blakestacey 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (297)

• On the post: Elon Musk Is Now Seizing Other People’s Twitter Accounts To Promote Donald Trump

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2024 @ 10:58am

  You (and especially Cush!ng) regularly delete inoffensive comments here that promote respect and appreciation for law enforcement

  As the kids say: "Oh no! Anyway..." Given what Techdirt publishes on the topic of reproductive rights, I'll hazard a guess that "women's sex-based rights" is some kind of TERF code. "Ghasp! True-blooded biological women like Karen here have to share public restrooms with ... [whispers] women with strong jawlines. We must protect the sanctity of the public shitters of America! Also, genital inspections for all teenage athletes. Because freedom!"

• On the post: New Yorker’s ‘Social Media Is Killing Kids’ Article Waits 71 Paragraphs To Admit Evidence Doesn’t Support The Premise

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2024 @ 08:40pm

  Even if we take at face value all the claims that social media is the cause of distress, the wailing over Section 230 misses a big point: Facebook gets away with bad things not because of the law, but because they are disgustingly rich. Change the law, and Facebook will still be disgustingly rich. Indeed, because they are the ones who can grease the palms of the people who write the law, that change might inconvenience them, but it will crush everyone else.

• On the post: On Fires, Theaters, And Censorship: Neither Vice Presidential Candidate Understands Free Speech

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2024 @ 10:57am

  That's a funny way of spelling "more criticism of a Democrat from an author who has repeatedly criticized Democrats".

• On the post: On Fires, Theaters, And Censorship: Neither Vice Presidential Candidate Understands Free Speech

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2024 @ 10:54am

  Yep. Walz repeated a colloquialism that people should stop repeating. Vance was a lumbering smeg monster from out of Elon Musk's comment section. You can spray the couchfucker with Febreze, but he's still a couchfucker.

• On the post: John Kerry Accurately Explains First Amendment, MAGA World Loses Its Mind

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 01 Oct, 2024 @ 02:40pm

  well, after reading everything I could find the past few years

  Look harder.

  Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to an analysis published Thursday in Science by a team of Harvard-led researchers. Despite those forecasts, team leaders say, the multinational energy giant continued to sow doubt about the gathering crisis. In “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,” researchers from Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research show for the first time the accuracy of previously unreported forecasts created by company scientists from 1977 through 2003. The Harvard team discovered that Exxon researchers created a series of remarkably reliable models and analyses projecting global warming from carbon dioxide emissions over the coming decades. Specifically, Exxon projected that fossil fuel emissions would lead to 0.20 degrees Celsius of global warming per decade, with a margin of error of 0.04 degrees — a trend that has been proven largely accurate. “This paper is the first ever systematic assessment of a fossil fuel company’s climate projections, the first time we’ve been able to put a number on what they knew,” said Geoffrey Supran, lead author and former research fellow in the History of Science at Harvard. “What we found is that between 1977 and 2003, excellent scientists within Exxon modeled and predicted global warming with, frankly, shocking skill and accuracy only for the company to then spend the next couple of decades denying that very climate science.”

• On the post: Ex-Congressmen Pen The Most Ignorant, Incorrect, Confused, And Dangerous Attack On Section 230 I’ve Ever Seen

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2024 @ 01:09pm

  We know what it’s like to sit at the dinner table and watch our grandchildren, even those under ten years old, scroll mindlessly on their phones.

  Jabronis can't make a "no phones at the dinner table" rule in their own house, but they want to rewrite federal law.

• On the post: MAGA World’s Belief In Their Made Up Claim That Biden Is ‘Censoring’ Conservatives On Social Media May Kill KOSA

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2024 @ 09:14pm

  The given link doesn't support those claims, I can't find anything that does, and that doesn't sound like something that NetChoice would report.

• On the post: MAGA World’s Belief In Their Made Up Claim That Biden Is ‘Censoring’ Conservatives On Social Media May Kill KOSA

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2024 @ 09:01pm

  Here are the GovTrack links for the House version and the Senate version, for reference's sake.

• On the post: KOSA Rises From The Ashes: House Committee Announces Markup

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2024 @ 12:38pm

  KOSA was referred to the Education and the Workforce committee as well, but I can't tell just by poking through websites whether it would have to go through the whole markup/vote rigmarole there too.

• On the post: KOSA Rises From The Ashes: House Committee Announces Markup

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2024 @ 12:35pm

  Here's a news story about that:

  However, House Freedom Caucus members have expressed concerns about expanding the FTC's, and by extension, the government's, power, even if KOSA's intentions are noble. "I am sympathetic on how to protect our kids with technology, internet, and so forth, but I don't like expanding government powers," said Representative Chip Roy (R-TX). "I am concerned about that anytime the government is involved, we want to protect everybody, but they have a way of using that to determine and secure outcomes that were never intended," added Representative Scott Perry (R-PA). Rep. Bilirakis reiterated his openness to revising the bill in his recent comments to The Floridian. He suggested that states' Attorney Generals could be given more authority within the bill and touched upon parental rights.

• On the post: Heritage Foundation Admits KOSA Will Be Useful For Removing Pro-Abortion Content… If Trump Wins

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2024 @ 05:38pm

  Short version: Nobody knows. Longer version: After this markup, it will have to go through at least one more committee vote (Energy and Commerce), and possibly another, as it has also been referred to the Education and the Workforce committee. After that would come the vote in the full House. But the House is only in session for a few more days before the election. It's entirely possible that further activity after this markup will be deferred until the lame duck period.

• On the post: Heritage Foundation Admits KOSA Will Be Useful For Removing Pro-Abortion Content… If Trump Wins

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2024 @ 04:59pm

  The Energy and Commerce Committee has scheduled the markup for KOSA, along with a heap of other bills, for this Wednesday.

• On the post: Heritage Foundation Admits KOSA Will Be Useful For Removing Pro-Abortion Content… If Trump Wins

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2024 @ 01:31pm

  This comes the same week that supporters of KOSA brought a bunch of misguided parents to the Hill to push for the bill under the false premise that it would protect children. It won’t.

  This is heart-breaking. Parents suffer real tragedies, and the scum of the earth exploits them in order to make the most vulnerable young people suffer worse.

• On the post: Australia’s Security Chief Says It’s Time To Start Forcing Companies To Break Chat Room Encryption

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2024 @ 11:49am

  Notice how it's the "worst fears held by industry", and not, say, the worst fears of civil-rights groups? Rather like how it's always "Big Tech" that opposes KOSA....

• On the post: The FBI’s Child Sexual Abuse Efforts Are As Half-Assed As Its Counterterrorism Efforts

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 06 Sep, 2024 @ 03:42pm

  'Twas the Invest in Child Safety Act.

• On the post: Second Circuit Says Libraries Disincentivize Authors To Write Books By Lending Them For Free

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2024 @ 01:53pm

  The better answer is that Congress should fix this and make it clear that copyright law blesses this kind of open digital lending, though the copyright industries would throw a shitfit if anyone even dared propose such a bill.

  A bill that blessed digital lending that is actually controlled — the library has to own a copy, lending must be one-to-one, etc. — would answer the good-faith criticisms of those authors who weren't on the IA's side. Heck, let's go for it.

• On the post: Second Circuit Says Libraries Disincentivize Authors To Write Books By Lending Them For Free

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2024 @ 01:33pm

  I realized a while back that I've surely seen Wikipedia articles cite tweets now and then, for announcements by public figures and such. I sure hope those were all backed up ... on the Internet Archive ... Oh. Let's see. The English-language Wikipedia currently has 6,878,867 articles. Roughly 4.5 million of those cite a website using the "cite web" template, and about 1.5 million use the "cite news" one; there's probably some overlap there which I don't know how to quantify. Getting an average figure for webpage size is ... wow, there's a lot of SEO schlock in searches for that. Let's call it 2.5 megabytes. While there are pages with hundreds of references, I'd bet there's a pretty long tail for that distribution. Maybe, in very rough figures, we're talking about 50 million references, for a total storage size in the hundreds-of-terabytes range?

• On the post: Second Circuit Says Libraries Disincentivize Authors To Write Books By Lending Them For Free

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2024 @ 01:13pm

  I suspect that I have lost more money out of a hole in my jacket pocket than publishers did because of the Internet Archive.

• On the post: Is Your Google Scholar Profile Looking A Bit Empty? Need To Bulk Up Your Citations? Simple – Buy Some

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 05 Sep, 2024 @ 01:01pm

  Nature got a quote from somebody at Google about Google Scholar. This surprised me, because I'm pretty sure that Google Scholar runs on a single tower PC under the desk of a guy named Mel who left the company in 2009.

• On the post: David Boies’ Baseless Lawsuit Blames Meta Because Kids Like Instagram Too Much

  

  blakestacey ( profile ), 04 Sep, 2024 @ 10:01am

  This is one of the very, very few times in life when I will actually hand it to Rand Paul:

  For example, if an online service uses infinite scrolling to promote Shakespeare's works, or algebra problems, or the history of the Roman Empire, would any lawmaker consider that harmful?

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