Why is a news article about a 44 year old drug on Hacker News?
As far as I can tell this isn't about tech, tech policy, a new medication, a new discovery about an old medication, science, etc. Seems like its just fodder for a political debate that is unrelated to this site.
Instead of politicizing HN, why don't you just toot this to your echo chamber on Mastodon?
There's nothing preventing us from the law requiring the same for online verification. It doesn't have to be the case that Facebook or Twitter or whatever store any information other than at some point they did verify your age.
As to the other information, you're more making the case that online tracking should be illegal (which I'd agree with). For the majority of people, they are either unaware or uninformed about how to prevent online tracking to a sufficient degree. If you're signed into your Google and Facebook accounts and then surfing the web, theres a good chance you're getting caught up in cross site tracking. Hell, even if you don't have accounts explicitly, its not like Facebook isn't tracking non-users. In the real world, stalking is illegal.
Also, in my state (Washington), IDs now have barcodes on them. When I buy beer at the store, the clerk doesn't even look at my ID; he/she scans it and thats it. I'd hope the information about what type of beer and how often I buy it isn't being stored somewhere but I'm just hoping.
I think this again comes back to the idea of thinking of it as some sort of digital town square.
We don't seem to have an issue with the government requiring businesses to check ID for alcohol, tobacco, porn (in the physical world), and firearms. Movie theaters check ID for rated R movies if you appear to be under 17. In fact, a lot of online retailers of alcohol and tobacco now require ID to be verified at purchase instead of at delivery.
Facebook/Twitter/TikTok/etc are not the digital town square; the most charitable analogy for them is they they are merchants in the town square. And the rules should still apply to them.
My point is not that they NEVER existed, its that they no longer exist in the capacity most people mean when they use the term. As you mentioned, cities used to be organized around them. Most people now live in cities that are either don't have one at all or don't have one that is used in the way they were hundreds of years ago.
Furthermore, the behavior that was tolerated in the town square would not be close to what we tolerate online. And we don't afford kids the freedom in the real world that we do online. I am not sure why people think that requiring parental consent or age verification online is some sort of assault on personal liberty.
If actual politics reflected sentiment on the internet, US politics would look very different. The Overton window on the internet is very different from real life, there is tremendous bot traffic from outside the US, there are people with multiple accounts, and algorithms and "trust and safety" rules that promote certain views above others. You are confusing signal and noise. The majority of politics - that matter - is not discussed online, the majority of new ideas are not shared/accepted/rejected online - even in a business sense most founders know their cofounders personally, not from online chats. Case rested.
You idea of the town square is also outdated. Do you think the municipal government in Rome still meets at the Forum? And you did not address my point that even if it did exist as it did in whatever millennium you yearn for, would the behavior that is present on the internet be tolerated the same way? Was the Forum or Copley or Dock square known for adult men showing their genitalia to underage women? Your idea of a town square is antiquated and likely would not have tolerated the behavior you think the internet should just because its the town square. Case rested.
> The rest of your post sounds like moral panic.
Nice rebuttal there. If it's just moral panic, why does the data suggest that social media use its detrimental to adolescents' mental health and well being? Why is the effort to curtail social media influence on kids' a bipartisan effort in an increasingly partisan society? Even the misguided level of libertarianism you're probably advocating for understands that short of pure anarchy, there are some externalities governments have to address, chief among them are social media platforms that are evidently harmful to certain parts of society (young kids). Case rested.
This has become such a common trope that I think people fail to apply even a modicum of scrutiny: the internet is not the town square and whatever your idea of the town square is likely wrong if you think its as wild-west-y as the internet is.
Firstly, try to approach children in the town square while wearing a mask for anonymity; or try to hold up images of porn in your town square. You will not be there long, you'd likely be detained, and you'd likely be asked for identification.
Secondly, why do people think there is some sort of town square? I have lived in several large US cities and several small towns. In neither was there any sort of common place where we all congregated to address matters of the town. At best, there are city hall/city council meetings where the public can speak but at least in my town (and I know of many others), identification is required to prove that you live in the town!
Even the founding fathers, when writing under pseudonyms, understood that anonymity and circulation was incumbent upon them to maintain, not that they were entitled to it because "town square."
To address your last point: this is not simply some ill conceived moral panic/think of the children type moment. Go try to host - as an adult - an AA meeting or "computer meetup" with children that happens to be held in the local adult toy shop. See how well that goes for you. At this point, we know children are getting approached by adults at a large scale on instagram, we know children are getting exposed to a lot of adult content on twitter, and on the spectrum between innocent HOA meeting and damaging to society as a whole, its clearly more towards the latter.
Yeah, a decent litmus test is if you sign into a service from a new device and without much effort all your chats/messages/history or whatever is there, the security is weak.
I got off WhatsApp years ago so I am not sure what's changed but back then if you signed on from any random browser, it was able to sync everything instantly and you'd see all your messages. This was after they claimed that it was E2E encrypted. What was explained to me at the time was that you share your encryption key with Facebook and hence the syncing.
Again, this is a bad analogy. Having a driver's license isn't linked to adverse health effects.
I am not sure why people always go down these weird avenues to try to justify their convictions. If what you believe you think is right (presumably why you believe it) then you should be able to argue your position on the merits rather than trying to sneak in why your position is correct by relating it to something more anodyne as justification.
The original argument was that the vaccine was like walking around a city and we don't educate people on the adverse side effects or risks of walking around a city. This is bad because people can choose to live in cities or not - whether or not you'll have the same employment prospects or whatever, you do not have to participate in city life. Now you're trying to make the argument that we put restrictions on society based on holding some sort of identification. I'm willing to bet society would look at those restrictions differently if the mere act of getting an driver's license carried the risk of cardiovascular complications (as alleged by this report).
Restrictions on society based on having identification =/= restrictions on society based on your covid vaccination status.
Presumably, you believe the benefits of the vaccine greatly outweigh any risks, so why are you opposed to people being explained the risk before they get the vaccine? If you believe that the benefits outweigh the risks, why are you incapable of arguing that position? Why make a contrived argument that its like getting a drivers license or walking around a city when its patently not?
False equivalency. I am not required to "walk in the city" to participate in society or the economy.
Sure, we can educate everyone on the risk of walking around the city as long as we don't require long haul truck drivers to walk around the city in order to later do their job.
Having lived in all 3 of those cities, I, too, am amazed it hasn't reached that state yet either.
What's worse is that at some point a lot of the restaurants that have made the current iteration of those cities what they are will not be able to weather the economic storm their own cities are putting upon them. Their voters will vote to increase wages arbitrarily, add on fees, regulations, taxes, etc. And then when their pad thai or poke bowl costs $27 for pickup or $38 delivered, they'll just stop patronizing that restaurant - whether out of financial necessity or some misplaced feeling that they are now getting ripped off from the price hike - until it goes out of business. I can't count the times I've heard "<insert restaurant/brewery/coffee shop> is just not worth it anymore." The bigger chains will be able to take the losses until they can absorb the entire market.
There will always be 3 Starbucks and a McDonalds in Times Square.
have seen increased profit and profit margins over the last year as well as huge increases in their stock prices. Not sure how you don't find that relevant in a discussion about income inequality but I also don't find anything else you said very compelling.
This isn't a thought experiment you have to run, there is actual data. All things considered VC's and high salaries for workers willing to take on risk has generally been good for SF. Look at other areas with similar politics and no VC funding and you don't see restaurant workers thriving. Portland's inequality has gotten worse and the livability for service workers has gone down even though its not a major benefactor of VC funding or ZIRP. If you removed all VC funding from SF, a lot of those restaurant jobs disappear. Tech workers making a middle class living off of investment money shouldn't be demonized. SF leadership and housing policy is your issue.
Correlation doesn't equal causation. Having lived in SF during that period, there was a lot of governmental policy that contributed to that rise in homelessness. Saw the same thing in Oregon: homelessness increased when housing prices increased but there was also measure 110 which decriminalized all drugs. SF's similarly lax policies probably have more to do with their homeless issue than their housing prices. If it were purely housing prices, these people would just move to somewhere cheaper. And before you say, they can't move, they surely could move into Oregon when meth became de facto legal.
For a lot of addicts, the criminal justice system is their only chance at substance abuse help (mostly because they won't seek it on their own on the outside as we've seen in Oregon).
You forgot the part where a lot of these big companies are still making buckets of cash and now those buckets are distributed amongst fewer people within the company further straining inequality, especially considering investors are generally rewarding companies for their reductions in force.
10,000 software developers losing their jobs in SF or Palo Alto are not going to make either of those areas affordable. Facebook's stock increasing in value 175% in 1 year is likely going to push some engineers into home buying compensation territory and the ones that can will start bidding wars for houses.
I'm not actually taking too much of a side here but its interesting how you view the ZIRP and VC industry as drivers of inequality as if VCs throwing enough money at startups so that some late 20s/early 30s person can make 180k/yr (plus some largely valueless equity) is the real problem. If anything VCs have made capital accessible to a class of people that would have otherwise been kept out of the party. During downturns and high interest rate periods, incumbents and bigger companies do well as they can weather the storm and buy up more of the market at a discount.
Even if you could drive up the interest rates to the point that these "generous endowments from VCs" and large companies cease to exist, the restaurant worker in SF won't start thriving. VC funding subsidized a lot of people's lifestyles in SF including the restaurant worker. There is not a substitute for building more housing.
Not saying it’s the case here but a lot of times congress asks these questions as leading questions or to give viewers the full context of follow up questions (or more likely for easy clips).
A hypothetical back and forward might be something like:
“How does Facebook make money?”
“By selling ads.”
“Does Facebook ever target those ads to kids?”
“Yes”
“So is it in facebook’s financial interest for kids to spend as much time as possible on the platform?”
I’m going to do you a favor here and be more honest than most will, please understand it’s coming from a place of good intention and trying to help you get a job: your LinkedIn reads like a crock of sh*t.
- Your tag line claims you’re an ML expert but you say you have 7 years of work experience and your LinkedIn doesn’t have any educational experience. I disagree with the necessity of degrees but 7 years of largely several month stints and no degree is hardly enough experience to be considered an expert in anything. If you’re into ML, that’s fine to put there but it’ll be off putting if there’s a stolen valor element to your profile.
- You have way too much written for some of your experiences. You were at CRATUSTECH for 7 months. If what you did was amazing enough to warrant what you wrote there, your previous managers would be knocking at your door right now. Pair things down so you don’t come off as inflating your contributions.
- You’re presenting your experiences in a confusing way. You have so much overlap that it’s hard to ascertain what your career narrative was. Most people who are experts in something weren’t able to reach expert level knowledge while jugging multiple jobs. Focus on your narrative so employers can determine if you’re the right fit.
- You’re commenting too much on stuff. No one is ever impressed by people’s comments online and the more opinions you share in comments the more liability it is for employers who already get to be picky right now. This isn’t to say you said anything wrong but if it were me, I’d just delete them to now have a busy activity section.
- Lastly, you need a better profile picture. If you want people to take you seriously put a better foot forward here. Even just a decently lit selfie. Don’t crop some photo of you and someone else out on a hike or whatever. Doing an activity is fine, but pose, smile, be by yourself.
I’m not sure how you can say Reddit deserves none of the credit for creating Reddit. It has to be at least as valuable (from a revenue perspective) to create the site as it costs to design and run one of the most trafficked site in the world otherwise no company would just magically appear in its place.
You almost act as if some people stumbled upon great software/infrastructure and improperly started charging people to use it. This isn’t some mountain spring some company claimed and is now charging the tribes down stream for access.
The communities on Reddit aren’t the valuable part. I don’t visit 99% of the subreddits. The valuable thing is I can go on one site, find a subreddit for everything I’m interested in, participate with the same account and have no learning curve/same UI/UX as the other communities I’m a part of. You can try to argue that those communities being there is what’s valuable to me, but without Reddit they all wouldn’t be on the same site.
Your argument reads as some poor adaption of the labor theory of value. Right now Reddit isn’t profitable, as long as these economics hold, no one is going to fill in for Reddit if it were to close. And all the mods and users can’t change that.
My argument (guess really) for why density necessitates more cops is that the opportunity for criminals also increases with density.
My thinking goes something like: a line of densely parked cars up Polk street with a bunch of people with their phones out at night making it hard to tell who is holding a flashlight probably means you need more cops patrolling the area to prevent crime vs my now suburban street with a few cars and no one walking at night means it would both be easy to spot opportunistic burglars and unlikely they'd hit up my street mostly for lack of targets.
I, too, could be wrong as I am saying this with no data.
Grew up in the area and lived in SF for years. I, too, hated all those good paying jobs coming into the city bringing in all those people who were annoyed by our crime and shit-on-the-street ways! We really need to keep anyone out if where they currently live has inferior economic opportunities, amirite?
On the real though, this pining for SF's old status quo because it fulfilled some weird grunge fantasy is just getting old. Yeah SF was a grimy, shitty, somewhat cheap place to live filled with equally shitty art and crap bands. It was shitty all the way from the 1960's until the early 90's when a homeless guy wandered in the TV repair shop we were at in the mission and pulled a knife and me and my brother while my dad was at the counter. Maybe it was great before then and maybe a lot of the people there want it to be better. Sorry if you don't get what you want.
Bee Tee Dubs, bro, people from or who live in SF don't call it San Fran.
I'm not sure if that national average is a good benchmark or not (maybe there is some sort of argument for how urbanized society has become) but my guess would be that there is some density factor. SF is something like 850k people pre-pandemic on 49 square miles. While it's not one of the biggest in absolute amount of people, it is the second(?) densest. I would suspect that a city of same population but 1/4 density would not need the same amount of cops.
update: I am guessing this is what your non-linear part is about; I missed that on first read.
As far as I can tell this isn't about tech, tech policy, a new medication, a new discovery about an old medication, science, etc. Seems like its just fodder for a political debate that is unrelated to this site.
Instead of politicizing HN, why don't you just toot this to your echo chamber on Mastodon?