boona

It's deeply unfortunate because there is quite a bit politically related content that appears on this site, and it's often links to ideologically driven articles, and people discuss those topics without reprisal.

> "You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle."

The issue I take with that statement is that I don't use this site for an ideological battle, I use it as a means to voice my opinions and discuss topics. Where the "battle" comes in, is that my views are at odds with large parts of the community. I don't hate Donald Trump, I'm skeptical of catastrophic anthropomorphic climate change, I'm reluctant to hand over control of the internet to politicians i.e. net neutrality, just to name a few. This puts me at odds with left-wing coastal culture, which this site seems primarily made up of. That means that I will get into debates more than the average person, and I will be down voted because people disagree with me. But what's the point of having a comments section at all if we don't want to be exposed to different ideas? I would think that of all places news.ycombinator would welcome different perspectives and the challenging of ones beliefs.

> That's an abuse of the site, and we ban accounts that do it, so please stop.

I would ask that you stop targeting individual who have a differing opinion from that of your own. If there's any abuse, it's the bullying and intolerance I've been receiving from you, so please stop and allow members to discuss in peace.

I'm totally with you. Dr. Patrick Moore is a quack. I mean ya people will argue that he co-founded Greenpeace, has PhD in Ecology and a B.Sc. Forest Biology, but he believes that changes in solar activity that has a much better correlation than CO2 levels, but the sun is so far away am I right? Here's another interview where he elaborates on his quackery, and a link to a science denial website.

> Steven Crowder Interviews Patrick Moore - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDK1aCqqZkQ

> Climate Skeptic http://www.climate-skeptic.com/

I agree with you, these crazies are legitimately deluded and a bunch of shills for questioning the data and it's conclusions. I mean sure the government has poured money into this industry and demanded a certain result, but government already knows what the right results are, who are they to question them.

Pvnick your opinion doesn't fall in line with evangelical progressivism, so downvoting rather than engaging you directly is in order. Don't you know that politicians always and everywhere make things better, and that billions of individual actors competing and testing various ideas simultaneously is doomed to fail. Also, make sure to ignore competing voices. Science isn't about skepticism, it's who has more people on their side. To quote Einstein upon finding out that there was a book titled 100 Authors against Einstein "If I were wrong, then one [author] would have been enough!". Clearly he was an idiot. Also, ignore those who disagree with our world view like the ones listed below. They're literally Hitler.

> Tom Woods Interview with Patrick Moore: http://tomwoods.com/ep-559-greenpeace-co-founder-repudiates-...

> The 97% consensus: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.ca/2014/02/a-climate-falsehoo...

> The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science http://blog.dilbert.com/post/154082416051/the-non-expert-pro...

> You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of production/acquisition all the way to the start of the value chain

This was common practice for communist countries, because they couldn't calculate otherwise. Logically, you can't calculate like the market does since the price system (or lack of system) is able to communicate vast amounts of information that socialism just can't. See The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich Hayek. It's in part why he won the Nobel prize in economics. It's a short essay that's free online.

> You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races.

It doesn't come close to explaining the catastrophic system wide failure that Marxism produces.

First, a comment that promotes Marxism or Nazism or any of heinous ideologies should be met with a certain harshness. We tried that in the 20th century, and considering the 100+ million dead people (most of it due to Marxism), I think it's fair to say that that was a bad turn in human history.

Second, considering that the comment I was replying to contained snark i.e. "atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions", I'm not sure why you focused on mine.

In the future, please be consistent with your application of warnings. You wouldn't want to members to believe that you're ideologically driven rather than promoting open intellectual discussion.

What are they waiting for? Why aren't they providing their services to the most lucrative market on the planet?

Exactly. Elon Musk has been working 80 hour work weeks for the past 20 years now. I'm not saying that's anywhere near a balanced lifestyle. But without those sacrifices, it's much harder to produce innovative world changing products or services. The United States creates and draws those character types to it, and for many Europeans countries, they don't.

I'm very skeptical of that claim. Besides the fact that every week we read an article about X city is the new Silicon Valley, Europeans in general don't seem to have that same drive Americans do to create new products. Which could explain why we haven't seen many large innovative tech companies come out of there in a while.

(Though in countries like the Czech Republic, and to a lesser extent places like Romania and Poland seem to have more drive, and the work ethic to boot.)

Edit: I'm not saying that they haven't achieved say a better work/life balance, but that their culture doesn't seem to produce very many world changing entrepreneurs as evidenced by so few companies being created there and that stay there.

I'm not sure what's going on with the Hacker News culture lately, but it seems to be increasingly hostile to diversity of thought. I get that comparing cultures has come under fire from the extreme political left, but that's no reason we can't have a discussion about it. I would like it if members didn't just downvote me, but engage me instead. Anecdotally, I've been to several European countries, I've engaged with local populations, and the culture is different. And empirically, they're not innovating anywhere near the rate the US is. I'm willing to change my views, I would love to be wrong and that Europe will experience an entrepreneurial renaissance, but I just don't see it. Tell me where I'm wrong.

I'm having that discussion elsewhere in the comments. Here is my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382.

> the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists

It has sure tried, but it can't, because it's Marxist at it's core, and it therefore shares it's same inherent problems. It can't calculate properly properly for one, and whether the heads of those systems are politicians or programmers, the failure points are the same.

> please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate

Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate. Soviet economists had a joke that went "We'll take over the entire world, but not New Zealand so we can know how much things cost". To that point, remember that when China was communistic, they had brought in thousands of Sears catalogs so they could allocate their resources correctly. These are things we take for granted today, but it's an attribute of economic freedom.

From an empirical perspective, Marxist economic systems have failed catastrophically in all of the 20th century. The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to starvation. Soviet Russia, China, and even North Korea had to allow at least pockets of free markets for people to survive.

So while I'm not saying that Marxists economists are economically illiterate, they have a lot to account for. And from what I've read from Mr. Fresco and the Venus Projects, including debates I've listen to, they don't seem to have an answer to these questions.

Edit: For more on the calculation problem you may want to look up "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by economist Friedrich Hayek. Incidentally, Jimmy Wales has stated that that paper was central to how the wikipedia project is managed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...

I think society values good intention way too much. This man fought his entire life for what amounts to Marxism with robots. His intentions may have been good, his heart in the right place, but his ideas were bad, and if implemented, they would be disastrous.

If we judge him by his intentions, he was a good man. If we judge him by what he wished upon the world, he was a horrible human being. Though we should keep good intentions in mind, I strongly believe that we should also judge the outcome of what people are proposing.

You mean someone who understands the complexities of the markets and the financial system wasn't convinced by Marxism with robots? I can't imagine why.

If any entity isn't healthy for the gaming community it's Polygon. This and other click bait articles they release regularly try to stir up controversy where there isn't any.

You've missed the point of my argument entirely. The FCC was put into place to regulate airwaves, i.e. who can use what airwaves and for what purpose. It didn't take long for them to start regulating the content said airwaves.

My point is that I really don't care what your good intention are, or what you believe the government will limit itself to. That's all nice and sweet, and a great discussion for a 5th grade civics class, but what I'm saying is how long do you think before well intended, someone please think of the children types (or more recently those of the outrage culture spawned from university campuses), will start regulating the content? Once you give them authority to make decisions about how the internet should be regulated, they'll start getting creative. The FCC is a historical example of that, and it's the exact department your handing over the internet to.

If the internet is fundamental to free speech, maybe it's not a good idea to give it's freedom over to state control, and in particular to an agency who historically has gone beyond it's original mandate and censored content.

When you hand over control to the government, don't ask yourself what it would look like if you were creating the laws, ask yourself what it'll look like when self-interested politicians create them.

> Do you honestly think every tax bracket pays the same effective rate as the middle class?

Are you talking to me? Because I didn't say that. What I said is that the rich pay for most for government services, which means that per person, they pay WAY MORE than their fair share. Elon Musk will be paying nearly half a billion dollars in income tax this year, what did YOU contribute? How much would you need to sacrifice in your life to pay a tenth of what he paid this year alone?

What are you doing to fix them? How can you ensure that bad school close down, and good schools thrive? Why not use a solution that has clearly worked? Why can't we agree that out of the infinite ways that people can organize themselves, that maybe having politicians and government runs things isn't the best solution in all cases?

> "Americans from all backgrounds should have a fair shot at a quality education, not just those who happen to grow up in nice neighborhoods."

While the rich pay more than their fair share and then some (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KENaWXPmBr0), I would think that quality education is something we could all get behind. It's unfortunate though that the left in large part seem to be opposed to school choice. That means that if you live in a more impoverished neighborhood, you're stuck with whatever school you're assigned to instead of being able to shop around, and for a lot of impoverished neighborhoods, that means schools with bad teachers and administrators, and there is no way out of it. This is a huge problem in black communities, and one area where the right legislation could make a significant impact.

I've had conversations with local builders, and it seems that since the early 90s the soft costs (i.e. costs related to regulation, zoning, inspections, etc) related to building new homes in much of Ontario have increased from approximately 20% of total cost, to around 50% of the cost. Meaning that half of the cost of purchasing a new home goes straight to the government. It's true that some of those costs are unavoidable, but if politicians were serious about reducing costs, they would reduce that overhead.

> I don't understand why it's controversial that California (or any other state) should be legally obligated to pay the pensions they promised to workers.

Because the people of California can no longer afford it. It's unfortunate that baby boomers allowed politicians to kick the can down the road by negotiating pensions rather than salaries, but now fiscal reality is settling in. And you want to talk about unconscionable, what they have in effect done is a money transfer from their children to them, since now younger generations have to pay the pensions, while receiving none of the benefits. That's why you're seeing movements like Generation Screwed here in Canada (http://www.generationscrewed.ca/).

I agree that /r/the_donald is a poor quality experience, but it's analogous and in response to the poor quality experience of the /r/politics. They're both "circlejerks" that don't allow competing views to be posted. So while you may need to take the_donald with a huge grain of salt, if you're only get your news from left wing site like /r/politics, npr, huff po, new york times, and even hacker news for the most part, you could do worse than checking it out. (Though I would recommended Daily Wire, Daily Caller, and Reason as a counter points.)

I'm still not sure how that's considered a loophole. The people who work for them are in fact small business operators, and it most certainly does simplify the process for them not having to pay for GST.

Is your argument that you wish they had structured it differently so they were forced to pay more taxes? If that was the case then the drivers would be making a less, and the passengers would pay a more to cover the costs of the GST, and I don't see the point in that.

If taxi companies want to level the playing field, why don't structure themselves in more innovative ways like Uber did instead of forcing others to pay more taxes?

>Uber has made a business out of exploiting legal loopholes.

I find that kind of argumentation silly. They brought to the taxi industry, what is common in other industries, like construction, tech, etc. Stated differently, Uber has been able to provide a competitive service by legally structuring themselves in a way maximizes return for the themselves, for the driver, but still keeps costs low client due to say structuring.

> uber hating world wide

I don't know if that's accurate to say. Do people part of the "outrage culture" hate Uber? Sure. But I don't believe that that sentiment accurately reflects what most people think about the company. Most people just go about their day, and are at most peripherally aware that some people are pissed off at Uber and that's that.

>I obviously think that Chaffetz's comment was roughly as idiotic as you'd expect from Jason Chaffetz

And that time Obama made a similar argument, you thought he was just as idiotic as well right?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/03/07/chaffetz-hit-for-...

> The earth is warming

Right, but only 0.74ºC in the last 100 years, which may very well be a normal variance. So original projections were wrong, and they had to change the claim being made.

> folks don't actually believe global warming

To be nit picky, the belief is no longer in global warming, but climate change. Those who promoted global warming got their predictions terribly wrong, and that's why we refer to it as climate change today. They got it right this time I'm sure.

> That article shows Google wanting new regulations imposed in some areas

Where did you get that? Kevin Lo from Google is quoted as saying "Regulations tied to physical infrastructure sometimes defer the investment altogether". Are you saying that in reference to something else?

Hmm, that's a good question. It's not clear to me at what level of government the most stifling regulations are. I had also read that they wanted to offer phone services for free, but they dropped those due to the incredibly high regulations in that field as well.

https://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-government-let-us-build-...

> He has taken to blatantly and explicitly lying about simple verifiable facts, and doubling down on those lies when challenged.

I'm not saying that's not true (I'm not a Trump supporter), but what sticks out to you as an instance of him doubling down on a lie?

Edit: It's disappointing to be down voted rather than being directly engaged. If you have a beef with what I said, please tell me where I've erred. I would love to change my mind on this topic. This is Hacker News after all, not Reddit.