oska

Pretty decent video released today by Wall Street Millennial that looks at the profitability of SpaceX (as part of looking at 'Terafab') :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSJi1oQFQzs

I don't know if Southern Lebanon town names were removed or never there. In either case it seems quite odd that the southern part of Lebanon has been left so void of labelling.

Perhaps the submission title could be changed just to reflect this seemingly odd paucity of town names in S. Lebanon only on Apple Maps?

This is such an excellent comment (along with SoftTalker's reply) and made me think. I've long rejected the term "intellectual property", along with the delusional/fraudulent term "artificial intelligence" (as opposed to real things like LLMs and machine learning) and "money laundering" but hadn't previously stopped to think about "identity theft". Now I have.

I believe that it's really important to consider the validity of terms that are heavily adopted and pushed around and whether you should use them yourself or call them out as intellectually vapid/dishonest.

> But then your comment history reveals enough about your intent.

This is really poor form, and against the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Financial privacy is a complicated subject, could you perhaps agree that there is a use for transparancy?

No, because I don't believe in income tax or capital gains tax. I do believe in government taxes but they should be made on land holdings (Georgism) and on corporate activities, not on individuals' financial status (their earnings & capital).

> The Government IS the public.

How can you say this (and seem to believe it)?

The Government is answerable to the public and should serve the public. But conflating the government with the public is simply bizarre, to my way of thinking.

Governments should be transparent as much as possible, yes. But that doesn't mean being necessarily transparent with sensitive information that they know about members of the public. Only with your (bizarre to me) conflation of the public with the government would this make any sense.

> asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties

Do people believe this? I certainly don't. How you behaved in your twenties is a good measure of the sort of person you are and will be for the rest of your life, albeit that you will (hopefully) mature and change some of your opinions and behaviours. So yes, you will have changed but you're also still that person you were in your twenties.

> because in 2024 their boss told them

I am not commenting on your specific example of DEI but I want to make the general point that you are always responsible for what you do, irregardless of whether you were told to do it by your boss, or commanding officer, or whatever.

So again, I don't care about the specific example you used but if something is 'in fashion' and you go along with it, including at work, then you are ultimately responsible for that choice. Because it is always a choice, including being a hard choice that results in you losing your job.

Yes, Cisco & Sun Microsystems are the better comparisons

Every organism must have an immune system which is essential to (but does not guarantee) their survival. Just the same, a society has xenophonia as its immune system. That does not make it 'bad', even though it can produce very ugly effects.

I do not agree with your expansion of xenophobia to the behaviour of a people outside their own country. I do not agree that xenophobia is objectively bad. I also do not agree that "the xenophobia of Japan was the seed for a fascist genocidal rampage" and I doubt that many, if any, historians would agree with such a simplistic assertion either.

Since you seem to have a very closed mind on this subject (i.e. xenophobia == bad, bad, bad) and further discussion seems pointless I'll leave it here.

I am very aware of the history of the Japanese with the Ainu, the native Okinawans , and in Korea and Taiwan (and in other countries, as I have said).

The broader point that I am making, outside the specific instance of the Japanese which you seem to want to fixate on, is that xenophobia can be a useful social trait, to avoid a society being overwhelmed by a foreign ingress. This could work just as well for the Ainu, the Okinawans and the Koreans (and I'm sure they exhibited it too, but unfortunately weren't in a position to act on it strongly enough to defend against colonisation/vassalisation).

I'm very aware, of course, of the horrific crimes that Japan carried out in China and other countries in the 1930s but that is not xenophobia. People going outside their country (to do whatever) are not affected by xenophobia. Xenophobia is a fear of people from outside the country, within that country.

Native cultures (however you want to define that) have always shown some curiousity and openness to visitors from outside the culture but that is balanced by some level of xenophobia too, that ramps up as people inside the culture feel that they are being overwhelmed. Both aspects of openness and shutting out are natural traits in any homogenous culture.

When xenophobia is a useful social defence :

> They were most successful in Japan, creating about 300,000 converts until their activities induced a wave of xenophobia and they were either expelled or killed.

I am immensely glad that Japan was not colonised early on like the Philippines to their south unfortunately was.

Of course there is. The whole thing is a cult, designed to pull in suckers.

Do you see Sam Bankman-Fried getting reinstated?

I don't and I see Sam Altman as a greater fraud than that (loathsome) individual. And I don't think Sam gets through the coming bubble pop without being widely exposed (and likely prosecuted) as a fraudster.

Justice should be blind

Australians might like to know he worked on rsync and Samba while a PhD student at the ANU

Yes, the GPL (by design) is what kept Linux from being embraced, extended and then extinguished

Yeah, that's cool. I loathe almost all of them too (e.g. Zuckerberg, Altman, Hoffman, Ellison, etc)

I guess what I'm saying is that when people only fixate on one oligarch, which one they mostly focus on can be quite telling.

The appropriate place to link to your website, newsletter, whatever is on your bio page (which people have to actively click into, specifically because they want to know more about you and potentially find such links).

I agree that linking to your own work in comments is generally bad form.

Not wanting to particularly defend Reddit but a controversies section on a wikipedia page is hardly a good metric, in my opinion. Wikipedia is often used to malign various entities (and protect others).

In my opinion, one of the things that most reveals a person's biases and worldview is which tech oligarchs they revere and which they loathe

To reveal my own bias / worldview, I loathe and detest Bill Gates in nearly every way and have done so for over three decades. I think he has had a massively negative impact on humanity, mainly by making the computer industry so shitty for 4+ decades but in other more controversial areas as well.

With Elon Musk, while perceiving a number of big faults in the man, I also acknowledge that he has helped advance some very beneficial technologies (like electric vehicles and battery storage). So I have a mixed opinion on him, while with Gates, he is almost all evil and has had a massive negative impact on the planet.

Let's just ignore Tesla's enormous positive health impact of replacing millions of polluting vehicles with zero emission ones

The GP comment was excellent and exactly the sort of unconventional but informed thinking (about tech) that I like to see on HN

I very much agree with your comment on an individual level (that of the individual judging the merit of information and opinion they are being presented with). I certainly take provenance into account.

However, I was talking about HN the site. I don't think news websites should (generally) discriminate against sources but the individual readers can (collectively, as with the case of HN and voting) make a judgement call and take provenance into account, including the example you give where an unlikely source makes concessions or gives validity to an argument that they would be usually opposed to.

But the main reason I raised provenance is that the internet has given small individual voices the chance to bring informed insight to the public that previously would have been without a platform. So in this particular case I don't necessarily discount some rando on Youtube making criticisms of SpaceX; they might hold at least some validity. (In this case they obviously didn't.)

> There are plenty of equally uninformed youtubers with glowing praise for SpaceX

Definitely true

> Just like the real news, people divide themselves into bubbles of whatever reinforces their beliefs

Hopefully HN can be better than that and be a place for informed criticism or informed praise from whatever provenance

Mildly interesting to be exposed to the world of 'YouTube engineers' who are derisory of the real-world engineering success of SpaceX. Informed criticism is fine but when you're just openly calling a world class engineering company 'stupid' then you deserve to be ignored (except, obviously, by everyone suffering from MDS).

Please read / reread the site guidelines

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(There's one in the In Comments section that you're in clear breach of)

What's the need for tile waterproofing ?

I had never heard of 'shopkeeper's privilege' but looked it up [1] and yes, seems to be a real thing in the United States and nowhere else, according to a quick scan of that wiki article.

More evidence to me that the US was set up to serve corporatist interests over pretty much everything (and everyone) else. Why else provide shopkeepers with some special legal status? (Which again, they don't have in any other country.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper%27s_privilege