jbooth

That's not facebook data, that's DNC/Obama data, accumulated over time by other canvassers including your friend. They've done that since before Facebook even existed.

Facebook's product is not selling that data, it's selling ads using the data. You can only sell the data once, you can sell the ads forever.

Then you're dealing with long, nested invisible type declarations.

Quotes from the man's mouth aren't good enough?

Are those links editorials? No, they're not. They're straight reporting.

Are you disputing the quotations attributed to Thiel in the reporting? No, you don't seem to be.

You asked for examples of toxic viewpoints held by Thiel, someone delivered, and you plugged your fingers in your ears and said "lol facts don't matter". Don't be that guy.

There are a tiny minority of liberals who, rather than embracing breaking down barriers and a hunky-dory co-existence like the rest of us, erect barriers of purity and constantly call people out.

They're annoying.

On the other hand, that's the dominant mode for the entire right half of the spectrum so take their complaints with a grain of salt. And who gives the above-mentioned annoying liberals their biggest platform? Right wing media. Gotta feed the wurlitzer.

It's not a "differing and diverse political opinion" to think people of color and women are inherently less worthy, it's just racist/sexist.

They apply "MBA 101" to the system, best summarized as "extracting more money with better care as a distant second".

Was chatting with the doc during our second birth, the admins had just pulled a bait and switch on the practitioners. Instead of better equipment and surgery rooms, they were getting a few hundred more beds. Beds are easy to bill for. Surgery and actual care are way less profitable.

If you want to talk about continuous, evidence-based, detailed and unsexy reform of various laws and regulations in search of efficiency, I'm all on board. We all do that at our day jobs.

But none of that shit fits on a bumper sticker saying 'taxation is theft' or whatever, and it'll never be a byline on Fox News. I couldn't even give a short, vaguely accurate description of the FDA trials process, let alone an expert description. I think there are 4 stages? That's where I cap out. It sounds like you couldn't, either. But the current system, whatever its flaws, doesn't allow people to ship poisonous babyfood like happened in China a few years ago. Successful reform preserves the whole "don't kill people" thing while increasing efficiency.

Platitudes about 'small government' and 'liberty' don't enable reform, they hamper it by banishing thought. Look at the tea party's legislative record.

'Inherently linked' is a misnomer. We're in the driver's seat here, we're not at the mercy of the weather. If we can set our trade policy, then we can set our tax policy and budget.

Raise taxes on the rich (short of making globalization a net loss to them), fund infra projects that put lots of blue-collar people to work, and in a generation we've got a bunch of cool shit on top of increased mobility and a better consumer economy. Everyone wins.

How's that work in practice?

"Am I being detained?!"

"You can't mug me, I have a right not to be mugged!"

It's not a law of nature. The laws of nature are things like "the strongest take what they want" and "cannibalism not only feeds you, it removes competitors from the food chain!". Inalienable rights must be enforced in order to exist.

globalism has not worked out for substantial parts of the population in most developed countries

Pardon my language, but that's crap. Every developed country has seen yuuuuge profits from globalism.

What, not all of it trickled down you say? That's a distribution problem. It's not a problem with globalization.

Shrinking the pie in order to pursue a more fair distribution is some ass-backwards, rube-goldberg-machine nonsense. Take the profits, fix the distribution. Invest in infrastructure while you're at it.

"This begins by having a limited gov't"

No, that's oversimplistic and silly.

I'm all for having leaner operations as far as that goes, but let's say there's a new law restricting people from bribing elected officials, complete with a funded enforcement arm.. is that 'less' or 'more' government? 'less' or 'more' liberty?

You will never, ever, ever have a government that's too small to be worth bribing.

It really doesn't in regards to land in modern society, though. Ownership of land is quite literally a deed on file with the government.

Feudal society, maybe.

That's not how Amtrak works now, they price it the same way as airlines, last minute is more expensive.

I'm in NYC and would never, ever fly to Boston or DC. For what that's worth.

It happens slowly.

Typically the condo board is in charge of contracting a management company who they give the fees to in order to keep up the place.

Said condo board is typically made up of retirees with the time to do it and they're less sophisticated than the management company.

Over time, the fees go up while the management company skates by doing a little less each year.

The labor camp comment was in response to someone calling quote 'china' a quote 'psychopath' while being very obviously ignorant about what it's like inside the country. So I'm gonna have to disagree if you're saying they were straw-manning a thoughtful and balanced comment.

There aren't billions of politically involved Chinese but there ARE millions of party members, with their own agendas and political battles rolling all the way up. It's not 5 people in a smoky room, and it's definitely not the same 5 people as 30 years ago.

It's a billion people and a big political system that we don't have a lot of visibility into. This whole thread is filled with simplistic, black and white dumbassery.

From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.

It's not whataboutism to point out that every great power, for thousands of years, has done that same thing.

Why's it worse in this case?

It's like saying Hollande and Chirac are both part of the 5th Republic regime. Technically true but not indicative of anything and probably a red herring.

That's not what the person was saying, though. They were saying something much more simplistic.

To your point, I'd say all 3 parties (D, R and CCP) have had slow and continuous ideological drift. All 3 are unrecognizable compared to 1989.

Easy for you to say. Last time China had a radical change of governments there were a few speed bumps.

It's not nearly as cut and dried as you'd make it. How many Chinese deaths would be justified for such a transition, in your opinion?

Yeah, those. Watch the video and tell me how bloodless it was. Or how it's not a massacre.

I'm not defending a thing about Tiananmen square, I'm just marvelling at the power of nationalism to excuse anything.

Bunch of snakes in suits with American flag pins declare a war for no reason, knowing that hundreds of thousands will die, but it's all Legitimate State Behavior. I'm sure it's a huge comfort to the orphans.

You ever see the shock and awe videos of Baghdad? That our government approvingly worked with cable news to make sure everyone saw it? For an operation very much not endorsed by the UN or international community?

Good thing that's not a war crime, though.

"what the market will bear" isn't necessarily appropriate for a public good, though.

It might maximize ticket revenue if they priced some people out of taking the train. Doesn't maximize good for the city, or even revenue for the city if some marginal person decides to stay home instead of going to work.

Yeah. Academia doesn't care about interesting applications, they care about novel methods.

"I made a huge difference for the business by being thoughtful about feature selection and then applying a bog-standard regression method" isn't appealing to the academic mindset.

I'm sorry, are you saying that India should control the whole Indian ocean and the West Indies for good measure? Maybe some reservations in Arizona as well?

Specifically, what will happen is Democrats will have to clean up the mess, and the GOP and their cheerleaders will call the fix 'job killing tax hikes'.

But that's later! Right now it's a red herring to call the mess a mess.

That's all fine, but IN CONTEXT, OP is still getting robbed. They're paying higher taxes while the super-rich pay lower taxes.

They could have passed a bill that eliminated those deductions and gave corresponding tax breaks to the middle class. They could have passed a bill that skipped the tax breaks for the super-rich and actually cut the deficit. I'm OK with paying my fair share if we were actually solving problems.

But no. We've gotta pay higher taxes while still blowing a hole in the deficit? In what world does that make sense?

Do most of your coworkers self-apply the term 'leftist'? If not, why would you call them that? Seems impolite. Especially if they're actually a mix of neoliberal and libertarian technocrats.

Maybe it's just zero tolerance for inaccurate name calling.

You've got some causality backwards, there. Interest rates were at basement levels before QE. QE was an inflationary measure in part intended to keep rates from going even lower into the negative.

QE was a reaction and counterpressure to low rates, not the cause.

".. could have gotten through if they had been a bit less sloppy"

.. and if my aunt had different bits she'd be my uncle. Of course a perfectly executed plot with hard-to-fake corroborating details and no holes whatsoever could have fooled them. WaPo reporters aren't perfect.

But they ARE genuinely interested in the truth, and interested in doing due diligence to ensure they're reporting it. Above personal politics or personal likes/dislikes of public figures. Conservative media don't seem to understand that. Maybe they can't understand it.