Amerika

• Dow tumbles over 500 points, bringing 2-day losses to more than 1,300 points

  The major indexes fell after some of the major tech names failed to recover from steep losses in the previous session. Netflix fell more than 1 percent after briefly trading higher. Apple also declined 0.9 percent, erasing earlier gains. Amazon dropped 2 percent after falling 6.2 percent on Wednesday.

  “It’s a momentum correction, not a portfolio correction,” said Joe Terranova, chief market strategist at Virtus Investment Partners. “While we have a bias to believe 2008 could happen again, I don’t think this is the case.”

  Official spin: this was caused by interest rates. Actuality: the dot-coms, who bet that having more users was more important than having profitable users, have again entered their death cycle, and this is occurring against the backdrop of interest rates and trade wars. Look for another dot-com crash just as bad as the one in 2000, except that now, more of the value of our economy is based on these businesses with dubious business plans.

• Facebook is removing hundreds of American accounts spamming political misinformation

  The company said in a blog post that 559 pages and 251 accounts would be removed. While the accounts used “sensational political content,” Facebook did not say that was the reason for the purge. Instead, the accounts and pages will be taken down after they had “consistently broken” the company’s rules against gaming its platform. Facebook noted that many used strategies like posting on fake or multiple accounts to generate traffic, or to inflate their popularity.

Facebook asks us to consider that they are acting in good faith; past evidence shows that no such assumption can be made. Instead, this will be the usual Silicon Valley game of removing a few highly dubious sources and then censoring many conservative voices who drift too far from the mainstream and are not popular enough to defend themselves. Facebook wants a safe space where consumerism is not interrupted by any dangerous or unsightly truths.

• Microsoft tackles ‘horrifying’ Bing search results

  Journalist Chris Hoffman discovered Bing suggested racist topics when he looked up words such as “Jews”, “Muslims” and “black people”.

  Bing also ranked widely debunked conspiracy theories among the top suggestions for other words.

  In response to Mr Hoffman’s findings, Jeff Jones, a senior director at Microsoft, said: “We take matters of offensive content very seriously and continue to enhance our systems to identify and prevent such content from appearing as a suggested search.

  People type things into search engines to find out if they are true, and search engines — like a primitive form of democracy — reflect back what people are looking up. If interest in forbidden topics becomes frequent, search engine results will reflect that in an unbiased attempt to give people what they seek. However, that conflicts with our democratic narrative, so now search engines must be censored to avoid more people waking up, which in turn will drive more people out of the mainstream. This is a short-term loss and a long-term big win for the Right.

• 

  All Reddit subs exist with the arrangement between moderators and admins that any information which too seriously challenges the narrative will be removed. There are no free speech sites in big social media, which Reddit has joined through its attempts to bring in more users by making yet another Left-leaning safe space.

• Why Russian Latvians vote for their own

  Ethnic Russians make up about a quarter of Latvia’s population. Most are citizens, and as usual the Harmony party, which gets most of their support, came first in the election. On issues like statelessness and protecting bilingual education, ethnic Russians feel that only a party of their own can represent them. Most get their news from Russian-language TV stations, many with links to the Kremlin. Other Latvian parties always rule out letting Harmony into government.

  Diversity never works because it consists of a paradox: having different groups co-exist in the same space means that no group gets control of its future, has its values represented, or even interacts exclusively with members of its own group when dealing with people in power, which is what all groups desire. Ethnic self-determination is the future, and the Latvian Russians are as doomed as the EU.

• “And you say, look, yes, for the good of socially, I should have five children, but what’s the benefit to me? And the wife says, What? Five children? We can’t go on holidays. So one is enough, or at the most two. The people at the lower end – in our three-room flats, two-rooms – some of them have 10, 12 to 14 children.” – Lee Kwan Yew

  “Well, we make them say the national pledge and sing the national anthem but suppose we have a famine, will your Malay neighbour give you the last few grains of rice or will she share it with her family or fellow Muslim or vice versa?” – Lee Kwan Yew

• From dog rape to white men in chains: We fooled the biased academic left with fake studies

  Seven of our papers were accepted, many in top-ranking journals. These include an adaptation of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” which was accepted by a social work journal. Another develops the concept of “fat bodybuilding” for a discipline called fat studies, and a third claims to address “rape culture” by monitoring dog-humping incidents at dog parks in Southeast Portland, Oregon.

  Leftism promotes those who express the Leftist ideology. It does not care if they are correct, accurate, good, or even functional. It wants only what it wants, which is more power to the mob. Expect more of these debunkings as people realize that academics are a club of Red Guards who could not care less that everything they publish is inaccurate and trivial.

• ‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’

  I think that the biggest problem that Reddit had and continues to have, and that all of the platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and Discord now continue to have is that they’re not making decisions, is that there is absolutely no active thought going into their problems — problems that are going to exist in coming months or years — and what they can do to combat them.

  …The incentive structure is simply growth at all costs. There was never, in any board meeting that I have ever attended, a conversation about the users, about things that were going on that were bad, about potential dangers, about decisions that might affect potential dangers. There was never a conversation about that stuff.

  Just like dot-com 1.0, these dot-com 3.0 goons have based their business models on the idea that having more users is better than actually generating revenue; this forces them to constantly grow, fake numbers, and pretend that internet advertising works (it does not). They know that eventually, as happened before, the gig will be up and they will all go away. What happens then to the American economy?

• Amazon Reportedly Killed an AI Recruitment System Because It Couldn’t Stop the Tool from Discriminating Against Women

  Amazon spent years working on a system for automating the recruitment process. The idea was for this AI-powered system to be able to look at a collection of resumes and name the top candidates. To achieve this, Amazon fed the system a decade’s worth of resumes from people applying for jobs at Amazon.

  …According to Reuters’ sources, Amazon’s system taught itself to downgrade resumes with the word “women’s” in them, and to assign lower scores to graduates of two women-only colleges. Meanwhile, it decided that words such as “executed” and “captured,” which are apparently deployed more often in the resumes of male engineers, suggested the candidate should be ranked more highly.

  If males dominate an industry, there are reasons why this is the case; if you then base your system on what has succeeded in the past, it will favor not just males but the type of males who succeed in this industry. Computers are unbiased. They return results to us that we do not want to hear. However, the fact that we have to keep crippling these results show us just how far away from reality that our ideology has pushed us.

• 

  Yet another example of social media removing relevant content because it makes people feel unsafe. They would rather remain in denial about actual problems, and consumer products like Facebook know this and try to remove anything vaguely controversial, leaving on the vapid. That ends the complaints, but rams the service into a death spiral as intelligent users flee and everyone else gets bored with the flood of vacation pictures, personal drama, and kitty videos.

• Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 within planetary limits may be achievable

  A global shift toward healthy and more plant-based diets, halving food loss and waste, and improving farming practices and technologies are required to feed 10 billion people sustainably by 2050, a new study finds.

  What is a “study”? An analysis, presumably based on data, that contains broad conclusions. The Left favors the mob, and it wants the many to equally divide up the wealth so that the many can rule instead of allowing people who are more competent to rule them. Their vision with climate change and other fears consists of telling the West to reduce its consumption so that we can add more people, which ensures that the next generation will face a population crash. They want to redistribute food wealth so that we can have ten billion people, while the same few will be the ones doing all the innovation and creation. This is a death cycle for humanity.

• FBI Director on Whether Apple and Amazon Servers Had Chinese Spy Chips: ‘Be Careful What You Read’

  Senator Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the committee, asked Wray when his agency found out about the chips that server manufacturer Super Micro implanted into server hardware, as reported last week by Bloomberg Businessweek. “I would say to the newspaper article or, I mean, the magazine article, I would say be careful what you read,” Wray replied. “Especially in this context.” Johnson called on Wray to speak to the accuracy of the story, telling the FBI director that, “We don’t want false information out there.” Wray said he couldn’t offer much detail because the agency has a policy of not confirming or denying that an investigation is underway. “I do want to be careful that my comment not be construed as inferring or implying, I should say, that there is an investigation,” Wray said. “We take very seriously our obligation to notify victims when they’ve been targeted.”

  China has bought or blackmailed huge portions of the American and European governments. When it was revealed that China had inserted tiny chips into SuperMicro servers to allow them to take over the machines and view any information flowing through them, Facebook affirmed the story, but Apple and Amazon claim it is bunk. In the meantime, the chips have been isolated and analyzed, which means that the FBI is covering up an epic spy ring for its foreign masters.

• Trump says Fed is ‘out of control’

  He also said his trade policies had hurt China’s economy.

  “Their economy has gone down very substantially. And I have a lot more to do if I want to do it and I don’t want to do, but they have to come to the table. …

  “They lived too well for too long and frankly I guess they think that the Americans are stupid people. Americans are not stupid people.”

  China prospered by cheating. They offered cheap products, then found ways to make imports too expensive to compete, and used the resulting influx of foreign money to build a giant economy, all while acting against the West by buying politicians like the Clintons and spying on our industry. Now that someone demands a level playing field, their economy is headed toward collapse. The same will prove true of other third world “miracles” that have been sponsored by Western Leftists, who make a career of hating their own societies as much as they detest their lonely unhappy lives.

• Polls point to anti-EU surge in European Parliament

  Eurosceptic parties could expand their strength in the European Parliament by over 60 percent at elections next May, adding pressure on EU leaders pressing for deeper integration after Brexit, a survey by Reuters of national opinion polls suggests.

  The EU went the way of the USSR: it tried to use social engineering to shape humans into what its ideology said they should be, ignoring the reasons why they are as they are. This denial of nature of reality went unpunished for some time, but finally the many bad consequences of its unrealistic actions came to light, and now people are fleeing the sinking ship. Tear down that wall!

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