I don't know if anyone noticed this; the name of chief product officer of TurnItIn is Annie Chechitells. If i were in her position, I would change my name to Check-it-All. that would sound more professional.
There seems to be an error in the first paragraph.
Introducing productivity blocker, The first Chrome extension for blocking any website that make you productive.
should the word "productive" be unproductive?
Neither did I. I stopped at the fake star ratings. Looks to me that they kinda failed.
Edit: Oh wait. It looks like i read the whole page. But didn't pay attention because I skimmed through the text and I never even looked at the icons. Not that I can recognize most of them.
I'm really not the target audience for this kind of product page...
have you ever lived in the soviet union before? or You just read about it from the media? Not to defend the system here. Just a gentle reminder of a bit critical thinking. >its all a game and there is little difference between what you can get away with, and what is right<...Here what about the Jeffery Epstein?
What about Epstein? His misdeeds were only acknowledged when he could no longer get away with them.
Edit: to be clear, I'm pretty sure they intended "right" to be sarcastic in that statement, not that they're actually endorsing something as depraved as cultural relativism.
The presentation itself is a huge distraction. I understand the good intention behind it. but does it really neccessary
to use 137 pages to illustrate a very simple issue? I think
5 pages is more than enough to explain it clearly. I read
this minimize distraction slides have been viewed half millions time already, if the maker use the slides carefully, wouldn't it save a millions of hours user's time.
And life?
A simple issue? This isn't a simple issue. I challenge you to cover it in 5 pages.
And spending a time on something that could potentially save everyone tons of time, and improve lives? That's exactly what people should be spending their time on. All of us.
That isn't really how it works anymore. It's possible (and standard) to push any political agenda without ever stating an opinion directly. It's all about which specific facts you choose to report and which you choose to ignore. It's very easy to select and report only facts that make group A look good, or only facts that make them look bad. In that way, 2 news sources can give people the opposite opinion without anyone ever stating an opinion or saying something that isn't true.
And furthermore, public sentiment (and therefore elections) are decided by what the main sources of media determine is the most important news.
Example: Cops have shot a thousand people a year for several years in a row (maybe a decade). About 300 of those each year have been black, which is a disproportionate amount by some measures.
However, it is nowhere near the biggest problem in our country even for black people. But because the media has chosen to report on that problem near constantly since Colin Kaepernick took a knee, it has dominated the public consciousness and therefore influences thousands of people to loot, burn, protest, riot and thousands more to develop opinions and attitudes that create more and more division in our country.
Most of what they report is factual but is it as important as the lofty position they are giving it in the news? Is it helping?
> However, it is nowhere near the biggest problem in our country even for black people.
Something tells me you're not qualified to speak on the behalf of black people (even if you were black).
Something tells me that when you choose to categorize what is happening in the US as looting, burning, and rioting (with a casual acknowledgement to protest), then you don't have a very empathetic understanding of the message people are trying to carry across, or why they believe this is a much bigger problem than you deem it to be.
It's not about the pure numbers of deaths. It's about the countless other scenarios just like the infamous ones that led to deaths that black people encounter throughout the US every single day, and have to wonder if they're about to become yet another name, or worse, just a statistic. It's about living in a continual state of terror that the forces of the state that are OSTENSIBLY there to "protect and serve you" do anything but. It's like living in East Germany and being constantly afraid of the STASI, only it's 2020 and it's the US.
That can be a much bigger problem then poverty, drug addiction, or anything else you might point to as a "bigger problem in this country for black people".
What does that statement have to do with the comment you're responding to? Yes cops should kill fewer people, but as the person to whom you replied mentioned, police violence is far from the most serious issue facing the US currently. Let's get outraged at the obesity epidemic, let's revolt against black on black violence in the inner cities, let's "defund" platforms which encourage division and turmoil.
Even my comment is derivative, the point is that news and media outlets are able to control public opinion even by being honest and factual. By simply ignoring some facts it's trivial for these outlets to skew their audiences perspectives on current events. The whole "left vs right" ideology is toxic and cancerous to a healthy society and it sickens me. It's increasingly difficult to hold a moderate opinion about a subject without being demonized by one group of extremists or another.
- Cutting down on high noise / low effort social media
- Reflection on whether the article you just read made you feel good or you learned something, find on the ground experts in fields.
- Debating with your “enemy” in a Socratic Way
- A true intolerant likes wrestling in the mud and stay there.
Michelle Obama tried to make this her primary focus through the entire Obama administration. Like everything else the Obamas did, the Right wing that is currently engaging in the same whataboutism and dogwhistles as this sentence, chastised it at the time as elitist and un-american.
> let's revolt against black on black violence in the inner cities
> let's "defund" platforms which encourage division and turmoil.
While I broadly agree with you that social media platforms are a problem that needs fixing, "defunding" them is a nonsensical statement that only makes sense in reference and in direct contrast to "defunding the police".
These platforms are not "funded" because "funding" in this context refers to allocation decisions of PUBLIC TAXPAYER FUNDS. Private companies are not collecting tax dollars then spending them on fun riot gear to go cosplaying in as they gas people exercising their first amendment rights.
The whole premise of "defunding the police" is to reallocate public funds to different programs that we currently task our police with (mental health, drug addiction, sex work, etc))
> because the media has chosen to report on that problem near constantly since Colin Kaepernick took a knee, it has dominated the public consciousness and therefore influences thousands of people to loot, burn, protest, riot and thousands more to develop opinions and attitudes that create more and more division in our country.
No, systemic racism caused by capitalism is the root cause of that.
The capitalist media is but one contributing factor of this.
The root cause for this rioting is hundreds of years of systemic oppression: redlining (now digital redlining in the digital age), racist banking policies (for a detailed analysis see ‘The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap‘ and ‘How The Other Side Banks‘, both by law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran), the school to prison pipeline, the CIA and Reagan’s ‘war on drugs‘ that flooded inner cities with crack in the 1980’s causing the crack cocaine epidemic (journalist Gary Webb exposed this), the CIA also systemically murdered the leaders of socialist black liberation movements (Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, etc.), and more (these are only a few examples that I can think of right now).
Wage slavery of course exploits and oppresses all of the working class (the 99% of us who don’t own capitalist property: technology in the form of trade secrets, patent claims, etc. (the means of production)). Yet black and brown people (both in the global north and the global south) have especially had a harder time simply because of the color of their skin.
It's not nearly that simple. You can essentially print an opinion based only in fact, both by picking carefully which stories you cover, and also which details of which story you choose to report. It's completely possible to frame the exact same story as either left wing or right wing using only facts.
If you want recent proof, look at that debacle with that Toledo kid. Some reported police shoot an armed thug, some report police shoot an unarmed kid. The video proof shows neither side is telling the whole truth.
The reasoning of which was widely derided when Kellyanne Conway offered alternative facts to explain a situation. People don't want to hear reasoning, they want to be angry.
Yeah all the news sources my parents sub’d to in the early 00s and I sort of figured I’d sub to as well once ready are aggravatingly narrative driven. I’m not sure if I never noticed that, or if it’s a new media approach, but I don’t need “baseball + narrative injection” articles in my life. I’m actually fairly bummed out about this, I go to Reuters now.
News coverage has always been narrative driven to some extent, but previously that was more in selectivity of coverage. The quality of reporting has been in a long slow decline due to a mix of sagging finances and low-no quality control competition. The 'Action News' TV format significantly degraded things, and then blogs and specifically conservative-targeted media drove adoption of the narrative approach.
This revealing interview gives an interesting perspective on the media business around the turn of the century. Note that this is a pdf archive copy saved to draw attention to a particular segment, and I'd urge you ignore that and rad the whole thing. I can't link to the original as it vanished some time ago, and this archive predates the establishment of the internet archive. Thus the presentation is biased (sorry) but it's the only complete copy of the interview I know of.
https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_M...
If you're on Android using an app like Materialistic to browser HN, like I am, use a reader-mode-only app like Reedy to open your articles; since it only parses html and doesn't run scripts, it will work on every site that sends the whole article and not just a snippet.
I'm partial to Reedy because it tends to fall "safe" and include more content rather than less, but other similar apps should work just as well (SmartNews has a similar function, as do Article Reader Offline, wallabag, and Webreader; I find Reedy has the best UI/feature set for my use).
TBH, I never use a "smartphone" for web browsing. Screen is too small, no tactile keyboard, etc. Also, I generally do not install mobile apps. Only a few from F-Droid on Android, one or two on iOS.
Really? I use Firefox literally all the time (with the minor exception of some internal work sites where they require Edge) and while all captchas annoy me to no end, recaptcha does work perfectly fine on Firefox even with uBlock origin and pihole running. Both on Desktop (I use FF on Windows, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD :) ) and on Android.
What is the problem you're seeing?
In fact I really rarely have any issues with FF whatsoever, and if I do it is always either uBlock Origin blocking a little bit too much, or a site that specifically rules out Firefox (like https://business.apple.com ), probably for no real reason other than not bothering to test their site with it.
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome also really works well on the desktop. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to get it working on Firefox on mobile (the chrome repo also contains the FF one now ;) ). Thanks for the archive link.
PS I understand that websites need to monetise.. But getting a subscription to read one linked article per month or so is just not going to happen. The sites I use a lot I do pay a membership for.
You need Firefox 68 ( fennec 68.11.0 ) to use extensions from the open internet. Mozilla axed general extension support in later versions of their android browser.
I just keep it around next to my regular browser for the occasional paywall.
perhaps you should consider getting a subscription one month per year and using the extension the other 11 if you think that's a more fair price to pay
Good point. But I'm not sure if I'd do this with the Washington post. I wouldn't normally read this unless it's linked from somewhere else (I live in Europe).
I actually had an online subscription to the Guardian for a while because they were really good on the privacy advocacy news. I wanted to support a paper with deep dives into privacy issues. However the last couple of years I got annoyed with too much Brexit stuff (not surprising for a UK based paper obviously but as I don't live in the UK I don't want to read about it every day). So I let it lapse.
But there's another thing holding me back. If I subscribe I have to give all my personal details. I don't want to have too many sites where I have that around, data leaks are now happening too often. Even a couple days ago I got yet another notification from haveibeenpwned (this time it was the Spanish company phonehouse.es that was hit).
Anyway, I just wanted to say that while I use paywall avoiding tools I'm not blind to the problem of monetisation and the cost of real journalism :)
All news outlets are biased. Choosing what to report is part of bias. Nobody has the resources to report on every possible news story. There is even such a thing as "centrist bias". Better to choose a few reputable publications with different bias (according to FAIR or whoever) if you want a more balanced approach.
speaking for myself, state-level bias is harder to ignore than the kind of bias a reporter has when talking about politics that are against their own personal beliefs.
personally I find outlets like NYT or NYPost to be too filled with the type of 'state-level bias' that I have a mental allergy to.
