weirdstuff

I saw that dead comment too and can't figure it out.

Reminds me of "Operation Chokepoint" where the U.S. federal government was able to persuade (not force) banks to cut off firearms dealers from their accounts in an effort to affect "unsavory businesses".

Another reason why I want to avoid a cashless society, at least in the way we're heading right now. Scary how quickly banks will cave in to pressure from the feds before any legal process even begins (if ever).

http://www.newsmax.com/US/Operation-Choke-Point-federal-bank...

Buffet talks a good talk, but I can't say he walks it much. I think he's great at PR and keeping a soft image to protect his massive portfolio. If you really dig down into his portfolio a lot of his investments create pollution, are ethically challenged, don't always pay their taxes "right", and so on. Which is fine, except he keeps talking out of both sides of his mouth, and I like to call that out for what it is.

I'm no longer a moral fan of his, sorry to say. I know he goes on record as saying he "pays less in tax than his secretary" (not an exact quote) but I think that's just a smart tactic to avoid public critique of his actions (and instead distract with nice words).

Small nit, but I'm not sure I'd prefer one (or a few) investor(s) over a larger, decentralized group of investors. Those are two very different power dynamics.

A world with a few super-heavy investors may not be as effective as a world with a more distributed (democratic) investor base. Fewer investing eyeballs, more tunnel vision.

I'm inclined to agree with that.

Maybe if jobs for all skill-sets were still growing (in availability and compensation) it'd be easier to write off a good portion of the population as mentally inferior, but now that knowledge jobs are gaining a monopoly on living wages/salaries I don't think it's as easy to be that glib.

We need to do better as a society.

We're not that glib when it comes to children and early education, and I don't think we should change attitude just because a person has reached adulthood. Laziness and/or the attribution fallacy seems to get the better of a lot of us on HN.

Perhaps the reason trafficking is incentivized is because this is a black market in the first place. We don't have the same levels of criminality with alcohol that we experience in the U.S. during prohibition precisely because a legitimized industry crowded out the ability to do most egregious criminal activity.

I'm not really biased one way or the other on the upthread conversation, however I think you'll find the Descartes' thinking continues to underlie a great deal of what we call modern science (or more precisely: our defining interpretation of universal phenomenon) and many of the applications that come with that.

You can find great nuggets in modern work just as you can find great nuggets in older work, too. It's not that disposable!

I really dislike it as well, as I think a sizable portion of the HN does according to these threads that occasionally appear. You're in good company.

Is google working on opt-in or opt-out functionality, or is that something that might happen in the foreseeable future? I think a move like that would go a long way in the goodwill department.

Well, the post he/she was replying to had a provocative line in it as well, so I think we can excuse the tone a bit.

Yeah, Fresh Air/Terry Gross is pretty caught up in her own bubble, if you ask me. She gets pretty feisty when guests challenge her from time to time, which I enjoy. (Good listening when that happens!)

Agreed, U.S. higher ed has been somewhat emptied of its thought diversity, in my own experience.

I can't help but have noticed that same thing, anecdotally (very anecdotally, but seems seems so pronounced that I'm commenting). Higher voice registers, smaller frames, more effeminate postures and body language.

Probably forever, yet they could have been right all along.

(No way to know subjectively, we weren't alive that whole time! E.g. I hear tales of evening strolls that entire towns would conduct after dinner hours, stopping on those front porches that we no longer use. Many towns seemed like ongoing parties 100 years ago. No more of those!)

[rhetorical answer] By offloading as much economic risk as possible on to producers with the least means of asserting corrective action in case of inequitable decision making.

(In other words pass losses on to employees and guarantee [as much as possible] returns to investors despite risks.)

It's also true that youngsters take their own day-and-age as the new-and-improved era in which they live, and have much less ability to compare past circumstances with modern ones.

The idea that the modern era is morally superior to preceding ones (even taking into account reprehensible notions such as slavery) is a tautology that stymies a critical reflection of history.

I've found it more useful to think of the modern day as a semi-improved and semi-regressed random walk of history. Some parts better, some parts worse. No sweeping generalizations to distort what we can't ever really know in our hearts – how past lives felt.

I'm a millennial myself, and I think there might be a good argument to make that there is an accelerated moral decay happening, and that has been happening for many decades.

It feels good to say that this is just old hogwash that gets repeated each generation – but as a student of history I look around and start to think maybe there is a long and steady moral decline that materializes itself in huge and unsolved economic/social crisis like what we're seeing now in the U.S.

He's making the same public motions that an office-seeker would perform. I don't think it's off base to connect the dots.

In all fairness the idea of Zuckerberg running for president is a little extreme (even if true) and is likely to be the subject of ridicule and criticism.

And /r/the_donald would say just the opposite. The thing about propaganda – why it works so well – is that it's presented as authentic civil discourse. There's no clear cut demarcation between the two types of speech.

One could argue that /r/the_donald uses the banhammer to maintain order (the narrative), and /r/politics uses shill comments+downvoting to do the same.

> religion and the right to bear arms (this is a generalization, of course).

Minor nit (sorry!) but rural folks mainly want limited government – a lot of their other arguments stem from that. They tend to not like power or authority and want to be left alone. (Perhaps to commit their own power abuses!)

This is less and less the case, as weird as that sounds. I'm finishing my degree not because I'm learning anything, but too many managers (and academics) have point-blank told me they just want to see that I've been "initiated".

I worked in state and city campaigns for a number of years, and I just wanted to confirm what you've written: that patronage and loyalty testing IS at the center (among other things) of high-level political operations. It's a cynical view, for sure, but politics is a cynical business for the most part. (Or at least that was my experience and observation.)

For many years I've observed an out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach by the citizenry towards the darker side of politics (beyond partisan horse racing and gotchas). No real demand for investigatory journalism, because who wants to pay for that? As long as "appearances were kept up" citizens seemed to dismiss the dirty stuff in favor of the shallow Gotcha Debates. Very frustrating to see corruption and/or neglect being ignored by the voter base in favor of Bread and Circus politics.

The fact that Trump is just making this more obvious has a lot of people stirring about how this is a new phenomenon, when what's happening is that the machinations are being exposed more willingly by the current regime. It's difficult to shake up a world view when appearances suddenly don't matter (in a traditional sense).

Wake up please! Still have some sunlight left.

Wait, what's the contradiction? You can definitely have liberal fascism. Italy under Mussolini is considered by many scholars as a liberal, fascist regime. There's lots of scholarly work on the subject.

The rich have principles. They're just more sociopathic principles, IMO.

Like David Brooks, I'm not convinced. Sure, Russia seeks influence, and has a little. But I have to be suspicious of leaked publicized intel.

Brooks' NY Times article from last week: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/opinion/russia-investigat...

As far as I'm concerned, both parties are mutually destructive. (Destructive competition.) Two peas in a pod since the 90s.

It's simply none at all, right?

What a crass thing to say, similar to "they wouldn't have starved if they just ate!"

Back to the point: what does any of that have to do with sex or gender? Maybe you will elaborate, if OP won't.