fche

"Fertilisers and fuel did not come from the air."

True, and they are probably at least a small net flow into the atmosphere. But:

"There are hundreds of millions of cows (and other livestock) that did not exist before."

... that part doesn't matter: agriculture is by nature carbon-neutral (except if you count mechanization aspects like fertilizers + fuel).

Thanks, so it's a human-food availability concern.

That would be an erroneous assumption.

"corals will be devastated, and that means really bad things for us and our children"

What "really bad things" would you or your children suffer, should all the corals suddenly become sentient and beam into outer space? Just curious.

"There is a whole lot of climate change evidence coming out that is terrifying."

Do you think any of that evidence is terrifying to skeptics? If not, think about why not.

Cowspiracy's points on GHG emission and water consumption are simply illiterate. They don't recognize the concept of a net flow. (e.g.: carbon that comes out of a cow first went into a cow - via its food - which got apprx. all its carbon from the air)

confirmation bias

"As a business, you are not entitled to a profit. Especially not at the expense of your employees welfare."

That's funny, but true. You know what else is at least as true? No people are entitled to employment, especially at a loss to the business.

rust "unsafe" is not about proprietariness of the hardware. It's about doing lower level operations that, in order to express, the rust compiler's safety logic must be disabled.

How many "unsafe" declarations should one expect in regions of the code that will need to deal with untrusted data (like networks, syscalls)?

The same court decision that was thrown out by the SCOTUS? The same jury that used the 51% "more likely than not" standard to assume that the difference in pay was due to discrimination, there being no actual clear evidence?

That one?

(that's not the same as scolding being common)

A commodity is a routinely interchangeable product, available from multiple suppliers, competing primarily on price. No, "data" in this context is not that at all. A library of user profiles is the opposite: it's proprietary, unique, massive.

"Monopoly" does not mean "two companies have lots of knowhow that competitors might like".

It's 1980s hobbyist level code. Almost small enough to be on stackoverflow as a sample. Not that much there to love!

The "ethical motivations" section is out of place here. Its moaning about "money driven companies" (as though money were a bad thing), or "monopoly" (which does not exist in AI), just reflects badly upon the project.

"We know this from explicit records, with Lilly Ledbetter being one example."

I'm not tremendously familiar with this case, but according to the gods of wikipedia, the evidence for discrimination consisted of nothing but evidence of difference.

Same old same old.

You notice that apprx. every single problem you listed in the last paragraph was not about being too "capitalistic" (i.e., laissez faire), but the state actively messing things up.

"I see no reason to reject ... as one of the factors"

Such agnostic logic is unassailable. You don't know; the powers that be don't know; the courts & lawsuits don't know. You're right not to reject the possibility.

However, you'd be wrong the assert the certainty "... disparity is also caused by discrimination" with such flimsy evidence.

If those data points were on topic ("discrimination"), instead of off topic ("difference"), I wouldn't reject them.

The EEOC only indicated _disparity_, and because it's a governmental political bully, it got to turn that into an accusation of discrimination. Logic not necessary.

Oh sure, the more the merrier. Just pointing out that the "for the most part" is kind of a silly criterion.

For the most part, no one carries guns around. In the US, some 3%ish of the population has concealed carry permits. (In some states, permits are not required at all, but the overall percentage won't be hugely higher.)

... and note the absence of the word "threaten".

"the NRA will start insisting people open carry"

Cute gag - the NRA would not "insist", and would not suggest "open carry" for tactical reasons either. To top it off, guns were allowed to be carried on board US airplanes till the 60s.

"worth every penny"

They've drifted too far left for my taste. Used to subscribe, a decade or so ago.

And the number of shootings on board airplanes has been ... zero.

What do you mean "but"? Both are entirely consistent with an attitude of self-sufficiency.

"It is never acceptable to attack and use violence against other individuals."

We're talking about electronic communications here, not meatspace.

Re. your last paragraph, the "different opinions" is exactly what we get, so it's not "instead" but "consequently". As for unbiased sources, that is a pipe dream as it ever was.