deathmtn

Unlike, say, Theranos, Spotify’s product works — just not for most musicians. That’s one reason it hasn’t imploded. Another is the service’s successful colonization of our imaginations. More than once in “The Playlist,” die-hard skeptics are won over by opening Spotify and experiencing the thrill of a seeming infinity of options, all at their fingertips. The app itself tells a visceral story about what’s possible — inevitable, even. Users have largely accepted this story.

There was just one problem: the ants built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal.
…
The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft.

[Religious extremist Wirathu] urged the government to raid Nuslims homes and mosques in a preemptive strike—a common demand of genocidaires, whose implies
message is that regular citizens must do what the authorities will not. The post went viral, dominating feeds across the country. Outraged users joined in the froth, urging one another to wipe out their Muslim neighbors. Hundreds rioted in Mandalay, attacking Muslim businesses and
owners, killing two people and wounding many more.

As the riots spread, a senior government official called someone he
knew at the Myanmar office of Deloitte, a consulting firm, to ask for help in contacting Facebook. But neither could reach anyone at the company. In desperation, the government blocked access to Facebook in Mandalay, the riots cooled. The next day, officials at Facebook finally responded to the Deloitte representative, not to inquire after the violence but to ask if he knew why the platform had been blocked. In a meeting two weeks later with the government official and others, a Facebook representative said
that they were working to improve their responsiveness to dangerous content in Myanmar. But if the company made any changes, the effect was undetectable on its platform. As soon as the government lifted its virtual blockade, hate speech, and Wirathu's audience, only grew. "From at least that Mandalay incident, Facebook knew," David Madden, an Australian who ran Myanmar's largest tech-startup accelerator, told McLaughlin, the
reporter. "That's not 20/20 hindsight. The scale of this problem was significant and it was already apparent."
Either unable or unwilling to consider that its product might be dangerous, Facebook continued expanding its reach in Myanmar and other developing and under-monitored countries. It moored itself entirely to a self-enriching Silicon Valley credo that Schmidt had recited on that early
Visit to Yangon: "The answer to bad speech is more speech. More communication, more voices.

> While Mass Save is funded by ratepayers, the program itself is run by gas and electric utilities including National Grid.

The seeming contradiction of the rule — that rebates to curb the use of fossil fuels can only be received by those who commit to using more — has renewed calls to remove the Mass Save program from the utilities’ control and reform the way rebates are offered in Massachusetts.