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Let me guess, was this banned account from the conservative side?

How many left-wing accounts have you banned for similar reasons?

Is that a life expectancy including infant mortality, though? The life expectancy of someone who survived to 20 would be much higher.

I don't believe in 10x developers, but I've seen a lot of 0.1x developers.

Find new friends. Move to a more politically diverse area.

I do believe we should go back to the old rule that neither religion nor politics should be discussed in polite company.

No, but if you listened to him and understood his world view and listened to the examples of why he thinks that, rather than his provocative headline, you might be able to come to some understanding.

Arguing about "feminism" is stupid anyway because "feminism" has become a motte-and-bailey concept.

Not at all. Most political disagreements come from perfectly reasonable fundamental disagreements about the way the world ought to be.

Then why is all the discussion in terms of who did win? People who don't like the result are "blaming" this phenomenon, without regard for the fact that this is something that everyone is presumably doing.

When Obama won, I seem to remember a lot of people around here praising the success of his social media strategy.

That's your opinion of a dumb idea. Can you accept that other intelligent, informed, well intentioned people might disagree with you?

>Combined with a bombardment of headlines that confirm their biases, targeted by personality, it could have a big impact.

Does your use of "their" mean that you think your own side of politics isn't exactly the same?

Well you don't have to. I've never paid for cable. I have this crazy thing called an aerial which picks up television signals out of the goddamn vacuum.

Maybe if people would quit killing cops then they wouldn't have to?

Nobody ever looks at Netflix and complains "I never watch most of these shows, I shouldn't have to pay for them" because Netflix doesn't encourage people to think in those terms.

Cable companies caused the demand for de-bundling via a partial de-bundling. If you could get all channels for $50 then nobody would complain. But if they force you to buy half the channels for $25 and half the channels for $25, people start to wonder why they can't just get a quarter of the channels for $12.50.

I think the point is not that it's driving off huge corporations but that it makes life difficult for every business. It doesn't seem to make life easier for workers either.

I believe in the principle that the unintended consequences of any policy usually wind up outweighing the intended ones.

The actual professors have already got theirs, so screw everyone else. And the adjuncts don't have any power and are easily replaced.

Also everybody knows that if the university administrators actually got replaced by sensible rational people then the English department might not exist any more anyway so they're all living on borrowed time.

Trying to change what words mean is a lousy way to achieve your goals.

Vectors aren't terribly advanced mathematics.

He is unafraid. He's rich and his livelihood is not threatened. He's got an audience already and being banned from twitter wouldn't affect his livelihood much. And he doesn't live in Berkeley so he's unlikely to get his head smashed in, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's had to increase his security measures anyway.

Breitbart makes no claim to be a general platform for discussion. It is openly a place with a particular bent.

Nobody is complaining about conservatives being banned from Democratic Underground, they're complaining about conservatives being banned from twitter and facebook.

Strictly true in the context of "first amendment".

But what I've realised recently is that "free speech" is more than just a legal right conferred by the government, it's a social climate. The climate of free speech is even more important than the government right, because if the climate is lost then people will start demanding that the government abolish the legal right too.

A social climate of free speech means a society in which people are accustomed to hearing things they find disagreeable, and don't flip out every time they do.

It means that although people hypothetically can punish each other for views they find disagreeable by means such as boycotting their businesses or shouting at them when they try to speak, they manage to refrain from doing so in all but the most egregious half a percent of cases, and generally tolerate disagreement.

This is what we're in danger of losing at the moment, and if this is lost then the legal right can't be far behind.

It wasn't easy enough to use for non technically minded people, and it didn't have a cute name.

Isn't rent control a big part of this? Does the effect persist in non rent controlled cities?

Though actually, thinking about my own feelings, as a renter in an expensive and non rent controlled city (Sydney) I would be opposed to any major development nearby. It's unlikely to materially lower my rent, but is likely to lower the overall quality of the neighbourhood (crowding, traffic, shadows, and the general ugliness of new apartment buildings).

Now, I'm not saying that the fact that I oppose it means that I have any moral right to stop it, but it's not surprising that renters should oppose development too.

I'm sure that an "intelligent, creative non-conformist" (a category into which you perhaps imagine you fall?) has better things to do than make enemies with librarians.

On the other hand I know a lot of Masters-qualified librarians who simply stock books all day.

The need for a Masters to do this job is perhaps more of a sad commentary on the university system's vast overproduction of humanities graduates.

Disagree. As someone who knows more mathematics and less programming than the average programmer I'd say the average programmer need not know all that much mathematics at all, if they're not working in a particular area that involves mathematics.

Of course the real use case for this kind of thing is property investors wanting to get in ahead of the wave.

I'm skeptical about the long term prospects for gentrification though, since there's only so many gentry to go around. Perhaps instead of focusing on gentrifying places, we should be working on how to gentrify people.

Because the term "fake news" is about two months old, and no sooner was it invented than people started abusing it well beyond its original definition.

The term was made up to describe completely and deliberately made-up news stories created for lulz or clicks, but immediately expanded to also include news that isn't deliberately falsified but might just be biased, distorted, true yet deceptively phrased, or non-deliberately inaccurate -- and from there used as a general catch-all term for criticising any news source you don't like, whether that's Breitbart or CNN.

There is very little objective news left, and very few unbiased umpires remaining to judge it. I don't think any of us should trust facebook, of all places, to set itself up as the arbiter of what is "fake" and should be censored, as the company's own political views are well known and I don't believe they are likely to be capable of applying consistent standards to both sides.

It's a dirt hole. My guess is that you create a large amount of mud at the bottom of the hole and then the walls collapse.

gab.ai is the only one I know about, its major selling point being that it's uncensored.

Name one person who doesn't have a name.

The trouble is that in most of the recent prominent government "whistleblowing" cases (Snowden, Manning, the other one I forget) there's a great deal of disagreement on the legality of what has been exposed. The issue is that an individual sets himself up as judge and jury on the subject of complicated legal matters which he might not fully understand.

I will say that both Snowden and Manning went well into the territory of leaking stuff that wasn't illegal in addition to stuff that was at least debatable.