darth_skywalker

This is the result of free petition in Massachusetts. If you like the 1st Amendment, then I would expect you also like that citizens in Massachusetts have the right to propose arbitrary laws (and the legislature is not required to enact them).

On the other hand, politicians have been trying to manipulate voters for centuries - it seems like a new danger that foreign governments are now trying to manipulate voters.

This is a fair point - it's hard to predict the future with our current technology given the difficulty of envisioning future technology.

Sure, some playgrounds may be mind-numbingly dull, but those are a well-intentioned response to older playgrounds that posed serious physical dangers. You can argue that getting a little bit scraped up once in a while isn't bad for children; it may teach them lessons about how to avoid such future mistakes - but plenty of children have sustained more serious injuries on playgrounds that allowed them to climb much higher than they could on, say, a tree in nature (speaking from my life experience). I think the article conflates the issue of modern over parenting with safer playground design - which if done right, can only be a good thing.

>> As usual when preparing Tor Browser releases, we verified that the build is bit-for-bit reproducible. While we managed to get two matching builds, we found that in some occasions the builds differ (we found this happening on the Linux i686 and macOS bundles). We are still investigating the cause of this issue to fix it.

I find this quite fascinating. Does anyone have any ideas for how this could happen? My understanding was that if you run the same compiler on the same code, you get the same executables. What could be going on?

Be careful though - TAILS doesn't suddenly make untrusted hardware safe. You can still be surveilled by things like keyloggers.

Try to be more respectful. We're talking about a human being who died.

>> Usually they keep questioning you for a while, but it's not hard to respond in a way that doesn't give them probable cause.

You should try exercising your fifth amendment right to remain silent. The police explicitly remind people who are arrested that anything they say "can and will" be used against them in a court of law.

Not really - they're surveilling a hell of a lot more than just the border, which is a 1-dimensional object. They're surveilling a Native American community that's in the USA, not on the border. They're basically building surveillance towers on the border and pointing many of the cameras towards the American side, where Americans live.

>> Accepting cash endangers the lives of employees and generally enables all sorts of financial shenanigans.

Financial "shenanigans" seem to be more likely with credit/debit cards actually.

It's an interesting concept, but the "frog in the pan" fable has no scientific merit. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#Experiments_and_a...

Perhaps, but it's impossible to judge the merit of said argument since you failed to make it.

I don't know what you mean by "court enforced public atheism." The right to express your religious views is protected in the United States by the 1st Amendment. And on the contrary, U.S. currency reads "In God we trust."

Pepper spray is actually quite damaging.

Storing a directory as a git repo (e.g. on GitHub) is a pretty good alternative to Dropbox.

A little surprised to see that there were no lightning deaths in Hawaii during this period, as I know a fellow who was struck by lightning while on vacation out there. People sometimes underestimate the danger that lightning poses - make sure to stay safe out there.

>> But then of course Uncle Sam show up, and basically say, “Hey, you know what, you just made a lot money this year. Therefore, you’re rich. Therefore, you’re evil and you’ve got to hand it all over to us.”

The government doesn't tax rich people because they're evil - they tax rich people to provide food, education, and security for society. Progressive taxes are useful because they help fight poverty and allow the very poor to participate in the market (extreme inequality and the resulting poverty is regarded by most economists as a market failure).

This guy mentions the importance of education, but does he realize that K-12 education is payed for by taxes? Unfortunately, inter-generational wealth mobility in the US is quite low, much lower than in most of Europe, where taxes happen to be much more progressive. You could argue that progressive taxes lead to wealth mobility; they provide the funding for education and other services that give poor folks the means to acquire wealth.

It isn't rational to base decisions off of sunk costs.