Very few people posting things publicly request people to start a debate about it.

Is your issue more that pg is a public enough figure that he can't not get attention for things he posts? Or is it that the attention he gets is likely to occur in a forum he views regularly and has an attachment to?

Lots of similar thinkpieces get posted on HN every day that people have all sorts of debates about without being invited to do so. And most figures with the wealth and visibility of pg can't really publicly post things without a group somewhere arguing over its content. A downside of having that level of fame I suppose.

Several Chinese dynasties depending on where one draws the line on "a few"

Why does propagating human genetics to a different planet/solar system give human existence meaning?

This is accurate, but compiler runtime efficiency and compiler effectiveness at producing efficient programs are inherently orthogonal.

There is certainly a major milestone in each new language though, when it becomes feature complete enough to write its own compiler.

In order: There certainly could be. How would we know? What if the universe isn't deterministic? Certainly it's more pragmatic to assume that only what we can experience is real, but that doesn't make it true.

The belief that there could exist parts of reality that the scientific method can't explain does not require having specific examples.

Even if all of reality can be understood by physics, that doesn't mean it can be simulated.

If physical reality can be simulated, then you could simulate the physical reality that makes up a person.

There is no guarantee that your simulation of the physical reality of a person would respond identically to an actual person.

There's a large body of philosophy on this, but basically it comes down to life working out better if we all assume everyone else is conscious.

There probably can be two similar beings demonstrating identical behavior with only one being conscious. Depends on what you define consciousness as I imagine.

I happen to lean towards believing Science can explain reality and that consciousness is a physical phenomenon, but to claim that things categorically must be that way is unfounded.

Community service, win reelection, and a trivial fine in America.

Why would you need a government, even a democratic one, if you had no intention of restricting any individual's freedom?

Individuals are generally trustworthy. Groups generally act like sociopaths.

There's a difference between restricting the freedom of all individuals and restricting the freedom of some individuals.

Eventually you have to draw some lines (e.g. not letting people murder each other).

But don't laws that apply to all individuals inevitably apply only to some subset? Most people have no desire to murder others and so are basically unaffected by a law forbidding it.

Insurance is inherently about distributed costs. That's the whole point. People who don't suffer whatever event they're insured for end up paying for those who do.

Exactly. It's also not a tax mandated by the state, which is the key difference between insurance and universal health care.

If America wants to introduce UHC, great, but let's be honest about what it is, and let's understand it's going to be prohibitively expensive unless we bring costs down first.

Where in https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... does it say that?

65917.7.b.4.A and B both impose minimums on the maximum height limit that can be imposed. They do not impose a minimum on the height itself. This bill allows for building higher, it does not force it.

I said “minimum height limits” read (minimum)(height limits) i.e. the height limits may not be lower.

That wording is a bit confusing. You might think about changing it to be minimums on height limits for better readability.