13thLetter

Unfortunately that train has already left the station, and to thunderous applause from the media. Twitter already carefully curates hashtags; it's not hard to imagine they'd take the liberty of promoting a series of tweets that they feel are important.

Just FYI, reading the wikipedia article is a really bad idea. A variety of fanatics, political obsessives and involved administrators have been squatting on it for months; it's a dumpster fire.

On the one hand, yeah, you're right, I tend to be too aggressive and rude and I really shouldn't do that, especially on a forum like HN. I genuinely appreciate you telling me that.

On the other hand, let's not forget that this is a very, very strong accusation. It's easy to lose sight of that, since it sounds like the usual world-weary complaining on a forum, but the gist of the statement is that the American government is deliberately making up false pretexts for war and killing foreign citizens and American soldiers, not for national interest or even crude financial gain, but in order to "test" warfighting doctrine. That's something a cartoonishly evil movie villain would do. I'm hardly a fan of the US government's current management, to put it lightly, but if this behavior was true it would make Watergate look like jaywalking and justify mass impeachment at the very minimum. If someone's going to toss it out I'd like there to be something to back it up.

Surely in that case the ideal number of humans is zero, because then there wouldn't be any human suffering. This is the logic of a mad artificial intelligence from a science fiction movie.

"My understanding of many of the most recent military engagements by the US is that they are basically sandbox experiments for prototyping new warfare tech and tactics, especially to study things like asymmetric urban warfare in which the distinction between combatant and civilian is difficult."

And my "understanding" of how gravity works is that the Earth is carried around the Sun by a giant invisible rottweiler dog. If I can't back it up, though, I'm not going to get my Rottweiler Theory through peer review. What do you back up your "understanding" with?

> So unless we are in a race with some aliens, it doesn't matter

It matters to the people who die early because we didn't develop a particular medical treatment. Just to pick a random example.

Does it matter?

We as a society have no ability to recognize and arrest a moral panic while it's in progress. At best, the people who point out that it's a moral panic get lumped in with the targets of the moral panic and marginalized.

In fifteen years when we've moved on to panicking about, I dunno, artificial intelligences or space colonization or whatever ("Sixteen Reasons Why Moving To The Moon Is Racist") we'll all look back on 2016 and smugly shake our heads at those ignorant, benighted simpletons and how they freaked out over the most minor things.

All those moral panics in the past were so embarrassing and obviously silly in retrospect, and I feel for all the innocent people who were attacked and ostracized.

It's a good thing that the moral panics we have right now are clearly righteous and accurate, and the people being attacked and ostracized unquestionably deserve it.

> Like, is there a conspiracy against the tech industry? I really doubt it.

Who said there's a conspiracy? There's no more a conspiracy against the tech industry than, say, people who vote Democratic are a conspiracy against the Republican Party. It's just a large number of people with similar opinions and self-interest. Unfortunately, in this case the emergent result of that large number of people acting in their own opinion and interest is a lot of unjust attacks on innocent people, dismantling of valuable concepts such as meritocracy, and a distorted view of the industry in the popular imagination.

> and there's a reason that the movement for equality between sexes is called "feminism".

Except you're going to have a hard time pointing to any of the places where feminism is fighting against this well-acknowledged discrimination against men.

...And that's fine! Really, it's okay to say "this is the movement for women's equality meeting here in this room, if you're interested in men's issues you're going to have to go somewhere else." The NAACP doesn't spend all its time fighting against anti-Semitism, after all, and that doesn't make the NAACP bad in any way. I don't understand the weird compulsion to try and crowd everyone else out of the gender equality mindspace.

I switched from OSX Yosemite to Windows 8.1 a while back.

I have had substantially fewer problems with Windows 8.1.

I don't think this search is focused enough to be useful (in either direction.) For example, the first page of NYT results includes stories about a lack of male teachers, but also about gender imbalances against women in labs, varying educational outcomes between boys and girls, and China's one-child policy.

It's not just tech sites, though, which is what I'm getting at. Major politicians and newspapers constantly go on at great lengths about alleged gender problems in tech. Do they talk nearly as much about, say, the imbalance towards women in education? I'm going to assert that they do not.

> While those are certainly relevant control factors, I would presume that any conclusions are premature without demonstrating a lack of bias in the actual positions men vs. women are promoted to, relative to their experience and education.

I'm wondering why the default assumption is that there is bias, and we're being expected to prove a negative here.

> Tech has a problem with gender. I'm not sure it's helpful to point out that other fields also have similar or even worse problems.

It kind of is. When there are other fields which both a) employ more people and b) have a much larger "problem," it's valid to ask why the laser-like focus on tech.

> The shakedown model just seems so scummy to me. There has to be a better way to monetize ad blockers.

Is it necessary to monetize them at all? An ad blocker isn't so complex that it couldn't be run as a free-as-in-beer software project.

Given the ubiquity of sophisticated cell phones and other recording equipment, it's best to regard the lack of a recording as strong evidence that it does not exist. Just as if multiple people claimed the Loch Ness Monster had surfaced in San Francisco Bay but somehow there were no photographs of it.

I agree with you that American border control is horrible and abusive. That doesn't mean we ("we" = worldwide press) shouldn't call out other countries for having horrible and abusive policies in this area as well, though. Not everything bad that happens is the fault of the United States.

> China and Russia have been oppressing their people and their peoples rights for a long time. Neither have a constitution that is supposed to enshrine the rights of the citizens. SO there isnt much of a story there

Counterpoint: If something goes without saying for long enough, people stop knowing it, because they never hear it.

The "drunk looking for his keys under the streetlamp" model of news reporting is indefensible. Let it go long enough and you end up with a large population of belligerently uninformed people, like we have now, who think the United States is the most violent, oppressive, and brutal government in the world, and that Americans have no human rights. This has real world consequences of an increase in relative political power and legitimacy for genuinely oppressive states.

It's kind of pathological to take a story about Brazil doing something wrong and twist it into yet another indictment of the United States. There are other countries in the world, you know.

It was quite something to see the massively negative reaction from everyone in the thread, followed by the original proposer ramming it down their throats anyway with a sarcastic, dismissive "I appreciate your passion" conclusory remark. Something about being a CoC proposer just makes people terrible.

What's your third way solution, then?

"You don't have to be convinced to be respectful. It is certainly not their job and probably not their goal to convince you."

Sorry? If they want to create political change in a democratic society, it is their job to convince him.

It could presumably accomplish great tasks more efficiently without the waste of individual human beings skimming kickbacks from the interstellar spaceship budget or arguing about what color the ships should be painted, but building them is still going to require a massive industrial effort that will have a significant effect on ecosystems, no getting around that.

Maybe the individual galactic factions are hive minds, but what guarantees that those hive minds are in turn going to get along with each other and not just recreate individual human disagreements and pathologies on an interstellar scale? Perhaps the reason we've never picked up any transmissions from aliens is that all the hive minds have blocked each other on Interstellar Twitter for publicly thinking something offensive fifty million years ago.

Is anybody shocked by this, really? Tim Cook knows very well that he will suffer absolutely no penalty for grandstanding against the U.S. government; in fact, it earns him and his company nothing but good press. Meanwhile his customer base will stand by his side (even as they obediently vote to re-elect the same government that's making the demands) and the government whose electoral base is those same customers will huff and complain but in the end do nothing.

But standing up against the Chinese government? Those guys may actually respond in some fashion. That principle actually carries some financial risk. Can't have that. China gives the orders and Cook's knees can't hit the ground fast enough.

Here's an idea: what if we built lots of personal rapid transit vehicles, but made them operate on the ordinary cheap-to-build-and-maintain roads that already exist, and sold them outright to the end users so there was no need to maintain a massive centrally controlled network? That could be a game-changer.

> The funny thing is, if you're not being an asshole to people, and stay on-topic, you will never have any problem with the CoC

Unless you post a political opinion that someone doesn't like on your own Twitter feed. Then you're in for it, cf. Opalgate.

Yes necessarily. You can't build an interstellar spaceship without an industrial base, and creating an industrial base is going to have the same effect on the local ecosystems that humanity is being damned for. At best, our alien hive mind is a giant hypocrite.

It's the man's job to run the bureaucracy, not be run by the bureaucracy. Any President who lets himself get run is not qualified to be President.

(Yes, I know this means most recent Presidents and current candidates are not qualified to be President. But does that really shock you?)