>The reason I'm worried is that it's becoming increasingly clear why the GOP was so enthusiastic about blocking Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to SCOTUS. That never made any sense, except in a bizarro world where they were very sure they weren't going to lose the Presidency.
How does that not make sense? They've been blocking everything they can since they got the majority.
I think this is a big part of why the SV powerhouses are mobilizing against Trump. They rally the troops with hyperbole and accusations of racism and sexism, but in private they're afraid of losing their H1B wage slaves and tax havens.
Hillary is far, far more deserving of that label than Trump. To campaign and donate millions of dollars on her behalf requires ignorance, a seriously twisted moral compass, or some financial and political incentives that you don't want to talk about.
She's spent her life struggling to help children and single parents. Donations fund her charity that has helped millions worldwide. To twist that into something bad is just more of the political smokescreen that plagues any woman in public office.
She moved to New York just so she could run for senator.
She and Bill also spent 3 million dollars on her daughter's wedding. Where did she come up with that money, considering that a President's salary is in the mid six figures?
Oh that's right, she (and Bill) get quarter million dollar speaking fees at Goldman Sachs.
What part of all that would not be reprehensible if she were a man, and if she were a man, wouldn't this all be dug up and thrown into his/her face if you were running for president?
How is pointing out moral turpitude a "political smokescreen that plagues every woman in public office"?
Great list: Like any number of men get away with and no comment. None of that is reprehensible; that is all business as usual. A good fraction of our Senators are 'carpet baggers', not been brought up before. Loyalty to a spouse is lauded if its a man being loyal. #2 speaking fees is George Bush but nobody brought him up. And 'linked to' is another smokescreen catchphrase, slings mud without having to show any real problem.
Yes, and none of those men are currently running for president.
If a man did all these things, and were running for POTUS, they'd get raked over the coals, just like Clinton is. What's your point?
Also, Clinton has made it a point to argue for "the right to be believed" for sexual assault victims. And she went to bat for her husband before that statement to cast doubt on his accusers? http://nypost.com/2016/08/15/hillarys-site-edits-sexual-assa...
What a two-faced person who should not be president.
They may not all be interested in it ("weeaboo trash") but I would hazard a guess that the vast majority would openly laugh at the idea that someone is offended by such things.
The people that write about games in the West have little in common with the average player. They project their bubble's academic norms of identity politics on an audience that they hold in undisguised contempt. I wouldn't trust them for critical analysis or social commentary on any group but other angsty liberal arts majors.
Meanwhile there is a picture of Hillary embracing a KKK member that the corrupt media refuses to mention. The kingmakers don't give a good goddamn about racism, except as a convenient narrative for purges. The 21st century equivalent of accusations of communism.
“It is almost impossible to imagine the United States Senate without Robert Byrd. He was not just its longest serving member, he was its heart and soul. From my first day in the Senate, I sought out his guidance, and he was always generous with his time and his wisdom.” -- Hillary Clinton
By the end of his career Robert Byrd was a repentant, former KKK member.
Trump is being embraced by current, active KKK members.
It is obtuse to pretend there's no difference between the two.
From your own Wikipedia link:
"In his last autobiography, Byrd explained that he was a KKK member because he "was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions."[23] Byrd also said, in 2005, "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times ... and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."[13]"
>Trump is being embraced by current, active KKK members.
Being embraced by and embracing are very different things. There are statistically going to be child rapists that support both candidates, does that make them both child rapists?
Way to give the half 'truth' there, it's a supreme irony that DT supporters are ready to call anyone a shill but are just fine parading lies because they feel repeating it often enough makes it true.
> Meanwhile there is a picture of Hillary embracing a KKK member
actually
> Meanwhile there is a picture of Hillary embracing a FORMER KKK member who said that joining the KKK was "the greatest mistake I ever made."
Man go read Byrd's wiki page or really any piece of information before presenting a faux defense
"Senator Byrd came to consistently support the NAACP civil rights agenda, doing well on the NAACP Annual Civil Rights Report Card. He stood with us on many issues of crucial importance to our members from the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, the historic health care legislation of 2010 and his support for the Hate Crimes Prevention legislation," stated Hilary O. Shelton, Director of the NAACP Washington Bureau
You say that as if the media sycophants would not be trumpeting such a connection 24/7 if Trump had one. That is my point. It does not matter if he claimed to have repented (you know, after filibustering the Civil Rights act of 1964), they would have spun it against him anyway. The fact that they haven't even mentioned Byrd is proof of bias.
edit for dang: Thank you for Correcting The Record. If you're going mark accusations of racism as off-topic, you should have done so a little further up-thread.
I'll give you props for not leaving an article like this flagged and dead for once. Too big to sweep under the rug?
>In case it's a concern: we don't care what your specific ideology is.
"We just cannot allow Donald Trump to become president. It would destroy this country." -- Paul Graham.
"I am contributing to both vote.org and voteplz.org, and probably two other get-out-the-vote non-profits. There are different approaches to this problem and I'm not sure which will work best, but unlike many for-profit startups it's non zero-sum–we have a long, long way to go to 100% voter turnout, and all the organizations working on this share the same fundamental goal. This feels like the most important US presidential election I've ever witnessed, and I want to do whatever I can to make sure we're all involved. -- Sam Altman
The main benefit of the death penalty is not deterrence, it is eugenic. Remove all of the irrationally violent from the gene pool for a few generations and you will soon have a population so much less prone to violent crime that you will forget why you had a death penalty in the first place. Until, that is, you start importing foreigners that have never had the violent culled from them, and all hell breaks loose in want of a solution that doesn't sound "racist."
To be blunt, this is one of the most fundamental differences between the most successful ethnic groups, and the least.
In 2014, the US executed 34 inmates. If you think that is enough to remove "the irrationally violent" from a country with a population of over 300 million, you might need to go back to a statistics class.
Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.
>In 2014, the US executed 34 inmates. If you think that is enough to remove "the irrationally violent" from a country with a population of over 300 million, you might need to go back to a statistics class.
You're right, it isn't nearly enough. I am talking about the effect from the past when execution was an immediate and extremely common punishment, not an ordeal that costs millions of dollars and years of retrials and appeals.
I was not necessarily advocating for eugenic programs today; I think the problem is better solved for most countries by stricter boarder controls and ending the insane policies of unrestricted immigration of violent unassimilable men. But if I were, the death penalty is not the only way to go about it; mandatory sterilization for violent criminals would have the same effect, given time and the willingness to use it consistently.
>Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.
Yes, but you will get many of the irrationally violent before they can sire any children. Over generations this compounds and you end up with Swedes instead of Somalians.
I cut this out from my original post, but I'll add it now. Every people came from nothing. Every people had their times of feast and their times of famine. Social capital does not come from wealth, wealth comes from social capital. From being able to trust that your neighbor is probably not going to murder you and your family in your sleep.
And so you see that some groups bounce back from crippling poverty and brutal wars. And others have merely found more advanced ways to kill their neighbors.
Peoples who have created anything remotely resembling a functioning society don't act with this brutality and frequency towards their own kin and tribes, no matter the circumstance. Either the Papua New Guineans and others like them have gone "backwards" from a common ancestor (insert pedantic comment about how there is no such thing as devolution), or the kin-killing irrationally violent genes were always there and the rest of us eliminated most of the people that carried them because they were preventing us from operating even the most primitive of villages.
I didn't realize this needed to be said here, but... you do understand how evolution and natural selection work, right? Beyond that, you understand the death penalty? We don't hunt down your progeny and kill them too. There is no "eugenic" benefit whatsoever, even if the scale were right, which it isn't. Even if eugenic control of violent tendencies were possible, which it isn't.
This paints a dark picture, not only for urban life, but for basic income. What wondrous creativity will be unlocked when we no longer need to work to survive? A negative amount, if you judge by the NEETs of today. Give a man food, shelter, and internet, and he'll kill himself for you.
It doesn't paint a picture because a limited and flawed experiment should not be used to make sweeping predictions about society at large.
This is precisely why, earlier, I was against calling the setting in this experiment a utopia. It's anything but. But call it that, convince people it's actually good conditions, and then other people will run to make unfounded claims that good conditions are bad. Not to mention that basic income is not going to magically create good conditions, anyway.
NEETs may be caused by poor life prospects, not the presence of food, shelter, and internet. I imagine you have access to those things, too, so do many other people who are not NEETs. People do not do well when they feel life is pointless, and many people do just as poorly as NEETs do but you don't see them or think about them because they don't make headlines.
Indeed it is a flawed utopia. Give them a planet to explore, problems to solve, predators to avoid, kin to protect, goals that must be met to survive...
>NEETs may be caused by poor life prospects, not the presence of food, shelter, and internet.
I am intimately familiar with NEETs, having spent years interacting with them. The pattern I have noticed is of above average intelligence, many even brilliant, who would have thrived if the world had only given them a push, but left to their own devices commit slow, masturbatory suicides.
Some people can invent purpose from thin air. This is especially common amongst the kinds of elites and academics that most eloquently advocate basic income. But the vast majority of us cannot any more than a mouse. Most insidious is that even those for whom purpose is closest to grasp lose their drive. The artists lose the joy of painting and the programmers never begin their projects.
The true utopia is the harsh, cruel world of nature that provides purpose to every living thing.
Most jobs don't provide a push toward self-actualization. They're just repeating basic actions for hours. So now the situation is the same, except with less free time.
If you want to get people out of the house and interacting, that will go a long way, and doesn't require 40 hours of drudgery.
> The pattern I have noticed is of above average intelligence, many even brilliant, who would have thrived if the world had only given them a push, but left to their own devices commit slow, masturbatory suicides.
I don't know the same people you do, but for the people I know, I think they could be thriving if the world would stop pulling. They don't need a push. They need to have a way of doing things on their own without ending up in extreme poverty. We were not designed for the increasingly complicated and demanding market economy. Some of us can't handle it.
How do you know that they would have thrived if the world gave them a push? What kind of push? Do we not have plenty of examples of people with such pushes doing not so well already?
I haven't interacted with NEETs specifically, but I have interacted with a few people in a similar bucket. Including people who actually exhibit some similar signs but are not NEETs because they technically are in work or education or something (in fact, I think that part of the definition is not really relevant and is just an easy shorthand - which is why I'm not buying the "need a push" thing - often these people can adapt to a push just fine). The issue I often found is that they lost life purpose, and often they're rather hard to argue with. The more intelligent people can't convince themselves with nice sounding falsehoods. But there's little else offered them. God, of course, is dead. And, after a while, there may not be anyone for them to talk to whether they go out there or not. Let's say that I'm not too surprised at their existence, and no weird explanations about how man moved too far from nature or something have anything to do with it.
A person being brilliant doesn't deal with unpleasant people or environments, it doesn't solve all the nasty hoops that one often has to jump through to do certain things, it's really not something that gives you all that much power. If anything, a more brilliant person may realize how powerless they are while a less brilliant one will keep pushing. If we have groups of intelligent people repeatedly refusing to participate in society that may mean something's wrong with the society. Something's driving them away, making them give up. I can see many such forces.
We should stop trying to create a surrogate purpose, whether it's through the worship of nature's hardships or deities that probably don't exist. We should, you know, maybe actually look at the problem, and figure out what we want to do. I think people want to do plenty of things but are usually not invited.
I'll agree that some people may not find a purpose on basic income, but they already don't have one. Someone in 3 jobs on min-wage drinking themselves to death in a bar is hardly better off than a NEET. Or what of people in gangs or cartels, what of drug addicts. There are many groups like this, NEETs are pointed out because it's a fun target people like to pick at. There was always a sizable percentage of people who had issues. Those people do not magically disappear in the natural world. This is a more advanced issue that basic income neither causes nor will it fix. But it should at least help make their lives a little less miserable, just like many other movements made the lives of certain groups less miserable.
> The artists lose the joy of painting and the programmers never begin their projects.
You appear to be referring to something that happened in the past? What?
A harsh and cruel world, is, by definition, not a utopia. At most you can argue that a utopia is not possible. But let's not call a bad thing good. Most beings do not enjoy suffering by its very definition. We've moved away from the natural state of things for a reason. Nature is not the way it is to make anyone happy, quite the opposite, really, so do not expect it to be the one to accomplish that task. That one is on you. There are far worse situations than being a NEET and nature offers so many of those. If that's all the world can offer, I'll keep
looking for more.
A simulation of strife, if such is so required, is already far superior to true strife. Strangely enough, simulated strife hasn't really been all that popular so far - people seem to ultimately prefer their games to be a bit more forgiving and fair.
And let's be suspicious of claims and theories that just say: "Let's go back to how it used to be". This is an expected rollback. You venture into the unknown, you don't know what to do, so you want to run back to how it was, because it's familiar. But consider how big the unknown is, how much possibility there is there. Why settle, why not make sure there is nothing higher? When we fail to fly, do we stop trying? When we can't find a solution to a problem, do we stop looking? Why do you expect the design of a world in which all humans are happy some easy task you so flippantly dismiss the moment there's a roadblock? It's only logical that there will be many, many errors and setbacks and failures along the way. This IS, perhaps, the true purpose of humanity.
Can you really not imagine a world better than this?
Only because we don't take social currency as seriously as monetary currency. In a world where financial incentives don't matter, you'll have other incentives. We can see this in video games where people half-kill themselves to get some status or armor or whatever. Or how wealthy people take up charity work or compete on social status points like who holds the better parties or decorates the home better.
>if you judge by the NEETs of today.
I think its pretty obvious that NEETs are very much in denial, or have no access to, the mental healthcare they need. We also need to accept that a lot of people on the autism spectrum will end up as NEET-like and there's probably nothing to be done about it.
I would probably be a NEET (or barely E-human) if it wasn't for SSRIs, despite being a (I think) competent programmer who wrote code since being 13 years old. Medication lets me manage my disdain for what a typical human like me has to do to earn their bread - mostly pointless, mostly useless (or even socially harmful, hello ad world) stuff. I'm in tech, but I know some people who are close to being NEET and are on the more "artsy" side. I suspect some of that comes from lack of mental strength to handle the reality that you need to suck it up and waste 1/2 of your day, every day, doing stuff of dubious value, in order to stay a respectable (and fed) human being.
(In case you think this is just laziness, it's not - look at the hobby craft world. People can do a lot of hard, difficult work, as long as they have any say in what they do. It seems that a lot of people crave more autonomy now.)
That's why I'm hopeful about basic income idea - it seems like a way to give more autonomy to people who do not have the grit to fight for it on the job market. A way to channel this untapped productivity.
Indeed, but I think also the mental strength tends to get sapped when the thing you're doing is pointless and/or socially harmful. Some people may delude themselves into thinking that their work is worthwhile even when it isn't. It's generally easier to live life when you think you're doing the right thing and everything makes sense.
Truly, "NEET" is a mental health issue in almost every case; when you look at it carefully it seems like a terrible way to live. Being utterly disconnected from your peers and potential social contacts is just not good for the human animal.
I came from a comment on a more recent story[0] so I realize I am a bit late, but what about being a NEET implies social disconnection? I believe you're thinking of shut-ins or hikkikomori[1] if you want to keep in line with the parlance.
NEET can simply mean someone is unemployed or "between jobs" as you will, which my undergraduate microeconomics courses told me is a normal occurence (cyclic economies, employer/employee mismatches over time). Whether they get money from the government or live off their family, plenty of my peers during bouts of unemployment would still go out.
I realize it's colloquial to continue the bastardization of NEET to mean someone who has withdrawn from society, though I feel the nuance requires particular attention especially if we're attempting to diagnose problems and propose solutions. Indeed there may be overlap, but what can be said for one set may not be true of another even if one is a subset of the other.
"...The blind forces of urbanization, flowing along the lines of least resistance, show no aptitude for creating an urban and industrial pattern that will be stable, self-sustaining, and self-renewing. On the contrary, as congestion thickens and expansion widens, both the urban and the rural landscape undergo defacement and degradation, while the unprofitable investments in the remedies…serve only to promote more of the blight and disorder they seek to palliate." (Mumford)
Mumford and Ellul are among the references in Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History, which I'm just completing. It came out in 1994, too early for Kaczynski's Manifesto (1995), but it wouldn't surprise me if he references it in later works (I've not yet checked).
Bill Joy cites Kaczynski in his own Wired 2000 essay, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us".
The FCC chairman case is just the tip of the iceberg, but I figured this headline would be the most likely to pass under the radar given recent revelations about YC's political affiliations.
> Many of George W. Bush’s nominees have been significant donors to his election campaigns or have personal and political connections to the president.
> Consider the U.S. ambassador to Canada, David H. Wilkins. (No relation to me.)
> President Bush nominated him in 2005. He’s been a South Carolina state legislator. He’s a friend of President George H.W. Bush and raised more than $200,000 for President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. Ambassador Wilkins and his immediate family contributed $33,050 to Republicans over the course of the 2000, 2002 and 2004 election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Apparently, he’d only been to Canada once — 30 years before his appointment — as part of military service.
> President Bush nominated Michael M. Wood as ambassador to Sweden in 2006. He knew President Bush, too. He used to ride mountain bikes with the president and attended Yale with him. He was a fraternity brother of the president. Ambassador Wood made his money by founding Hanley Wood, a company that produces magazines for the construction industry.
> Ambassador Wood’s predecessor, former Texas state Senator Teel Bivins, ambassador from 2004 to 2006, was a Bush Pioneer in 2000 and 2004. (Pioneers raised at least $100,000 for President Bush in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. In 2004, Rangers and SuperRangers raised at least $200,000 or $300,000 respectively. This system was designed by Karl Rove, President Bush’s senior political adviser.)
> Many other appointees nominated by President Bush followed this pattern of financial or political familiarity.
That list continues, followed by links to criticism like “Speaking Out: Political appointees: a cost-benefit analysis.” and "Alan D. Berlind, a retired Foreign Service officer writing in American Diplomacy, thinks such patronage appointments to diplomatic posts do not serve the nation well." with a quote and link to why.
It's basically going to be impossible to avoid as long as you have a system of political appointees - even if people actually want to try to consciously avoid it, they will tend to know more about people they have a reason to know, and that will make it very easy to favour some of them.
I strongly dislike this direction of Apple's design, seen also in the new MacBooks. You ask, "What is the point of doing away with all of the ports and support electronics if you need an big, ugly, cumbersome adapter to make the device useful again?" and in response hear judgmental sneers that you aren't their target customer anymore, you power user.
But I guess that's par for course for the consumers that clad their fantastically stylish sci-fi pocket supercomputer marvels of manufacturing in neon Croc-rubber.
Why include things that take up space, weight, and cost, things which most users won't use, when users seem to most want less space, weight, and cost?
Users have gone wireless on nearly everything else, and are about to buy more wireless headphones than wired. The dongle is just an interim fix until you switch other devices to matching wireless; we've done it many times before, and we'll do it again.
Users that want the thinnest phone possible so they can wrap it in a Fisher Price box.
Users that want cheaper phones so they can pump more money into the accessory ecosystem the functionality back.
You have fun charging 2 or 3 things every few hours and having horrible device interop or none at all with your headphones and other accessories. I'll keep my headphones.
How does that not make sense? They've been blocking everything they can since they got the majority.