redthrowaway

This could turn out really well for them. I've got several friends, from real estate agents to concert promoters to plumbers who already use Facebook in this manner.

Hell, just look at HN. This place was pretty damned libertarian not five years ago. The sea change to identity-driven progressivism has been swift.

This is the dumbest bubble.

I put in about $1000 and took out $1500. It's gambling, pure and simple. It's shits and giggles; I had my laughs and now I'm out.

Seriously though, the dumbest bubble. There's no value here. There's just greater fool speculation.

Politicians support the businesses in their districts/states. Republicans are ideologically pro-corporate, viewing that stance as the best way to generate growth and jobs, but not many politicians are above getting a dig in at the other tribe.

The Republican base hates Silicon Valley with a passion. There's good political hay to be made by pretty much any Republican politician going after them. Imagine how popular going after gun manufacturers would be for the Democratic base, then imagine gun manufacturers were both insanely wealthy and powerful, and near universally loudly opposed to Democrats culturally. You don't really have to imagine the power of that; there's a reason Weinstein thought he could deflect the accusations against him by going after the NRA. Similar situation, but SV is far richer & more powerful than the NRA is.

Also, getting rid of SALT deductions isn't about "transferring funds to red states", it's about disincentivizing high state and local taxes.

Blackmail is certainly a concern, but even garden variety harassment would be made far more harmful by the inability to have it removed.

I can see this being a pretty terrible tool for doxxing.

Doesn't appear images are actually stored, just linked. So imgur or whoever would, presumably, remove it and miners would just have a broken link in their blockchain.

I can't think of plaintext that would be both illegal and small enough to store in the blockchain.

How is it that Alsup ended up with both of these high profile cases?

Presumably this didn't apply to CFCs or sulfur emissions?

I actually think this is a step too far, conceptually. The isochrone map actually maps better to how I think about travel, and I would find it much more useful.

Leave aside everything she did wrt Wikileaks. That's a can of worms that need not be opened here.

What has she done since? Has she done anything to warrant a Harvard fellowship? As far as I can tell, her greatest contribution to humanity has been a novel use of emojis on twitter.

We're getting 503s on s3 assets. Definitely having issues. Cloudfront is still good.

>FWIW I have always considered the test ban treaty itself as a means by the nuclear powers to attempt to kick the door closed behind them (because they can use numerical simulation instead of real world tests) rather than an honest attempt at reducing proliferation.

That's not a bad thing. A world in which the great powers are nuclear and the minor powers aren't is a far safer one than what we would have with a nuclear free for all. And given that the great powers were going to get nukes regardless, the current system is probably our least bad option.

NK is a massive challenge to that system. I hope this can be resolved with a minimum of bloodshed. I desperately wish the world had a more capable person leading the effort.

You're not wrong. The failure of the West to honour its agreement with Ukraine is a serious impediment to future disarmament.

I wonder how plausible a decapitation strike would be. The Chinese apparently had a coup lined up until Kim killed his uncle. Would the US and China be able to assassinate Kim and install a pliant regime from the existing elites in exchange for economic and security guarantees? Assassination of foreign leaders is an extreme step that is rightly shunned, but it might be the best of a host of really bad options.

Government action might be required to manage and regulate AI, but it's inconsequential in its development. AI will be developed by private American companies, and the lead they have over international competitors is staggering.

For more than half a century, the best and brightest minds in the world have come to America. Bret Stephens put it best:

>As for Nobelists, a report by George Mason’s Institute for Immigration Research found that Americans have won 40 percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded — and immigrants accounted for 35 percent of those winners. Last year, the only native-born American to win the prize was Bob Dylan, for literature. The rest of the American winners — economist Oliver Hart, physicist J. Michael Kosterlitz, chemist Fraser Stoddart — are immigrants.

>A common American conceit is that we attract brilliant foreigners because we have brilliant things: great universities, vast financial resources, a dynamic economy, high-tech. That gets things mostly backward. It’s because we have brilliant foreigners that we have those things in the first place. Google. Comcast. eBay. Kraft. Pfizer. AT&T. They all had immigrants as founders.

>Overall, a 2016 study by the Partnership for the New American Economy found that 40 percent of all Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Taken together they employed 19 million people and had revenues of $4.8 trillion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/daca-trump-dreame...

The United States will be the leader in all major technological advancements for the conceivable future, because there is more genius in the United States than there is in the rest of the world combined. There has never, in human history, been a nation so adept at attracting the best and brightest minds from the far reaches of the globe.

No other country comes close to possessing the capacity for invention and sheer brilliance that the US does.

>Want to buy a Tesla? Use my referral link!

Man, this only needs to work once for it to easily outstrip all other forms of revenue a blog might generate.

> Also, combat zones != California suburbs.

We're just going to leave that one tee'd up, aren't we?

Future of symmetric warfare, sure. Future of asymmetric warfare looks a whole lot like Skynet sending robots to kill humans, but Skynet takes a mandated 15 minute coffee break every two hours.

What's the point in the Army developing its own, parallel autonomous vehicle technology? Why not just have DARPA funnel funds to Google or someone and piggyback off their research?

So what happens if a big volcano goes off and we suddenly need that sunlight again? Not too easy to clear debris out of a Lagrange point.

All of these are true. On top of that, they're lifestyle and identity products. That carries a massive premium. Those yoga mats you see suburban moms hauling around probably cost $0.30 to make, but they'll easily sell for $20+. Ditto the pickup. When your daily driver is also a powerful class and in-group signal, it's suddenly worth a lot more.

Is there a good resource for what Google's diversity efforts actually include?

>He does, however, clearly state that Google's hiring standards had 'lowered the bar' for women and minorities. I think it's awfully charitable not to infer that he considers the women/minorities at Google (on average) to be inferior engineers.

Yes, but that's simply how statistics work. If you require one group of people to score 90 on some test in order to be hired, and another group to score 80, then among successful applicants the second group will have lower average scores than the first. There's no getting around that.

The argument should be over whether or not Google's hiring practices lower the bar for particular groups of people. If they do, then the above conclusion about the average talent of various groups is inescapable.

>I disagree that it’s possible to write what he did about general populations, then walk it back to say “but of course it doesn’t apply at an individual level.”

I'd be curious to hear an actual defence of this line of thinking. I mean, it's simply a fact that group differences aren't particularly useful indicators of what an individual is like. Nevertheless, they're very good indicators of what populations are like. Is there any actual criticism of that argument, or is the objection more about how people feel about that argument?

One of the most interesting developments in AI will be watching how we respond to human rationality detached from human morality. Programs that optimize for practical outcomes are going to come up with a whole host of solutions that we consider abhorrent, not least because the mere notion that that solution is a practical one riles our sensibilities.

>This is because most of society is still struggling with day-to-day tasks like getting housing, clean water, reliable food, healthcare and dealing with physical conflicts.

It's been nearly 100 years since anyone struggled with that in the West. Nobody's expecting Eritrea to put a satellite in orbit.

And telling how quickly this post got flagged off the front page.

You're right, that's an important difference. However, it doesn't alter the core point about the chilling effect this particular ideology is having. Could you honestly say that someone expressing an equally divisive statement that was in agreement with progressive dogma would be fired? If someone argued in favour of refraining from hiring straight white men until sufficient diversity had been achieved, do you think Google would have fired them?

It's neither difficult nor arguable, but it's a bit of a cop-out. Google is, of course, well within their legal rights to fire the employee. The 1A applies only to government restrictions on speech.

But the larger question, of whether it is good that a particular political ideology, adhered to by a small minority of the country, should hold such sway over public discourse that to challenge any of its dogmas is to commit career suicide, remains. This is a trend that is only accelerating, and it's going nowhere good.