Thursday, October 27, 2022

Password Paywalls: RSS government: Why did comedy die?

How to bypass a paywall (easy guide)


Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder https://12ft.io/


Measuring the relative location of U.S. Supreme Court justices on an ideological continuum allows us to better understand the politics of the high court. In addition, such measures are an important building blocking of statistical models of the Supreme Court, the separation of powers system, and the judicial hierarchy. 

This website contains the so-called “Martin-Quinn” measures of judicial ideology developed by Andrew D. Martin (Office of the Chancellor, Washington University) and Kevin M. Quinn (Department of Political Science, University of Michigan).  The “Martin-Quinn” scores are estimated for every justice serving from the October 1937 term to the present. Currently estimates are available through the October 2021 term.”


Why did comedy die?


RSS government GovFresh, Luke Fretwell – “Defaulting to an open protocol to syndicate government information makes public communications universally accessible. Every government website should have an RSS feed. This ensures there is an open, universal standard for syndicating government information. 

The problem – While it’s important that government shares information via distributed outlets – social media, email newsletters – there isn’t one universal, open standard that is free and easy to access. Relying on social media or email newsletters forces the public to submit personal information or join a private network to subscribe to official updates. This is a barrier to equal, unfettered access to government information. The solution – Government should lead on using an open standard for syndicating its website content. All government websites should have an RSS feed. RSS is an ideal information syndication option because it’s:

  • An open protocol
  • Free to access
  • Easy to create
  • Interoperable
  • Machine-readable
  • Privacy ensured…”




Americans’ Trust In Media Remains Near Record Low Gallup – “At 34%, Americans’ trust in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” is essentially unchanged from last year and just two points higher than the lowest that Gallup has recorded, in 2016 during the presidential campaign. Just 7% of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have “a fair amount.” Meanwhile, 28% of U.S. adults say they do not have very much confidence and 38% have none at all in newspapers, TV and radio. Notably, this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined.

  • 34% have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in media
  • 38% with no trust at all outpaces great deal/fair amount for first time
  • 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans, 27% of independents trust media…”

Gizmodo – Here’s How Meta Became the Internet’s Biggest Hub of Covid-19 Misinformation: “…From the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, Facebook understood the outsized role its platform would plays in shaping public opinion about the virus and the safeguards that governments would inevitably institute in hopes of containing it. Ten months before the first reported U.S. infection, Facebook’s head of global policy management, Monika Bickert, had laid out in a company blog a plan for “Combatting Vaccine Misinformation.” And while the title alludes to efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation — namely, by curtailing its distribution in the News Feed — what the blog really reveals is that, at some point, Facebook made a conscious decision to continue hosting vaccine misinformation rather than aggressively purge it. It was a missed opportunity, given that, at the time, the groups and pages promoting “anti-vaxxer” sentiment were relatively few in number. Very soon, that would all change. In our latest drop of the Facebook Papers,
 Gizmodo is publishing 18 documents that shed light on the internal discussions within Facebook on covid-19. The papers, only a handful of which have ever been shown to the public, include a number of candid conversations among mid- and high-level employees; researchers, managers, and engineers with appreciably different views on the company’s moral obligations. Facebook declined to comment…”