meri_dian

I'm not talking about dating prospects though.

You have it backwards, the "no barriers" mainly came from being wealthy. I'll give a small anecdote: One of my friends is from a very wealthy family. He is a person of color. He was still able to gain admission to an elite boarding school, now works for a prestigious company, is respected by his peers, etc.

Privilege mainly comes from wealth. Of course it is a serious problem in society when certain groups have disproportionate poverty or less wealth, because that indicates some structural cause.

However in the modern day that cause is simply the fact that most people, regardless of skin color, do not move out of their parents' income decile. And when one group is already more economically disenfranchised than other groups, then that economic disenfranchisement will perpetuate itself.

For most people it really doesn't matter, including most people in powerful positions. But we keep telling ourselves it does, unfortunately.

Homelessness, both in San Francisco and elsewhere is not rooted in housing but in drugs and mental illness.

Building more low income housing won't address those root causes or noticeably ameliorate homelessness as a symptom, because most homeless people cannot hold down a job and have 0 income, aside from begging.

There is no easy solution, but allowing the mentally ill to fend for themselves on the streets in the name of freedom is morally naive. Put them in institutions and get them off the streets.

While data security is an issue Facebook must reckon with, it is not the major issue Facebook's existence poses to democracies around the world.

The real issue in my mind is that the platform can be used by bad actors to spread misinformation. It's as if during WWII the Nazi's had the ability to publish editorials in leading newspapers throughout the US.

While this is a feature/bug of the internet in general, the vast scale of Facebook and its near ubiquitous use amongst the general voting public in the US and other democratic nations make it the most potent vector through which a bad actor like Russia could spread propaganda and misinformation.

I'm not sure the recent move to label political advertisements as such will do much to safeguard us from misinformation.

The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.

I think many people, especially in large and proud nations, don't like the idea of being a second class power to the United States. That's certainly what motivates Putin and Xi Jinping. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the best, of course. I welcome competition.

Unfortunately though this frustration with not being the lone superpower drives people to focus solely on what the US is perceived to have done wrong while ignoring the tremendous amount of good the US has done and continues to do for the global international order. Therefore people develop a very skewed and biased understanding of the world.

Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen in the period of global peace and stability we've seen since the US has been the superpower.

I see China envy online a lot, especially given our recent political disfunction as people look at the superficial stability of China and want that for their own societies.

Well that would be an inconvenience because I and many others go to work and ride public transport every day. Which is why we don't see TSA checkpoints everywhere; it would be too inconvenient.

People fly infrequently though, and also have a very strong desire to feel safe when flying, so they are for the most part fine with TSA checkpoints. TSA checkpoints are implemented to make people feel safe.

See, it's a balance.

It's funny, hate speech laws are unconstitutional and could not be passed in the US but such laws are commonplace in Europe. Yet people like to mock the US for saying it's the land of the free.

Having to be scanned to get on a plane seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to have to do. I fly often and I'm glad the TSA exists and does what it does. I don't feel like my liberty is being taken away in the slightest.

No it's not. It's the job of law enforcement to, unsurprisingly, enforce the laws. If you have a problem with the laws being enforced, call your congressman.

Sorry dang

So there wasn't torture destruction and murder on a mass scale before guns?

Humanity works itself into a fervor of anger sometimes. That is what kills people. The implements of anger are irrelevant.

I guess we're both right then

Why were those guns and gas used? Because of the hateful rhetoric of an evil man and an evil ideology.

Cambridge Analytica served ads to people. This is something that all candidates, campaigns and their affiliates do. Sure it collected data on people through sketchy means, but the essential part of its work was to serve advertisements.

Similar companies have been employed by virtually every other presidential candidate in the last decade.

We can't be mad at CA without being mad at the entirety of industrial political adveritising.

I mean basic income is just either printing money, or redistribution of money. One leads to inflation, the other is Socialism and already practiced in a number of countries.

So we're basically just saying we need more socialism right? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Edit: UBI evangelists, why am I being downvoted?

I don't have tinnitus but I do know that not getting enough sleep can make you feel emotionally distraught and incredibly negative about everything.

So I'd say focus on getting a good sleep before anything else.

What exactly is Data Science? It seems like such an overused term and the value of the subject really gets diluted for me when I see charts in Tableau being offered as examples of "data science".

What's the difference between, say, a Master's program in Computer Science where one studies machine learning and a Master's program in Data Science? Am I wrong for thinking the Data Science program weaker?

"MIT is likely concerned with increasing its power. Thus is part of the establishment. Doing lots of great things, but part of the establishment."

Almost all organized groups exist in order to increase their power/influence. Those who try to destroy centers of power without either redistributing power or accumulating it for themselves are destroyers, nothing more.

Yeah, that's just being dramatic too.

A tremendous amount of things in the past were created by skilled artisans, workers, farmers etc.

And in those cases where people had to do difficult work and suffered, that was because there were no other ways of accomplishing that work.

It's not that there was some cabal of evil leaders making life hard for the masses, it's that in order to accomplish things like mining and large scale public works without machines, hard manual labor was necessary.

Of course we could have just not done any of this, but then we would still be hunter gatherers.

Where are you coming up with those percentages? Why are you assuming that human operators will be removed from the decision making process?

>"...that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes."

These drone strikes have been happening for decades without interpretive AI, and they will probably continue with or without. So let's make the strikes more precise and save more civilians.

>"But improved analysis of drone video could be used to pick out human targets for strikes, while also better identifying civilians to reduce the accidental killing of innocent people."

Changed it, though "trying to kill 3 people" rather than "killed 3 people" are morally equivalent.

Yes, and the crazy people are the ones who, when desperate and angry, try to kill 3 innocent people and then themselves.

I don't understand the equivocation here. It seems a symptom of the broad inability in modern social thinking to pin any responsibility on individuals. While this stems from our desire to root out systematic issues, which is necessary and important, it should not be the only thing we care about.

In fact, a culture of individual responsibility actually can become a deep feature of our society if we take the time to engender it.

Talking about individual responsibility is not ignoring the systematic issues in society, because a lack of focus on individual responsibility is actually rooted in our culture and hence is a systemic issue in itself.

She was crazy. I don't think attempts to walk through her thought processes will bear fruit

"CNN is not dictating what its personnel report"

Come now, you think managers and executives at CNN are just playing board games all day?

No, they're crafting policy and setting the direction of news room reporting.

"One goes against the government's views, the other one pushes it."

No, that's not it.

A free press is "free" because it's unconstrained by a Government or capricious regulation, not because it "goes against the government's views". Sometimes members of a free press will support the government, other times they won't.

It's not a priori virtuous to go against the Government's views. Sometimes the Government is right and sometimes it's not. Like everyone else.

CNN doesn't stand up and say "we're devoting our reporting resources to all things anti Trump, this is our bias, it's not secret". They simply report the news they choose to report.

Just like Sinclair.

People watch the news hoping to get an accurate depiction of reality. When only one side of a multifaceted situation is reported on, the depiction becomes distorted.

It's never OK to do this, regardless of whose side you're on.

How is that any different from major news organizations like CNN with a national reach clearly pushing biased anti-Trump news constantly?

It's funny: Trump attacks CNN for being fake, biased news, then CNN responds by focusing all of their negative reporting on Trump, becoming exactly what Trump says they are. People would have had much more respect for CNN if they had stuck to the middle path in the face of Trump's insults.

We should not turn a blind eye towards some instances of bias in media simply because they reinforce our own values and beliefs.