vectorpush

The words have meaning. If you don't understand them you could just ask for them to be explained rather than throwing out insults. I suspect you actually do understand the meaning of what was written though so I suppose that means you're just trying to start a flamewar.

There is no agreed upon measurement of job performance that transcends the partisan divide.

This is a typical condescending blockchain enthusiast line. Stop implying that the critics don't understand how things work, it's insulting, intellectually lazy and false. When the blockchain is actually useful enthusiasts won't have to beg everyone to give it a chance.

It's statistically possible, so why not?

It's not "fair" as far as logical argumentation is concerned because the statement proves nothing since it is equally true of successful technologies as it is of failed technologies. It is an absolutely meaningless platitude.

This is an oft repeated fallacy by blockchain enthusiasts. Skeptical predictions from the past that turned out to be incorrect in hindsight has absolutely zero relevance to the viability of blockchain technology.

Sure you can, just store them in .sql files and have your CI system auto deploy them.

It's unfortunate that you take such an inflammitory tone when you're so completely incorrect. They are constant, end of story.

This makes no sense. Have you ever used a web forum before reddit? People get banned all the time for arbitrary reasons on forums all over the web, why should reddit be any different? "The internet" has not been turned into anything, it remains the same as it has always been, a place where communities of varying interests can interact at their own discretion, a freedom which includes the prerogative to exclude anything the administrators deem off topic, offensive, annoying or even boring.

The internet gives everyone the freedom to create a community of their own, and it's easier, cheaper and the experience is better than ever when doing so. There are already popular "anything goes" discussion forums (e.g. 4chan, voat) that give much wider room to "freedom of expression", so how have companies like reddit or google prevented others from operating in any fashion they find acceptable within the confines of their own communities? The answer is they haven't.

If you're rebuilding aspects of your production system for the sake of "incorporating newness" then the problem is poor engineering not react or any other tool. If things are working fine as they are, you only have yourself to blame when you introduce new technology that you find too complex to manage.

Not necessarily (based solely on the axiom that men and women have different brain chemistry).

It is logically possible that the differences we observe in career distributions are more heavily influenced by other factors besides differences in brain chemistry.

It does not follow logically that just because men and women are biologically different that those differences are necessarily significant with regard to career distributions.

Bitcoin ATMs are rare, notoriously unreliable, often require invasive KYC and always come with a gigantic markup.

You can acquire cryptocurrency just as easily as you can acquire cash:

This is obviously untrue. Cash is ubiquitous throughout every corner of society, while cryptocurrency is extremely niche to the point of practical obscurity.

sell things for it

The overwhelming majority of potential buyers will not have even heard of crypto.

exchange currency with friends

Very few people have friends who dabble in cryptocurrency.

exchange currency with people you find on LocalBitcoins

Risky, time-consuming and impractical, especially for someone that's only looking to buy some weed. Additionally, localbitcoins puts you back "in the streets", you're better off just exchanging cash for drugs in the streets rather than exchanging cash for crypto in the streets so you can go back online to buy the drugs.

steal it, run a business taking payment in it, ...

That is absurd. You're not making a very convincing case.

People who buy drugs "in the streets" generally aren't versed in how to acquire and manage cryptocurrency. Most people buying drugs have a personal relationship with a dealer and don't do transactions "in the streets". Additionally, actually acquiring cryptocurrency requires a bank account in good standing and a ton of invasive KYC paperwork which will raise suspicions and alienate "street buyers". Finally, in my personal opinion, a street transaction would be preferable to giving out my address to anonymous dealers on the internet, but I know some may agree on that point.

I agree and I appreciate the nuanced tone of your answer.

So the only option is to arrange an in-person meetup with a random stranger from the internet so that they can gouge me with a gigantic markup or just rob me. This sounds terrible even if I have no beef with the government, but totally absurd if I am actually trying to hide money from authorities; for all I know, the person I meet up with is a federal agent or works with them.

It's a currency that can't buy much of anything, so it's close to useless as far as paying for the needs of a typical person. You can speculate about the future of crpyotcurrencies all you like, but the future you imagine is not inevitable and certainly not the reality of today or the foreseeable future.

Beyond that, if we're speculating, a world where all transactions live on a blockchain is an ideal one for a government bent on tyrannical control of the economy. It is likely that governments of the future will have advanced methods of associating wallet activity with real-life activity, especially for citizens who intend to interact with the larger law-abiding economy (if you ask me, blockchain money is the ideal currency for a tyrant). Of course, you can just continue to speculate about future crpytocurrencies that will solve all these issues and that is the reason why this type of speculation gets us nowhere.

How do you turn eth into spendable money without a bank account?

Facebook is not mandatory, you don't have to use it, the government doesn't need to get involved.

I absolutely agree that the SPA was already a thing before angular, in fact, angular was specifically designed to wrangle the general design concerns related to building SPAs and doing so sold the distinct concept of the SPA to many developers.

It's a double-edged sword. The code's behavior is apparent in that simple example, but things get considerably more difficult to understand when you're dealing with monkey patched methods and dangerously clever method_missing magic in non standard library code.

Rails was designed at a time before angular brought the SPA into fashion. SPAs manage state and template rendering on the front-end, so much of the Rails machinery becomes unnecessary. You can still use Rails to implement your JSON API backend, but the simplicity of something like Sinatra is often preferable since you're increasing the complexity on the front.

The node+react+webpack combo gave web devs the power to process application states and render the UI on the front-end and the back-end using the same code; a feat that is not possible at all with Rails pushing it a little further out of fashion.

Of course, the SPA suffers plenty of criticism, and Rails is still a popular choice with and without an SPA on the front-end, but I think it's fair to say that Rails is no longer the "fun" way to do things (though the most fun doesn't mean the best business or engineering solution).

You" as an entity are really just a process emergent from chemical reactions on some area, and your "will" is just the result of feedback between many regions of that process and outside stimuli.

Agreed.

Biological evolution is a process happening in more dispersed reactions, but still has all manner of internal feedback mechanisms and responds to external stimuli.

Disagree. Evolution does not "respond to external stimuli", there is no "internal" or "external" as far as evolution is concerned, that's like saying "erosion responds to external stimuli"; "it" does not respond, "it" is a description of a process.

I don't see how you've drawn a meaningful distinction between them, except to say that one os easy to observe in total (eg, you can draw a box around it) and is sort of like you, so you feel you can understand it.

I can't draw a box around it because it is not a thing with a position in space unlike "you" which is.

Homeostasis and physical locality don't seem partocularly germane traits when discussing whether or not something has a will.

Of course it does, if words are to have any meaning at all. Whatever it is you're trying to describe that is common between an organism and the description of physical process is not called "will" by any useful definition of the word. It's like if I said "evolution has no guiding principles" and you replied "well neither do humans really because our 'guiding principles' are just the result of a deterministic evolutionary process", but that's not true because "guiding principles" is a human concept that applies to beings that reason about their environment, even if the foundation of that reasoning is determined by constituent factors.

I disagree with your assessment that it's any blinder of a process than your own will is.

I understand what you're saying, but the two concepts cannot be effectively compared. An organism's "will" is a label for the reactive tendencies we observe in physical systems that exhibit homeostasis, whereas evolution is the description of a physical process that is perpetually ongoing and has no physically discrete meaning.

There isn't really a threshold beyond that pattern or object somehow communicating to you that it does indeed possess a will or some form of consciousness

I agree. It is a further anthropomorphism to even assume that the integrated sensory and memory perception phenomenon that we apparently experience as consciousness is inherently "human" in its quality rather than something more qualitatively similar to the bending of space-time by matter. An incidental consequence of homeostasis is that arbitrary pieces of matter are somehow a "self" and a cluster of sensory signals are somehow an "experience". The animist view isn't even necessary if we do not insist that "consciousness" be "a state of existence" for thinking creatures to "have" or not.

Your analogy doesn't really say much except that you endorse the idea that bits and atoms are comparable with regard to the "realness" of what they compose, but that assumption is the crux of the debate. One could just as easily say "letters are letters, regardless of how advanced they are, they're still letters. 'Killing' people (if you can call it that) is fine", yet the analogy on it's own fails to enlighten the argument if one already rejects the idea that people composed of text in a work of fiction are real.

and tell me again, based on your own definition, how all news isn't fake news?

That's a pretty disingenuous response. Obviously, "all news" is not deliberate fabrication presented as truth, and to suggest as much is worthless cynical hyperbole or willful ignorance or both.

For example, if I load up CNN.com right now, the tag-line for the front-page story reads "Another blow to Trump's travel ban". Clicking through to the article yields the headline "Appeals court upholds block on Trump's travel ban". You can read the article here:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/25/politics/4th-circuit-travel-ba....

This is not fake news. The 4th Circuit court really did uphold the block on Trump's travel ban. Here is an excerpt FTA:

Judge Paul Niemeyer, one of the three dissenters, said the majority "looks past the face" of the executive order. The approach "adopts a new rule of law that uses campaign statements to recast the plain, unambiguous, and religiously neutral text," Niemeyer, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote. "Opening the door to the use of campaign statements to inform the text of later executive orders has no rational limits."

I will reiterate: this is not fake news, Judge Paul Niemeyer really is a 4th circuit judge and those really are his words. Do you understand what I'm saying here? This is a thing that happened in the real world, it is not a fabrication created by CNN to defame Trump, this is reporting of a noteworthy current event that merits news coverage. A critic of CNN might claim "CNN always reports negative stories about Trump". Fine. Selective reporting meets the definition of bias, but bias, once again, is not fake news.

We can perform the same exercise with Fox News. The front-page tag-line reads "TWISTED TREACHERY - ISIS tricked US into bombing building where 100 innocents held captive". Clicking through to the article yields the headline "ISIS rigged explosives to home where 100 civilians died in US-led airstrike, military says". You can read the article here:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/05/25/isis-rigged-explosiv....

This is not fake news. The military really did report that ISIS tricked them into bombing civilians. Here is an excerpt FTA:

An investigation into the March bombing found that the terror groups rigged a house with over 1,000 pounds of explosives, put civilians in the basement, and employed two ISIS snipers on the roof to bait the U.S.-led coalition to attack. U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Matthew Isler, the investigating officer for US Central Command, told Pentagon reporters that the bomb used by the American jet, a GBU-38 (500-lb bomb), would not have caused the type of damage associated with the destruction of the building.

I will reiterate: this is not fake news, Air Force Brig. Gen Matthew Isler really is a U.S. Air Force Brigadier General, and those really are his words. Am I making myself crystal clear? This is a thing that happened in the real world, even if civilians are not in a position to corroborate the findings of a military investigation, this is the official report from the military and not a fabrication created by Fox to excuse or justify the U.S. bombing of civilians. A critic of Fox might claim "Fox News always defends the military, even when they kill innocent civilians". Fine. Publishing stories with a tone favorable to one's predefined narrative meets the definition of bias, but bias, once again, is not fake news.

You see what I'm getting at here?

Let's call a spade a spade, and admit that all factually incorrect articles, infographics, and stories are what they are...fake news.

Simply posting something on the internet does not make it news and you are actually contributing to the "debasing of the term news" that you complain about by refusing to acknowledge the distinction between memes posted to facebook, factual errors in reporting, institutional bias, and deliberate fabrications with no basis in reality. I mean, you're argument is literally "all news is fake". If more people would abandon your cynical defeatist attitude that encourages labeling literally everything as fake news and actually judged individual stories based on their own merit, political discourse in the USA would be a lot more productive.

I'm open to it being in some other category of fake, but then we need a label for it.

I agree with you. I think "deliberately misleading", "factually inaccurate", even "complete bullshit" are applicable, I just disagree with the overloading of the term "fake news" to describe all manner of falsehood. The word fake followed by the word news in an english sentence is supposed to mean something very specific and when the term is blithely abused to suit the egos of warring partisans it diminishes society's ability to hold the influential news media organizations responsible for accuracy in reporting. In today's world everything is fake news to somebody and that wasn't true in 2014.

you don't get to define fake news. Fake news is as simple as it sounds: articles that are factually incorrect.

I'm happy to debate the nuance of the term fake news, but I think it's ironic that you presume to glibly assert your own definition of fake news right after exclaiming that one cannot do so (unless you're suggesting that CNN and myself, in particular, are forbidden from doing so).

Anyway, fake news is not simply "articles that are factually incorrect", otherwise every misreported fact or journalistic error could be classified as fake news which any intellectually honest person will admit is not what is intended to be described by the term fake news. Further, something cannot be fake news if it is not "news". Random images floating around the internet is not news. People posting memes and rumors on social media is not news. Honestly, even partisan bias and selective reporting by news organizations is not "fake news", and the terms "bias and selective reporting" accurately convey those qualities. Fake news is a loaded pejorative that carries the baggage of the 2016-2017 zeitgeist, so if you're going to use it at all, stick to the definition that common sense would have given us prior to 2016: reporting of current events that is deliberately presented as true when the authors know it is false.