It's sad that you are being downvoted. This is a legitimate question especially considering the history of science and just history in general.
We used to wipe out all kinds of animals that were deemed pests only to find out later on that these animals served a role in an ecosystem.
I personally do not mosquitoes and wouldn't mind if they weren't around. But I hope we are absolutely sure that we know what we are doing and don't regret wiping out these mosquitoes a century later. Hopefully there aren't any unintended consequences.
You should hold it against them because veganism ( and to a lesser degree vegetarianism ) is morally wrong as it the most environmentally destructive and the most unnatural healthy diet. Veganism is the worst diet you can choose for your health, the health of the environment and causes the harm to animals ( mostly small mammals, insects and worms ).
You can see the absurdity of veganism as they proudly support locally sourced organic food but their diet makes "locally sourced organic food" an impossibility. A vegan anywhere on earth will die without importing avocados, all kinds of seeds, vegetation, etc from all over the world and still be lacking nutrients and have to resort to lab processed supplements. Real "natural" and "organic".
And omnivore ( a diet of every human society ) can have diet from locally sources. You can have a homestead almost anywhere and as an omnivore survive just from your own homestead. A vegan homestead can't exist anywhere because you can't grow all the necessary vegetation and supplements to survive.
Veganism is one of these great lies that seem "good" on surface but dig a little deeper and people will see what an absurd notion it is.
1) Since we already grow enough plants to feed the entire human population, we will only reduce animal suffering and land use by eating a vegan diet. It’s just that at the moment we feed grain to animals that we then slaughter instead of growing it to eat ourselves.
>1) Since we already grow enough plants to feed the entire human population, we will only reduce animal suffering and land use by eating a vegan diet. It’s just that at the moment we feed grain to animals that we then slaughter instead of growing it to eat ourselves
But do we grow enough plants to eat a vegan diet? A vegan diet requires a rather narrow set of plants in much higher quantities than we normally consume, eg beans, soy etc. You can't just look at the calories we get from corn or grain and say that we have enough.
Feed conversion for beef is around 6:1, so you have 6 pounds of plants for every pound of beef. Lots of those plants are grass and other stuff humans don't really want to feed on though. Still, the large number of calories cattle need to make gains leave some room to adjust the crop mix.
Of course grazing animal migration patterns and grassland effects (desertification/deforestation) not withstanding. I would love to see an increase in variety and number of grassland mammals in general in order to preserve/expand grasslands.
Corn, wheat, rye, oats, beans and soy are staple foods for humans and are what is often fed to the animals we intensively farm. For the non human-edible crops like alfalfa, canola, etc there is some wriggle room to change to other crops. My main point is that it is a realistic change not an environmental and moral disaster as it was framed.
As far as supplementing B12, I say better safe than sorry, but even that is not straight forward when you look into it.
A lot of health study regarding food is junk "science" because a lot of them are funded by companies, industry, special interest groups or charlatans trying make money by selling you a diet plan.
Everything from "fat is bad" or "cholesterol is bad" for you has been pretty much walked back.
And nonsense like "cereal or orange juice is part of a healthy breakfast" are "science" funded by the cereal and orange industries. It's marketing pretending to be a science.
Now the vegan charlatans selling their eating disorder to young and impressionable kids. The saddest part is that it is mostly young females falling for when they are at a critical stage of development. Almost all of them will leave veganism eventually but the curse of veganism will stay with them for the rest of their lives. In 30 years, we are going to have an epidemic of medical issues like osteoporosis, especially among women.
Balanced diet. It's simple. An omnivore diet that was part of ever human society.
Is it social media or the news? Is it CNN, Foxnews, NYTimes, BuzzFeed, Huffpo, MSNBC, etc or social media?
Did rolling stone intentionally lying about campus rape cause the problem or social media? Is the media constantly peddling lies like "campus rape crisis", "racist attacks", etc the problem or social media?
I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media.
The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general. But I guess blaming russia hasn't worked so now we can scapegoat social media.
From UVA to Covington to Mollett and everything else, is it the platform or the journalists, celebrities, etc creating the message.
It's not an either-or problem: both contribute to the outrage crisis. The difference is that media doesn't provide the platforms for individuals to communicate with each other and the world. That responsibility falls on social media.
> I don't remember social media having this level of problem until the news industry forced it's way into social media.
I'd argue that this is largely due to the fact that it took many years for social media companies to onboard large portions of the modern world. You may notice a correlation here, but where's the evidence of causality?
> The outrage isn't being driven by social media. It's being driven by the news industry and the media in general.
I disagree with this. Many social media platforms guide their users to certain types of content automatically using their recommendation engines. As an example, I consume a lot of political content on Youtube, and yet I get recommendations to watch conspiracy theory videos constantly. CNN isn't telling me to watch Q, YouTube is.
I remember Twitter being an instant hit with people in the news biz. I attended an early "Times Open" conference where they were quite shocked that people were live tweeting it.
Not saying that this isn't the case. The person I responded to conflates the rising popularity of social media with the entrance of news organizations into the space, which I believe is an oversimplification.
So what if people communicate with each other? That's the point of the internet and has been forever. That's like blaming telephones for outrage.
What does Q have to do with outrage? Is Q responsible for Smollet and the race baiting by CNN and the rest of the media? Is Q responsible for the russia fearmongering?
Are you really blaming small fringe youtube channels for the current state of affairs? Most people get brainwashed into hysteria by CNN, MSBNC, Foxnews, NYTimes, etc, not fringe youtube channels.
Conspiracy has been on youtube and the internet forever. It's nothing new and it is fringe.
What's new is that the entire media apparatus has decided to shift blame onto social media for the problems they caused. The extremism isn't on youtube, it's on CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, Huffpo, Buzzfeed, TheVerge and all the rest of the media.
They are the ones spreading conspiracies. They are the ones spread lies. They are the ones spreading hate. They are the ones claiming one side are nazis and the other side are commies. They are the ones lying about trump being a putin slave just like 8 years ago some in the media painted obama as a foreign born muslim.
The only ones blaming "Q" are propagandists working for the media or politically affiliated groups. 99% of americans haven't even heard of Q. But 99% of americans have heard the hate-filled divisive propaganda from CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc.
Blaming social media for the current outrage is like blaming mortgage borrowers, rather than the multinational banks for the financial crisis. It's absurd.
Also, don't you think it's a bit odd that outrage has increased since youtube, google, facebook, etc shifted their algorithm to favor CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. I wonder why.
And most importantly, much of the outrage is coming from the left, not the fringe Q crowd. You know the people consuming CNN, MSBNC, NYTimes, WashingtonPost, etc. But we can blame "Q" or "4chan" or "russia" or any of the other nonsense the people pretending to be journalists love to spout.
I'm not sure how you can say that when most of the actual murders (shooting up church congregations; shooting up synagogues; shooting up festivals; driving cars into protestors; etc etc) is coming from the right.
You don't get much more outraged than trying to kill someone.
I have looked at the stats. It's very clear that most violence, and the worst violence, is from the right. Have a look at the FBI list of domestic terrorists. These are almost all right wing extremists.
I'm not talking about journalists getting scuffled at rallies. I'm talking about church congregations getting killed. It's disingenuous to suggest there's any equivalence.
> During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the country. During the past several years, special interest extremism—as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)—has emerged as a serious terrorist threat. The FBI estimates that ALF/ELF have committed approximately 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of 42 million dollars.
[...]
> Right-wing groups continue to represent a serious terrorist threat. Two of the seven planned acts of terrorism prevented in 1999 were potentially large-scale, high-casualty attacks being planned by organized right-wing extremist groups.
Here's a relevant quote from the link you've posted:
> During the past decade we have witnessed dramatic changes in the nature of the terrorist threat. In the 1990s, right-wing extremism overtook left-wing terrorism as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the country. During the past several years, special interest extremism—as characterized by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)—has emerged as a serious terrorist threat. The FBI estimates that ALF/ELF have committed approximately 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996, resulting in damages in excess of 42 million dollars.
I'm not much into US politics, but aren't the two mentioned "liberation fronts" left?
This is very true. It's also easy to blame this on profit motive and clickbait driven advertising but a lot of these journalists are ideologically motivated in large part due to their ironically upper middle class liberal arts education (read privileged).
I'm not a journalist and I've only ever worked for one news publication in my career, so I obviously can't speak for all journalists. That said, we can't ignore the impact that traffic quotas have had on the industry since the collapse of print media.
I worked for a paper in 2016 on their software team and saw how much of an impact that Trump's name in a headline had on the traffic an article received. Everyone on the outside was screaming about why the media was giving him so much attention while the industry, in the middle of a financial crisis, was less than interested to leave money on the table. In the age of internet journalism, orgs are heavily incentivized to produce what they think the community wants, and that has some really dangerous long-term implications.
People don't realize how bad the financial situation is for newspapers across America, and how desperately print media orgs are trying (and in many cases, failing) to stay afloat.
I think this is where I do my usual comment and observe that print media isn't struggling to stay afloat. There are plenty of publications that are profitable. This is invariably ignored and a 'crisis' generalised to the entire industry because the profitable papers tend to be owned by Rupert Murdoch, and they tend to be profitable because they put up paywalls and charge money for their analysis and opinions rather than give them away for free.
This doesn't jive with the agenda of most journalists, who very much want to "change the world" and "do what is right not what is easy", etc. They see a big part of their job as guiding readers to the correct decisions and protecting them from false ideas, but of course if you throw up a paywall and charge money, you're much less able to do that.
I used to be quite sympathetic to the plight of the news industry - it wasn't their fault that times were changing, that they were now all competing with each other, that Craigslist outdid them on classified ads etc. But then some papers started turning things around financially, I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free, and I became much more aware of the extent to which journalists try to manipulate their reader base. My sympathy is now gone: newspapers are businesses, and they need to turn a profit by charging for their services. If that means giving up influence, well hey, welcome to the world the rest of us live in.
> There are plenty of publications that are profitable.
Many that do achieve profitability do so at tremendous sacrifice to the service they provide to the community. A perfect example of this is Alden Capital Group, which owns over 100 papers. They're infamous in the industry for reducing the newsroom headcount by up to 50% and replacing them with sales. Not only that, they're now trying to offload their entire new portfolio because this model of profitability actually devalues the papers in the marketplace, largely because they can't serve their communities.[0] The papers they print are essentially worthless because they can't put resources into writing important local stories.
> I realised nobody forced these papers to put all their content online for free
The model of the internet forced them to do this. Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly. Ad platforms by companies like Google were the best way for them to monetize, but in doing so they gave up all control. It was a die quickly or die slowly scenario. Most chose the latter.
Nobody forced them to create websites at all, certainly not "the model of the internet" which can't make anyone do anything. And of those websites, nobody forced them to not implement paywalls. You seem to be claiming that there is some dichotomy between serving a community and charging money for things, but there isn't. Lots of local businesses successfully serve their local community whilst still being financially sustainable.
All the market is telling the news industry is that it's way overstaffed. Too many journalists doing too little work that anyone actually values, too badly managed, often because their idea of an important local story isn't really aligned with what local people think is important.
Your case study of Alden seems to back this up. They're private equity, their purpose in life is to turn around failing businesses and make them sustainable, which they have done. The difficulty selling the resulting business is blamed in the final paragraphs on pension liabilities i.e. the hangover of an era when they were fiscally mismanaged; not on their inability to put resources into writing important local stories. With a 15% profit margin they should be able to easily find a buyer regardless of their perceived journalistic quality, but a huge pensions liability will definitely kill the attractiveness of the businesses.
That's like arguing nobody forced you to create a LinkedIn account in order to get a job. All of the infrastructure to get a job is online and has been for years, as is journalism. Sure, you don't _have_ to create an online professional profile, but you're dramatically limiting your options by doing so. Print media chose move online largely due the explosive growth of the internet. Publications saw the internet as innovative (who didn't?), and chose to jump on. Look at the bubble in the 90's, companies were trying to figure out how to incorporate the web into their business years ago. The armchair argument of "they didn't have to jump on" is weak when you consider they didn't have the benefit of hindsight. Everyone was getting on the web.
> Too many journalists doing too little work that anyone actually values, too badly managed, often because their idea of an important local story isn't really aligned with what local people think is important.
Investigative journalism is dying in the United States because it often takes months or years to investigate a story and can come at an astronomically high cost.[0]
We're approaching an era of journalism where major landmark stories may never see the light of day because the market doesn't care to pay enough for them. Should we be concerned that future investigative scandals (think Catholic Church sex abuse) may not be unearthed in the future because we're not willing to pay people to investigate them? How much money is knowing about such scandals worth to a society that isn't willing to pay for it?
Er, well, yes. I've never used a LinkedIn account to get a job. I've found work via knowing people. (I have one, but almost never update it, rarely check messages and have not obtained any work through it).
How much money is knowing about such scandals worth to a society that isn't willing to pay for it?
I suspect there are models that can pay for deep investigations, but it's probably not daily or weekly newspapers. One problem is that so much investigative journalism is junk that collapses when itself investigated. We focus on the high profile impactful stories and ignore the constant stream of heavily promoted "scandals" that end up being more in the journalists' heads than in reality.
> One problem is that so much investigative journalism is junk that collapses when itself investigated.
There are many reasons why legitimate investigations don't yield results (inability to retrieve financial records and other evidence, lack of cooperation by key players, threats from sponsors, etc.)
From the article above:
> The level of sponsor interference that news directors said they experienced this year was pretty much the same as last year – it exists in more than half of all newsrooms. In all, 17 percent of news directors say that sponsors have discouraged them from pursuing stories (compared to 18 percent last year), and 54 percent have been pressured to cover stories about sponsors, up slightly from 47 percent last year.
This survey was conducted when news media was in a much healthier financial situation than it is today, and back then, over half of news stations received pressure from sponsors in one form or another to either cover or suppress stories.
> We focus on the high profile impactful stories and ignore the constant stream of heavily promoted "scandals" that end up being more in the journalists' heads than in reality.
Can you provide some examples of such "scandals"? Investigative reporting, like most other reporting, typically goes through many layers of approval before being published.
I don't mean investigations that hit dead ends and never get published. I mean investigative journalism that turns out to be wrong or fraudulent.
Claas Relotious is a particularly notorious recent example, but there is plenty of meta-investigative journalism out there, like Glenn Greenwald's writeups of how the media present things that look like investigations of scandals but which are factually wrong. Here's a recent summary he did of 10 such cases:
I myself am a subscriber to a daily newspaper, which I read online, to get access to paywalled content. It's essentially opinion and analysis which I find value, and only rarely investigation of scandals. There are lots of newsrooms and only occasionally do they ever get a genuine Watergate or Snowden style scoop which means I can't really subscribe to get them because I don't know where they'll crop up next. And anyway, any paper I do subscribe to will end up paraphrasing and summarising the original paper's investigations anyway, which for me is fine - there's no particular need to learn about these things quickly or even at all, because I can't do anything with the knowledge usually.
In the end I'm skeptical journalism is the right way to keep powerful institutions in check. There are other ways.
Had local newspapers held firm and implemented paywalls, a huge number of them would've gone out of business very quickly.
I don't think that history bears this out. The Wall Street journal was an early paywall adapter, and they have been successful at it. The San Jose Mercury was one of the first newspapers to go online and originally had a paywall. They subsequently removed their paywall and went into a financial tailspin (I'm not suggesting that that's a cause-and-effect relationship, but removing the paywall certainly did not help them in the long-term.)
Yeah, the pundits always have the same thing to say to the Democrats, which is "move to the right" but they never say the Republicans should "move to the left".
I think it's less "move to the right" and more "admit you've already moved to the right".
Democrat attitudes feel increasingly puritan instead of actually liberal to me (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on everyone aligning to a specific moral framework), while Republican attitudes feel increasingly laissez-faire instead of actually conservative (as demonstrated by the continued insistence on destroying our environment instead of, you know, conserving it).
The reality is that the political spectrum is not one-dimensional, or even two-dimensional.
What one person calls a "lack of spine" might be another person's "being responsible to your constituency".
I was an elected official of a party committee once and I faced issues where I believed one thing that only half of my constituents believed so I slowplayed whenever I could.
To be fair, both Democrats and Republicans claim to have moral high ground over the other. Evangelical Christians tend to vote Republican because that party has successfully sold itself as the party defending traditional Christian morality and American culture.
What is now happening though is that the right is now gaining people who are not religious but are pro-free speech and a host of other related but not religious issues. I used to consider myself pretty far on the left. In the 80s and 90s the Evangelical Christians were the problem. They tried to censor music, video games... Now the censorship and dogma comes from the left. What's very interesting is that those same Christians who I thought were very intolerant of others views (and make no mistake they were and sometimes still are) have accepted people like me. Some of it is that we now have a common enemy but it also feels like they've realized that religion is no longer mainstream and thus have come to accept other less than mainstream opinions even if they don't agree with them.
It's worth keeping in mind that the Republicans and Democrats already once swapped sides on the "left" v. "right" spectrum. It ain't inconceivable to think that it might happen again (and in fact might already be in the early stages of happening again).
I remember the news getting a lot worse in the late 1980s. I think the O.J. Simpson affair was the watershed, but just before that I remember shows like "Hard Copy" moving into the
timeslot between 4pm and 6pm on broadcast TV.
Cable wasn't so important back then.
CNN found its stride which was extreme low-cost programming based on the same talking heads blathering endlessly about the latest "news". For instance, CNN kept talking about MH370 for months despite there being no real developments in the case. On a slow news day when there were not any plane
crashes or school shootings, the CNN anchors might wonder why their ratings are so bad and why people don't take their civic duty of watching CNN seriously.
Trump changed all that. Ever since he started his campaign you never knew what crazy thing would come out of his mouth next. Then he became president and it's been like a terrorist attack every day -- and the best thing is that they can sit on their touches in Atlanta and D.C. and not pile on short notice into an airplane to go visit some school that got shot up in a flyover state or go to Egypt and get beat up by Mubarak's thugs the way Anderson Cooper once did.
ICBMs stand for InterContinental ballistic missile. Intercontinental being the key word. Last I checked both china and japan were on the same continent.
I disagree. Let passionate people on all sides have their say. I think it's more toxic to stifle passionate people.
It's amazing how everyone from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Linus Torvalds is labeled as "toxic" and yet the "toxic" environment they created led to substantial advancements.
And poisoning the well ( or any ad hominem derivatives ) doesn't stop discussion, it generally leads to more discussions - though often times more contentious and off topic. And though I agree that it can make people angry, polarized and amp up the stakes, those aren't necessarily bad things. Most of the time, it is actually a good thing and a basis for competition.
Finally, I'd say HN has a different culture, not necessarily better. Also, what you are doing could be viewed as a form of shaming and virtue signaling. And at the end of the day, if you don't like linus's style of communication, you don't have to read or listen to it.
I don't understand the mentality of "I don't like it so you should change".
> It's amazing how everyone from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Linus Torvalds is labeled as "toxic"
To be clear, there is a difference between toxic people and toxic behaviors. The former, I think, doesn't exist. There are people who often engage in toxic behavior, and those who do rarely. Pointing out toxic behavior is the first step to correcting it. And correcting it is in fact the goal of community guidelines, in order to establish a more inclusive culture.
> Let passionate people on all sides have their say. I think it's more toxic to stifle passionate people.
Let's be clear about what "toxic" means, and not let it degenerate to "loud and I don't like it." Toxic means that it actively damages open discussion, drives people away, and kills off conversations. It is the same sense as a toxic substance; kills.
> And poisoning the well ( or any ad hominem derivatives ) doesn't stop discussion, it generally leads to more discussions
Ok this is manifestly untrue. Please read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well). Poisoning the well is a form of preemptive insult to discourage opponents from taking a position by making it seem toxic. The fallacy is aptly named.
> what you are doing could be viewed as a form of shaming
Yep! I am happy to shame toxic behavior when it is clear.
> and virtue signaling
Maybe. I'd be happy to do it anonymously if you would prefer.
> And at the end of the day, if you don't like linus's style of communication, you don't have to read or listen to it.
This is the very definition of suppressing conversation: sending people away who don't feel like putting up with insults. It's counterproductive and unnecessary.
> I don't understand the mentality of "I don't like it so you should change".
This isn't some he-said she-said situation. I am pointing out direct unprovoked insults designed to stifle discussion and establish a particular point of view. As I have made it abundantly clear, I find this completely unnecessary and I pointed it out because I really think we can stop doing this if we're just consistent about it. We'll have better discussions with more diverse viewpoints, not just hotheads shouting at each other.
When we are talking about toxic, I think we all understood it meant behavior. And the point of community guidelines isn't to make it the community more inclusive, it's actually to make it more exclusive. Limiting speech and thoughts are exclusive behaviors, not inclusive ones. But I'm all for HN or any other platform having guidelines.
I studied philosophy in college so I don't need an explanation of what poisoning the well is. "Poisoning the well" itself is poisoning the well and I don't want to get into the intricacies of ad hominems and logical fallacies. Many times, people misunderstand logical fallacies and use logical fallacies themselves to stifle debate.
Also, Linus wasn't having an argument or a debate. He was giving his opinion. He is allowed to say someone's argument is stupid : "how stupid your argument is.". He didn't call people stupid, he called the argument stupid.
Finally, ad hominems may or may not stifle discussion from the passionless or people who don't care about the topic, but it never stifles discussion from passionate people or people who care about a topic. Every major debate - going back to religious debates or debates about science or debates about slavery or debates about civil rights or anything else was "passionate". Can you imagine these debates being shut down because that's not what "polite company discusses"?
And why would it matter whether you virtue signal anonymously or not? You are already anonymous as HN is thankfully an anonymous forum. One thing HN is fairly good about ( as far as I know ) is anonymity.
I don't believe in ad hominems or attacking people. But if people want to use harsh language to express ideas they are passionate about, I say go for it. The same goes for you. You seem passionate about the subject and I support your right to express it in whatever manner you choose. What I find ironic is that under the aegis of "inclusivity and encouraging discussion", you are advocating for exclusion and stifling Linux Torvalds' speech. But as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Certainly, you can see that you are doing precisely what you claim Torvalds is doing - stifling speech ( or at least advocating for it ).
Well, we are going to disagree about this, so I won't drag this on forever. However I would like to be clear about a couple things.
> And the point of community guidelines isn't to make it the community more inclusive, it's actually to make it more exclusive.
Again, mixing up behaviors and people. The whole point of community guidelines is to serve the community--to include and support a wide range of people, not a wide range behaviors. Certain behaviors just flat out drive people away--that is the very definition of exclusiveness. Being "inclusive" of these toxic behaviors leads to an exclusive culture. The worst, most exclusive cultures are the ones without guidelines, full of bad behavior. Inclusiveness requires curation of behavioral guidelines. Let's not invert the sense of words when convenient for argumentation (e.g. calling community guidelines and behavioral standards "exclusiveness" because they discourage one type of bad behavior but encourage hundreds of other good ones).
> What I find ironic is that under the aegis of "inclusivity and encouraging discussion", you are advocating for exclusion and stifling Linux Torvalds' speech.
This seems to be the crux of the issue. First, it's an exaggeration to say that advocating against using insults and inflammatory language is "stifling" (see above). I actually want Linus to speak his mind--just do so without the anger channel. It's really fucking annoying to some people. Even calling ideas stupid is really fucking annoying to the people who have those ideas. But the worst part is, for every Linus there is, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of people who are going to read something like that and just silently leave. That's a sign of a bad culture. That's toxic right there. And those people who leave are the meek ones who normally wouldn't speak up because they don't want to get the firehose and spotlight pointed right at them. They don't want their ideas called stupid or idiotic or be told they aren't dealing with reality. Those kind of people that actually can be very bright and have very different (and valuable!) perspectives. The kind of people who just disappear and you never notice. And I've met plenty of people like this--if you ever people-managed, you find out hey, this or that person is leaving, and it's because they actually really didn't like being around this group. It's a loss. Most people just don't notice, but their community just got a little worse each time that happens. So you gotta find soft ways to stop it.
At any rate. Generally your comments can be construed as a defense of people that really don't need any defense. That makes it even worse when the community explicitly stands up and defends loud, obnoxious, unnecessary behavior and lionizes these "hotheads". (To be clear, I am not suggesting you are explicitly doing that, it just has that ring to it). Trust me, hotheads need no defense. They need no coddling or encouragement to keep mouthing off. Many hotheads will stick around and annihilate a community, perhaps unconsciously, because it works. They win. So don't defend them. Defending bad behavior is a death spiral, as it sends exactly the wrong message about inclusion, and that's double bad.
It's semantics to say community guidelines serve to support a wide range of people and not behaviors. It has the same effect. It will drive away people who do not fit your definition of "good" behavior. It's no different than homophobic policies that said we don't discriminate against gays, we discriminate against "bad behavior". And certain behaviors can drive away people, but censorship definitely does.
And I have to disagree with you about the worst communities. The worst communities are those with too much guidelines. Of course some guidelines are necessary, but mostly those involving harrassment, not speech. The US is based on the idea of less guidelines. North Korea, China, Russia, etc are based on "lots of guidelines". And the death spiral can go boths ways. Just as much to totalitarianism as it can go to anarcy.
Also, it's not an exaggeration that "insults and inflammatory language" is stifling. It's the definition of it. Anything can be considered insulting to anyone. That's why we have principled understanding of free speech. The basis of free speech is that you have the right to offend. Otherwise, you claiming that the earth is round is offensive and inflammatory to a flat earther and grounds for censorship.
You seem to think that just because I think someone should be allowed to say "an argument is stupid" is me advocating for anarchy or harrassment. I'm not. Also, "insults" aren't that insulting to everyone. Language that you find offensive isn't offensive to me. And I don't consider Linux's language to be offensive. But you do. But that's the point isn't it. Everyone has a diverse upbringing and diverse opinions.
Also I'd stay away from the term "bad behavior" because that's the same terminology the chinese government uses to crack down on its own citizens and oppress them. It's rather paternalistic and authoritarian which reminds people of the worse form of nanny states.
And last thing, why do you care how linux speaks. He is his own individual. Does he come to you and tell you how you should speak? I just find it the high of arrogance that you ( a relative nobody just like me ) has the gall to tell someone like Linux how he should speak or behave. If you don't like it, just don't read what he says. That's what I find frustrating. Why do you feel like you get to tell others how to live their lives?
At the end of the day, the people at HN can do what they want because it's their property. Regular users like you and I won't change anything. Just like we aren't going to change Linux or the platform he uses to express his opinions. I wish I could have changed your mind but I think I failed so I'll just end it here too. I just find it strange that anyone on hacker news would be demanding that linus torvalds or anyone for that matter be censored.
Let passionate people be passionate, but there is no reason to accept immature and toxic behavior. I won't answer the rest, because I believe your opinion is stupid :)
He isn't wrong since most linux servers run on x86 architecture and obviously most windows desktops run on x86 architecture.
To your last point, if that is true, then what will the differences be when both the OS and CPU architectures are different? I suspect it will create even more headaches.
I don't see ARM winning the server space anytime soon or ever considering how established and dominant x86 is.
As I corrected your lies in that thread, I'll correct them here as well.
H-1B visas had nothing to do with Silicon Valley. The H-1B visa was created in 1990. Silicon Valley had already existed for decades by then. How can H-1B visas be the reason that Silicon Valley exists if Silicon Valley predates H-1B visas by decades?
You do realize that H-1B visas aren't confined solely to Silicon Valley right? Zuckerburg could have gotten H-1B visas workers to work in Massachussettes. There are plenty of interviews by zuckerburg stating why he moved to california. It had nothing to do with H-1B visas.
And H-1B visas doesn't prevent zuckerburg from opening offices all over the world.
Canada is a country, not a small region like silicon valley. And if canada becomes the new silicon valley, good for them. Please stop repeating the same lies over and over again.
A lot of foreign born workers are not H1B because they got their green cards or citizenship. I'd safely say a majority of them were H1Bs till recently. Till 2008, getting a green card for any country was not a problem. It has gotten a lot worse since then.
I have and even more, I know people who work in silicon valley. Have you been there?
Ignoring the fact that "90% of tech workers there were born outside the USA" is absolutely false, what does that have to do with H-1B visas?
It could be true that 90% of tech workers were born outside the USA and none of them could be H-1B visa holders. There are plenty of american tech workers who immigrated to the US as a child and became american citizens. Like sergei brin or jerry yang. They may be born outside the US, but none of them are H-1B visa holders. They were all american citizens.
The fact that you are intentionally lying and being sneaky with stats is very worrisome.
We used to wipe out all kinds of animals that were deemed pests only to find out later on that these animals served a role in an ecosystem.
I personally do not mosquitoes and wouldn't mind if they weren't around. But I hope we are absolutely sure that we know what we are doing and don't regret wiping out these mosquitoes a century later. Hopefully there aren't any unintended consequences.
Don't birds and other insects eat mosquitoes?