I'm going to very amused as Google's "don't be evil" facade comes crumbling down, having lost their revolving door with the US government and protection from antitrust enforcement.
Google has a very small business, search & ads, that basically prints money. They then spend almost all of that money on unprofitable operations that crush competition by 1) setting the price-point for many services at free, 2) intercepting customers (e.g. Google Flight and Hotel bookings at the top of search results), and 3) poaching all of the best talent and wasting it away on these terrible side businesses.
It will only become easier and easier to do great harm to many people. And so there is no number of terrorists that is an acceptable risk.
We can't allow these savages to keep developing their capabilities, growing their numbers, and inspiring sympathizers around the world. The only option is to eradicate ISIS and similar groups from the face of the Earth. We must strike fear deep into the hearts of any who would think to do us harm.
"It is better to be feared than to be loved, if you cannot be both."
Muslims are the primary victims of terrorists groups. They would be very happy to be rid of the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
>That's more or less how we got here in the first place.
I don't agree. We got here because Western institutions and ideas were causing dramatic and rapid social change in the Muslim world, and inspired a violent counter-reaction.
Take your second paragraph and replace the word ISIS with "The USA". That is essentially their recruitment speech for their operatives in the rest of the world.
Checkmate.
Yes, there does have to be a winner and a loser. Given that ISIS aims for a global caliphate and the destruction of the US and Israel, I sure hope you want them to lose...
The problem behind ISIS isn't their numbers, or their land, or their weapons, or their tactics. It's the mentality behind it. And that has already gone worldwide.
You can kill people with violence, but an idea will only grow stronger.
This is a silly argument. Trump and Clinton competed for the electoral college, not the popular vote. Which means that Trump spent a lot of time campaigning for one electoral vote in Maine and almost none in courting millions of people in California and New York. It's impossible to say what the outcome would have been if the popular vote would have mattered, because both campaigns would be run totally differently.
Actually, no it's not. The electoral college was setup in 1787. What it has to do with politics two centuries later in the age of the internet seems out of date. Yet it's the rules we live by, not the rules we like.
Since 2000, it's clear that voter majorities have been underrepresented in presidential elections. And as we claim to be the world's largest democracy, we have been, in fact, the world's largest republic.
I'm highly amused that you start with "actually, no it's not", implying that you are going to disagree with my comment, because you don't actually address anything I said. Did you even read what I said?
The parties may of run entirely different candidates if it was a popular vote as well. They would likely hold entirely different policy positions as a party.
Like it or not, increasing fossil fuel extraction and cutting environmental regulations is now the policy of the President of the United States. The public communications of the executive branch are under his authority and he's not just going to let the EPA run its public relations and releases contrary to his agenda.
Like others have pointed out, there are other ways the public can get the information. But it won't be the EPA running a press office counter to the President's.
For policy statements, yes. But scientific reports, from agencies that have a scientific civil service, like the DoE, NASA, EPA, DARPA, etc. are traditionally considered to be different from policy statements, and lots of them are released every month by low-ranking scientific staff without needing approval from the administration's political appointees.
I don't like it. I don't really understand the point of your comment, you seem to just be summarizing some of the article. Do you have something substantial to add?
It shouldn't be an ad network's job to adjudicate truth, especially given Google's monopolistic position. They should stick to selling and reselling eyeballs and clicks, and regulating things directly material to that, e.g. deceitful ad placement.
So they should be banned from providing their customers (the people buying ads) assurances about the sorts of content their ads will appear next to? Seems like that forces them to leave a lot of value on the table.
It specifically names propaganda sites. The problem though is that the definition of propaganda should not lie in the hands of google alone. Never hand over shackles that could one day be used on you.
I never understood this line of reasoning, as if regulations were some extrinsic property.
"I'll take one quart of regulations, a three feet of rules"
It doesn't work that way. The practice of regulation is non-linear in terms of its formulation and result. Long, complicated regulations could be relatively meaningless, while short rules could be really important.
Saying we are going to cut 75% of regulations is useless. Point to specific rules and regulations.
Since ignorance of the law is no excuse, you still need to read and understand those "long, complicated regulations that are relatively meaningless" to determine if they apply to you, and if so how to comply with them. Removing those regulations would make doing business easier with minimal downside, especially for smaller companies that can't easily afford large armies of lawyers to understand the law.
Depends which 75% of regulations he cuts. If he cuts EPA regulations and there is more pollution as a result of the increase in manufacturing this could result in more deaths in the long run. How about safety regulations get cut so manufacturing gets cheaper but more workers die in manufacturing plants, is that ok?
He did put in a provision to prohibit federal agencies from hiring contractors. From the order: "Contracting outside the Government to circumvent the intent of this memorandum shall not be permitted."
I haven't seen a single fake news site report that though, they are all pushing the alternative fact that contractors will be hired en mass.
Stuff still needs to get done, so a hiring freeze means needing a workaround, they will find money for contractors because it is seen as a limited time expense, even though it is probably 3x or 4x more expensive over the long term. When they tell you they cut the size of government they won't tell you that government costs went up, or they will tell you government payroll is down and contractors get costed as something other than payroll.
In software it never works like that. Costs more to build it with contractors and then because you get rid of the contractors support is done by people unfamiliar with the code so support costs more, upgrades cost more because new contractors need time to learn the codebase or the old contractors charge more because they know the codebase.
I only see him cutting regulations that hurt the large organizations. He'll keep the stuff in that helps our current monopolies. That's what he's wanted his whole life, why change now?
TPP was a threat to the sovereignty of the United States. It would have encoded in a multilateral trade agreement, representing huge amounts of economic activity, massive regulatory requirements, enforcement courts, and processes for further multilateral regulation. It would have made the cost of changing those regulations unbearable for any future administration.
We almost had the regulatory state imposed at an international level. Good riddance.
It's nice to see I'm not completely alone on HN in defending the concept of national sovereignty these days, because often it can be a very lonely field to argue about.
Having spent a lot of my time since getting out of the military trying to understand the bigger geostrategic picture, I am fairly confident in saying the national sovereignty is one of the most important, and most under-discussed, issues of our time as we progress towards an increasingly global economy. The global economy itself is here, and I am not disputing that the world needs more cooperation on international issues such as global climate change, but far too often I see these arguments being used to then turn around and use those issues to advocate overthrowing the idea of sovereignty, which I find is logically fallacious reasoning, callous, naive, and can only imagine such touting comes from the ivory tower of intellectuals, academics and other insulated peoples who haven't experienced the stark reality of this world when the sovereignty of nation states is violated.
In short, those who call for an end of nationalism fail to understand the proper and right role of sovereignty in the apllication of the rule of law, and in the ability for the people to affect their government.
My question for those who propose national sovereignty as being an outdated concept, I have one question:
What would you propose to replace the nation-state with once you toppled it down?
I couldn't have said it better myself. Sovereignty is the only barrier between you and a global government that turns tyrannical. If you can't run away from a bad government when you need to, you'll be in deep doo-doo.
For me, the optimal outcome is actually as much secession as possible - to a state or county level. With so many options in place, people can self-select into what fits their style and culture. This would be, in my view, a recipe for increased global peace. It is when forced integration is in place that conflict emerges.
The TPP doesn't weaken the nation-state. Like every other "trade deal", it has much more to do with foreign policy and geopolitics (reinforcing US power and isolating China) than with economics or trade.
I agree about the importance of sovereignty, for the same reasons as Nassim N. Taleb. He says the EU results slightly increases efficiency at the cost of vastly increased complexity and fragility, and therefore weakens the world order and threatens global peace. This isn't the case for the TPP, and it's unlikely that Trump can negotiate something much better economically.
It's not about sovereignty, it's about the rule of law. Every international agreement involves governments committing themselves to do certain things and not do others. Sometimes that also means agreeing to abide by judgements by an arbitrator. But they're free to negotiate changes to those agreements or withdraw from them. That means they retain sovereignty.
Treaties passed by the legislative branch of the government are laws. Do you believe that your governments executive branch should be bound by the laws of your nation, or not?
You retain sovereignty in a technical legal sense, but the cost of exercising that sovereignty becomes prohibitively expensive if you can't get the other signatories to agree. That's why trade agreements that mandate extensive intellectual property and other regulatory frameworks are so dangerous.
So you're aware, you're being downvoted for "liberal internationalism". I'm completely a liberal internationalist, and I opposed TPP- for a lot of the reasons you described! This is a class issue, not a partisan issue.
The TPP was far greater than a class issue. It was part of the War on General Purpose Computation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg). It cut through class lines, into our ability to control the technology in our lives.
I just removed it because it's not even the right word. I meant to refer to the philosophy that seeks to incrementally build an international legal order. It's commonly called "liberalism" within the context of international relations but isn't directly related to contemporary western leftism, also called "liberalism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism_(international_rela...
I think the word that most clearly states what you mean, and would be understood by the greatest number, is "neoliberalism". In any case, I've undone my downvote.
When meeting with clients or other teams in a big organization, it's obviously discouraged.
When speaking with colleagues, it's discouraged only when there's people who are trigger-happy about complaining to HR. Fairly or not, women in particular have a reputation of running to HR when someone says something offensive or crude, which leads to them being excluded from office banter, which leads to them feeling left out of the group. Tough problem to solve.
It makes sense really. You let the profanity flow when you feel that you can trust people. You're also most honest when you feel that you can trust people.
It reminds me of the famous article by Joel Spolsky about his first Bill Gates review [1]
>In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f*-count, the better.
God bless Bill. I've also heard great stories of chairs being thrown (not at people, of course) in high-level Microsoft meetings. Can you imagine him getting away with it today though? Someone would have tried to sue him for creating a "hostile workplace" or something like that.
If I have to consider what I'm saying. Then I'm considering what I'm saying and I have a opportunity to spin it or outright lie. Straight off the cuff I can speak faster but don't have that chance.
I was raised in a home that didn't allow any swearing, swearing just really isn't in my active vocabulary.
I totally swear when I stub my toe, when I forget something and I'm half way to work, but I never feel need the need to interject swears into common sentences.
People comment that I don't swear often -- usually uncomfortably checking if I'm against it-- I'm not, I work in finance where there is a lot of swearing done and don't mind. Its just not part of the vocab I use.
Interesting twist for me is that now that the kids are all grown up my mother swears and said she swore a lot before kids but 'gave it up' to make the rule real. Totally hard for my brain to handle.
> Fairly or not, women in particular have a reputation of running to HR when someone says something offensive or crude, which leads to them being excluded from office banter, which leads to them feeling left out of the group. Tough problem to solve.
Actually, it seems really easy to solve: Stop cursing so much at work and stop excluding women from your conversations. If you can't see the value of inclusiveness over cursing, you're the problem in the situation.
This is not a slippery slope. All I'm saying is that you should prioritize making people feel included over using whatever vulgar language you want in the workplace. Do you disagree with that?
I didn't argue women do that. I've never encountered a woman who has done that.
People can be made uncomfortable though by vulgar language. It shouldn't be used in an office setting to the point that it's making other people uncomfortable. Read those around you and try to be accommodating. This is basic stuff.
Friendship is not fair. Friendship is freely given and freely withheld. Who you choose for your social circle, and why you choose them, is unassailable.
Also, it's not a purely gender thing. My mother, of hispanic upbringing, finds that she cannot banter the same way around American-raised women as she can with other hispanic women. It turns out that getting easily offended and trying to ruin people's careers over it is not innate to women, but has for some reason arisen out of American culture and also afflicts many men.
Workplaces are supposed to be inclusive environments. It's fine if your mother talks in a way that American-raised women don't like (whatever that means) with her friends. It's not fine if she does that in an office setting.
I'm not saying you need be friends with everyone. I'm saying part of your job is helping ensure everyone on your team feels included and feels like they fit in. I'm not suggesting this will always be possible for every last person, but it's hardly the tough problem you seem to think it is. Read people around you and be empathetic and accommodating. That's it.
I should also say your talk about women ruining careers by going to HR is ridiculous, but it's so ridiculous that I don't feel it needs further addressing. I've been in the industry a long time and I've never heard of anyone filing a complaint with HR outside of clear instances of sexual harassment.
It's not really. Coworkers engaging in banter is friendship. But yes, there's no doubt that friendships between coworkers affect how things get done. That's just the human condition. If you want to change that, you'd have to run your office like a Stalinist dictatorship, and that would be terrible for getting things done. Which is, you know, the whole purpose of a team.
The situation is different, in that you don't necessarily have the right to choose your coworkers or teammates as you would your friends.
And no, I'm not promoting a Stalinist regime by suggesting that people be considerate of the feelings of others.
As an aside, and probably why I replied in the first place, is that I feel people are just too extreme nowadays. Everything is offensive to everybody, including getting offended of others being offended. People can't swear freely without eventually offending somebody, but people can't object to offense without being belittled. The extreme component of this is that nobody has chosen to pick their battles, instead further entrenching themselves in an ideology of moot points rather than a focus towards conflict resolution. I feel many of the comments in here are representative of this.
I'm hopeful that people realize that there's a middle ground to all of this, but folks on both sides don't seem to care.
>The funnest part of writing a bot is using all the historical data to observe how the bot would have done during that period. I ended up checking thousands of permutations of parameters by brute force to determine the best ones, but in the end transaction fees killed me.
That's a sure way to find a bad strategy. You end up doing the equivalent of overfitting. If you look at enough variables, the chance of there not being spurious correlations is basically zero, so you're guaranteed to land on sets of parameters that look good with historical data but fail going forward.
The writing does not exclude proper backtesting. A more favorable reading would have him/her use a holdout or test set that is in the future of the historical data used for training. Then there would be no problem with that approach in regards to overfit/poor generalization.
There is still the problem of the market not reacting to his trades. It would be very easy for me to show a trade of $1m making money, but very hard to execute such a trade.
I hope you all don't eat meat, eggs, cheese, or milk. The animals that those come from would love to be treated as well as circus animals.
And do you understand that these animals are absolutely vicious and cruel with each other in the wild? A tiger will start picking at your guts while you're still breathing. A male lion will kill all of the existing cubs of its new mate.
Which, I guess, is ample justification for humans to treat these animals cruelly? Not really following the logic of your argument here. Though I definitely agree with your point about cruelties inherent in the meat and dairy industries.
There are much better, more constructive ways you could frame that message. Ways that are much more likely to be received well.
Just to toss one possibility out, maybe something along the lines of "Hey, that did bother me. Check out this other thing that bothers me about X farming."
You don't think it likely that a significant proportion of the loudest opponents are also vegetarians?
I love people who make silly counter arguments. Watched a hunter challenge someone protesting their hunt: "Do you wear leather?"
"I'm a vegetarian" was the entirely predictable response.
(Actually, I now remember it was the other way around. "Do you wear leather" was the next step after asking the protester whether he ate meat and getting the vegetarian answer. As if a vegetarian would go out of his way to avoid meat, protest hunts, and still not be aware where leather came from.)
I suppose the key insight is this: it's human nature to want those who disagree with us to turn out to be hypocrites. Much easier than dealing with the possibility that our moral code is broken.
Identifying hypocrisy is not just about dismissing opponents, it's about getting them to reconsider their views, which are possibly not well-founded and contradictory.
Striving for ethical and compassionate behavior toward animals need not be and should not be an all or nothing prospect. For example, a vegetarian who wears leather may very well cause less harm to animals than an omnivore who wears leather.
Restricting one's consumption to vegetables can promote animal welfare despite engaging in other practices that harm animals.
Demoralizing people who strive to promote animal welfare by pointing out their contradictory behavior is less desirable, to my mind, than encouraging people to do as much as they can.
Why not reconsider your own views and encourage such people to promote animal welfare in all the ways they could rather than demoralizing them to give up altogether?
EDIT: spelling, rewrite final sentence, formatting.
I don't think you get me. I'm not concerned about animal welfare and I don't think other people should be either. It is all the way down on my list of concerns, right below the least important human concern.
I'm asking you to reconsider your position. I understand you're unlikely to do so.
One thing you should consider is the very strong possibility that "the least important human concern" is not distinct from what you consider to be "animal welfare".
Living beings on this planet are probably deeply intertwined and interdependent in ways we poorly understand. For one example, take the growing research around gut flora and microbiomes.
As individual beings, we are crucially dependent on bacteria that, in fact, extend the boundaries of what we consider to be our bodies far beyond what we have understood to be the case for millennia.
Separating the human condition from "animal welfare" is a grave mistake. For your own good, I think you should reconsider your position regarding the care of non-human organisms.
I do eat meat and i do see the point in eating less/no meat. But eating meat affects my daily live a 1000x more than a circus show i'm normally not watching.
Besides that, i also think it is a different thing: You do have to eat, we are eating meet for 10000 years and we need it much more than watching a circus show. Also killing an animal quick and fast is also a different thing than dominating an animal for a show.
"It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes."
-- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864
In fairness, the chances of most North Americans getting it right are pretty low when you consider the obesity epidemic, lack of physical activity, and all their orbiting ailments.
To your point though, difficult in what respect? I've been doing this since I was 9 and haven't had any issues. The most common concerns I hear are nutritional (protein, iron, calcium, B12) and convenience (restaurants, grocery stores, birthday cakes, etc). But I'm curious as to what your specific concerns are.
Google has a very small business, search & ads, that basically prints money. They then spend almost all of that money on unprofitable operations that crush competition by 1) setting the price-point for many services at free, 2) intercepting customers (e.g. Google Flight and Hotel bookings at the top of search results), and 3) poaching all of the best talent and wasting it away on these terrible side businesses.