Rotten194

I'm trans. Please dont use us as a cover for your arguments, thanks.

People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america nazis, that many people born in this country think doctors should be able to deny care to LGBT people based on their religious beliefs -- meanwhile everyone I know who's immigrated from a different country has been nothing but wonderful to me -- I would argue that believing immigrants will somehow reverse progress on civil rights is ridiculous and not justified by the facts.

There's only that much pent up demand to live in the US because our immigration policies have bottled up decades of immigrants. the borders would have to gradually transition to fully open, sure, but after that transition the borders could be fully open.

i find the idea that 150 million people would "ruin" the us to be laughable. when has immigration ever made the us worse? why do you think immigrants are worse citizens than people born here? if anything, people who want to move here are motivated people who truly believe in the promise of america -- the exact kind of people we do want.

I believe in freedom of movement as an ideal, just as I believe in freedom of speech as an ideal. The UN declaration of human rights also includes freedom of movement as an ideal. No freedom is a state of normalcy, we spent thousands of years killing each other for saying things we didn't like, or moving into our space, or being gay, and many other things that would shock modern conscience. I think we should try to rise above that and be better, and part of that is not acting like territorial animals.

Immigrants are a) not a financial burden long term, people might need assistance at first but will generally get established and then pay into social programs and b) the US is incredibly wealthy. We can spend trillions on the military, we can afford welfare.

The point about east germnay was that it inhibited freedom of movement. I see no practical difference between preventing someone from leaving and preventing someone from entering. Both deny the person their freedom to live where they choose.

The point about colonialism is that colonialism is the reason much of the global south is in cycles of war and poverty (eg, european powers dividing up africa ignoring tribal boundaries). so it's pretty rich to extract wealth from a place to build your indsutrial economy, and then tell people trying to escape that war and poverty that they aren't allowed the fruits of that wealth extraction. and why are you pretending this is ancient history? the french were comitting war crimes in algeria against the independence movement in the 60's!!

automation is coming. expanded welfare will be necessary regardless -- we cannot have a world of 10 billion programmers and service workers. the top strata owns the vast majority of the world's wealth. if we returned to 50s era tax rates these people could still live extremely opulently and we would have morw than enough resources for all americans and immigrants.

Ok, in that case I agree. Taxation does set a lower bound on the value of a currency (barring unusual circumstances like hyperinflation), but it's not the sole determiner of a currency's value.

I haven't heard her stance before, but it seems interesting and I agree with what I've read so far.

With that in mind, I do support an open border. Why wouldn't you? A closed border denies freedom of movement under arbitrary restrictions of "productivity" (or random lottery, which is just as arbitrary), aka you only earn the freedom to move if you've been deemed productive -- so people with physical disabilities preventing them from working, or severe mental illness should be denied the right to move where they wish? Or that person from the Congo shouldn't be allowed to come here simply as a circumstance of their birth?

I'm sure almost everyone on HN would decry the Berlin Wall as a authoritarian human rights abuse. And lets be clear, most western nations aren't shooting people trying to cross the border on sight, and usually have some sort of asylum process (that may take years and years, however). But the limitation of movement itself is also a human rights abuse, in my mind. German families were cut off from each other, unable to see relatives trapped on the other side of the wall. The Stasi secret police were able to apprehend and torture people unable to escape because of the wall -- a closed border makes authoritarian regimes more powerful. The US is far from East Germany, but why even begin down that path? Don't we supposedly value freedom above all else? Didn't Franklin say "He who would sacrifice freedom for a little temporary safety deserves neither"? How is a closed border compatible with that sentiment?

Westerners didn't ask permission to invade the Congo, or India, or hundreds of other places in the global south, and we certainly didn't get visas before stripping those countries of natural resources and their cultural heritage (see: every item in the British Museum that they refuse to return), and then we turn around and say hey you can't come here without our permission? How hypocritical is that?

And lets not kid ourselves that closed borders keeps "the bad people" out -- people who want to commit crimes generally don't care about following immigration laws. They'll dig tunnels under walls, pilot submarines full of cocaine past the Coast Guard (this really happens), and extort desperate people trying to escape violence and crushing poverty.

So yes, I do think a closed border is immoral. If it means more strain on welfare programs in the short run as people try to start new lives here, well, if we can afford trillions to bomb the middle east into the stone age, we can probably afford that.

Bite belt sanitation fee: $300

The lack of generics kills Go for me. I know it's an old rag and they'll never add them, but I just can't get over it. Maybe I should try Rust...

If you believe that, how do you explain the OP post? The Somali government collapsed, it had no ability to enforce violence. And if currency was solely predicated on violence, why would the warlords bother to loot the central bank for it's paper currency? They could just buy bulk paper and write "accept this for your goods and services or we'll kill you" on it and print as much as they want (assuming that most warlords have shorter-term goals in mind than hyperinflation, like being able to pay their soldiers).

Thanks for the clarification!

Well hyperloop will be more expensive any place maglev is more expensive. If maglev costs $x to build above ground, and $5x to build underground, then hyperloop would cost $10x and $50x, would it not? (disregarding what the actual scaling factor is)

How is RDR:Online not an mmo?

I just watched the reinforcement learning video and was very confused -- where did the reinforcement learning happen? I thought reinforcement learning was giving an agent positive / negative signals to learn without example output data, but in the video the network was just retrained with more data? Is it an overloaded term maybe?

IMO, it is just misogyny. They don't target the equivalent esports and gaming personalities (mostly male) who do the same thing, and it's couched in the language of "thots" instead of, you know, something thats not a derogatory term for women. Plus, I find it really hard to believe that most of these people actually care about fair taxation -- are they also informing the IRS about the kid on their block making money mowing lawns, or their server friends not reporting their cash tips? Give me a break.

> Though it may seem like a useful tactic when you’re starting out, more established influencers worry that fake sponcon is creating a race to the bottom. Because brands can piggyback off of waves of unpaid influencer promoters, some have ceased paying influencers completely, or now pay rates far below what they previously spent.

https://twitter.com/prettybadlefty/status/107234761673268428... is my favorite take on this

The article seeks pretty rambling and doesn't have a clear point, but I have friends in the sex-work industry and the closing part is true: like music, people don't want to pay for porn anymore, and it's making it harder and harder for non-megastars to make a living. Everybody I know making a living off porn is doing it through twitter, premium Snapchat accounts, patreon and the like, not traditional sites, and it's not easy.

was it the net promoter score?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter

Think about it -- a vinyl can hold ~22 minutes of music per side, and a DVD-R can hold ~120 minutes of video per side, in a much smaller area.

Why did a search engine for movies need the actual movie files, and not just the metadata? Or was it actually making the movies themselves available?

so your second paragraph is justified by the completely baseless speculation in the first? if you actually had read the pdf I linked you would have seen the multitude of other examples of medical discrimination against queer people in it. im queer and have experienced medical discrimination. my queer friends have experienced medical discrimination, in washington state, not even a conservative state. intersex babies still routinely have non-consensual genital reassignment surgery performed, sometimes without their parent's knowledge.

yes, cishet people experience medical malpractice as well. but individual bad experiences is not the same as systemic discrimination. systematic discrimination against queer and intersex people goes on every day in our medical system, as much as people like to pretend it doesn't.

In one case, a 39-year old teacher allegedly died after not getting appropriate medical care due to her sexual orientation.9 According to a lawsuit filed by her brother, the teacher’s medical condition was not taken seriously by the EMTs who responded to her 911 call after they “‘became immediately aware’” she was a lesbian. She was abandoned for over an hour after being admitted to the hospital – in violation of protocol – and while unattended, she fell into a coma.10 She died several days later.1

https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/lgbt_refusals_fa...

it's a bit weird, but it's perfect for writing quick shell one liners with once you get used to it. no regular scripting language can match it for that

I don't think most tech companies actually want a completely custom, radically new typeface. They want a designer to trace Helvetica so they don't have to pay licensing fees.

left-pad

Why would you use a blockchain? There's already a central authority - the DC city government. They should just host their own git instance.

Although the author's opinion appears to be intelligent design:

"As a consequence, all purported evolutionary trees and sequences become highly suspect, including such icons as the whale and human series. For they are based on similarities of traits between species, and similarities are an unreliable indicator of common ancestry as implied by the trees’ typically low adjusted consistency indices. Instead, similarities appear to be the result of a designer reusing design modules in different species to meet common goals.

Ewert’s article represents only the first step in evaluating and developing his framework. Still, the significance of this research cannot be overstated. The dependency graph model explains why subsets of the biological data crudely fit a tree pattern and why so much of the data is incongruent. It also makes clear predictions on the results of future studies on the distribution across species of both physical traits and similarities in molecular data. Finally, it should lead to a robust and innovative research program based on the intelligent design framework. "

9 is next to 6 on a numpad :)

So now your comments are flowing through infrastructure wasting bandwidth and possibly leaking internal configuration details?

No -- beehives rely on near-continuous nectar flow throughout spring and summer, and almonds don't produce enough for long enough to feed a hive.