about the sportsball event when you’re in the middle of super complicated logic. You go from being able to use the restroom 30 seconds from your desk to walking 10 minutes to get to the closest one at the office. You go from making a quick sandwich and then getting back to work, to driving miles away to find something decent to eat. Every engineer I know is more productive at home.
More likely, they’ve reached critical mass and are now using this as a downsizing move. They know a % will quit. Will reduce the number they have to float until eventual layoffs.
Aren't they risking losing their most talented workers doing that? I assume they can more easily find jobs providing the flexibility they're looking for.
I work in tech, at one of the big tech companies (the Rainforest one).
The dirty little secret of tech is that you don’t need the best engineers. You just need people that are “good enough”, and that bar varies wildly across all of tech. I’ve worked with senior engineers from Google that absolutely crumbled outside of building Python web apps, and recent grads in LCOL areas that are better in all areas.
Alongside this, many tier 1 services in big tech are propped up by mid-level engineers. Depending on the company and org, you’d be shocked at how little coding some software engineers actually do, because they’re attending WBR’s, building review decks, running all scrum ceremonies, even responsible for multimillion dollar team budgets. Again, many of these people aren’t particularly talented compared to your standard engineer.
You’re absolutely right, but I doubt any big tech company cares. They want to reduce human cost as much as possible, and if that means letting everyone that knows how shit works go, and hiring new grads to keep your systems alive, so be it.
This only works for so long, then the company hires an MSP which does have top notch engineers and they run it like that for a decade before bringing it back in house. The cycle has always been like this. They did it in 08-11 when a ton of companies laid off their devs and shipped the jobs to code farms in India…then half a decade later when the code was like a house of cards, rehired top talent back in house to fix it all. The cycle will continue, it’s just the way CEOs who aren’t there long term for the company think. Short term profits, aka kick the can down the road to the next guy.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a fucking stupid approach, as do ~90% of IC’s at these companies.
Someone at Amazon put it nicely when they’ve said that there’s a rise in “belief-driven” leadership in tech right now. Instead of following the data and asking people what they want, we’re seeing tech leaders position themselves as visionaries, and making market-changing decisions on gut feeling. It’s absolutely a series a short-term decisions, and all they care about is what they think, and how it’ll save their skin for the next 3-6 months.
Oh man thank you for that phrase. “belief driven leadership” is exactly what’s happening there right now. Spot on. I’m so close to finding somewhere else to work but my immediate leadership thinks the RTO is bullshit as well. However I know they can’t hold off forever.
I’ve worked most of my career with msps and yes there are a lot of the lower level guys which are more for triage than fixing anything and they’re average, but the higher levels all have top notch engineers usually. Don’t get me wrong, there will always be those who squeezed by and made it higher but most who are higher up the food chain have a lot of experience from tons of different environments.
That’s very shortsighted though. One great engineer is worth 10 mediocre engineers, especially when you factor in the time required to manage them. But I’ve never built a trillion dollar company before, so I’m probably not qualified to say that my ideas are better.
This is Africa we’re talking about. That whole continent was the playground of ruthless European colonizers for centuries, and I’m under the impression it wasn’t exactly a paradise before that, either. So, probably not.
This was my snap initial thought too but it does not hold up well. Their previous system may not be sanitary by today’s standards, could be impractical to access in modern times, or socially humiliating now. Even if all of those were non concerns though I believe we should still be able to provide modern solutions to people requesting them instead of writing it off as “be happy with the solution you had yesterday”
Why would you assume it's an emergent property and thus should be dismissed as not being a force of nature? I'm making fewer assumptions than you are by wanting to list it alongside the other forces until we can determine if it is emergent or not, and the implications of such emergence. It's kind of a big deal that we can sit here and ponder the forces of nature with some degree of control over our little sack of atoms.
It's safe to say that this list is going to change over time and represents a current snapshot of humanity's limited understanding. Under the current snapshot of human understanding, leaving it off of the list seems to me to indicate an ironic bias on the behalf of researchers who must use the very force in question to do anything. By necessity, it is the overarching phenomenon surrounding all other forces since the only place we can definitively know these forces even exist is within our own mind. To say anything more is to make assumptions.
While I agree that a certain level of assumptions are necessary if we're going to get anywhere, I'm also acutely aware that they're still assumptions and that assumptions are not scientific. If we're going to be scientific about this, we need to make as few assumptions as possible.
It is feasible for consciousness to be something like a force (more accurately, perhaps, a field) and as such it would be by definition a “physical” force. The use of the modifier “physical” on force doesn’t make much sense here: all forces are physical, as are all things that actually exist. It could be useful to consider the objects of consciousness as emergent, and the force of consciousness as fundamental; I don’t know enough about this line of thought to say much on that.
Consciousness is not a force, as far as we know.
That’s literally what the comment you’re replying to says. Emphasis on “as far as we know”. There’s no obvious way to dismiss it outright as not being a force, it’s just that as far as we know currently, it isn’t a force.
I don’t personally have a well thought out stance on the matter.
We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted
You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.
While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.
Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.
If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.
If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.
There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.
I find emergence to be the least reasonable of the 3 main hypotheses I consider, but I still accept that it's possible since I can't disprove it. However, it is illogical to conclude your hypothesis must be true at this stage.
Your comparison proves nothing. It is no different than insisting a radio must be creating the signal it's picking up, because if you poured alcohol or liquid gabapentin all over it, it will no longer be able to play music. I'm sure you realize that if your radio breaks, that doesn't mean the radio signal has disappeared. It is possible our brains are simply interfacing with consciousness rather than inexplicably fabricating it from more than the sum of its parts.
Based on everything science has taught me, it seems far more likely to me that consciousness is not magically created by my brain, but rather one of two things are happening:
My brain is able to interface with a conscious field
Consciousness is a force inherent within the universe, and our brains are able to make use of the force
I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.
Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.
In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.
we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon
This statement begins with the assumption that the brain produces consciousness, then says that because the thing that produces consciousness has components, that it can't be fundamental. This is a really really good example of circular logic.
Something becoming more than the sum of its parts to such a degree would indeed be magic. Are you claiming we're AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT? Are information and consciousness synonymous? I would say that one of us indeed doesn't understand the complexity of the situation.
Are you claiming we’re AI computer programs and that real life is analogous to ChatGPT?
No, those are T2 systems and we’re (at least) T3 systems, roughly speaking we don’t have pre-programmed methods of learning and can generate behaviour from that, but we have pre-programmed methods of learning how to learn to generate behaviour. Notice the additional “learn”. T4 if you count evolution itself as a further level, learning that which is pre-programmed in us.
Practopoiesis is currently the best model we have, incorporating all the neurological and psychological data we have in a cybernetic understanding of things respecting (as cybernetics generally does) issues of computability and complexity theory. Trying to replicate the information processing capacity of the human brain with our current AI tech, all T2 systems, indeed would require computers (or brains) the size of multiple planets. It’d also make us prone to forget how to play piano when learning to cook pasta as compartmentalisation of learning requires said capacity to learn how to learn, to encode things in distinct ways and not just smear everything into an overgeneralised whole, overwriting unrelated information.
Are information and consciousness synonymous?
Now that would be rather strange and terminally fuzzy. You could say that consciousness is a by-product of information processing. Best I can put it (and this is meditation experience, not fancy science) is that the field of consciousness is a point of different information processing systems coalescing, integrating their individual results. A committee meeting room of sorts. We like to identify with that and think it’s oh so important but, eh, is it really? I mean the identification, not the coalescing and integrating. If the experience was not present but its function was still fulfilled, what would change in practice? Are you sure that none of those sub-systems contributing to your consciousness aren’t themselves conscious, you generally just don’t notice it because there’s no need to? If your motor cortex cracks a knuckle and you’re not around to notice it, did it really crack a knuckle?
Consciousness is relevant, and your point should not be dismissed. But it is difficult to measure, so science is not able to comment on it yet, rightfully so.
Force of nature or not, some abstract philosophical conceps will have to wait to be tested experimentally or better described empirically in order to be applied the same way.
Tangentially related but I can’t seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:
Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.
Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.
Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
Muons are naturally generated by cosmic ray protons colliding with atmospheric molecules and creating pions, which then rapidly decay to muons and muon neutrinos. These themselves then decay into a bunch of other things.
If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don’t travel very far at all on average.
That muons can hit the Earth is one of the key pieces of evidence in favor of relativity, in fact. As you say, with a mean lifetime of 2.2 nanoseconds, they shouldn’t be able to hit the surface of the Earth, but because at relativistic speeds time dilation occurs from our frame of reference (or, equivalently, in the muon’s inertial frame, it sees the distance it has to travel be radically shortened via length contraction), they do end up hitting the earth.
Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I’m curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.
I doubt it, because they decay so quickly. AFAIK you have to do it via the pion decay route, and all the muons we create are in particle accelerators. I guess it would be like how we create radioactive isotopes in hospitals on-demand for medical purposes that wouldn’t survive transportation to the hospital before decay, and couldn’t be stored long-term because, well, they would decay.
as an aside, Nature is rather more pessimistic about the discovery, which I think is reasonable.
Muons are naturally generated by cosmic ray protons colliding with atmospheric molecules and creating pions, which then rapidly decay to muons and muon neutrinos.
So in theory they could exist anywhere in the universe somewhat close to a star, if the relevant particles in our atmosphere are around that star? That’s what I meant about the density distribution: are they spherically distributed around (all) stars, or are they only present in very specific situations?
These themselves then decay into a bunch of other things.
I thought they had a small selection of possible decay products. Not particularly relevant to me at the moment, though.
As you say, with a mean lifetime of 2.2 nanoseconds, they shouldn’t be able to hit the surface of the Earth, but because at relativistic speeds time dilation occurs from our frame of reference (or, equivalently, in the muon’s inertial frame, it sees the distance it has to travel be radically shortened via length contraction), they do end up hitting the earth.
I mistyped the mean lifetime, it’s actually 2.2 microseconds. That’s three orders of magnitude different, but from a (non-relativistic) view it would still only travel about 66 centimeters. I’m missing too much information to try to solve the length contraction equation (I don’t know its length, or its velocity) for the observed length. I’m curious here because they’re able to travel on the order of roughly 50 meters into the Earth, and from what I can find they disappear there due to absorption from the many atoms they pass through on that path. So that leads me to a question: If there is not relatively dense earth to get in the way and attenuate the muon, such as if it were produced by a gas cloud beside a star, how far would it realistically be able to travel? Since the muons on Earth “die” from absorption rather than lasting long enough to decay via weak force, they would, in open space, surely be able to travel far enough without enough collisions such that they do end up “dying” by decay.
Thanks for the reply, I am curious here about something that I don’t have enough knowledge to answer for myself.
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