Biden's $2 trillion Plan for Insfrastructure and Jobs

[Adam Varga + 123]

President Joe Biden introduced a sweeping $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs package that looks to reshape the American economy and make the most significant domestic U.S. investments in generations. The plan includes everything from road repairs and electric vehicle stations, to public school upgrades and training for the clean-energy workforce.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/04/01/2-trillion-infrastructure-bill-charts-detail-bidens-plan/4820227001/ 

[Roch + 537]

On 4/1/2021 at 10:50 AM, Adam Varga said:

President Joe Biden introduced a sweeping $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs package that looks to reshape the American economy and make the most significant domestic U.S. investments in generations. The plan includes everything from road repairs and electric vehicle stations, to public school upgrades and training for the clean-energy workforce.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/politics/2021/04/01/2-trillion-infrastructure-bill-charts-detail-bidens-plan/4820227001/ 

ONLY FIVE PERCENT OF $1.9 TRILLION GOES TO INFRASTRUCTURE :

ROADS

BRIDGES

RAILWAYS 

AIRPORTS

THAT'S  < 5% OF $1.9 TRILLION

What a joke. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT TO DEMOCRAT  WISHLIST.

 

Edited April 5, 2021 by Roch

[Roch + 537]

The U.S. voters fall for this.

 

FIVE PERCENT OF $1.9 TRILLION GOES TO ;

ROADS

BRIDGES

RAILWAYS 

AIRPORTS

THAT'S  < 5% OF $1.9 TRILLION

What a joke.

[surrept33 + 609]

2 hours ago, Roch said:

ONLY FIVE PERCENT OF $1.9 TRILLION GOES TO INFRASTRUCTURE :

ROADS

BRIDGES

RAILWAYS 

AIRPORTS

THAT'S  < 5% OF $1.9 TRILLION

What a joke. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT TO DEMOCRAT  WISHLIST.

 

What does infrastructure mean in the 21st century? This bill is in line with how the American Society for Civil Engineers defines it: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/infrastructure-categories/

Which is a lot narrower than a "95% progressive wishlist" (which would have been more akin to the EU's green deal or china's expected carbon neutrality pledges) and broader in scope than just transportation. It's also inline with the modernization (to maintain global competitiveness) that the 'mainstream' business community has lobbied for: https://www.uschamber.com/lets-rebuild-america

Keep in mind this bill is quite a bit more fiscally conservative (hence the increases in spending are also offset with tax hikes) than the infrastructure bill that passed the house last summer, which President Trump and the Dems both had supported (but not the senate Republicans). Why is it structured this way? Because of moderate Democrats: https://www.axios.com/joe-manchin-infrastructure-bill-c8408e99-17f3-4477-b5df-8e3d537c0bd9.html

 

Edited April 5, 2021 by surrept33

[Roch + 537]

5 hours ago, surrept33 said:

What does infrastructure mean in the 21st century?

 

 

LOL, you are too much.

Now, it depends on "What does infrastructure mean . . . "

Good Lord, what has happened to our country.

This is right up there with :

"it depends on what the meaning of is .  .  .  is"

or 

" .  .  .  but I didn't inhale "

Edited April 5, 2021 by Roch

[Roch + 537]

1 hour ago, Roch said:

LOL, you are too much.

Now, it depends on "What does infrastructure mean . . . "

Good Lord, what has happened to our country.

This is right up there with :

"it depends on what the meaning of is .  .  .  is"

or 

" .  .  .  but I didn't inhale "

Political analyst Dick Morris slams Biden so called "Infrastructure" bill.

President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal is meant to collectivize the nation, political strategist Dick Morris said Sunday in a harsh criticism of the bill.

Speaking on “The Cats Roundtable” radio show hosted by John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM, Morris, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, said Biden’s infrastructure package is "designed to collectivize the United States, to regiment us, to unionize us, and to make us controllable and tractable as an economy.”

Stressing that “the metaphor that comes to mind is when Stalin insisted that all the farmers go to collective farms,” Morris cautioned that the main feature of the infrastructure legislation is that “you cannot get those funds unless you unionize. Davis-Bacon will control all of that spending. You have to have a union for your company to qualify. That’s going to force the entire construction industry and huge numbers of other industries into unionization.”

He also emphasized that Biden intends to make the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act part of the legislation bill, which he said would “be the greatest disaster we’ve ever had.”

Morris warned that the general public does not yet know about the PRO Act, but said that the end result would be that  “nobody can work for themselves. Everybody has to be on a corporate payroll. If you are a consultant or a contractor or a freelancer, you have to close up shop and become an employee of your client or the people you contract with.”

He said that this means that some “30 to 40 million people who make their living that way are going to have to be now on payroll,” stressing that such a law is already in effect in California and has “totally deformed the economy” of that state.

Morris said that the overall goal of Biden’s strategy on this legislative package is  “to organize our economy for more efficient government control. It sounds like in Germany where everybody basically works for a few large companies and there are only one or two large unions that represent everybody.”

"https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/1016301/1

Edited April 5, 2021 by Roch

[Roch + 537]

5 minutes ago, Roch said:

Here is what political analyst Dick Morris says about Biden's so called "Infrastructure" bill. 

President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal is meant to collectivize the nation, political strategist Dick Morris said Sunday in a harsh criticism of the bill.

Speaking on “The Cats Roundtable” radio show hosted by John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM, Morris, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, said Biden’s infrastructure package is "designed to collectivize the United States, to regiment us, to unionize us, and to make us controllable and tractable as an economy.”

Stressing that “the metaphor that comes to mind is when Stalin insisted that all the farmers go to collective farms,” Morris cautioned that the main feature of the infrastructure legislation is that “you cannot get those funds unless you unionize. Davis-Bacon will control all of that spending. You have to have a union for your company to qualify. That’s going to force the entire construction industry and huge numbers of other industries into unionization.”

He also emphasized that Biden intends to make the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act part of the legislation bill, which he said would “be the greatest disaster we’ve ever had.”

Morris warned that the general public does not yet know about the PRO Act, but said that the end result would be that  “nobody can work for themselves. Everybody has to be on a corporate payroll. If you are a consultant or a contractor or a freelancer, you have to close up shop and become an employee of your client or the people you contract with.”

He said that this means that some “30 to 40 million people who make their living that way are going to have to be now on payroll,” stressing that such a law is already in effect in California and has “totally deformed the economy” of that state.

Morris said that the overall goal of Biden’s strategy on this legislative package is  “to organize our economy for more efficient government control. It sounds like in Germany where everybody basically works for a few large companies and there are only one or two large unions that represent everybody.”

Edited April 5, 2021 by Roch

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

2 hours ago, Roch said:

The U.S. voters fall for this.

 

FIVE PERCENT OF $1.9 TRILLION GOES TO ;.

Voters didn't fall for this, the voters picked another candidate. 

Big Tech and the Deep State picked their 50 year plant to pretend to run things while they collect their kickbacks on their billion dollars "investment" buying the presidency, voters be damned. Your opinion doesn't count, literally

[surrept33 + 609]

2 hours ago, Roch said:

LOL, you are too much.

Now, it depends on "What does infrastructure mean . . . "

Good Lord, what has happened to our country.

This is right up there with :

"it depends on what the meaning of is .  .  .  is"

or 

" .  .  .  but I didn't inhale "

Yes, precisely. The great advantage of the English language is there is no rule by the "40 wise magi". That would be very francophone: https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095345649

You get to decide what infrastructure means (to you). By you, I really mean, we, because you are we, and us is us.  It's good, in my opinion to reflect on what infrastructure means to you: https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-and-social-reform/sociology-general-terms-and-concepts/reflexivity

To me, infrastructure is best loosely defined as an analogy. It's like a high interest credit card that in a competitive globalized world, if a society doesn't sufficiently invest in the upkeep (maintenance) of, then the size of the overall pi is lessened. Let's face it, politically, there is always pragmatics with going overboard in too much of a omnibus and the converse - a legislative body being stuck in a deadlock. Where the middle ground is completely subjective, and always has been. There is a reason why congress often has so low approval rating in modern times - it's because it's often stuck in hyperpartisan polarization rather than trying stuff, making mistakes, and then fixing it, which historically has been a great advantage of the American democratic experiment. 

[Metalmania + 37]

7 hours ago, Roch said:

The U.S. voters fall for this.

 

FIVE PERCENT OF $1.9 TRILLION GOES TO ;

ROADS

BRIDGES

RAILWAYS 

AIRPORTS

THAT'S  < 5% OF $1.9 TRILLION

What a joke.

Not most of us!

[KeyboardWarrior + 527]

What the hell is the other 95% going to? 

[Boat + 1,315]

On 4/5/2021 at 8:59 AM, Roch said:

ONLY FIVE PERCENT OF $1.9 TRILLION GOES TO INFRASTRUCTURE :

ROADS

BRIDGES

RAILWAYS 

AIRPORTS

THAT'S  < 5% OF $1.9 TRILLION

What a joke. NINETY-FIVE PERCENT TO DEMOCRAT  WISHLIST.

 

You on drugs boy. Try reading. 

[Boat + 1,315]

On 4/5/2021 at 11:36 AM, Ward Smith said:

Voters didn't fall for this, the voters picked another candidate. 

Big Tech and the Deep State picked their 50 year plant to pretend to run things while they collect their kickbacks on their billion dollars "investment" buying the presidency, voters be damned. Your opinion doesn't count, literally

You should pick better presidential candidates if you want a different agenda. Trump did much better than even Obama at whipping up support for Biden. I told you this would happen before the election. You called me names. Lol

[surrept33 + 609]

On 4/5/2021 at 12:36 PM, Ward Smith said:

Voters didn't fall for this, the voters picked another candidate. 

Big Tech and the Deep State picked their 50 year plant to pretend to run things while they collect their kickbacks on their billion dollars "investment" buying the presidency, voters be damned. Your opinion doesn't count, literally

They have automated algorithm (most likely *many* of them, they form a statistical ensemble) that detect and bans abnormal like/dislike spam (considered abuse. otherwise, one could just "click" on dislikes automatically with multiple headless browsers running on multiple peering networks). Any service with a large amount of user generated traffic does this to differentiate authentic human vs bot traffic. Otherwise, "like driven" recommendation algorithms are worthless and the robots (and malicious humans) would once again win:

https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt

*- note that to economically disincentivize people (and companies, governments) from undertaking this type of behavior, usually the "bot detection" would hash a lot of details about the "request" (an event stream of "behavior". for example, how long does it take a page to load? is it on a peering network that is associated with poor reputation?) to detect whether it is "unusual" or not. Then some form of "challenge" is shown, but these days bots can easily break through current generation anti-recognition mechanisms even with off the shelf computer vision, for example, see: https://www.usenix.org/conference/raid2020/presentation/hossen

Now, think about various entities that may not care about money as much, as they would have to burn through expensive ipv6 blocks on peering networks (or are running a botnet). 

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

1 hour ago, surrept33 said:

They have automated algorithm (most likely *many* of them, they form a statistical ensemble) that detect and bans abnormal like/dislike spam (considered abuse. otherwise, one could just "click" on dislikes automatically with multiple headless browsers running on multiple peering networks). Any service with a large amount of user generated traffic does this to differentiate authentic human vs bot traffic. Otherwise, "like driven" recommendation algorithms are worthless and the robots (and malicious humans) would once again win:

https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt

*- note that to economically disincentivize people (and companies, governments) from undertaking this type of behavior, usually the "bot detection" would hash a lot of details about the "request" (an event stream of "behavior". for example, how long does it take a page to load? is it on a peering network that is associated with poor reputation?) to detect whether it is "unusual" or not. Then some form of "challenge" is shown, but these days bots can easily break through current generation anti-recognition mechanisms even with off the shelf computer vision, for example, see: https://www.usenix.org/conference/raid2020/presentation/hossen

Now, think about various entities that may not care about money as much, as they would have to burn through expensive ipv6 blocks on peering networks (or are running a botnet). 

You know, I know, and the White House knows those aren't bots.

What the Xiden administration did was demand that Trump hand over his "followers" on social media. Trump built those viewers up from scratch, Xiden couldn't. Millions of Trump followers are being handed Xiden content and they're voting it down, at a rate of perhaps 1/1000 bothering to click on the down arrow. If Xiden really got 80 million votes he'd have 80 million of his own followers no? The fact that he doesn't is the embarrassment they've asked Google to hide

[Bob D + 562]

On 4/10/2021 at 6:58 PM, surrept33 said:

They have automated algorithm (most likely *many* of them, they form a statistical ensemble) that detect and bans abnormal like/dislike spam (considered abuse. otherwise, one could just "click" on dislikes automatically with multiple headless browsers running on multiple peering networks). Any service with a large amount of user generated traffic does this to differentiate authentic human vs bot traffic. Otherwise, "like driven" recommendation algorithms are worthless and the robots (and malicious humans) would once again win:

https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt

*- note that to economically disincentivize people (and companies, governments) from undertaking this type of behavior, usually the "bot detection" would hash a lot of details about the "request" (an event stream of "behavior". for example, how long does it take a page to load? is it on a peering network that is associated with poor reputation?) to detect whether it is "unusual" or not. Then some form of "challenge" is shown, but these days bots can easily break through current generation anti-recognition mechanisms even with off the shelf computer vision, for example, see: https://www.usenix.org/conference/raid2020/presentation/hossen

Now, think about various entities that may not care about money as much, as they would have to burn through expensive ipv6 blocks on peering networks (or are running a botnet). 

I've never seen anyone use more words to say nothing.  Really 

[surrept33 + 609]

On 4/10/2021 at 9:16 PM, Ward Smith said:

You know, I know, and the White House knows those aren't bots.

What the Xiden administration did was demand that Trump hand over his "followers" on social media. Trump built those viewers up from scratch, Xiden couldn't. Millions of Trump followers are being handed Xiden content and they're voting it down, at a rate of perhaps 1/1000 bothering to click on the down arrow. If Xiden really got 80 million votes he'd have 80 million of his own followers no? The fact that he doesn't is the embarrassment they've asked Google to hide

People have known in ad tech that "counting" this way caused perverse incentives and led to a lot of resources fighting fraud, targeted campaigns, or disinformation:

https://qz.com/work/1597035/ted2019-jack-dorsey-rethinks-twitters-like-feature/

Same thing with Facebook/Instagram/Youtube/etc, which is why they are all canarying (conjoint testing) these types of additional features. People can implicitly engage (or not) on stuff with their eyeballs, or for example, replying to content, which expresses semantic intent, and on average is less prone to abuse (sorta). 

[surrept33 + 609]

2 hours ago, Bob D said:

I've never seen anyone use more words to say nothing.  Really 

It's factually correct:

Quote

YouTube told PolitiFact that it has systems in place to ensure that engagements with videos — such as likes and dislikes — are authentic, so that the analytics information it provides is reliable. Those systems worked as designed to remove spam engagement on this video, according to YouTube. The de-spamming process starts when a video is uploaded and continues to run to ensure metrics remain accurate, YouTube said.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/25/did-youtube-remove-dislikes-video-posted-biden-whi/

For the most part all these systems are automated, anyways. 

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

57 minutes ago, surrept33 said:

People have known in ad tech that "counting" this way caused perverse incentives and led to a lot of resources fighting fraud, targeted campaigns, or disinformation:

https://qz.com/work/1597035/ted2019-jack-dorsey-rethinks-twitters-like-feature/

Same thing with Facebook/Instagram/Youtube/etc, which is why they are all canarying (conjoint testing) these types of additional features. People can implicitly engage (or not) on stuff with their eyeballs, or for example, replying to content, which expresses semantic intent, and on average is less prone to abuse (sorta). 

Patently ridiculous. This site has multiple "like" features. That's a feature not a bug. No one is writing complex algorithms to upvote their posts. @Enthalpic would have if he were smart enuf, which he clearly wasn't. I've suspected you of being an Enthalpic sock puppet a time or three but you don't quite fit the profile. You were however, one of the few other than his sock puppets to regularly upvote his tripe. 

Everyone in the know sees the YouTube downvotes originating from humans. Now to be honest those humans are bringing up the video, clicking down vote then leaving, because let's face it, who wants to listen to gibberish Joe for half an hour? A trivial Bayesian analysis tells us that humans are doing it, not bots and Google knows it without a doubt. But they are playing Masters of the Universe there, and are loath to admit things aren't going according to plan. The 78% aren't fooled into believing that the 22% are the majority. This will continue regardless of their blatant censorship, shadow banning and false search rankings. All they're succeeding in doing is pushing people to alternative search engines and video hosting sites. That goes against their eyeballs for dollars value proposition. Maybe Xiden will throw them some PPP money to make up for it, quid pro Joe and all

[surrept33 + 609]

25 minutes ago, Ward Smith said:

Patently ridiculous. This site has multiple "like" features. That's a feature not a bug. No one is writing complex algorithms to upvote their posts. @Enthalpic would have if he were smart enuf, which he clearly wasn't. I've suspected you of being an Enthalpic sock puppet a time or three but you don't quite fit the profile. You were however, one of the few other than his sock puppets to regularly upvote his tripe. 

Everyone in the know sees the YouTube downvotes originating from humans. Now to be honest those humans are bringing up the video, clicking down vote then leaving, because let's face it, who wants to listen to gibberish Joe for half an hour? A trivial Bayesian analysis tells us that humans are doing it, not bots and Google knows it without a doubt. But they are playing Masters of the Universe there, and are loath to admit things aren't going according to plan. The 78% aren't fooled into believing that the 22% are the majority. This will continue regardless of their blatant censorship, shadow banning and false search rankings. All they're succeeding in doing is pushing people to alternative search engines and video hosting sites. That goes against their eyeballs for dollars value proposition. Maybe Xiden will throw them some PPP money to make up for it, quid pro Joe and all

It took me 1 second to figure out out to do (on youtube), but if you naively tried, you'd discover that they automatically ban this.

Quote

document.querySelector('[aria-label~="like"]').click();

This type of "click fraud" is very well known. Over the years, more and more sophisticated attacks that try to evade such systems have been created (it would be blackhat SEO is basically on the "other" side of this, but it tends to be a cat and mouse game).

Most sites on the web don't care about it because they don't get enough traffic.  Typically with a headless (e.g, you can run them on cloud servers) browser that isn't following robots.txt most (at scale) dynamic web systems will downrank the traffic flow by watching the (obvious) clickstream. Or else things go out of control and a site simply turns into spam. Keep in mind that for the very sophisticated attackers (for example nation states), they'll use multiple CDNs and such. 

Google is an advertising company, and fundamentally to make at scale advertising work, they need to spend a lot of resources proving to advertisers that traffic flow is organically generated.

Anyway, I thought this was a pretty good book about the general issue (from 2018):

https://www.likewarbook.com/reviews-2/

Edited April 13, 2021 by surrept33

[ronwagn + 6,290]

2 hours ago, Bob D said:

I've never seen anyone use more words to say nothing.  Really 

An automated busllshit producer is being used.

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

9 minutes ago, surrept33 said:

It took me 1 second to figure out out to do (on youtube), but if you naively tried, you'd discover that they automatically ban this.

This type of "click fraud" is very well known. Over the years, more and more sophisticated attacks that try to evade such systems have been created (the SEO is basically on the "other" side of this, but it tends to be a cat and mouse game). Most sites on the web don't care about it because they don't get enough traffic.  Typically with a headless browser that isn't following robots.txt most (at scale) dynamic web systems will downrank the traffic flow. Or else things go out of control. Keep in mind that for the very sophisticated attackers (for example nation states), they'll use multiple CDNs and such. 

Google is an advertising company, and fundamentally to make at scale advertising work, they need to spend a lot of resources proving to advertisers that traffic flow is organically generated.

 

You just proved my point. People on websites are laughing about clicking the downvotes on Xiden videos. Clearly the Whitehouse isn't buying Google ads so it's something else. Trivial to catch automated clicks so QED they're humans, as I've said. YouTube's mass deletes of dislikes are to cover embarrassment, not make up for fake clicks. My analysis stands and like everything else we've seen this past year, Google is using their stature to squelch discussion, debate and dissent. They're enjoying being 😈

[surrept33 + 609]

3 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

You just proved my point. People on websites are laughing about clicking the downvotes on Xiden videos. Clearly the Whitehouse isn't buying Google ads so it's something else. Trivial to catch automated clicks so QED they're humans, as I've said. YouTube's mass deletes of dislikes are to cover embarrassment, not make up for fake clicks. My analysis stands and like everything else we've seen this past year, Google is using their stature to squelch discussion, debate and dissent. They're enjoying being 😈

I said 'naively'. It's not too hard to get around it, but it just takes ip addresses. So it takes money. 

The like/dislike metric is (one) thing that is fed to recommendation algorithms (in order to for example, create a stream of "next videos" to autoplay), as well as ad placement (the other way around, so not the white house, but for advertisers who many want to advertise against a "random surfer" whose ad personalization profile is being targeted). 

Anyway, public display of 'dislikes' look like they are being designed out more globally:

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/104325801?hl=en

More so for the "digital wellness" movement. This has nothing to do with the White House since the issues are much more endemic and much more global (and have been going on for years). 

This change isn't particularly new, I think this is how vk.com in russia works (which was innovative at one point, but has been struck in time for ages since pavel durov fled russia and putin's friends seized the site).

Keep in mind "certain state actors" are known to amplify automated targeted disinformation campaigns, for example:

Quote

While authorities have so far tolerated YouTube journalists, they certainly haven’t allowed them to work without obstacles. It’s common for pro-Kremlin bots to bombard videos with dislikes and negative comments, to suppress their popularity, and government surrogates often target journalists directly

https://restofworld.org/2021/independent-russian-journalists-are-thriving-on-youtube-for-now/

Youtube has a lot of anti-spam tools that automatically remove this type of automated "feedback", and it shows up as discrete steps if you sample it like this. 

Edited April 13, 2021 by surrept33

[Ward Smith + 6,615]

YouTube is just Google and they've been lying for years. Today is April 13, they're rioting in Minnesota. Here's the results from two search engines. You can't sugar coat this out of existence this is easy past likes and dislikes, this is indoctrination.

[surrept33 + 609]

Well, it's fundamentally different relevance ranking strategies (in my eyes anyways): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_(information_retrieval)

DuckDuckGo is mostly bing (try searching for something random on both news sites, or something like Ecosia). Microsoft monetizes MSN by reselling their search index to many brands. 

Google News often tries to create "topics" by compressing redundant information from a large number of websites, sometimes imperfectly, but often publishers try to target it (via semantic enrichment) because of reach, and topics often get converted to adwords: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_model 

Even Google, which has a >>Googol of "topics" indexed, still gets ~15% new stuff every day, especially if you consider the diversity of the world's languages and world's events. 

So is Microsoft or Google more relevant? It depends. They have different strategies and different ways to monetize it. Some of it is based on past experience like dealing with content farms. If you just search for "riots" on google you'll probably see similar results to Bing.