I think the dirty secret is that a lot of it is not "1/2 the price that lasts 1/4 the time" but "1/4 the price that lasts 9/10 the time" or "1/2 the price for the exact same product without half of the budget going to marketing".

It's not all of it. Some things are seriously worse quality. But really a ton of the "better quality" is just better marketing.

I know I'm not supposed to complain, and you are all free to flag this comment, but i actually cannot believe i got downdooted for calling out Garry Tan's slop racebaiting

It's poorly structured. I think a better split between technical vs social measures and how they interact would result in a much better article. It also doesn't seem to even mention DPI or great firewall of China as prior art.

> society has decided to stop jailing (committing) the homeless

> leaving them on the street is not helping them. committing them would give them access to (force upon them) care, and is the more humane thing to do

> I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem

> doesn't that pretty much "fix the problem"?

Which problem? Every misunderstanding is someone replying to someone else without knowing who was replying to whom

That issue looks like it was filed 3 months ago and there has been active development debugging and trying to fix it the whole time?

I dunno, at mag7 i see painful infra bugs sitting on the vine for years... maybe my bar is low, but that bug looks like a good response

I believe it's because in many cases, the unspoken follow on to "inequality is the norm" is "and so it's useless (or actively harmful) to try to defy that norm."

Not that above commentator is meaning that.

But many "thought leaders" i.e. Jordan Petersen play around with similar motte-and-bailey - "hierarchies are natural" (examples with lobsters, apes, whatever) --> "existing hierarchies should be preserved" (not defended in the argument but implied).

Probably some downvoters are reacting to the structural similarity, although taken in good faith i think above commenter makes a fine point about the historical pattern of periods of equality being short lived and brought about by great intentional effort while sliding back to inequality seems to occur all of the time.

I do see how your comment is similar to AI writing (a couple other comments explain) but it did NOT set off my AI trigger. I think it's just clear writing.

> Would you say the same if the people involved had names that sounded more Caucasian but from a similarly rival nation?

If the people had Russian names instead and top commenter said:

>US Nationals

><Russian names>

it's still racist, yes.

> I don’t think top commenter is racist.

I won't make any claims about the commenter. I'll criticize their implication that people with foreign sounding names are not "real Americans" though.

You can use this argument to support literally anything:

> claim: these people have Chinese names, are they REALLY Americans??

> response: suspecting "true allegiance" based on peoples names is racist and was used to justify atrocities like Japanese internment in our country's history

> rebuttal to response: "art of being a Good Person these days, is never admitting that you know or suspect this, even if you've seen & heard it yourself."

Instead of defending the claim you're just claiming you're being censored.

The difference is, of course, the claim that blood is thicker than water has been a relatively reliable way of guessing where someone's loyalties lie for millenia; while the "response" is a cosmopolitan universalist tic common only to the past 70 years or so, and flying in the face of so much experience & common-sense requires shaming anyone who thinks otherwise.

I think you could make a better argument for nativism than "its been that way for millenia" and "it's common sense". Warring tribes were also around for millenia and were probably quite common sense.

Most people consider the modern state, society, etc, to be an improvement. Many people also consider not questioning people's loyalties by their surnames, to be an improvement, even though I'm sure it was common sense for a long time.