It isn't strictly required and it hasn't changed; it's always been complicated and it's always been a balance. This isn't speculation or a hot take. Consumer boycotts are as old as the hills, so it's an observable fact that our relationship with firms and their politics has been complicated and negotiated for a very long time.
Regarding your later edit:
> PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.
Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.
That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.
We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.
I don't know much about geopolitics so tell me if I'm off base but it seems to me if they're making threats it's because the facility is not a high enough priority to actually strike? If they wanted to and had enough ordinance to overwhelm whatever defenses, then they just would right? But they can't/won't so they're hoping to gain advantage without actually spending ordinance?
Regardless, it is grimly interesting to watch the next chapter of tech companies becoming increasingly significant in geopolitics.
The Iranian's regime's minimal goal is regime security. To that end, it aims to apply maximum pressure/cost on Israel/US, and hope that they will relent at some point. Iran has no other means to actually cause the Israel/US to stop (as in, it lacks the ability militarily deter or defeat).
Iran recognizes that it is not just the actual damage, but the credible threat of damage that incurs pressure/cost. For example, there are piles of ships holed up in the Gulf - Iran has the capability to strike at them, but they don't need to. Publicity is part of magnifying the threat.
Iran likely lacks the capability to actually assuredly destroy any single target of its choosing. Iran instead likely has the capability of destroying maybe 1-10% of targets that it actually chooses to engage. However, it can hold hundreds of targets at threat to try to ratchet up the pressure. In addition, by casting an ever wider net of claimed targets, when it does get around to attacking, it's more likely to be able to construct a narrative of "calling their shot".
No. They have been able to destroy much more important and hardened targets, i.e multiple AN/TPY-2 radars, the extremely valuable AN/FPS-132 radar in Qatar, $Bs worth of aircraft on the apron at Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi.
Not to mention being able to quickly deliver counter-attacks to like for like infrastructure when theirs has been attacked. i.e the Ras Laffan counter punch after South Pars was attacked and the UAE aluminium plants after their steel mills were hit etc.
They have also already essentially taken AWS Bahrain permanently offline at this stage.
So they are certainly capable of it but simply hitting the target removes the leverage of using it in a negotiation. If it's already gone you can't say "we won't hit X if you agree to terms Y before time Z".
There is no reason to just strike it. The point is it is a threat and they want to raise the cost of continuing to bomb them.
If they can strike and destroy $1 trillion worth of things it would be very dumb to do that right away. Then they will have used up all their valuable targets and they will have less leverage going forward. Instead they would want to destroy $50 billion a day until they get what they want.
No... hitting it gives them nothing. What MIGHT give them something is the threat of hitting it, it might change the behavior of their enemy. Of course, if push comes to shove they might have to actually hit it to not lose credibility, but that's not the ideal outcome for them. Think of a kidnapper at a disadvantage threatening to shoot the hostage.
Noone would be remotely surprised if Iran attacked a nominally American target, so it's puzzling why the Iranians would talk about it instead of just doing it. They would also need to be careful not to cross the line between pressuring friends of the US administration to lean on Washington and pushing so hard that those friends double down on their commitment to the US. It's not like the Gulf states are simpatico with Iran after all, they might think for example that the Shia worldview is vaguely heretical and wacky anyway so why should they not let the US shoot at them.
You are puzzled why Iran threatens the destruction of assets of powerful American oligarchs if policy changes aren't made? Allow me to point out that political leaders rely on the patronage those oligarchs and are strongly incentivized to do what they say.
Its exactly the right play for Iran to threaten but not do and hope that corporate greed panic does the work for them.
The good news is that boiling water is not functionally necessary since the extraction was done up front. I drink it cold or with warm water. Boiling is hotter than I want to drink anyway.
If there's significant scale at the bottom it's possible it's making your kettle materially less efficient. If you put in like a cup of vinegar and a cup of water (you could probably dilute it more than that), heat it up and swish it around (it doesn't need to be boiling), it should all come off.
I found that 160F to 180F is enough for instant coffee, depending on personal taste and what you feel like at that moment. I have an electric kettle that has a several buttons for different temperatures, and heating only to 180F saves time over heating to boiling, plus I can drink it right away.
Yep, all the instant coffee jars I’ve seen have a note to use hot but NOT boiling water. And I’ve noticed that using too hot water can even spoil the taste a bit.
I usually turn off the kettle when the noise starts noticeably changing. This usually is something between 70-80℃.
Indeed. I have a Nespresso machine for when I need coffee quickly. As soon as I press the button, hot water flows in a trickle. It’s certainly not boiling but it’s an ideal temperature as a hot drink.
Different commenter but yes, that's exactly what they mean.
The main disadvantage is strong coupling. The shared state inside the static makes it more difficult to test your code. There are ways to reduce this coupling, the most obvious being that you push as much logic as possible into functions that accept a reference rather than use your static directly. Then you minimize the size of the code which is difficult to test, and cover it with end to end testing.
The OnceLock does impose 1 atomic operation of overhead, whereas an Arc imposes 2 (in this case, it can be more if weak references are used). However neither are likely to be important when you consider the overhead of the Mutex; the Mutex is likely to involve system calls and so will dominate the overhead. (If there's little to no contention then the Mutex is a lot like an Arc.)
Your alternative would be to use `Box::leak()` as the parent comment describes, which would force you to pass a reference around (resulting in better coupling) and eliminate overhead from OnceLock. However, it's unlikely to result in any material performance benefit, and you could reduce coupling without departing from your current approach, so I don't think either approach is clearly or overwhelmingly better.
The ironic usage makes for compelling dialogue and comports with stereotypes about Southerners as formal/restrained. So that's what ends up on television. At least that is how I think I came about having that impression.
I'm getting the impression that a lot of people in this thread think this is because they violated an open-source license and saying things to the effect of, "they're just the ones who got caught". I also thought that was the scandal initially. (And when it comes to license violations, yes, there's absolutely more where that came from.)
But that's just the cherry on top. I don't think they're being thrown out because they violated a license. There are really serious fraud allegations. Allegedly they were rubber-stamping noncompliant customers, leaving them exposed to potential criminal liability under regulations like HIPPA.
>Pre-written audit conclusions. The "Independent Service Auditor's Report" and all test conclusions were already filled in before clients had even submitted their company descriptions...
>Copy-paste templates. 493 out of 494 leaked SOC 2 reports (99.8%) had identical text, same grammatical errors, same nonsensical descriptions...
There's an excellent podcast and writeup on this from Patrick mcKenzie, which explains the story in more detail, including an interpretation of their statement and background on why this is a scandal in the first place.
I came across a top tier compliance auditor doing the same thing recently. I tried to talk to them about it and rather than approaching this from a constructive point of view they wanted to know the name of the company that got certified so they could decertify them and essentially asked me to break my NDA. That wasn't going to happen, I wanted to have a far more structural conversation about this and how they probably ended up missing some major items (such as: having non-technical auditors). They weren't interested. They were not at all interested in improving their processes, they were only interested in protecting their reputation.
I'm seriously disgusted about this because this was one of the very few auditors that we held in pretty high esteem.
Pay-to-play is all too common, and I think that there is a baked in conflict of interest in the whole model.
Yes. But I'm not working at either company and I'm 99.9% sure that it would lead to absolutely nothing other than a lot of misery for myself. The NDA's I sign have some pretty stiff penalties attached. I was actually hoping to see my trust in the auditing company confirmed and I'm still more than a little bit annoyed that they did not respond in a more constructive way.
My response however is a simple one: I used to steer (a lot of) business their way and I have stopped doing that.
Similar boat. Seen the same shenanigans being played with actors who really should know better - everything from military secrets to medical data, and absolutely YOLOing it with an audit mill. I have it on good authority that there are superuser credentials floating around for their production systems that they’ve lost track of.
And no, I won’t whistleblow either, as it would mostly be me that would face repercussions, and I am unafraid to say that I am a coward.
We choose the battles we fight, and I’d like to believe that ultimately, entropy will defeat them without me lifting a finger.
No NDA can prevent you from making protected communications about fraud, illegal activity, etc. If you have seen fraud that involves the military you can make an anonymous report to the DOD IG. If it involves medical data you can make an anonymous report to the HHS IG. Or, if you want to get rich off of it, there's another option. Happy to chat.
I've already established that it was improper. It's up to them to make the most of that knowledge and then to determine of this is a singleton or an example of a class that has more representation. In that sense it is free to them, I'm under absolutely no obligation to provide them with a service. But I'm willing to expend the time and effort required to get them to make the most of it. What I'm not going to do is to allow them to play the blame game or 'shoot the messenger'.
I didn't mean it as a criticism, I think giving them the opportunity to improve and refusing to offer a scapegoat were both standup things to do. I'm just wondering if they were ever in a position to take that opportunity.
I'd called out fraud (blatant lying in investor updates) at a VC backed startup where I was a technical co-founder, once. I emailed all the investors and presented all the evidence to them. They decided to not rock the boat and keep my charlatan co-founder. So, I left. Now, the company is slowly bleeding to death.
There are thousands of companies where the shady practices are rewarded, the companies thrive and make money for the investors. So the investors are incentivized to reward this behavior just on the chance that they are rewarded back.
Whistleblowing sinks those chances and the investors and VCs know it. It doesn' just take away the money, it even takes away the plausible deniability. They put a lot of effort to absolutely punish any whistleblower to discourage the rest. Anything for a dollar. and this is probably all you'll ever need to know about almost every VC out there. Beyond the witty "I'm rich so I'm smart" blog posts and tweets, they're very much just the "anything for a dollar" type of people.
if they touch the federal government, feel free to ping me. I can walk you through how to report to people who will actually do something about it and do so anonymously
To be fair, I’m not sure blatant lying in investor updates alone constitutes fraud. There needs to be harm (or the intent thereof) AFAIK. The other party needs to be using that information to make a decision. If you give me a dollar and then later I tell you I’m actually Beyonce, is that fraud? Or am I just a lying sonofabitch?
If I give you a dollar and you say it’s being spent wisely, Beyonce loves the product, you’re about to land Taylor Swift as pro bono public ambassador… yeah that’s fraud.
Lying in investor update was merely the tip of the iceberg. There was lots more, fabricating customer traction pre-investment, paying oneself back-pay for months spent twiddling thumbs pre-investment (before I was involved), etc.
My lesson from the whole kerfuffle was that investors (at least the ones I’d dealt with) prefer hustle over integrity and execution abilities.
This makes sense because investors in startups just care that they aren't left holding the bag. As long as they aren't the final fool in the buy in chain, they don't care.
It's auditing, nobody that is good at doing anything goes to auditing, unfortunately its one of those jobs. I haven't interacted with any auditor that actually understood all they were auditing, some are better than others but the average is worse than almost any other job description I have dealt with.
If you care about this stuff you need to in-house auditing and do your own audits with people who care. Then get certified by an external auditor for the paper.
You can start very lightweight with doing spec driven development with the help of AI if you're at a size where you can't afford that. It's better than nothing.
But the important part is you, as a company, should inherently care.
If you rely on an auditor feedback loop to get compliant you've already lost.
Nobody really tries to get technical people to do the work.
Like cool, it's a great idea and would potentially produce positive results if done well, but the roles pay half the engineering roles, and the interviews are stacked towards compliance frameworks.
There's very little ability to fix a large public company when HR is involved
Maybe it should be treated like on-call duty and have the load spread between existing engineers on some kind of schedule, maybe with some extra comp as incentive because it's boring and will take more effort/time in the "easy case" compared to pager duty.
Maybe that's just a goid moment to review your _policy_. About a half of our compute is exactly that, and we just don't have to do this sort of backups, that'd be silly.
We don't deal with the military though, only fintech (prime brokers and major banks, funds) some government. Plenty of certifications (have someone all site all year round),!no silliness.
But companies don't care. They don't want compliance for feel goods, they want compliance because their partners require it. They do the minimum amount required to check the box
Caring about security and comparing about some of the arbitrary hoops you have to jump through for some of these compliance regimes don’t always overlap as much as you’d expect.
I’ve been at companies where we cared deeply about security, but certain compliance things felt like gimmicks on the side. We absolutely wanted to to do the minimum required to check that box so we could get back to the real work.
You should check out the banking industry sometime if you'd like to interact with a competent auditor.
Compliance gets taken quite seriously in an industry where one of your principal regulatory bodies has the power to unilaterally absorb your business and defenestrate your entire leadership team in the middle of the night.
I've seen this up close. The regulatory bodies as a rule are understaffed, overworked and underpaid. I'm sure they'd love to do a much better job but the reality is that there are just too many ways to give them busywork allowing the real crap to go unnoticed until it is (much) too late.
Because they’re put there as a box ticking exercise without ever being given the power or resources to be able to do damage or negatively impact the bottom line of the big rule breakers. It’s just supposed to maintain the appearance of doing something without ever supporting these activities for real. For the most part they are a true Potemkin village. If the risk is diffuse (just some average Joe suckers will lose money) I wouldn’t hold my breath that anyone is controlling for real.
Usually on a Friday night. If you see a bunch of rental cars hanging out near a bank HQ on a Friday afternoon, get all your money out before the doors close. FDIC is about to wreck shop.
They do it on a Friday so they can work through the weekend and reopen the bank on Monday as a branch of a different bank which is solvent, so I wouldn't worry too much. I'd be more worried about putting my money in a fintech not regulated by FDIC or NCUA (though many contract with a "real" bank so that your money is still protected).
The industry is paid to provide a fig leaf for shady practices. Everyone knows what's going on, no one is going to do anything about it unless governments step in and give regulators more resources and more teeth, and "errors" lead to prosecutions and jail time.
None of those are likely.
This is the industry that missed Enron, WorldCom, Wirecard, Lehman, and many others.
lol strongly agree it is just cherry on top. In big tech they also copy but just copy in a smart way so I don't believe that's the reason they got removed.
YC has no problem with morally questionable behavior, many YC startups do things that are just as shady. YC is, ultimately, not responsible for what these startups choose to do. Delve’s problem is that they betrayed so many other YC companies in the process. An important value of being in YC is access to a ready-made customer base. The licensing issue is nothing compared to their fake audits but it is an affront to the YC community, hence, kicked from the community.
I’m sure if Delve has only engaged in fraudulent audits or had only resold another YC company’s product, they would have been allowed to stay, the problem is all of that combined pissed off enough other YC companies.
I think it’s partly that, but also that when you have something that is toxic, radioactive and on fire on your ship, you shove it overboard, and assess just how bad the damage was afterwards.
Scribd are quite annoying. The pitch was "the YouTube for documents" allowing stuff to be posted and shared but they tend to try and get subscription money off you to see anything unlike the likes of YouTube.
Scribd scrapes the web of all the .PDFs that it can find, then gates them behind a paywall and SEOs their way to the top of Google's rankings. That's it, that's all they do. They run a zero value tollbooth with other peoples' IP, taking advantage of users who don't have the search-fu to hunt down the documents themselves.
I think when making the claim a company is a net negative, it's necessary to explore what would have happened if the company hadn't been founded.
I find it unlikely, for example that there would not be a dominant centralized forum platform. People would have certainly started problematic communities on the dominant platform, and it's unlikely a platform with strict moderation would have gained dominance before 2015 or so. I do think a dominant player would have been established by 2015.
Do you think whatever you see as harmful about Reddit would not have occurred if the company didn't exist?
This comment assumes both that Reddit is harmful and the outcomes were predictable. The former is debatable, but I am sure the latter is not true; the founders of Reddit didn't know what they were building.
They thought it was a social bookmarking thing for people to find and share blog posts. It didn't even have comments for the first half year. For two more years, self-posts only existed as a hack where the poster had to predict the post's ID to make it link to itself. User-created subreddits didn't show up until about 2.5 years after the site launched.
I’m pretty sure all endless scroll social media has been scientifically proven to be harmful. Reddit also runs a 1:1 copy of TikTok.
I don’t really care to defend the morality of extremely wealthy VC firms like YC. They know the enshittification process that happens with 100% of the companies they fund.
They could create companies with charters and ownership structures that ensure they exist to better the world and make good products as their binding guiding principals, but they choose not to.
It would have happened more slowly at least, delaying the increase in populism, nihilism and depression in the Western world, the anglosphere in particular.
What traits specific to Reddit as opposed to a hypothetical generic alternative forum platform do you think are major contributors to those social trends?
Recommendation engine pushing users into ideological bubbles, public voting mechanism creating incentive for conformity which then creates purity spirals, lack of moderation.
Early Reddit had a recommended tab, but that didn't last long. The current recommendation features are relatively recent - this decade at least.
It would surprise me if the winner in that space didn't have a public voting mechanism. Digg, Reddit's early major competitor had one, and heavy-handed moderation surrounding the HD-DVD decryption key leak was one of the major inflection points that drove users from Digg to Reddit. Stricter moderation during that time period would have been a losing strategy.
The “I just have the arsonist the match, I didn’t tel him to strike it” approach of tech bros has caused untold damage to the world over the last 20
Years.
> You are overcomplicating this. They were ejected because they got caught.
I don't see how "they got caught doing X" is more complicated than "they got caught doing Y", but at any rate think it's worth being correct and precise in order to reason from accurate premises. If you absorb a lot of false information you'll start coming to incorrect conclusions and it'll be difficult to understand why. It took me years to unlearn all the bullshit I absorbed from when I used to spent a lot of time watching History channel documentaries.
> What for or how they got caught, does not matter.
So if they were ejected for jaywalking or for murder, that's all the same to you?
I've seen a bunch of people go on random crusades. Investigation is fun and righteous indignation is intoxicating. For certain personality types it's easy to get completely absorbed by a mystery/crime and not even realize how much time you're spending digging into it until the sun rises. Others may be intensely motivated by perceived injustice, dishonesty, or graft. Or they may feel personally cheated.
I don't know who this person is or whether they are legit but it doesn't surprise me that someone would do this.
it may be anybody. Even somebody at YC wanting to create a background to drop Delve if suppose Delve were shady and they discovered it (i really don't know anything here and am simply speculating, heard about Delve today first time, just googled and read some techcrunch article - it says Delve has 1000 clients - googled employee count - sub-50, and until it is "an Uber for auditors" i have hard time to believe that 50 Silicon Valley people can do even one compliance certification for one client, with AI or without)
Yes, the way this is being pushed online seems like there is a competitor involved. If not in the initial disclosure, then in the daily rehashing of it.
It's also still unclear to me how much fraud they actually were involved in, and how much of the fault falls on them. SOC2 Type II and ISO 27001 are not audited by them, but by actual accredited auditors (apparently mainly Accorp and Gradient), which must have been just as complicit/negligent. As customers of Delve are free to chose their auditors I'm wondering how this hasn't blown up earlier.
If there were not a manipulative competitor, if people just found fraud and abuse of open source compelling and the story was circulating organically, how would that look different? What do you observe that leads you to believe a manipulative competitor is a better hypothesis?
My interpretation: they're kicking the OpenClaw, OpenCode, etc. users off and telling them they can use extra usage for third-party tools, and they're softening the blow by offering free and discounted usage, and they're offering it to everyone else too to avoid the appearance of unfairness.
They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals.
Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?
How would they prove that no launch happened? There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, and if there were it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
> There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, ...
A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty. Which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined; you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue".
It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon.
> ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.
I don't have anything to say to your argument, not because I don't think it's worth addressing, but because it doesn't address my argument, and because I find this statement more interesting:
> People are easily convinced by lies, as you have demonstrated just now.
You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence. You seem to be assuming my position is reflexive rather than considered.
Cynicism, contrarianism, the assumption opposing positions are unconsidered - that is not what "free thinking" looks like. That's just being dependent on the "mainstream narrative" in reverse. If you can't imagine someone examining the evidence and coming to a different conclusion than you, you are engaging in the dogmatism you criticize.
It also does not make you less gullible. Cynicism is the dual of naivete. Both are equally exploitable. Cynicism can feel rational and rigorous because it has a hard edge to it, and because it feels like legitimate skepticism. But that's merely aesthetic. People can and do pull the wool over cynical eyes by tailoring lies to that aesthetic; instead of saying, "experts say X is true, and you can trust them" they say "experts say X is false, and you can't trust them" and the outcome is the same.
Propaganda and lies are real, you aren't wrong to protect yourself from them, but I genuinely think this mechanism does not.
> I don't have anything to say to your argument, not because I don't think it's worth addressing,
...but simply because you have no argument. Just a lot of vague handwaving that amounts to nothing and seems designed to fill the air full of noise more than anything. No statement you have just uttered is of use to anyone.
> You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence.
So you watched the multiple videos of the US flag waving in the breeze on the moon and learned nothing?
You saw the flat, unblemished surface of the moon right beneath the lander's giant rocket engine, which had just shut off moments before leaving no trace of any disturbance--not a speck of dust disturbed--and learned nothing?
You watched the Apollo 11 press conference where, far from acting like returning heroes fresh from walking on the moon, they seemed somber and ashamed?
You saw the 'rock' with the letter "C" written on it? The converging shadows? All the other discrepancies? The seams where photos were joined together to make a fake? You studied all the obvious lies being told about "space is cold", "you can't see stars up there", "a thin plate of aluminum is plenty of radiation shielding", etc, and learned nothing?
You saw the pictures of all the supposed Challenger astronauts who are still alive to this day, one of whom (Judith Resnik) is even still living under her real name, teaching law at the University of Minnesota? And you learned nothing.
It seems your "studies" didn't help you much.
Really, the evidence is so clear and obvious that to make a post as you have just written weighs the odds heavily in favor of you being a disinformation agent.
I'm not going to address your arguments if you're not going to address mine; that's me working overtime while you simply handwave with skepticism. I certainly do have points to make, but if you're not going to explain why Russia and China are carrying water for the USA, even through the collapse of the USSR, no, I am not going to respond to your points.
Yes, I studied the evidence and came to a conclusion. You've come to a different conclusion. That's not because you're smarter or less gullible. It seems to it's because you are cynical and, to be frank, over indexing on dubious evidence. If you're scrutinizing people's facial expressions to determine whether a gigantic physical event has taken place, you've taken a be wrong turn. Facial expressions are about the lowest quality evidence I can imagine to answer a question about spaceflight. It's way too far removed and there are way too many alternative explanations.
You're complaining that people dismiss you without taking you seriously while being completely unserious. You cannot preach against dogma while literally calling those who disagree with you cultists and paid agitators. You cannot complain that people refuse to engage with your arguments when you refuse to engage with theirs. (You didn't express these complaints to me but I see them in your other comments.)
Or rather, you can, but it seems like being closer to the truth is an important value to you. And if that's the case I think you are doing yourself a great disservice.
But I've enjoyed our conversation and I wish you well.
> How to talk to a science cultist: you can't, as your post will be immediately flagged and censored.
This was the comment I was referring to, as well as a vibe/through line in the rest of your comments. If I misinterpreted you I apologize.
Regarding your flagged comment, I am a human being for whatever that's worth. I don't really know what to tell you about your world view other than that it's deeply mistaken and seems to be informed more by paranoia than evidence.
Entertain for me the idea that you are mistaken. If you have built a worldview that interprets disconfirming evidence as a further layer of conspiracy and people who disagree as professional propogandists - how would you ever change your mind?
Any belief which functions as a ratchet and gets tighter and tighter without any mechanism to change your mind will eventually strangle your ability to understand the world.
Regarding your later edit:
> PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.
Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.
That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.
We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.
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