ardy42

> I'm not sure how that demonstrates QAnon members are not generally trapped in right-wing echo chambers. Are yoga practitioners exempt from right-wing echo chambers?

I suppose a significant number of yoga teachers/influencers could be secret dittoheads, but the idea kind of beggars belief.

One of the interesting things about QAnon is that it offered on-ramps to groups outside the stereotype of people would go for such a theory (e.g. "save the children"). People in right-wing echo chambers were definitely more susceptible, but it's a mistake to be reassured by that.

Also, particular echo chambers aren't some kind of primordial entity. They start all the time and they often grow. So even if something like QAnon requires one, that just means there's one more step.

> I believe it is reasonable to speculate that QAnon members are generally trapped in extreme, right-wing echo chambers. Echo chambers enable people to retain undeserved credibility.

That's not true, for instance:

https://www.startribune.com/conspiracy-theories-of-qanon-fin...

> Conspiracy theories of QAnon find fertile ground in an unexpected place – the yoga world

> QAnon's conspiracy theories have taken root among yogis and other adherents of natural medicine.

> How long would it take you to establish enough credibility to be able to make an accusation like that and have people actually take your word for it?

Keep this in mind: Q is literally some dude on 4chan/8chan with a tripcode.

> There might be a few nutters out there who are so predisposed to hate JFK that they'll believe anything negative about him, but most people - even those who dislike him - would rightfully question such an outlandish statement made by someone with no credentials.

I make no claim that my example lie is a good example of misinformation/disinformation. It was only meant to show the asymmetry of effort implicit in "more discussion."

The key thing about getting a lie to stick is to hitting the right emotional buttons with it. And it's so easy broadcast lies nowadays that you can even discover those buttons stochastically, by just throwing random lies out there and seeing what sticks.

Furthermore, if your goal is not to convince anyone of anything in particular, but to just to gum up a society (which is the goal of disinformation, properly understood), you don't event need to find particular lies with a broad appeal across society. You just need enough lies that enough people fall for one or two.

> misinformation is combat with MORE discussion, not less!

The problem with that idea is that it takes more effort to debunk a lie than to tell one. It also takes more effort to absorb a debunking than a lie. That's why disinformation works.

Here's an example: JFK ate babies occasionally, and the media hushed it up. Oswald was actually a secret high-level CIA operative, and was so outraged by this that he assassinated JFK for it.

It took me two seconds to write that. How much effort would it take you to debunk it?

It's just not practical to put all the burden of combating misinformation on each individual's shoulders. It's also necessary to stop the spread of misinformation. That doesn't need to be done by a central authority, but people who've been convinced by a lie will perceive that as "censorship" by one.

> scientific consensus is not arrived at when every scientific paper says the same thing. this is a fundamentally wrong view of science and also reality. on any given topic, the corpus includes opposing conclusions. eventually we figure out why and discern the underlying principles.

Scientific consensus is also not arrived at by publishing literally every crackpot idea, and answering each with "more discussion." Science has several mechanisms for "censoring" bullshit and misinformation (e.g. peer review), and it couldn't function without it. "More discussion" is saved for cases where those mechanisms failed.

> It's political censorship disguised at fact checking. If they were really concerned about "fake news", they would apply the same standards to the other side. Remember how just a couple years ago almost all of the major media outlets were pushing a conspiracy theory about "Russian Collusion"? Yet nobody is talking about shutting ABC, CBS, NBC, or MSNBC down, kicking them off cable, or banning them from the internet.

You're misremembering. Russian collusion was an allegation that needed to be investigated because of 1) the actions of Russian intelligence agencies to influence the election in ways advantageous to Trump, and 2) weird things members of the Trump campaign did that were suspicious. However, the major media outlets only reported on that, and it didn't go on to claim that there was actual collusion.

For instance, here's the first page of results from major media outlet search for "Russian collusion" (ending the day before the Mueller report):

https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20190321...

> BRIEFING Judge Doubles Down on Scrutiny of Roger Stone’s Book

> POLITICS Roger Stone’s New Instagram Post and Book Draw Scrutiny After Gag Order

> POLITICS Trump Lawyer ‘Vehemently’ Denies Russian Collusion

> POLITICS ‘Collusion Delusion’: Trump’s CPAC Speech Mocks Mueller Inquiry

> POLITICS Trump Says There Was ‘No Collusion’ With the Russians

> OPINION The Russians Were Involved. But It Wasn’t About Collusion.

> POLITICS Indictment Details Collusion Between Cyberthief and 2 Russian Spies

> OPINION How Will ‘Collusion’ Play in the Midterms?

> OPINION Can We Please Stop Talking About ‘Collusion’?

> OPINION Oh, Wait. Maybe It Was Collusion.

That last piece sounds like it's the closest to saying there was collusion, lets see what it says:

> What remains to be determined is whether the Russians also attempted to suborn members of the Trump team in an effort to gain their cooperation. This is why the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is so important.

That's not pushing a conspiracy theory.

On the other hand, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, etc. lied to the extent that they're legitimately worried about the conspiracy theories they were pushing costing them a lot of money from defamation lawsuits:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/19/business/fox-smartmatic-news-...

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/05/media/lou-dobbs-fox-show-canc...

https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/02/03/newsmax-mike-...

However, I don't fault you too much for this confusion. There are a lot of liars out there who've found a lot of success "arguing" with false equivalencies to keep their followers loyal to the cause.

But if there are 34 billion tethers, $18 million is like a rounding error.

The difficulty is that so much infrastructure has been built around the assumption of car use, and that will be very expensive and take a long time to redesign and replace.

> Surely there must a technical trail to investigate.

The probably is, but I'm guessing the really definitive records would probably require a subpoena to obtain (e.g. business records of the domain registrar or hosting company).

> It‘s a pretty strong case for Len to be Satoshi, admittedly. And it would explain the mysterious silence from Satoshi Nakamoto - he's dead.

I think it's pretty likely that the person (or people) who went by Satoshi is dead, and probably died before their Bitcoin hoard was worth much.

If not, you'd have to explain why someone is giving up the opportunity to never have to work for someone else to support themselves ever again. And those are less believable to me: e.g. 1) already having so much FU money they're secure in their lifestyle w/o the Bitcoin, 2) being either extremely ascetic or happy to work for someone else to support themselves, 3) deliberately choosing to destroy it for some reason, 4) losing the all keys in an accident (more understandable for a rando playing around than the creator), etc.

Were there any scientific utility to these payloads, or were they added in order to create some spacecraft porn? How much did the equipment for this weigh?

IIRC, a downward facing camera is useful for precisely locating the landing location, but I'm having trouble seeing a purpose for the upward facing camera besides getting cool sky-crane video.

> Per their press conference today, in the Q&A section. https://youtu.be/gYQwuYZbA6o?t=4025

What was the model? The recording was garbled, and all I could hear was "...we're using a commercial computer, an Intel ???? PC. It's running Linux...

> Griddy is simply an energy provider you can choose to hedge your bets and save money if you are smart. Plenty of people using it shut off their power or switched providers when they were informed of the incoming price surge. That some households ignoring the warnings shouldn't be a reason a service like Griddy can't exist.

It's not reasonable to expect households to monitor their electricity rates or alert emails that closely nor be prepared to drop everything to switch providers at a moment's notice for an entirely unexpected reason. I know I don't immediately read every email I get.

An even if someone was monitoring that closely, or was ready to jump, there's no guarantee they'll be able to switch:

https://6abc.com/griddy-gridy-texas-power-bills-what-is-ener...:

> In a rare move Sunday night, Griddy sent out an email to all 29,000 of its customers, urging them to switch to a different provider. Thigpen says she tried Monday morning, but no one was taking new customers....

> We reached out to a few providers here in Texas. They are not taking customers. Some say they may accept new customers by next Wednesday, when they say the weather has improved. That was the earliest 'maybe' answer we could get.

> This article seems to suggest the answer is a fully automated smart home, with some kind of AI to intelligently manage your power usage. Sounds awesome, but I don't think that's ever going to be a reality outside the valley.

It also sounds awful. It would objectively be a regression from reliable electricity to unreliable electricity, like in an undeveloped country.

The only thing such a technology would do is give the power companies a BS way to shift the blame for their planning fuck ups onto consumers, because technically it would be the consumer's equipment that killed the power.

> That's kind of what I'm saying. Rich people making their own dream cities is probably as old as rich people and cities. Ig I could see an explosion of home automation tech giving more people a reason to try, though

Not all rich people, though. It might be interesting to characterize the one's that have built a utopian city, and see if they conform to some common type. Maybe they share important characteristics with modern-day "tech moguls"?

> They dont really seem too, though. Theres a lot of examples of rich people building towns even in these comments. Is there any evidence tech moguls do it any more frequently?

The OP didn't really establish it (e.g. take an inventory of all Americans building utopian cities, and see if tech moguls are over-represented), but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true. The combination of experience with disruptive innovation, engineer's syndrome, and power would seem like a recipe for these kinds of cities, though a less productive one than near-absolute power over some polity.

Also, a lot of the towns mentioned in the comments pre-date tech moguls.

> What a strange thing to pin on tech. Company towns have existed forever, to the point of having laws made about how they can function.

The idea of building a utopian city doesn't need to be a brand new thing for tech moguls to have a greater interest in creating them than other types of contemporary moguls.

Also, I don't think a company town is really the same thing as a utopian city. In my mind a "company town" is mainly an attempt to maximize exploitation of a set of workers, while a "utopian city" is built as a pure expression of some subset of someone's ideals, relatively unsullied by competing ideas, which usually aren't so crass as "maximal exploitation of the residents."

>> No. It's time to push back on Bitcoin.

>> It is disgraceful to watch people such as Elon Musk and most of the VCs put money ahead of the environment.

> I am sorry you did not buy it when it was cheaper. No need to hate it now because you were stupid back then.

You're obviously defensively making some false assumptions. The big one is probably assuming that people are primarily motivated by greed and jealousy, and that other motivations are fake and meant to disguise that.

And for the record, I agree with the GP, and I've made quite a bit of money off of this bubble by selling some bitcoins I mined a decade ago.

> Agreed. Surprised there are so many Bitcoin lovers on HN and in the startup scene, which is supposed to consist of smarter-than-average people. Bitcoin is basically shitty gold, because unlike gold, it has no intrinsic value and can go to zero, it's all based on fragile sentiment.

Being "smart" often doesn't translate into making good decisions or having good judgment. Sometimes intelligence only amounts to better capabilities at rationalizing whatever harebrained thing you already wanted to do, instead of giving up on it.

I think Bitcoin hits a bunch of special-interest buttons in some people that make it very difficult to put aside, for instance: truly innovative technology, startup thinking/wanting to be in on the "ground floor" of a big success, sci-fi made real, libertarianism, etc.

> The argument for gold is that it isn't 100% a speculative investment. According to Wikipedia(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold) 50% of gold's use case is in making jewelry and 10% is used for industry. On the other hand, Bitcoin isn't used for anything, except as for a speculative investment, not even as a currency or as a "decentralized PayPal".

Also, Gold has literally thousands of years of cultural precedent as being a "valuable thing." Bitcoin, not so much.

> China gains no benefit from destroying Bitcoin; they can just continue to let it exist and tax all the Bitcoin miners in China, generating revenue for themselves and their citizens and continuing to be a thorn in the side of dollar hegemony.

That's making a lot of assumptions which I don't think there are good grounds to assume. For instance, that Bitcoin tax revenue is something the Chinese government cares enough about for it to affect its decision-making, or that Bitcoin is a "thorn in the side of dollar hegemony."

I think the reality is that Bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general) is a niche thing that isn't nearly as important as its fans like to think it is, so there's little for a state-actor to gain by making the effort to disrupt it.

> Life will be so much better after we erase our history so we can repeat it.

So you're saying the way to prevent a repeat of the holocaust is to setup awards and honors in the name of Adolph Hitler?

> It's interesting if you want to support 50B people on Earth, but the resources required to build it out mean it isn't really even a viable solution for restoring farmland to wildland without massive amounts of mining.

Also it seems to be mainly about producing calorie-poor produce like lettuce. If you actually want to feed people, you need to produce calories, and I don't see how that's helped by putting several extra conversion inefficiencies between the energy source and the plants.

> I'm surprised there aren't more independent apps geared towards maximizing earning for drivers. Like it can't be that hard to create an artificial surge price if there's enough coordination between most regular drivers at popular spots (e.g. airports).

Wouldn't an app be relatively easy for Uber to monitor and subvert?

Drivers are already sometimes coordinating to create surge pricing, and they don't need an app to do it: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/uber-lyft-drivers-artificia...:

> While a reporter looked on, a group of about 50 drivers for both Lyft and Uber sat at their waiting area at Reagan National waiting while two drivers watched online to see when planes were about to land. After a plane lands, a lot of passengers request rideshare rides, which pushes demand up to begin with. But the drivers further tipped the imbalance between demand and supply by simultaneously turning off their apps five minutes before landing. Then two drivers stood at opposite ends of the waiting area, looking at the Uber and Lyft pricing for fares from the airport. They kept checking fares and watching the surge price increase until the fares were $13 higher than normal. At that point, they told the other drivers to turn their apps back on so they could begin accepting rides. The whole operation took less than two minutes, but now arriving passengers would pay around $13 more to reach their destinations.

> - They are loud

That really depends. This one seems pretty quiet: https://youtu.be/rGM8Y6yal-8?t=337, but buckling spring keyboards are obnoxiously loud (IIRC from my childhood).

> - The keys are massive and ugly

That's only true if your preference is for laptop-style keyboards.

> - Massive travel time (So slow to type on)

IIRC, one of the main benefits of mechanical key-switches is that you don't have to bottom them out to activate them. On my keyboard, there's at least 50% more travel after the switch is activated, and the travel-to-activation doesn't seem massively different than a laptop keyboard.

Also, non-mechanical desktop-style keyboards require the most travel time of anything.

> Sure they are a bit more customizable, but is that really worth all the drawbacks? Especially the worse typing, which is the main point of a keyboard.

Honestly, I think one of the better arguments for mechanical keyboards is that most non-mechanical keyboards were designed with cost reduction as the top priority (or in the case of Apple, thinness for its own sake). I guess if you're used to that, it's fine, but gunning for cheap usually leads to quality compromises in other areas.

The most annoying things regarding mechanical keyboards is that the culture around them has weird obsessions (like stripping things down to the fewest possible keys and using stylish custom keycaps). For instance, when I was searching for a quiet keyboard video, I found this one (https://youtu.be/O3-9ttpaU0E?t=57), where they guy misses the point and thinks the cool thing about Symbolics keyboards was the keycap style, when it's really the seven modifier keys.

> IID/BAIIDs that gets installed in vehicles are often installed to protect other peoples life, not your own.

Yeah, but that's just an example. If you were about to make a suicide attempt, you could be involuntarily committed, and the only person's life being protected would be your own.

The point that I was trying to get at was that black and white individualist statements like:

>>> You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it.

...paper over some important complexities of real life. There are many, many cases where people have responsibility for others (and I'm not just talking about legal responsibility, even though my examples all intersected with the law in some way).

>> Who decides that someone is a responsible and healthy adult?

> You do. It's not up to someone to decide, you're responsible for your own body and your own decisions to improve/harm it.

That's obviously not that black and white. If it was, then breathalyzer interlocks wouldn't be a thing, for instance.

>> control over whatever open source projects they target.

> but if they rewrite the project in rust, why _shouldn't_ they control that project? If other people choose to switch, then it's not wrong for them to move, and not wrong for to google gain control of those users.

I think the issue is the more critical projects Google controls, the more they can make decisions by fiat. Those decisions will favor Google's interests, and could sacrifice everyone else's interests in some way.

It's sort of like web browsers. My understanding is that Chrome is so dominant that Google can basically dictate HTML standards at this point, or at least effectively push them in directions that are favorable to its ad-based business.

> Opioids are insanely and instantly addictive. I accidentally became addicted after knee surgery.

Is that true generally, or just for a subset of people who have some predisposition to addiction?

While it could just be Purdue Pharma propaganda, I vaguely recall hearing that the "instant addiction" was a myth. However, people like you have experiences like yours, so there must be some truth to the "instant addiction" idea.

Edit for downvoters: I think it totally makes sense for everyone treat opioids like a loaded gun, like another poster said, if some people are vulnerable to an instant addiction effect. I just want to clarify what the actual situation is (for me and all the other people who were told it was a myth).

> Do wholesale prices directly translate to consumer prices?

I don't think they do where I live, because the rates are regulated and the power company needs permission to raise them.

> 900/Mwh is 90c per kwh, national average is about 14. Higher cost states are around 20c with Hawaii near 30c.

And IIRC, electricity in Hawaii is so expensive because they generate most of it with diesel.