I pick through boxes of potatoes/carrots, throwing out the bad ones and bagging up the good ones, then throwing those bag into another box. I do things like this for 2 hours on the weekend at a local charity called harvesters.org. At the end I've worked up a sweat, but it's quite relaxing and I always meet friendly people there to chat with.
Agreed. Being of the Libertarian mindset, I was at first completely okay with it under the argument of personal liberty and personal property. It's a private company and they can do what they want.
But the closer I looked at it the more I realized that it truly is a public space. And then when powerful political figures started influencing what was okay to censor on it I realized they are trying to do an end-run around the actual law via technicality. No need for the government to censor anything when they can just get the technocrats to do it for them. And everyone seems okay with it, so long as it's not them.
Having a lot of people in a space doesn't make it a "public space". These terms are well defined, and we should stick to them when discussing, or we'll all talk past each other.
YouTube is not even a "privately owned public space" because it isn't legally required to be open to the public.
If you believe video hosting is critical public infrastructure, nationalize it.
Past thought about free speech seems to be based on the assumption that people can communicate without having some third party approve the sender/receiver/message. Now we mostly use a communication medium that involves a lot of third parties. How many private companies carried this comment to your screen? The bakery whose WiFi I'm using now, their ISP, some unknown backbone carrier, YCombinator, your ISP. Maybe a CDN provider and some others I can't think of.
We already have an answer about a government-operated communication medium: the government (including those acting on its behalf) must uphold our rights. That implies an obligation to keep storing/hosting/delivering things we say. It costs money, but society is more or less ok with the idea of a government having a legal obligation to spend resources on something. But what do we do with a private entity which spends a lot of money to operate and maintain a communication medium?
It's a tough nut to crack. Think about fields like architecture and engineering, where the historical knowledge is well over three thousand years. Yet they still have failures, go over estimates, and generally suffer the same issues that we do, but at much greater costs.
There is debate within the scientific community about changing other planets in general. Not everyone is convinced that we should alter or terraform to suit our needs.
This is like nimbyism on steroids. "No one build anything what if there is Rare Science in our backyards".
I mean yes I do kinda see your point, but priorities man. There are ridiculously large advantages to colonizing the universe and destroying a few samples is a low price.
It's not that we can't or won't. It's that we should study and debate it before we do anything to change the environment. Given how humans have run roughshod over so many environments, I think carefulness might be warranted.
Particularly when we don't even know have reason to believe there are samples. If/when we detect life elsewhere we can talk about leaving it alone, but there are plenty of rocks in the universe with no life that we can work with.
Why is contamination a question? there are millions of rocks scattered around that are not contaminated or explored. There is more to learn by contaminating a few and seeing what happens than to leave them all uncontaminated.
> If so, just visit the inside of any government agency.
How is this still a retort? OF COURSE MANY GOVERNMENT AGENCIES SUCK. That is the direct result of fifty-plus years of "government is terrible, elect us and we'll prove it." Even some of our more popular agencies are so underfunded they can barely do their original mission, much less the aspirational stuff we want of them. NASA says it'll take--pulling numbers out of thin air--$10 billion to reliably go to the moon. Our electeds' response is "you can have $3 billion" and then we complain that NASA hasn't sent anybody to the moon yet.
Never mind this patchwork of responsibility where virtually everything is no one's actual fault or job. The much-complained-about Department of Motor Vehicles is, in various states, operated as an independent entity, part of the department of transportation, part of an agency that handles licenses for everything that needs a license, or simply just kind of happens. There's no one whose job it is to say "this thing needs to work well" and since everyone doesn't like it, it doesn't command any kind of respect for being paid properly.
And then speaking of paid properly, why on Flying Spaghetti Monster's Earth would someone go to work for a state or local government and get paid, especially in tech, on average about two thirds of what he or she could be making in the so-called "private sector," or go to work for the Federal government and not only have the same wage penalty but ALSO be subjected to random "well, we couldn't get our heads out of our ass so you're not getting paid for anywhere from one to one hundred days, sorry" instances.
"Just visit the inside of any government agency" my shiny metal ass; we MADE this problem and now we kick dirt at it as though decades of voters bitching about government haven't gotten us exactly the front-line government services we deserve as a consequence of those votes.
So which parts of the government should we give more power? The CIA? The FBI? Any part of the justice system? Those government agencies have plenty of power and funding especially with the “War on Terror” and the “War on Crime/Drugs”. Private corporations don’t have the power to take away my life/liberty/property. The government does. Given a choice between corporate power and government power, I would rather see less government power.
Even the military is a wasteful mess because of government power. The military has told the civilian government that they don’t need some of the weapons or military bases that they are getting but the government - because of corporate meddling -keeps funding things that the military has said they don’t want.
Why would you trust these same government officials not to be persuaded by corporate officials. This is the same government that got rid of Net neutrality, bans cities from creating municipal broadband, extended copyrighted repeatedly and protects draconian DRM.
We do it currently. Holland is a good example of fighting back the sea, but at great expense. And not every country will be able to do this type of engineering.
The temp rises are another thing that we can adapt to. Maybe even some global engineering to thwart it. But again it will be at great cost. And this will probably have the bigger impact on all of us. Our eco-system is very susceptible to small temp changes.
Basically what it comes down to for me - I don't want to be distracted by my laptop and only bring it to meetings if I feel it's necessary:
- Daily stand ups? My laptop is distracting and I use a paper notepad instead.
- Long planning sessions or tech meetups? I need my laptop in order to be effective.
Staying focused is a constant struggle. Example: Being on Hacker News "wasting" a few minutes right now when I have a long list of tasks to work through.
I was very skeptical of fasting for quite a while, but over winter I was on a contract with a guy that did intermittent fasting and his particular schedule had him eating after 3pm. The guy was like a machine. Just this sense of urgency in his work that was incredible to watch. He accomplished so much more than the other guys in the same position. I'm sure part of that was his own character and his work ethic, but when I talked to him he attributed a lot of it to his fasting. Turns out he's probably correct.
Agreed and I I think a lot of it comes down to financial factors. In other words, why are we paying someone so much to make design decisions and how can we be assured they are doing it correctly? Because of science.
