Readit NewsBut you're welcome, I guess. At least one of us did.
More name-calling. You still haven't addressed my initial question yet. I'll rephrase it again for you: How do you enforce norms without a dominant culture? Do we even need norms at all?
The fact that the teenager got defensive is indicative of his understanding of societal expectations and norms. Bending and pushing against norms is what teenagers do, and have done since the dawn of time, regardless of their cultural background and regardless of whether they're navigating the norms of a dominant monoculture or those of a multicultural society.
Your question assumes there was some breakdown that needs fixing, but the only 'problem' was mild inconvenience. When did that become evidence of cultural collapse requiring homogeneity to solve?
You still haven't explained why 'teenager won't use headphones' made you think 'multiculturalism is a problem.' For all you know, this story involved two white Christian Scots from the same cultural background. I'll gladly discuss theories about norm enforcement with you once you've explained why you deemed it necessary to inject race and culture into a story that mentioned neither.
I'm not going to entertain your 'just asking questions' routine until you do.
A dominant culture means a step back from individualist values. The most effective 'policies' are created through communities not through law. We cannot rely only on the law for a healthy society; it is necessary but not sufficient.
Rebelling against cultural norms is not the problem. The problem is when people escalate quickly because of it and threaten others. That means the gaps between cultures/subcultures have gotten too big.
But I see we've pivoted from "multiculturalism bad" to pseudo-intellectual theorizing about collective cultural conformity. Very smooth. Different packaging, still trying to sell the same product, though.
> The problem is when people escalate quickly because of it and threaten others.
Guy asked teenager to use headphones, teenager got defensive, guy put in earplugs. That's... literally de-escalation and conflict avoidance. Are we reading the same anecdote?
You've managed to escalate "rude teenager won't use headphones" into a lament about the decline of Western civilization and the need for cultural homogeneity. It's almost impressive how much ideological weight you're hanging on one kid's refusal to wear headphones.
Rephrased for you: If there is no dominant culture, how do you resolve conflicts like that?
I don't remember bringing up race. Another interesting leap.
But please do elaborate on what sort of 'dominant culture' you're longing for and what sort of policies you'd love to see to (re-)establish that 'dominant culture' to resolve the incredibly new phenomenon of teenagers being rude and rebelling against social norms.
Come on, don't be a coward and just drop the dogwhistling. You're bad at it.
How can you do effective conflict resolution in a society where someone reads an anecdote about a rude teenager and immediately assumes the problem is multiculturalism?
Payment processors have effectively become unelected censorship boards with the power to strangle entire categories of legal content by threatening to cut off the economic infrastructure that platforms depend on. The fact that a single advocacy campaign can pressure Visa/Mastercard/PayPal into forcing platforms to remove legal adult content should concern anyone who values free expression online.
The fundamental issue isn't whether you personally approve of adult games or specific content - it's that a handful of payment companies now wield veto power over what legal content can exist in the digital economy. This represents a massive concentration of censorial authority in the hands of unaccountable corporate entities that face no meaningful democratic oversight.
We've seen this pattern repeatedly: PayPal blocking VPN providers over "piracy concerns," Visa suspending payments to adult sites, and now this coordinated pressure campaign. Each time, legal content gets effectively banned not through legislation or courts, but through corporate policy decisions made behind closed doors.
By inserting themselves as moral arbiters for the digital economy and free expression on the internet, these processors are creating a very strong case for being designated as common carriers or being subjected to much stricter public utility regulation. When payment infrastructure becomes as essential as electricity or telephone service for participating in the digital economy, treating these companies as neutral utilities rather than editorial boards becomes not just reasonable but necessary.
At a minimum Replit is responsible for overstating the capabilities and reliability of their models. The entire industry is lowkey responsible for this, in fact.
Your point about AI industry overselling is fair and probably contributes to incidents like this. The whole industry has been pretty reckless about setting realistic expectations around what these tools can and can't do safely.
Though I'd argue that a venture capitalist who invests in software startups should have enough domain knowledge to see through the marketing hype and understand that "AI coding assistant" doesn't mean "production-ready autonomous developer."
The fact that an AI coding assistant could "delete our production database without permission" suggests there were no meaningful guardrails, access controls, or approval workflows in place. That's not an AI problem - that's just staggering negligence and incompetence.
Replit has nothing to apologize for, just like the CEO of Stihl doesn't need to address every instance of an incompetent user cutting their own arm off with one of their chainsaws.
Edit:
> The incident unfolded during a 12-day "vibe coding" experiment by Jason Lemkin, an investor in software startups.
We're in a bubble.
The "0.02% of your genome" framing is fundamentally misleading. Those ~640,000 SNPs aren't randomly scattered junk - they're specifically selected markers that correlate strongly with ancestry, health predispositions, pharmacogenomic responses, and familial relationships. The intelligence value isn't in raw percentage coverage but in what can be inferred from those curated data points. And you can infer an awful lot from these targeted markers.
The comparison to browsing history or social media activity is pathetically cavalier. We're talking about immutable biological data that:
- Links you to family members who never consented to participate
- Allows inference about relatives' genetic predispositions based on your data alone
- Has unknown future applications as genomic analysis capabilities advance
- Cannot be changed, deleted from your actual biology, or "opted out of" once the implications are understood
This is exactly the kind of expert blind spot that leads to catastrophic privacy failures decades down the line.
You've kicked this entire thread off with an incredibly telling non sequitur: teenager won't use headphones -> multiculturalism bad. When called out on that leap, you pivoted to abstract questions about norm enforcement while ignoring that the norms actually worked fine in this situation.
You're not interested in debate. You're interested in getting someone to validate your predetermined conclusion about the necessity of a cultural hegemony. Having to acknowledge that norm enforcement wasn't actually broken here is pretty inconvenient for that narrative, isn't it?
Still waiting for you to explain that original leap, but we both know you won't. Because you can't without exposing yourself further. Good day. Thanks for playing.