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Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#191
post #172
post #135

When and why did news cease being news and start being short stories and opinion? This entire article could have been cut down to the last few paragraphs and nothing of value would have been lost. Look at The New York Times in 1921 [0]. Generally the stories are factual and to the point. The entire front page seems to be pure news. There's very little storytelling here, at most there are a few timelines of events. Lo…

If you want the "pure" news as in 1921, subscribe directly to AP/AFP/Reuters/EFE. The world has changed, and most of the added value of newspapers now comes from contextualization that you seem to disregard to having no value, despite being the higher journalistic effort. It's easy to report that a chicken died crossing the road, it's a lot harder to explain what chain of events led to a chicken dying crossing the ro…

> The world has changed, and most of the added value of newspapers now comes from contextualization that you seem to disregard to having no value, despite being the higher journalistic effort.

But that's not what most of them are doing anymore. It's not so much context as it is agenda. The stories are written to lead you to a particular conclusion. From right now:

NY Times: Republicans are abruptly pushing Americans to wear masks, despite President Trump’s resistance.

Fox News: 'Looked like the Lone Ranger': Trump jokes about wearing mask, supports it

And that's not even getting into how the stories are chosen or prioritized.

NY Times: Some States and Cities Halt Reopenings As U.S. Cases Surge

Fox News: Media narrative of peaceful Seattle CHOP zone turned upside down

They've chosen sides. Maybe they always had, but it seems more blatant now. They're not even pretending anymore.

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#192
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find the following inaccurate or biased, and if so, for the uninformed, briefly why? "Campaigns initiated in his lifetime include those against the Qara Khitai, Khwarezmia, and the Western Xia and Jin dynasties, and raids into Medieval Georgia, the Kievan Rus', and Volga Bulgaria. These campaigns were often accompanied by large-scale massacres of the civilian populations, especially in the Khwarazmian- and Wes…

From what I've seen Ganghis Khan was brutal against non-surrendering nations, but beneficial for those who followed him. E.g. you woulsn't see him cutting his subjects heads, and his brutality was pretty much an intimidation tactic so others army would join him.

>brutal against non-surrendering nations

This is ambiguous about cities or nations that resisted and then surrendered. There seem to be a lot of references to how surrender was followed by everyone being killed or enslaved. I kind of think that's an area of contrast between their standards and today's. You can point to "civilized" countries destroying whole cities in the 20th century, but doing it after your enemy is defeated is much more frowned on.

Also, when you say "beneficial for those who followed him" it elides what it meant when they enslaved the women and children from a conquered population. I don't think they generally allowed individuals to choose whether to be among those massacred or not. And what happened next probably wasn't consistent with modern human rights standards, which again, I think goes back to the original point that started the subthread.

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#193
post #135

When and why did news cease being news and start being short stories and opinion? This entire article could have been cut down to the last few paragraphs and nothing of value would have been lost. Look at The New York Times in 1921 [0]. Generally the stories are factual and to the point. The entire front page seems to be pure news. There's very little storytelling here, at most there are a few timelines of events. Lo…

I view this phenomenon as a sort of sociological entropy. Anything bad that can happen will happen if the people tolerate it. Same with shitty politicians, encroaching of rights, etc. Its all just a matter of time.

Speaking with my physics hat on I have to caution against this -- I wouldn't call it entropy, and I am very happy abusing that word in a variety of other contexts. (Like at church I will call Satan entropy.)

But the reason I'd balk here is that entropy as a phenomenon happens in absence of a driving force.

(1) In the present WSJ case, this is not mere indifference on the part of readers: storytelling is deeply a part of what makes us human and readers do actively turn away from flat descriptions of events to storied accounts—the WSJ is just satisfying the demand. Like, this part of the WSJ, the A-hed is actively edited to be a bit more fluff and less hard reporting to try and rope more of these folks in, as observed in comments above.

(2) In the case of shitty politicians, at least in the US, something even more remarkable is happening. The very construction of the US's voting system has a very non-obvious fixed point (as a transformation polity → polity), so that fixed-point theorems from mathematics seem to impose their own biasing force on the candidates. Or to use more economic language, the rules of elections in the USA actively incentivize its politicians to be shitty. Well, the parties are incentivized to be spineless and the politicians are incentivized to belong to one and thus inherit the shittiness—but it's the same thing. [note]

Entropy still has a part to play when you introduce a bias voltage like this, but it is usually the exact opposite. Entropy explains why air molecules are not falling to the floor in spite of the fact that there is a clear bias force—gravity—that makes everything else fall to the floor quite swiftly and the air molecules have certainly had enough time to start hitting the ground. Similarly, entropy may be more helpful in explaining why some news is still buried inside the Wall Street Journal articles or why the US political parties are able to work together on various operations to bomb remote lands.

[note] I can discourse at length about the downfall of the Whigs but the short and fast of it is that they had a spine or agenda of core issues, chiefly economic. They brokered compromises under one Whig president about the issue-of-the-day, slavery, to try and refocus attention on their agenda items. They nominated General Scott in 1852 to represent them. The spineless political party they were against, used the opportunity to nominate a candidate who nobody really knew and who was himself a compromise, a Southerner who was personally anti-slavery, and mirrored their opponents' agenda quite thoroughly. (Something, I should note, you can only do if your opponent has a spine and you don’t.) Voter turnout in the election of 1852 was incredibly low as a result, and that Southerner won the electoral college in a landslide, despite the fact that he did not actually do any campaigning. “I don't know what he is gonna do about the issue-of-the-day but he seems to have something in common with me” actively won out against “he thinks the issue-of-the-day is a distraction from the real problems and will broker compromises on it to try and address those real problems,” which, I don’t know, maybe was a fluke. But what wasn’t a fluke was the aftermath: any landslide loss leads to self-reflection, right, but if you have a spine it is worse: the internal tensions in the Whigs over that issue-of-the-day broke the party into two chunks and suddenly the party was no more, and a similarly spineless party ultimately took its place in the great two party system of the USA. That party’s spinelessness means that it has weathered similarly disastrous losses as the one which broke the Whigs with almost no alarm and has also led to it slowly reversing its geographic constituency from North to South as the opposite has happened to its spineless opponent, which is again much more of an interesting random-walk phenomenon that one could ascribe to entropy.

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#194
post #189
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've seen Ganghis Khan was brutal against non-surrendering nations, but beneficial for those who followed him. E.g. you woulsn't see him cutting his subjects heads, and his brutality was pretty much an intimidation tactic so others army would join him.

That's how authoritarian regimes usually work. Do everything they say and you'll be okay. The problem is a decent number of people don't want to be absolutely subservient.

>Do everything they say and you'll be okay

This is an extremely odd thing to say about authoritarians right now, although this may be my American perspective, since people have been pointing out recently how futile it can be when dealing with police in the US. Still, I kind of think it's universal - being polite to authority is utterly useless once you are a suspect, thought to be dangerous, or have something they want.

It made a lasting impression on me when I was stopped in my car as a teenager and an officer decided that I must be a drug smuggler because I was too quiet/nervous.

Edit: I guess if you interpret "everything" broadly enough, your statement is somewhat plausible, but "everything" includes many situations where an authority asks you something that is theoretically or ought to be voluntary and you have to be aware that it's not really a choice. And it's still not always true.

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#195
I wouldn't fault them for that, I've observed some sites most likely are gaming the system by detecting and providing Google bots with artificially lower prices so that they would appear in indexes summaries and then when you access the product, its real price is always higher than the one reported in the index.

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view this phenomenon as a sort of sociological entropy. Anything bad that can happen will happen if the people tolerate it. Same with shitty politicians, encroaching of rights, etc. Its all just a matter of time.

Suggest you read my comment above, before you let this one story make you think the decline of civilization is imminent.

Nowhere did I say I think "the decline of civilization is imminent."

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I view this phenomenon as a sort of sociological entropy. Anything bad that can happen will happen if the people tolerate it. Same with shitty politicians, encroaching of rights, etc. Its all just a matter of time.

Speaking with my physics hat on I have to caution against this -- I wouldn't call it entropy, and I am very happy abusing that word in a variety of other contexts. (Like at church I will call Satan entropy.) But the reason I'd balk here is that entropy as a phenomenon happens in absence of a driving force. (1) In the present WSJ case, this is not mere indifference on the part of readers: storytelling is deeply a part…

Great counterpoints!

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#199
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want the "pure" news as in 1921, subscribe directly to AP/AFP/Reuters/EFE. The world has changed, and most of the added value of newspapers now comes from contextualization that you seem to disregard to having no value, despite being the higher journalistic effort. It's easy to report that a chicken died crossing the road, it's a lot harder to explain what chain of events led to a chicken dying crossing the ro…

> The world has changed, and most of the added value of newspapers now comes from contextualization that you seem to disregard to having no value, despite being the higher journalistic effort. But that's not what most of them are doing anymore. It's not so much context as it is agenda. The stories are written to lead you to a particular conclusion. From right now: NY Times: Republicans are abruptly pushing Americans…

I agree. Before it was a more or less united America vs the commies and the commies were bad and we weren’t perfect and we had some housecleaning to do...

Now it’s all narrative and the focus is pannational. Not much has a local flavor. It’s not what’s good for Canadians or Ghanaians, it’s what can Canadians and Ghanaians do to make the world better (despite there being lots of things Ghanaians and Canadians could be doing in their own backyards to improve the life of their own downtrodden.

It feels like a recast comintern.

Re: A Google bot scrapes pricing info by adding items to carts

#200
post #135

When and why did news cease being news and start being short stories and opinion? This entire article could have been cut down to the last few paragraphs and nothing of value would have been lost. Look at The New York Times in 1921 [0]. Generally the stories are factual and to the point. The entire front page seems to be pure news. There's very little storytelling here, at most there are a few timelines of events. Lo…

> When did this happen? Why? Did people lose interest in actual news? Is there less actual news to report?

1. Search engines prioritized longer content.

2. People are less aware of longer-lasting events and most people land on news stories from social media as a one-off. The additional context is needed.

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