indubitable

Much appreciated!

One clarification, since my own language was sloppy. C# did not get open sourced in 2014. That was the date that Microsoft open sourced just about everything (and that's a weasel word there - to my knowledge, it is everything) that wasn't already open source. Things like ADO/ASP/Windows Forms/etc were open sourced back in 2008, along with Microsoft's implementation of their framework libraries, which Mono rapidly integrated into their implementation.

And so on that note, much of that information on the Wiki page is outdated by at least a decade. Mono, especially since their 2.0 release (back in 2008), has been a fully fleshed out, cross platform, production ready alternative to Microsoft's implementation. So I certainly wouldn't call C# a second class citizen on Linux by any means. The one and only reason Linux is not my primary development platform is the lack of Visual Studio.

Ultimately C# started out pretty awful. The language was a mediocre java clone, performance was abysmal, and the language itself was lacking in features. But that changed relatively rapidly, and certainly today it bears little resemblance to where it started. And I think that is perhaps the problem, people seem to think C# of today is the C# of 2004, but I don't understand why that degree of misinformation is so strongly exemplified in this particular language. I think it's particularly a shame because of what a successful tool the language has evolved into.

> At the end of the day, someone has to 'waste' money, in order for companies to earn money

I also used to feel this way, but I no longer think its accurate. This is most obvious in digital business-consumer goods today. Imagine I make a game. And it cost me about $100 to make this game. And you really want this game and would pay $5 just to get to play it. But I'm nice and sell it to you for $1. You certainly haven't wasted any money. And the fact I then sell it to 10,000 other people also doesn't mean you've wasted any money, nor they. Yet I've somehow made an immense amount of profit.

Even in the more difficult scenario of business to business material goods trades, it doesn't hold true. Imagine I sell iron and you need iron to make your widgets. It costs me $4 to produce a single unit of iron, but that's largely because I have an extensively refined and stream lined operation, and am able to benefit from an immense economy of scale. I sell it to you for $10. Well it seems that you must be wasting money, but the reality is that even if you bought the iron mine yourself and started producing your own iron you'd end up spending far more than $10 to create the volume of iron you need. So even though I'm again making immense profit, you're also not 'wasting' money in buying my iron.

This is why even huge companies are not entirely vertically integrated or producing their own supplies in other words. It's because buying from somebody else, even when that person is profiting immensely from the exchange, is not going to be inherently more expensive than if you did it yourself. And this is even true for simple no-skill goods like semi-raw materials. Get into skilled products, like semiconductors, and this all becomes even more true.

This is not my field, but I have used Accord.NET (http://accord-framework.net/) while learning machine learning and have no complaints, but also have little room for comparison. Any C++ library you'd consider as definitive, for some basis to compare? One other thing is that running C++ libraries in C# is, in most cases, quite trivial.

Why do you think it's been closed source with minimal cross platform effort? Most of everything from Microsoft related to C# is open source. This includes their compiler, the runtime, and the framework and libraries. And it's been this way since 2014. The .NET standard itself has always been open and cross platform implementations like Mono go back to 2004! I'm not sure what you mean by 'heavyweight.' Its performance is head to head with C++.

Here's the primary repo for .NET goodies: https://github.com/microsoft/dotnet

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And if anybody downvoting could take a second to actually chime in, it would be illuminating. From my perspective all I see an immense amount of misinformation about the language, and I'm genuinely curious what people may not like about it.

Something I often wonder in these sort of discussions is why C# is generally omitted. Its performance is comparable to C++, with none of the trappings. It also does an excellent job of integrating some of the most useful features of functional programming into an imperative language. And multi-processor programming with the language is also incredibly simple.

But I think the best part is in programmer time. An anecdote I find endlessly entertaining is on another forum I shared some code to solve a problem people were having an issue with, and it was assumed my code was pseudo-code. It was correct, compilable C#. And they're constantly adding incredibly useful features. For instance a recent addition is more expressive tuples:

    (int number, string s, char c) triple = (2, "two", '2');
    triple.number = 13;

And lambda functionality is similarly clean. A lambda value might be:

    x => 2*x + 5;

Equivalently, as an anonymous method:

    delegate(double x){return 2*x + 5;}

And an example of how simple arbitrary processor count parallel programming can be (using lambda syntax as above):

    Parallel.ForEach(listOfThings, thing => DoSomething(thing));

Yet as typical in scenarios like this one, the author sees the decision as being between opposite extremes of C++ and Python. The only downsides of the language I've run into are a lack of some shoot yourself in the foot features of C++, like multiple inheritance, and the fact that template specialization is awkward. Garbage collection is vastly overblown. My main work is with projects that have in memory collections in the gigs of size and you'd think the collector would be a huge issue, yet it's mostly transparent and can be controlled if necessary - which in the vast majority of cases, is not.

First one quick aside, Wikipedia tends to fare very poorly when we get into contemporary issues or issues involving social matters. And that is certainly in play here. The "Historical Accounts" features such amazing information as the story of a pregnant woman grabbing a sword and scaring away an attacking force, while topless of course. The "Historical Existence" section is literally nothing but stating that there are two scholars that argued they existed, and one scholar that argued that they did not exist.

The main point is again that we have hundreds of years of activity from a civilization that heavily interacted with numerous other civilizations. And the written word had long since been developed and spread. If female fighters played any meaningful role whatsoever, you would not be here trying to debate it using obscure bits of low quality evidence - it would be as self evident as vikings being male. They would have regularly participated in battles, been regularly observed (and noted) by other cultures and so on. But instead you're left to cite tales of a pregnant woman scaring off an attacking force bare breasted, or reference "physical evidence" like 'there was a female skeleton inside a grave that had weapons!'

To be clear, why do you think vikings were men? I needn't provide you with some obscure tale of a man buried in a grave or whatever. These battles were regularly recounted, vikings were regularly interacted with, and the entire civilization is reasonably well recorded. And there's no real ambiguity. Any ambiguity is in us taking isolated incidents and trying to extrapolate them upwards while ignoring the other 99.99999% of evidence.

You don't find this to be bias confirmation? What we have is a female skeleton buried with a couple of horses, some weaponry, and some games. That's it. They use this to declare the individual a warrior. It's possible, but it's also complete speculation. Most peculiar, to me, is that that paper and the wiki entry [1] make no mention of the outfit that the skeleton was wearing. It was surrounded by weapons, not equipped with such. Speculating in another direction, did Vikings hold funery rights for those whose corpses could not be recovered? That would likely be a semi-regular event be it from falling on campaign, in battle, or even just being lost at sea. For individuals of high rank, which this grave obviously indicates, human sacrifice was on occasion part of funery rights.

So for instance one of the first things I'd be curious about is the skeleton's diet. This sounds incredible, but there's actually precedent for this [2]. In that study they were able to relatively compare diets noting similarities between the common class, contrasted against the elite class. If I'm going to go against Occam's Razor (and the lack of any meaningful evidence for female viking warriors makes this paper's assumption very much this) I'm going to try to disprove my hypothesis in every practical way. Why was none of this done to at least ensure the person was not a beloved slave/lover/wife of some sort? It seems the only examining the authors of that paper took out was to determine if there was indication of trauma or damage of the skeleton, as might be evidence of battle. They found that the skeleton had not been damaged in battle.

Finally, let me conclude with a little quote from that paper: "Do weapons necessarily determine a warrior? The interpretation of grave goods is not straight forward, but it must be stressed that the interpretation should be made in a similar manner regardless of the biological sex of the interred individual." I think this is illogical. The entire goal of science is to formulate the most probable hypothesis with consideration to all evidence available. The fact that this corpse is a female radically changes the probabilities. If you find the corpse you somehow know to be a well nourished Nazi inside a holocaust mass grave, would you assume he was there for different reasons than the other corpses around him? Obviously. Your interpretation can and should change with every bit of data you discover.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birka_female_Viking_warrior

[2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544031...

The thing that strikes me about these discussions it that if female viking fighters were at all common, discovery of possible evidence of such would hardly be news. The vikings are not some mythical or extremely ancient entity. They thrived in the 8th-11th centuries and came into contact with numerous other cultures and these cultures had extensive writing and records that survive to this day.

Female fighters is something that certainly would have been widely recorded by nearly all of the cultures that the vikings came into contact with, yet there's no real record there. Things like the Byzantine Empire's Varangian guard were even heavily composed of Scandinavians where surely such tales and discussion would have received much attention. Yet again, no.

This seems to be a decidedly modern invention that, though certainly better intentioned, feels akin to things like phrenology in that people spin together hamstrung and disparate bits of data to try to create a view with a facade of 'science' behind it, when it's really just about trying to confirm biases.

I'm surprised to see so few mention a more direct ostensible 'fiduciary duty.' Going public, especially without share tiering aimed at letting the owners keep control, involves yielding control of your company to shareholders. And this often creates a conflict of interest. Shareholders, generally, are not holding shares because of any affinity for a company. They're holding shares because they think those shares will appreciate and give them more capital.

SpaceX is a great example. They don't want to go public simply because their longterm goal is not something that has an immediately apparent path to monetization. And on top of that it's also very high risk. Elon is driven by ideology which is, in my opinion, a great thing. But it's not something that would work well at a public company.

As another example take something like Steam - the primary PC gaming platform. In spite an effective platform monopoly, they've chosen to never 'squeeze' their position. And they're doing better than ever for it. On the other hand they could likely multiply their short to mid term revenue in exchange for killing themselves in the long run. When the owners of a company are more interested in increasing their net worth, than in creating a solid long term company - it creates a major conflict of interest.

In theory my argument should fall flat because of market efficiency. If making decisions so obviously hurts a company's longterm outlook, then that should theoretically be factored into the price of a stock. But in reality quarterlies seem to drive the market.

As America becomes increasingly polarized and driven towards echo chambers, political violence continues to emerge across the political spectrum. For instance the recent attempt of an individual randomly murder congressmen after verifying they were republicans [1], or perhaps the mass murder of police officers in Dallas by an individual at a BLM associated rally [2]. Both had strong links to various political organizations. Using anecdotal evidence you can condemn most of anything.

In my opinion Cloudflare should not be in the business of making judgement calls one way or the other. The law exists for a reason and, as in this case, when a group is seen as acting outside the law, Cloudflare can be directed to terminate access. They need not preemptively act as judge, jury, and executioner themselves. Another issue is that when you start refusing to accept some group or another, it leads to an implicit endorsement of all the other groups. You can certainly find all sorts of completely abhorrent sites that utilize Cloudflare. A social campaign showing this sites while emphasizing that Cloudflare can, and does, refuse service to sites for what might be perceived as 'lesser crimes' would leave them in a difficult to handle situation. And this will happen. By contrast, not all that long ago they could have simply and eloquently responded, "We do not judge content."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...

Your numbers are both technically wrong and misleading. The federal government is currently spending 120% of our annual revenue. Even if we somehow cut enough programs that 18% of our revenue became disposable (which is itself completely unrealistic) you'd be making 0 progress. You need to not only start paying off the principle + interest, but also drop our spending to 100%. That's already about 40% of gross federal revenue.

The misleading aspect is because 40%, and even 18%, don't sound as absurd as they really are. Even cutting spending modestly is incredibly difficult. Cutting it by 18% is arguably impossible without completely reshaping government as we know it. Cutting it by the 40% required to actually make progress on the debt is completely unrealistic at any point in the foreseeable future. And these numbers are getting worse each year, with the difficulty of getting out of debt continuing to increase. And of course this repayment pretends we will both maintain or increase income while never increasing spending beyond growth in said income - for 30 years.

No, no private company is getting a loan in these conditions. Drowning in debt with the only means of possible repayment, both short and longterm, being to hope they can find other lenders to pay off you, as a new lender? That's like a mental version of something between a ponzi and pyramid scheme.

I don't think the actions and the goal are inconsistent. As you quoted it's all about 'ending big government.'

Taxing and spending increases the size of government. And it arguably has no end. Government is the ultimate bureaucracy and will spend every penny it receives, and then some. Even Finland, whose government takes more than 40% of its national GDP in taxes, is now somehow facing mounting government debt. It has phenomenal state programs, but will they prove to be sustainable or not? Since the government is a bureaucracy, the only way to reduce its spending is to reduce the amount of money it has available. As Milton Friedman put it, reducing taxes 'cuts the government's allowance.' Reducing taxes results in either programs being cut out of necessity, or the eventual collapse of the government under its own debt. In either case it certainly 'ends big government.'

The big hypocrisy is not in the tax cuts, but in the spending of presidents like Bush. We spent one can only imagine how many trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while perhaps the military can be considered distinct from government in general, spending money on poorly justified wars we can't afford certainly precludes any notion of fiscal purpose.

This is false. The entire story of the petrodollar is lengthy and involves an understanding of economic arrangements in times past, how they worked, how they collapsed, and the details in between. Rather than try to write this all out here, I think an excellent post that does a very good job of summing up these intricacies is available here: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-oil-priced-and-traded-in-U-S-do...

The fact that oil is settled to this day primarily in USD has everything to do with the US and Saudi Arabia. Understanding this system also helps one appreciate the relevance of very contemporary issues like China attempting to push oil producing nations to settle their contracts in yuan. It's not about the short micro level effects, which would essentially just be a currency conversion, but about the macro level effects and implications of what currency the most in demand import in the world is offered in. If China succeeds with their goal, the economic consequences for the US could not be overstated.

Companies are able to attract investors and lenders because of the reasonable expectation of future profits. For the US there is no expectation of ever breaking out of our debt. There's a term for private entities whose only means of ever being able to pay off old investors and lenders is from the funds of new investors and lenders.

I think it's a perspective problem. Since this issue is more complex, I'll use a simpler one - nuclear weapons. There has not been major unrestrained warfare directly between modern nations in what's approaching a century. Very few people alive today have lived through this sort of warfare. So it becomes a unicorn. Yet we still have things like nuclear weapons. And people see these as a relic of times past. Why would you want these sort of weapons when this sort of warfare no longer exists? And so naturally we have an increasing push to try to get rid of nuclear weapons, a stark reminder of a 'less enlightened times.'

Of course the reality is that this era of peace we've created has largely been enabled by nuclear weapons. Mutually assured destruction is indeed MAD but it has been the one thing, in the entire history of our species, that has managed to prevent this sort of conflict. Without nuclear weapons nations like the US, China, and Russia would certainly have long since came to 'hot war' in the process of determining who's ideology will be the world ideology. And that certainly would have drawn in the rest of the world, one way or the other: to wit, World War 3.

And so too today in economics, most people have lived during an era when the US has been more than capable of 'printing' (not how many is made - another complex topic) vast sums of money while suffering no real economic consequence, as well as being involved a system where we are only able to pay off old debts by taking on new debts - with no expectation of this ever really changing. If a private organization was behaving as we do, it would be considered a Ponzi Scheme. The reasons for this economic immunity are complex -- the fact our currency is indirectly backed by oil is a major player. But the point is is that people don't see any nuance here. We've always been able to behave this way (from the perspective of most people), so why would anything suddenly change? Probably a similar scenario to what happens at the end of any other meaningfully long era.

Negative generalizations are, at best, tangentially related to racism. Racism is most fundamentally, "I think blue people are better than green people, because they're blue." Speaking negatively, or positively, of blue or green people would not be racist. Refusing to associate with any green person, because they're green, would be racist. Considering a specific blue Nobel prize winning nuclear scientist to be dumb, because blue people have a statistically lower IQ on average, would also be racist. Observing that mentioned IQ difference and considering that it would be expected to result in a lower than average distribution of aforementioned Nobel prize winning nuclear scientists, would not be racist.

Wolfram Alpha [1] is another tool from them that's simply phenomenal for a multitude of purposes, including research. It's what I'd really like to see in a search eventually. It tries to actually directly deliver answers instead of correlating searches to a prioritized list of websites which is slowly degenerating search into 'search trendy websites by keyword.' For instance search google for "price of google stock in 2009", and then do the same search on Wolfram Alpha.

As that project evolves, it could eventually be the sort of searchable knowledge database that would render current search obsolete. Google itself could be a literal query of 'list high traffic SEO'd sites that mention [search term]'. Who actually wants that result other than the sites in question, ...and the companies that profit from their advertising, is beyond me.

[1] - https://www.wolframalpha.com/

One of the big reasons I find it interesting is because I expect there's probably more news outlets now than ever before, yet we see such a peculiar level of homogeneity in the views they espouse - perhaps even more so than in times past. The New York Times has an awesome archive going all the way back to the 1850s. In fact there's a lot of really great free newspaper archive resources [1]. And in perusing these archives something that I think has really changed is that in the past there was a far greater diversity of published views. By contrast today views tend to be quite uniform except in archetypical difference, such as partisanship.

In a way I would not be surprised if behind the scenes people were collaborating with one another, feeling that expressing different views would undermine the credibility of what's said as different organizations contradict each other. But ironically I think this sort of homogeneity is playing a large role in peoples' diminishing trust in media. It makes the news seem very artificial and orchestrated. And the homogeneity means that when they get things wrong - as seems to be the case here, it makes the entire industry look just awful. Being wrong is one thing, being so collectively ill informed as to not have even meaningfully considered the possibility of a binary truth (it is a weapon, or it's not a weapon)? That's something far worse.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...

You have to distinguish between fatal crashes and all crashes. Here [1] are the data for the US if you can tolerate that site. What is the typical condition for a fatal crash? It's extremely counter intuitive. It is driving straight, on a major roadway, in good weather, during the day time, while sober, in a 4 door hardtop sedan. Seriously.

I'm reluctant to go social science and start handwaving too much causality there, but on the other hand I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to observe that those 'easy' driving conditions also tend to be some of the highest speed driving conditions. Creates a nasty combination of of a situation where we might be more subject to lapses of attention, due to comfort, and exponentially increased consequences when that lapse results in a crash.

But the really cool thing here is that these are also the conditions that right now the self driving systems are rocking. In other words there's actually a chance you're right that we're not comparing apples to apples, but instead are actually oversampling conditions where fatal accidents are more likely to happen!

[1] - https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

That is rather humorous on the red flag traffic laws. Had never heard of that before!

One thing that's nice now about self driving vehicles is that it seems that more or less the entire automotive industry is hopping on board. For some time it looked like it was going to be Google + Tesla doing self driving and I think it being lobbied and consequently "regulated" out of existence in the US was a very real danger. But at this point, which influential lobbying force might, even if we're just speculating, be a concern?

I find it more interesting that the media coverage has been, predictably, completely one sided and sensationalistic going so far as to strongly imply 'suspects.' It's a great reminder of how, in the past, we slipped into 2 red scares and it seems we just barely dodged a third in the present.

Perhaps ironically we can attribute this to the internet. It is a great device for misinformation and FUD, but at the same time it also allows people to openly point out poor logic, unsupported conclusions, or even false facts. This diversity of view probably helps any singular view from taking as hold as strongly as it has in times past -- for better (red scare) and for worse (climate change).

We've already had fatal self driving crashes while the self driving system was in operation. The media irresponsibly, but predictably, tried to use it to drive people into a terrified frenzy - which surprisingly did not work. And even more surprising, the regulators were also reasonable. There was an understanding of what caused the crash and that there are inherent risks. This was contrasted by data indicating that, for instance, since Tesla rolled out their autopilot system - crashes as a whole declined some odd 40%.

And finally there is even just macabre data on fatality rates. On average in the US currently about 1.2 people are expected to die in car crashes per 100 million miles driven. Tesla alone has had hundreds of millions of miles driven in its full autopilot mode, and the fatalities are not racking up like they 'should' be. We could argue that maybe people are paying more attention when the autopilot system is enabled, but practice across the industry has shown the exact opposite to be invariably true.

I think it's just been so long since our society had a revolutionary 'physical' technology, that we've become scared of change and progress. Imagine what a change it was going from horses to cars operating on internal combustion engines and relying on brakes to stop these vehicles going far faster than any horse. Or imagine the idea of stringing the entire country up with electric polls with so much energy going between them that anything landing on a wire and touching something else was certain to be killed, and accepting the fact that when these polls, or the lines between them, go down they not only could but on some occasions would start fires, and so forth. Going from human to automatically driven vehicles is a hardly meaningful contrasted against many of the revolutions of technology throughout the times.

And one final point is that we're also being somewhat self centered in this discussion. These technological changes we're seeing are happening worldwide. An image of e.g. Singapore streets with people in vehicles relaxing as they are autonomously driven to their destination would leave the state of the US and its rules and regulations looking increasingly like an anachronism. Certainly something that would cast a dim light on our view of ourselves as the world leader in innovation.

Out of curiosity, where do you see the future of ads going as free ad-driven services, such as Facebook, start to approach market saturation?

Increasing revenue further would mean that product would need to increase ads, or somehow increase ad efficiency, but either case seems likely to deteriorate the user experience which could end up counter productive for all involved, at least in the long run.

I'm certainly oversimplifying things, but it seems like ad driven models have a very clear ceiling. Or is the endgame to simply to continue increasing costs to advertisers?

You have to keep in mind that prices are, generally, not magical. The price is a balance between what people are willing to sell something for and what people are willing to buy it for. Of course that's elementary, but thinking about this will explain why drivers, in general, will not be well paid.

Driving is a low value skill that the vast majority of people have, and if they don't have - they can learn it rapidly. Let's imagine now being a driver was lucrative. Well you'd have a ton of people racing to become drivers, no pun intended. But with so many people willing to drive people around, it'd mean a shortage of work for all the drivers. And so somebody would offer to drive people for a little bit less. And that'd repeat on downward until we reached the equilibrium point at which not enough drivers were willing to go below.

There are some exceptions like truck driving where people spend hours and hours on the road driving vehicles that do require some degree of skill to manage. And so the wages there are still pretty decent. It's not just driving per se, but unpleasant work that requires some degree of skill.

Ride sharing apps bring market efficiency. If you're willing to drive for $x and people are willing to pay $x, well - why shouldn't you be able to? They're still centralized of course, but I think it takes us one step closer to decentralizing the entire industry which would be amazing, as it entirely removes the middle man and let's people simply directly offer and purchase each others' labor. Of course this ideal is pointless in this particular case as automation is imminent and will super-centralize the industry. Although there prices will likely be lower than even a decentralized market could offer.

Sure, but in reality opinions are the one thing we ought scrutinize the most, right? Facts are either true or false, but are unchanging at given any moment in time. Opinions are not necessarily true or false, but can and arguably should constantly change. So perhaps seeing things from anothers eyes might lead you to consider your own opinion in another way. And if not then of course that's also fine. To each their own!

Check out the Utah Data Center [1]. They are already creating storage on the order of exabytes in a single facility. As storage technology improves, we can expect to see that capacity grow rapidly. Assuming they retain the data, over time it would be declassified and made legally available. The big question is whether or not they retain it. At the minimum, I doubt they'd even consider deleting anything until current encryption is cracked to enable them to decrypt the bulk 'line tap' style collections.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

As an aside here, I would be cautious of attributing declining growth on Facebook to pretty much anything. They are the first company in the history of our species to take market saturation to such extremes. They have more than 2 billion active monthly users, and growing.

The issue they have is that there are only 3-4 billion internet users in the entire world. Their growth is predictably going to hit an asymptote at some point in the near future - they are simply running out of people.

That also poses an interesting issue from a company perspective. We still live in a world where endless growth is expected. But with a ad-driven service the only way to make more money is to get users to view/click and otherwise interact with even more ads, or to otherwise increase the efficiency of ads. And that in general achieves little other creating a worse user experience, no matter how clever the packaging and delivery.

And the NSA. They are creating one of the most in depth and far reaching collections of human interaction, all the way down to the most private and intimate level. Long after we're all dead, and presumably technology is developed to trivially crack current encryption, that data will provide a level of information and detail unlike anything before.

I have no love for what they're doing in the present, but at the same time the 'time capsule' they're creating is going to be an unimaginably valuable gift to the future, if it is not deleted. At some point we may even reach a point where you could feed the information into an AI with the goal of it producing simulations that would strongly resemble the times which could be used for teaching, education, and more. And what a key time now is as in one human lifetime we develop the internet, automation, likely become a multiplanetary species, and so much more. Funny coincidence we happen to live in this time...

You don't find it ironic in that you're judging people for what they find enjoyable and arguing it misses the point of doing something for enjoyment? I receive immense pleasure and enjoyment in improving at things -- something I assume is probably an evolutionary imperative. Bettering ourselves is fun. Competing is fun. Bettering ourselves while competing is absurdly fun.

Expressing dismay out at the audacity of somebody to even dare state something, as opposed to stating why either it's wrong in the case of a fact or why you disagree in case of an opinion, is language policing. In other words it is attacking the choice of language, instead of discussing or debating the view itself. Note the person who started this line of discussion chose to immediately go ad hominem on the author instead of provide rationale for why their personal opinion was that 'just' understates the issues in play.

I have no concern for what people think facts "promote." Give the same information to different people and they will come to different conclusions. Ultimately facts are what inform our opinions. When you believe something may promote some opinion or another, you should consider the fact that you may likely be projecting. People interpret things differently. For instance let's take another controversial example, but one that also brings the issue down to its most fundamental level. Imagine somebody states that blacks make up 38% of the prison population, yet only 13% of the US population. This is very true. However, it's also true that that same 13% of the population also commits more than 52% of all the murders in the nation, along with similar over representation in most forms of crime.

Rather than trying to cherry pick data to lead people in one direction or the other, I think it is important that all facts are considered - even when we might consider those facts as less than pleasant. In my example here, both facts are very likely to mislead without the context of the other. And if either fact were presented without the context of the other, I would fully agree with you about 'cherry picking' facts. When I asked you to provide any relevant facts I may have omitted after you claimed I was 'cherry picking data', you failed to be able to provide a single one.

--

As a sort of meta comment. Line by line quoting tends to create somewhat scattered and disparate logic, made even worse with paraphrasings. Try to think of things holistically and I think you might be able to express yourself more clearly if you're perhaps expressing some nuanced view I'm still too dense to perceive.