Thousands of people are being detained and questioned for sending messages that cause “annoyance”, “inconvenience” or “anxiety” to others via the internet, telephone or mail.
Nope; they aren't. They arrested a grandmother for praying silently outside an abortion clinic. They arrested a high schooler for saying a cop looked a bit like a lesbian. There are no shortage of stupid examples of their tyranny; even Keir Starmer was squirming a bit when Vance called him out on it.
Regarding the abortion clinic case, those aren't content restrictions. Even time/place/manner restrictions that apply to speech are routinely upheld in the U.S.
You can trade your time for goods, but others might trade money for time. Something to think about maybe.
Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”
Lots of people were confused about the purpose or utility of 'micro-blogging.' It only really clicked for people once you had minor celebrities using the platform to crowd-source information, advice, and ideas from fans.
My understanding of Twitter is that it is or was like your official personal Gazette[0] where you could broadcast what you are up to or whatever is on your mind at the moment. It has definitely different use cases for regular users and so for celebrities and government entities.
Also you can think of Twitter as a standalone spinoff of Facebook status updates user behaviour but with hashtags. I actually find Twitter more compelling than Facebook but somehow Twitter's management was able to ruin Twitter. Now we have not only Twitter but X, Threads, Bluesky and Mastadon. It is way too fragmented but imo they should all interop and work as an one ecosystem.
>There were some 90 dentists and around 30 doctors operating in the City, for the most part trained in China but unable to operate in Hong Kong without taking more exams. The City provided a handy alternative and they were allowed to operate there without oversight from the authorities. Many were actually very good at their job and attracted patients from a wide area – including a number of policemen to our knowledge – the best of them with smart premises along Tung Tau Tsuen Road that ran along the north side of the City.
>Most people have terrible eyes for distinguishing content
A related phenomenon is not being able to hear the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. I find the notion astonishing, and yet lots of people cannot tell the difference.
Plenty of reasonable scientists support a political party which explicitly denies the existence of biological differences between groups of humans. In the final analysis, it seems scientists will align with organizations that hold unscientific tenets. It's probably not really a big deal.
I was asking ChatGPT about a "squiggled s" yesterday. It thought I meant ß, but the character I was actually interested in was §. Context was obscure keyboard layouts.
