Cue the beginning of a spam robo-call (or more accurately, robo-receive) industry purely for the purpose of collecting this $10 for every call received.
There is always a cost associated with trying to change a job, one that may be difficult for a poor person to pay. You need to do research to find these other job choices (and you really may not have many choices depending on where you live), apply to multiple places, show up for interviews, etc. Doing all these activities takes time and energy, which a person, who is possibly already struggling to make ends meet, may not have. Imagine coming home from your grueling warehouse job where you had to pee in bottles, putting together a dinner for yourself and your kids, doing some basic chores around the house so that your place doesn't turn into a shithole, and then finding the energy to do all the things you need to do for finding a job.
It's easy to pontificate while sitting in our cushy tech job chairs, where if we don't like the current job, there'll be 10 recruiters blowing up your email with job opportunities, about what a person who may be less fortunate should do.
> I think it's just easier to blame Amazon than for people to make different choices.
It is possible that some blame lies with both parties, but Amazon definitely shares a clear (and rather heavier) burden of blame here, and there is nothing wrong in calling that out.
The company that I work for employs a system of peer review - where at the end of the year your teammates write reviews for you and your appraisal is based on that. It seems to work pretty well our case and definitely aligns the incentives of the employees with having an impact on the people around them.
This comment is highly understating the power of social media micro-targeting by dubbing it as buying a few ads on FB and running twitterbots. I would request you to check out the Ted talk by Zeynep Tufekci (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI) to get a sense of how effective social media campaigns can be.
Well that would explain why they were so effective in the Ukaine campaign, right?
Or you're saying Americans are so much more deceived and gullible?
The Kochs and the Soroses pump so much more money into manipulating elections what the Russians did was peanuts. People would hardly be complaining if they had instead been on Team Bernie. But since the candidate who could not possibly lose lost a Sure shot, people want and need a ready made answer, enter twitterbots and FB ads.
Anyway, the agreeing narrative phenomenon is most clearly evident in the Assange issue. When he was exposing America's behavior in Europe and the middle east and it also aligned with left ideology, he was a hero, Swedish accusations be damned. Now that his leaks hurt the left, he's a tool of the Russians, of course.
> The Kochs and the Soroses pump so much more money into manipulating elections what the Russians did was peanuts. People would hardly be complaining if they had instead been on Team Bernie. But since the candidate who could not possibly lose lost a Sure shot, people want and need a ready made answer, enter twitterbots and FB ads.
The Kochs (etc) are Americans manipulating the system with their wealth and probably within the law. I resent them for it, but that’s very different from a foreign government attempting to influence the results of a US election. I don’t pretend to know the actual pervasiveness of Russian influence; I’m only saying that your comparison falls flat.
I have to wonder if you might realize this yourself, but choose to ignore it in order to justify your own agenda.
Also, I would be angry with any outcome that was shown to be the result of election tampering. That goes for any candidate, even if I voted for them myself.
Would anyone even care about the Facebook ad spend and meetings with campaign officials if it were Israelis or Saudis instead of Russians? I think if you do this mental exercise a lot of the "Russiagate" stories start to look weird.
This gets tricky. So does that mean suddenly it's meddling when Saudi Arabia makes political FB ad buys, or Egypt, or Japan, or whomever wants favor from Americans?
Can a Russian, Israeli or Saudi or Mexican citizen in their respective country buy political ads targeting Americans and favoring or disfavoring a particular American candidate for office?
What if they are on vacation in the US?
What if they have jobs in the US, are not citizens, but live here and have an interest in politics?
What if they are here illegally and buy ads favoring or disfavoring a candidate for office?
What if in some cases it was their own money, what if in other cases they were hired by people in their home countries to buy ads?
What if they work in DC and act as foreign agents and pay for lobbying?
> Can a Russian, Israeli or Saudi or Mexican citizen in their respective country buy political ads targeting American and favoring or disfavoring a particular American candidate for office?
Yes, lawfully [1]. This is a complicated area of law, which is why foreigners and foreign governments seeking to properly lobby in America hire proper counsel.
So Twitter found some $100k spent on ads from Russia during the campaign. Are you really suggesting that someone spending $100k could decide the outcome of an election as big as the U.S. one?
It's time to stop this "Russia hacked the Election" non-sense and just accept the fact that Hillary lost in a fair election.
> Are you really suggesting that someone spending $100k could decide the outcome of an election as big as the U.S. one?
You are very conveniently omitting recent disclosures from facebook that over 126 million Americans may have seen Russia based political posts over a two-year period leading to the election.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-socialme...
This isn't about a particular candidate winning or losing the election. The case would be equally horrifying if Hillary had won the election with the help of a foreign-state-sponsored social media campaign.
And I would implore you to check out the Ted talk I have posted above. It is not about supporting any particular candidate - it simply talks about how powerful these micro-targeted campaigns can be, and we ignore their potential and their effects on democracy at our own peril.
I feel that if some Facebook posts are able to affect the elections to a large degree, we as a people have failed and it doesn't matter what the outcome is since it's just a symptom of a larger problem.
Just like it didn't matter what the exact process by which GW won the contested election. The very fact that the counts were so close means we might as well have tossed a coin.
The last election showed that you only need to target a small amount of people in a few key states. $100k, coupled with some convenient gerrymandering, could easily reach that many people.
Is there any possibility that the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2017 (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392/...) would see the light of day anytime soon? This act would eliminate the per-country numerical limitation for employment-based green card petitions.
Also, what would be the implications if this bill does become law?
There is a chance although any major overhaul of immigration laws almost always requires the support of both parties so I think the chance is still low. It would have a profound impact, I think, both repressing and encouraging immigration to the U.S. but the exact parameters of this are hard to say.
Although this bill has large number of co-sponsors from both sides (D-163, R-139), I'm not very hopeful. The same bill (HR 3012) passed house in 2011 (Y-389, N-15) but died quietly in the Senate subcommittee. Despite all the rhetoric and name-calling, neither party seems genuinely interested in immigration reform.
I wonder if any parallels can be drawn between this and the inordinate amount of time children today spend starting at smartphones. While my personal opinion is that it is probably harmful to have so much of our attention focussed on phones at such a young age, we don't know how future societies will view this activity in retrospect.
People in the future will probably view smartphone use/ the internet in general similar to how many people view television now: as an activity that is fun on occasion, but is mostly a boring waste of time and generally bad for kids.
Apparently the average adult watches 5 hours of TV a day. How the hell do you even fit that in? My social media is about an hour a day all up, and it still feels like too much...
Television and smartphone/internet use are only comparable to some extent, though. Television had a much more limited amount of power compared to internet usage. You could clearly get by without a TV; it was just a convenience and a form of entertainment. The internet has had a lot more influence in our daily lives in contrast.
I don't know about this. Is HN, and much of the internet, not full of people who spend all their time absorbing information? TV is far more homogenous due to the high barrier to entry and pressure for it to appeal to the least common denominator 100% of the time.
My prediction is that everyone will be fine just like every other time a new thing came around, and phones won't finally be the one "it's different for real this time super seriously" thing.
You may be right, but it's clear that the _level_ of the addiction, and its ubiquity, are more powerful than anything before. It's basically everyone is doing a minimum of a couple hours a day (but spread out, so without any prolonged cessation), with the average now like 4-5 hours I believe. Television is probably the closest competitor, but that was typically confined to blocks of after-work hours.
Just like how cigarettes were completely fine for a few generations, or added sugar took over fat in every food product? I mean, if everyone does something bad, does it make it fine or only invisible?
Another thing that might (no strong studies AFAIK so this this straight out of my behind) be a consequence of our increased phone use is myopia.
There is some evidence that myopia incidents(diagnoses?) have increased but I don't think there is proof that it is caused by our increased time spent looking at things close to us.
I also think it is harmful to have so much exposure especially because the most popular apps on smartphones are designed to grab our attention constantly and create this dependency on getting a notification.
Hopefully we see some great studies in the next 10-30 years that can properly map the effects the so-called "attention economy" has had on us
To the best of my knowledge, current studies seem to suggest the cause of myopia is insufficient exposure to bright light (i.e. sunlight) during the developmental phase. That's why it looks like TV/phones/etc might be the cause yet every controlled study was unable to find a link.
For that matter, what do you suppose is the effect of hours and days spent focusing on intellectual abstractions in school and work.
In my experience it is extremely consciousness-altering. And the effect sticks. It can become "reality" for a person.
In the meditation scene we have a technique for altering your consciousness through prolonged concentration. The Buddhists call it "Samatha". It is potent.
