smarttack's comments

On: Show HN: HN.Academy – Top online courses recommended by Hacker News users

[smarttack]

You know these are all affiliate links?

[_lpa_ → smarttack]

I'm curious - do you think affiliate links are a problem, and if so, why?

[GrumpyCoder → _lpa_]

I have seen lots of udemy affiliate link spam on "learn programming" type subreddits. They use alt-accounts for fake reviews and make affiliate links looks like regular links. I'm okay with them as long as there is transparency and don't start a spam race.

[mxschumacher → smarttack]

they are affiliate links, yes.

On: In Screening for Suicide Risk, Facebook Takes on Tricky Public Health Role

[smarttack]

"You haven't logged onto Facebook in over a month. We were concerned so we sent over an over an officer for a welfare check"

On: The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understands

[smarttack]

I worked in the industry selling and designing software for Financial Aid offices. You are simply a SSN to them which equals $##,000 in potential revenue

On: What Happens When Facebook Goes the Way of Myspace?

[smarttack]

It's hard not to suspect that there is at least some personal vendetta involved here from the media. Facebook destroyed a lot of the business models which were already reeling in the internet age.

On: US Is Net Oil Exporter for First Time in 75 Years

[smarttack]

How do you like living there?

On: China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls

[smarttack]

Pretty similar to 1984 where Orwell split the world up into Eurasia, East Asia and Oceania

On: Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet

[smarttack]

"If you lived during the 80s, you'll recall predictions of the Amazon being cut down and the ozone layer being depleted by now. Also peak oil was supposed to have happened, along with several other resources becoming rare."

Isn't it amazing how all the past predictions of environmental doom have been wrong?

[richev → smarttack]

I think that it's the predictions of doom that call attention to the risk, and allow us (or have done so far) to avert the crisis just in time.

[acct1771 → richev]

[Citation needed]

[xref → smarttack]

because of massive political/economic/agricultural/etc shifts to avoid those outcomes.

if nobody ever made an issue about banning CFCs do you think the ozone would be better off today?

[goatlover → smarttack]

It is. Elrich's population bomb was an earlier example that has been wrong so far. I recently re-read Whitley Strieber's Nature's End, published in 87. Although a fictional account of the future similar to the Blade Runner movies (in terms of environmental impact), it embodied the idea at the time that the Earth couldn't support several billion humans. Set in the mid 2020s, the northern forests were dead from acid rain, the Midwest was a desert and the Amazon had mostly burned down. 7 billion humans had completely decimated the biosphere.

So I'm a little skeptical whenever the latest doomsday predictions roll around.