StopTheWorld

In July 1992 five MoD members were charged with hacking, and they were basically defunct as an active hacking group after that. LoD was mostly defunct even before that, although the movie used the Mentor's manifesto. New York LoD members, or those affiliated with them, had been busted in July 1987. So yes, a lot of the 1995 movie was covering stuff that had happened from the 1980s up until mid-1992. When the movie was released, some of the MoD members were on probation and not allowed to associate with one another until probation ended. The busts, trials, prison terms, and probations were all happening around the time the movie was being written, filmed and released.

The writer of Hackers, Rafael Moreu, went to New York 2600 meetings and talked to various members of MoD (a hacker group which had a book written about them by a local New York reporter, Joshua Quittner, who later worked for Wired and then Time/Pathfinder if anyone remembers that).

The names and handles of the movie reflect this - Cereal Killer, Plague, Joey, Razor - all handles of local New York people. Phreak in a sense too. Some of the kids went to Stuyvesant high school, where scenes were filmed. The kid getting raided in his shower happened locally. The plant worker almost getting shot by a flare gun held by people trashing happened locally. As did other things.

Some other national things made it in, like the Hacker's manifesto written by an LoD member.

Some things were invented for the movie. There was no attractive 19 year old Angelina Jolie type hacking along with the boys as shown in the movie. These guys were not rollerblading through Manhattan together. There was no Cyberdelia nightclub everyone hung out at, although some of the guys might have gone together once in a while to the nightclubs popular at the time (The Tunnel /Limelight / Palladium / Club USA / Webster Hall).

Should point out this is not the first time the BLS came under serious fire, politically. When the Republicans regained control of the Senate in 1995, they set up a commission (Boskin commission) that said inflation had been overstated, and henceforth cut Social Security cost of living adjustments.

In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was won by Tu Youyou.

During the Vietnamese resistance war, Vietnamese moving down the Ho Chi Minh rail were contracting malaria in the jungle. The Chinese were asked for aid, and Tu Youyou was tasked with assembling a team to help.

One thing Tu Youyou did was consult "traditional Chinese medicine" with how to aid victims of malaria. Most of what she found did not work, but wormwood did produce results. Tu Youyou again consulted traditional Chinese medicinal texts and they said wormwood should be used with cold water. The team extracted artemisinin from the wormwood in cold water, and a new (and old) way of fighting malaria was born.

Can't forget his appearance at the beginning of the classic hacker movie, WarGames.

> flipping quantum coins...Newsflash: neurons and digital computers both have to play by the universe's stubbornly deterministic rules

I don't really understand what this means - you obviously know at the smallest level things happen by random probability - because you mention the quantum world - but then you say the universe is deterministic.

> Hunter gatherer tribes

Hunter gatherer bands. There's no evidence of any tribes 20,000 years ago.

> Unless you are arguing semantics, yes there were. Tribes and tribal violence.

There is no evidence of any tribes existing 47,000 years ago. Insofar as tribes, and tribal violence, the OP mentioned them, which is wrong in that time frame, semantics or not.

> What kind of world do you live in that has denied you access to evidence of early human existence?

I didn't say humans didn't exist 20,000 years ago, I said there was no tribal violence. There's no evidence the Jaburara were organized as a tribe 40,000 years ago, although later on that may have happened.

> What about simple tribal violence?

Is there any evidence of any tribes whatsoever existing over 20,000 years ago? All the evidence points against it.

There was no tribal violence 47,000 years ago because there were no tribes!

That is a statistic on one chart on that. For only those who are 65 and up, total spending of the top 1% drops to 17%. In the charts posted, from the ages of 19 to 44, the amount spent on women is much larger than on men (not sure why - obstetricians?)

Then of course, some people get cancer and some do not. With a normal age distribution of 18 year olds and up, it isn't surprising to me that very little is spent on the 18 to 30 year old men, and that one of the 65 and over got cancer and a lot of spending went toward that.

I worked with a guy who went to a public university - not a top 25 public university but in the ballpark. He was hard-working, smart and "got it", but he wasn't at the level of some super-geniuses I met coming out of school. He worked with us (Fortune 100, non-FAANG, non-tech, non-big metro) as a junior SWE for a year and did not get promoted as he desired. He jumped ship for a FAANG-adjacent company after a year working for us, and his TC jumped from <$100k to over $200k. Two years later he was promoted to senior and his TC is now over $300k.

He is smart but not a genius. He kind of knows what is going on though, he "gets it". Probably even more motivated than smart, but not insanely motivated. Motivated enough to learn how to get features done at a brisk pace, take ownership of his team's work, and to study for interviews. Didn't go to a top tier CS program, didn't come out of FAANG or FAANG adjacent, and probably took a detour working for us, but three years later his TC is over $300k. He also had the luck to jump ship before the FAANG layoffs of late 2022.

There is a push, which has been around for decades, to measure how effective teaching is for a school system taking in taxpayer dollars. This is measured via standardized tests. The tests are generally passed via testing and repetition. Often this becomes the metric for measuring teacher, principal, superintendent performance and school funding. So these authorities begin having the students memorize, do repetition and testing - and testing not to guide a student's progress, but to reward or punish them. The school authorities have the students due this to pass the standardized tests, at the behest of those who have authority over the school authorities and want measurement.

So then the question is, is this the best way to learn in general? You can read studies of education including John Dewey's from over a century ago to see that it is not. The purpose of the education system is not to educate, but to do this thing described in the first paragraph. Nowadays the public schools are contending with charter schools, vouchers and the like, so there's a more injection of profit, religious fundamentalism and the like in the educational taxes people pay than there was a few decades ago.

Madoff took in other people's money. The Medallion Fund stopped taking new outside money in 1993, and in 2005 it got rid of all outside money. The people making (or potentially losing) money are the people making the trades.

Right. The current world population growth rate is about where it was at the time of World War II, and that growth rate was the highest it had been in about 8000 years. The baby boom in the 1950s and 1960s was a world-wide phenomena, and we are not at that peak now, but world population is currently growing faster than it did from 4000 BC to 1940.

Some countries, like in the Baltics, are seeing population decline, but human population is still growing fairly quickly.