rnernento

We are in big trouble, and if we don't collectively recognize that, put aside our differences wherever possible, and start acting accordingly, a lot of people are going to suffer.

There is an army out there of intelligent, qualified individuals ho just don’t care that much about work. You likely won’t be able to keep people who are highly ambitious long term without constantly sweetening the pot which usually isn’t tenable.

Find the right people, treat them with respect and allow work to not be the most important thing in their lives and they will be with you for a very long time.

I'm not saying that Amazon wasn't at fault here, but if you just read the headline and looked at the picture you might think Amazon was the one selling the counterfeit pills.

I'm not saying Amazon should be selling these things, but that choice makes me distrust this whole article.

This is the most interesting part of this and should be discussed more. There seems to be a lot of evidence that viral load is a factor. If social distancing and proper hygiene doesn't just lead to less infections but to more mild infections that's a big dea.

Pretty much sums it up doesn't it.

While the anecdotal evidence is salacious it's not really useful in determining whether or not they're "evil".

First it says debt as a percentage of GDP used to be higher so it should have been scarier. Then it says current interest rates are low but doesn't give anywhere near the weight to that statement they should.

Even in the article they state 8% interest was normal 30 years ago but then go on to say sustained 8% interest going forward is crazy talk. WHY? Why wouldn't interest rates go up? They certainly can't go much lower...

If they did go up our debt would take a much higher percentage of the budget than the 18% of the 80's and 90s. This is a very real problem.

From the article:

"The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky: “deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims [2])” The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X. The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein’s harem. (See https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef...) Let’s presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it). The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex. We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates. I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation. Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."

That would be problematic.

I wonder what a datacenter would look like 10,000 years from now if no one did anything to it. obviously it wouldn't be powered but I'm thinking there would be recoverable data.

You could load the entirety of Wikipedia onto an e-reader and power it with almost no electricity.

Data centers are basically bunkers and there is a tremendous amount of replication occurring.

If anything I think we're likely to leave by far the largest accumulation of knowledge in history, regardless of how bad things get.

Why? This is the crux of the problem. I don't believe that anyone who could be so easily swayed in one direction can't be swayed back. What am I missing here?

It probably makes you feel better about yourself to label someone else a despicable degenerate and simultaneously scrub your hands of the problem and any possible attempt you could make towards a solution but it's not doing anything to make the world a better place.

There are powerful tools that have been used throughout history to dramatically change the world and change the types of people you would label as degenerates. We just have more work to do.

My assumption is that this is primarily a site for engineers who are highly effective practical problem solvers and I think we would all benefit if more people treated this like a solvable problem.

This is a very good point. It's interesting because it could happen on an image forum but it would probably be hard to make it meaningful in the way that you describe (and that is so important).

I can't help but thinking the internet might at least be part of the solution though. So much opportunity for diverse groups to meet and interact.

"Talking to these people over the course of hundreds of years hasn't helped"

I think you have to concede that over the past couple hundred years race relations have improved significantly.

"more and more i'm lead to believe that the compassion and empathy of the sensible majority is largely performative and on a fundamentally emotional level they just want heads to roll irrelative of any actual justice"