> What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive.
> She is accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and at least two of her 11 journal articles. Two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation even seem to have been copied from another work.
Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people by allowing students to protest against Israel. Then people went digging for something to use against her and found this plagarism. From the NYTimes:
> After weeks of tumult at Harvard over the university’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the leadership of its president, Claudine Gay, there was no shortage of interest in a faculty forum with Dr. Gay this week.
> In a town hall held over Zoom on Tuesday with several hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay focused on how to bridge the deep divides that had emerged on campus as a result of the war, according to two people who attended and asked for confidentiality because of the sensitivity of the situation.
> Faculty members who spoke up in the meeting were largely positive, and there were no questions about Dr. Gay’s academic record after public allegations of plagiarism. The matter wasn’t even raised, one professor said.
> But by Thursday, new questions surrounding Dr. Gay’s scholarship had shifted to the forefront, after the university said late Wednesday that it had identified two more instances of what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” from her 1997 doctoral dissertation.
>Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until [...]
If the recent youtube plagiarism drama[1] is anything to go by, you can do blatant plagiarism for years, get called out by randoms, and still get away with it.
> The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people
This seems to be standard in academia. The president of Stanford was found to be a fraud through work he'd done years or decades earlier, it only came to light after an undergraduate went on the attack. How did nobody notice beforehand? Turned out that the had noticed and it'd all been swept under the table.
>Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long.
Multiple German politicians have been forced to resign decades after their dissertations, with similar accusations. It seems like it is a case of rising to a point of public renown that then leads to greater public scrutiny. In some cases, I wonder if it a fake-it-until-you-make-it situation that upon making it, causes the house of cards to collapse.
Plagiarism and research fraud are rife throughout academia. If we subjected everyone to the same level of scrutiny we would find a lot of people who have done far worse than Dr. Gay. I am hopeful that new AI tools will automate this type of investigation and find more instances of academic dishonesty.
I haven't used Turnitin for several years. From what I recall it couldn't detect cases where the author paraphrased another work without adding any original thoughts.
The problem really isn’t that students at her institution support genocide. The problem is that when she asked if chanting in support of the murder of Jews was against school policy, she equivocated. She would not have equivocated if the students had been chanting that Blacks should be killed, instead of Jews.
Exactly. What they said was so offensive, not because she spoke in favor of free speech. It was because after being outspoken and sanctioning students for years in regards to hate speech towards other groups, when it comes to murdering Jews, they are suddenly eliciting the importance of freedom of speech.
When you promote hate speech as free speech against one group, while punishing hate speech against all the others, it leaves many outside observers with the opinion that you tacitly approve of hate speech against that group and I believe creates a hostile environment in the entity you lead towards members of that group.
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s a yes or no question. Let me ask you this. You are president of Harvard, so I assume you’re familiar with the term intifada, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that term, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: And you understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews. Are you aware of that?
CLAUDINE GAY: That type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: And there have been multiple marches at Harvard with students chanting quote, “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” And quote, “globalize the intifada.” Is that correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’ve heard that thoughtless, reckless and hateful language on our campus, yes.
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
Given that the Second Intifada saw over 800 Israeli civilians murdered in terrorist attacks, it is not unreasonable to interpret "globalize the intifada" as call for murdering Israelis and/or Jews outside of Israel. And if the President of Harvard admits it happened, we don't really need to know the exact dates in order to know that it did happen.
Also, if you don't sit on someone's neck, you don't have to worry about being shaken off. If you don't benefit from or justify oppression, you have nothing to fear from the uprising against it.
It's when you want to eat the cake and still have it when things get "complex", like posting walls of text that amount to "no, I don't" in context.
> like posting walls of text that amount to "no, I don't" in context.
Claudine Gay never said "no" in that part of her testimony. She described "there is only one solution intifada revolution" and "globalize the intifada" as "thoughtless, reckless and hateful language" and "hateful speech" which is "personally abhorrent to me", but didn't give a clearcut answer to the question of whether it is "indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews".
ELISE STEFANIK: So, based upon your testimony, you understand that this call for intifada is to commit genocide against the Jewish people in Israel and globally, correct?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally abhorrent to me.
If she thinks it’s so hateful, why are you trying to excuse it?
CLAUDINE GAY: I will say again that type of hateful speech is personally
abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: Do you believe that type of hateful speech is contrary
to Harvard’s code of conduct or is it allowed at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: It is at odds with the values of Harvard. But our values
also —
ELISE STEFANIK: Can you not say here that it is against the code of
conduct at Harvard?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views
that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech
crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying,
harassment —
ELISE STEFANIK: Does that speech not cross that barrier? Does that
speech not call for the genocide of Jews and the elimination of Israel?
CLAUDINE GAY: When —
ELISE STEFANIK: You testify that you understand that it’s the definition
of intifada. Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?
CLAUDINE GAY: We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide
berth to free expression even of views that are objectionable —
ELISE STEFANIK: You and I both know that’s not the case. You were aware
that Harvard ranked dead last when it came to free speech. Are you not
aware of that report?
CLAUDINE GAY: As I observed earlier, I reject that characterization.
ELISE STEFANIK: It’s — the data shows it’s true. And isn’t it true that
Harvard previously rescinded multiple offers of admissions for
applicants and accepted freshmen for sharing offensive memes, racist
statements, sometimes as young as 16 years old? Did Harvard not rescind
those offers of admission?
CLAUDINE GAY: That long predates my time as president, so I can’t —
ELISE STEFANIK: But you understand that Harvard made that decision to
rescind those offers of admission.
CLAUDINE GAY: I have no reason to contradict the facts as you present
them.
ELISE STEFANIK: Correct, because it’s a fact. You’re also aware that a
Winthrop House faculty dean was let go over he — over who he chose to
legally represent, correct? That was while you were dean.
CLAUDINE GAY: That is an incorrect characterization of what transpired.
ELISE STEFANIK: What’s the characterization?
CLAUDINE GAY: I’m not going to get into details about a personnel
matter.
ELISE STEFANIK: Well, let me ask you this, will admissions offers be
rescinded or any disciplinary action be taken against students or
applicants who say from the river to the sea or intifada advocating for
the murder of Jews?
CLAUDINE GAY: As I’ve said that type of hateful reckless offensive
speech is personally abhorrent to me.
ELISE STEFANIK: [inaudible] today that no action will be taken — what
action will be taken?
CLAUDINE GAY: When speech crosses into conduct that violates our
policies, including policies against bullying, harassment or
intimidation, we take action. And we have robust disciplinary processes
that allow us to hold individuals accountable.
ELISE STEFANIK: What action has been taken against students who are
harassing and calling for the genocide of Jews on Harvard’s campus?
CLAUDINE GAY: I can assure you we have robust —
ELISE STEFANIK: What actions have been taken? I’m not asking —
CLAUDINE GAY: What actions underway?
ELISE STEFANIK: I’m asking what actions have been taken against those students.
CLAUDINE GAY: Given students’ rights to privacy and our obligations
under FERPA, I will not say more about any specific cases other than to
reiterate that processes are ongoing.
[…]
And _that_ is why she should not lead a university, Harvard or otherwise. All she had to do was say, without commenting on any specific cases, that chanting “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” or “globalize the intifada.” would be regarded as “bullying, harassment or
intimidation” and students found to have participated in those acts would be punished according to the rules they were required to agree to when they decided to attend Harvard. To retreat to bureaucratic platitudes about FERPA instead shows that the Harvard administration is itself is antisemitic (aka racist). They simply don’t think that what these students did was wrong. They also don’t believe that the rules should be applied to everyone equally.
> They also don’t believe that the rules should be applied to everyone equally.
Exactly. It's unbelievable to me that this is apparently hard for these university presidents to understand. Set the standard and keep it - whether it's punish all the 'abhorrent' things students say, or none of them.
As a Jew, I can't imagine continuing to donate to an institution that was so clearly run by people tolerant of anti-semitism. Hopefully Harvard's endowment sees significant punishment, since the university itself appears to agree with Gay's stance.
Some people consider "from the river to the sea" to be a call to genocide of Jews. Because, of course, they ignore the simple fact that majority of Jews don't even live in Israel [1]. And to call for a Palestinian state from the river to the sea doesn't say that Jews people cannot live inside it. And ironically the likud party which dominated the Israeli government the last couple of decades have almost the same sentence in its first point on its charter [2] and no one calls this a call to kill all Palestinians (Although some say it in public [3][4]).
>Some people consider "from the river to the sea" to be a call to genocide of Jews. Because, of course, they ignore the simple fact that majority of Jews don't even live in Israel [1].
so it's only genocide when you're trying to wipe them out entirely? if you only wipe out a quarter, for instance, that's not genocide?
I didn't say that. This is just you trying to bend my words. I did say that from river to the sea does not mean that Jews living in Palestine will be wiped out. If you think that this the meaning that's fine. I just hope that you consider it the same when the other side use almost exactly the same slogan (interesting you ignored that)
And why do you suppose she did that? Is it perhaps because of the constant attempts to force people to treat "jews the people belonging to a certain race/religion" and "the state of israel" as exactly the same thing? The sheer amount of people who accept these, bad faith, to put it mildly, arguments, is, well, not surprising, but is pretty sad.
So because those Zionist arguments exist, calling for the murder of Jewish people (not metaphorically, the question was a hypothetical) is something where "nuance" matters now?
You acknowledge the arguments as bad faith, then turn around and use them to relativize hate speech. Anyone calling for the murder of Jewish people (per the metaphorical) would never accept those arguments in the first place
I was going to write a long winded reply about the differences between "hate speech" directed at "israelis" vs "jews" and how easy it is to conflate the two, especially with the constant israeli attempts to force people to treat the two as the same thing, but instead let me ask you a question:
Do you honestly think that the president of harvard wishes for, hopes for, or even wants, the mass murder of jewish people all over the world?
And following up on that, do you honestly believe that the students at harvard want all jewish people all over the world to be murdered?
Isn't it more likely that the students in question want the israelis to stop committing acts of violence against palestinians and perhaps don't view the palestinian violence as any worse than what the israelis are doing?
One thing I've noticed over the years is that it seems really easy for people who benefit from the current status quo to condemn violence meant to change the status quo. It's pretty easy to come up with restrictions for people's protests when you're not the one living in an oppressive society.
> And following up on that, do you honestly believe that the students at harvard want all jewish people all over the world to be murdered?
"We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence."
For the people who view Oct 7 as justified, yes
> Isn't it more likely that the students in question want the israelis to stop committing acts of violence against palestinians
They can want both at the same time. October 7th was an act of terror against Jewish civilians. The people who blame the Israeli government 100% (including aforementioned student organizations) don't find fault with the people committing those murders. That implies that they see the murder of Jewish people as justified punishment for the actions of the Israeli government. The choice of words is deliberate
Criticizing the Israeli government and publicly stating that an act of terror is justified are two very different things, of which Harvard students know the difference
Charitably, I think the point was that academics overlook it, like the dirty inside secret that everyone knows to not talk about.
Once she drew the ire of people outside the normal academic circles, things that should have been controversial (like blatant plagiarism) were brought forward.
Further, these people weren't looking specifically in the interest of academic integrity, they were looking for any reason at all to get her fired for not unequivocally saying that calling for genocide is outside the student code of conduct.
As a result, the allegations have, thus far, been treated as unworthy of much attention- it wasn't that they are right, but the accusers have the wrong motivation.
I don't know how much of this phenomenon is a modern issue, but it does seem to be very prevalent in today's society.
The anti-zionist attacks, the anti-jewish genocide talk, and the anti-palestinian rubbling of Gaza are all deeply troubling. Consequently, I do not fall into either of the two main camps.
However, she is the president of a premier university and must be held to account for her serial failures to uphold academic ethics.
We need to have severe penalties for negligent DMCA takedowns, not just willfully malicious ones. Including disbarment and possibly imprisonment for any lawyers involved. Taking down pages about NASA rocketry because they shared a name with a social media model was probably an accident, but it's an inexcusable accident that never should have happened. These kind of accidents wouldn't happen so often if the people issuing takedowns were forced to have skin in the game.
This is a very nice-sounding fantasy. Too many people profit from the status quo to do such a thing. Lawyers and judges would not dare issue a ruling or enact any law harming their and their friends' profession.
Cynicism like this is poison for changing the political system. Not only have you ceded all ground to the copyright industry - you also discourage others from trying to make a difference.
The public isn't as powerless to enact change as you make them out to be.
Yes the public is powerless. Nothing short of revolution will change the status quo. Until then, not a god damn thing will ever make a meaningful change away from the direction things are heading. The people have lost control of the government.
People here, if organized, could absolutely change things especially considering the resources at the financial disposal of those here.
No, I don't mean issues like what you see endlessly litigated on the news. There's countless other issues that barely get any attention in the news such as - Copyright! Not to abolish it - that will never happen, but changes are absolutely possible.
Also, the penalty against falsely claiming you represent a copyright holder can/will be weaponized against anyone trying to bring attention to abuse by issuing the "missing" DMCA takedown requests in a logically consistent manner.
In other words, it ends up making it easy for issuers to selectively bully small weak targets while carefully avoiding anyone who could fight back legally. The fact that one thing was removed/kept doesn't create precedent for another fundamentally identical thing posted by someone else.
I mean the lawyers behind Prenda Law were disbarred and sent to jail for their outrageous copyright trolling in large part because they abused the justice system. Judges don't like it when you do that. They can and do bust lawyers and law firms all the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law
I think the main issue here is, if you're a victim of DMCA fraud it's hard to get a case in front of a judge because of the way the law is written. But that doesn't mean it will never happen, and if it does I absolutely feel like a judge might set a precedent which curtails the practice, because judges by nature tend to take a dim view of abuse of process.
It's well respected in the sense that when you're at a dinner party and tell people that you're a school teacher everybody says "Oh how nice! that's such an important job. You must love working with the kids, right? So rewarding to be able to make a difference"
Contrast when you tell somebody you're a lawyer or lobbyist, some people will be impressed but other people will get a bit uncomfortable and try to change the subject or start telling "lawyer jokes".
The best example is soldiers vs. mercenaries. Soldiers are highly regarded by society because society tells them they did an honorable thing because society didn't have to compensate them very well, and especially didn't have to compensate them enough to not go fight for some other society that treats them better.
Mercenaries on the other hand are not highly regarded because they are well compensated, and don't really care about the honor of fighting for some society that wants to pay them dirt.
Status is far cheaper to confer than money, so we make sure those willing to work for status are well compensated.
It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.
I'm not sure I buy that. I think the reputation of soldiers varies greatly with the public perception of the wars they fought. Soldiers are highly regarded when they're seen to be fighting some great evil, but at other times soldiers are considered to be fools or even among the lowest strata of society (particularly before the modern era.)
WW2 veterans receive near universal praise, but in the Vietnam era there were widespread (probably heavily exaggerated if not fabricated) reports of soldiers being spat on because a whole lot of people didn't think America's military adventurism was really in defense of America. Of course those who felt that the war was necessary in the fight against communism to defend the American way of life had a more positive view of the same soldiers. In more recent wars with all volunteer soldiers I think the reputation of soldiers is just as polarized although usually the negative side doesn't go further than cool sniffs and sneers; the spitting was probably all apocryphal in the first place. Certainly you won't see me going around thanking Iraq vets for their service; they signed up for a stupid war and I'm not going to thank them for making that mistake. I won't look down on a soldier who got drafted, but those soldiers who signed up for the travel, job experience, college education, etc are essentially mercenaries anyway.
> in the Vietnam era there were widespread (probably heavily exaggerated if not fabricated) reports of soldiers being spat on
So you recognize this is a myth, but nevertheless use it as an example? Vietnam soldiers were drafted, and a lot of anti-war voices were soldiers and veterans. The resentment were towards politicians (remember the “LBJ, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” chant.) in contrast, the “support our troops” slogan were an attempt to equate supporting the soldiers with supporting the war.
The fact that nobody was injured in the previous incident is fortunate for anybody who might have been injured then, but doesn't diminish the importance of addressing whatever flaw caused the explosion. Considering that we're talking about a lot of liquid helium being improperly vented, the next time something goes wrong it could end up asphyxiating a hundred people.
Just because nobody was in the danger zone the first time it exploded doesn't mean you should count on nobody being in the danger zone the second or third time it might explode. This is the reason work site safety officers yell at people to report all near-miss incidents, not only the accidents that get people hurt. If something went wrong and nobody got hurt by chance coincidence, it might happen again when people are actually near it. Therefore a near miss incident needs to be addressed with the same seriousness as an accident that actually caused injury.
Even if it doesn't suffocate you, helium leaks can be pretty bad since they'll temporarily brick any modern phone with a MEMS oscillator (like a quartz time crystal, but smaller) in it. Not great if you need assistance.
You've rightly hedged with "sometimes", the article on the other hand is very whiggish and seems to incline that any perception of decline at any time in any place is a cognitive bias and not representative of reality. What about in the UK during and in the years after WW2, when rationing continued and in some cases got even worse even after the war ended and average body weights were dropping? Where people who perceived a decline there and then operating under delusions and believing things which weren't true? Do their experiences at the time not count because a generation later things started to recover? Or maybe their experiences don't count because the decline of the British empire was actually a good thing from certain points of view and anybody who saw it as a decline had an invalid opinion?
Or maybe because technology seems to march inexorably onward, decline in other aspects of life are wholly negated and therefore anybody who perceives any decline is wrong. If rent and groceries now account for a larger portion of an average worker's spending but ipads got twice as fast, does that mean that people who perceive a decline are objectively wrong?
So let me get this straight, your training as a psychoanalyst qualifies you to discredit a woman's testimony, despite you never having met with her? How wonderful.
By the way, have you read this?
> Today, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) reiterates its continued and unwavering commitment to the ethical principle known as "The Goldwater Rule." We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media. Armchair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.
Just to be clear. I'm not a psychologist or psychoanalyst. I trained as a psychoanalyst (and not in the US) but don't practice. Also to note - the APA don't represent psychologists or psychoanalysts, but rather psychiatrists. Anyone discussing the motivations of any public figure is engaging in armchair psychoanalysis, and although I agree with the premise behind prohibiting professionals from doing so, psychiatrists often do in fact provide professional opinions to the media about people they have not examined (for example diagnosing certain political figures).
In any case, I don't think anyone is qualified to credit or discredit a claim in a medical or psychologically diagnostic sense without a clinical interview (something that few psychiatrists are qualified to perform by the way). That's not what I'm doing here. What I'm pointing out is the unreliability of recovered memory. Specifically someone claiming that they repressed sexual abuse at age 4, for decades, and then remembered it accurately. That's simply not how memory usually works.
> In any case, I don't think anyone is qualified to credit or discredit a claim in a medical or psychologically diagnostic sense without a clinical interview (something that few psychiatrists are qualified to perform by the way). That's not what I'm doing here. What I'm pointing out is the unreliability of recovered memory.
Uh huh... and in another comment in this discussion you've gone on to speculate that she has BPD, with the implication that her accusations shouldn't be believed for that reason.
It would be consistent with motivating the confused cognition (e.g.: her rambling and contradictory statements in the article linked by OP), and producing false or disingenuous allegations. However so could lots of other things. My point wasn't to diagnose this person, but to make clear "it seems pretty clear something terrible happened to her and was invalidated" is a dubious rationale for believing any kind of allegation.
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. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If they think it's being absorbed through the lungs then they should plug the subjects noses and have them inhale instead of sniffing it. But that's a far fetched assumption. Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor. That's why they had the subjects sniff it, because they obviously suspect that it's based on odor.
If, let’s say for sake of argument, this study’s hypothesis is that the effect is caused by pheromones, then by definition it’s odorless.
In fact, one of the inherent challenges of trying to study this effect between humans is that the participants need to be clean and odorless, to ensure you’re actually measuring the effects of pheromones and not, say, odor. This review talks about this challenge[0].
You nose detects it and your brain reacts to it; it's odor. Just because you don't consciously perceive it doesn't mean it isn't odor. If it isn't odor then there isn't any other good word for it.
>Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor.
No, odor is a perceived smell. UV and IR both interact with the eye without being visible, so there's no good reason to insist that it's impossible for chemicals with no smell to interact with the nose.
When chemicals float through the air into your nose or mouth and get detected by your brain, that's odor. Conscious perception or unconscious emotional reaction makes no difference, both are odor. If there are no chemicals being emitted or they have no reaction to your nose and your nose doesn't change the signals it's sending to your brain, then you can fairly say it has no odor.
To say that odors aren't odors unless they are consciously perceived is like saying UV isn't light because you don't consciously perceive it. Except it's the same physical phenomena, electromagnetic radiation or chemicals floating through the air, your sensory organs are detecting it (mostly being destroyed by it in the case of UV, but probably not in the case of tear odor...) and your brain is reacting to it even though you don't consciously realize it.
>To say that odors aren't odors unless they are consciously perceived is like saying UV isn't light because you don't consciously perceive it
No, I'm saying that EM doesn't produce colors unless it's visible light. What you're saying is that not only are cold, pressure, and pain flavors, so are any additional effects on satiety or insulin response or whatever triggered by any interaction with receptors on the tongue.
That's a different definition of odor than commonly accepted. If you can't consciously perceive it, it's not an odor. Just like you can't see the TV remote shine a bright infrared light. We don't call TV remotes flashlights, because we can't perceive infrared. If we can't consciously perceive a smell, it's described as odorless.
If tears are being detected by the brain, it's through chemicals from the tears traveling through the air and landing on sensors in your nose (or mouth); that is odor. If there is some mechanism other than odor by which humans might distinguish tears them from saline solution after sniffing them, please tell me.
Odors also being detected with your tongue is irrelevant trivia which doesn't alter my conclusion. Sound can be heard through your chest but that's irrelevant trivia when somebody says "if there's no air to transmit pressure waves to your ears then there's no sound." Sound is transmitted through pressure waves in the air, and odors are transmitted through chemicals in the air. If you're hearing them with your ears or chest or smelling them with your nose or mouth makes no difference, the fact that any detection is evidently taking place shows that there is sound or odor involved. Furthermore, the researchers obviously suspect that the mechanism of detection is odor because they asked their subjects to sniff it. You don't ask subjects to sniff a thing unless you suspect odor of being involved. If researchers were studying the perception of magnetic fields, they wouldn't ask people to sniff the fields.
Again, if there is any other plausible mechanism for detection, then tell me. Otherwise, stop wasting my time.
I've used several laptops as file servers in hot apartments without AC and haven't had issues. The trick is to make sure you're not running a bunch of bloat you don't need (which is the root cause of 99% of "my old computer became slow") Slap something like debian on the laptop and don't even bother installing a desktop environment. The load of an NFS server sitting there idle most of the time and a few other system services doing basically nothing is negligible, any laptop should be able to handle it in 40 C weather. If not then you probably have some dust issues, so blow it out and see if the issue resolves itself. Keep the screen partially open (you can turn it off though) to help with ventilation.
I've never had any laptop die while operating like this. I only replace them when I replace my primary use laptop with something new, demoting my last primary use laptop to the server role.
> websites shouldn't be able to make money from advertising at all.
This is the case. Advertising is a scourge, psychological warfare waged by corporations against our minds and wallets. Advertisers have no moral qualms, they will exploit any psychololgical weakness to shill products, no matter how harmful. Find a "market" of teenagers with social issues? Show them ads of happy young people frolicking with friends to make them buy your carbonated sugar water; never mind that your product will rot their teeth and make them fat. Advertisers don't care about whether products are actually good for people, all they care about is successful shilling.
Advertising is warfare waged by corporations against people and pretending otherwise makes you vulnerable to it. To fight back effectively we must use adblockers and advocate for advertising bans. If your website cannot exist without targeted advertising, then it is better for it to not exist.
Think about what it would mean to not have any advertising whatsoever. Most current large brands would essentially be entrenched forever. No matter how good a new product or service is, it's going to be almost impossible to reach a sustainable scale through purely organic growth starting from zero. Advertising in some form is necessary for an economy to function.
The problem is, as was mentioned above by someone, all content has to be paid for. If there were no ads we wouldn’t have had TV and radio for the past few decades. 90% of the internet would disappear, and the only stuff left would be paywalled - i.e. only the rich could use the web.
I’m sure you try to avoid ads - I do too, they suck. But don’t pretend you don’t use a lot of websites that are not paid for with ads.
The internet began in 1969 and by 1992 was by far the largest network of computers and had exactly zero ads and zero paywalls. (The US government imposed a rule against commercial use of the internet to appease private businesses that didn't want competition from the internet. The rule remained in force till 1992.)
Also, you're currently using a very large non-paywalled site with no ads.
So, no, ads are not needed to have a nice internet available to all.
I don’t think you’re being intellectually honest. I didn’t have access to the Internet in my home in 1992, and the rest of the world didn’t either. I did pay for and have access to Compuserve forums. There was very little content back then. Certainly no huge video sites where you can learn practically anything, or hardly any of the good benefits we enjoy from being online today. If you loved the 1992 internet I can probably find an AOL disk to send you. And just because there is one ad free site we are both using hardly means the rest of the sites wouldn’t somehow disappear. YC is paid for by some rich folks who have made plenty of money that ultimately (though not exclusively) came from ads. Like it or not, ads are an economic necessity. If you have a better solution start a company that gives away free, valuable content and prove it.
>I don’t think you’re being intellectually honest.
Do you think I'm outright telling falsehoods? Which part do you think is false: that the internet had many millions of users in 1992? That the internet pre-1993 was completely non-commercial with absolutely zero ads and no paywalls?
1992 internet had email, mailing list, newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat, massively-multiplayer online games (called MUDs) and places (mostly using the "anonymous FTP" protocol) where you could download free software like Linux and GNU utilities.
>There was very little content back then.
The newsgroups were absolutely huge in 1992: if you spend all day every day reading newsgroups, you could keep up with less than 1% of it. The same could be said of Internet Relay Chat and probably also of mailing lists (though I didn't subscribe to enough mailing lists to say that with 100% confidence).
Just because you never had access to it in 1992 does not mean that it is irrelevant to the topic of our conversation. AOL users had limited access to the Internet in 1992. They could send email for example I think to non-AOL users over the Internet, and 1992 I think is the year that they gain access to the newsgroups (including famously the ability to post to the newsgroups). But if in 1992 all you knew was Compuserv and AOL, you didn't know the Internet.
And again, one of the few rules of the internet (imposed again by the US government, which was footing the bill) was no commercial use. So for example there was a newsgroup called ba.jobs (the "ba" stood for "bay area") where employers could advertise job openings and employees could make posts announcing their availability for a job. But contractors (i.e., 1099 workers as opposed to W2 workers) were prohibited from making such a post because that was considered too commercial (in that an individual contractor is a lot like a small business and for such a contractor to use the internet to announce his availability was too much like a small business posting an ad).
>I didn’t have access to the Internet in my home in 1992, and the rest of the world didn’t either.
In 1992, most users of the internet got their access from their employer or their school of higher education. You could've bought access for $20 a month in 1992, its just that the Internet was not being advertised, so you didn't know about it. (Also, if you were living in a rural area, you might've had to pay your telephone company long-distant charges for every minute you were connected.)
Actually, it is not just that the internet was not being advertised, the people running it actively discouraged journalists from writing about it because there was a senator named William Proxmire who was good at getting the press to repeat his accusations of governmental wasteful spending, and the internet was an easy target for Proxmire: there were for example academics of every department using the newsgroups to discuss ideas, and Proxmire could say (truthfully, but misleadingly) that the US government was spending taxpayer money so that professors could discuss <pick the most ridiculous things academics might discuss>. (Here's an example of a journalist losing his access to the internet in 1984 in part because he wouldn't stop writing about the internet (then called ARPANET): https://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html)
So you see there was an availability bias at play in which advertising is loud and designed to get attention (of course) and it tends to drown out information that is not part of the advertising-dependent information-ecosystem. (And again, the people in charge of the infrastructure of the internet pre-1993 were even actively striving to avoid any publicity.) Particularly, hardly anyone knows nowadays that many millions of users were using the completely-noncommercial internet of 1969 - 1992. People tend to think that the internet was created in 1993 or that advertising-dependent companies were essential to its creation.
I don’t think you’re taking scale into account. Millions of internet users then vs billions now makes a difference. Generous hobbyists and some universities payed for those services back then. The “massive” in MUD was a few thousand simultaneous players, with mostly text and maybe limited graphics. I very much doubt any of them could/would have paid if their usage went up by 10,000 times, with the higher quality and expectations that we have today. Again, I challenge you to come up with a service for a hundred million people that is open to everyone and doesn’t require ads. I hate ads too - I’ll join your service if you can make it work.
Just for reference, I was there too. I started with a shiny 300 baud modem. To compare the old days to today and say they’re even comparable in terms of information, media, knowledge, access, gaming, entertainment … it’s not even close.
Earlier you wrote that "I did pay for and have access to Compuserve forums", and that "if you loved the 1992 internet I can probably find an AOL disk to send you".
Could you clarify whether you had direct access to the internet (the newsgroups, email, ftp sites, web sites, not mediated by AOL or Compuserv) before mid-1993? Also, if yes, how many hours did you spend on it? I ask because I would be surprised to learn that it is possible for someone with your opinions to have had extensive experience with the internet pre-1993 (and I go looking for surprises).
I remember seeing spyglass and using NCSA mosaic at work and school, and Compuserve from home. There was definitely stuff out there, I downloaded images, a song or two and some programs. I saw a very early version of (I think?) Windows 95 (or 3.1?) that could play different videos in different windows and was amazed (these were from disk, not the web). Used a sysadmin for a Netware network.
It was a really fun time. But the breadth of what we have now more than dwarfs what existed then. It’s not surprising - that was 30 years ago. I don’t see any way to get from there to here without a ton of money being spent. Some of it was spent by governments and individuals, but I’m guessing the bulk was by companies. Economic realities require those companies to get something for their investments - they’re not charities. Advertising is the major vehicle for that investment. I’ll bet we’d find radio and TV followed a similar historical trajectory.
I use uBlock and avoid ads because they’re irritating (and I feel like a hypocrit for doing it). I hate going to recipe sites for all the garbage you have to wade through to get to the recipe. So I get it. The web, at current scale, doesn’t and can’t exist outside of economic realities. Micro transactions might have been the solution but it wasn’t. Kagi has a great model (happy customer here), but everyone can’t afford to subscribe to everything.
> “if you all dropped dead”, “you smarmy parasitic prick”
Dude. I hope you’re just having a bad day. If this is your normal mode of discourse you should get some counseling. I say this from a place of good will advice.
What's a viable business model for web search other than ads (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Naver, etc.) or paid search (Kagi)? If paid search is the only option left, is it okay that poor people can't use the web? Is it okay if poor people don't get access to news?
Oh, and they don't get to vote because voting day and locations can't be advertised by the government, especially in targeted mailings that are personalized with your party affiliation and location. The US Postal Service will also collapse, so those mailings can't go out, even if allowed. At least the rich can still search for their polling location on the web [<- sarcasm].
None of that is okay with me. More/better regulation? Yes! But our world doesn't know how to function without ads. Being absolute about banning ads is unrealistic and takes focus away from achieving better regulation, thereby playing into the hands of the worst advertisers.
> What's a viable business model for web search other than ads (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Naver, etc.) or paid search (Kagi)?
Not my problem. Those companies, and any other with business models reliant on advertising, don't have a right to exist. If your business can't be profitable without child labor, your business has no right to exist. This is no different.
> She is accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and at least two of her 11 journal articles. Two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation even seem to have been copied from another work.
Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people by allowing students to protest against Israel. Then people went digging for something to use against her and found this plagarism. From the NYTimes:
> After weeks of tumult at Harvard over the university’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the leadership of its president, Claudine Gay, there was no shortage of interest in a faculty forum with Dr. Gay this week.
> In a town hall held over Zoom on Tuesday with several hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay focused on how to bridge the deep divides that had emerged on campus as a result of the war, according to two people who attended and asked for confidentiality because of the sensitivity of the situation.
> Faculty members who spoke up in the meeting were largely positive, and there were no questions about Dr. Gay’s academic record after public allegations of plagiarism. The matter wasn’t even raised, one professor said.
> But by Thursday, new questions surrounding Dr. Gay’s scholarship had shifted to the forefront, after the university said late Wednesday that it had identified two more instances of what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” from her 1997 doctoral dissertation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/harvard-claudine-gay-p...