Hua Guofang

Even worse, the media too. The right provokes the left, the left explode in shrill incredulity, the right call the left derranged, the left explode again. Rinse and repeat. The whole thing is a circus shitshow and makes me want to inject heroine into my eyeballs.

Just tweeted by the Pres. himself. Now watch everyone froth at the mouth about it (instead of important stuff) Dude truly is Lord of all Trolls.

I understand what you're saying and agree to a point - I just don't know what that point is. But to illustrate the reality of it, one of Australia's big 4 has been busted not holding up its end to implement regulation and they have allowed millions upon millions of international money transfers to go unchecked. When the authorities did their forensic work they find large amounts moving to places such as the Philippines in ways that fit previous identified patterns of child trafficking and exploitation (they've identified some of the people and they are known to be involved, etc. etc.) Then you've got to consider the potential for jihadi/terror groups to be fund raising and financing operations elsewhere in the world (Hezbollah were caught doing this in Australia in the late 90s, early 2000s), corrupt officials moving money off shore and espionage operations occurring that undermine national security. Again, I agree, a financial panopticon is not desirable, but the costs for absolute freedom are very high and are often paid by the less fortunates around the world. I've underlined the most relevant bits and have deleted irrelevant parts of this article. Westpac CEO pushed out amid child exploitation scandal Brian Hartzer has become the first casualty of the money laundering and child exploitation scandal that has engulfed the major bank. https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/banking/westpac-ceo-resigns-amid-child-exploitation-scandal/news-story/a1b785b735053246572609d567eb6ebd Westpac chief executive officer Brian Hartzer has been pushed out as the major lender battles an investigation by Australia’s financial intelligence agency over a money laundering and child exploitation scandal. The bank’s leader will step down on December 2 with a hefty golden handshake of 12 months’ pay, which amounts to $2.7 million. Westpac chairman Lindsay Maxsted said this morning the board accepted the “gravity” of the issues raised by AUSTRAC. “As was appropriate, we sought feedback from all our stakeholders including shareholders and having done so it became clear that board and management changes were in the best interest of the bank,” he said in a statement released to the Australian Securities Exchange. Mr Hartzer said he was “ultimately accountable for everything that happens at the bank”. “It is clear that we have fallen well short of what the community expects of us, and we expect of ourselves,” he said in a statement issued by Westpac. It comes after a report in The Australian revealed Mr Hartzer attempted to lobby support from Westpac’s senior leaders by saying the scandal “was not playing out as a high street issue”. “We all read the Fin (The Australian Financial Review) and The Australian, and we all read that and think the world is ending,” he said, according to the newspaper’s two sources. “But actually for people in mainstream Australia going about their daily lives, this is not a major issue so we don’t need to overcook this.’’ Mr Maxsted will also bring forward his retirement to early 2020, while Director Ewen Crouch — who is in charge of risk and compliance — will not stand for re-election at the Westpac annual general meeting on December 12. AUSTRAC chief executive Nicole Rose told reporters last Wednesday the major lender failed to report more than 19.5 million international funds transfers over five years. The transfers amounted to $11 billion, which Ms Rose said resulted in a “significant loss of intelligence” for the financial crimes agency. “Westpac failed to pass on information about the origin of international funds transfers and keep records as required,” she said. The most staggering indictment in AUSTRAC’s bid to investigate Westpac was less than $500,000 that a dozen of its customers allegedly paid to the Philippines and South East Asia. The agency says these types of payments are consistent with transfers made to those who are involved with child exploitation. “Westpac failed to introduce appropriate detection scenarios to detect known child exploitation typologies, consistent with AUSTRAC guidance and their own risk assessments,” Ms Rose said. Current chief financial officer Peter King will serve as acting chief executive from December 2 until a new boss is appointed. Mr Maxsted said the interim chief has been tasked with implementing the Westpac Response Plan in the face of the child exploitation scandal. “Peter has had a long and distinguished career at Westpac and has been the CFO since 2014,” Mr Maxsted said. “He is the right choice to provide stability and direction to the bank and its people. “He is an executive of exceptional integrity who is deeply respected by the market and the entire Westpac team.”

Maybe its my noobism but I can't see how blockchain can be dead but cryptos going well. Don't cryptos rely on blockchain ledgers? It's always the way though, everyone sees a new disruptive tech and expects it to change the world in the next ten years. If people in the 1950s were right, we'd all be living under big glass domes on the moon with robots mowing our lawns and bringing us lemonade. It's usually the tech you don't see coming, like personal computing and the internet that has the big and fast changes. People just expect too much, too quickly and then act like it was all a dud when things didn't blow up akin to their unrealistic expectations. 'Blockchain is dead': Crypto enthusiasts losing faith in technology By Vildana Hajric November 14, 2019 — 8.02am https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/blockchain-is-dead-crypto-enthusiasts-losing-faith-in-technology-20191114-p53ag0.html For a technology that was supposed to transform and solve seemingly every problem in the world, the enthusiasm is fading pretty quickly. Blockchain, the underlying technology that powers cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, is getting its last rites read at the Consensus Invest conference in New York, where hundreds of crypto true-believers have gathered to discuss the latest trends in the still-nascent digital assets market. The decentralised technology records and verifies transactions and has been adapted by companies including Walmart and Microsoft. But after only a decade in use, some are already saying it's perishing. "Blockchain is dead," Meltem Demirors, chief investment officer of CoinShares Group, said on the sidelines of the conference in Times Square. "After two, three years of spending a lot of money on this and a lot of investment dollars going into this, I think the bigger question as an investor is: What's the scalable revenue model and is there equity value that's created in these businesses? And arguably the answer is: not yet." For evidence, Demirors points to early adapters including R3, Digital Asset Holdings and Chain, which she says are pivoting into new business models. "Most of the companies that raised massive amounts of capital in 2016, 2017 to build blockchain, they don't exist anymore or they've pivoted into cryptocurrency and tokenisation," she said. As cryptocurrencies caught fire in 2017 and early 2018, a raft of firms - including cigar manufacturers and sports-bra makers - cashed in on the market's love affair with the underlying blockchain technology, often using the ledger as an antidote for lacklustre stock returns. But the sudden pops often didn't last long and many of them lost steam as the price of bitcoin and other digital assets subsequently crashed. Data trends also show that blockchain's been losing its fizz. In a big turnaround from years prior, the flow of cash into blockchain start-ups has dropped, according to data compiled by CB Insights. Businesses focusing on blockchain are on pace to draw $US1.6 billion ($2.3 billion) this year, down from a record $US4.1 billion in 2018, the firm said recently. Hassan Bassiri, a portfolio manager at asset manager Arca says blockchain's limitations are being recognised. "Slowly what people are starting to realise is that blockchains are basically public ledgers and it's not an efficient system. Really, there's very few things that belong on a public blockchain," he said on the sidelines of the conference. "Anything that needs efficiency or speed operating probably doesn't belong on the blockchain. And it's crypto so everything goes through a hype cycle and we sometimes put the cart in front of the horse." However not everyone is convinced. Digital Assets Data co-founder and chief executive officer Mike Alfred said the technology is too entrenched in the market. "Blockchain is the foundation of what makes the entire ecosystem work. Bitcoin's blockchain has been running for more than 10 years without interruption. In no way is that dead," he said. "The current state - it feels like fatigue, it feels like trading fatigue, it feels like a lot of people are tired because we've been in this space and everybody is waiting for the space to grow up and for good things to happen. And it's just taking longer than most people expected but in no way does that mean the space is dead." Bloomberg

once upon a time the latest in Corinthian battle tech

Australia does this, we promote trade pretty well and have a whole tertiary system set up to teach it. Pretty proud of our TAFE system, actually, wife is doing programming there now just for the fuck of it.

His arms are bigger than his head. Not his girlfriend's, though...

Yep, pretty lucky that in Australia undergrads are subsidised. Postgrad not, though. One year of masters cost me $25, did it in 2013-15 and only just finished paying it this year. Only 2/3 of the experience was worth money as well.

Seen video of this dude almost getting his head slapped off his shoulders. There's a slapping competition in some Russian speaking country, which he entered, which he shouldn't have because he was a fairy's fart away from bawling in front of the crowd.

Attorney General says he's viewed the tape and it really was suicide. Forgive me if I don't see Barr as a wholly credible source, but you'd expect that if it could be tied back to the Clintons, at a time when the impeachment gig aint going so well for his boy, he'd launch it. What he should do though, is release the footage (understanding that there were no cams on his actual cell because he was off watch, or whatever the story is). There are so many unanswered questions around this and reason for doubt. Justice needs to be seen to be served otherwise the system fails. https://apnews.com/4ff27f28f32d446795b65ac7dd8cc4ac AG Barr: Epstein’s death was a ‘perfect storm of screw-ups’ By MICHAEL BALSAMOan hour ago 1 of 7 Attorney General William Barr speaks with an Associated Press reporter onboard an aircraft en route to Cleveland, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2019, during a two-day trip to Ohio and Montana. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) ABOARD A US GOVERNMENT AIRCRAFT (AP) — Attorney General William Barr said he initially had his own suspicions about financier Jeffrey Epstein’s death while behind bars at one of the most secure jails in America but came to conclude that his suicide was the result of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said his concerns were prompted by the numerous irregularities at the Manhattan jail where Epstein was being held. But he said after the FBI and the Justice Department’s inspector general continued to investigate, he realized there were a “series” of mistakes made that gave Epstein the chance to take his own life. “I can understand people who immediately, whose minds went to sort of the worst-case scenario because it was a perfect storm of screw-ups,” Barr told the AP as he flew to Montana for an event. Barr’s comments come days after two correctional officers who were responsible for guarding the wealthy financier when he died were charged with falsifying prison records. Officers Tova Noel and Michael Thomas are accused of sleeping and browsing the internet — shopping for furniture and motorcycles — instead of watching Epstein, who was supposed to be checked on every 30 minutes. Epstein took his own life in August while awaiting trial on charges he sexually abused girls as young as 14 and young women in New York and Florida in the early 2000s. His death cast a spotlight on the federal Bureau of Prisons, which has been plagued by chronic staffing shortages and outbreaks of violence. The indictment unsealed this week against the officers shows a damning glimpse of safety lapses inside a high-security unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. But the indictment also provided new details that reinforce the idea that, for all the intrigue regarding Epstein and his connections to powerful people, his death was a suicide — as the city’s medical examiner concluded — and possibly preventable. A lawyer for Thomas, Montell Figgins, said both guards are being “scapegoated.” The attorney general also sought to dampen conspiracy theories by people who have questioned whether Epstein really took his own life, saying the evidence proves Epstein killed himself. He added that he personally reviewed security footage that confirmed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died. Epstein was placed on suicide watch after he was found July 23 on his cell floor with bruises on his neck but was taken off the heightened watch about a week before his death, meaning he was less closely monitored but still supposed to be checked on every 30 minutes. He was required to have a cellmate, but he was left with none after his cellmate was transferred out of the MCC on Aug. 9, the day before his death, the indictment said. Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell when the guards went to deliver breakfast. One of the guards told a supervisor then that they hadn’t done their 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. rounds, according to the indictment. The Justice Department is still investigating the circumstances that led to Epstein’s death, including why he wasn’t given a cellmate. “I think it was important to have a roommate in there with him and we’re looking into why that wasn’t done, and I think every indication is that was a screw-up,” Barr said. “The systems to assure that was done were not followed.” Epstein’s death ended the possibility of a trial that would have involved prominent figures and sparked widespread anger that he wouldn’t have to answer for the allegations. Even with his death, federal prosecutors in New York have continued to investigate the allegations against Epstein. Barr, who has vowed to aggressively investigate and bring charges against anyone who may have helped Epstein, said investigators were making good progress in the case. “They are definitely pushing things along,” Barr said. “I’ll just say there is good progress being made, and I’m hopeful in a relatively short time there will be tangible results.”

Well, I agree fully on the no sauce thing - salt is the only thing I go for on meat. And whilst roaring form is definitely expensive, they serve pretty good meat. Wholepaycheck is hippy but so fucking what, you can eat really well there, drink beer and wine, see hot chicks, etc. and it was a stone's throw from the corp apartment I lived in. Fuck that, I loved it. Salt Lick was seriously shit, IMO. But everyone at work talked about it like it was the pride of the town. They took me to a bunch of dingy Mex food trucks somewhere in the southwest that was awesome. Hadn't even heard of Mexican coke before that. There was also a pretty cool late night food areas somewhere down on 6th that had a double decker bus, I went to about 10 years back after getting a skin full in a bunch of dingy bars close by. First time I tried choc coated bacon. Was drunk, NFI if it was good but the chick who served me was a BBW goddess that loved my accent. Would have surfed her waves of butter fat if I weren't already spoken for. Anyway.....

Yeah, man, I've done the Salt Lick thing and a bunch of home done BBQs at friend's houses in Tx and I aint buyin it. Y'all shower that shit in sauce so much that the meat is almost an after thought. Roaring Fork does good meat and there's something to say about hitting Austin Wholefoods when you feel the need to eat. Best fucking supermarket on the planet. I'll likely never get back to Austin again and I'll always miss it but am so glad I got to spend serious time and work there. On topic, went to a range there as well and let go with some .22, 5.56 and 9mm. Not sure where it was, not far from a single line layup on the side of the road. Bunch of farms around the area, not more than 25 mins out of town.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/11/andrew-giuliani-white-house/602110/

This is pretty interesting in regards to how the social media platforms are looking to evolve and how the retweet/share button enabled pile ons and 'harassment' campaigns. Not sure if you're all aware of the gamergate phenomenon but it was the first time that a broad and organically organised social media campaign emerged to the point that not only did it have IRL consequences but it influenced everything from online marketing to political campaigns (think Roger Stone, he actually hired some of those guys for what they did in terms of whipping up a frenzy). I think that limiting the number of retweets a user can do in the space of 24hrs might assist but it will only stop the casual retweeters from being carefree, it won't stop the organised campaigns. Interesting article, worth a scan read: The Man Who Built The Retweet: “We Handed A Loaded Weapon To 4-Year-Olds” The button that ruined the internet — and how to fix it. Alex Kantrowitz BuzzFeed News Reporter Posted on July 23, 2019, at 4:05 p.m. ET Developer Chris Wetherell built Twitter’s retweet button. And he regrets what he did to this day. “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon,” Wetherell recalled thinking as he watched the first Twitter mob use the tool he created. “That’s what I think we actually did.” Wetherell, a veteran tech developer, led the Twitter team that built the retweet button in 2009. The button is now a fundamental feature of the platform, and has been for a decade — to the point of innocuousness. But as Wetherell, now cofounder of a yet-unannounced startup, made clear in a candid interview, it’s time to fix it. Because social media is broken. And the retweet is a big reason why. He’s not the only one reexamining the retweet. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told BuzzFeed News he is too: “Definitely thinking about the incentives and ramifications of all actions, including retweet,” he said. “Retweet with comment for instance might encourage more consideration before spread.” Yet emphasizing that retweet with comment won’t necessarily solve Twitter’s ills. Jason Goldman, the head of product when Wetherell built the retweet, said it’s a key source of Twitter’s problems today. “The biggest problem is the quote retweet,” Goldman told BuzzFeed News. “Quote retweet allows for the dunk. It’s the dunk mechanism.” Wetherell’s story begins 10 years ago. He joined Twitter in 2009 as a contractor fresh off a run at Google, where he built Google Reader, a once-beloved RSS aggregator the company has since discontinued. In working on Reader, Wetherell immersed himself in the study of how information spreads online, and built a reputation in Silicon Valley for his expertise. So when Evan Williams, then the CEO of Twitter, wanted to build a retweet button, he called Wetherell. “I was very excited about the opportunity that Twitter represented,” Wetherell said, noting that he initially felt the retweet button would elevate voices from underrepresented communities. Before Wetherell joined Twitter, people had to manually retweet each other — copying text, pasting it into a new compose window, typing “RT” and the original tweeter’s handle, and hitting send. With the retweet button, Twitter wanted to build this behavior into its product — a standard practice in tech that, at the time, was performed without much thought. “Only two or three times did someone ask a broader and more interesting social question, which was, ‘What is getting shared?’” Wetherell said. “That almost never came up.” After the retweet button debuted, Wetherell was struck by how effectively it spread information. “It did a lot of what it was designed to do,” he said. “It had a force multiplier that other things didn’t have.” “We would talk about earthquakes,” Wetherell said. “We talked about these first response situations that were always a positive and showed where humanity was in its best light.” But the button also changed Twitter in a way Wetherell and his colleagues didn’t anticipate. Copying and pasting made people look at what they shared, and think about it, at least for a moment. When the retweet button debuted, that friction diminished. Impulse superseded the at-least-minimal degree of thoughtfulness once baked into sharing. Before the retweet, Twitter was largely a convivial place. After, all hell broke loose — and spread. Chaos Spreads In the early 2010s, Facebook's leadership was looking for ways to drive up engagement. Having previously failed to acquire Twitter, they looked to its product for inspiration. The allure of going viral via the retweet had drawn publications, journalists, and politicians to Twitter en masse. And their presence shined most prominently during the 2012 election, a big moment for Twitter and a relative dud for Facebook. So Facebook, in a now all too familiar move copied Twitter, adding a trending column, hashtags, and a retweet clone. “Facebook was doing really well with getting photos of your friends and family, and was looking outward and was saying, ‘What else can we be?’” Josh Miller, a former Facebook product manager, told BuzzFeed News. “Twitter was obviously at its peak, and it was natural for the company to look and say: ‘Wait a minute, the News Feed is about being your newspaper, and it should probably include updates from public discourse, news, personalities, and leaders.’ Facebook didn’t have that in a lot of its content, and Twitter did.” Eight days after the 2012 election, Facebook introduced its version of the retweet — the mobile share button. And at around the same time, Facebook upped the number of links in its News Feed to encourage more sharing of public content. “It’s kind of an implicit message to people who use Facebook, which is, ‘Hey, News Feed is for links,’” Miller said. An Offensive Conduit In 2014, Wetherell realized the retweet button was going to be a major problem when the phrase “ethics in game journalism” started pouring into a saved search for “journalism” he had on Twitter. The phrase was a rallying cry for Gamergate — a harassment campaign against women in the game industry — and Wetherell, after seeing that first batch of tweets, watched it closely. As Gamergate unfolded, Wetherell noticed its participants were using the retweet to “brigade,” or coordinate their attacks against their targets, disseminating misinformation and outrage at a pace that made it difficult to fight back. The retweet button propelled Gamergate, according to an analysis by the technologist and blogger Andy Baio. In his study of 316,669 Gamergate tweets sent over 72 hours, 217,384 were retweets, or about 69%. Watching the Gamergate tweets pour in, Wetherell brought up his concerns in therapy and then discussed them with a small circle of engineers working in social media at the time. “This is not something we need to think about,” he recalled one saying. "It dawned on me that this was not some small subset of people acting aberrantly. This might be how people behave. And that scared me to death.” “It was very easy for them to brigade reputational harm on someone they didn't like,” Wetherell said, of the Gamergaters. “Ask any of the people who were targets at that time, retweeting helped them get a false picture of a person out there faster than they could respond. We didn't build a defense for that. We only built an offensive conduit.” Gamergate was a "creeping horror story for me," Wetherell said. "It dawned on me that this was not some small subset of people acting aberrantly. This might be how people behave. And that scared me to death.” Twitter, from that moment, became an “anger video game.” Retweets were the points. The game took another dark turn during the 2016 presidential campaign, when impulse-sparked sharing caused outrage and disinformation to flourish on both Twitter and Facebook. It’s one thing to copy and paste a link that says Hillary Clinton is running a pedophile ring in the basement of a pizza shop — and share it under your own name. It’s another to see someone else post it, remember that you don’t like Hillary Clinton, and impulsively hit the share or retweet button. “We have some evidence that people who are more likely to stop and think are better at telling true from false,” David Rand, an associate professor at MIT who studies misinformation, told BuzzFeed News. “Even for stuff that they are motivated to believe, people who stop and think more are less likely to believe the false stuff.” It wasn’t only politicians and foreign entities that geared their messaging to stoke outrage-sparked sharing, but the press, too. In the rush to get stories that would be retweeted and shared, they disregarded speed bumps that might otherwise cause them to hold on a story, such as in the case of Jussie Smollett, the actor who police say staged a hate crime earlier this year. The benefits of creating such content accrued disproportionately to the fringe. When someone retweets something, they’re sharing the content with their followers, but also sending a signal to the person they’re amplifying, said Anil Dash, a blogger and tech entrepreneur. The more fringe the original tweeter, the more valuable the retweet. “If I retweet the New York Times, they don’t care,” Dash said. “But extreme content comes from people who are trying to be voices, who are trying to be influential in culture, and so it has meaning to them, and so it earns me status with them.” The pursuit of that status has driven many Twitter users to write outrageous tweets in the hope of being retweeted by fringe power users. And when they do get retweeted, it sometimes lends a certain credibility to their radical positions. The retweet and share, in other words, incentivize extreme, polarizing, and outrage-inducing content. Undo Retweet After a brutal 2016 election season, Facebook and Twitter reformed their policies. But as a new presidential election approaches, their services remain filled with harassment, outrage, and sensationalized news — because the companies have barely touched the machinery itself. Advertising revenue keeps the system in place. For every dollar an advertiser spends pumping up a piece of sponsored content, it can count on some amount of shares and retweets to expand its audience organically. “The more users see information that interests them, the more time they’ll spend on the platform; more views will be generated, and this creates the potential for greater advertising revenue,” said John Montgomery, the global executive vice president for brand safety at GroupM, a major media buyer. Without a retweet button, Wetherell said, brands “would certainly be less inclined to have a financial relationship with [a platform]. And when you're Twitter and that's vastly your primary source of income, that might be a challenge.” A full rollback of the share and retweet buttons is unrealistic, and Wetherell doesn’t believe it’s a good idea. Were these buttons universally disabled, he said, people could pay users with large audiences to get their message out, giving them disproportionate power. "Oh no, we put power into the hands of people.” To rein in the excesses of the retweet, Wetherell suggested the social media companies turn their attention toward audiences. When thousands of people retweet or share the same tweet or post, they become part of an audience. A platform could revoke or suspend the retweet ability from audiences that regularly amplify awful posts, said Wetherell. “Curation of individuals is way too hard, as YouTube could attest,” Wetherell said. “But curation of audiences is a lot easier.” Another solution might be to limit on the number of times a tweet can be retweeted. Facebook is experimenting with an approach of this nature, although not in its main product. Earlier this year, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, limited the number of people to which a message could be forwarded to five at a time, in response to quick-spreading rumors and disinformation. “The forward limit significantly reduced forwarded messages around the world,” WhatsApp said in a blog post. “We'll continue to listen to user feedback about their experience, and over time, look for new ways of addressing viral content.” MIT’s Rand suggested another idea: preventing people from retweeting an article if they haven’t clicked on the link. “That could make people slow down,” he said. “But even more than that, it could make people realize the problematic nature of sharing content without having actually read it.” Whatever the solution, Wetherell looks at the retweet very differently than he once did — a lesson that he thinks has broader implications. “I remember specifically one day thinking of that phrase: We put power in the hands of people,” he said. “But now, what if you just say it slightly differently: Oh no, we put power into the hands of people.” ●

Those Zombe panels are ridiculous.

will stop power posting now.....

I agree, which is why I know the people in my area that have guns and have plans in place to take the fuckers should I ever need them!* *Most people who have guns think that having them means you know how to use them.

This is why Australia's preferential voting system (the one that NYC used recently) is good. Smaller parties that have no chance in winning cna influence the policies of the major parties through preference deals. You still end up with one of the two majors - which both of are fucktardal in Australia as well - but you can at least stop them from going full retard..., sometimes.

I fucking love this. Have you got the image without the text?

Shouldn't Warren have a red star behind her too, though? She's all about redistribution of wealth, from the little that I follow the primaries. * Yes, procrastinating instead of working.

Ummm, doesn't the video show that his hands weren't up when he was shot, though? Not saying the shooting was ok but in the video it looks like he was doing something with his hands by his side when he was shot. I know nothing of the details of this story, just the video that was embeded.

That is fucking hilarious. A fucking eyesore but a pretty funny 'fuck you' to their boss.

Oh man, what a great post, thanks. I haven't seen that old TDF Music Box wall in a fucking lifetime. Who did the ratler with While the City Sleeps? I've still got a couple of old Hypes stashed away somewhere.

Sure..., he's still a virgin though.