trgv's comments

I don't know why you think that. I think the safest assumption is that being dead will be exactly like not being born.

I don't think it was ridiculous to begin with (neither was "terrorism") but it's ridiculous now.

I would define "fake news" as news published by people who know what they're publishing is false. My feeling is that either there were more of those kinds of articles floating around this past election or they were more visible.

You might just call it clickbait, but "fake news" didn't seem like an inapt descriptor until it started being applied to everything someone disagrees with.

He did win, in 1998. Even if he hadn't, he's dead now, so he wouldn't be eligible.

Long term thinking is not useful when long term means "5 billion years".

Lots of places have multiple names. Especially in the Arab world, I would expect many places to have a "formal name" that might appear on a government map but that differs from how locals refer to it.

I'm alo not sure if the purpose of intelligence agencies is to collect the names of landmarks either. And speaking as someone who works with maps, it wouldn't surprise me at all if various agencies used severely outdated maps. In fact, I'd be shocked if they were efficient about that kind of thing.

If you find yourself typing something about "the type of programmers attracted to X language" just delete what you wrote and move on.

JavaScript isn't going anywhere. End-users don't care about executing "non optimal code."

> Weak social connections have health effects similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day

Uh huh

Calling it "live" seems just slightly inaccurate to me. Every time code needs to run an http request needs to be made. (Unless there's some new tech here I'm unaware of)

This is a limitation that may make no difference in some cases, but in others it is important for code to execute in the client.

A good example of this is making a visualization that seamlessly responds to the user's mouse pointer.

For those interested in this stuff, or the "we will preserve your body and resurrect you in some date in the future" technology, I recommend a Don Delillo novel from a couple years ago, title is Zero K.

Each employee should act according to their conscience, not according to your conscience.

Your perspective reminds me of a Chris Rock joke: "How come it's only unemployed people who tell you to quit something?" The point being: it's really easy to tell someone to quit their excellent, fulfilling job over some moral outrage that you perceive.

Finally, while I understand this is an unpopular opinion around here, I believe the tech community's focus on privacy is overwrought. We should expect to be tracked on the internet. If you're doing something that you don't want to be tracked, there are numerous tools to avoid tracking. Making those tools cheap and accessible seems like a worthy cause to me. Fighting for overly broad legislation like this seems like a waste of time.

The difference is that - in theory anyway - all of the balls are the same.

I agree with you generally...the uproar over twitter bots and fake news stories has struck me as a little silly.

At the same time, some Russian activities seem to have risen to the level of espionage. According to the article, Russian agents traveled around the US, posing as Americans, gathering information. The article also says that Russian agents organized and funded political rallies.

Making a big deal over that stuff is hypocritical given US actions abroad over the past hundred years, but that's a separate issue. Maybe the US shouldn't be interfering in the elections of other countries, but every country probably has rules like these: https://www.fec.gov/updates/foreign-nationals/ and every country seeks to minimize foreign influence on internal politics.

I don't think we should passively accept aging or death, but I'm not sure if life extension is underfunded, or how you would even demonstrate that.

Many different areas of research, such as cancer research, could fit under the umbrella of "life extension."

I feel like you missed my point. I'm not saying this is good or that it should continue.

I'm saying that, in the context of the world as it exists today, if I am the mayor of Boston, it will benefit my city to offer Amazon tax breaks to entice them to build there.

I agree with you that these kinds of transactions are regrettable and they leave a bad taste in my mouth. At the same time, you haven't convinced me that local governments are making a bad decision by playing this game.

I think perspective is key here. From a broad economic perspective, Amazon is going to build this thing somewhere, and so these kinds of trade-offs seem pointless. Economists likely object because the whole thing is economically inefficient from a broad (national) perspective.

But from the perspective of a local government, that may not be the case. A local government is concerned about the local economy more than the national economy, and so offering these perks makes sense.

Again, I agree that the whole thing is regrettable, and that it probably hurts the economy as a whole. I wish Amazon didn't play these games. But I also think it's worth pushing back against the idea that these local governments are clueless idiots. They may very well be making a good decision from their narrow perspective, and the city that Amazon chooses may very well see a net increase in tax revenue.

Of course it's not quite that simple. People using phones at a concert affects everyone's experience. This is a godsend for some of us. It absolutely detracts from my experience in theaters, concerts, shows, etc when everyone has a phone out.

My feeling is that this is a valid choice for artists to make, and if you disagree then avoid shows where this is the policy.

I imagine there are "people diagnosed with clinically depression" who could cure their depression by exercising and/or changing their life in some way.

However, I know a couple people who do not fall into that bucket. Both of these people suffer bouts of totally debilitating depression. They are both respected within their communities, smart, successful, and have full lives. Both of them get a lot of exercise, both are extremely fit and have been their whole lives.

In my opinion, the way to look at this kind of depression is as a chemical imbalance. Theorizing that there's some missing piece in their lives seems ridiculous to me. And yes, antidepressants work.

These days it is often assumed that if you don't mention this kind of thing then you are tacitly endorsing it. I don't buy into that, but I don't mind playing along.

> That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

This is vintage Mencken. My favorite is his obituary for William Jennings Bryan: http://history.msu.edu/hst203/files/2011/02/Mencken-In-Memor...

In my opinion, Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon is a direct descendant of that work: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...

I suppose, with Mencken, you should make reference to his racism (not to mention his strange views on Mathematics). I see him as a memorable writer. You can be a good writer and hold ignorant, offensive views.

My opinion is that killing and subjugating people is wrong, regardless of your motivation for doing so, unless your motivation is to stop people from killing and subjugating other people.

In general, I'm not comfortable speculating about various groups' motivation for mass killing and subjugation and then ranking those instances of mass murder based on the purity of their supposed motivation. That entire exercise seems incredibly silly to me.

I think it's easier to talk about motivation when we're discussing crimes committed by individuals, but even then, I think it's something courts should do less of.