badsock

Sigh. You're right, sorry. I'm out.

I don't agree with visarga's first sentence. But I don't think it's childish to want a war criminal to be held to some account. More than 100,000 civilians died in that conflict, and Rice played a key role in knowingly selling the lies that lead to their deaths.

She deserves prison, and the founders and board of Dropbox deserve to be hounded for their complicity in her escape from any negative consequence resulting from her actions.

I thought the Boring company was the most "obviously for Mars" project. One of the cheapest ways to create pressurized, radiation-sheltered spaces is to dig.

This subthread is off of devmunchies comment about Reddit and Twitter, and the OP is about 4chan. All of these forums are global.

My point is that American-style conservatism may represent half of Americans, but it's overwhelmed in other developed countries (which, taken together, are larger in population). So much so that I would argue that in the global context, American conservatism is small enough and far enough to one side of the debate that it's accurate to call it an extreme.

I don't understand why everyone bought the idea that we don't need unions anymore.

This is exactly the sort of thing they make better.

What makes you say that American conservative views are not extreme, in the context of the global internet?

Something that's popular is practically by definition not on the extreme any more.

In most of the developed world the Democrats would be considered a moderate right-wing party, and the Republicans a far-right theocratic extremism party (like, say the DUP in the UK, or CHP in Canada).

What you're seeing is a ground-shift in values, and what used to be considered OK is now considered extreme, and is therefore being shifted into the margins of the discussion.

To put it in sharper contrast: if you started loudly expressing the most mainstream views of the 1700s in today's society, you'd get a lot of people trying to shut you up and, failing that, marginalize you. And, probably, they'd be right to do so.

You're speaking in pure ideology.

I could just as easily say that this the result of 40 years of the upper class shifting the tax burden downward to the middle class, while lobbying for the passage of laws to ensure that all of the economic gains during that period are funneled upwards towards themselves.

Telling the middle class to tighten their belt because - despite a growing economy - there just isn't enough to sustain the lifestyle that their parents enjoyed isn't sound economic principles, it's class war.

I have no problem with the possibility that men and women are different. What's unjustified is, given the powerful effect of culture on behaviour, someone making offhand claims that they know what differences are natural.

I read "natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people" as saying that what's "implicitly" (i.e. commonly) understood as to be the natural differences is correct. Because what has been "implicitly" understood has differed substantially across time and cultures, that's a highly suspect claim that requires a matching degree of evidence.

Furthermore, just the long and loud history of people spouting off absolute bullshit about what women are and aren't is, by itself, enough to demand significant evidence for any positive statements of what's natural or not.

That plot would fit into, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which had a viewship in the millions) no problem.

Also, if you're going to say things like "natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people" (down thread), you're going to have to bring some double-blind, peer-reviewed evidence.

This is a controversial subject that's overflowing with armchair sociologists. Right now you're indistinguishable from them.

Are you sure that's not spam?

This is essentially Trump's plan, which has had a hard time finding anyone in the field of economics to back it.

Can you point to anyone who has qualifications beyond being a pundit that believes that things would work out as you say?

Have you considered the possibility that there might be more than two ways (Randian capitalism or Marxist communism) to run an economy?

That's the standard ideological line, but this whole story is about how Apple is stockpiling cash, not investing.

(And yes, I understand that the cash isn't just stuffed in a mattress, but it's an important distinction that the money isn't being invested in the direct sense)

Genuine question: given this, am I correct in thinking that if there was a big corporate tax cut the most likely outcome is that the money retained would just further inflate this savings glut?

It's deserved:

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11833548/donald-trump-support-ra...

That theoretically makes the hack harder (you've got to hack two systems/vendors), but we're talking about attackers with potentially state-level resources.

The bigger problem is that it can be used to verify that a coerced voter cast their ballot the way that the coercer wanted.

My question is: why go through all this incredible effort, and take such huge risks, when paper ballots do the job just fine?

The right talks about more freedom, but their actions result in less of it.

Arbitrary power used to be much more concentrated in one particular race and one particular gender. The left has been trying to diffuse that power, the right is trying to re-concentrate it.

Furthermore, there is the concentration of power that comes with having vastly more money than the median person, and the ability to use it politically. Or the power that comes from monopolistic control over an industry. The left generally seeks to curb these powers (e.g. the fight against Citizens United, or for more antitrust action).

The Magna Carta is illustrative: it's a set of regulations aimed at reducing the exercise of absolute power. The lesson is: if you restrict the powerful, the net freedom of the population increases.

A more modern example: the regulations that prohibit companies from firing their employees without cause are a reduction in freedom for the employer, true. But with them, the far more numerous employees are now more free to be and say things that upset the powerful within the company (in ways that are specifically unrelated to the performance of the work) without fearing retribution. Overall, an increase of freedom.

The right wing, under the banner of "less regulations", have consistently lessened the protections of the weak against arbitrary power. They fight for the freedom of those with money, corporate power, and political influence to do as they please. That's a retrogression of overall freedom, and (IIRC) exactly what Atwood was talking about.

Estonia's system is absolutely hackable. Anything that runs on commodity hardware or a commodity OS is. See my rant in the main thread.

Imagine if you took a vote with paper ballots, and then went to every one of the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people who had a hand in creating a voting machine (think of the millions of lines of code in the OS and drivers, and the billions of transistors) and left the unsealed box of votes with each of them, alone, for several hours. That box would travel to people in many foreign countries, some working for intelligence agencies. Would you trust the votes after that?

It's possible to hide exploits in so many places - consider the obfuscated C contests, or the trojans that have been found in SSDs, or that hack a while ago where someone compromised a RNG by undetectably tweaked the dopant levels on a chip.

It takes very little to swing an election if you're strategic, sometimes less than 1% of the vote, and having the head of a state owe you a favour (not to mention the blackmail material), is well worth compromising one or more of the people involved in the production of the machine.

To make a demonstrably exploit-free voting machine, you'd have to design and manufacture every chip yourself and write every line of software (including the OS) yourself. Not only that, but everyone involved would have to be trusted to not be bribed, and to not make any mistakes that could lead to an external exploit. That's completely unrealistic, so countries are essentially saying "it's OK if there's a possibility for someone to take control of our country through fraud, because even though we know for sure that it's possible, we don't think it will happen to us".

Elections are too important to let the fools and charlatans who say things like "unhackable" to have influence over anyone with the the power to make decisions about electronic voting machines. Everything is hackable, given the resources and the motivations. Gaining control of an entire country is sufficient to have both.

Ah, the good old Social Darwinism argument.

It's a left-wing value that you can, and should, separate the person and what they believe from their actions.

If anyone were to suggest that we should ban Trump supporters from immigrating to my country, I would be very opposed to that. I would also be opposed to denying those people the ability to hold public office, or receive services, etc., based on their beliefs.

So it's fine to be a Muslim. But if a person wants to use public forums to push Sharia law, which includes the subjugation of women and punishment of gays, I support removing their access to those forums. What goes on in that person's head, or what they discuss in the privacy of their homes/email/etc., is none of my business, no matter how odious I find it. But if those beliefs start impacting the public and are discriminatory, then the hammer comes down.

You see it as hypocrisy to condemn specific actions without also condemning affiliated people. I see those as separate things, so you can have a different policy for each. You can't punish people for something you think they believe should be done, but that they haven't actually done or incited others to do themselves.

Trump and Pence have both taken substantive actions against Muslims and gays, not based on what those populations actually did, but based on what they believe or who they are. If a Muslim campaigned for and legislated in accordance with Sharia law, I would condemn them in exactly the same way (but more strongly).

But I will not condemn every Muslim a priori even though I completely disagree with their beliefs.

Please be more open minded in the future.

Please be less condecending in the future.

I'm mostly responding to your "Why does diversity initiatives never seem to care about diversity of political opinions?" question.

I'm saying that it's legitimate for diversity initives to not support all political positions in the name of diversity. Yes, it's a paradox, but it's not something that hasn't been addressed.

And, yes, the Trump ticket was intolerant. You can make the argument solely on the grounds of the anti-muslim rhetoric, not to mention his running mate's public views on gay rights.

If you haven't heard anyone address that point, you haven't looked very hard. It's an (IMO) important part of the left-wing philosophy to be intolerant of intolerance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

My take is that the "hacked the election" is mostly a right-wing framing.

What's much more interesting is evidence of collusion: money changing hands in undisclosed ways, policies changing dramatically after secret meetings, means of blackmail, etc. The first two wouldn't surprise me at all at this point.

The point being: if a foreign - hostile - state has substantial, non-disclosed power over US executive branch, that's a very big deal, and there's a number of laws meant to prevent exactly that sort of thing. The speculation is that at least one of these laws has been broken - that's much more damning than evidence of troll armies trying to sway votes.

At best that's correct in a very narrow sense; my point is that extrapolating that model wholesale into the realm of politics has had real and very dangerous repercussions.

You're not wrong, but I also think that culturally we've made a big mistake by not acknowledging that there's a gradient here.

There /is/ an objective reality, and we can measure it to varying degrees of accuracy. The air temperature at a given place and a given time, for instance. Of course there's always the possibility of it being wrong (e.g. a passing hot air current, a faulty thermometer, etc.), but to live as though you can't record the temperature is absurd. It paralyses action based on evidence, rather than ideology, if everything is considered equally suspect.

Yes, we're going to get it wrong sometimes, and that has a cost. But there's also a cost to thinking that you can't ever get it right, and that is letting people the who routinely dismiss inconvenient evidence have their way all the time. I think we've swung too far towards the latter.

I'm in the same boat. But my naivete was in thinking it would be easier to dispel lies when facts where easily linked to. The propagandists' workaround was to just attack facts.

Forgive the pedantry, but The Prince has /always/ been viewed as a how-to-manual, because it literally is one.

I understand the argument for excluding housing, food, and fuel from the official inflation stats, but at this point it's making that number a complete departure from reality.

Canada right now is basically getting divided into two classes: those who happened to own real estate a decade or two ago and their children, and everyone else.

That's not success based on how hard you worked, or how much you contributed to society, or proportionate to the amount of risk you took. It's just (mostly) Chinese money randomly landing on some of the population, and causing real issues with quality of life and serious opportunity costs for the rest. That is not something we should be happy about, and it's something that we should have better numbers on.