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Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

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Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#171

Post by ken47 »

petre wrote: post #135
standardUser wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could divide it into 5-10 different test, administered over the course of several years. Anything but what they are doing now, which sounds like it was custom designed to encourage drug abuse and suicide.

Drug abuse is rare and severely punished. You go to prison if you're Korean, you did drugs recently and got caught in Korea. It doesn't matter if you've smoked pot overseas, flew back to Korea, got tested and the drug test came out positive. They'll still throw you in prison.

Unless you're a celebrity, in which case you get "special treatment."

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#172

Post by brailsafe »

mtmail wrote: post #8

2018 Algeria shut down internet during school exam season. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/21/algeria-shuts-... "Algeria is not, however, the only country to take such radical steps during exam season: Syria, Iraq, Mauritania, Uzbekistan and several Indian states reportedly block access to the internet. Ethiopia shuts down social media."

That's a whole lot of value being attributed to exams.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#173

Post by ryloric »

foragerdev wrote: post #82

I read the comments you guys probably have no idea what is going on in here. Let's talk about it from the start. It's 2021 and Imran Khan is the PM of Pakistan and US is leaving Afghanistan. Now US would certainly want to have their military airbases in Pakistan to keep an eye on Taliban government, they made an undercover request which was denied by Imran Khan on a Tv interview[1]. Which really unpleased the Biden G…

Sounds like a movie script.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#174

Post by kaliqt »

standardUser wrote: post #99
devoutsalsa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious, so I googled… - “The government grounds aircraft or reroutes flights to keep students from getting distracted during the biggest test of their lives.” - “ On the streets Thursday morning, you could hear more sirens than usual, because anyone running late to the competitive exam can call for a free police escort to rush them straight to the test site.” - “Success is defined narrowly. Get a high score on…

Any test that is so big that it requires shutting down large sections of society is way, way too big. And I mean, WAY too big, like grotesquely so. Just imagining that level of stress stresses me out.

Stress isn't the enemy, it's the balance of priorities and what is better for society. Just on the virtue of you being stressed is not an argument for or against this.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#175

Post by standardUser »

kaliqt wrote: post #174
standardUser wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any test that is so big that it requires shutting down large sections of society is way, way too big. And I mean, WAY too big, like grotesquely so. Just imagining that level of stress stresses me out.

Stress isn't the enemy, it's the balance of priorities and what is better for society. Just on the virtue of you being stressed is not an argument for or against this.

No, the argument against it is the suicide rate and the lack of sex and dating and the fact that, all things considered, judging people on one gargantuan, life-determining test has no intrinsic value compared to the myriad other ways to assess knowledge and skills.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#176

Post by FredPret »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #149
FredPret wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, most connections would be within individual cities, so you would definitely need it to hook servers and satellites into the mesh so you can cross dead zones. But that would already be a huge win for humanity.

Presumably the people who control the data links between population centers could just cut off the Internet, no? Doesn't that largely defeat the anti-censorship advantages of something like this?

At worst, the mesh is no worse than what we have right now.

In reality there will always be some people moving around between cities, satellites and drones passing overhead, and enthusiasts setting up antennas.

If mesh devices become ubiquitous, and they will, it’ll be almost impossible to control.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#177

Post by FredPret »

supertrope wrote: post #151
FredPret wrote: post #112

It'd be so cool if all our phones & laptops could have globally-unique addresses and talk to one another directly in a big global mesh. You'd still need cables and satellites to deal with rural areas and to cross oceans, but you couldn't really switch that off. Free speech would go through the roof!

The users would need an incentive to relay others' traffic and run down their batteries faster. Mesh is also extremely slow. Just try using Tor as an example. BitTorrent offered up the incentive of free downloads of copyrighted media. Bitcoin offered money.

You’re right - we’re many years of tech progress away from this dream. But it might become the standard new way of getting on the internet in future. Ubiquitous, always on, secure, and probably almost free.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#178

Post by rayiner »

petre wrote: post #135
standardUser wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could divide it into 5-10 different test, administered over the course of several years. Anything but what they are doing now, which sounds like it was custom designed to encourage drug abuse and suicide.

Drug abuse is rare and severely punished. You go to prison if you're Korean, you did drugs recently and got caught in Korea. It doesn't matter if you've smoked pot overseas, flew back to Korea, got tested and the drug test came out positive. They'll still throw you in prison.

And they say drug prohibition can’t work.

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#179

Post by rayiner »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #160
PoignardAzur wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the same suicide rate as the US is not indicative of a healthy culture, especially in a country without easy access to guns.

It’s not even remotely the same, it’s nearly 50% higher than the US (which isn’t doing that great either). South Korea has the 10th highest suicide rate in the world.

On the flip side, how much as South Korean society managed to advance in the 50 years compared to “happy America?”

Re: Pakistan cuts off phone and internet services on election day

#180

Post by mr_toad »

klassik wrote: post #138
standardUser wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could divide it into 5-10 different test, administered over the course of several years. Anything but what they are doing now, which sounds like it was custom designed to encourage drug abuse and suicide.

100% agree There's a simple statistical argument behind it: the variance drops as you increase the number of tests. Let's say your true ability is A and you have one measurement M1. The variance (or, let's put it in another way: the probability that your M1 is waaaay different from your A) goes down if you also get M2, M3, M4 and take an average. In other words: your measurements become more precise and the stress go…

Taking four independent samples isn’t the same as taking one sample and cutting it into four.
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