coryfklein

A few things:

1. You either are unaware of the meaning of the word "disingenuous", or you know my own intentions better than I do.

2. Did Parler express suprise that some of its users attempted to (and in some cases succeeded) incite violence on their platform?

3. Again your tendency towards superlative undermines the discussion, but "everybody knows it" and "the damage has been done"? This is a very strong statement indeed, claiming that you have knowledge that Parler's moderation has been so ineffectual that every user on their platform is able to view all inciting content before it is taken down.

See Trope 9: "This speech may be protected for now, but the law is always changing."

TLDR: yeah, the law can change, but it's highly unlikely because "the United States Supreme Court has been more consistently protective of free speech than of any other right, especially in the face of media sensibilities about "harmful" words"

[1] https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...

> That's too much power with one person.

Well, the USA could impeach and remove that person, or they could reduce the power of his office. But so far the people and their elected representatives have opted not to do either of those things.

> If you're promoting armed, violent protests and insurrection - that is also a crime.

You are conflating Parler with it's users

> this is happening to a small degree on Twitter and FB - but they make some attempts to stop it

From the article:

> And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.

FTA

> of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler

I think parent was pointing out that the question of "where should the line be drawn and who should draw it" has already been settled. Those things are already illegal, so we don't need to impose further restrictions on speech in order to prevent those things.

Funny you should ask, because I just happened to see Robin Hanson share [0] the exact statistics on this today.

2020: 64

2019: 11

2018: 13

2017: 9

2016: 4

2015: 4

[0] https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1346656330149470211

Education has changed. Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured. This is not the case today, where merely speaking disagreement to the majority narrative gets your professorship cancelled and gets students disciplined.

He is suggesting a solution - self governance. Trust the people to make their own decisions, because there is no better alternative. What else can we do, have some committee that decides what the public is allowed to hear? That is fascism.

Ah, but is there any avenue for you to speak to them?

The practical power of "that's offensive" is so much stronger than "we should allow free speech". I'd love for a better and more succint method of conveying the threat that putting "offensiveness" on a pedestal puts to science and democracy. Do you have one?

It needs to be made clear that the path of progress is littered with hurt feelings, and that the importance of our feelings is significantly dwarfed by the collective good of science and democracy.

It's the practical erosion of Free Speech. Liberal (small "l" liberal) democracy and liberal science thrives on members:

1. Being willing to admit they may be wrong

2. Having access to a diverse information diet

But the past two decades have shown erosion of not only legal Free Speech, but practical free speech:

* Whereas previously they were just ignored (or even rebutted), today employees, students, and professors are all punished administratively for saying something that contradicts the narrative of the predominant members, or that may be offensive to someone. "If the federal government won't do it, let's restrict free speech on the ground-level."

* It is difficult to broaden your information diet, even intentionally. The platforms of yore that provided a place for free debate are empty, with everyone having migrated to social media where they can form disjoint sets defined by their ideology. Ever try having a dialectic on Twitter with someone of an opposing ideology? Haha, good luck.

* Expanding on ^, folks that aren't actively seeking diversity of thought have no natural avenue of exposure to information that contradicts their ideology. Whatever information delivery mechanism they choose today is, by default, going to agree with them.

* All of the above results in: staunchly maintaining your correctness in the face of opposition is rewarded far more strongly than admitting the possibility of wrongness

* Online radicalization makes in-person dialogue even harder; there are fewer and fewer opportunities for two moderates to debate when the possible participants are further across the spectrum than ever

Although restricting offensive speech has the upfront benefit of not hurting our iddly-widdly-fweelings, this is the price we pay for abandoning free speech.

For further reading, I recommend Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703086.Kindly_Inquisitor...

Yes, the phrase "social justice" has been co-opted. So if you or anyone else wants to refer to what that phrase meant 20 years ago, then you should stop using the phrase "social justice".

Tangential, but is Michigan considered a western state?

If California wanted to make those subsidies conditional on folks like Musk maintaining residency, they certainly could have done so.

I thought the same thing!

> To act like square pixels are a new plague is dishonest.

Please folks, the holidays are here and 2020 is almost over. Let's all be a bit more forgiving and generous to our fellow human beings. Maybe something like, "You may have forgotten that square pixels were contemporary" instead?

This comment belies a misunderstanding of how alcohol affects the body - that it merely creates a gradient from "not impaired" to "impaired".

Clearly there is more to alcohol than just impairment. Alcohol is both a stimulant and a sedative. It's widely recognized as a social lubricant. All of these properties, in moderation, can be beneficial to many kinds of work.

I've been through enough Mac upgrades by now to learn that I'm going to have a better time waiting for M2. I'm not really interested in jumping on this particular early adopter train. As a developer, who knows what random tweaks and system behaviors I rely on to get my job done, but that will be completely broken on a new Mac.

I certainly am heartened by all the news about processing power improvements. I'll just join the rest of y'all young whippersnappers after you pay the early adopter tax for me.

This doesn't seem quite so obvious to me.

1. Do we know what the contracts between Verizon-Apple look like? Verizon may get discounts for buying in bulk or for being a strategic partner.

2. Cell providers (like Verizon) may be funding OP's iPhone 12 with the monthly-payments of other customers that don't exercise their ability to upgrade their phone exactly every 24-months. I think this group may actually be rather large.

3. Interest rates for financing your iPhone via your cell provider's 2-year contract plan are likely lower than financing an iPad on a credit card or other third-party financing.

All of the above likely combine to make the iPhones proportionately cheaper than iPads, possibly significantly.

The parent is at least tempering their statements with uncertainty. How is it that you are certain that they use beef tallow? Seems like a rather strong claim given that McDonalds doesn't appear to list their ingredients.

> I have the same feelings when I read "McRib"

Me too! That name invariably forces a cringe as I imagine biting down on a rib bone secreted away between two buns.

> you are lying to yourself.

Gee well that's a rather bold statement. I find this attitude of "if you're not vegan you're a liar" so insufferable. I can think of at least a few explanations for the parent comment. "If you think your cheese is suffering free..."

1. You may be underinformed

2. You've purchased free range dairy products

3. You know something I don't

> projections out to at least a year

You're right - I should have said "periodic vaccination", not annual.

Also yeah, there's a subtle difference between why we'd need periodic covid vaccinations vs flu vaccinations. But in the end the result is the same, we'll probably need to be re-vaccinated against covid over time.

Covid isn't going away because it has a non-human animal reservoir, so it's all about a strategy to prevent it's re-emergence into the sapiens reservoir. It's possible that periodic vaccinations of the population as a whole would be overkill and we could reactively immunize smaller populations as re-infection occurs.

The difference is that placing trust in China/Russia means trusting in a narrative driven by a small group (the ruling elite), while placing trust in "the West" usually refers to the collective knowledge of scientific endeavours that tend to succeed better in a nation more friendly to liberal democracy.

Are you suggesting that the signal of the markets today has zero corellation with the promise of this vaccine? That seems like quite the position to take.

Or are you lamenting that much attention is given to something that is primarily driven by wealthy organizations? I guess I might sympathize with you there.

s/a decade/in perpetuity

We'll almost certainly need an annual covid vaccination for the same reasons we get annual flu vaccinations - with our current medical technology we can neither rid the planet of the virus nor obtain permanent immunity.

Because it's cost prohibitive to find every animal on the earth that has the virus and medicate or eliminate them.

Can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find this - but this is exactly true. Since the virus has a non-human animal reservoir that means that even if every human receives the vaccine, all it takes is re-transmission from the animal reservoir back into the human population after the immunity period expires.

This means we'll probably have to receive Covid vaccination on a regular basis along with the flu vaccine in order to maintain a permanent broad-scale immunity. At least until we have a radical new treatment for this family of viruses that can confer a "permanent" immunity - something that for now is in the realm of science fiction.

No, it doesn't. $1B in bitcoin is only 1% of the bitcoin market cap. The bitcoin world can basically just move on and ignore this if they want to.