On your first point: And this would be believed by whom? Just as everyone credible firmly takes seriously Russia's claims that it attacked Ukraine to rid the smaller country of a Nazi threat to Russian sovereignty? Give me a break.
As for your second claim: So can hydro plants, causing enormous destruction. So? Secure the vulnerable asset, create defensive and preventative strategies. You don't go through life not building genuinely useful things because somewhere, somehow, somebody might aim to do them harm. The logic is absurd if taken to any other level. For example, I should never buy or build a house because some group of landless lunatics might coalesce and try to take it from me one day. Better to not have my own useful home in the first place then? Absurd.
Not to denigrate the scientific effort and achievement of the people creating this, but if even a fraction of what our medicine can do in mice were at all workably, usefully applicable to humans, we'd be living dream lives of medical therapy by now. Too bad so much that works in said mice would instead simply kill us stone dead, or just do nothing.
It should in principle be okay to disagree with whatever posture you like, just it should be okay for billionaires to fund the viewpoints of their choice if other billionaires can fund more dominant viewpoints of their choice without problems. I'd say it's you who misses the forest for the trees, and the other poster's main point, which to my reading was that if the Gates Foundation (and many others) can funnel billions to a certain climate science/policy stance, it's nothing short of hypocritical for hysteria to be devoted on people like the Koch brothers for doing the same in a different direction.
On a final note, while the basic scientific consensus that human caused climate change is a real thing seems quite firmly settled, there are many details and disagreements that no self-respecting scientist can claim don't exist. There are enough of these for plenty of healthy debate, even on major points, to be a good thing, as it almost always is on most topics. There's also no shortage of self-interested politics being mixed into narratives pushing for aggressive climate change responses. This is rarely conducive to completely honest discourse from either side of the table.
Of course, lets demonize all of them, redneck or capable of intelligent discourse. It doesn't matter, they're just cogs in a large right wing conspiracy. The funny thing is how many progressives consider themselves highly reasoned, unprejudiced people, despite being subject to exactly the same sorts of deeply emotional, irrational biases, just in other directions.
Simply bullshit. It got flagged because it didn't fit a certain hive mind narrative I already mentioned. Top posts on HN routinely feature politics of all kinds, much of it quite ordinary or banal and far from touching upon some "interesting new phenomenon". Given how little is actually described (and with decent photos no less, accompanied by an in-person narrative) about conservative rallies, I'd say this post fit the bill just fine.
Why the hell was this flagged? What? God forbid someone posts a great blog article with good photos about a person visiting a rally for a group often discussed disdainfully on this very website and demonstrates that they're not all monsters or redneck idiots.
For god's sake why? What's the "problem" you'd be trying to solve with that regulatory nightmare of rules you claim to want? If someone renders a completely invented AI image and uses it for whatever they like, or if businesses and media use these creations of their own for all sorts of commercial purposes, who should care and why should punishment be involved?
I have nowhere near the same problem with someone who claims the things Andreesesen does in his angry rebuke of this project, if that person doesn't at the same time preach for elsewhere what they very visibly don't want to practice close to home. Again, this is why NIMBYsm is so detested, not so much because of its specific arguments but because of its often overtly disgusting hypocrisy.
>“I am writing this letter to communicate our IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton,” wrote Andreessen and his wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen in an email. “Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbors and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic.”
The comment, which was originally reported by The Atlantic’s Jerusalem Demsas, was also reviewed by Fortune. Andreessen did not respond to either outlet’s request for comment. The other executives who opposed the 58 housing units also did not respond to or declined Fortune’s request for comment.
Andreessen’s opposition seems to represent a shift from his expressed views in an essay he publish on his venture capital firm’s website at the start of the pandemic, titled “It’s Time to Build.”
“We can’t build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential—which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future,” he wrote.
In the essay, Andreessen also noted that his perspective was probably an uncommon one for someone of his ilk: “I expect this essay to be the target of criticism.”
The hypocrisy is delicious, and so typical of many ostensibly progressive tech magnates in California (and elsewhere). NIMBYsm at its peak.
Quite the opposite. Logistics matter. even to a Google, scaling human responses for user problems is extremely difficult when those users are in the billions. There will always be lots of difficulties unless AI gets radically better. I still think we fundamentally agree and Google should definitely ensure real responses at least to anyone who spends over a certain amount with it, but to me Mailchimp has far fewer excuses. These are paying customers of a multimillion dollar company and only a fraction of such people require support at any given time. Yet they still treat these users like shit sometimes for no good reason.
edit: and I have dumped Google. I use it for exactly nothing important in my life. It is possible and doable.
I completely agree with you on this, my point in my original comment was that Mailchimp doesn't even have this ambiguous and very shifty pretext of it being difficult to handle customer service with a humen response when your users number in the billions. Google has no excuses either at its enormous size and scope, and with annual revenue of $258 billion for 2021 (and a very healthy percentage of that being profits) they could at least make a sincere effort. It is however even less justified in a company like Mailchimp, whose users actively pay for the expectation of decent service and number in the low millions instead of billions.
To anyone who reads this, works in Mailchimp and happens to be in a leadership position at the company, sincerely, it would be nice to see you go bankrupt and fuck right off the face of the landscape. You don't even have the sheer size pretexts of Google, for example, to justify such terrible responsiveness, shitty customer service and generally awful account suspension and service practices. Is it simple laziness or a sharper sort of contempt for your own customers? Disgusting tendency among too many tech companies that reach any moderate size.
If someone is convinced that climate change will kill us all then I'd say they're not exceptionally smart to begin with, and are misattributing to cynial high intelligence that which is the much more common phenomenon of media-induced blind hysteria.
I have read the book and your interpretation of what he says is extremely selective. Pinker doesn't deny any of the atrocities against human life that occurred during and after the enlightenment. Instead he numerically demonstrates that even with these murderous events, general levels of violence worldwide on a basis relative to a fixed metric of population (per 100,000 etc) decreased steadily leading up to modern times, and continue to be historically low. During the time of the Inquisition, it wasn't just those inquisitors and their few thousand victims that were the cause of human suffering in the world.
>I am really not an back-to-the-trees kind of guy, but knowing rough and wild nature life and knowing and seeing the systematic suffering in our modern meatfactories (whether for humans or pigs) I remain very sceptical that everything is so much better now, than how it used to be.
Yes, unequivocally, and by every real measure life is better now than it has ever been for more people than ever before. You claim to "know rough and wild nature life" but how do you propose forcing it upon 8 billion human beings with your self indulgent logic? Nothing stops you from living this supposed rough life consistently, yet here you are regularly commenting on HN, participating in tech industries and contributing to the use of a wast, worldwide high technology infrastructure that extracts resources from the Earth to sustain itself. It's not just meat farms that contribute to massive natural resource use.
The aside about antidepressant use as an argument against the previous claim about improved living standards is just bizarre, because for one thing it does the opposite of negate a claim of improved conditions for people and secondly, it's such a minor thing relative to billions of people living longer, better, more calorically and medically stable lives than has ever been the case in any previous century.
Part of your attitude boils down to: I wish all these shady, ignorant people would stop living their own lives more privately because it makes my life slightly less easy. They're probably criminals anyhow.
>The only ones who gain are business owners commiting tax fraud or people doing other illegal activities, which I condemn, and a cash free society would make them unable to doge taxes anymore making it fair for everyone.
Define illegal activities. Also be aware that very random things can suddenly be made illegal for very corrupt or self-interested political reasons (australia and Canada spring to mind here more recently, so too does Russia to a much greater degree). The ability to fight back against overreach by society's single most powerful entitiy, the state, be it with cash or some other means of defiance is fundamentally a good thing and has been throughout history. At the very least small time tax dodging and grey market deals are a much less historically and fundamentally evil thing than governments overusing their powers for repressive ends.
Also, tax evasion in a fully digitized, cashless society would happen just the same, but it would now be done only by large companies and the very wealthy, who have the pull to buy their favorite laws, politicians and special exemptions. Your claimed individual, middle or lower class tax dodgers matter much less. What will matter however is the inability of normal people to keep their heads above water because they can no longer hide certain things from irresponsible tax collection or onerous regulations.
You seem to think that more easily catching a few tax dodgers and making the misery of having no escape from taxes more "fairly" distributed is a worthy gain in exchange for a total surveillance state that has the tools to control you at any time of political winds shift.
I can't stand this attitude. People who think like you on this do a lot to help move the surveillance society and the potential for turnkey repression forward endlessly. No evil reasons needed, but a constant stream of self absorbed platitudes of "oh but it's so convenient, I hope everyone else has to do it too, and make trivial things even easier for me". These of course remain blind to any perspective of how history has shown governments and criminal organizations using the ability to track everything for creating easy victims of others. No matter though right? As long as it saves you from having to carry a few ounces of wallet around because oh, it's such a "relic." Sooner or later basic privacy, anonymity and the freedoms that are bound to these can also become complete relics of the past, but I suppose that will be a relief, because so much will be convenient.
It's a binary choice. Either who you're with will want kids, or not, and if you're determined to have them but they simply refuse despite all appeals of any kind then what consensus are you talking about? In other words, there has to be a point where you say you're leaving someone unless they also want kids. This is an ultimatum whether you want to call it that or not. Beating around the bush politely about it doesn't change or resolve anything.
It's so unstable that the existing government has been firmly in power for over 70 years, passed down from one generation of leaders to the next from just a single family with no present signs of slackening practical authority. If this is hoped-for instability, i'd hate to see a stable regime at work.
Your absolutist stance is absurd. Just because all people who don't believe that some substance affects them negatively are wrong because a certain percentage of people who consume that substance are actually wrong. The same goes for certain changes in behavior, they don't automatically mean that a problem exists.
This basic claim is like saying an ocasional drinker who's become more social because alcohol helps them with talking to groups of people in certain specific situations is no different from an alcoholic because both drink and behave differently while drinking. Context, quantity and quality all make defining differences. How tedious it is to be judged harshly by someone who can't see this and takes any example of consuming something as a case of not admitting addiction. Often there really is no addiction.
And 40 years later, after dozens of billions or more spent, someone might just be allowed to finally build an amazingly clunky, drastically bloated up version of it that has been finally approved by a myriad storm of shifting regulations and unhappy contrary interests.
I can think of many (admittedly anecdotal but I think valid enough) examples. Just off the top of my head, Facebook is full of people who plainly use their real name and operate their account within the context of their real, in-person or professional circles of friends. Despite this, many of these people regularly place comments or posts that are blatantly rude, racist, spammy, fraudulent and so forth. It's a very common phenomenon and with little repercussions in most contexts. Social media and many other digital media forums are also loaded with people who regularly defraud others in ambiguous ways with little to no legal consequences. Imagine, if you go to a typical city police station in, say, nearly any North American city and report a non-violent property crime, the police will often straight up tell you that aside from filing a report, they'll do next to nothing else. Now imagine how much less they usually care in the case of legally grey cases of digital fraud below a certain genuinely large or frequently repeated amount. Even if you have a person's completely real name to point to, many criminal investigators just won't care, it won't be worth their time unless it's part of a massive pattern, involves lots of money, or affected someone with major political or social clout. A lack of anonymity means nothing in these contexts. At the same time, a lack of anonymity does indeed expose many other people to all kinds of unfair abuse that they have little recourse against.
As for your second point: The topic of dis/misinformation is a whole separate can of worms that I won't go into in detail right now, aside from saying that it's loaded with assumptions and shifty, politically charged definitions of what really is disinformation. This aside from the fact that I sincerely believe people have a right to share even stupidly mistaken opinions of X or Y, regardless of what certain self-proclaimed intellectual betters think should be allowed. With regard to your other points about crime and harassment, I refer you to my point above: firmly verified IDs barely dent these things. However they definitively do open people up to surveillance, censorship and the illegal leaking of vast troves of sensitive personal data from hacks of "secure" ID verification systems run by governments and corporations. To me, the trade-off is clearly in favor of giving people a basic right to hiding their real identity in all but absolutely necessary situations..
I didn't deny that long covid exists and I don't claim this writer is lying, but sentimentality aside, like I said above, all of the possible alternative causes exist too and why deny them for the sake of being polite?
First, even when people strongly have their real identity tied to their digital or other activities, it amazingly often does nearly nothing at all to stop them from all kinds of spammy abuse, fraud, lying, trolling and all sorts of bad behavior. This happens across the board, world-wide in any non-personal social or digital setting.
Secondly, I'd argue that the ability to "decentralize" ID and anonymize oneself is more than worth having as at least a moderate bulwark against the pervasive parasitic, predatory modern corporate/government surveillance world that we increasingly live in. It's nice to talk about keeping people "respectful" with a strongly tied down identity but how ideal is this when these people live in a world of giant institutions that respect next to nothing whenever it's convenient for their interests?
Anecdote, sure but I've had COVID 3 times so far across at least two strains (Delta, Omicron and maybe a newer mutation of Omicron) and no, no long term symptoms that I can identify. Likewise for at LEAST a couple dozen friends and acquaintances of mine. I'm sure that long COVID does exist, but I hesitate to give so many claims credence when they could easily also be the result of ambiguous things like general hypochondria, misatribution and sickness fetishism, all three of which absolutely exist too.