refenestrator

This has been eating me up all day in case you happen to check in again.

I didn't start posting to whine about being banned a few months ago, I was more concerned about the immediate thread.. but since you brought up my posts, you specifically told me while banning me that civility wasn't "good enough". I was doing this exact recommended pattern of responding patiently and civilly at the moment that you banned me.

Maybe I'm just really oblivious, or a congenitally bad poster, but what would be good enough? It's irrelevant since I'm banned but I always like to self-improve if I can, there must be something I'm missing here. If you're busy or don't see this, no biggie.

That's not good enough.

HN will continue to trend towards having 2-5 content-free "china bad amirite" threads a week with an echo chamber of people who don't know any history of the region saying completely nonsensical things. People who know a little more, or who point out things like "the belt and road initiative isn't a literal road and can't be used to invade someone" will be banned for contributing to flamewar.

For example, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29655341[1]. You can't be everywhere, there will always 10x comments like that for every 'bad' comment going the other way, and your even-handedness means that 9/10 of them are implicitly judged as fine, acceptable and encouraging intellectual something-or-other.

[1] Check that guy's history, he writes Xi Jinping as Hsi Chunping.. his commitment to ideology is so strong that he wade-giles'd Xi, lol

Ok, fine. Food for thought:

You'd probably like to ban the topic entirely, but it'd be weird to have one banned topic and you've said that doesn't work, so that's out.

So what's left, being even-handed, I guess. Except it's a 10-1 ratio, so being even-handed, ban people from both sides leaves you with a 9-0 ratio.. congrats? Even if you're really, really, really trying to be even-handed with regards to content, most people would bias towards handing out 50-50 to feel fair, while 10-1 (or whatever ratio) is actually statistically fair. But that would feel quite biased if you did it! Practically taking a side! So we get a phenomenon where a bad Chinese-adjacent comment (or even a polite one) is super likely to be moderated, but you can't possibly moderate all of the really bad anti-China comments in this thread, there's too many, they rule the day and they establish truth for passersby.

Tech is one of the few industries with a large Chinese minority during this time of rising tension. It would vastly improve the intellectual tone of the site if we had more of them explaining their viewpoint and less of people telling them they're brainwashed.

Failing that, I think the actual real-world answer is to pro-actively push down the repetitive anti-China stories that hit the front page multiple times a week, and then just deny it if anyone asks. They're not intellectually interesting, they're hostile to a significant tech minority, and you don't like the flamewar. Why keep them?

Look at this immediate thread above your comment, majority vote did decide the truth about how Chinese people think (they're brainwashed!). Then you scolded someone who got salty about it.

It's not just a civility burden, it's a factual burden.

If somebody came onto HN posting obviously dumb stuff about how American people feel and think, they'd be downvoted, because everyone can see the obvious falsehood.

But when it's Chinese, majority vote of Americans decides the truth! They will tell you the real deal on how things work inside China. And if someone calls them morons, we have you to come in and keep things civil.

Just so long as we're clear that my "ideological battle" was scattershot takes across a bunch of different topics. I'd hate to be thought of as having a coherent ideology :)

That's just not an accurate summary of my posting history. I post on a wide range of topics. The last 2 weeks I posted about bitcoin, education policy, tax policy, the British royal family, software architecture and that upvoted comment on the Chappelle thread that you flagged (which was admittedly wading into the muck a bit).

I'm sympathetic to the fact that flame wars about China are too common here, and hey, banning the non-american point of view might end them, circlejerks can only go so far on their own. So maybe you're right, but I wouldn't be super satisfied with that solution.

Was I not respectful?

The shape of global politics is interesting to me. Your call.

Invade where? Tajikistan? The thing about belt and road is.. we could do that, too. Instead we blow a fortune in the middle east and get salty at them for being smarter.

As far as china's ambitions go, anything can change but they have a long, long history of non-interventionism. It's hard to justify ideologically when they teach every schoolkid about the century of humiliation and the evils of colonialism.

Cite? Do you have a quote from "China" on this?

I think Xi is quite clear on his view of China's place in the world: hegemon in their region but no desire to be global police like America.

You don't need to be accredited to buy bitcoin.

You might need to be accredited to invest in a bank that operates on bitcoin, or have all your money parked on an exchange that operates in bitcoin, unless they're willing to do the paperwork. These are things that can and should be audited regularly if they're going to hold a lot of people's money.

If they don't want to restrict themselves to accredited investors, they could alternatively adhere to SEC guidelines for selling financial instruments to the public. Clear auditing, GAAP, prospectus including a frank discussion of risks, etc. It's really not that high a bar, considering the $ involved.

You can't ask for no accountability, these rules are written in blood (or red, I guess).

"Many" people is a weasel word, a couple dozen could qualify.

It's only an issue for the media-addicted and those who fill airtime for a living.

How many people are mad at Joe Rogan on this issue at this moment? None, they're all on Chappelle right now, it'll be someone else soon.

One other note, on CK, I wonder the overlap between people who want him punished forever and those who support rehabilitation of actual felons.

They will absolutely forget all about this in a few weeks.

It's the same conundrum as some open source projects who put up a BLM banner at the height of the protests last year. How do you ever remove it now? Not that the issues have been fixed but there's more than one issue in the world and you're a json library.

Plenty of overengineered projects became fragile messes as well, it's hard. You need to actively break some subset of "best practices" on any given project.

Here's the rub, all the things you're asking for cost way more energy and produce way more carbon than being third-world poor.

I don't think I've seen a US/UK MSM article comparing China to us favorably in at least 5 years. Ive seen dozens or hundreds beating the drum against them..

It's a major coincidence for such a free press, right?

Band together to protect the billionaires? Could you pick a less sympathetic reason?

Consider it an anti-godwin measure and it's still a win, whoever is saying it.

They should be a lot less aggressive and assertive about it, but, given the stakes nd the history I think the polite fiction is perfectly fine compared to lots of alternatives.

All taxation is double taxation. I pay income taxes, and then when I spend my money someone else pays income taxes on their profit.

Similarly, the rich person paid taxes and then their rich kids pay taxes on their inheritance.

Cite for that 97% figure?

I was under the impression there's a large exemption for inheritances under a few million and then it's still a number lower than income tax on the rest.

Philosophically, you don't own anything after you're dead. Someone else, alive, is getting income in the form of an inheritance.

I think it's all technically government property already?

The benefits are unrealized fanatasies about freedom from government that will never, ever happen.

The government, tax, justice systems and regulatory bodies are made out of people, you can't fool them with some "haha it's not USD" technicality like a sovereign citizen. It's all the same at the end except for a bunch of wasted energy.

It's a fact at the macro level. Individual speculators may profit but there's no benefit to the species. They don't even work as currencies because the transaction costs are so high.

How many people are you shooting?

In the neighborhood of 1 percent of all energy consumption, for literally nothing, is a colossal waste.

Try to think of it in tons of coal. You proud of that?

I don't really use Twitter, but this is the first time I've heard of the whole thing since a year ago. If he's on there every day fighting with people, then yeah, he's an addict too. If he's just checking in after a year and saying "hey it's working out for us", more power to him.