Hacker News Reader

crowdpleaseron How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

+1. We should make sure that our allies get access to our best technology and weapons platforms and obviously we can commit to defend them if they can commit to defending themselves (places like Germany need to step up to the plate) but America doesn't need to be the world's police man and can't afford to be the world's police man.

crowdpleaseron NYC scientist fired after raising questions about a DNA test gets $1M settlement

I agree that there's a cosmopolitan bias, but I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that journalists writ large are motivated by a sense of professional ethics and are exposed to people from a variety of backgrounds.

I don't think I saw a single journalist apologize for pushing the Trump/Russia misinformation, the NYT and WASHPO haven't given back their pulitzer for reporting on it, what's most telling is that after the report dropped, the journalists pivoted to impeachment - it's clear the Russia angle was more about having a stick to beat the dog than anything else.

Additionally, I think people in cosmopolitan areas are probably more ignorant about life in rural areas than vice versa. This is a pretty partisan source, but look how some journalists reacted when asked if they knew anyone who owned a pick up truck (one of the most common vehicles in America): https://www.dailywire.com/news/12138/journalists-lose-it-aft...

I'm sure journalists have 'diverse' friends/social circles, but I'd wager that they're all in agreement w.r.t culture war topics - how diverse is that really?

crowdpleaseron Changing San Francisco Is Foreseen as a Haven for Wealthy and Childless (1981)

We would expect parcel prices to increase with upzoing - land becomes more valuable if more people are permitted to enjoy using it. That's the behavior that encourages developers to make multi-family housing.

crowdpleaseron Major U.S. cancer center ousts ‘Asian’ researchers after NIH flags foreign ties

I think any level of descriptiveness is fine as long as it's consistent.

If a Chinese thief is an "Oregon Student" then I want a Chinese surgeon who saves lives to be an "Oregon surgeon".

crowdpleaseron How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

"Just following orders" was a valid excuse until the Nuremberg trials.

crowdpleaseron Japanese F-35 in the Pacific, cue biggest counter-espionage ops since Cold War

Yeah, but thrust to weight really matters too. I'd be floored if two Russian engines had anywhere near the power to weight ratio of the F-35 engine.

But the Russian engineers are very good, they've done a great job of designing competitive planes with those constraints. I wouldn't cast stones at the prototype Sukhois or MiGs.

crowdpleaseron Japanese F-35 in the Pacific, cue biggest counter-espionage ops since Cold War

Probably not at any scale beyond serial production, even then, there isn't a Russian powerplant that would offer the thrust/weight performance required for the plane to perform.

I'm sure some of the materials on the F-35 would be very difficult for other countries to make at scale, figuring out how to fabricate parts out of those unusual materials at tolerances required for low-observability would be really tricky. I'm sure there are machinists anywhere who could figure it out, but at that point we're talking about bespoke part production using 98th+ percentile operators. Although skilled labor is cheap is China and Russia, it's pretty untenable to use it to produce a knock-off that'll eventually hold an inferior Chinese/Russian engine.

crowdpleaseron Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion Coming Soon

I ain't racing to 60. I'm racing to ~120-140 and seeing how long those Teslas can hang with a machine that's optimized to go fast and far

crowdpleaseron Battery Reality: There’s Nothing Better Than Lithium-Ion Coming Soon

Come and take it. Good luck chasing me in an electric vehicle.

crowdpleaseron Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry

Agreed. What we're seeing from the thought police is a resurgence of puritanism. With various degrees of success, religions can put guard rails on puritanism with 'love the sinner hate the sin' messages, it's not apparent whether any of that exists for puritanical ideologues - the Pope washed the feet of Muslim refugees, when's the last time you saw someone woke AF go out of their way to affirm the humanity of someone who holds opposing views? Ask hollywoods liberals if they'd shake Trump's hand.

crowdpleaseron [dead]

they told me if Trump were elected we'd see open racism and they were right!

crowdpleaseron Making Video Games Is Not a Dream Job

+1.

Many of us working jobs we don't really have 'passion' for are doing it to fund the things we are passionate about.

I really hate it when people talk about how they need public subsidies to follow their self-gratifying dream, like that money comes from people who aren't following their dream. I'm not going to work harder on stuff I don't like to support you having fun.

crowdpleaseron Bay Area housing prices drop in tech-heavy counties

If they live in a place with walking access to a shuttle (and enough walking distance amenities that they don't need a car), they're paying a lot in rent.

I wager you're paying more for car insurance than you spend on gas - car insurance is more expensive in the Bay Area than the rest of the country.

The price of gas certainly affects the contingent workers (guards, cooks, cleaners) whose work schedules don't line up with the shuttles.

crowdpleaseron Bay Area housing prices drop in tech-heavy counties

>Aside from housing, cost of living isn't that different, at least if you don't have kids. Things you buy from Amazon cost the same. Maybe it'd be a different situation if I had children.

Transportation costs are much higher in the bay area than normal parts of the country. Gas is usually $1/gallon more expensive (bay area electricity is about 2x as costly as the national average), car insurance is high, and the congestion is substantial.

crowdpleaseron Forget Bribery – The Real Scam Is Pretending That Degrees Have Value

Degrees themselves may not have much value, but the value of the degree is that employers can use them to offload discrimination to schools.

Through disparate impact legislation and jurisprudence, employers can only consider job applicants on narrow grounds. Schools have much more leeway to admit/deny admission.

An employer would probably get sued for using IQ tests because blacks and hispanics tend to do poorly on those tests. However, the ACT and SAT are highly correlated with IQ and schools can and do use those to make admission decisions. An employer that wants to filter for smart people would be well-advised to hire from schools that only accept cognitively gifted students.

You can't refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't speak well, but you can refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't hold a degree from an institution that refused to admit Jamal because he didn't get a high enough score in the English section of the ACT/SAT.

crowdpleaseron Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy

It’s subjective of whether it was better or worse.

We better get sex robots quick or who knows what’s going to happen when more guys are more frustrated.

crowdpleaseron FBI discussed charging HRC with 'gross negligence' and DOJ said 'no'

Is this any surprise? Since early 2017 people have been alleging that the Obama DOJ was biased in the 2016 election in favor of HRC. Beyond shielding her from criminal charges and protecting people in her circle, they and the FBI got a fishy dossier funded by themselves and the DNC / Clinton Campaign as opposition research and used that to secure a FISA warrant on Trump campaign staffers and regularly unmasked them to leak things to the press.

The only question now is which details are true and which are fantasy?

crowdpleaseron India's engineers struggle for work as jobs crisis worsens

Is there a way to help? The brain power going to waste is awful.

crowdpleaseron Facebook backtracks after removing Warren ads calling for Facebook breakup

Does Facebook claim to be a content-agnostic middleman? I know we accuse them of it, but they pulled some GOP / Trump ads for being sensational, that hardly sounds like a dispassionate middleman.

crowdpleaseron Science Denial Won’t End Sexism

I think I can provide evidence of this, but I'd like to use a double-crux and put both of our beliefs on the table.

If I can show you criticism of a scientists' work in a natural / mathematical science field that emphasizes the (white or male) identity of the scientist in question, would you be prepared to concede that there is progressive scientific denialism and progressivism can be at odds with scientific inquiry?

crowdpleaseron The Persistent Economic Advantage of America’s Suburbs

https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/erika-d-smi...

Improving a blighted neighborhood is racism. If I were to displace a minority from “their” neighborhood, I would have done a racist act.

crowdpleaseron The Persistent Economic Advantage of America’s Suburbs

Is it any surprise?

I don't want to be accused of being a racist so I can't move into affordable urban neighborhoods with too many 'underrepresented minorities'. I like peace and quiet, you don't find that in the city. I like driving more than walking/bicycling/taking the bus so I live in a place that makes it less of a hassle to own the cars. And I care for my safety and my property, I'd be an idiot to move to the cities near me that care more about being nice to criminals than protecting property owned by the working class.

And yeah, the suburbs are advantaged. I saved money to live there, I want my kids to have the most advantages possible, I've instilled enough discipline in them that they're able to learn and grow at school. I've been in city schools, they're full of kids pissing away the opportunity to learn and interfering with the learning of other students, how can someone succeed when their classmates are cranking that soulja boy?

crowdpleaseron First-class air travel is in decline

First-class air travel in American is in decline because American corporations can deduct business class airfare more easily than first class airfare.

IIRC, the only domestic airline in America with first-class is American Airlines. The other legacy carriers have gotten rid of it, premium economy is one of the fastest growing classes of air fare.

crowdpleaseron Gun laws where guns take the most lives

>Does this rural Midwest area have an active police presence?

Not anything like you'd see in a more developed area. We had a county sheriff - I recall going months without seeing a law enforcement officer, I think we had a police to citizen ratio about 1/4th that of the nearest major city. Over the holidays, even getting emergency services can be really dicey. One time my neighbors were screaming and yelling at each other, we called the police and the dispatch told us that unless we heard it get physical, they wouldn't be able to send an officer out until the next day or the day after.

>How well policed do you think a rural area in Mexico is?

Probably equally as well, but the police in rural mexico are much more likely to be an extension of the cartels than police in the rural Midwest. If those cases, increasing patrols would actually increase cartel power. Until Mexico figures out their corruption issues, it's not clear how things can get better.

crowdpleaseron Gun laws where guns take the most lives

Do the drug cartels have better funding? Mexico's Federal Budget was $314 billion dollars last year, estimates put America's illegal drug expenditures in the region of $100 billion [0], I imagine a lot of that money stays within the country. But I don't see how it's possible for Mexican cartels have even 25% of the budget of the government.

Why do you think the Mexican drug cartels have better funding than a government with a budget of $300 billion/yr?

IIRC, El Chapo is in America because Mexican prisons couldn't contain him. All his prison breaks involved corrupt guards, in fact, during his trial it was claimed that El Chapo paid a $100 million dollar bribe to the sitting President of Mexico. I think it's more plausible that Mexicans would rather join in the festival of corruption, saying that the Government is outclassed by the resources of the cartels seems false.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_the_Unit...

crowdpleaseron Gun laws where guns take the most lives

>One of the answers is money.

It would be convenient if it were true, but I don't think money is a great explanation. I come from a rural area in the Midwest, the people are very poor (even poorer than the urban poor) but have a lot of guns. Despite being poor and armed, the gun homicide rates are very low (the suicide rates are unfortunately not that low).

Can you help me understand why poor farmers in the midwest don't commit as many murders as similarly poor and armed Mexicans?

crowdpleaseron Gun laws where guns take the most lives

Why can't Mexico perform the basic state function of protecting its citizens from organized violence?

Drug rehab may sound like a panacea, but as it's practiced and administered in America, rehab centers seem to respond to their perverse incentive to treat addicts enough to get them out the door and relapsed back into treatment.

I think we're doing a lot to treat addiction, but Mexico can't count on us to solve the hard problem of addiction. Mexico would be much better served by doing the comparatively easy task of reducing corruption and violence rates to something that reflects its status as a middle-income country with European institutions. Simply making it harder for cartels to thrive and for Mexican politicians/police to profit off of drugs would reduce the amount of drug pushing here in America.

crowdpleaseron Gun laws where guns take the most lives

Mexico has a firearm homicide rate of ~6.3 murders / 100k people / yr. The United States has a lower rate, 4.62 murders / 100k people /yr [0].

If American guns are the problem, why aren't the gun homicide rates higher in the United States than Mexico?

But at the very least, it sounds like Mexico could benefit from stronger border security, too many guns are flowing across its porous border with the US. How many Mexican lives would a wall save from gun violence?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

crowdpleaseron When Women Control the Money, Female Founders Get Funded

This doesn’t sound very inclusive.

If inclusivity is so important, why do the loudest advocates for it eschew it whenever they get the chance to turn the tables?

crowdpleaseron $35,000 Tesla Model 3 Available Now

It probably does have a larger margin, you'd be shocked at how little it costs automakers to add some features / content. IIRC, an Escalade's interior costs ~$1,000 more to manufacturer than a Suburban's interior. The rule of thumb in trucks is that interior upgrades usually carry a 75%-90% margin for the manufacturer - in some cases, the lower trims actually cost more to build because they're such low volume configurations that the complexity in the supply chain / manufacturing process costs more than the savings of cheaper goods.