rjf72

When a public figure makes a negative statement against a group or individual in modern times, it's generally a carefully calculated political play that's about as authentic as you'd expect of a politician. Because of this, even when their statement is wrong (and it often is) they'll simply double down on stupid. His rapid followup visit, let alone his public acknowledgement that he was incorrect were major indicators that he's authentic.

And this is a big deal because he is not only the most ambitious administrator NASA has had quite a long time but also the most politically capable. And that leaves me highly optimistic for the future of NASA. Bolden (the previous administrator) was everything you want on paper, but in practice he lacked both ambition and political skill. I've no doubt he very much had a love for space and technology, but he simply didn't have the toolkit to make it matter. As a result of this NASA ended up achieving little more than inertial progress for 8 years.

Had no idea [head of NASA] Bridenstine had visited SpaceX. This is really cool. Here [1] is a video Q/A with Musk, Bridenstine, and the two astronauts who will fly on the first commercial crew shuttle that he (Bridenstine) streamed.

For those unaware of the backstory there Musk recently had a major reveal of SpaceX's StarShip program. Bridenstine made a pretty direct jab the night before saying "I am looking forward to the SpaceX announcement tomorrow. In the meantime, Commercial Crew is years behind schedule. NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It's time to deliver." [2]

That was generally not so well received, since SpaceX is engaged in Commercial Crew (the program to get astronauts to the ISS on commercial launches) but so is Boeing. And SpaceX is substantially far ahead of Boeing on this front. So it felt like a partisan and biased sleight since Boeing, who went unmentioned, has substantially more political influence and clout.

In the Q/A Bridenstine acknowledged he was not really correct on his assumption, which makes me like this guy even more (as he does genuinely seem heavily driven to get the American space program back on track) - even if I think he should have figured this out before racing to publicly Tweet. Looks like he genuinely wants to get Commercial Crew going ASAP and was worried that SpaceX was putting it on the backburner since StarShip is also a really big and extremely ambitious program being done at the same that as Commercial Crew.

[1] - https://www.pscp.tv/w/1OyKAengZAMKb

[2] - https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/117771110630074777...

In the end I think this isn't going to just apply to speech but many facets of modern life that are increasingly controlled by companies instead of governments.

For example within 10 days of Wikileaks publishing 'cablegate' back in 2010, Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, and Western Union all blocked donations to the site. [1] This effectively destroyed nearly all of their funding. As we've reached an era where a variety of absolutely critical industries are completely or near completely monopolized, it means that things like the first amendment are much less meaningful. If the government wanted to ban some form of speech, all they need to do is to make a call to a handful of companies and, like that, they've banned > 90% of discussion of it. And from the company's perspectives, they can agree to cooperate and expect rich rewards and favorable treatment from the government in the future, or they can refuse to no real gain and end up facing the full fury of an incredibly far-reaching government.

Perhaps one of the many reasons that the founding fathers were so obsessed with keeping governments small and relatively weak. This power of coercion is in some ways even more dangerous than any law that might be passed since it can often effect the exact same end while keeping most of the public generally uninformed.

[1] - https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html

Here is the video [1] with complete context. Unfortunately I've yet to find a complete translated transcript. But from what I've read (from potentially unreliable sources) the casters said 'Go ahead and say those 8 words and we'll wrap up here. There's nothing else to talk about. Let's lower our heads.' He then said 'Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time' while wearing a gas mask. Guessing that's 8 words in Mandarin. They then laugh and clap.

This is actually the thing that most frustrates me about these protests and issue in general. Finding complete, in context, recordings of the critical events is so incredibly difficult. This makes no sense since we are now in an era where everything is on camera from 500 different angles. But it is what it is. And of course providing in context video gets downvoted, because it makes the issues look less black and white. But that to me is the clearest example of idiocracy. We should not seek to create Hollywood villains and heroes in how things are presented. People should make judgments based on reality which, almost invariably, is more of a million shades of gray rather than good vs evil, right vs wrong.

[1] - https://youtu.be/KyxO0Ea1_kM?t=2152

That I can explain. The world tide is currently shifting - gaming just happens to be one very clear example of it. China, for instance, literally has more gamers than the US has citizens. [1](2014) The US market is still #1 in terms of revenue, but that's ending imminently - literally perhaps next year. We're currently at $36.87bn compared to China's $36.54bn. [2] And that's with an untapped market of hundreds of millions in China. And their rapid economic growth means all players, new and old, are going to be able and willing to spend more money. Within the next two decades, the US gaming market will likely be a fraction of the Chinese market.

This creates an interesting little micro-paradox. Customers in the US claiming they will boycott Blizzard over this situation are precisely why Blizzard is motivated to act in this fashion. Because there would be a mirror situation in China with a vastly larger customer base acting in an equal but opposite fashion. Until people (around the world) can accept individuals behaving in a way they find deplorable, we're only going to end up in a world where the biggest wins. And as the geopolitical status quo changes, that's no longer simply synonymous with USA or even the west in general.

This is one of the many reasons I think the trend of 'free speech is only the government' is so incredibly myopic. People don't consider that the views they support will inevitably also come under fire from the powers that be - and they'll rapidly find themselves facing silencing and censorship with no recourse. Free speech is a value, not an amendment. Dismissing this because it's convenient is something that will only come back to haunt people as the tides shift, which they inevitably do. We should base our values on a system of ethos, not whichever chain of often contradictory positions we think will work as a means to achieve whatever ends we think we're going to get.

[1] - https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-number-of-chinese-game...

[2] - https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-10-countries-by-gam...

When you expose yourself to different news sources it also makes clear who is engaging in propaganda. It's only by comparing the information provided by various nations that one can clearly see who is manipulating the available information to push an agenda.

One extremely contemporary example of this is Hong Kong. In trying to find out what was going on, I was searching for videos of the police shootings. This [1] is the US cut of the first shooting. This [2] is footage of the exact same incident from ChannelNewsAsia, a Singapore news company. No need for commentary beyond that since I think the extreme difference between the videos, and the message they try to convey, speak for themselves.

I'd never heard of CNA before that. Seems to be quite a solid source of information [3]. Though I expect it may only a matter of time before that honeymoon fades. It wasn't long ago that I also used to think the same of Reuters.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-anniversary-hongkon...

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN4MvOrPotk

[3] - https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/international

Would self determination not be reflected by approval of one's government? Presumably one is going to have a sense of greater self determination and government satisfaction if they feel that their government is pursuing their interests, and vice versa otherwise.

Harvard carried out a study involving a survey polling people across 30 different nations on a variety of different topics. [1] This includes (among various other more detailed categories) peoples' awareness of various world leaders, their self determined attention rate to news involving various leaders, and their general rating of those leaders. It reveals quite a lot of really interesting and surprising results. For instance about 88% of Americans do not know who Modi is, 85% of Saudis do not know who Putin is, but coming out on top is Israel which sports a less than 5% awareness of Modi. A number of the results really reveal how much of a bubble we all live in.

But the reason it's relevant is because it gives some third party measurement of how people within various countries view their country's leaders. As with all big data like this, people can prove anything they want - so I'm going to avoid giving any more specific numbers other than the neutral ones from above. Okay one more fun one, Tanzania just friggin loves everybody!

[1] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/reflections-survey-...

> Or look at the video preceding this incident, and you'll see that the officers ran ahead of their group, and the kids confronting them were not looking at their phones because they were busy trying not to get shot.

Are you saying this video is taken out of context? Please do share any available video evidence. I assure you I tried quite hard to try to find more and this all I came up with! This is the thing that most confuses me about these protests. They are, by far, the most widely recorded protests in a developed nation - yet lengthy in context footage of the critical events events is surprisingly difficult to come by. Instead we just get snippets taken out of context that can be framed to show anything you want to show.

For instance this [1] is Reuters reporting of this video entitled "Dramatic footage captures moment when Hong Kong protester was shot." It strips out absolutely all context and splices the video together in a way that even makes it seem like it's an officer charging a protester who is simply trying to defend himself from an officer drawing a gun. It then includes clips from a police statement which, without the context of what that conflict was about, paired with the selected footage they provided sounds comically absurd.

This is absolutely propaganda, and quite ham handed propaganda at that. But of course there is also extensive propaganda coming from the Chinese side as well. It makes it all extremely difficult to have any clue of what is really happening. If you have any recommendations whatsoever on lengthy uninterrupted film footage on these events, I am absolutely all ears.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-anniversary-hongkon...

This [1] is the video of the first shooting in the Hong Kong protests - reasonably safe for life for anybody who has not seen it. Something I didn't understand when I first saw the video is how the protesters were able to do what they do. An armed group of protesters moved rapidly towards their target, and manage to ambush him around a blind corner. Their target was a single police officer that seems to have temporarily become separated from other officers. The protesters seemed to know this and all immediately set upon him.

You could make an argument that somehow they used some other technology to carry out their attack, but I'm not sure how much weight it'd have beyond the fact that no we don't have video (to my knowledge) of one of those guys explicitly opening and looking at the app to find the target. In any case, it certainly refutes the argument that no protesters have managed to catch the police by surprise or ambush them - because that is exactly what happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN4MvOrPotk

US dependency on Saudi Arabia is not just about our access to their oil. Due to quite prescient agreements dating back all the way to 1974 is the reason that Saudi Arabia, to this day, only sells oil in the dollar. [1] We made them a deal that seemed too good to be true. They simply sell their oil in the dollar (and only the dollar) while investing any surplus resources in US treasuries, and we'll provide them with military aid and equipment. Essentially getting a free military alliance with the strongest military power in the world in exchange for nothing.

Of course it's not nothing. Imagine we do things some might consider a bit dubious. Perhaps accepting the running of a deficit in the trillions of dollars, or injecting trillions of dollars into the economy and calling the resultant price inflation growth. The natural consequences of these sort of actions are things such as inflation and a weakened dollar on the international scene.

But now here's the interesting thing. Imagine we do create inflation or weaken the dollar and so there is a surplus of USD in circulation and things start to increase in price. And now imagine a country wants to go buy oil from Saudi Arabia ( though now a days, it's not just Saudi Arabia but the majority of oil producing nations ). The first thing they need to do is accumulate the USD. And since they're getting less oil for the same USD (due to said inflation and/or a weakened USD) they need to take even more USD out of circulation than usual. They then go buy their oil. Saudi Arabia then ends up using that USD to secretly buy US treasuries. That money is now back in the hands of the government and out of circulation and, like magic, the inflation and/or weakening of the dollar starts to revert.

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This was an extremely clever strategy. This is why things like China and/or Russia increasingly becoming buddy buddy with Saudi Arabia is such a big deal. It's also why Saudi Arabia can get away with practically, if not literally, anything (so long as they keep on the petrodollar agreement). But the petrodollar also ended up creating a bit of a funny relationship. We thought we were using Saudi Arabia, but ultimately we ended up dependent on them as our economic behavior took them for a given. So we now have the nation with the largest military force in world and the largest economy in the world behaving in an oddly deferent way to one little nation in the Mideast.

So I do fully agree with you - the next 20-30 years are going to be incredibly interesting. But not just for Saudi Arabia. The interplay between oil, economic power, and all of these other major issues (let alone huge wildcards like space) mean we're in for one terrifically unpredictable and interesting future.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untol...

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/27/saudi-arabia...

Haven't you found it interesting that all of our media coverage has provided an extensive amount of coverage of the protesters, but almost nothing about the context of people outside of the protest? What percent of people support the protests? What are the average views on it? How has their day to day life changed if at all? Are they in support or against the transition to violence? So forth and so on. An immense amount of potential reporting material there, but it seems be being almost entirely neglected. "Almost" is a weasel word -- I'm not really able to find anything meaningful at all.

This seems odd. Like you, I'm not terribly fond of anecdotal evidence, so I went searching for some way to try to gauge what people might be thinking. One thing I came upon was this [1] survey from 2016 which was carried out following the protests of 2015. One of the questions that was asked was whether or not Hong Kongers would be in favor of separating from China once the "one country, two systems" agreement ends in 2047. If there is any bias in their numbers, one would expect it to err on the side of Hong Kong given the institution that carried it out. [2]

Only 17.4% of people said yes, 22.9% were ambivalent, and 57.6% were somewhat/strongly against it. I wonder what percent of the protesters are in that 17.4%? What are the views of the 82.6%? Why aren't these questions being asked, let alone answered, by our media? Whatever the case, it seems very safe to say that the vast majority of people in Hong Kong do not see the China as having an "oppressive authoritarian" government. And I think it goes without saying that views towards their government are going to be even more favorable in the mainland. So no you're not just talking about the Chinese government - you are talking about the Chinese people.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-china-survey-idU...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_University_of_Hong_Kon...

Let's imagine that this issue did not exist, if you can. And let's further posit an acceptance of companies advocating for some set of values, as you have. Now whose values do you think it would make most sense for companies to advocate for? Employees, management, chief executive, the board, customers, somebody else? Perhaps this is a bad assumption but I would assume the vast majority of people would say they should stand for their customers, if for no other reason than the fact that a company cannot exist without its customers - and so pleasing them (and keeping them) is always priority #1.

And this is where things get tricky. For decades, the entire life of many of us, the US has been dominant over the entire world. But that dominance is ending. Gaming is just one particularly clear example. China, for instance, literally has more gamers than the US has citizens. [1](2014) And while the US market is still #1 in terms of revenue, that's ending imminently - literally perhaps next year. We're currently at $36.87bn compared to China's $36.54bn. [2] And that's with an untapped market of hundreds of millions in China. And their rapid economic growth means all players, new and old, are going to be able and willing to spend more money. Within the next two decades, the US gaming market will likely be a fraction of the Chinese market.

That creates an interesting little micro-paradox in this situation. Customers in the US claiming they will boycott Blizzard over this situation are precisely why Blizzard is motivated to act in this fashion. Because there would be a mirror situation in China with a much larger customer base. Until people (around the world) can accept individuals behaving in a way they find deplorable, we're only going to end up in a world where the biggest wins. And as the geopolitical status quo changes, that's no longer simply synonymous with USA.

[1] - https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-number-of-chinese-game...

[2] - https://newzoo.com/insights/rankings/top-10-countries-by-gam...

I expect it's the same reason that the quality of discourse on the internet as a whole, including the English Wiki, has really quite deteriorated. On the Chinese Wiki there's a tremendous intellectual barrier to entry - being able to read/write Chinese. This is not to say that China (as the largest source of people able to read/write Chinese) is not full of 'less academically inclined' individuals, exactly as any other nation, but the percent of those individuals that are in any way involved with Wiki is going to be extremely close to 0.

The entire internet itself used to have a similar barrier to entry in that it wasn't something that 'normal' people 'did.' And so you had a relatively small group of generally 'more academically inclined' individuals mostly just engaging with one another. But as you opened the flood gates the 'newcomers' gradually became the majority and the internet was completely reshaped in their image. So compare, for instance, old newsgroup archives to e.g. Twitter or Facebook. Makes it quite easy to lose faith in society. In my case it simply led to me tossing aside any notion of tabula rasa.

But the point of this is that I don't think individuals who are 'more academically inclined' are the sort to sit around wasting hours, days, years edit warring and effectively trolling one another. They can accept different views, values, and also correct themselves when they discover they had a poorly formulated view. Wikipedia entered the game early enough that the internet hadn't gone completely to the 'less academically inclined', and so it had some time to grow. In today's environment Wiki, from scratch, would be simply impossible. By contrast, the Chinese Wiki gets to party like its 1992.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

1957 is an interesting year. In the United States that's the year that Control Data Corporation was formed in the US. Seymour Cray, the namesake of cray supercomputers, would join it a year later and would go on towards the rapid process of turning what were glorified room-sized calculators into the computers that we now take for granted and that would rapidly take over all forms of technological development. In China that was the year that Mao Zedong would begin to try to implement socialism in China. Over the years that followed tens of millions of Chinese would literally starve to death.

Over the next decade to 1969 Mao would start his 'Cultural Revolution' which would see millions of Chinese 'purged', one way or the other, extensive class warfare, and the destruction of undesirable elements referencing their cultural and religious past. By contrast in the US in 1969 we would put the first man on the moon. In 1976 Mao would die and end up, after a brief power struggle, being replaced by Deng Xiaoping in 1982. He opened China to foreign investment and rapidly transitioned China to a system more driven by free market economics that persists to this day.

In the two decades from 1960 to 1980 China's economy grew about 165%. In the twenty years from 1980 to 2000, it grew 555%. In the twenty years from 1998 to 2018 it grew 465%.

In the two decades from 1960 to 1980 the US economy grew about 111%. In the twenty years from 1980 to 2000, it grew 95%. In the twenty years from 1998 to 2018 it grew 45%.

The only reason 1960 to 1980 in China looks not as awful as it was is because of rapid population growth, mass starvations notwithstanding.

---

Historically China was a world leader in technology. Wiki has a list of Chinese inventions which you can compare and contrast to their western counterparts in time, method, and source [1]. In modern times they made some bad decisions and at some of the worst possible times. Of course this should make you ask (as it did me) what about the mid ages? The period of time after Chinese tech supremacy but before the modern era? This [2] article offers an interesting argument that seems quite compelling.

One of the big differences is that China was a unified and stable empire. By contrast Europe was a chaotic land of never ending conquest and war. And periods of stability always had an underlying tension of imminent war. This competition and lack of unification within Europe meant that inventors, scholars, and others were free to do as they felt. If one country doesn't like what you're doing and declares you a heathen or other naughty word, so what? Move 100 miles and you're now in another country that's happy to go against the desires of the other country if not only because it's that other country!

China wanted stability and security. Europe wanted progress. It's interesting the compare and contrast this to modern times. No single answer fits clearly, but it's certain that times have changed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_inventions

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/28/why-t...

The problem with this is that context matters. I think we'd probably agree that the most conservative requirement for somebody to discharge a weapon is when he has a reasonable reason to believe his life, or the life of another person, is in danger. So what were the contexts of the shootings? Were they arbitrary, unjustified? Or did the officers have some reasonable justification in fearing for their lives or the lives of others?

Fortunately, unlike in times past, we don't need to rely on hearsay or propaganda. Everybody has their camera out and we can see what's happening, at least most of the time. This [1] is the video of the first shooting. And this [2] is the video of the second and, to my knowledge, final shooting. Do you feel the officers acted disproportionately, abusively, or in an otherwise inappropriate fashion?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN4MvOrPotk

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHKbe5mAoNo

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For those concerned the videos are mostly safe-for-life in what is depicted, even if it is somewhat unsettling.

To understand the issue (and any issue for that matter) I think it's important to make an effort to try to see things from perspectives outside your own frame of reference. There are 1.4 billion Chinese, the vast majority of whom see what we frame as democratic protests, as unlawful acts of arbitrary destruction and now increasingly often - violence as well. And they too are framing the violence as increasingly racial/cultural. For instance mainlanders tend to speak Mandarin. Hong Kongers tend to speak Cantonese. Guess whose property is getting disproportionately destroyed. And as these protests are turning increasingly violent, it's easy to see where that is and will continue to be focused as well.

Even within Hong Kong there seems to be no reliable information available on aggregate views. The only poll I can find, potentially of dubious reliability, is from 2016. [1] And in that poll, the vast majority of those living within Hong Kong were against separating from China once the 'one country, two systems' agreement expires, in 2047. Only 17.4% supported independence from China even when it was just in theory and 2 decades away. What percent of the protesters are within that 17.4%, and what are the views of the 82.6% on these protests? These seem like important questions that are going unasked, let alone answered by our media and reporting. Whatever the exact numbers may be, there are a lot of people who are very much against whatever you want to call what is happening in Hong Kong. This isn't just a scenario of "good guys" vs "authoritarian government." Its large groups of people who feel very different about the same situation.

Of course you will reference propaganda and I fully agree with you. But there too I am left to wonder something. Take the average Chinese who relies on his regular sources of information for news. And now take the average American who similarly relies on his regular sources of news for information. Who would be able to provide a more accurate response to factual queries on the protests, Hong Kong's relationship with China, and the views/values/etc of those within and without the protest group? Similarly, do you think that, for instance, the New York Times has provided accurate and objective reporting on this topic? Or do you think that their reporting and presentation is attempting to present this story from a distinctly prejudiced angle?

Something that I think social media has masked for many people today is that our own views are not "THE" moral imperative for the world. In fact they, regardless of what they are, tend to be quite obscure when contrasted against the world at large. Step outside the anglosphere and it's amazing how insane we are starting to look from the outside. Or perhaps we always looked this way, but by living inside the bubble for so many years I was equally a part of the insanity.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-china-survey-idU...

> I bet most people that have eaten a hamburger have never pet a cow.

Given that most Americans have definitely never pet a cow, and I'd go as far as to propose most have probably never even seen a cow in person, that's probably a very safe wager. But what percent of people that have pet a cow, would you wager also do eat beef?

As an indirect response to this, if you'd like to see impartial predictions for the next election - turn to Vegas [1]. People betting have a financial incentive, not a political one - so it tends to be a great way to avoid potential bias. If you're not familiar with betting terminology something like "+110" (current odds on Trump) means if you bet $100, you will win $110 in profit. By contrast something like -450 (Clinton's odds on the morning of the election in 2016) means you need to bet $450 to win $100 in profit.

So the smaller a number, the more likely it is to happen. Factored into this is going to be a bit of juice. Trump's currently on +110 so Vegas is saying the next election is basically a coin flip. For an example of this revealing things that regular polls might not, it's also showing that Biden is a pretty sizable dog to Warren (+550 vs +375).

You can now use these numbers to see how close your predictions come to what the market is suggesting. So for instance let's imagine you think Trump has a 50% chance of winning. What would be your expected value if you bet $100 on this? It's: 0.5 * -$100 + 0.5 * $110 = $5. So you have expected value there of a 5% gain, so you're slightly more optimistic than Vegas - though once you factor in the juice/vig/'tax' it's about even.

Now let's imagine that you think Biden or Warren stand a 60% chance of winning (30% a piece) with 40% for Trump, and so you put $100 on each of them. We can again work out the math. 0.4 * -$200 + 0.3 * $550 + 0.3 * $375 = $197.5. That means that if your expectation is accurate, you would have an expected value of doubling any wager. So you are going pretty far away from what the market thinks, and if you believe this to be objectively accurate - it'd be a terrific wagering opportunity.

[1] - http://www.lasvegassportsbetting.com/2020-US-Presidential-El...

This insanity started much earlier than that. For one extreme example see executive order 6102 [1]. In 1933 FDR passed an executive order that made it a criminal act for Americans to possess any private gold coins, bullion, or certificated ownership. They were required to turn over all their gold to the government in exchange for about $400 per ounce in inflation adjusted prices. Refusing to do so was punishable by up to a $194,000 fine and ten years in prison. And this was topped off by the "gold reserve act" [2] passed the following year which let the government artificially set the price of gold. FDR chose a 75% increase.

Makes modern executive orders look downright tame by comparison, and this is from a president that would go down extremely positively in history.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Reserve_Act

This article discusses a very interesting, and surprising, study on political correctness. [1]

The paper found that Americans' views could be typified into three major groups. About 25% are traditional or devoted conservatives, 8% are progressive activists, and the other 67% are an "exhausted majority." The exhausted majority was typified as Americans who don't belong to either extreme, and "share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation."

And most of everybody had a disdain for political correctness that transcends politics, race, and even age. The following think political correctness is a problem in the country:

- 80% of the general population

- 74% of those aged 24-29

- 79% of those under age 24

- 75% of blacks

- 79% of whites

- 82% of Asians

- 87% of Hispanics

- 88% of American Indians

There's a reasonable argument that perhaps people don't agree on what "political correctness" means, and indeed the poll part of the study did not define it for participants. However, the study engaged in various focus groups as well as individual interviews and found that individuals were "concerned about their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them."

The reason this is important is that a lot of the political correctness stuff is carried out in domains that are in no way, shape, or form representative of the general population of America. This [2] poll from Pew lays out social media usage in the US. Twitter is a good, and surprising example. Only 22% of Americans use Twitter. And of those that do, 58% use it less often than once per day. Yet I think it goes without saying that our 8% from above are nearly all on Twitter and using it constantly. This results in an extremely misleading image of American society in general if you go in with the assumption that platforms like Twitter are even vaguely representative.

The point of this is that cancel culture not American culture. It's something propagated by a vocal minority on deeply unrepresentative platforms. By contrast South Park has been an American institution for more than two decades. And it continues to draw millions of viewers per episode. Cancel culture largely targets individuals who are unable to defend themselves or those for whom the "progressive activist" group makes up a significant share of their potential influence. For South Park, this couldn't be further from the case.

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...

[2] - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...

There are specific reasons for the things you're talking about.

For Antarctica (which is not the Arctic, but I assume what you meant - Scandinavia is quite self sustaining!) you have the Antarctic Treaty System. [1] The TL/DR there is that pretty much every form of development in Antarctica is illegal, and you're not allowed to leave any waste whatsoever. When an antarctic researcher is on a mission, they're required to bottle up their feces/urine and bring it back to base. The urine is processed and then returned to the sea. Feces are generally returned to the host nation for local removal. Mining and other industry is expressly prohibited.

But something even more interesting is comparing Antarctica to Mars, even ignoring the treaty system. Mars has two big things going against it: radiation, and a negligible atmosphere. That means you need to limit your exposure outside, and when you do go outside it needs to be with appropriate equipment and clothing. Of course the exact same requirements also hold true of Antarctica, though to a lesser degree.

But it also has quite a lot of things going for it. Mars day/night cycle is identical to Earth and it even has near identical seasons owing to a near identical tilt. Antarctica, by contrast, has what is basically a 6 month long day/night cycle. And the weather is absolutely vicious. There are genuinely violent snowstorms, as well as temperatures that average -30F, and much lower on the inner areas away from the coasts. By contrast temperatures on Mars (depending on what part of the planet you're on, and when) can get right balmy. Summer on the equator? It gets up to about 70F, though the nights are still extremely cold owing to no atmosphere.

But the snow storm part is one of the more interesting comparisons. Maybe the biggest thing is "The Martian." The key plot event there was a terrible sand storm on Mars ravaged their base and setup the plot for the rest of the film/movie. The Martian itself is a hard sci-fi book. This is one of the very few things that was intentionally faked. The worst sandstorm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze owing to the negligible atmospheric pressure. Think about that - a hard sci-fi book had to resort to fantasy to create a meaningful disaster!

There's a lot more to say/compare as well, but this is already getting a bit too long. Suffice to say, these issues are extremely counter-intuitive, but also extremely interesting to explore!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System

You have to try to see things from their perspective. Any option they could choose is going to be bad, so they're incentivized to choose what they perceive to be the least negative one. Sexual/gender groups tend to be hyper active on social media and organization - they are also extremely vigilant in trying to socially damage any perceived enemies. Had Stack Exchange chosen to not act they would likely be facing an angry mob of people who are hyper active on social media hounding them about not being inclusive, engaging in [--]phobia, bigotry, etc.

They probably simply felt that firing one moderator was easier than dealing with what was likely to become a deluge of public relations damage if they did nothing. Depending upon the laws in New York, there would even be the potential of them facing discrimination or other lawsuits. Regardless of the merit of the claims, it would be enough to severely hurt the company. For instance see Ellen Pao vs Kleiner Perkins. Even though she decisively lost every single claim, their company's name and image was dragged through the mud for months in many major media outlets that draw tech oriented readership. And that's a company that doesn't, in the same way, rely on general populace brand value.

The solution, like many things, is to never put yourself in this position to begin with. And that starts with paying for your labor.

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As for the mod selection process itself, it's the same thing everywhere. In general moderators are hired from the community. The problem is the people you don't want to be mods are the ones that'd be most interested in such a position, whereas the people you do want are generally not going to be willing to do it without compensation. There are some exceptions of course, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that they are indeed the exception.

He's referring to something in specific that many people do not consider. Most of our money is not printed, but created by fractional reserve systems through debt. Banks in general are only required to hold 10% of their deposits on hand. The rest can be lent/invested. If there's a run on the bank they rely on a central bank to give them money to cover it. Most people know this stuff, but consider this:

- Bob deposits $100 of 'real' money at a bank.

- Joe takes out a loan of $90 and uses it to buy something from Jane.

- Jane deposits $90 at the bank.

- Mike takes out a loan of $81 ...

And this process recurses on downward with a smaller and smaller share each time. But the mathematical result of this is that $100 of "real" deposits ends up creating $1000 of debt. And that's before interest which, for long term loans, can be multiplicative. So $100 of "real" money may end up creating thousands of dollars of debt. We've created a system where banks end up, quite rapidly, being owed literally more money than exists. Great time to be a banker for sure.

This is why the Fed and other financial entities are so obsessed with inflation. Inflation makes everything more expensive in the present, but it also reduces the cost of loans from the past. Imagine I take out a loan for $1000 and somehow the next day we see 100% inflation. Well now my loan can be paid back with only $500 of 'value' as measured from the time I took out the loan. If inflation is higher than the interest rate on my loan, I actually earn money by not repaying it. By contrast, deflation makes older loans more expensive. And of course there is also the investment outlook. Inflation is a penalty on wealth. If there's 2% inflation per year, my billion dollar piggy bank becomes worth ~$20 million less each year. So I'm incentivized to invest actively. By contrast with deflation I can sit on my money and become relatively richer by the day.

But this also puts us on a roller coaster. Old debt is only paid off with new debt which will only be paid off with new debt which ... And the money definitely does trickle downward, but at the same time it gushes upward. And the ride keeps going faster, and growing bigger. Not hard to imagine a different system as ours is grossly counter intuitive. Of course different doesn't mean better so, as a recurring theme in human history, we're only like to change once things go boom.

It seems all sites that rely on free labor for moderation end up with similar sorts of problems. Moderation is time consuming, tedious, and thankless work when done well. Who wants to spend hours doing this each day without any financial incentive? You end up getting folks attracted to having some degree of power over people, or ability to enforce or espouse their own views/values/ideologies, and so on. But all of these motivations are completely antithetical to what the position 'ought' be about - which is essentially a digital janitor.

Pay moderators and the problem goes away since you now attract a pretty normal pool of people whose motivations might be earning a buck, or career advancement. I think we can see that clearly enough here where it's self evident that the moderators are paid. The problem of course is imagine a larger site wants 100 moderators. OK, you can get 100 people who are going to do a mixed job at best, but for free. Or you can pay $3,000,000 a year for the same team. Most companies? Easy decision. That's a $3 million executive bonus right there!

Brave is fully open source. [1]

Brave's model is to try to remove the coercion from advertising. Right now most companies are spending immense amounts of efforts spying on your and then trying to shove ads at you, and fighting every effort to block those ads or to avoid their spying. Brave's model is instead to try to create a more cooperative system. You view ads if and only if you want. The motivations they give you for this is to support the sites you like while also getting a little kickback yourself.

Somewhat analogous business models have failed, repeatedly, in things such as 'socialism restaurants' that tried to operate on a pay-what-you-can scheme since enough people opted out (by paying $0) to make it a losing venture. But I think it's something that will likely succeed here since the purchase price is always $0 - you're paying with attention, not money. Hahah, perhaps one of these socialism restaurants could actually work if they also provided a "free" pay method such as watching an ad!

[1] - https://github.com/brave/

As one aside on the flat Earth stuff, I think something that people do not really consider is scale. There's always going to be people that are a bit off the cusp, some intentionally and some not. So hoping for 100% on most of anything is never going to happen. So let's imagine 99.9% of Americans think the world is spherical, or oval, or whatever - not flat.

That is really really good. Yet, take that 0.1% to scale. In America alone that would mean that you have 330,000 people that think the Earth is flat. On Facebook scale (2.5 billion monthly average users) that'd be all the way up to 2.5 million people. And thanks to the internet people with 'eccentric' views are more capable than ever of joining up with other people with such views. And people with these views tend to be very strongly inclined to do just that, alongside also trying to evangelize their views so much as they can - because they think they know something other people do not.

This effect creates a deeply misleading image of the relative popularity of various views and values. Can you imagine a Facebook group with millions of people who genuinely think the Earth is flat, and many people popping their head up in various locations to advocate for such a view? You could have that, yet it be the case that 99.9% of people do not feel that way.

Scale is a hell of a thing. And given the increasing size of various platforms, you're always going to see what you perceive to be large numbers of people with rather peculiar views and values. It in no way suggests there are actually large numbers of people with these views and values. The social media paradox stands head and shoulders above that relatively petty birthday paradox.

Advocating to join a terrorist organization, or providing support for such, is illegal. Believing or saying stupid things is generally not illegal. Equating the two is nonsensical both from an intuitive and legal stance.

I also think 'whataboutism' is critical to maintain logic consistency and try to avoid bias. For instance imagine I dislike group X, and and I use a condemnation of action A (which they engage in) as part of the justification for that dislike. If my condemnation of A is valid and genuine supportive evidence of my rationale for disliking X then A should be bad in contexts other than when X is engaging in it.

And so comparing A when done by actors other than X is absolutely critical in determining whether it's actually indeed a bad action, or whether I'm simply clouded by bias and calling it bad because of my dislike of X.

In searching Google Trends it's somewhat unsurprising to find that 'whataboutism' as a term didn't even really exist until around 2017 [1] when partisan driven bias and antagonism started to exponentially skyrocket. It's quite an insidious term since it helps deflect potentially logical critique of irrational views, but has a paradoxical connotation of legitimacy and intellectual authenticity.

[1] - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=w...

This argument doesn't really work. I think the clearest example of this is Mars, Hershey, Nestle.

These companies are, at the minimum, complicit in literal child slavery in the production of their chocolate. [1] This gets a piece run in the mainstream news once every couple of years or so. People express shock and awe, vow to boycott the companies, come up with some neat slogans or hashtags and all that. A few days after the next outrageous news piece comes up, it's a distant memory. And that's over something that's like comic book villain black and white bad, or in other words that there is going to be nothing but quite strong derision for that situation.

Hershey and Nestle are showing record breaking stock prices. Mars is private, but it's safe to assume the same.

The same is true of most topics now a days. The vast majority of activism is not driven by individual initiative, but by media attention. That means when the media spotlight fades, so does interest in the topic. In this particular case, the revelation of PRISM [2] (of which Apple, Google, and all major US tech providers are a part of) reshaped my entire perspective of the world and of these companies. Ask yourself why these companies would participate in such a program. For many, it's now just a distant memory - and you even have people now arguing that PRISM couldn't have been that bad. After all, the media isn't even talking about it anymore.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/business/hershe...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...

Everything makes a lot more sense if you don't look at advertiser decisions as moral ones, but rather as economic ones.

LGBT is laden with a number of controversial and polarizing issues. This means something that is advertising on a video where this is a meaningful focus, whether positive or negative, may result in controversy. And advertisers can't win in controversy. If they withdraw advertising, one group is pissed. If they don't withdraw advertising, another group is pissed. So they see it in their best interest to avoid controversy altogether simply as a means of maximizing their economic return.

And so you get the end result - advertisers are drawn to bland and inoffensive content. I'd hypothesize this also goes some way towards explaining the deterioration of music which went from invariable social commentary tied to the issues of the day to a million different versions of 'oh baby i love you' as the top tracks. Dylan to Bieber in 40 years. What progress...