Nothing you've said here is wrong. The enquirer doesn't meet the minimum standards of journalism, they are a blackmail rag. I think this could actually be proven with empirical data.
There's a difference between a correction to a flawed article and attempted blackmail though... One is an accident that can occurre in the course of good journalism, the other is something else entirely.
Yes, but this isn't an accurate description of gawker's case either. This wasn't a case of accidentally falling on the wrong side of the legal line and only realizing when it's too late. They repeatedly ignored direct court orders, eg to take down the video.
There is no such thing as "financial freedom". Financial freedom is a concept that arises from personal beliefs and practices.
There is only one universal freedom, the freedom of chioce. I think this is more important than any 21st century pay day lending problem. We need to preserve free choice not just for our generation/set of problems, but for all time.
Edit:
Don't confuse living a long, healthy, happy life with freedom. They could not be more different.
No, absolutely not. Choice in its purest form is and always was an illusion. People are driven by their circumstances and their environment, they do not have a consciousness that is capable of perceiving and acting apart from the world they live in. Jean-Paul Satre make a very cute case for Radical Freedom, but it is little more than a thought experiment.
Ultimately people would prefer to know that things are going to get better, but perhaps they don't have the tools and know-how to do it. Much like telling a depressed person they have a choice to not be depressed, someone desperately poor doesn't have the simple choice to not be poor.
Financial freedom can be thought of at many levels, some all the way up to super rich and able to subvert laws at their whim. In this context, I am meaning freedom from the emotional distress caused from being incapable of being secure in the knowledge that there is a high probability they will have a roof over their head and food to eat for at least a couple of months. In turn, this allows for forward planning, and forward planning is the manifestation of being capable of exercising choice with regards to that persons/family's future development.
So, considering that people are constrained by their environment, our "generation/set of problems" is absolutely relevant, suggesting there is some universal otherwise which can be preserved with impunity is akin to suggesting there exists/can exist a form of universal justice.
I believe universal justice exists. I believe you can quantify justice. I think at the end of the day you and I are both right, and both wrong. We hold utterly different perspectives on life, choice, and freedom. These may be irreconcilable. For example, I genuinely believe depression can be cured by "not being depressed".
Edit:
What if I want to live my life paycheck to paycheck? What if none of what you just described about freedom from the emotional stress of finances matters to me? What right do you have to force me to make the "right" choices and be financially responsible? Why shouldn't I be allowed to hurt myself?
With respect to your edit, for those who have limited resources: I would suggest anyone who has taken on responsibilities is unlikely to think in a matter in which anything can be ignored, and anyone who is without responsibility is probably already disconnected enough from society that they can probably get what they want many other ways. It is the former that we try to protect, the latter doesn't care to be protected anyway. In terms of managing a society, the former is a far greater priority than the latter. The former is probably also the majority.
As for your statement about differing perspectives, I would argue that I'm talking about solutions for present problems, ie the practical side, whereas you talk about what should be, which may require a very large transition period, and thus is not useful at this point in time.
I think we also would disagree on the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.
> for present problems, ie the practical side
I see your point here, but we can't lose sight of the big picture. Compromising in the short term, no matter how many people it might help, seems like a bad idea to me.
There's a couple of things going on that you might not be familiar with as it's a bit different to most languages:
The public modifier on these constructor parameters is actually introducing them as properties of the Student type:
constructor(public firstName: string, public middleInitial: string, public lastName: string) {}
Since the Student type has 'firstName' and 'lastName' properties, it meets the Person interface requirements. It doesn't need to declare that it is, but could and usually would just for readability and the additional assurance that you haven't forgotten something.
No, you don't need to inherit or implement which is one of the great features of TypeScript!
In this example, the `greeter` function accepts any object that has a `firstName` and `lastName` property defined, regardless of what the object/type is called. No need for inheritance.
In fact, the `Person` interface is not even emitted in the JS output because interfaces are only used at compile time, not at run time.
> We're just burying our heads in the sand about the reality of it.
As a US citizen, what can we really do. I realize our country shares responsibility for climate change, but isn't a major problem here also poaching? To really solve this, wouldn't Africa have to step up and crack down locally on industry damaging the environment, and poaching?
I don't think anyone is burring their heads in the sand, we just have no power to change things here or abroad. Half of our country still thinks climate change is a hoax...
> Half of our country still thinks climate change is a hoax...
That's not quite true. Most Americans (7 in 10 in a recent study [1]) believe climate change is happening. The difference is that half are unwilling to pay extra in electricity bills and other areas to deal with it.
The overtones of political tribalism in your denouncement of "half of Americans who believe it's a hoax" is good reflection of why politics is so divisive in the US and only grows further apart on important issues.
The only thing that will significantly slow down poaching is a massive reduction in it's profitability. The only way to do that is with a massive reduction in demand.
Most of the demand comes from SE Asia and China where they think this stuff cures medical conditions.
Long term, those governments need to modify primary and secondary school curricula to unambiguously dispel those myths. Eventually, the people who believe rhino horn cures cancer will die out or be pressured by their children, but this will take at least a generation.
In the meantime some species will go extinct. Their only hope is a sudden and prolonged recession or depression in Asia.
> Long term, those governments need to modify primary and secondary school curricula to unambiguously dispel those myths.
How many people in the developed world believe that vaccination causes autism? Or that they have biological intolerance for MSG? Or take extreme doses of vitamins or minerals?
I don't think that any amount of grammar school curricula could overcome the human tendency to believe in crazy shit, non-backed by science or reason. This human nature even transcends class, and appears among the relative elite (e.g. fear of irradiated food, avoidance of gluten when your not even celiac, Elon Musk's belief that we live in an alien computer simulation, etc).
You can perhaps use school curricula to shift mainstream thought, the Overton window, etc. But there will always be enough "alternative view" enthusiasts that I doubt you could ever eliminate demand for rhino horn as an erectile dysfunction treatment.
Do the Chinese/Asian governments do anything WRT to education now?
This seems like it has being going on for a while and the Asian governments just don't do anything.
---
Also WRT to finance incentives for locals: IIRC rhino horn goes for obscene ammount of dollars in Asia, so any tourism dollars will have to compete with that.
The issue of poaching comes up repeatedly on Nat Geo for instance, the usual community outcry being that authorities need to crack down hard on poachers. The end of the day reality though is these poachers are just poor hunters trying to eek out a living and provide for their families and the economic benefit will always trump the legal risks for them. More systemic changes are needed in these locales to reduce the incentive.
EDIT: and worldwide, i.e. reducing the international demand
The economic benefit to the government from the giraffes is higher than to the poachers from the hunting. That’s why governments will start protecting these animals with more extreme violence towards poachers as numbers diminish.
Perhaps there is a non violent solution to this problem: turn poachers into park rangers. This has been done before[0] and perhaps could solve the problem in governments wanting to protect their wildlife (for tourism revenue) and the necessity of common people to provide for their families.
Will not work. This is not a case of poor people freely making choices. If you try to stop Cocaine traffic turning farmers into innkeepers, they will be assassinated or forced to cultivate drugs again by the local narco-chiefs in no time.
If you convert some poachers in park rangers, you are just rewarding their past activity. More poachers will come and fill the place in seconds (now with the hope to reach a redemptive ranger position in the future). The extremely rich families that raised this lucrative system will exerce their power to keep the business running. The name of the poacher pawns is irrelevant for them.
Education will not work either. Too little too late. There are lets say 3000 extant tiger in the planet. We could easily find 3000 selfish people in the planet that want to show a stuffed tiger in their house next year as another rich toddler toy and symbol of power. Not to mention the yummy idea to earn lots of money speculating with the "tigercoin viscera market". Is not realist to expect future generations will have the chance to cleaning this mess. Would be like expecting current australian people to fix the Tasman tiger extinction by their grand parents.
Closing the market and exportation is the only way, but is a difficult goal when a diplomatic luggage can be send to any part of the planet with a full order of lioness bones or leopard tortoises alive inside.
What is the economic benefit of giraffes to the government, tourist draw? Regardless they don't have the resources to cover millions of acres of open savannah, enforcement just isn't going to work for this problem.
If the economic benefits of protecting the giraffes outweigh the economic benefits of hunting them, then the resources for enforcement do exist. It's "just" a matter of distributing the benefits effectively.
There isn't just endless savannah. Poachers need local infrastructure, supplies, protection, etc. If locals can make a living from tourism and from protecting the animals, they will stop the poachers and/or stop being poachers.
If poor hunters poach, it is usually to feed their family. Many poachers are professional and make a lot of money for it(because of the risk if caught). Poor hunters usually don't have connections to international smuggling gangs, which is what you would need if you wanted to make money from exporting poached animals.
AFAIK climate change is a small factor in the endangerment of African species. I could be wrong, but is seems like it's not even close at this point compared to poaching.
Yes you are right. India tiger population is increasing but they are still under threat. Government recently joined two tiger reserves near my hometown to create an ecosystem. Maybe they are doing something right. https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/india-s-tiger-populati...
> climate change + population growth will stress humans on the continent and increase environmental destruction
I find it interesting that population growth is discussed so little in the context of climate change. It seems like simple incentives/restrictions could be imposed to reduce birth rates. This would have a major impact on both climate change, and the depletion of the planets resources.
> It seems like simple incentives/restrictions could be imposed to reduce birth rates.
You don't need to do this. The simplest solution to birth rates is to improve the economic power of your women--generally by education. Once women have choices that don't suck, birth rates drop dramatically.
People generally don't like it when they're told to not have children, as opposed to say buying an electric car or turning off the lights. Restrictive policies, if applied selectively, can also have an effect similar to eugenics.
Restricting population growth is just another restrictive policy, and not all forms of it resemble eugenics as you've implied here. If you just had a yearly quota of births and members of the population were eligible to enter for a random drawing from the quota, it is not eugenics.
I was only pointing out an obvious example approach which is not eugenics-like, it wasn't intended to propose the hypothethical as an ultimate solution. Debating it as such isn't something I have time for or interest in right now.
The point I was trying to make was that a levying a fine would end up being a impose a crude way of eugenics on the population, since it might end up allowing for those that are rich to over-reproduce since they can better deal with the consequences.
I'm not convinced enforcement is even necessary at all. Just a quota with zero enforcement would be a significant difference.
Simply having a department receiving resources supporting scientific research and planning of what is an appropriate population size for some kind of nationally recognized standard quality of life, and having that department publish annual figures comparing our size and trajectory to their data would be useful.
Today one often can't even have the conversation without what's effectively a table-flip reaction in the form of terms like eugenics, forced abortions, involuntary sterilization, fascism, nazism, and the holocaust.
I personally think the only way to gracefully manage population size is culturally. A population that's cognizant of how impactful their decision to have excessive children is to everyones' long-term quality of life will behave differently. Today we don't even inform people of what excessive is in this context. Can we even agree in this conversation what an excessive number of children is? Where has it been defined? There's zero consensus, and our leaders willfully ignore the topic.
We have MPG figures on vehicles, we have MPG standards put out by the government as targets, people can qualify what is a fuel-efficient vehicle according to current standards relatively easily as a result. There's _nothing_ from the government saying what is an excessively large family to the best of my knowledge. When people can start having real conversations on this topic, with generally respected data behind the figures, then the culture can begin to evolve through the natural course of societal life.
When the EPA started talking about fuel economy and setting standards, it normalized the conversation surrounding fuel-efficient vehicles while supplying tangible figures. It would be quite useful if something similar happened with the topic of population size. Normalizing this conversation would go a long way towards helping people acknowledge that the main cause behind anthropogenic-caused global problems is the multiplier.
It's not something I expect to ever happen. Our economy is too dependent on continuous growth.
Somewhat off-topic but relevant: If this UBI concept actually gains any traction, it will be very interesting to see what happens to all the optimistic predictions of population size flattening out relatively soon. Occupying people while they make just enough to scrape by is, I suspect, a big part of what keeps their numbers down. UBI is just one example of something that may inadvertently blow those predictions away. When you've got a population on the order of hundreds of millions like in the USA, it doesn't take many doublings to become a billion.
What is the relationship between overpopulation/climate and poaching? I was under the impression poaching was more of a consequence of China's huge homeopathic market than Africa's temperature or population density.
Bushmeat consumption is a huge problem for many African countries and will only get worse when climate change wipes out other crop sources and populations increase. Africa already has massive issues as it stands, and climate change will only make it worse.
If you really think it's going to get better, it won't.
The issue is completely politicized and no longer has anything to do with objective reality, so about the only way that's going to happen is Donald Trump going on TV and talking about how global warming is horrible.
> This is one of the things that turns me off Hacker News, an overly strong bias in defense of white men.
Really? I feel the exact opposite. HN is full of articles like this, singling out white men, and claiming they are somehow either toxic or the beneficiaries of privilege.
I detest gender/identity politics, and don't think claims should be leveled against an entire group based on unrelated physical traits. This is the only reason I jump to defend "white men". If an article was posted making the same claims about another race/gender I would mount the same defense. However, those kinds of articles never show up here, because the are more obviously racist.
This is the problem with using the government to enforce any kind of grey aria social issue. We all have different definitions for sexual deviants, or reasonable drug use, etc...
I'm sure the above comment has some sort of religious background, and genuinely believes people on those subs are deviants.
> why is it so hard to not be a jerk to other people? That's really the essence of "being PC". Treat others with respect.
Other replies have already hit the main points of why this position doesn't really make sense. Mostly it comes down to "jerk" being a subjective term.
However, I'd take thing a step further even. Why is it a problem if someone is a jerk? As adults shouldn't we be trivially able to disregard the aspects of someones communication we deem "jerky"? Why do we consider it reasonable to escalate hostility when someone is being (what we perceive as) a jerk? "Sticks and stones my break my bones, but words will never hurt me", is an objectively true statement. Any harm done by words is self inflicted. If we use the basic, nearly automatic, capacity we have to filter communication, "jerks" aren't really a problem.
Can anyone speak to how likely it is a case like this will succeed? It seems like abuse of the court system has become more rampant, especially with the emergence of patent trolls.
How often are people able to recuperate expenses incurred while defending against a frivolous suit? How much additional legal work is required to actually seek reparations like this? Is it judged as part of the original case, or is it a separate lawsuit?
It depends on the state. California is one of a few states that has an anti-SLAPP statute that allows for award of legal fees under certain circumstances.
No, it's a massive statement, and I think you're being intellectually dishonest to assert it's not. The counterargument is also a huge statement, none of us are saying it's not.
The only reason the counterargument is slightly more palatable is because it conforms to Occam's Razor.
> because they consciously and continuously choose to be poor is ridiculous on its face
This is a blatant straw man. We are saying they don't make wise choices for a myriad of reasons, not that they intentionally choose to be poor.
Edit:
If you make bad choices in life the end result will be poverty. That doesn't mean you chose poverty consciously.
Sure. All of us here would have made the correct hundred thousand or so choices and avoided the enormous number of traps and inherent dangers of poverty.
We would have gone from poor five year olds to wealthy 30 year olds by force of will.
We would have had the energy and resources and parental support to source our food, health, shelter, and education for our first 18 years because we make such great decisions.
Or: we believe we _are_ good because we _have_ it good.
