marstomorrow's comments

> they did the exact same thing at the exact same time.

They did not do the "exact same thing" at all. You are spreading lies using logical fallacies and that causes harm to the community here; please stop. Your false equivalence, presented without evidence, is harmful.

That is a false equivalence. You are spreading lies by equating two very different things.

> Cambridge Analytica was not the 1st time this was done.

is not supported by the link you supplied. If you want to equate the two, then go ahead and do it, but you'll need much better sources than that.

CA/Trump is very different from what Obama's campaign did.

> This assumes that targeted ads are truly effective for changing politics

No it doesn't. "Targeted ads" had very little to do with the CA/Facebook scandal and I see them as largely irrelevant in what happened. So I don't see that assumption present in the top comment at all.

A significant amount of the "noopolitics" done with this kind of data is done through peer-based evidence - "regular" accounts posting political things, with "regular" accounts responding, but where both accounts are false personas, spies if you will.

The 'targeted ads' line is a misleading spin. Very little was done with targeted ads and a lot more was done with impersonating Americans and posing as GOP officials, etc.

> Crying about this or that opinion being published,

I have absolutely never once in my life seen someone cry over an opinion being published. I have, however, seen hundreds of people complain about others 'crying', or 'literally shaking' but I have never seen it once happen and I have been looking. I honestly think such people do not exist. Can you cite any? This is surely not the cultural phenomenon you make it out to be.

> Plus, the "children in cages" has been going on since forever one way or another.

Something happening in the past does not make it okay to happen today. Are you suggesting that nobody should protest children being put in cages, simply because it has happened before? I don't understand. Since it has happened before, and it's awful, and it's happening again right now, don't you think we should stand up and stay that it should be stopped?

> Even the Wall is nothing new, there has been a wall, beatings, and killings at the border well before Trump.

Again, just because something isn't new doesn't have any bearing on it being bad or not. In fact I think it emphasizes how important these issues are. They persist and we must fight against them fully.

> Now it's just fashionable to speak against it (because Trump), whereas under Obama 2 million could be deported and it was OK (and it didn't involve as many children imprisoned, so late night talk shows didn't feel the need to cover it)

What are you talking about? Putting children in cages, family removals, etc of legal immigrants is completely different from deportations of illegal immigrants.

Are you suggesting nobody should speak out against these atrocities or try to avoid them happening in the first place, simply because they have happened before? I don't get it.

> There are "children in cages" all over Europe, in camps for immigrants (where they're not allowed to leave)

That sounds awful. Everyone should be protesting this everywhere. Everyone should aim to avoid the circumstances that allow this to happen: chief among them is trolling.

> I do know however that people that had those things happen to them in real-time history and in their full horror, were much more resilient, courageous, and could even shrug them off.

This is wildly untrue and outrageously offensive. Do you really think this? What evidence do you have for this? Today's youth are experiencing their own valid forms of discrimination, hate and violence fed by trolls and you are no judge of their pain. And why are you doing this whataboutism with the past anyway? What do you have to gain from saying lambasting those who suffer and whom with you share so little you can surely hardly understand their circumstance?

> The touchy feely, safe-space demanding people today, who get discouraged or hysterical for 1/1000th the offense done to them,

Who are these people? Do they really exist? I think you have made up, invented an enemy towards which you are directing these statements.

> are a regression and an insult to those people (whose actual sacrifices and efforts gave the rights to the snowflakes of today).

How on earth? Everyone I know today who cares to improve society is trying to avoid the atrocities of the past. Positing that reasonable discourse, backed by facts and logic, with an avoidance of 'trolling' and bad-faith acting, is a direct attempt to reduce the suffering and pain of the future so that we can avoid such horrible things from the past from happening again.

Your callous dismissal of today's youth looking to improve the world by reducing the spread of hatred and violence is exactly the kind of thing that enabled such horrid violence in the past.

We can see history rhyming. We can see the genocides being committed around the world, fed and enabled by trolls, and we are trying to stop it from happening. We are trying to slow down the intentional suffering hoist upon minorities today by reducing the online vitriol and hatred that creates such physical horror.

> A decade ago, when I was a senior in high school, “Jimmy,” a jilted ex-patient of my dad’s, began stalking our family. Over a period of months, verbal harassment escalated to threats of violence and we soon found ourselves accompanied by police escorts for the better part of a week

> ....

> In Jimmy’s case, though, I simply cannot fathom how Instagram made this connection, despite quite a bit of legwork on my part to do so. He is not (and has never been) in my contacts, nor, after searching my email accounts, have I ever typed his name or even been forwarded an email about him. The more elaborate explanations I’ve entertained are nakedly conspiratorial, and so I’ve written Jimmy’s case off as a mystery that will remain unsolved, like a ship sunk in deepest waters.

The author described in sufficiently meticulous detail that Jimmy's location and presence felt through verbal harassment etc were frequently in close proximity to the author's entire family. I can think of at least a dozen clearly non-conspiratorial ways that Instagram has made the connection.

I think the author is living in the same bubble that much of the Internet is in: that the tech companies don't care to track us in the 'real world' and that most of it is still done with tracking pixels or smart-advertisements.

Instagram/Facebook openly use location and photographs to identify subjects and track them. This is no secret. If there is any remote possibility of a person having been anywhere near you for the last 10 years it should be assumed Instagram / Facebook already know about it. Any assumption less than that sounds conspiratorial to me ("don't worry nobody cares to watch you" etc).

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I have come across this in some friends. It's super interesting but also dangerous. It has taken me sometimes years or a decade to fully come to terms with some past debates. My friends would seemingly hold opinions and cling to them dearly, opinions I felt were so unconscionable I could not imagine holding them. Friendships were strained and maybe some lost. They tell me now that they were doing as you do, and that they did not hold those opinions but were merely testing them and practicing debating, learning about both sides, etc.

But I wonder about the unintended consequences of this. How many 'opinions' are out there in the world purely to cause pain? What portion of opinions that are shared on social media or the news actual opinions from those people, vs crafted statements of trolling themselves?

When you take the 'other side' for practice, is there really a valid [1] other side to take? I find often that the other side is based on logical fallacies and is not, at its base, a valid argument. I wonder if you are creating distance between you and others while you test out the opinions of propagandists? How valid [1 again] really are all these opinions?

[1] Okay here we go with this. I am indeed calling some opinions "invalid". What I mean is, I do not think it is a valid opinion to cause harm to minorities on purpose. I think this is cruel and amounts to a crime in our society. But you will find people advocating it loudly on social media and TV - and their arguments are based on treating humans cruelly for no reason other than the cruelty and other various logical fallacies.

If you are to take stances that you don't agree with, please check them logically first before putting those arguments out there in the world. Some things are better understood without trying to understand 'the other side', simply because it is not going to be based in logic and has no possible outcome of being 'understood'.

What possible reason would you have for personally believing that SpaceX is not cash-flow positive, when the exec teams says that it is, if you are not reading conspiracy theories? Where are these ideas coming from then? We have real legal facts here. Real people in charge of the real company saying real numbers to us, but you're not going to believe them? I'm just not sure how else to talk about this stuff. When the exec team is a proven group of people with a solid track record and a recent history of accomplishing goals, meeting expectations and producing record-breaking technology and revenues - and they tell us facts about being profitable - it's definitely a conspiracy theory to state that they are secretly not profitable.

SpaceX is profitable.

> But considering the state of things in less developed countries, I assume space born Wifi is not the top priority. But hey, if investors are buying into I won't complain.

Reliable and fast access to information improves quality of life, even in places with other problems. Much of the USA is like a developing nation itself, with population-scale problems of getting access to clean water and having basic food security. But still, reliable network access can also improve both of those things too - the internet is backbone infrastructure just like the water pipes, and is needed for a developing country - or a developed one - to grow economically.

> I assume space born Wifi is not the top priority.

Countries, organizations, investors, businesses can all work on more than one thing at once. Something need not be 'top priority' for it to be worthy of investment and continuing to do at break-neck pace.

> my cash and profitability remark concerned their operative launch business excl. NASA dev contracts and the like

Do you mean that you are excluding a primary revenue source from their finances in your calculations? I just don't get it.

I searched for this for the last 5 minutes but couldn't find any info about it online. Do you have any links or citations? I think it is false info.

Edit: Based on the info I was able to find, it looks like this is indeed false information and not true at all.

I can find no evidence that SpaceX is having trouble raising money or that their recent raises have gone poorly. No evidence. But I can find a lot of people explaining why these numbers are incorrect and why it is false to say that SpaceX is having trouble raising money. A lot. Here are a few.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/bem0lr/spacex_only_...

> So it is again a long term gamble to maybe make one day a load of money.

No, that's not what this is. The comment above you said nothing about this anyway, it seems to be off-topic? The entire point of this launch is to reduce the risk, assess potential problems early, and find paying customers quickly to prove the market demand before and their ability to handle it, before scaling up and launching more.

> So again one of Elon Musks enterprises is promising a long term success story.

There is no way to make the world better without trying to do it. And that takes time. Why would you have a problem with someone trying to make the world better on a long-term scale? And also, nobody is promising anything, especially as SpaceX is not a public company and has no public investors.

> Before they get there they have how many satellites to build and launch?

Like, 60? And just this launch? I believe they intend to be revenue-generating from this very first network launch? This isn't some long-term gamble, they are testing the market quickly for acceptance of their tech and business model.

> Before space link is profitable and cash positive all that cost has to off set by profit and positive cash flow

It's called Starlink. And, okay..?

> Personally I doubt that SpaceX is cash positive and profitable

Oh. You are directly stating that the CFO, CEO and President of SpaceX are liars? If that is your position I don't think much that I say will ever change your understanding of this. You are mired in conspiracy theories and not listening to the facts in the world.

> With more fiber being laid every day, increasing wireless deployments, and technologies like AirGig in the horizon, is Starlink launching into a shrinking market?

What you are describing sounds like a rapidly expanding market, not a shrinking market, though, right?

> Further, as SpaceX is having trouble raising the needed funds, is this launch simply a fundraising exercise?

What do you mean? SpaceX is not having trouble raising their needed funds. Do you have a citation for that? This is the first I'd be hearing of it and would be surprised. Also, needed for what? Are you referring to Mars colonization?

> is this launch simply a fundraising exercise?

This also doesn't make any sense. This launch is a groundbreaking event that begins a 12,000 satellite network deployment. This is a very cost-intensive thing and not exactly a 'fund raising exercise'; it's intended to provide early service to internet customers.

This is very neat, and the last paragraph is indeed very heavy-hitting. It's always hard to read that some of our societies greatest present-day problems are so many thousands of years old.

However, I think this definition is narrow and only encapsulates part of the modern definition of 'trolling'. Today, 'trolling' is used as a weapon of war, not only in debate with other individual people. Trolling is as much a mechanism of creating emotional trauma among a large population as it is a mechanism for 'debating' in bad faith.

Modern trolls will post violent content, often based on lies, in order to get an emotional rise out of a population. This is a large-scale effect that wastes huge amounts of people's time and energy, as they 'debate' with these soldiers of war whose task at hand is to create unnecessary emotional pain and waste the time of their enemy.

Yes, trolling is also happening on a more individual 'debate' level still, but narrowing our notion of trolling down to these ancient definitions is doing a major disservice to our modern understanding of how language is used in debate.

Oh my I'm sure glad you can't pass such a dictatorial law [1]. By directly charging people for using a safety mechanism that they bought with their car, you are incentivizing people to reduce the physical safety of others around them.

You really want that average American, with less than $400 in savings, to think twice about honking and potentially saving someone's life by warning them of danger? It's not even about actually saving $5, it's about the length of time it takes to think about it. Even if you decide not to save the $5 and go for it, honk! you may have delayed so long that someone is now dead that could have been saved.

> If you really need to honk, you'll happily pay $5 for the ability.

This is very definitely not true and an incredible danger to society. Please reconsider the unintended consequences of charging poor people to maintain other people's physical safety on the roads and sidewalks.

[1] And I think this is a wonderful example of why all dictatorships are bad, especially those run by people who think they know all the solutions already.

Elon's stated goal re: astronauts and training is that the technology should be sufficiently simplified to let anyone go up with minimal training. The idea of a heavily-trained astronaut is old, and the new thinking is that the people going to space should be able to spend their time up their doing whatever it is they are good at - even if just vacationing - rather than learning how to fly spacecraft etc.

I know this is a Jeff Bezos / Blue Origin article, but I would fully expect the same to be true here. Jeff has stated multiple times that he sees millions of people moving to space stations for work and general life. Earth should be left void of manufacturing and mining and things, which could be moved to space (and asteroids, etc) leaving Earth to be more of a natural environment for life to thrive.