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I have a problem with a country that acts holy but was sponsoring oppression of people in my country and continues to sponsor oppression of people of many other countries in this day and age.

The ANC have anything but a clean past. Are the Chinese not sponsoring oppression of any people in your country or are they potentially sponsoring the oppression of a minority that you don't belong to? I would dig deeper before making such blanket statements.

I used a c and it got autocorrected to that

I have a feeling you're not going to want to admit this, but the current administration is actively reversing that policy. Also look into what China is doing economically in Africa and you might be reminded of pre-Gulf War America in the Middle East.

Everything from that list is from within the last 60 years. While China was murdering between 60 to 100 million of its citizens, America passed the Civil Rights Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#Implicati...

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-xinjiang-prisoners-bli...

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/ch...

Not all costs are monetary. The long term ramifications of our businesses cow-towing to mass-murdering authoritarians is far greater than potential profits.

In my experience, if you ever use more than clone, fetch, pull, push, checkout, merge(tool), reset, add, and commit then somebody messed up.

If you've never done a side project, I would definitely recommend the experience. That being said, the people I know who always have to have something software and/or business related on the side are stretched thinner than anyone else I know.

I've gotten the most mileage out of the extracurricular pursuits that have the least to do with programming - usually those around art or sports. When I have an interesting idea for a technical side project I pursue it, but when I was in a phase where I felt obligated to do so, it brought more stress than enjoyment.

Something I like to do to minimize this effect is to forward my calls to a dumphone whenever I don't need the smartphone.

My family uses alternative messaging with me while I'm at work and you'd be surprised how people really don't care if you don't text them back until the end of the day.

When I get home, the smartphone goes upstairs where I'll hear it ring if someone calls. At this point, it's a glorified GPS and Spotify/Audible device. The only time I'm actively on it is in between sets at the gym in the morning.

100 millionaires and billionaires.

There are over 500 billionaires. My point being that OP's point comes off as an emotional argument as opposed to a data-based one.

Edit: I now understand the OP meant "100-millionairs". Even so, the math is still off. As of 2015 there were ~5000 100-millionaires and billionaires in the US[1]. That's 0.0015% of the population.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2015/06/15/5000-u-...

1. US population: 329,663,350

2. 0.01% is 32,966 people, not 100

3. There are 585 billionaires in the US [0]

4. Billionaires make up 0.00017% of the population

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_numbe...

Deception by omission. That entire comment section was fueled by bots on both sides.

Don't forget masked "protesters" who are actually police infiltrators attempting to turn a protest violent.

The masked person can look but not be seen—an enormous and liberating power particularly in today’s age of surveillance.

It's only liberating if the masked person acts ethically. As we've seen in Portland, when masked "protesters" commit violence against civilians, it's the antithesis of "liberating". Remember that the anti-mask laws in the US south were enacted to limit the nefarious actions of the Klan.

IMO, HK has gone so far that the masks are a fake sense of security. The police will drag you off, mask and all, and know exactly who you are. Either the HK people have to accept using guerrilla tactics or they will eventually be swallowed by the CCP.

And when was the last time Twitter turned a profit?

"Winning hearts and minds" isn't a bad thing on its own - NATO forces are objectively better than islamic extremists like ISIS and the Taliban - but acting like our military is wholly altruistic is naive at best and purposefully disingenuous at worst.

We've been seeing nothing but bullshit valuations for years. Twitter was a bullshit valuation.

I'm just glad we finally had a sanity check on something.

"Good PR" is also seen as the lack of bad PR. Like when we drop a bomb on a school and kill a bunch of kids. PsyOps are the ones who pay off the village.

No, I was stationed as security for a PsyOps team in Gardez, Afghanistan for four months in 2003.

PsyOps main job is convincing occupied peoples that the occupier is their friend. One of the ways they do that is by taking photos of bags of rice being handed out. They also actively work to spread (dis)information.

You're going to get downvoted for sharing wrongthink and not screaming "hate!" at Goldstein... I mean Kavanaugh, but you're ultimately right.

The thing is, though, there is no more "newspaper of record". The newspaper industry has been in such a downward spiral for such a long time that, like any other industry bleeding money, quality has severely suffered. Try to find a single notable paper that adheres to the objectivity guidelines of the AP guidebook. Hell, even the AP doesn't do that anymore.

Makes sense, with their main business being the inverse.

I'd argue that it's paid for content - whether it's ads or partisan coverage, lobbyists, paid shills, or astroturfed pressure groups all managed by professional manipulators...

I think it's that, and the average people who don't realize what they're digesting and who think it's organic. Perhaps I'm being nostalgic, but I don't remember another time when so many average people had over-inflated notions regarding the power and reach of their thoughts.

Not that they didn't have strong opinions, but I don't remember anyone outside of nutjobs believing that those opinions should, by default, carry so much weight. Now your average, middle aged Facebook addict thinks that they're on a mission from God.

You still keep going to this "witness" testimony as if it's a kill all. It isn't. Where Minsky was and with whom has far more weight than what someone said who - for the umpteenth time - WAS ALSO ON JEFFREY EPSTEIN'S ISLAND.

This "witness" also has zero bearing on anything Stallman wrote, as he was writing under the assumption that the accusation is true. Your continued use of it in defending Stallman denotes bad faith.

...RMS did not excuse the accusations of sex...

No, he only wrote a blog post saying that diddling kids should be legal. I can infer from that his thoughts on the Minsky situation.

No, I'm only repeatedly restating what RMS said in different forms in a vain hope that one of these restatements "clicks" with you.

You're reiterating your interpretation as if it's valid. It is not, for all the aforementioned reasons.

TI calculators are the biggest technology racket in education. The fact alone that most schools won't allow the use of Casio equivalents deserves an anti-trust investigation. There are programs that even dictate which TI model is accepted.

That you're still not reading.

Projection. Read that paragraph you quoted, specifically the words "in the moment". Nobody is arguing that Stallman didn't deduce she might have been coerced. His whole excuse is that Minsky wouldn't have been able to tell that in the moment, even though he was on f'ing sex trafficking island.

That a 17 year old offering to sleep with a 74 year old man on a billionaire's sex island was a victim of trafficking is not something that takes any bit of thoughtful reflection to figure out! It can be done in the moment by anyone with a conscience.

He didn't excuse him.

Yes he did. "The 74 year old man might have thought the 17 year old on sex trafficking island was willing" is an excuse of the most disgusting type. Now you're making excuses for the excuser.

Some people do not like RMS, but hate lies more.

You have proven no lies in my bulleted list.

RMS did not describe the trafficked child as "willing". He said she presented herself to Minsky as willing...

That unbelievably loose semantics, especially considering this wasn't some random streetwalker at a bar. They were on an billionaire's island with a f'ing sex temple, for god's sake. And, I'll reiterate, this was a child being offered to a 74 year old man.

What I will concede is that RMS is the first person I wouldn't expect to understand any of the unspoken obviousnesses of the situation, such as being able to deduce, in the moment, why a child prostitute would be presenting herself as willing. Regardless, that doesn't cover how he used it at the time to excuse Minsky allegedly sleeping with her, because this supposed witness wasn't openly known. "He may have thought the child was willing" is about the most disgusting excuse imaginable.

But what upsets me most is that people jump to the defense of a 66 year man that does this, as if he shouldn't have learned by now how not to act like this, even with impairments. He has been allowed to be this way, because his horrid behavior is always defended by his fans.

What am I writing that's false?

* Minsky went to Jeffrey Epstein's pedo island. * Everyone agrees he was offered a 17 year old girl * Someone else, who was also on pedo island for some reason, says he didn't take the offer, even though they were on pedo island * RMS described the trafficked child as "willing" * RMS has also made public arguments for legalizing pedophilia * People somehow still take RMS seriously

As someone who worked a lot of low-end and blue collar jobs before getting into software, small talk with coworkers is a whole lot easier in the former environment.

There is so much petty politics and ego in the modern office that all it takes is saying one thing that someone doesn't like to cause potentially years of unnecessary drama.

One gossipy sociopath who's trusted by your manager, that doesn't like something you said during small talk, or who didn't like the look in your eyes when they mentioned a strong political view, can limit your ability to get promoted.

People just talk anything and everything in blue collar jobs and nobody cares. I think that's because nobody has their ego wrapped up in how well they mop a floor or flip a burger.

Do you know there's a reason they call the tail end of the French Revolution "the Reign of Terror"?