Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
No one is saying this is a genocide at the "hands of the Jews". Jews are not a monoculture, and while there are Jewish people involved in this genocide, this is clearly at the hands of the current state of Israel (and more specifically at the hands of the IDF).

Conflicts have rules, and Israel could absolutely have a conflict with Hamas (whom, it should be noted, I do not support) without eradicating the civilian population in Gaza.

There are plenty of military conflicts around the world. And arguably many war crimes committed by all parties. What the IDF is doing in Gaza is uniquely terrible, absolutely targets civilians, and much of the violence and harm perpetrated is wholly unrelated to defeating Hamas.

Comment · 1 year ago
> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon.

Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.

Comment · 1 year ago
Curious, what makes that not safe for work? It's a discussion about a handgun manufacturing error, and the manufacturer's failure to respond adequately to it.
Comment · 1 year ago
> many of Americas regions are effectively uncivilized

I suppose America does have a lot of undeveloped land and national parks that are left wild, but I don't see how that could ...

> ... the real number of Africans incarcerated in the USA would be even far higher

... Ohhhh you are just racist. Got it. Take that somewhere else.

Comment · 1 year ago
Because English language news sources aren't particularly interested in developing the relationships necessary to report on Chinese scientific breakthroughs. It undermines the prevailing media narrative that China is behind and backwater.

Americans don't like the idea that maybe China is actually rocketing past them technologically and infrastructurally, so news doesn't really report on it much.

Comment · 1 year ago
Just out of curiosity, what do you think an ion is?
Comment · 1 year ago
You are describing people misusing the expression "Dog Whistle" and then saying that's the definition.

It's fine to say people overuse the term, or apply it incorrectly, but like, the definition is unambiguous here.

Comment · 1 year ago
That's not what "dog whistles" are, lol. Dog Whistle means "coded language" basically.

Dog whistles are where someone says something that their audience will understand to mean a specific thing, but will be inaudible or neutral sounding to people who are not in their audience. They are named that because they are like the whistles only dogs can hear, while most people cannot.

"Inner city" is a canonical example of a dog whistle. Where the literal meaning is the districts in a city in the urban center, but is often used to denote poor minority communities. (If the literal meaning is only "city centers", then would you describe Manhattanites as inner city?)

On the left, "tax the rich" might be a dog whistle that carries a similar literal meaning disjoint from the understood meaning within the community.

Comment · 1 year ago
> I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR.

I can generate 1,000 PRs today against an open source project using AI. I think you do care, you are only thinking about the happy path where someone uses a little AI to draft a well constructed PR.

There's a lot ways AI can be used to quickly overwhelm a project maintainer.

Comment · 1 year ago
China is expected to have hit peak coal consumption this year, and within 25 years it might not be burned as a base generation fuel any more. The trend line there is clearly renewable energy (particularly solar) taking over. The US is moving much slower.

I expect that countries that invest heavily in solar or nuclear like China will have a huge advantage in 20 years, when energy availability enables industries like steel production, datacenters, ammonia production, transportation, and water desalinization to essentially become cheaper and cheaper as more and more solar gets built.

Comment · 1 year ago
Would reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reverse current problems? On it's own, it would start to, yes. It would reduce global temperatures, reduce weather irregularities, begin to cool the globe back down.

But we'd then have to move on to other things like deforestation, overfishing, water conflicts, plastics, etc. It's not a panacea, but it would reverse course on a pretty significant root cause.

Comment · 1 year ago
That's needlessly complex. It's means testing for CO2. Means testing is a huge waste of effort, imo.

If the US, Europe, Russia, India, and China stop burning fossil fuels, we'll be well on our way. I'm not really worried about whether Ecuador is burning fossil fuels right now, it cannot be a meaningful amount of output compared to those 5.

Comment · 1 year ago
Stop burning fossil fuels, build infrastructure to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Extract the minimum number of fossil fuels necessary to serve non-fuel uses.

The solution is not easy. But it is known.

Comment · 1 year ago
It has nothing to do with "white guilt" or fetishism. It's not a race thing at all.

It's a "my nation recently and currently systematically exploited people. I would like my nation to try to make those people whole" thing. It happens to be the case that many targets of exploitation were non-white, but the concern is the exploitation not the race of the exploited. We systematically exploited plenty of poor white people too, we should make them whole too.

Redlining in my city "ended" officially in 1968, but in practice it was probably another two decades before it really was removed from standard operation. And in my city, plenty of white people were considered undesirable and redlined. I guarantee you there are people directly impacted by this policy who are still alive, this isn't some far away past long since forgotten by time.

As an example, the city should be considering whether reduced interest rate loans, subsidized housing, rent freezes, or other benefits can be passed on to families directly impacted by redlining policies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Just because it's been 40 years doesn't mean the city should just give up trying to make people whole.

Comment · 1 year ago
That's not a generalization. That's a totally separate argument. Making someone whole for the loss of a phone does not require you to provide them housing (which is significantly more valuable than the phone was.) It probably means returning the phone -- and if you gained some money from the use of that phone, perhaps some portion of that as well.

Taking that example back to colonialism, it means probably returning stolen wealth and some portion of capital earned on the back of that stolen wealth.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton