Privacy (fewer trackers), fewer advertisements, better security. I don't personally do it but to some those things are valued more highly than the ability to read an article.
You can always disable by default and enable for the sites/applications you trust.
> I don't get why torture yourself with disabling JavaScript for everyday browsing.
The counterpoint is why should websites force users to run javasript in order to read plain text? Its not necessary. Why should websites torture users by requiring them to run code which is not stricly ncessary for reading the article?
Because they're not interested in only getting you to read the plaintext.
I get your point and I'm on your side, generally speaking. But if you place this much value on any given piece of news, then maybe it shouldn't be free.
Why torture yourself? Because you don't want to get owned by evil javascript malware perhaps? There is an extension called NoScript that is quite popular with security-minded folks.
What's really bizarre is that they actually deliver the article content in the initial HTML response. It's just hidden using CSS. You can read it by turning off CSS for the page.
Every time someone turns off javascript something bad happens. Right? I'm not sure but I think too many websites use javascript nowadays. Disclaimer: I'm browsing with IE6 with javascript enabled.
You're really speaking for a minority there. Most people browse with javascript enabled and I don't think developers should even cater for non-javascript users anymore.
> I don't think developers should even cater for non-javascript users anymore.
What do you mean by 'cater to'? If you mean 'develop primarily for,' sure. If you mean 'tolerate,' then you're part of what's wrong with today's Internet.
We already have to deal with multiple versions of multiple browsers on desktops, phones and tablets, on screens with a wide PPI range. There's no way to justify more work by saying that some people want to browse the web without javascript, or with text browsers.
This trend started a long time ago when they realized it's easier to hide millions of dollars behind companies people expect to bring in millions of dollars. The smaller ones often used chain stores that did a lot of cash business but also plenty of volume. The larger ones just partnered with banks that looked the other way at where the money was coming from. Sometimes they start a bank (BCCI) geared toward like-minded individuals. A side-benefit of all this is much less heat on them and [in U.S.] a statute of limitations on any given crime that wasn't murder.
So this is nothing new except to the writer apparently.
The Italian mafia is evolving to operate more like the Japanese Yakuza do. The Yaks are so "infiltrated" into Japanese business and civil service that the Japanese just consider them a part of ordinary life. Only recently have law enforcement and some businesses been cracking down on the Yakuza presence.
As an Italian entrepreneur in Milan I must say: absolutely not! We are ensnared with inefficiencies often requiring ‘networking’, nepotism and clientelism, but the reek of the Mafia is nauseating and avoided at all costs. It's about, of course, but nobody I know or know of ‘accepts’ it.
Is it more acceptable in certain regions? I guess Milan is a pretty important city, so I can't see the Mafia being tolerated. But what about for small shops in villages etc.?
That's definitely an oversemplification of a complex problem, as anyone can understand. There is mafia also in the North of Italy, just a quick lookup to the news will do.
Really, Italy is a young and complex countries with regional differences that are almost ununderstandable to foreign people. There are many "mafias", more or less violent, more or less connected with the economic and political powers, it's not simple and it's not dicothomic, there is a very big grey area.
People and movies focused on the killings, while the real nightmares were and are in the business, public sector and work environment. When you don't do what a politician wants you to do, he sends you the tax authorities or some other random authority of which Italy is full of, and he'll get what he wants. Do you realize how bad this is? The Public Forces are used to enforce mafia-like behavior. It's bad, it's widespread, it's cultural and it's stopping any kind of real development or innovation. The problem is that Italy never really got out of feudalism.
My guess is that in a "professional" organized crime family if you have to whack someone it means someone (possibly yourself) screwed something up very badly. Killing someone is extremely high risk and is probably regarded as sloppy operations.
It sort of mirrors the way governments have gotten more advanced with repressive and tyrannical techniques. Unsophisticated governments will whack people or arrest them and throw them in bottomless pit prisons, etc. Sophisticated totalitarian regimes use nudge theory and very advanced astroturf type propaganda, and when they have to 'whack' someone they discredit them and assassinate their character and credibility rather than martyring them with a physical attack. Much cleaner, more efficient, and in the end far more effective.
> My guess is that in a "professional" organized crime family if you have to whack someone it means someone (possibly yourself) screwed something up very badly.
Maybe, maybe not - a lot of those groups operate via intimidation, and there's nothing like a gruesome murder to underline that.
Bikers have done this too, here they own development corps which are just rackets to exploit city tenders. Nobody else can bid or else you find your yards and equipment robbed or destroyed. Police don't do anything because propping up org crime is part of their management strategy of the failed war on drugs. Young violent upstarts who heat out the city with public shootings are better handled by the dominant org crime group so they let them racketeer it up so long as they promise to reign in the lesser groups that make the police look bad with public violence. Since these young upstarts need the money laundering services only mafia/bikers can provide on that scale they generally fall into line.
They also are propped up in the prison system in turn for helping the guards establish order in overcrowded units. Guards do set ups to make sure the dominant group always has an upper hand in any conflicts, like 4 associates being "accidentally" put in the same class/program with a rival of another group.
I'll post some later tonight when not swamped at work crunch time, what would end this is legalizing most of the black market since all you need to make a million dollars right now is a handful of drug delivery drivers and a couple of guns to shoot at and rob all the other drivers. Cities can then break up the entrenched corruption since they don't need a "boss crew" to keep order. Prisons won't be overcrowded with drug convictions either.
There will always be gangs but they won't have access to millions in capital to fund huge street wars thus less incentive for new recruits to join them.
There's also a well known illegal drugs shack called the "blackdoor" that operates with impunity because before they arrived the streets were a free for all of violence, during the Olympics the police asked them to close so the media wouldn't discover it and embarass them.
Then of course there was all the Quebec mafia corruption probes into illegal city tenders that went nowhere.
Of course, and I bet that's the GP's point. In fact, the commonly held definition of a state is the organization that holds the monopoly of violence. Whether that organization is a United Nations member state or haunted down by Interpol has historically depended more on old friendships and stalemates and Who Has The Oil than anything else.
In your estimation, what would it take for the police to become as effective as organized crime at keeping young publicly hyper-violent criminals in line?
Legalize victimless crime, and hold property owners responsible for securing their own property. When police can concentrate solely on reducing violence, they will do a better job of it.
I'm not advocating anything above, merely answering the question. Police are like any other people; they respond to the situations in which they are placed. Drug use cannot be stopped, merely pushed around from one place to another. If police are forced to attempt the impossible, they will not succeed.
To answer the question, robbery is violence. I'm talking about securing property against theft, vandalism, etc. "Fault" seems like a moral judgement, which isn't necessary here. To hold someone responsible is to expect responsible behavior from that person.
The police becoming "as effective" as organized crime at "keeping publicly hyper-violent criminals in line" is easy, traditional police are more effective and use similar methods - there's a line you can't cross.
David Simon describes both this phenomena and how the war on drugs tossed this approach [1].
That said, this hardly eliminates crime or makes it OK. Poverty and the turf wars over facilities for victimless crimes are always going to spur violent crime.
Parent's comment falls more or less in line with my (anecdotal) understanding of organized crime operations and their relation to the justice system in most mid-to-large Canadian cities. I can't imagine American cities are much different.
One interesting fact is that the mafia was reduced to meaninglessness during the facist era in italy. I deduce from that that there can be only one villian in town.
The US liberators fixed that and made sure that Sicily was to become one of the special statute regions. They don't send any collected VAT to the central state to this day. And VAT in Italy is 22%.
After WW2, there was a period of time when it was seriously considered that Italy might come under communist control. Most famously, you have Operation Gladio[1].
If I recall correctly (and I may not, because this is probably colored by some History Channel conspiracy documentaries), there were contingency plans where Sicily would secede to allow NATO to retain a foothold in the Mediterranean, with the CIA relying on Cosa Nostra connections with the Sicillian mafia in order to effect this...
Yep, I must have been watching that in between a special on the Mayan calendar, and one on how Stonehenge is a pre-historic alien spaceport...
There's no shortage of international scumbags that big foreign powers have made deals with and supported in their atrocities in order to get their diplomatic/geopolitical games going.
I don't think people realize that Mafia is not anymore what it used to be 50 years ago. They are well-established in different regions across europe (you wish it was just an italian thing, right?) which are generating a tremendous income with drugs and prostitution, but the real deal is when this capital gets re-invested in legitimate business - again across europe. Do you really think that once you get into the range of the tens of millions any financial institution is going to turn down easily any investment? They won't.
So, I think it's so simplistic to picture mafia as gangsters robbing and extorting businesses and dealing drugs. I rather picture them as shirt-and-tie business men traveling to Milan, Munich, London, Luxemburg and Geneve looking for investing opportunities.
There are layers. Some still extort businesses, some still deal drugs (though they no longer handle the street-level distribution directly in most of the country). Others are doctors, lawyers, businessmen, politicians. There's a whole spectrum in the private sector organized crime.
"So, I think it's so simplistic to picture mafia as gangsters robbing and extorting businesses and dealing drugs. I rather picture them as shirt-and-tie business men traveling to Milan, Munich, London, Luxembourg and Geneva looking for investing opportunities."
69 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadSorry but your website needs HTML for readers to care.
Are you using plain text browser? I don't get why torture yourself with disabling JavaScript for everyday browsing.
You can always disable by default and enable for the sites/applications you trust.
But I don't comment to whine that my uBlock broke that website...
The counterpoint is why should websites force users to run javasript in order to read plain text? Its not necessary. Why should websites torture users by requiring them to run code which is not stricly ncessary for reading the article?
I get your point and I'm on your side, generally speaking. But if you place this much value on any given piece of news, then maybe it shouldn't be free.
Definitely agree.
What do you mean by 'cater to'? If you mean 'develop primarily for,' sure. If you mean 'tolerate,' then you're part of what's wrong with today's Internet.
So this is nothing new except to the writer apparently.
Really, Italy is a young and complex countries with regional differences that are almost ununderstandable to foreign people. There are many "mafias", more or less violent, more or less connected with the economic and political powers, it's not simple and it's not dicothomic, there is a very big grey area.
It sort of mirrors the way governments have gotten more advanced with repressive and tyrannical techniques. Unsophisticated governments will whack people or arrest them and throw them in bottomless pit prisons, etc. Sophisticated totalitarian regimes use nudge theory and very advanced astroturf type propaganda, and when they have to 'whack' someone they discredit them and assassinate their character and credibility rather than martyring them with a physical attack. Much cleaner, more efficient, and in the end far more effective.
Maybe, maybe not - a lot of those groups operate via intimidation, and there's nothing like a gruesome murder to underline that.
The line is of course somewhere between "maximum intimidation" and "might annoy enough people to have the police actually do something" I guess.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_%28weapons_expert%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams
They also are propped up in the prison system in turn for helping the guards establish order in overcrowded units. Guards do set ups to make sure the dominant group always has an upper hand in any conflicts, like 4 associates being "accidentally" put in the same class/program with a rival of another group.
There will always be gangs but they won't have access to millions in capital to fund huge street wars thus less incentive for new recruits to join them.
The prison beating lawsuits are all here http://blogs.vancouversun.com/2015/11/26/violent-attacks-in-...
There's also a well known illegal drugs shack called the "blackdoor" that operates with impunity because before they arrived the streets were a free for all of violence, during the Olympics the police asked them to close so the media wouldn't discover it and embarass them.
Then of course there was all the Quebec mafia corruption probes into illegal city tenders that went nowhere.
So if someone is robbed, it's their own fault?
To answer the question, robbery is violence. I'm talking about securing property against theft, vandalism, etc. "Fault" seems like a moral judgement, which isn't necessary here. To hold someone responsible is to expect responsible behavior from that person.
David Simon describes both this phenomena and how the war on drugs tossed this approach [1].
That said, this hardly eliminates crime or makes it OK. Poverty and the turf wars over facilities for victimless crimes are always going to spur violent crime.
[1] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on...
Your entire post is filled with speculation verging on crackpot conspiracy theory.
Mafia should only be able to thrive in underground activites like predatory loans, drugs and such.
If I recall correctly (and I may not, because this is probably colored by some History Channel conspiracy documentaries), there were contingency plans where Sicily would secede to allow NATO to retain a foothold in the Mediterranean, with the CIA relying on Cosa Nostra connections with the Sicillian mafia in order to effect this...
Yep, I must have been watching that in between a special on the Mayan calendar, and one on how Stonehenge is a pre-historic alien spaceport...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
So, I think it's so simplistic to picture mafia as gangsters robbing and extorting businesses and dealing drugs. I rather picture them as shirt-and-tie business men traveling to Milan, Munich, London, Luxemburg and Geneve looking for investing opportunities.
So where does the "organized crime" kick in?