kthxbye123

To his mind, the greatest possible evil is that someone, somewhere, might be held accountable for their actions.

That's his point. There's no comparison between entering the public part of an office during business hours and what happened yesterday.

I really doubt the inevitable failure of all of these predictions will be the "end of the line." Messianic cults and movements are surprisingly resilient to unmet expectations. "When Prophecy Fails", etc.

The (very reasonable) comment this reply was originally threaded with is now dead, so I’ll post it here:

Some level of fraud in a social welfare system is absolutely acceptable, if tightening controls to eliminate the fraud would mean that otherwise eligible people didn’t receive benefits they qualified for, or even if it meant that accessing those benefits became much more onerous. I don’t doubt that $36bn is too high, but this kind of analysis is almost never present in these articles and politically in this country the spectre of fraud is usually used as an anti-welfare cudgel

Some level of fraud in a social welfare system is absolutely acceptable, if tightening controls to eliminate the fraud would mean that otherwise eligible people didn’t receive benefits they qualified for, or even if it meant that accessing those benefits became much more onerous. I don’t doubt that $36bn is too high, but this kind of analysis is almost never present in these articles and politically in this country the spectre of fraud is usually used as an anti-welfare cudgel

Man, you think that's bad, just wait until you hear about how Americans treated the legacy of a gang of violent slave-owning traitors who tried to destroy the country and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in the process

He's only 50. How 'few good work years' do you think he has left?

I don't understand how they could miss on 'interest'. Isn't this literally just based on what you 'like'? That shouldn't require advanced ML, just a simple JOIN!

The whole game for the social sociopaths is to pretend that the federal government had no obligation to provide for people's livelihoods during lockdown - which they absolutely did, obviously. This was wholly intentional, to sabotage health-and-safety conscious Democratic local governments, and force them into the Sophie's choice of mass unemployment or mass death among their constituents (local GOP leaders, for the most part, of course didn't actually care about mass death OR mass employment, since their constituency is the handful of billionaires who fund the whole party and right-wing ideological apparatus; so they were able to further sabotage the health-and-safety efforts by simply refusing to implement any).

The state and local governments that shutdown did the right thing - they put the health and safety of their populations first. The federal government failed them by defaulting on its obligations. It did this intentionally.

I think there's a lot of reasons. Part of it is that, as the power of the tech industry has grown, journalists have become more active in exposing how it abuses that power to make the country, and the world, a worse and more degrading place to live in, and people on HN don't like being reminded of how they contribute to that.

There's also a ton of people who are just reflexively hostile to the idea that society is systematically unjust and exceptionally hostile to the idea that they benefit from the ways in which it is unjust, and as mainstream journalism has been largely sympathetic to these ideas, they are in turn reflexively hostile to mainstream journalism.

There are a lot of half-wits, especially in tech, who think reflexive contrarianism is a sure sign of intelligence and wisdom.

Am I allowed to come into your house and scream into your ear without limit? Can you expect to go into a synagogue and hang a nazi flag from the rafters without them being able to ban you from the premise?

I think that much of this kind of stupid discourse on HN is driven by thiel-worshipping reactionaries who believe weird theories about why their genes make them better than black people, but another huge part of it seems to be literally fourteen year old libertarians. Which are you?

Look at what Democrats said just this year. Nadler asserted that if he wasn’t impeached, Trump would “rig the 2020 election.”

How can you possibly say this is mere paranoia in the face of an active, ongoing attempt by both the President and a huge portion of the institutional GOP to do exactly that?

106 House Republicans have just joined in a lawsuit by 18 Republican AGs to overturn the results of the election. The Trump administration of course followed eight years of ferociously racist conspiracy-mongering about Obama's illegitimate birth. The GOP is a minority party that simply rejects the legitimacy of their political opponents to hold office. Why do you persist in these ridiculous false equivalences? They're not even 10% different, they're 100% different.

Frankly, Gore should not have conceded - allowing the Bush campaign to steal that election set the stage for the unprecedented abuses of power that followed.

The current attempt to steal the election is bound to fail, but it's setting up the GOP playbook for stealing a closer, more plausibly contested presidential election.

There's a terminally Online neo-fascist who goes around interviewing other terminally Online personalities. Of interest only to maybe a few thousand people globally who spend all their time following schizophrenic racists on twitter.

Trust the plan, Q is coming!

Nor did nearly twenty Democratic-controlled states sue in federal court to overturn the results of the election, as just happened today!

Coincidentally, “the state has decided to ease up on its brutal repression of poor black people” is also why the Musk family left South Africa

Curious to hear from the downvoters. What about Peter Thiel’s banal punditry justifies overlooking his active and enthusiastic contributions to neo-Nazis?

Don’t think for a second you fool anyone, buddy.

Name the specific true facts about reality you think these models are capturing that are at risk of being 'purified' by AI ethicists. List them.

What politically uncomfortable regularities are those? Please name the specific uncomfortable true facts about reality that you think these models are capturing.

Porn producers in the United States are already required to maintain a registry of their performers so that it can be verified that none of them are under 18. I'm not sure why you are reacting to a solution that is in some sense already implemented with such cynical sarcasm, especially when the alternate is "let this tech company continue to profit from sex crimes"

Sex education will stop rapists and child abusers from uploading videos of their victims to the Internet?

I don't think Kristof's solution is necessarily the best one, but you sound like you don't take the problem seriously at all.

Ideologically, politically and aesthetically Mishima was clearly a dead end, but I’ve always found him of minor interest because his aesthetic was so clearly Westernized in a way that earlier strains of Japanese fascism weren’t. The campy, macho-hysterical aesthetic elements that have been present in western far-right movements from D’Annunzio to Trump weren’t really present in the prewar Japanese military government, but Mishima was really almost their apotheosis. It’s kind of ironic - rather than being a throwback to a pure strain of Japanese masculine identity, he was really a syncretist.

What a sad way to indulge the urge for petty vandalism. At least graffiti carries some risk and sex appeal.

I'm not talking about you personally, obviously I don't know or care what you do or who you are (although if you suddenly came up with a way to make $6 million, perhaps I’d take an interest). I'm merely making a correct observation about a phenomenon of which you are a small part.

It is of course even more ludicrous to expect anonymity when you have solved the lottery in states that do not permit anonymous winners.

It is unacceptable to try to track someone down about money through their parents.

As a blanket statement, that's nonsense. Stalking someone's parents to collect an unpaid medical would certainly be unacceptable. A polite DM or e-mail requesting an interview with someone who has apparently come up with a foolproof method to generate millions of dollars is entirely reasonable.

The recent outburst of hostility to journalism in the tech sector is absolutely the result of a lot of tech and tech-adjacent sacred cows coming in for public examination and criticism for the first time, and a driving factor is absolutely driven by the tendency of tech sector workers to personally identify with their employers. If this is not apparent to you, then you are

But regardless, if you come up with any kind of system to generate millions of dollars, whether it's a business or a way to game the lottery, you should absolutely expect to be subject to public scrutiny and it's ludicrous to frame a Facebook DM as an unacceptable invasion of privacy (making this argument while working in the surveillance-tech sector elevates the absurdity to self-parody)

Lately there’s been a burst of intense anti-journalist sentiment generated by various tech plutocrats who would prefer to be free of public investigation or criticism. This sentiment trickles down to professional class workers with aspirational visions of becoming plutocrats, where it is enthusiastically aped and amplified, and applied indiscriminately to basically any journalistic endeavor, under the principal that the wealthy and influential should never have to be exposed to the public eye on anything other than their own terms