abvdasker

Add this to the long list of actions by the Saudis demonstrating that they are probably the most unambiguously evil government in the world. But they seldom get any criticism from mainstream US media and politicians because of the Saudis' vast oil resources. Imagine how much better off the world would be today had the US government chosen to topple the Saudis after 9/11 (for which everyone knows they were actually responsible) instead of pursuing irrelevant boondoggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Funding for Sunni terrorists would have been disrupted which probably would have had a far greater impact to reduce global terrorism than anything else the US did. Hell, even the neocons just in it for oil would have been happy with that.

There's a lot of speculation that the Alexa orgs are going to be decimated by this round of layoffs. I genuinely have no idea how Alexa could be losing Amazon $10 billion every year.

All it took was a crowd booing him for Musk to get so bent out of shape that he abandoned all pretenses of being in favor of free speech. That must have really hurt his feelings.

You're arguing against a claim which I never made. I didn't say that decriminalizing drugs would "mitigate retail theft", just that criminalizing drugs doesn't do anything to prevent drug abuse and addiction.

Can you point to a well known communist today who opposes freedom of speech?

We already tried this. It was called The War on Drugs and it failed totally, completely and unambiguously. If there's one thing to understand about the last 60 years of United States drug criminalization and enforcement, it's that those policies have utterly failed to curb drug abuse and addiction. There are a mind-boggling number of studies which show that criminalizing drug use doesn't create fewer drug addicts.

Ah yes, the "simple solution" of uprooting your entire life because it takes ~2 minutes longer to buy deodorant.

Too bad the piece never mentions it.

I think this piece is more of a reaction to the hackneyed articles we've all seen about how wine knowledge is all bs. It's a qualification of those conclusions that does a good job of explaining that the reality is a little more complicated.

That's a good point. The piece fails to address the many ills of the entrepreneurial capitalism it describes, probably owing to Silicon Valley's tendency towards self flattery. It's remarkable how poorly the industry has fared now that the Fed has closed the spigot of free money.

If I'm being honest, I'm on Twitter for the pure schadenfreude of seeing public figures — journalists, celebrities, politicians — get publicly humiliated in real time, usually after saying something inadvertently funny or embarrassing. I'm not proud of it, but it has resulted in some of the funniest content I've ever seen on the internet.

What a great and thoughtful response. I really believe too many people — some very ambitious and successful — are being driven by unexamined pathology. I've seen too many examples of people who achieve their goals in terms of money or career or prestige or knowledge and remain miserable because they never took the time to ask themselves these questions.

I genuinely believe that AB testing as practiced by every major tech company (and the incentives it creates) has caused much of this. AB testing is a really unsophisticated way of measuring extremely short-term incremental gains in isolation. That's how we've ended up with products which have gradually become so hostile to users. Because individually the changes seem like small wins, but taken together and over the long term they are deeply destructive to the core product. AB testing doesn't capture long-term changes to user behavior from the accumulation of disparate features. The incentive structures within these companies are all set up to be able to prove these small wins in dollar values to get a raise or promotion which has led to a race to the bottom as teams create features nobody wants to justify their existence.

Anecdotally I and many people I know have reached a kind of breaking point where these apps have become so demanding in terms of attention that we have to stop using them entirely. Whether it's YouTube's incessant advertisements, TikTok's infinite scroll or Facebook's insane jumble of a UI/feed these products are demonstrably inferior to their incarnations 5-7 years ago.

That's capitalism, baby! It turns out domestic chip fabrication wasn't competitive (in this case a rare double-whammy of failing to compete on both cost and capability). The global market determined that Taiwan and South Korea made the best and cheapest chips so that's where all the manufacturing went. Demand for semiconductors is overwhelmingly not created by the military so it doesn't really make sense to compare it to submarines.

Ecofascism is a pretty unimaginative, lazy and downright illogical solution to the complicated problem of climate change. It's also morally and scientifically wrong.

> it had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with states rights

"states rights" to do what?

> What about the industrial north and the agricultural south?

Guess what kind of labor the economy of the "agricultural south" was dependent on at the time. The Civil War was primarily about slavery, especially the expansion of slavery westward. To argue the opposite is ahistorical nonsense so false it amounts to an outright lie.

Even the Confederacy was open about the fact that slavery was the reason for succession. Just read The Cornerstone Speech given by the vice president of the Confederacy weeks before the Civil War began:

> [The Confederacy's] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

There's no reason for scare quotes given the specific carveout for slavery which exists in the Constitution. If you have an issue with that verbiage, take it up with the 38th United States Congress and Abraham Lincoln.

> do murderers get to walk free?

You're arguing against an extreme position that nobody actually holds. Most reasonable people would probably point to criminal justice as implemented in many European countries as exemplifying a more humane model which produces better long term results.

The carveout for the enslavement of incarcerated people also created a perverse incentive which played out predictably in the wake of Reconstruction's failure. If you're interested in the long and painful history of this fact here's a useful resource:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA

I think they object to the continuing to allow slavery part.

They obviously won't. The Republican Party is explicitly opposed to expansion of the social safety net which would support the children from unwanted pregnancies. Outlawing abortion has nothing to do with protecting children. It's about exerting religious control over women and that's it.

His exact words were "get wages down".

Personally, I think this slow moving inflation disaster is the result of the US government's inability to raise taxes. They have to reduce the money supply somehow to fight inflation and they're doing it with one hand (fiscal policy) tied behind their back. I suspect the reason is because tax increases are politically toxic while monetary policy changes made by the Fed are seen as apolitical. To be even more cynical about it, one could argue that the wealthy people and corporations who control politicians have an obvious interest in preventing tax increases even when it would benefit the economy as a whole in the long term.

Powell has said explicitly that one of the Fed's short term goals is to bring down wages.

The unfairness doesn't derive so much from the act of cheating. It's more that he got the answer ahead of time because of his connection to someone at the company. When people talk about certain inequities in tech demographics I think it's not unreasonable to point to situations like this as part of the problem.

I did exactly what you're describing. I like the S22 but it is a little bigger than my ideal size. My only minor nitpick is with the fingerprint reader being under the screen instead of embedded in the power button (which I loved about the s10e since holding it naturally would unlock the screen). Samsung should just make something like an S22e or 23e.

What's the bad news to come?

If Twitter learns your identity through the verification process are you really anonymous, though?

I think there's some truth to this, but there are two categories where Netflix's content is actually much better than basically all its competitors: reality TV and programming outside the US (which there is a huge amount of). I agree though that Netflix's non-reality TV programming in the US is their weakest area.

You completely missed the context of my comment. This was a discussion specifically about the acquisition of media companies unrelated to the businesses which create billionaires' wealth.

Elon Musk himself said explicitly in his interview yesterday that he "doesn't care about the economics at all" which supports my argument. For Musk owning Twitter is not about making money from it the way he does from Tesla.

https://twitter.com/ElectionWiz/status/1514696106223022088?s...

What other reason could the billionaires possibly have for owning these companies? I doubt it's out of the goodness of their hearts and given the success of their other businesses probably isn't about making money.

This is just robber barons all over again and to believe otherwise one would have to be pretty ignorant of America's history. Chomsky's best insights are about how this kind of control actually works and it isn't really that journalists are censored by owners (though this does occasionally happen).