501–510 of 1001 posts
Let's keep advanced research out of the hands of the gun nuts (aka most of the USA).
Do we really want to test a theory that we can have a repeat of the 1930s when the democracies fell far behind an autocratic regime in the arms race, and again the autocratic regimes will not win? Democracies are in retreat around the world, and I only hope we wake up before it is too late. The military-industrial complex may have become far bigger and perhaps in some ways a burden, but the world is a dangerous place…
"the world is a dangerous place and becoming more so." Are you basing this statement on a general feeling or on a specific data-based metric? The military industrial complex greatly benefits from this common sentiment, but by most all quantitative measurements the world continues growing slowly safer, average lifespans increase, etc. While years-long aberrations exist (e.g. civil wars), the overall trend is very clea…
As Pinker notes, progress is not monotonicly increasing. While it is true that things have gotten better on average across the world, we should be wary of those who do not champion enlightenment ideals, particularly in autocratic China with the apparently life term of Xi Jinpeng. We should be wary that those without our interests at heart don’t overtake us.
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So we should substitute 'strong cryptography' for 'arms' and see what happens.
It is funny you mention that actually - as a personal anecdote, I can say that many of my friends who happen to be advocates for free distro of crypto tech - or more commonly, cryptocurrencies - also tend to be fairly strong 2A advocates. TL;DR; - IMO there is some significant crossover between crypto* people, and 2A people.
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The reality of Defense/Intelligence is that you do have to just trust some of us.
The same defense/intelligence that has lied its pants off for how long... Gosh, I don't know when to begin. You are working on a morally bankrupt program for a morally deficient organization, large parts of which have zero concern for human life. And you tell us to blindly trust you?
In case it helps, it's not a question of supporting views or actions you disagree with, but of supporting the community we're all participating in here, so it doesn't slide into war.
Social pressures in that direction seem to be stepping up these days, so if we're to have much hope of preserving HN, we need a corresponding uptick in efforts to take care of it.
And this is why tech workers need to unionise. This petition is a weak statement that probably will have no effect. Unless these workers could pose a real threat to Google by threatening a strike action, Google has no need to change anything. Furthermore, if the workers really stood by their moral convictions, they'd use their collective power to tackle the issue more directly than by just appealing to Google. Compan…
This may be an uncomfortable fact but people have surprisingly short memories: the military funded the majority of the early advances in systems, networking, and cryptography (and especially as a large part of the latter subject area, invested heavily in fundamental, theoretical research). Not saying that I disagree with the employees' opinion, just that DoD/Pentagon involvement in artificial intelligence research sh…
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The world is currently the least dangerous it's ever been in history, and all data and all trends point that it will be even less dangerous in the future. Sorry but you're simply wrong.
Not sure about that. Wasn't the Doomsday Clock just moved back to an all-time dangerous spot?
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> our inalienable, universal rights That school of thought dates from the 18th century when thinkers appealed to a Creator who endowed those rights (even if it was a rather aloof Deist conception of God). However, in the following century it faced strong competition from the utilitarian school that suggests that rights are only a convenient fiction that society recognizes for the common good. Plus, these days ever mo…
Not at all. The concept of natural rights merely means that by our nature we have rights. The schools of thought that led to that identification and to the foundation of the US based on the ideal of a government exclusively tasked with securing these rights goes back at least to the 15th century (Aristotle and other Greek thinkers already were inching towards the idea that there are things that are right to protect i…
The Greeks may have had a concept of natural rights separate from their being endowed by a Creator, but that is not the same concept of natural rights that John Locke proposed and which inspired the American Founding Fathers, leading to posts from Americans like the one we see above. Advocacy for that school repeatedly cites the existence of a Creator.
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They didn't step up to Stalin and Mao. Hitler was because of alliance with Britain and the Japanese attack, not because of how awful the Nazis regime was. The US for the most part didn't want to get dragged back into another European conflict. Hitler was bad, yes. But what happened in Germany was rooted in the outcome of WW1, which was rooted in all the alliances and what not proceeding it, which was rooting in yet p…
Oh, the US didn't meet the USSR in Berlin, stop the westward movement of the Soviet advance, saving dozens of countries from communism? My bad, I totally forgot that the Cold War never happened and that the soldiers of WW2 didn't form a hard border in Berlin that they were not friendly over.
As far as I know, no? The US was quite far from Berlin by the end of the war, and did not engage the USSR in battle for territorial control of Germany.
> saving dozens of countries from communism?
Surely not "dozens", but was there even one? The other Allies essentially handed Poland over to Stalin.