howaboutnope

> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

-- Stephen Hawking, https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama...

Something wrong doesn't become one iota better, or acceptable, because bigger evils exist. By that logic, persecuting homosexuals is perfectly fine, because bigger evils than that exist, too.

And no gay person suffered millenia of persecution, not even non-persecuted individuals live that long. You might as well say carbon-based lifeforms suffered millenia of persecution at their own hands and call it a day.

That's not even moving the goalposts, that's like walking off the playing field to do something else entirely.

The people who took photos of my parents in their childhood and youth are most likely dead, so at this point not even they care anymore how good a photographer they were. I certainly don't, I care that I still have those photos.

Yes, and gay people were pissed about it, too. Your point? It was an unjust way to treat homosexuals, it's an unjust way to treat supposed "bigots". Especially when it turns into vulgar Gesinnungsschnüffelei combined with double standards, and reading inner motivations and beliefs into snippets, because "it could be".

No, this absolutely does need attention. Probably not yours, but that's fine.

https://old.reddit.com/r/fakedisordercringe/comments/lz83c2/...

> young people have massive egos and little awareness, which isn't anything new

There is a new element tho, and that's adults being the middleman and exploiters and shapers of said needs via electronic means at mass scale, who exploit and capitalize on the weaknesses of young and old alike, and don't give the slightest fuck about they harm.

The movie "Walk on Water" comes to mind. I think you might like it.

"anticipatory obedience"

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorauseilender_Gehorsam

Sadly the article only exists in German because, well, the most well known example of it is how people acted under Hitler.

I oppose ruling via violence and murder. And generally, I think coercion needs to be justified, and often can be. When a child runs into a busy street, and yelling "stop" doesn't suffice, then you grab that child to keep it from run over. That's coercion, and perfectly fine in my books. As are taxes (as a general idea, of course the corrupt ways they're often spent aren't), and many other things.

And I know I am personally responsible, feeling doesn't enter into it. I'm not religious, and nobody can take the responsibility of judging and acting from me. There is nobody to hide behind, nobody to take orders from. The buck stops with me just like it stops with you.

> Once the platform is in place, money is supposed to flow through the system without much extra effort at all.

In other words, rent-seeking behavior.

So my original comment was flagged. Why? What rules did it violate?

And "retry" what? That "all states are based on coercive violence" doesn't mean Nazi Germany and modern Sweden or Finland are essentially the same, and when someone pretends that's a good argument, that even needs rebuttal, anything I reply to that will get some further sophistry in response. Might as well say considering the heat death of the universe, the outcome of all actions is the same. Technically true, but realistically not worth my time.

> And somewhere in between those two is "don't be in the wrong place when we are rounding up people we don't like in a country we just invaded, else you might just spend 15 years in an island prison without charge, representation, or compensation."

What actually matters is that "coercive violence" ALSO applies to locking up rapists. So instead of avoiding that, tell me how there is an issue with that, as if all coercion was the same, no matter the reason or context or outcome. You can bring countless examples for violent coercion in bad faith with bad outcomes in Western democracies, but I still only need that one example to refute the idea that all coercion is the same, and equally bad. This is so trivial that it shouldn't even need mentioning, and that comment I replied to doesn't even pass the smell test.

I don't take issue with the criticism of American imperialism, but with the straw man that it's all just another Yellow Peril Cold War US thing, seeking issues where there is none to distract from domestic issues. Leica and Mercedes Benz are German companies, and they and others already kissed the ring. That won't do.

And then there is this:

> The future of the United States, and the world, rests on American-Chinese co-operation in a global society of genuine internationalism. But that is too obvious to require discussion.

But it does require discussion, it should be questioned, because the "Chinese" in that sentence isn't Chinese, it's the CCP. Another Orwell quote comes to mind:

> Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

-- George Orwell, letter to Noel Willmett (1944)

There is something that is actually worse than war. Humanity survived countless wars, it would not survive global totalitarianism, be that in one bloc or several.

Nothing of this hinges on taking me as a person seriously, at all, and that the stuff I didn't quote is hundreds of pages, and not always super exciting, is hardly an argument against what I did quote. It's just an excuse. "I could argue, but for $silly_reason I won't". Yeah no, you couldn't even if you wanted to. Prove me wrong.

I didn't mean to contrast the two with each other, but both with "disingenuous", of which they're synonyms.

Even if the US was perfectly saintly, that wouldn't change the nature of the totalitarianism of the CCP, and the ambitions that are inherent in it by necessity (since you cannot control and rewrite history without controlling the globe in some way or another).

It's also not a binary choice. The same values that require resisting oppression and violence perpetrated by US administrations, would also lead a person resist the CCP, and doing either helps with doing the other. If you have two types of cancer, you don't treat the bigger one and completely ignore the other... if there is good reason to do A, having "even more reason" to do B doesn't mean you shouldn't still do A.

> cold warrior type's fantasies of war with china

That's a straw man. My fantasy would be the Chinese people successfully fighting for change, like they tried once before they got brutally slaughtered for it. Like the people in Hong Kong are fighting. If you're going to get personal in this manner, also consider the cowardice and spinelessness of those who would rather prolong their life a little (or even just increase their bank account) by not speaking out and standing up.

Oh, you're right. But still:

"you are being deceitful" 1 result "you are being dishonest" 42 results

... if I tried them all they might add up to over 100, but still. It's hard to make the case with a few searches, maybe I shouldn't have started this ^^ It's just something I notice constantly. E.g. half of the time, "I'm not entirely sure I agree" is a sincere statement, the other half it's just "I disagree" in more words that are supposed to give an impression of depth that isn't there.

It's my translation from the first German edition of "Origins of Totalitarianism". It's on page 683.

> Wir kennen keinen vollkommenen totalitären Herrschaftsapparat, denn er würde die Beherrschung der gesamten Erde vorraussetzen. Wir wissen aber genug von den immer noch vorläufigen Experimenten totaler Organisation, um zu erkennen, daß die durchaus mögliche Vervollkommnung dieses Apparats menschliches Handeln in dem uns bekannten Sinne abschaffen würde. Handeln würde sich als überflüssig erweisen im Zusammenleben der Menschen, wenn alle Menschen zu einem Menschen, alle Individuen zu Exemplaren der Gattung, alles Tun zu Beschleunigungsgriffen in der gesetzmäßigen Bewegungsapparatur der Geschichte oder der Natur und alle Taten zu Vollstreckungen der Todesurteile geworden sind, die Geschichte und Natur ohnehin verhängt haben.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft"

Nice try, but I see the huge difference between something like "don't rape people, or we all agreed you should be locked up" and "don't mention the Tiananmen square massacre, or the unaccountable rulers will lock you up for endangering their power, or hurt your family if they can't punish you directly"

Ain't HN the king of that..

"you are being disingenuous": 110 results

"you are being stupid": 4 results

That wasn't a top level question though, it was a question to a commenter saying "We wanted to obfuscate this bit of code, to make life just a little bit harder for reverse engineers." That you obfuscate code nobody other than you can even access is completely irrelevant as a reply to that question.

What % of the money youtube makes on ads goes to artists? If I pay some random goon 5€ to listen to a song they didn't make, I am technically "paying for entertainment", but that's hardly "doing the right thing" either.

> Given that all human behavior can (very likely) be reduced to mathematical equations too

I can reduce all the music in the history of the world to the phrase "rhythm, melodies and lyrics". So? That'd say nothing about all that music, it'd just say something unflattering about me.

> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.

-- C.S. Lewis

Do you take issue with the validity of the test or are you just making observations?

> When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-- C.S. Lewis

So some grown man play acting as a fighter to help keep people's mind off anything that might improve their situation reacts with violence to being called out on it, but Stossel is the "whiny baby" doing "cutesy stuff idiots seem to like"? That's rich.

> I don't condone any violence

No, you just talk about "an open slap that most of us might slough off", and call someone a "whiny baby" for not sloughing it off.

I didn't say it's perfect, but it's surely better than it's presented by people who get nothing about it right.

> GDPR do make a lot of things cumbersome, not only if you are doing "bad" things.

That's a far cry from "they make these cookie banners necessary". Tracking people without consent on first visit is what makes them necessary. The anger is consistently misdirected at the people who violate the boundaries of others, not the law that requires consent for it.

> So let's say you have a printed list where kids and their parents signup with name and phone numbers, you should probably have a data integrity policy and someone akin to a DPO. In your small non-profit soccer club!

"We'll ask them if it's okay to store it, and once they leave the club we delete their contact information after N months." Now you have a policy. The person who does everything else, the person who is already secretary, receptionist, accountant, project manager, janitor, coach, counselor, CEO, is now also the PDO.

Human rights being trampled on with an ever increasing mesh of surveillance by big agencies and corporations as well as little informants are such gross violations, such a terrible trajectory we put society on, that mere complication and discomfort is not something that can ever trump them in my book. I would even say if you can't put food on the table without ignoring the human rights of others, just don't put food on the table -- because that's the negotiable part, while the preservation of human rights is not. We need human righs, we don't need ad-hoc low-effort soccer clubs. Like, at all. Just get a ball and some friends in that case.

> crap like GDPR (which makes basically all normal interaction cumbersome)

Only if you count "tracking users on first visit before they do anything else" as normal. Otherwise, there isn't a banner needed; sites could simply have a link to opt-in to tracking in the header or footer, and not track unless the user opts in.

This is like passing a law making it illegal to just hit people in the street, requiring you have to ask them for consent first. So most of the people who want to hit others up come up with some gish gallop that most people fall for, and then hit them.

And people bitch about the law, and claim it "makes it necessary for people to chew off the ear of other people they pass by in the streets"... with a straight face, that's what they twist it into, with an air of indignation even... and not just for a few weeks, until they read up and the initial misunderstandings are cleared up, but year in and year out, because they never read up, and the falsehoods you just posted keep getting repeated.

This wouldn't be a "distraction", this would be him owning his shit. The distraction from that is what he fills the rest of his life with.

And HN buries the thread. How surprising.

(and before someone comes out of the woodworks to punish this statement of mine in a dead thread, another HN custom: when a 2 hour thread with 7 points is on page #2, while this can't be found going several pages, then it's censored, without even the courtesy/honesty of putting [flagged] in the title)