Recently a popular thread here discussed a child murderer whom had been admitted to Harvard, but they later renegged. Many people echoed the argument that: 'if someone isn't allowed to participate in society like a normal person, then why even let them out of prison, because it only otherwise encourages them towards crime?'
What should we do about people who are not allowed to participate in society like normal people, but have committed no crime? If we want to remain logically consistent, shouldn't we lock up the Trump supporters with the baby killers?
That's a serious claim to make without evidence. Perhaps you have evidence and you're not sharing it. If that's the case you should ask yourself why you're not comfortable sharing that evidence, and if that discomfort should apply to making the claim at all.
Alternately and more likely, you have no evidence, in which case you should certainly not make such a claim.
No, we should let them participate in society. Political discrimination is the same as religious discrimination: bad.
What is the difference between these two statements?
1) Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to run social apps
2) Republicans shouldn’t be allowed to run social apps
Same shit different religion.
This is especially true with economic policy, which really has little to do with religious belief, but even with a lot of social policy its true.
That is, while there probably aren't many devout Catholics who support late stage abortion, the opinions on things like LGBT rights, the environment, refugee and immigration policy, homelessness, access to education, and more will vary wildly between devout Catholics. That second part is also true for devout Protestants and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists.
Sure the means might not sit in exactly the same places, but that's very different than the political spectrum in the US, which is essentially bimodal.
Case in point: US imagery invokes a lot of God stuff and Germans still pay church taxes. Most religions in most of the modern world are also tax exempt organizations etc.
Andrew was kicked out among other reasons for saying "Build the wall" to a YC alum who was expressing concerns about Trump's proposed ban on immigrants (and how the ban might affect their life directly).
Your point is an important one and worth serious discussion. Ultimately, people have always demonized some subset of the population; it's what people do no matter the century. It's certainly traumatic, but what's to be done? Even scientists give up, and they're a stubborn bunch: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376
He was doing a pretty good job of not being particularly nice to someone in the screenshots I saw. I won't go out of my way to witch-hunt him or anything but implying he was kicked out strictly because of his political viewpoint is a really tall claim to make without evidence.
If someone is going to get punished and excluded anyway, why would they care about the fine points of what gets called "racism" and adjust their behavior to stay in line? Once people aren't following the rules, the rules cease to be an effective way to modify behavior. Drug dealers don't pay taxes, and alt-right pariahs don't care about how offensive they are.
But there's also the impact of anonymity and zero-cost (dollar wise) widely-spread speech. Both of these are major recent changes compared to how things had been for decades previous. Maybe you're expressing it in the most extreme terms in part just for the reaction—this is obviously generally not productive from a societal perspective, but used to be restricted to a much smaller set of people who didn't mind the public blowback. Now you can do it for free with a throwaway identity. This also contributes to moving people further and further away from each other.
He murdered a child. If Harvard doesn't want to allow a child murder into their institution, it's not a crime against that person. That person can have a normal life, just at Grand Junction State (or I'm sure there's a million other colleges other than Harvard that will accept him).
There are consequences to actions. If the consequence of murdering a child is you don't get to go to Harvard, it's not a tragedy. Go do something useful with your life, other than going to Harvard or killing kids, yeah?
The thread that immediately precipitated his removal is still online; you can just go look at it:
https://www.facebook.com/garry/posts/10102671732962523?pnref...
(It's buried under Anisa Mirza's reply).
Unless it's your claim that trolling is a political stance deserving of protection, in which case we can all just agree to disagree about our definitions and move on, his support for Trump was not the problem here.
>He was removed for hostile trolling of other YC founders.
Precisely, the words used by YC were "threatening and harassing" comments. To my knowledge this is the exact comment YC cited:
>All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
>I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
I certainly see how this speech can be viewed as rude and disagreeable. But I don't really know how you can say that he made any serious threats or was honestly harassing anyone.
It's probably not worth litigating this further, though.
>While Torba paints this as a free speech issue, YC told BuzzFeed that he was kicked out for “for speaking in a threatening, harassing way toward other YC founders” — particularly in this Facebook comment:
>All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it.
>I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.
[1]: https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/trump-supporting-startu...
Being proud of "meme"-ing Trump into office, wow. Torba repeats how his right on free speech is violated, but is an outright dick to everyone around him because they have another view on some topic...
Pro-bono I could see firms taking it, lots of press and the chance of being defined as a top tech-related litigation company. Or Google's many enemies could finance this.
There is zero chance that a law firm would take this pro-bono, regardless of the perceived marketing benefits, because it's simply too expensive.
It will not be financed by Google's enemies. If it's financed, it will be by a litigation financing company like Burford or Bentham IMF or something.
It's an important question that might define the future generation of programmers. Hacking used to mean something specific: it meant you were free of channels. It didn't matter if you owned a channel when people were tinkering in their basement on something they owned.
Now it's all interconnected, and questions of ownership are critically important. I respect Stallman, but he was hard to take seriously. Then, suddenly, even his outlandish ideas seem pescient.
https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/os 80+% market share in shipped phones, although that probably includes Android forks with non-Google Play stores (in China maybe?)
Can you explain in greater detail what you mean by this?
For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market there wasn't much to differentiate them.
One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV. Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for eggheads and communists. The programs the 3 networks offered were indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were expensive whole families watched the same shows together, so they had to be suitable for everyone.
And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen every night. We were literally in sync.
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Android's Play Store, iPhone's App Store, Reddit and HN are all channels that define our generation. When you point out someone's project to a coworker and they say they already saw it on HN, that means you're both being influenced by the same channels. It molds you far more profoundly than most of us like to admit to ourselves.
Hacking was, briefly, a respite from this. When computers weren't synonymous with business, you had to love it. You invested your time and money into it because it fascinated you, not because it was a good investment.
You also had access to the entire ecosystem. You could see what everything was doing, and how everything worked. If you didn't like something, you could just change it.
In return, you owned everything. You were free to take whatever you needed and to contribute however you could. Ideas and skill alone determined the outcome.
It wasn't quite that simple; ideas still had to be promoted. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html
But they could be promoted and they could win against the objection of any higher authority. In fact, it seems strange that any authority could ever have been in a position to decide Emacs' fate.
Yet that is our present world. Apple doesn't like you? Gone. Ditto for Google. These are the authorities you answer to. You obey masters; we all do.
Missed it while I was on a "no media" diet during school, but we do seem to watch the same channels.
It strikes me that their argument on iOS might be even stronger given the relative unpopularity of jailbreaking devices these days and the complete lack of sideloading functionality for non-developers.
He has critiziced what he calls "extreme capitalism" in the past. But I highly doubt that he would support a regulation that could potentialy undermine freedom (not only economic freedom) and harm not only big companies but also small players.
In my humble opinion, I don't like the precedent the gab lawsuit is trying to set. I'm for free association, but against active collusion. They're only suing Google and they're not alleging collusion between multiple parties (like Apple).
The registrar thing is a whole other ball of wax. One company has a monopoly on domain registrars. That's going to prove to be a big problem for people who are not on the Right one day very soon.
I'm hoping the courts can see the difference when judging "free association" and just throw this out.