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Peter Hitchens had a hell of a time trying to fix Wikipedia's appalling biases:

https://hitchensblogarchive.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/goodbye...

Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it.

I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.


I decided to look at why the original block happened.. it's on [0], search for "July 2018", then check out administrator's reply, including the links to recent edits.

I had no opinion either way, but wow, I have to agree with the block here. Peter put words like "This was a ridiculous statement" into wikipedia article, which is as far from wikipedia tone as it can get; and then completely failed to understand administrator's advice on the tone.

If you want to show wikipedia has problems, you might want to choose some other example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Clockba...


> written by experts

…and let the bickering begin…

Nothing is going to be immune from people accusing it of bias, etc. Wikipedia is pretty damn good (and free).


This is true but Britannica articles are also written by LESS people

Less room for activism and other things


I don't know the details but amongst his views apparently is:

>Hitchens has frequently rejected the scientific consensus that human activity is linked to global warming, stating that “there is no proof that this is so”

I wonder if that relates to one of the appalling biases he tried to fix? I'm ok with a bias towards scientific accuracy myself.


I wouldn't take an anti-vaxxers word on Wikipedia being biased. They believe heavily in something that has no scientific basis.


Potentially-ignoramus comment here, apologies in advance, but amazon.com itself appears to be fine right now. Perhaps slower to load pages, by about half a second. Are they not eating (much of) their own dog food?


They are 100% fully on AWS and nothing else. (I’m Ex-Amazon)

It seems like the outage is only effecting one region so AWS is likely falling back to others. I’m sure parts of the site are down but the main sites are resilient


those sentences aren't logically connected - the outage this post is about is mostly confined to `us-east-1`, anyone who wanted to build a reliable system on top of AWS would do so across multiple regions, including Amazon itself.

`us-east-1` is unfortunately special in some ways but not in ways that should affect well-designed serving systems in other regions.


Kindle downloads and Amazon orders history were wholly unavailable, with rapid errors from the responsive website.


I was getting 500 errors a few hours ago on amazon.com


Worth remembering that the Venerable Bede was writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People two centuries before Athelstan, so clearly there was some notion of unity as early as that.


This will have a big effect on those in passive index funds I think?

Tech made up about a third of the S&P last time I checked, but the AI hype is also affecting non-tech sectors.


I recommend "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science" by E.A. Burtt if you're interested in that period. It discusses both the science, and the different philosophies of physics that were informing and perhaps influencing them. The book is a hundred years old but very readable.


Thanks for the reference.


There's the O-1 for that.


O-1 is not enough. For jobs requiring bachelors degree, there is currently plenty of US-born workers looking for jobs. For jobs requiring masters and PhD there is still a need for H-1B visas, and O-1 is too high a bar.


Fine, so there are some that fall below the O-1 bar. Nonetheless, those are a drop in the ocean compared to the regular $150k jobs being lost to H1Bs.


Immigration benefits capital and hurts labor, but big business has hypnotized the left into supporting it.


That's not what's happening though.


Account managers and sales engineers are the ones I’ve seen laid off. They seem to have kept the licensing specialists they need on calls because nobody understands the convoluted mess they’ve created. So, losing the people we were working with, on top of all the issues with the products themselves, it made going to OpenShift that much easier.


I mean Microsoft laid off 5% of the developers and 30% of the product managers in my org, so they think that they don't need Windows development.


> The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.

Offshoring can, and ought to be, heavily tariffed.


Do you know what tariff is? How is it applicable to hiring people in offshore offices?


The tariffs are illegal and void. Even if it's implemented, how do you rise tariffs on intangible works? For the planned tariff, US consumers are the ones to bear the brunt of the costs.


> Even if it's implemented, how do you rise tariffs on intangible works?

If you are an American company (or a subsidiary thereof), and you have an employee resident in another country who does IT work, then you pay a tax to the US Treasury on that employee's salary. This tax can be varied depending on the country of the employee's residence.

Alternatively, if you pay OutsourceCo or whomever to provide you with IT services, then, depending on OutsourceCo's incorporated location, either you pay a tax on the services you buy from OutsourceCo, or OutsourceCo pays the tax on salaries just described.

All this can be avoided by hiring American workers, of whom there are many currently looking for work (mainly because of offshoring and immigration).


In the 1970s, a single-income family on a factory worker's wage could buy a 3-bedroom house with a 3x mortgage.


Factory workers weren't (and even today really aren't) a replacement-level job that anyone can just go out and get. A guy making $4.50/hr at GM in 1970 had a great job that his peers would have envied; quite a lot of people who worked just as hard were making $3 or $2.


Sure, but the 2025 equivalent of that GM job -- if you can find it -- is not going to pay enough to support a family and pay a mortgage on one income.


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