useragent86

> Apparently Mark Twain never said it.

The advice has been written and uttered in various forms for millennia.

> If the quote stated "If you are ignorant on a topic it's better not to discuss it" that would be advise. (Though less quippy).

Your quote would be different advice; it doesn't have the same meaning nor implications.

> But I read the quote as essentially saying: "You are so incredibly stupid you should never, ever attempt to speak to another human being ever again, on any conceivable subject".

How many of your personal experiences are you reading into a context-free aphorism of the ages? Friendly suggestion: you may be making this same mistake when interpreting words in other situations.

Friendly, pedantic, hopefully helpful reminder:

> - ideally, the backup process on the home server side should not be more difficult than a cron job running "rsync -avz --delete /mnt/raid user@server:/mnt/storage"

A mirror is not the same thing as a backup.

> IMHO, space is big + satellites are hard to track, if they're highly-maneuverable or designed to be stealthy = possibility of launching untracked microsatellites that couple with space assets and wait for activation

From what I've read, I understand it to be more of the opposite: there's nothing to hide behind in space, and NORAD and NASA track nearly every piece of debris in orbit, not to mention satellites. So it would be hard for an adversary to do anything like that sneakily, even if there might not be any countermeasures (unclassified ones, anyway). I'm no expert, of course.

> There is a very distinct strain of American thought that says freedom means the biggest or richest get whatever they want.

Where did you get this idea? How do you reconcile it with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights?

I like serif fonts, but on page 31 of that document, "List of Design Recommendations," it says: "Sans-serif fonts are usually more legible than fonts with serifs."

Of course, you're right.

At the same time, we may ask why American society seems to be more ideologically polarized now than at various times in recent decades. If the root cause is natural human failing, what is the second-level cause? Could it be that American society has been under a form of ideological siege and sabotage for many years, that is now coming to fruition?

For example, it's documented that, as far back as the early 20th century, the USSR funded programs to demoralize American society through means as seemingly innocuous as making public art and architecture uglier. As well, Marcuse's "long march through the institutions" has now had 50 years to take effect, and polls have shown that American academia is much less ideologically diverse than in past decades, now being nearly entirely formed of those who vote for one party.

There are elements of history that seem like weather, coming and going in cycles, but there are also parties taking active roles to effect certain ends, and we would be wise to be aware of their influence.

Here's what should be an obvious one: any time I see communism criticized, the comment gets downvoted, and often flagged. Even comments written by people who lived in communist states, offering first-hand accounts, without breaking any HN guidelines, get downvoted and flagged.

In the same threads, "conservatives" and "conservatism" and Republicans and "liberty" are freely condemned, mocked, and accused of all sorts of evil behaviors and intent, without even being downvoted, much less flagged.

This happens regularly, any time these topics come up in a popular thread. So it's hard for me to understand how you could be unaware of this de facto community bias.

Thomas Ptacek and Don Hopkins are two examples of very high-profile users who routinely post guidelines-breaking comments without being downvoted, flagged, or chastised by mods.

Even if you were to concede that, you'd probably counter that you can't read all the comments. And, of course, that is so. But that is beside the point that I have made many times before: the community's bias allows such users (and those who espouse certain views) to break the guidelines without penalty, while heavily penalizing others and those with contrary views.

Every time I see you tell someone that moderator bias is an illusion, I can't help but think that you are talking past each other, because the elephant in the room (which I have rarely seen you even acknowledge) is the extreme bias in the community's downvoting and flagging behavior, which naturally results in the official moderation actions being biased toward what is flagged, which amounts to a de facto official moderation bias. (If a community only calls the police when certain groups of people break the law, the police's actions will naturally be biased toward enforcing against those groups of people, because they aren't omniscient.)

> It's awfully hard not to see this as the commenter just taking this as a stalking horse to bring up an opinion they already held.

Isn't this what happens on every HN thread, people expressing opinions relevant to the topic? Or is it only forbidden when criticizing descendants of the Frankfurt School?

No, your premise is flawed. You jump to the conclusion that he made that claim based on a single data point. Just because he illustrated his point with one example does not mean his point is based on one example.

In any case, this is not a statistical argument, and your comment adds nothing but noise to the discussion.

> What are you talking about? Where did I make an end of the world prediction? It is you who brought that up. Of course nothing is going to end. Nice strawman.

What do you think I refer to by "end of the world"? Don't you think I refer to this part of your comment?

> I look at that data and I think to myself, in a few decades we will have problems, many indirectly from more and more troubled nations who will bear the brunt of the climate change, that that silly little piece of software I write seems meaningless if I start thinking about the bigger picture.

Don't you think that I refer to the numerous comments seen on HN whenever this topic comes up, from people saying that they're expecting massive global upheaval in a few years, that they're not having children because they think society will collapse?

> You even try to bring COVID into the discussion?

Do you not see a parallel between the way the media has stirred panic about global warming^W^Wclimate change^Wcrisis for decades, and the way the media has stirred panic about COVID for the last two years?

> What are you doing, and why?

I would ask you the same.