This is exactly the insight that shifted me from being libertarian to progressive. Humans create organizations to coordinate behavior. Corporations are good for risk taking ventures, governments are good for social cooperation and coordination. Different purposes, time scales and objectives. Both are important and necessary. We should make them the best they can be.
When you are Elon, or Trump, or even a moderately succesful business… all the government does (or at least what you perceive) is tell you no. You can't dump that here, you can't build that there, you can't fire that person for that reason, you can't do that without a permit, etc.. They just want to clear all the roadblocks out of the way for their PERSONAL gains.
Get rid of the government and you can do whatever you want. That is what they want. These are people who feel they have "won" the game of capitalism, and were still told, "No." That greatly upset them. How can a winner be told they can't do something?
FTA: In her decision, Chutkan wrote that the states "legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight." But the judge said the states had not shown why they were entitled to an immediate restraining order.
That doesn't mean Elon was exonerated, it just means that an immediate restraining order won't be issued.
> So in good faith, i'd ask you, what is your solution to solve the fraud issue?
The question cannot be asked in good faith because it frames the discussion in a manner that suggests the concern here is one of fraud, however what we've witnessed by DOGE instead is arbitrary and partisan firings, as well as brazen falsehoods and mischaracterizations about the nature of what is being cut and the total numbers of what is being saved (by several orders of magnitude in some cases).
I don't feel the need to discuss an earnest plan about cutting fraud and waste because that is not what is on the table right now with DOGE. Further, I don't see any evidence presented to explain why the GAO and other bipartisan efforts to curtail fraud are regarded as ineffective. Simply stating "fraud still exists" is not an honest rebuttal, since fraud will always exist.
To charitably-interpret the parent-poster, they didn't say that.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
The president telling any member of his cabinet to do anything is presumptively an official act, and the evidence of him doing so is categorically forbidden from being used as evidence. (Hell, that's more extreme than even Trump's lawyers asked for! This basically overturns US v Nixon in its quest to elevate
This is an opinion that might make sense if we were being asked if a president ordering drone assassinations makes him liable for murder. In the context of the president trying to instigate a coup for not being reelected, to the point that his own government is threatening mass resignation if he carries it out in protest at the sheer unconstitutionality of it... this is the kind of question that almost begs SCOTUS to say "make a narrow ruling as to whether or not this specific instance is permissible" and SCOTUS decides instead to make a grand, sweeping proclamation for all ages and circumstances and neglect to look at the specific facts in this case and leave it unanswered here.
Roberts, let this case be your Dred Scott decision, your Korematsu decision. You've certainly done more to torpedo the credibility of the court in one decision than any other case in the past few decades... and that's saying quite a bit.
Ah yes—as the saying goes: “keep your friends at the Bayes-optimal distance corresponding to your level of confidence in their out-of-distribution behavior, and your enemies closer”
> I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it” -Voltaire
I also just want to elucidate this quote a bit in case you didn't know.
Voltaire did not actually write these exact words. The line is a summary of his views on freedom of speech and thought, and it was penned by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her 1906 biography of Voltaire titled "The Friends of Voltaire." Hall wrote this phrase to encapsulate Voltaire's beliefs on the subject.
Given that Voltaire himself did not say these exact words, there is no specific context in which he was addressing someone or some particular statement he disagreed with.
Voltaire was a man of the Enlightenment, which prioritized reason, evidence, and logical argumentation. He would likely have opposed the deliberate spread of falsehoods and deceit. However, he would also probably have advocated for the right of people to express even flawed arguments, as challenging such arguments through reason and debate is foundational to Enlightenment values.
But when it comes to personal attacks, slander, deceit, and hate speech, he would have not been so tolerant, because the subtext is when he speaks of "speech" he means engaging in an enlightened conversation using reason, evidence, and logical argumentation. It's okay to have flawed logic, evidence or reasoning, but he was fighting the powers at be of his time, and those were using deceit, irrational and illogical fallacies, appeals to emotions, forced censorship and the like to push falsehoods. The values of the enlightenment were about working towards accurate truth seeking.
The most valuable thing I've gotten from the past several years of therapy is a better model for how humans actually process information. The simple model a lot of people have is:
1. Receive some stimulus, input, or experience.
2. Process and understand it.
3. Respond to that emotionally.
What we actually do is more like:
1. Receive some stimulus, input, or experience.
2. This data is way too ambiguous to make sense of on its own. So to turn it into coherent information, interpret it through the lens of a narrative about who we are and how we expect the world to work. This happens automatically and unconsciously.
3. React to that interpretation emotionally.
4. Watch logical rational brain then scramble around trying to come up with a coherent story that explains why we started feeling a certain way. The answer it comes up with may or may not agree with the unsconscious process that happened in step 2.
So much of therapy is "Why does X make me feel Y?" How do I fix X? The answer is almost always that X doesn't make you feel Y. X in the context of belief Z you have about yourself leads do you feeling Y. You fix Z by questioning the often toxic beliefs you hold about yourself. But it can take a lot of work and therapy to even be able to see Z, much less root it out and install a better narrative.
Case study: I help run a site that has resources for trans and LGBT people.
With a question as sensitive and personal as “am I transgender or not and how would I know,” it’s deeply important to me that visiting my website won’t accidentally get my users into trouble, even indirectly through tracking or federated cohort ad targeting.
- The only JavaScript is that which is necessary to run the site;
- The site only listens on HTTPS;
- There are no cookies;
- I explicitly opt users out of FLoC to prevent other sites targeting ads to my users based on my site’s content;
- I use a third-party hosting provider that only supplies aggregate passive server logs for a 30-day rolling window, which only shows me the domain name of the Referer, so I can’t know exactly where my users came from.
I used to believe his brand of libertarianism was an attempt at "neutral right" but the anti-union thing really strongly tilts right. He has since declared publicly he backs a GOP outcome. Given some of whats going on in the GOP that makes it very very hard to put him soft-right because a declaration of preference like that demands questions: what does he think about J6 and what does he think about vote suppression.
His commercial engagements in Europe and Asia (china) do not actually define him politically one way or another. Nor does the starlink/Ukraine thing although I value that immensely as a buffer against destruction of telecommuniations utility functions in Ukraine.
Several respectable US political long-term trends analysis suggest the GOP cannot be used as a "pole" in left-right center discussions unless you accept it has moved significantly rightward on many fundamental matters of civil rights. Views which previously would have been considered untenable have become normalised, and the overton window has shifted. It used to be the overlap in right DNC and left GOP was strong. It's no longer the case.
I am of course Partisan in this. I don't believe the shift has been a "both sides" thing. But others might disagree.
TL;DR what makes you right leaning now, puts you very firmly right in any 10+ year analysis of what "right" side is.
I should also be clear I am neither a US voter nor US citizen or resident so my views may count for significantly less no matter what.
For first point: https_//twitter_com/libsoftiktok/status/1592655096252608513
'Supports' does a lot of work in his post, 'mingles with' or 'enjoys the content of' is closer to the truth. Philosophical alignment with that kind of characters betrays contempt for certain groups.
For second point: https_//www.thefader_com/2022/12/13/elon-musk-talib-kweli-twitter-ban
A few boos are enough to make him re-platform a dude with that kind of public record? It shows brittle spirit, as his friend Dave Chappelle would say.
For third point: https_//nymag_com/intelligencer/2022/12/elon-musk-smears-former-twitter-executive-yoel-roth.html
This one is the one that's serious, this kind of thing could amount to stochastic terrorism, but no one cares, because he's rich beyond measure, and that makes people excuse his every indiscretion.
It was a cursory google search, and while the burden of proof is on the one making the statements, it costs little to check it yourself.
It definitely isn't a good look for him, and while looks aren't that important, it does paint a picture of a man that has principles only outwardly, a man that is petty, and a man that thinks the world bends to his very word. It doesn't matter, though, the title 'billionaire' tells us that much, and grants him those powers.
Yes, you buried all of the very difficult parts of your suggestion in "extra administration." Who decides what's popular? Who decides when it isn't popular any more? Who decides who gets which name in the global namespace?
I think I'm just going to refrain from talking about namespaces now. I tried to be super vague and just point out one thing that wasn't solved by namespaces (typo-squatting), but I've somehow gotten sucked into this discussion.
No more. I'm done. Sorry, it isn't directed at you. Just tired of the discussion around namespaces and the neglect to account for the "admin" parts of it.
He clearly doesn't agree with the spirit of the editorial (it's a staff editorial, not an op-ed). He thinks there are real free speech problems, but that the editorial (and the public sentiment it cites) terribly misconstrues them, succumbing to sloppy thinking in a way that not only works against their stated goal but actually further jeopardizes speech.
I've thought a lot about how this might be studied empirically. The problem is that the only people who'd care strongly enough to bother are people with a strong pre-existing commitment to one side or the other, and any study they produced would be guaranteed to regurgitate the conclusion they've already come to—for a whole bunch of reasons, some obvious, some not so obvious. You'd just re-encounter the same problem at a meta level.
Here's a different way to look at it empirically. Can you, or anyone, find a single example of someone making a strong ideological generalization about HN that wasn't opposed to their own ideological preference? If my analysis is wrong, these shouldn't be hard to find, so let's start with an existence proof. I'm pretty sure I can find thousands of cases the other way around. If that's correct—thousands of cases exist on one side, close to zero on the other—it is surely evidence of something. I claim that it is evidence of a psychological mechanism, and not a weak one.
By the way, while I have you: would you please stop arguing in the flamewar style on HN? It's against the guidelines, it's destructive, and it's tedious. Snarky swipes like "or is that just a [fancy synonym for stupid]" destroy curious conversation and don't belong here. People do this when they're more interested in defeating enemies than in learning from each other, and this site is supposed to be for the latter, not the former.
You unfortunately do this a lot. In fact, the last time you asked me a question (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23018879) I had the same feeling: that it was not a genuine question but a cross-examination, almost of a "have you stopped beating your wife yet" sort. There's a reason why we added "Don't cross-examine" to the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
"Both sidesing" is another example. That's a reductionist label which doesn't reflect back to me how I actually see this problem at all. When you categorize what I'm saying that way, my felt sense is that you want to back me into a corner rhetorically, alongside a bunch of concepts I don't have, but which are easy to argue against. In other words, that you're advancing a step in a fight.
I don't enjoy this impression. I prefer the feeling that the person I'm talking with is curious to understand what I actually think and feel, and is interested in dropping any distorted perceptions they may have, rather than affixing them to me further.
