mikeash

And that explanation was that he’s done a bunch of valuable stuff. But your first answer to me was “justice.” These don’t match at all.

The comparison with the African kid went over my head because approximately none of the people pouring so much effort into being outraged that Stallman got fired have a close personal connection with him. Sure, I’m more upset when a friend suffers than when a stranger does. But you’re not friends with Stallman, are you?

You seem to be saying that it’s not really about “justice” at all, but rather that it’s purely about defending people who have done a lot of visibly valuable things. Did I get that right?

I don’t think it’s a false dichotomy at all. This same community discusses other things, far worse things, and we can compare them. When this community discusses victims of harassment who get fired for reporting it, there isn’t nearly this much time and energy spent on it. When an article about a drone strike blowing up an Afghan wedding made the front page recently, there wasn’t this much outrage. Uber covers up actual crimes and the discussion degenerates into arguments about whether there’s any duty to report crimes to the police. People get fired all the time for far smaller infractions and everybody just shrugs.

Why does this community care so much about what happens to this asshole?

Sorry, I’m going to call assholes assholes. I don’t know why people get so upset at swear words. People are saying all sorts of heinous shit in these comments, but apparently this is fine as long as you don’t use one of the Seven Deadly Words.

Your mirror question is missing the decades of context that led up to this.

Edit: I should note that “asshole” isn’t a random insult. It’s highly relevant. People get fired for being assholes while at work. For jobs that involve interacting with other people (which is just about all of them, including Stallman’s) this is not only factual, but perfectly reasonable. Asshole loses job, what’s the big deal? The only surprising thing is that it took this long!

There are millions of more pressing injustices going on right now. The people attacking him didn’t do anything wrong either so who cares at all?

Here’s what I don’t get: why are you all so concerned about what happens to this guy? He didn’t get lynched. He’s not going to prison. He had a comfortable life and he will continue to have a comfortable life. Why does this asshole deserve so much of your time and energy?

It will until it doesn’t. What troubles me is that it’s hard to tell whether the risk is 1% per year or 0.000001% per year.

Nukes are not that powerful. See: https://what-if.xkcd.com/15/

“In the cold war people built concrete bunkers in their basement for fear of a nuclear Armageddon.”

It’s not like this threat went away. People just stopped paying attention to it.

Probably because satellites in LEO are too low to get such a broad view, and the camera-equipped satellites that are higher up are all over the equator.

Reminds me of a time I was searching for parking in downtown Washington, DC. Block after block was full. I eventually came to a street that had no cars parked at all. Jackpot, right? Must be some obscure rule prohibiting parking there. I kept looking. Still no luck, so I finally went back to the empty street. I carefully studied the signs and concluded that it was legal to park there. I got out of my car and paid. By the time I was done paying, the entire block was full of parked cars!

And what’s the term for a figure that’s hard to estimate but which you guess at anyway? An “assumption.”

There’s always an implicit (or explicit) “if conditions X, Y, and Z hold” on these statements. That prediction wasn’t wrong, conditions just changed, largely because predictions like this managed to wake people up to the dangers.

Ignoring the unstated assumptions in these statements isn’t really skepticism.

The Drake Equation is perfectly reasonable. You just have to interpret it as “these assumptions imply aliens” rather than “there are definitely aliens.”

Yes, sometimes things go wrong. But if you’re always late, then you need to get started earlier.

One is about a year, the other is close to five years.

Wasting time and money getting lost, getting separated from companions with no way to find them again, significantly reduced transportation options, having some sort of emergency and having a much tougher time dealing with it.

I have a decent amount of experience traveling internationally before the smartphone era. It was mostly fine, but with the smartphone is way better. And I had a couple of difficult unforeseen circumstances that would have been made far easier with one.

Why every 4-5 years?

Anymore? Advertising has been the major source of newspaper revenue forever.

Historically, progress has resulted in more environmental damage and CO2 emissions. Relying on progress to fix these things is counting on a fundamental shift to happen. By comparison, progress historically has always increased GDP, so counting on progress to grow away our debt is just expecting the historical trend to continue.

Traffic police around here seem uninterested in enforcing any rules other than red lights and speed limits.

No, the US builds lots of real stuff. It’s not just assembly. Not by a long shot.

The reason the trends are in opposite directions is because of increasing productivity. The number of worker-hours needed to build a car is much lower than in the past because of improved efficiency.

Exercising backups isn’t always a good idea. Testing your UPS? Yes. Testing your emergency parachute? No. I don’t see a pressing need to test my no-phone backups, and a lot of downside.

Manufacturing employment has been on a long, steady decline. Manufacturing output is experiencing steady growth and has never been higher.

The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world and will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Giving up on it would be a huge mistake. What we can’t do is count on it to employ the masses.

The dude hates doctors and nurses so much that he thinks they deserve to be physically attacked. And yet he is desperate for their services. This is a contradiction. I’m attempting to point this out.

There’s lots of discussion here about UI design and intuitive interfaces in here, but not much about training.

Computers are, by far, the most complicated machines that people are expected to be able to operate without any training whatsoever. Is that actually reasonable?

It really sticks out for me in the workplace. So many jobs require computer use. So many of the people in those jobs have no idea how to use them. They muddle through on a combination of habit and tribal knowledge, and call for help the moment anything different happens.

Consider jobs that require operating a car. It’s expected that someone hired for this job already knows how to drive. If they dont, they either won’t be hired or they’ll be required to complete training to learn how to operate this equipment.

Yet if you replace “drive a car” with “operate a computer,” usually they don’t care. Just try your best, and call IT for help.

Making intuitive interfaces that anyone can pick up and use is great, don’t get me wrong. But I feel like we try to take it to impossible places.

Intelligence is approximately a normal distribution so the mean and median are almost exactly the same.

The #2 story on the front page right now is “A photo survey of the blackboards of mathematicians.”

Maybe front page rank isn’t about how important or pressing the story is?

You could stay home instead.

I can totally see being upset with the people in administration and billing. But how can you be that upset with the doctors and nurses, when your whole complaint is that you wanted more of their attention?