whybroke

This is completely incorrect. Every unregulated monopoly catastrophically chokes an economy over time and those that are regulated are almost as disastrous.

Your own example, Bell System, is an example of an sub-optimal but obviously adequate regulated monopoly that worked moderately well over a century.

And US Steel certainly did _not_ have competition when anti-trust was brought against it. By 1907 there were no longer any competitors and anti-trust attempts only started in 1911.

What you do have today, for adopting pro-monopoly policies for decades is, among other things, the highest bandwidth prices in the developed world. Higher even than the comically inept regulated monopoly Telefonica. Which btw has phone plans and per minute charges a fraction of the US and where the idea for charging for an incoming call is unthinkable. And a food supply monopolies that inflates the price of food to stunning levels. The list is endless but my typing patience is not. So here's a link.

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21695385-profits-are-...

>And Bitly links ain't it.

And why aren't they? Too damning I presume.

>That might provoke something like the Bork Video Privacy Protection Act.

Which oddly has be weakened by subsequent decisions and legislation to allow tracking of consumers while still keeping politician's records off limits to reporters.

One can certainly see how insincere the free speech claim really is from the light gray color of the preceding post.

But perhaps criticizing someone who hounded Gawker out of existence for its expression is just too oppressive.

The line being the answer to the questions: to what degree should you tolerate intolerance, to vote for voter intimidation, to call incitement to violence a mere difference of opinion and to be inclusive of exclusivity.

And do be aware that a person who would jail his opponent is never going to be so tolerant of you as you might be of him. It is the position that calls for tolerance only so long as it is weak.

I might suggest that an industry with a very small number of the exact population being targeted should do some serious soul searching about exactly what free speech (if campaign contributions are speech) they are standing by.

Because he leaves his supporters to assume his agenda is theirs by never explicitly stating it: Against backdoor crypto? so is Trump. For a backdoor crypto, so is Trump.

Actually it explains why everyone has innate racial profiling, even members of the target group. It's also why, even if a policy against it is adopted, it is immensely hard to actually change.

When there is an emergency humans look for an explanation of the events. Even when there is no possibility of finding one, they will still choose a fictional one derived from their existing world views.

Putting huge effort into explaining a true emergency (eg fire, fight etc) is evolutionary useful, doing so for a non emergency is not.

For a complex of reasons related to modern communication and the nature of celebrity among other things, the latest events around Assange feel like an emergency to some people and so they desperately seek an immediate explanation at all costs.

In general this is always a problem because those removed from events could use their distance by calmly looking at the situation objectively and rationally instead of promulgating a wave of attractive but erroneous conspiracy theories (which are always entirely destructive).

As a life rule it is convenient to note which category various information sources fall into.

>If Peter said some of the things Trump says himself, he would no longer be part of Y Combinator.

If it is only reasonable to spouse Thiel's supports Trump is in every particular. Not just the least damaging but also the most. So this not only includes the more palatable anti globalization stance but also race baiting and, hostility towards women as well as a fiercely anti democracy, anti free press platform.

I assume much of that is exactly opposed to ycombinator's higher mission.

Thiel's association with ycombinator is not one of employee to employer, it is voluntary association of colleagues for a common goal, presumably with goals higher than just monetary. Going forward, continuing with Thiel will not only make any claim to those nobler goals _look_ disingenuous they likely will in fact _be_ undermined.

Is criticizing someone who plans to jail his political opponent also suppressing him too?

Why should we suppose there is any other agenda than what he says it is?

>he represents a group of people who haven't been represented for the last 40 years

He _appeals_ to that group but what he has said does not indicate any serious intention to benefit it.

An utter disinterest in the details of how to bring it about such a benefit and a near total focus on blame shifting to vulnerable groups and conspiracy theories makes it painfully clear this is merely a self interested demagogue.

This is very deeply regrettable because the group he appeals to does in fact need help. But as has happened repeatedly historical, they have instead been lured in by an aggressively anti-democracy demagogue.

Strangely, you're now implying that he is trying to buy influence but figured the other party was harder to pay off.

>..There seems to be a very small amount of dirt that has been dug up..

I am unfamiliar with that definition of "small".

>...His donation allowed him to speak at the RNC...

Is the arrow of time also a liberal media conspiracy?

>...Hyperbole and conspiracy aside...

good luck with that.

>The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called "Cost of Living."

It's impossible to over emphasize how core to the problem this is. From social mobility to resentment of the "elites" and a dozen others.

For that to be, Trump would have to win (or have post election influence) and Thiel would have to believe Trump's low education, semi-ludite supporters could be convinced the tech that displaced many of them is good.

It's hard to image Thiel could possibly believe the latter but surely it's impossible that he believes the former.

>...Liberal newspapers...

Like the WSJ?

Peter Thiel is not clueless but knows exactly what he is doing. Thiel opposes democracy [1] and Trump has done an extraordinary amount to damage it. Indeed, even knowing that defeat is all but certain, he concentrates even more on doing so. Spending 1.5 million to fund the a campaign denouncing all voting as rigged (amount other things [2]) is stunningly efficient at undermining it.

[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

[2] eg sues critical news papers, threatens opponents with prison, encourages voter intimidation, encourages foreign powers to engage in cyber-warfare, blames "magazines" for terrorism

Because the greatest threat to a hegemony of the wealthy is democracy.

And a candidacy that threatens opponents with prison, encourages voter intimidation, enlists foreign powers for cyberwarfare, intimates that any result will be rigged, distroys the norms critical to government functioning and a dozen other things, is the best investment someone who hates public control of policy could make win or loose.

Twice that rate of Germans (16%) and Americans (18%) think the Sun goes around the earth.[1]

So does 9% really indicate a key culturally defining characteristic?

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-ge...

>It's promoting behavior that is different from real life as they stand to gain from stoking outrages and heated discussions: more active user engagement!

This undoubtedly has very serious consequences beyond merely being annoying. Trending untrue news stories, encouraging post-true controversy and providing an echo chamber for these things to intensify and become ingrained.

And doing these things on a enormous scale to a huge percentage of the population such that vast swathes of people can no longer even agree on basic facts.

It would be interesting to see how much of the bizarre political events in the west are a result of social media in general and Facebook in particular.

The Tohono O'odham people lived happily straddling the border drawn as a straight line in Washington.

That is until 1980.

Strange that "progress" makes a human system that worked happily for 10,000 years suddenly an unthinkable conduit to crime in some people's minds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O%27odham_people

If you do _not_ believe humans possess "identical statistical distribution of [academic performance] genes across all subpopulations" why hide such insight? It'd be interesting to hear where in the gnome the "academic performance gene" sits.

And have you also "discovered" a correlation between this academic performance gene and melanin content? Or gender too? Surely you don't want to deprive us of such important "discoveries".

Ironically, yummyfajitas definition of "intinsic" to mean "not teachers, curriculum, nor facilities" would thus include life circumstance.

For example, the kid's quality of life outside of school. Which is demonstrably improved by helping poor kids with rent. Which I believe he is trying to argue against.

Not only that but you will find some people in the US go though ridiculous mental gymnastics to claim that money makes no difference to education. While at the same to they put huge effort into moving into a neighbor with high spending on schools.

It is not enough to defend privileged with taxation, institutions and laws but they must use astounding double-think to convince themselves that the result is somehow fair. Part of that self-indoctrination is putting huge effort into convincing everyone around them of these absurd views.

No doubt the vast majority of police departments have good intentions.

But when the group protesting police malfeasance is then monitored by those same police in order to keep what those police consider to be the peace over them. And then they must rely on those same police not to target individual participants after the protest for retaliation, then that monitoring is obviously a very serious problem if the protesters be correct.

There is no "p-hacking", you can see the original study here [1].

And $500 seems like allot to privileged people but even shopping at a bottom level chain such as Ross, you could get 50 pairs of pants for that price. Or a loaf of cheap bread almost every day.

Even for someone just above the poverty line it represents a 5% raise and for the 40 million below that, even more.

If data don't match ideology, it is not the data that is wrong.

[1]http://www.nber.org/papers/w22721?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_mediu...

You may as well argue Columbus out of crossing the Atlantic or the Polynesians out of crossing the Pacific. Humans will fill every island and every frozen coast. Indeed every species does this. Mammals act out of curiosity not just safety and do so for an evolutionary reason.

So the first question is will it be our civilization or another. The second is will you see it or not. The third: why delay the benefits.

But the biggest question is this: is the point of life merely to be a safe, comfortable and predicable at all costs or is it to devote at least some resources to seeking out challenges, knowledge and unknowable benefits.

Also there's a false dichotomy in your words. That hypothetical billion price tag for a Zika cure could be fully funded by a 20% tax on ice cream. Should we give up the space program just to eat a few more scoops of ice cream, smoke a few more cigarettes buy a bit more makeup?

Certainly considering the uncountable victims, quibbling over semantics might seem absurd.

But I think it is very productive to look very closely at the exact rhetoric that caused murderous excesses of WWII with a view toward prevention.

After all, both Germany and Japan were not very unusual in the generations before the war. And are today among the most charmingly pacifist countries on the planet.

But somewhere in the 1930s their leadership whipped their people into a murderous frenzy using what looks like different rhetoric (and with absurdly primitive media technology too). It would be informative to know exactly how and that I suggest requires looking closely at the details of the propaganda.

It was part of a Nazi plan called "Lebensraum" where people of the wrong ethnic group would be killed, those of slightly wrong groups would be enslaved and those of the correct group would be indoctrinated into Nazi values.

All vaguely steaming from looking at British, French and Spanish colonies were large numbers of their ethnic groups had taken hold.

Also in the '30s Italy invaded Ethiopia and Japan invaded Manchuria to create belated empires though with less overtly genocidal intentions.

(However dry the above description, I personally do not want to suggest that the Nazi project is equivalent to those other nation's actions)

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskommissariat_Ukraine [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

The line you drew is utterly arbitrary and could just as easily include sleeping with staff and justify that as great salesmanship.

What about hacking a company server to put his resume on the top of the queue? Offering the data in exchange for a "position"? Blackmailing with it?

Because he just got into dozens of company offices using nothing but a tee shirt. He could easily have carried a flash drive alongside the resume in those donuts.

Each person who cheats draws the line just beyond their own behavior. To prevent chaos the hard line lies were the authorities enforce it. And such blunt instruments damage the systems they protect almost as negatively as the violators they catch.

But the argument about cheating has been going on since the Olduvai Gorge and this conversation is going to have exactly the same effect as every other one.

The only difference at this time is that cheating has been bizarrely fetishized into being a good thing. And the biggest picture is merely chasing the latest web fad so zealously that a community has been transformed into one so obsessed with wealth that its member happily step over homeless on the way to lunch everyday. And so much as commenting on this situation is consider politically extreme even transgressive.

>Do you really equate sleeping with HR to getting noticed by delivering donuts to executives?

No, there is a huge difference.

But why does the line lay at donuts? Who decides which rules matter? How about cash instead of donuts? How about fake references? Is that brilliant or wrong?

There are quite a few successful people who are far more than just naughty, I believe one is successful enough to be running for president. The slightly naughty have far less room to criticize outrageous behavior if their line is ever shifting and coincidentally always just beyond their own acts.

Any human system requires good intent and fair play to function. Any such system can be gamed by a small number of players. Those players will usually come out ahead with little harm to that system. If the number gets large then then any system will begin to break down. So is the goal to keep the number of rule breakers small and make sure we are always in that group?

And if the hiring process is broken, fix it. Encouraging ludicrous ad hoc random non-sense is the exact opposite of fixing anything.

What is being suggested is that there are some unwritten ever changing rules know only to the initiated that are the real rules. The official published rules are for "the other" and frankly only exist exactly to keep out the uninitiated.

Of course. After all he is seriously suggesting that:

There are genes that are present in every rich person across the planet but absent in every poor one.

That the human genome is so poorly understood, there's plenty room for that hidden in it.

That these genes evolved in the last 15k years (because before agriculture, wealth was limited to what you could carry and everyone was a generalist and so there was no selective pressure)

That they did not evolve at a single site like every other gene (because then we would find all the rich people on earth clustered in one spot with no poor people around with a density spreading outward) so...

The genes appeared coincidentally in every civilization and society independently the same time. In the last 15k years. With very mild or no selective pressure.

And this was discovered by one person (Gregory Clark) with no background in genetics and in opposition to near universal criticism while, coincidentally, telling a story that comforts the rich.

But at least it's not eugenics.