ihsw2's comments

How do you differentiate between genuine grassroots opposition and astroturfing campaigns?

Lying by omission and plausible deniability are hallmarks of pernicious and subversive agents.

> In order for device manufacturers to get the Play Store on their phone, they have to give in to Google's demands to add the Google search box on the home screen of the phones.

What's wrong with this? The Play Store is subsidized by search revenue, it makes sense to tie them together.

Activists in general should always expect to be treated harshly.

How would you feel if insurers prodded overweight people to exercise and eat better, or else their rates go up or coverage cut altogether?

How would you feel if insurers prodded lazy people to engage in healthier lifestyles?

Empowering insurers could be useful in this regard.

There's nothing wrong with having a geographic bias in skepticism, Nigeria is not a historical source of innovation.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, if anything it elevates this boy's achievements even more and puts his talents in the realm of once-in-a-thousand-generations.

"Creating capital" isn't an evil thing -- when provided a free and frictionless economic market to roam, made aware of such opportunities to fully realize their ambitions, and inspired to achieve their wildest dreams, people will surprise you.

We -- you, myself, anybody reading this -- aren't just "creating capital," we are fulfilling our life's ambitions. It just so happens that the free market is the best environment to explore and drive towards something better than what 90% of the other comments are complaining about (reductio ad absurdum lives of complacency.)

Creating capital isn't the end to a means, it is a means to an end.

It is for domestic consumption, and much like Japan it is generally being held domestically. They are indebting themselves to themselves tremendously and (as is in the case of Japan) it's not necessarily a bad thing.

The story looks similar too, which is why the CPC is shifting to encouraging demographic growth (including strongly incentivizing young professionals to form families.)

Using per person GDP when discussing China is a cruel joke. Like most usages of per person GDP in any country, it glosses over regional disparities and (more importantly) economic equality measures like Gini coefficient.

Taking Gini coefficient into consideration, China still has a long way to go.

How does one reconcile this with jaded cynicism of "regulations for thee but not for me"?

Furthermore, does this regulation target the hardware products themselves, the software performing the recognition, the biometric data itself, the transfer of this biometric data, aggregate ("anonymized") biometric data, the processing of biometric data? There is a lot to talk about here.

Progressive supremacism is a far more accurate term, denoting the outright hostility towards even tacit opposition or signs of hesitation.

Those uncivilized societies were rightfully left to the dustbin of history -- they embody the nihilism I am referring to.

One is that empathy and self-control are the internal enforcers of the civilizing process. A lack of one or both is the sign of an uncivilized society or individual.

Another is that parents' authority over children is sacred, as well as the bonds of marriage and friendship.

There are absolute rules that we should adhere to, to imply that they are a social construction is to embrace nihilism and anarchy.

There is a set of universal standards and expectations have existed for millennia in many forms. There has always been an implicit set of common rules -- common across all cultures and generations -- that we as a species live by. Implying that everything is a social construction mental laziness and a desecration of our fore-bearers at best and malicious destruction of the bonds of society at worst.

A problem that Apple faces too -- any product proposal that doesn't derive 10-20% profits out of the gate is derided as a non-starter, so product development becomes stagnant.

Do you believe the US is in a state of civil war?

There is a difference between exercising your freedom of speech and the social justice warrior crusading that the parent commenter is advocating.

Nobody is above criticism, that much is certain, but we shouldn't cross the River Styx into a world where random acts of violence is the preferred method of political expression.

I'm not sure of an exact name for that but what you're describing can be considered the theory of marginal productivity[1].

Your argument that the 10% cost in labor (to hire those 100 extra workers) is where the additional cost ends is a common logical fallacy -- those 100 extra workers will not be operating at 100% efficiency from the get-go. They will need to be trained and there will be a ramp-up period, and up until then they will likely have a negative return on investment.

What this means is that the value derived from these new employees will be net-negative for a period of time. One could say that ~10-30% of that $6M in new labor costs for the next 12 months will not be recovered.

Your theoretical scenario could result in:

* current employees departing (taking institutional knowledge with them, decreasing the efficiency of your organization)

* current employees using their hours at work helping ramp up their new co-workers (decreasing the efficiency of your organization)

* new employees taking on tasks they're not yet trained for (decreasing the efficiency of your organization)

Furthermore, some new employees will not stick around for multiple reasons (eg: family events like a spouse moving to another city, being unqualified but passing the interview process, etc), and therefore the significant investment in them will be gone for good.

Now, that said, is it better to give everybody a 10%? Of course not, but only because everybody is not equal. Raises should be handed out based on competence-based metrics (be it qualitative reports from co-workers and managers or self-reported quantitative data pertaining to their individual impact). Real bottom-line pushers would even qualify for 20% raises.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_revenue_productivity_...

> There's been progress on that front with several Trump administration officials confronted while dining for example.

Normalizing the harassment of elected officials is dangerous and it puts us on a direct path towards politically-motivated random acts of violence.

That's not how language works. Words and terms have meaning, you can't just make stuff up and say "languages evolve/everything is subjective/use whatever phrase you want whenever you want."