If your phone and your laptop were suddenly worth twice as much would you also be celebrating?
I am struggling to find the right words to express how wrong your view is to me. Housing is a basic human need like food and clothing. How can you in good conscience celebrate making a tremendous profits exploiting the fact that people cannot afford a basic need?
> I am struggling to find the right words to express how wrong your view is to me.
Then surely I have failed to convey it!
In any case, my edited point about "deadweight loss" is perfectly consonant with the parent poster's feeling of guilt, and with what I presume is your feeling of disgust; it is in fact the economic term of art for that at which you intuitively recoil.
(Although you're kind of equating a very, very expensive home, in the overall scheme of things, with the minimum requirements of decency, if you really think that he's exploiting someone's inability to afford housing, but w/e.)
Now let's get into the controversial stuff...
> Housing is a basic human need like food and clothing.
Agreed. But it's also an asset, because someone has to build and maintain it and have exclusive use of (at least parts of) it, and being a basic need doesn't automatically create a right to something (for obvious reasons) so that asset is gonna trade hands voluntarily like any other. Its price will fluctuate, sorry.
Now, NIMBYs using government fiat to drive down housing supply in their market is an annoyingly common failure mode of local democracy, maybe that's all you're upset about.
No. It really is that your view is wrong, and not that you simply failed to convey it.
You glimpse the problem at the end, only to dismiss it. Your glimpse is when you say:
> Now, NIMBYs using government fiat to drive down housing supply in their market is an annoyingly common failure mode of local democracy, maybe that's all you're upset about.
The triangle that you're looking at is that NIMBYs lead to lack of construction, lead to undersupply of housing, which is a direct cost of both high housing costs and high homeless populations. The profit that I have as a homeowner comes from somewhere. Where it comes from is artificial scarcity that causes renters to struggle, and over 170,000 Californians to be unhoused.
Looking at that without guilt, is like New Englanders whose families made a fortune investing in the triangle trade, congratulating themselves on not having been those evil slave owners. Sorry, but it is tied together. You cannot both profit from the crime, and disclaim a portion of responsibility for it at the same time.
> Housing is a basic human need like food and clothing.
Yes, food, but I don't see many arguments for bringing down the price of caviar.
IOW, making an argument against high property prices in highly desirable areas is not the same as making an argument for low cost housing.
It doesn't really matter how dense you make housing in highly desirable areas, there'll always be more people who want to live there than houses available.
The solution is more remote working and much faster public transport.
Tax breaks on businesses for each remote worker will be cheaper than building more slums, it will be quicker (demand is affected almost immediately) and it needs no political campaigning against the local NIMBY residents.
Instead of trying to guilt trip people about the paper value increase in their property, just remove that paper value increase altogether.
(I'm not sure how you would solve the slow public transportation problem. Where I am we have 160km/hour trains, but the door-to-door travel time using these trains to travel 20km is still about twice the time it takes to drive)
> It doesn't really matter how dense you make housing in highly desirable areas, there'll always be more people who want to live there than houses available.
A land area with a 40 mile radius and the population density of Manhattan would contain the entire population of the United States.
> Instead of trying to guilt trip people about the paper value increase in their property, just remove that paper value increase altogether.
The only way to do this is to build more housing. You can't fix it with mass transit because the existing housing is low density and mass transit requires high density.
> A land area with a 40 mile radius and the population density of Manhattan would contain the entire population of the United States.
That's a good point you make - even at the extremes of high-density living, high density still doesn't solve affordability!
People can neither walk nor bike 80 miles, and public transport over 80 miles with multiple stops takes hours, so you can reasonably expect that prices would be considerably higher in the center (40 miles to everywhere) where it is more desirable, and people can neither walk nor bike 40 miles for commuting. Public transport infrastructure for a 40 mile journey also makes commuting infeasible.
The problem of not being able to afford living close to where you need to be is still there, even in the hypothetical pathological case.
If it can't solve the problem in the ideal case, it can't solve the problem in any case.
I’m not the GP poster. But I do not think one 80 mile wide city containing every US resident was intended as an example ideal case. It was intended as a demo of how non-dense the US is, on average.
Most “new urbanism” people advocate for medium sized, densely built, 15 minute cities. Not a single megalopolis.
Which is fine -- nobody is asking for a law requiring all housing to be high density. The ask is to remove the laws prohibiting new housing from being high density.
Which should make it even easier to find low density housing, because you won't be competing for it against people who just need a place to live and don't care about having a big yard.
Right. Nobody is trying to force anyone to live densely. The point is: dense housing (e.g., Manhattan) is expensive because of supply/demand. Lots of people do want to live like this. And it's illegal to build this way in most places in the U.S., only perpetuating the affordability problems across the board.
> That's a good point you make - even at the extremes of high-density living, high density still doesn't solve affordability!
Manhattan is <23 square miles, containing ~1.6M people, surrounded by a metropolitan area of ~20M. The surrounding metro area has a much lower population density (less than 3% that of Manhattan itself), implying that it's practical for it to be higher, which would reduce housing costs by supply and demand.
It's not about how much housing you have in absolute, it's about how much you have relative to demand. The demand in NYC is about the highest in the country, so they need more supply than they have even now.
> People can neither walk nor bike 80 miles, and public transport over 80 miles with multiple stops takes hours, so you can reasonably expect that prices would be considerably higher in the center (40 miles to everywhere) where it is more desirable, and people can neither walk nor bike 40 miles for commuting. Public transport infrastructure for a 40 mile journey also makes commuting infeasible.
The average commute is 41 miles as it is. And with that level of density you could justify express trains that travel at highway speeds or more, making that distance a much shorter commute than it is even now.
The area in the center might cost more than the outer ring, but what of it? The point is not to make all housing have the same price, it's to build more housing to lower the price of all housing. It doesn't matter if the center costs more than the outskirts if they each cost <25% of what they do now.
It also goes without saying that you would not actually build this. You neither need nor want the entire US population to live in an area the size of Connecticut which represents less than 1% of its land mass; there are multiple metropolitan areas spread all over. The point is merely that enough housing for the entire population would fit in that area, which serves as an upper limit on how much housing demand you could even have. And even Manhattan has a lower population density than we could build at -- it certainly doesn't consist entirely of 100 story buildings despite them being possible to build. The claim that it isn't possible is clearly false.
> The problem of not being able to afford living close to where you need to be is still there, even in the hypothetical pathological case.
That is the pathological worse case scenario because you would have to provide enough housing for a single city with 340M people in it, and you still end up with a lower average commute than people have today.
If you took an existing metropolitan area and raised the population density to that of Manhattan (i.e. lowered the area with the same population) then the San Francisco metro area with 7.8M people would have a radius of less than 6 miles.
And it would be silly to do even that, because all you need to do is convert existing single story housing into multi-story housing and thereby provide enough housing to satisfy demand. You can increase the density by a factor of >50, it's not a question of whether existing construction technology would allow it to be built, but even increasing it by a factor of only 2 or 3 would significantly lower housing costs.
> How can you in good conscience celebrate making a tremendous profits exploiting the fact that people cannot afford a basic need?
I'm completely missing your point.
If I buy property in a developing area because I think it's cool, and I live there for years and am part of the community and watch it grow around me, and years later decide to sell - I took an early risk, don't I deserve to recognize the rewards from that risk?
If it was a bad risk and the area went to hell, and I lost money - is that ok?
But making money isn't?
Should home builders not be allowed to make money because housing is a basic human need?
Should we not be allowed to build luxury homes that cost more because we could have built multiple cheaper ones with the same money?
> I took an early risk, don't I deserve to recognize the rewards from that risk?
In your mind, how much of the increase in value of housing is due to “early risk” paying off in a valuable community vs an increase in overall demand without an increase in supply?
When the nation sees the housing supply increase slower than the population, that’s not a risky investment. It’s musical chairs where you pay to win.
Hmm don’t think I said profit is wrong. I said owning an asset in limited supply with growing demand and then selling later is not particularly risky. I made no moral claim.
I’ve seen HGTV. I’m familiar with house flipping, I know that the markets are local. I don’t really need an economics lesson to understand that low interest rates spurred buying. Don’t kid yourself into thinking it takes a genius investor to buy something in low supply relative to demand and resell it for more.
Singapore has a good model that allows most of its citizenry to own homes. Basically, it competes with home builders directly. If they don't want to build, the government will do so.
The Singapore government won’t build in advance so demand is far higher than supply so there is a lottery. Oh and you have to married. Singles wait until 35 and can only buy a 1 bed.
If you don’t win the lottery you can always buy resale which is close to $1M for a 2 bedroom place.
Oh and it’s a 99 year lease. After 99 years you give it back to the government and get $0.
In Singapore, the state has vast eminent domain powers and is exempt from all zoning laws, which is covered in the video. I'm not sure that would ever fly in the US.
It’s not just a matter of trust. Locale specific datetimes in the future are simply not computable to a point on a number line in the general case. Some locales have date changes that must be determined by the local government every single year. Israel is an example of such a case.
Unix timestamp (actual reference with easy math) + timezone give you absolute time to work with, such that you can work out the correct presentation for the timezone even if the timezone has undergone multiple revisions in the intervening years.
There's still a bunch of problems (timezone of event origin? Event reporting origin? Server? Client? Client + presentational overlay?) and confusing things to work through (including relativistic problems) but the consistency of the reference point is valuable. Nobody is going to confuse what timezone you are using as your point of reference when you use Unix epoch. Just use a 64-bit number to hold it.
The suggested approach simply doesn’t work, because human calendars simply don’t work that way.
If the state of Indiana decides this year to change when they set their clocks forward and back, and you stored your appointment datetime as a timestamp, when do you show up for an appointment? At the new 930 AM after statutory date adjustment, or the now incorrect time stamp in your database? Will the DMV respect your claim that you had an appointment at epoch timestamp 1726651800, or will they say sorry buddy the clock on the wall says 9:30 AM, you missed your window? Are your taxes next year due at 1713173400, or are they due at midnight April 15th?
This is NOT a UI issue. This is an issue where the timestamp you calculated in the past literally does not mean the same calendar date in the future as it does now.
And if your answer is to recalculate the timestamp based on locale changes, what was the point of storing the timestamp? (I hope you stored an audit trail of the locale as well as the timestamp, otherwise you can't even recompute the timestamp). The timestamp is never the ground truth, the human readable string is the ground truth.
The timestamp for a particular human date time is not generally a computable function, because human governments change how dates are reckoned frequently, and the human government, not your database are the ground truth.
Very good point, which is a reminder that you have different "types" of dates that you may want to store.
Went storing the time at which an event happened (e.g. for a system log) then a UTC or UNIX time works, and it will be transformed at display time depending on the user's timezone.
When storing a future time at which to do something, it should be stored with its target timezone so you can always make sure it happens at the right moment. For this iso datetime representation makes a lot of sense.
That is exactly was I was referring to with needing to know whether it was an origination stamp or what, ie the context of the stamp. That problem holds regardless of the format you store the stamp in, because even if there is a colloquial understanding of how to interpret a time change (1030 on Thursday is still 1030 on Thursday) it doesn't hold for every context (5 hrs from now is still 5 hours from now, except if when you said 5 hours from now you meant clock time)
Agreed. As a kid I vividly remember waking up in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm thinking that it had finally happened, the Soviets must have launched and the world was ending. I can’t really feel that scared about killer robots when an entire generation lived under the constant fear of nuclear extinction.
> Don’t many/most state of the art models take many months to train on far more data than humans need for similar tasks?
Humans generally need 18 years of pre training followed by 4-6 years of fine tuning before they can “one-shot” many difficult tasks. That’s way more training than any machine learning model I’m aware of.
Even for tasks like reading the newspaper and summarizing what you read, you probably had to train for 10-12 years.
I see this stance of yours parroted over and over but a 3 year old can tell a dog from a cat doesn't need to be trained on millions of images. Also uses way less energy for that.
It takes basically a week on a single GPU to train AlexNet which has human level ImageNet performance. Let's say it's 500 W for the GPU versus around 10 W for a human brain. So that's 84kwh for the model and 175kwh for the baby (over 3 years at 16h/day). That's without a half billion years of architecture and initialization tuning that the baby has. I think the model performs very favorably.
I don't. This is so obscenely flawed in obvious ways. The energy to train the model was used only for model training while the energy used by the baby performed a myriad of tasks including image recognition, and can presumably apply the knowledge gained in novel ways. Not only can a baby identify a cat and a dog but it can also speak what the difference is in audible language, fire neurons to operate its musculoskeletal system (albeit poorly), and perhaps even no longer shits its pants. Apples and Oranges. Is model performance getting more impressive every day? Definitely. Has anyone actually demonstrated "AI". Still nope.
The context of this thread is the cost of training brains and models on comparable tasks. Not that the model is comparable to a human in every way.
If you want to be pedantic then 6% of the human brain is the visual cortex but then you also have to argue that AlexNet is horribly inefficient to train. So you cut the brain cost to 6% and the model cost to 1%. They're still within an order of magnitude (favoring the model) which I'd say is pretty close in terms of energy usage.
Sure but my point is that the energy costs are in the same magnitude.
If you want to be pedantic then only 6% of the human brain is the visual cortex. But AlexNet is also an inefficient model so something like an optimized ResNet is 100x as efficient to train. So now you're at 10.5kwh and 1.5kwh for the baby and model respectively.
You can argue details further but I'd say the energy cost of both is fairly close.
You’re missing my original point which is about continued, ongoing robustness that works in the low data regime and allows pilots/astronauts to make reasonable decisions in _completely novel_ situations (as just one example).
The networks we have are trained once and work efficiently for their training dataset. They are even robust to outliers in the distribution of that dataset. But they aren’t robust to surprises, unmentioned changes in assumptions/rules/patterns about the data.
Even reinforcement learning is still struggling with this as self-play effectively requires being able to run your dataset/simulation quickly enough to find new policies that work. Humans don’t even have time for that, much less access to a full running simulation of their environments. Although we do generate world models and there’s some work towards that I believe.
> but a 3 year old can tell a dog from a cat doesn't need to be trained on millions of images
A 3 year old has 3 years of multimodal training data and RLHF + a few billions of years of evolution that have primed and biased our visual and cognitive systems.
That requires a lot more data than machine models that literally zero inherent bias. Assuming you want a true apples to apples comparison.
I can train a bird song recognition model in about two days in a v100 which performs decently well on upwards of three thousand species, and generalizes reasonably to real world data (beyond a somewhat skewed training data distribution).
Humans are very bad at this task; it takes a massive effort to learn this many birds. In fact it's a great counterexample to human few shot learning ability...
This is under the assumption that brains start at random (the Tabula Rasa theory of the brain) but that doesn’t seem plausible to me. Brains have the benefit of some amount of pre training at the time of birth. That’s why spiders don’t need to be taught how to spin complex webs and why humans don’t need to learn how to manipulate abstract mental symbols (i.e. language).
The moronic thing about this is, humans aren't just training, they're having a life. The "training part" is one part of it sure, but it's not the reason for existence.
Anything posted on the CIA website will be thoroughly analyzed by state agencies that are well funded and well equipped to find shenanigans. If the CIA were really doing something to US citizens via something on their public site, it would come out very quickly as it would be an embarrassment to the agency.
Unless you mean that the mere act of visiting the CIA website would be suspicious because you are in a country that might frown upon that, like China? But wouldn’t the CIA site be blocked there anyway?
Maybe you're right, but I wouldn't assume that everyone, from every IP, who requests a file hosted on the CIA's webserver would necessarily always be served the same content either
I'm not saying you shouldn't check it out for yourself though. While you're at it, maybe the NSA has interesting looking .swf .vbs or MS office documents sitting around at their domain.
I just don’t get how the risk/reward works out in their favor.
The uproar if their malfeasance is detected is far more than the value of any information they would gain.
Wouldn’t it be far simpler and more direct for them to go to Google or Facebook and ask them to hand over everything they have on you, at which point those companies almost certainly comply?
You're absolutely right, and I'm mostly kidding. If the CIA, or pretty much any three letter agency, wanted to inject something nasty into your internet traffic or infect your device with malware I'm certain that they could do it without uploading ironically named ebooks to their server and waiting for someone to post about it on social media. Still... from a risk/reward perspective, I can pirate this book from somewhere else just as easily
McDonalds obviously made the game in the hope that it will sell more hamburgers. If you buy a hamburger, their strategy worked, which means they (and other companies that are watching) have a reason to do similar things in the future.
What’s weird about incentivizing behavior you like in the hope that you get more of that behavior?
The behaviour in question isn't simply producing retro games. It is producing something unique and interesting that their competitors are not offering. It is an edge.
If their competitors copycat McDonalds' marketing, they totally didn't get that message, because by the time they clone it, the uniqueness McDonalds demonstrated does not apply to them - they've made a copy, or even a shadow of what came moments before. The edge McDonalds had is their cliff to behold unless they find something unique to counter with.
> A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.
I don’t understand this. Can you elaborate on what untruths you mean? Who’s parroting these lies?
Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. It’s the space around politics and think tanks and national security. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power. It’s a vague description but that’s because of the nature of this unspoken expectation.
More concrete examples would be how you’re expected to just completely agree that Russia and China are essentially evil and enemies. Like that’s the unspoken premise. Or in the US, playing this game of theatre around how Democrats or Republicans are bad. I’m not American but there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life. That’s the kind of skill that’s seen as necessary in these kinds of “elite” circles, where you’re just expected to be able to hold two contradicting views and milk them to your advantage. You’re expected to be able to peddle mistruths and warp facts convincingly and worse, you’re seen as higher status and more “refined” for being about to pull this off convincingly.
Another example I’m reminded of is an Australian one, where a think tank that is funded by arms manufacturers called ASPI, had its CEO defend itself on live television. As you’d expect, he was surprisingly able to spin a tale where they were seen as the good guys using all sorts of deception and rhetorical tricks. I don’t know how these people sleep at night but it’s the very definition of double think from 1984. I do believe more people will see this subtle aspect of how opinion is shaped in future.
Russia commits countless war crimes on a daily basis (there is tons of documentation) and China has concentration camps. America is not perfect but they are legitimately much worse
The US did commit various war crimes in about every of their foreign engagements. Those had to be leaked of course and weren't reported by some self-correction built into the system.
The US uses false narratives like "national security" to justify unjustifiable actions regularly. See their economic sanctions, Huawei, etc. pp.
The list goes on of course. Now, the one thing clearly better about the US is, people being able to talk about it. But that only has meaning if it is done and actually leads to changes. Else it is only another layer of deception.
There is still a great difference between mainstream media and politicians avoiding certain topics and police activly supressing knowledge about historical events and rewriting history as they see fit (tiananmen square).
And completely banning Winnie Pooh, because some internet dudes made a funny picture.
Even beyond the war crimes; just the wars themselves. The WMD thing in Iraq is nice because not only was the war flimsily justified, but that justification itself was a lie.
However, a lot of the other wars are just bizarre. Taking Afghanistan - the costs, suffering caused and damage to the global economy are completely absurd. Nothing was achieved. There isn't any reason for someone in the US to even feel better after that debacle. The decision makers had to know that was what they were triggering, they did it anyway and many of them are still treated like reasonable choices for leadership positions.
That decision making was worse than anything Russia or China did, it was just pointless killing and destruction.
The cost of one party is the profit of the other. What was that money spent on? Weapons, ammunition, vehicles, food and clothes and other stuff for the soldiers. Someone sold that stuff, and those people needed these wars.
Guantanamo Bay is thousands of times smaller in magnitude than putting millions of your own citizens in concentration camps. It's also reprehensible and should be closed, no one disagrees on that
Maybe, but now we are discussing scales of evil and not whether evil is actually done. Moral superiority is effectively lost.
Also, this is nothing compared to millions of deaths due to wars and entire vast regions fucked up badly for generations. In that aspect, US is much worse than Russia or China, if we check past few decades (which is way more relevant for present than judgling last 200-500 years).
It pains me to say that, because I strongly align most of my values with US ones in this world, but this is fucking horrible and cant be ignored or marginalized. All done for profit of few since day 1.
> Also, this is nothing compared to millions of deaths due to wars and entire vast regions fucked up badly for generations. In that aspect, US is much worse than Russia or China, if we check past few decades (which is way more relevant for present than judgling last 200-500 years).
The hundreds of millions of people who lived under Soviet communism (entire Eastern Europe, South East Europe, Central Asia) are fucked badly for generations.
There are NOT millions of people in “camps” in China, that’s a bizarre claim made by some so called researchers like Adrian Zenz. 1000s or 10,000s at most. And do you even know what the rationale for these so called “camps” are for?
Do you have any citations for that dismissal? Multiple researchers have the Uyghurs on the order of a million people, plus something like half that number of children separated from their families into boarding schools, and the primary reason for the decline in camp population being the preferential switch to forced labor programs rather than giving up on the genocide.
This is the exact narrative that I’m talking about. It’s a hand wavy pseudo intellectual narrative that goes, Russia commits war crimes and kills civilians, China is Nazi Germany 2.0 and is trying to exterminate Muslims like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews and America is bad, you know with even more casualties in the Middle East but it’s not as bad as these cartoonishly evil regimes. I mean no offence to you by calling it hand wavy and pseudo intellectual but this is the exact attitude I’m talking about. It goes, “Everybody knows [something] [something]” and that’s usually a big warning sign for me; I know because I had to examine some of my own beliefs that way and it was painful to realise that most of it was talking points I had unfortunately picked up from so called thought leaders.
It’s a lot to unpack and I’m not going to discuss Russia because a lot of that is actually true, but why don’t you hold America to the same standards? Also regarding the concentration camps thing, this is another narrative. Can you describe to me what you think is going on in China? I’m genuinely curious. My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay, because you know, they had terrorist attacks where there were hundreds killed in stabbings in Xinjiang but you probably don’t know about that right? It seems all that people know is the pictures of lots of Muslims sitting in blue overalls behind wired fences, which has been deliberately used to evoke comparisons to gas chambers and the Holocaust, by ASPI. But when I say this, people often have a knee jerk reaction which is along the lines of: “How can you support genocide or another Holocaust, you’re evil.” Which is the exact problem because the whole premise of the discussion has been completely warped by so called accepted “truths“ and people manipulating our emotions in a classic appeal to pathos. Could the world really be this cartoonishly black and white and good and evil, where my side is morally righteous and our adversaries are morally despicable? This is exactly what Orwell described in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.”
Regarding the concentration camps narrative, just Google ASPI and you’ll realise that about 70% of this narrative originates from them. Not only that but they’re literally funded by the military industrial complex (e.g. Northrup Grumman, Thales) and their plan worked because Australia recently bought billions of dollars worth of crappy missiles from the very companies that sponsor this so called “think tank”. It’s most definitely NOT a conspiracy theory and it’s very revealing that these think tanks can be this brazen. If you want to get to the root of this, just search for the origin of common narratives like this one and you’ll find it’s just a handful of sources all repeating the same misleading points. You’ll be shocked at how easily narratives can be seeded in the media.
>My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay
Guantanamo Bay isn’t for US citizens though. You can’t be arrested in the US for being Muslim and be sent to Guantanamo bay.
They aren’t in any way similar because it’s not used against citizens, which is strictly what China’s concentration camps are for.
The military has claimed they could keep a citizen there indefinitely, but they haven’t yet and if they did it would get challenged in court pretty quickly.
Politicians leverage anti-China rhetoric to get votes while mainstream media use it to get an audience.
Just write "China bad" and automatically get 2x more views and clicks.
When was the last time you read something positive or even neutral on China in the mainstream media? I can't remember the last time. Probably before Trump.
1.4 billion people and not a single positive thing happens in China, according to Western media.
Show a Chinese person being happy? Must be CCP propaganda.
You didn't automatically say "China bad"? CCP shill.
Show a Chinese company having international success? Must have stolen the tech.
Social media app that US teens love to use? China must doing mass surveillance on Americans.
This sort of black and white demonizing of China creates extremist views. You can see these extremist views on China all over HN, where one expects users to not be easily deceived. I was wrong.
People are so concerned and fearful of pro-China propaganda that they don't even realize they've been drinking propaganda from the other side as well.
Mainstream media gets more views and clicks by generating fear, anger and saying "China bad":
* Your view of China turns negative over time
* Politicians need your vote in order to advance their careers
* Politicians say "China bad" to get your votes
* Media quotes politicians saying "China bad"
* Your view of China turns even more negative
* Politician's approval ratings are down
* Politician says "China bad" to distract you
* Your view of China turns worse
Because of this endless cycle, it's career suicide for a US politician to not be anti-China. Any US politician objectivity on China has been lost since 2016.
And it's not like there are alternative media since the media landscape has consolidated into a handful of powerful conglomerates.
I know some will accuse me of being anti-western or pro-CCP below. No. I'm not. I'm anti-extremists.
The fact that even people on HN are convinced by the good (western) vs evil (China) narrative shows you how effective this sort of thing is.
> My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay ...
Excuse me, but the camps are for free vocational training and re-education. A lot nicer than Guantanamo Bay! A lot of citizens in the US are crying out for free education!
This makes no sense. The conflict started in 2014, you point to an article from 2014, how does that show years of bombs? In addition Russia no longer keeps up the lie that the 'little green men' that invaded Ukraine were just ethnic Russian Ukrainians already in Ukraine. They admit that they invaded with Russian troops. Soldiers will often have their service in 2014 hyped in online obituaries when they are eliminated now. Ukraine was responding to an unannounced invasion by it's much larger neighbor with the weapons is has at hand (weapon's that Russia also has and uses). What a non-point made with non-evidence trying to place blame on a country that was invaded. Do you also use 'how she was dressed was asking for it' as an arguement?
> there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life.
> Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power.
How do you know that this is true without mind reading or lie detection powers? I'm not being sarcastic. You see these people talking and have somehow arrived at the strong belief that they do not believe what they are saying. How?
First, it’s because I noticed myself and others doing this through observation and intuition. Secondly, it’s because there are literally accounts and articles where these people say out loud what they’re doing. E.g The Tucker Carlson example wasn’t me just surmising something, I read it in an article where acquaintances literally said he held no outrageous views privately and was literally doing it to rile his audience up. Same for other Republican politicians who appear “rabid” and “crazy” in the Twittersphere to rile up their constituents, and then clock off work and behave completely normally, like flicking a switch. My impression is that the left thinks they’re morally superior for not supporting so called Republican crazies but they’re being played like a fiddle too, since they ALWAYS fall for this rage bait theatre and think that lambasting conservatives is actually constructive or achieves anything.
Ah yes, Tucker Carlson who was dropped by Fox News for managing to lose them $750m after refusing to reign in his messaging on Dominion, and then during discovery his personal messages and recordings include such explicit gems found in court filings as:
* "Now this guy may be a child rapist," he says, "I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her."
and
* When the show host describes 14-year-old girls at Mr Carlson's daughter's school sexually experimenting with each other, he says: "If it weren't my daughter I would love that scenario."
and then
* Mr Carlson refers to celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as "the biggest white whores in America", he calls the journalist Arianna Huffington a "pig" and says that Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton are "anti-man".
Yes I'm sure that guy who has day in and day out pushed "extreme" narratives for so long is just a totally well-adjusted person. You know, just like Bill O'Reilly who proceeded him ... what's that? He went down for sexual harassment in the workplace? [2] Total outlier. Definitely all an act.
Random examples that I can think of: Trump has/had (strong) ties with Russia, needed those Russian ties to win the election and used them to win the elections.
The only incorrect part of that is that it played an important role in his winning the election. But that part isn't necessary for the whole thing to be very bad, in my view.
Who? It is accepted that Trump got help from Russia and that he publicly asked for it. It is not accepted that he has strong ties with Russia, and unlike what the GGP has claimed, there is no "official" story saying that. The only person who did say that was private investigator Steele, in a dossier that Clinton didn't believe and discarded but that McCain did and leaked.
I abhor partisan politics but there are things associated with (e.g., Trump) that call for scrutiny.
Trump is a fascinating character and has broken so many norms that it's been mind bending. It saddens me that HN has many of his rabid acolytes that make any such discussion a shit show.
The GP comment is not telling the whole story. Yes the first thing _congress_ did was pass additional sanctions on Russia but Trump delayed [1] them from going into affect for over a year allowing more than enough time for Russia to mitigate the impact significantly.
It blows my mind that there are so many rabid supporters here on HN. There's no point in dialog there because there's no interest in that.
That said, we should be exploring how to hack society to "improve efficiency at scale", and that requires discussing policy and that is what politics is ostensibly all about. C'est la guerre.
Why wasn't there a discussion of the contents of the leaks, that the DNC did everything in their power to coronate Hillary, and only a discussion of the leak's provenance?
There was a ton of discussion about those claims but it largely stalked because the leaked emails didn’t show anything significant. You can still find Bernie die-hards claiming a conspiracy but they’re generally ignored because there’s no evidence that he did anything but lose fairly.
when putin accuses media he doesnt like of being foreign agents without proof we can recognize how transparently self serving it is. wouldnt you agree?
Trump openly asked for help from Russia on national TV. I don’t see how the existence of some degree of Russian collusion is debatable given that it was done in the open.
I do agree that there are people who vastly overestimate the extent or effectiveness of whatever Russia did do. Trump
won due to general discontent with the status quo coupled with the fact that Hillary Clinton was a politically tone deaf candidate who ran a terrible campaign. If anything Russia did succeeded it’s because it was able to capitalize on this dynamic.
no, I also believe he misspoke, but the point was, "we" take trumps jokes at total face value, as to actually believe he asked the russians, where if you watch the video, and know anything about how trump talks, you know he was not really asking them to do that, but making a joke. Something he often does. It may have been a stupid joke to make, all things considered, but it was one nonetheless.
If you can suspend blind faith in the media narrative and out-of-context clips, and smear campaigns, and see what the man said, you'd see that too.
Trump is a moron for many many reasons, but not what they accuse him of
i brought it up as such to hopefully be able to spark the idea that saying words does not mean that the words without any context means exactly what they are at face value.
Whether it was delivered on, is irellevant, if I made a joke asking putin to hack into a US aircraft carrier to find surveillance of their toilet facilities, and it happened, would it logically follow that they did it because I said so?
also, facts are facts, let Hillarys emails speak for themselves.
we had to hear nearly every single day from the talking heads and top democrats how they had seen mountains of evidence of direct collusion, and yet it was not presented. Did you read the müller report? I did.
edit:
and isnt it also entirely possible that if russia did "respond" to trumps "ask", they did it to make "you" believe he colludes with them, to hurt him?
Makes a fun sound bite but given the context was he was speaking about a program for people to navigate voter suppression, do you really think he has a secret voter fraud plan and accidentally revealed it like that Politicians speak a lot and I know I myself can mix up words sometimes and I don’t speak nearly enough.
> OK, trump wanted the TRUTH to come out, he wanted facts exposed to the american people, that admittedly benefitted him, but still, facts relating to illegalities to his political opponent.
That’s just clearly false.
> Russia tried to hack Hillary Clinton’s office five hours after Trump called on Moscow to find her deleted emails
So basically Trump solicited a third party to commit a crime on his behalf. As far as I know that makes you an accessory. Also Russia later also hacked the RNC so the lack of release of anything incriminating there leads a reasonable person to conclude I think that they have blackmail info on the RNC that they’re holding back because they have an agreement with the elites in that party. Notice how especially pro-Putin right wing media has been since that time period.
The Meuller report is pretty thorough. If you haven’t read it at least find unbiased analysis of what it shows.
> Russia tried to hack Hillary Clinton’s office five hours after Trump called on Moscow to find her deleted emails
Emails that were deleted in a crime, that should have been public record. so while he may have been soliciting a crime (he didnt, and there were never charges, also, if you knew ANYTHING about trump, you knew he joked when he said that. but regardless), he wanted the truth to come out
> think that they have blackmail info on the RNC that they’re holding back because they have an agreement with the elites in that party.
yeah you think, but you have no evidence, its entirely possible there was nothing there, and we have some evidence to point to that, regardless of how criminal the RNC may have been(and they are for sure every bit as bad as the democrats), in that Trump has talked plenty about how he put great effort to not having any digital copies of important stuff that COULD be hacked, and in addition to that, invest in "cybersecurity"
This technology has tremendous potential for good. It’s not all nefarious.
People who are paralyzed or suffering from neurodegenerative diseases might have a chance of regaining independence. New treatments for mental health diseases could be a benefit as well.
I am struggling to find the right words to express how wrong your view is to me. Housing is a basic human need like food and clothing. How can you in good conscience celebrate making a tremendous profits exploiting the fact that people cannot afford a basic need?