No one is saying paid speech is not free speech. Obviously it is.
The flawed argument Zuck made is that in order to have free speech we must have paid speech. That's a self-serving fallacy.
There's a difference between paying for printing costs and paying a middle man to distribute your message to an arbitrary number of people, especially when that middle man has zero accountability and zero marginal cost.
It looks like you've misrepresented not one, but two arguments.
> No one is saying paid speech is not free speech.
The parent to whom I was responding said "It's interesting how hard Zuck is working to try and conflate the idea of 'free speech' with paid advertisement", implying that they believe that paid speech is not free speech.
> The flawed argument Zuck made is that in order to have free speech we must have paid speech.
Zuck never said that. From the article, he is quoted as having said: "Ads can be an important part of voice - especially for candidates and advocacy groups the media might not otherwise cover so they can get their message into debates,"
You have it backwards. Conflating free speech with paid ads isn't about whether the paid ads are free speech, it's whether paid ads are necessary for free speech. That's an important distinction, and is clearly the argument the OP is making.
Zuck never said it explicitly, but it's strongly implied from his conflation of free speech and paid ads that he thinks paid ads are necessary for the freedom of speech.
That's where the fallacy lies. Paid ads, while being free speech, skew the messages' reach. It's cute that he tries to use a grassroots message as the upside, but it overlooks two massive problems that are pervasive on his platform.
1. The deeper your pockets, the louder your megaphone. It doesn't really matter that the little guys can also buy political ads if the big players can drown them out. In fact, I would say it has the opposite effect than the one he suggests. A grassroots effort with a compelling message can make waves without political advertising, e.g. the Arab Spring. But in an environment where most political messaging is ad-based, a small effort will never have enough resources to compete with a larger foe.
2. There is no accountability in the political ads. In one example, there are at least 10 "different" pages all disseminating the same false messages, coordinated at the same time. Yet Facebook says these are unrelated pages. Being as there is no reporting of who is funding the ads, it's impossible to tell if it is a candidate, a PAC, or a foreign power backing them. And as we've seen, that lack of accountability can be very problematic.
We have a lot of rules about political speech because we have seen over time how it can be abused. Social media did not exist at the time, but now it has more power than any other form of media. Twitter sidestepped the whole issue, and kudos to them for it. Candidates and PACs can still get their messages out, but now it has to be on merit rather than money. Facebook is going the opposite direction, and that's a problem.
First step would be banning political ads on social media platforms. And then everywhere else.
The problem with your initial argument is that paid political ads give even more power to the gatekeepers. It also overlooked the issue that more money equals more speech, meaning grassroots political movements are at an even bigger disadvantage because of the disparity of funds than if everyone had to get their message out organically.
And I use one as a race car telemetry system using a 9-dof sensor and a GPS module (with brake, throttle, and steering inputs to come).
For most of these projects, they're complete overkill in terms of hardware, but with integrated wifi and bluetooth, and a host of GPIO pins, they make developing projects like this dead simple. And at $35, the amount of time they save is well worth it over bare metal hardware.
No, but women are marginalized in many aspects of life, including their careers. That leads them to be minorities in leadership positions and other positions of power, which then perpetuates the cycle.
The issue isn't her agency in choosing to model or not. The issue is that casually having a Playboy around work is in and of itself exclusionary. It taints the history of graphics research because it is so clearly inappropriate, and only in a very broken work culture would it be remotely okay to have that sort of stuff just laying around.
Sign up for a free Fusion 360 license and watch a lot of YouTube tutorials. If you're good with spacial relationships, you'll start to work it out pretty quickly.
Of course, there are also online courses, but for the most part the software is so good it's not necessary.
That logic is inherently flawed because luck plays a part in each of those aspects, too. To have learned the "relevant skills" means you need to have been fortunate enough to have been provided an education. To build a network that matters you need to have access to the right people. Looking for new business opportunities is only possible if you have the resources to do.
Eventually, it all goes back to who you were born as and who you were born to. Your odds of "success" are much higher if you're born as a white male in the US than if you're born as an female in rural India. No amount of effort can change those odds.
That's not to say that effort doesn't play a part, it absolutely does. But a significant amount of success is supported by good fortune layered on more good fortune.
It's not a race to the bottom. It's a correction. Why should your health care be determined by your employer? It's a ludicrous system that should have died decades ago.
> Why should your health care be determined by your employer? It's a ludicrous system that should have died decades ago.
Yeah but it's being replaced by insurance that is utterly unaffordable for a lot of contract employees. If we want to decouple health insurance and employers (and we should) then we should be proactively working out what that looks like in the future.
> utterly unaffordable for a lot of contract employees
Caused in part by the issues of employability of (some) chronically ill people, driving up costs, and making "individual" plans de facto "high risk pool plans". Which would be helped by, as you said (and I agree):
Yes, a correction to the most dehumanized form of employer-employee relationship possible, which is following the logic of the market (dominated by asymmetric information and power) to its end.
The flawed argument Zuck made is that in order to have free speech we must have paid speech. That's a self-serving fallacy.
There's a difference between paying for printing costs and paying a middle man to distribute your message to an arbitrary number of people, especially when that middle man has zero accountability and zero marginal cost.