Red Flag Laws = Gun Confiscation Orders. Just because they aren't using the most accurate terms doesn't mean I am editorializing the article. Look at their implementation in the states.
All of these laws have the same ends, gun confiscation before due process. Maybe the due process takes place in a week, maybe it takes place in a year, in any case, these are gun confiscation orders with no conviction of a crime and in many cases, no evidence that a crime has even occurred.
Guns = Lethal Killing Machines, but if New York Times writes "Silicon Valley luminaries want fewer lethal killing machines in society" I'm pretty sure you'll be unhappy about the title.
Those are my feelings too.. I understand how the public can be swayed by inaccurate media representations, but it's Y Combinator which seems to portray itself as a source of intelligent people.
The thing is, I can understand people who, swayed by inflammatory media reporting and Bloomberg-funded propaganda, experience an emotional reaction to these various shooting incidents, and immediately think "something MUST be done". I get it, even if I think most of their proposals are useless, or actively harmful, in terms of reducing violence and protecting the innocent.
BUT, I think a lot of people on the "more gun control" side are actually pushing a very specific agenda, which has absolutely nothing to do with "public safety" or "protecting the children" at all. It's an ideological / elitist mentality that says "only WE should have guns, and the common riff-raff need to be disarmed one way or another". This position I have zero sympathy towards, and the only correct response to this, IMO, is "come and take 'em".
I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think the "liberal mentality" is a problem.
Plenty of liberals realize they are actually pro-gun if you just sit them down and explain the restrictions which are already in place. The democratic party has been hijacked by Bloomberg dollars through Everytown, which is why the candidates all went way further left of the overton window.
At the end of the day, people believe in self-preservation, but they've been misguided by the media to believe that gun laws are something they are not. Basic facts can cut through their lies, the hard part is promoting that message without billionaire funding.
Yes, you said it better than I. MSM/Dems constantly lie about the facts to push for gun confiscation, when the facts dont align with they they are regurgitating from the gun control playbook.
The problem is that people hold vaccines and "herd immunity" so dearly to themselves that they're afraid to accept that they have side effects just like any other medication. Gardasil (HPV Vaccine) for example is responsible for a slew of well-documented side effects (paralysis, GBS, etc) causing countries like Japan to stop recommending them. Add in it's inefficiencies at actually vaccinating against HPV and that the big risk of catching HPV is through an elective behavior and it's clear it shouldn't be mandatory.
Individual vaccines can be argued against their own merits, but unfortunately as you say the "Overton Window" is rife with people who are swallowing down opioids like candy and believe anything that comes in the form of a pharmaceutical is gold. The reality is most medications have extensive side effects, and vaccines are no exception. Unfortunately nobody can have an honest conversation on which ones are worth it and which ones aren't because of the uneducated stigma associated with the average anti-vax beliefs.
I'd cater that the same thing is the case with climate change. I read some comments today from people who unironically believe that humanity will be wiped out within 12 years. Al Gore said that 20 years ago and here we still are.
I'd advise people to be more open minded and try and convert the anti-vaxxers to the correct side. Of course you can admit that measles isn't so bad of a disease while still promoting it's vaccines, and surely that will garner more support than advocating strapping anti-vaxxers to a table and shoving a needle in their arm.
> read some comments today from people who unironically believe that humanity will be wiped out within 12 years.
If they are the widely reported ones for which that timeframe is cited, that doesn't seem to be the consequence they were talking about. (Yes, the phrase “the world will end” was used, but the world ending is a common hyperbolic metaphor for things other than the end of humanity—and even with the end of humanity it's still a hyperbolic metaphor, since that does not literally end the world.)
> Al Gore said that 20 years ago and here we still are.
It's also worth reminding that it was a ruling which put a prominent politician in prison for campaigning against WW1 and encouraging people to resist the draft.
Which is to say, it came preassembled with a slippery slope.
Seriously? I just assume most people on there are in high school, it seems like a place where the lowest common denominator ideas get upvoted and everything else gets nailed.
It's crucial to mostly ignore and unsubscribe from the default subreddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, try to find a small subreddit dedicated just to it. My personal reddit homepage looks virtually nothing like the default, and indeed whenever I accidentally view the "popular" feed I'm shocked at what the site devolves into if you don't manually curate your subscriptions.
Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.
Some popular subs can have good content, too - askreddit has a good topic once or twice a month, and depthhub (used to) have good curation of deep learning.
>Yep. Look at woodworking, sailing, overlanding, etc. and you'll find people who care about their hobby and are knowledgeable.
I disagree. Those subs are chock full of people who suffer from "expert beginner" symptom. The real experts have moved on to communities with a higher bar of entry (mostly forums). You can't have real in-depth discussion about technical subjects when you're constantly getting buried by people who are mostly trying to score internet virtue signaling points by pointing out that their table saw is old and lacks the most modern safety features or that they're not using jack stands. Forums (or 4-Chan, or anywhere else with linear, non-ranked discussion) doesn't have that problem. Once you're above the lowest common denominator in any sub there's little left to gain because you can't reliably interact with people who are at or above your level (because those people get drowned out so they start keeping their mouths shut or leave entirely).
It's because Reddit displays the upvote totals. Anytime you set up something that looks like a scorekeeping mechanism, people are going to start treating it like a video game and chasing high scores, with all the attendant showboating and bad behavior that leads to.
I've also yet to find a subreddit I like. I admit I haven't tried recently, but the "high school" vibe is very much the one I get. I don't even mean in a bad way, I just mean in a very naïve way. I came of age on the internet, as a teen in the mid-90s, and I just feel like, 20+ years later, I've moved beyond the "everything is new" phase, and reddit still feels like everyone discovering things for the first time. Whether it's a car subreddit where nobody knows how cars work, or a tech-specific subreddit where nobody has the background of my peers.. I'm all for helping people along, but on every topic it feels like 95% rehashing the same old things I rehashed as a teenager.
I think it's just that, ultimately, younger people have more time for online community than middle-aged folks, and the average tone of most subreddits clearly shows this.
Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I was pursuing a new hobby, so I was the n00b, but I'm.. not.
Agreed. I've seen cases where you had niche subreddits containing people who are somewhat experts, but when the sub gets remotely popular, it gets bombarded by people who don't know anything but feel like they can post whatever useless crap they want that has been posted a million times before. Eventually the moderators give up trying to control quality due to posts and upvotes by beginners, the experts leave in disgust, and the sub devolves into dumb conversations about the topic because now it's just beginners talking to beginners.
The heavily moderated ones are generally better. /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians are the highest quality subs I know of. They delete any comments that don't cite sources.
Moderation and composition contribute a lot to a sub's quality. On one end you have fantastic and popular subreddits like Ask(Historians|Science|*) which rely on extremely heavy moderation and qualifications or sources. On the other end you have very niche subs that are really only of interest to enthusiasts/relevant parties, and so composition keeps the quality high rather than moderation. The problem with a lot of subs is that they are popular and unmoderated, and so left alone they just converge to the mean (and the mean's not great).
As someone who has been on reddit for a long long time (10+ years). It's clear as daylight that the site is mostly comprised of teenagers and that is the dominating voice. As other mentioned there are still (plenty of)diamonds in the rough if you know where to look but the site lost its voice and the leadership their values. Since spez has returned the strategy has been to gradually move the goal posts to keep uproar at a minimum.
This was inevitable though. At some point the corporate overlords will want to cash out. Time for something new.
You could say the same thing about YouTube -- just look the "YouTube trending" page any time, it's a bunch of stuff only children and dumb people would be contributing statistics for (sorry to be pretentious, but am I wrong?). That doesn't mean YouTube isn't a valuable source of information -- you just have to find the right channels.
/r/starcraft: doesn't have nearly as much good discussion as TeamLiquid, but TL's forums are not easy to trawl through. Great coverage of tournaments/announcements tho
/r/personalfinance: really great here, lot of professional financial experts drop knowledge bombs. I've improved my financial life oodles just reading through this.
/r/piano: lots of great/interesting posts, mostly people playing pieces or shots of their set-ups, not too much memery but people try a little bit. Quite a few better/more experienced players than I am to answer my Q's.
The main thing I hate is memes. They are very low effort, many of them are inside jokes/highly meta, and the humor is usually bargain-basement, not very funny. If you can avoid those subreddits where memery takes over, then you have a better experience IMO.
Your reddit experience varies wildly based on which subreddits you subscribe to. If you don't have an account, you're likely seeing the unwashed masses.
The sports streams subreddits are a God-sent though for people like me obsessed about sports, for the first time in two decades I've started watching US sports again thanks to /r/nbastreams and /r/MLBStreams/.
I went to Syracuse University and the police force there are a joke. They're your average overpaid, overworked hillbillies who will smoke a cigar in your face while issuing you a ticket and send everything less than a SWAT team to break up a house party.
I hope railroading this guy assures that none of my amazon packages are ever stolen in this kind of scheme again. I don't feel bad for him whatsoever. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
People are bloodthirsty because stealing packages is so much more personal than, say, shoplifting. The mail is personal. The shit you get shipped is personal. Especially around christmas. "Who the fuck steals the gift for my nana?"
And it's like, people don't usually even know what they're stealing. There's a damage&reward imbalance between the person who loses something of great potential sentimental value (it's not always amazon packages, sometimes it's stuff people send each other), just so that some petty thief has a shot at having something they care about / can make a profit on.
I'm with everyone else on this, fuck people who steal packages. Those and bike thieves.
It seems sensible enough to me. If you steal $item from a shop, you're a shoplifter. You stole it from an abstract corporation. If you take the same $item from /my/ doorstep, you stole it from /me/.
I don't eat the losses, Amazon do. So technically you stole it from them. But just as my insurance company eat the losses if you steal my car, I'm still going to internalize it as "you stole my $item." And I can't help but judge that much more harshly than shoplifting from some faceless name.
It’s also just plain inconvenient. Shoplifting doesn’t affect me as a customer at all, aside from the ambient rate eventually being reflected in prices. But when my package gets stolen, I have to report it and get a replacement sent out, wait for it, hope that one doesn’t get stolen....
It’s small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, but it’s definitely more than retail theft.
Who knows. He doesn’t have to know the specific value. Maybe the thief has analysed the data in some way and has calculated the expected value of a package.
I agree. It's too bad we don't collectively apply that same, sane logic to wall street, banks and the corporations that led to '08 due to their "games." I wonder which is a larger problem...
The problem is we collectively employ the logic of "punish them or subsidize them with bail outs". A free market, without a lender of last resort or FDIC, will effectively punish those responsible for financial crises.
I mean, the two scenarios are completely different. Yes, they both suck, but it's almost impossible to compare stealing physical property one owns and "stealing" the potential difference in wage between two individuals.
Um. Yes? What has this guy done in the past 5 years? All the linked commenters saying how great his work is posted 10 year old videos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Maybe the better question is, is Walt Mossberg still relevant to the technology scene?
All of these laws have the same ends, gun confiscation before due process. Maybe the due process takes place in a week, maybe it takes place in a year, in any case, these are gun confiscation orders with no conviction of a crime and in many cases, no evidence that a crime has even occurred.
Red Flag Laws = Gun Confiscation Orders.