mjreacher

If anyone ever asks about optimism in the 20th century I will point them to this article and the wonderful illustrations within.

> society needs builders and plumbers, not masters of English literature and Sociology.

There's no reason why someone can't be both. Universities weren't originally designed to be job centers, that's what vocational education was for. This is also one of the problems that I see with the current system is that universities are just seen as a way to get a job rather than to be educated. The issue of people feeling shit about wasting their time or whatever also stems from this issue - they came to university to get an easy job afterwards, not to learn, and this belief is misleading.

This was always the logical consequence when big tech companies started listening to various requests from random countries about their own domestic laws. One wonders what would today look like if they only enforced US law and told the other countries to fuck off and block them if it was really that necessary for national security or whatever reason they give.

"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin."

- John von Neumann

Several past threads with more comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14211242

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3632821

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18627594

I guess ultimately it does come down to legal questions but reading some of the cases against them such as this [0] it doesn't seem like there's no ammunition for prosecutors to use. For example on pages (using page numbers listed at the bottom of the page) 104-105 that the Sacklers knew of several doctors that were suspected of prescribing opioids inappropriately yet continued to sell to them. Another example on page 112 states that Sacklers knew that they were selling to an illegal pill mill yet neither stopped selling to them nor reported it for 2 years. I note that other directors and executives are also named as defendants in this case. It most certainly doesn't seem that the Sacklers weren't involved in operations of Perdue, maybe not at a day to day level but they certainly were reported to and advised by Perdue staff very regularly (and they demanded plenty from the staff too).

[0]: https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2019/01/31/Massachusett...

I'm not familiar with NY state law but could something like negligent homicide fit the bill? They were negligent (pushing pills (either knowingly or knowing it was likely) that it would significantly contribute to an opioid epidemic) and it lead to people dying as a result (homicide).

Here's a 6 minute video explaining the sprint missile for those unaware and interested (rather fascinating technology for the 70s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dl9Ovwmnxw

The author, Peter Woit, is a long term critic of string theory. His wikipedia page should give you an overview of his background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Woit

The context of this is that proponents of string theory say it predicts gravity and hence is a successful theory of quantum gravity. However it also can predict many other things that wouldn't make sense in our universe depending on what parameters you use. The key point is that it doesn't really make any new predictions we can currently test at energy scales we can reach (from what I understand).

Paywall Bypass: https://archive.is/NWLge

I wonder if senator Johnson ever faced any criminal prosecution for his actions here or if he too high profile to consider such actions against.

One question I have is how does Lex Fridman constantly get such high quality guests for his interviews?

I think the parent is talking about the fact Dick Cheney is on the advisory board among other former US government officials as seen on the linked page.

It's less so that people are downvoting you because we don't want to talk about these things but rather because you present grandiose claims without presenting any evidence for them.

In this case the GCHQ isn't a domestic intelligence agency. In addition there usually is some slight evidence available for claims like these which would help support its existence. For example before the Snowden disclosures there were several other disclosures that demonstrated that mass surveillance was ongoing, for example with ECHELON and Room 641A.

Is there any evidence for the scale of such operations being conducted domestically?

Is there any difference between that video and this one?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhpVSV6iCko seems to be the same author but that video is 10 minutes longer.

I agree, two famous mathematicians who had severe mental illnesses come to mind, Kurt Gödel and John Nash. In fact there seems to be a link between the two (intelligence and predisposition to mental illnesses), see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-g...

See further discussion here: https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/osfc0x/you_know_those...

He says the same in this interview too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnMsgxIIQEE&t=109s

Of course you will never stop all attacks, however you can try limit them in amount by making them more expensive to do, whether this be by limiting where they can hire from, the kind of political consequences they will incur, etc.

I really don't get this line of argument that regulation is useless. For example if you made it illegal for ex US gov workers to work at companies like these I would expect the vast majority to comply with this, so at the very minimum you would be limiting the available talent pool. The post several parents up talked about regulation for biological, nuclear, etc industries being effective, and although 'cyber' would never be treated in the same way, they're right, after all you don't see organized criminals running around with biological or radiological weapons now do you?

Was there ever a time when espionage and cyber warfare weren't fair game? To me the only difference seems to have been where a nation state did have the capability and where they didn't.

I always see this is trotted out as to say that Iraq did not possess WMDs, however technically it is wrong, as WMDs (chemical weapons in this case) were found after the invasion, (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destr...). While there was no evidence of nuclear weapons or an active program I believe that a better quote should be used since the pretences that it is quoted for are technically wrong.

Landing on the moon once didn't sound very realistic either, doesn't mean we should stop trying. At the current moment there is plenty of public pressure on Israel so if it could be directed at something like this that would be a good thing in my mind. This is a political problem and hence should be solved as such.

Why not both? Western governments should (theoretically) be promoting democratic causes not allowing companies to sell to governments that target those that protect democratic values such as activists and journalists.

At what point are western governments going to crack down on companies such as NSO Group?

Hmmm, looking around for a bit I assume you are talking about this study here https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s... which notes the 2.2 million as a worst case scenario where nothing is done to stop the pandemic, which is obviously not what happened. Although I would agree that the government should be taking into account his previous forecasting when determining the accuracy and significance of his model.

>2 million, in the USA, will die by summer 2020 even with lockdowns

Which scientific paper/organisation even made this claim?