dubfan

8 ms·

1.
by dubfan 12y ago
That's fair. It seems police forces across the US have learned to be less confrontational against protestors, and in general this has been a good thing. I've expressed this in a sub-optimal manner, but I'm concerned about wha
2.
by dubfan 12y ago
> Freedom isn't the ability "to do" something or anything, it is simply the absence of coercion. A profound point apparently lost on so-called intellectuals. Thank you for understanding.
3.
by dubfan 12y ago
Yeah, being late to my job because my bus can't get through a protest and getting fired as a result is just a slight inconvenience.
4.
by dubfan 12y ago
They have as much of a right to speak as I have to ignore them. When my right to ignore them is taken away, I have a problem with that.
5.
by dubfan 12y ago
The protestors are using fear (the fear of being attacked by police) to achieve a political goal (somewhat murky but the general gist seems to be to accelerate the depolicing of cities).
6.
by dubfan 12y ago
The protests went further than just shutting down the freeways, at least in my city. Here they blocked a transit tunnel that moves commuters through downtown, forcing the buses to use crowded surface streets and completely disabling the lig
7.
by dubfan 12y ago
> The social pendulum in the U.S. has swung far too far towards an authoritarian police state. My view is it's gone the opposite direction. We've neutered our police forces such that they can't even protect the rights of c
8.
by dubfan 12y ago
That's disappointing. I come to HN to get away from political discussions.
9.
by dubfan 12y ago
The right to peaceably assemble shouldn't supersede the right for citizens to go about their business. The protests crossed that line when they started shutting down freeways and transit. The only difference between that and terrorism
10.
by dubfan 12y ago
> If your valuation rises, you might be forced to move by taxes. If it drops, you lose services and the place starts to get grubby. Or, if you live in SF, Seattle or Portland, your taxes go up but you still get poor quality services and
11.
by dubfan 12y ago
The NY Times is known for their characteristic headline style: http://observer.com/2014/02/for-the-new-york-times-headlines...
12.
by dubfan 12y ago
I place "The World According To Monsanto" in the same league as "Zeitgeist" and "Loose Change". Great if you want affirmation of your worldview, pretty underwhelming if you're interested in facts.
13.
by dubfan 12y ago
The first GM crop to be licensed for human consumption in the US was the Flavr Savr tomato, which contained a trait that improved their shelf life and appearance. It was a commercial flop and taken off the shelves after a few years on the m
14.
by dubfan 12y ago
> * GMOs tend to promote monoculture and pesticide use. That's true for industrialized agriculture in general and not specific to GMOs. Growing GMOs doesn't promote monoculture or pesticide use any more than growing conventiona
15.
by dubfan 12y ago
Propaganda works both ways, and Sourcewatch has a massive blind spot when it comes to anti-corporate propaganda. Their page on Monsanto is full of uncritically repeated propaganda from the likes of Vandana Shiva.
16.
by dubfan 12y ago
Universities in Germany are free for everyone, besides the semester fee which is negligible. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/10/29...
17.
by dubfan 12y ago
Very cool. Years back I attempted to write a web app in Python to chat with MegaHAL, and though I managed to get something working, I was in way over my head at the time and the app had too many bugs to release to the public.
18.
by dubfan 12y ago
I don't think anyone here is trying to tear Davis down. It's just that his writings can reflect poorly on our community as a whole to those who aren't familiar with his circumstances. In the current climate of hit-piece, shoo
19.
by dubfan 12y ago
I've been seeing a lot of these types of articles lately, trying to convince how bad off the American worker is and how those fat cats in the 1% are siphoning all of the wealth away. I've also noticed a recent uptick in socialist-
20.
by dubfan 12y ago
At least the conservative think tank is up front about their bias, unlike HuffPo.
21.
by dubfan 12y ago
Also, Osborne went out of business in 1985, but the 486 didn't debut until 1989.
22.
by dubfan 12y ago
I recall that the site has some flamewar detection algorithm that will penalize a story if it detects a flamewar. I don't have a source for this at the moment, though.
23.
by dubfan 12y ago
Prejudice isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a society, we're fighting over where the line is between "bad prejudice" and "good prejudice", and the tech gender gap is just one of many battlegrounds in that fight
24.
by dubfan 12y ago
Does anyone else find it strange that the author uses an article that uncritically repeats the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax as an example of dispelling myths? Doublethink indeed.
25.
by dubfan 12y ago
I hate to be that guy, but... Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it o
26.
by dubfan 12y ago
That's just a red herring to make you think they aren't rigging elections! </tinfoilhat>
27.
by dubfan 12y ago
Or for suggesting that capitalism isn't all the bee's knees in 1950s America. How quickly we forget.
28.
by dubfan 12y ago
There does seem to be a movement to purge anyone with unpopular opinions from the public sphere, regardless of the context in which they developed their beliefs and how irrelevant their beliefs are to the work for which they earned fame. Th
29.
by dubfan 12y ago
Probably not. Agriculture in the western US relies on irrigation due to water scarcity, but places like Iowa have the opposite problem. They actually shunt water off of their fields. Also, losses of agricultural water due to evapotranspirat
30.
by dubfan 12y ago
Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought , by Jonathan Rauch ( http://www.amazon.com/Kindly-Inquisitors-Attacks-Thought-Exp... ) I picked this book up shortly after the Brendan Eich incident earlier this year. Thi

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