fsociety999's comments

People did talk, but they were silenced and the media did not report on it: http://raylahr.com/ntsb-clears-up-twa-800-conspiracy-theory....

> No fewer than four serious professionals within the investigation made specific allegations of evidence theft or tampering: Linda Kunz and Terrel Stacey of TWA, Jim Speer of TWA and ALPA, and Hank Hughes of the NTSB. Their allegations were taken seriously. Kunz and Speer were suspended from the investigation, Kunz permanently. Stacey was arrested. And Hughes was denounced by the FBI’s Kallstrom for his participation in a “kangaroo court of malcontents,” namely a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing.

Pretty funny to look at this description on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800_conspiracy_theo...

> TWA Flight 800 conspiracy theories are discredited alternative explanations of the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 (TWA 800) in 1996.[1] The NTSB found that the probable cause of the crash of TWA Flight 800 was an explosion of flammable fuel/air vapors in a fuel tank, most likely from a short circuit. Conspiracy theories claim that the crash was due to a U.S. Navy missile test gone awry, a terrorist missile strike, or an on-board bomb.

Now ask yourself, what else is the Government lying about? It will be interesting to see if the truth about 9/11 ever comes out.

I think there is a fine line between a tech company and a financial services company.

Do you think it is okay for a bank to restrict people access to their own money or deny bank accounts because of opinions they hold or things they say?

It’s really easy to make claims like this when you don’t think the rules would ever apply to you. “Oh they are just targeting some fringe site on the internet. That’s perfectly within their rights”.

The precedent is what is dangerous. Imagine a world where if anyone says anything bad about billionaires, they are no longer allowed to use financial services.

I assume you are referring to this article: https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/20/the-growing-menace-of-bi...

Can you point out where it says he knew there would be a pandemic?

Do you think the public deserves to know that Bill Gates and his foundation contributed $789 million to the World Health Organization in 2021 (more than the U.S. Government)?

What you consider “misinformation” today may turn out to be the truth tomorrow. I am not familiar with this site, but do you have examples of the “blatant lies and deliberate misinformation”?

Imagine if in 2001 everyone used your argument to deplatform anyone who said that Iraq did not have WMDs. Imagine if anyone who claimed that the U.S. recruited Nazi scientists to work in the U.S. government after World War II had their funds cut off. Imagine if anyone who suggested that smoking cigarettes was unhealthy or could lead to cancer in the 1940s was banned. There are countless examples of things like this.

Your line of thinking here is very dangerous because the justification to ban or deplatform people you disagree with today will be the same one used to ban people you agree with tomorrow.

The other thing is, as you pointed out, the issue is not black and white. Neither is the classification about what is considered “hate speech” or “misinformation”. Are you comfortable with big tech giants making those decisions?

I agree, but that is not what the study in the linked article shows. It looks like they only looked at people who had previously tested positive for COVID:

> They ran an analysis of the first 509 COVID patients treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and, in a paper published later that year, reported that 42 percent of them experienced neurological symptoms upon contracting COVID, 63 percent upon being hospitalized, and 82 percent over the entire course of the disease.

From what I have seen, this is the same with the other long COVID studies I have seen as well as the other references in this article. Do you have an example of a study that compares long COVID symptoms of people who tested positive compared to people who never had COVID? I would be very interested in reading that.

I do not deny that this exists and is a real symptom. The issue is when you classify regular anxiety and stress as long COVID in addition to actual neurological issues caused by COVID (which multiple studies have done), it inflates the overall numbers and dilutes the seriousness of the brain fog issues. That is also how you end up with long COVID as the “third leading neurological disorder” in the U.S.

I read some of the “Long COVID” studies a while back, and they all included things like anxiety, depression, and mental state weeks or months after testing positive for COVID. Linking this to COVID is an example of bad science. Correlation does not equal causation. People could be experiencing these symptoms for a multitude of reasons including, but not limited to, government mandates, rules, policies, inflation, economic difficulties, isolation, remote work, etc.

Even their comment about the impact of vaccines can be explained in this context:

> The vaccines are certainly helping. Before they became available, about one-third of everyone infected with the virus came down with long COVID, Koralnik says. “There is brand-new data showing that if you’ve been double vaccinated and boosted, then the risk of developing long COVID, if you get COVID, is probably more like 16, 17 percent

If your state of mind and anxiety about things are included as “long COVID” symptoms, it makes sense that the peace of mind offered to people who get vaccinated would put them in a better head space to not experience these symptoms regardless of how effective the vaccines are.

None of this means that it is impossible to have lingering COVID symptoms. Of course that can happen, but that can happen with any disease.

The main difference I see here is that buying up mining hardware actually has limitations and constraints. You have to find enough supply of the hardware, find enough energy to run it, find a location big enough to house it, make sure to keep it up to date, etc.

With PoS, although governments can’t print tokens, it doesn’t really matter. The governments and central banks have unlimited money. They control the money supply. Even if some of the top stakers won’t want to sell, they would still be able to find enough sellers who are. We have already seen how a single tweet from someone like Elon Musk can cause thousands of people to buy or sell. Manipulating the market is easy and doesn’t require permission from the people with the largest stake.

All they would need to do is float a bill that they are planning on making Bitcoin illegal and then after it is on the front page of all the news sites, when everyone is rushing to exit, swoop in and buy up the supply. I think Wall Street has already done this to a large extent. Hence, this is why I believe they are likely the ones behind this push as opposed to the people who will be hurt as a result.

All of that said, I’m willing to keep an open mind and see what happens to Ethereum after its switch to PoS. If I had to guess, I suspect we will begin to see stories of blocked transactions and blocked wallets, etc.

I don’t think they are necessarily the same. People on Wall Street only see crypto as an opportunity to make more money. Switching to proof of stake does nothing to really change that.

On the other hand, at least some people in the crypto industry care more about the other proprieties: anonymous, unconfiscatable, censorship resistant, fixed issuance/supply, free of central bank/government control, etc.

If you are correct, what reason would Wall Street folks have to be against a ban on mining?

If anything all a ban would do is enhance their ability to take control of crypto and make more money since they will be able to simply buy up the network ownership with their virtually unlimited cash. At least with POW, it actually takes some effort to buy up mining hardware, find an energy source, run the software, keep up operations, keep hardware and software up to date, etc. Much simpler to just buy up a stake and do nothing.

What makes you so sure the existing lobby are not the ones pushing for this? Also what makes you so sure that the banking/Wall Street lobby is not larger than the crypto lobby in terms of $$$? I suspect it is much larger. I also suspect they are the ones more ideologically aligned with DC here.

Proof of stake and other “environmentally friendly” consensus algorithms allow a select few to control the network and benefit the most from it which I suspect is the real goal here. The “environmental impact” is just an excuse.

It’s true that a large percentage of Bitcoin is owned by a few people, but at least now the benefit to them is only financial gain. Once you start to allow rich people to validate the blockchain itself, then they can begin to censor and block transactions or wallets from any individuals they deem unworthy or a threat to the powers at be.

We’ve already seen this happen with pretty much every traditional payment provider over the last few years to some extent so it was only a matter of time before they decided to come for Bitcoin.

Their real goal is to cripple and control the Bitcoin network. If they really cared about the environment they would go after energy companies or defense contractors or the banking industry who all use orders of magnitude more energy than Bitcoin miners.

As a sidenote, the executive branch has become much too powerful. They were never supposed to legislate like this. Every president since George W Bush has used extreme executive power, and no one seems to care. We are supposed to have elected representatives to legislate, not a king.

> Migrating from svelte to react, is months if not many man-years.

I’m not sure what your argument is here, but I’m pretty sure you have it backwards.

The fact that it might take a while to migrate a svelte project to react is not because of poor documentation or tooling or communication or anything like that. It’s because so many things work out of the box in svelte, and to do the same things in react would take tons of boilerplate or third party libraries. Some things may not even be possible to port, at least not easily.

This doesn’t show that svelte is bad though. It shows that react lacks functionality and is more difficult to use.

This entire study should never have made it through peer review for this alone:

> The effect of vaccination was not systematically assessed. In total, 144 participants received an mRNA vaccination between the baseline and the follow-up scan. We performed separate analyses for participants with vaccination as well as for participants without vaccination. The results were not different from the findings of the full cohort as presented. The cardiac effects of vaccination require further research.

144 out of 346 total participants is statistically significant, but this number only includes people who received a vaccine dose between the baseline and the follow-up. The study makes no mention of people who received a vaccine dose before the baseline measurement. Since the baseline group covered people who got COVID between April 2020 and October 2021, there is a high likelihood that even more people were vaccinated before they were selected to participate in the study. Therefore, it’s impossible to prove if the cardiac related issues have to do with COVID or the vaccine.

In addition, two of the three authors of this study received speaker fees and grants from Bayer AG who helped develop and manufacture COVID vaccines in Europe.

> It really isn't. This is the usual ignorance of social contagion that we see from free speech purists who can't fathom that spoken ideas can spread and motivate catastrophic outcomes.

Have you considered how many ideas have been spread this same way by sharing tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos? Why haven’t there been big campaigns to ban Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube from the internet?

Do you see how preposterous it sounds? I can understand banning individual people from a forum or taking legal action if what they did could be a crime, but removing an entire forum for the actions of a small percentage of their users is crazy.

> in reality incitement would've been the mere tipping point, in which case the specific duration that the incitement was up for is mostly irrelevant.

It is entirely relevant since that was the main justification Cloudflare provided for de-platforming the site. Your original post suggested that it is unlikely Cloudflare would lie about their motivations.

If the original post was the reason, then why didn’t they take action days ago? Instead they published a piece saying why they would not remove Kiwi Farms. My point is that something must have changed in the last 48 hours that made them change their mind, and I don’t think it is related to “targeted threats escalating”.

That is a fair point. Perhaps that was the wrong classification, but “an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life” is a pretty extreme portrayal of events without any additional evidence/context.

If anything, the fact that it is a common occurrence on the internet is a stronger argument for not de-platforming a forum for what their users post on it.

The Kiwi Farms response claims that post was deleted within minutes, and the fact that someone posted on 4chan referencing a post on another site is a ridiculous reason to ban the other site.

The original justification from Cloudflare for de-platforming them which you quoted in your post was that “targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours”. That is the claim that requires evidence. Citing a post that was removed prior to that time period is not proof that threats have escalated over the last 48 hours. What evidence is there of this claim? Do you have a link you can share to the thread of harassment and hate?

Is there any evidence that it is true other than the word of one person? The Cloudflare post didn’t provide any examples, and it seemed to be news to the Kiwi Farms people as well.

Just a few days ago Cloudflare took a pretty strong stance that they would not take action so for them to flip-flop like this in such a short period of time they must either have received:

- Strong proof that there has been an escalation, and there is an immediate threat to human life.

- Pressure from investors who are worried about the stock price and company’s image

- Their own set of threats against Cloudflare employees for refusing to take action

- Word that a large company who uses their platform was threatening to remove all traffic ($$) from Cloudflare unless they took immediate action

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof so if they can’t provide the proof, it seems far more likely they caved to social/investor pressure.

I hope you see the irony of taking a big tech CEO at their word and criticizing someone else for lacking an imagination when they suggest an alternative.

Crazy, this article was rising on the homepage of hacker news. Got up to number nine when I checked and then all of a sudden, I refresh and it was gone. Demoted to page two. It’s a shame too cause more people need to read this.

I think DALL-E will end up more as a tool to provide inspiration for artists as opposed to one that will replace them. I can see AI working the same way in other mediums in the future (music ideas for musicians, for example).

That is a ridiculous take. If you share a link to an article and Facebook decides to not show it on the feed for other people especially at the direction of the FBI or government, how can you argue in good faith that that is not censorship?

I think in some ways this is even more sinister than what Twitter did by blocking the article completely cause at least on Twitter you were told that you couldn’t retweet or share the link to the article.

On Facebook, anyone who shared it was under the impression that their friends were going to see it, but yet they most likely didn’t.

This is a somewhat misleading headline. Everyone who participated in the study was unvaccinated.

> Eligible participants were personnel of the Swiss Armed Forces (SAF) who were aged 18–30 years with a positive or negative RT-PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 during their service between March 1, 2020, and Dec 31, 2020.

And the control group, if I am reading correctly, was all people who did not have COVID (nothing to do with vaccination status although some of them were vaccinated).

So this means really they were comparing the levels in people who had COVID vs. people who did not. The claim that the difference could be related to the vaccination status of the people in the control group seems to be a bit of a leap.