Hacker News Reader

zamryokon Tennessee begins free community college plan

> At the risk of sounding callous, starting a family before you can afford it is living beyond your means. I don't live in the US so I don't know if this applies to some contexts within the US, but in other contexts a family (partnership with one or more people and raising children) is sometimes a neccessity for survival: you share food and lodging and save money, a shared income, shared tasks and responsibilities and, in the absence of a retirement plan, your children will help you when you get old or sick. Raising children is a tough job so you had better start young, when you still have the energy to juggle the big amount of work that requires.

zamryokon Google+ invite lands man in jail

My issue with the previous comment was with the wording that made it seem that restraining orders are unfair in general. If we want to talk about generalities and how we percieve the situation then we can't escape discussing how and if women and men are advantaged in society, and that's why I brought it up. We can't generalize based solely on the case of the Google+ invite.

> over someone that did nothing to cause you to have the disadvantage initially Disadvantages only exist in relation to others' advantages. Being in danger is a disadvantage, and threatening someone is an advantage. I understand that this is not just a question of gender, but that it's also related to the current conditions in the US that I only read about from afar (high gun posession and violence, relationship between police and citizens, mass incarceration and police brutality...) I don't know the situation, but saying women exploit restraining orders just smelled fishy.

zamryokon Google+ invite lands man in jail

I would word it differently: "for women to use this in order to regain some sort of advantage" considering the fact that women generally are at a strong disadvantage in society (especially when it comes to personal safety and income)

zamryokon Your location history

My radio button setting was "disable" even after I visited the location history. I think enabling location access and enabling location history are two different things, in that you can enable the detection of your current location to have better instructions from the application, but at the same time disable history.

zamryokon Cyber-libertarianism: Silk Road battleground individualism vs authority

Different approaches to the question of "HOW to bring about change" (as opposed to just "WHAT change is needed") are the reason so many political tendencies exist. Your approach can be described as reformist, and it surely hasn't always proven to be the "right way to go" (other commenters have mentioned the civil rights movement). On the other hand, "hoping that illegality will reach a scale where the government will be forced to accept it" is a strategy frequently adopted by anarchist, libertarian or autonomist trends that hope to create pockets of resistance outside the "system" and try to expand them to bring about change from the outside.

I doubt that there is only one "right way to go" that applies to any situation, but I think that any tactic that can bring about a powerful long-term mass movement is more likely to succeed: for example in the case of the Civil rights movement mentioned, civil disobedience was only one of the methods used, along with discussions, massive marches, boycotts, threatening escalation, and alliances with certain people within the system who have more access to power and who supported the movement.

Which brings me back to the OP's point: individualism vs. authority. Since I personally believe that building mass movements that support freedoms is the most effective way to protect them, individualism (as a method of organising) seems to be another obstacle to building a strong opposition to authority, and thus indirectly serving it.

zamryokon I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything

It amazes me how so many commenters here can miss an essential point about hipsters and hipster-hate. Hipster-hate is more than bullying, it can be understood if we consider that socio-economic classes are at war with each other: in this understanding, hipsters are the ones that have crossed the trench lines. They're percieved as people who mostly come from a wealthy white background, from which they want to be independent, but which gives them a certain legacy and advantage over non-white poor people. This helps them colonize/gentrify poor neighborhoods, thus pushing the prices up and paving the way for the city to push it's poor further away. Not to mention the fact that they are easy targets from the traditional upper class who percieves them as "willfully bohemian". We have the same kind of hate here in France for our "bobos". Hipster hate has a material economic basis.

zamryokon Gitmo Is Killing Me

Some people are not considered "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law". That is what I find unjust. I can accept focusing on "high-risk groups" (although one should question how this definition of a high-risk group is constructed), monitoring them, and trying them in court. What is unjust is punishing them without a fair trial.

zamryokon Gitmo Is Killing Me

> The double standard of what human rights mean if you are a US citizen and if you aren't makes me physically ill.

I also think that is profoundly unjust, and unfortunately it is not simply a question of being a US citizen or not: US citizens who are arab or muslim are more likely to be suspected of acts that could be considered to lie within the vague legal category of Terrorism. So it seems that non-muslim and non-arab people (whether US citizens or european citizens or otherwise) are less likely to be subjected to exceptional treatment, to be detained without trial or be killed in extra-judicial assasinations etc. It seems the divide is more on a racial/ethnic line than a US-citizenship line.

zamryokon Speaking up

"percentage of males in teaching professions, and/or daycare?" I agree it isn't fair. But this can be seen as misogyny/sexism backfiring against men. One main reason why men are discriminated against in these professions is that for a long time many societies have considered that women should only care for children and domestic work. These societies have adapted to that, elevating gender roles and hierarchies, and making it hard for people to escape their grip. And although this has mainly been to the disadvantage of women, many men have also suffered from being limited to male jobs/roles etc.

zamryokon Speaking up

A huge discussion within feminist movements has taken place and continues to take place on the subject, and I cannot do it all justice in a short comment (keywords to research: Sex-positive feminism), but my understanding is that it is best to stick with the idea that women (or any human being really) should be able to choose what they do with their bodies and with their bodies' representations -- the question is the extent of real control women are allowed to have compared to men. I'd say that since you have a general context in society where women are not equal to men and are objectified, it makes it all the more difficult to have a porn creation process that doesn't reinforce this, although exceptions exist in feminist porn.

zamryokon Speaking up

Furthermore, it seems clear that the way she was attacked was specifically designed to exploit at least the following :

- the fact that she is a woman adressing a predominantly male audience (the fake porno)

- the ambient objectification of women in society

How can that not count as sexist?

zamryokon Skype vulnerability allowing hijacking of an account if you know just the email

The site is very buggy indeed. But it is possible to change the primary email adress if, when you are prompted to retype your password, you "type password and click button by mouse, not by "Enter" key" (as the post says). Maybe that would work for you...

zamryokon How I manage my todos, priorities and calendar

In your account settings (https://www.google.com/settings/), next to "Authorising applications & sites" there's an Edit link.

zamryokon Finland's Alekstra is quietly building the first Global Virtual Network Operator

the article seems to suggest that they help companies lower their mobile bills, which seems significantly different than becoming a virtual network operator

The article also suggests that the biggest obstacle to becoming a global virtual network operator is plugging into the billing systems of (non-virtual) operators. If Alekstra has already covered that for their current business of lowering mobile bills, that means they have a big advantage.