squozzer

I would argue that economics drives at least some of this because Hollywood and media in general have no shortage of talent waiting in the wings.

So new mechanisms for generating attrition will always find more fans (the underdogs) than opponents (the top dogs.)

In those milieu, everyone - even filthy rich producers, is expendable. Though expendable connotes a sense of usefulness, so maybe disposable works better.

It was a trial in the court of public opinion, from which there is no appeal. (thx to Machiavelli for that nugget of wisdom.)

>Add the wrong ingredients into the Big Data recipe, and what you’ll get is a potentially toxic output.

Shouldn't the Big Data algorithms apply the same principles?

Where I think the non-racists have failed us (meaning those whose attention lies mostly elsewhere) is in providing a description of a non-racist system. It may prove impossible, and I think if someone had described one, we'd all have heard about it.

Right now, the only system I can imagine as non-racist is closed and all of its elements belong to the same race.

Mathematicians would probably call this a trivial description. Comedians might call it a country club.

That moves the question not to whether we can build a system that isn't racist, but what racist qualities need the most suppression and which ones (where we have to choose) can be ignored.

Keep in mind this discussion has been ongoing for centuries and was simpler (e.g. slave vs. free) in the past than today (health, education, economics, psychology, religion.)

And more variables appear regularly.

That said, could algos help judges make more consistent rulings/sentences? Probably already are.

Judge: I'm gonna throw the book at this defendant!

LAL 9001: I can't let you do that.

OTOH, people remember (in a distorted way, to various degrees, highly dependent on culture)

Genghis Khan

Attila the Hun

Jesus Christ

Buddha

Moses

A few other prophets

Archimedes

Gaius Julius Caesar

Dunno, about 32 years ago I drove through KS on I-70. It had some rises and dips. Maybe I'm remembering eastern CO.

“His decision not to use [emergency declaration][last week] is a little bit puzzling because in some sense that’s an almost ideal outcome,” McCarty said. “That’s the only way to end the shutdown while allowing both sides to save face.”

Another way out would be if some reps broke out of party gulags and proposed a reasonable and understandable plan.

Something similar happened once recently -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(immigration)

Maybe the second referendum should just be between soft leave and hard leave, as the first referendum already settled the question of leave or remain.

Call it a runoff referendum.

>GitHub and Tibetans like Lobsang Sither were among the first victims on a new front in China’s war on the internet, launched by a new breed of censor determined to go after the country’s enemies wherever they might be, using whatever means necessary.

I wonder if China's fentanyl factories aren't plugged into the internet...

My guess - it was overloaded with homilies.

But maybe the "push-button" denunciation culture has an agenda. We could be approaching a time where certain things we still take for granted today - e.g. good jobs - will become a lot scarcer. And how would one gain an edge? By destroying the competition by any means necessary.

Or so Peter Turchin and those who follow Structural-Demographic Theory seem to think.

>A post denouncing Emily also went viral. She, too, was the object of nationwide group hate.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

>The guy who called out Emily is named Herbert.

Ditto. Judge not, or be judged. I won't cry on the day the mob rips Herbert apart.

And the cycle will continue until everyone's broken or tired of breaking people.

What bothers me most about critiques of the Enlightenment is the critics usually fail to convincingly answer the following:

1) Was it better than what preceded it (e.g. the divine right of kings?

2) In what way(s) are the ideas that followed an improvement?

That we're all just treading water, and that one day, the water will win.

We never should have let the AI get ahold of Roget's...

Jokes aside, the article serves a useful purpose - to remind us that even American revolutionaries aren't above hanging political undesirables.

To quote an ad-lib line from a famous rock musician -

"Does anyone remember laughter?"

>The underlying assumptions of social justice censorship are that words are a form of violence, that a subjective interpretation matters more than the speaker’s intent and that safety is contingent on not being teased or challenged.

Probably who tells the joke matters more. Except for the following:

>On the same day, Netflix pulled an episode of “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj” for the following joke about the killing of Saudi Arabian writer Jamal Khashoggi

Maybe, as the article insinuates, it was to protect the delicate feelings of Saudi elites. My money is on the belief Netflix wanted to keep Hasan alive.

I would argue the earlier mindset (i.e. China engagement) was not based solely on pie-in-the-sky optimism, but had a couple of other factors -

1) The belief that China would eventually succeed with or without us, so it is to our benefit for them to succeed with us.

2) The belief that engaging the Soviets hastened the end of the [First?] Cold War, so it might also work on the Chinese.

Because we have no control scenario we can't be sure, but engagement probably worked, if for no other reason than to set up a situation where China appears a bit more transparent today than 30 years ago.

What bothers me most about the discussion today is how tightly bound sins and virtues - even traumas suffers by one's ancestors - are to genetics.

So we now have not just a racism / sexism morality based on actions and statements, but a religious viewpoint (good / evil), eugenics (because it's all baked into our genes), and caste (separating and ranking various human phenotypes.)

History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes has a similar chord progression.

Do the employees sing carols?

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1004151-christmas_story

I thought of Antigone's execution dirge as the post's counterexample.

Or another example - Jesus praying in Gethsemane. Maybe fiction, maybe not, but certainly an example of internal exposition.

On what basis is health care a human right?

I would claim that rights either provide some protection to the ruling class (the right to life means not executing unpopular leaders) or are derived from other rights.

So in this case, we could claim the right to life provides the basis for the right to health care.

Note the right to life is not absolute, e.g. capital punishment and military drafts (being forced into life-threatening situations at gunpoint.)

But googling "on what basis is health care a human right?" yields nothing convincing on the pro side, i.e. they all just assume health care is a human right.

>HEALTH is a human right. When people are not able to access the healthcare they need, especially if this is for reasons of cost, their human rights are denied.

Continuing...

>Universal health coverage is built on principles of equity and fairness, with health services allocated according to people’s needs and the health system financed according to people’s ability to pay.

That statement has a familiar ring.

Here's an anti-right argument -

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1126951/

>To propose that health care be considered a human right is not only wrong headed, it is unhelpful. Mature debate on the rationing and sharing of limited resources can hardly take place when citizens start from the premise that health care is their right, like a fair trial or the right to vote.

I would test the rights argument with a few questions --

1) Would the right to health care justify certain impositions on the population, a la jury duty? Would governments have the right to draft people to work in medicine?

2) If we could keep someone alive forever at the cost of $1 bil/day, would we be required to do so?

3) Would the right to health care provide governments the justification to override market mechanisms?

Or said another way -

4) Would governments have to repeal anti-competitive laws that limit the supply of health care?

>But critics say that having too many emergency departments in one community reduces the quality of care because it shrinks the amount of practice that local trauma-trained physicians get when treating complicated injuries. A similar argument was made when Northside Hospital tried to open a trauma center earlier this year, but withdrew after two other area hospitals with trauma centers contested the expansion.

A spin on the Roemer Effect it seems. Florida apparently has a Certificate of Need policy.

The basic premise of the article seems sound, that money corrupted an arrangement that might otherwise be innocent.

Uber / Lyft were upgrades to Craiglist ads for rides / carpools - more convenient for riders, and drivers make a few bucks taking someone somewhere they were going anyway.

AirBnB was a way for travelers to access a more "charming" experience, maybe a little more conveniently than booking a hotel/BnB or scanning CL ads for rooms for rent.

Where they went wrong was professionalization, i.e. people driving full-time or renting for the income.

That's when it became obvious that Uber/Lyft was actually a taxi company and AirBnB a rental broker.

In fairness, if in certain cities (NYC) taxis weren't intentionally managed to scarcity, Uber/Lyft probably would have had more difficulty gaining traction.

Nor would I begrudge a homeowner making a little money boarding guests.

But of course the economic opportunity proved too much for too many to resist, which is why we have the problems mentioned in the article.

I forgot someone even more crucial to my argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Kirov

Then what exactly made Mr. Solzhenitsyn's work so powerful? Was he a capitalist stooge?

He probably captured best the malaise and hypocrisy of the USSR.

My hypothesis is that the conditions imposed in the name of communism, and not communism itself, destroyed the USSR.

In particular, success - especially political or military success, became more dangerous to achieve than failure.

Not even Georgy Zhukov was spared a certain level of wrath, which was probably more of a warning to potential coup plotters than anything to do with Zhukov himself.

For better or worse, the mini-notebook is where I learned about using a ballast resistor for LEDs.

What bothers me about the coverage of the riots is so far I have seen no one offer an opinion on whether the rioters' complaints have merit.

Is Ms. Meng related to Meng Hongwei?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-interpol-chief-ousted-china-to...

Interesting perspective. I figured NYC would go all-in on cashless because cash facilitates tax evasion.

And to most governments, tax collection > human rights / conveniences.

Get enough crusaders with differing viewpoints in the same room (or internet) and you have scorched earth.

My only anger comes from the new definition of the word "thot" - which I had been using for decades as a substitute for the word "thought."