Assimilation as most people understand it does not necessitate an immigrant become completely indistinguishable from a native citizen. There are some baseline expectations that are not always met right now, such as learning the official language of one's host country, and sometimes its social standards. Most countries simply lack the necessary coercive incentives to make that happen systematically. I would argue that most Western cultures have become too individualistic at the expense of societal health, fueling the notion that assimilation is inherently unethical.
Fighting antisemitism is clearly not the true motive behind this ideological "war", just as denazification was clearly not the motive for Russia's invasion of Ukraine; it's just a convenient excuse to target institutions such as Harvard that are unwilling to distance themselves from the progressive left.
Western tastes favor intense flavors, so tamari may provide better balance than standard (koikuchi) soy sauce in that sense, but in Japanese cooking, "richness" is not necessarily a desirable characteristic, and tamari would overwhelm many dishes when substituted for koikuchi in similar amounts. Reprocessed (sai-shikomi) soy sauce, made by fermenting soy sauce twice, is considered a middle ground between koikuchi and tamari in terms of richness and is popular for dipping. But there is also a relatively wide range of flavor within the koikuchi category, and the US-made Kikkoman sauce that many people are familiar with is not very flavorful.
I paid for a service that gave me useful insights into my ancestry and health profile, and it cost me less than 30 minutes with a teledoc and a basic blood test. I opted out of keeping my sample in storage and using the data for research at the time, and deleted my account and data a few months ago as a matter of general digital hygiene, but even if they didn't honor any of that, I don't see why I should be concerned about it being out there. The privacy concerns were quite obvious and oft-discussed several years ago when I sent my sample in, so I certainly didn't get "bamboozled". I'm sure there are many people who didn't consider that their data may not be private, but how many actually care about that?
How much in retail value? I've seen a few small companies that have all their manufacturing operations in China pass on tariffs at cost transparently, and for those that have already adjusted to the current rates, the surcharge is much smaller than I expected (~30%), but I don't know how margins differ by sector.
In my understanding, the Obama administration expelled 2.5 million illegal immigrants under the same emergency powers now being invoked by the Trump administration and did bypass standards of "due process" being raised today to block deportations. If it's practically impossible to expel the illegal immigrants allowed in via open border policies over the previous term, that's dysfunctional and the standards should be relaxed.
This case is particularly egregious, as the judge personally helped a violent illegal immigrant evade law enforcement outside of her jurisdiction, which explains the arrest; but "systematic obstruction" refers to the injunctions being issued constantly to block executive actions, suggesting that the Trump administration's attempts to reverse open border policies are subjected to a much higher standard than Democrats were under Obama just 15 years prior when they correctly viewed illegal immigration as a problem.
Not really. I want law and order to be upheld for the benefit of the broader society. If this can't happen due to systematic obstruction, then it's not a violation of my principles to be less critical of toeing a line I'd otherwise not like to see breached. If we all had hard lines drawn in the sand that never moved around, this wouldn't even be a conversation, because 15 years ago mass deportations were uncontroversial.
My disillusion with credentialism reached its peak when I published my first paper as an undergraduate student. That paper was based on a project I'd worked on part-time for maybe half of a semester. After my professor pushed for me to write a paper about it, I obscured the subject matter with the adequate specialist jargon and convoluted technical style and it was accepted by a fairly well-regarded publication uneventfully. I was on an accelerated curriculum planning to pursue a Master's degree and had much higher expectations for academia. I ended up dropping out after earning my Bachelor's. I'm much more sympathetic to independent researchers than to academics these days, and if I were to engage in serious research again, I would probably publish it independently rather than going through academic channels.
It's those with your attitude, in a state of constant smug denial, who look like tools right now. We'll see how it goes in a few years, but I doubt that will change. The constant goalpost-shifting as LLMs keep getting better and better is becoming embarrassing, and even if they stopped getting better from now on, which is certainly not the case, their impact on communications is on the same order of magnitude as that of the WWW. The curmudgeons I work with are too stubborn to realize that LLMs have moved past GPT-3, and most of the haters on HN sound the same.
China has a high-speed rail network whose size spans about half of the United States'. Some old US cities had better transit systems in the 1950s than they do now. No one expects every US city to be on the level of Tokyo, but there is no excuse for being so far behind.
I think people fixate on the directionality too much, at this point it is a self-reinforcing cycle. I don't know how to break it, but I'm not optimistic about the half-hearted attempts of some countries to address it via subsidies and tax breaks.
> I know very few parents that would rather work than hang out with their kids.
Work being a proxy for resources, most people want both. The value shift I mentioned earlier affects the extent to which we prioritize one or the other. Given the same economic environment, a society where family is viewed as more important than material comfort would have more families sacrificing income rather than just talking about it.
Is the cost of child care a cause, or is it a symptom of a deeper problem? The decline in the fertility rate is not an isolated phenomenon, and it spans many disparate cultures. I know this opens a can of worms, but perhaps we should be more open to the idea that maximizing the labor force participation of both sexes by outsourcing child-rearing is a suicidal model. It manifests as a gradual change in behaviors that we, in our hyper-individualistic society, tend to attribute to personal choice, but I don't think so many people would go "child-free" if we didn't frame child-rearing as a low-value trap that isn't worth sacrificing a professional career over. The supply constraint is a consequence of that value shift.
This poll is being propped up as evidence that people don't actually want to work in a factory, yet more people voiced interest in doing so than are currently, by an order of magnitude. If you believe there's a disconnect between perception and reality, that's fair, but it would have to be off by an order of magnitude on the positive side to support the premise, and an anecdote about a Chinese factory is very weak evidence of that. I would posit that many people would be happier and more fulfilled working in a factory than being stuck doing gig work or packing foreign products for Amazon or even bullshit desk work, but I'm not elitist enough to pretend to know what blue-collar workers in stagnant towns actually feel, let alone argue that they actually want the opposite of what they say. Personally, I wish I had the chance to work in a factory at 16 years old instead of a call center.
Tangential comment, but I now see people adding disclaimers reiterating their political affiliation to their posts regularly and I want to say that you shouldn't have to justify bilateral criticism. It doesn't imply equal magnitude, and it's only taken that way by bullies in dogmatic bubbles.
HN has a good model for technical discussions, and the fact that it's a forum with a limited scope whose audience mostly consists of technology professionals probably helps a lot in filtering low-effort posting (not to downplay the role of moderation). But when it comes to emotional topics like anything political, it clearly devolves into what you described.
That makes me wonder if there are forums out there that focus on current events in politics or economics and successfully filter emotionally-charged posts; the few commentators on X who manage to stay detached are the only people keeping me on algo-driven social media.
The pompous tone of your comment exemplifies what actually makes most social media platforms awful, which is how people act on them. Inconsistent moderation is everywhere, and most people getting banned from X absolutely deserve it. If you posted something like this on 4chan, people would quickly tell you to get off your high horse (in more vulgar terms). The nice thing about an anonymous message board is that without a name or upvote count attached to your name, you don't get positive reinforcement for putting on a show of moral superiority, and struggle sessions via petty call-outs or pile-ons are not a thing beyond the lifetime of a thread. And on the other side of the same coin, people are not afraid of damaging their reputation by being uncouth, which helps not take anything too seriously, and enables direct feedback instead of passive-aggressive behavior.
Both standardized tests and IQ highly correlate with success in higher education and career over a lifetime. Harvard's performance and reputation have tanked as a result of its anti-meritocratic policies, and the market is indeed responding, slowly but surely. You are making things up and conjuring nonsensical hypotheticals to deny the evidence that's right in front of our eyes.
Can't even be penniless these days, you need a fancy electronic device, a data plan and reliable access to an outlet before you can beg for charity. Sad world.
Well do you care about results or not? Because if climate change is such an urgent threat to face, it seems like all efforts should be directed towards the lowest-hanging fruit and making the most possible impact with the resources that you have, instead of muddying the waters by convincing people that buying a hyper-processed chocolate substitute will actually change anything meaningfully. OP clearly does not care enough to make it his or her life's quest, but that doesn't make it inconsistent to criticize the effort of those who supposedly do, just like it's not inconsistent to criticize a bad movie without being an accomplished film director. What's inconsistent is selling climate change as an imminent thread that has to be an immediate top priority to address, while promoting purely performative efforts. It seems like what actually motivates activists in this area is the sense of moral superiority more than a sense of duty.
I've been in secondary, but didn't have it described to me that way. I would not call it detainment without clarifying it because I associate that word with incarceration, but I am also reluctant to travel knowing the odds of that happening again are up.
As much as HN posters like to pretend they're above them, it's not an exaggeration to say that this site is now about as political as Reddit or Bluesky and votes like them. Depending on the thread, your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing partisanship, not because you're wrong or because your post is low-quality. For the record, my vote seems to have removed the low-opacity threshold on your post. I have no doubt that countless intelligent posts have been hidden solely because they do not align with leftist consensus, and comment sections are full of entirely delusional subthreads that fail to comprehend just about anything about politics, economics, or ethics, but are promoted because they align with a simplistic radical framework of "good guys smart, bad guys dumb".
Looks much better. The current map is a nightmare for readability, especially when you're squinting from a distance trying to read it inside a subway vehicle without encroaching on the personal space of someone sitting below it. For actual locations in relation to other points of interest, consult a general-purpose map, there are more options for that than there are readable and up-to-date alternative renderings of public transit network maps.
To me it just sounds like you're holding interrogators to an unreasonably high standard in order to deny the findings of the study. If we're talking about statistical aggregates, knowing that the average person lacks the knowledge to exploit known biases of current AI models is enough to dismiss the expectation that interrogators should target them specifically. Commenters also seem to be missing the fact that this is a situation where the interrogator does not know if they are conversing with an AI model or a human being. I wouldn't expect someone to go all out boxing a punching bag if I told them there's a 50% chance that there's another person trapped in there. I've never seen the Turing Test described in such demanding terms, and a look at the Wikipedia page contradicts the definitions pushed forward here.
Perhaps another name should be coined to describe the level of perfection that critics expect from this. It sounds like what you want is something akin to a comprehensive test for AGI.
Do the goalposts have to keep moving until we can no longer find any gap in common knowledge or eccentric behavior in AI? If so, what does that say about eccentric human beings?
Crime rates from immigrant populations are highly dependent on where the immigrants come from, and the US tends to do a better job at integration than European countries in recent years. Not that the US did not experience problems with immigrant crime from South America, but it is much worse in Europe, notably with immigrants from the Middle East. I think the baseline crime rate in the US was also higher than it was in European countries, before mass immigration policies kicked in.
The UK and Australia are ahead of countries like France in restricting freedom, so this sounds like a poor attempt to avoid complimenting the US specifically.