When I read these types of articles, there is always an underlining irony present there...
Out of all the diverse groups of people in the prison, only the racist whites (Nazis) would tolerate and give protection to this person - yet this person's entire write-up is predominantly against this same group of people.
A further explanation is provided to the reader that picks up on this: while these Natzi-people must truly hate him, they only truly protect him because there exists an even deeper more-menacing underlining racism within them.
All the other groups, are just fine, nothing more than a structured response to the racism.
While low on details, the story ends with the realization that while white discrimination is an evil unlike any other discrimination, it does allow the strong to find their true roots.
This story would be told quite differently if this person went to prison in a Muslim country.
This guy is one of those insufferably left-wing Jews who are borderline tankies most of the time. Most Jews, both my mom and dad, for example, either are indifferent or outright dislike other groups more than they do modern day white supremacists. My dad, who by the way isn't some country bumpkin, but is a senior VP of engineering at a company HQ'd in Palo Alto which I won't name, has made so many passionate rants about blacks, Hispanics, Asians, communists/socialists (both my parents are from the Soviet Union), etc., that I couldn't even remember the individual instances anymore. Funny enough, Benjamin Netanyahu's son recently said the left is currently a bigger threat to Jews than white supremacists currently are. In my own life, I've heard way more antisemitic remarks from blacks and mestizos, and even Asians, than from whites, even though I've been around many more whites in my life.
If you want to be correct, its more like "we've looked at your model and talked to the people that created it, and everyone that worked on it agrees that the debate is being driven by politics rather than science. We've found that emissions of the sun are responsible for 98% of the current climate change, that carbon is the smallest factor in the other 2%, and you are being set up for a global taxation system that is designed to establish control over everyone under a false premise."
That's a (much) better argument than the "God wouldn't let this happen" straw-man often argued against by climate change activists. The "Climategate" emails make it particularly compelling. The air of corruption and decay around academia and academic publishing in particular have legitimately eroded trust in those institutions, and thanks to the nature of climate change the data is highly indirect and difficult to independently verify (compare the discovery of climate change to the discovery of Saturn's moons, or the ideal gas law!)
Truth is, although I strongly tend to believe climate change claims, I still feel some strong skepticism. I know my way around math, statistics, chemistry, and physics, but I couldn't tell you what measurements you actually can do to support climate change assertions. How do you measure the average temperature of a region, let alone the world, over a long period of time?! I've always felt uneasy about archeologists drawing conclusions from a single bone fragment, or even cosmologists drawing enormously long chains of conclusions from star spectra, but in those cases a) the measurement itself is obvious, b) the reasoning is obvious (even if you disagree with it) and c) it doesn't really matter all that much. Climate change, though, suffers from a) measurements that aren't obvious, b)reasoning that isn't obvious, and c) is incredibly important and we can't get it wrong. And moreover, if you express these doubts, the vast majority of climate change activists will just get angry with you and either stop talking to you at all, or point to letters with lots of eminent signatories saying, "it all makes sense to us, the evidence is overwhelming, we're really smart, so trust us."
Argument from authority isn't good enough, and the intuitive argument isn't good enough, either. Yes, we live in a thin skin of biosphere and we are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at a huge rate in absolute terms. But I don't have an intuition about the relative rate, especially when compared to natural processes (which are vast). We cut down forests at a prodigious rate, which hurts capture, but I don't have an intuition about the amount of this either. I would love it if someone took these concerns seriously and wrote a book about it.
(For the record, I think there are other "good enough" reasons to change our behavior. Rampant consumerism isn't good for people or the planet in more obvious, directly measurable ways. Plus, even if the odds are low for a global catastrophe, it is better to be safe than sorry.)
Alas, many skeptics, even on HN, prefer to make general armchair-physics arguments despite the information already out there, condensed and edited, and backed by peer review and hundreds of citations into the literature.
Annoyingly, sometimes these skeptics even then complain that there is not enough information to really be sure, as if they have looked.
The link lacks answers to the basic, first-order questions I've asked regarding methods, particularly methods that yield historical background to currently observed phenomena. Also, your attitude of contempt, and continued reliance and argument from authority, shows weakness. After all, if you really knew what you were talking about, the answers to my questions should be easy.
The last time this was suggested on the news (CNN, etc), I did some quick math.
To ship gas to Europe, the US will need to spend about 50B-100B+ (minimum) building LNG facilities on both port sides, and then build something like 10,000 LNG Carriers (oceanic ships) to meet demand. Which would cost another 100B+ (maybe even 1T).
After all the infrastructure is set up, the prices will be at least 2-3 what they pay now (as they have to do things to and with the LNG that Russia does not in the process of delivery).
Its not feasible, unless you want the US taxpayers to pick up the bill and then subsidize it.
These were back of the envelope calculations. It could be a factor of 10 off in either direction.
How were those numbers estimated? To go with adventured's proposal that Germany replace half of its coal power with LNG, Germany generated 284 TWh from coal in 2013. Producing 142 TWh from gas would require about 25 million tons per annum of gas (assuming 490 g CO2/kWh from gas generation in CCGT, per IPCC 2014, and working backward from CO2 to CH4 -- 178 kg of methane per MWh).
The US is already expected to add 66 MTPA of LNG export capacity by 2019:
Why couldn't you build a submarine pipeline, instead of the ship terminals and ships?
Langeled (1166 km) and Nord Stream (1222 km) transport gas under the sea, and a US-to-Germany pipeline would only be about 5 times that distance. I estimate Boston-to-Hamburg could be done for $60 billion, and it could make stops in Newfoundland, Ireland, and Britain.
The speculation driven movement of the BTC cannot be compared to the speculation on the USD or any other currency. 0.01% and 50000% are all percentages, but the number is so different as to completely change what we are talking about.
> Speculation is unquestionably a good thing.
Maybe, but usual only if the resulting volatility results in lower price for the consumer, or makes a market.
But then again, BTC has no market for goods nor services compared to the currency it is bought and sold with (its legitimate non-fictional market is so low as to be non-existent).
> The speculation driven movement of the BTC cannot be compared to the speculation on the USD or any other currency.
Care to explain this a little more? At face value I'm not sure I agree with that statement, but I get the feeling I'm not understanding what you're trying to say.
I've been following quantum computing since D-Wave made its press release some years back. Now I'm a complete skeptic.
The huge red flag I can't get over is if it is as so, why can no one validate it after all this time?
Why is there the proverbial "it works but not in the way you think it works" (i.e., quantum annealing) or "it works but we can use non-QM systems to simulate it faster, better, cheaper by a factor of a trillion"?
If QM computing was truly feasible (assuming that QM does have an underlining phenomena that is physically real), why are the results after all this time so fuzzy?
Because you have to build the quantum computer in a world that is overwhelmingly classical.
There are no qualifiers along the lines of "underlying phenomena". It's simply difficult to get a stable enough interface between the classical and the quantum, so you can control it, while at the same time isolating it enough that it doesn't decohere to classicality.
Who knows, maybe reliable scalable quantum computation truly isn't feasible for some reason, but if you study the physics, the fact that this is so hard is not really a surprise.
But they have already solved the engineering problems (at least 10 years ago).
They already have "qbits".
The interface issues look to be 98% solved.
And the temperature cooling, the EM shielding, and everything else (that is outside the circuitry design and the physical chipset), a person with a budget of 80,000 USD can recreated in his garage.
Its the results I can't understand.
Why can't X qbits, in the time they stay coherent, produce results that agree with the mathematical analysis of the setup? Why is it always off by a factor so large that its not even productive for any task.
My understanding of it is not complete, this is why I ask. Is the interface issue only 2% solved (and not 98%), etc.?
It's being down voted because it's an accusatory, non-answer to a speculative statement. The parent comment literally stated "I want to verify this." It's not a legitimate point in any sense of the word legitimate.
I'd have myself a hard think about what lead you to writing such a comment up.
Ironically though, just as another anecdote (and to the best of my knowledge), the very first "fake news" right-wing site who's operator was confronted, ended up being a left-voting liberal who [paraphrasing] "hated conservatives and people on the right, and wanted to spread disinformation to them to pollute their arguments".
But I guess we'll never know, so the best solution is still non-censorship.
> Facebook tried doing this to combat actual fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn't Facebook's problem to deal with.
Assuming we followed the same Facebook story (that intentionally set up boards of people - that were biased - to curtail the news in various ways), it seems like what you are trying to say is that alternative and conservative news is "fakes news", and they should receive algorithmic censorship.
Personally, for myself, the last 10 stories I've seen on "neutral" outlets like CNN and to the left outlets like Washington Post / New York / MSNBC - have been 100 percent driven by agenda rather than facts.
And the only time I'm able to get anything real is when I go to the other side, in which case all I have to do is tone it down 50%, yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth.
So how would you categorize which one of us is the idiot whose sources of news should be curtailed? Because I'm actually fine with you listening to CNN.
Does anyone have any sources of major news outlets reporting that the Texas gunman was Muslim? The problem is treating tweets as "news" and this is a problem by media outlets left and right. There are all kinds of tweets that are false and misleading that trend in both right and left circles why do we only complain about one side.
Major news outlets, no. Not so major outlets, sure.
All the Googling I've seen seems to point to a "Santa Monica Observer" as the primary source of this claim. (See the Snopes article: https://www.snopes.com/texas-samir-al-hajeed-sam-hyde/ ), Snopes also links to a "Freedom Daily" and there are a couple of other sketchy news websites with this claim.
The Snopes article also mentions that a comedian known for trolling-style pranks (Sam Hyde -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hyde#Hoaxes_and_pranks ) is tangent to these claims. So my best guess is that you are correct, someone treated a trollish tweet or post as actual news.
I'm not sure why bias is brought up all the time in "fake news", because bias is not the same as fake. Nobody should have issues with conservative news that is known for better vetting, even if their bias is strong (your Wall Street Journals, National Review, etc.). Fake is fake whether it comes from the right or the left. It is true that conservative fake news was much more prevalent in the 2016 election (https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf), but "progressive" fake news definitely exists.
The tweets exist on "both sides." Sure. But how effective and endemic are these misleading tweets in each sphere?
I'm having a real hard time thinking of analogous lies on the left that have readily observable support or momentum in comparison to misinformation like the origin, religion, or race of a mass murder and/or claiming that an elected president wasn't actually born in the U.S.
Hard to dismiss such misinformation that's heartily consumed and propagated in whatever sphere as just being "tweets" or saying "it exists over there too!" when the effects of said misinformation in each sphere are significantly different.
>it seems like what you are trying to say is that alternative and conservative news is "fakes news", and they should receive algorithmic censorship.
That's an incredibly disingenuous if not an outright idiotic comprehension on what was stated. If a source continually propagates blatantly false news it doesn't matter what the political bent is. It's going to lose credibility. Just like if someone is continually caught in a lie, you might stop listening to them, regardless of what race, religion, sex, or gender they are. You're not censoring them, you just know taking them at their word is a losing gamble.
The fact that a host of popular conservative sources continually participated in spreading false and misleading information isn't the fault of any content aggregator, and in this case Facebook certainly wasn't at fault. In fact, it seems like a problem that should be earnestly addressed within the conservative sphere, instead of conveniently using it to bolster a political platform and help with general ad revenue.
If you want to spit out little pathetic buzzwords and engage in intellectual lukewarmness, that's your prerogative. But you're going to have a hard time attempting to cry victim, or censorship, and engage in false equivocations when other people or organizations stop taking these sources seriously and choose to stop lending them a platform to spread lies and conspiracy theories.
> yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth.
Okay, well. I didn't realize I was dealing with unmitigated idiocy here. I'd have saved myself the key presses.
With all due respect, your post contains some content, but this isn't behavior for HN and I'm really surprised it's being tolerated, let alone upvoted. Do you somehow expect to change any opinions with an insult-riddled comment like that?
So two things. You quoted three things, all 3 five words or less. At most that leaves 15 words across 3 paragraphs. Hardly worth drawing attention to.
Not that it really matters, because everything that was stated was pretty justified. It's curious that you take issue with my post or its tone, and not that out right dishonest response I was negating.
Looking at your posting history, and your continually false and misleading statements regarding all things geopolitical, I can only assume you're here to cause a stir. With all due respect.
I agree with your content but completely disagree with your delivery.
Did you come here from reddit? It's unnecessary and inappropriate, and I don't think that kind of behavior is 'justified' in response to someone you consider uneducated.
As for my (respectful) posting history: I only post when I feel that something has yet to be pointed out by anyone else, which will naturally be the more uncommon opinions and/or devil's advocate type of questions.
No it's pretty appropriate. I didn't say anything uncalled for. Especially when someone is being dishonest. Congratulations on not being able to discuss the subject matter in your attempt to completely derail the conversation.
Historically, if you look at past discussions, we've had great conversations by upvoting any comment that adds a new perspective to the mix.
If an ideal society wishes to eliminate climate change denial, for example, it won't be through silencing and stigmatizing their beliefs; it'll be through respectfully listening and debating.
As an example, I was rather unaware of the debate against climate change until reading a discussion on HN from people who were oft characterized as 'deniers.' One, for example, believed there were more immediate problems to be solved, and the other wasn't convinced by the science. It was a productive discussion, and I feel that everyone is better off having it, yet I fear that it wouldn't be condoned today without a mass of downvotes.
At this stage of the matter, it is quite possible that you fell for exactly the sort of bad-faith 'discussions' that pjc50 mentioned. Two forms of this are the repetition of thoroughly-debunked arguments and the injection of non-sequiturs (as I don't know what you are specifically referring to, I cannot say for certain, but most of what appears in this domain falls into at least one of these categories.)
I agree that there is no point in downvoting this sort of thing, but it is unfortunate if it gets upvoted by people who are not in a position to judge its validity. Scoring arguments on style is not the way to go (even if that is how the SAT essay is scored.)
Some people are down voting him for name calling. Both republicans and democrats suffer from a persecution complex on HN. It's kind of funny.
All sites are agenda driven. But somehow sites with agendas that I disagree with are more guilty of bias. Funny how that works. Fake news, on the other hand, is claiming global warming is hoax invented by the Chinese. I would say only 10% of my facebook friends are conservative and I've only seen them post blatant lies like photoshops of black NFL players cheering the burning of a US flag. The liberals, at worst, get a little too excited about the Russian investigation. Though that has as much merit as Hilary's emails.
> Some people are down voting him for name calling.
I was surprised by the downvotes to a fairly argued comment, and then I read this hours ago and it seemed valid. The most upvoted comment in response now, however, calls him 'idiotic' several times throughout.
When someone says that I cannot discern fake from real, and for my own well being I should be protected from "fake news" (otherwise I'll start to believe that global worming is real / not-real), than I'm being treated like I'm some type of an "idiot", so why hide that word.
Also the giant monolith/megalith structures in Russia are out of this world.
Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.
Plenty of people viewed it as dictatorship the whole time, most of which just confined their thoughts to themselves (diaries sometimes, kitchen talks sometimes).
I lived there before the collapse. It was a communist state. With centralized planning. And all the waste that goes with it.
After Stalin, the Soviet Union had several levels of "above president" parliaments (with an elect and/or rotating boards), such as the "Supreme Soviet", that had enormous power. Presidents where forced to resign, some where placed under house arrest.
A dictatorship did not exist there in the form of a president.
Communism is Marxism. You will never be able to separate them. Nor change the fact that they don't cure human suffering, they produce it.
> After Stalin, the Soviet Union had several levels of "above president" parliaments, such as the "Supreme Soviet", that had enormous power.
The office of President wasn't created until 1990, and there was only one person to hold that office.
Are you thinking of the Premier (formal head of government before 1990), or the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (head of state)?
> Presidents where forced to resign, some where placed under house arrest.
The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy.
> Communism is Marxism. You will never be able to separate them.
Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.
> The office of President wasn't created until 1990, and there was only one person to hold that office.
I was being general (and going throughout USSR's history, not just after 1990). There were all kinds of titles and offices and committees, with a central official that the public could see: Chairman, General Secretary, First Secretary, etc.
"President", from the outside perspective [we are not in the Soviet Union], is good enough for the description against the argument that was being made (of a Stalin type "dictatorship").
If you have to nitpick on the word, your argument will never end...
> The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy.
And after all that said, no one can still name just 1 / like they name Stalin?
The answer is "its an etheric dictatorship that could be this or that or anything I want it to be to for the arguments sake"?
> Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.
Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes. None of which you are going to want to ingest. Because if you do, its only a matter of time before you die.
> And after all that said, no one can still name just 1 / like they name Stalin?
Uh, since I said the list included all three Premiers that were also General Secretaries of the CPSU, that's equivalent to naming Kruschev. (Lenin was before Stalin and Stalin was Stalin.)
> Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes.
Arguably, in the case of Marxism vs. Leninism, it's more similar to the relation between the abstract concept of a “democratic republic” and the concrete state known as the “German Democratic Republic.”
You've named all people who could be removed just as easily as they where placed into power.
That is not a dictatorship. I'll provide an example -
Saddam Hussein was a dictator... He had the power/authority, ability, and the will, to kill half the country's population to control the other half. Not that he did it.
Thats a real dictatorship.
Another way to think about this -
Within the Soviet Union, Russia spans 11 time-zones. Just by size alone (and the diversity it provides), the country was too large to have any effective dictatorship over because of all the different regional alliances. And they had constant problems that would never end, to prove it.
Even today, Putin himself has admitted that one of the biggest problems in Russia is that both state organizations and regional authorities will not do what they are told.
That's simply not true. Russia is very centralized. Whatever power local overlords wield, gets stripped immediately should they anger Moscow. They're usually assigned from outside and as such alien to locals.
That is more or less the main way the media in the US, the EU, and some other world regions, is operating right now.
For each major story, they remove all the real details, even the context, and just present you with a well crafted narrative which itself is mostly supported only by promises of inside-knowledge, secret/anon sources, and "proofs" that are never released.
Then after some time passes the details are re-introduced by the non-liars and the narrative collapses.
Except nothing changes because the general public has already been conditioned to want to be lied to daily and just moves on to the next fake-news story.
>They remove all the real details, even the context, and just present you a well crafted narrative that has no basis in reality.
I don't normally comment on political topics, but who are you talking about here? Is the "they" in this sentence RT or Twitter? Both have huge incentives to misrepresent facts to make themselves look good.
>Except nothing changes because the general public has already been conditioned to want to be lied to daily and just moves on to the next fake-news story.
Sounds about right. I just assume both parties are lying here.
They being the media. Journalistic integrity died years ago. We like to blame Russian for the last election outcome, but are quick to forget that mega corporations spent way more time and effort trying to sway the election. For some reason we are ok with Google trying to influence voters through recommends and search results, but aren't ok when Russian does the same thing using ads (on Google platforms). Google, Twitter, Facebook had no problem taking Russian money during the election.
It seems to be most people are focused on blaming Russian involvement instead of asking how much impact Google, Facebook and Twitter had on the election. It's the blame game and it's way easier to blame a foreign country.
Out of all the diverse groups of people in the prison, only the racist whites (Nazis) would tolerate and give protection to this person - yet this person's entire write-up is predominantly against this same group of people.
A further explanation is provided to the reader that picks up on this: while these Natzi-people must truly hate him, they only truly protect him because there exists an even deeper more-menacing underlining racism within them.
All the other groups, are just fine, nothing more than a structured response to the racism.
While low on details, the story ends with the realization that while white discrimination is an evil unlike any other discrimination, it does allow the strong to find their true roots.
This story would be told quite differently if this person went to prison in a Muslim country.