> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.
Yeah, that's how I knew that he was born 13 years after the establishment of the city's modern borders and that your original claim is incorrect (and, incidentally, not corroborated by the result of your quick google search, which doesn't even attempt to suggest that he had anything to do with the city's "ring suburb design").
I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.
But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?
On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.
Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."
But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.
> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.
Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"
As much as we would like otherwise, law is a subjective tool. We implement objectivity as much as is feasible, e.g. using careful wording and precedent, but ultimately it would be a fool's errand to attempt to make it 100% objective/deterministic.
All this to say, we tend to oversimplify in our criticisms when more objectivity would have given us a result we agree with.
We tend to agree that we want laws to stop businesses from "tricking people". The specifics vary widely, but the goal itself is unavoidably subjective, so there will always be some subjectivity in its application.
There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here, so your comment is a non sequitur. If particular accounts are posting fraudulent information, then go after those through regular legal channels. The platform is not the problem here.
> There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here.
That is a purely subjective opinion, since I have talked to elderly people who assumed “blue checkmark = celebrity” and was therefore confused why there are so many such interactions on trivial posts.
Ignorant people sometimes have stupid thoughts. This is not an actual problem, or anything that governments or media companies need to fix.
Even under previous Twitter management, there were a lot of verified accounts who weren't celebrities by any reasonable definition. So only a moron would have ever believed that "blue checkmark = celebrity". We can't protect morons from themselves and it's pointless to even try.
Calling people stupid is a common and low-quality excuse to not regulate. It's part of how societies start to fail. If some percentage of people are mistaken about something, the reality of that is all that matters, regardless of how stupid you personally think those people are.
Nah. There's no evidence to support your claim. You're just making things up to try to find a plausible, friendly sounding excuse to justify government censorship. Citation needed.
Life is hard. It's even harder when you're stupid. Government regulation can never change that reality.
In the United States we have a long, foundational legal tradition in support of Free Speech and free enterprise for this very reason.
The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.
This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.
There's at least a little bit of strawman-ing going on here.
The regulators are not insisting that blue checkmarks mean what they've always meant. Secondly xitter hasn't been transparent about changes to blue checkmarks. There was a long period of time when blue checkmarks were given or even forced upon credible sources at Elon's whim while he sold them to hucksters and frauds. Even if blue checkmarks had been that debased throughout their existence, there's still plenty of basis for regulators to find that they are deceptive.
The worst part isn't that a company makes up a designation and is forced to stick with it by regulators. A designation could have been designed from the beginning specifically to head off regulators.
The worst part is that it is simply a lie. Blue checkmark never meant "trustworthy source of information," and most people who had blue checkmarks were not trustworthy sources of information. Thierry Breton is spreading misinformation here, but that would not have ever been grounds to remove his checkmark.
Blue checkmarks were an arbitrary piece of gamified tat given by twitter when it felt like it, and now it's a paid piece of gamified tat that can be revoked whenever Musk feels like it.
At best checkmarks were "verified" accounts. That meant that most likely party with access to account had identifiable identity connected to it. Say celebrity or real business. For any given value of celebrity also big enough "influencer" counting.
Now would celebrities, influencer or company marketing accounts always be trustworthy sources? For more cynical almost never...
Nope, its just that the current Eu establishment doesnt like how its narrative about the Gaza genocide or the Ukraine War was challenged by including even its own press, so they want control and censorship. The countries that are pushing for this are persecuting people for protesting the Ukraine war or the Gaza genocide. Also there's the thing with the current Eu commission president's secret whatsapp chat with Pfizer lobbyists, which has become a major issue that reached the top European court recently.
> "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.
It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.
Running a 2009 Mac Mini in a business setting. Connected to a barcode scanner within a local python development environment and communicates over a wired network. Runs 24/7 with barely an issue.
> I genuinely can't understand the thought process of a Yankees fan.
There is very little free agency in American sports fandom. People are (for the most part) fans of the team local to where they grew up. (This kind of bums me out as someone raising kids in New England, which is not where I'm from, and so not whose teams I root for.)
Backing the local team always makes the most sense. In NYC you can choose Mets or Yankees (though where you live in the city affects even that). Choosing a team from some other city means you see your team play much less often and only after much effort. Worse there are less people to talk about the game as nobody has seen your team play and you didn't see their team plan. (except when your team plans the local team)
In order to rethink Bachelor Degrees, one must first rethink high school. It is routine in the US to see schools where 1) <=5% of the student body is proficient in math; but also 2) the school has a 90% graduation rate.
If that's high school, then it's useless, both as a signal, but also just because, you know, nobody is learning anything. You pretty much have to have some other place for smart people to demonstrate that they're smart.
We need to admit schools are babysitting kids and not teaching them anymore. A few kids can still learn, but so many others don't. Especially the one who would learn in a better environment, but whose class is disrupted by 1 or 2 students preventing their education. Once a student gets behind a year, they aren't going to ever catch up if they are only passed on to the next year instead of being identified as someone who needs to repeat the year.
Edit: I should have been clearer in "are increasingly babysitting" and not been as strong as indicating it as some universal truth. I hear horror stories from teachers about how much of their time is focused on classroom management, how little on actual education, and how much effort it put into processes so the grades stay up regardless.
I wonder if alternative forms of education (like Waldorf/Steiner) would make more sense to more kids. It's clear that the standard way of teaching doesn't resonate with many kids, and we would do well to investigate that.
The hilarious thing is to get a visa in Europe one of the most reliable ways is to start a business under DAFT or be an investor. They want the evil hypercapitalist entrepreneur, they don't actually want the kind of people that their system often claims to champion the most.
Speaking only for myself, I think Europeans, in general (and most people in this thread) have no real sense for how violent the US really is, how much more crime we have than Europe, how many of our violent offenders serve no serious time, or how many times the modal US prisoner has been previously arrested or convicted of a crime.
The typical US prisoner 1) did their crime; 2) did many other crimes besides the one they're in prison for; 3) is very likely to commit additional crimes upon their release.
Small, homogenous European countries have absolutely no idea how to solve our crime problem and their criticisms reflect an irritating combination of ignorance and arrogance.
Your solution to crime isn’t working very well, but that’s OK, nobody’s telling you what to do.
We can just observe the society you have and wonder how you can simultaneously not take responsibility for your outcomes, and bash others who make different choices and have better outcomes.
From your post it sounds like you feel that you do know better, and the only issue you’re having isn’t your policy, but your “lack of homogeneity”, which makes it impossible to improve anything.
That's correct. We should have a lot more people in prison than we do. We are far too soft on repeat offenders and we've allowed courts to deem unconstitutional practices that literally nobody at the founding would have thought were questionable.
When you talk to people about "mass incarceration" in the abstract, they think it's bad. But when you show them what the modal prisoner and the modal prison sentence is actually like, they think it's too soft. Opposition to "tough on crime" policies is based on the myth (the lie?) that most US prisoners are innocent or, if not innocent, guilty only of harmless crimes like drug possession -- that the system is racist and unfair.
But that's not what the data show.
What the data show -- again -- is that the modal prisoner did the crime, and many others besides, and that they are very likely to commit more crimes once released.
Criminal justice is not a mysterious science. You identify repeat offenders and then you execute or otherwise permanently incapacitate them. This works because a large share of all crime is committed by repeat offenders.
But of course that's probably not what you mean when you say that our solution to crime isn't working well.
i can tell you being physically strong comes with it violence and is at the fabric of being an American. so i’d say the issue is complicated and nuanced as is most.
breaking the law (through violence) is also American. we stand up for what we believe in. even if it means breaking the law and going against our government. this is America.
the fact that you have better outcomes for crime is great. how’s your investment system? how’s your sports teams? how’s your military? how’s your stock market? how’s your currency?
I can respect that breaking the law is American, and by all means, go for it.
In general life in Europe is pretty good and could be better, thanks for asking. We can invest, we watch different sports than you do and we don't have a comparable military. The stock market is fine, the currency is fine.
I guess the social media campaign is addressed at those of you, who would like less crime, and who would like rule of law, and less aggression, and a safer lifesytle. To lie to them and tell them that having these things leads to downfall or something.
and i did also say it was complicated and nuanced so please do not ignore that detail of my comment.
i’m glad to hear life is good, and to hear you’re humble enough to acknowledge it could be better. it could be better over here, too. are we doing it right or are you? i have no idea. :)
we’re probably both doing things right and wrong. should it even be solved? are we just living a Memento (great movie) like existence where we’re keeping ourselves busy and at war because if we all got along we would over-populate the planet and destroy earth?
what if our ignorant violent human behavior is actually an environmental mitigation technique?
I don’t think this needs to be solved. We should both strive for what each of us want to have.
Obviously in Europe there will be more variety because there’s more cultures and independent countries.
We have the advantage that we can take good ideas from each other, because people can travel easily and observe that certain things work well.
The US doesn’t have this benefit, since it’s so inward oriented. That’s fine, but don’t go saying Europeans don’t have freedom if you can only look at Europe through the domestic lens.
> We have the advantage that we can take good ideas from each other, because people can travel easily and observe that certain things work well.
True, but, interestingly, we can travel thousands of miles within the United States and in so doing observe that different US states have wildly different outcomes while living under the same federal government and very similar state governments.
Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Minnesota live under the same Constitution, the same federal government, and with very similar state governments -- and yet we see that they have very different outcomes on a variety of measures.
Norway and Louisiana have very different crime rates, but so do New Hampshire and Louisiana. This tells us, at a minimum, that the form of government isn't likely to be the primary factor.
Some US cities incorporated their lower-density "streetcar suburbs" over the years and other US cities didn't. This is why "Kansas City" proper has literal farmland [0] within its city limits, while "St. Louis" proper [1] on the other side of the state doesn't even include most of the skyscraper development that's occurred there within the last 40 years.
This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular place is technically part of "the city" doesn't really tell you anything about it. As you might expect, this causes a ton of unnecessary confusion.
They're pretty clearly not using "the city" to refer to city but instead to a certain density threshold, so pointing out that city limits are arbitrary doesn't really help anything.
What you're describing is called "agreement." I'm very plainly arguing that if the distinction between "city" and "suburb" is to mean anything at all, then it can't just be about what's within municipal boundaries and what isn't.
So you were agreeing with OP's comment, not disagreeing?
> Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.
That's why people have been using paragraphs to clarify what they mean. Paragraphs that you seem to have ignored in favor of critiquing the utility that specific words have when taken out of the context the author intentionally put them in.
Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.