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Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur Profile picture
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15 Apr, 9 tweets, 3 min read
I keep seeing this appear in my timeline. I don't think people understand what Reuters is. It's a news agency. It provides news to professionals. It doesn't provide mass market news.
The customer base is professionals, not the mass market. The mass market willing consumes advertising-driven "clickbait" stories. Professionals are willing to pay a lot more for quality news that isn't agenda drive or clickbait driven.
Well, yes, it's bland vanilla. That's entirely the point. If you want reliable news, rather than ginned up clickbait, then you have to pay for it. Entertainment is cheaper than reliable information.
If you read their financial filings, you see that their news revenues primarily comes from selling to professionals already, with "consumers" an afterthought.
Their primary competitors aren't the NYTimes or WaPo. Their primary competitors are Bloomberg, AP, AFP, and Getty. They sell:
- publish news to finance terminals like Bloomberg
- sells news to other news outlets
- license images like Getty
Providing news for essentially free on their website helps them build brand awareness, so that's good. On the other hand, it devalues their brand, making them look like just another newspaper. Thus, they want to stop providing cheap/free access to their website.
If that means nobody signs up for the website, then that's good: their website wasn't a source of revenue anyway, but something that hurt their other sources of revenue.
You know how often the Associated Press or Reuters gets embroiled in these "fake news" controversies? Zero. They are an information service designed to tell you what the news is, rather than stoking your outrage.
Bah, "zero" is probably an exaggeration. I mean their goal is simply to report the news, not get involved in controversy.

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More from @ErrataRob

Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur Profile picture
14 Apr
I have the same questions. Note that I am willing to accept there's good explanations, that there's some law I've missed that explicitly gives them power to do this. It's just that if there isn't, then the FBI's actions are egregious and worthy of outrage.
I deal with sides: law enforcement on one said and cyber anarchists on the other. Law enforcement hates anarchists and see themselves as inherently better, because they believe in following the law.
Except, as it appears here, they didn't. They simply ignored the law, pretending that a search warrant gives them the power to delete files from people's computers. They feel justified in this obvious misreading of the law because their cause is just.
Read 4 tweets
Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur Profile picture
12 Apr
I've boycotted the FSF for 30 years. I'm not sure what new thing that the rest of you have recently discovered that makes you want to boycott them now.
I mean, I do understand. It's the social media pile on effect where a bunch of like minded people get outraged and feel they can successfully bully the FSF into seeing things their way.
I've read letters like the following. It's garbage, indicting Stallman for being nerd, which by definition means he sees things differently.
rms-open-letter.github.io
Read 4 tweets
Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur Profile picture
12 Apr
Everyone is laughing at Ted Nugent for saying "why no lockdowns for COVID-18", but people aren't likewise laughing at tech CEOs for saying "we can do X online but not vote?".

The answer is because a small amount of fraud/mistakes are acceptable for X, but not for voting.
Credit card fraud accounts for like 0.5% of all purchases. Imagine if 0.5% of votes where fraudulent. Uber is full of GPS problems (arriving and getting you to the destination), and drivers routinely game the system to get the most profitable riders.
Moreover, the most important part of the voting system is trust -- trust that the system hasn't been hacked either by foreign hackers or the elites who run/administer it. That's vastly easier to demonstrate with a paper trail than the magic of computers.
Read 6 tweets
Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur Profile picture
9 Apr
How is Musk's tunnel in Las Vegas better than a normal train tunnel.

To answer this, we are going to use what computer scientists call "big-O notation". Tunnels are 𝑶(𝑛²) -- so Musk's trick is to create narrow tunnels.
The effort to dig tunnels depends upon the size of the tunnel -- but this grows faster than you think. Twice the width of the tunnel means FOUR TIMES the effort to dig it. You can see that with the following circles: the larger is twice the width of the 4 smaller ones
Subway tunnels to fit rail cars are often around 28 feet, Elon's trying to get his tunnels below 14 feet. This means creating tunnels with ¼ the effort, a quarter of the cost. Instead of $200million for the Las Vegas project, $50million.
Read 9 tweets
Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur Profile picture
7 Apr
College programming courses are horribad. They are college -- they attempt to teach you the theory of coding rather than practice. Thus, they leave you totally unequipped to actually code.
To be a good coder you need both theory and practice, so I can't say that colleges are wrong in focusing on theory. I'm just saying that you need practice. If you enter college having already practiced, the theory will make much more sense.
If you try to learn coding by picking up a college textbook and all that theory looks like gibberish, drop it and find a book that focuses on practice instead. But later, go back to that college textbook and learn theory. Both are needed.
Read 5 tweets
Robᵉʳᵗ Graham😷, provocateur Profile picture
7 Apr
If you go back through my feed, you'll see tweets like this one. I'm rabidly pro-vaccine, but also supportive of the fact that there's two sides to the question, that instead of bullying people for questioning vaccines, we should empathize with them:
Sometimes a feel alone. All I see on my twitter feed is toxic bullying of those who have questions about vaccines -- without anybody actually answering those questions. Am I wrong? Should I be bullying instead of empathizing?

Then I see tweets like this:
Please get your covid vaccine as soon as possible. Those aren't "side effects" -- those are the "effect" of the vaccine that tricks the body into feeling sick without making it sick. So brief fatigue/headaches/mild-fever are normal right after -- it means it's working.
Read 12 tweets

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