Sangermaine

You may be surprised to learn that the Koch Bros. and the Saudis do, in fact, receive enormous amounts of criticism for their behavior.

But I think with Musk the answer is that people respond extra harshly to perceive hypocrisy. The Kochs are almost cartoon corporate arch-villains and the Saudis are brutal theocrats. No one has any illusions that they are good people trying to help the world. Musk, however, has been presented as a Good Guy by both himself and a largely fawning press, set up as some kind of technology messiah. I think people therefore react strongly when, of course, this proves not to be true and that he's just another businessman, albeit one who does genuinely seem to want to help people.

>It's really unfortunate that abiding by local laws and regulations is considered unethical.

What a disgusting comment. What is legal and what is ethical are not the same thing at all. I have difficulty believing this was written in good faith.

>The western bias is towards being the first to discover an unknown restaurant with great food that just hasn't had time to build a reputation, but that's not how a typical Chinese person would approach the restaurant problem.

But that's not bias, the Western approach is correct and the Chinese approach is wrong, if the goal is to find good restaurants (with the assumption that "Western" and "Chinese" approaches are as described above).

>It is actually good heuristic

No it's not. It assumes there's a correlation between quality and customers, or at least that quality is a prime cause of customers. But there's no reason to think that's the case. In fact, it's more likely that location is the prime factor: the restaurants in Times Square in NYC are very busy, but they are by no means the best in the city or even particularly good. They just have great locations in the heart of the tourist zone.

I remember reading something by Tyler Cowen where, with regards to NYC restaurants, he advised trying the ones on the streets and not on the avenues, because the streets get less foot traffic and so have to be better to draw people in. I've found this generally to be true living here.

After location, the second most important element is probably hype/fame. The hot restaurant of the moment isn't the best restaurant of the moment, it's the one that has managed to capture people's attention, which could be for a variety of reasons ranging from a celebrity chef to some new gimmick.

Your response demonstrates your ignorance of psychology if you’re not even aware of how results often vary across cultures. One area to start educating yourself in is looking into the discussion in the last decade or so of how psychological research has been skewed by over-reliance on “WEIRD” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic) test subjects, and that studies with subjects from places without these attributes often produce different results.

You don’t seem to understand what you’re talking about in the slightest.

>No it doesn't: it depends on whether it's dysfunctional or not. Even if the people involved don't see the dysfunction.

“It’s dysfunctional because it’s dysfunctional.”

I hope I don’t have to explain why this is, again, begging the question.

What is “dysfunctional”? That’s largely culturally determined, because what’s “functional” is relative to the environmental you’re in.

You seem to conflating morality or human rights with mental dysfunction. I suspect you are doing this because it’s easier than addressing the comment thread I was replying to regarding “open” vs “closed” cultures. What is the objectively correct “functional” mode of human interaction?

But that just begs the question. What’s classified as a “behavioral dysfunction” is going to depend on your culture. If you come from a more “open” culture, a more reserved one will seem repressed and controlling. If you come from a more reserved culture, a more “open” culture might seem childish and unable to handle their own emotions.

This reply comes across as saying you’re preying on people too desperate or poor to have any choice but to accept your terms, and too inexperienced and naive to be able to evaluate them.

No, the comparison doesn’t work. Gyms count on going to the gym being something people have to force themselves to do, and so often fail to do so. Seeing movies is different: it’s a fun activity people want to do.

Somehow I doubt that this medical school has already implemented or tried every robust maternity leave, childcare, or other family support policy that would address their concerns about female doctors being forced to choose between quitting or having a family, and so the school simply has no other options left but to secretly deduct points from female applicants.

>They should try to give the books away for free before chucking them out, no?

The local library where I grew up tried this. It also doesn't really solve the problem of too many books. They would first put up surplus/old books for sale for a quarter or less, and twice a year would hold an event where they put the stock outside on tables and people could just take them for free. They were always left with tons of books even after all that.

It's sad to see books destroyed but they literally can't give them all away, and each building only has so much space.

This is quite a complex question, but the basic answer is that under US law native tribes are "domestic dependent nations". This means that they possess sovereignty as any separate nation would (which flows from Constitutional recognition of their pre-existing status), but it is a limited sort of sovereignty. Congress can limit that sovereignty through legislation and the federal government can make treaties with them. However, unless a treaty or federal statute removes a power, the tribe is assumed to possess it.

In practical terms, addressing your question, if tribes keep trying to sell their sovereignty like this Congress can pass a law removing their sovereign immunity with respect to patents. And, in fact, moves have already started in that direction:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-allergan-patents-congress...

The tribes would probably be wise to knock this behavior off as it's almost certainly going to result in pieces of their sovereignty being carved away, because everyone seems to agree that this sort of scheme is an absurd abuse.

>I am skeptical there will be an 'Event', something more like a gradual decline seems more likely (so, more British Empire than Roman).

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The (Western) Roman Empire's decline was not caused by "an Event" either, it was a gradual process with many causes over several centuries.

It's exactly this sneering "user beware" attitude that fosters abuse of privacy online. It's (probably) well-intentioned and supposed to push people to take privacy and security more seriously, but what it has actually done is created a general culture of blaming the victim where everything not being absolutely locked down being up for grabs, and if you mess up in any way and are harmed it's your own fault so quit whining.

I think the parent is right: if we tried instead to foster a culture that respects privacy as an ethical issue first it would greatly improve everyone's experience online. Privacy should be a bedrock principle, not something that exists only as far as the strength of the personal digital fortress you can erect.

I have a GV number as my work number on my cards, site, etc. and I still get spam through it, though admittedly less than through my personal number.

Reuters yes. An Op/Ed in Reuters, no. You have to know you’re being disingenuous here.

>Podcasts are, for the most part, decentralized

No, they aren’t. Of course anyone can put up a podcast, but the successful ones tend to cluster into podcast networks of like shows or join the big podcast groups like Nerdist, Wondery, or Earwolf. Or be a part of an established media company like NPR or Slate.

It’s easy to start a podcast but very hard to survive and expand alone.

Elon Musk Defends His Rejected Mini-Sub Plan for Thai Cave

https://nyti.ms/2NCzvi6?smid=nytcore-ios-share

>He said the expert was Richard Stanton, one of the first two British cave divers to reach the soccer team, and Mr. Musk shared an email in which Mr. Stanton had asked him to “please keep working on the capsule details.”

>But a spokesman for Mr. Stanton said Tuesday that the cave proved to be too narrow for the mini-submarine.

Crazy how the Thai official in charge doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and now Stanton doesn’t know either! Why is the world conspiring against Musk with these lies?

Where’s your messiah now?

But he didn't do good, except for himself. What he made was apparently useless.

The cult of Musk on Hacker News really is disturbing. The messiah can never be wrong or commit an error.

Oh okay. We should accept Musk's instruction to disregard Thai officials and instead accept this snippet of an email he provides which still only shows Stanton saying the effort might be useful days ago. I guess The Guardian and ABC just don't know as much as the glorious Musk:

>http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-10/thai-cave-rescue-elon-...

>https://www.theguardian.com/news/live/2018/jul/10/thai-cave-...

I contributed as much as Musk did to this rescue operation. Where's my parade?

>Well they're all out now, thank goodness. Musk at least tried to do something and he did it quickly. Where was say, the US Navy?

At the site actually helping the rescue operation:

>http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/07/09/thailand-cave-rescue-f...

>https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1569955/dod-per...

>http://time.com/5321829/thailand-cave-missing-boys-soccer-te...

Instead of taking advantage of a high-profile crisis for a self-aggrandizing (and as noted here ultimately practically useless) PR stunt.

This Musk cult of personality is getting ridiculous. Perhaps if you spent a little less time worshiping Musk you might have known about the actually useful efforts of others like the US military.

>Heck, their entire system of government could be called "innovative" - certainly no-one else has ever tried that before.

Authoritarian one-party rule with a strongman at the top is nothing new, they just have newer tools to enforce it.

Nonsense. We still read works from centuries or even millennia ago that continue to be lauded and enjoyed.

Nonsense.

Other train systems manage exactly that. In Japan being even a minute late isn’t acceptable. This isn’t some impossible fantasy thwarted by human nature.

Your comment is exactly what I’m talking about. The MTA has managed to train us to accept this awful state as unavoidable and natural. Don’t buy their bullshit.

>It really does seem that the social media team calms down a lot of angry people.

Great, they've mastered spin. People are angry for good reason. Don't calm them down, fix the damn trains, now. This is just more of the MTA's endless bullshit.

Honest my ass:

>“I think people think it’s a lot worse than it is, this catastrophic mess all the time,” she said. “I’ve had to put a moratorium on talking about the trains with my boyfriend. We had to say no talking about the trains. He’s part of the public. They just see the bad parts. They don’t see the strides we’re making and how this information that we put out makes a difference. They’re caught up in the negative part.”

The "negative part" is the trains being late or stopping in the tunnels almost daily. The "negative part" is our lives being constantly disrupted by the MTA's unbelievably poor service. She's damn right we're "caught up in the negative part".

This is a bullshit spin operation. Fix the damn trains, don't hire some PR operative to tell us we're somehow delusional and we're not really having these problems.

Then the human can fix the awful service and stop feeding us bullshit.

It's a blank page.

>For the first part, I still think that Chinese culture is quite special with culture that passed on for that long.

Of course you do, this myth of the "5,000 years of history" making China both unique and exempt from trends that affect the rest of the world is a very old part of the CCP's propaganda:

The Myth of "5,000 Years of History" http://camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/