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I've never been awarded any money because somebody said something to me I didn't like.

Yes words can have consequences. Let's take politics, some parties get elected based on their words, and then implement policies that are harmful to me. I still never got any kind of compensation for that kind of thing.

How much money should ehticalsmacker be awarded from you, because you not thinking much of his comment hurt his feelings?


When you facetiously equate my comment with the harm perpetuated by someone actively racially discriminating against someone, do you expect me to take your argument in good faith?

I'm not going to argue you with you.


The only reason you think it's facetious is because you disagree with his specific point


Agreed, I think racism is bad.


Maybe not ”equate“. Let’s say it’s 10.000 times less harmful. 3M/10k = 300. You owe that man 300 bucks.


Your math doesn't work because the situations are incomparable.

jszymborski comments did not break the law.

Tesla violations of employment laws regarding a hostile work environment did break the law.

Two different juries decided that Tesla broke the law, and that punitive damages were needed to deter that behavior in the future.

What law is jszymborski breaking? What court is applicable? None.


Just because something is a law, doesn't imply it is good or justified.


Perhaps you can explain the relevancy of your comment?

Your comment suggests you think financial payment to an HN user with hurt feelings due to another user "not thinking much of his comment" is either good or justified.

I find that hard to believe.

On the other hand, decades ago the US decided that it's neither good nor justified to have a hostile work environment - something I agree with - and put laws and systems into place to enforce that belief.

That's what the lawsuit is about.

Yet I also find it hard to believe you support a hostile work environment.

That makes your comment seen like neither here nor there.


Your argument was that "so and so did break the law". I answered that just because something is a law, it isn't good or correct. If you don't see the relevancy, I don't know what else to tell you.

I don't think people should pay other users because of their comments. On the contrary, my argument was that they shouldn't have to pay.

As for hostile work environments, my opinion is that people should simply quit their jobs if they are unhappy with their work environment. I don't think governments should interfere with how companies conduct their business.

I even think racism should be legal. Don't get me wrong - I don't like racism. But the government shouldn't be allowed to tell people who they have to like or dislike. If somebody doesn't want to work with somebody else because they don't like their nose or whatever, it should be in their rights to refuse to work with them. In general, people should be allowed to do with their money as they please, so also to pay for work who they want.

One thing I heard is that the guy in question here even tried to get a relative a position at Tesla, which seems odd if he thought the work environment was so bad. Not sure if that is true, though.


It would be easier if you simply wrote "we need to get rid of all employee rights laws."

> Your argument was that

No, my argument was that the two situations are not meaningfully comparable. I then explained why.

Even if the law isn't good or correct, the two situations are still not meaningfully comparable, because the awarded damages requires that the law exist.

> simply quit their jobs if they are unhappy with their work environment

Ahh, sounds like a libertarian in favor of the Lochner era. I strongly disagree with what I see as a naive belief in the freedom of contract.

As you correctly point out, it means allowing racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace, with people like Oncale quitting his job with Sundowner because "I felt that if I didn't leave my job, that I would be raped or forced to have sex."

That's the freedom of contract you want.

Those were not good times to be an lowly employee. I suppose they were great times to be a manager and business owner, if you didn't care much about others.

> get a relative a position at Tesla, which seems odd if he thought the work environment was so bad

While I haven't read much about the case, it's clear you've read far less. From the judge's opinion in the first trial, at https://casetext.com/case/diaz-v-tesla-inc-4 :

] After several months at Tesla, Diaz recommended that his son (and former plaintiff) Demetric Di-Az come to work at the Tesla facility. See, e.g., Tr. at 503:8-16. He testified that he “did believe he would be in a different location” so the situation might be different for him. Id. at 503:11-19. He said that he could not recall whether he warned Di-Az about the racial harassment. Id. at 504:5-11. At one point, Diaz witnessed a white supervisor yell at Demetric that, “I can't stand all you [fucking] [N-words].” Id. at 419:18-24. Diaz said that it “broke” him. Id. at 420:1. He testified that, if he had to do it over again, he would not have recommended that Demetric work there, calling it his “biggest mistake.” Id. at 420:2-5.

Note that his son was a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit. The opinion doesn't say why it was dismissed, but the other co-plaintiff settled the case with Telsa.


Of course the situations are comparable. Your only explanation was that there is a law for the one situation but (allegedly) not the other. Which probably isn't even true, as you may be able to sue people over insults (ianal).

> As you correctly point out, it means allowing racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace, with people like Oncale quitting his job with Sundowner because "I felt that if I didn't leave my job, that I would be raped or forced to have sex.

Why would you want to continue working for somebody who wants to force you to have sex?

>Those were not good times to be an lowly employee. I suppose they were great times to be a manager and business owner, if you didn't care much about others.

In a good economy, you can find another job. In a bad economy, as socialism is notorious to bring about, you can't. So congrats, you are entitled to keep your job with the boss who wants to rape you.

> While I haven't read much about the case, it's clear you've read far less

"He believed he would be in another location" - so he didn't believe Tesla was racist at heart?


How can you judge what is harmful to me? You personally are no general metric to all mankind. In fact, what you just wrote made me suicidal now since your words hurt me very badly and triggered massive childhood trauma which I barely survived but haven't told about to anybody due to shame. Your words hurt me that much. You can't question it, since you have no idea what is happening on my side. If you try to diminish the harm you have already done, you are causing me even more harm.

To compensate this harm, I am suing you for 3 billions $$ + legal fees, since I know you are not poor and come to HN. My lawyers will contact you.

And there you go, you just did exactly what you criticize on others and put yourself above somebody else. Hell, that's another trauma for me, now its 4 billions since I have panic attack now from your toxic posts.


Of course, none of that is actually going to happen, there is no general legal basis for "Someone owes me money because they said a thing that made me sad online in a debate website I voluntarily visit in my leisure time for (one assumes) entertainment or educational value," and your explanation of why it would happen indicates massive ignorance of the legal framework relevant to this thread topic.

I always find it interesting when people who are willing to accept the arbitrariness of the LISP interpreter or JavaScript's market dominance or the C++ curiously recurring template pattern get shocked or surprised that the United States' framework of law and legal precedent is arbitrary and path-dependent and does not conform to their (also arbitrary and path-dependent) sense of fairness.


People fret about the programming languages they use all the time...


That's irrelevant. The HN comment forum is not government by equal opportunity employment law.

The definition of a hostile work environment is not "said something to me I didn't like". Quoting the EEOC at https://www.archives.gov/files/eeo/policy/facts-about-workpl... :

"... the anti-discrimination statutes are not a general civility code, Federal law does not prohibit simple teasing, off-hand comments, or isolated incidents that are not extremely serious. Rather, the conduct must be so objectively offensive as to alter the conditions of the individual’s employment."

The juries - in two different trials! - have determined that the conduct at Tesla meets that threshold.

Tesla is legally obligated to prevent workplace harassment, and respond to complaints about harassment. They did not do so. Punitive damages for Tesla's illegal behavior form the large part of the awarded amount.


Musk has claimed on Twitter that Tesla wasn't allowed to present new evidence, and that the fine would have been 0 with the new evidence. But he says the jury did the best with the given evidence and he respects their decision.

I think there is more to the story than CNN reports, also, just because something has been made into a law, it isn't beyond discussion or criticism. There are many bad laws in existence.


Musk claims lots of things on Twitter that aren't true.


Such as?


I recommend doing one's own research on this topic; the well is quite deep. Musk's greatest talent is salesmanship; that sometimes divorces from the truth.

This can get you started: https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musks-lies-about-tesla-on-tw...


Doesn't sound like such a clear cut case. Has the court decided yet?


That was just one search result. Again, I recommend doing one's own research. There's a lot to find.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/elon-musk-twitter-te...


The usual list. He clearly isn't a leftist and it angers a lot of people very much that he doesn't automatically follow the leftist commands. Doesn't make him evil or a liar. And for example making a prediction that turns out wrong also isn't a lie. It is just an opinion.


The lies make him a liar, not his political-spectrum position.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/02/tesla-shareholde...


Lawsuits don't prove he lied.


https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23474381/elon-musk-twitt...

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1596118994565894145?lan...

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4020362-who-you-gonna-belie...

You can keep defending him if you want, but the preponderance of evidence is not on his side. On average, I would no longer consider Elon Musk a reliable source.


You are incredible.

1.) he doesn't have to justify reinstating Trump at all. People who banned a sitting president have to justify their actions 2.) Seriously, what the fuck - you want to hold his dying child against him? This is ridiculous nitpicking, you can say "it died in his arms" even if he wasn't holding his child all the time. You should take a long hard look into the mirror and ponder what your irrational hatred does to your personality. 3.) A couple of cars with a tiny discount proves what? A list of 30 cars, with a generously calculated average discount of 3%, out of probably thousands sold?

Keep hating, though. Your hatred is irrelevant.


I don't hate Musk. By-and-large, he earned his way into the money he's made.

... but some of that earning was done via deception. Look at the history of billionaire CEOs, and you quickly learn that bending or breaking with the truth is pretty much mandatory at some point in their careers to win the game. They are salespeople for the firms they helm, and a certain amount of sales is based on deception (information asymmetry is the beating heart of the engine of profit).

If anything, one can tip one's hat to him for winning the game he's playing so well. The game itself may be of questionable virtue, but he's an excellent player of it.

(Possibly except for this Twitter acquisition. That was a weird move. I don't think it's working out the way he'd hoped).

The only lie he tells consistently that I hold against him is Tesla's FSD. Even the name is incorrect in terms of what the technology is capable of, and it's a lie that gets naive people killed when they believe the marketing hype and turn over full control of their vehicle to a technology that is not yet reliable.


Iirc there was one event that might qualify as deception, when he claimed he already had funding secured from some entity and that made some other entity (the government?) also give him funding. That first entity ended up also giving him funding.

Can't say I rank that very high in terms of deceptions, as it doesn't involve the actual product, and also, in the end it was true that entity 1 also gave them funding. And entity 2 could have given funding under the condition that entity 1 gives funding, to be safe.

As for FSD, as far as I know it is still officially in beta and they officially say you can't rely on it just yet. I don't share his optimism for its development, but it seems conceivable that he legitimately thought it was doable in the timeframe he imagined. I don't think missing delivery dates really counts as lie. Companies do it all the time, even companies like Apple. They announce they are working on product x and expect to have it ready at time y, and frequently they miss the date y by years of sometimes even scrap the product completely.

I also haven't heard of an increase in accidents because of Tesla FSD. The accidents that happens seem to all make the news and on close scrutiny turn out to be nothingburgers.

Edit: this seems to suggest that Teslas with autopilot have far fewer accidents than normal cars https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/1144/teslas-using-autopilo... - I supposer you can find all sorts of other statistics, though. I haven't really looked into them. Googling, one finds many headlines of the sort "most vehicles involved in automated driving accidents are Teslas" which are of course misleading bullshit, as presumably that is just an artefact of the much higher number of Teslas on the road.


What lousy lawyers Tesla must have. There were TWO jury trials, and the plaintiff was successful in BOTH of them.

There are also many companies with illegally discriminatory workplace environments in existence.

Just because "pedo guy" Musk claims something doesn't mean it's beyond criticism.

There's always more than what's reported in the news. It's not like we're going to read the court transcripts.

Please be specific about what's wrong with this law, otherwise it seems like you are blowing smoke to minimize Tesla's blame.

I'll quote from the first opinion at https://casetext.com/case/diaz-v-tesla-inc-4 as a starting point:

> The jury heard that the Tesla factory was saturated with racism. Diaz faced frequent racial abuse, including the N-word and other slurs. Other employees harassed him. His supervisors, and Tesla's broader management structure, did little or nothing to respond. And supervisors even joined in on the abuse, one going so far as to threaten Diaz and draw a racist caricature near his workstation. ...

> On Diaz's second day of work, Diaz saw the N-word scratched into a bathroom stall. Id. at 401:6-12. Over the course of his employment, more racist bathroom graffiti was added. Id. at 403:5-15. He encountered swastikas and the phrase “death to all [N-words].” ...

> The jury, in special verdicts, found that: (1) Tesla subjected Diaz to a racially hostile work environment, (2) Tesla was a joint employer of Diaz, (3) Diaz was subject to a hostile work environment caused by a supervisor, (4) Diaz was subject to a hostile work environment caused by a non-immediate supervisor or co-worker, (5) Tesla committed a civil rights violation in a contractual relationship, (6) Tesla failed to take all reasonable steps necessary to prevent Diaz from being subject to racial harassment, and (7) Tesla negligently supervised or negligently continued to employ Ramon Martinez and that action harmed Diaz. ...

> The weight of the evidence is against Tesla's minimization of Diaz's emotional and psychological harm. Diaz testified about the severe consequences he experienced during his time at the factory. See supra Background, Section II.E. Jones similarly testified about the effects on her father. Id. And his psychological expert confirmed all of this, including by performing psychological evaluations to determine whether Diaz was “overreporting” his symptoms. Id. The jury, in short, had ample basis to believe Diaz's testimony that he was severely emotionally harmed.

Given that two different jury trials found Diaz's claims valid, what should the law be to prevent this level of hostile workplace environment?

If $3 million in punitive damages too large, and you think it a smaller one is more reasonable, how much is enough to deter Telsa from having a hostile work environment in the future?


Maybe his colleagues didn't like Diaz much. I don't approve of such slurs, on the other hand, I am in favor of free speech and people being in charge of their own companies.

Lousy lawyers - ianal, Musk said they were not allowed to present new evidence. No idea what was going on. Certainly there are judgements in the US legal system that seem wrong. It is not a perfect system.


> I am in favor of free speech and people being in charge of their own companies.

About half a century ago, after some difficult (and in some cases bloody) fights, the United States passed several laws curtailing some liberties a company owner may take with how they run their affairs with the aim of a net societal good. They are pretty well-constrained, place little burden on companies overall, and have the net effect of allowing a double-digit-percentage of working Americans of having a fair shot at doing the work they must do every day to make wage free of a kind of psychological torment that their peers are never at risk of experiencing daily.

It was certainly a curtailment of freedom of speech and expression. It was a curtailment of such with significant positive outcomes and made the country a better place.

Nothing I've seen about the way we are today suggests to me that rolling back the clock on those laws would be a net good.


That's your opinion as a probably left leaning person. Other people may think differently. That such laws were passed 50 years ago does not prove that they were a net positive.


Totally agree. They're the law right now, and if you're looking to change that, there is a process to do so. I haven't heard any explanation of how removing them would improve America other than "it would take us back to how things were before, which was better," which is a non-starter.

...And you will be fought every step of the way, as the people who got the laws first passed were fought every step of the way. Of course, I hope you fail, as I've never heard an explanation of how repealing those laws would improve things.


The explanation is simple: freedom. People forget that when they curb the freedom of their employers, they also curb their own freedoms at the same time. They make sure that they can never escape from the hamster wheel. Of course most people are happy as long as other people are not better off than they themselves, so being stuck in the hamster wheel doesn't bother them that much.

More freedom also means more potential businesses who have to compete for workers, which is good for the workers. If businesses have to compete, they'll try to make things as nice as possible for the workers.

The argument that things would become what they "were before" doesn't make that much sense. In a poor economy, things are poorly, no matter what socialist laws try to prevent it (worker protection only helps you if you have a job, for example). There is no reason that by abandoning some law from the 50 years ago, the economy would fall back to the state of the 80ies. Also maybe the 80ies weren't actually so bad. I'm too lazy to look it up, but I keep hearing that in the old days, people could afford to buy houses and feed a family on a single salary.

I'm sure you can get better explanations and economic theories. You have never heard an explanation because you have never looked for it or listened to one, not because none exist.


Freedom only for the owners of companies?

Or do you also respect the freedom of employees to engage in collective bargaining, the freedom of employees to negotiate a closed shop with the company, the freedom to engage in solidarity and political strikes, the freedom to carry out secondary boycotts, and so on.

Most of those are prohibited by law, where 100 years ago they were legal. And they didn't require a special law to enable those powers, because they grew out of the right to quit one's job.

> If businesses have to compete, they'll try to make things as nice as possible for the workers.

Which is why businesses don't like to compete, and will form cartels and informal agreements to prevent competition.

> I'm too lazy to look it up, but I keep hearing that in the old days, people could afford to buy houses and feed a family on a single salary.

We also had a lot higher tax rate on the wealth. And stronger union power. If you're going to lazily cherry pick history, then there are a lot of cherries to pick from.


> Freedom only for the owners of companies?

Everybody can start a company - or should be allowed to, that is the point. Socialist rules making it difficult prevent people from becoming independent.

> Or do you also respect the freedom of employees to engage in collective bargaining, the freedom of employees to negotiate a closed shop with the company, the freedom to engage in solidarity and political strikes, the freedom to carry out secondary boycotts, and so on.

People should be free to do that, but "employers" should also be free to fire them if they do.

> Which is why businesses don't like to compete, and will form cartels and informal agreements to prevent competition.

That works by government intervention and freedom would prevent it.

> We also had a lot higher tax rate on the wealth. And stronger union power. If you're going to lazily cherry pick history, then there are a lot of cherries to pick from.

I am not the person who claimed things were so bad in the past that we must not go back.


This is a country of over three hundred million people. Independence past a certain degree is intractable.

I recommend if you don't like the rules and are too lazy (as you've self-described) to do the hard work to change them, you should consider changing countries. After all, your remedy for employees who don't like working for employers who break the Equal Employment Act is they should change companies.

If that solution seems unpalatable, meditate upon why it is inappropriate to suggest that employees who don't like being discriminated against should just use the remedy of changing employers.


I don't live in the US.

What socialist like you keep forgetting is that somebody has to provide the jobs that you claim the rights to. If nobody provides the jobs, you can make laws all you want, people still won't have jobs.


We've been running that experiment for upwards of a century.

It turns out there are a couple motivating factors for why people form companies, including:

1. There's something they want to do and they need a lot of people to do it

2. They want to make a lot of money

3. They want to set their own work conditions

Socialist policies don't really impact motivation 1 (in fact, they can enhance it; one way American firms are hamstrung relative to their international peers is they have to pay directly for healthcare for their employees, whereas other countries treat that as a national-level responsibility that doesn't come asymmetrically out of various firms' pocketbooks). And motivation 2 is still satisfied if they're making $10 million instead of $10 billion, so long as $10 million is the number you're making when you're "winning the game." Motivation 3 is still very much a liberty that every company owner has, with only a few curtailments (not really any more than the notion that my driver's license gives me liberty to drive on public roads, even though I'm not allowed to drive on the left side of a divided road directly into oncoming traffic).

People have been predicting "socialism will kill the desire to make work for people" for decades as myriad nations have developed stronger government support for citizens' needs, and it hasn't happened. Sooner or later, one has to accept the evidence is against the "socialism kills jobs" hypothesis.

The US has more socialist policies in place right now than ever before, and unemployment is under 4%.


Most companies don't need lots of people. And setting their own work conditions is exactly what is at stake - which also impacts workers, as it also limits their choice of companies to work for. I also doubt wanting to make a lot of money is as common as you think - you can do that more easily in some corporate jobs these days, without the risk.

I don't know the extent of socialism in the US, but it certainly isn't a socialist country yet. Yes, we have run the experiment in the past, and all socialist countries failed spectacularly.

There is no such thing as free health care. Whether companies pay directly or via taxes doesn't really make a difference. The system in the US seems weird in various ways. All the "free health care" systems in other countries seem to be struggling a lot, by the way. None of them is really a proven solution as of now.


> Most companies don't need lots of people. And setting their own work conditions is exactly what is at stake

Great, if they don't need lots of people the Equal Employment Act shouldn't be a problem for them. There's a minimum size on enforcement of the law.

I really think you're overestimating how difficult it is to avoid creating a hostile work environment. You just follow up on reports. That's what you do. There's a whole standardized process to it and every company does it. The fact that Tesla failed to follow it (and failed so hard a jury originally awarded over $100 million in punitive damages, a number speaking to their outrage and disgust at what was allowed to occur) makes Tesla an outlier here.

Point blank: do you think the goal it is trying to achieve is correct but the method is flawed, or do you think the goal (changing, by law, the environment so that an entire demographic of Americans have any hope of having a job without harassment based on unchangeable characteristics they have) is wrong?


> You just follow up on reports. That's what you do.

And then you simply fire the non-liberals involved? Hostile work environment is usually people not getting along. I don't think that is usually easy to solve. You probably have some bias thinking about racists and what not. But even if you just choose to believe all liberal complaints, that enables people to exploit the system. An example would be female execs who seem to always file for "sexism" when they are fired, because why not.

> Point blank: do you think the goal it is trying to achieve is correct but the method is flawed, or do you think the goal (changing, by law, the environment so that an entire demographic of Americans have any hope of having a job without harassment based on unchangeable characteristics they have) is wrong?

I think nobody should be forced to employ somebody they don't want to employ (with their own money - for tax payer money, different rules are necessary). And I don't trust governments to know better how to run companies than the people owning the companies.


> And then you simply fire the non-liberals involved?

This is an odd sentiment and I don't know what to make of it. I'm assuming you don't think only non-liberals can create a hostile work environment, so what do you mean?

> I think nobody should be forced to employ somebody they don't want to employ (with their own money - for tax payer money, different rules are necessary).

As you've mentioned you don't live in the United states, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt that you don't know our terrible history with racism. The short version is that we had to pass laws after trying myriad other things because, as a principle of a nation where all men are created equal, it was unacceptable that there were entire regions of the country where one simply could not maintain employment if one had the wrong skin color.

It was an ugly fight. They shut down public education in some places during the fight. In some places blood was drawn during the fight.

But in the end, we the people said no.

And that declaration of "no" is tied to a privilege, not a right: the privilege to own a company, which is a legal construct licensed by the government. No one is owed the right to be a company owner, and if one wants to own a company, there are societal obligations they shoulder. Obeying the Equal Rights Act and the Equal Employment Act are such obligations (again, once the company is big enough!), right alongside "obey zoning laws" and "don't dump toxic waste in a river."

It is fundamentally naive to believe this is a problem the market will solve, because this country already tried solving it with the market.


> This is an odd sentiment and I don't know what to make of it. I'm assuming you don't think only non-liberals can create a hostile work environment, so what do you mean?

You claimed it would be easy to create non-toxic workspaces. So I assume you think you only have to fire the non-liberal people. How else do you imagine things to go down? It is also usually the liberals who complain loudly about allegeddly toxic workplaces (while somehow never creating any workplaces themselves - why are all business owners evil, when there seem to be so many good people around?).

Racism - yes I know you had all sorts of struggles. But I think you are lying when you claim black people could not hold jobs. In the beginning, black people were deported to the US to work. Also I don't think racism is at the core of your country, that is just the modern "Critical Race Theory" bullshit. It is not built around racism. People would rather be left alone.

Here is how you are REALLY wrong, though:

> No one is owed the right to be a company owner

Exactly the opposite: everybody should have that right. That means freedom. Nobody is owed a job, though - who should be obligated to provide that job?

If everybody can be a company owner, so can black people. Are you sure even black company owners would discriminate against black employees? There are many places with predominantly black population in the US, are there really no black owned businesses there?

And you know bloody well that most companies and organisations discriminate in favor of black people these days. You are really overly dramatic in your retelling of the story of racism. The sad thing is that in that way, the real issues are also not being addressed.

> because this country already tried solving it with the market.

I'm sure you misrepresent the actual history very badly here. "The market" would allow black people and also liberals who only love people to create companies and create all the non-toxic work environments they can dream of.

What would be stopping them? Would EVERY bank deny them a credit? Even good people like you, who want to help black people. Aren't there hundreds of millions like you - what would stop you from giving money to black businesses (for example via Kickstarter)?


> But I think you are lying when you claim black people could not hold jobs.

We're done here. You do not know sufficient history to make this conversation worth my time. I can't bridge the gap if we're not working from the same collection of facts, sorry.

> What would be stopping them? Would EVERY bank deny them a credit?

Yes. That's literally what happened. Entire towns and states that would loan zero money to a black person. And we have no evidence that but for the law we wouldn't go right back to that.


> I can't bridge the gap if we're not working from the same collection of facts, sorry.

I wonder what your sources are? For sure black people were able to work throughout history.

> Yes. That's literally what happened. Entire towns and states that would loan zero money to a black person. And we have no evidence that but for the law we wouldn't go right back to that.

Towns and states are not in the business of giving out loans, and nobody is entitled to a loan. But good people like you would have been able to give loans to black people. I don't think your idea of history is accurate at all.


> People forget that when they curb the freedom of their employers, they also curb their own freedoms at the same time.

Freedom to what, in this context?

> If businesses have to compete, they'll try to make things as nice as possible for the workers.

This is the "capitalism will solve it" argument which proved so untrue we passed the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment Act. It turns out that, no, even when it's economically obvious that catering to a minority population would be valuable, you can have 100% of a town refusing to do so because racism is more important to them than money. That creates entire regions of the country that are no-go zones if your skin color is wrong, and we decided that's not acceptable.

> There is no reason that by abandoning some law from the 50 years ago, the economy would fall back to the state of the 80ies.

I'm not concerned about what the economy would do; I'm concerned about whether it would be harder to keep a job free of daily torment if you're the wrong skin color than it is now. My mistake; the law in question isn't 50 years old, it's a 1970s law.

> I'm too lazy to look it up, but I keep hearing that in the old days, people could afford to buy houses and feed a family on a single salary.

If you can find some evidence that the passage of the ERA modified that, feel free to present it. But I'm pretty sure to explain why that changed, you're looking for Reagan-era deregulation (and the economic shift from a manufacturing economy, where unions were strong, to a service economy, where few unions existed).

> You have never heard an explanation because you have never looked for it or listened to one, not because none exist.

Interesting and unsupported hypothesis. But I don't expect you to bring me anything new because you've already declared you're "too lazy to look it up," so I think this conversation thread has ended.


> Freedom to what, in this context?

The freedom to work in the way they want. To escape the hamster wheel, for example by starting their own company with the conditions they prefer.

> This is the "capitalism will solve it" argument which proved so untrue we passed the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment Act.

It didn't prove untrue. The early days of capitalism where marked by a previous population explosion and abandonment of the feudal system, with lots of people pouring into cities looking for work. That is why there was a lot of poverty.

> That creates entire regions of the country that are no-go zones if your skin color is wrong, and we decided that's not acceptable.

Pretty sure there are lots of No-Go zones for people with the wrong skin color today. At least if your skin color is white.

> I'm concerned about whether it would be harder to keep a job free of daily torment if you're the wrong skin color than it is now.

So you think there wouldn't be any businesses run by black owners? Why not?

> But I'm pretty sure to explain why that changed, you're looking for Reagan-era deregulation

So the economy was better in the past, but your argument was that it was worse?

> Interesting and unsupported hypothesis.

Well everybody who HAS heard explanations knows they exist, so the reason you have not heard of them must be that you wilfully denied their exoistence.


Yeah but they can also live with a computer that costs 500$.


I would also not trust that number of 0.3% population growth. Were did you get it from? There are a lot of refugees from Ukraine, for example, which may have given prices another boost in the last year.


Is there a calculation as to how many hours would be lost spent on the road because of a speed limit? Like I don't know, say every day people spend a million hours driving on the highway, and a speed limit would bump it to 1.2 million hours (no idea, just made up numbers)?


Haven't looked into the Twitter API in a long time, but this might just be badly implemented. They should have every user user their own API access code and their own rate limiting, not post everything via one account.

At least it sounds as if this is just an issue of generic rate limiting, not specific to Mastodon.

In that sense, this is fake news, as it falsely suggests Twitter has special rules in place to shut out Mastodon.


The rate limiting should be done by user id not developer id. That's how the Google APIs work.


it's that way, but twitter limits their API to 300 posts/user/3hours, and some power users hit the limit

"""

there's a little star on the documentation saying that an app can only create 300 Tweets per user or per app for every 3 hours. I believe that the influx caused a lot of new power users from twitter, that post a lot, to come over and that's now causing the crossposter to hit the limit.

"""


If a real person (not a bot) can tweet more than a 100 tweets per hour (i.e. 1 tweet every 36 seconds on avg) I would call them mentally ill, not power users.


True. So if anything, they are being very generous with the rate limit here. I think they should dial it back to 10 tweets per hour.


Getting api access at Twitter is probably too involved for many users, and I don't know whether "I want to run that program over there" would be sufficient as a reason. I don't know how it currently is, but some years ago they changed from "sign up and here's your token" to "sign up and explain to us why you need API access". Might have been after Cambridge Analytica, I don't know.

They're not overly inquisitive, but it seemed that a human judged the comment you write, and there was some delay, so it's probably not something most people would do if they want to give a third party service access.


I mean let's be honest, they're using Mastodon which has a high effort barrier to begin with, they can create a Twitter Developer account.

The form you fill is only needed for upgraded access, it requires filling multiple pages with minimum character limits (not very Twitter like). It was approved automatically for me, but the basic API is fine for regular users. If you do any kind of analysis though, basic and upgraded Twitter APIs are useless and too rate limited even if it seems generous.


Hmm I see your point, but I disagree. I think creating a Twitter developer account and getting an API key is MUCH harder than signing up for mastodon.

For example, I have a colleague who has been a big twitter user. They’re a passive listener on the site, and want to move to mastodon because people are moving. They created an account on mastodon.social and struggled to find their people. I suggested some tools that would help… and they refused on grounds that they were afraid the tool would abuse their twitter login information.

I wound up trying to explain oauth scopes. They didn’t get it and still haven’t tried. There is no way this person would sign up for a twitter dev account. But they are on Mastodon and putting some effort into figuring it out.


Signups are currently 50k+ people a day, and probably about half of the people I follow on Mastodon are people of a totally non-technical background. It may feel high effort to people, but it's not something which requires any more technical understanding than getting past the "what the heck is an instance?" issue, and I've seen people get comfortable on Mastodon before even understanding that and then had it click once they there.

That said, the proportion of people making the move who also want to set up a crossposter might well be much more technically inclined.


If the official API requires jumping through hoops, then use the API that Twitter's web interface uses. Run it in Selenium if you have to. No approval for that besides creating an account.


it doesn't seem badly implemented, and yes, generic API post limit.

some power users are hitting the 300 post/3hours limit according the linked thread.


Those numbers sound more like spammers than "Twitter power users", whatever that could be.


Gotta make full use of that eight dollar checkmark.


Or it could just need maintenance but the team that did that was fired


You can back up your data from Huawei phones, too. Apple had plans to scan the photos on your phone and automatically report you to the police if the algorithm thinks something is off. I wouldn't trust them at all.


I think I cut undercut their price for producing a movie nobody wants to see every day.


I don't understand what benefit the hypothesis library gives here? Why can't you just generate values without hypothesis and call the test function with your values "manually"?


The cool thing is that hypothesis tries to build minimal examples that make your test fail.


The magic is in the "strategies"? How does it do that? And does it have a memory between test runs?



As a counterpoint, my kid was playing a game on Roblox that taught them basics of avoiding fraud before allowing them to play. It was a game about trading animals. It is not all bad.


Nobody is a scientist, it is all just people.


It may all be people, but some of those people have spent an inordinate amount of time learning the current state of the art in a particular field, and contributed new information to help advance the state of the art in (mostly microscopic) ways. We call those people “scientists.”

(People without that monomaniacal background and focus still write about science, but they’re prone to making basic errors. We call them “journalists.”)


True. But they still need to come out of their labs and talk to normal people by persuading them. Their scientific perch doesn't give them the right to be a dicatator. We are still free to reject their conclusions. That is our right.


That’s kind of a non-sequitor, isn’t it? Scientists aren’t being dictators. But climate scientists specifically are raising alarms, with an unprecedented level of consensus. We ignore those alarms at our peril.

Climate science is full of well-meaning laypeople rehashing basic facts, and doing so poorly. I’m not a climate scientist, and I don’t know the details, but I know enough to know that figuring out historical temperatures is a whole branch of science with massive amounts of work and research behind it. This amateur comes along with a naïve data collection methodology and gets some results that casts doubt on one of the fundamental facts of climate science—that the world is getting warmer.

At this point, he could have stopped and said, “this data is completely out of line with the established science. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand.” Perhaps do a literature search to find out how data is collected and confounding factors are addressed.

Or he could throw his crap data up “without comment,” implying that he’s found some secret. Pfeh. Lazy and irresponsible. At the bare minimum, he could have shown a little intellectual courage and asked what he was missing, and why his data was at odds with the scientific consensus.

The scientific community encounters these sorts of well-meaning amateurs all the time, particularly in physics. They combine ignorance and enthusiasm into an unending firehose of time-wasting ideas. They’re called “crackpots.”


They are not all "crackpots". Many environmentalists have come forward stressing the importance of walking back some of the verge-of-catastrophe alarms that have been pulled. (Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, and one former Obama administration advisor, to name a few). They are not saying its a non-problem, but they are saying it's completely manageable without destroying civilisation by hiking the cost of energy.

These alarms bells have been pulled repeatedly over the past 50 years. Calls for imminent catastrophe in just 10 years if nothing is done. That was 20 years ago. At some point, you have to wonder just who is profiting off of your fears while flying around in their private jets. That should tell you something.


I wasn’t familiar with those names, so I looked them up. Neither is a climate scientist. According to Wikipedia, “ Shellenberger's positions have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics.” Lomborg’s book was found to be “scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts.”

I'll let you have the last word.


The "environmental scientists and academics" in question have probably also been accused of bad science by their opponents. And who gets to decide who is the scientist in that debate?

Shellenberger and Lomborg have presumable studied the issue for decades, so at what point does one cross into "being a scientist" territory? Years of study apparently doesn't do it, so what does? Obama's seal of approval?

You are confusing science and specific systems of doing science, like say a countries university system. A specific system of doing science does not automatically produce good science.


It requires continued adherence to the scientific method. As soon as you stop doing that you stop being a scientist, whether your name is Shellenberger, Lomborg or Watson for that matter isn't relevant. Science is what you do not who you are.


Sure - but then how do you verify that some alleged scientist has been doing that, if you are not allowed/worthy of checking their work?


Of course you are allowed. And whether you are worthy or not is up to you but just gathering a bunch of questionable data, throwing it in the blender, ignoring all evidence to the contrary and using that to spread FUD is definitely not science.


How is it not science? Of course that is also science. Can you point out something where he broke your rule of using scientific methods?

All he did so far was provide some data points. The "real" scientists should be able to explain them easily.

Btw, since I was just talking about her elsewhere, would you say Greta Thunberg qualifies as a scientist?


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