Thriptic

> Drinking in public is OK.

> Being drunk and a nuisance in public is not OK.

In my experience, this is basically the way it already is in many places in the US. As long as you put even a modicum of effort into complying with the letter of the law in front of cops (ie using a brown paper bag, putting alcohol into a non-obvious container, etc) and you're in compliance with the spirit of the law (ie not being a loud and disruptive drunk asshole in public), the cops will generally leave you alone and you can responsibly consume freely in public venues.

This is not realistic. Your conception of an average user is actually a power user. If I tried to imagine my mom doing this (who is highly intelligent but non-technical and not a power user), I would see her getting tripped up on:

Whonix / VM:

* Figuring out which version of virtual box is appropriate for her setup. The download page is not at all noob-friendly and there is no big "click this button to download for this OS" button. What does windows host mean? Does that mean windows? What's an SDK? Do I need the extension pack?

* Figuring out which version of Whonix is appropriate for the same reason. Download securely without verification? Is that ok? What's a signing key? Open pgp? What if she downloads the wrong one? Will it fuck something up?

* Feeling comfortable employing a VM. She has never used a VM and would have no idea what was going on when a different OS appeared within her OS. This could be very unnerving because it seems incorrect. The idea of importing an image would be so foreign that she might not be able to figure out how to do it using the virtualbox interface.

* Trivial tasks on whonix. She wouldn't know how to do trivial things on Whonix because it is has a totally different UI than Mac or Windows. Most non-technical people memorize what they have to do to accomplish tasks without actually understanding what they are doing so they can't port that knowledge to another platform.

* Troubleshootong. She would not be able to use Google for help because she can't form the queries correctly to ask what she wants.

VPN:

* Determining which VPN(s) to use and signing up. There are about 100 options and she has no way to evaluate the quality.

* Determining whether the VPN was set up correctly. Leak tests? Checking external IP? What's an IP?

* Understanding why certain things don't work anymore. Why can't she print documents anymore? Why are certain sites going to the Canadian page instead of the regular .com page? Why isn't Netflix working anymore? Why is she constantly dealing with captcha?

* Understanding why everything is so slow

She would quickly realize she is in over her head, get frustrated, and then feel embarrassed because she would have to call me for help with what you described as a "trivial task". She would probably just not do it to save herself from the embarrassment / "wasting my time".

> That's been the status quo up until now, but it doesn't have to be. We're moving towards orwellian style censorship at a breakneck pace with SV leading the charge.

Very few people actually want such a site arrangement. Believe it or not, I have no interest in interfacing with people who want to kill me unless they are open to honest and rational debate, which few are. One of the reasons I enjoy Hacker News is because I know won't have to deal with the type of people that will frequent the fringe elements of the style of site you are advocating for.

Also, I'd hardly call a business led moratorium on speech advocating terrorism and genocide "moving towards Orwellian style censorship". Absolutely nothing is stopping these individuals from standing up their own server and hosting this content themselves. They aren't banned by an ISP. Moreover, business owners should be allowed to express their opinions too, including who to do business with.

I've had the impossible burger on multiple occasions. Every time I've had it, it felt like whoever cooked it either didn't care or was trying to present the burger as basically as possible to try to demo it as a discrete product. The trouble is, that's not how anyone over the age of 10 actually eats any kind of burger, so it's not really a fair presentation. If you actually season it (it absolutely needs salt and pepper) and put on equivalent toppings and condiments, it's really not bad at all in my opinion. I tend to view it like soylent. It's definitely not as good as a good beef burger, but it's good enough to consider eating regularly for convenience and health reasons.

Ublock origin (in advanced mode), umatrix, and noscript each enable this functionality. Umatrix has the best UI of the three once you get used to it in my opinion. Go on YouTube and look for "the hated one" for great tutorials on JS blocking with umatrix and ublock origin.

If you drive without insurance, hit someone, and kill or severely injure them, you will almost certainly lose most if not all of your assets in the subsequent lawsuit.

If you have a house and it burns down in a fire, you will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or more replacing it.

If you get rid of health insurance, there is enormous potential downside risk.

If someone is on your property and injures themselves or you accidentally harm someone, they can sue you for millions.

Insuring against all of this and more is almost certainly under 1000 per year. That is a trivial expense for someone with that much money. Even shit ROI on a portfolio is yielding at least a hundred thousand per year in growth assuming this person no longer works. The more money you have, the more insurance you want because you have far more to lose.

Definitely not. You want to insure against catastrophes as they can wipe out all your assets. This includes regular insurance (home, auto, health) and personal liability insurance AKA umbrella up to the value of your assets. If you hurt someone, the victim could seek large damages if they realize you are wealthy. Liability insurance can protect you against that.

And yet Robert Moses managed to ram home some of the most ambitious public works projects the world has ever seen in New York, precisely because he was somewhat corrupt and could disregard process and opinion.

I am not a lawyer, but from what I understand from a forensics class I took, personal devices can be in scope in the US if:

* A warning banner is displayed when you connect to the VPN / network / asset that states that use of the resource voids your expectation of privacy, you consent to monitoring, and you acknowledge they can inspect personal devices etc

* You signed a policy document acknowledging that they can monitor you and that connecting to a company resource brings your personal device in scope of monitoring and seizure

* You committed a crime, the police become involved, and a search warrant is issued.

If you do not sign such a policy document, they do not have evidence of a criminal (ie not civil) infraction, and they do not display a warning banner, then you can claim reasonable expectation of privacy (meaning you were ignorant of their policy), refuse a search, and there isn't much they can do to my knowledge. In this specific case you would have to talk to a lawyer, but I would just be safe and use only work assets for work.

Sounds like there needs to be more tsundere in the data set.

I'm not going to acknowledge the legitimacy of his motives because it's what he wants. He wants to be viewed as a martyr and to have his grievances heard and discussed, but killing 20+ people over stealing some IP (and not even a life changing innovation but a fucking manga) is categorically unacceptable in any society and is a disgusting act. Therefore, I will not even acknowledge that he has rational motives; he will be considered insane and disregarded as a fool, and I will move on without paying him or his "grand gesture" any mind. This is the ultimate punishment for an angry idealist who is demanding to be heard.

I'm not speaking about Facebook at all, never mentioned Facebook anywhere in my comment or in this thread, and have not made any statements about the validity of speech restriction in any context so I'm not sure why you're mentioning that. I'm speaking to a general issue brought up by the parent.

As for your comment, the cake shop has a product they are letting people buy (in effect, serving them). They are willing to produce that product for a certain group of people for a certain activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on their identity. They are not willing to produce that product for another group of people for the same activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on that second group's identity. Now you can argue that the shop is within their rights to do that for religious reasons and the Supreme Court would agree with you, but it's still refusing service based on identity and you know it. If you want to split hairs and say they "refused to provide COMPARABLE service because they were gay" as the buyers may have been able to buy other products then so be it.

The supreme court heard a court case in 2014 in which a business refused to serve people because they were gay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine

A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.

I think my interpretation of the thread was that anger towards people with money just for having money was legitimate. If your thought is that those people are actively retarding the ability of the poor to improve their situation, then I think you have some ground to stand on, but otherwise I don't think it is reasonable. I think it's ok to wish things were different; I think it's ok to be angry at a system; I think it's ok to be angry at people who have personally done you wrong; but I don't think it's ok to be angry at people who haven't personally done you wrong just because they have something you don't. I actually happen to fall into one of those minority groups that you mentioned, and I don't hate the other people that can do things that I can't; I hate the system and the people perpetuating the stupidity. That may predominantly be composed of people in that other group, but it is certainly not anywhere near all of them, and I have the ability to make that distinction and avoid prejudgements. That being said, all of that nuance went unstated in my original post, so my bad.

Saying "I hate you for having more than me and I want your stuff" is just straight up jealousy, and it should be easy to understand why wealthy people respond with hostility to this, creating a negative feedback loop.

Yeah it's dumb, but to be fair this is something where we get to have our cake and eat it too. The moralizers / religious / people fairly concerned about drunk driving get to feel good and maybe have a positive effect, and everyone that is 18-21 still gets ready access to alcohol at school where the need to drive is substantially reduced. Whenever I wanted to get alcohol at school, I could easily get it and the situation was the same with all of the friends I knew at other universities. If you don't go to school you get access through work friends.

Yeah I really don't understand this move. HBO has a product that is profitable and well loved by it's users explicitly because it is not Netflix and features content that would never show up on Netflix (except maybe via FX). It makes no sense to blow that up in order to create Netflix 2.

Frankly I think going after Netflix in general is a dumb move. They own that mass market content space, you're never going to displace them, Hulu already tried and failed miserably, give up. Why not amass a series of these premium brands (eg Showtime) and focus on becoming the place for awesome smart content to augment Netflix?

That's a viable stance to take, but it's not without problems:

1. The time horizons involved don't work well with government. The US can't get anything done over a 20 year time horizon, and the highly delayed ROI means projects would always be first on the chopping block when it came to cost cutting. As a side note, currently we can't even agree to adequately fund basic research in the country, let alone drug development.

2. R&D would inevitably be politicized. Some senator would want disease X researched because their kid has it etc. Some tax payers won't want to fund disease Y.

3. It places R&D and regulatory in the same high level entity. That sets up all sorts of conflicts of interest.

4. It complicates international trade. What if the US develops most drugs. What should Europe be charged for them? Surely products can't be open sourced because one group of tax payers paid for them and would want ROI etc.

5. Similarly, who decides pricing for all the US buyers? Get ready for massively complicated procurement based on tons of different rules.

One thing that is typically not mentioned in these debates is the fundamental structure of the industry. Let's say someone finds a research compound which looks to be promising, and they start a new company to try to commercialize it. Often, they are looking at at least 1-2 decades to get that product to market. Assuming they don't sell out to a big company, they almost certainly have to go public before starting trials in order to amass the required funds. Normally, a public company is expected to show regular profits and growth. This is impossible for a new pharma company because they don't have a product yet, so they are expecting investors to foot the bill for years and years of development and trials. During this time, if the compound fails a major trial, the entire company can go under because it may be prohibitively expensive to start over again if there is a problem. Therefore, not only is there a massively delayed ROI but a lot of risk. As such, when a company gets something to market, investors expect massive profits for shouldering that risk and delay. It is simply not feasible for companies to charge small amounts of money because no investor could justify locking up capital / taking those risks for something other than a huge return.

> Pretending that "the old days" weren't full of kids doing whatever it took to hit the dopamine joy-buzzer is stupid.

They were, but now we have a device which can massively amplify shame. Worse, evidence of bad, stupid, or shameful behavior is archived forever for later judgement by people in your professional and personal life. This is not mentioned by the article but it should have been. People do dumb and embarrassing things when they are young (childhood up through college), and they used to have the ability to leave their past behind them when they became adults. Now that privilege has been taken away from them and they have to police their behavior and speech or some asshole might post it without their consent on Instagram. I am so glad camera phones were garbage when I was a kid and that social media was in its infancy when I was in college.

Well, to be fair these congressional hearings are mostly nonsense political grandstanding anyway. It's some congressman scoring political points by ranting at Zuckerburg about things they don't really understand and Zuckerburg playing along. If the government were serious, they would start bringing lawsuits against the company or would threaten to craft regulations to reign in the behavior. They are not doing so, so they are obviously not serious. The minute the government starts to do such things, Zuckerburg will also be more serious.

I must be misunderstanding this. People are supposed to pay for the privilege of potentially driving traffic to a site that features ads? Is the reasoning that aggregators could just summarize the content and negate the need to go to the original provider?

Iirc this is done in China with Wechat

This is my general response whenever these types of articles appear. If your labor costs are insanely high, you need to raise prices. If people won't pay more for your products, you need to create better products worth more money, give staff equity and reduce profit, or shut down.

I actually had the polar opposite experience. I had a complex support issue with my pixel 3 delivery and I got irritated because support was constantly escalating and shunting to different teams. While it was a bitch to fix the problem and took awhile, to Google's credit they did eventually do so and went the extra mile for me to extend a promotion and honor a referral code which they certainly didn't need to do.

Yup, my parents had many in wall / ceiling speakers wired up to a receiver that they sort of forgot about because the system only received input from a 30 pin ipod dock and no one ever bothered to figure out how the receiver was configured. I pulled that interface out and replaced it with a chromecast audio and it blew their minds. It was probably the biggest ROI I've ever gotten out of any tech project I've ever done for them.

I'm very sad they are discontinuing this product. I was actually about to buy one for my new apartment. It looks like they are sold out everywhere already :(

To be fair, paying with cash at a gas station is annoying if your objective is to fill your tank completely rather than spend X amount as it forces you to guess your prospective spend.

It all depends on the product. Once you start getting into niche products which cost thousands or tens of thousands per year to use, the assumption is that the customer is a serious business with funding that has a known problem to solve. There will be a much smaller number of approaches than with a cheap consumer facing product and a conversion is worth a lot, so it makes sense to pair prospective customers with a domain specialist / sales person immediately to tailor the pitch to the specific candidate, modify the solution as necessary to fit the customer's needs, and make sure they are happy.

People want more things and they want to be better than other people. People want a higher quality of life. People want the social status and personal gratification that comes with performing higher status, skilled work well. It's not as easy as simple saying "you don't have to work anymore to have a decent quality of life". You would have to profoundly retool peoples' expectations and the way we view work as a society.

I know several people who could retire tomorrow and never work again but they keep working away anyway. If your premise is we would all like to stop working but can't because we aren't deploying tech correctly or don't have the money to do so, why do large numbers of these people exist?

I can't point to specific suits off the top of my head, but I've seen a few from inside my former employer and heard my friends tell of instances where someone wasn't granted a position and sued on the basis of descrimination.

The issue is generally not that an org is descriminating, it's actually generally the exact opposite. The org is trying to institute policy which protects them from these suits and "standardizes" the hiring process. It's typically subunits or managers in the org who get fed up with the process because they can't hire who they want to efficiently, and circumvent it by writing these job descriptions. HR audits these employment calls and has no clue what half the words in the description mean or what the position actually entails, so it is not flagged.