ghda · HackerTrans

I think it’s legitimate for Welsh speakers to advocate for the Welsh language, just as I think it’s legitimate for English speakers to advocate for the English language. As a native English speaker, I don’t want to make it easy for the world to speak languages other than English either.

ghda

7년 전discuss

Great! Maybe now I can get un-shadowbanned on HN?

ghda

7년 전discuss

You left out the big one: genetics.

ghda

7년 전discuss

Plus you spend post-tax money but you gotta earn pre-tax money. A penny saved is nearly two pennies earned, depending on your tax bracket.

ghda

7년 전discuss

So the sole problem in the world is your political outgroup? Boy, that must be convenient.

ghda

7년 전discuss

The “sinking” angle might be the clickbaity angle for the western media, but mostly it seems that Indonesian government types just don’t like living in Jakarta, which is a city without much to recommend it for pretty much the same reasons you’ll find in any other third-world city of twelve million or so people.

Even the Lonely Planet guide to Jakarta begins “Jakarta can be a difficult city to love...”

Indonesians I met in Bali had a brief look of panic and sympathy when they thought I told them my next stop was Jakarta. When I clarified that I’d actually said Yogyakarta they looked relieved.

ghda

7년 전discuss

> we might need to take drastic measures to avoid the default outcome

If you think there’s a “we” that could make such decisions then you’ve either missed, or are not addressing, the point of the essay.

ghda

7년 전discuss

How would one know if the Chinese government was supported by the population or not, given that anyone expressing a contrary opinion is likely to be killed?

ghda

7년 전discuss

It’s a completely made up statistic, as far as I can tell, and it’s repeated constantly.

It probably does a lot of harm, too, by discouraging people from having a go, people who might have actually got off their arses if they’d instead believed “half of all businesses fail within five years”.

ghda

7년 전discuss

We all have our own “life taxes” to pay.

Here’s one: since men are larger and headboard than women, we need more food just to stay alive! A few hundred extra calories a day over a lifetime, the cost must be substantial — almost certainly greater than the cost of tampons.

Life is unfair to all of us, both sexes.

ghda

7년 전discuss

Better than letting human society collapse though. If that’s what you really believe will happen.

ghda

7년 전discuss

I don’t know if Finland as an example really proves or disproves anything. Finland is a small, homogeneous, and pretty unusual sort of country, and the fact that they happen to do well in certain standardised tests doesn’t mean that anything in particular they’re doing is optimised.

ghda

7년 전discuss

Segregating students by ability is one of the easy, cheap, sensible ways to improve outcomes that almost certainly works. Taking slower students out and teaching them at their own pace should benefit those taken out and those left behind.

Unfortunately, it’s my understanding that this sort of thing winds up politically impossible in most parts of the US, as segregated-by-ability classrooms wind up looking uncomfortably like segregated-by-race classrooms.

ghda

7년 전discuss

No, for conspiracy to break into DoD computers.

This actually seems like great news for journalists. The fact that this is the only charge implies that prosecutors have decided that wikileaks’ core activity of publishing classified information obtained by others was actually legal.

The fact that assisting someone to break into a DoD computer turns out to be illegal probably shouldn’t surprise anyone. If someone asked for your help breaking into a DoD computer would you say “oh sure, that sounds like a perfectly legal thing that can’t possibly get me into trouble”?

ghda

7년 전discuss

Are people obliged to abide by an obviously racially discriminatory contract under EU law?

ghda

7년 전discuss

I would imagine it will be fixed eventually, when the whole “telephone” system goes away and is replaced by some other voice-calling platform or combination thereof.

ghda

7년 전discuss

Does “diverse” actually mean “diverse” or just “no straight white men”?

ghda

7년 전discuss

This has always struck me as a weird sort of edge case, because the hypothetical situation is pretty disconnected from all the other situations where people might seek restrictions on free speech that it doesn’t really matter which way I go.

If I say that yes, I suppose we can carve out some sort of exception for people who directly cause harm to life and limb by falsely proclaiming the existence of immediate dangers in crowded areas, then this doesn’t seem like a slippery slope — I am not forced to then admit we should also start censoring anything else outside that very narrow category.

If, on the other hand, I say that free speech should apply even to those shouting fire in a crowded theatre, am I worried that this is going to suddenly become a major danger? Are psychopathic pranksters going to start causing fatal stampedes at every opening night? No, because it’s not something that actually happens; anyone shouting fire in a crowded theatre would probably just get shushed and escorted out by ushers; at worst they’d provoke an orderly evacuation through the plentiful emergency exits that theatres tend to have nowadays.

So I guess I’ll go for the second option — refuse to carve out the exception and accept the risk of the occasional unnecessary evacuation.

There are other small and well established edge-case restrictions on free speech I am willing to accept, mind you, eg market manipulation or giving false statements to police. But I don’t see the classic fire-in-theatre one as being relevant to anything.

ghda

7년 전discuss

Genuine question: has the end of net neutrality had any bad effects so far? I remember a lot of doom being prophesied regarding the end of net neutrality, and then I remember it ending, and then I don’t really remember hearing about it again until just now.

ghda

7년 전discuss

I’ve managed to cut down my news diet to financial papers (the Australian Financial Review in my case).

All the important news filters through eventually, and most of the filler content is emotionally neutral (“some company you don’t own launches takeover bid for some other company you don’t own”) instead of outrage-porn click bait (“this sign spotted by a twitter user in the bathroom at a bakery in Des Moines will either outrage you or else the fact that other people are outraged about it will!”)

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