Ya, really. Of all the sites I visit and get valuable content from, most of them I pay for. The only outstanding ones I can think of are google search, gmail, and HN. Facebook? NYT? Buzzfeed? Not really in my interest areas.
I'd also waste a lot less time on random stuff if I had to pay for it, so I'd be more productive and make more money!
But that goes against the very grain of a free and open internet, where anyone of any income level can access information. When you start creating paywalls, you start creating scarcity of information to justify people to pay those fees.
I find the whole "internet ads are bad" argument silly and specious at best - I don't care that Amazon shows me pictures of wallets I might want to buy if that means a poor kid in Eastern Europe can read CNN or BBC news for free.
I also don't care if they show me pictures of wallets I like over wallets I don't like.
I do care when any third party knows where I've been, what I am interested in, and otherwise monitors my activity.
Like everything, it's a tradeoff. However, I acknowledge my primary concern is myself -- if not tracking me costs other people a slight chance at an opportunity, I'm must conclude to not include that in my calculus. (In fact, it would be to my advantage if I believed it were a zero sum situation.)
Yes, it makes sense if you think about that "tax" as the payment for the lottery ticket of a functioning body and brain.
Every person here won that lottery ticket, when we could have just as easily suffered from any number of horrible diseases and disorders. Not wanting to pay higher premiums b/c the "lotto losers" are included is like not wanting to pay for a lotto ticket after the fact because you know the rare outcome won't hit you.
Correct, but that's just because of the inherently unpredictable nature of future telling.
What are the alternatives? One could simply not engage in projections, which is difficult because they're so tempting. A third option is to listen to the non-experts, which doesn't seem more valuable...
This is something I struggle WRT economics. I know economists are little more than fortune tellers, but what are the other options?
I'd just like to say that Disneyland has always felt like BNW to me. In that sense, it seems more realistic, because I've experienced something like it in today's society.
I suppose it depends on how you define "lucked in to".
Even building my own company, bootstrapping over these 5 years, I feel like I lucked into where I am. Not because I'm undeserving, but really because I feel lucky to live in an era where I even have that possibility.
If my world is entirely comprised of SV type startups, perhaps I'd feel differently. But I try to keep some perspective. (As in, I lucked into not being a field hand in 4th century Italy, and instead I can use my brain to manipulate electrons through small finger movements, that supposedly create value enough for other people to transfer electrons into a virtual account of "mine" that I can exchange for goods and services.)
I'm sorry if that sounds harsh, it's not intended that way. I really just wanted to point out that people define luck very differently.
Generally it means that you do not identify with a particular religious sect. It may also mean that you do not believe in the organized supernatural ideas that most religions do.
Exactly, but that doesn't tell us if you're actually religious or not! You may or may not have a personal religion. That's why I found it weird in this case, where the while point of the survey was to know if people are religious.
IMO, religion is something organized and part of a community. "Spirituality" is when it's something personal (and, as I get older, I am coming to believe is an important part of my life, even though I don't believe in anything supernatural.)
The argument that I've commonly heard is twofold. One, Manning was in the Army, so lots of his actions fall under military jurisdiction, where the primary concern is not the rights of the accused.
Secondly, Manning dumped a lot of info without knowing what he dumped. Snowden knew what was in the docs he leaked, and he made sure to protect human lives.
That's what I've heard, at least. It seems to make sense to me, but I'm open to having my mind changed if you have a different perspective.
For the life of me, whenever I hear someone call Manning a whistleblower, I cannot ever get the person to articulate exactly what he was blowing the whistle against. It's my understanding that most of what was released was nothing more than embarrassing personal cables that harmed diplomatic relations. Snowden revealed legitimate privacy concerns that the American people had not yet been privy to.
I couldn't off-hand recall anything, either. But a cursory search reveals: "There were hundreds of classified reports of torture, that continued even after the Abu Ghraib scandal."[0]
The diplomatic embarrassment is what made the news, but whose fault is it that -- and who stands to gain from it? People like a good embarrassing story. And I'm sure governments prefer you think of them as having their diary exposed to the public as opposed to the guys paying thugs to torture people.
But that 99.9% (assuming your figure is accurate - I have no idea the proportion of damning vs. embarrassing vs. irrelevant information that was leaked) doesn't make Manning not a whistle-blower.
Unrelated transgender protocol question... When referring to events in the past, do you use the gender the party identifies as now, or the gender they (at least publicly) identified as at the point in time the events occurred? I suspect that might vary from person to person, but in most cases, I expect they would prefer the former...
In this case at least, Manning always felt feminine. It just took a long time to personally work that out. The reason she joined the army in the first place was to make herself more manly, because she already didn't feel like a man at the time.
Is this not feature comparable with others in its class? What don't you like about it? Is something not worthwhile if it's not first?
Aaaaand you've convinced me to again eliminate my HN account and spend time elsewhere.
Idiots are the best productivity measure -- they make me not want to be on HN.