For future reference, am I allowed to know what ideas/opinions are permitted on HN, in what quantities, and which ideas aren't permitted?
Are discussions about social issues permitted only if you agree with the prevailing thought of the day? Is HN meant to be an echo chamber?
Yes, I have some opinions that go far outside of the mainstream as is part and parcel of hacker culture, but I've never thought that not allowing other people to speak was the answer. (in fact, the post you banned me for ironically acknowledged others' right to disagree).
Furthermore, even if you didn't see it that way, the main thrust of my post was about ensuring that some of the least-advantaged people in the world had their problems taken seriously. Right now, there's a huge group of people in the western world that immediately dismiss a good deal about these types of women' issues because the problems focused on in the first world (that I gave a couple of examples of) are seen as so trivial.
No offense intended, but it's a bit confusing knowing what topics/opinions I'm allowed to discuss and which ones I'm not.
For the record, you're criticizing me for a post where I suggested that everybody had the right to voice their opinion (even those I disagree with) and suggested a tactic that would help give respect to a movement that voices concern for at-risk people.
I feel very strongly about equal rights for all humans, and I'm not sure why this is so offensive here.
People are certainly free to talk about whatever they want to talk about.
But I think feminists would find nearly universal support if they'd spend more time talking about real life and death issues such as this rather than going around with vagina hats on their head and complaining about video game characters being too sexy or manspreading on trains or any other first world problems.
> More than 40 Twitter users sent similar strobes to Mr. Eichenwald after they realized they could trigger seizures, he tweeted Friday.
I'm not suggesting that these people shouldn't be charged with some sort of crime, regardless of whether or not they can prove that Eichenwald had a seizure (which I have my doubts about). There's a precedent set that things like lasers shined at pilots eyes are gone after regardless of whether or not it causes a crash.
However, while not condoning these peoples' alleged actions, I can understand why this guy attracts a lot of derision online. Eichenwald appears to be a really scummy character. Google his name and "child p*rn" just for starters. There appears to be a lot of wild stuff there about a big time shady payoff to a site he was "researching".
He also recently appears to be becoming mentally unhinged. He recently went on Tucker Carlson's show and gave a serious repeated accusation about Trump being hospitalized in a mental institution that he later claimed was a joke.
Should be a fascinating legal case to follow if it goes to trial.
A lot of comments about this on Ars Technica are about debating whether flashing lights or an image can ever be an assault or not. I think it probably can be, and examples like "shining a laser into a pilot's eyes" are some things that most people would probably agree are an assault. Seizures are serious business and can cause death, so I don't think people should be doing that.
I have sympathy for Kurt if he was actually harmed. However, based on seeing how often this guy lies about things and how extremely shady he acts, I wouldn't be too surprised if he didn't actually have a seizure, and was just happy at an opportunity to claim victim status and cash in with a big time court case and possible lawsuit.
The court case here might end being very interesting on many levels.
a) Just for the record, I'm not a fan of being a "dick" (more on that below) towards women. My thought-crime was merely pointing out how gaming communities insult everybody equally and don't just insult women because they are women. I would have thought that a community like HN would understand that this was an explanation of what I believe happens, not an endorsement.
b) I'd like to make a mild observation. You used the phrase "dick" to mean a synonym for rude or disgusting behavior, and nobody batted an eye. Can anybody guess how the usual suspects would react if somebody whose ideas they disliked used "pussy" as a pejorative? It's an interesting thought experiment.
c) I'm not sure where your ideas or philosophy is at, but I appreciate your observations here and your willingness to at least advocate openness to ideas you may disagree with.
a) Red pill? Gamergate? What's that stuff? Certainly nobody should ever google any information and do their own research and make up their own mind.
b) You'll notice that in my responses I didn't say that women weren't being harassed nor did I say that harassment was right. So why the hostility? I'm speaking IMO accurately about gaming culture.
c) Speaking of tired cliches, what would you call the "women are always eternal victims in every walk of life" school of thought?
PS: I love women and want them to have the same rights as men. I think telling the truth about gaming culture is honest and fair and the right thing to do.
a) Where did I say that women aren't experiencing harassment on some gaming communities? In fact, I explicitly acknowledged it. Your post is kind of pointless virtue signaling or something.
b) I just pointed out that it's just generally not about your gender. It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman: every newcomer gets harassed in really rough ways using the most biting insults available. A fat guy will get the obvious insults. An ugly guy will get obvious insults. A young kid who has a high pitched voice because he hasn't hit puberty yet will get obvious insults. A gay man will get obvious insults. So will a black guy or an arab. Or a christian. They'll use any facts they know about you. And guess what, women are treated equally here as well and will get insulted. Not saying it's right, but it's what actually happens to everybody. Gamers are treating women equally, I thought that's what women wanted?
c) The only difference is that when a woman gets harassed, most of civil society is sympathetic about it by default and she'll get a horde of white knights expressing sympathy. When a man gets his feelings hurt, he's portrayed as weak for showing emotion. Maybe this is part of the reason that some men are seeking an escape from society?
d) It's really hard to know whether your community is hostile to men unless you're a man. A lot of women just don't understand how much harassment a typical man experiences, and when they hear it criticized basically fall back on "well I don't see it" and conclude it must not be happening rather than trying to collect more information. (2 of us can play this game)
e) While this is a fascinating discussion that I'd love to have, this point about sex and male/female relationships is 100 times more important than debating about harassment to women gamers for the hundredth time. Things like family and relationships are important motivating factors to men, and when social reforms (some people call that progress, some don't) remove or lower that factor for ~80% of men, civilization will also decline.
* Disappointing that the false meme about some gaming communities being hostile to women because they're women was promoted in this article. Some gaming communities are very hostile to newcomers: but it's not because you're a woman, it's because you're a noob or just suck. Welcome to one of the last remaining meritocracies.
* The article makes a correct observation insofar as more men (not just an occasional sad social reject) are using games as an escape, often due to poor economic realities. But it's disappointing that the huge role that male/female relations and sex plays in this trend is ignored.
* Google terms like "the sexodus". There are many politically incorrect truths here about what is going on with male/female relations and why more men are seeking an escape and why everybody is unhappy that I think are more at the root of this issue.
Mayer got a multi-hundred million dollar compensation package to sign up with Yahoo and run them into the ground, but somehow the narrative here is that a man is being paid more than a woman?
You make a valid point about defiance. The Overton window and the timing of ideas is something that I've thought about a great deal and I'm not going to dispute that. The real answer is that like most people I don't have "fuck you" money and speaking my mind publically would be a risk in this politically correct environment. One of the best things I feel Trump has done is started taking the lid off of that culture of political correctness and it might be getting easier in the future to speak your mind unless this "everybody I don't like is a Nazi, and it's ok to punch nazis" Antifa type of guided movement takes off.
I have no idea where you're getting this idea that I want to stiffle anybody's right to speak. If you want to use Facebook or not, it's your call and I've never said otherwise so you're wrong about that.
Sure, out of a population of a billion on Facebook, if even .1% speak their minds that's still a lot of people. That doesn't really negate my point that most people are silenced most of the time.
Also, who those people are is important. The smartest folks who have careers and a social reputation at stake are going to be less likely to contribute. The people who might be more willing to speak their mind on Facebook might not be the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Autism and craziness aside, if you want to discuss real ideas online you go to places like 4chan. You see memes and ideas created there pop up elsewhere on the internet days later.
> Without names attached, people’s words become either mean — or meaningless.
The complete opposite is true.
The true meanlessness in society is the bland echo chamber on places like Facebook where everybody parrots the politically correct ideas they're told to say by the corporate media.
With real names and identities attached, most people are usually pressured away from saying any idea that goes outside of the narrow 3 x 5 Card of Official Approved Public Opinion. Real names and identities create an echo chamber of political correctness and trying your damnedest NOT to offend anybody lest you ruin your social or career prospects. Sure, some people trickle in truth sometimes, but enough people are silenced so that people who hold normal opinions are made to feel like they're the minority.
As far as meanness goes, sure freedom sometimes gives people the ability to say dumb things, but there's no way to curb that without restricting freedom. But honestly, the true meanness in society is not people telling the truth and leading them down a road to ruin. To give a very minor example: you're not supposed to say the truth about fat people because we have a body acceptance movement that has declared that everybody fat is beautiful and no choices are unhealthy. Wishing that something was the case doesn't make it so and denying reality and "not being mean" leads to people destroying their lives. The real mean thing in this case is to stay silent and deny reality and not tell the truth.
I wonder if a younger Bill Gates would have supported heavy taxes on his company's computer software that allowed 1 accountant armed with a spreadsheet to displace the jobs of, I don't know, maybe a dozen experienced accountants using paper?
Surely, society is so much worse off with so many workers being displaced because of all of this technological progress created by Microsoft and others and being denied of so much extra tax revenue?
I find the logic presented in this article to be ridiculous.
If markets for healthcare can't exist, why is medical tourism a thing?
But enough about that, let's proceed.
Yes, if you just got hit by a bus you have no ability to comparison shop for ambulance services, but you also have no ability to do literally anything.
Outside of the comparatively rare emergency situation where somebody is bleeding out and going to die literally right there without treatment, there's always an opportunity to reasonably comparison shop for medical services even if you're sick.
I don't believe that the insurance system advocated in this article is a panacea. Because of the crazy insurance system that exists, simply getting the actual prices of procedures is nearly impossible. It's easy to comparison shop for a phone or a toaster because stores advertise prices. But it's difficult for even trained professionals to figure out the ballpark prices even for the most common procedures because of the crazy insurance system.
There are many articles like this where people call healthcare providers and try and determine pricing of even common procedures like child birth and get the complete runaround.
Yeah, less than 24 hours after a video of a woman asking Alexa if it's connected to the CIA goes viral and Alexa refuses to answer, we get a fun, light-hearted PR distraction piece about poop.
* The article makes some great observations about energy levels. I think you can definitely run a company more productively if employees had more leeway about picking their own hours as long as the job gets done. Anecdotally, I'd get far more work done if I set aside just around 9-midnight every night for coding from home rather than waking up early and slogging to an office.
* The article presents some opinions without really justifying them. According to who exactly does the 40-hour work week not work anymore? It works great for some folks, it works badly for others. Personally, I'd rather see more people working less, and I think more jobs should be more flexible about things like remote working and letting people pick their hours when possible.
* This article also erroneously gets some history wrong. People like to cite some of Ford's management innovations as some magnanimous gesture on his part to give employees enough cash to buy more products. The reality is that he was initially having a problem keeping employees because assembly-line work is so monotonous and doesn't leave much room for human contact and many employees would quit or inconsistently show up to work after a while. He was trying to make working conditions as good as possible to reduce employee turnover/absenteeism, greatly reducing his recruiting/training expenses in the long run and making things run smoother on a daily basis. It was in his self-interest to do this because once you got a great Ford job you wouldn't quit or just not show up to go to a baseball game or whatever people did back in those days. I believe some people erroneously got this part of history wrong because there's a narrative out there that the free market is some kind of predatory exploitative thing that needs to be completely controlled or it will work to destroy people. To me, that's incorrect because employers also need to compete for employees' labor. Going forward, innovative and smart companies will increasingly offer things like remote working, picking your own hours, limited work week, etc to compete for the most talented employees. Some companies might want butts in seats at 9AM and will compete by offering cash. That's fine too, let people have a choice.
For future reference, am I allowed to know what ideas/opinions are permitted on HN, in what quantities, and which ideas aren't permitted?
Are discussions about social issues permitted only if you agree with the prevailing thought of the day? Is HN meant to be an echo chamber?
Yes, I have some opinions that go far outside of the mainstream as is part and parcel of hacker culture, but I've never thought that not allowing other people to speak was the answer. (in fact, the post you banned me for ironically acknowledged others' right to disagree).
Furthermore, even if you didn't see it that way, the main thrust of my post was about ensuring that some of the least-advantaged people in the world had their problems taken seriously. Right now, there's a huge group of people in the western world that immediately dismiss a good deal about these types of women' issues because the problems focused on in the first world (that I gave a couple of examples of) are seen as so trivial.