4chan seems to do ok. Or maybe not, depending on your perspective. There are a ton of smaller chan style boards that are awesome and don't seem to have the problems everyone is talking about here.
It's not really comparable because their boards have a limited number of active posts and the bigger boards get so much traffic anything is gone within a few minutes. So if you complain about something and they don't respond within the hour, it's gone anyway.
Still they have big problems with spam, ddos attacks and moderator turnover and that is after they delegate the bigger problems to /b to be mostly ignored.
The double-edged sword of not moderating based on racism and other undesirable behavior is that your job as a moderator is much easier, but you have the terrible reputation that 4chan has. I am personally fine with boards that allow pretty much everything other than CP and other illegal content. I think this is how a number of chan boards operate.
Is this "If you can't beat em, join em" Nazi edition? Half the challenge of the other boards out there is keeping the waste of molecules that constitutes 4chan away.
Out of all of the people who would like to frequent message board, some of them can't stand boards with a lot of censorship; and others can't stand boards which don't have strong moderation.
Surely some forum hosts will desire to serve those users who desire strong moderation, and for these forum hosts, not censoring or moderating isn't a solution.
Yep. I think the right approach is to expose the browser's primitives and just have people write their own markup/layout/style languages if they want to. Keep HTML/CSS as a fall-back and because a lot of work has gone into optimizing their performance, but start the long-needed move to opening up mainstream browsers on a lower level. Also, of course, leave JS as a fall-back but introduce a lower-level language. Re-implement HTML/CSS/JS on top of the new exposed primitives in order to expedite moving to the new standards. So you'll be able to use either original, optimized HTML/CSS/JS, or the new HTML/CSS/JS that has been re-implemented on top of the new exposed primitives, or just new stuff built on those primitives.
>If they pardon him, they say it's alright to release national secrets based on "feelings"
Ah, but the thing is, they built the domestic surveillance infrastructure based on "feelings" — after all, the real threat of terrorism is minor compared to all sorts of other dangers the resources could have been spent on.
And the idea that they really did it because of terrorism is pretty much the most charitable interpretation of why they did it — it is easy to devise darker ones.
If they don't pardon Snowden, then they are saying (yet again) that it is alright for the government to waste our tax money — in secret and in order to spy on us, no less — based on feelings.
I doubt it. Trump has praised NSA surveillance in the past and has hinted that Snowden should be executed. Unless he was just saying such things to try to get the intelligence community on his side pre-election, he's in favor of authoritarian tools.
The only retaliation I can think of that would be both proportionate and ethical would be to hack secret data of the Russian leadership and release at least part of it to the world public. The Russian government is accused of two things: hacking and creating fake news. Assuming that the allegations are correct, a perfectly mirrored response would include hacking and fake news. However, it would be unethical for America to create anti-Russian government fake news of its own. So the only part of a mirrored response that would be appropriate is hacking followed by an at least partial public release of the hacked data.
No need to create fake news, the corruption in Russia is insane, it goes straight to the top, involving vast amounts of public money. Putin's net worth may even be in the 100's of billions (http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/02/15/putins-net-wort...).
Life is tough for the man on the street in Russia, they wouldn't be happy knowing the entire government is profiteering at their expense.
All the US would need to do is flood vkontakte, news comment boards etc, with repeated facts of corruption, as Russia has been doing many years now in the West.
Russians are aware of corruption at the local level, but not that of the highest level, nor its scale.
They might tolerate it if they themselves were getting better off, a social contract of sorts. But if people are worse off, and they know it's at least partly due to oligarchs and Putin enriching themselves, at their expense, Putin may find his grip over the people isn't as ironclad as he may think.
You only cite one source of propaganda. Perhaps you have not realised that propaganda works both ways, a bit like being forced to play for the school sports team because you cant go to another school to play for them instead.
Why do Russian oligarchs move their money outside of Russia?
The US cant launch a cyber attack from known US IP addresses because this would be too obvious and easy for Russia to block. So the US would need to hack computer systems in other countries to cover their tracks. Ergo the US Govt is dragging innocent entities (members of the public/businesses/Govts) from other parts of the world into a cyber war which could escalate into a real war considering the Cold War2.0 rhetoric thats being put about by the media who also happen to like to play both sides and fuel people's bias and cognitive dissonance.
I'm not suggesting Russia is any better or worse than the US or any other country but scientific data and other known facts can lead others to conclude differently.
The fundamental flaw for humanity is the belief that hierarchical forms of governance are best, when all the science shows that people in power become corrupted especially when they set the laws that allow the deniable op's and other coverups.
Perhaps the best metric to consider for a balanced least corrupted society is the difference between the richest and poorest in that society. In other words, the less social cohesion you have the greater the corruption. Considering the US has the richest people in the world, the data suggests the US is the most corrupt nation on the planet.
And with the US now hacking the world whilst it tries to hack Russia whilst blaming Russia, I refer back to my analogy about being forced to play for the school sports team whether you like it or not. Its the same problem migrants face, no one asked to be born and no one asked to be born in a repressive country or a country where the psychopaths rule the roost.
So does the above now make you think these sociopaths who like winning popularity contests (what else is an election) enjoying tricking and misdirecting people who dont think through the consequences?
Perhaps its high time to start Questioning More as the Russia Today tag line suggests. In other words dont be so easily led or to put it even more bluntly stop behaving like a dog fetching the stick your master keeps throwing you.
I don't think there's a problem reconciling the brain with the mind, if by 'mind' one means problem-solving ability. The problem is in reconciling the brain with consciousness. There is, as far as I know, no theory that explains how consciousness can arise from matter.
There is: the attention schema theory, and I find it quite compelling.
I've come to think that the great consciousness mystery is a psychological one: why are human beings so obsessed with the consciousness mystery? Why do we need so much to believe that we are special?
Should this super AI come to be, I expect it to give the problem of consciousness the same amount of thought we usually give to other people's bowel movements.
Behavior? Yes. Consciousness? Maybe not. As far as I know, no-one has ever come up with an explanation of how matter can give rise to consciousness. Obviously consciousness is affected by changes in matter — if I take certain drugs, I feel different, etc. — but there is no explanation at all for what mechanisms may give rise to consciousness in the first place, and the very idea of the material giving rise to consciousness might actually not make sense.
This line of thinking begs the question of whether consciousness is some special thing in nature. You only have to look for an explanation if you think there is something to explain.
If I start from the assumption that I am mistaken about what I think consciousness is--that maybe it doesn't exist at all the way I think it does--then I don't have to worry about how matter gives rise to it. I can focus instead on trying to understand where my definition went wrong.
Humans have never lacked for opinions or explanations about what natural things are, or how they got that way. But in the practice of science, these must yield before empirical evidence.
As you note, there is a huge amount of evidence that consciousness is physical. But there is no objective evidence that I experience consciousness as you define it. You just have to take my word for it--and so do I. But maybe I'm wrong.
In many situations, it does make financial sense to live with family — however, sometimes one is simply happier and more productive when one has sufficient space that one more or less controls. Living in close proximity with others can be wonderful, but it can also take a toll. Even when those around you are nice people, it can take some energy to interact with them. I wonder how much productivity society loses when people who long to live alone are forced by circumstance to live together with others.
Out of curiosity — how would you feel about a rural suburb if you could work remotely from it and make the same money that you could make in a big city? What other things would you need the rural suburb to provide if employment wasn't an issue?
For me, it would need to not be rural or a suburb to provide what I desire out of life. I want to be near things. There is a life to urban communities that does not exist in rural or suburban places (and I grew up in both) that I don't think I would want to live without. Being in places where it's a half-mile walk to things I want to do is an unmitigated good for me and there is nothing a suburb or rural area can do to replace that.
Remote work from home, where you are ensconced in your isolation box, is gross, too; as a consultant, I have a home office and I spend most of my time out of it.
(Mind, I have considered buying something in a rural area--but that's effectively a retreat, not a home. Homes are a by-and-large a pipe dream for people who are under 30 right now unless they want crushing commutes or nothingvilles.)
I have the opposite dream right now: I've spent almost my entire life in large cities and now that I'm in my thirties, finally have a career going, and am no longer obsessed with my sex life, I'm longing to move out of the city and somewhere a bit more suburban. I don't want kids or a wife — I just want space to be able to walk around half naked if I want to, sing at 4 in the morning if I feel like it, and indulge my own weird rhythms. I'm a software developer, and my company actually allows me to work remotely, so I'm seriously considering making the move. I seem to become more productive when I have more space, so even from a productivity standpoint the idea probably makes sense.
I actually love going on long walks, so the thought of walking a half hour to buy groceries if I don't buy a car seems ok.
I've spent the last decade or so in San Francisco, and none of the local scenes really attract me. There used to be some cool artists around, but a lot of them got priced out. Maybe some other city has a more thriving cultural life, but San Francisco's isn't doing anything for me. I just have to figure out where to move.
Well, I hope that we both manage to figure out a way of life that is good for us.
> I just want space to be able to walk around half naked if I want to, sing at 4 in the morning if I feel like it, and indulge my own weird rhythms.
What you're describing in terms of collapsibility, zero space, and cultural lifelessness is why I have avoided San Francisco like the plague, but San Francisco isn't like most urban areas--when asked why I refused a job with a startup out there I responded with something very similar to what you're saying here. =) I live in the Boston area; the city I live in is on the subway line, but isn't Boston proper.
I live on the top floor of an apartment building; my place is about 1200 square feet. I regularly sleep an off-kilter schedule. My neighbors like me, and me being up at 3AM doesn't seem to bother the downstairs neighbors seeing as how we hang out once a week or so.
Rural areas are fine if that's your thing, don't get me wrong. But there's a lot that you can't get in those areas (and I've spent plenty of time in them) at all.
Three weeks ago I moved from a suburb-ish type neighborhood (not much walkable) to a urban-ish type neighborhood (nice grocery store 10 minutes walk away, bars 2, 5, 15 minutes away, pet store one block away).
I too work from home, and the difference is so stark, I can't imagine ever living in a less dense neighborhood again. I haven't gotten in my car in a week. Not going back.
