firstlink

[Spoiler warning]

> it's not clear until the very end whether the character is going through increasing levels of paranoia, or dealing with an adversary

Er, which one do you think it resolved as? Your phrasing suggests you went from doubt to believing the narrator is reliable and sane. I was and am convinced in his reliability; yet, he fell for a painfully obvious ploy by the adversary, which is not terribly consistent with superintelligence. Nevertheless I understand the story to be, in-universe, reliable, but from outside, intentionally following narrative tropes consistent with mental illness. Other tropes include "there's something in the jab", "CIA is after me", "I have become the renfield of a hidden adversary".

So there's a lot of evidence for the opposite interpretation, that the protagonist is simply ill the whole time. This interpretation has the distinct advantage that falling for the attack was truly a flaw on the part of the protagonist (qua confabulator, I suppose) rather than the narrative or the author. In fact I can't really say why I don't adopt this as my preferred interpretation; perhaps a bias for my original interpretation, or skill on Chiang's part in convincing the reader of the less plausible explanation through, what, sheer sympathy?

It looks like there are no provisions for double or treble damages. Look no farther for the reason airlines deny automatically.

> The folks objecting to this don't make much sense to me. The injunction forbids the gov't from doing the things that the plaintiff complains about. If the gov't isn't currently misbehaving, then the injunction is a No-Op: the government's claimed current state of doing nothing wrong will just continue as is (putatively) already is.

The argument being pushed is "The government didn't do those things and it's a good thing that it did." Makes perfect sense to me, in the correct context about the ideology of those pushing it.

> but are frugal

That is a potentially grave mistake to make. They are in no way frugal (the very concept of being frugal with an unlimited faucet of "other people's money" is truly ridiculous). If they forbear to go to trial and/or appeal adverse rulings, it is only because they strongly prefer never to suffer adverse precedent. They would rather lose the same case a thousand times, than have precedent which restores the rights of ten thousand all at once, let alone 300 million. In a way it's quite the opposite of frugality.

Indeed, PV targets will now be able to record themselves physically assaulting PV agents!

Analogous sui generis weaknesses in human cognition are the far greater threat.

Preventing such stripping as a website operator would be trivial. Just sign the combined URL and tracking parameters and refuse to serve the unauthenticated version. This is very well understood technology with a barely novel application.

(Please cite this comment as prior art!)

Primary sources are anathema to mainstream media. It's not just political articles, it's the whole damn profession. If you can watch ten seconds of him bowling you don't need to spend ten minutes on the article.

It's telling that not a single reply to your comment actually engages with the question about poor smart white kids. The answer is simple: poor white kids are the outgroup, and "mainstream" American society would like them to kindly go away. They aren't wanted. Society has no use for them.