hashmap

This is a good example of a particularly sinister argumentation style, and you can see it everywhere these days. It typically goes like this:

1. Take an objectively bad reality. "Citizens of Hong Kong could possibly be extradited to a totalitarian state for any thing that state decides was a crime."

2. Restate it as an abstract ideal or extreme case, ignoring the details that make it bad, and ask why one wouldn't want this thing that's actually good: "But shouldn't people who commit crimes in other countries have to face justice?" / "Should someone that commits murder in Taiwan be able to escape the law in HK?"

I'm not sure what to call it, but it would be good to have a two or three word phrase to succinctly call this kind of thing out. I'll have to think, but would appreciate input from others who have noticed it as well.

Edit: I would add that the really "sinister" part is that those bad details are ignored for the sake of making the argument, but are, in fact, the end goal.

The available evidence says the opposite is true.

http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf

The way to deal with the "bad guys" is for private businesses to not give them a platform to spew their hate from. And it's up to us to pressure these private businesses to do that.

The whole "but science is just as bad as religion" argument rings quite hollow.

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists-debun...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheme

Yeah, still way more pleasant than any suicide I could manage on my own.

https://healthblog.uofmhealth.org/heart-health/why-daylight-...

> This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.

This study says earthquake precursor movements send signals into the ionosphere, that cause other signals to propagate to earth, which can make objects vibrate audibly, minutes or possibly hours before the main shock. It argues this may be what animals are hearing. Rube Goldberg if true.

> There is absolutely no evidence that humans are having any impact on the climate whatsoever.

Starting off real strong. Maybe climate scientists themselves don't exist either.

> In order to establish an actual human impact in a statistically significant way, you must show a modern trend that deviates from a baseline of appropriate duration.

Pick a site, any site. This one's good:

> As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature has climbed 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/pag...

> Not only are we not in a period of "record high temperatures", we are in one of the coldest periods in the past 65 million years.

Which means... what, exactly? We are experiencing record high temperatures within recent history, and that's what matters to our survival. We are not equipped to deal with the speed of the change that is happening.

> The earth had had ice caps for maybe about half of the time over the past 500 million years.

Again, so what? We have ice caps now and them melting quickly is problematic for us.

I don't have enough time to address all the nonsense 4chan can come up with. The rest of it is left as an exercise for the reader.

That being said, there are no sacred cows in science. Questioning conclusions is important; however, when the science has been settled by mountains of evidence and there is scientific consensus, continually questioning those conclusions in the absence of new and contradictory data is a waste of time.

You could likewise argue that the earth is flat for all eternity, and "round earthers" wouldn't be holding their conclusions as a sacred cow just because they dismiss your arguments.

Like the earth being round or gravity being real, man-made climate change isn't really a debate.

https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm...

And innumerable scientists who are in the business of documenting the climate change they observe.

This sort of inflammatory, unsubstantiated nonsense doesn't belong here.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/08/childhood-lead...

"This means that lead exposure is likely to be associated not just with violent crime, but with juvenile misbehavior, drug use, teen pregnancy, and other risky behaviors."

I guarantee you'd never see a comment like that voted up on r/2xc.

It's a clear indication of a problem with the community, and there's no way you don't see that...?

Screencapping this for when HN's users claim they don't make the tech space awful for women.

> The American Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD, the predecessor of ABET)[1] has defined "engineering" as:

>The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation or safety to life and property.

If your programming really hasn't involved any of this, perhaps "programming" isn't the right word for what you've been doing?

What it certainly would do is free people from wage prison - people who would rather not participate in the work force but are forced to for reasons like obtaining employer's healthcare. Obamacare will free many people from this trap in exactly this way - and one of the most pronounced effects these types of things have is allowing older workers to retire who were forced to stay employed, making room for the younger generation.

And people leaving jobs who don't want them but are forced to take them is a good thing. Right now we have 3 people looking for work for every 1 job opening, which drastically skews labor markets in favor of employers. It would be good for everyone if this balance shifted in favor of workers.

The people who want to work will still want to work even if you hand them cash for free. The people who don't want to work shouldn't have to in order to avoid calamity.

"...make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts... " means states cannot issue their own currencies as legal tender. They can only make gold or silver legal tenders for debts. The federal government can make paper dollars a legal tender, and the states can pay their debts in that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_Clause#Legal_Tender

What drug kingpin would ever be morally against theft? Does the fact that this trade is being done via the internet imply that these groups have all adopted some kind of code of honor? DPR of SR1 put out hits on people.

Parent's suspicion is right on the money.

Come on, man.

I'd put bitcoin's inherently deflationary nature, inability to perform chargebacks, vulnerability to selfish mining, incentivizing the waste of electricity, or a myriad of its other problems far higher on the list than the fact that it has no intrinsic value. Outside the above argument, its lack of intrinsic value isn't that common a criticism, nor is it really relevant.