This is often measured by researchers. It is called a "cost of living" calculation, and every one of these that I have seen indicates that this isn't the case.
>how modern work for a lot of jobs has become de facto indentured servitude...The average worker can't afford anything without taking on debt.
For people from other countries wondering about the veracity of these claims, let's take an example: The typical shitty job everyone on here complains about is working at an amazon warehouse. This is a job people with no skills take on. They pay 15 USD an hour. In other currencies that is 42k a year AUD or 2390 Euros a month. (the cost of living is roughly the same in these places).
I'll leave you to decide whether this is "slavery" and whether they "can't afford anything" or whether Americans are just so rich they are out of touch with reality.
I couldn't agree more and I think the road the right takes with "free speech" is purely emotional and makes no sense.
What makes HN great isn't that there is free speech, it is that everyone is treated equally. The rules are the same no matter what your opinions. I really wish the people clamoring for free speech would use their heads instead of their hearts and realize that this is what they really want.
If Twitter openly said, "we ban anyone with a right of center opinion" then I would be perfectly happy. What bothers me is they lie about what they are doing. It tells me they know they are doing something wrong. It is really dark and manipulative what they are up to.
Well first, Twitter literally banned the President of the United States while allowing ISIS and other terrorist groups to have free reign. All this tells me is that one of your friend groups is perfectly happy lying to themselves about what is going on.
>Again, not judging and willing to be proved wrong, but the right is a lot ... rougher, aggressive
I am yet to see anyone on the right openly talking about murdering black people, whereas it is common for left wing twitter users to talk about murdering white people (remember the new editor for the New York Times had a number of tweets to that effect). Also, posting pictures of themselves with severed heads of their enemies while covered in blood seems like a thing among left wing users. I am in fact struggling to think of anything "rough" or "aggressive" from the right, even at the most extremes that comes close to the norm of the left on that platform.
Bad example because the only reason the communist dictatorship in North Korea still exists is that they are propped up by China, and the only reason Chinese dictatorship exists is because they are propped up by the West.
This is historically accurate, sure, but from what I have seen the current ruling class in the West has used this as a cheap excuse at best. It certainly seems to me that they have simply been selling our cultural and technological heritage away to line their pockets. The fact that a lot of these people would prefer a society run the way China is run also helped in getting them to support China too.
If you watch the videos the entire city was on fire and the "peaceful protestors" were firing rocket propelled grenades at the police force. And the Democratically elected leader, Yanukovych, had to flee the country and give control over to the insurrectionists or he would have been murdered.
I guess you can say "That wasn't a coup" if you like, but we would really just arguing about semantics here.
1) An all powerful state is the logical conclusion of anyone who believes the collective is more important than the individual.
2) There were many benevolent all powerful states during the 20th century, but every single powerful state that believed in collectivism turned into a murdering hell hole filled with poverty and suffering where the poorest people risked their lives to flee to countries that believed the individual is more important than the collective.
There are a huge number of cultural differences in the US to other places, with all sorts of different reason behind them (seriously it is like being on a different planet), and the reasons can be hard to pin down.
However, a lot of them, and I think this one included, can be put down to the ethos with which Americans interact with each other. In other Western countries (perhaps with the exception of Mediterranean Europe) it is considered polite to not expect things of your interlocutor unless you know them well, and even then, not so much. In the US it seems to me that it is much more acceptable to be somewhat demanding of strangers, for their time and attention, and it is expected that you will do the same back. When an American uses first names for their family, they are, if we were to exaggerate greatly, be saying "How stranger! This is my family, I demand you WILL know them, and I will follow your demands that I know yours, as is custom in these parts, now let us break bread."... I know it's ridiculous, but I find looking at things this way helped me a lot.
Ok you have provided zero evidence of anything happening today, the best you had is 40 years ago, and that one was false.
>In the 80s we have plenty of lawsuits demonstrating the black Americans were routinely denied home loans because they were black
This has been proven statistically false. Easily proven because if it were true, the black people that were accepted for home loans would have lower default rates than whites. In fact, they had exactly the same default rates as whites and when laws were introduced to force banks to accept more blacks, the default rate increased above whites. Proving race was never considered, just the chance of repaying the load.
Anyway, since you are only talking about history, lets put it into historical context.
Racism was pushed heavily by the big government socialists and the intellectual elite who called themselves "the progressive movement" for a very long time in the US, and was opposed by the Republican party, who thought everyone should be treated equally, for just as long.
One can't help but notice, it is exactly the same people, and with exactly the same economic and collectivist ideas who are pushing the exact same racist policies today, like affirmative action against Asians, for example. The same people who have always been responsible for the problem saying "we are now solving racism with more racism" doesn't impressive me much. To accept this I would need some evidence that today's world, with the new ideas that everyone should be treated equally regardless of their race, is not working.
Evidence which you have not provided.
>The legacy admissions also provide the formal evidence of the original claim: people who's admission to a good school has nothing to do with their skill, merely being white allowing their family to have attended any school.
This ended with the introduction of standardized testing. A policy that is now being challenged by people who follow your ideology.
I remember listening to someone point out (I think it was Sam Harris) that what all ideologies and religions have in common is that they must have, somewhere, a very strange idea that everyone in the religion must accept. One that clearly goes against common sense and experience.
It really says a lot about what an amazing society we have created in that here we have some people making history by revolutionizing our understanding of something that was (at least in the past) considered absolutely fundamental and unique to the human condition...
...and one of the things that people find remarkable about it is that it isn't immediately and freely available to everyone on earth.
> This is the precise argument in favor of diversity: that we have, for centuries now, been discriminating on the basis of race and selecting inferior performers over better choices because they were white, or male.
If people who believed this could actually present a shred of evidence that it is true, then a lot of people would be a lot more receptive to these ideas.
Every release is more bloated, runs more slowly, non of the old problems fixed or improved (e.g. still can't handle large files well and every release handling of graphics gets slower). The user manual has gone from being one the best I have ever seen to being terrible for all the new sections for the new functionality they implemented. A lot of the new functionality is badly designed, not like the old stuff which was incredible. The actual useful stuff like interfacing with external code is so old that it barely works anymore (like interfacing with c# compiled later than 2010)...etc.
I don't understand all these comments saying "Sure Wolfram may be arrogant, but he has achieved amazing things". "lets look at his work and ideas not him as a person".
... What does this even mean? Steven Wolfram has never achieved a single thing in science or mathematics. Absolutely no one has ever said otherwise, except for Steven Wolfram himself.
I used to think he was a failed scientist who, at least, was good with computers and software, but after seeing the decline in the quality of Mathematica, and the hairbrain schemes he has been leading there instead of improving his core software, it has become clear to me that he wasn't even the one responsible for Mathematica being so great, and whoever it was has now left the company.