Judging by the vote totals of the above post, it seems there is a cadre of users here who believe the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor[0].
No wonder HN folks have such a hard time with the idea of fact checking.
Since Fox News started fact-checking Trump, Trump's followers have stopped treating Fox News as a reliable source and are voting with their feet towards OANN another very far right sources. They're clinging to lies (politely: disinformation) even in the face of evidence to the contrary from a source that they formerly considered reliable.
That is my point.
Conservatives (or, at least, Trump followers) will turn their backs on sources of information that they considered trustworthy if those sources contradict the leader de jour.
Cryptocurrency is the ponzi scheme for tech people.
Because the cryptocurrency ecosystem does not do investment -- likely in very large part because no one can buy anything legal with cryptocurrency -- returns for coiners who cash out must, by definition, come from later investments.
Paying earlier investors with the investments of those who follow is the definition of a ponzi scheme.
By the beginning of January, the termination of pandemic-related economic supports is expected to put 19 million Americans at risk of homelessness, and make 11% of the US population unable to afford to put food on the table.
The longer-term picture is that the millennials (born 1980 or later) will be the first generation in a very long time to have a lower standard of living than their parents did.
These are the kinds of problems civil unrest is made of.
You're shifting the goal posts from the question of a campaign conspiracy (coordination) to a broader question of inappropriate connections between Trump and Russia.
Further, the purpose of the Mueller report was not to investigate any of these issues. The Mueller investigation was very narrowly focused on whether the Trump campaign conspired (not 'colluded') with Russian entities during the 2017 campaign.
The additional issues you raise were outside of Mueller's remit. Those questions were supposed to be answered by a separate counterintelligence probe conducted by the DoJ. This separate investigation has vanished without a trace[0] and appears to have been killed or suppressed.
Leaving aside the conflict of interest issues inherent in the Trump DoJ investigating Trump, why would this investigation disappear, given how eager Barr would be to exonerate Trump if the outcome of the investigation would give the DoJ the slightest figleaf of justification to do so?
The role of fact checking is not to strive for partisan balance but rather to identify public comments that are untrue.
American conservatives would fall afoul of fact checking far less frequently if the conservative worldview wasn't wedded to talking points that are not factually accurate. For example:
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. There is no evidence of ongoing large-scale voter fraud in US elections. There is no evidence that the incoming Biden administration intends to end capitalism. There were no 'convoys' of migrants preparing to violently storm the US-Mexico border prior to the 2018 midterms. Barrack Obama was not ineligible to serve as President. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is detaining children in the basement of a pizza parlor. There is no evidence that the Democratic party is run by a cabal of pedophile cannibals. Etc.
A fact checker who does not point out the fact-free basis of these, and other, deeply-held conservative talking points is simply not doing his/her job.
If the weight of fact checking falls primarily against conservatives, then conservatives can fix that problem by lying less frequently.
What do you do when the Republican fact checker repeats what the leader of his party tells him to say even though it is fact-free?
A majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election (!) because that's what Trump is saying. There is little reason to think a Republican fact checker would contradict Trump. Indeed, any fact checker who did would be ostracized as a RINO, much as has happened with Fox News since they acknowledged the outcome of the vote.
Partisan fact checkers would only give the Republican party a safe space to continue to lie about matters of objective fact, such as who won the last election.
Frankly, the fact that 'what is truth' can be framed as a partisan issue in America speaks to much, much deeper societal problems than organized fact checking can fix. This is an attitude that is much more in keeping with that found in countries like Albania or North Korea rather than in another advanced democracy.
This is inaccurate. Go read the report, or at the very least read the Wikipedia summary.
The conclusion was that a conspiracy between Trumpworld and the Russian government could not be proved because the potential suspects on the US side hid, or destroyed, evidence and lied to investigators.
What were these people covering up -- at considerable risk to themselves for prosecution -- if there was nothing to hide?
Disinformation is dangerous because too many overly credulous people are all to willing to believe in alternative facts even if contradictory primary source materials are available.
There is very little evidence that fact checking actually works to reduce the impacts of disinformation. See e.g. this study of the impact of Twitter warnings on belief in disonformation:
I don't see it as unjustified to point out that the primary risk actors in China's threat model will be the American armed forces and/or three letter agencies.
Quoting from your downstream posts for which HN is blocking replies:
> The job is in fact risky, which is why the profession is so highly regarded.
Police work doesn't even break the top ten most dangerous careers in the US. Landscaping workers are more likely to die on the job than police officers.[0]
Why would you assume the uplink isn't authenticated and/or encrypted, given that the downlink data has very little value but interfering with the uplink could disable the probe?
Spacecraft are power and compute limited. It's entirely possible the designers chose not to spend the resources to encrypt a downlink that isn't sending anything that needs to be kept secret. In contrast, it's reasonable to assume that the uplink is at least protected by a HMAC, because the consequences of an adversary exploiting the uplink are so great.
The Chinese are well aware that the US security establishment is petty enough to interfere with a scientific probe purely for its own amusement. They will have taken precautions to deter this.
This explanation just reworks the question into one of why western interest rates are so low.
Western central banks can't raise interest rates above the lower bound without triggering unacceptable unemployment or even deflation. Indeed, the highest safe rate has fallen in the wake of every recession.
To me, this suggests major structural problems in the western economies. It's hard to think of a single explanation that applies to all (pre-pandemic) zero-interest rate western economies, however. The economic foundations in Australia, Canada, the UK, the US, and the EU are different enough that there is no obvious single structural fault common to all of them.
> Why can't America build anymore? Is this a cultural problem, or a failure of public policy?
America can't build anymore because America's executives have chosen to steal every piece of wealth they can take without leaving anything behind to build for the future.
American business culture has become far more interested in zero-sum rentierism and financialization that rapidly concentrates existing wealth in the hands of the wealthy than in technological innovation that creates new wealth over the longer term.
The collapse of American industry is the entirely predictable consequence.
We're on different sides of the disinformation control debate but I completely agree with your take on the toxicity of HN.
This place is much worse than most of non-ideological Reddit.
Serious discussion of matters at the intersection of tech and policy, is not possible on HN when the downvote and flag tools are routinely used to suppress posts for ideological heresy rather than low effort, irrelevance, or bad faith argumentation.
Community moderation is incompatible with a community culture that values ideological conformity over respect for good faith argumentation.
An upvote-only karma system would be much more appropriate for tech policy threads.
No wonder HN folks have such a hard time with the idea of fact checking.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory