If you use Gmail, there's also nothing stopping them reading the emails on the way through.
If you use Outlook, there's also nothing stopping them reading the emails on the way through.
If you use Yahoo, there's also nothing stopping them reading the emails on the way through.
If you use virtually any email provider this is true.
Oh, absolutely that's true; even with privacy-focused, hosted systems like Proton or FastMail there's always that tiny shadow of doubt that they're doing what they're saying they do.
I just wish the bureaucracy in so many levels of government was vulnerable to change. It seems like bureaucracies are quite resistant to change because the system fundamentally lacks a structure for improving itself. It reminds me of how GM's poor management style and lack of respect for its workers led to labor strikes and entire facility shutdowns. Eventually they teamed up with Toyota to form a new facility [1] that used Toyota's style of continuous improvement. They managed to increase production while making workers happier to work there, in part because management listened to employees at all levels and empowered them with the tools to directly influence change. A worker thought a part could be made faster a different way? Perfect, just show a team leader and send it up the chain. Constant improvements were being rolled out and it was the respect for the individual's capacity to think that drove the improvement IMO.
I wish we had levels of government that worked the same way. Dedicated pathways for suggesting, researching, and implementing organization-wide improvements that can change everything, even the structure of the organization itself. Seeing our lack of reasonable governance just frustrates me.
This is very much up for debate. Elected officials actually have free postage and can send letters if they need to. Not only that, they likely enjoy direct access to their local news networks and can broadcast messages through that avenue. Most have email lists, and can send interested constituents updates through that platform. Most also have websites on official .gov accounts where they could host press releases as well.
Not everyone has a Twitter account, and I think you need to seriously reframe your perspective if you think it is the cure-all for delivering news to constituents.
> Not everyone has a Twitter account, and I think you need to seriously reframe your perspective if you think it is the cure-all for delivering news to constituents.
NO! I am not saying that at all. I am saying that this is why Twitter is a de facto public square. I am not advocating that Twitter should be a public square. Frustrating to see a strawman of this sorts. You have completely and utterly misunderstood my points. Basically, 180 degrees opposite of what I was trying to say, may be a failure of mine to be less precise but jeez.
The observation that Twitter has become a public square is undenieable (this is different from advocating Twitter to be a public square. I actually wish it wasn't).
I thought it was very obvious. Just check your local firefigting department or police. From local Governments to the President, they use twitter to inform their citizens sometimes exclusively. Meaning there is no other place to go for this information.
Unrelated but - Doesn't it bother anyone that it has become a necessity to use Twitter and they demand your phone number to login simply to view the Tweet?
I'd like to see reasons why Twitter is not a public square.
> Just check your local firefigting department or police. From local Governments to the President, they use twitter to inform their citizens sometimes exclusively. Meaning there is no other place to go for this information.
I believe federal, state and local institutions have reporting requirements that ensure the information is also publicized on their website or available in paper form upon request. I don’t think it’s legal to put important government info exclusively on Twitter.
Twitter is 1 method of quickly dispensing information, but that information then gets more widely distributed through traditional news networks. For example, I use Twitter almost every day but I never once read Trump’s tweets. I heard about them by watching TV or reading a news article.
When anyone from police to the President need their message heard, they put it on TV.
Also, a town square is for the public to communicate to the public. People seem to use FB, Reddit, Instagram, etc. all for that purpose. I’ll grant that it’s one of many virtual town squares, but it’s not a monopoly, so I think “the de facto town square” is a bit of a stretch.
- Completely redesigning their UI two times over,
- Launching a subscription-based service (which seems to make it the first social media network without ads)
- Lengthening tweets to 280 characters
- Letting users make money off their following (super followers)
I'm confused as to how any of this makes it stagnant.
It’s just an example of the product not being stagnant. There’s a lot of things that go into current Twitter and it’d probably take no less than a couple hundred engineers just to keep the site up assuming no R&D whatsoever. That adds a ton of inertia and friction against changes.
Anyway I’m happy with Twitter’s direction. They’ve gone and made it less toxic, and in fact I’ve recently created an account because it has become a pleasure to use.
Twitter Blue still has ads and still constantly fights you to try and show you their algorithmic timeline.
It also doesn't cover multiple accounts - and my side account, when it switches to the algorithmic timeline every other day, is convinced I want to know about pop musicians and inserts 1000 "suggested topics" about the Grammys and BTS I have to dismiss individually.
So many people compare twitter to the national government (even Elon) and make the case that their censorship is akin to a violation of free speech. I would say they need a civics class more than anything.
But in terms of a nationalized social media network, I can't imagine it going well. The lack of innovation in the government would probably mean the site gets overwhelmed and taken down shortly after it was made.
I really love how certain execs spend the time to read and respond to their emails. Tim, Craig, and all the C-level employees must be incredibly busy, so it's pretty refreshing to see that they're responsive.
> About a decade ago, Columbia University scientists proposed that a different type of UVC light, known as far-UVC light, would be just as efficient at destroying bacteria and viruses but without the safety concerns of conventional germicidal UVC.
Why does everyone keep calling this "new"? I've seen it published in articles seemingly everywhere within the past few days. It's not a new technology;
Boeing was prototyping this in their fleet several years ago[1].
>David J. Brenner and co-inventors have been granted a U.S. patent titled "Apparatus, method and system for selectively affecting and/or killing a virus" (US1078019B2).
The study looks like it's about the efficacy of putting commercially available lights in real world rooms. Really it's just the headline that says "new type".
I think in a colloquial sense, this is fair I think. They are pretty new. If it's something some people have been trialling within the last few years, that's pretty new to me. Especially in the context of "a light".
The article describes "far-UVC" light, which they say is new.
> Far-UVC light has a shorter wavelength than conventional germicidal UVC, so it can’t penetrate into living human skin cells or eye cells. But it is equally efficient at killing bacteria and viruses, which are much smaller than human cells.
The UVC lights on Amazon are presumably plain old eye-destroying UVC.
(If you want to use UVC, get it installed in your air ducts, where eyes don't go.)
It is like Hacker News articles. Sometimes an article will have an upvote or two and few comments and sink from news, and then it gets reposted a couple of years later and there's hundreds of votes and tons of discussions.
