burfog (u/burfog) - Readit News

burfog commented on More than half of 18 to 29-year-olds in the US are living with parents msn.com/en-us/news/us/mor... · Posted by u/jocker12

thomasfl · 6 years ago

There is a housing crisis. Birth rates will eventually go down. The real estate market is ready to be disruptet with new walkable cities. Based on modern human centered design on walkability, mixed use for businesses and housibg, bike friendly cities.

burfog · 6 years ago

Birth rates will go up because they are inheritable and because exponential growth always wins. The USA will be Amish.

It's only a change in environment that can knock that down a bit, but exponential growth still wins. Birth control cut the birth rate for most people, but not for all. The resistant sub-populations are still on exponential growth even as the other sub-populations go through a population crash.

It's as certain as math. Exponential growth wins.

burfog commented on What are the best sources for US and global statistics? · Posted by u/WoohDang

burfog · 6 years ago

Wolfram Alpha is pretty good for random factual queries. It will even do computation, so you can ask for the number of dietary calories in a cubic lightyear of cream cheese. https://www.wolframalpha.com/

If you are looking more for proven statistics that get suppressed for political reasons, then the now-defunct hatefact site is what you want. It featured over 700 awkward facts, with citations. Archive as one big page: http://archive.is/LRe05 Archive with 1 page per category: http://hatefacts.subvert.pw/hub.html

burfog commented on Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu... · Posted by u/nojs

dang · 6 years ago

That's the basic algorithm, but there are quite a few additional factors- see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

burfog · 6 years ago

That document could use a clarification for the "Ask HN or Show HN" section. I didn't see an option to make an "Ask HN or Show HN" in the UI. Do we just add that text manually? Does the software recognize it as special keywords? If so, is it case-sensitive and does it need spaces or a colon?

burfog commented on Professor suspended for saying 那个 nà ge languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu... · Posted by u/nojs

violetgarden · 6 years ago

Yes! I am a female in the tech industry, and we are inundated with warnings about going into a male dominated field. I’ve noticed it gets to a point where some women can’t even receive criticism because they think “he wouldn’t talk to another man like that,” even if the criticism is valid. I can see why it happens though. We hear over and over about being harassed and put down that we almost subconsciously get a chip on our shoulder about it.

I’m not saying that racism or sexism doesn’t happen. But I am saying I see how a person can also take something as racist or sexist just because it’s something you’re told to expect.

burfog · 6 years ago

That sounds like the robustness principle, featured in RFC 1855 (Netiquette Guidelines) among others: "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" or "Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receive."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855

burfog commented on Tech workers flee Belarus as IT haven takes authoritarian turn bloombergquint.com/busine... · Posted by u/warpech

mhh__ · 6 years ago

As in Joe Biden's wife and children died in a car crash, and later one of his surviving sons died?

Trump has no concept of morality or loss - you realise why he wasn't invited to John McCain's funeral, right?

burfog · 6 years ago

This is 100% unjustified speculation. Dehumanizing an opponent helps to unleash hate.

John McCain's funeral was a political event.

burfog commented on 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland reason.com/2020/09/04/you... · Posted by u/Bostonian

baryphonic · 6 years ago

> Hacker culture isn't the entire field of programming. > > Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are some of the largest businesses in the world and they are also free services. > > I would bet that the majority of people who code or design software find hacker culture, to be silly.

I get what you're saying. And yet Facebook HQ's physical address is 1 Hacker Way. Not 1 Big Business Way, nor 1 Status Quo Way, nor 1 Software Engineer Way. Hacker Way. Google used to speak about allowing the whole world to access information with ease, including projects like making libraries accessible.

Clearly Facebook and Google at least identify themselves with hacker culture. I'm not sure if Twitter ever professed any sort of noble goals, though it's a dwarf compared to the other two.

> With the President and many politicians supporting the killing in in Kenosha, clearly a portion of those in power support it.

I'm not sure I'd say anyone supports the killing. I personally think it was a big mistake for that kid to go there, regardless of whether he has the right to. It was a bad decision, and led to a tragic situation where there were no winners. That said, he's not a murderer; if anything, the mob was coming after him (guns firing in multiple cases) to kill him.

I also question the de facto power that the president has when the press really is able to control when and how he says what he says. And the press's lies seem to be getting more absurd and brazen. (The personality of the current president does him no favors. It's a negative, in fact.) He holds de jure power, but given his inability to pull 2000 troops from Syria or drop charges against his former National Security Adviser, his legal authority seems like the Queen's royal prerogatives++. The press and entertainment industries, the universities and the bureaucracy seem to hold fragments of power both legally and in the culture, which makes the de jure power a bit weak.

> There are alternative news sites, forums and even social media. Nobody is locked to these sites, except for an entitlement to an audience.

Twitter and Facebook have strong network effects, which effectively does lock people in. YouTube's are much weaker, which is why I suspect decentralized video will be the first decentralized service if they can get some legal kinks worked out. (There's also a legal argument about monopoly common carriers, even at common law, and how they shouldn't terminate service unless the law is violated.) However, even if we accepted that these were competitive, this kind of competition can only exist when we at least have some level of order and security. The reason.com article seems to indicate how we do not have that kind of basic stability.

burfog · 6 years ago

Lots of people support the killing. When you look into the background of the 3 people shot, the reasons become obvious. The first person shot had attacked boys aged 9 to 11, raping 2 and molesting 3 others. The second person shot had a history of abusive relationships, including strangulation. The third person shot (surviving) was a burglar. That's 3 out of 3 being horrible people. Hitting a criminal in that crowd is like hitting a tree in a forest.

Remember that many people feel that a pedophile rapist should get the death penalty. They are offended by the fact that he was out on the streets of Kenosha chasing a boy. Some people, probably fewer, feel the same about the woman abuser. It is a common viewpoint that justice was served.

burfog commented on 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland reason.com/2020/09/04/you... · Posted by u/Bostonian

vidarh · 6 years ago

The first problem is when people try to treat antifa as an organization rather than as a loose ideology that is supported by groups across a wide spectrum, and then tries to use that to assign guilt by correlation.

E.g. the original antifa was set up by the KPD (pre-war German communist party), but many modern antifa groups use logos that incorporates symbols that were used by the SPD to explicitly attack the KPD and Hitler (and Papen; who eventually demonstrated how dangerous he was by being the person who brought Hitler to power) who they saw as just as authoritarian as Hitler (with good reason - KPD were Stalinists). E.g. you might recognise the 3 arrows from this poster [1].

You'll find antifa groups coming out of groups with political ideologies that are close to mortal enemies. The only things they have in common is opposition to fascism and some general symbolism.

[1] https://antifacwb.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/ka003265.jpg?w...

burfog · 6 years ago

The original antifa and that modern antifa have a lot in common. They share the name, symbols, violence, and ideology. The original antifa was so awful that it made people want Hitler. The modern antifa might achieve a similar accomplishment.

burfog commented on 'You're Not Allowed to Film': The Fight to Control Who Reports from Portland reason.com/2020/09/04/you... · Posted by u/Bostonian

sudonim · 6 years ago

This Andy Ngo?

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/28/right-wing-journalist-andy-...

burfog · 6 years ago

He was considered left-wing until he dared to report what he saw, refusing to censor it for the benefit of Antifa. That sounds like a reputable journalist to me.

burfog commented on Tech workers flee Belarus as IT haven takes authoritarian turn bloombergquint.com/busine... · Posted by u/warpech

mhh__ · 6 years ago

Even if Biden is boring, he's a good man to lead the US out of the quagmire it's in at the moment.

Trump is totally amoral, whereas Biden has experienced loss in a way that few can imagine. He's not perfect, but he knows how to play the congressional game and when he reaches out to people looking for change in the police who have lost a loved one you know he isn't lying.

The alternative was also Bernie, which I just cannot see ending well.

burfog · 6 years ago

What loss, his marbles? If you mean his son, well, Trump lost two brothers.

When in congress, Biden pushed for the harsh sentencing that we had, with the 1994 crime bill. Trump supported and then signed the First Step Act, which is legislation to undo some of that.

"Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle" -- Biden, in 1977

burfog commented on An Argument for Race Abolitionism (2020) spiked-online.com/2020/08... · Posted by u/rictoo

Kednicma · 6 years ago

Are accents cultural or racial? There's plenty of cultural traits which are heritable and measurable. The difference is that there's only one human race, while there's many different cultural memeplexes.

Race literally doesn't exist: The partitions that you imagine as dividing people aren't actually backed by any particular observable or experiment. Meanwhile, cultural markers do exist: We can measure what people wear, speak, trade, value, etc.

Aside from accents, another good example is that of locally-grown staple foods. Different locales support different crops, so that merely living in a region for a time is sufficient to alter one's diet. Yet it is not due to differences in people, but differences in soil, which determine which crops are grown and eaten where.

burfog · 6 years ago

Accents and staple foods are terrible examples.

We know that the sound of the human voice is determined by the shape of the air passageway, including teeth and nose. We know that these shapes vary around the world.

We know that lactose tolerance varies by population, and that this would influence the degree to which milk is used as a staple food.