IAmEveryone

Coal mines used to be in the business of giving employment to hungry children. Who did choose "freely" to work there, sometimes, when the alternative was starvation.

Nobody is denying that it was in publishers' own interest to be linked to on Facebook. Indeed, the law only makes sense that way. Where economics or physics makes something impossible, no law is needed to stop it.

At issue is the power imbalance between Facebook and publishers. the latter is a group of many, who cannot coordinate because of prisoner's dilemma mechanics and maybe even antitrust reasons. The law is supposed to rectify this perceived power imbalance by external enforcement.

I've always had the impression that the cryptocurrency community was trending rightwards. So it's good to see some quantifiable evidence of it.

Which leaves the question: why? Technology as a whole is centre-left, so there's something else going on.

One common theme seems to a loss of trust in any institutions, and democracy itself: "the FED is just a private bank" isn't far away from "the mainstream media is lying", and even the latter is an opinion more common among the crypto bubble as far as I can tell.

Or are crytocurrencies of interest primarily to people interested in "getting rich, fast" and therefore liable to glorify a self-annoited master of making money with little work?

Yes, by self-selection of visitors.

There really is no “other side” to many of these. You won’t find a community of lunatics making 340min-videos about “round earth”, except maybe NASA. And the opposite of a far-right racist isn’t a far-left anything, but a regular person that just happens not to be racist.

That's just victim blaming. The same logic applies to every crime: "lock your doors if you don't want your TV to be stolen!".

It also works at any level of security: "Lock your doors and hire guards if you don't want clever thieves breaking a window..."

But if you require everyone to take adequate measures to physically secure their houses, you don't even need laws and morality!

And while this may provide the sort of negative reinforcement you are hoping for, actual damages in each case are going to be all over the place. That makes this one of the worst possible punishments. Imagine the penalty for speeding is a random outcome somewhere between a stern reminder and the death penality. There would be nothing fair and little useful about that, even though it does follow the same basic principle of do bad -> be harmed.

..which is why I am somewhat convinced that Github single-handedly increased participation in OSS by orders of magnitude.

I never figured out the processes to submit patches in the dark time of sourceforge and mailing lists. Since Github standardized this, I frequently contribute.

EU countries have like one space agency among the 20 of them, which looks somewhat collaborative.

They also did not recently create “space force” to militarize space and pander for votes in the most obnoxious way possible.

We shouldn’t ruin Planet A in our attempt to switch over to Plan B.

The amount of geoengineering needed to make Mars hospitable would solve all environmental problems on earth five times over.

It makes no sense. Curiosity was powered with solar cells.

The totality of Voyager’s scientific output is... low. Like most space exploration. A nuclear accident that distributes enriched plutonium as fine particles throughout the atmosphere would cause thousands of lives if the generally accepted theory of the harms of radiation (linear with exposure) are correct.

This is the classic "Manufacturing Consent" narrative/conspiracy theory, at least when "engaging" implies (sometimes) "pays".

You may not mean it that way, but rather "talks to/adjusts its messaging". In that sense, it's quite obviously true, but just... not quite as sinister?

Some people have more influence because they people have come to enjoy, trust, or otherwise seek it. Sometimes, this dynamic is formalized by putting them into position with in-built distribution advantages, such as TV personality or editorial writer.

There is nothing wrong with that. "Opinion-having" is a skill like any other, and it would be strange to make it the one category where quality does not lead to more widespread consumption.

The US is also divided in a way not seen for generations. I don't quite see how one can look at the state of politics today and complain about a lack of choices, or imply that "they are all the same". If there is some cabal of mighty though-leaders, they certainly failed quite spectacular in 2016, when the Republican establishment was opposed to the current president at least as much as the Democratic party.

Indeed, you acknowledge the possibility that opinion-makers aren't on-board for rather mundane, individual reasons with the reference to "more democratic countries". I posit that even in the US, a majority does, in principle, support "the system". The left-wing critics of capitalism I know would be perfectly happy with something like the "Nordic Model" of social democracy, which is a set of policies entirely consistent with the current political structure of the US.

Safety, as measured in fatalities per person per mile per year, has increased by a factor of 100x since the 1960s: traffic increased 10-fold, while fatalities fell by the same factor.

So they do seem to be doing something right...

The lack of chaanges may just indicate that the current paradigm is a rather good one. If anvbody came up with a working scramjet, regulation would be a minor hassle.

It's really physics that are limiting here: supersonic travel is too inefficient both economically and environmentally. And personal autonomous local transport (i. e. "flying car") is impossible without some sort of breakthrough on noise.

It’s civil law, not criminal. It adds an extra zero to the settlement a one-eyed journalist will get from their lawsuit against DHS about 26 months from now.

There have been quite a few protests lately. Some of them involved vandalism, especially on the first day. In Portland over the last few days, there was some fireworks and a few trash cans were burning.

But the vast majority of protests were entirely peaceful. And and even greater number of individual protesters have done nothing wrong.

The police doesn’t get to shoot you in the head because you look like the people they saw on the news doing something wrong half-way across the country.

And even actual criminals aren’t fair game to police violence. This isn’t some gang war between equals. The police is expected to be better than that sort of revengeful sadism.

people who don't share the je-ne-sais-quo of platonic intrinsic motivational factors that makes his blatant greed somehow romantic[0]...

...and also fail to be white men from a middle-class background, as far as I can tell.

I'm not usually one to think in these terms, but this somehow still strikes me as a caricature of white middle-class privilege:

"Having to take considerable financial risk definitely sucked, but it was also was a great filtering function. If you didnt have conviction in yourself or your product theres no way you would have been there. For those who made the leap, it made success the only option."

...and by not letting anyone not descending in a straight line from the Mayflower work at it, they make sure it's second-rate, at best.

Of course if he also succeeds in abolishing universities' non-profit status as he's recently started adding to his culture war talking point reservoir, not even Americans will be there to run this thing.

Last I checked, SSC was the first hit on google when searching for his real name. That would seem to make it rather pointless to believe in the ability of keeping that content hidden from his patients.

I’m also not entirely certain it isn’t in the public’s interest to allow patients to read their therapist’s writing. Yes, they shouldn’t be privy to the details of their love life and favorite spot to go skinny dipping. But Scott never disclosed much personal information anyway.

I think rather fondly of his writing. But it should be uncontroversial that some of it is, well, controversial. Even if I don’t agree with his critics, I wouldn’t consider it entirely unreasonable to disagree with him on some points. And because so much of it touches on hot-button issues, some of them might very well decide not to share their most private thoughts with him, and could feel betrayed when learning about it only after the fact.

It’s also somewhat strange to see a community (his, and here as well in previous posts) complain about unnamed sources any time the news media is discussed, but getting outraged when one publication actually makes it policy to use real names more often.

There is a case for anonymity on the internet, and even for others to respect that wish. But at some point, when you start having the sort of cultural influence that Scott has, and your efforts of hiding your name were rather half-hearted to begin with, it’s nobody’s job to play pretend on your behalf.

Berlin, New York, London, and Tokyo, and dozens more show that it’s perfectly possible to get the virus under control even in places where public transport is popular.

This graph is a nice illustration of the principle that getting the virus under control and economic interest are not opposed, but in fact closely track each other: https://twitter.com/bopinion/status/1285517303141072898

You’re disproving your point by noting the Times speaking against this, showing that it was never more than a ridiculous minority opinion.

Additionally, enough time has now passed to assess the danger of these protests. Considering they mostly happened in the large cities of the north, there is absolutely no evidence that they had any major effect in the resurgence of the virus, which is mostly spreading in the south and west. Even there, rural areas are often hit harder than cities.

And the opposition to climate science was maybe motivated by greed and this strange US obsession with everything that’s harmful to nature or people they don’t like.

But the campaign against science was informed by the previous decades’ obsession with evolution.

In this case, the low-level moderators were apparently overruled by a self-describe “conservative” higher-up.

You can sue anyone for everything. Do you stand a chance? No.

The platform/publisher dichotomy is mostly just a right-wing talking point with absolutely no basis in law. As your example alludes to, a website can well be both at the same time.

For text that is Facebook’s own editorial content, the liability standard generally applied to any speaker, but historically tested in relation to news media and book publishers would apply, which is one of “malicious intend”: you need to prove that they wanted to cause the harm your suffered.

This is a rather high standard, but it follows from the US’s regard for free speech. You are likely to encounter additional difficulties trying to prove and quantify the specific damages you incurred.

But Facebook’s fact checking is set up somewhat differently, with third parties doing these checks. It seems almost impossible to make a case for intent against FB for a correction authored by any of these organizations.

Why is it a precedent? Nobody was under the illusion that it isn't technically possible for them to shut down some customer they don't like.

Nor was/is there any debate about the legality of doing so,

So the only reason for continuing to work for/with violent anti-semites was that they wanted to. Until, at some point, they changed their mind.

HN has a strange infatuation with this idea of avoiding responsibility by pretending to be powerless. But it's neither morally sound nor logically or legally coherent to pretend to be bound by some principles that are entirely of one's own making.

This assumption (i. e. that everything bad is done anyway, only in secret) is a truism. People who buy into this sort of cynicism will rely on the non-existence of evidence as evidence of their theory of all-powerful government able to suppress all evidence.

The idea is also destructive for any effort to improve matters: if everything and everyone is corrupt, there's no point in trying to hold anyone to account. And if those in power continually get hit with the wildest accusations people can think of, they will at some point abandon the idea of trying to do a good job and/or being honest because there are no incentives whatsoever when the discourse is dominated by narratives that are no longer in any way tied to their actual behaviour.

Germany doesn't "give itself as many powers as it can". Just recently, the courts affirmed that even foreigners have a right to privacy that intelligence agencies have to respect.

Privacy regulation in Europe is the mot stringent anywhere, and contrary to popular myth it applies to governments just as it does to corporations and citizens.

Conservatives have been clamoring for metadata retention requirements afor communication companies for about a decade or so, but all of their ideas failed either in parliament or in the courts.

Video surveillance is illegal by default, and is only done in sensitive areas such as airports. Even as a private citizen, you can get fined for installing a camera that points at public spaces. Some landlord was even fined for installing a fake camera in the public staircase, because the possiblity of surveillance was considered harmful.

I don't necessarily agree with the following with regards to OpenAI, but it is what I have been told by a few professors and other academics in bioinformatics:

Money is terribly tight in academia, and even at hot think tanks like OpenAI. The difference between a working but not very pretty prototype and a polished product you are willing to be associated with may seem like just a bunch of trivial boilerplate such as documentation or tests.

It is indeed boring work (at least for scientists), but a lot of it. And if the intention is to publish and support something on an ongoing basis, and for widespread use, you probably need to invest 5x to 10x as much time and money.

So in the end most code in academia is hidden because it's hideous, not to hide how they hardcoded all the good jokes GTP-3 comes up with.

Yes, it's a case related to Epstein. But it's really a run-of-the-mill investor protection lawsuit like thousands each year.

It's also day seven of her being assigned the case. She may have sent out some preliminary inquiries to start thinking about a trial schedule. She definitely didn't make any decisions that have the potential to expose whatever criminal mastermind people believe to be lurking in the shadows.

Later in the trial, a judge's recusal could have resulted in a mistrial, potentially delayed it for years, or even caused plaintiffs to run of money or patience to try again.

But at the very beginning, there is no reason to believe she is different than any other judge who would be assigned in her stead, and the schedule would barely be affected.

The "value" of order flow is not "per person". Ordinarily, it should correlate with order volume, but RH is getting far more than expected on (something close, but not exactly) that measure. I wonder if RH customers maybe trade far more than those of other brokerages? Maybe that data isn't publicly available, requiring them to use average account value as a proxy?

Anyway, the point here is to stoke anger from RH customers by calling them stupid (making bad trades). Dividing their revenue by number of accounts would tell a different story, one that would also anger customers because, again, it paints them in a bad light. But this time their stupidity would manifest itself by allowing RH to profit so much more than other brokerages.

Basic logic dictates that after medical science has found cures for 90% of diseases, you will tend to notice the remaining 10%.

"Modern medicine", as you feel apt to call it, has been nothing if not spectacular successful against infectious diseases. It strikes me as implausible that the profession is somehow corrupt in a way that specifically hinders progress against chronic diseases, compared to the banal explanation that these are more difficult, and maybe that we've had less time dedicated to their study because they only appeared when people started to routinely live to old age.