dubfan

That's fair. It seems police forces across the US have learned to be less confrontational against protestors, and in general this has been a good thing.

I've expressed this in a sub-optimal manner, but I'm concerned about what I see as an erosion in the degree to which we give police officers discretion about how to do their jobs in the name of what amounts to a political ideology. I'm also concerned about what I see as a mentality of fear and distrust against authority (of all types, not just law enforcement), and the tendency to act on this fear rather than trying to ensure that those who have authority have it for the right reasons.

Freedom isn't the ability "to do" something or anything, it is simply the absence of coercion.

A profound point apparently lost on so-called intellectuals. Thank you for understanding.

Yeah, being late to my job because my bus can't get through a protest and getting fired as a result is just a slight inconvenience.

They have as much of a right to speak as I have to ignore them. When my right to ignore them is taken away, I have a problem with that.

The protestors are using fear (the fear of being attacked by police) to achieve a political goal (somewhat murky but the general gist seems to be to accelerate the depolicing of cities).

The protests went further than just shutting down the freeways, at least in my city. Here they blocked a transit tunnel that moves commuters through downtown, forcing the buses to use crowded surface streets and completely disabling the light rail.

The social pendulum in the U.S. has swung far too far towards an authoritarian police state.

My view is it's gone the opposite direction. We've neutered our police forces such that they can't even protect the rights of citizens to go about their business without being impeded by anti-authoritarian protestors, and we've accepted that as a fact of life. If this country didn't have the inertia of having the world's reserve currency and the largest industrial capacity for a crucial ~50-60 year period, nobody would invest in us given our social unrest.

That's disappointing. I come to HN to get away from political discussions.

The right to peaceably assemble shouldn't supersede the right for citizens to go about their business. The protests crossed that line when they started shutting down freeways and transit. The only difference between that and terrorism is the rhetoric.

If your valuation rises, you might be forced to move by taxes. If it drops, you lose services and the place starts to get grubby.

Or, if you live in SF, Seattle or Portland, your taxes go up but you still get poor quality services and everything is still grubby.

The NY Times is known for their characteristic headline style: http://observer.com/2014/02/for-the-new-york-times-headlines...

I place "The World According To Monsanto" in the same league as "Zeitgeist" and "Loose Change". Great if you want affirmation of your worldview, pretty underwhelming if you're interested in facts.

The first GM crop to be licensed for human consumption in the US was the Flavr Savr tomato, which contained a trait that improved their shelf life and appearance. It was a commercial flop and taken off the shelves after a few years on the market.

* GMOs tend to promote monoculture and pesticide use.

That's true for industrialized agriculture in general and not specific to GMOs. Growing GMOs doesn't promote monoculture or pesticide use any more than growing conventional crops do. In fact the same farmers that grow GMOs often grow conventional crops at the same time, or switch from year to year, with very little change in their practices.

* Studies have shown that the same developments that make GMOs more insect resistant can also make them more difficult to digest.

Without knowing what studies those are, it's impossible for me to rebut or defend it. I will say, the record on studies that claim to show that GMOs have safety issues is not a good one (http://academicsreview.org/2012/09/scientists-smell-a-rat-in...)

* When it comes to animals, GMOs tend to have much poorer quality of life and tend to be completely incapable of surviving without constant support (chickens who can't stand on their own, cows who can't go more than 48 hours without milking, etc).

I am not aware of any GM livestock in use. Monsanto, the bogeyman of anti-GMO activists, does not research or produce GM animals. AFAIK the only GM animals on the market are things like glowing goldfish.

* GMOs almost never focus on the true value of a food item, but rather the sell value. A food that looks nutritious is more valuable than one that actually is and GMOs make it easier to create that false association (deep red tomatos that taste like wall paper glue, etc).

Again this is a broader symptom of industrialized food production and is not related to GMOs. Yes, there are GM traits that are meant to do what you expect (e.g. the Flavr Savr tomato which was a commercial flop, and the Arctic Apple which is just recently rolling out) but this is a trend that goes back decades.

Propaganda works both ways, and Sourcewatch has a massive blind spot when it comes to anti-corporate propaganda. Their page on Monsanto is full of uncritically repeated propaganda from the likes of Vandana Shiva.

Universities in Germany are free for everyone, besides the semester fee which is negligible. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/29...

Very cool. Years back I attempted to write a web app in Python to chat with MegaHAL, and though I managed to get something working, I was in way over my head at the time and the app had too many bugs to release to the public.

I don't think anyone here is trying to tear Davis down. It's just that his writings can reflect poorly on our community as a whole to those who aren't familiar with his circumstances. In the current climate of hit-piece, shoot-first-ask-questions-never outrage journalism, for which the straw man of the out-of-touch privileged techie is a favorite punching bag, you can't be too careful.

I've been seeing a lot of these types of articles lately, trying to convince how bad off the American worker is and how those fat cats in the 1% are siphoning all of the wealth away. I've also noticed a recent uptick in socialist-populist activity. I'm not sure which is the cart and which is the horse but it seems like articles like this have a specific political agenda in mind.

At least the conservative think tank is up front about their bias, unlike HuffPo.

Also, Osborne went out of business in 1985, but the 486 didn't debut until 1989.

I recall that the site has some flamewar detection algorithm that will penalize a story if it detects a flamewar. I don't have a source for this at the moment, though.

Prejudice isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a society, we're fighting over where the line is between "bad prejudice" and "good prejudice", and the tech gender gap is just one of many battlegrounds in that fight.

Does anyone else find it strange that the author uses an article that uncritically repeats the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax as an example of dispelling myths? Doublethink indeed.

I hate to be that guy, but...

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

That's just a red herring to make you think they aren't rigging elections!

</tinfoilhat>

Or for suggesting that capitalism isn't all the bee's knees in 1950s America. How quickly we forget.

There does seem to be a movement to purge anyone with unpopular opinions from the public sphere, regardless of the context in which they developed their beliefs and how irrelevant their beliefs are to the work for which they earned fame. That it's now largely coming from the left wing, which suffered great marginalization during the Red Scare and McCarthyism, is ironic (and depressing as someone who used to identify as a liberal)

Probably not. Agriculture in the western US relies on irrigation due to water scarcity, but places like Iowa have the opposite problem. They actually shunt water off of their fields. Also, losses of agricultural water due to evapotranspiration are higher in CA than in a state like WA due to the hotter, drier climate in CA.

Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, by Jonathan Rauch (http://www.amazon.com/Kindly-Inquisitors-Attacks-Thought-Exp...)

I picked this book up shortly after the Brendan Eich incident earlier this year. This book was written over 20 years ago but it could very well have been written yesterday. It lays out an excellent argument about why all free speech, even hateful speech, much be unrestricted. It's also very good at rebutting what Rauch calls the "humanitarian" attack on free speech, which seems to be the preferred method of attack in the last few years (in Western countries anyway). Perhaps saying that it "changed my life" is an overstatement as I've always held the belief that unrestricted free speech is the ultimate freedom, but it's allowed me to express exactly why I believe that way.