rjf72

I'm sure you'd agree that there would be a substantial amount of support for these protests, and similarly more for any country or executive that would align itself with the protesters. How much support in mainland China do you think the Hong Kong protests have? How do you think mainland Chinese would respond to the US overtly aligning itself with the protesters?

I fully agree that of course nobody would support censoring a view or political ideology that they agree with. The big question is what happens when the view or ideology is one we not only dislike, but condemn?

I think you make a great point. From my perspective there are some things that cannot be reasonably proven that people may have different views on. For instance I'm sure you'd agree that social media "platforms" (as well as various other "platforms") over the past ~6 or so years have been engaging in increasing censorship. And that censorship has been not only accepted but applauded by some segments of the population. So where we probably diverge is on who are these segments of the population? How big are they? What are their views on this recent censorship?

I've been unable to find any sort of polling or other objective data (for that matter even poll data on Hong Kong is basically nonexistent) so we're left to rely on anecdotal data. When stories of censorship against unpopular topics came out in times past, what was the zeitgeist in your view? In the Hong Kong story as of today, does that vary? I took as an assumption people sharing a roughly similar view on this question. But I think it's a fair point that perhaps this is an invalid assumption. If I've learned anything on the internet it's that we all live in our own little bubbles, try as we might to escape them.

Of course I'm certain I could dig up plenty of examples of people contradicting themselves but that no more proves your [implied] view incorrect anymore than you finding a examples of people remaining consistent would prove my view incorrect.

The original post I was responding to was pondering what would happen if the NBA pulled out. In order to try to predict this it's important to try to accurately characterize how people would behave in response. In the US we ostensibly value free speech, but especially in modern times this is increasingly often set aside faster than you can blink when it becomes an issue where somebody says something we disagree with. See for instance practically every major social media platform that has been censoring increasingly loosely, largely to stabilize (and ideally increase) their profit by satisfying advertisers. When people dislike the groups censored they not only could not care less, but are often genuinely enthusiastic about it.

Think of the countless times people have, rather enthusiastically, argued that 'free speech doesn't mean you're free from the consequences of your actions'. Yet when it's a group that individuals ideologically align with they rapidly segue from free speech being a technical legal requirement as defined by the first amendment of the US constitution, to a value - an ethos. And we are not speaking in hypotheticals - this is happening, right now.

In modern times people increasingly seem to not like defending the right of groups they disagree with. We could debate the reasons there, but I suspect a large part is because we now live in an era of never-ending social media virtue signaling. That's actually what makes what I wrote above so easy to show. If you are genuinely arguing in good faith and do not believe people are engaging in wide-spread hypocrisy, you could go obsessive-compulsive and digging through people's post histories and find many of the same people upset about corporate censorship today cheering it on not long ago. Because they felt that by cheering on nasty groups getting censored, that they were showing their own virtue in being so adamantly against such things. We are, in effect, living out the "First they came ..." poem. As always, what's new is old.

That's awesome to hear, but I expect you must see you would be a very small minority. Most people now a days seem to base their worldview not on any system of consistent ethics, but instead on who's being benefited and who's being hurt.

For instance on what precipitated this particular issue (the Blizzard stuff), many are framing it as an issue of free speech. But that's incredibly disingenuous because there's no doubt that many of the same people outraged ostensibly about a violation of free speech would have been the first ones lining up to cheer and rejoice had Blizzard chose to ban a player who chose to show up in a MAGA hat and screamed "Build the wall!" in an identical venue. It's safe to assume they also would have taken it further and done all they could to try to get said player banned from any other gaming venue as well, in an effort to kill his livelihood and, by proxy, him. In other words, they couldn't care less about free speech - but only speech that they support, or oppose.

This example here (in our reverso world China) would take this to an even bigger extreme since you would be expressing support not only of a group with next to no national support, but simultaneously expressing support of a deeply unpopular foreign government which could be framed as borderline treasonous. And all of this being done in a highly nationalistic nation? That's a tall order for sure.

I'd distinguish between prepping and doomsday types. Prepping can be as simple as having some basic supplies and nonperishable goods such that you're not going to die if, for any reason, you need to survive independently for some period of time. It's not like some lifestyle or even dependent upon an assumption that you'll even ever need these things. So it's a relatively low cost decision to be able to be at least somewhat prepared for an eventuality that, though extremely improbable, would have disproportionately negative consequences if you were of the 'do nothing' extreme on the other end.

To put it mathematically, if I said there was a 1 in a million chance of you losing a billion dollars sometime in your life, and you agreed with me, it'd certainly be logical, if you could, to provide insurance against that eventuality for $1. In fact it'd still be mathematically sound to spend $1000. But this is for an event that you are literally 99.9999% sure will not happen. I think the big difference is in seeing reality as a neverending stream of probabilities as opposed to seeing reality as a neverending stream of certainties. The probabilistic mindset can lead you to conclusions and decisions that look peculiar to a deterministic mindset. By contrast doomsday types are those who have a deterministic mindset and have decided that the world (as we know it) is going to end and thus make that a part of their persona and worldview. Granted, they could also be of a probabilistic mindset with a different weighting but, at least in my experience, that's not usually the case.

Reverse the situation and imagine how you would feel.

Say China was running extensive media in favor of an increasingly China-friendly group within the US equally unpopular with both average US citizens and the US government, but quite popular with Chinese citizens and the Chinese government. And now a Chinese executive in charge of a Chinese product popular in the US, spoke out in favor of this group. Following US pressure with implied economic threats, he not only refused to retract his statements but chose to completely pull his company's product from the US - perhaps iPhones, which we'll pretend could be made nowhere other than China for the sake of the hypothetical.

Are you going to be mad at the US government? Most likely this would just work to further evangelize anti-China and anti-China-friendly group sentiment within the US. And I think this is true without even getting into the cultural differences in terms of things like nationalism. I think in your comment you're probably transplanting the average US citizen worldview onto the average Chinese citizen. In that case your idea would very much work, but that's not the case here.

We hit "peak university" in 2011. [1] In 2017 there were 1.25 million fewer enrolled students than in 2010. But this [2] is the zinger: in that same time frame, more than 300 new degree granting institutions opened up! It's becoming a hyper-competitive business. Good students not only are likely to stay on for the entire term of the institution, but also increase the prestige of your school which means more students, higher fees, and more profit.

I think a big issue is that the regulations on loans are removing any and all notion of supply and demand, so costs just keep getting crazier and crazier. Living on campus at an average private nonprofit university now will run you more than $50k a year. [3] Spending $2,357 for what may likely be $200k+ for 4 years is a phenomenal return on investment.

As usual, non-profit in practice and non-profit in connotation really don't mean the same thing. I attended a top 10 university only to see them constantly tear down perfectly functional buildings just to replace them with more aesthetically pleasing buildings that otherwise functioned just about identically. In some cases the new buildings had less room than the older ones. All it seemed to achieve was to 'Amazon' their profit figures. I don't really understand why they seem determined to waste so much money. The cynic in me imagines it's easier to justify a million dollar administrative salary when that's a much smaller fraction of your gross, and a "non-profit" institution would have difficulty justifying constant cost increases if they're showing a massive profit margin.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_105.30.a...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84

[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cua.asp

Why would it be hidden away in some settings instead of right in your face with a nice fat button "Change how my videos are recommended..."? Even beyond that though, most online platforms today offer very limited general customization - and so there's not much reason for users to go digging through settings. They are designed to work primarily with the default configuration, and so that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

There's a very simple solution here that avoids any and all bias and hidden agendas: simply make everything transparent.

- Users get to create their own profile. For instance in your profile you get to selected whether you would like to see content geared towards men/women/any. And this would follow for a whole slew of other topics, similar to the opaque profile companies are creating on users today without their consent or input.

- All recommended videos have all their profile tags openly shown. And the reason for recommendation is also completely open.

The cool thing about it is that this also works really well with the current neural network based recommendation systems since they output a weighting of things. Simply transform those weightings into a nice output and the user can see exactly what's going on and exactly how they're being viewed. As a nice aside this would also remove a big chunk of the incentive for increasingly aggressive spying as companies try to get ever more extensive profiles on each and every person that uses their products.

One downside here is that users might not be consciously aware of their own preferences. This could again be resolved transparently. "Hey PhilWelch, we've noticed you like videos about underwater basketweaving. Would you like for this interest to be ticked in your profile? [Yes, No, No + Never ask again]

I'm curious why people aren't seeing China as, at least potentially, a very big customer. They have hundreds of millions of people with limited to no internet access, in spite of a rapidly increasing level of national wealth. Their government could change that, instantly, with a check.

Not that I'm in favor of a censored internet but it's a reality of China and it would perhaps work even better with something like the Starlink. Satellite internet relies on ground stations to know what to beam out on requests. China would operate their own regional ground stations resulting in a complete centralization of all access from China.

Only reason I see this not happening is if China chose to develop their own similar solution, which is perhaps a real possibility.

When forming opinions on things like this, I think its important to see what happened in context.

This [1] is the entire, in context, video of the controversy in question. Unfortunately I've yet to find a complete translated transcript so I am left on relying on potentially unreliable online translations. From what I've read the casters say 'Go ahead and say those 8 words and we'll wrap up here. There's nothing else to talk about. Let's lower our heads.' He then screams 'Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our time.' Guess that's 8 words in [presumably?] Cantonese. This was done while wearing a gas mask. The tournament casters then laugh and clap.

This is actually the thing that most frustrates me about so many issues. How can people justify forming opinions on these things without seeing everything in context? Why isn't this entire video, alongside a professional translation, a part of every story on the topic? Of course providing in context video gets downvoted, because it makes the issues look less black and white. But that to me is the clearest example of idiocracy. We should not seek to create Hollywood villains and heroes in nuanced issues. We should consider these issues as they are, which invariably tend to be a million shades of gray as opposed to black and white.

[1] https://youtu.be/KyxO0Ea1_kM?t=2152

Obviously yes it is possible for DDG to determine that result G is "better", and prioritize accordingly. "Better" of course is subjective, but this search is a pretty clear example that they're doing something right. They do source results from Bing yet their engine determined, quite accurately, that Bing's results are really quite bad.

But beyond that, consider the bias in your statement. You're claiming, by definition, that anything that doesn't match Google results is "inferior". I found Google's results here to be much better than Bing (not a high bar to pass) but much worse than DDG. Here are the results I get for Google, though I think it's also worth mentioning the hassle. For the privilege of being able to search I was required to go through a captcha. This is presumably because I prefer to use TOR when directly using Google. Then there's some giant "privacy reminder" at the top that requires me to agree to have all my data hoovered up and combined across services to generate a profile on me. Presumably a GDPR related thing since each time this happened it was on an EU exit node, though it used dark patterns to coerce consent which was supposed to be unlawful to my knowledge. Anyhow, after that nonsense I get:

- 4 monetizable links (Amazon 'space taco' lighter, 2x space taco restaurant facebook pages, some soundcloud 'space taco' band)

- 4 nonsensical links of google linking to its own books.google service

- 1 link to FT.com where Neumann raised $700m through share sales.

I changed my IP a couple of times and got similar results - the monetizable ones were always the same (order varied - though always at the top), so I expect this is probably at least similar to what you got. Of course it's silly to debate what results should be returned for an intentionally nonsensical query, but nonetheless I think this inadvertently ends up emphasizing what each engine's priorities are. DuckDuckGo tries to return whatever results are likely most appropriate for what you searched for. Google tries to return whatever it can make the most money from. And Bing... well Bing is "special."

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I do fully agree with you that being tied to the partnerships is potentially exploitable by the partner. And as DDG continues to grow this could become an issue if, for instance, Microsoft decides they have more to gain by undermining DDG than they do by continuing to partner and profit alongside them. My "only" was in reference to the quality of the search, which is what we were discussing.

What would you suggest is the minimum evidence necessary to support the view that an ideology promotes violence?

- Isolated incidents of violence on behalf of the ideology?

- A "sufficiently large" number of incidents on behalf of the ideology? If so, could you elaborate on "sufficiently large" as you see it?

- A general tacit approval of violence?

- An explicit approval of violence?

- Something else?

The problem I think that many see is there tends to be extensive cognitive dissonance. People apply one set of standards to groups they like, and another to ones that they don't. I think you'll find that in trying to answer my above question it becomes quite difficult to include the groups you don't like, while excluding the groups you do like. That's even when my framing above which is unrealistically softball. For instance I didn't even mention things like harassment, destruction of property, etc which I think we should also generally be intolerant of - even when it's a group we like engaging in such things.

Yes, they source their results. This is not the extent of your claims. You were stating that they directly rip from other engines meaning that, in your words, "In order for search results to get better on DDG, they first need to get better on their partner search engines".

That is simply completely wrong, as my example showed extremely clearly. The one and only weakness of sourcing from third parties is that if they are not indexing some site, you also will not be indexing it. You were implying they are directly dependent on the ordering and quality of the other engines, which is obviously and provably false.

Which keywords? I just searched (as posted above) for "extent space taco secure". It breaks bing. Yahoo returns results that are closer (including some shared oddities like storage units in Nashville), but they're still very distinctly unique.

You know there's something weird. You could prove your little hypothesis here wrong in less time than it took you to write it. So why state something that's wrong?

I tested this by choosing to search for something completely random that would return unusual results and give a decent indicator of whether or not DDG was just copy-pasting results, so to speak. I searched for "extent space taco secure", no quotations. Bing seems to have exploded when I searched for this. The results are completely nonsensical and seem to have nothing to do with what I searched for. The first two hits are to Google, the first about webhp (apparently some virus?) and the other to their chrome page. Other links include things like links to fidelity.com, americanexpress.com, and the huffington post front page.

DDG's results are [mostly] reasonable and populated mostly by things like some recent event where the head of NASA mentioned space security. Though it does have a link to the SF bay area craigslist alongside a couple of other really weird ones. In any case, you can see for yourself. Suffice to say they're definitely not just replicating results, at least not from Bing.

You literally have NSA whistle-blowers stating, under oath, that these programs are not legal and the NSA is knowingly and purposefully violating the US constitution. [1] That testimony was part of Jewel v NSA [2] which emphasizes what happens when you take intelligence agencies to court. That case was filed more than a decade ago.

The government has already managed to get numerous key parts dismissed under state secrets privilege. [3] The government was also directed to preserve key data related to what remained of the case. In 2018 they informed the court they'd accidentally deleted it. Oops. [4] Oh yeah, in the same statement they also acknowledged they lied under oath when previously stating that they had preserved all relevant data on magnetic tapes and stored them with counsel. Oops again! Penalties.. consequences? You can guess.

And yes, you can also sue the government in China. Just don't expect to win.

[1] https://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._NSA

[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/jewel-v-nsa-making-sen...

[4] https://www.lawfareblog.com/summary-jewel-v-nsa-and-accident...

How would that reset their progress? The leaks have revealed that our secret organizations are pretty open (at least among themselves) about parallel construction. For instance this article [1] reveals some slides of the more harmless surveillance data on a target. Nonetheless, in a giant disclaimer at the top the NSA reminds their agents "This information is provided for intelligence purposes in an effort to develop potential leads. It cannot be used in affidavits, court proceedings, or subpoenas, or for other legal or judicial purposes."

And as the leaks have fallen off the news cycle, along with an interesting rise of misinformation in social media, you gradually see people beginning to understate what was revealed and to show ever less concern over it. It's actually a phenomenal demonstration for how a secret agency should handle a leak to avoid any meaningful consequences of what is ostensibly ground-breaking information on programs that are, at best, in legally grey areas, all being released to the public en masse. Snowden no doubt felt that his leaks would change our approach to intelligence if not our entire nation. In reality, next to nothing changed.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/14/nsa-gcsb-prism-surveilla...

Apologies on the formatting here. I think citing everything on this topic is absolutely critical since it's absolutely rife with misinformation. Dealing with formatting for extensive citations, alongside quotations of materials (for those who don't feel like perusing the first party sources) is tough in little more than ASCII and italics!

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The evidence is not too hard to find. This [1] site provides an extensive and ordered collection of most published Snowden related documents. It's also quite nice since it ties the documents to the first press coverage as well, if you'd rather peruse something other than the raw data. There seems to be a curiously large amount of misinformation on this topic, but when you actually look at the evidence - this situation is not in the least bit ambiguous.

These [2] slides give a broad overview of what PRISM is:

- Slide 3 describes PRISM: "PRISM -Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple".

- Slide 5 describes what is collected: "What will you receive in collection (surveillance and stored comms)?" - "in general" : "email, chat - video + voice, videos, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity - logins, etc, online social networking details, SPECIAL REQUESTS (caps added here to represent the bolding in the slide)".

This [3] is a document entitled "User's guide for Skype PRISM Collection". It gives some insight into how the program operates from an operative level including screenshots. It details surveillance of skype conversations, including conversations between skype and a landline connection. In skype-skype connections surveillance is available for audio, video, chat, and file transfers. It also mentions another program "DECODEORDAIN" which apparently maps different email addresses to a single person (used when engaging on surveillance on a target with skype registered under multiple email accounts).

That document also details that as data goes from Skype's servers, it also goes directly to the NSA. So this leads to situations where their agents can apparently become a bit confused about receiving multiple copies of the same chat log. That might happen, for instance, when a user logs onto a different device and his chat history is resyced so it goes from Skype to him as well as to the NSA. That's all made even more interesting by the fact that this was back from 2011 when Skype was still peer to peer. So while we get hints of how their process worked, the exact mechanisms are still a bit obscured.

There's a lot more really interesting stuff as well, but you could spend years going through all of it. Anyhow, suffice to say - no the government isn't just collecting just metadata. Anybody that says that is spreading misinformation either intentionally, or because they themselves have been misinformed and now think they're informing others.

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[1] https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.c...

[2-article] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligenc...

[2-slides] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...

[3-article] - https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-...

[3-document] - https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...

This isn't how IQ tests work. IQ test results are measured relative to a population. In particular 100 is the mean with a standard deviation of 15. So if you score 115 on an IQ test it doesn't mean anything in a vacuum. It means that relative to the population who took the test you scored better than ~84% of people. An IQ of 130 means you scored better than ~98% of people, and so on.

This is what led to the Flynn Effect [1]. It was the initially extremely surprising observation that raw IQ scores over time were increasing. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1970 was actually scoring substantially higher than somebody who scored a 100 just a few decades prior. Not so fun fact: starting sometime around the mid nineties, raw IQ scores started declining, at a substantial rate, in many and potentially all developed nations. In other words somebody who scored a 100 in 1995 is scoring worse than somebody who scored 100 in 1975. The reason for this is unknown and controversial (as all things even potentially genetic nowadays), but the effect persists even when controlling for things such as immigration.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Imagine two worlds. In one world all people are completely and absolutely identical and unable to change themselves in any meaningful way. In the other world people are all completely identical, but able to radically reshape themselves as they see fit.

In one world an individuals actions and decisions would largely determine their outcome. In the other world things completely outside of an individual's control would be the primary determining factors in their outcome.

One of these worlds would imply the need for systems directly subsidizing those who fail to achieve. In the other world, poor outcomes would be attributable in large part to poor decisions. The latter scenario doesn't necessarily preclude a subsidization of those who fail to succeed, but it makes it a much more tenuous proposition.

Normal BMI values are for adults. Child BMI differs somewhat sharply depending on age and gender.

This [1] is a tool from the CDC for measuring the BMI of children. For instance a 9 year old with a BMI of 22.5 (in the middle of the normal range for an adult) would be considered obese. A BMI of 17.6 (very underweight for an adult) would mean they're more overweight than 70% of other children their age, but it's still considered a healthy weight - just on the high side. By contrast dropping down just 1 BMI point (to 16.6) puts the child at the 55th percentile, meaning it's a perfectly average weight.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/bmi/calculator.html

Miasma theory [1], as you are referencing, was not "obvious advice" - it was the scientific consensus, worldwide, for thousands of years in terms of the propagation of illness. Germ theories had been suggested by numerous people for many centuries, but a problem is that miasma theory was deeply entrenched as the consensus view and could also explain most things such as people who are around sick people also getting sick. It's a theory that was extremely difficult to falsify until it became undeniably wrong once we developed the technology to actually be able to literally see bacteria.

On top of scientific inertia, another issue is that "actual, careful study" often fails to detect things that are really there. A great example of this is scurvy. Scurvy at one time was one of the most virulent diseases there was. It killed many millions of people during the age of sail alone and long-term voyages simply accepted the reality that they would likely lose a significant portion of their crew to scurvy. [2]

We now know that scurvy is simply caused by a lack of vitamin C, but one problem with resolving the scurvy mystery over time is that the actual cure sounds absurdly hokey and superstitious. Oh you're dying from this absolutely awful disease that's causing your entire body to deteriorate and rot from the inside out? Here, suck on some limes - it'll cure you! And scientific trials to test the "lemon theory" (which had been written about for hundreds of years) failed to show any meaningful success. The reason is that exposing lime juice to light, air, and certain metals used in storage/delivery (all as happened during experimentation) worked to greatly reduce its vitamin c content.

It was also confounded by the fact that fresh meat also has lots of vitamin C. So you notice claims that fresh fruits seem to cure scurvy and fresh meats also seem to cure scurvy. This now led to the scientific view that the problem was caused by tainted food. So forth and so on, stumbling very awkwardly along again until we reached an era of technology where we could isolate and measure 'vitamin C' and finally prove, once and for all, it was indeed the root cause. As a fun aside, vitamin C was not initially named ascorbic acid. It was named hexuronic acid. It was renamed to antiscorbutic (against scurvy) acid, shortened to ascorbic, once it's effect was proven once and for all. This is also where the slang of a limey for a British sailor came from. They were one of the first nations to require a regular dosing of lime for their sailors.

So there's always a balance in life. It's important for the evolution of our entire species that not everybody believe the exact same thing. Common sense is usually right, but sometimes it's very wrong. And science is usually right, but sometimes it's very wrong. People diverging from the norm to pursue their own views and values is something that benefits everybody as they work as completely volunteer guinea pigs. And it's often the case both that common sense ends up complimenting science, as well as science complimenting common sense.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#History

The paper is irrelevant. It's about the discovery. And a person who makes a Nobel-worthy discovery is generally not going to go "Dang, didn't get published. Guess I'll move on."

Extreme success tends to involve some extreme personalities with a very high frequency. Einstein, as one of the best examples, wrote his initial revolutionary papers in his spare time while working as lower tier assistant inspector at a patent office because he could find no university that would take him on as a researcher. Even at the patent office he was passed over for promotion due a perception of inability. Suffice to say, he wasn't especially concerned with what other people thought about his capability.

I expect two major components are demographics and a lack of partisanship. What I mean by demographics is that the Chinese political system is a very tall hierarchy. Representatives from each level vote for the one above it going all the way down to villagers voting for their village representative, and all the way up to the elected elite at the top of the hierarchy electing their representative - the president of China. And so because of this you end up with a generally more informed demographic at each level going up. This system means those at the top are not directly accountable to those at the bottom, but that lack of accountability also frees them up to pursue big picture goals.

Longterm goals and progress are quite separate from the everyday life of most people. China recently completed the largest radio telescope in the world. Next year they begin work on what will be the largest particle collider in the world. And then there are their rapid advances in space. In appealing to the lowest common denominator of demographics, these achievements are easy to tear apart. "Spending billions to grow potatoes on the moon while people are starving back here on Earth!? WTF!?" That's an illogical but common argument. It implies you should not achieve greater things until you solve the fundamental ails of society. Problem being it's likely impossible to solve those ails in complete -- certainly without any technological advancement. The argument is tantamount to suggesting a freeze on progress for the sake of progress.

And the partisanship issue goes practically without saying. Our founding fathers wrote extensively on the dangers of parties, but were unable to solve the issue. China solved the issue, but at great cost - there is only one party. But for now at least they seem to be avoiding the issues we're facing. As for how this applies to longterm progress, in 1972 Nixon remarked “This may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the Moon.” [1] A significant part of the reason he decided to strip NASA down was because of a feud he had with JFK. He lost to Kennedy in an extremely close and contentious election in 1960. Apparently even Kennedy's assassination was insufficient to put that feud to rest. One president wanting to destroy things associated with another's legacy, because of a political feud? As always, what's new is old. Hard to achieve much when in a few years the next guy's going to try to destroy everything associated with you because of a feud driven by our partisan nonsense. And then the voting masses just get dragged along between the feuds. And as our political leaders become ever more effective at this game, it seems to be causing a greater and greater fragmentation within society which means things like big picture progress are going to be ever less likely.

[1] http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/jason-callahan/20...

What do you think about things such as room 641A [1]? In short it is one tiny part of the NSA - an NSA office inside of an AT&T building that only NSA "minders" have access to (funny how terminology has such powerful connotations isn't it?), and is used for hoovering up all information which is then processed and used as part of our surveillance state.

As for arbitrary detention, how about the National Defense Authorization Act (2012) Section 1021 [2]? The language is a mixture of strong and weak. What I mean is that it says, for instance, one can be detained for providing direct support of a specific terrorist group, but it also includes anybody engaging in a "belligerent act" against the United States as similarly sufficient grounds for arbitrary detention or transferal to the custody or control of any other nations. This remains one of the loopholes for 'we don't torture' - we just transfer to countries that do. When Obama signed this bill into law he openly acknowledged this, as well as the rather extreme constitutional conflicts, and simply claimed his administration would "interpret" the law in a way that would avoid a constitutional conflict. [3] Whether that was true or not is anybody's guess. In any case 'the law's still here, he's all gone' (in my best Springsteen impersonation.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...

[3] https://www.ajc.com/blog/jamie-dupree/obama-defense-bill-sig...

Does Osaka have the same school cleaning culture with a meaningfully large number of schools? In particular I know some schools in Japan (not sure what percent) do not even employee janitors because of this culture of cleaning responsibility.

It'd be an interesting way to test/refute the obvious hypothesis that the article is promoting. If the answer is yes, then the hypothesis can, more or less, be rejected.

I'm curious about something. I tend to be quite skeptical, so what is your view on corruption? For instance if I pay you $10 will you say the opposite thing and start supporting an even greater integration of these businesses and perhaps even bringing more Google entities into government funded institutions? Probably not. $100? $1,000? $1,000,000? You're going to change your tune quite rapidly. I think that everybody, for the most part, has a price. And it's generally quite low.

Last year Google's net income was $30,740,000,000. Put another way, 30,740 millions. Obvious of course but all these zeroes often let us lose intuition of just how stupidly much money this is. There are a total of 535 voting members in the US congress. And of course to ensure a company is safe it needn't get all 535 members, just a handful of key players sprinkled about would be more than enough. I'm also certainly not suggesting this is some shady cloak and dagger nonsense as I initially proposed to you; instead, simply a result of completely legal lobbying. I come to you with a presumably poignant pretty pleasant palatable power-point presentation - the undertone of our exchange needs not even be spoken. I, as a mega corporation, am simply looking for politicians that are 'doing the right thing.' You could get a transcript of our conversation and it'd be perfectly kosher. Leave office and, even though we already regularly chat, if you've been a good boy you stand to get paid $400,000 for 30 minute chats, over and over. Got a loser son? You know I think he just has a lot of untapped potential. We're always looking for executive advisors that can offer unique perspectives - pay's about half a million per year.

I find it difficult to find any other explanation for the state of business today. The behaviors of companies today are vastly more anticompetitive than those of companies in times past, an increasingly distant past, when the government actually did anything. The difference seems to be that modern companies have just become vastly larger, and they're increasingly interweaving with government. I wonder if this is analogous to how people felt in the days before the separation of church and state.

I'm certain that the vast majority of scientists, physicists for certain, do "believe" in extraterrestrial life. Belief makes it sound kind of quirky though. It's essentially a probability measurement. Is it more likely that we are the only life in the universe, or not? You reach the same conclusion whether by intuition or by what crude modeling we're capable of. It's not really possible to create a compelling scientific argument for the lack of alien life. This is why the Fermi Paradox is a thing.

The reason people try to discount aliens is because you can attribute literally anything to aliens. And so you reach another equally simplistic binary. You discover some unknown phenomena. It is aliens, or not? Well we've discovered a whole lot of unknown phenomena throughout the years (and centuries and millennia depending on how you want to play this game) and often times it really did look a whole lot like aliens, but to date it's never yet turned out to be them.

And since the determination of an unknown phenomena often comes down to probabilities, aliens get weighted down a good deal. But nonetheless, I have no doubt that at least lurking in the back of every physicist's mind is that something now as regular as a fast radio burst could indeed finally be those LGM - the kind of joking nickname given to the first radio pulsar discovery. Standing, of course, for little green men. Is it? Well probably not, but it'll always be probably not - including when it finally is.

This is the text from that article:

"Police confirmed that an officer opened fire at a protester, saying he was acting in self-defense. “A large group of rioters was attacking police officers in Tsuen Wan,” police said in a statement. “Police officers warned them, but they were still attacking police. A police officer’s life was seriously endangered. In order to save his and other officers’ lives, they fired at the attacker.” One clip posted on social media and verified by Reuters shows the protester, an as yet unnamed 18-year-old man, swing a baton at a policeman, brushing his right arm."

The article and video are designed to imply that the Chinese are claiming that the the officer who fired at the protester is the one who's life was in danger -- that brushing the officer's arm was placing his life in danger. Somebody only consuming that media would have no idea that in the middle of the group of protesters was a police officer who the protesters continued to beat, potentially to death. Note as the crowd disperses to the point that the beaten police officer laying on the ground would become visible, the video immediately cuts to a new frame - repeatedly.

This deception is made even more gratuitous by the inclusion of the police spokesperson's response. Without being able to understand the context of what was happening in that video, which is not provided, the spokesperson's comments sound completely absurd and basically like he's just overtly lying to justify shooting a protester. That in effect makes people think the officer's statement is simply propaganda. Somewhat ironic.

I think the whole propaganda war is idiotic. Let people see what's happening on both sides with complete context and judge for themselves. Real life is not full of Hollywood heroes and villains, it's invariably a million shades of gray. Debate and discussion these issues is healthy and productive for everybody. Most ironically, I suspect people would ultimately come to the same conclusion even with honest context. So why lie?