cderwin

Well, it's nearly half of the voting population and I think it's fair to extrapolate that to the entire population. Even taking the approval poll numbers, that's more than one in three, so I don't really think it changes my above comment much, if at all.

Honest question: how do you think a country where nearly half of its population are "bad people" should be governed? I can't imagine you'll actually be successful in pushing away one out of every two Americans. What do you think would be proper action to devalue the influence of these people and where in the world would you draw the line?

I wonder how much calling actually matters, because I feel like whether they receive 10 calls or 10,000, it's always going to be one-sided. Conservatives aren't going to call their reps and they don't have the propensity to engage in the same activism as progressives, so I would think representatives would take calls with a relative grain of salt. If a very conservative congressperson starts getting a bunch of calls saying how much the dislike [standard conservative proposal], they've got to think that as much as the people who voted against them don't want [standard conservative proposal], the conservatives who voted them in do.

For what it's worth, when I wrote "progressive causes" in my original comment, I wasn't refer to things as black and white as the science on GMOs. I was referring to scientists using their scientific authority to make progressive claims on issues like abortion, or taxation, or anything else that ignores either (a) actual scientific evidence to the contrary or (b) the lack of scientific consensus on the issue at all.

For example, there is significant disagreement within economics on, say, minimum wage. It would be an abuse of authority for an economist (for example, Paul Krugman) to claim we ought to raise the minimum wage because there is an economic consensus that we should do so, when in fact there is not and the said economist wants to raise minimum wage because it's a progressive cause.

A good example of this in practice is Neil deGrasse Tyson's "Rationalia" tweet[0] in response to the Brexit vote. He claims that a constitution should have just one line: "All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence". He is implicitly appealing to authority by invoking the scientific method, and as a progressive he clearly is under the impression that such a technocracy would come to nearly exclusively progressive conclusions. But of course this denies the fundamental truth that he could find a perfectly rational opponent for any of the causes he supports, from public funding of science to Britain's membership in the EU.

The problem here isn't that scientists can be wrong: everyone knows that. The issue is that claims like these are becoming more and more common, and their gross effect is that the very institution of science has become tainted with progressive bias.

[0] https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/748157273789300736?ref_...

> Its the weirdos who gave us the Apple // and the Mac. Not the button down conservative culture Thiel represents.

I don't think that's fair. First of all, in some sense Thiel is one of those "weirdos" you mentioned above as a gay man. But that aside, the more modern versions of those enterprises -- google, facebook, uber -- were all funded by that "button-down conservative culture". It is hard, if not impossible, to call the success of those enterprises as anything but cooperation between "the weirdos" and people like Thiel.

And it is of course ridiculous to say that Thiel isn't genuinely a member of the tech community: if partners in ycombinator aren't genuine members of the tech industry, then who is? Just the engineers?

I guess it's not a surprise, but apparently gitlab does this too. kudos to both!

Or a Trump victory was already priced into the market -- it doesn't necessarily mean people weren't bearish on Trump.

Even if you don't expect any scientists to want to be on a Republican ticket, why refuse to support prospective scientists who would do so? There might not be many conservative scientists, but I'm sure they exist.

The only answer that seems feasible to me is that they're not really interested in getting scientists elected, instead they're more interested in scientists who are willing to abuse their authority to promote progressive causes.

You say that, but take a look at the HN thread on Peter Thiel's prospective gubernatorial campaign[0]. It's needless to say the idea of a Thiel governorship was not very popular.

This isn't to say the criticism found there is unreasonable, just that it's not special. People in science and people in tech can get involved in politics, but most of the political issues out there are not scientific or technological so support for them will break down on ideological lines, not technocratic ones. The case of Peter Thiel isn't special, i.e. a conservative member of the tech community would not prefer Richard Stallman to Marco Rubio, just as a progressive member of the tech community would not prefer Peter Thiel to Jerry Brown.

If you want technocracy, I would suggest encouraging tech-minded folks to move to the public sector rather than run for office. Personally I would oppose that, as I think most tech talent would be somewhat wasted there.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13401358

I think of late one of the problems is that there is a certain dogma within political circles and the media that the body of facts produced by scientists is absolute and irrefutable, when the truth is somewhat the opposite: the body of knowledge produced by science is constantly changing, individual results are continually reevaluated, and theories are compared against each other until there is a preponderance of evidence in favor of one over the others.

I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.

Here's a more in-depth record of some things that have been inaccurately and widely reported[0], and interestingly enough, from a right-wing magazine that refused to support Trump's nomination.

[0] http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/23/mainstream-media-still-b...

I am not a lawyer, but I don't think so. Citizens United didn't rule that money was literally speech, but instead that laws prohibiting the expenditure of money on speech (i.e. a political ad) are impermissible impediments on protected speech. Fraud isn't protected speech, and money laundering isn't speech at all, so I don't think the first amendment comes into play at all. And yes, I don't think constitutional protections would apply to a bank simply refusing to be the medium for a financial transaction.

I'm mostly talking about moving between different machines. I would like to be able to tar up my source code and venv, distribute it to multiple machines, untar it and run it. However that's not possible with virtualenv unless you do a lot of hackery in your build. In particular, creating a virtualenv on each server during deploy is not an option.

Oh cool, I actually hadn't seen pyenv before. Looks like it does indeed solve my problems (from a glance anyway, though I didn't see anything about pip in the readme).

I would look at this comment[0] by sametmax for a critique of pip. My main gripe with virtualenv is that it's required at all: other interpreted languages, like node and elixir for example, have figured out how to handle non-global dependencies without a third-party package. Beyond that, it's frustrating to deploy because its non-relocatable (in our build/deploy scripts at my last python job we had to use sed all over the place to fix paths), and I find it semi-annoying to have a bunch of different copies of interpreter and all that goes with it (though this is mostly a minor annoyance -- it doesn't take up that much space and it doesn't matter if it gets out of sync.

Also notable, IMO, is the lack of a tool like rbenv or rustup for python. I can't tell you how many times I have had to try to figure out which python version a given pip executable worked with.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13460490

This is great, but sometimes I think that python needs a new package manager from scratch instead of more tools trying to mix and mash a bunch of flawed tools together in a way that's palatable by most of us. Python packaging sucks, the whole lot of it. Maybe I'm just spoiled by rust and elixir, but setuptools, distutils, pip, ez_install, all of it is really subpar. But of course everything uses pypi and pip now, so it's not like any of it can actually be replaced. The state of package management in python makes me sad. I wish there was a good solution, but I just don't see it.

Edit: I don't mean to disparage projects like this and pipfile. Both are great efforts to bring the packaging interface in line with what's available in other languages, and might be the only way up and out of the current state of affairs.

Most countries would still have bans on post ex facto law.

I don't really think people in general being bad at math is a problem. The real problem is that it's somewhat socially unacceptable -- particularly among less academic people -- to be good at math.

From a grammatical perspective it should be noted that "they" is plural. It is gender-neutral, but should only be used when referring to multiple people. The correct gender-neutral singular pronoun is "he or she".

There is no POV of "the people". A bunch of individuals comprise the people, and some of those individuals also comprise the government. But "the people" as a group do not have a POV.

With all due respect, OP did note this: "And don't get me wrong, India has their share of talented and brilliant guys, but the average case is rather bad".

Interestingly Charles Murray's universal basic income proposal mandates that $3,000 of the $13,000 annual basic income be payed on health care.

http://www.fljs.org/files/publications/Murray.pdf

There are certainly UBI proposals in which at some point UBI does scale back. I don't see a good reason why it scaling back would disqualify it from being a UBI, and I certainly see little likeness to unemployment insurance.

I mean it's been the primary campaign issue in 2010, 2012, 2014, and the non-presidential 2016 races. Not repealing Obamacare would be a political catastrophe for them. If you haven't noticed, it's also the very first item on the docket of the new legislature too. It's very, very important to them.

Very true, I really mean that Democrats have zero incentive to negotiate until after Obamacare is repealed.

I imagine at that point the cause and effect would become mightily, mightily mixed up. Maybe race is a cause of political affiliation (it certainly isn't an effect), but surely certain factors, like donations, would be an effect of political affiliation. As it already stands, it seems reasonable to me that the urban/suburban/rural split might be equally as much an effect as a cause.

As it stands, that sort of analysis might be interesting, but is of little value without separating cause and effect (and surely those will be different for everyone).

I don't think either the California National Party or the Texas secession movement want to secede because they are comprised of neoreactionaries. That article doesn't provide a shred of evidence that neoreactionaries are involved in any actual secession movements.

As a side note, that linked article and the assumptions you make off of it (the article does not mention "anarcho-capitalism" or "private government") both seem wildly unbased, more than bordering on conspiracy. The evidence against Thiel is more or less tantamount to him funding a startup founded by Yarvin, but surely there could have been a plethora of non-political motivations behind that.

As a side note, it's interesting to note that either California or Texas seceding would be irreparably damaging to the country because the political scales would tip so greatly.

> Or maybe just corporations, like people, get more conservative when they're richer. Possibly out of cynical self-interest.

In the case of people, this is a popular misconception. Democrats are funded by more billionaires than Republicans, are in control of a majority of the wealthiest congressional districts, and among people earning more than $200,000 the presidential vote was very evenly split.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/jun/23/...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/opinion/how-did-the-democ...

http://ijr.com/2014/02/116056-wall-street-bankers-top-donors...

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/elections/e...

Part of me wonders if the whole deal with Brendan Eich is a problem with tech or a problem with California. Would the same thing have happened if Mozilla operated out of New York or Seattle (let alone Denver or Austin)? And if not, at what point do the particular nuances of SV (such as political intolerance) become a burden not worth tolerating within the tech community?