JCzynski

Source? Murder rates didn't drop below trend.

False. In the UK and Australia it didn't even make mass killings go down.

His first four claims (plus #11) are just wrong. He's not even addressing the points, let alone rebutting them.

85% of Catalans wanted the vote to happen.

It had 90% in favor instead of 80% like the previous one, and got modestly more votes than the separatist parties received in the last regional election. The result is eminently believable.

I personally favor a weak federal government, somewhere in the vicinity of the Articles of Confederation or EU, which manages military and basic rights, supervening mainly on city-states and with special provision for a different local model for large rural areas.

City-states are the closest to being self-contained economic units, and having the scope of government match the scope of people's economic lives is a good thing.[Citation Needed]

The benefits of large governments - uniform currency, uniform code of law - have been increasingly eroding and losing relevance, so I am pretty sold on the city-state model.

The population of Catalonia has risen 0.1% since that vote (in 2014), and the raw number of Yes votes has risen 5%. If all the Yes voters vote for secessionist parties in the next regional election they will have a majority.

Catalan turnout for last year's national election was 61%. Turnout for the last regional election, two years ago, was 75%. Some of those against stayed home - and no wonder, since casting a vote for something you weren't passionate about would still risk a run-in with riot cops - but not a huge amount.

Free speech is not just the right to speak unimpeded by the government, but the right to speak so that you can be heard. (You don't have to be listened to. But people must have the option.) Systematically coordinating to keep speech off the internet is a violation of their moral right to speak, even if it is technically legal.

It is the consistent position of the United States Supreme Court that hate speech is protected free speech.

>But few really oppose the basic predicate of these removals: that private companies can and should be arbiters of permissible speech on their platforms.

I am proud to count myself among those few. Social media is the modern public square and must be treated as such.

No, that would be if P=NP. This is either a proof that P!=NP, or not a valid proof of anything.

Google will never figure out how to do social apps well. They have failed repeatedly to make anything resembling a good social platform, and the one that came anywhere close (Google Chat), they killed and replaced with a succession of moribund, inferior replacements which are all being killed off in succession. (Hangouts is dead within a year, supposedly; Allo and Duo are not doing well either, and there's a totally new one coming.)

Events is enough to keep people using it, though.

Sometimes I think that the only features FB uses internally are events and groups. They're the only parts of the site that do what you want them to do well and intuitively.

Agreed, withdraw-only access is the obvious Right Thing. Could be hard to implement, I guess.

Give BTC a little credit, it's capable of giving you a solid rush and getting you(r bank balance) high. It doesn't always bankrupt you. That's a lot better than you can say of krokodil.

Surveys of the field consistently show a majority expecting less than a century, and people focused on the problem less than 50.

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

Yup, and it's still looking true about Bitcoin. See: next Tuesday.

Not very; about 10 hours is spent on that with instructors, plus more time practicing it in the form of whiteboard questions. Which means there was a wide variance from most knowledgable to least.

And the bribes do very little to affect who wins or benefit the bribers when they do. Yawn.

>Don't get me wrong, most of the skills gap is for capable engineers, and if you understand data structures, algorithms, architecture, memory management, etc. you'll get a job very quickly. We're talking within a week.

Empirically, that's totally false. The people I knew who went to the same bootcamp (App Academy) as me and had the strongest skills took longer, not shorter, to get jobs. The average was around 9 months.

Yes, ICOs are structurally terrible and not sustainable. Ethereum will implode at some point, and some time down the line, three or four major blockchain iterations from now, we'll get something sustainable that can actually be used to support real growth and live up to the potential that's fueling the current bubble.

Bet you $100 that, in 2035, >10% of the cars on the road are level-4 autonomous or higher, and >90% of new cars sold are level-4 autonomous or higher.

Capitalism won't change. It has no reason to; those changes don't affect the underlying processes of the economy, they just change the circumstances and incentives.

Not exactly. It says that "which strategy for growth is best?" has only one answer. Which is true.

The spam filter is way overzealous. I switched back to unInboxed Gmail after the third time I never got shown an important email and missed an appointment; all three happened within the same month.

Not good. The codebase is a terrible monolith using frameworks long-dead everywhere else, there's poor coordination.

False. Squelching reviews that are "not relevant" or otherwise flagged, making them not show up unless the list of reviews is expanded to include the described-as-low-quality reviews, and IIRC not being included in the star-rating calculation, is SOP at Yelp.

It's done algorithmically by default, but there are people whose job it is to track places where the algorithms have gone wrong, and while ostensibly their latitude for independent decision is narrow it's actually pretty broad. Also that set of decisions is kept in a separate DB most programmers can't view or interact with, but which the customer support team could easily point the flaggers to.

Source: Worked there briefly.