khawkins

I don't think this is true, and even if it were it would be something everyone except literal fascists would oppose.

You're suggesting that the message you just typed out has the same weight as printing a few thousand copies of a manifesto for someone and shipping that book across the country to be put in bookstores and eat the cost if it doesn't sell. In no reasonable way does the "book publisher model" resemble the "social media model".

The "social media model" is far closer to discussions you would have in a coffee shop or at a dinner party. Starbucks doesn't need to listen in on your conversations and kick you out if they're not disturbing anyone else.

It's interesting to see how quickly Silicon Valley culture has changed over the past 10 years from one of free speech absolutism to "benevolent censorship". The people so vociferously clamoring about the nightmare-hellscape of a world without Net-Neutrality are now telling us that a handful of major corporations actively and blatantly censoring speech is no cause for concern.

The mere act of making a message accessible from an internet connection is only 1% of what "publishing" is, and it's the only reason Google, Facebook, and Twitter make billions. Otherwise, the whole Geocities-type model where everyone has their own private website would be successful today.

The reason these technologies are successful is that 99% of "publishing" is getting messages to the eyeballs that want to see those messages. The essence of their monopoly is that everyone's content they want to see is on that particular platform, both political and apolitical. It is difficult to follow people who get excommunicated from platforms, and the whole reason anyone uses these platforms is to avoid this difficulty.

Not only is the "climate change" analogy strained, it perfectly contradicts their argument, showing both its weakness and their total lack of self-awareness.

The positions on climate change range from "existential threat to all life on the planet within 20 years and our way of life" to "mass hysteria founded by fault-ridden scientific evidence whose solutions are an existential threat to the global economy and our way of life". These positions in particular are held by a significant percentage of the population of the Western world, and most people cluster near one of these two extremes. In other words, it is an extremely polarizing issue that, for many, colors how they perceive other people, should they discover their positions.

The creators of this website suggest that social media and data-mining are forcing people to self-censor and not freely express themselves, but then proceed to frame the contentious political issue of climate change as a believer/denialist modality. The authors make it clear that they don't want people to have a nuanced opinion on climate change, they want them to conform to the "unquestionable truth".

But it is this form of rigid thinking that causes people to self-censor, not the intangible specter of "big-data" and "the algorithm". If you were employed by someone who made it clear that they are only interested in hiring people who were devout Christian, you wouldn't openly share your atheist views publicly. Western society as a whole is selecting more and more topics, like climate change, where to be on the record holding a conflicting opinion is disastrous for your relationships with friends, family, and employers. This fact isn't a fault of the technology, though the technology might be the reason society is becoming rapidly intolerant of dissent.

Conflict and social guardedness like this is guaranteed to arise when we have a political landscape that is so divided and thinks everything is on the line.

Only people who spend most of their life in densely crowded cities could think that the planet has so little space that you'd need to grow crops underneath solar panels for efficiency's sake.

On a very related note, California Prop 16 will be on the ballot in November, seeking to remove the following text from the CA constitution:

>The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...

And it's right to publicly shame him for that?

I'd like to see people approach the debate with enough nuance to recognize that the science on recent topics is extremely flawed, and the trustworthiness of results is decreased significantly when it becomes politicized.

And honestly, doing placebo-controlled studies might be a colossal mistake. If people genuinely benefit from the placebo effect, it's a feature, not a flaw. If people get HCQ+Z-pac+zinc and recover then it's a victory either way. If people are incorrectly led to believe HCQ is poison and get a reverse-placebo effect then we're not really helping anyone, are we?

It does speak to why he's treated with so much distrust, as is discussed by other threads. Unlike the average person, Gates is someone who can actually make things happen with his incredible wealth. It suggests a form of paternalistic authoritarian attitude towards social issues that undeniably colors his attitude towards this pandemic.

You can also read in his tone that he feels personally slighted by not being given a seat at the table in the US COVID response. People point to South Korea's success and call the US a failure, not realizing that if you implemented their measures in the US: things like forced contact tracing, forced registration, and locking up the infected in isolated sites, you'd have a civil insurrection on your hands.

And her male rival had a crush on a high school boy and eventually her. It steered far clear of sexual tones, but showed romantic attraction. It was so obvious that many of those scenes were censored in the US.

A picture of these vertical farms would have gone a long way towards helping me understand what all would be required to deploy these things. Yet they decide to use white-space to tell me what the population of the world is and estimates of it in the future and why farming is important.

>When we see Border Patrol agents wearing camouflage and helmets, carrying M4s with optics, rigged up like they’re about to go on patrol in Ramadi or the Korengal Valley (or deal with a migrant caravan in the southwest), that’s empire coming home.

The federal agents in Portland are using technology to reduce harm. Over 50 nights they have had mobs trying to come in and destroy a federal courthouse, but instead of reenacting the Boston Massacre, at worst there has been non-life threatening injuries.

Empires and countries grow weak when they divide against themselves. This is obvious, and the main way power structures fall apart. Articles like this are trying to further this division by suggesting that trying to keep a mob from destroying courthouses is authoritarian. Would Putin be so patient as to allow mobs to lay siege to a courthouse for 50 days?

It's unbelievable how hyperbolic the rhetoric has gotten on this issue. My guess is that people like the author are not actually seeing what's happening in Portland. He's seeing what the federal agents are doing, but not what the mob does to provoke these responses. I won't go so far as to say the city is burning down, but if the federal agents left the courthouse to the mob, it would be burned to the ground that very day.

Given that police officers

(a) are first-responders whose central job is public safety,

(b) are regularly sent into situations where their life and safety is on the line (6 have been shot to death in the past two months), and

(c) regularly face violent and hateful prejudice as an identity, just for putting on the uniform,

it's hard to justify that they don't deserve advocacy from a group of people with shared experiences.

It doesn't mean that unions should always get their way or that unions should be officially recognized, but police can and should exercise their rights to collectively bargain and strike if necessary.

How does it compare to Matlab's symbolic toolbox, aside from not being affordable outside of academia?

Clearly, the goal of this article is to shift power into the hands of the author and her ideologically aligned community.

OP: "a fusion center in Missouri listed Ron Paul supporters as potential domestic terrorists"

Report, top of page 7: "Militia members most commonly associate with 3rd party political groups. It is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitutional Party, Campaign for Liberty, or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate: Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr."

Honestly, I'm sympathetic to many of the ideologies and ideas that are described in this report, but I actually think the document is important as an internal document for police. They need to be informed about radicals within these ideologies, and knowing who they might vote for for president is very relevant for helping to understand or empathize with them, especially for conflict deescalation.

Say you're in a hostage negotiation with a sovereign-citizen type who's worried you're going to disappear them to some black-ops prison. If you knew enough about the movement to abolish the Fed, about FEMA camps, or about the NWO, and said you're a Ron Paul supporter, you might be able to establish trust. Ron Paul isn't strictly someone involved with the latter two conspiracies, but there is a heavy correlation between the three, and he's the highest profile figure supporting the first.

These documents aren't political, they're tactical information for real-life police work. Police have to deal with the radicals, even if they're a fringe minority.

This is under the assumption that you see college is a program of self-betterment and not busy work for receiving a degree that says you can have a middle-class job. It feels like even the universities themselves see it as the latter these days.

Given the region's susceptibility to Islamic State uprisings, I'm not convinced Iraq and Syria are going to be good stewards of antiquities in the long-run. [1][2] These areas haven't been stable for decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_cultural_herita...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Mosul_Museum_ar...

The fundamental problem is that there is collective action on both sides of the issue. There are plenty of people organizing for the removal of "hate speech", and there are plenty of people organizing for free speech. It's not exactly clear which side is economical since you're not going to make both sides happy.

Tech giants have picked the winners and I'm pretty convinced they've picked sides based on their personal convictions. They're removing hate speech because they think they're on the right side of history, not because they think it will make them the most money.

Dragging the company into a slew of political activism creates a toxic work environment. When people take up the mantle of speaking for all of the employees when they, in fact, don't, they end up silencing and intimidating people who disagree with them because they want to get along with their coworkers.

If you think climate change is a ticking time-bomb and needs drastic action, great, go to a climate rally in your free time and protest for more environmental laws. Some of your coworkers disagree with you, they just don't say anything because they want a good working relationship with you.

For this reason, I think instead of trying to force a new system, work within the reality that the federal government has a near-monopoly on student loans. Tie the amount of students that can get student loans at a particular college directly to the amount of money is being paid by students who have graduated. Also, cap the amount of money each student needs to pay back per year to their salary.

The colleges will have no choice but to ensure their students have nice enough jobs to pay back the loans, and will quickly see attendance plummet if they can't get people in the door anymore. Remember that it's the government paying these colleges directly, not the students.

I wish more of society would apply this wisdom to climate change modelling.

I had to stop reading after the insinuation that Hacker News comment sections are filled with trash. To the contrary, I find that half of the time the comments sections are more thoughtful and enlightening than the article posted. Very regularly I read the comments first to see if the post is worth diving into.

I agree it was reasonable, but it was written such that it was very recognizable as a non-human automated system response. I'd make the case that the message should go even further to seem like a robot, because few empathise with mindless automatons. For the same reason, it's not clear that serious emotional damage occurred. It wasn't cruel or unsympathetic, it was a machine going through its motions.

I think it was a simple oversight on behalf of system administrators.

> Also, the average paid sick leave varies between 6-10 (working) days. Suggested quarantine is 14 days.

All the more reason to treat coronavirus as an exception that needs to be considered, as-needed, business by business. Or state-by-state, or county-by-county. Just because something like coronavirus happens every so often doesn't mean we need a 1-size fits all policy for every year and occasion.

I think businesses should be encouraged to play a role in helping limit the spread of the virus, but if everyone just decides they need to take 2 weeks off because of the cold, that's going to cause some economic troubles. Maybe something like that is needed this year, but for every year, that would be excessive and not help.

You're missing the point, the problem that is if you're trying to offer credible expert opinion on how to deal with a crisis, you undermine those opinions by introducing a highly charged political wedge issue that offers no solutions to the problem at hand.

Sure, you can argue that single-payer healthcare would have been good to solve this crisis and others would certainly argue that it would make things worse, but the debate is totally fruitless because implementing such a system will take years--well after coronavirus is either endemic or wiped out. Thus, even bringing it up makes me question whether you, as an expert, are capable of divorcing your personal bias from your scientific objectivity. I immediately think, "is this person speaking from their objective expertise, or do they look for the data that satisfies their political arguments, and ignoring the rest?"

Scientists should tell people the facts as objectively as possible because that is the purpose of the field and discipline. Leave activism to others, who will use the facts to come to whatever conclusions they can.

It's not "oddly", it's deliberately deceptive and trying to exaggerate the problem to advance a political narrative.

We're behind them on the timeline because the president restricted travel from the epicenter back at the end of January [1], and the US is the best prepared country in the world for an epidemic [2]. Italy got its 3rd coronavirus case on Feb. 6 [3], and now its totals are at 10k.

Take a look at the cases/country chart on [4] and sort by cases/population. The US is many orders of magnitude better than European countries. It's absolutely worth comparing for specifically the reasons mentioning in OP's post, that being ahead of this makes all the difference in the world.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/business/china-travel-cor... [2] https://www.statista.com/chart/20629/ability-to-respond-to-a... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-italy/third-... [4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

> Zero universal guaranteed paid sick leave

This is a false statement. There are 12 states which require paid sick leave, amounting to 30% of the population [1]. Federal employees are guaranteed paid sick leave days [2]. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 61% of workers have paid sick leave, 78% have paid vacations, (80%/90% in large employers with 500 or more workers) [3].

That whole section is just political garbage. There's plenty of reasons to believe that businesses will take precautions themselves to limit the spread of the virus internally, which includes offering paid sick leave to encourage people to be extra careful.

[1] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/paid-sick... [2] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/leave-ad... [3] https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2009/ownership/private/...