Can someone explain to me if the article in The Information on this topic is completely dumb, or whether I'm dumb for misunderstanding it: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-unbundles-.... (You don't need to pay, just read the few paragraphs visible for free.)
The author claims there's no benefit to consumers because prices went up. The whole point of the rule is to prevent MS from killing off competition by keeping the prices low. So the benefit should be in the form of a healthier ecosystem (and long-term high quality / price tradeoff) rather than the price level today.
"repulsive to the general public because regular people, on some level, understand that everyone has an unconditional right to the safety and dignity"
I want to point out a couple errors in your statement.
1. The correct verb to use is "feel", rather than "understand". "Understand" can only refer to an objective fact that can be verified, proven, etc.
2. While some "regular people" (including myself) share your views, it is not all of them, and not even an overwhelming majority of them. In fact, I suspect it's only a minority, perhaps a tiny minority of people worldwide who actually agree with you (and me). So perhaps a better way to say it, "repulsive to me and others who share my beliefs because we...".
These may seem like small things, but actually writing the way you do make your statements sound like a religious tract (kinda like "Human beings understand that God's will is absolute"). I doubt that was your intent.
People generally do have the right to safety, but it's not "unconditional", because there are other values such as personal freedom. We compromise between those conflicting values. If I drive a car, I create SOME risk that I run you over. I'm not allowed to drive intoxicated, or without a driver's license, or above certain speed limit, because we find that level of risk unacceptable. But if I drive perfectly sober, within the speed limit etc., I STILL put you at SOME level of risk. I could still lose control over the wheel and smash into a passerby. Statistically speaking, we know it will happen for every million car rides or so. But we consider this level of risk acceptable. The margin is low enough for me to exercise my freedom. So yes, your safety matters, but not unconditionally. It matters to a certain - arbitrary - extent. At least that's the social consensus.
Your proposed corrections actually turn the claim on its head. If you want to argue against it, then you should actually argue and not hide behind semantics.
Yes, a regular occurrence for the social issues that are either uncontroversial (e.g., reducing poverty, improving education, dealing with pandemics) or only lightly controversial (e.g., climate change, misinformation in the media, etc.).
For the more controversial topics, the talks are vetted more carefully, to make sure they align with the political position of the company, and that they don't raise too much opposition from any groups within the company.
The goal of the speaker is to convert as many (preferably influential) people as possible to their viewpoint. The goal of the hosting employee is typically the same, at least for the controversial issues (since those are usually highly politicized). The goal of the host company is to promote themselves as a bastion of certain (good, from their perspective) ideas, and/or as a place for thoughtful discussions.
The professor surely knows that cheating is near universal because the incentive structure of modern life makes cheating optimal in expectation. Nothing he can do will change this fundamental fact. So why bother?
No, I didn't mean that I cheat, and therefore everyone else cheats. I meant that the one time he got to see what's going on, he found that nearly everyone cheats. Unless he has some evidence to the contrary, a reasonable conclusion is that cheating is near-universal.
Evidence to the contrary could be, for example, that this class was very different from a typical class in some way, etc.
You argue that most murders are criminals killing each other. Suppose you're right. So let's look at robberies instead. Those are primarily directed towards random people not towards other criminals.
The safest US city in that respect is Irvine with ~20 per 100k (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...). Irvine is indeed a very safe city, and I doubt parents would be concerned too much with letting their kids walk to school (if only the school was within a walking distance away).
Now move out of Irvine. Pick a city. San Francisco is ~360, NYC is ~160, Seattle is ~210. Even Mountain View, near Apple, Google, and many other high tech companies is ~60.
And btw, people in Tokyo generally do very little protect themselves from violent crime, since it's so rare. They walk around late, alone, often drunk, paying no attention to their surroundings. I'm pretty sure if people behaved like that in SF, the robbery rate would jump significantly.
So IMHO, the dumb one isn't the "pen test" from the Japanese TV, but rather the clickbaity YouTube video that makes fun of it. That said, the Japanese TV is slightly tongue in cheek, it doesn't claim to be a science channel.
Instead of disabling comments, why wouldn't they use one of the techniques that successful discussion forums employ to filter out spam, extremism, and other noise?
HN being an obvious example, but there are plenty of others, each with its own approach.
Many successful online discussion forums rely on user moderation, which makes it feasible without Inquirer hiring a huge dedicated staff.
> why wouldn't they use one of the techniques that successful discussion forums employ to filter out spam, extremism, and other noise?
They have done.
Removing comments will reduce some engagement, but as pointed out they've come to the conclusion that the sort of engagement lost is of low value to the majority of their target audience and comes with a cost (in terms of moderation effort) that isn't worth, to them, any residual "good" value the comments sections have.
>HN being an obvious example
I think a key difference between HN and news pages like those in the enquirer in this matter is that their comments area is more of an afterthought to start with where much of the purpose of many visiting HN, good sub-reddits, and do forth is for the comments. This means removing them would be much more sufficient a loss. It also means that for a greater part community moderation works, reducing more costly (for the need site) central effort (it is still needed, of course but the cost/benefit balance is very different).
> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.
But maybe not. And cleaning it up (for existing comments if they didn't just junk everything prior to now, and in terms of ongoing moderation) would be more effort than they are currently spending on the matter.
Also, a large part of it may be that the comments are at the bottom and a large part of their readership don't get that far on many articles. Some will read the headline & byline, some complete the opening paragraphs, and only then if it seems interesting enough (or they are otherwise lacking anything to do) will people read on further (never mind all the way to the end of a long article). Getting around that by putting the comments higher up probably isn't a good answer. I've seen some places have a "<number> comments below" link near the top but I can't imagine that drawing people through unless they would read that far anyway or the <number> is high enough to suggest some interesting controversy.
Unfortunately you're more likely to just find confirmation bias here. The HN community (and the tech community in general) is predominantly pro-nuclear.
Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change
But that's not what happened. Given the current state of the industry we can't afford to spend decades trying to right the technical and regulatory wrongs of the past now that renewables are becoming truly viable.
> Personally, I think this article raises great points. If we could rewrite history and have built a thriving nuclear power industry 20 years ago, we'd probably be in much better shape now, at least with respect to climate change
France did that. It is not perfect but I would call it a success. France CO2 emissions are low [1], electricity is affordable, and suffered no major accident. France is even able to recycle nuclear fuel, and is generally among the world leaders of everything nuclear.
People advocating for a reasonable position which they hold isn't confirmation bias. Reading a recitation of arguments you've already encountered shouldn't adjust your priors, that's for new information.
At the 60-comment mark, I count 28 comments that are advocating nuclear or poking holes in assumptions about renewables. I’d say the debate is pretty equally represented in quantity if not quality.
When you ignore the glaring problems with renewables? Sure... but why pay attention to rare earth minerals needed, massive problems creating massive amounts of PV panels, recycling issues, etc
We can't afford to let the burgeoning "savior" of our world continue on it's destructive path because the Religion of Renewables won't admit to the fact that it's Priests are doing bad things with children...
To many aspects and conversations turn into religious debates. PC? SJWs? Climate Change? Anti-Nuclear/Pro-Renewable? (or vice versa on all of them) all turn into religious debates with people who refuse to look at both sides of very complex issues.
You gotta love the whataboutism of the nuclear folks ranting about recycling issues of current renewable energy tech when nuclear leaves behind toxic material that has to be kept in a safe place for a long time surviving changes in government, potential revolutions, terrorist attacks, incompetence, greed, etc.
When the main arguments against nuclear power are around cost, it's entirely reasonable to point out costs and inconveniences around alternative power generation sources, which for renewables are mostly around land use, rare and bad to mine materials used in construction, pollution around them and potential recycling, and the lack of stability. All those bring costs up, and some are outright ignored when arguing nuclear is too expensive.
The difference is, most of these costs _are_ factored in to renewable costs because there are few subsidies (at least at grid level). In contrast, there is a huge implicit subsidy to nuclear by punting the issue of nuclear waste storage to future generations. I just don't understand why we're still talking about this when nuclear storage costs, even when included, are laughably optimistic. None of the long term storage plans made since the 1960s have panned out. Everything is still in temporary swimming pools until the music stops and someone has to pick up the bill.
> The difference is, most of these costs _are_ factored in to renewable costs because there are few subsidies (at least at grid level
It will depend on location, but across the EU there are massive subsidies. Furthermore, recycling costs aren't included and are just starting to come to light with the decomissioning of the first generation of solar and wind generation platforms. Their limited useful life,bserious recycling costs and related pollution, and all of those on the energy storage required to actually make them useful for bade load are rarely a part of the discourse.
> I just don't understand why we're still talking about this when nuclear storage costs, even when included, are laughably optimistic
How so? Most of the problems around long term storage are political. The temporary swimming pools are still good enough for decades or even centuries to come, while projects on underground permanent storage are advancing ( most notably Finland iirc).
You know, you have some valid points. Unfortunately, due to your demeaning and dismissive tone, I don't feel there's any point in engaging with you further.
His argument is highly contingent on a single premise: nuclear power is very expensive to build, making it uneconomical.
However, it's extremely difficult to determine how much of this expense is necessary vs. due to over-regulation or lack of innovation. It's easy to say that some regulations on nuclear power are probably unnecessary (cf. widespread nuclear paranoia); it's much harder to say which. It's easy to say that new kinds of reactors might be cheaper; it's harder to say what kind or how much cheaper.
ReBCO-stabilized fusion on the horizon throws another wrench in the prediction machine, as well. Who knows what that's worth? It was invented yesterday!
Agree that his premise is entirely an economic one. From first principles, nuclear energys's marginal cost is very inexpensive (similar to renewables).
What's basically needed to bring the cost of nuclear down is scale, investing more in production. This is why new approaches to mass producing small scale reactors is so interesting. It should allow nuclear to get competitive with renewables, and having a diverse energy base is definitely a good thing.
Also, fusion holds the most hope for massively decreasing the cost of energy. It's a game changer, and it's close. It's possible that fusion allows things like mass carbon capture, powering reforestation efforts, and more.
I didn't fully understand the implications. Why is there so much focus on privacy protection? Isn't by far the biggest application of this technology in security? (Presumably, ensuring that no one steals money out of my bank account is much more important than hiding my porn preferences from the advertisers.)
AFAIK FHE offers little security benefits compared to more standard cryptography when it comes to securing bank accounts. It can hide things (which is the first application of cryptography, hence the crypto prefix − ancient greek for hidden), but it doesn't give you certification like asymmetric cryptography, quite the opposite actually, because by definition FHE schemes are perfectly malleable.
Ah thanks! I incorrectly assumed that if so much effort is spent on this, it must be because it helps protect something valuable (directly by preventing bank or credit hacking, or indirectly by helping secure trade secrets behind encryption, etc.).
The author claims there's no benefit to consumers because prices went up. The whole point of the rule is to prevent MS from killing off competition by keeping the prices low. So the benefit should be in the form of a healthier ecosystem (and long-term high quality / price tradeoff) rather than the price level today.