Institutions put out messages and public relations at odds with their own interests all the time. It's never very strongly at odds with the institutional interest of course. Just a sop put forward which gets back as much in extra public credulity as much as it costs in development, in opportunity cost to the raw, core profit machine, and in the seemingly cross-purposed promotion.
In this case, one is better off presuming that Marky Mark "My Users Are Dumb Fucks" Zucker-Borg's company does indeed consider privacy a thing extinct and is happier if the public thinks of it that way too, until we start to see an overwhelming trend in the other direction. Until then, the trend is clearly that Facebook wants to cultivate the "privacy + dinosaur = go together" association in the public's mind, and they even callowly do it right alongside a pseudo "we CARE that you should be able to protect your privacy".
The "caring" is simply out of a wish to create a legally plausible image of taking reasonable steps to give dumbfucks the opportunity to not have their privacy butchered wholesale, so that they can butcher privacy wholesale.
Let me state this here and now, and I hope it's heard and recognized by you and by all others who take the "corpotations are GOOD not bad because we have so much wealth due to them, and we wouldn't have it without them" line.
It is at the least mistaken to believe that. The angrier I get, the more likely I am to all call it wrong-headed and self-serving and then more foul things down from there.
It's mistaken -- as may be perfectly characterized by "not sure how you buy a house without a mortgage!" -- to believe that you couldn't have a house without a financial corporation to loan you casino poker chips out of thin air (oops I mean loan you money on a fractional reserve basis) to buy it.
And it analogously mistaken to think that corporations are sine-qua-non for the provision of comfort and needs.
Our ways of doing business, lawful and entrenched and paradigmatic as they are, are just abstractions above the actual business of value creation and provision. They are not the only systems or abstract rules which may provide us the good things in life.
Got that? The entrenched ways of providing things are not the only way.
So far as my argument has come, I think logical minds should recognize that it's non-sequitur to think that the current paradigm of finance and business is the only way in which we could provision material comfort, and indeed "buy a house".
Next, let me see if I can further convince you that what we have is actually BAD. (Having done away with the notion that this system is good AND necessary by establishing that it's not necessary, I want to further establish that it's not-good AND not-necessary.)
It is the provision of money through debt which is just about the most fundamental mechanic that is (what I will call) BAD. I say this because I think it would be GOOD if we could build towards, and subsequently achieve, a healthy steady-state balance with our planet or planetary system.
But the provision of money through debt and only debt sets up a world where there is always more debt than money, as the money owed in debt is always more than the money created by debt.
Competition for this "scarce resource" money will keep humans on an eternal Sisyphean Hamster Wheel generation in and generation out as they can't EVER come to a healthy balance of economic production and consumption. We don't need entropy and heat-death to keep us busy working -- we've got a hunger for money to pay things off that's infinitely more ravenous than the fight against entropy.
Got that? Money is created by debt issuance, and destroyed by debt repayment (that's right, destroyed by debt repayment just ask a fianncial accountant), and it takes more money to pay off any debt than the amount of money that was created by the debt. Ergo people can never achieve a balance and healthy steady state, as they have an imperative to expand and extract value (unsustainably extracting value) just to avoid bankruptcy.
Whether it's balance with our planet, or planetary system, or beyond, as long as we keep having to go into debt to finance our houses and business expansions, it won't matter if the planet is twice as abundant in natural wealth, or if we expand to 10 wealthy planets, it will be flat-out impossible to come into macro balance between our artifical and abstracted "need" to pay back more money than we have and the real world in which we create value and luxury to earn said money.
So, please, will you? Take your "hurr-hurr, durp-durp can't have a house without a mortgage" and throw it away and start thinking about the medium- and long-term results of our un-necessary and un-healthy system. Start thinking and talking in more realistic terms.
Let's start provisioning our needs and comforts and luxuries without chaining ourselves to a broken paradigm.
Seriously, we already have well more than half the people on the planet effectively barred from access to more than a very small pittance of the money in existence, separating the world into "first world" and "third world" societies, and yet the first world is struggling hard to not fall into collective bankruptcy and depression.
We hog most of the money for ourselves, keep most of the other people out of wealth-buying casino chips (oops I mean money), and yet we in the E.U. and the U.S. still are struggling to make ends meet.
That's our wonderful systems of finance and corporate organization for you. God forbid an A.I. should take them for granted, and actually believe it must compete for money.
Seriously. Westerners play XBox and that's their portal to militarism.
Oh. And they can pass quotes from their secondary education on militarism as knowledge of it.
In actuality, we're all just house pets who've never been in the jungle. Our owners are the ones who know about war and slaughter.
And the Armchair General types, don't get me started. They look at the world like a Risk Board that doesn't have enough of their colored pieces on it until we've got everything. And talk about how others are too squeamish or domesticated to do things properly. But they are far removed from war, and post on HN.
Well, if I know the typical populace, which includes people who have conditions, or know loved ones with conditions, which make arrhythmia life-threatening, they would not regard such effects lightly.
But, sure, the GQ author may be guilty of using a mis-leading characterization of the induction of irregular heart patterns as the full "stopping" of heart patterns. ("Hey it's true it 'stopped' for a little," plausibly says the misleader.) Kind of like industry just may be guilty of mis-leading us in the opposite direction.
Oh, and thanks for not trying to make me substantiate the Joe Bageant quote. He's more of a dead, angry, neo-communist Hunter Thompson who values rhetorical effect above all, and will play loose with facts. I just like his rhetoric.
But back to the bottom line:
"The data as a whole clearly indicate that the heart responds to EM energy, particularly if it is pulsed and the pulses impinge at the right time in the cardiac cycle... [but] are not sufficient to draw conclusions about mediators.... [but, again,] the neural system is responsive to the energy."
Anyway, in my long experience, people let their preferred conclusions guide them persistently (if sub-consciously) to interpret perceptions, observations, and "facts" accordingly. The conclusive ends justify the means of getting there. When people want to persistently deny something, they can, easily. With that in mind, I just say "I exhort you draw your own conclusions -- you probably were going to do just that anyway."
Profitable as this conversation has been, I think I'll exit stage-left now.
"Frey tested microwave radiation on frogs and other lab animals, targeting the eyes, the heart, and the brain, and in each case he found troubling results. In one study, he triggered heart arrhythmias. Then, using the right modulations of the frequency, he even stopped frog hearts with microwaves—stopped the hearts dead.
"Frey observed two factors in how microwaves at low power could affect living systems. First, there was the carrier wave: a frequency of 1,900 megahertz, for example, the same frequency of many cell phones today. Then there was the data placed on the carrier wave—in the case of cell phones, this would be the sounds, words, and pictures that travel along it. When you add information to a carrier wave, it embeds a second signal—a second frequency—within the carrier wave. This is known as modulation. A carrier wave can support any number of modulations, even those that match the extra-low frequencies at which the brain operates (between eight and twenty hertz). It was modulation, Frey discovered, that induced the widest variety of biological effects."
Well that's food for thought! Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it"
Or as put by Joe Bageant:
"The Information Racketeers: It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long-term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet-proof mammalian material."
Institutions put out messages and public relations at odds with their own interests all the time. It's never very strongly at odds with the institutional interest of course. Just a sop put forward which gets back as much in extra public credulity as much as it costs in development, in opportunity cost to the raw, core profit machine, and in the seemingly cross-purposed promotion.
In this case, one is better off presuming that Marky Mark "My Users Are Dumb Fucks" Zucker-Borg's company does indeed consider privacy a thing extinct and is happier if the public thinks of it that way too, until we start to see an overwhelming trend in the other direction. Until then, the trend is clearly that Facebook wants to cultivate the "privacy + dinosaur = go together" association in the public's mind, and they even callowly do it right alongside a pseudo "we CARE that you should be able to protect your privacy".
The "caring" is simply out of a wish to create a legally plausible image of taking reasonable steps to give dumbfucks the opportunity to not have their privacy butchered wholesale, so that they can butcher privacy wholesale.
Bonus 1: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wofs8ZpcXlM&t=78s > Subliminal Messages Caught Red-Handed
Bonus 2: > http://blogs.computerworld.com/privacy/20698/privacy-postmor... > "Privacy: A Post-Mortem" by Steven Rambam. (Search for it on YouTube as well if desired.)