Are you a natural language processing machine, or has reading too many O'Reilly books dented the part of your brain that allow humans to understand nuance?
Agreed. My point is just that each person tends to favor one or the other.
In truth, it's a false dichotomy for everyone except the super-rich. People could have both low taxes and good social services if they would be willing to tax the super-rich to the same extent that we did so back in, say, 1950.
Did you read the article? They prefer giving small amounts of merit aid to many rich students than large amounts of merit aid to fewer poor students. The result is that, for the same level of merit, the rich get a subsidy and the poor are denied.
His comment was perfectly clear, enjoyable, valuable, relevant, and came with a link to a great article.
The fact that you're insulting him for his valuable and interesting contribution is an outrage. Why don't you go pick on someone else, someone who doesn't contribute, who doesn't post great links, who doesn't have an entertaining style.
Not everyone has to be a robotic autistic technical writer on this casual internet forum.
Posts should be judged by their content and style. Your nerdy hatred toward the colloquial /s tag comes off as dry, dweebish, vindictive pedantry.
I'm aware that you represent the HN Zeitgeist to some extent but that pretty much just exemplifies the problem here. You're engaging in the "automatic middle brow dismissal" that pg has identified as majorly obnoxious.
You think sarcasm tags are "too urban" for HN. How fucking classy of you. /s
The parent's point was that AA has a bad track record for honoring their deals. The linked article was fascinating and shows how, if the contract/promotion/product they owe you is used too much despite not violating any of the terms, they will still go after you.
AA advertised a lifetime of free flight. They made people pay a lot of money for it. The users weren't abusing it. They were operating according to the terms they signed up for and indeed paid top dollar for. Despite not breaking any rules, AA still revoked their access to the service the customers paid for.
The parent's comment totally applies. The subjects in the article were not abusing the system. AA was abusing the system.
>I never learned to skateboard. I can’t dance. I can’t play a musical instrument. I struggle learning foreign languages. I know people who can do those things well.
The reason people need to become programmers is because, while people love to skateboard and dance, that shit don't pay.
Programming gets money. It's the only white collar job that doesn't artificially limit the number of people entering the field--in fact programmers seem to actively support importing foreign workers to compete with them for jobs. That's a new development in history. A group of professionals eager to give a helping hand to low-wage competition.
You're just being pedantic. The thrust of his comment was clear while not perfectly correct. "Fund" is well understood as a euphemism for "control"
It would be ideal if science were "funded" (read: controlled) by the public in the interest of the public good, but in reality it is controlled by the corporatocracy.
Is Goldman Sachs "funded" by the government or is the government "funded" by Goldman Sachs? The best understanding is that the government is a corporate subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, a profit-centre that Goldman Sachs invests in and controls by means of investment, and those investments reap profits.
Technically you could say that GS is funded by taxpayers, but funding implies both investment and control. So it's more accurate to say that GS funds the government, because this makes it clear where the locus of control is. Citizens are indentured servants that pay tribute to GS via taxes. Academics are indentured servants that receive money and position in exchange for their services to the subsidiary of GS called NSF.
Having said that, I think many foundations are genuinely independent of GS control, but they still can't be said to be funded by the public for the public. They are just altruistic private parties as opposed to the megalithic non-altruistic faction that is the corporatocracy.
Those are government entities, and the government's parent company is the corporatocracy that owns all the politicians and media.
Science is a business in the service of global capitalism. Truth hurts.
I will give you the MacArthur foundation and certain other non-profits. But most non-profits are also operated by the corporatocratic elite, like everything else on this planet.