bleepblorp

Since Fox News started fact-checking Trump, Trump's followers have stopped treating Fox News as a reliable source and are voting with their feet towards OANN another very far right sources. They're clinging to lies (politely: disinformation) even in the face of evidence to the contrary from a source that they formerly considered reliable.

That is my point.

Conservatives (or, at least, Trump followers) will turn their backs on sources of information that they considered trustworthy if those sources contradict the leader de jour.

Cryptocurrency is the ponzi scheme for tech people.

Because the cryptocurrency ecosystem does not do investment -- likely in very large part because no one can buy anything legal with cryptocurrency -- returns for coiners who cash out must, by definition, come from later investments.

Paying earlier investors with the investments of those who follow is the definition of a ponzi scheme.

By the beginning of January, the termination of pandemic-related economic supports is expected to put 19 million Americans at risk of homelessness, and make 11% of the US population unable to afford to put food on the table.

The longer-term picture is that the millennials (born 1980 or later) will be the first generation in a very long time to have a lower standard of living than their parents did.

These are the kinds of problems civil unrest is made of.

You're shifting the goal posts from the question of a campaign conspiracy (coordination) to a broader question of inappropriate connections between Trump and Russia.

Further, the purpose of the Mueller report was not to investigate any of these issues. The Mueller investigation was very narrowly focused on whether the Trump campaign conspired (not 'colluded') with Russian entities during the 2017 campaign.

The additional issues you raise were outside of Mueller's remit. Those questions were supposed to be answered by a separate counterintelligence probe conducted by the DoJ. This separate investigation has vanished without a trace[0] and appears to have been killed or suppressed.

Leaving aside the conflict of interest issues inherent in the Trump DoJ investigating Trump, why would this investigation disappear, given how eager Barr would be to exonerate Trump if the outcome of the investigation would give the DoJ the slightest figleaf of justification to do so?

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/15/what-happ...

The role of fact checking is not to strive for partisan balance but rather to identify public comments that are untrue.

American conservatives would fall afoul of fact checking far less frequently if the conservative worldview wasn't wedded to talking points that are not factually accurate. For example:

There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. There is no evidence of ongoing large-scale voter fraud in US elections. There is no evidence that the incoming Biden administration intends to end capitalism. There were no 'convoys' of migrants preparing to violently storm the US-Mexico border prior to the 2018 midterms. Barrack Obama was not ineligible to serve as President. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is run by a cabal of pedophile cannibals. Etc.

A fact checker who does not point out the fact-free basis of these, and other, deeply-held conservative talking points is simply not doing his/her job.

If the weight of fact checking falls primarily against conservatives, then conservatives can fix that problem by lying less frequently.

What do you do when the Republican fact checker repeats what the leader of his party tells him to say even though it is fact-free?

A majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election (!) because that's what Trump is saying. There is little reason to think a Republican fact checker would contradict Trump. Indeed, any fact checker who did would be ostracized as a RINO, much as has happened with Fox News since they acknowledged the outcome of the vote.

Partisan fact checkers would only give the Republican party a safe space to continue to lie about matters of objective fact, such as who won the last election.

Frankly, the fact that 'what is truth' can be framed as a partisan issue in America speaks to much, much deeper societal problems than organized fact checking can fix. This is an attitude that is much more in keeping with that found in countries like Albania or North Korea rather than in another advanced democracy.

This is inaccurate. Go read the report, or at the very least read the Wikipedia summary.

The conclusion was that a conspiracy between Trumpworld and the Russian government could not be proved because the potential suspects on the US side hid, or destroyed, evidence and lied to investigators.

What were these people covering up -- at considerable risk to themselves for prosecution -- if there was nothing to hide?

Disinformation is dangerous because too many overly credulous people are all to willing to believe in alternative facts even if contradictory primary source materials are available.

There is very little evidence that fact checking actually works to reduce the impacts of disinformation. See e.g. this study of the impact of Twitter warnings on belief in disonformation:

https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.cornell.edu/dist/c/8659/...

The only known-effective way to deal with disinformation is to remove it.

News media. See e.g.:

https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/r...

for more information.

What sort of 'proposal' do you suggest to deter unethical business practices and encourage the prosecution of white collar crime under existing laws?

The problem with white collar crime isn't a lack of ideas, it's a lack of will among prosecutors and judges to punish it.

I don't see it as unjustified to point out that the primary risk actors in China's threat model will be the American armed forces and/or three letter agencies.

Quoting from your downstream posts for which HN is blocking replies:

The job is in fact risky, which is why the profession is so highly regarded.

Police work doesn't even break the top ten most dangerous careers in the US. Landscaping workers are more likely to die on the job than police officers.[0]

Police work is just not that dangerous.

[0] https://www.workandmoney.com/s/most-dangerous-jobs-29090b32c...

This post is advertising (spam) and contains no technical details.

Why would you assume the uplink isn't authenticated and/or encrypted, given that the downlink data has very little value but interfering with the uplink could disable the probe?

Spacecraft are power and compute limited. It's entirely possible the designers chose not to spend the resources to encrypt a downlink that isn't sending anything that needs to be kept secret. In contrast, it's reasonable to assume that the uplink is at least protected by a HMAC, because the consequences of an adversary exploiting the uplink are so great.

The Chinese are well aware that the US security establishment is petty enough to interfere with a scientific probe purely for its own amusement. They will have taken precautions to deter this.

What was your reason for posting this?

Risk factors are about probabilities, not certainties. Anyone who has even rudimentary exposure to statistics will understand this.

One single heartwarming anecdote does not invalidate the fact that the odds didn't work out for 1.4 million people world wide.

This explanation just reworks the question into one of why western interest rates are so low.

Western central banks can't raise interest rates above the lower bound without triggering unacceptable unemployment or even deflation. Indeed, the highest safe rate has fallen in the wake of every recession.

To me, this suggests major structural problems in the western economies. It's hard to think of a single explanation that applies to all (pre-pandemic) zero-interest rate western economies, however. The economic foundations in Australia, Canada, the UK, the US, and the EU are different enough that there is no obvious single structural fault common to all of them.

Why can't America build anymore? Is this a cultural problem, or a failure of public policy?

America can't build anymore because America's executives have chosen to steal every piece of wealth they can take without leaving anything behind to build for the future.

American business culture has become far more interested in zero-sum rentierism and financialization that rapidly concentrates existing wealth in the hands of the wealthy than in technological innovation that creates new wealth over the longer term.

The collapse of American industry is the entirely predictable consequence.

See also

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/18/clayton...

for a similar but slightly different take.

We're on different sides of the disinformation control debate but I completely agree with your take on the toxicity of HN.

This place is much worse than most of non-ideological Reddit.

Serious discussion of matters at the intersection of tech and policy, is not possible on HN when the downvote and flag tools are routinely used to suppress posts for ideological heresy rather than low effort, irrelevance, or bad faith argumentation.

Community moderation is incompatible with a community culture that values ideological conformity over respect for good faith argumentation.

An upvote-only karma system would be much more appropriate for tech policy threads.

Suppose, hypothetically, that someone with malicious intent installed an advertising billboard, next to your home, that falsely accused you of having committed a horrific crime. Suppose, further, that you lost your job and your family because of the false allegations on that billboard. Would you work to get that billboard taken down or would you put up your own billboard to deny the allegations and call it a day?

Proving disinformation wrong does not make it go away and the answer to malicious speech is not more speech.

Why do you believe the right of bad-faith actors to load disinformation into the minds of the gullible is more important than the right of uninvolved third parties to live?

It's one thing to spread disinformation that leads people to harm themselves (for example, by encouraging them to drink laundry detergent or bleach). It's quite another to spread disinformation that harms third parties. Third parties have no say in what disinformation the gullible choose to consume but they will be subject to the consequences of the gullible believing what they've been told.

Every polity that has something resembling a right to freedom of speech imposes limits on that speech when it can harm others. Libel, slander, and incitement are not generally tolerated. Restricting the spread of disinformation that increases the impact of a deadly pandemic is no different.

I do agree, however, that the final arbiter of what speech is acceptable should not rest with Youtube or any other private entity. This is a question for elected governments and the judiciary.

Bitcoin does not scale as a medium of exchange. It has a hard transaction limit of 7 transactions per second. In contrast, the VISA network alone can process at least 47,000 tps. The entire Bitcoin system would be hard pressed to serve the retail transaction needs of a large shopping mall, much less a city, country, or the world.

The hard cap on the number of Bitcoins also makes Bitcoin a deflationary asset/currency. Deflationary currencies have been known to be actively harmful since at least the great depression.

Overall, Bitcoin is a technological curiosity that is only attractive to people who don't know much of anything about monetary economics and have no desire to learn.

I think it’s really a middle ground. Yes, a large majority of the wealthy people did get there by working hard, and being disciplined with money.

That depends on how you define 'wealthy.' There is a vast gulf between the kind of money people of sound mind and body can get through hard work and the degree of wealth the truly rich actually own.

The guy who grew up in a ghetto but is now making a six figure income (anywhere but San Francisco) did it mostly though his own hard work. I would not, however, call that guy wealthy when compared to the truly rich.

The 40 people who own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the US population own it by virtue of being born to the right parents. There is no degree of hard work that will make someone a billionaire. Those people got that far by being born into a family that could give them seed capital and access to elite education that enmeshes them into the right social networks.

When people talk about income inequality, they're not talking about people earning $500,000 in wage income by working 80 hour weeks. Instead, they're talking about people who are extracting a tens of millions of dollars in economic rents (as largely untaxed capital gains) without needing to do any work for it.

Growth in inequality correlates very nicely with expansion of the money supply.

This gets complicated. The money supply has to expand to keep up with growth; getting the flexibility to do this is the reason why the world abandoned the gold standard. Failure to expand the monetary base adequately leads to deflationary economics, which is another kind of hell entirely.

That said, the fed's response to the last two economic disasters (2008 and 2020) has been to do quantitative easing in ways that do concentrate wealth in the hands of asset owners. Buying questionable assets with printed money does give the owners of those assets money at the expense of non-asset holders.

There are ways to respond to economic disasters without increasing inequality, but these choices are not politically feasible in America as they would involve giving money directly to people who don't have much of it.

Giving money to rich people (through monetary or fiscal policy) is seen as politically good, while giving money to anyone else is 'welfare' and is a political third rail.

Economists do know how to deal with these issues. The problem, as with everything else in America, is that the politicians (hello, Mitch McConnell) and interest groups (hello, Koch network) who have a veto over policy don't want to deal with them.

Part of the point the author makes is that the tech sector--as a cluster of monopolies with disproportionate socioeconomic power--is part of the economic problem.

Like it or not, the tech sector does not operate in a vacuum. What the tech sector enables, and how it concentrates wealth, has consequences for all of society. Anyone who is connected to the tech industry, as an investor or employee, has a social obligation to be aware of the externalities created by this industry.

No one gets to mix paint thinner into the office coffee and then cry 'stop playing office politics' when they get called on it.

Man, this thread really bringing out the worst of Hackernews and its so disappointing but unfortunately not surprising to see the complete lack of capacity for empathy from some of the other heavily downvoted commenters.

That's an improvement over the usual HN COVID-19 threads, where 'it's just a hoax-flu, bro, stop spreading fear' usually gets upvoted and posts pointing out the dangers of SARS-CoV-2--and of SARS-CoV-2 disinformation--are downvoted, flagged, or removed.

The most generous interpretation is that HN has a severe Dunning-Kruger problem. The more likely explanation is that HN is host to a lot of people who are completely incapable of empathy and are unable to protect themselves from disinformation in areas outside of their own expertise.

This doesn't say much for HN or the tech sector in general.

. .

A contagious biological virus is not conceptually different from the Morris Worm. If there was a neo-Morris Worm loose on the Internet, those of us on the sysadmin-side of the IT house would take all reasonable measures to protect our systems from it. Indeed, failing to do so would be negligent.

Failing to take protective measures (social distancing, masks, WFH) against SARS-CoV-2 is no different from putting unpatched systems directly on the internet while a worm is active. It's so clearly negligent that no one whatsoever should advocate for it.

Ocean freight has far lower emissions per tonne/km than road, rail, or air transport[0].

[0] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/specific-...

Yes, of course. If one side wants to behead a scientist for talking about reality and the other side thinks the same scientist should guide policy, we should carefully listen to both sides, and then compromise by cutting the scientist's fingers off. I am very smart.

Not all views have equal value. Giving equal consideration to crackpots and con artists (e.g. flat eathers, alternative medicine advocates, climate change deniers, COVID deniers, antivaxx advocates, election results deniers) only benefits the crackpots and con artists.

Reality matters; promoting a false balance[0] only helps those people who object to reality for dubious reasons.

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

Given the proliferation of lower-performing SMR drives, effective HDD prices have actually gone up rather than down. We're forced to pay the same price for grossly inferior products.

Another way to describe the difference between Germany and India is that's the difference between a rich society and a poor society that has (a few) rich people in it. This distinction also correlates with multiple factors of collective well-being, including life expectancy, and income inequality.

America made the choice in the 1980s, with the arrival of Reagan, to transition from being a rich society to being a poor society that has a fair number of rich people in it. Income inequality has deteriorated since then, the quality of public services/public infrastructure has severely degraded, and social trust is rapidly eroding. It's almost certainly too late to change course.

This information is easily found on Wikipedia for those curious enough to look.