kinsomo

>> Also the Syria and Yemen are civil wars. Don't know how you think it's reasonable to pin that on the "US, NATO and friends".

> Though I think you can put much of the blame of the civil wars staring on the US, even if you disagree the wars are still dramatically different than it would be without US support.

I think that's profoundly ignorant and belies lazy thinking, especially in relation to Syria.

The precise cause of the civil war was the domestic policies of the Assad regime [1] [2] [3] [4].

As for "providing the various sides with arms and support," I would be gobsmacked if you could show the US provided arms to Assad, especially in significant numbers. I recall significant dithering by the Obama administration over the level of support to give the rebels, and the fact that the US withheld arms to the rebels (over fears of inadvertently supporting Islamic extremists) is what allowed ISIS to grow so strong and eclipse the more liberal rebel groups.

> the wars are still dramatically different than it would be without US support.

If only because the support of other nations would have had a relatively greater effect [5].

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

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

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/world/middleeast/26syria....

[4] https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/11/22/syria-s-path-from-c...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Syr...

> The drone program is an assassination program which is fundamentally different than somemething like the f-35.

My point is there's no meaningful difference between dropping a JDAM on a particular target with an F-35 or dropping a JDAM on the same target with a drone.

Either way, you dropped a JDAM on a target. Doing it with a drone doesn't magically make the result worse or different somehow.

> If they had learned from that mistake they wouldn’t be trying to wall the internet off.

They're walling off foreign political ideas and avenues for domestic political organization, not foreign technological advancements. They are very explicit about that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...

> Nothing in that amendment specifically mentions the purpose of preventing totalitarian government.

You have to take into account the context. It was written and ratified by people who'd just staged a revolution against what they described as a "tyrannical" regime, often using their own personal weapons.

To note that the Constitution doesn't mention "totalitarianism" is to note that it doesn't contain an anachronism. It's a modern coinage that's not to far in meaning from "tyranny."

> Seems many Americans are willing to crap all over the 2nd Amendment, which is specifically in place to prevent totalitarian government.

Exactly. If America has learned anything from the past half century of foreign military adventures, it should be that a big modern Army can't easily defeat a motivated insurgency that has the support and sympathy in the local population.

The 2nd Amendment may have a lot of costs, but the private gun ownership it provides for would definitely make it much more difficult for a domestic totalitarian regime to establish itself in the US.

> That didn’t work for the USSR, why would it work for China?

The CCP does have the benefit of learning from the failures of the Soviets.

> China was here before. Cutting yourself off from the world just means you eventually find yourself having fallen behind everyone else.

That mainly happened because they were so dominant in their sphere that they didn't bother themselves with far off areas that seemed primitive to them. I'm pretty sure the CCP has learned from that mistake.

> In other news, the US, NATO and friends in this century alone destroyed Iraq, Libya, almost destroyed Syria and Yemen and did a few other nasty things that resulted in at least a million dead. Do you have a big enough item 5 for that?

Destroyed? You'll need to provide some pretty strong proof to convince me those countries aren't there anymore.

Also the Syria and Yemen are civil wars. Don't know how you think it's reasonable to pin that on the "US, NATO and friends" (that is, unless you want to do something silly like trace things too far back to look for butterflies, ignore a lot of recent history, and remove all agency from the locals).

> I agree but how should this actually work? I feel like we have no options here. Everything comes from China, beginning with my mobile devices.

One option is to more or less emulate China. It's factories were built over the last 30 or so years. There's no reason that other countries couldn't start to replicate those capabilities and supply chains over a similar time period. It would probably require more automation to be economical in the West, however.

The hard part with that will be to force Western profit-uber-alles corporations to comply.

> I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost.

Why do you think the Chinese government can't sustain the cost? Intensive policing is manpower intensive, and China presently has manpower to spare. They also don't have to deal with democratic pressures to contain the cost and redirect the savings to programs that benefit the general public.

> If I ran a forum for a number of years, and a person decided to close their account, that'd be fine. But if they then said that I need to remove _all of their posts_, that's really shitty.

> It would destroy the usefulness of a forum.

Couldn't you just anonymize their posts, for instance by updating their username to something like "Deleted User"? Wouldn't you be fine as long as there wasn't anything left to link them to their real identity?

> If we reduce everything to being ahead of a potential enemy, then we soon get to a point where the solution of all problems is a single deadly upfront attack.

> Those technologies aren't for defense;

Have you ever heard of Mutually Assured Destruction? Basically the idea is having "credible deterrent" actually prevents the use of the weapons, because the side that makes a "single deadly upfront attack" will lose along with their opponent. The only winning move is not to play.

The problems happen when one side has capabilities the others lack, or when there are options for a "single deadly upfront attack" that aren't suicide.

In short, "offensive" technologies can be defensive.

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

> So in your opinion developers and scientists are not "patriotic" enough, I disagree

Where, exactly did I say that? You're putting words in my mouth.

The same Wikipedia article states:

"The drones are flown by United States Air Force pilots located at an unnamed base in the United States. US Department of Defense armed drones, which also sometimes take part in strikes on terrorist targets, are flown by US Air Force pilots located at Creech Air Force Base and Holloman Air Force Base."

>>> No, the primary difference is that we deploy drones in areas we are not engaged in warfare, and to assassinate various individuals in foreign countries where we are not at war.

>> The US hasn't been officialy "at war" in a long time. I think the last one was World War II.

> If you believe that then how you call the military operations in recent years and present?

Wars, for the most part.

> The point is these aren't even military operations

I disagree. I would call operations conducted with military equipment and with the participation of military personnel (e.g. USAF pilots) military operations.

> No, the primary difference is that we deploy drones in areas we are not engaged in warfare, and to assassinate various individuals in foreign countries where we are not at war.

The US hasn't been officialy "at war" in a long time. I think the last one was World War II.

> We do not deploy F-35s to assassinate people in Pakistan.

Of course not: F-35s are more expensive to operate and I'm not sure they've even attained the level of readiness to attempt such a mission.

> 1 Do you think China will send drones and attack US citizens?

It's not unthinkable, especially if they feel confident that they have a technological advantage that would shield them from detection or in-kind retaliation. They also have somewhat different notions of citizenship/nationality than Western countries, and they have a few diasporas they'd like to control.

> 3 If there are enough money in this there will be people going to work on the project, so I am sure the US will have good droning software

What makes you so sure of this, or that those people will have the necessary talent? Lower quality software could lead to more collateral deaths.

> 4 US brought this on itself with the way they used the drones , like you have the verb "droning"

Contemporary drone-strikes are literally just regular airstrikes: for instance, the weapons the drones use were actually developed for other military aircraft [1] [2] and adapted to drones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-114_Hellfire

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

The only real difference is that there's no pilot in the plane, so less risk he dies in a crash. And I say crash because most of the drone-strikes happened in places where there were few hostile anti-aircraft weapons to actually shoot anything down. Most of the pilot risk would have been from mechanical problems and human error.

> The Make-A-Wish Foundation is mostly useless. People have a moral obligation to set aside their feelings in order to do the right thing. Giving to the Make-A-Wish Foundation is motivated mostly by a desire to feel good.

> If you want me to stop saying that, prove me wrong. Calling me mean isn't an argument. If what I say makes people feel bad, the solution isn't to start lying to make them feel better.

People aren't robots, and there's no moral obligation for them to act like they are.

> In case your question is serious: There are still some of us who believe in peace as an end-goal for us humans

Refusing to assist the military develop weapons doesn't really help that goal. A weak(er) military with a lesser technological edge could actually encourage war, as countries that aren't as bound by peace-seeking principles exploit the opportunity to wage war for their benefit. Basically, military weakness is destabilizing.

The refusal line of thinking makes a little more sense if you assume (in this case) the US will be perpetually militarily dominant, which I think is a bad assumption. It's also kind of racist assumption, since it assumes other nationalities are incapable of technologically leapfrogging the US or negating its military advantages.

That's not to say there might be good reason to not want to work on particular weapons systems that have specific moral problems to them, but I'd feel like you'd need a lot of detailed information to make those calls.

I think the most defensible type of objection to assisting the military is at the personal ethical/religious level.

> Drone strikes, as they are used, are a more evil way of taking out identified targets of other nationalities. I find the concept of a nation state summarily assassinating people a bit troubling, but drone strikes make it even worse by making it imprecise and cheap.

There's no significant difference between a drone-strike and a conventional airstrike by a manned aircraft, at lest when it comes to targeting, precision, etc.

Drone-strikes might even be better than conventional airstrikes because the pilot may have less workload (therefore more focus) during the strike part, meaning fewer errors and mistakes.

> That's a fair point, but ultimately people are going to care more about children that are 'closer' to them. You're free to criticize people for this, but it probably won't do you any favours.

Also, making charity too much about distant problems and far off research outcomes factors out the civic and community-level thinking that actually drives and sustains a lot of charity.

It also makes charity solely the domain of experts. Instead of seeing a problem firsthand in your first-world community and reacting to fix it, you have to delegate to someone who you hope knows the highest needs in far off lands.

> In reality FB events are extensively used by ages 16-30 as well for bigger group gatherings, such as going on holiday, going for a weekend somewhere, or something like that.

I don't understand why you'd use FB events for "going on holiday, going for a weekend somewhere." Those things would entail a smaller, tighter knit group with much more communication and planning. Group chat seems like a better fit.

IMO, FB events are really only suitable for things like parties, with an large invite/smaller rsvp dynamic, with mostly broadcast messages from the host.

> See maybe this is why I never understood the supposed all-important-ness of Events. I still just hang out with friends or family or by myself rather than going to "events".

It's not so much all-important, but it's the one feature that impacts Facebook-abstainers the most. If someone's planning a party and is lazily using FB events, you'll probably be left out if you don't have an account.

> I suppose you can object and campaign for the EU to setup its own Great Firewall or something along those lines and only allow companies to operate within its borders which adhere to stringent rules around posted imagery. Good luck with that.

Europe isn't China, and the distribution of those photos isn't an existential threat to the government, so a Great Firewall is overkill.

Facebook has assets, operations, and revenue that originates in Europe that could be easily targeted with little controversy to gain compliance. If that doesn't work, Europle could always try to make the executive decision-makers personally liable. I'm sure Zuckerberg wants to be able to visit Europe in the future without being arrested.

> I agree. At this point, FB and others are just to big to be able to subject them to policy. Even how they handled the GDPR just right before May 25 is a joke. They have billions of cash on hand to fight all the lawsuits whicht might come.

I don't think we're quite to the dystopian vision of international megacorps being totally above the law, yet. No matter how much cash Facebook has to fight lawsuits, the government has more and actually makes the laws to boot. Facebook is also clearly a non-essential service, if it was run out of business, most people who don't have the last name of Zuckerberg would adapt and get over it in a couple of months.

I liked his idea that the common American is stuck at the loser-end of a system of "asymmetric risk." Americans are expected to take on more and more "personal responsibility" (i.e. risk) for healthcare, for securing income, etc. and that means they're subject to all the consequences of any failure.

On the other hand the powerful and wealthy monopolize the rewards of risk, and broadly refuse to share it. However, they have such large cushion (and connections) that they never really took any personal risks at all. If they fail, they'll probably be fine (except maybe with some hurt feelings).

> I despise the removal of the 3.5 mm jack to this day... and I still do not get why Apple removed it. What exactly did it get in the way of and what was made available by its removal? Worst move ever.

Johnny Ive took "worse is better" too literally.

> I've seen quite a lot of criticism against the social credit system. But to me it it just crime history and (financial) credit history mined from big data and combined into a centralized system.

> What's particularly bad about the system per se,

Tightening everyday social control that's at least partially designed to serve the political goals of an unabashedly authoritarian regime that's self-consciously opposed to things like "universal values of human rights." [1] [2]

It might be easier to understand it this way: in China, you're a de-facto criminal if they judge you to be in some way opposed to the regime.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-lea...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa...

> without getting into the arguments specific to Chinese politics?

That's almost like asking what's bad about something without getting into its bad aspects.

> AI Winter was referring to how the potential of current AI methods is limited

Not exactly. "AI Winter" refers the historical periods that followed unsustainable hype that surrounds AI methods prior to those times. Skepticism of AI during the last winter was so strong that "AI" kinda became a dirty word and people invented euphemisms like "machine learning" to avoid the stigma.

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

> "uncontrolled and unsustainable population growth" definitely is. Sadly, what we have is the latter

No we don't. IIRC, birth rates are dropping everywhere and the world population in on track to plateau mid-century before it declines.