spaceseaman

This definitely seems like a good place for either regulation or unionization.

Unionization would likely be difficult though due to the low barrier of entry for the job - artificial barriers would have to be created by the union and those break down pretty easily due to human factors (see Walmart).

I'm all for regulation in this case. Require that folks who review content for illegal posts be limited in the amount of content they review in a weekday, must have certain benefits like mental health counseling, and get some vacation / sabbatical from the work.

Risks might be reduced innovation in the field, but the big boys like Facebook and Google have already found excellent ways to snuff out their competition within the existing market.

The scenario at hand in the OP, where a cop murders a completely innocent man through mistake. I agree that a ban on guns would likely solve the problem in the video that you posted.

My point was that your video seemed out of place since the actual issue is that cops in the U.S. are held to a different standard for murder. If cops were held to the same standard, then they could be held accountable for their crimes and some of the public outrage would be alleviated.

If (for the sake of argument) the amount of guns in this country were significantly decreased via a ban and the police still held to a different standard, police would still be able to kill an innocent person out of fear for their life. Racial biases could also cause a cop to be more fearful in a situation and still kill an innocent person without consequence.

I also think that changing how police are prosecuted for crimes is much easier than repealing the second amendment in the U.S. (although both would face fierce opposition).

Does anyone have a link to how to go about generating an image like this?

Did the writer hand make the individual polygons or generate it from an image of themselves?

> does he lose all his rights?

You've just created a pure strawman. Cops should never lose their rights! I am not making such an argument, and I don't see how you got there from my points. I would never argue such a claim.

The cases I'm talking about are not self-defense. They are like the story above. If A murders B, and A is a cop, then A should go to jail regardless of the fear A had in that situation. But this is not what happens in the United States. Cops don't go to jail for shooting perfectly innocent people because the cop can claim they were afraid for their life and thought that B had a gun.

If I'm a civilian, that defense doesn't fly. But if you're a cop, then it does work. That is a flaw in our justice system that needs to be corrected because a perfectly innocent man can be killed by the state and no repercussions are felt.

The state should never be able to kill an innocent man. If they are shooting at you, they aren't innocent. But if you think they have a gun (especially in an open-carry state like Kansas or Texas) then they are innocent and should not be killed.

EDIT: I am saddened by the downvotes. Does the state have the right to kill innocent people if those people own a gun? Doesn't the second amendment protect against this? I simply do not see the legitimate argument for allowing such behavior. This just seems like rabid tribalism for police.

I have a real hard time caring about cops' fears in such a scenario. Innocent until proven guilty is a time-honored maxim of the U.S. justice system, and a cop deciding to kill you completely invalidates that.

Is being a cop scary? Hell yeah and I feel bad for those folks, but if you don't want to constantly be in fear of your life, get another job.

Put cops who murder innocent civilians in jail. End of story. This shouldn't even be a debate in the U.S.

EDIT: Since I had the goal posts moved on me, I want to make it explicitly clear that a cop should be allowed to kill in self-defense, just like any other lawful citizen.

> the phenomenon is rather that HN readers with strong ideological feelings tend to see the site as dominated by, and the mods in cahoots with, their ideological enemies.

I agree, but I don't think that's why this is a popular piece. Such a post would not resonate as well on NeoGAF or ResetERA or even Reddit, but the political leanings of this site propelled this to the front page. There's more to it than just seeing the mods as being in cahoots with enemies. It's the ideology that any moderation is inherently untrustworthy and that the power must be constantly kept 'in check'.

You can find endless examples of folks who feel they are pariahs. I still think that Hacker News has a severe idealogical bend, just like any online community. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that bend matches the mindset of many programmers - techno-libertarianism.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that the moderators have some idealogical bias - I've never come across that. Simply that certain trains of thought are very popular here, and the notion of "free speech" being impeded by aggressive moderation is something that has been rehashed on this site time and time again.

I realize you may have taken issue with my comment because I said "site-runners" in my claim of an ideology. I realize that this was poor word-choice, as I actually meant the YC, not Hacker News - they got conflated in my mind and I apologize for the mistake.

The statement assumes that one considers the poetic qualities as significant as marketability - not useful. You seem to have misunderstood the creators' intentions as they have no interest in providing you a "practical demonstration" or anything practical at all.

Art has little direct use - Michelangelo's David has very little practical value, yet it's significance is immense.

The creators of this project do not care for the practical value of any of this. They wish to experiment in the hope that some poetic qualities of their work will be deemed significant enough to carry on into new works (some of which may actually be useful).

I was not attempting to convince anyone. The above poster claimed that safe spaces were meant to "prolong the coddling" of childhood, yet this directly contradicts the history of creation and specified intention of safe spaces. There is no opinion and thus no "counter-view" to be had about what led to their creation and their creators' intentions as those are facts.

Now one is free to have the opinion that safe spaces stifle discussion, or prevent ideas from being addressed or some other such things - those are all opinions and all views that can have their nuances. But safe spaces were never created to prolong some sense of childhood comfort or safety - like I said, that idea is just a popular meme of the alt-right.

Pretty much.

The counter-argument goes that people "should know" and be responsible with their money, but I'm not a fan of that argument. It relies on people being perfectly rational actors that they just aren't.

I'm personally in favor of instituting regulation for these things. Even if it is just purely from the "we have to protect the children" angle - children are arguably the main market for these strategies after all.

Just look up the EA Star Wars Battlefront 2 stuff. It's a big old mess. You pay money for crates which randomly drop items that improve the game experience.

Some people consider it gambling because you are preying on the same tendencies in people for your own gain. People also don't get any real value for their "gambling". Other people say this makes it not gambling, etc. That's a very simple oversimplification of the subject - there's a lot of articles out there about it right now.

I do not consider Nazi ideology an opinion. Their ideas are purely based on maintaining a power dynamic. There's no logic or legitimacy to their ideas, and thus they are not opinions. They change the ideology as needed to maintain power and promote their own strength.

For a historical viewpoint, simply look at how often the German Nazi party would change what classifies as being a Jew or "undesirable". It was only ever about putting fear into people and maintaining control. They had no real opinions on why these people were undesirable - those could be made up after the fact.

If Nazism was an opinion, I would be willing to defend it. But it's not, and it thrives when it's given the legitimacy as such.

EDIT: To try and tie this back to the topic at hand, are blatant lies still "opinions"? What about death threats and hate speech? My point is simply that we already make distinctions about what kind of speech is free, so I feel that Facebook instituting policies that align with these existing rules makes sense - even though I feel that they are becoming too large to be the de-facto source for information on the Internet.