hi-im-mi-ih's comments

From the link:

  Mike Pence once supported the use of federal funding to treat people "seeking to change their sexual behavior."

That seems like a great thing to fund. Looks like our current vice president seems interested in helping those who seek help.

I know you don't understand me but I'm basically saying that there is a religion that espouses responsibility, that has ancient relevance to the human race.

Then there is atheism which basically means follow nothing, do what you wish, which might mean that you're a great person nonetheless.

Oh my god dude... it's simple, you believe in responsibility or you do not believe in it.

Situation is bad, what to do? Work to change it. Criticism without means to enact improvements is meaningless. Then let these weak men suffer and wither. Harder working men will prevail

Well the problem is that you think you somehow know how to adjust the status quo correctly in order to properly set up your nation for the rest of the 21st century. But the reality is that you have no idea, probably because you're a programmer, but also because you have not borne up the responsibility of acquiring deep knowledge of policy, government, social science and everything else required to make those calls. You say we need broad structural improvements - and what are those, exactly? And how are they going to provide a utopia to us that is better than the one we currently have, where most people can work their way into a mid to high paying career and raise their families in almost complete safety for decades and decades to come?

The truth is that it's easy to say something needs improvement, but it's not easy to take the 10 years studying the problem to deeply understand the solution, and even a partial understanding of possible workable solutions is something neither of us have, because we're spending our week nights wasting time in one way or another instead of paying sharp, _sharp_ attention to the studies and data collected now and in the past to broaden and deepen our insights.

Also you mention that my advice boils down to "shut up and get a job" which is really fantastic advice for most people, because even getting a job carrying 2x4s up scaffolding all day would be so damn tough and tiring that you'd come out of it healthier, persistent, and basically a terminator capable of any hard, physical labour. A good skill! And that skill carries with it an appreciation of the physically gentle computer work we all do, thus making your future tech career more enjoyable.

I think I've made a pretty good counter argument here but feel free to rebuke it.

Sure it has merit to say that, generally speaking, Christianity espouses responsibility and atheism does not. Where are the tracts of Atheist values and dogma that carry a deep message of responsibility? Point me to _any_ symbolic representation of central atheist values - There is nothing. To be atheist is to be not associated with any belief system, and without any coherence among atheists, I can't say anything about atheists in general, but I certainly cannot say that they all think the world has a deep meaning that they're directly involved in.

So basically you're saying that as an atheist I have no idea what you're up to... Right, because you're not up to _anything_ that other atheists are up to. You're a heterogeneous mix of feelings and ideas that are mostly based in Western values but are held together loosely. I can look at a devout Christian and know that he's guided by his faith to taking up hard tasks and completing them diligently as part of his commitment to his faith.

I'll venture a guess: We've been talking about rights for so long, as a nation, that we forgot to discuss responsibility.

The major media and political narratives are focusing on the rights of women, the rights of trans folks, the rights of minorities, and the rights of immigrants. They are all well and good, but we should equally talk about the responsibility of our well-represented young white males to bear up under some responsibility and push themselves to improve their country. Responsibility to provide and protect is a very masculine idea, and if we fed ourselves an equal diet of responsibility as we do rights & freedoms, the young men of today might be a lot more energetic and engaged.

I also venture that it has something to do with the sharp rise in atheism. Christianity espouses responsibility. Carry your cross and accept suffering without malice. Atheism says that the world is meaningless, we were created from entropy. One of those belief systems might work better for getting young guys out of the house!

You're also not interested in debating your opinions, which is your right but also frustrating.

The point of the list is to reduce the best human behavior into a small cheat sheet. It's like boilerplate that includes all the important functions.

The complexity of the environment created by and occupied by human experiences is infinite. There are infinite scenarios that humans find themselves in, and there are infinite positive responses to those scenarios. You can take any positive human response to a given scenario and "disprove" the response's positive outcome by changing something about the scenario. But once you do that, you introduce other positive responses that could taken instead.

The principles boil down it into 25 patterns of human behavior that tend to result in success for the individual and his/her greater community. The list is an optimum solution: lowest number of characters for the highest amount of good outcome if followed. When confronting the complexity of existence, a set of guidelines is useful to refer to.

However, anyone that consults a list of principles when their family is in danger is likely not smart enough to comprehend the list anyways, so it does not apply to them.

Well, I could argue that people are waiting to tell you the principles of their behavior, but you've yet to ask. If people look serious in a coffee shop, it's acceptable to ask them why they look serious. Perhaps the commandments could guide you through the process of extracting and understanding a person's motivations in their own words.

The commandments are meant to help you improve your own behavior. As you improve your own behavior, people will confide more information about themselves in you, and your understanding of what makes people tick will grow. You'll have more intuition about how someone will react to a given scenario. Use the principles to improve your own attitude and behavior so that others pass information to you more easily.

The implementation of this comes down to your clear communication (through both word and body language) that you embody the 25 commandments to everyone you meet. They will receive such a person with great pleasure. As you communicate with them, they'll freely dispense their motivations and dreams to you for study.

Sorry Dang. I'll try to not do this in the future, as it does make HN a worse place for everyone.

Hmm, I have not considered how they're retrieving driving data. I'm sure they're getting that data back somehow. It's a lot of data to waste.

You make some great points here. However, isn't 27 vehicles small potatoes? Tesla has almost 500,000 cars on the road and it also has 5 billion miles driven. That's a lot of training data. The approach to self-driving cars is largely training a model, so the data from 27 cars is actually extremely underwhelming.

I don't think that angry Twitter comments are a sure sign of impending nuclear war. We'll become wary when there are border skirmishes and killing of diplomats.

You're absolutely insane if you think we should abandon capitalism. It is about the only social system that does not result in the state killing hundreds of millions of it's own. The ideologies that you profess here are incredibly dangerous.

Being poor is not a sacrifice. Being poor is a condition in the terms of your life. A sacrifice is being frugal, being diligent, and working hard at self-improvement - Do all poor people do that consistently, as a quality of being poor?

Of course not; being poor is a condition, it is not a sacrifice. It holds no merit as a condition. You cannot use your lack of capital as a bargaining chip at the table. It is not a sign of your deserving more money. If you work hard and do something good for me, that I am willing to pay for, then you deserve money.

Capitalism is altruistic. It functions when people do good, valuable things for each other and establish trust that payment will be provided for that value. It has nothing to do with your status as poor.

You need to refute the central point of my argument, not provide a counterexample as you have done.

This is Marxism at it finest: boil the complex reality of the wealth generation and the economic productivity of the super rich into a seductive narrative about oppression using a ratio that you actually wrote incorrectly:

  Harder than 99% of the other population? Lol.

If you punish the most productive members of a society and redistribute wealth in any way that adheres to the oppression narrative, there will be absolutely disastrous consequences. This is because your perception how wealth is distributed is flawed - It is not the tyranny of the 1% that creates their wealth, it is their sacrifice. Remember, they only get rich if they sell something that is cheap to huge numbers of desiring consumers (a very difficult endeavor), or if they provide a useful service to large-scale businesses (a similarly difficult exercise). Both of those are good activities to have performed by intelligent, hard working individuals, because they provide a unique and often impossible-to-duplicate value to their customers that truly enrich their lives.

How far we have fallen. We've got a long way to go

Do you have an argument against women being hypergamous, or are you just going to be derisive in every comment?