Or the ballooning wasteful paramilitary spending to wholesale trample our Constitution and attack US civil society. Destroying an apartment building on suspicion that it houses some illegal immigrants makes negative economic sense.
That just seems like the straightforward maggot plan though, once you read past the marketing hopium? Assuming our new Chinese owners will be willing to let us have factories, of course.
So scientists shouldn't be allowed to hold their own political opinions, or organizational leaders shouldn't be allowed to exercise some autonomy with regards to the culture they foster, or educated people shouldn't tend to favor the political tribe that focuses on constructive solutions, or what? What is your specific critique here?
Whatever it might be, it seems like we could have instituted a targeted reform for that specific problem rather than self-immolating our educational institutions and continuing to hand the reigns of world leadership to China.
It's a solution. No other solution has worked, or been proposed.
Remember Brendan Eich? He was excommunicated because of a personal political view, allegedly because "he lost trust of the community". So yeah, being right-wing is faux-pass in tech and academia, therefore the left has no argument against people being defunded / fired because of personal political opinions. But we're talking here (see my other post) is institutional far-left policy (DEI meaning explicit racism and sexism against white men). No wonder they have totally lost trust of the community (like half the US), to be seemingly beyond reform, up for restarting from scratch.
I think this is the crux of your misunderstanding. I did not say the scientific institutions were self-immolating - I said you were self-immolating. You're not torching some independent other. You're burning the foundations on which the strength of our country lays.
It's also frightening how often I hear this same refrain of griping about instances of "the left" transgressing upon a certain value, as justification for discarding the entire value - did those values ever matter to you, or do they not? Because the way I see it, the entire point of values is something you stick to even when others trample on them, giving society at least a chance of converging around stability.
For example: I'm a libertarian. I did not like what happened to Eich and I certainly understand the oppressiveness of DEI run amok. I have spoken out about those, dissecting the nuances in those issues modulo my own values. But now that those issues are being used as anti-intellectual rallying cries to tear down our institutions rather than reform them? I'm done. I'll choose the tribe that believes we should at least try to have a society.
Brendan Eich did not simply give a commentary on his economic policy. Brendan Eich went so far as donating not insignificant amounts of money to make sure a significant portion of the population - of which many of his users and employees are a part of - do not have equal rights.
I am so beyond tired of this trope.
What, nobody ever faces consequences for hurting other people? We just have to tolerate intolerance forever with a smile?
Why would you otherwise oppose Eich’s private bigotry against gays but ignore educational institutions’ institutional bigotry against white men? Both were the topics of my post you first replied to and the rest of this thread
I see comments like this where destructionists have their simplistic bullshit releasing on full-spread, and it reminds me to go back and upvote the article. HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected, giving us the possibility of discussing how to move past this societal mental illness.
> HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected
Something I learned a long time ago is that it doesn't matter how well you argue a point with a nincompoop, they will simply shrug and repeat their horseradish verbatim in the next thread, hoping that next time they don't attract an audience with as much critical thinking. Unless you are willing to waste as much time as they are arguing on the internet, it's a fruitless endeavor.
It's really up to the moderators of a social space to keep bad faith nincompoops out, and Hacker News has shown themselves to be complicit and unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its own enshittification. At this point, this place is just Reddit with a tone policing and a nuclear downvote button.
The way I think about it is that the person I'm arguing with online is not really the person I'm trying to persuade; I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
The tech community was the source of the largest threat to American science in a century. As cheesy as it sounds, I think its my duty to counter the lazy talking points that otherwise go unaddressed in these circles.
> I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
That does help, and is part of the reason I myself engage with these folks from time to time, but it requires discipline to recognize when you're throwing good effort after bad.
You want to give your voice the greatest chance of being seen. Strategically responding to upvoted bad faith in a highly visible thread is a good idea. Keeping an argument alive 5-6 levels deep in a subthread that was already flagged is less so.
The mods here are worse than complicit. Dang in the past has allowed threats of violence while warning/deleting/banning petty name calling in the responses. It’s frankly disgusting.
Hacker News is Reddit with a tech-supremacy mindset.
> And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection.
Why are you saying they got pissed off? Going around another vehicle that is blocking the road sounds like basic driving to me.
I've used 3rd party retail gift cards to pay for consumer VPN service, which is only "grey market" because privacy is often criminalized. But I still 100% agree with what the AARP is saying. This is one of those things that sure, there is technically an exception, but by the time you get to the level of knowing enough to know when that exception applies, you end up agreeing with the common advice.
Isn't the nameplate capacity of solar the peak production when the sun is right overhead and the panels are new? Or is it spec'd differently at utility scale?
Say 20% around-the-clock production versus the nameplate capacity, cell degradation, and battery storage doubling the cost, and those costs are starting to look in the same ballpark. Plus having some diversity of sources isn't bad.
Battery backed solar is cheaper than nuclear today, and any nuclear generator will take at least ten years to build, shovel in ground to first kWh to the grid.
Sure, I don't disagree with that argument, and think the destructionists ending the solar subsidies is a treacherous "mistake". But I'd also say that some diversity is worth it in and of itself, rather than relying on one single thing to solve it all, as technologists tend to want to do.
This argument is easy to make when it’s other people’s tax dollars or capital. I don’t mind this position, as long as it isn’t my capital or tax dollars being incinerated on high risk suboptimal energy system investment, based on the evidence and known trajectories. For those who believe it’s worth it, I fully support them contributing their capital or tax dollars to their belief system.
Given how this regime has squandered money and ballooned the debt for things that are outright harmful to our country, I'd say as long as the reactors don't melt down (whether through sheer incompetence or as part of a deliberate plan) we're coming out ahead. I certainly wish we were at a place where fiscal responsibility arguments had relevance, but we just aren't.
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