It's hard to identify which practices are responsible for which outcomes. Suppose you wanted to combine the high happiness rate of Denmark with the low crime rate of Japan; how would you figure out which are the policies you need to accomplish that?
There is research, and it's pretty intuitive. Create stability. Reduce income inequality. Focus spending on social programs. Help people out of addiction, crime, give them a network, healthcare, education and jobs. People who cannot work need funding. Enough to live a dignified life. People are happy when they don't have to worry. People who are happy with the system doesn't really commit crime.
> Americans tend to reject it entirely out of hand as it smells like vile socialism to them.
This is a bit too reductionist. I'd wager that most Americans agree that these are worthwhile goals, but many are skeptical that empowering the government is the best way to achieve these ends.
On concrete policies along these lines many poll in the majority. They don’t get implemented not because the American people are against them (they’re often for them) but because powerful interests are against them. (Corporations and some portion of the very wealthy.)
Just as a recent example of the influence of money here, there was a vote to reduce defense budget (which is at record highs) by 10% and reallocate that money. It was voted down. But those that voted against the reduction got 3.4x as much money from the defense industry as those that voted for the cut.
The same dynamic plays out on issues like single payer health care, with those against it getting major contributions from health insurance lobbyists who want to defend the status quo even while the policy has a large majority approval across both democrats and republicans (and a whopping 88% approval among Democrats).
Not really. There's a lot of debate on the role of government within socialist circles themselves, and there are many socialists that are skeptical of the idea that you can implement socialism top-down, without it becoming either totalitarian, or a form of collectivist capitalism where the ruling elites collectively own the means of production and collect economic rents from the rest.
We can surely agree that cheap wide good education has to be one of the policies necessary for that, yet it's quite ignored even in some rich countries.
A big problem is that many educators and school boards treat education as indoctrination. i.e. "Teach people what to think"
The real goal of education is to teach people how to think. Logic, rhetoric, analysis, scientific method, how to identify logical fallacies, understanding statistics, falsifiable theories, analyzing history not only through secondary sources, but actively seeking out primary sources to corroborate secondary sources, so on and so forth.
A useful education for a healthy well-functioning society is about inquiry, not regurgitation.
There's near-universal agreement that education should be cheap and wide and good. The question is which policies best accomplish those goals. Should we add vocational high schools like Denmark has, where teachers can focus on practical skills since it's already been decided the students won't go to college? Should we add 60 more days to the school year and universal high school admission tests like they do in Japan?
These are the kinds of questions that need to be studied and answered. But instead, politicians just say “‘Murica is #1” and leave it at that. The platitudes need to stop. We need some policy wonk technocrats to take over government.
I don't think this is something we can blame on the politicians, though. People got grumpy enough about Common Core; imagine how much worse it would go over if a school district announced that it was going to transition towards rote learning.
I agree. There are many practices common to countries reporting high levels of happiness that Americans (And certainly other western nations) ignore seemingly on principle.
We would have to analyze the actual distribution of that spend. When this is done, we see wealthier places have higher spending per capita because public schools in the US are funded primarily by property taxes.
One of the thing Americans do differently is setting up systems for inequality from the get go. First past the post voting, but also using education to produce/select 'winners', rather than use it as a tool for equality. One could say this is a choice and there's no wrong way to make it, but to me it seems clear that it is the root cause for many of the issues in the US. I think superstar systems and mentality necessarily produces inequality and inequality necessarily produces problems.
The question isn't how you and I can individually avoid being spear phished, but what policies can be implemented across an organization to prevent it. Even the most trusted security teams aren't going to be allowed to summarily fire everyone who fails the test.
I also think this is a much stricter standard than you're recognizing. In my company's last spearphishing test, they sent out a link purporting to be a company survey immediately after an all-hands meeting announcing there'd be a survey (the real survey link came a few hours later). Expecting that nobody will be distracted enough to fall for such a thing seems unrealistic no matter how well you train them.
Just wondering if employees failed the test just by clicking on the link or if they had to actually enter some passwords or confidential information on the fake survey site. I wouldn't think clicking a link then looking at the address bar and seeing the domain name is wrong, then closing the page would be a problem, would it?
We got judged on both. Most security teams in my experience feel that even clicking on the link is a big risk, although I've never read a more detailed explanation of why than "oh there might be a 0-day".
The corporate security team sent out the email. It had a link with no actual content, giving an error, but that got you on the list of people with bad security behavior.
The trouble at my office was that most employees were highly capable security researchers. These are people who reverse engineer malware for pay and for fun. Of course they eagerly attempted to download from the link! They wanted fresh new malware. People would typically download via wget in a virtual machine on a PC without important data.
How would this work? I get emails like "you have been added to <link> gerrit review" and "<link> Redmine issue was updated" several time a day and I need to open these links.
The mixed use buildings you're referring to are approaching from the wrong direction. They're 1960s style office parks - sometimes a modern reinvention of them, sometimes literally a redevelopment on the same land - and you can't get a meaningful mixed use space in an area where everyone drives in at 9 and drives out at 5.
There are kernels of a political opinion in that comment, but it mostly consists of ad hominems against Trump supporters. They have a "fundamental deficit of character", they can't be trusted to avoid "bigotry and discrimination", they should "carry that black mark with them for the rest of their professional lives". I don't consider aggressive personal attacks like this to be political opinions; they're on the same level as wordless screams, attempts to rile people up rather than engage in discourse.
> For those who aren't aware, the reason for this is well-known: the average POC statistically leans right on all social issues except for race.
Blacks are the most supportive of abortion legality in most or all cases of any race other than Asians, so that's one issue that isn't race that Blacks lean to the left on.
It’s complicated. They are also more likely to say abortion is morally wrong than many other groups, which has political implications. (Legality versus non-legality isn’t really the main issue today.)
No, I mean to the right of the median. For example, in poll data from last year 61% of Americans overall but only 51% of black Americans support gay marriage. On some issues like interracial marriage, they're actually even further to the right; 18% of black Americans say interracial marriage is bad for society, while only 12% of Republican-leaners do.
Marriage equality is a notorious outlier. Compare abortion, marijuana legalization, immigration, and taxes. (Rayiner noted earlier that black voters are to the right of Democrats more generally, which is true, but they're right at the median overall, and far to the left of evangelical white voters).
My understanding is that black voters are also to the right of the median on abortion. I can't find any recent statistics - all the polls I'm seeing only break down "white" and "non-white", but black Americans trailing in support for abortion is a historically well-known phenomenon (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3852356/).
The other issues, yeah, you're right. I don't really consider taxes a social issue, but I realized I forgot about gun control.
> My understanding is that black voters are also to the right of the median on abortion
As I point out, with a source, in another subthread, Blacks are more supportive of abortion than the nation as a whole, and second only to Asians.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23936024
Even in your ancient (5 years after Roe!) piece, while Blacks were less supportive of abortion than average, they were also becoming supportive more rapidly than other groups. 40+ years later, that faster change has flipped the starting positions.
I've been explicitly told by the HN moderators that my opinions on policing - which are well within the American mainstream and probably a touch left of center - are so controversial they constitute flamebait and I shouldn't discuss them here.
That doesn't sound very likely. People make up all sorts of stories about what moderators supposedly said or did. The tell is that they're invariably linkless. If they came with the relevant links, readers could see what actually happened and make up their own minds.
I generally err on the side of not providing links to other comment threads so as not to give the impression I'm calling for a pileon. I'd happily link it, but my old profile https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=SpicyLemonZest no longer shows the comment thread. It was on a post about federal police in Portland from last week which I'm not sure how to find.
it could be you can't see that thread anymore because a lot of it was flagged dead. if you turn on showdead in your profile, threads like that will be visible.
it could be you are talking about the one that starts here:
dang says: "We've rate limited your account again for perpetuating flamewars on this site."
you said: "I've been explicitly told by the HN moderators that my opinions on policing - which are well within the American mainstream and probably a touch left of center - are so controversial they constitute flamebait and I shouldn't discuss them here."
that does not to me sound at all like a good-faith representation of what dang said.
It strikes me as nonproductive to call it "stupidity" or debate whether there's a precise equality. Both halves of the country have made it clear, in word and in action, that they think some causes are worth spreading the pandemic.
On the contrary, I regularly read articles and watch videos edited by "their guys". I don't have much interest in listening to people scream on social media, but I'm genuinely happy to learn the perspectives of people who don't think the same way as me.
A consequence of this is that you may find yourself changing your views-- or at least being more open minded about things your friends don't approve of.
If it's just politics with no direct relevance to your life-- are you really better off that way? Is being more right or just more open minded about something that you have no influence do you any good if it alienates you from friends or family at all?
Being more open minded allows me to maintain a friend group who's similarly open minded, and wouldn't ostracize me for holding opinions they don't approve of. From what I've seen this strategy works for most people, and life seems like it'd be really stressful otherwise; if I for example got a stalker and needed to start carrying a gun, I wouldn't want to be in a situation where my friends will abandon me if they find out.
I of course don't begrudge anyone who feels they have to keep a closed mind in order to maintain a reputation in their community.
Obviously there's less open dialogue about it, but I think it's fair to say that it must. The CCP censors it very heavily, sometimes explicitly stating they're trying to prevent rumors and misinformation.
To be clear, Eisenstat's concern here is that Facebook isn't exercising enough editorial control over the content it allows. She argues that Facebook ought to remove content which upsets its employees, its advertisers, or the civil rights community.
Does the Big Bang Theory encourage violence against creationists?
I don’t ask that question seriously, just to point out that generalising things isn’t always useful. For example, “hate speech” is a defined term and the Big Bang theory ain’t it.
I don't think "encourages violence" is the standard that's being applied here. For example, on the 14th of June 2017, a political activist who'd been radicalized by Facebook made a list of elected members of Congress, went up to them, and asked them about their party affiliation before opening fire on them. There were zero mainstream calls to for Facebook to crack down on the communities or content that radicalized him, and this incident is almost completely absent from the narrative about the dangers of Facebook. Not only that, respectable mainstream media organisations like the New York Times falsely claimed that actually, the party that had been targetted was the one whose rhetoric was causing members of Congress to be shot, erroneously blaming the shooting of Gabby Giffords on them when in reality it seems to have been inspired by anger at her specifically that had nothing to do with national partisan politics at all.
> Does the Big Bang Theory encourage violence against creationists?
Excellent point. There's much broader support for banning advocacy of violence, than for banning statements that offend the audience's religious sensibilities.
Perhaps a better example is speech that advocates abortion rights. Pro-life advocates consider such speech to incite murder; pro-abortion advocates don't.
I think this adds an interesting wrinkle to the hate-speech / censorship debate: It shows that even meta-rules meant to keep a discussion civil (i.e., we won't allow speech that advocates violence) aren't necessarily neutral to the viewpoints being discussed.
In one of the controversies discussed in the article, Facebook banned an ad on the grounds that an upside-down red triangle constitutes hate speech - it's "a triangle symbol used by Nazis to identify political prisoners", you see. So I'm not sure the concept is quite as well-defined as you're suggesting.
Except that is defined, that's a thing that's real, and the upside down red triangle specifically was used to identify political prisoners of the Nazi party, like liberals, socialists, and unionized laborers.[1]
I guess I'm not sure of your point, because to me, the use of the symbol, in a political context, and especially in the context of a polemic populist political campaign, is problematic, regardless of whether or not the Trump campaign or whoever backed that advertisement knew what it was.
The question isn't whether it's problematic in some generic sense, but whether it's hate speech or a call to violence. I'm extraordinarily skeptical that anyone sees a red triangle and thinks "ah, I understand, the triangle is telling me I should go engage in political violence".
