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Comment by fortythirteen | Hacker News Reader

If I had a nickel for every time someone called me paranoid or a conspiracy theorist for mentioning this before last week, I'd have a ton of nickels.

I should feel better now that people of aware of the nefariousness of this type of data collection, but I feel worse. The general public is being fed this as "Russia" and "Trump", and not getting the real, horrifying, surveillance state truth of what's going on.

I'm less worried that the Trump campaign used CA (and that the Clinton campaign used CTR), than I am by Obama saying "it's just metadata".

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Google can probably determine EXACTLY how many nickels you’d have and here you are stuck just guessing.

181437

That is very precise but inaccurate.

The standard nickel is 5 grams but they typically weigh between 4.9 and 5.1 grams. However for such a large number of nickels, due to wear, I'd say it's a safer bet to lean towards the lower bound, and also add some uncertainty so a more accurate answer is probably 204±5 thousand nickels.

If you had a ton of nickels you would have about $9071.85.

thank you, I was just about to start figuring that out myself. :)

And that's much more than the raw materials...

A nickel is 75% copper and 25% nickel.

There are 2000lbs in a ton. That's 1500lbs of copper and 500lbs of nickel.

Scrap pricing is $2.50/lb for copper, $3750. Scrap pricing is $4.83/lb for nickel, $2415.

Total = $6165

> A nickel is 75% copper and 25% nickel.

Interesting, I thought nickle was the coin and nickel was the metal, but it seems that isn't the case and/or changed. (?)

Coinage has a marked propensity to debase.

"For in every country of the world, I believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states, abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees diminished the real quantity of metal, which had been originally contained in their coins."

-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius#Debasement_and_evolut...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denarius#/media/File%3AFinenes...

But... don't you remember how cool Obama was? He loved his blackberry!

Obama...that was the president who authorized the FBI to infiltrate the Occupy Wallstreet movement and paint the protesters as rapists and weirdos, right? Democrats who think highly of him are no better than Republicans who think highly of Reagan.

> If I had a nickel for every time someone called me paranoid or a conspiracy theorist for mentioning this before last week, I'd have a ton of nickels.

I just had an existential age-related hiccup realizing that I had a school paper on the subject back in 2002.

I wish the USA would stop calling people conspiracy theorists for critical thinking, especially as we see more what used to be 'conspiracy theories' actually come to fruition. It actually hinders critical thinking and is a bad path to go down.

The problem is that a lot of people that complain about actual issues, like Facebook stalking, also try telling people about a lot of things that are totally conspiracy theories.

On top of that, as someone with experience in database marketing, people act as if they are being personally spied on. If you are tracking 800k people and you have 20 employees, the issue isn't really having another person looking at your data, the issue is the unethical ways organizations are using that data to manipulate you and the rest of society.

It's the difference between "The government conducts unethical surveillance" and "The government is spying on me."

That's a good point on how you phrase what they are doing. You want to avoid implying that you or the person you are talking to is being targeted (because they're not really and it makes you look like a conspiracy theorist).

The issue is that the difference between the "The government conducts unethical surveillance." and "The government is spying on me." has essentially disappeared.

When everything is remembered forever anything you've done can be retroactively traced backed to you when you become a person of interest.

America has three types of "conspiracy theorists"

* Logically consistent in niche fields that could be verified if more information was public (Room 641A); these should really just be called "theories"

* Harmless garbage ideas perpetuated by dumb people (flat earthers); these theories deserve open ridicule

* Propaganda created by intelligent people with the intent of causing harm (Uranium One); these should simply be illegal as libel

Those are important distinctions. Some conspiracy theories are straight up garbage, they do not deserve any modicum of respect... legitimate theories are in the minority.

Can you elaborate on Uranium One being 'libel'? As far as I know from reading the Wiki, this went to a Congressional Investigation.

Libel: a written or oral defamatory statement or representation that conveys an unjustly unfavorable impression

The "Uranium One conspiracy theory" was a libelous attack on a political candidate. That attack is a prime example of legitimate conspiracies.

  * Harmless garbage ideas perpetuated by dumb people (flat earthers); these theories deserve open ridicule

Antivaxxers certainly fall into what you call "garbage ideas perpetuated by dumb people"

Those theories are anything but harmless, actually kill people and sabotage decades of medicinal breakthroughts, which saved millions of lifes.

True.... though I bucket that under my last grouping, because I think there's a conspiracy attacking the legitimacy and experience of scientists. If the public mistrusts doctors and vaccines, they're more likely to distrust climate change and anti-refined-sugar research.

Yes, they are important distinctions. But the problem is how to not mistake one for the others?

Think?

"I'm less worried that the Trump campaign used CA"

But, and maybe someone can clarify, every single intelligence agency has come out and said that there was some interaction between Russia and Trump and, more specifically, between Facebook and Russia. And it's been proven Facebook is directly implicated in both the Trump campaign and Russian election meddling.

We hold the ability to vote in free elections as pretty a basic fundamental right in a democracy, so why wouldn't this be the thing we should all be worried about?

How much interaction is there, during, prior, or after election time, between the political or intelligence arms of the USA, and the politicians of any country in which the USA chooses to meddle in?

If we were so worried about the integrity of democracy, we wouldn't have our fingers in so many other ones. You've just described soft power.

"How much interaction is there, during, prior, or after election time, between the political or intelligence arms of the USA"

Great question. We don't know, because either we don't get caught or doesn't happen to begin with.

We can make up all sorts of conspiracies, but Russia got caught so the conversation starts there.

Here's a wiki page listing the US interference in foreign elections that we know about.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_interventi...

> How much interaction is there, during, prior, or after election time, between the political or intelligence arms of the USA, and the politicians of any country in which the USA chooses to meddle in?

Probably a level which should induce intense concerns in citizens of those countries if they already had a democracy to protect in the first place.

But thanks for the textbook display of Whataboutism.

No, what I've described is a textbook example of blatant hypocrisy.

Whataboutism is pointing at an unrelated problem, to divert attention from your problem. "But what about African Americans getting beaten!" to draw attention from bread lines and GULAGs - that sort of thing.

This is an incredibly related problem. The two cannot be discussed in isolation. This is quite literally, one of the top countries for 'interference in democratic elections' having an issue with its election being interfered with by a foreign power (In a relatively[1] minor way.)

Notice how none of the talking heads or politicians are taking a principled stance against interference with elections - they are just taking a stance against interference with their elections.

[1] Relatively, in terms of impact, effort expended, size of the United States.

> No, what I've described is a textbook example of blatant hypocrisy.

Yes, the accusation you've launched is one of blatant hypocrisy; the use of such accusations against those raising an issue as distraction technique to draw attention away from the issue raised is exactly the definition of Whataboutism.

Even when the accusations are indisputably true and relevant?

> Even when the accusations are indisputably true and relevant?

You can probably construct an argument where the hypocrisy of some speaker advancing the argument would itself actually be relevant to the argument being advanced [0], but that's almost never the case in any real discussion; instead Whataboutism (and then tu quoque fallacy more generally) has the same rhetorical purpose as guilt by association or as hominem; create a negative emotional charge attached to some group associated with an argument, and use that to get people to dismiss the argument without considering it's merits.

The accusations in the motivating instances for naming Whataboutism were often both indisputably true and the same type of wrong as the act they served to distract from.(which is as close to relevance as charges of hypocrisy get.) They were still fallacious, just as this one is, irrespective of its truth or.degree of analogy.

[0] e.g., if the argument specifically included as a key point that the speaker did not engage in hypocrisy.

So, in your opinion, moral authority isn't a thing?

You can cry "whataboutism" all you want when confronted with examples like these ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... ), but don't be surprised or dismayed when no one listens.

> So, in your opinion, moral authority isn't a thing?

Sure, it's a “thing”, specifically a name based on rationalization given to the cognitive filtering mechanism which a number of fallacies, notably as hominem and tu quoque, target.

But it's never relevant to the merits of the argument; targeting moral authority is always an effort to avoid consideration of the merits of the argument.

So, your point is valid, but it only applies to robots, not people. Is that pretty much the right way to view it?

If so, I sympathize. I get that a lot, myself.

US interference in other countries' elections is absolutely wrong. It is because it is wrong that I feel justified as a US citizen saying that other countries' interference in our elections is wrong, too.

If the citizens of Iran or Vietnam or Korea or Iraq have a right to be upset at a lack of political self-determination, so do I. Punishing the people of a country for the actions of the leaders they did not meaningfully choose is exactly why US interference is wrong.

And it is because I as an individual care about democracy that I oppose the actions of both my leaders and anyone else to override democracy.

> But, and maybe someone can clarify, every single intelligence agency has come out and said that there was some interaction between Russia and Trump

No, they say (in the public assessment) that Russia intervened to favor Trump, not that there was interaction between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Now, there's been at least one guilty plea from the Mueller investigation specifically referencing interaction, but that's a separate thing from the public intelligence assessment.

"not that there was interaction between Russia and the Trump campaign."

The FBI strongly disagrees with that statement. Facebook has been proven to be used as one of the tools to achieve those ends.

Could you provide a citation? OP's comment mirrors my understanding. My understanding is that Russia acted both for and against Trump, though primarily for. But that is different than those efforts being coordinated by the Trump campaign.

Cambridge Analytic was named as such because it sounds "official" and it helped when they were eventually were hired by Bannon.

> The FBI strongly disagrees with that statement.

Whatever the FBI or people in it believe, the public assessment put forth by the US Intelligence Community does not address interaction; it is inaccurate to attribute that as a public unanimous conclusion of the Intelligence Community.

Note that I'm not making the “no collusion” argument, hence the reference to the Papadopoulos plea. The Trump-Russia interaction just is outside the scope of the public Intelligence Community assessment, and shouldn't be described as the public conclusion of the US intelligence community.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

It's worth noting they ALSO say Russia intervened against Trump. There's at least two anti-Trump rallies alleged to have been organized by Russia.

> It's worth noting they ALSO say Russia intervened against Trump

No, they don't.

> There's at least two anti-Trump rallies alleged to have been organized by Russia.

Be that as it may, the public assessment does not state as the ICs assessment that any part of the intervention had an anti-Trump purpose (a rally can be organized whose overt message supports a cause without the purpose being advancing that cause.)

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