"There are downsides to the consolidation of food suppliers, to be sure, but food safety is probably better for it."
Nope, quite the contrary. By necessity consolidation means fewer individual processing facilities, which in turn means any single facility services a larger percentage of the market. Given fixed odds of any given single processing facility being cross-contaminated by a dirty shipment, by necessity that contamination event will impact a larger volume of product due to bulk mixing. Additionally this cross-contamination event will impact a larger portion of the market due to now-commonplace multi-state product distribution.
I frequently hear "efficiency" touted in the context of the agriculture industry, always by individuals who have no involvement with it, and have to wonder what, exactly, they believe they are cheerleading. A loaf of bread is not significantly cheaper now than it was 50 years ago, so no obvious benefits to the consume accrue from this notional efficiency. What has changed is rural bankruptcy and suicide rates have both skyrocketed, with the consolidation of the AG industry consistently implicated as the primary driver of both.
This is one of those rejoinders that tries to be clever but really, really isn't. The "intern as fake CEO" is left holding the bag because it's their signature on contracts and other legal documents. The idea of puppet CEOs to fraudulently dodge accountability existed well before LLMs became a thing. Courts see right through that kind of scheme plus the "intern" is likely to turn coat against the mastermind to save their own skin at the first sign of trouble.
If you think CEOs are the primary legal signatories for their company you might need to spend some time away from garage band startups. Companies maintain entire legal departments for a reason.
Maybe, maybe not. A lot of folks would gleefully avoid rocking the boat if handed a job this cushy. If they do flake out you could ask if anyone in facilities would like to take a break from emptying trashcans...
And they are. I read somewhere a few days ago that France is vacuuming up academics and advanced students that have been displaced by various recent policy changes that have proven to be hostile towards academia and research.
If you can't understand the utility of having welcoming and creative/tenacious people involved in your science (which your questions listed are asking about) then you are not nearly the expert in qualifications you think you are.
I am saying we are not selecting for those people.
When we hire at the university, we ignore creative, tenacious people and instead select mediocre people with a nice woke story that meets the woke requirements.
I would encourage you to reflect on what you think "woke" is, and why things that you think are woke are mutually exclusive from the skills and qualities you value.
"Woke" is a nonsense scare phrase at this point, when what you're actually taking issue with is valuing people's lived experiences and backgrounds as a part of what they contribute. Understanding where people come from and how that colors their world view is simply a good practice when doing anything, but especially when you're trying to do science/academia. Too many similar minds in a room will never produce what one with a diverse group will. Diversity is good science, and valuing it is not "woke".
Pretending the word doesn't mean anything is the most obvious sign that the person saying that is one of them.
If you don't like the term given to your basket of political beliefs give one that encapsulates it that you like better.
"MAGAts" is the obvious 'other side' parallel. Both sides have their crazies and denying that one exists means you're obviously one of them. As a Pacific Green I don't even like the fact that I can say "both" and people both know what I'm talking about and perpetuates the misguided notion that only two parties exist.
>When we hire at the university, we ignore creative, tenacious people and instead
select mediocre people with a nice woke story that meets the woke requirements.
Which university? Name some "creative, tenacious people" who were rejected by said university.
There's nothing in your HN profile to out you to anyone, so have at it. If you are unwilling to do so, I call bullshit on your anecdote. Or as they say, "pix, or it didn't happen."
Oh I am very clear about what precedents I want set. I want the C-suite, board, and major shareholders of any corporate entity that meaningfully deviates from legality to face all of the same consequences a private individual would.
On the subject of gatekeeping in the climbing community there's also the minor issue of getting threatened with violence by locals when trying to document routes.
Grandmother Mountain boulders in western NC, me and a buddy had to cut a climbing trip short after getting into some shit with a four pack of the locals over me taking photos of some of the problems there. Nobody got hurt but it was every bit as hostile as any encounter with the surfing locals I'd ever had in the Outer Banks.
Vedauwoo Wy, a local friend made me leave my camera at his place and basically warned me not to talk to or even make eye contact with any of the locals at some of the back country crags we were going to. No encounter there but the stories I've heard told (and believe) are something else. Same for Wild Iris near Lander.
Out of curiosity, how long ago were those incidents? Seems crazy for such well-known areas with guidebooks and extensive documentation on mountain project.
There's a crag in MA where the access is specifically conditioned on the crag not having a guidebook or the routes being recorded in an online database.
I don't know of any violence occurring over any of this, but I know there have been access issues and closures in the past.
I am sick to death of the seemingly obligatory oh-but-im-all-in-on-ai disclaimer embedded in what is otherwise a (totally valid) critique of AI. Have the courage of your convictions already.
I think most people see AI as an economic inevitability, immune to what any of us thinks. Why spend the time and energy making a reasoned critique if nobody has a real choice in the end? It's like railing against the concept of money or the existence of the mosquito.
It's not an either-or. Some of us are genuinely excited about what AI can do (or has already done for specific personal projects etc), while also being dismayed about what it's used to do on the internet at large.
Ok, what is your stack? Which MDM did you put on your tween's devices? What about the 15 year old who really wants Graphene OS? Do they VPN back to your home network to ensure your DNS and IP block based filtering applies to their mobile usage? Are you caching the teachers' recommended YouTube videos to Plex from the YTDL container or just monitoring their watch list stats of brain rot shorts?
He’s saying that parents will always allow their kids to see, think, learn, and say things that he believes should be off limits, with government stepping in to decide that.
Some parents will berate their kids or discipline them inappropriately and instill stress and anxiety in them that causes them to seek out things that should be off limits. It's easier to see a solution for the second issue when the first is not socially acceptable to talk about out loud. Nobody wants to be told they are parenting their own kids inappropriately. But in some cases, that just reality. Tech CEOs are a 100% reliable source of blame; parents - the people who are physically around their children the most - are not. (Source: myself. The best I managed to escape childhood with was C-PTSD, and I have had to get therapy to be able to manage my digital device usage ever since.)
So rather than work on the first problem, which is admittedly difficult, you want to remove the outlet that helps them cope? What do you imagine to be the most immediate consequences?
I mean I think we can all broadly agree that showing snuff and hardcore porn to 11 yr olds is objectively bad. There is a line, we just might not agree on exactly where it should be placed.
I'm saying most parents are perfectly powerless to prevent their children from seeing shit like that on the internet. Hell there's snuff on YouTube. Hardly a non sequitur.
It’s still a non sequitur because it’s not the argument I was responding to (which I found bizarre). I’m not really interested in rehashing general “must protect the children” arguments, sorry.
Except technicality absolutely factors in. Sure there's mouthbreathers out there that exercise no oversight at all over the content their kids are exposed to but there's also a large group of well-intentioned parents that would likely do a much better job at this if the bar wasn't set quite so high.
Smoking is becoming cool again because lets face it, vaping makes you look like a bit of a nonce. Nicotine pouches are good too, but I think it's mostly men who use them.
But yeah, smoking is on the rise. I'm a youngish person and whenever I go out and meet others, it's quite rare for someone to turn down a cig.
Was it? Are you just saying throwing manure, or do you think that children were regularly buying cigarettes in stores until just a decade ago?
Do you think that pornographers and social networks are desperate for child users, and that they provide a significant amount of income? Do you think that rooting everyone's computer so the sites can comply by flipping a switch and never have to hear about this again will bother them in the slightest, except for pornographers being afraid that adults afraid to lose their anonymity will stop visiting?
Social media has been trying to deanonymize users since Facebook's real name policy and G+. Deanonymized users are worth more. They love this idea, and don't give a shit about losing 17 year olds. It's proof that governments will do anything, even reinterpret their constitutions, in order to preserve the right of online multinationals to algorithmically manipulate adults for money.
I think that by "Child users" parent meant children buying porn or selling porn to children. It probably happened but I think that it was much less common than children getting a porn magazine from an older brother that got it from an older friend and again and again until a legit sale to some adult.
It also means we don't need identity verification. Anonymous scratch-off cards sold in stores to adults, just like cigarettes, can be used to verify age. Or alternatively, device-only attestation. There's no reason to verify age upon every use of the product; only when it's sold.
Nah, we definitely need identity and age verification, if for no other reason than it strips tech companies and data brokers of plausible deniability. They already know who you are and by extension your age, this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.
> we definitely need identity and age verification...it strips tech companies and data brokers of plausible deniability
> this fight is very much about tech companies avoiding consequences.
If I follow your logic, you seem to be saying: tech companies could easily not target kids if they wanted to, but they don't. That may be true, but I don't see why violating everyone's privacy is the only way to prove it.
As Stated Elsewhere you have to have a thing before it can be violated. Given the comprehensive scope of digital surveillance performed by tech companies, you can't claim to have privacy online. And before you "but but the government" they can already subpoena your entire digital existence at will, assuming Palantir or some data broker hasn't already sold it to them. So yeah, may as well make life more difficult for the companies that make all of this possible, that would at least present a modest improvement on the status quo.
Absolutely we do not. You just ASSUME anyone needs that other than the big mega-corporations dreaming up of identifying everyone at all times, without a warrant.
This "well actually" feels like it's in the same vein as tobacco companies funding cancer research. 30 seconds with Google shows that CoreCivic's Q1 earnings for 2026 are ~%50 higher than earnings reported for Q1 from last year. So yeah, they're getting rich off this.
I think it's the utter banality of the end goal that offends me as much as anything else. The idea that we as a society will sell ourselves this cheaply beggars belief.
Nope, quite the contrary. By necessity consolidation means fewer individual processing facilities, which in turn means any single facility services a larger percentage of the market. Given fixed odds of any given single processing facility being cross-contaminated by a dirty shipment, by necessity that contamination event will impact a larger volume of product due to bulk mixing. Additionally this cross-contamination event will impact a larger portion of the market due to now-commonplace multi-state product distribution.
I frequently hear "efficiency" touted in the context of the agriculture industry, always by individuals who have no involvement with it, and have to wonder what, exactly, they believe they are cheerleading. A loaf of bread is not significantly cheaper now than it was 50 years ago, so no obvious benefits to the consume accrue from this notional efficiency. What has changed is rural bankruptcy and suicide rates have both skyrocketed, with the consolidation of the AG industry consistently implicated as the primary driver of both.