throwawayjava

One hundred years ago maybe. Not today. And the Exxon scientist/Deere engineer is meant to be read in a prototypical way. The point is, modern food security depends on the proper functioning of a lage, inter-dependent system.

It would be pompous to claim that the average software/petro engineer understands farming better than a farmer. But I didn't make that claim. I made the claim that some of these folks understand a related industry that is as important to US food security as is the actual act of farming a particular piece of land.

I also provided concrete and specific ways in which Farmers rely on a larger social fabric and, in particular, engineering/scientific/financial expertise that tends to concentrate in large cities.

Instead of calling names, provide counter-points those concrete and specific dependencies. Explain how a modern modern farmer could do his work, in an economically and ecologically sustainable way, without those other industries.

Also, in addition to the dependencies I've already pointed out, I'll provide an actual counter-example to your claim. Plenty of countries with many more farmers per capita than the USA have far worse food security than the USA, even given excellent farmland. So clearly, farmers are only part of the story!

And also a counter-example in the other direction: plenty of countries that don't use insane gerrymandering to give a minority of voters out-sized political influence have excellent agricultural systems. So clearly, farmers don't need minority rule in order for a society to enjoy a stable agricultural sector.

So no, we are not going to starve if rural folks lose their ability to push policy on abortion and bathroom usage. Both rationally and empirically, the claims you're making about the supremacy of the farmer's vote don't hold up to observed reality.

> What they don't deserve to be is permanently dictated to because their profession requires that they live in less population dense areas.

That's true. But they also don't deserve more say because they live in a less dense area, which is what you were originally claiming.

And even if farmers did have some unique secret sauce understanding of the inter-connected system that ensures US food security, your argument still does not justify giving rural folks in general an out-sized voice in governance. You do not make the case that the average rural McDonalds employee should have more voting power than the average urban McDonalds employee. The proposition that your argument actually defends is that that (farm) land ownership/stewardship should determine voting power.

Ew.

Each person should have one vote, equally weighted, and without respect to geographic location. No?

> What percentage of people living in New York have worked a farm? I think you're pulling your conclusions out of thin air.

Well, New York has a lot of agriculture ;-)

WRT NYC, That's not the correct question. The correct question is: what percentage of people in New York understand OR[1] contribute to some industry or process that's critical to US food security? That's a good question, and sounds difficult to answer with any specificity, so I stand by my original claim: "a lot".

[1] Mere understanding is sufficient here, because your claim was that farmers need a bigger electoral voice to ensure food security. My claim is that many people in cities understand what's necessary for a functioning agricultural system, and will vote accordingly (seeing as they like eating and all)

Civil wars tend to end but I'd prefer the current state of affairs over a full-blown war, to be honest.

Ugh.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. The agricultural industry does not exist in isolation, so its most immediate practitioners do not deserve a minority-rule electoral power.

Farmers use Wall St money to fund the planting of seeds geo-engineered by folks living in cities, harvest the resulting crops using tractors designed/built by folks living in cities, then ship the product on freight designed/built by folks living in cities. Throughout the whole process, farmers depend upon a whole set of energy informatics products (from weather prediction to oil discovery) made possible by a tour de force of scientific and engineering talent designed/built by folks living in/around cities.

Farmers are not rugged individualists, and an individual farmer is no more "critical to the survival" of city folk than a Deere software engineer or an Exxon scientist is "critical to the survival" of the modern farmer. And yet, you don't see those folks asking for a non-representative democracy...

The myth of the rugged farmer as the pillar holding modern society is just that -- a BS mythology.

And all of this before even considering that city folk help pay for all the public infrastructure that makes farming possible in the first place -- everything form rural roads and interstates they never directly use to subsidized crop insurance they don't immediately benefit from to concessions in international treaties that directly harm their industry in return for concessions that boost our agricultural industry and thereby contribute to our own food security.

Going back to the article, farmers don't deserve to be the dictators of a minority-ruled psuedo-democracy because farmers are just one more cog in a huge machine, a machine that farmers depend on to support their own way of life and, in many cases, even survival.

> When every policy decision is decided by the needs of the residents of a few, highly populous cities, with no thought to the different needs of those living in rural areas, being a farmer, miner, logger, etc. becomes completely disincentivized.

There are lots of people in cities who depend on and know a lot about the agricultural industry. Some of them grew up on farms and went on to work in knowledge industries supporting farming. Many of these city folks know more about farming/logging/mining than even the most skilled farmer/logger/miner. And many have more at stake in the success of America's agricultural industry than the folks actually working the land.

Presuming that someone who doesn't work the land can't know the needs of the agricultural/mining/logging industry is a somewhat conceited viewpoint.

I don't know if it is considered normal, but it is normal.

> A candidate wins yet people try to have him kicked out.

Impeachment is in the constitution for a reason. Winning an election is not a sufficient condition for maintaining a public office. So on face, there's nothing actually wrong with trying to use a constitutional tool to kick out an elected official.

That said,

> If so, why?

You're kind of asking for a retrial of very polarizing figures from recent political history, a dangerous topic on hn, and I suppose that's the reason for the downvotes. I'm trying, here, to give an honest and historically accurate answer.

Obama and Bush impeachment advocates were mostly unjustifiable partisans, in the sense that there were never serious, constitutionally plausible, and widely-believed-to-be-true justifications for impeachment. That's probably why neither person was ever actually impeached. Consider this "the system working mostly as intended"

Clinton was justifiable, at least at one point in time, although we could fairly ask whether the same accusations would result in an impeachment today. Again, consider this "the system working as intended"

Trump is an open case, and these things are hard to judge without the benefit of hindsight. But there are at least serious, plausible accusations of impeachable conduct. We'll see if those accusations are true, I guess.

However, you'll note that in all of these cases except for Clinton, it was a minority of elected representatives from the opposition party calling for an actual impeachment.

The vast majority of opposition representatives did always call for investigations. But that's a checks-and-balances system working as intended IMO.

Well, let's analyze each of your questions in turn.

> Since I came to the US there is this constant push for impeaching the sitting president

When did you come to the USA?

There was a constant push to impeach Obama. There was a constant push to impeach Bush. The was a constant push to impeach Clinton.

Clinton was elected in 1993, so there are a lot of adult Americans who were born in the USA and who can also say that "since I came to the US (aka was born), there has been this constant push for impeaching the sitting president".

> extreme gerrymandering

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering#Etymology

> and all the other nonsense

Congress seems to be more dysfunctional now than it was in the 80's and 90's. But there have been worse eras, too. At least the congressmen who've been shot lately weren't shot by other congressmen in duels, for example... :-\

but that still implies a 100m person market, just in the USA, and people in other developed countries tend to be closer to the "healthy" range. There are lots of healthy people out there.

In short, I don't think this will be the make-or-break for flying cars...

But what if parent's premise is correct?

What if these areas cannot support a local economy that justified the rapid build-out?

What if these areas will never be able to support that?

Sometimes the truth is hard. That doesn't make the truth-bearer "cold-hearted". Indeed, sticking our heads in the sand seems even worse, from a moral perspective.

Who cares? More concretely, how many professional or semi-professional photographers care?

> Bottom line though, everyone knows Kodak and no one knows Ascribe

But Ascribe is building useful technology while Kodak throws around buzzwords.

I think it's more the ability to do individual targeting that matters, from that perspective. And Reed's Law doesn't say anything about that (other than in the trivial "subnetworks of size of 1" sense)

I think the internet is fundamentally different from the old broadcast media, but not because of Reed's combinatoric observation.

In particular, notice that the radio also allowed these subgroups; e.g., the interference issues in the USA leading up to WWI seem like an apt historical example.

But that's already a crowded marketplace, and it's not clear to me why Kodak announcing they're going to enter a crowded marketplace would push their stock. Especially given that the announcement is paired with an up-front admission that they're accruing lots of useless technical debt at the beginning of the project.

I would be more inclined to invest in Kodak on the basis of this announcement if it didn't mention cryptocurrency at all.

The juxtaposition of a cranky critic or unserious person becoming a near-absolute authority on the thing he's cranky/not serious about is a common comedic trope. E.g., insert joke about Satoshi creating bitcoin to make an ironic joke about the dotcom bubble and accidentally launching the first ICO.

The Mel Books skit is not intended to seriously suggest that there were originally 15 commandments. And Satoshi probably wasn't making performance art about late capitalism. And Ecclesiastes wasn't written by a cranky atheist.

It's a joke.

> To me, it just seems to be purposefully inflammatory and edgy

The commonness of this trope indicates that lots of people find it funny, perhaps especially when it's disconnected from anything that's important to them.

But more importantly, no one is laughing at you, and the intent of this joke isn't to inflame.

The author is using a relevant quote from a source, and leading into that quote with a light-hearted joke. The fact that this joke is about Ecclesiastes has more to do with the fact that the author is using a quote from that book (to make a serious point, and a point that's at least not incongruent with the original intent).

The author is instantiating a common joke template in the context of a quote he's using the lead off a talk.

That's all.

> As it turns out, it's really off-base, too.

No, it's not, because it wasn't a serious premise. You can tell that this is the case by the fact that the 20+ slides that follow this one are not on the subject of theology or christian/jewish history...

Bullshit is shameful.

The killer feature is "lawyers armed with DMCA", not the crypto-themed CRUD app.

Yes, that was my point. Your argument -- that a professor should be expected teach in classrooms a lot because they're called a professor -- is absurd :-)

This is already a job title! An alternative, often equivalent title is "Instructor". And these people are primarily responsible for classroom teaching! And they are primarily evaluated upon that teaching! What you are asking for already exists.

There are also colleges and universities where all people with the title "professor" are dedicated to classroom teaching. Harvard isn't one of them.

> There should be a title of Graduate Advisor

There is. For historical reasons, at Harvard, the "Graduate Advisor" is called an "assistant/associate/full professor". But don't get confused by the name. These professors don't do much classroom teaching, just like most software engineers don't build engines. It's just a title, not a job description, and getting angry about it is just as silly as getting angry that most software engineers don't write software for engine control units!

> we're completely ignoring the issue that a student comes into the university to learn

And assisting in that learning is not the majority component of the jobs of tenure-track professors at research institutions.

> Really what's happening is people are paying for an apprenticeship to become a researcher.

Research grants, not undergraduate tuition, pay for tenure-track professors' research at places like Harvard.

You seem to have a deeply flawed understanding about what a modern research university is, how it operates, and what undergraduate tuition money is spent on. That's perfectly fine, except that you're continually arguing with people who try to explain to you your misconceptions.

>> It's the title of the job: Engineer.

From the dictionary: "Engineer: a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines"

Hopefully you see the point I'm making? Just because you think a job title means something, and just because that's an accurate historical meaning, doesn't mean that the job title retains the same meaning today.

Repeating this line over and over does not make it so. (Tenure-track CS) professors at Harvard are not there to (primarily) teach (undergraduate) courses. This is just a fact.

> If you can't/don't want to teach you should be a professional researcher and admit that

Professional researchers do not typically advise doctoral students. So professors at research universities are doing a lot of teaching that someone at an industry lab probably would not be doing.

Classroom teaching is not the only form of teaching, and professional researchers do not grow on trees.

> Via tuition, etc... fraudulent to the students paying tutition

Tenure-track professors at places like Harvard fund themselves through grants, not undergraduate tuition dollars.

Also, you've completely ignored my first point above. Even if we accept that teaching is the primary responsibility of a "Professor", it does not follow that this teaching manifests primarily as classroom teaching. Advising is teaching, and is the primary form of teaching undertaken by professors at certain research-intensive universities.

Incidentally, there are job titles that describe classroom teachers at research universities -- "instructor" or "teaching professor". The author of this post was not an "instructor" or a "teaching professor". He was an assistant and then associate professor. Classroom teaching was not a majority component of his job.

Luckily for every software engineer out there, historical cruft in the names of job titles is a bad criteria for evaluating job performance.

It's not super clear to me that this would protect Damore, but IANAL.

With what votes, and what leadership?

The entirety of the GOP house leadership opposes any form of legal cannabis. Messer, the policy committee chair, even opposes medical cannabis for vets prescribed by their VA doctor and residing in states where medical cannabis is legal.

Concretely, which GOP representatives do you think will vote for decriminalization? I'm incredulous, but curious to hear a rational argument that this is a remotely reasonable expectation.

1. Advising is teaching. In fact, advising is the majority component of an R1 teaching load! So, he DID discuss the teaching component of his job. A lot.

2. In terms of classroom teaching, he was probably teaching 1-2 courses per year at Harvard. So classroom teaching really wasn't the majority component of his job. It's unsurprising that he didn't spend much time talking about this minority component of his job, in the same way that it's unsurprising when a developer talks primarily about writing/reading/testing code rather than the ~20% of their workday activities that are something other than writing/reading/testing code.

Of course, one hopes that developers introspect on their effectiveness in various meetings, when talking to clients or internal stakeholders, and so on. But you'd be unsurprised if a dev, discussing their biggest mistakes during their first few years, focus on code-related mistakes.

3. Maybe he felt good about his non-advising, classroom teaching? The title of the post is "everything I did wrong", not "a summary of everything I did".

And, moreover, one particular nation-state. But still, the scholarship you find in American Interest tends to be high quality. I can respect a sincere concern with quality argumentation, even if the reasoning is motivated and even if I don't entirely sympathize with that motivation.

> Also, claiming that communists tried to nurture a middle class is just plain wrong. Communists were, at least according to Communists, trying to abolish class entirely

The second sentence is entirely accurate. However, the article doesn't claim that communists (or capitalists) of the 20th century were trying to nurture "the middle class". Rather, the article (carefully) claims:

"virtually all states—whether capitalist or communist, industrialized or developmental, great power or post-colonial—aimed to legitimate themselves by serving the interests of middle classes whose size they sought to expand... Both capitalist and communist accumulation strategies were based on the nurturing of industrial laborers".

I think the article's characterization is fair, in-so-far as you can say anything at all about such a broad group of political projects as "all capitalists and also all communists"! WRT your first sentence specifically, the communist project did aim to "nurture" industrial laborers; the purported means was abolishing class, of course, but all the same.

You claimed that profits, not revenues, constitute "the profit motive sum" for private prison operators. But if revenue is tied to executive compensation, that's clearly not true. I didn't offer the number as a comparative, but rather as a way of refuting your claim that total revenues don't contribute to profit motive.

Aside from this point, I don't really think Hiniger's salary is relevant to this conversation.

> Peak war on drugs existed during peak government prison complex. Nobody likes to talk about that.

So are you really claiming that private prisons caused prison populations to decline? If not, what point are you trying to make by mentioning this obviously-not-causative correlation?

> rather, it's to highlight that the public system is radically larger and just as financially motivated

You'll find just as much "hysteria-like concern" here on hn, and elsewhere, about profiteering in public prisons. And yes, that includes concern over lobbying by prison guard unions.

I agree with your general point that a wave of stupid in the 80s and 90s is more to blame for our current situation than profit motive. And to get back to the article, Sessions has always been in the eye of that hurricane of stupid.

But profiteering -- by unions, by private prison suppliers, by suppliers to public prisons -- certainly helps sustain the present situation. Different people choose different subsets of that Goliath. So what?

Like I said above, I really, really don't understand the battle lines you're trying to draw here. Surely, we can all agree that the solution is putting fewer people in jails, right?

1. I don't think you have to disagree with vel0city to make your point. Just agree that the private prison complex is large and dangerous to society (as you apparently have) and point out that the unnecessary aspects of the public sector prison complex are also large and dangerous.

2. Any time someone can have a financial stake is something like a prison while also holding immense political power, we should all be very scared and concerned. This is why there's so much well-placed concern over the private prison industry. Of course, it's worth noting that there are also lots of ways to make lots of money off of public prisons. And those mechanisms should also be choked off.

3. Damon Hininger makes about $1M/yr in salary. Presumably if total revenue were only $200M, he'd be making a lot less in salary.

But large criminal syndicates funded by blackmarket alcohol are very much a thing of the past. At least in the USA.

I guess I technically know quite a few people who make "black market" whiskey. It's not legal to distill without lots of licensing and these people do sell bottles to friends and friends-of-friends.

But it's Really Hard to understate the difference between poor folks running cottage industries around moonshine and the sprawling violent criminal enterprises that flourished around the alcohol trade during prohibition.

(e: also, illegal alcohol isn't just a poor person thing. Plenty of wealthy folks illegally distill, they just normally aren't motivated to sell.)