abrahamepton

If it looks like a Nazi salute and is done by a Nazi to honor another Nazi while adoring Nazis cheer, why do I care that you think it’s not Nazi?

You can’t name one single lie. If so, please do.

Assuming that the age field is the only thing being used for determining payouts is really wildly naive. If you wanted to game SSA, this would be the dumbest and easiest-to-catch way to do it. Your other garbage about how frontline worker estimates of fraud being large means the fraud itself must be large bespeak a silly person who’s already reached the conclusion he wants. All your conspiracy theorizing sounds like a person marinating in right wing garbage news sites for a while. Sorry to your family.

http://flow.epton.org - inspired by note taking in high school debate (“flowing”), the idea is to better represent a debate by breaking it up into topics and exchanges and visualizing it to make it easy to consume and evaluate.

Not only does that not make sense…it doesn’t make sense! Why would unpayable ransoms be higher? And my argument is that in fact, “open[ing] up the ease of payment” enables a new form of monetizing activity, so it is a new incentive because it unlocks a new business model.

BTC here is synecdoche for all crypto. Silly crypto flavor of the day X doesn’t avoid the ransomware problem at all.

So you don’t disagree that extortionists use crypto to monetize their illegal activity at scale.

Huh? The argument is that they commit crimes and receive ransoms in BTC that they can then convert to USD, EUR. This is a new incentive to commit crimes that simply didn’t exist before; wire transfers and the like are not a good substitute, by design.

These expectations go both ways: it used to be that most jobs were stable, long-lasting and well paid. I live in a 100 year old house in Seattle whose first occupants were an immigrant janitor and his homemaker wife. Today most of our neighbors are lawyers, architects and other professionals because those are the only jobs that pay well enough to afford a house in Seattle.

It’s really no surprise that if your only options for work don’t pay much and demand a ton, you’re not gonna be too invested in that work. If you don’t see how you can build a stable life for yourself through work…why work?

Expectations go both ways. We used to expect people to work hard at one job that a household could survive on. Such jobs basically no longer exist outside of tech or law, so it’s natural that other behaviors change too.

And to the author’s fevered insistence that nobody can talk about this…I suggest talking to people. This is a very common discussion on the left, outside of his weird caricatures.

Yeah. I've been on those sidewalks too. "People are passed out, possibly dead" is...hyperbolic. It's a real issue, I grant you, but there's a looot of hyperbole. It's not that bad, except in a few specific corners across an entire city of 700,000 people. So I disagree with the assessment.

Lol. I live in Seattle, with a kid, on a block with tons of kids, in a neighborhood with tons of kids. It's fine. Seriously. It's great, actually.

WTF are you talking about.

This is so f’ing stupid, and in that way perfectly epitomizes what’s so broken about crypto.

Nobody wants to run their own bank, which ALSO means nobody wants to use Jim’s shady internet bank or their buddy’s bank or their mom’s bank or or or…

Like, nobody in crypto seems to think for one second about how the world actually works or what people not brainwashed by crypto might want.

It’s a tech that has thoroughly, definitively lost the argument. It’s as clear a dead end as the metaverse, or pivots to video (let alone Meta/FB’s pivot to video)

> Or perhaps it's a matter of personal principle. Personal conscience and conviction used to be held sacred in the US ... to the point that conscientious objectors wouldn't be forced to fight in wars

It's a great argument, so long as "rejecting a vaccine during a pandemic" meets the same moral tests as "opposing war". In fact it does not, and so this "personal principle" is quite silly and actively harmful.

The government has not done anything in mandating vaccination that it has not done, over and over again, with total societal unanimity. Until some people decided there was political hay to be made with a bad, dumb argument about "personal principle" and now tens of thousands of people are dead for no good reason.

It's super dumb, and the "personal principle" argument fails every test you could throw at it.

I don’t understand why it matters what Haugen believes - whether in “no encryption” or space fairies or whatever - instead of what she proved, which is the profoundly amoral and dishonest nature of the company.

Mounk is famous for writing exactly this piece, over and over again, with only the names changed. As long as the person getting “canceled” is in some way conservative, Yascha Mounk (and Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi) will be there to write this article.

Having worked at a media outlet, it's not particularly credible that they "ignored" it. Maybe some of them did.

But if the Washington Post and Buzzfeed (who are also, uh, media sources themselves) FOIA'ed 3200 pages of Fauci emails, there's a zero percent chance - zero - that someone from a bunch of orgs didn't at least take a look.

The reason it looks like they "ignored" it is because they didn't see a story to report. Which is how the process should work.

So if there were a Fauci email saying, "Yeah, we probably created covid, whoops" there's a zero percent chance you wouldn't see at least someone linking to the email in question. Do you see those links? There you go.

Just read that and...there's nothing. Fauci's one of the most prominent people on the planet, dealing with one of the worst pandemics in recent human history, so I'd honestly expect his emails to contain way more interesting stuff than what the Tangle pulled out. If that's all there is, no wonder it's crickets from everybody except the right, who have an obvious interest in discrediting Fauci and a notable disinclination to give a shit about facts.

Was it massive? My impression was that it was exactly what you'd expect - basically a nothingburger, a few interesting tidbits, most of the sensational stuff was taken out of context and/or already known and/or flatly misrepresented.

What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?

Yep, I have!

Homelessness is a profound and society-wide problem, with no easy answers unless you consider "spend way more money, build way more housing" an easy answer (which I do).

Until we do those things, it should be no surprise that a region with skyrocketing rents has a housing crisis, and that will present itself in myriad unpleasant ways.

Muckraking implies at least a casual desire to stick to the facts, which is entirely absent from Sinclair-owned stations.

That piece, and KOMO's larger project, are toxic right-wing propaganda. Please don't consider that a reliable source.

There's a great book on ~roughly this topic - Ghettoside, by Jill Leovy. The thesis is that police in some cities (her work is in LA, but I lived in Chicago for a while and the idea transfers seamlessly) do an abysmal job of solving homicides.

That has all sorts of knock-on effects: people close to a murder victim lose the sense that the state will do something about their loss, so they take the matter into their own hands; people who commit homicide are a tiny minority but if they're not apprehended, they can keep committing homicides, which makes a broader society feel less safe; people sense that the state, their city, their neighbors, etc don't care about them because if the homicide was of someone in a richer neighborhood, it would be more likely to be solved; etc. Been a while since I read it so I'm forgetting a lot.

I think this goes some way towards explaining why people in neighborhoods where lots of violent crime is committed have such ambivalent feelings about the police - they are at once underpoliced (police don't solve major crimes in their neighborhood) and overpoliced (police bust people for all kinds of small-time stuff, which has devastating long-term consequences).

At the same time as all of the above, it's also true that it's basically never been safer to live in a big American city (ok ok, at least since like the 1960s - before then the picture gets significantly more complicated). So it's safer than ever, but big crimes don't get prosecuted or solved, unless they happen in the "right" neighborhoods. The solution therefore isn't more of the same police; maybe it's more policing but the policing itself needs to change.

There are serious, devastating critiques of Bitcoin. There are no serious rebuttals to those critiques, but plenty of people "involved in the industry" are making a lot of money from BTC, so it's no surprise they've convinced themselves it's fine. I guess they suckered you in too.

It’s a pretty silly argument. Maps, android, gmail, translate, docs, mapreduce, kubernetes, tensorflow come to mind off the top of my head. Honestly it’s a stupid contention. Apple’s awesome but the list of “great” things they’ve done is what, a third as long despite existing decades longer?

Here you go; fits 4 kids easily and is electric so you won’t smell bad: https://bunchbike.com/products/the-original-electric-cargo-b...

This is pretty damn incoherent.

> the core reason for cryptocurrencies; escaping inflation and control

Maybe in a whitepaper. In the real world, it's mostly about speculation and enabling crime.

> Law and order stands on the backs of a lot of stuff and CO2. Bitcoin is an example of one little piece of this not needing all that stuff.

Ok...? This is nonsensical.

> Instead it's protected by this mining fleet. And if you want to contest ownership there's no one to invade, no one to attack; the best you can do is make a fleet and try to mine.

Or someone can beat you up and make you give them your password. Rubber-hose decryption has a long track record and is trivial for the right actor to implement, this isn't some weird edge-case.

> It's a small step in the direction of getting away from all these endless wars and control.

Citation badly needed; how does cryptocurrency "get away from all these endless wars"?

> Carbon tax CO2

Ok, this is correct and not incoherent.

I've worked at Google and a newspaper (Chicago Tribune). I can guarantee you that a room full of Google SWEs could not start producing an edition of the Trib one day later, though they could absolutely put words into articles.

There's so much more that I want to say to you but I'll leave it there. You are wildly incorrect.

The premise is not, even remotely, "humans can't be trusted to talk to one another" but rather, "humans have spent our entire existence as a species talking to each other in a different way than we have begun to in the last two decades."

The alternative to trusting humans is not to just leave ourselves open to the vagaries of the winds, or whatever, but to allow malicious actors to take advantage of an unregulated medium to pursue their own interests. Not sure why anyone should think that's a better outcome.

No, the notion is more like "the Internet enables a fundamentally different kind of communication than we've grown up with, and we should rethink our assumptions accordingly."

It's just not like other kinds of human communication that we've had for our entire history as a species.

Human psychological evolution is thousands of years behind the technical capabilities we've developed in the last few decades. A bit of thoughtfulness in the governance of those capabilities isn't too much to ask.

Multiple senior members of a Presidential campaign have either pled guilty or been convicted of serious felonies, and you think the ones to blame are the FBI?

I mean I think the FBI has a lot to answer for, here and on plenty of other issues, but...

I don't know how to tell you this, because you won't believe it, but if you're sincere and not a troll then you have a very unhealthy media diet. Your take here is very disconnected from reality.

I'm sure you disagree. Alas.