Kaveren

Citizen's United infamously set that in stone.

The alternative is that you can't make documentaries about a candidate's bad climate change policy and monetize it as you would a non-contentious issue.

That the average American has approximately zero influence in politics is a mathematical, deliberately orchestrated truth.

Neither does the individual "economic elite", defined as anyone in the top 10%.

People can complain about the two party system all they want, but ranked choice voting was just rejected in Massachusetts, the most liberal state there is (and I'd be correct to assume that Democrats have more reason to desire this than Republicans).

Gerrymandering is bad and needs to be disposed of. We aren't an oligarchy because there's some gerrymandering.

Money in politics is vastly overrated, and there isn't even that much money in the field to begin with. Bernie Sanders didn't lose his 2020 primary because of money, Trump didn't win his 2016 primary because of money.

What data do you want? Look at the way people change their answers to whether or not they support Medicare For All based on how the question is phrased, or support for the Affordable Care Act [1]. What you are asking for is asinine. The data is the results of elections. You are the one who has provided no evidence for your claim.

If you think what someone answers to an opinion poll matters here, you're just wrong. Show me people voting based on these issues as a primary factor and not seeing results because politicians magically change their minds after winning.

"economic elite" is literally defined as anyone in the top 10% of income by that study. Guess what income group always votes? Those same people. And they're going to be the ones pressing for action the most. [2] And they are more educated, so it's stupid to compare public opinion like this. You need to compare expert consensus to policy and public opinion.

Not to mention the Electoral College and Senate.

What data do you expect?

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obamacare-vs-affordable-care-... [2] https://econofact.org/voting-and-income

Secondly, I believe it confuses cause and effect.

People say a lot of things. People mostly agree with universal background checks for guns. It isn't the Evil Rich People preventing this from happening, and the NRA isn't particularly rich itself even though it's a popular bogeyman.

People talk a lot about climate change until it's time to shape policy on it. Someone answering a poll question doesn't matter, what people vote for matters.

Your argument comes from a fantasy where most people actually agree with you, but the lobbyists just prevent things from changing. In reality, many people are very poorly informed. People don't understand just how powerful political mobilization and voting is. I agree that they think voting won't do anything, but they'd be wrong about that.

that's because many people don't vote or take part in political advocacy. it doesn't make society in "oligarchy". our democracy actually works really well, even with gerrymandering and some voter disenfranchisement. if all those people actually voted frequently, the policy outcomes would be a lot different.

compare this to actual oligarchies where opposition parties actually can't accomplish anything because they're denied access to elections, or there's legitimate election fraud, or serious voter intimidation, et cetera.

and policy outcomes being determines by random people is actually awful, the average person has absolutely no understanding of basic economics. it's not even desirable.

The better alternative is just to learn thoroughly and apply knowledge as much as you can. You can explore without guesswork.

That attitude is actually how I program—with scripted languages I write code and see what happens, if it didn’t work I write it again.

This is an incredibly harmful attitude towards learning, but it feels nice because it's a lot less effort than actually trying to read or listen to something to learn. It's just laziness.

Learning C++ this way is how someone would end up with a buffer overflow every 30 lines of code they write. It's the reason some self-taught developers can't give you the fuzziest definition of the difference between O(n) and O(n^2).

The closest approximation of this is how kids learn to speak, but this is incredibly inefficient, and they receive many years of formal education anyway.

something being popular and eliminating other options is not inherently bad. there is nothing wrong with one company acquiring a monopoly through superior service. you can attack amazon's behavior as anticompetitive, but that's not what you're doing here.

exact opposite, they've made a 180 on advertising. there used to be external offsite ads shown on the website, which were removed. there used to be a developer API to show video ads for revenue within games, which was removed. they've cut down heavily on event promotions from companies (think movies that appeal to kids)

they have an extremely high revenue business model off actual customers, so they don't really need to do advertising, there's plenty of other ways to get more profitable.

for example, they're at the scale where they might be able to do what Dropbox did by running more of their own infrastructure to save big.

there isn't a tweet you can send that will start a war unless the administration sending it is willing to confirm that is indeed a move they're making. you think diplomats are idiots.

that tweet threat isn't even an immediate threat.

sorry you just don't understand how the world works. nobody is ever starting a war over twitter, not least because people understand that accounts can be hacked. and the president's twitter account tweeting about a war would mean the president gets a call within 2 minutes. it would never happen.

north korea would absolutely never initiate a war over a tweet, they're fully rational.

also nice link to an article about a tweet that the president actually wanted to send, as opposed to a hacker tweeting, which would be denied by the white house within 15 minutes.

you spend too much time online if you think you can start any war over twitter

you may be unaware of better alternatives because of anticompetitive behaviour by Google

google provides all of the best services in each of its major consumer categories unless you value privacy, except when there's a major competitor. there's no hidden gem better than youtube that would scale as well.

i guess we should all follow anarchoprimitivism in that case. we need to find "eternal ever lasting bliss and happiness".

Microsoft is selling you into the IDE, in small portions

what are they selling me

armed robbers randomly targeting people are not criminal masterminds. they are often hastily planned, or are completely opportunistic. you could easily accidentally shoot someone, or the victim says or does something you didn't expect, or you panic. it's very believable someone would abandon a botched robbery.

bloomingdale, washington d.c., where he got shot, has a rate of robbery almost 4x the national average, and twice the murder rate.

if only there were some investigations into the source of the hack. i guess we'll never know

and this young guy gets murdered for no reason and not even robbed?

im sure you're an expert on crime but it is not in fact ridiculous that when a robbery is botched and someone gets shot they won't steal anything because you want to run immediately. you're sheltered.

no american tech ceo is getting killed because of a minor dispute like this why does everyone on HN think we're in some low budget spy movie

photography was an art, and photos were generally manipulated, sometimes heavily , sometimes to remove people etc.

Except this was time consuming and couldn't be done automatically in an undetectable way.

human societies have survived without video evidence since forever

Stupid argument, we've also survived war since forever, except now a war between nuclear powers would be devastating in a way war historically wasn't. It will absolutely not be the same as it was before photos and videos.

i was assured by the cybersecurity experts of hacker news that REALLY this was all a mastermind ploy to steal and sell twitter DMs. who would they sell them to? doesn't matter! what information of actual value is sent through twitter DMs? doesn't matter! we did it, hacker news.

you cannot start world war 3 or become a billionaire through some tweets, this is not a movie.

On 4 October, 2016, Mr Stone tweeted: “Payload coming. #Lockthemup.”

It was clear publicly that Stone had a very inappropriate relationship with Wikileaks. What would you do, attempt to extort Stone for more than $100k and hope he pays? Leak little more than was publicly known?

Yes, introductions get made on Twitter, "slide into the DMs" does not mean that you're trying to conduct a three year romantic relationship on it. Usually people are going to get off it, and onto a real messenger application, even if they just want sex.

Kanye West and Elon Musk have absolutely nothing of value in their DMs. Anything you could do with access to Musk's DMs you could do better just by tweeting as Musk.

There is no value in Twitter DMs.

Exfiltrating DMs seems like it's going to accomplish just about as much, if not more.

Nobody is communicating anything valuable over Twitter. This is such a ridiculous point that people bring up all the time. Scandalous relationships? Most of that will be on true messenger applications. Business deals? Business email. Many more mainstream prominent people don't even run their own account.

It's not that everyone is so security-minded, it's just that Twitter is an extremely inconvenient way to maintain personal relationships.

I think the Bitcoin scam was also the perfect innocuous cover story

There is almost no value in DMs. Funny seeing HN speculate about these elite hackers selling them as if there's any market for them, let alone one that would pay $100k+.

This is disingenuous.

If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.

This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn. Before porn was trivially available online, teenagers still had plenty of sex. Sexual consent was still widely misunderstood too (and still is).

Of course pregnancy is a long lasting consequence, but if it is addressed by a program we need even without porn, it's irrelevant to porn.

Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences.

If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.

No, there have been claims for decades about the harms of pornography. There should be enough evidence for detractors against pornography consumption to use. The burden is proof is on them.

So your evidence for the "lasting consequences" of pornography is that there are some studies indicating a correlation to a reduction in condom usage. This indicates to me a need for better sex education.

This doesn't justify the ominous phrase "some long lasting consequences".

Absolutely none, people will just use a VPN or TOR.

Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences. Survivorship bias.

[citation needed]