tertiary

The fact that HN is set up to prevent flamewars and IMHO has been able to hold calm and reasoned discussion on politics in the past is all the more reason we should be talking about it here.

That's probably part of the problem. Anybody can just sit around flagging content with a low karma threshold and much fewer people are allowed to vouch back. It's the exact opposite of the downvote threshold on here which is designed to keep people from just killing off opinions they disagree with.

It's pretty ridiculous, especially for a website that pushes free speech so much as its guiding principles. The information is clearly "of interest to a hacker" by just how many people are upvoting the articles and how relevant it is to the US election in literally weeks.

It stinks that people can just flag away facts that make them uncomfortable like this. It's kind of abuse of the flagging system IMO.

Posting here too:

For comparison, President Trump payed $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. I just looked it up and I, a graduate student who makes like $30k a year paid three times that amount last year.

For reference, President Trump payed $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. I just looked it up and I, a graduate student who makes like $30k a year paid three times that amount last year.

This is crazy. Another version of this article has nearly 50 points in half an hour and isn't even in the first 200 listings on the front page because of people flagging it. We are like weeks out from the US election and this information is important for anyone trying to stay informed (as evidenced by the shear number of people voting it up).

There's something broken here when you can just flag away any facts that you are uncomfortable with and pretend that they don't exist. I've already vouched the article back from the dead. But this is ridiculous for a website which claims one of its core principle to be libertarian style free speech.

For reference, I just looked it up and I, a graduate student who makes like $30k a year paid three times that amount last year.

Not really clear how they would solve bottleneck problems for memory access. But, still nice to see growing competition in the CPU space. No matter what, that should benefit consumers.

Doctors are just there to give you the best evidence based advice to help you with your medical problems. They work with patients that believe vaccines cause autism and manage to do it professionally and without abusing them or forcing them to convert to their beliefs even when they are making decisions that aren't backed up by facts.

Doctors don't treat people differently based on that patient's political identity and doctors don't disclose their own politics to a patient. Medicine has a massive oversight structure and they would lose their license if they made decisions because of who a person votes for.

Abuse is also not relative depending on who you vote for. There is abuse behavior and non-abusive behavior not left behavior and right behavior. Professionals like doctors only make decisions based on the best available evidence and separate their political beliefs from what science says.

> Congress has consistently cut funding for the IRS for years and years

I just want to clarify that de-funding the IRS doesn't have universal support in congress and is actually a partisan policy. I'm guessing you know that and are just toning it down to be less politically offensive on HN.

However, this is an important distinction and not for the sake of finger pointing. It's important because it means that we have the power to change our government. We have the power to demand better of our politicians and to refuse to vote for them if they support policies that make it easier for tax cheats to walk while increasing the tax burden on everyday people.

I understand why you might want to tone it down and just blame congress and all politicians for this type of policy (because, yes politicians are gross and should be kept at an arm's length), but that breeds the idea that we are just stuck with a broken government that can't be changed. You really can have an effect on government if you are willing to look at who historically votes for policies like this and make the choice that is best for you. If you didn't have power in the process, then our politicians wouldn't be spending so much money on campaigns to get you to their side.

From the articles you linked:

> The IRS has never been a popular cause on Capitol Hill. But Democrats and Republicans long shared a grudging consensus that the agency’s basic work of tax collection deserved protection. That changed when the Republican Party came into power in 1994 and Newt Gingrich became the speaker of the House. The new majority’s main priority was tax cuts, and vilifying the IRS helped its case.

> The notion wasn’t a fringe position within the party. Former Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected mainstream Republican, ran for president in 1996 on a platform of abolishing the IRS. A Republican congressman in 1998 introduced a bill to repeal the Internal Revenue Code by 2002. “Abolish the IRS” remains a potent talking point. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, campaigned on the slogan when he ran for president in 2016.

> Republicans, riding the Tea Party wave, took control of the House of Representatives and started hacking at the IRS’ enforcement budget

> Down it went, some years the cuts were steep, some not, as Republican lawmakers laughed off dire warnings about the consequences of letting tax cheats run free.

Ha, really? I missed that. Thanks for pointing it out.

The whole ban is so gross. It's clearly politically targeted to deplatform Trump critics all while firing people up about China.

For those that aren't familiar. TikTok is pretty ubiquitous in the under 21 crowd while being practically unused by older people. It's sort of like when young people fled to Twitter and Instagram to get away from their parents on Facebook. It's basically the next Twitter for that age group.

TikTok (the community, not the company) is also quite critical of Trump. For instance, the buying up of rally tickets a few months ago so he would show up to an empty political event was organized on TikTok and we know that it pissed Trump off [1].

That level of age and political specificity in their audience makes it easy to target them for their ideas.

This type of laser focused ban on specific conpanies (rather than, say, disallowing data to be stored in China or banning Chinese owned companies from operating) reveals the nakedly political motivation behind this action. "China is bad" is just the excuse here. It's really about banning a popular meetingplace for a political demographic opposed to Trump.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-...

That's just another cynical "both sides are bad" argument. Judge the parties by their actions, not some vague handwaving about the Pareto principle and that all politics is corrupt.

From what I've seen, there's one party that has done more to disenfranchise voters and attack our democratic processes in the last year than I can remember in my entire lifetime. Attacking the postal service during a historic mail in election, inviting foreign influence into the election and directly soliciting it in exchange for military funding (and then getting impeached for it), the constant suggestions that the election is illegitimate so that he can scream and shout about it if he loses. The Trump reelection campaign (yes the political campaign itself, not even a neutral government entity) has also been litigating to make it harder to vote across the country.

At this point, coming to an article about a republican administration committing pretty clear voter suppression in the context of the past year of partisan voter suppression and saying "well actually, both sides are bad" is basically gaslighting. All sorts of voter suppression tactics like hardcore voter ID laws, purging the voting record (and "accidentally" getting rid of hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters), poll taxes by proxy, and crazy voting deadlines, restricting resources for polling places, and making it harder to leave your job to go vote leans to one side of the aisle.

My concern is more on the legal side and being targeted in real life. My hope is to provide a fair representation of everything, but I live in an area that isn't known for their friendliness towards people that are concerned about the police. I'm worried about the potential for doxxing and crazy people coming after me. Also, the potential for targeting by the police. I hope that this wouldn't happen, but I'm sure we've all seen news stories about it.

The other worry is if one of the politicians I'm getting responses from doesn't like how I portray them (or even just that their honest responses are online) and seeks legal action. I can't really anonymize myself from them because I have to ask them questions.