PolitiFact | The Obameter: Tracking Barack Obama's Campaign Promises
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:03 am EST, Jan 28, 2009
PolitiFact has compiled about 500 promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign and is tracking their progress on our Obameter. We rate their status as No Action, In the Works or Stalled. Once we find action is completed, we rate them Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-01-24/Flagged Revisions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:01 pm EST, Jan 27, 2009
On Wednesday Jimbo Wales asked the Wikimedia Foundation to turn on Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia on his "personal recommendation". Wales also cited the poll on the proposed implementation of Flagged revisions. The move has inspired much controversy and discussion, including a rejected request for arbitration that has called Wales' unique role as "founder" on Wikipedia into question.
Much of the opposition to the request stems from the fact that the poll closed at a 60/40 split, not the consensus that is usually required for such decisions. Erik Möller, the Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, previously stated that "a very large majority, at least two thirds, is generally necessary".
Having emerged from Seattle's influential Sub Pop music scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lanegan was also a close friend of the late Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Here's a duet of those two singing a searing rendition of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," available on Lanegan's 1990 solo album The Winding Sheet.
Another good musical thread on BoingBoing, this one involving a Nirvana cover of In the pines that I hadn't heard. The thread links a few more interesting renditions of the song, and makes reference to three other LeadBelly covers that appear on a box set that I don't have. I looked those three up on YouTube and included links to them below:
This message might meet you in utmost surprise however,it's just my urgentneed for a foreign partner that made me contact you for this transaction.I am a banker by profession from DAKAR REPUBLIC OF SENEGAL in west Africa and currently holding the post of auditing general, I discover this deposit in our auditing course.
Yeah! Spam hit Memestreams. We're on the map now. We're a target! :)
Thanks for the report.
The volume of spam on MemeStreams is really intolerable. There are a wide variety of websites that include us on lists of good places to post spam. Spam posted here doesn't get indexed, but its not like the people running these lists care about their accuracy. Fortunately, we've made enough architectural changes over the years that for the most part, this spam doesn't negatively impact the day to day use of the site.
The spammers that start directing messages to people's memeboxes are the exception, of course, and if you get spam like that please report it because I need to delete users like that. There are further architectural changes that I could make that would make memebox spam less annoying, but really, I think something different is needed.
I think we need an invite only token system for new users. I don't see a viable alternative at this point.
Although some of you did join this community without being previously connected to one of the users here, I don't think that could happen today. The vast majority of people who join this site are spammers and there are so many of them that if a legitimate user joins its most likely that no one would notice them in the fray. They likely remain in the "New Users with posts" ghetto, wadding in the spam, and almost certainly giving up before getting noticed and promoted into the normal user base.
I think that at this point a token system would be far more likely to enable new users to make positive contributions to the site.
When I'll have time to develop one, however, remains to be seen. I wrote a bunch of changes to the code in March that remain unfinished and unshipped.
It’s hard to imagine what, at this point, needs to be kept secret, other than the ways in which the administration behaved irresponsibly, and quite possibly illegally, in the Masri case.
A post on Boingboing drew my attention to this case, in which a German man was rendered to Afghanistan and tortured because his name sounded like someone the CIA was after. Rattle noticed the case last year but otherwise I'm not sure it was discussed on MemeStreams. This case seems to couple totally incompetent intelligence work (they apparently rendered this guy based entirely on the fact that his name is similar to someone they were looking for without any further confirmation) with the almost limitless scope of the state secrets privilege as a consequence free environment for administration actions.
One would like to see the new Administration investigate cases like this, not as a way to seek political retribution but out of a basic sense of justice. Some sort of reparation is absolutely appropriate here if the facts are as they seem. But even if the Administration addresses this, the structural problem remains.
The government seems to have concluded, broadly, that the law does not apply to its actions. Therefore our freedom appears to be entirely the consequence of the benevolence of the kings we're electing. I have a very hard time reconciling that observation with the complaints that have been raised about warfare being over-lawyered. The lawyers appear to have added institutional overhead without actually adding justice. Its the worst of both worlds.
The news that Merrill Lynch paid out $15 billion in bonuses is sure to ignite new questions about the wisdom of bailing out Wall Street. Merrill Lynch took $10 billion from the TARP, allegedly to fill holes in its balance sheet. But instead of using that to repair its financial health, it simply put the money into the pockets of its employees. There is no way to defend this disgusting payout.
...when you pay yourself a bonus with taxpayer money you are simply taking money from someone who earned it and giving it to someone who didn't. If the government hadn’t supplied the means for redistributing that money, you’d just be a mugger.
More insight in the threads.
I came from the industry... One thing I never came to terms with was how many of my colleagues actually thought they deserved their big paydays. Yes, they put in a lot of hours, but I did the same and often more in the industry I had left. What so many never seemed to understand was that their bonuses were more a factor of being able to dip their hands in the river of money that flowed through the firm, rather than any value creation greater than in other industries. Could any one of them honestly say the value he or she created was more than that of a teacher in a third-grade classroom? Their compensation was a result of a structural imbalance in our economy that rewarded oligopolistic behavior in the name of an illusory market transparency derisorily (un)enforced by the SEC and the self-regulatory organizations.
Oh, how true this is:
When I started in the business in risk management a veteran trader drew me a picture of the money river to tell me how everyone got paid.
He drew the river and then in a prime spot, a dam. That's where management was. Then you had sales and trading rank and file down the river a bit, but on the bank dipping their pans in the river. Middle office was behind the river bank dipping in the occasional spill over.
Then he drew a spot miles away from the river. "I used to be a chemical engineer and this is where I used to be."
And this:
Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.
