I remember the last Thiel thread was a holy war filled with people who thought outspoken Trump supporters should lose their careers on grounds of bigotry and hate speech propagation (citing https://xkcd.com/1357/ among other things).
Revisiting that thread with the knowledge that Trump would win and that Trump supporters were not some vocal minority is sobering.
Look at the numbers; they're still a vocal minority, they're just ones who vote as a bloc and have the geographic advantage. Trump got less than Romney after all.
The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process, the winner is always going to be decided by a "vocal minority".
> The real story is that with more than half of the country sitting out the voting process
Are you surprised by that? Properly voting costs a lot of money. I spent hours researching my options and another hour just walking to and from the voting dropoff location. When you add up all the time it takes to research an election and vote, multiply that by your personal time value of money, multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook, the individual voters cost/benefit is abysmal.
"multiply that by the probability that it will change the election and then multiply it by the benefit of having 1 candidate over the other on your personal economic outlook"
No you can't just loop that in there. The cost of walking to and from the polling location, fine, but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy. I waited in line for over an hour before work. If I extrapolate my salary out, I paid probably $10 worth of my time to vote. Considering that is once every 4 years, that's not much to live in a democracy where we get to vote to choose our representatives.
> but these kinds of costs are the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy
Not really, we could randomly choose a few thousand people to vote and it would be practically just as effective without all the costs of having everyone vote. Better yet, you would probably get a better sample of the population too since it would not be biased towards people who normally vote.
You'd need perfect security... I mean perfect, or that would be a trivially easy system to control. The irony that the government subject to such a process would be needed to ensure the sanctity of that process should not be lost on you.
That would be a good response, except you can still live in a democracy without voting. You're just accepting that generally a plurality of the voting population will make a reasonable decision rather than saying you need to take part in that yourself every time.
I'm not sure how this is related to the cost/benefit of voting? Yes you can not vote and still live here. And? (I'm not trying to be argumentative, just don't understand).
I think it's a reply to your description of voting as one of "the costs you have to pay to live in a democracy". You don't, strictly, have to pay that cost.
Can you expand on having to walk an hour to the 'voting dropoff location'? Firstly, do you mean where you actually vote and secondly is this an urban location?
I'm interested as having lived in two countries with different electoral systems (UK and Australia) and in urban and rural locations I never had to walk more than a few hundred yards to a polling booth (urban) or I could park pretty close (rural).
I also noticed that news coverage of the election was showing very long lines, is this a typical experience for voters in US?
> the winner is always going to be decided by a "vocal minority".
I hope, this is taken note. The job of a representative democracy is to get a representative. We could just use the concept of sortition - randomly sampled voters.
As it should be, if you're not passionate enough to get to the polls and stand in line for a few minutes then you shouldn't have a voice in the election.
I'm not sure that being ruled by the most passionate is actually that effective. It seems to me that passion and a lack of intelligence seem strongly correlated. It's easy to work someone who can't see the broader picture, up into a frenzy than it is to convince people with complicated and diverse views into that same frenzy. It is frankly, why the Republican party could toe the same line for decades, echo that on radio stations and TV chat shows, and consistently whip their base into a frenzy over a predictable handful of issues. By contrast Democrats had to appeal to a fundamentally more diverse base with a similarly diverse set of issues, less open to sloganeering.
There is an essential asymmetry when you value passion over knowledge of the issues, intelligence, and education.
You forget that the GOP fractured and there was a neocon candidate whose vote would have gone to Trump otherwise.
A couple hundred thousand votes difference is a tie. It's bad weather in Texas or California turning off a quarter million voters and ending up with the same result.
And if you think ~half of the country is so horribly racist or sexist they should lose their jobs on grounds of bigotry and hate speech you've got bigger problems than the ability to do math. People just want change and Trump's offering more than just discrimination, he did well amongst white women and beat Romney's numbers with many non-white demographic groups.
He might not be my first choice, but I won't discredit all of his supporters over it.
lol I never said that. I said people who work in computer science who say that <50% is a majority have a serious problem with math and should look for work elsewhere given the nature of our field.
Yeah, have fun with that. I don't think putting money in the markets right now is a great move unless you can afford to lose it all. Granted, that's always the case to some extent.
We were already looking rough before Trump, the UK has Brexit, the EU is struggling, China is... who the hell knows. I think we could be in for some historically bad times, and all of this while the Middle East and Northern Africa are burning.
If not for nuclear detente, I'd be pretty concerned about WWIII right about now.
Yes, of course. Long lines to vote is not a function of the size of the country, it's more likely to be a function of the number of people and the number of available polling stations in a given area. There are very many large cities around the world that can handle voting without the excessive lines seen in the US.
> It's a sad world we live in that I speed read your post and wasn't sure if you meant the UAE or USA..........
I hate this type of rhetoric comparing the USA to a police state. The USA does not detain, "disappear," or torture political dissidents or opponents. The USA is not a police state. It's not even close to a police state.
Which state would reckon being a police state? To determine whether it is, we need to look at facts. 95% prisoners are there on plea bargain, which means they have never been proven guilty (They might just not be able to afford analysis); 1146 people killed by police in 2015; 1% of the population in prison and up to 6% depending on race; people get raided by SWAT for playing poker, 2 gigantic databases of everyone's online actions with a Real Name Policy (Google+ and Facebook), torture is legal for opponents of the country, a guy who investigated Hillary Clinton was suicided by a gunshot in a park...
...and a guy who exposed illegal action ("under any normal person's understanding" of the Constitution) is currently the #1 top wanted guy on the planet and is seeking refuge in... Russia (oh, the irony). Every single one of those facts could be turned into a movie, but we're now so used to them that we all despair.
I, as a foreigner in Europe, don't go to conferences in USA because of the TSA.
It could be because the people who know they are guilty take the bargain and save themselves some years, while the innocent go to court and prove their innocence.
This doesn't prove they are guilty. That's the problem with plea bargain: Scientific analysis costs a lot, even to prove obvious things, and most don't have the money to purchase that. Hence: 95% people in jail aren't proven guilty.
Tell me, are you afraid of criticizing President Obama on Twitter? Are you afraid jack-booted secret police might kick down your door in the middle of the night and throw you in prison for 5 years if you complain about the government on Facebook? Those are the types of problems people in UAE have to deal with.
Gamers are the only ones we have pictures of. We don't know what happens to the rest of the population, especially politically-involved people, and especially people who investigate on Hillary Clinton.
I didn't participate in the downvoting of your post.
> We don't know what happens to the rest of the population, especially politically-involved people, and especially people who investigate on Hillary Clinton.
We do have a pretty good account of entire news and political organizations being extremely vocal about their opposition to one or more dominant political parties. Anyone can purchase a subscription to many magazines that take an overtly anti-government stance.
I find it strange that you point out Hillary Clinton as an "off limits" public figure; the amount of articles critical of her is in the tens of thousands. The initial email server scandal was broken by Gawker, and further investigated by reporters at the New York Times. Nearly every hour of Fox News I watched this year had something critical to say about Hillary Clinton. 60% of my Facebook feed is anti-Hillary posts. She is perhaps the safest public figure to criticize without expectation of negative consequences.
> Initially, it will explore the feasibility of building a line linking the two cities.
So now it's one of those "feasibility" projects?
Hyperloop suffers from the same problem as Solar Freakin' Roadways and Artificial Gills, I'm afraid: too much saying, not enough doing. I am instantly suspicious of projects that have lots of hyped up marketing but little to no prototypical substance.
To me, Hyperloop One still seems like a sci-fi pipe dream (pun intended).
It's not our money funding this company, I don't see the utility in trying to take them down a notch. If they fail, only their investors lose. If they succeed, we all win.
If it's an HN thread about the latest social media startup, the lament is that SV doesn't innovate enough. If it's about a company tackling something hard, out come accusations of 'vapourware', and predictions of their imminent doom.
You realize that isn't actually how a capital market based economy works, right? Investors are the "command" part of the economy, responsible for allocating resources. If they decide to only invest in ridiculous, worthless ideas then we all definitely lose. So far that hasn't happened, but never forget that it is very important for us all where investors put their money.
Wealth is the only credential required for investing. If some or all of today's investors crash and burn, loads of other wealthy people will find better opportunities with reduced competition from today's foolish investors. (Maybe they aren't investing now because their risk profiles require better opportunities to get the cash out of the mattress.) If one hasn't somehow hitched her wagon to the fools, their poor investments can't hurt one at all.
This "somewhere, someone is losing money!" concern trolling fallacy is one "usefully idiotic" source of our repeated bailout follies, so I'd like never to see it again.
The particular crashes you cite didn't hurt me. We're not all in this together when Jaimie Dimon is enjoying his luxuries. Why would we all be in it together when he makes a dumb investment?
Because when lots of people collectively make dumb decisions, then the whole macroeconomic picture goes bad and people like you and I, otherwise not involved find ourselves out of work because of general layoffs in a down economy.
One bad decision here or there won't make much of a difference, because it doesn't dent the whole, and it likely doesn't affect anyone directly connected to us. But many bad decisions is a whole other ballgame.
At the top of this thread, one could see the goalposts. At that point a "live and let live" attitude toward speculative investing was advocated, appropriately for a site like HN.
Here the argument seems to be that a transportation project in Dubai is somehow the same as Goldman purchasing CDSs from AIG.
And I agree with that argument. Where I must respectfully disagree is when you say the previous two major economic upheavals didn't affect you personally, as if implying they shouldn't affect anyone else either, which is silly. You probably didn't mean to imply that, but that's what people are going to read (myself included.)
I'm not against helping out "little people" who need help. A cursory examination of the bailouts, however, makes clear that nothing of the sort was ever contemplated. All payments were to giant financial firms. Briefly, certain shameless pundits claimed there would be some sort of "trickle down" effect, but no one really expected it.
When the general welfare is invoked to justify extraordinary action, but the action itself doesn't contribute to that at all, the original argument ceases to convince. Cui bono?
> This "somewhere, someone is losing money!" concern trolling fallacy is one "usefully idiotic" source of our repeated bailout follies, so I'd like never to see it again.
I had trouble parsing this, is there an idiom in here that I'm not familiar with?
Maybe more than one such idiom? I probably skipped some commas. Also, I'm a bit of a nut, so most people will disagree with at least part of that sentence. Piece by piece:
"somewhere, someone is losing money": Any functioning market in securities will have winners and losers, so it isn't automatically a problem that someone has lost in any particular situation.
"concern trolling": This is when e.g. I pretend that I'm worried about something bad that might happen to you, but in reality the advice I'm giving is meant to help myself instead. We see this typically when a consultant from one political party claims to be worried about consequences for the other political party.
"fallacy": Something lots of people believe, that isn't true.
"usefully idiotic": A "useful idiot" is someone who believes the bullshit peddled by class enemies to such an extent that she'll repeat that bullshit in all seriousness, to her own detriment.
"bailout follies": We've had lots of economic downturns, but somehow only those overseen by Goldman alumni as Treasury Secretaries have required the taxpayer to give Wall Street lots of money.
I don't think Hyperloop is going to result in anything particularly useful. It seems to have a lot of fundamental problems. I'm sure it's no coincidence that Elon Musk tossed the idea out with minimal support rather than having one of his companies build it, or founding a new one.
However, it seems a bit premature to say that it's too much saying and not enough doing. It's only been out there for about three years. There have been scale-model pods built, and test tracks are under construction. If anything, progress seems remarkably fast for such a radical machine.
The Hyperloop is technically possible. It will struggle for the same reason Maglev struggled: It won't be cost effective to build or maintain within the safety factors people are comfortable with.
You really have to look at the history of Maglev because the parallels are considerable. Maglev undeniably works, but nobody is building Maglev systems aside from a few pet vanity projects because High Speed Rail is "Good Enough" and cheap!
Hyperloop takes all of the cost issues that Maglev had and makes them worse. Even if the tube didn't have a negative pressure (just a tube with atmospheric pressure) it would be a cost nightmare, but you add in the costs of building something which can withstand negative pressures and the whole thing is just a farce.
Maglev, like Hyperloop, initially wanted to build on raised towers. But it largely wasn't because being able to escape during an emergency is kind of a big deal, same reason why the Euro-Tunnel is 2x larger than it needs to be to support escape tunnels.
A project like Hyperloop won't ever be able to win against real life problems like bombings, earthquakes, fires, extreme weather, and so on. Or at least it won't within the normal realms of cost.
> nobody is building Maglev systems aside from a few pet vanity projects because High Speed Rail is "Good Enough" and cheap!
Japan is building the Chuo Shinkansen, which will be a major intercity Maglev line. It's expected to connect Tokyo and Nagoya in 40mins, down from 100mins on the Tokaido Shinkansen (although a good chunk of that is due to a more direct route through the mountains), and later Osaka.
I could believe it's not necessarily a cost effective investment, but I don't know if I'd call it a vanity project. My impression is that they're trying to duplicate the success of the original Shinkansen, by building something similarly ahead of its time.
Given this is the UAE, I'm not sure they care about the costs. :)
For them, this is just another innovation to put the country on the map of the world as an innovative and futuristic place, and that attracts tourism; which is said to be a large part of the economy here.
In addition to what the other guy said, think about vulnerability to terrorism.
Blow up a support for a segment of tube in the right spot at the right time, and you turn the train into a kinetic kill weapon. (it's traveling 50% faster than a 747!) I'd hate to see that done when it was going through a city.
Blow up a support at any point at the right time, and you've murdered a tube of passengers, plus completely shut down an entire segment of transportation infrastructure for a significant amount of time. Do you know how much it cost the US to shut down all air traffic on 9/11?
Basically, hyperloop is a lot more feasible in a world without homicidal nutjobs - but, alas...
I have a different POV on this given I currently live in Dubai, UAE. They have a 74KM automated rail system (Dubai Metro) and most of it is built on raised towers. This proposed system from what I understand is going to cross mostly empty dessert area.
Secondly, UAE is a pretty safe country in terms of terrorism. At least thats the perception you get if you live here. I haven't heard of one terrorism related activity here. That may be because the media is tightly controlled, but word still gets out if something that major were to happen here. This might just be because they have very tightly controlled borders, and are surrounded by friendly states that also have a relatively good security record (Saudi, Oman).
Just my take on these issues. I don't have any hard data, this is just my perception from having spent 3 years in this country.
I am not sure even Dubai has enough money to make a hyperloop work. I mean, it sounds so good until you break out the details and examine it piece by piece and then you start to realize exactly what they are proposing
Trump supporters just tried this and were in fact caught.
Nobody with sense would try, it carries severe punishment (it's a felony) for virtually no benefit to the person taking the risk, and really virtually no effect on the election either.
In my experience in the US, you have a registered polling station where you are allowed to cast your ballot. When you arrive, they cross your name off the list. If I'm only allowed to vote in one location, and that location only allows me to vote once, that should prevent double voting, even if I'm not who I say I am. Or rather, I'm not going to vote twice as the same person.
Is this the case across the US?
Whether the voter registration rolls are up-to-date, that's another matter as well. And double voting is only one type of fraud.
> Your belief should be based on the evidence you have, even if that means a small amount that leads you to an extreme conclusion.
That's one way of thinking, but I reject it. You'll easily be manipulated by political and corporate agendas if you think this way.
Often my own intuition is at odds with the "evidence I have" and I turn out to be right later. If I had jumped to the (extreme) conclusion that smoking was healthy back in the 70s and 80s because of the evidence big tobacco was pushing from the shadows (doctors recommending brands, etc) I might not be here today.
You won't be easily manipulated by virtue of having strong opinions, as long as they're weakly held, because you'll probably state your strong opinion to someone who knows better than you. If your opinion is actually weakly held, you'll recognize that their opinion is closer to the truth and adjust yours accordingly.
Often my own intuition is at odds with the "evidence I have" and I turn out to be right later.
I mean evidence in a broad sense, encompassing all information available to you for basing your worldview upon, including your intuition. If your intuition has been reliable in the past, and the scientific evidence was being put out by entities with obvious incentives for a certain conclusion, then it's rational to weigh your intuition highly relative to the scientific evidence.
What does 'a strong opinion' mean to you? Because I think we have different ideas of what that means.
I think the people who are against forming strong opinions on little data, thinks it essentially means being confident, speaking your mind, and influencing others towards seeing things your way, when you haven't done much research into a topic. Which I think is a bad idea, because it has a high chance of propagating misinformation.
