> World Was 2, they uncritically accepted Walter Durranty letting Stalin ghostwrite for him, specifically w.r.t. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, because America was allied with Stalin.
Duranty's New York Times articles were written in 1931, a decade before America entered World War II. They not only predate an American alliance with the Soviet Union, but they also predate the United States having any diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union whatsoever.
> Go back through the major wars in American history and you can find the New York Times championing the cause of war before each of these.
Are there other major American newspapers who have a history of dissenting against war? Wasn't the New York Times' behavior in most of the conflicts you mention in line with American popular opinion?
> Wasn't the New York Times' behavior in most of the conflicts you mention in line with American popular opinion?
Dear god, what? I love the unintentional satire its so funny. "Its fine if the media lies to the people if the people believe the lies." That's low even for this stemlord dumpsterfire of a platform
> "Its fine if the media lies to the people if the people believe the lies."
That is low, but that's neither a direct quote or not an accurate paraphrase of my comment. While I realize that the comment I replied was edited after my response to talk about lying in more recent conflicts (which might be causing your confusion), I don't think you (like OP) are trying to make the argument that the New York Times is bad because of their reporting in the 1930s.
The American political apparatus was already normalizing relations with the Soviet Union due to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931, which is when WW2 truly started), due to the great depression in America making alliance with the Soviets look economically advantageous for America, and due to political instability in Germany and Italy. There was a strong sense of shit hitting the fan soon and that America would be with the Soviet Union through it. FDR officially recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, during the peak of Stalin's famine in Ukraine, which the New York Times was actively denying.
As for other newspapers, the Times isn't worse but bears the brunt of the criticism because they are after all America's foremost, most influential newspaper.
Your comment is full of historical revisionism. The Second World War has little or nothing to do with the Holodomor. The Times' lack of reporting on it has nothing to do with American foreign policy (both Duranty and Gareth Jones were British) and everything to do with credulous reporters. The idea that America and the Soviet Union would be natural allies was not the majority viewpoint in the 1930s (outside of American communist propaganda) and is clearly disproved by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
"The fundamental issue is that SendGrid’s business model depends on making it easy for legitimate businesses to send email at scale."
I disagree with this conclusion, if not only because other email service providers don't have this issue.
It wouldn't surprise me if something was broken with SendGrid's internal infrastructure. I used to be a SendGrid customer until my deliverability started being affected by this issue. SendGrid took weeks to reply to my customer service messages about resolving this, even though I was a paying customer and was renting private IP addresses from them to send mail.
I finally gave up and closed my SendGrid account in July 2021. Despite this, they continued to send me monthly invoices until May 2022. Multiple SendGrid representatives promised that they had resolved the issue, but it wasn't until one CSR added me to SendGrid's global suppression list that they finally stopped.
>closed my SendGrid account ....continued to send me monthly invoices
I used to run IT for a medium company. The amount of times I saw this with various SaaS companies was troubling. We had hundreds of services some as small as a single manager that demanded X and company wide tools. It was frequently a several months long hassle to get them to stop billing us when we cut ties with them. I wish I kept personal records now it was a minority but definitely in the 15%'ish range.
If the attackers in this case are cleverly exploiting anything, I would bet on aggressive grey patterns like that more than I would US culture wars. Noticing that a company has policies that let you hide in plain sight means that you're paying close attention. Knowing what issues are hot button culture flamewars means you can access literally any American news outlet.
> In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning.
It took 2 years because FFmpeg waited 2 years to send a DMCA notice to Github, not because of delays in the legal system. I think you are conflating different unrelated issues here.
A lot of comments here seem to suggest that we should discount or ignore this paper because the OLPC program had other benefits (increasing uptake of lower cost laptops worldwide, giving children computer skills, etc.). This is a reasonable argument assuming that most people have only read the free abstract, but this isn't the conclusion that the authors come in the actual paper. Instead, they suggest that the program might have been more successful with increased teacher training and internet access in schools.
I was able to access the NBER version of the paper, but it looks like working copies are also available in a number of other locations:
While that's undoubtedly true, is that really feasible?
Training programs are expensive, and i imagine difficult to conduct across potentially remote areas with underdeveloped infrastructure.
Internet access is maybe more doable now with starlink, but how practical was it at the time? I imagine this varries significantly with region, maybe in some cases all that was needed was LTE modem -> wifi, but if actually new infrastructure needed to be set up, that could be very pricey very fast.
Like everything its all about trade offs, if olpc did those things would they have budget for other things?
the only way to improve education is to train more and better teachers. that's even completely independent of projects like OLPC. asking if training teachers is feasible is simply the wrong question. arguing that it is expensive is the wrong argument.
education and teacher training is the only way to achieve progress in this world. and if training is expensive or difficult to achieve then that's a challenge we need to overcome, not an excuse not to do it.
There are viable alternatives to Internet access, notably offline resources as provided by projects such as Kiwix. I'm not sure to what extent the projects described in OP actively leveraged these efforts with any real effectiveness. If it didn't, those OLPC mini-laptops would've been functionally equivalent to glorified calculators, and the results would be quite unsurprising.
> because the OLPC program had other benefits (increasing uptake of lower cost laptops worldwide, giving children computer skills, etc.)...
What does that matter if food insecurity, stunted growth, low quality K-6 schools, and other critical issues remain?
From a human capital development perspective, the amount of money spent per year on OLPC could have subsidized a number of similar programs that are both cheaper and have been documented to lead to better developmental indicators.
And it wasn't like OLPC actually placed educators to teach programming at the K-10 level in most of the target regions.
On top of that, broadband and internet penetration didn't expand until the 2010s with Asian commodity telecom equipment being mass produced and exported to developing markets - so what use was a computer which had no internet to a household that was almost always in the lowest income bracket in a developing country?!?
This is why evidence-based policymaking has become the norm and why Banerjee and Duflo won a Nobel Prize.
Edit: can't reply
You (most likely) grew up in a first world country and in the top 5% of households globally.
For the target communities for OLPC, much more basic needs like clean water, school access, nutrition access, and other services were either limited or functionally non-existent.
Much of rural Peru during OLPC (the 2000s) [0] had HDIs comparable to what Laos, Cambodia, and Bangladesh today.
More critically, Peru back then used to be more developed than China [0], yet China's HDI has now outpaced Peru developmentally because local government took an evidence-based approach to developmental policymaking thanks to guidance from Stanford's REAP group [1]
I'm sure you can recognize that the policies needed in a developing country are entirely different from those in a developed country.
The math of college still holds true in the US depending on what you major in [0][1].
Most non-college goers are not attending apprenticeship programs or joining union jobs - which nowadays increasingly require a college education [2].
This isn't the 1970s anymore where you can go to the local factory and screw parts by hand - manufacturing, carpentry, metalworking, and other industrial arts increasingly require STEM fundamentals which for most students they can only acquire in some form of college (be it 2-year or 4-year).
I've seen this first hand now that I've been taking carpentry courses at my local CC as a side hobby - the union track apprenticeship program that's part of the CC expects an associates degree at a minimum.
The OLPC project clearly didn’t achieve its aims, but how would they have known that without trying?
More recently, the impact of smart phones on the developing world has been transformational, suggesting some of the ideas behind OLPC may have been good, but the specific implementation lacking. Thanks to smart phones, developing communities now have access to media in global languages, online education, finance, communication, markets (without having to travel for miles), disaster recovery, health resources and much more.
You can even now see rural villages themselves prioritise phone infrastructure over many things that on the surface seem more important - such as by fixing the phone charger before they fix the plumbing!
Well, at least they acknowledge there was a pandemic.
There's still plenty of people who don't believe 1,100,000 Americans died of COVID. These same people also wonder why it suddenly became harder to find workers.
I think that when a wealth of other reliable sources don't describe an economist as Marxist, Wikipedia shouldn't give precedence to a single op-ed in the Stanford Daily from 1976.
You're focusing on when the word "Marxist" was removed in 2024, but you might want to consider when it was added to the article (in August 2020, about two weeks after Harris was selected to be the vice presidential nominee): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_J._Harris&...
It is important to note that the author of this article (and the founder of this organization) is also the owner of notorious harassment forum Kiwi Farms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
The parent comment is an ad hominem attack, plain & simple.
Nothing has been said by the parent about the message: Instead, the messenger is marked as the target in order to take down the message via association.
"Give me the man and I will give you the case against him"
It's mainly 3 semi-related parts stapled together. If the person/business/bank is complying with the law:
- 1a) Banks with > $10 billion are blocked from (i) the Fed's discount window lending program, & (ii) the Automated Clearing House Network, if they refuse to do business with them,
- 1b) Banks are required to accept deposits from them & law-complying member banks,
- 1c) The board of directors of banks/credit unions have to notify the state/fed if said access blocking happens,
- 2) (Section 5) Payment networks can't refuse service to them, &
The message is an important one, and it deserves advocacy. I have advocated for this specific legislation myself in recent comments. But we've seen in the past what happens when this individual is given attention, and it is difficult to, in good conscience, assist him in attracting more of it.
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