mwfunk

No it's boundary issues and meddling and it's not remotely OK.

Not only that, but there's often comments about how people moving from CA to TX are fleeing the results of a presumably left wing tax code to enjoy the benefits of a presumably right wing tax code, but it's not that simple.

CA is as expensive as it is in large part because of NIMBYs and tax schemes that were absolutely the product of right-wing ballot initiatives for the most part. OTOH, a large part of the appeal of TX is that it doesn't have a state income tax, but the state is absolutely on the dole. IIRC TX takes in ~$150b from the Federal government, but only pays ~$100b into the system. CA (like NY) pays more into the system then it takes out, so about ~$50b of the annual budget of TX is literally bumming money from other states, albeit indirectly.

Which is a roundabout way of saying, the narrative about people moving from CA to TX often makes it sound like a narrative about left-wing economic policies vs. right-wing economic policies, but the reality is that CA is expensive in large part because of right-wing economic policies and TX is cheap in large part because it's basically on welfare from the Federal government. Which is fine, the system should allow economically healthier states to help the less successful states get by (looking at you KY), but it's so counter to the narrative that usually surrounds these stories that people tend to sweep it under the rug. And also TX is hardly an economically unhealthy, depressed state in need of assistance from the rest of the country. It should step up and stop being being a bum, because AFAICT it's not a bum but rather a state with well above-average prospects.

If we've learned nothing else the last 4 years (last few decades really, but the last 4 years really hits home), it's that so much of what we take for granted about the US being supposedly safer or having a saner, more hands-off government is based far more on norms of behavior than actual legal protections for anyone, or legal guardrails that prevent whoever's in charge from abusing their power.

So you've got a point, but nowadays it's like you're comparing the risk of crossing a street blindfolded on a highway during the day vs. a 4-lane expressway in the middle of the night. One is a lot safer than the other but let's not pretend that either one is rational or advisable.

I don't think being more professional/collegial and less dishonest in an interview leads to monocultures. Ideally it would just reflect well on the person for not obviously trying to game the system. If that actually leads to someone being less likely to get a job someplace, well that's a place you wouldn't want to work at anyway.

I'm all in favor of people who need them having emotional support animals, but for as long as this has been a thing I have been totally shocked at how many people I personally know (who I thought were better people than this) completely abusing it to bring their pets with them everywhere (planes or anywhere else where you don't normally take pets). And joking about abusing the system, and joking about how awesome it is that they can just pretend to have this need, et voila now they can take their pet everywhere.

And of course, the reason this was bad was because inevitably, people abusing the system would screw it up for the people who actually need it or would benefit from it. Which is what happened.

I know it's petty but literally the fact that it was named Nikola was reason enough for anyone to think they're shady or uninspired or a straight up scam. I would be equally skeptical about wannabe Apple competitors named Banana or Dragonfruit, or a Microsoft competitor named Megahard, or a Burger King competitor named Hamburger Aristocrat. If the best someone can come up with for their own name is a joke pointed at their primary competitor, it does not inspire confidence.

Seriously, do people not remember that this statement was first made for the first game, in 2007, at a time when so much of what was in the game could've been a political lightning rod? You're playing someone from an organization that was historically associated with Islam, going around killing Crusaders (and everyone else, but still) in the Middle East during the Middle Ages. This was the time of the 2nd Bush administration, the occupation of Iraq was still in full swing, and the news was still filled with daily fearmongering about Muslims and imminent terrorist attacks. IIRC this was still the era of the color coded terror threat levels that the DHS would issue, and that was still getting cited every day on TV nows as if it were the weather or sports scores.

Basically it was a batshit crazy collection of historical, religious, and political trivia that was used as the background for the game's narrative, but at that time there was so much potentially controversial stuff if anyone took it too seriously that it could become a marketing nightmare. Boycotts from Christian groups and/or right wing nutjobs claiming that the game would encourage children (gotta think of the children!) to become Islamic terrorists. That sort of thing. It was a complicated game to market in that atmosphere. All sorts of different groups could have latched on to it as the epitome of how video games rot kids minds and turn them violent. It doesn't require anyone to actually do anything violent, it's just fuel for a gazillion fearmongering rants for Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, etc. All they would have to do is describe the game and demonize Ubisoft for making it; instant ratings gold.

They've continued having that statement at the beginning of each game, at this point as more of a tradition I think. Once the franchise was established, and got out of the Crusades, it gradually lost its potential to be a lightning rod for politically- or religiously-motivated anti-video game criticism. Although let's not forget the later game in which you have a boss fight vs. a historical pope who ended up being the villain in that game. Considering how freaked out certain demographics got by things like The Passion of the Christ (the movie), it's not much of a stretch to imagine somebody like Glen Beck going on an anti-video game crusade (no pun intended), throwing gasoline on the fire by going on and on every night about how these evil Canadians made this evil video game where you play an assassin from an order that was historically Islamic, where you're literally sneaking in to the Vatican to kill a historical pope (albeit with non-historical superpowers). Therefore kids are being brainwashed by Ubisoft to become Islamic terrorists right before our eyes. You know, Glen Beck stuff.

So it's really always just been a marketing CYA thing to reassure everyone that the game wasn't made with any particular political/religious/historical agenda. Admittedly, "we've got Catholics therefore we're obviously not in favor of assassinating popes" and the like is the "but I've got black friends" excuse for racism, but FWIW the intention was to proactively disarm accusations of biases or hidden agendas. It was not to be some sort of diversity statement.

But of course, it goes without saying that even if it was a statement of pride in diversity (which it wasn't), WHO THE EFF CARES. People getting triggered by such things need to go back to their safe spaces on Parler or wherever. So much projection from the 8chan kids. Who cares.

Seriously. Some major rose-tinted glasses going on here. It's also hard to see anyone see this guy and how he presents himself and think, "wow, what a cool dude! I wish I could be more like him!" Like on a purely personal level, there are people in the tech world who think this is someone who has done well at life and they'd like being friends with him and spending time with him if only they could. This guy is and always has been the Icy Hot Stuntaz of the hacker world and it's super revealing when people seem to default to being on his side because they think he's like "one of us" or whatever.

I have no problem with people arguing about the pros and cons of copyright law and where the lines should be drawn and who's responsible for what, but it's really hard to take anyone seriously who thinks Kim Dotcom of all people seems like a pretty cool guy. None of this has anything to do with who's right in this case or whether or not he should be extradited, it's just a really inexplicable undercurrent to any discussion about him.

Knowledge or intelligence can't ever hurt. The only things that can hurt a situation are when people have a lack of perspective, or a lack of self-awareness, or Dunning-Kruger type situations where they overestimate themselves, underestimate others, and are short on natural skepticism about their own cognitive processes.

But this stuff happens with anyone, and maturity and professionalism overcomes it. But perhaps its more obvious or toxic with super knowledgeable and specialized people.

That's not just a popular opinion, it might be the general consensus for the last 20+ years. That's why articles about people still using Tcl or even just people liking Tcl have so much novelty value. Tcl created a language niche that Perl/Python/Ruby quickly took over. It was all downhill for Tcl from that point on, for all the reasons you mentioned.

It was really cool for a little while though- I have fond memories of using it for a couple years in the mid '90s, but I would never go back to it once I moved on. Also, at the time I remember thinking Tk (Tcl's GUI toolkit) looked mostly modern and nice, maybe even more modern and nice than other GUI toolkits common on Unix systems at the time (Athena widgets, Motif, OpenView, etc.). As ancient and bizarre as it might look nowadays, back then it looked halfway decent if not outright OK. I don't know what Tk looks like now but I have to think it's not that different from 20+ years ago, with the weird autolayout/resizing policies and everything. Tk was a huge draw then but probably not so much now.

Same here, my awareness of it comes and goes, but I swear the effect itself varies from time to time. I seem more likely to notice the ringing if there's white noise in the background, like from a fan or AC, but it's just a theory.

It wasn't that long ago that Texas nixed critical thinking from K-12 education. The reason given was, and I wish I was making this up, that teaching children critical thinking might cause kids to question their parents and their church.

Alito/Thomas/Kavanaugh are clearly on the wrong side of this, big freaking surprise there. If Oracle wins this is going to be catastrophic for our whole industry (in the US at least). Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

No, none of this applies to privately owned web sites. If anything, forcing them to act like utilities impinges on the speech of the platform owners. The Ben Shapiros of the world have desperately been trying to spin a different narrative though and they will jump through endless hoops and contradictions to do it. This is all just moderated-vs-unmoderated newsgroups/mailing lists/web sites all over again. There’s room for both. Nobody has a constitutional right to force YouTube or anyone else to host their content, or to have those companies shield them from criticism.

If someone wants to argue that YouTube should be declared a public utility that is required to host everyone’s content no matter what, that’s totally understandable and they should make that argument instead. Otherwise they’re just asking for the government to mandate that YouTube, etc. are safe spaces where everything is permitted and no one is allowed to judge other people for what they say, including the company paying for the servers. Which is so totally counter to what those very same people seem to think about everything else that I’m surprised the hypocrisy and inconsistency doesn’t create a singularity or something. But here we are, in 2020, and AM-talk-radio types are demanding the government mandate safe spaces for them on privately owned platforms where they are shielded from consequences.

Yeah, there's definitely a cultural aspect. People WANT to get out of the house ASAP. It's not like all of those American 18 year olds are bummed that their parents expect them to go someplace, it's that many/most of them are chomping at the bit to have their own place and their own life with day-to-day financial and social independence from their family. If they're more likely to be staying home now, it's a sign of financial trouble because presumably most of them would love to go someplace else but can't.

To the degree that there's a stigma associated with adults living with their parents in the US, the stigma comes more from being the sort of person who would want to live with their parents when they could afford to be on their own. That's the stigma. It's not a stigma about poverty, it's a stigma about someone who would want a more sheltered and less independent life, and a stigma about someone who wouldn't get seriously annoyed at having their family around 24/7. Those are both pretty alien concepts to a lot of people in the US. There's also the rule of thumb that the #1 way to keep a family together and loving each other and constructively involved in each other's lives is to not see each other every day. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.

But like you said, this is independent of it being good or bad or right or wrong, it's really just cultural context, but that's the cultural context.

Likewise, the Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster were incredibly '50s names (and awesome names, but very in line with '50s branding).

It is utterly shocking how many bullshitters show up for interviews. I'm sure it varies by company and industry, but a fair chunk of interviewing is weeding out bullshitters.

I find this is the case pretty much anytime leads with, “As a <whatever>, I believe that...” Like they make it sound like because they identify as an anarchist or a libertarian or a Christian or a mom or whatever <blank> is, that that determines their big picture view of everything, and they have to contextualize everything in terms of that thing. They want to have something to point at and tell them what they should think about, and that because their view comes from their personal identity, rejecting the view means rejecting them on a personal level somehow.

Like, an actual libertarian (for example) should be able to make a good case for their perspective without making it sound like their chosen personal identity is somehow forcing them to see things in a particular way. People should think things because they are rational, not because they identify with an ideology that they allow to dictate their beliefs on the stuff that they haven’t done their homework on.

TL;DR you can identify a lot of bullshit and sloppy thinking if you listen to what someone says after they invoke the dreaded, “as a <blank>, I think that...” and anarchists are no exception.

One issue with the article: it talks about the DNC hack but not the RNC. Both were hacked by Fancy Bear, but only the DNC info was dumped online. Whatever they got from the RNC stayed secret, almost certainly for kompromat.

I'm no fan of Palmer Luckey but didn't he do some actual engineering for Oculus though? I know Jaron Lanier had some success in academia in the '80s but I thought the past 30 years for him has almost exclusively been speaking engagements and interviews and writing think pieces. He was all over the mainstream media during the first wave of VR hype back in the early '90s and he always just seemed to be talking about how neat it would all be someday and how we all have to think about what it means and how it's going to change everything and maybe we should buy his book or go to one of his talks to learn more about his amazing predictions about the amazing future.

To be clear, I'm not down on anyone for being a thinker or a philosopher, we need those people as much or more than we need engineers when it comes to understanding how technology can (and should, and should not) change society. But sometimes people talk about Jaron Lanier as if he's been doing way more tangible, impactful stuff than speaking engagements, interviews, and think pieces over the last 30 years, and so far I haven't found much evidence of anything.

Maybe less the Kim Kardashian of VR and more the Ray Kurzweil of VR? I’ve had similar experiences, he’s been talking about this stuff for 25 years but he’s more like a philosopher or creative thinker/talker type of person. AFAIK his main achievements are getting speaking engagements and writing the occasional article, but he’s often presented as some sort of VR pioneer or some sort of big deal in the world of VR, which I’m pretty sure he is not.

Whenever people talk about meritocracies as being real things or potentially real things that merely require everyone to be on board to implement, I always wonder how old they are and whether or not they think they would benefit from being in a meritocracy, and to what degree they think they’ve been screwed over in the past by not being in a meritocracy. IME, they’re almost always little kids up through people working their first job and frustrated that everyone hasn’t perceived their brilliance yet. Or insecure adults frustrated at their lack of success compared to what they think they deserve.

I’m not saying meritocracies are bad- they’re the ideal, they’re generally what everyone wants. Of course you want the best people for a given job or educational opportunity. But when people start talking about meritocracies as if the only thing preventing us from having better ones are people making conscious decisions to have them, I seriously wonder about their life experiences, worldliness, and personal/professional maturity.

For example, it’s common for people to attack things like pushes for diversity as being antithetical to meritocracies, but the intention of things like encouraging diversity is to build the foundation for better meritocracies in the future by helping weed out the things that stand in the way of better meritocracies now. And it’s also very common for those same people to be convinced that if only the world was more meritocratic, they would personally be more successful and everyone would respect them more, because they see themselves as not getting what they think they deserve. Funny how that works, kinda like how libertarians generally think that if only everything was more libertarian, they personally would be more successful, because other people would no longer hold them back. They think some other people would be more successful too, and some less deserving people would be less successful, but their emotional pull for the whole belief system comes from thinking they deserve more than they’ve got and that it must be someone else’s fault. And IME, in practice they’re super wrong about that, but it must be a wonderful sort of fantasy to go through life believing. “I’m better than everyone seems think I am, and it’s other people’s fault that everyone doesn’t see me that way. If only all those other people would see the light and stop holding me back and allow the truly meritorious like myself to flourish!”

They seem to be specifically talking about the case where you're on a web page, you click a link to go to what ought to be another web page, but instead you're in a PDF in your browser. I get it, PDFs are documents and not web pages, and dumping a visitor into a longish PDF when a concise web page with the answers they're looking for would be better.

So, use web pages for presenting information best presented in a web page, and use PDFs for presenting information best presented in a PDF, and don't use a PDF when a web page would be better and don't use a web page when a PDF would be better. But that doesn't seem to be the point they're making for some reason.

Absolutely nobody hates meritocracies, and it's intellectually dishonest to claim they do. If you're referring to things like encouraging diversity or CoC's or the other usual things that some personality types REALLY enjoy getting worked up over, the people that advocate them advocate them because they want to establish better meritocracies in the face of implicit biases. Biases that stand in the way of meritocracies (similar to things like nepotism, etc.).

You can disagree with them that those biases exist, or that that is a way to accomplish a more perfect meritocracy, but you can't claim that they are motivated by a desire to make anything less of a meritocracy. You can only claim that they're going about it the wrong way and give really thoughtful and coherent reasons why you think that's the case.

Since this is like an inverse Karen move, perhaps anti-Karens should formally be known as Julies.

Have they been printing money? Has more USD been created, physically or virtually? This is something I don't understand, I'm hoping someone here can explain it.

I was under the impression the last 40 years of US deficit spending has been mostly financed by selling US bonds to China, Japan, etc., while counting on growth and inflation to take the edge off when they come due. And selling more bonds instead of defaulting, so the debt just keeps growing. Printing money causes inflation but not deficits or lingering debt.

I don't know though, I'm not an expert. I would appreciate any corrections or clarifications from anyone.

The crazy thing is some people will use this passage to justify not having regulations at all, because "regulating them will only make them conspire together against everyone!", when in fact the main reason Smith connects the two is that without regulation, the competitors (who are described as local artisans, not giant international corporations) might otherwise not know of one another's existence and would never talk to each other about shared concerns. Which was true when it was written, not so much now. Now that they can trivially find each other and conspire against consumers all they like, it's no longer an argument against regulation. Nowadays it's more useful as an argument against industry consortiums, standards bodies, professional organizations, and certifications, but I don't think of any of those things as being net negatives.

If we ever find ourselves in a situation where humanity collectively is frightened to tell some industry that it can't do something for fear that that industry would retaliate by conspiring to do something even worse to us behind our backs, that's not an argument against regulation, that's an argument against the whole industry.

I'm not a historian but my understanding is that Goldwater was the first major Republican candidate to go big on the whole "the government can't solve problems, the government is the problem" political meme, when he ran for president in 1964. Meaning, the notion that governments doing stuff, any stuff, is inherently bad. It dovetails somewhat with libertarian thought but only in the most handwavey, BS ways possible, because somehow the result is always less fiscal responsibility and even more wasted money.

Republicans have leaned on this talking point hard ever since then, in part to justify tax cuts for their donor class (but not spending cuts, ironically). They also use it to justify inaction, because if the government takes action, then that's the government "doing something", which is bad, get it? This is a much easier argument for them to make than actually coming up with alternate solutions to things. It's nihilism disguised as trying to save people money, but the reality of the last 56 years has been lower taxes for their donor class coupled with vastly increased government spending, which is the opposite of anything resembling fiscal conservatism.

If being the 5th largest economy in the world and contributing more tax dollars to the Federal government than it receives is largely dysfunctional, that sounds pretty awesome. California has tons of problems but I can't think of many less dysfunctional states.

For example, Texas has the second largest economy amongst the states, and would be the world's 10th largest economy, but IMO it's more dysfunctional than California because it's on the dole for $50bil annually from the rest of the country. They subsidize their low taxes by sponging off the other states, including California and New York. Also, Ted Cruz.

That's why education has to try to be as objective and apolitical as possible, and when the two are at odds, choose objectivity. And accept that it's never going to be perfect. Nobody is ever going to agree on where that sweet spot is and there will always be segments of the population who vociferously disagree with how some things are taught, but as long as there's a critical mass of educators making good faith efforts to achieve those ideals, the result will be imperfect but better than kids being taught random things (whatever their parents want to indoctrinate them with) by random people who aren't professional educators (the parents doing the teaching). I'm not arguing against homeschooling here, just arguing against the nihilism expressed by the parent post. I'm fine with homeschooling as long as there are educational standards and it's not just parents who want to brainwash their kids.

FWIW I was partially educated in American public schools and got no shortage of what many would consider to be anti-government messaging, at least in the sense of being encouraged to think critically on my own and taught about all sorts of occasions where people's moral convictions went against government policies so they protested or went into government or whatever to change it for the better. I also got no shortage of focus on all of the ways in which America did terrible things in the past: Native American genocide, slavery, Japanese internment camps during WW2, Jim Crow laws, etc. The focus was always on why those things were bad, how they got changed, and how understanding those things helps us perceive normalized shittiness in the present day so we can fix it and make things better. Nothing's ever completely fixed, history is just an endless process of things (usually) getting marginally better over time in the aggregate.

I'm sure there are lots of shitty schools with shitty teachers that teach blind obedience and tribalism, but those are shitty schools with shitty teachers and they need funding and improvement, rather than throw our hands up in the air and say there are no standards and no truth and everyone just believe whatever. If nothing else, education at least needs to expose people to a range of things they wouldn't be exposed to if left to their own devices, and help students learn critical thinking so they can make their own rational choices about things.

Also it's not like parents give up all rights to educate their kids when they don't homeschool them. They can teach their kids all they want about whatever they want, including things that contradict what's taught in class, for better or worse.