Arainach

The Pakleds assembled a huge pile of technologies they didn't invent together into a powerful ship and social-engineered the Enterprise into giving them more valuable stuff to exploit.

This is Hacker News, replace "Pakleds" with "startup founder" and so long as it's profitable that's called being brilliant and innovative.

I appreciate this. The full text search is fairly crucial, as while I've seen the entire series more than once I cannot for the life of me remember "the name of the episode where the aliens pretending to be dumb kidnap Geordi", but the search is good enough to get there without being too obvious.

The challenge is not a technical one, and cannot be solved with technology.

The presence of token minorities doesn't change the intention or effect of their policies.

There aren't enough rich people out there for Republicans to win elections based on the votes of people their policies actually help. They use things like racism and transphobia to energize voters among groups they hurt (such as folks relying on medicaid, social security, farm subsidies, clean air and water, etc.)

It's not, as those policies allow those in power and currently benefiting from the status quo to abuse minorities. It's why rights and equal protections have to be codified.

> This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.

And you probably don't live in a dense urban area, or at least a minority-heavy part of one.

I grew up in Michigan. In the suburb where my parents lived, there were 8-10 voting machines for a not-large population and voting was a matter of pulling in, walking inside, casting our ballot, and leaving.

In the college town less than 20 miles away it was a very different story - far fewer machines per person, polling places far away from where students live so they have to find a ride to get there, and more - and this was an intentional tactic to discourage youth voting.

Allocation and staffing of DMV and similar offices where one has to go in order to get an ID are manipulated in the same way.

The Voting Rights Act has been gutted, allowing southern states to gerrymander and reduce the voting power of minorities. Not even hypothetically, Texas did so moments after the Supreme Court gutted the VRA.

States are aggressively attacking minority voting rights through several angles - reducing sites you can vote and hours you can vote at them, especially in minority areas, ID requirements that hurt people who don't own cars and thus don't need Drivers' Licenses (and are essentially a form of poll tax), and many other nefarious tactics.

> 250K trees sounds like a lot, but Finland has like 20B trees, so it would take 3 hours for Finland to grow this back

That's not how math.....or trees.....work.

Community moderator is a stressful thankless job, especially on a subreddit with a reasonable amount of (often political) content, PARTICULARLY on one regularly brigaded by trolls and antagonists from a competing subreddit, so I'm going to cut a lot of slack to the unpaid volunteers who put up with a lot of hate directed at them.

What's to be embarassed? These are busy community moderators, not whitehat hackers. They don't owe anyone a writeup of technical vulnerabilities. They owe the community clear communication of rule changes and most people expect explanation of why rules were changed, and they delivered both.

> I'm not quite sure what caused the decline over 3+ decades

Finance. Everything is a number to be optimized that must constantly grow. The US abandoned antitrust, worker protections, social safety nets, and more in the name of greed.

For workers to care you need to treat them as humans. People care about a team and a family that care about them back.

The mythical story of the person who started in the mailroom and worked their way up is gone. The mailroom, secretary, custodian, and as many roles as possible have been replaced with contractors without benefits or any future in the building they currently work in who will facelessly cycle out in a few months for another contractor.

Employees have been abused too much to believe the lies. If I work twice as hard, my reward is a sub-inflation raise and no realistic hope of promotion. Feedback employees give is ignored, so there's no motivation to push to improve things. The management class has a desperate dream of all people being fungible so they can throw them out and get cheaper ones, and fungible is what you get - if you want a generic interchangeable cog, that's what you get, but don't complain about how the cog doesn't "care enough".

> Why do we use a shovel instead of our hands?

AI is not a shovel. A shovel digs faster than hands, but it is still digging in the ground and cannot unearth anything that wasn't there.

Generative AI tooling creates things that weren't there. It is not deterministic and not compatible with the spirit or rules of creative competition.

It's cheap and reliable with predictable costs. It hasn't caused me any problems in a decade. Most of the websites I want to host don't need cloud anything, they're statically generated.