powertower

When I read these types of articles, there is always an underlining irony present there...

Out of all the diverse groups of people in the prison, only the racist whites (Nazis) would tolerate and give protection to this person - yet this person's entire write-up is predominantly against this same group of people.

A further explanation is provided to the reader that picks up on this: while these Natzi-people must truly hate him, they only truly protect him because there exists an even deeper more-menacing underlining racism within them.

All the other groups, are just fine, nothing more than a structured response to the racism.

While low on details, the story ends with the realization that while white discrimination is an evil unlike any other discrimination, it does allow the strong to find their true roots.

This story would be told quite differently if this person went to prison in a Muslim country.

If you want to be correct, its more like "we've looked at your model and talked to the people that created it, and everyone that worked on it agrees that the debate is being driven by politics rather than science. We've found that emissions of the sun are responsible for 98% of the current climate change, that carbon is the smallest factor in the other 2%, and you are being set up for a global taxation system that is designed to establish control over everyone under a false premise."

The last time this was suggested on the news (CNN, etc), I did some quick math.

To ship gas to Europe, the US will need to spend about 50B-100B+ (minimum) building LNG facilities on both port sides, and then build something like 10,000 LNG Carriers (oceanic ships) to meet demand. Which would cost another 100B+ (maybe even 1T).

After all the infrastructure is set up, the prices will be at least 2-3 what they pay now (as they have to do things to and with the LNG that Russia does not in the process of delivery).

Its not feasible, unless you want the US taxpayers to pick up the bill and then subsidize it.

These were back of the envelope calculations. It could be a factor of 10 off in either direction.

The speculation driven movement of the BTC cannot be compared to the speculation on the USD or any other currency. 0.01% and 50000% are all percentages, but the number is so different as to completely change what we are talking about.

> Speculation is unquestionably a good thing.

Maybe, but usual only if the resulting volatility results in lower price for the consumer, or makes a market.

But then again, BTC has no market for goods nor services compared to the currency it is bought and sold with (its legitimate non-fictional market is so low as to be non-existent).

But they have already solved the engineering problems (at least 10 years ago).

They already have "qbits".

The interface issues look to be 98% solved.

And the temperature cooling, the EM shielding, and everything else (that is outside the circuitry design and the physical chipset), a person with a budget of 80,000 USD can recreated in his garage.

Its the results I can't understand.

Why can't X qbits, in the time they stay coherent, produce results that agree with the mathematical analysis of the setup? Why is it always off by a factor so large that its not even productive for any task.

My understanding of it is not complete, this is why I ask. Is the interface issue only 2% solved (and not 98%), etc.?

I've been following quantum computing since D-Wave made its press release some years back. Now I'm a complete skeptic.

The huge red flag I can't get over is if it is as so, why can no one validate it after all this time?

Why is there the proverbial "it works but not in the way you think it works" (i.e., quantum annealing) or "it works but we can use non-QM systems to simulate it faster, better, cheaper by a factor of a trillion"?

If QM computing was truly feasible (assuming that QM does have an underlining phenomena that is physically real), why are the results after all this time so fuzzy?

That makes sense.

Ironically though, just as another anecdote (and to the best of my knowledge), the very first "fake news" right-wing site who's operator was confronted, ended up being a left-voting liberal who [paraphrasing] "hated conservatives and people on the right, and wanted to spread disinformation to them to pollute their arguments".

But I guess we'll never know, so the best solution is still non-censorship.

> A fake news site owner said conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe and spread fake news. In fact...

Why would you believe what a "fake news" site operator tells you?

When someone says that I cannot discern fake from real, and for my own well being I should be protected from "fake news" (otherwise I'll start to believe that global worming is real / not-real), than I'm being treated like I'm some type of an "idiot", so why hide that word.

> Facebook tried doing this to combat actual fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn't Facebook's problem to deal with.

Assuming we followed the same Facebook story (that intentionally set up boards of people - that were biased - to curtail the news in various ways), it seems like what you are trying to say is that alternative and conservative news is "fakes news", and they should receive algorithmic censorship.

Personally, for myself, the last 10 stories I've seen on "neutral" outlets like CNN and to the left outlets like Washington Post / New York / MSNBC - have been 100 percent driven by agenda rather than facts.

And the only time I'm able to get anything real is when I go to the other side, in which case all I have to do is tone it down 50%, yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth.

So how would you categorize which one of us is the idiot whose sources of news should be curtailed? Because I'm actually fine with you listening to CNN.

Also the giant monolith/megalith structures in Russia are out of this world.

Personally I think some of the footage and pictures of them are more impressive than the pyramids. The size of the blocks compared to a human is just incredible.

You've named all people who could be removed just as easily as they where placed into power.

That is not a dictatorship. I'll provide an example -

Saddam Hussein was a dictator... He had the power/authority, ability, and the will, to kill half the country's population to control the other half. Not that he did it.

Thats a real dictatorship.

Another way to think about this -

Within the Soviet Union, Russia spans 11 time-zones. Just by size alone (and the diversity it provides), the country was too large to have any effective dictatorship over because of all the different regional alliances. And they had constant problems that would never end, to prove it.

Even today, Putin himself has admitted that one of the biggest problems in Russia is that both state organizations and regional authorities will not do what they are told.

> The office of President wasn't created until 1990, and there was only one person to hold that office.

I was being general (and going throughout USSR's history, not just after 1990). There were all kinds of titles and offices and committees, with a central official that the public could see: Chairman, General Secretary, First Secretary, etc.

"President", from the outside perspective [we are not in the Soviet Union], is good enough for the description against the argument that was being made (of a Stalin type "dictatorship").

If you have to nitpick on the word, your argument will never end...

> The dictators (such as they were) were usually the General Secretaries of the Communist Party (including the three that were Premiers). Like most real dictatorships, rather than theoretical ones, there was a lot of power within the upper bureaucracy and shifting practical, if not consistent legal, checks on the power of the leader (particularly, the Politburo was powerful), and like most 20th century and later dictatorshios there was also a lot of political theater behind which the actions of the dictatorship were cloaked to give a veneer of legitimacy.

And after all that said, no one can still name just 1 / like they name Stalin?

The answer is "its an etheric dictatorship that could be this or that or anything I want it to be to for the arguments sake"?

> Communism is broader than Marxism; as well as things like anarchocommunism, it also includes Leninism, which while it claims to be Marxism rejects several key components of Marxism.

Which is all similar to the various radioactive Plutonium isotopes. None of which you are going to want to ingest. Because if you do, its only a matter of time before you die.