Asbostos · HackerTrans

Asbostos

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11 лет назадdiscuss

Holocaust victims can't feel insulted because they're dead. Survivors can but they're few in number and will soon be extinct. Are you sure these are the main groups of people who would be hurt by legalized holocaust denial? I find that hard to believe, especially since we allow denial of most other large scale killings - even those bigger than the holocaust.

11 лет назадdiscuss

Perhaps the New Zealander reviewer wouldn't have invested so much time and preparation into one meal if he didn't have high expectations? Sure it's bad if they didn't respect his reservation, but you don't reserve a seat at McDonalds that far in advance so you don't have the opportunity to suffer that problem.

11 лет назадdiscuss

You can calculate the GDP per man-hour to compare "smartness". Of course that doesn't mean individual workers are doing something smarter, but that together they've built a system which operates more efficiently. Maybe past generations of Germans spent their work doing something that benefits current generations (figuring out how to make reliable car parts?), while past generations of Greeks worked on less helpful things (tourism?).

11 лет назадdiscuss

How is it hate speech? Are there people who would start killing Jews if they discovered it didn't really happen? Serious question, maybe Germany has people who are ready to commit violence but are held back by the thought that the holocaust probably happened? I can't think of the chain of causation from saying "It didn't happen" to someone killing someone else.

The closest I can find on Wikipedia's definition of hate speech is "...disparages ... a protected individual or group." Who is that group? Is it "people who believe the holocaust happened"? Surely belief in an arbitrary claim doesn't count for defining a "protected individual or group". Is the group Jews? How does it harm Jews?

11 лет назадdiscuss

I think it's worse than that - it distorts our record of history. In another couple of hundred years, if people want to find out what happened, they'll see how it was banned and realize that most information that we did publish must have been biased. They could reasonably assume that it's largely false since no serious well funded attempts to refute it were allowed. So they could conclude that they have no idea what really happened. They might conclude as you did, that it might not have happened, otherwise information about it wouldn't have been subject to so much suppression.

We should probably make the same conclusion today. Since when have legally enforced official versions of history been trusted over free and open research?

11 лет назадdiscuss

In real life, Tan Bao wouldn't have been evicted, he would have preferred the opportunity to accumulate money instead of not accumulating money, despite the temporary lower quality of life working in the factory. I'd say he has less poverty now. He can still survive but can also save.

11 лет назадdiscuss

I think depends on the medicine. Like fixing a bullet wound, some medicines obviously work and you don't need a study to know that (for blood pressure, insulin, severe pain, etc). But those are perhaps the ones we take for granted and don't really include when we think about the idea of medicine being bunk.

What's more suspicious is medicine that people use just because they're in a culture of taking medicine for everything. Reliefs for colds, coughs, mild pain, sore throat, psychological problems, etc. These illnesses have a strong get-better-anyway effect so it's very easy for people to believe that whatever they took cured them. Don't believe me? Go to China and you'll see people taking herb drinks for the same illnesses and having just as much faith in their effectiveness. Other popular cures include drinking warm water and "growing a pair".

11 лет назадdiscuss

They say it's still cheaper and less energy intensive than credit card processing. So it's a step in a greener direction. We don't have to get to the final solution in the first try. Dogecoin, etc have their own shortcomings that make them far worse than bitcoin for exchange and storing value.

11 лет назадdiscuss

Pet peeve as a viewer - avoid disguisting body nioses - lip smacking and sighing between sentences, sniffing and saliva sliding around the mouth. I guess that last one is a microphone thing.

11 лет назадdiscuss

Sure, but who will pay for that time and energy? I guess no-one, which means not producing the product in the first place.

11 лет назадdiscuss

> in a millennia copyright is looked back upon with the same disgust and insanity that human sacrifice, child wives, and genital mutilation are

1000 years is enough time for our contemporary culture to change. Those things you listed may even become acceptable by then. Just to compare with what we already accept - capital punishment, abortion, children being controlled by their parents, and even forced to eat food, circumcision.

11 лет назадdiscuss

I personally make money selling software that I wrote expecting to be able to sell it in the future. Without copyright, I wouldn't have done it in the first place. How do you see this sort of activity in a world without copyright?

11 лет назадdiscuss

True, but since 2008 at least, I think any level headed rich person would have to take any promises made by JP Morgan with a grain of salt. They might get screwed but they might still get the best return on their investment compared to more honest alternatives. It's still a choice to make in where you put your money.

Everything I hear about investment banks is that their job is to rip off rich people. If you don't like that, then use a regular bank and get a regular couple of percent interest.

11 лет назадdiscuss

Optimizations, GPUs and even parallelization are not always much use in simulations because the computational complexity is usually very high - like O(n^3) or so. That's not even counting the cubing of the problem size in going from 1D to 3D. If you can get 10x the performance out of some optimization, that can allow you to solve a slightly bigger problem - but isn't likely to be dramatic enough to go from 2D to 3D.

11 лет назадdiscuss

You can also do that with SolidWorks. Sadly this kind of kinematics/CAD software is hugely expensive and still too complex and narrow-market for open source to offer any good alternatives to :(

11 лет назадdiscuss

Most victims of guns aren't attackers that were shot in self defense. Are you saying it's better that large number of innocent people get killed than a minority of self-defending people? That doesn't sound like a safe solution overall - it only benefits the people who take more action to defend themselves and hurts everyone else.

Question too - how do you use a gun to defend yourself against somebody else with a gun? Doesn't it come down to who can "draw" quicker - which will surely always be the attacker because he's the only one who knows what's about to happen?

Or are you only talking about defending yourself against people without guns who who might use them impulsively so they don't have the advantage of surprise?

11 лет назадdiscuss

Yes. It's still sad that we have to have several people getting killed by the same person in the same day for it to become a public discussion. People get shot to death every day, but we don't care because they're all separate incidents (boiling a frog). Also they're mostly black but that doesn't make race the reason.

11 лет назадdiscuss

It's OK to argue. That's how we learn to see different viewpoints, rather than pretending to agree for sake of making everyone happy.

I see you're talking about what I would call culture or customs, rather than the broader range of qualities that stereotypes can include - things that might (if they were true) apply to those same groups across different cultures.

There's a kind of moral leap people are making if they say "Men have a harder time controlling their sexual urges, therefore it's OK for men to objectify women." You could still have the same stereotype with a different conclusion by saying "Men have a harder time controlling their sexual urges, so we should be more vigilant about men when we're trying to catch somebody objectifying women." This seems to be how it ended up with blacks and crime. I'd say the outcomes that we don't like don't require the stereotypes, so the stereotypes themselves aren't harmful and it's OK if they turn out to be fundamentally true.

11 лет назадdiscuss

Surely it's OK for a backup drive to fail occasionally. Your working drive might fail occasionally too but it's extremely unlikely that both of them fail within a day or so of each other. That's the situation that would lead to loss of data.

That's for a pure backup. For a history of previous versions, of course you'd want more reliability if you only have one copy of that history.

11 лет назадdiscuss

I agree that whole argument seemed quite artificial. I took it as a way to complain about other researchers who apparently had assumed that all stereotypes are somehow false, whatever false means. I'm sure they didn't mean it must hold for each individual in the group to be accurate.