MikeUt

> it did used to be illegal for non-whites to emigrate to the USA

You must be mistaken. It's well known that the USA was conceived as a "melting pot nation", a nation of immigrants, and those agitating for the opposite are rightly rebuked as un-American. Diversity is our strength, e pluribus unum, etc.

That is simply not compatible with ever having had white-only immigration laws, let alone so recently that it would still affect the age-structure.

> Asian Americans represent 41.8 percent of Google’s workforce. [..] Forbes diversity writer Ruth Umoh summarized the report’s data as indicating both “modest gains in representation for women and people of color,” and “a disproportionately white [52%*], Asian and male workforce.”

The US is 61% white. I've lost count of the number of articles that casually call companies where whites are under-represented as "disproportionately white".

*https://diversity.google/annual-report/representation/

> If my students benefit from public largesse and access, it’s because they challenge public institutions, asking why they are not free (like CUNY once was), demanding access to them, and questioning the way they work.

I'm not sure how to interpret this passage. Is she saying public libraries are only accessible thanks to her students "challenges" and demands?

> No one may “collect, sell or publish information on network product security vulnerabilities,”

So you cannot even inform the general public that, for example, a widely used consumer product has a critical vulnerability?

It will be interesting to see how the growing Chinese influence in our media will change popular culture and attitudes.

> As Suitt points out, about 42% of Americans are now either unaware of the fact that their country is still fighting wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa or think that the war on terror is over. Consider that for a moment. What does it mean to be fighting wars for a country in which a near majority of the population is unaware that you’re even doing so?

I must admit I'm not sure how one would distinguish an agenda, from simply a viewpoint that has remained unchanged.

My education in history differs from most of HNs, so I find it difficult to let slide a field of study that omits half of the history it claims to represent. Nevertheless, if you insist, I'll refrain from commenting on this topic entirely in the future (I would offer to comment in a non-flamewar style, but if my above post counts as flamewar, I don't think there's a way to express my perspective without it).

Like ISPs saying their mergers won't reduce competition because they stay out of each-other's territories.

And if we look at the entire chip-making business, instead of the narrow foundry-for-hire category? Or consider the possibility of Intel expanding (not just buying) into the foundry business?

Strange how such a long article about imperialism in the middle east does not mention the Ottoman empire even once. An empire that genocided 300,000-900,000 Greeks a mere 56 years before Said's book was published [1]. Surely it played a large role in the West's perception of the Orient, which is what the field of Orientalism purports to study.

It's telling that the cover of his book [2] is The Snake Charmer painting, instead of, for example, The Slave Market [3], by the same artist, showing a very different relationship of the West with the Orient, than the one portrayed by Said.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Market_(G%C3%A9r%C3%...

> machines that are usually exempted from gambling laws

But that's besides the point. You don't need gambling laws to see that this is fraud, deceiving customers to pay in the expectation that the game is fair.

Fewer independent companies increase competition? Sounds like something out of a corporate press release.

Is this what it has come to? Never knowing when items you supposedly own will refuse to work, due to court or corporate decisions you're not involved with?

Amazon remotely deleted copies of 1984, Peloton bricked indoor bikes unless you paid a monthly fee, and now this. A man's home is his castle, and a simple purchase should not be a standing invitation for corporations to invade and compromise the functioning of my devices.

Having functionality of items we thought we purchased be continually dependent on the whims and good standing of manufacturers is dystopian. Will I have to worry that I'll remain without light one evening, because the smart lightbulbs were found to infringe some patent? Will the water filter cease to function for a similar reason?

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewon...

Witherspoon et al. attempt to answer the question, "How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?". The answer depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity, and the populations being compared. When they analysed three geographically distinct populations (European, African and East Asian) and measured genetic similarity over many thousands of loci, the answer to their question was "never".

> while the White House deletes tweets that likely anger the CCP

I haven't heard about this. Could you elaborate?

The solution is winning hearts and minds to convince workers to organize. In the past, corporate propaganda and improving living conditions convinced many that unions were a net negative. As conditions change, so too can those convictions.

But I don't think mandatory unions are a solution. Unions would have to be very popular for such legislation to pass. But if they were so popular, they would no longer need compulsory membership.

In general it is unions and organized labor that push legislation meant to help workers, so starting with legislation instead is putting the cart before the horse.

How quickly we forget. This is not the first time workers have faced inhumane working conditions. Unions worked as a solution before - why wouldn't they work again?

> The idea is that, under Chinese law, it is somewhere between “complicated” and “forbidden” for foreigners to own certain big important Chinese tech companies.

They don't allow foreign ownership of their companies, but they do buy ownership of big western companies (such as Volvo). That sounds a lot like trade war... but that can't be right, the media didn't say anything about a trade war until Trump's tariffs.

"It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

Emphasis mine. Or are you trying to imply a single incident should encompass all those descriptors, before qualifying as Orwellian? If so, wouldn't that disqualify most incidents in 1984 itself?

It's odd that after all that #BelieveWomen [1,2] business, Vice is able to so deftly switch to calling them liars. Not directly, of course, they merely tell how their tears were used to justify horrible things, and then give only one example, where the accusations turned out to be false.

Has there not been one instance where their white tears weren't fake? That's certainly the impression this article gives.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/gyemm3/when-believing-women-...

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/j539e3/why-and-how-you-must-...

And they would not notify me in advance, simply take it. And if it was in my garage, the repo man would use his master key to break in. And they keep a list of all items everyone has purchased, from cars to things as small and cheap as books, to be taken without notice if any legal issues come up in the future. The surveillance is total, the law is absolute and inescapable, the devices you own are backdoored to betray you.

Compare this to buying a physical book, with cash.

If you don't find this Orwellian, I don't know what to say.

I recall when I bought a book from a bookstore, but later it turned out the publisher did not have a license. So they hired private security to break into my home, steal my book, and leave money in its place.

Oh sorry, "on a computer". That makes it okay.

> 32. A quick way of getting rid of an opponent's assertion, or throwing suspicion on it, is by putting it into some odious category.

I'm surprised such a popular tactic is so low down the list.

> use the damn youtube-dl. [..] and Reddit "gods" can't do anything to block you.

They can threaten to sue youtube-dl also. Not having a Reddit account doesn't stop a lawsuit.

They* want to be the only record keepers, and it scares me. Now when they remove a video for "violating content guidelines" (or all the videos of a banned account), it will be as if it never existed.

*Nearly every major video host deliberately makes saving videos difficult.

That's a bit reductive. All tribes may share this characteristic, but not to the same degree.

The GP even says as much.

> From the Blair-era defeat of national ID cards onwards, the British people have been wary of anything that seems like a national database. Begin tracking people in a centralised system, they fear, and it’s the first step on an inexorable decline towards a surveillance state. But as the weight of legislation piles up, it seems inevitable that something will change soon.

It is "inevitable" that unwanted legislation will be passed? This sounds like a tacit admission that British democracy is broken.

> It's the 3rd smallest number of the most recent 15 years. Smaller also than 1906, 1907, 1910, 1913 and 1914.

And the 3 largest were 1.27M, 1.18M, and 1.13M. For the last 20 years legal immigration was at an average of 1.06M/year, and the year-to-year differences were negligible (except for 2003) (yes, including during the notoriously anti-immigrant Trump presidency, that averaged 1.08M legal immigrants/year). So ranking them in terms of Nth smallest/largest makes little sense - you're studying noise.

There are three factors at play: population size, population lifestyle, and efficiency of resource use.

It is customary to completely ignore population size as a factor, as long as lifestyles or resource use could be more eco-friendly (commute with bicycles, rebuild infrastructure to make that possible, re-zone cities, change diets, make industries and farming greener, etc..)

This is the case even though those large, society-wide transformations would take decades, and even while the population is actively being increased by immigration (most of the developed world has had below-replacement fertility for decades, so birthrates are not a factor).

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Billion_Americans

I don't know why ecological stress is so rarely traced back to population size, outside of "debunkings" of Malthusianism.

Edit due to rate limit: One of the replies claims the US has a positive natural growth rate. This is false - US fertility is currently at 1.78 births/woman. The last time it was above the replacement level of 2.1 was in 1972, 49 years ago:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...

Edit 2: As dragonwriter pointed out, I was mistaken and both are true - fertility is below replacement, and natural population growth (birth - deaths) is positive. I think this is due to population aging, and due to immigrants skewing younger (i.e. childbearing age): https://cis.org/Report/Birth-Rates-Among-Immigrants-America

It's certainly not the way disfavored movements or ideas are handled.