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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: February 6th, 2025
  • Almacca@aussie.zonetoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•River home to 500 crocodiles chosen as Olympic rowing venueEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Or just hold them in Athens where it originated, or better yet, abolish them altogether.

    From The Doubter’s Companion: The Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense:

    OLYMPIC IDEAL The Greek games began in 776 BC as a competition among amateur athletes from the different city - states. The purpose was to bring the citizens of the rival cities together in an apolitical gathering, which would reduce squabbling and develop a larger sense of community.
    The rising merchant class in those cities subsequently inverted their purpose by introducing the idea of city rivalry into the games. The city - states then began subsidizing their athletes indirectly and often invisibly. The amateur athletes were soon living a parody of amateurism. They had careers and future income riding on the competition. Winners became heroes, that is to say political heroes. They were fed at the cost of the state for the rest of their lives.
    Subtle corruption gradually turned into rank dishonesty. Athletes were eventually bribed to lose. In AD 394 the games were abolished because they had become a parody of the amateur idea, a focus of corruption and a source of political rivalry.
    The Olympic Games were re - established in 1896 as a competition among amateur athletes. One of the purposes was to bring citizens of rival countries together in an apolitical gathering. What the Greeks managed to do in 1,170 years, we have done in less than 100.

  • Almacca@aussie.zonetoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•FBI Warns ICE Agents Not to Trust Any Woman Willing to Date ThemEnglish
    181·
    3 days ago

    While this is pretty funny, there’s also this horrifying detail at the end of the article:

    What’s likely more of a risk for undocumented individuals is face recognition and commercial ad data. ICE officers can feed a photo of anyone into a facial recognition app called “Mobile Fortify,” monitor social media with apps like SocialNet, and look at vast troves of commercially available location data without a warrant. One surveillance app that includes ICE on its client list is Penlink’s Webloc, a tool which can pull advertising geolocation data for entire neighborhoods and search through photos to locate individuals with face recognition. Penlink explicitly advertises one of its data sources as Tinder. In May, Politico reported that ICE published a request for information (indicating interest in a vendor) to expand use of “commercial Big Data and Ad Tech providers” in investigations.