metaphorm

it's shocking that this division exists. liberty requires freedom from ANY institution, whether state, church, or corporation, from having too much power over your life.

HN has a lot of blindspots. This famous quote comes to mind.

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

most drivers in NY drive for multiple companies. Uber, Lyft, and Gett are the most common.

a permanent resident immigrant is definitely an American. it's important to distinguish between temporary guest workers and Americans who were born somewhere else.

you're already writing the test cases to ensure correct behavior with typical input, and predictable exceptional input. putting in one more assert for predictable exceptional input (wrong type) doesn't really add a noticeable amount of overhead to writing the tests you were already writing.

The type systems of Java and C/C++ are the most commonly encountered ones and by far the most widespread in industry programming (as opposed to academia/research) and they are actually awful and really add a lot of friction and inertia to developing. Being free of that kind of type system when using a language like Python really does feel like a big upgrade.

There is a different problem with the more powerful and useful type systems in more modern statically typed languages though: learning curve. Haskell is dysfunctionally hard to learn and other languages do a little bit better but there's still friction in the learning curve that gets in the way of widespread adoption in projects that want to be able to hire rapidly.

I think you should be a lot more careful about throwing around terms like "extremely narcissistic", which both has a technical definition in psychology, and also an enormous amount of emotionally loaded subtext.

I also think you should be a lot more careful about advising people what to do. It comes across as both bossy and judgmental.

No zero days is such good advice. Even a small, but concrete, goal to accomplish every day makes a huge difference. It requires self-compassion to set appropriate goals that match what we're capable of in the middle of a low period though.

you may have a very idealistic idea of academia.

its not non-sense but it might be underspecified. the only jobs that care that you have, specifically, an English degree are jobs in academia. Corporate jobs will gladly hire an English major just because it's a degree they don't care that it's an English degree though.

this is the demogaphics page from the Harper's Bazaar media kit

http://www.harpersbazaarmediakit.com/hotdata/publishers/harp...

they push heavily that their target audience is affluent, college-educated women. they therefore want to run content that appeals to this demographic. the editors of this magazine believe that that demographic finds articles like this one appealing.

these are the primary advertisers purchasing spots in Harper's Bazaar

http://www.harpersbazaarmediakit.com/hotdata/publishers/harp...

http://www.harpersbazaarmediakit.com/hotdata/publishers/harp...

http://www.harpersbazaarmediakit.com/hotdata/publishers/harp...

http://www.harpersbazaarmediakit.com/hotdata/publishers/harp...

the products that Harper's Bazaar advertisers want to sell to their audience of affluent, college educated women is primarily very expensive luxury/prestige brand names in the high fashion industry.

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these are a few other recent articles written by the author, Gemma Hartley

http://www.ravishly.com/depression-dirty-secret

http://www.ravishly.com/im-not-mother-when-i-travel-alone?pl...

http://www.ravishly.com/why-i-wont-make-my-daughter-play-nic...

http://amendo.com/8-essential-podcasts-will-help-master-life...

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finally, here are several other recent articles on this topic. they are similar in tone and content.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/08/women-gender-r...

http://jezebel.com/is-it-even-worthwhile-to-teach-men-to-val...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/psyched-in-san-francisco/why-w...

it was a bad interview and Peterson's cantankerousness got the better of him during that segment. The second interview is more worthwhile, and the two of them have an interesting discussion about what sorts of concepts they respectively like to address with the notion of "truth". Peterson is not anti-evidence or anti-rationalist at all, but he does more broadly include psychological and archetypal patterns as truths.

was he right? he's one of the most historically examined leaders of all time and we still don't know. In the present we have the benefit of hindsight and can more easily see that war was inevitable and we might even think Lincoln was foolish to initially pursue a policy that sought to avoid war. Was that so obvious in his own time though?

Lincoln did change his mind but he seems to have changed it not because he had an epiphany about the evil of slavery, but because he became convinced during the war that it would be a total war and not a containable skirmish. once that logic was in play the Emancipation Proclamation made sense to issue. It also bolstered his support with abolitionists.

Today we have no ambiguity about the evil of slavery and view it as one of the greatest moral failings in our history and a legacy we are continuing to face down and one which has caused huge misery for millions of African-Americans. Even with this modern perspective, it's hard to view Lincoln as anything other than a conflicted man trying to weigh very heavy decisions indeed. So I dunno if he was right. I don't think Lincoln knew in his own time and I don't think we will ever be able to adequately judge. We know what happened but we don't know what else could have or should have happened instead.

> In the 1850s US, there were pro-slavers and anti-slavers. Who was in the middle, and were they right?

Abraham Lincoln

you're correct, there are many many different varieties of Buddhism. It's more correct to talk about Buddhisms since it's not just one thing. In the Chinese context though we're generally looking at Mahayana schools ranging from apolitical to anti-authoritarian. The Chan/Zen school founded by Bodhidharma is particularly anti-authoritarian though.

Trump is deliberately using the language and tactics of his political enemies against them in a kind of counter-trolling demagoguery.

This is ugly stuff. The discourse has descended to the level where the media is dominated by two different groups of extremist trolls taking potshots at each other using the language of outrage and grievance. The rest of us are caught in the middle and our society is becoming deranged as a result.

Romulans are emphatically not dark and barbaric, they're "evil" Vulcans, and aesthetically modeled on various European Imperial iconographies with lots of Eagle/raptor symbolism. Ancient Roman (it's in the name already) or even 20th century Fascist seems like the reference points.

The Cardashians seem to be based on Totalitarian Communist regimes. They have grey skin, which isn't dark, but is also not a human skintone anyway, but they seem to map most closely to Russian/Stalinist. Not dark or barbaric by any means.

The Borg seem to be a comment on Western technocracy run-amok. I have trouble seeing the Borg as anything besides a cautionary warning against tech singularity ideology. If you submit your culture to the logic of machines don't be surprised when it becomes mechanical and inhumane.

There are dark and barbaric trek villains too, of course. The Jem'Hadar shock troopers seem like a particularly charged take on the trope, being essentially militarized slaves. Interesting, though, that the Jem'Hadar were controlled by a very white technocratic Vorta. Maybe a reference to historical practices like the Ottoman Jannisaries. What should we make of the non-humanoid shapeshifter "founders" though? Pure scifi or allegory for the formless, faceless, secretive domination of neoliberal capitalist interests acting in the shadows?

The Ferengi are dark skinned and despicable, with more than a hint of "Shylock" flavored bigotry incorporated into the trope. Kinda unfortunate. They did significantly redeem this trope in later DS9 episodes when they focused more on Quark and showed some of the more nuanced and interesting aspects of Ferengi culture.

And then there's the Klingons. This one is hard to put a finger on. They were originally introduced as space barbarians with a swarthy (but not black) complexion. I think the original model there was intended to be something like Barbary Corsairs, which is kind of a racist trope I guess. The Klingons were updated a lot though. The more mature portrayals of Klingons had them as an honor society that resembles Samurai culture in a lot of ways, while also incorporating a kind of hedonistic body culture that is very un-Japanese. It's not so simple really. What about now? Klingons made less human-seeming and more cartoon villain seeming? Not sure where they're going with this.

you just reflexively accused someone of being a sexist on no evidence

Chinese philosophical roots include both Confucianism and Taoism, as well as the imported schools of though associated with Buddhism, and more recently quite a lot of modern Western ideas (particularly Marxism).

Taoism is anti-authoritarian in the extreme. Buddhism is significantly more neutral on the subject but is definitely aligned closely with personal liberation and at minimum it does not make special exceptions for authorities. There are many famous incidents involving Bodhidharma trying to disillusion authority figures about their own authority.

So I disagree with you that there are no Chinese philosophical traditions that are anti-authoritarian or that promote individual liberty. There are, but they are losing right now.

that isn't what compensation means, and the amount of money it costs to improve your health outcomes is not much how much those improved outcomes are worth, it's how much you were billed

kind of a bogus measure. if the nominal cost of health insurance coverage rises, and your employer continues to pay for it, your total compensation went up, but you didn't benefit from it at all. it just became more expensive for your employer and the health insurer effectively raised their "tax" rate.

you're bending the word propaganda to the breaking point.

I think they stumbled into being media companies out of naivety and not understanding, initially anyway, that they had duplicated a media company business model with everything except the content generation. they simply replaced the content generation part of the business model with what was being given to them, for free, on the internet by users and other original content creators.

when they dropped their initial naivety and took stock of what their business really was it was sufficiently obvious to them that they were media companies and that selling ad inventory was their business. they now fully embrace being media companies but are able to do so in a way that has, at least so far, evaded the traditional cultural and legal regulatory frameworks that other media companies deal with. I think this era will come to an end rapidly though.

the parties differ on fiscal policy, and each has chosen opposing sides in the inter-generational culture war, but besides that they are shockingly similar.

both parties are corporatist, neoliberal, military-interventionist, and in general anti-democratic in that they are very happy to allow wealthy interests to set policy without deferring much to the will of the people.

"It is with appreciation and gratefulness that I accept from you this scroll for the Los Alamos Laboratory, and for the men and women whose work and whose hearts have made it. It is our hope that in years to come we may look at the scroll and all that it signifies, with pride. Today that pride must be tempered by a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish. This war that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them in other times, and of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our minds we are committed, committed to a world united, before the common peril, in law and in humanity."

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Acceptance Speech, Army-Navy "Excellence" Award (16 November 1945)

quite a lot of perfectly legal behavior, that would not be called misconduct by a prosecutor or investigator, can still be on shaky ethical grounds for various reasons.

surely Google does not visit the white house just because they enjoy the breakfast buffet. they're lobbying for their business interests. this isn't necessarily unethical at all, but when you look at the pattern of campaign contributions and think tank funding (and various other kinds of pulling of influence levers) you start to find the grey area.

I probably wouldn't go so far as to call it bribery, but it's not a clear cut thing. I'm nearly certain that is why the poster said "depending on your definition of bribery". He/she was (in my interpretation) intending to discuss that grey area. Shutting down that discussion by throwing the dictionary at him/her is both rude and unhelpful. There might really be an interesting discussion of ethical grey areas in political lobbying activities to be had, but not if you're gonna shut it down with that kind of reactionary literalism.

I don't follow you on making a connection between Joe Arpaio and the story in the linked article. In what way are they connected?

it's not a very convincing argument to quote the dictionary at someone who is clearly trying to make a more sophisticated point about political and cultural attitudes w.r.t influence peddling and interaction of money and politics.

Corporations (like Google) and billionaires (like Eric Schmidt) buying our politicians (by influencing them with sponsored think tank studies)

what counts as funded by Google?

if you have a media product that is monetized through ads and you put Google ads on your site, are you funded by Google?

if you are a member of a political party that Google made contributions to, are you funded by Google?