kimdcmason

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Wat? You just stated that it's inappropriate to smile at a co-worker of the opposite sex.

That's sufficiently bizarre that I assume you misread the original post... (I'm applying Occam's razor).

"Or britain - you know the place that 1984 was about. Or germany, spain, canada, russia, saudi arabia, etc."

What rubbish. The assertion that nations like Canada are comparable in terms of freedom to nations like Russia and Saudi Arabia is utterly bizarre.

Citation needed.

Why is it a dangerous notion? For the sake of argument, if everyone went completely over the top and deleted all their social media accounts, the world would go back to looking like it did around 2006. A few corporations would go broke. A few other corporations values would increase. Mass psy-ops would become more difficult and expensive.

Doesn't sound dangerous at all to me.

This times a million. Delete the FB account now, install uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger, and the data about you that's out there will become increasingly stale.

I never liked the reciprocal friend model of Facebook, and I liked even less that it was exposed publicly by default, allowing anyone to crawl the social graph. Even if you lock down your friend list, it doesn't matter because your friends mostly aren't locking down theirs.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal clearly demonstrates why this is a dangerous thing. The clear solution is to unfriend everybody then delete (not suspend, but delete) your account.

Enough people do this, and Facebook's cherished network effect will be weakened enough for better alternatives to begin appearing. Alternatives that don't vomit large amounts of data about you into the public sphere by default.

It's libertarian extremism. It's simply the reverse of communism, where the taxation level is 100%, and the state provides everything. Under this model, the taxation level is 0, and the government provides nothing.

Neither of these models works at all.

Sounds sensible, but how does one ensure that the "lots of consumer options" part holds? There seem to be quite a few sectors with winner-take-all dynamics (e.g. social networking), and quite a few other sectors that under many conditions tend toward oligopoly or monopoly (e.g. insurance, banking, credit history reporting).

"Atheist are on that front the same, and believe 100% there is no god."

This is a false statement. The rest of your post is supposition and anecdote.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0012902/

tldr; speed traps save lives and reduce injury.

It didn't strike me as snarky at all, and it's also not obvious considering that many people want the police warnings so that they can break the law. Apparently complying with laws is seen as optional by a lot of folks, and the result is mass deaths and injury.

Police and red light camera warnings in Waze always struck me as both encouragement and enablement of deliberate law breaking.

Anecdotes are not data.

"Offshore developed code is not usually the same quality."

American exceptionalism and absolutely wrong.

All of these seem sensible except "Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that."

"Your mission" is simply a placeholder for what you believe will make you happy. It's very subject to change. I'd argue that a healthy respect for what makes you happy can help you avoid a mission that you'll later regret.

The vast majority of clothes are made in low wage countries because economics. Putting others down because they dared buy inexpensive clothing is sanctimonious claptrap.

The blue jeans I'm wearing made in Lesotho disagree with you.

Doesn't sound arrogant at all. People are pressed for time, and the costs of spending time on clothing outweigh the benefits for many.

The suit is dead except explicitly formal occasions. The global financial crisis killed it. Basically every person commuting securities fraud in the oughts did so while wearing a suit. Think about who you now see wearing suits - bankers, salesmen, and politicians. Occupations that trigger a range of responses from general mistrust to downright loathing.

Suits have become a liar's uniform. Whenever I encounter anyone in this mode of dress who isn't an obvious dandy, I'm immediately on the watch for tactics to squeeze as much money out of me as possible.

This leaves business casual and casual. As the article points out, most of those haven't seen substantial change for years. People don't get rid of clothes these days because they're out of style. Given these trends, it would amaze me if clothing sales weren't down substantially.

"the Fed reacted with big interest rate hikes that sent the stock market plummeting."

Wat? We're still in of one of the longest bull runs in history. The S&P 500 jumped 80% in the last 5 years. Even incorporating the minor market correction in the last week (2/3rds of which has already recovered), the stock market has done the reverse of what you suggest.

I’m not convinced. It does that for a high percentage of the population. However, after a period, the smaller percentage of the population that don’t reduce their birth rate will become increasingly dominant.

Current examples are the rapid growth of Orthodox Jews as a percentage of Israel’s population, and evangelical birth rates in the US.

My bet is that given technology to allow massive extension of fertility into older age, the fertility differences between religious groups that believe in a religious duty to procreate, and everyone else, will increase even more.

Being bitten by a snake is in no way comparable to drunk driving.

I prefer to deal with the world as it is, rather than as I wish it to be. The US government has never worked the way you describe.

Unfortunately, when it comes to legislation and budget considerations (including education), lobbying works.

My understanding isn't especially deep, but I believe AMD prevents access to unloaded pages that the code doesn't have permission to access, even for speculative access. Their specific quote is:

"AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault."

What it does is create a branch in code that is never actually followed, but is executed speculatively by the CPU, which then discards the result. The problem is that even though the result is discarded, computation of the result causes a measurable side effect (specifically, it populates caches accessible to the code).

In short, the speculatively executed branch retrieves a value from a kernel page (that the code shouldn't have access to) - Intel CPUs allow this, but AMD CPUs do not. It then &s the value with 0x01, and then uses the result to calculate and access an address in a page that it DOES have access to.

This results in that address being stored in the TLB (i.e. a cache that stores mapping from virtual to physical memory).

The result of the computation is then discarded, but the address that it calculated is still in TLB. Since there are two possible addresses that could have been cached based on the value of the data in the kernel page, all the code has to do is time the access to each address, and it can discern the value of the bit in the kernel page based on the relative timings.