> they did the exact same thing at the exact same time.
They did not do the "exact same thing" at all. You are spreading lies using logical fallacies and that causes harm to the community here; please stop. Your false equivalence, presented without evidence, is harmful.
Both campaigns abused Facebook to get the personal information of people who never downloaded the offending app. The Obama campaign collected information on a lot more people than CA did, so many that Facebook said they would have blocked anybody else requesting that much information.
I may be misunderstanding this, but it looks like the Obama campaign was able to access the entire social graph of people who knew that they were contributing information to the Obama campaign. So for example if we were Facebook friends and they got you from my social graph, it would be because I knowingly let them have access to my information knowing it was for political purposes.
According to the Wikipedia article on the CA scandal [1]:
> Cambridge Analytica in turn arranged an informed consent process for research in which several hundred thousand Facebook users would agree to complete a survey only for academic use. However, Facebook's design allowed this app not only to collect the personal information of people who agreed to take the survey, but also the personal information of all the people in those users' Facebook social network. In this way Cambridge Analytica acquired data from millions of Facebook users
So, both got more information than the sharers intended (namely, information from people in their social graphs), but in the Obama case the root nodes of any such information trees were people who knew they were sharing with the Obama campaign whereas in the CA case the root nodes were people who were told that they were sharing only for academic research.
That seems to me to be a pretty big difference. In the Obama case if I'm a root node, the abuse is that although they used the information for the purposes I intended when I gave it, they got more information than I may have intended to (or had a moral right to) give. In the CA case if I'm a root node the abuse is that plus them lying about why the information was being collected.
> This assumes that targeted ads are truly effective for changing politics
No it doesn't. "Targeted ads" had very little to do with the CA/Facebook scandal and I see them as largely irrelevant in what happened. So I don't see that assumption present in the top comment at all.
A significant amount of the "noopolitics" done with this kind of data is done through peer-based evidence - "regular" accounts posting political things, with "regular" accounts responding, but where both accounts are false personas, spies if you will.
The 'targeted ads' line is a misleading spin. Very little was done with targeted ads and a lot more was done with impersonating Americans and posing as GOP officials, etc.
> A decade ago, when I was a senior in high school, “Jimmy,” a jilted ex-patient of my dad’s, began stalking our family. Over a period of months, verbal harassment escalated to threats of violence and we soon found ourselves accompanied by police escorts for the better part of a week
> ....
> In Jimmy’s case, though, I simply cannot fathom how Instagram made this connection, despite quite a bit of legwork on my part to do so. He is not (and has never been) in my contacts, nor, after searching my email accounts, have I ever typed his name or even been forwarded an email about him. The more elaborate explanations I’ve entertained are nakedly conspiratorial, and so I’ve written Jimmy’s case off as a mystery that will remain unsolved, like a ship sunk in deepest waters.
The author described in sufficiently meticulous detail that Jimmy's location and presence felt through verbal harassment etc were frequently in close proximity to the author's entire family. I can think of at least a dozen clearly non-conspiratorial ways that Instagram has made the connection.
I think the author is living in the same bubble that much of the Internet is in: that the tech companies don't care to track us in the 'real world' and that most of it is still done with tracking pixels or smart-advertisements.
Instagram/Facebook openly use location and photographs to identify subjects and track them. This is no secret. If there is any remote possibility of a person having been anywhere near you for the last 10 years it should be assumed Instagram / Facebook already know about it. Any assumption less than that sounds conspiratorial to me ("don't worry nobody cares to watch you" etc).
> In Jimmy’s case, though, I simply cannot fathom how Instagram made this connection... and so I’ve written Jimmy’s case off as a mystery that will remain unsolved
Is it really that mysterious? The connection could have been made in the other direction. For example, Jimmy could have had the author's email address in his contact list and allowed access to his contact list to some web site? Jimmy could have searched for the authors name on Instagram (not sure - I'm not a user) at some point?
here's a possibility right here - google sells a list of potential names a given user searched for, and facebook / instagram use that as a way to try to find connections
> but I haven't seen any evidence that they sell data
It's worse than that, they give it away. RTB (real time bidding) on advertising works by presenting the bidder with a whole pile of info on the ad slot they are bidding on.
So even if you don't bid or you lose the bid you still get all that juicy data.
There seem to be three kinds of parties here, the advertisers, the exchanges, and the websites. An advertiser places targeted ads with exchanges. The websites send bids, potentially with user info, to the exchanges.
I'm finding web pages at Google showing that they run their own ad exchange, and they integrate with other people's ad exchanges.
I don't know how to find out if Google makes bids using any exchanges other their own, or whether the information from Google's bids could otherwise leak to advertisers.
I have come across this in some friends. It's super interesting but also dangerous. It has taken me sometimes years or a decade to fully come to terms with some past debates. My friends would seemingly hold opinions and cling to them dearly, opinions I felt were so unconscionable I could not imagine holding them. Friendships were strained and maybe some lost. They tell me now that they were doing as you do, and that they did not hold those opinions but were merely testing them and practicing debating, learning about both sides, etc.
But I wonder about the unintended consequences of this. How many 'opinions' are out there in the world purely to cause pain? What portion of opinions that are shared on social media or the news actual opinions from those people, vs crafted statements of trolling themselves?
When you take the 'other side' for practice, is there really a valid [1] other side to take? I find often that the other side is based on logical fallacies and is not, at its base, a valid argument. I wonder if you are creating distance between you and others while you test out the opinions of propagandists? How valid [1 again] really are all these opinions?
[1] Okay here we go with this. I am indeed calling some opinions "invalid". What I mean is, I do not think it is a valid opinion to cause harm to minorities on purpose. I think this is cruel and amounts to a crime in our society. But you will find people advocating it loudly on social media and TV - and their arguments are based on treating humans cruelly for no reason other than the cruelty and other various logical fallacies.
If you are to take stances that you don't agree with, please check them logically first before putting those arguments out there in the world. Some things are better understood without trying to understand 'the other side', simply because it is not going to be based in logic and has no possible outcome of being 'understood'.
For these cases, you have to examine the whole of those friends' character. If that friend repeatedly brings up the same arguments 'just to test or practice', and/or if they reveal the fruits of those arguments in other aspects of their character or thought, you can make the argument to them that you cannot in good faith believe that they are merely holding that position for argument's sake.
However, if they have a known position and they make arguments clearly outside those boundaries, and then /show that they return to their usual position after/, it is much more feasible to believe that they are indeed merely testing their own position thoroughly, as any reasoning person should.
My own experience with this tends to arise out of an extreme cognitive dissonance - I want my opinions to be internally consistent, and I've come to realize that a few of them just aren't consistent. When you get into reading the philosophy (or the relevant literature in other cases) you can come to conclusions which are quite far removed from beliefs one holds dear. So there's some tension between what I'd like to be true (security in a belief) and what seems true when I rationally consider the arguments. The second part of my experience shows that when you report your findings to others, they are immediately skeptical to the point of refusing to engage with the established literature. In reality, I try and make others aware of these opinions by arguing for them - partially in the hope that they can offer a counter-argument and that I can be back "home" safe in my original opinions which I thought I couldn't justify.
Secondly is the matter of epistemological framework; some people seem stuck with a particular way of finding information about the world which intentionally or not is constructed to dismiss critical engagement.
The most controversial topics of political philosophy are very interesting to me because it can be hard to find a view which is internally consistent. I'm emotionally upset when I can't arrive at such a view. To hold a view I can't justify is a horrible feeling. The kind of topics I'm talking about are issues of freedom of speech (pornography, hate speech, censorship, debate, the notion of harm and the validity of the harm principle), economics (the labour theory of value, tendency for the rate of profit to fall, objectivity or subjectivity of value, various historical arguments), social psychology (ideology in society and the flattening of culture, totalitarianism of the market, the experience of other sexualities e.g. the adult My Little Pony fan community and the Japanese lolicon phenomenon), and the nature of work (the meaning of consent and coercion, free will, the phenomenon of "bullshit jobs"). In the face of these issues, I find that it's hard to spend any energy on talking about such banalities as vim vs emacs or FOSS.
The trouble with entirely self consistent philosophically positions is they have tended towards extremism. At least according to my reading of the history of philosophy.
As with science, we have to accept that we can simultaneously hold two theories to be "true" even when they don't square with each other. To do otherwise is an exercise in frustration. Or extremism, if you choose to discard all philosophies that do not fit with your preferred one.
Open any unmoderated comments section on any site and you'll find thousands of trolls.
It's strange that you think trolling is some subversive and venerable reaction to censorship, when anonymously commenting on websites is a nearly effortless act that incurs neither a cost nor risk.
I totally agree that, when adopting a hypothetical opinion, it's a good idea to vet it, and prevent wasting everybody's time in hypotheticals. Though part of that process may be to temporarily adopt an absurd view and work out how it fails.
You almost never have to spend an entire argument to vet a complete garbage opinion. If you do it quickly, or the opinion isn't complete garbage, you're not running afoul of the complaint.
> So it is again a long term gamble to maybe make one day a load of money.
No, that's not what this is. The comment above you said nothing about this anyway, it seems to be off-topic? The entire point of this launch is to reduce the risk, assess potential problems early, and find paying customers quickly to prove the market demand before and their ability to handle it, before scaling up and launching more.
> So again one of Elon Musks enterprises is promising a long term success story.
There is no way to make the world better without trying to do it. And that takes time. Why would you have a problem with someone trying to make the world better on a long-term scale? And also, nobody is promising anything, especially as SpaceX is not a public company and has no public investors.
> Before they get there they have how many satellites to build and launch?
Like, 60? And just this launch? I believe they intend to be revenue-generating from this very first network launch? This isn't some long-term gamble, they are testing the market quickly for acceptance of their tech and business model.
> Before space link is profitable and cash positive all that cost has to off set by profit and positive cash flow
It's called Starlink. And, okay..?
> Personally I doubt that SpaceX is cash positive and profitable
Oh. You are directly stating that the CFO, CEO and President of SpaceX are liars? If that is your position I don't think much that I say will ever change your understanding of this. You are mired in conspiracy theories and not listening to the facts in the world.
The first pint was referring to the comment stating that the service, when live, will generate a load of money. Maybe it will, maybe not. I can't tell. But it will for sure have to, simply due to the fact that putting the service up is extremely expensive.
Long term stories are great. And yes, everything that makes the world a better place is welcome. But considering the state of things in less developed countries, I assume space born Wifi is not the top priority. But hey, if investors are buying into I won't complain.
The whole service is planned to have around 12k satellites (another comment, did check primary sources myself yet). So still way to go.
Regarding finances, as SpaceX is a private company reliable numbers are hard to come by. All I have is what little went public a couple of years ago, benchmark numbers from other launch companies and the public parts NASA contracts. But I should have been more precise: my cash and profitability remark concerned their operative launch business excl. NASA dev contracts and the like. I suspect that their development is financed by external funding while their government contracts are cross-financing their low commercial launch costs. Nothing wrong with that as everybody else in that industry is doing the same thing. Everybody else isn't SpaceX, so.
Just one last thing, I am happy to discuss SpaceX. Because new facts and view points are how we develop. Implying that I call people I don't know liars and that I am full of conspiracy theories is not helping in that regard. Just saying.
What possible reason would you have for personally believing that SpaceX is not cash-flow positive, when the exec teams says that it is, if you are not reading conspiracy theories? Where are these ideas coming from then? We have real legal facts here. Real people in charge of the real company saying real numbers to us, but you're not going to believe them? I'm just not sure how else to talk about this stuff. When the exec team is a proven group of people with a solid track record and a recent history of accomplishing goals, meeting expectations and producing record-breaking technology and revenues - and they tell us facts about being profitable - it's definitely a conspiracy theory to state that they are secretly not profitable.
SpaceX is profitable.
> But considering the state of things in less developed countries, I assume space born Wifi is not the top priority. But hey, if investors are buying into I won't complain.
Reliable and fast access to information improves quality of life, even in places with other problems. Much of the USA is like a developing nation itself, with population-scale problems of getting access to clean water and having basic food security. But still, reliable network access can also improve both of those things too - the internet is backbone infrastructure just like the water pipes, and is needed for a developing country - or a developed one - to grow economically.
> I assume space born Wifi is not the top priority.
Countries, organizations, investors, businesses can all work on more than one thing at once. Something need not be 'top priority' for it to be worthy of investment and continuing to do at break-neck pace.
> my cash and profitability remark concerned their operative launch business excl. NASA dev contracts and the like
Do you mean that you are excluding a primary revenue source from their finances in your calculations? I just don't get it.
Hey, you don't have pitch this thing to me, ok? I. don't have the cash make the smallest imaginable difference in any space-born venture! :-)
I tried to explain my line of thought. You disagree, fine. It is just that when I developed an interest in the financial aspects of the launch business around end of 2018 and early 2019, I wasn't the only one with doubts in that regard. I'm no expert on either aspect, so if there facts out there that proof me wrong just share them. We are all hear to learn, right? Just do me a favour and don't cite reddit, ok?
> It is just that when I developed an interest in the financial aspects of the launch business around end of 2018 and early 2019, I wasn't the only one with doubts in that regard. I'm no expert on either aspect, so if there facts out there that proof me wrong just share them.
Here's what the parent comment was getting at:
> SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Tuesday that the privately held Hawthorne space company is valued at almost $28 billion based on recent funding rounds, and that it is profitable.[1]
> With more fiber being laid every day, increasing wireless deployments, and technologies like AirGig in the horizon, is Starlink launching into a shrinking market?
What you are describing sounds like a rapidly expanding market, not a shrinking market, though, right?
> Further, as SpaceX is having trouble raising the needed funds, is this launch simply a fundraising exercise?
What do you mean? SpaceX is not having trouble raising their needed funds. Do you have a citation for that? This is the first I'd be hearing of it and would be surprised. Also, needed for what? Are you referring to Mars colonization?
> is this launch simply a fundraising exercise?
This also doesn't make any sense. This launch is a groundbreaking event that begins a 12,000 satellite network deployment. This is a very cost-intensive thing and not exactly a 'fund raising exercise'; it's intended to provide early service to internet customers.
SpaceX's last few raises did not perform well with the last two raising $43 million out of $400 million offered (2019) and $250 million out of $750 million offered (2018).
I searched for this for the last 5 minutes but couldn't find any info about it online. Do you have any links or citations? I think it is false info.
Edit: Based on the info I was able to find, it looks like this is indeed false information and not true at all.
I can find no evidence that SpaceX is having trouble raising money or that their recent raises have gone poorly. No evidence. But I can find a lot of people explaining why these numbers are incorrect and why it is false to say that SpaceX is having trouble raising money. A lot. Here are a few.
Not OP but: This is the 2019 raise they were referring to [1].
I don't know much about SEC regulations - they're required to file info about who has invested in the first 15 days - and rumours used that to say they couldn't sell all they offered. Other rumours said that they don't have to file to say they sold it all. Would appreciate clarity from someone who knows SEC regulations.
This is very neat, and the last paragraph is indeed very heavy-hitting. It's always hard to read that some of our societies greatest present-day problems are so many thousands of years old.
However, I think this definition is narrow and only encapsulates part of the modern definition of 'trolling'. Today, 'trolling' is used as a weapon of war, not only in debate with other individual people. Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith.
Modern trolls will post violent content, often based on lies, in order to get an emotional rise out of a population. This is a large-scale effect that wastes huge amounts of people's time and energy, as they 'debate' with these soldiers of war whose task at hand is to create unnecessary emotional pain and waste the time of their enemy.
Yes, trolling is also happening on a more individual 'debate' level still, but narrowing our notion of trolling down to these ancient definitions is doing a major disservice to our modern understanding of how language is used in debate.
In a way I feel like I might have misunderstood something within my self.
I agree with the assessment but I never connected trolling and trauma, because my personal concept of trolling is essentially a continual escalation of reductio ad absurdum. In that sense it's not really trolling or sarcasm, it's more of a way of livening up overly-serious conversations.
I should probably not refer to that as trolling as the intention isn't to fuck people off, gaslight them, traumatise them...but to soften the mood.
I don't think anyone is attempting to narrow the definition of trolling; but in general any appeal to more nuanced understanding is worthwhile too so don't take this as disagreeing with you.
I note that "doctrine" was also an important element of the definitions offered and regret that we do not question our doctrine (and its sources) enough even now.
>Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith.
Perhaps this was not present in older societies (and other countries today) because people were not as touchy feely as the current generations...
And I'm not trolling. I seriously think modern western societies are too snow-flakey and touchy feely for their own good. It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt...
And that's despite older societies having it much harder, and having much more difficult problems to be "traumatized" with...
I say this without snark, but the only way I can imagine someone actually thinks this, is because that someone is not well read on history, or holds values that were more in vogue to be "traumatized" for in such past generations.
People forget that in those older societies, people were killed, jailed and fined for holding certain beliefs. People were literally burnt at the stake, witch hunts were something more serious than a twitter mob complaining, intellectuals wrote lengthy arguments about the immorality of certain views; for christ sake, "Marge & Itchy and Scratchy" is almost 30 years old.
So yeah, I hold the opinion that people who think today's society is more easily offended than past generations are either too disconnected to what past generations really were, or is shocked to find themselves on the receiving end.
We had dictatorships, civil wars, and other such things in my country not that long ago.
I have relatives who went through those things -- and other modern tragedies today. I have befriended, talked to, and interviewed people jailed and tortured for decades for their beliefs. Even family killed by previous regimes.
So, it's not like I don't know that people "were killed, jailed and fined for holding certain beliefs".
I do know however that people that had those things happen to them in real-time history and in their full horror, were much more resilient, courageous, and could even shrug them off.
The touchy feely, safe-space demanding people today, who get discouraged or hysterical for 1/1000th the offense done to them, are a regression and an insult to those people (whose actual sacrifices and efforts gave the rights to the snowflakes of today).
I don't see how that disproves my point, I also come from a country with a recent and ongoing history of hardship, just 6 years ago while I was on vacation, a shootout happen in front of my home while my father and I were painting; actual bullet holes were made on the wall we were working on, and yet after we saw the cars flee, my dad just shrug it off and continued painting. Yes, I know that people can be resilient and adapt to life's hardships
And still, social sensitivities can be quite complex. My dad, a man who accepted a rain of bullets as just one more of the life's hardships, can get quite uncomfortable to the point of refusing to eat, if you insist on passing the salt on his hand instead of leaving it on the table near him, and I just picked one of the weirder but he and a lot of people have some petty stuff that causes them great offense.
With the examples I gave on GP, my point was not that people endured hardships, but that people who offended societies sensibilities were harshly punished. If you think that society that got so offended by stuff like blasphemy, sexual preferences, and failing to follow caste systems or even other weird social customs, are more courageous or have a tougher skin, then we have a different definition of courage.
And I say this without making a moral judgement, maybe severe punishment from deviancy served as a societal glue that allowed to thrive despite the material hardships, or perhaps a case can be made on the pathological aspect of having real hardships and still devoting so much time on irrelevant stuff. Still my point is that I don't think people got any less offended than nowdays, and perhaps watching today's punishments on the offenders, maybe that's one indicator where we are getting better.
> I do know however that people that had those things happen to them in real-time history and in their full horror, were much more resilient, courageous, and could even shrug them off.
This is wildly untrue and outrageously offensive. Do you really think this? What evidence do you have for this? Today's youth are experiencing their own valid forms of discrimination, hate and violence fed by trolls and you are no judge of their pain. And why are you doing this whataboutism with the past anyway? What do you have to gain from saying lambasting those who suffer and whom with you share so little you can surely hardly understand their circumstance?
> The touchy feely, safe-space demanding people today, who get discouraged or hysterical for 1/1000th the offense done to them,
Who are these people? Do they really exist? I think you have made up, invented an enemy towards which you are directing these statements.
> are a regression and an insult to those people (whose actual sacrifices and efforts gave the rights to the snowflakes of today).
How on earth? Everyone I know today who cares to improve society is trying to avoid the atrocities of the past. Positing that reasonable discourse, backed by facts and logic, with an avoidance of 'trolling' and bad-faith acting, is a direct attempt to reduce the suffering and pain of the future so that we can avoid such horrible things from the past from happening again.
Your callous dismissal of today's youth looking to improve the world by reducing the spread of hatred and violence is exactly the kind of thing that enabled such horrid violence in the past.
We can see history rhyming. We can see the genocides being committed around the world, fed and enabled by trolls, and we are trying to stop it from happening. We are trying to slow down the intentional suffering hoist upon minorities today by reducing the online vitriol and hatred that creates such physical horror.
> This is wildly untrue and outrageously offensive.
Oh no, it's definitely true.
If not, can you give me a modern equivalent to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weary_Dunlop ?
Prisoner of War under the Japanese for three years, suffering horrific conditions.
After the war "Dunlop forgave his captors and turned his energies to the task of healing and building."
>This is wildly untrue and outrageously offensive. Do you really think this? What evidence do you have for this?
This is wildly true, and 100% not offensive.
I've talked to such people, I'm in a country with actual historical scars and full of people that went through extreme hardships, I've interviewed dozens of them people, I've read tons of historical accounts, interviews, and so on.
>Today's youth are experiencing their own valid forms of discrimination, hate and violence fed by trolls and you are no judge of their pain
Well, I can be the judge of their pain (it's a free universe), and I can tell you that their pain of "discrimination, hate, and violence caused by trolls" is nothing compared to war, civil war, dictatorship, genocide, torture, and so on (all of which experienced numerous times in the last 100 years in my country).
It's a sad state of affairs that this has to even be spelt out, or that people think someone being called names by online trolls, or harassed at school for being X, or whatever, is as serious and as important as those kinds of events.
I've banned this account until we get some indication that you intend to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. Would you please stop creating accounts to do that with?
As the guidelines explain, this is not a site for ideological and political battle. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
>The pain the trolls are creating is directly causing war, discrimination, dictatorship, genocide. And regardless, there is no need to obsess over who "had it worse" or whatever.
Not really.
From the native Americans to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, the US (and Western Europe and USSR for that matter) did war, genocide, discrimination, segregation, slavery, and so on, very well, on a huge scale, without trolls.
Trolls are absolutely insignificant in causing "war, discrimination, dictatorship, genocide".
If anything, our "troll heavy" days are much better in all of the above terms.
And if you mean the infamous "Kremlin trolls", those are just the fad of the day, to point them blame on someone. The US had and will again do its thing in the middle east for oil, regardless of what some Facebook troll says. And they'll compete and go to trade war with China for their private interests, regardless of what Twitter says.
The argument here is "I shouldn't avoid emotionally traumatizing you because at some point, someone else in the future may emotionally traumatize you".
Perhaps there's a case to be made for exposing people to controversial or offensive ideas in a controlled environment to prepare for encountering them in an uncontrolled environment - in fact, this is frequently called a "safe space" and ridiculed by people who believe that modern societies are too "snow-flakey"!
But that's certainly not what internet trolls are doing.
> It's like going out in life expecting padded roads, walls, and everything, lest you ever get hurt...
What? How offensive.
Let me be clear, then. The United States is committing a genocide against minorities as we speak and it is enabled and emboldened by "trolls". This is not touchy-feely. This is children in cages, separated illegally from their families and put into places of extreme disrepair, unhealthy conditions, etc, while the President goes on TV to state that machine guns would be a more "effective solution".
This is not touchy feely or snowflaky stuff and I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. What I'm talking about are trolls going online an on TV to spread messages of hate and cruelty. This directly results in human suffering and death of innocent people.
There is no logic behind talking about using machine guns to kill people who are trying to legally migrate to your country. To make those statements is to wage a weapon of war and to do it online and on TV en masse is a new kind of trolling that is physically dangerous.
Your ..... dismissal of the problems of youth....and use of .... to not finish...sentences makes it difficult to understand your point.
Trolling in the modern era has nothing to do with any of this "touchy feely" or "snow-flakey" rubbish.
It has to do with enabling genocide. Trolls normalize bad behavior to the point where it goes unpunished. Bad behavior to the extreme, unpunished from the top, for years on end, can and does result in really bad things like genocide.
I'm not making leaps here. This is real, it is physical, it is urgent, and it matters.
> using machine guns to kill people who are trying to legally migrate to your country. To make those statements is to wage a weapon of war and to do it online and on TV en masse is a new kind of trolling that is physically dangerous.
Nobody is doing any of this and I am perfectly happy to dismiss such ridiculous claims.
This is not real. This is not physical. Nobody is machine gunning down people at the mexico border.
You you are the one who is engaging in trolling and lies by spreading such a message around.
>Let me be clear, then. The United States is committing a genocide against minorities as we speak and it is enabled and emboldened by "trolls". This is not touchy-feely.
The United States has committed some soft of genocide or another since the days of the Native Americans. That's not touchy feely.
Crying about this or that opinion being published, or whether a coworker can make or not make a comment, or what group is the more victimized for BS offenses (where usually the crying is made white middle/upper middle class self-appointed spokepersons) is.
And I'm not talking about the "children in cages" either. This is obviously not a kind of "touchy feely" issue.
Plus, the "children in cages" has been going on since forever one way or another. My people were hunted by the KKK back in the 20s and 30s for not being white enough. I've written (in other places) about the Mexican immigrants fueling the California agricultural sector, and how they're exploited and sent away when bosses are done with them (eg. the strawberry picking business).
Even the Wall is nothing new, there has been a wall, beatings, and killings at the border well before Trump. Now it's just fashionable to speak against it (because Trump), whereas under Obama 2 million could be deported and it was OK (and it didn't involve as many children imprisoned, so late night talk shows didn't feel the need to cover it).
Still, I'm not an American myself. But the hypocrisy is strong, as if all those "good souls" care about the "children in cages".
There are "children in cages" all over Europe, in camps for immigrants (where they're not allowed to leave):
>Your ..... dismissal of the problems of youth....and use of .... to not finish...sentences makes it difficult to understand your point.
You could replace "..." with "." in my comment, and nothing would change of its point. Instead you've chose to point an inconsequential stylistic issue, and exaggerate it to death.
Let's make my point even clearer: aside from general economic prospects (college debt and so on), there are no serious "problems of youth" in 2019 in the USA in the white middle/upper middle-class population that cries about being "traumatized" the most. It literally never had been better trauma-wise, today when people cry the most about it, for anything and everything.
And I don't expect you to agree with this assessment. That's my opinion, it's a free universe.
> Crying about this or that opinion being published,
I have absolutely never once in my life seen someone cry over an opinion being published. I have, however, seen hundreds of people complain about others 'crying', or 'literally shaking' but I have never seen it once happen and I have been looking. I honestly think such people do not exist. Can you cite any? This is surely not the cultural phenomenon you make it out to be.
> Plus, the "children in cages" has been going on since forever one way or another.
Something happening in the past does not make it okay to happen today. Are you suggesting that nobody should protest children being put in cages, simply because it has happened before? I don't understand. Since it has happened before, and it's awful, and it's happening again right now, don't you think we should stand up and stay that it should be stopped?
> Even the Wall is nothing new, there has been a wall, beatings, and killings at the border well before Trump.
Again, just because something isn't new doesn't have any bearing on it being bad or not. In fact I think it emphasizes how important these issues are. They persist and we must fight against them fully.
> Now it's just fashionable to speak against it (because Trump), whereas under Obama 2 million could be deported and it was OK (and it didn't involve as many children imprisoned, so late night talk shows didn't feel the need to cover it)
What are you talking about? Putting children in cages, family removals, etc of legal immigrants is completely different from deportations of illegal immigrants.
Are you suggesting nobody should speak out against these atrocities or try to avoid them happening in the first place, simply because they have happened before? I don't get it.
> There are "children in cages" all over Europe, in camps for immigrants (where they're not allowed to leave)
That sounds awful. Everyone should be protesting this everywhere. Everyone should aim to avoid the circumstances that allow this to happen: chief among them is trolling.
>I have absolutely never once in my life seen someone cry over an opinion being published.
Well, I've seen then cry, demand it's unpublished, demand the person writing it is fired, and so on.
>I have, however, seen hundreds of people complain about others 'crying', or 'literally shaking' but I have never seen it once happen and I have been looking.
Well, perhaps not looking unbiased enough.
>Something happening in the past does not make it okay to happen today.
Which I didn't say in the first place. My point is that as an old thing this is not related to the recent touchy-feely behavior I spoke against. (Nor of course are the people kept in cages, or the people who complain about them, are complaining about touchy feely issues).
>Are you suggesting nobody should speak out against these atrocities or try to avoid them happening in the first place, simply because they have happened before? I don't get it.
No, there are two threads here: 1) tons of younger people today complain about touchy feely issues, and 2) most younger people complain about these serious issues only when it becomes fashionable (e.g. now under Trump or previously under Bush, not before under Obama or Clinton).
I argue that (1) the touchy feely issues should be dropped, and (2) the important issues should be complained all the time, not when it's in vogue.
>That sounds awful. Everyone should be protesting this everywhere. Everyone should aim to avoid the circumstances that allow this to happen: chief among them is trolling.
Trolling is nowhere in the list of things that "allow this to happen".
Capitalism, EU immigration policies, hypocrisy, exploitation, and other things are.
You really need a citation? Go look on social media for yourself, and the kind of trending complain posts. Or college campuses for that matter. Or youth oriented news outlets.
>And anyway, if it were true, why would that be bad?
Well, because for me people should be more resilience, less hysteric, and more adult. That's why. And because a society of touchy-feelers is a crippled society.
Also the world is not a safe space, and life is not a Disney movie. People unprepared for it will only fail more, be more gullible, and make a mess of things (like an idiot who thinks all animals are like cute pets, and gets eaten by a wild animal).
>Oh wow that is so wrong and so offensive to boot. These are straight up lies. You have no backing to this
Yeah, I don't have "backing", e.g. some expert report by scientists, saying "Only 21% of the people complained about this under Obama, but 87% under Trump", and "67.4% didn't care, they just show it on some media, and will drop it again, when it's not trending anymore", as if those things exist.
I only have my grasp of reality and observation skills. And my experience dealing with such things, and being involved with people across different decades, and seeing people jump on bandwagons, and going off again when it's not trendy anymore.
>> I argue that (1) the touchy feely issues should be dropped,
>> Wait. You are arguing that young people should be banned from discussing topics of their interest?! A total ban on free speech for the youth? what do you mean by this?*
No, I'm saying that touchy feely issues should be dropped (e.g. voluntarily discarded by those peddling them).
That said, your (strawman) suggestion is not bad. "A total ban on free speech for the youth" could be a good plan to me, if somewhat heavy handed. They can listen, learn and understand first, speak later (e.g. after 25 or so).
As Bertolt Brecht once wrote (as a standing judge for a collection of crappy poems from young poets on social issues, most full of melodrama and naivety), "People shouldn't be allowed to write poems until they've completed their army service" (referring to the mandatory general conscription at his era, at around 18 y.o. or so, synonymous to becoming an adult).
I'm half joking, though B.B did say that. But the point is that people should be able to listen to such suggestions and be "offended" without screaming bloody murder and run for "safe spaces".
That is just not true. Broader definitions are actually very useful when you're trying to describe general principles (like in law) — using a word that's too narrowly defined can limit the scope of what you're saying.
That's the difference between a principle and a definition, law has both - criminal offenses for example are more defined than the principle of tort, the more you want something to be useful as an accusation the more narrowly defined it needs to be or you just end up with a moral panic.
Oh my I'm sure glad you can't pass such a dictatorial law [1]. By directly charging people for using a safety mechanism that they bought with their car, you are incentivizing people to reduce the physical safety of others around them.
You really want that average American, with less than $400 in savings, to think twice about honking and potentially saving someone's life by warning them of danger? It's not even about actually saving $5, it's about the length of time it takes to think about it. Even if you decide not to save the $5 and go for it, honk! you may have delayed so long that someone is now dead that could have been saved.
> If you really need to honk, you'll happily pay $5 for the ability.
This is very definitely not true and an incredible danger to society. Please reconsider the unintended consequences of charging poor people to maintain other people's physical safety on the roads and sidewalks.
[1] And I think this is a wonderful example of why all dictatorships are bad, especially those run by people who think they know all the solutions already.
The point is to make them think twice about the DISTINCTION between honking to save somebody's life and honking to express their own annoyance or frustration.
(I think the idea of tying the could level inside the car to outside is better, but that you are missing the point)
Elon's stated goal re: astronauts and training is that the technology should be sufficiently simplified to let anyone go up with minimal training. The idea of a heavily-trained astronaut is old, and the new thinking is that the people going to space should be able to spend their time up their doing whatever it is they are good at - even if just vacationing - rather than learning how to fly spacecraft etc.
I know this is a Jeff Bezos / Blue Origin article, but I would fully expect the same to be true here. Jeff has stated multiple times that he sees millions of people moving to space stations for work and general life. Earth should be left void of manufacturing and mining and things, which could be moved to space (and asteroids, etc) leaving Earth to be more of a natural environment for life to thrive.
Someone has to fly and troubleshoot the spacecraft when the inevitable failures occur. Most of the astronauts can be basically passengers but there has to be at least one pilot who knows how to switch SCE to AUX without a moment's hesitation.
Space ships are computer controlled nowadays. You can't fly them in any meaningful sense, and they don't have manual toggle switches like the old moon landers. There will be no pilot except the autopilot.
To take a real world example, Falcon 9 is completely autonomous during flight - the controllers on the ground can trigger an abort, and perhaps change the flight plan from a range of preselected options, but they're not going to attempt to take over the rocket and switch it to manual mode or something. They observe, they don't intervene during a normal flight, and if something does go wrong, they're not going to be able to save the situation. There is no pilot.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster. Unmanned boosters have always been automated.
Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree of manual control. This new generation of private manned capsules will be no different.
Manned spacecraft so far have always allowed the pilots to take over a significant degree
This is untrue for Soyuz or Dragon 2 - any capsule design is not pilotable. It will also be untrue for the upcoming starship for example. It might have crew but I struggle to think why it would have a pilot.
Falcon 9 is just another unmanned booster.
Which just so happens to land itself.
The point I'm trying to make is that machines can land themselves perfectly well nowadays, and control software and its interaction with hardware is now too complex for puny humans to understand or interact with, so they're better off just letting it do its thing and land or crash - a human interaction during landing is not going to save the machine - things have moved on from the mooon landings.
The latest Soyuz capsules still have an extensive set of manual displays and controls for the cosmonauts to use when necessary. The point is not to hand fly the spacecraft during re-entry, but rather to deal with system failures or unexpected situations which the autopilot can't handle.
Nobody's proposing "just a few years". Both Musk and Bezos have grand visions that require difficult, complex technical and financial problems to be solved.
First up is lowering the cost of escape velocity such that "casual" flights are financially feasible. This includes reusable components, a very low failure rate, and an ecosystem of employees, engineers, and culture that supports it.
If M/B achieves their stated goals in this domain, then the next steps can be practically executed.
A big part of astronaut training is knowing how to fly the craft and knowing what to do if something breaks. If the machine is automatically controlled and reliable, you don't need as much training. (Maybe they'll send a trained person or two along with the tourists?)
Not sure I follow that logic. More automation might mean you won't have to use your training as much, but how does it mean less training? In the event all the automation fails you still have to know everything an astronaut would need to know were there no automation.
For Starship, there's absolutely no way a human could fly it anyway. Even if it weren't fly-by-wire, a human could not control the drag fins and the engines precisely enough to land safely. Even on Crew Dragon, which will (hopefully) fly in the near future with crew onboard, there isn't a hardware joystick. If the vehicle fails to the point where the computers aren't working, your only option is to deorbit. These spacecraft weren't intended to be flown manually.
They did not do the "exact same thing" at all. You are spreading lies using logical fallacies and that causes harm to the community here; please stop. Your false equivalence, presented without evidence, is harmful.