badsock

6 ms·

1.
by badsock 9y ago
Sigh. You're right, sorry. I'm out.
2.
by badsock 9y ago
I don't agree with visarga's first sentence. But I don't think it's childish to want a war criminal to be held to some account. More than 100,000 civilians died in that conflict, and Rice played a key role in knowingly
3.
by badsock 9y ago
I thought the Boring company was the most "obviously for Mars" project. One of the cheapest ways to create pressurized, radiation-sheltered spaces is to dig.
4.
by badsock 9y ago
This subthread is off of devmunchies comment about Reddit and Twitter, and the OP is about 4chan. All of these forums are global. My point is that American-style conservatism may represent half of Americans, but it's overwhelmed in ot
5.
by badsock 9y ago
I don't understand why everyone bought the idea that we don't need unions anymore. This is exactly the sort of thing they make better.
6.
by badsock 9y ago
What makes you say that American conservative views are not extreme, in the context of the global internet?
7.
by badsock 9y ago
Something that's popular is practically by definition not on the extreme any more. In most of the developed world the Democrats would be considered a moderate right-wing party, and the Republicans a far-right theocratic extremism party
8.
by badsock 9y ago
You're speaking in pure ideology. I could just as easily say that this the result of 40 years of the upper class shifting the tax burden downward to the middle class, while lobbying for the passage of laws to ensure that all of the eco
9.
by badsock 9y ago
I have no problem with the possibility that men and women are different. What's unjustified is, given the powerful effect of culture on behaviour, someone making offhand claims that they know what differences are natural. I read &qu
10.
by badsock 9y ago
That plot would fit into, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which had a viewship in the millions) no problem. Also, if you're going to say things like "natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people
11.
by badsock 9y ago
Are you sure that's not spam?
12.
by badsock 9y ago
This is essentially Trump's plan, which has had a hard time finding anyone in the field of economics to back it. Can you point to anyone who has qualifications beyond being a pundit that believes that things would work out as you say?
13.
by badsock 9y ago
Have you considered the possibility that there might be more than two ways (Randian capitalism or Marxist communism) to run an economy?
14.
by badsock 9y ago
That's the standard ideological line, but this whole story is about how Apple is stockpiling cash, not investing. (And yes, I understand that the cash isn't just stuffed in a mattress, but it's an important distinction that t
15.
by badsock 9y ago
Genuine question: given this, am I correct in thinking that if there was a big corporate tax cut the most likely outcome is that the money retained would just further inflate this savings glut?
16.
by badsock 9y ago
It's deserved: http://www.vox.com/2016/6/2/11833548/donald-trump-support-ra...
17.
by badsock 9y ago
That theoretically makes the hack harder (you've got to hack two systems/vendors), but we're talking about attackers with potentially state-level resources. The bigger problem is that it can be used to verify that a coerced v
18.
by badsock 9y ago
The right talks about more freedom, but their actions result in less of it. Arbitrary power used to be much more concentrated in one particular race and one particular gender. The left has been trying to diffuse that power, the right is tr
19.
by badsock 9y ago
Estonia's system is absolutely hackable. Anything that runs on commodity hardware or a commodity OS is. See my rant in the main thread.
20.
by badsock 9y ago
Imagine if you took a vote with paper ballots, and then went to every one of the tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people who had a hand in creating a voting machine (think of the millions of lines of code in the OS and drivers, and th
21.
by badsock 9y ago
Ah, the good old Social Darwinism argument.
22.
by badsock 9y ago
It's a left-wing value that you can, and should, separate the person and what they believe from their actions. If anyone were to suggest that we should ban Trump supporters from immigrating to my country, I would be very opposed to tha
23.
by badsock 9y ago
I'm mostly responding to your "Why does diversity initiatives never seem to care about diversity of political opinions?" question. I'm saying that it's legitimate for diversity initives to not support all political
24.
by badsock 9y ago
If you haven't heard anyone address that point, you haven't looked very hard. It's an (IMO) important part of the left-wing philosophy to be intolerant of intolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parad
25.
by badsock 9y ago
My take is that the "hacked the election" is mostly a right-wing framing. What's much more interesting is evidence of collusion: money changing hands in undisclosed ways, policies changing dramatically after secret meetings,
26.
by badsock 9y ago
At best that's correct in a very narrow sense; my point is that extrapolating that model wholesale into the realm of politics has had real and very dangerous repercussions.
27.
by badsock 9y ago
You're not wrong, but I also think that culturally we've made a big mistake by not acknowledging that there's a gradient here. There /is/ an objective reality, and we can measure it to varying degrees of accuracy.
28.
by badsock 9y ago
I'm in the same boat. But my naivete was in thinking it would be easier to dispel lies when facts where easily linked to. The propagandists' workaround was to just attack facts.
29.
by badsock 9y ago
Forgive the pedantry, but The Prince has /always/ been viewed as a how-to-manual, because it literally is one.
30.
by badsock 9y ago
I understand the argument for excluding housing, food, and fuel from the official inflation stats, but at this point it's making that number a complete departure from reality. Canada right now is basically getting divided into two clas

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