Right. What's really surprising is how much better the best are. Human superforecasters, and prediction markets are surprisingly accurate too.
We could live in a world where things are much more chaotic, and the best humans (or AIs) would only be slightly better than chance. Evidently the world we live in is pretty darn predictable.
> Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?
It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.
Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.
You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.
Is it possible to help or encourage our local municipal services to have either an RSS or BlueSky feed? At this point, it's becoming apparent that putting all the information eggs in the twitter basket is/was a bad idea. This is a place where open source standards should shine.
This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas.
No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.
Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.
Like email, I sign up for a Mastodon account on a server that suits my tastes. I then follow other accounts, on other servers, using a client - I use Ivory on the mac & iPhone (because it's made by the same company who made Tweetbot) - and those accounts show up in my feed in chronological order, like Twitter in the old days.
I'm not going to say RSS is inherently inaccessible to normies, because the blogosphere of 20 years ago saw even elderly non-techies happily using it. However, I think the trends in computing in the years since, where most people use the internet solely through popular phone apps, mean that RSS is no longer going to see any significant use. So, a municipality is not doing a palpable service to its constituency by moving communications there.
We even saw it with RSS. Everyone using RSS was lamenting Google Reader going away. Isn't the client supposed to be the most easily replaceable part of RSS?
The most practical way would probably be to create that feed yourself based on their Twitter feed. You could automate it using some Nitter-like service (please do not scrape public Nitters, but you can run your own Nitter and scrape it as you like). It is generally easier to do something like this yourself than to convince someone else, who does not care at all, to do it. I don't know how you would advertise it.
How about municipal councils looking around at any remaining "mainstream media" local outlets and committing to post relevant notices/updates on their websites?
This is something I wanted to push while working on newsroom CMS projects: giving direct input access to the CMS from external bodies - police, fire, ambulance etc. Posts could be vetted/edited by newsrooms, as with any externally filed copy, but turnaround would be a matter of half-a-minute or so. Either that or enable direct publishing permissions to said authorities.
OK, I am out of the loop. But, my point is, what loop? What is an essential piece of information that was only possible to reach you via twitter? Did this make or break your life recently? Would there truly have been no other way for you to find this information out?
Road closures, youth sports/school schedule changes due to things like weather, etc.
Is it possible to live without this knowledge? Of course. But it's not unreasonable to me that people would want to receive this sort of information or that it is of some value to them, or that they'd rather have it pushed to them in an app on their phone than have to call friends or the school office to find out whether the status of some event has changed.
When there is a road closure it gets pushed to the systems that hook into google maps to reroute navigation. And short of that, there are also detour signs that redirect you around the obstruction.
If something happened e.g. a snow day at school surely you could call the office and find that out. There is no way twitter is the sole source of that sort of information. I guarantee it is on their school website.
You have to remember that the world has to work for the senile old person too.
> When there is a road closure it gets pushed to the systems that hook into google maps to reroute navigation.
Sure it does, everywhere. (/s in case that isn't clear, this doesn't always happen in my area which has several Google offices, let alone other less populated areas)
> And short of that, there are also detour signs that redirect you around the obstruction.
Sure, which you could have avoided entirely had you known about the issue.
> If something happened e.g. a snow day at school surely you could call the office and find that out. There is no way twitter is the sole source of that sort of information. I guarantee it is on their school website.
School closures for weather, yes, but not everything, and often they are slow to update, and people would rather not call (and the central office would rather not field those calls).
> You have to remember that the world has to work for the senile old person too.
And you have to remember that not everyone seems to be seeking out inconvenience as much as you.
No one is saying it's impossible to survive without push notifications about local events, they are saying that twitter became a de facto standard for that years ago because it was the best option for publishing small updates by local governments and other similar organizations, and now that twitter has devolved into its current state there is no good alternative and people are slow to change.
All my local groups are on facebook. It's horrendous. Could do with a browser plugin which only shows posts I want to see, it might even be good enough to send me back to facebook
I think the last facebook group I was participant of was in school some 15 or 20 years ago before parents were allowed to make their own facebook accounts. Life has been just fine without any such dependence on twitter or facebook. It is always surprising to me how the people who use these networks so religiously cannot imagine living without them. I am here to say that yes, it is possible, and probably more people around your periphery are living like that to success without you even realizing it.
> Who'd imagine squeezing the middle class would backfire epically? Compensation hasn't reflected the GDP per capital increases for the majority of the workforce. I don't think even the productivity increases from personal computers in the end of the 1970's have trickled down.
Why would investments by employers result in higher compensation for employees?
Money is just a tool to get what you actually want, the goal itself shouldn't be "more money", unless you want to miserable, because that hole you feel never gets filled by shoveling more money down it.
More money generally equals more freedom, even if you don't know what you want specifically, but you're ultimately talking about a bigger, unrelated issue.
Americans have the most disposable income on earth and a very high quality of life.
Trump's obvious graft, corruption, and general behavior disgust me, but why exactly would a meaningful number of people risk throwing their lives away to protest a man-baby who will be out of office in a little over 2 years if a cheeseburger doesn't get him first, and will probably be politically neutered in under 6 months?
No because he is setting an example other will follow now that they know that american citizens have no guts, pride nor morality and surrender faster than the french.
I think you will find the French are rather good at protesting and holding their government to account....
.....whereas Americans stereotypically mumble something about the Second Amendment keeping a government in check, then go back to being screwed over and launching a gofundme to pay for their chemotherapy.
If all the things you describe came to fruition, the current residents will have to live with the consequences of their decisions and suffer a lower quality of life (which they don't want to do), and the problem would resolve itself.
Or in reality, desirable locations remain desirable, and the current residents who had a hand in making it desirable have a right to prevent a reduction of their quality of life for the benefit of people who would prefer to live there but are unable to successfully compete with others in the housing market.
Excessive land use restrictions and downzoning inherently reduce the "compete" of the housing market, on purpose, for winners of prior cycles (frequently the deceased relatives of current owners).
> Why does it matter? The data sources are cited and are publicly available.
Because I don't want to click through to every data source to verify every figure and need some baseline level of trust about whether they've been correctly used.
If there's an error, I want to be able to contact the author somehow.
I assume the data source citations are referencing Census Department API endpoints, I would make the data sources explicit by adding links.
You also might want to consider archiving the data if you aren't already given this administration's tendency to remove data that doesn't further their agenda.
Obviously the best humans are better than average, but this isn't all that surprising to me?
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