It was one of the world's most opulent railway stations, sitting imposingly on the French-Spanish border - but then it fell into disrepair. Now, writes Chris Bockman, the building is showing new signs of life.

When they built the station at Canfranc, it was on a grand scale and with no expense spared. It had to be bold and modern - an architect's dream come true, built in iron and glass, complete with a hospital, restaurant and living quarters for customs officers from both France and Spain.

At the time it was nicknamed the "Titanic of the Mountains".

To give you an idea of its size - there are 365 windows, one for each day of the year; hundreds of doors; and the platforms are more than 200m long. The question is, how did such an extravagant station, high up on a mountainside in a village with a population of just 500 people, ever see the light of day?

Facebook and Twitter are hurting those they should be protecting.

Add this all to the ongoing trainwreck regarding possible election interference on Facebook (a byproduct of the company running ads from essentially anyone who can pay and relying largely on user reports to weed out the bad), and it's very clear that there is a serious problem with how private corporations manage public speech. Namely, the corporations in charge of the largest speech platforms on Earth have utterly failed to manage speech on those platforms, and increasingly seem incapable of doing so.

The actions that Facebook and Twitter take to police speech don't follow any kind of moral compass, are disproportionately applied, and--at least outwardly--seem completely arbitrary. They are full of false equivalences, as in the case of Lil B being banned because, as one Facebook spokesperson told Motherboard, if you flipped his comment around to say black people are violent that would be hateful: "If you just took a step back and replaced it with anything else, those are the type of things that our hate speech policies are intended to capture and they apply equally to all races," the spokesperson said. As if these same platforms aren't full of white people, often with connections to power, saying racist, harmful, hateful things with impunity.

These companies' actions are also often arbitrary and callous, as is the case with Facebook's ongoing campaign to force trans people to use their legal names, a policy that also puts sex workers and survivors of abuse at risk.

In 2015, a Google Photo algorithm auto-tagged two black friends as "gorillas," a result of the program having been under-trained to recognize dark-skinned faces. That same year, a British pediatrician was denied access to the women's locker room at her gym because the software it used to manage its membership system automatically coded her title--"doctor"--as male. Around the same time, a young father weighing his two-and-a-half-year-old toddler on a smart scale was told by the accompanying app not to be discouraged by the weight gain--he could still shed those pounds!

These examples are just a glimpse of the embedded biases encoded in our technology, catalogued in Sara Wachter-Boettcher's new book, Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech. Watcher-Boettcher also chronicles more alarming instances of biased tech, like crime prediction software programs that mistakenly code black defendants as having a higher risk of committing another offense than white defendants, and design flaws in social media platforms that leave women and people of color wide open to online harassment.

Nearly all of these examples, she writes, are the result of an insular, mostly-white, tech industry that has built its own biases into the foundations of the technology we use and depend on.

You may think that offering your seat to someone elderly on public transport is a considerate thing to do, but experts have revealed that doing so could actually hamper their health as they age.

In fact, old people should be encouraged to stand and discouraged from taking it easy in order to keep themselves fit, an Oxford professor claims.

Sir Muir Gray, clinical adviser to Public Health England, has spoken out to say the elderly should try to walk for ten minutes a day and relatives should encourage to take the stairs instead of a lift or excalator.

Police: Neo-Nazi demo and anti-fascist counter-protest in Tampere restless - Investigation opened

Police first called the demos peaceful, but an investigation of violent activities in the counter-protest is to be opened.
[...]
The protests were organised by the Nordic Resistance Movement and the opposing group, called "Tampere Without Nazis". The counter-protesters numbered some 800 people according to police, an estimated four times more than the neo-Nazi rally.
[...]
Counter-demonstrators detonated at least three smoke bombs during the demonstration, Yle reports. Counter-demonstrators also shortly interfered with train traffic by walking on the tracks for about half an hour. One demonstrator was taken into custody on suspicion of assault, one was detained on grounds of endangerment and two more were apprehended in order to prevent escalation. All those detained were marching in protest to the neo-Nazi gathering.

YLE is a state organ. Counterfactual reporting, if any, invited.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

[L]ike Britain's National Health Service, the VHA provides direct care to veterans, via salaried personnel who are not paid on a fee-for-service basis. As the nation's largest publicly funded, fully integrated health care network, it's a model of socialized medicine more far-reaching than the single-payer plans proposed by Congressman John Conyers and [?!] Senator Bernie Sanders (who is also a leading defender of the VHA).
[...]
Bernie Sanders, former chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee in the Senate and longtime defender [!] of the VHA, has introduced legislation to reduce staff shortages by allocating $5 billion to new hiring. But Secretary for Veterans Affairs Dr. David Shulkin, who served in the Obama administration, is under White House and Congressional pressure to expand a program called "Choice" [!] instead. ...Created by Congress in 2014, Choice allows veterans who have to travel 40 miles or more to the nearest VHA facility, or who face appointment delays longer than 30 days, to use private providers instead.

archived: Faux Accompli

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Die Spitzen von SPD, Linken und AfD haben sich heute in Berlin zu ersten Sondierungsgesprächen für die Bildung einer Opposition in der neuen Legislaturperiode getroffen. Dabei wollen sie ausloten, ob es eine gemeinsame Basis für Kritik an der Politik der Bundesregierung gibt.

Das Fazit nach den ersten Stunden war verhalten positiv, die Chance für Rot-Rot-Blau, das intern auch r2b oder Nordkorea-Opposition genannt wird, ist da.