Ti år etter kræsjet

"the banks never had to take any losses at all"

Ten Years After the Crash, We’ve Learned Nothing

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The trouble with Johnny Depp

Lang artikkel om Depp og hans problemer, som ikke akkurat levner Depp mye moralsk overtak:

The Trouble With Johnny Depp
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Problematisk kunst, problematiske kunstnere

Nå og da slår det meg hvor forferdelige enkelte aspekter ved filmer jeg elsker er. Særlig den seksualiserte volden som kan være ekstrem i filmer fra 70- og 80-tallet kan være stygg. Og er det ikke vold så er det knapt en film fra 80-tallet for ungdom eller voksne hvor karakteren ikke er på strippeklubb eller hvor det er minst en sekvens fra en damedusj.

Det samme gjelder regissører, skuespiller og andre som har fått stygge riper det siste året...

Det er problematisk, og denne artikkelen treffer spikeren på hodet: The world's an imperfect place

Les også What About “The Breakfast Club”? skrevet av Molly Ringwald.
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Einstein/Hawking - sosialister

Einstein var kommunist - Why Socialism?

Stephen Hawking var en fullautomatisert luksuskommunist?

Hva er så det? Sjekk her.

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Kampen om Mikke Mus

I 1998 - kun uker før opphavsretten til åndsverk laget i 1923 skulle falle bort, ble loven endret slik at alle verk fikk utvidet opphavsrett fra 75 til 95 år. Årsaken var nok i stor grad en viss mus (mer her).

Nå er vi inne i det siste året med en beskyttet Mikke Mus, eller i hvert fall den tidligste versjonen av Mikke - hva skjer? Vil kapitalistene og økonomene i Disney og interessesammenslutningene gå for nye 20 år, vil politikerne godta dette... 

Per i dag ser det ikke sånn ut.

Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won’t happen again

Bilde funnet her.

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Faktisk

Faktisk.no på nett i dag.

Interessant!
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Rojava

Noe jeg ikke har hørt om før: en sekulær autonom region i Syria basert på sosialdemokratiske prinsippper, likestilling og bærekraft.

Sjekk wikipedia og denne artikkelen.
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Frimenn i Norge

Var en sak i en av riksavisene i dag om frimenn her til lands.

Sjekk De som hater staten av Torgrim Eggen.

Wikipedia er verdt en titt, både Freemen on the land og Sovereign citizen movement.
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Hvorfor amerikanere frykter muslimer

Hvorfor frykter amerikanere muslimer - fordi de ikke skjønner hvorfor de er et terroristmål...

Trump’s story about why [his executive order on immigration is] necessary is, factually speaking, garbage. But a normal human being can at least understand it and its moral: These incomprehensible foreigners are all potential psychotics, we’ve got to keep them out. Under these circumstances, who cares that no one from any of these seven countries has killed any Americans yet? They’re all part of a huge morass of ticking time bombs.

By contrast, the Democratic, liberal perspective laid out by Obama makes no sense at all. We’ve never done anything particularly bad in the Middle East, yet … some people over there want to come here and kill us because … they’ve been exploited by violent extremists who’ve perverted Islam and … gotta run, there’s no time to explain."

WHY DO SO MANY AMERICANS FEAR MUSLIMS? DECADES OF DENIAL ABOUT AMERICA’S ROLE IN THE WORLD.

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Neoliberalisme

"A lot of people -- Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Mark Blyth and Yanis Varoufakis, to name some prominent names -- have written that austerity does not work, especially in the middle of an economic downturn (as it was practised in many developing countries under the World Bank-IMF Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s and the 1990s and more recently in Greece, Spain and other Eurozone countries).

Many of those who push for austerity do so because they genuinely (albeit mistakenly) believe that it works, but those who are smart enough to know that it doesn't still would use it because it is a very good way of shrinking the state (and thus giving more power to the corporate sector, including the foreign one) and changing the nature of state activities into a pro-corporate one (e.g., it is almost always welfare spending that goes first).

In other words, austerity is a very good way of pushing through a regressive political agenda without appearing to do so. You say you are cutting spending because you have to balance the books and put the house in order, when you are actually launching an attack on the working class and the poor."

Mer her.
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Trump og maskinlæringsalgoritmer

Trump er et godt eksempel på hvordan maskinlæring fungerer:

Trump is an object lesson in the problems of machine learning

"Trump's algorithm is to say semi-random things until his crowd roars its approval, then he iteratively modifies those statements, seeking more and more approval, until he maxes out and tries a new tack.

This is one of the core strategies of machine-learning: random-walking to find a promising path, hill-climbing to optimize it, then de-optimizing in order to ensure that you haven't plateaued at a local maximum (think of how an ant tries various directions to find a food source, then lays down a chemical trail that other ants reinforce as they follow it, but some will diverge randomly so that other, richer/closer food sources aren't bypassed).

It also betrays one of the core problems with machine learning: bias in the sample-set. The people that Trump relies upon to give him his success feedback are the people who show up for Trump rallies, who are the most extreme, least-representative group of potential Trump voters. The more Trump optimizes for this limited group, the more he de-optimizes for the rest of the world."

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Orientalisme i Big Trouble in Little China

"BTLC, made at the tail end of the exploitation film era, does a better job of exploring (specifically) Asian-American culture than any blockbusters made recently."

Orientalism in Big Trouble in Little China

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Enkel forklaring av kvantesammenfiltring

For de av oss som gjerne vil forstå:

Your Simple (Yes, Simple) Guide to Quantum Entanglement
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Opphavsrett

Hvor lang tid er det rasjonelt å beskytte åndsverk?

"10 years of copyright protection is probably sufficient to justify the time and trouble of producing most creative work — newspapers, films, comic books and music. Thirty years would be more than enough."

Hvorfor er vi nå oppe i 70 år, og lengre i USA? På grunn av de få åndsverkene (Mikke Mus) som selger like godt tiår etter tiår.

Copyrights and wrongs

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Sirkus

Lang interessant artikkel om republikanernes valgsirkus.

Inside the GOP Clown Car

"It will go down someday as the greatest reality show ever conceived. The concept is ingenious. Take a combustible mix of the most depraved and filterless half-wits, scam artists and asylum Napoleons America has to offer, give them all piles of money and tell them to run for president. Add Donald Trump. And to give the whole thing a perverse gravitas, make the presidency really at stake.

It's Western civilization's very own car wreck. Even if you don't want to watch it, you will. It's that awesome of a spectacle."

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Finansnæringen og samfunnet

Er finansnæringen bra for samfunnet? Svaret er nok "nei"... (i hvert fall i USA.)

Does finance benefit society? (PDF)

"[...] our view of the benefits of finance is inflated. While there is no doubt that a developed economy needs a sophisticated financial sector, at the current state of knowledge there is no theoretical reason or empirical evidence to support the notion that all the growth of the financial sector in the last forty years has been beneficial to society."

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Økonomisk globalisering - ikke så supert allikevel?

"[...]despite all this activity and enthusiasm, hardly any of the promised returns from globalization have materialized [...]".

The great unraveling of globalization

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Øknomisk nøysomhet

Lang og interessant artikkel fra Paul Krugman om økonomisk nøysomhet i statsbudsjetter og Storbritannias manglende framgang på den smale sti.

The Austerity Delusion

"Since the global turn to austerity in 2010, every country that introduced significant austerity has seen its economy suffer, with the depth of the suffering closely related to the harshness of the austerity"

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Krypter

Kryptering, ikke en dum ting å gjøre:

ENCRYPTING YOUR LAPTOP LIKE YOU MEAN IT

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Om Sad/Rabid Puppies og Hugo

Lang og interessant artikkel/kronikk/bloggpost om sabotørene av Hugoprisen:

Guided by the beauty of their weapons
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