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Still posting links...

Anyone know when reocities disappeared? Does anyone besides me even remember reocities? Is geocities completely forgotten now?

If you've never read Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitz before, I think you might be in for quite a treat: https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/03/06/foreign-government-lobbying-is-an-abomination-and-should-be-eradicated-immediately-part-1/

The basic gist is that while the "resistance" is freaking out that Russia "hacked" the United States election by running ads, meanwhile foreign governments actually spend orders of magnitude more money than Russia allegedly did, influencing already elected, in power politicians, and nobody seems to care. Some choice excerpts:

Only an childish culture with a subconscious imperial collapse fantasy would discover that a Russian troll factory ran the above and conclude it represents an existential threat to the Republic

It’s ridiculous to the point of comical that we’re turning a Russian troll farm spending $100,000 on clownish Facebook ads (like the one below) into a national security issue, while the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads.

each time there’s a bipartisan push in Congress to stop the U.S. government from actively aiding the Saudis in their genocidal campaign in Yemen, Saudi money swoops in to line the pockets of American lobbyists in order to prevent Congress from doing the ethical and constitutional thing.

There you go. Foreign governments are paying intermediaries (lobbyists) to arrange meetings with the very people elected to serve as representatives of the American people. Every minute a Congressional member spends with a Saudi lobbyist is a minute he or she can’t spend on issues that affect the daily lives of the U.S. public. Is that Russia’s fault too?

Today Facebook sent a warning to the Babyon Bee, a Christian satirical website (think The Onion, but Christian-themed), alerting them that one of their articles had been fact-checked by Snopes.com and determined to be false. Facebook warned Babylon Bee that if they persisted in posting false content they risked having the distribution of their posts reduced and their ability to advertise removed.

You really have to see the Snopes.com "fact-checking" to believe it: https://www.snopes.com/cnn-washing-machine/.

This is a fact-checking article about a Babylon Bee article that said that CNN bought an industrial-size laundry washer so they could spin the news before reporting it.. Yes, it's that blatant. Why in the world did Snopes fact check this?

It stands out to me here that this article claims "some readers ... interpreted [the washing machine article] literally." That's got to be baloney. Either this is boiler plate that goes into every Snopes.com article about the Onion, the Babylon Bee, and other satirical websites, or this is a third-rate Snopes writer just trying to crank something out to meet a deadline. Or else it's a bold faced lie, but surely not, right? Do they actually have evidence that anyone somewhere actually made this misunderstanding. Or possibly English is not the writer's first language, as evidenced by the grammatical error in "CNN had made a significant investment in heavy machinery to assist their journalists 'spin' the news they report."

Reader who attempted to click the Babylon Bee link from Facebook were faced with a warning that they might rather go see the more factual "additional reporting" on the subject from Snopes: https://twitter.com/MrB_Loves_Jesus/status/969425733100720128/photo/1/

Here is the Babylon Bee owner's screenshot of the warning from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Adam4d/status/969405110324523008/photo/1/

And here is one of the more complete reports of the event I've seen, which includes the fact that Facebook has since corrected the error and acknowledged it was a mistake that should never have happened: http://freebeacon.com/culture/facebook-threatens-satirical-site-article-failed-snopes-fact-check/

What I don't see reported on much is that the owner of Babylon Bee has also recently (mid-January) launched his own news aggregator site based on the idea that internet giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google et al are now exercising too much control over what news people do and do not see: https://www.christiandailyreporter.com/manifesto.html

This article makes some fascinating postulations about religious belief and the purpose it serves, as well as the question of judging the rationality of beliefs versus the rationality of actions. It's a tough read, but I found it fascinating.

Anyone know who runs the SoylentNews twitter account? It hasn't been updated since Nov 5.

The lameness filter is preventing me from responding to someone. Admittedly it's a political post, so it probably is truly lame. But I can't figure out what's causing it. It says "Filter error: You're not even trying, are you?"

I've finally figured out how to explain the Bitcoin/BitcoinCash fork in a way that is understandable for most Soylentils, even those who haven't been following Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Core development team is basically adding systemd to Bitcoin, funded by a company called Blockstream. Those who want to keep Bitcoin pure from that kind of radical change forked off BitcoinCash. The result is that the ledger, for now, has two alternate timelines.

For anyone interested, this seems to be the most comprehensive and logical explanation and evaluation I have found of the Bitcoin segregated witness proposal that is in the news so much lately: https://medium.com/the-publius-letters/segregated-witness-a-fork-too-far-87d6e57a4179

It's Saturday morning and I'm helping my 2nd, 3rd, and 4thborn children walk through Adventures In Raspberry Pi by Carrie Anne Philbin. They don't actually need a whole lot of help from me, and their little minds are fascinated as they learn UNIX commands.

Fun moments:

• My kids think this and this are funny now.
• 10yo daughter was delighted when I printed out a command-line reference page
• Shortly thereafter she thought it would be funny to tell her twin brother to type in sudo shutdown -h now
• Later, he excitedly exclaimed "Daddy! I can remove a directory!" (Do these kids have my genes or what?)
• Everybody was delighted when I showed them they could use apt-get to install ucblogo, which they have used before under Windows. They'll be doing Scratch later in this book, but logo still has a great appeal for them.