The Microcomplaint: Nothing Too Small to Whine About - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/fashion/the-microcomplaint-nothing-too-small-to-whine-about.html <comment><USER2> At the risk of "microcomplaining," I'd like to deride this as yet another thoughtless, substance-free article from the NYT.

With an amusing lack of self-awareness, a non-issue is identified (as a "seismic shift," no less) and connected with unrelated social phenomena using misinterpretations of the available evidence, many of which, conveniently, have also been described in other hyperlinked NYT articles.

If you believe this is a new phenomenon, I invite you to read just about any novel written during the Victorian era. If you manage to endure the first dinner party dialog between members of the upper class, I think you will take issue with the thrust of this article.

As for the implications of social media, that it can amplify certain aspects of human behavior is such a humdrum, "middle-brow" observation that I'm surprised this wasn't written by Thomas Friedman.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a macrocomplaint about microphenomena?

 _If you manage to endure the first dinner party dialog between members of the upper class_

I think this is a little different; a dinner party presumably is full of people who want to listen to each other talk. (And novels are generally more thoughtfully prepared than tweets.)

I don't know if it's a seismic shift, but anecdotally I can say that my microcomplaints around the dinner table don't get likes like Kanye and Kim's tweets do.

Edit: something about the fine line between comedy and whining.

<comment><USER2> I agree the situation isn't directly analogous, though presumably one only reads updates from people whom one wishes to follow.

I was trying to suggest that, with respect to this particular issue, social media has simply amplified a human tendency that has existed historically. In other words, it hasn't produced some "emergent" phenomenon that merits special consideration, as this article suggests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We are a society that is addicted to outrage. I don't begrudge people being outraged at things, but it's not a terribly helpful position and it does tend to amplify the exposure of the thing that is outraged over far beyond what it deserves to receive.

For example, this stupid Starbucks "Red Cups" issue. It's probably just a handful of idiots who don't even understand their own ideology who are complaining about these cups. And I personally would never have known about the whole issue if it weren't for people in my Twitter stream complaining about people complaining about red cups. How many of those people who are now complaining about the cups learned about the issue from people they know who complained about people complaining about the cups?

It's like some kind of hamfisted, Saturday morning special on intolerance or something, like one of those old Star Trek episodes where some people had half of their face black and other people had half of their face white, or vise versa.

We've socialized ourselves into believing that we must social-media-comment on every issue to make sure everyone knows where we stand, to create proof that we still maintain our standing within our in-crowds. It's exactly like school- children jumping in to mob bully someone. We have a child's understanding of how interpersonal relationships work. We can't broker any level of disagreement, because that would call into question whether or not we're BFFs.

It's nothing new. Remember people tying yellow ribbons around their trees during Desert Storm? Same thing. It's easier to retweet than it is to accept that you can't do anything about an issue.

<comment><USER5> > We have a child's understanding of how interpersonal relationships work.

That one sentence explained a whole lot to me about the culture of victimhood, microaggressions, and the like. Brilliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> When my father returned home from his combat tour in WW2, he was bemused by the trivial things that people complained about. He was like "you're not going to die tomorrow, what are you complaining about?"

<comment><USER7> I remember a clip from The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch where he was complaining to his Mother about how hard his phd was and she said "Yes, dear, but at your age your Father was fighting the Nazis."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Protest was once a thing that was mostly practiced on a local level, within the family and church, and subject to the constraints of small groups. It is now fully secularized and pushed into the hands of the masses. There is a subculture for everyone.

And this works against "strong and silent". Strong and silent is not particularly noble in practice - it's a self-sacrificing game theoretical strategy. To take the upper hand in social situations, you avoid showing vulnerability and instead consistently display strength. For any problem someone cares about, you will show that you don't have to care, that you'll soak up the consequences rather than try to help. For any threat presented, you shrug it off or escalate until they cave in. Then everyone else has to bend to your wishes if they want your cooperation.

The ideal strong and silent person is psychopathic. Most people trying to follow it tear themselves up to do so.

The alternative is to allow the small complaint, to whine a little bit about how something wasn't right today. Because you have a subculture to validate you, your feelings become "reality" in that you can have an ongoing conversation about it instead of being told to shut up. On balance, a good thing for every underrepresented idea under the sun.

What we don't know how to deal with yet is when this turns into a social media mob; the new face of the manipulator is someone who points the subculture at a target and says "their fault; go get 'em." But - my conjecture is that eventually, most people burn out on this kind of radicalization.

So then, are we getting better? Will Endless September come to a conclusion? Stay tuned, I guess...

</comment><comment><USER9> This has been a strange year. Some people that pointed out "victim culture" were demonized for it earlier this year. It's strange to see that the idea has caught on.

The 'victimhood' culture was only a very small minority of people found online that praised each other for things like being neurodivergent and handed out encouragement for not seeking medical help. It was crazy to see ideas like 'manspreading' being taken seriously outside of those (not so small after all) communities. Have they already overstayed their welcome?

The terrible part is that some legitimate complaints are being mistaken for the usual whine.

<comment><USER10> Neurodivergence as a movement started out of functional people with managed symptoms being forced into abusive 'cure' therapies from intolerant parents. It is still by and far the go to movement to discuss the stigma of being mentally ill despite functionality and lack of distress.

<comment><USER11> What happens if the distress is over other's reaction to the condition, but not due to the condition itself.

<comment><USER10> That's also in neurodivergence afaik, unless we're talking about trans folk, they're their own category.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The authors of the paper assert that we are now in a culture that valorizes > victimhood.

An interesting observation. I have never thought about it that way before, but it seems plausible. What do others think about this statement? (Please make sure you read the context, though...)

<comment><USER13> I think that's too strong of a statement. Victims aren't considered heroes. Rather, social media enables broader transmissions of stories, and people connect with certain stories, so people playing victim card may receive sympathy, possibly empathy, but not made into a hero.

Now the person that DOES something about their shitty situation, now there's a person we call a hero.

<comment> barry-cotter > Now the person that DOES something about their shitty situation, now there's > a person we call a hero.

Asking an administrator to fire someone who "makes you feel unsafe" is definitely doing something. They're not a hero.

<comment><USER14> Well jezebel declared someone that read during Donal Trump rally a hero for the act of reading. I guess hero is not an extremely hard to obtain status nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if this (and other things like it) is just a product of human beings being very prone to ideological influence/groupthink and the internet providing an effective medium to transfer that?

Consider a publication with 2m+ hits per month on their website that posts about how outrageous it is that people "Never Wonder Why Tampons Aren't in Men's Restrooms"[1] and the crowd cheers. The question I wonder is "How did these people get where they are now, to be outraged by this?", and I think the answer is incremental internet influence.

[1] [http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/11/common-examples- cissexis...](http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/11/common-examples-cissexism/)

<comment><USER16> And this is why I treat people who complain about complaining with skepticism. It's a pretty good question to ask why there are no tampons in men's rooms. I often ask myself why there are no baby changing tables in men's rooms. Anyone who has ever needed either and was the "wrong gender" by social convention to be afforded that convenience knows it's kinda not a small problem.

<comment><USER17> It's a tiny problem. You simply walk into the ladies restroom and use the changing table. It's not as if the door won't open, and it's not as if the women there won't understand. I've done this without a problem in plenty of places.

<comment><USER16> Gonna throw paper towels on the bathroom floor and change the baby that way instead of risk g getting arrested for walking into the women's' room.

<comment><USER17> Why would walking into the womens rest room get you arrested? Just open the door, ask the ladies if they object to your presence and if not go ahead.

<comment><USER18> It's not necessarily about actual risk as much as a culture of fear.

"Sexual harassment" is a career-ending bogeyman. Best to avoid anything that even whiffs of it.

Never be alone with a pretty woman that works for you. Never be alone with a child that isn't yours. (Ironically enough.)

<comment><USER17> Why would the woman have to be pretty?

What about the friends of my kids?

<comment><USER19> Let's not pretend the comment that you're responding to was written in good faith.

<comment><USER20> > _Let 's not pretend the comment that you're responding to was written in > good faith._

I find little to disagree with in the comment in question. I've followed the rule, _Never be alone with someone else 's kid_, forever. You always want another adult to be able to testify that nothing untoward happened. The Two- Deep Adult Leadership Rule is perhaps the core principle of the Boy Scouts' youth-protection program [1] --- which, it has been noted, could be described with equal aptness as the adult-protection program. The same rule is also followed by wise pediatricians, dentists, etc., not to mention by male physicians with their female patients.

I do agree with Jacques that the attractiveness of the woman is irrelevant: Less-attractive women (there _are_ no "ugly" women) can claim sexual harassment too. And rumors can start regardless of the participants' attractiveness.

[1] [http://www.scouting.org/Training/YouthProtection.aspx](http://www.scouting.org/Training/YouthProtection.aspx)

<comment><USER19> Women aren't children. Doctors and lawyers are alone with clients all the time. This whole discussion is depressing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The real sea-change is a steep decline of self-restraint as a core value within power structures. The powerful, particularly on the right, have learned that self-restraint, shame, remorse, empathy are unnecessary and even damaging. They have learned to do something that came naturally to their aristocratic forebears: to actively eliminate such feelings as a weak distraction from the correct use of power.

Stephen Colbert made a career lampooning this change.

"If you are in power, and someone speaks up: Don't admit mistakes. Don't apologize. Don't defend yourself. This opens you up to unnecessary liability. People are self-interested sharks, and more often than not if you take any of these actions, this will just be like blood in the water. They will balloon their concern out of proportion and take a huge, unjust advantage of you. So just ignore it." \- What GWB might have said with a straight face.

When those in power start adopting this attitude, the powerless lose what little power they had to "shame" a leader into simply doing the right thing. The powerless lose all respect for the powerful, and it is only through the unflappable loyalty of security forces that the powerful remain in power doing those times. At least in a democracy we have a _chance_ of occasionally flushing out arrogant, disconnected power-mongers without violence - but in many cases there is no such mechanism.

Anyway, no it's not about victimhood, it's a (possibly preemptive) reaction to the loss of self-restraint among the institutionally powerful.

</comment><comment><USER22> My favourite hashtag this year is #NationalOffendACollegeStudentDay

</comment><comment><USER17> People even complain about complaining in the New York Times.

</comment><comment><USER23> Back in the UK, somewhat relevant: [http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/16/lets- not...](http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/16/lets-not-whinge- at-waiters)

</comment><comment><USER24> I think if you complain about "microaggression", it's automatically a microcomplaint and can gleefully be forwarded to /dev/null.

<comment><USER25> One of my co workers wears a gray hoodie every day, but is the only person that constantly gets told that she doesn't look like a dev. Just happens to be a black woman. Seems pretty annoying to me.

<comment><USER24> It could well be annoying, but if she produces good code and gets accepted as a dev (and gets paid the same, etc.) it doesn't rise above the level of _annoyance_. Me, I'm annoyed that I look like everybody's nerdy whiteboy dev stereotype. I'm a grown-ass man. Yes, I _can_ see that R-rated movie; I actually remember when PG-13 wasn't a thing. No, I don't have a student ID; college was a long-ass time ago and I'm glad it's over.

<comment><USER25> Wow. Your struggles sound oppressive. How do you overcome these daily challenges to self-esteem and sense of belonging?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It takes much less energy to be negative than positive.

<comment><USER5> Maybe to be mildly negative. To be outraged, though, takes enormous energy. Unless the offense is actually worthy of the outrage, it's a waste of time and energy.

<comment><USER26> I have to disagree. When one is negative, one can find communities of other people just as negative about something. One can then feed on their energy, so one doesn't have to expend as much. Over time (even in a short period of time) there's a group of outraged individuals who've gotten there rather easily.

You almost never see similarly charged, overly happy communities (outside of the potheads - just kidding). I think the reason is, it's way too easy for someone to come in and spoil everything by starting something negative.

Negativity is like a disease that just spreads and consumes.</comment></comment></comment>


USA Gov arrested 200 Israeli Spys last yr then tryed to keep it silent - a-smith http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/1387069/US-arrests-200-young-Israelis-in-spying-investigation.html <comment><AUTHOR> 14 years ago. That's an article from 2002.</comment>


A-10 replacement? USAF strategy calls for 'future CAS platform' - <AUTHOR> http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/a-10-replacement-usaf-strategy-calls-for-39future-cas-415639/ <comment><USER2> Any aircraft that is useful to the poor buggers on the ground will be close enough to worry about having RPGs fired at it, let alone "advanced anti- airfcraft systems."

Calling that out as a reason to retire the A-10 is kinda bogus. The A-10 was designed from the very beginning to absorb that sort of damage and continue it's mission.

Fairchild Republic got on someone's bad side some years back and that resulted in the production contract being cancelled. Since then, it's performed like a superstar in every deployment.

There is no viable replacement available.

Just ask anyone who's called God for one and see how happy were with the service.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really think what they should do is look at all the instances where an A-10 was damaged and returned to base, and seriously ask whether an F-35 would survive that kind of damage.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that's not happening :-)

Really _close_ air support really isn't a job for fast movers.

F-35 is too fast for close work.</comment></comment>


Oracle Announces JSRs for Java 7 and Java 8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/11/oracle-java-jsr

<comment><USER2> I'm really disappointed to see the language support for collections get pushed back to Java 8; it's one of those minor things that really starts to wear on me when I'm using the language.

I might just switch more code over to Scala...</comment>


Mond, a scripting language written in C# - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Rohansi/Mond/blob/master/README.md

<comment><USER2> So what motivated you to make Javascript in C#?</comment>


Set your code free - <AUTHOR> http://ar.to/2010/01/set-your-code-free

<comment><USER2> Careful - many legal jurisdictions do not recognize an author's right to place its work in the public domain. SQLite, arguably the most famous/successful example of public-domain software, has a paragraph on its copyright page[1] dealing with this circumstance. I remember reading (though I can't find a reference) that the SQLite authors regretted placing their choice of license, due to the legal issues, and stated that if they were to choose again they'd pick the new BSD or X11 license.

        Let me ask you: how often have you passed up on utilizing a great software library just because its open source license was not compatible with your own preferred flavor?

Usually only when it's an unusual / poorly-designed license, such as WTFPL or four-clause BSD. Though sometimes, if the library is particularly important to whatever I'm doing, I'll choose/write a GPL'd version over BSD.

        Contrast this with the GPL/LGPL, which are one-way streets, or put another way, they are an entry without an exit. To paraphrase a classic song, your code can be checked out anytime you like, but it can never leave. It's easy to see that if you want your code to be used as widely as possible, copyleft is perhaps not the way to go. But then, that's sort of the whole point of copyleft, of course: you can look at my code, but if you touch it in a way I don't approve of, I'll crucify you with law and impunity.

Well, yes, that's the point of copyleft. It simulates a world where all source is available, and embeds it into current copyright law. As more works become available in the embedded "sandbox", there is more incentive for others to open their work.

Somewhat unrelated, but the outright hostility towards copyleft that I sometimes see from the BSD side is baffling. I recently had an internet- argument about using the GPL for some software I released[2], where some of the same claims in this article appeared. Most notably, that using the GPL "doomed it to relative obscurity" and "copyleft code is contaminated". From where do these beliefs originate? Most of the software I use every day is available under the GPL -- the only cases I can think of which aren't are Xorg and OpenSSH.

[1] <http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html>

[2] [http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/ajbvb/cpython_haske...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/ajbvb/cpython_haskell_ffi_bindings_to_python/)

<comment><USER3> What turned me against GPL was mysql -- MySQL AB decided that shipping Mysql with a commercial product was a "violation" of GPL and thus we'd have to buy a commercial license.

Their argument is essentially that you can't _use_ mysql for a commercial product because if you do, you're "linking" to it and thus need a commercial license. If using a database as a database server doesn't count under the "work product" of a database, then what does?

Thus, I have to assume that any company backing GPL software might eventually go that route, making it dangerous to my business to ever try to use it for a commercial product.

That is a worry I don't want to have, and thus I use non-GPL open-source whenever I can.

This is what the OP meant by "contaminated", and since many people don't like to use GPL code for this same reason, it is what lead him to call it "doomed to obscurity". Clearly hyperbole, but point taken.

<comment><USER4> There's no legal precedent for MySQL's argument that simply using their database is linking.

There's not even legal precedent that linked code creates a derivative work.

<comment><USER5> A disputed matter. No one is going to bet his business on that issue, when alternatives exist. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Link...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Linking_and_derived_works) But if you give it for free, neither Linus nor the FSF will lift a finger (like the NVIDIA drivers) ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _If you failed Ethics 101 (sociopaths, raise your hand) or are not one to philosophize, you can safely quit reading here._

Or if you value your time or don't like being hectored.

</comment><comment><USER7> This was a reasonable post until it got into how "free" software advocates use the powers of state violence to enforce their crooked ways. That just seems a bit far-fetched to me.

<comment><USER8> To an anarcho-captialists, this is quite a reasonable view.

You just need a different perspective.

<comment><USER9> Indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given the international variations in public domain copyright law, I wouldn't do this without thinking about it pretty heavily (and doing a great deal of research). Your code can be "more free" with an MIT/BSD style license in some cases.

</comment><comment><USER11> _If you failed Ethics 101 (sociopaths, raise your hand) or are not one to philosophize, you can safely quit reading here._

I love ethics, and my sense of ethics leads me to use the GPL. I'm a consequentialist/utilitarian, and that tells me that I should behave in a way that maximizes the utility of the software I release. I think that the GPL has a fine record of causing excellent-quality free software to come into being, so I use that; it's a strategic choice.

It's possible that someone could make an argument that releasing software under a BSD license, or indeed public domain, results in a greater volume of free software than when you use the GPL. I've never heard that argument made, though, and the success of Linux contrasted with the failure (as free software) of FreeBSD is one example of why I'd be suspicious of that claim.

Since we're talking about ethics, we could try to work out where yours diverge. It sounds like you might be a deontologist of some kind -- you say you're worried about people experiencing violence as a result of decisions people make to release GPL'd software, but that's extremely rare, because no- one forces anyone else to violate the license of GPL'd code; instead, people will just use other code instead.

If the outcome you're fixated on bothers you even if GPL software doesn't _actually_ cause anyone to lose everything in a lawsuit (are there any documented examples of that happening?), you don't appear to be a consequentialist, or to choose your behavior based on expected consequences. What do you choose it on instead?

<comment><USER12> I'll sign up for deontology. The user has a right to learn from and improve their tools. If sapience has a purpose, that's a huge part of it, and I find this to be the main ethical argument the author neglected. I know some users don't care about this (they're honestly fine with doing only what the vendor supports) but I've never had much respect for that attitude, so I'm not moved to contribute to proprietary or non-copyleft work unless paid well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, this is a gross misrepresentation of CopyLeft licenses.

<comment><USER14> How so? Copyleft has always said "you are free to do things our way." That's the entire intent and why proponents of the idea like to write Free with a capital, to distinguish from the usual definition of the word.

<comment><USER13> Do I really need to point out the ways? Agree or disagree with CopyLeft, this is just extreme:

\- Applying the coercive machinery of the state in this way always boils down to the threat of physical violence for non-compliance.

\- [you've] given men with guns a pretext for tearing apart a life, or lives

\- I have no interest whatsoever in wreaking havoc on people who want to use my code

\- Not only copyleft advocates but anybody affixing a licensing statement to open-source software is guilty of ... magical thinking

<comment><USER14> It's an odd way of looking at things, but not incorrect. If you refuse repeatedly to submit to law, physical violence is the necessary end result. What he does misrepresent is that his rant is true of _all_ application of law. I certainly do not think anyone would seriously claim all use of law is bad.

At any rate, it does not misrepresent the GPL. It describes it fairly well. It is his stance on law overall that is extreme: the position of anarchy.

<comment><USER13> For an extremely loose sense of the term physical violence perhaps. In any case, I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find a single case of Copyright enforcement in the United States (or any other first world society in modern history) where physical violence was used.

As such, it does misrepresent the GPL. The author is implying that anyone who uses the GPL wants to hurt you and your family. And that is absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Regardless of MIT/BSD/Apache/public domain choice, I am heartened to see so many people coming out in favor of these licenses vs copyleft.</comment>


Wiley uses fake DOIs on its website as a crawl trap - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uTVHPI8r4VO31KihsyiBHsh_gp8jZ38fMvP5nP5XOkw/ <comment><USER2> This certainly points out one of the many difficulties of crawling the web. Wiley has set up their robots.txt correctly but someone else duplicates their content, which just has links.

The author was crawling[1] and as such should have checked Wiley's robots.txt file which disallows it. So The "academic mining project" should have contacted Wiley directly and said, "Hey we're linking together a bunch of DOIs we would like to automatically fetch them from your site." And Wiley would have said "Sorry, nope." or if they weren't complete idiots they might say "Ok, use this user agent, XXX, and at most this crawl rate XXX. Respect the robots.txt file and when the user agent is disallowed again you have to stop crawling."

Since they didn't do that, they violated the terms of service for Wiley and Wiley back tracked the IP to the university and called them to find out what was up with that. (Part of their "aaron defense" no doubt)

[1] "I attempted to use these DOIs for a legitimate academic mining project in good faith (one which I had pre-informed the library about)."

[2] - [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/robots.txt](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/robots.txt)

<comment><USER3> If I read this right, surely the point is that he was not crawling the /Wiley/ site, but rather something else that contained those links? This is the thing about deliberate contamination - it spreads.

<comment><USER2> My reading of the article has him accessing the Wiley site using a crawler. He may have sourced the fake DOIs from some other seed document but he didn't actually try to fetch them with a browser.

He states that he accessed the site from the library so that he had access to Wiley online (as part of the Library's access arrangement). And he states that he was building tools for automatically linking documents. (tool, not browser).</comment></comment></comment>


Can you explain to a beginner why we use OOP? - what-lisp https://www.quora.com/Can-you-explain-to-a-beginner-why-we-use-OOP/answer/Max-Thompson-41?share=1 <comment><AUTHOR> A lot of the time we use OOP is for this simple reason: we need a record structure to keep related properties together, as if it were one value.

The features of a language that are recognized as its "OOP system" are organized around the record-defining capability. Record types may be called classes, and operations on records may be called methods and so on.

If we need a record structure to keep related properties together, say three of them, we could use an array or list of three elements. In some languages that would be a non-starter for records whose elements have different types, because an array or list has to be of items of the same type. In dynamic languages, it would work. However, we then have to remember that emp[0] is the employee ID, emp[1] is their telephone extension, and so on. We could define constants for these so we can access emp[id] and emp[phone]. We are then on our way toward creating an _ad hoc_ , record system. We notice limitations, like we would like customers to have an "id" and employees to have an "id", but since id is a constant, we have to put the "id" at the same array offset in the employee array and the customer array. This approach will not scale; there will be clashes requiring us to put these offsets into namespaces. These arrays all have the same type. We'd like to know, given this object P, are we looking at an employee or customer? So we can come up with a convention like element P[0] always holds a type code. Problem: Bob, Alice and Mallory want to integrate their separately developed modules into one program. Each of these programmers has come up with their own record-in-array type system, incompatible with the other two. It's a mess! Mallory took advantage of arrays with negative indices and put the type at [-1]. It's not a simple integer code but itself an array with multiple properties. Bob and Alice used [0], but with different integer codes whose values clash.

Instead of this _ad hoc_ approach, we have some sort of record or structure type in the language.

</comment><comment><USER2> Real reason: that's the only thing most beginners are taught. (For better or worse, but that's the facts.)</comment>


Merck's NotPetya attack: Was it an act of war? - <AUTHOR> https://www.inquirer.com/wires/bloomberg/merck-cyberattack-20191203.html <comment><USER2> I worked at Merck for three years as a scientist and only left a week before this went down. My former colleagues said they stood around and did absolutely nothing for days and then struggled to get the tiniest amount of work done for weeks.

The article chooses not to get into stunning mistakes by Merck's IT that allowed this to happen in the first place. The patches for the EternalBlue exploit were released by Microsoft on March 14, but Merck's IT chose to sit on it for over three months. (Like many large companies, they disable Windows update, choosing to release patches on their own schedule.) Even after the WannaCry attack crippled computers around the world on May 12, they still had a month before NotPetya brought them to their knees on June 27.

<comment><USER3> While patches would have helped in this specific case, that's only because Merck was collateral damage.

In a targeted attack, it's likely the foreign agency would be using a 0-day attack.

The only way to protect against that is by reducing the OS monoculture, offline backups, and using network air gaps on critical data.

But those practices are extremely rare in my experience.

If I was on unfriendly terms with the US, I'd use this as a case study on how to cripple the economy by taking advantage of the large monocultures created by lax IT in a hundred or so of the largest firms.

<comment><USER4> > In a targeted attack, it's likely the foreign agency would be using a 0-day > attack.

A targeted attack is also expensive and the victim would need to have something worth this kind of money and attention. "Nation state actor" just isn't a reasonable risk assumption for a great many organizations.

> The only way to protect against that is by reducing the OS monoculture, > offline backups, and using network air gaps on critical data.

When the "nation state actor" comes looking for you with some motivation, all that and the air gap won't mean much. See Stuxnet.

Like J. Mickens said: "Basically, you're either dealing with Mossad or not- Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you'll probably be fine if you pick a good pass-word and don't respond to emails from firstname.lastname@example.com. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU'RE GONNA DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT."

[https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf](https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Nation-state actors can be deterred by nation states. If Vova believes that CNAing someone in the US will cause the US to bankrupt him and/or the people whose support he requires to stay in power, he'll make damn sure this doesn't happen. As long as the US does not demonstrate this capability and willingness to use it, he'll continue to misbehave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's up for the attacked (the US) to decide when the line is crossed and how to respond. Russian strategy is to confuse as mush as possible possible. They do cyber attacks, assassinations and political operations in the western countries.

Obama used covert action against Russia in response to election meddling. "Obama used covert retaliation in response to Russian election meddling." [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2017/06/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2017/06/29/obama-used-covert-retaliation-in-response-to-russian- election-meddling-heres-why/) Trump is not responding.

Is hybrid warfare a warfare until it includes conventional warfare in the mix?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_warfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_warfare)

> Hybrid warfare is a military strategy which employs political warfare and > blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare and cyberwarfare[1] with > other influencing methods, such as fake news,[2] diplomacy, lawfare and > foreign electoral intervention.

> The U.S. Army Chief of Staff defined a hybrid threat in 2008 as an adversary > that incorporates "diverse and dynamic combinations of conventional, > irregular, terrorist and criminal capabilities".[9] The United States Joint > Forces Command defines a hybrid threat as, "any adversary that > simultaneously and adaptively employs a tailored mix of conventional, > irregular, terrorism and criminal means or activities in the operational > battle space. Rather than a single entity, a hybrid threat or challenger may > be a combination of state and nonstate actors".[9] The U.S. Army defined a > hybrid threat in 2011 as "the diverse and dynamic combination of regular > forces, irregular forces, criminal elements, or a combination of these > forces and elements all unified to achieve mutually benefiting effects".[9] > NATO uses the term to describe "adversaries with the ability to > simultaneously employ conventional and non-conventional means adaptively in > pursuit of their objectives"

</comment><comment><USER7> I really enjoyed this despite insurance usually being billed as dull. A few points I don't see anyone else making:

* Act of war is poorly defined (and gets more poorly defined by the year). Since insurers use this term and (I assume) wrote the contracts, any reasonable question over its definition should be interpreted in the insured favour. That's how most contract law works since otherwise the contract writer has a perverse incentive to make their contract language unclear and then argue definitions and technicalities. That's not just dishonest, it creates unnecessary uncertainty and excess court cases and those cost everyone.

* I was sort of amazed by mention of the presidents pronouncements as if they mattered. Do they matter legally? They shouldn't: presidents are in no way a reliable source of information on geopolitical matters. Quite the opposite, they have the most motive to lie and its literally often illegal to expose that (if an NSA employee leaked classified proof it was NOT the Russians, they'd be imprisoned under the espionage act). Leaving aside the current presidents reliability, Obama pronounced on the Sony hack, blaming North Korea. Almost 5 years later and no evidence has been produced and plenty of people doubt that. Its also worth noting that no president should be empowered to effectively decide billion (trillion?) dollar lawsuits without oversight or scrutiny, they're not kings after all.

* Finally I thought how adult and reasonable Lloyds' response was. Both in settling the claim (assuming they did so for a reasonable fraction of what was owed) and requiring explicit cyber policies going forwards. That's the act of a group that is reasonable and wishes to take a long term, useful, role in the economy. Any bozo can sell "insurance" policies and then quibble over ever claim, the result is people stop buying. But honouring your commitments and correcting yourself going forwards is exactly what we need in insurers. I wonder what can be done to get US Corporate structures to follow a similar model?

</comment><comment><USER8> So what does this mean for company cybersecurity? Will companies be motivated to secure their networks by higher insurance rates? Will insurers hire infosec auditors? Will insurers stop offering coverage, and leave companies to consider hacks as Black Swan events?

<comment><USER9> They would be very wise to hire their own auditors, not necessarily to go into their client's businesses but to review the assessments most of them are already getting periodically, to make sure that evidence presented actually made sense and earned them a pass. It's been my experience that IT auditors are often book smart, but IT-experience poor. Some are simply not savvy or experienced enough to interpret their own framework the same way a week or a month later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > One researcher told a colleague she'd lost 15 years of work.

You're telling me that you had never backed up anything in the span of 15 years?

<comment><USER11> This happens far more often than it should. Non-experts simply don't realise the importance of backups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If the attacker doesn't declare war and the defender doesn't respond by going to war then the blunt answer seems like it'd have to be a no.

<comment><USER13> The claim in the article is that the target was Ukraine, the attacker Russia, and Merck a collateral casualty at an attempt to disguise a state-sponsored cyber-attack as a criminal extortion attempt.

One would need to dig deeper to get a really informed opinion. I do believe Russia to be able and willing to do that, I do believe the so-called "Western intelligence agencies" to blame any malware on Russia or China on the flimsiest evidences.

There is also the possibility that the same tools were used both by the GRU and Russian criminals, leading to a misleading identification. Black hats would totally take someone else's malware and modify it for their purpose while still hiding their tracks.

Zero days are expensive to get but once they are exploits in the wild, they are anyone's to use.

<comment><USER14> If you analyze the NotPetya attack, it differs from other ransomware attempts in two respects. First, it was specifically targetting Ukraine. Second, the attackers didn't actually take any money but rendered all systems defunct. If you are a criminal, you aim to make money, right? Why give up on that possibility? It makes no sense.

So, even if in the infosec world you can never say never, but just as Stuxnet is generally attributed to Israel/USA, in the same way NotPetya is attributed to Russia, even though none of these countries will ever admit they actually did it.

<comment><USER13> Oh I did not know that. The attack was behaving differently on Ukrainian targets? That's a pretty damning thing indeed and makes the question of the act of war very relevant.

Note that it could make sense to a pro-Russia Ukranian group to extort money abroad and to hurt economically on the target. That seems to be the Russian MO to not be directly implicated in the Ukrainian operations: help with tools, weapons and money the groups that are already in place.

They give up direct control over the actions in exchange of deniability.

<comment><USER15> As far as I know, it didn't behave differently on Ukraine targets. The attack was on Ukrainian tax software M.E.Doc that businesses in the Ukraine are legally mandated to use.

So it was targeted at the Ukraine, but plenty of multinational companies also operate there, so they were collateral damage

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yeah sure, just like sanctions and tariffs are a economic way of doing war. But how do you response with counter cyber attacks or sanctions and tariffs.

</comment><comment><USER17> The main problem with allowing cyberattacks into the "declaration of war" category against all known diplomatic norms, is that attribution is extremely questionable. History is full of false flags done in the physical realm. Cyberattacks will be no different, other than easier to perform.

</comment><comment><USER18> Speaking of war. Just to show how effed is the definition, here is the article where they try to decipher between war, armed conflict, whatever else they've come up with: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/is- it...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/is-it-a-war-an- armed-conflict-why-words-matter-in-the-us-fight-vs-the-islamic- state/2014/10/06/f4528a6c-49a1-11e4-891d-713f052086a0_story.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> Considering it hit the company by accident via a server in Ukraine the whole act of war thing is really questionable.

It's completely reckless use of malware and there should be consequences for Russia not taking care of their offensive weapons and causing serious damage.

But phrases like "act of war" shouldn't be thrown around like that. I highly doubt that was Russia's intention, which I think should matter, even if we still find them at fault.

<comment><USER20> I don't think the accidental nature is the crux here. As I understand it, if a Russian bomb had inadvertently damaged / destroyed a physical office in Ukraine, the insurance would not have covered that either. The question is whether or not this virus was an act of war (against Ukraine) or if this was an act of vandalism/crime by an individual actor.

</comment></comment><comment> ga-vu Yes it was. I think everyone from Five Eyes to private cyber-security experts have said this already for the past two years.

<comment><USER21> No, it wasn't. And this over-militarized diction of cybersecurity is dangerous. You want nation states to be bombing developers sitting in offices due to a perceived threat because this garbage rhetoric is how that happens.

Oh wait, here we are. Hope your bunker is ready! [https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-a-first-israel-responds- to-...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-a-first-israel-responds-to-hamas- hackers-with-an-air-strike/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If a country funds a bunch of script kiddies to attack something somewhere does that make the attack a state action? If the state takes measures to conceal the source of that funding then is it still a state action? If a group of script kiddies takes action due to a general suggestion from a state actor? If a group of script kiddies with political aims congruent with one or more state actors takes action all on their own?

This stuff is fundamentally different than the case where a group of people end up with guns and engage in politically motivated violence. It is really a form of advanced trolling. The fact that absolutely anyone can do with with no fear for their life or freedom makes it politically meaningless.

There is no such thing as cyberwar...

So insurance is really just about insuring against security lapses. It should be priced appropriately and should come with requirements.

</comment><comment><USER23> Act of war against .... Merck, a company? I've heard of some circuitous logic to deny insurance claims, but this was not an act of war against Merck, which BTW isn't a country, so by definition, one can't go to war with it? Well, maybe hyperbolically a competitor might, but unlike real war, they're bound by the rules and laws of civil society

This is the very definition of an accident, if the article is to be believed, with Merck not even being the target. Pay up insurers, this is why you exist.

Further, what is the point of insurance, especially for sensitive IP laden companies like pharma research, if there's no protection against nationa-state attacks, which isn't outside the realm of possibility for such companies.

<comment><USER24> While I'm opposed to using legal terms to weasel out of an insurance claim, it's an interesting question. If Russia deliberately dropped a bomb on Merck's factory, it would unquestionably be an act of war. Likewise if they dropped a bomb on a neighboring plant and also accidentally destroyed Merck's plant.

But dropping a bomb on a facility in Ukraine, with equally destructive shrapnel destroying facilities all over the world? Knowing that using this weapon can easily cause such collateral damage?

We barely have the terminology for discussing this type of warfare. The initial attack was an act of war, certainly. Beyond that, we have to come up with definitions and reactions. At the very least, it's a subject for diplomatic channels, maybe even sanctions.

<comment><USER25> Dropping a bomb is not an act of war because of the target itself. It is because to do it you have to violate the country's whole security system and cause damage to the country's real state, which is an act of war, whereas to invade a company's cluster of computers you don't have to compromise the country's whole cybernetwork.

It is interesting though to think about aftermath. If it is not an act of war, one can compromise a country's economy without going directly against the country itself.

<comment><USER24> Deliberate attacks against a country's economy would probably be handled on a case by case basis through diplomatic channels.

E.g. I'd argue that if China announced it would not repay its massive Treasury debts to the US, that would basically be an act of war even if no aggression was used, just due to the extreme destructive effects. And the reaction would be similarly upsetting, although not quite on the level of an unprovoked, large-scale military action.

But it quickly becomes a discussion of semantics at that point ;)

<comment><USER26> > E.g. I'd argue that if China announced it would not repay its massive > Treasury debts to the US

Other way round: US has "borrowed" money from China

<comment><USER24> Ah, I had a suspicion I had my signs mixed up. Thanks for pointing that out. Point stands though :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> No.

</comment><comment><USER28> No. Not an act of war: an act of embarrassment. Merck should be shamed.

Can we stop calling these things "cyber attacks" or "hacks"? I think "gross negligence on applying even basic information security" and "a focus on security theatrics" fit much better.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's really an act of not being prepared.

$1.7B? They should be able to destroy and rebuild their entire infrastructure in less than a day.

Have tested backup and restore processes. Ideally have all users in VMs.

I don't see how this isn't entirely Merck's fault.

<comment><USER24> Not _entirely_ Merck's fault. It wouldn't have happened (at this time) if Russia hadn't used their weaponized exploit.

There's also something to be said for being the first large-scale victim of a category of catastrophe that is known to be a real threat, but hasn't happened on this scale before.

But you do have a point. There were probably security or IT ops people who warned about this, and if Merck's shareholders take the full hit, organizations will properly feel the risk and adjust their backup & restore processes accordingly. Not so if insurance pays the full damages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't believe it, NotPetya was generic ransomware that spread to a lot of organizations including the NHS in England. This fiction, yet another example of the neocons attempting to demonize the Russian Federation, no doubt to distract from problems at home.

<comment><USER14> You must be kidding, right? NotPetya was designed for Ukrainian targets and brought the country to their knees (again) - what some Western companies like Merck or Maersk experienced was just a tiny fraction of what the institutions in Kiev went through.

Whether insurers like AIG can run away from their contractual obligations playing the "cyber war" card is a different issue. Technically, it was a cyberattack similar to many others, no matter if the authors were Kremlin- employed or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Something like a missile attack on a Samsung factory is so easy to investigate and get conclusive evidence about what happened. Within hours or days we would know with almost certainty if it was an act of war or something else (accidental firing by the South Korea military or something...).

Consider something like Stuxnet, it took years before it was truly discovered and attribution could be made, at least in way which would hold up in a lawsuit about insurance claims.

</comment><comment><USER32> The ransomware wanted $300 in Bitcoin per computer encrypted.

This is a commercial extortion attempt, not an act of war. The insurers, as is their wont don't want to pay out.

<comment><USER33> Just as a thought experiment, if country X would shut down power in country Y, asking for 100 billion in ransom to start power again. Would that be an act of war, or just commercial extortion? It matters from a legal perspective, and perhaps the laws of war have to be updated for cyber warfare.

<comment><USER34> Laws of war require to wear uniform, even for cyber soldiers. If they are not wearing uniform when doing their informational attacks, masquerading as civilians, then it's just act of war crime. There is no need to update the law.

<comment><USER35> You're misinformed, laws of war do _not_ prohibit intentionally not wearing uniforms, and the (many!) cases of war operations performed without uniform or wearing enemy uniforms (sometimes on large unit scale, e.g. in WW2) were _not_ considered war crimes.

What may be the source of confusion is that the Geneva convention requires wearing uniforms... to get the protections afforded by Geneva convention. If your troops violate that requirement, then that means that if they're captured without uniforms, the enemy is free to not fulfil the prisoner of war treatment required by Geneva conventions, but summarily execute all of them as spies; which was also often the practical consequence in WW2 if such troops were cought. A parricular example may be the trial after WW2 of Otto Scorzeny and other officers for Nazi troops wearing USA uniforms during Operation Greif in Battle of Bulge, where they were acquitted on the claimed charges of war crimes because these actions were considered by the court as 'legitimate ruse of war'.

If I recall correctly, masquerading as Red Cross could be a war crime, there are specific provisions for that, but the international treaties do not prohibit to masquerade as civilians or enemy troops, or to perform all kinds of other misinformation.

For most members in most militaries, it's a legal requirement _set by their command_ to wear uniforms - but it's a requirement that the commanders can alter if they deem it necessary.

<comment><USER36> Masquerading as Red Cross can be a grave breach of Article 37 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I [0]

[0] [https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/WebART/470-750111](https://ihl- databases.icrc.org/ihl/WebART/470-750111) (paragraph 3.f)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


As a Full-Stack how will you build an e-commerce web app and the mobile version - <AUTHOR> Hi @all. Just be pinged by a partner who wants me to build a simple e-commerce web app and his mobile version to sell clothes on.<p>As a Full-Stack how will you handle such app technically? Will you go with a CMS and call API on the android version? Or you will take all in hand and build something really lightweight from scratch with for example NodeJs and Express(loopback.io) with material design? Thanks. <comment><USER2> From a business perspective, my first approach would be to build on an existing ecommerce platform...Amazon, ebay, Yahoo etc. That avoids a host of security and payment and content issues...and ongoing support issues. The app would be a front end for the shopfront and be the place where features add value (rather than risk).

One particular risk using an existing platform reduces is the risk associated with maintaining the ecommerce site. A developer who likes to build stuff in node may not have long term interest in tasks like regulatory compliance and such...things like calculating VAT depending on the buyer's location and automating payments to the government concerned.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, your arguments are also right @brudgers. Thanks for it. But It looks like build on an established e-commerce platform can be a pain when we need to add functionalities or customize existing one. What is your points about, please?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> cms. shops can became complex very fast

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your point, yes I agree. Then you recommend to go from scratch with some tables and the stack you love?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It really depends on the budget/time that you have. Are you more comfortable with Android or Full-Stack Web? If web, I would say of course build out a web solution and make it mobile friendly (MEAN: MySQL, Loopback, Ng2, Node). If you are comfortable with Android, use Loopback to build a web-app, and mainly focus on building out the APIs that you need, while knocking out the mobile side. It gives you an awesome interface for testing your APIs. Overtime, you can build out the client side of the web-app (I use Ng2) to handle the data management that you will need. Note, this is a lot of customization, so just make sure you have a clear direction before starting, especially with an e-commerce app that could get more complex then initially thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok thanks for your points too, it really helps me to better handle my case.

I'm comfortable with Android and web dev, but not any php stuffs.</comment></comment>


Windows 10 ISO Download Tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

<comment><USER2> I do wonder... does Microsoft expect people to know what the <nothing>/N/KN/singlelanguage variants are?

There's no explanation on the page, on the linked FAQ or other links.

<comment><USER3> I was asking myself the same question. Windows is by far not my primary OS, and I used to know what those variants were, but I don't remember anymore.</comment></comment>


The way we eat - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/04/the-way-we-eat/

<comment><AUTHOR> Features my site, Housefed, and YC Grubwithus</comment>


Dressing for nerds - <AUTHOR> http://www.nerdboyfriend.com/

<comment><USER2> I'd love some dressing tips for nerd women. All I ever wear is jeans, polo shirts and knitted pullovers. No glasses though, I prefer contacts. I don't even know how to dress otherwise or how to use make-up.

<comment><USER3> I don't use make-up. I'm allergic to everything. So no tips on that from me.

As for clothes: Pick up a copy of David Kibbe's "Metamorphosis". Learn what clothing shapes, patterns (stripes, polka dots, etc) and colors work best for you. Get a good hair cut for your hair type and face shape. If you have any health issues, work on those. Healthy people look better, regardless of what they wear. Once you have some idea of the shapes, colors, etc you need to focus on, try on lots and lots of clothes but only buy those things that are both very comfortable to wear and are also flattering. (With practice, it gets easier to shop once you know what works for you. You can eliminate most clothes in the store without trying them on once you have this knowledge.) If you are physically comfortable in your clothes, it helps you pull off a sense of "style" in the eyes of others. Elegance is not just about the clothes you wear but about how you move and that is enhanced by being physically comfortable. If you have self image issues negatively impacting your clothing choices, the best solution to that is probably having a positive intimate relationship with the right person so you Get Over It.

If you want to learn about power dressing, there is only one book that I know of which is based on actual research into what works: "Dress for Success" by John T. Malloy. It's apparently been updated a few times. Searching for it on Amazon brings up "New Women's Dress for Success".

I've read a lot of clothing books over the years. A lot of them don't have much value. If you want good results without investing a lot of time and effort into it, those two books are must haves and most of the rest can be ignored.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, for some reason it didn't occur to me that there could be books on that.

Honestly, I can't stand shopping for clothing, you can waste an entire day and not find anything that's "both very comfortable to wear and [...] also flattering" and making people take you seriously.

<comment><USER3> Most of the time, I spend very little time shopping for clothes. I have been known to pull something off the rack and buy it without trying it on and have it work out fine. Get "Metamorphosis" and figure out what shapes, colors, etc. work for your coloring and body type. Expect to spend some time up front trying on a lot of clothes so you can develop a mental model. Afterwards, shopping will get easier. You will be able to look at a rack of clothes and say 'wrong color', 'wrong shape', 'no..no..no..yes, I will try this one thing on'. Most of the time, the first thing I try on is the best thing for me to buy because I can pick it out so well.

With regards to comfort: For me, cotton, nylon, and silk are good materials. I am okay with rayon. I avoid polyester like the plague, which is hard because so many things are a cotton-polyester blend. I wear a lot of knits, something men generally can't get away with for a business look but something I find is wonderful in terms of comfort and a woman can it wear to work. I'm just careful to get the right weight of knit material that works for me/my look. That will differ from person to person.

I don't get your remark about making people take you seriously. Do you mean the sales people?

<comment><USER2> about the "making people take you seriously". I got some comments about me looking like a sixteen year old schoolgirl while I'm about 25. Well, I'm not particularly tall. But thinking about it, it's probably more about self esteem than a dressing issue.

<comment><USER3> There are some things you can do to "dress older". My sister dressed in very "serious" clothes in her twenties and people often didn't fully realize how young she was. But I still have people think I am about 5 years younger than I am. Given that I get viewed as younger than I really am even on the internet, I think it has a behavioral/attitudinal component and isn't just about looks. I have read of examples in various books of taking a cute, petite woman and dressing her much more seriously in order to overcome the cuteness factor and get her taken seriously.

On the other hand, my 22 year old son gets misread as being a lot younger than he is and he doesn't hesitate to take advantage of such assumptions. Just tossing that out there as food for thought: Maybe it isn't only a problem. Maybe there is also an opportunity in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can someone tell me what the point of this is? Are they poking fun? Giving advice on how to replicate "the look"? Something else I haven't thought of? It seems lame and pointless to me. I don't understand why this was posted to HN. If anyone can enlighten me, please do.

Thanks.

<comment><USER4> It is just pictures of really cool, well-dressed personalities, and then (in the small pictures) information about what they are actually wearing and where you can obtain the items.

I suspect it is mostly interesting for fashion-nerds who appreciate the detective works gone into finding what kind of shirt John Huston is wearing on that particular picture taken 40 years ago. It is probably _not_ that useful as a general guide to fashion and for dressing sharp, since it is clearly the personalities that makes the clothing items cool, not the other way around.

It may be pointless for people who aren't obsessed with style, but I don't think the site is poking fun of anyone.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I missed the tiny type with the names. The only one I readily recognized was Robin Williams (listed as "Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Awakenings)". That makes more sense.

I actually like "fashion" (dressing well), but my personal relationship to the topic has changed a lot over the years. I still find the topic fascinating and I still exercise my skills in that regard, but to a somewhat different end these days.</comment></comment></comment>


How a movie changed one man's vision forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world/all

<comment><USER2> Here in the UK I get:

"We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee."

<comment><USER3> [http://www.bbc.com.nyud.net/future/story/20120719-awoken- fro...](http://www.bbc.com.nyud.net/future/story/20120719-awoken- from-a-2d-world/all)

Using the nyud.net Coral Content mirror.</comment></comment>


What Is "Economic Freedom," and Who Is It For? - <AUTHOR> http://www.todaysworkplace.org/2016/02/03/what-is-economic-freedom-and-who-is-it-for/ <comment><USER2> If you come at every discussion about economics as if you are an oppressed employee as opposed to the small business owner or an employee entering into a voluntary mutually beneficial contract, then you are going to rally for state interference in everything concerning your employment. Unfortunately, there are so many negative and obvious unintended consequences that the workers are harmed more than if they would have been more "economically free".

<comment><AUTHOR> The balance of power is tilted in the employer's favour, and therefore additional regulation is required to restore balance.

The US employer has powers that businesses only dream of in other developed countries. It's time that US employment law was harmonised with the rest of the world and not the other way around.

Demographics are shifting. We will end up electing representatives to government who will eventually harmonise labour law.</comment></comment>


Statistical Techniques Data Scientists Need to Master - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/the-10-statistical-techniques-data-scientists-need-to-master-1ef6dbd531f7 <comment><USER2> Somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of data science is dealing with stuff like "some of the people collecting the data used 1 for yes and 0 for no, and some of them used 'Y' for yes and 'N' for no, and some misread the question and put in numbers, your job is to figure out which 1s mean yes and which mean that the data is bad," and you can go your entire career in data science without ever using a SVM. But sure, let's have yet another article on methods.

<comment><USER3> When I opened this thread, this was downvoted. I can understand why, it's kinda dismissive of the article. However, I can also understand the frustration and would generally agree.

Context: Was a data scientist for a bigCo for a few years. 90% of my day to day was cleaning, organizing, building pipelines for, building golden sets for, messy data. I was in a _very fortunate_ position where I got to actually develop some models from the ground up/do some "Creative Work" as it were, but the vast majority of my workload was not stuff I had ever really been prepared for despite a degree in stats.

I don't say this to paint one or the other as "more important/better/more respectable" work, but compared to how much I read about stats vs. going elbow deep in real world data munging, there's certainly a bulk of the former that's not aligned with my use of each. My guess? More generalizable, well encapsulated, easy to talk about. I'd be hard pressed to discuss "general techniques of figuring out how to un-fuck whatever data was being collected in that legacy telemetry system that really wasn't meant for what it's being used for", but that sort of work for me at least proved to be the bulk of my learning on the job.

<comment><USER4> > When I opened this thread, this was downvoted. I can understand why, it's > kinda dismissive of the article. However, I can also understand the > frustration and would generally agree.

Although I didn't downvote, I often downvote comments that are negative on knowledge. You know the type. If we're talking about CS they will argue that you don't have to know algorithms and data structures to be a good developer, because you can just go on stackexchange. If we're talking about data, they will argue that knowing what a p-value is useless because the methodology is flawed anyway. If we're talking about knowledge itself they will argue that going to university is a waste of time. And of course, no matter the subject matter, you never need "all that maths".

<comment><USER5> I don't usually see many comments like this, which "downvote knowledge" as you say.

Instead, I see comments arguing that the _emphasis_ placed on that knowledge is wrong-headed or misplaced.

For example, knowledge about data structures is a great thing. But defining an interview process with data structure trivia as an implicit standard for hiring someone is bad, and is a good teachable moment for pointing out why it's a silly way to filter candidates.

Similarly, detailed knowledge about advanced statistical methods is a great thing. But it's silly to force candidates to fill resumes with buzzwords or treat their stats knowledge like peacock feathers because those are the hoops to get hired, when then in reality the work will be 90% data engineering and devops. It's similarly a teachable moment to point out why an emphasis on these methods is silly, unless you're in a business that actually plans to give an employee projects and tasks that require these things.

I guess if I saw a comment that truly was dismissive of the knowledge, in and of itself, then I would agree that is worth downvoting.

I honestly can say I've not seen that very often, though. Only comments reacting to that way signalling effects are used to subvert the knowledge for e.g. silly hiring trivia or data science credential.

<comment><USER6> > Similarly, detailed knowledge about advanced statistical methods is a great > thing.

We have to keep in mind, though, that nothing in the article is advanced statistical methods. They're the very, very beginning. Being able to run a simple linear regression or bootstrap a data set is equivalent to being able to write fizzbuzz for a programmer.

<comment><USER5> I'd be more inclined to say that understanding expected value and variance at a baseline level is like fizzbuzz of statistics.

Basic regression at least requires understanding sampling standard error of estimators, distinguishing p-values from the posterior probability a hypothesis is true, transformation of random variables (like for understanding why classical 95% confidence interval bounds are +/\- 1.96 * standard error) and some linear algebra.

But I agree the methods discussed, with the exception maybe of support vector machines, are all elementary statistical methods.

What's sad is that if these represent the fizzbuzz of statistics, it means most jobs in statistics only require you to do tasks easier than fizzbuzz (cursory data cleaning & summary stats). Because in most jobs, dimensionality reduction, SVMs, clustering and boosting would be seen as incredibly advanced, scarce work projects for people to fight over who gets to work on them.

<comment><USER4> I object to the comparison entirely. Basic statistical concepts are orders of magnitude more complex than a loop with a couple of ifs.

As a software engineer you CAN'T fail fizzbuzz. Whereas in statistics I can come up with problems that rely only on basics but are still counter-intuitive enough that some practitioners will make mistakes.

<comment><USER6> I used to work as a statistician. Now I work as a software engineer. The comparison is valid between what is considered the basics to operate as a professional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Linera Regression

Classification

Resampling Methods

Subset Selection

Shrinkage

Dimension Reduction

Nonlinear Models

Tree-based methods

Support Vector Machines

Unsupervised learning

The main take away is that Machine Learning _is_ Statistics.

<comment><USER8> > The main take away is that Machine Learning is Statistics.

That and brute force computation. A lot of ML models use vastly more data and bigger feature sets than was feasible when these techniques were originally developed. Stepwise regression, lassos, cross validation, etc have become much more popular as raw computing power has increased.

<comment><USER9> thanks for this comment. I was reading the article thinking "do people really use stepwise / all-subsets regression these days?", but your point is fair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This blog post's topics are remarkably similar to Stanford's Introduction to Statistical Learning's topic order.

<snip>

        Topics include
        * Overview of statistical learning
        * Linear regression
        * Classification
        * Resampling methods
        * Linear model selection and regularization
        * Moving beyond linearity
        * Tree-based methods
        * Support vector machines
        * Unsupervised learning

</snip>

source: [https://online.stanford.edu/courses/stats216v-introduction-s...](https://online.stanford.edu/courses/stats216v-introduction- statistical-learning)

There is a free (R-lang based) course, which covers this material by Trevor Hastie: [https://online.stanford.edu/courses/sohs-ystatslearning- stat...](https://online.stanford.edu/courses/sohs-ystatslearning-statistical- learning-self-paced) \- it's mentioned in the blog post.</comment>


Yes, I'm Feeling Bad About Climate Change. Let's Discuss - <AUTHOR> https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/yes-im-feeling-bad-about-climate-change-lets-discuss/ <comment><USER2> I was in my teens in the 1990s following the Kyoto Accord with great interest. I went through my own crisis of feeling bad, a period of bereavement in the early 2000s, thinking we're screwed.

People and politicians are all talk and no action — denial or cognitive dissonance — it doesn't matter as long as nothing gets done. The same result.

I live in a town where people fight any improvement that might make pedestrian life better, with less reliance on a car, even over the smallest inconvenience (e.g. another crosswalk).

I live in a small net-zero house with solar panels and an electric car. Meanwhile the local oil company/refinery gets subsidies so it can afford to operate.

Some of the local schools threaten kids with failing grades if they strike for climate but missing school for sporting events is encouraged.

It's hard not to be discouraged but I've come to the point of just doing what I can and making it a priority in my own life and for my family. Not sure what else to do.

<comment><USER3> If we don't fix this those grades won't matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really good article. It touches on the global denial, the gross generational inequality of the status quo, and acknowledges the personal mental health difficulty in trying to accept what the human race has done.

It's also pragmatic and talks about what's being done. Very worthwhile reading in its entirety.

<comment><USER5> Do you think we as society are going to change fast enough to combat the challenges we are currently facing? It seems that we are all just repeating past mistakes in a grander scale.

<comment><USER6> No. We will only change faster once the situation becomes dire (crop failures, heat waves you can't fight with AC, roads and bridges failing from the heat), and there will be much suffering due to the delay.

Prepare yourself if you can.

<comment><USER4> I don't blame you for this because you're probably in the US, and probably not in agriculture, but we are having crop failures. In the US. Massive ones. It's not just heatwaves, but increased thunderstorm sizes (hail) and increase rainfall during vulnerable planting and harvesting periods. A lot of this spring was washed out in parts of the US Midwest.

Globally, it's much worse. People are showing up from Central America _because of_ crop failures. That is climate change induced human migration. Syria collapsed because of climate change based crop failures. The "Arab Sprint" was in large part because of agricultural productivity issues due to climate change. Large cities in Africa and south Asia are running out of water.

<comment><USER6> I should've been more specific. Crop failures where middle class Americans start to starve. Society is nine meals away from revolution. Keep a close eye on US grain reserves and other ag indicators.

I agree with your points that crops are already failing. It just hasn't impact the first world middle class yet.

<comment><USER7> I disagree. Most of America is already onboard; it's just being held back from progress by its non democratic systems, a minority that clings to power, and power systems that can spend unbounded amounts of money for short term profits.

<comment><USER6> Can you show evidence that a majority is onboard? People are still using petroleum like it's going out of style, and no one wants a carbon tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry man, but all your hopes look pretty bad (as any other average eco- enthusiast hopes do).

1\. Renewable energy (solar and wind mainly) is shitty mostly, not delivering, huge resources required, and huge backup battery/hydro storage required. SOLUTION = Nuclear

2\. EV cars are junk, poorly packed energy, much less than gasoline per kg, giving bad range and big mass overhead to vehicle (meaning also bigger energy consumption). You just feel eco but price is paid in electrical infrastructure / power-plants / battery materials. SOLUTION=Nuclear again, then you can pack your cheap electricity back to chemical energy and use totally clean ICE which now has totally clean exhaustion (no impure fossil shit).

3\. Recycling (although not highlighted in article) is waste of time and resources (mostly), moving junk around the globe so that you can feel green :D SOLUTION=Nuclear again, just get abundant cheep electricity and burn it with plasma torches. Don't send you garbage to China, even they don't want it.

In short, Fusion would be great, Fission will save us also. Just stop wasting time/money/resources on other stupid ideas that change nothing and sometimes do more harm than original solution they have replaced.

<comment><USER9> We have about 10 years of emissions left if we want to stay below 2°. Building nuclear plants takes ten years on average, at the current rate of building them. If you wanted to suddenly build two or three orders of magnitude more, you'd first have to scale up the supply chain, e.g. for pressure vessels.

There is not enough time left for a nuclear revolution.

<comment><USER10> And there's enough time for a solar or wind revolution?

It's not like solar panels come out of thin air either. Same with windmills...

To build solar or wind at the scale we need would be quite the "revolution". Probably even more so than nuclear because you'd have no way to store the energy unless you went absolutely mad with lithium mining and battery production. Which would also take years to scale.

Truth is - both options are difficult. But I think nuclear is a lot easier and it's surprising that it meets so much resistance all the time. It's much more like take a few square miles out of a few geographies and you get reliable power. Versus - miles and miles of solar panels (that you may or may not be able to fly over and are very prone to the weather of the day) or windmills (killing all the birds and not so great sound for anyone close). And then the battery farms you gotta spread around everywhere... Or have everyone purchase $5,000+ in batteries that have to be replaced every X years.

<comment><USER9> Renewables have the benefit that they provide a gradual reduction in CO2 emissions that starts basically right now, compared to not reducing emissions at all until the reactors go online.

<comment><USER10> I think the scale required to do batteries + solar + wind is much greater than building nuclear power plants.

I know that nuclear power plants are a large scale event but so is creating a factory to make PVs. Same with lithium mines. Same with refinement of that lithium. Now we're getting into having to create lots of steel for wind turbines too.

In my mind, you get to the end in 10 years with nuclear. With solar, you get to production capacity to solve the issue in 10 years while slowly addressing the problem along the way. I think the dent you'd make in 10 years while ramping up to production capacity would at best just match increased demand.

Then you have large swaths of land that are dedicated to solar cells, wind turbines, refineries, factories, and mines we had to use for all the lithium. (Not that some of those won't exist for nuclear)

<comment><USER9> IMO the situation is dire enough that we should just follow both paths simultaneously. Build as much nuclear as we can, but also build as much renewables as we can.

<comment><USER8> I don't think that "industry capacity" is problem for nuclear option. That problem is in peoples minds and public opinion thanks to Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Check out how fast you can ramp up production when in need :D [http://mathscinotes.com/2017/09/ww2-tank-production- comparis...](http://mathscinotes.com/2017/09/ww2-tank-production-comparison- between-combatants/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II)

Problem is that if you ramp up solar/wind you will have to ramp up battery/hydro for backup if you want to stay clean. Nuclear does not need batteries. If you have cheap nuclear, than you make real changes in transport and recycling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel that a major part of the problem is misguided activism.

I'll give one example.

IMO, the solution to the energy problem is obvious: Nuclear. Nuclear is the safest, cleanest, and most stable form of energy production we have right now. It really works great. We should close all coal/gas plants and replace them with nuclear plants asap. Nuclear's best feature is that it produces no carbon to the atmosphere, and right now, that should be our main concern. But it just so happens that it's also the safest form of energy (death per kwh) and the most stable (active production days per year). Plus we know how to take care of the nuclear waste. Sure it has disadvantages but the overall solution given our situation is totally clear. [0]

The only reason this doesn't happen is the public's perception of nuclear being "evil" and radiation being scary. So no politician despite their good intentions can ever hope to rally the people behind them with this idea.

So we push wind and solar which are a joke. Especially given the urgency of the times. When we site "Renewable energy" we mean bio-mass. [1]. Bio-mass is just burn wood. It's renewable because it releases young carbon so its net- zero emissions.

[0] [https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of- energy](https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy) [1] [https://ourworldindata.org/renewable- energy](https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy)

<comment><USER12> You were very right 10 years ago. Two things have changed in the last decade:

\- the price of wind and solar and batteries have dropped dramatically, making them price competitive with coal and vastly cheaper than nuclear.

\- we're running out of time. We need to get these plants active within a decade and nuclear plants take longer than that to build. We've lost the institutional knowledge on how to build them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I joke with Andrew Winston that after each of our conversations I require a stiff vodka martini. The thing is we must listen. Start here. It's as rational a view as you will find

</comment><comment><USER14> It's hard to motivate oneself to act knowing the act is futile. I was a vegetarian for a decade and a half. What did that achieve for climate change (or unrelated for animal welfare)? Nothing. Because it's almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things especially when most greenhouse gas emissions come from the commercial sector by far. And especially when the commercial sector and political sector that's supposed to govern it aren't doing shit to solve this, especially in America. As another comment points out, we've had the solution for over half a century: nuclear. But we haven't done shit. That's the kind of action that could really help the situation. Other countries are doing a lot better but without collective action it's unlikely we can solve this in time, especially with the politicians in power in the US. In the US this is somehow a partisan issue because the people in power would prefer to kill most human beings on earth and a million other species rather than lose a little money on their fossile fuel investments.

On the scale in the linked article, I'm probably a four or five, but I'm also in my late thirties and don't plan to have kids. So while I stay informed, I don't worry. If I was younger or planned to have kids, I'd be fuming. It's unbelievable how badly our so called leaders, especially in the US have fucked us.

</comment><comment><USER15> Late to this, but I commented in 2 recent discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339865)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20353814)

...in effect that we are not competent to solve this or our other key problems while rejecting the creator (and basic rules like honesty and the Golden Rule), and that none of the current events should be surprising at all, though they are sad. These are predicted, expected, and it will get worse, but we can be at peace and seek good things, and really, we can be OK. Linked to details on why I think that, and more info.

</comment><comment><USER16> From "Climate Change: How Do We Know" from NASA, mentioned in this article, there is a carbon level rise and fall graph which looks almost periodic. Perhaps the previous cases of cause and effect help us to be aware of the present situation?

For example- Do we know what took the carbon dioxide level high during 400000 and 320000 years ago, aftermath and things that brought the level down eventually in next few thousand years before the rise (again)?

[1] [https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/](https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/)

<comment><USER4> Look at it overlayed with this graphic of ice ages: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#/media/File:Ice_Age_Te...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#/media/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish I could adequately apologize to my Stepdaughter about the climate disaster. She's almost 20 and will have to live the majority of her life dealing with the effects of the collective acts of human stupidity over the past 200+ years.

I want to sponsor planting trees, but I worry that we're doing far too little, far too late.

<comment><USER3> I want to find a way to spend the majority of my time fighting this. That means paid work, unfortunately, because I'm not rich enough to retire.

Do you have any idea how I, or anyone else, can do this?

<comment><USER17> If you are physically able to plant trees, then find a local organization and volunteer. Easier said than done, but I think that's something a lot of people could do to make a definitive step towards fighting the climate disaster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "The news is bad. That's not negativity or pessimism; that's a cold, hard reading of the situation, much like an honest cancer diagnosis from a doctor." This is how I feel. Sometimes I am down about and feel like all could be for naught, that existence is pointless if we do not sustain the planet.

</comment><comment><USER19> The problem with climate change isn't climate change. It's because it has become co-opted by politics. It's now impossible to discuss climate change without becoming political.

The politics don't even agree relative to the side. Climate change has left the spectrum of left-right wing.

<comment><USER7> Any change that affects society is going to be political. Why is this a surprise? How could it be different?

<comment><USER20> The problem is that the issue itself became a _polarized_ political point, which resulted in the people who view politics more similar to sport teams than steering society to hardline for/against the issue without even knowing what the issue is about. And I attribute this phenomena wholly to our big political leaders, who go in front of a camera and devote themself fully to solving complicated situation [x] as the cornerstone & identity of their party, automatically causing the other party to fight against it; in this case I believe it happened with Gore during the 2000 campaign. Without this whole polarization effect carbon reduction could have easily been non-eventful manner that CFCs or smog was handled in the 70s, instead you have people denying/evangelizing the effect just because the guy on the TV with the matching letter next to his name told them to.

This isn't just something unique to environmentalism either; I believe the same thing happened to net neutrality when Obama made a big speech about it when 90% of Americans didn't even care about it beforehand, and I'm hoping to god the same thing doesn't happen to the right to repair because all successful progress on it will grind to a halt the minute it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I read that a single cargo ship pollutes more than the entire car park of many countries(!), and so I figured, it's just common sense to support autonomous sail ships. I don't know how much pollution we could save, but I'm guessing between thousands to millions of tons each year. I think this will work, because not all cargo is time-intensive as long as there's good logistics behind it. And I think autonomous sail ships could really make a difference here. I really want to get into this. Can someone help me? :)

</comment><comment><USER22> THIS IS AN EMERGENCY

</comment><comment><USER23> Nobody mention population.

<comment><USER9> Do you propose reducing the population to zero over the next twenty years? If not then you don't solve the problem.

<comment><USER23> If growth is as predicted in India and Africa (for example), then even the most extreme penitent self-flagellation in the developed world will not make a blind bit of difference.

<comment><USER9> If the developed nations figure out how to live sustainably, India and Africa can just do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm sure the emotions are genuine, but articles like this leave me with a sense that those concerned are waiting for others (especially "leaders") to make something happen. They want electric cars to be mandated so they can continue their addiction to the automobile despite the severe environmental effects of car culture regardless of the fuel source. They want government to force companies to develop carbon neutral everything so that they can continue their lives of consumption uninterrupted.

We control our own actions. Our continued individual consumption leads to CO2 emissions. It's in our power to radically reduce our own carbon footprint by scaling back our lives. Not seeking out environmentally-friendly alternatives, but by curbing our out-of-control consumption urges which lie at the heart of this entire mess.

However, this requires painful, life-changing choices for many. Foregoing the house in the burbs for a walkable/rideable commute. Shunning unsustainable locations like Silicon Valley, even if that means reduction in income. Scaling way back on air travel. Avoiding foods grown in rainforest whose consumption encourages deforestation (e.g., coffee). Living far below our means, in other words.

Stop blaming Trump. Rejoining the Paris Accords won't solve the problem. Far more radical adjustments will be needed to prevent even the mildest effects now being predicted.

I want to see people voicing climate change concerns recommending the only thing that audience members can directly control - live a far simpler life and start doing it now. Stop complaining about how impractical this option is. This is what every "leader" is doing, from CEOs to presidents. Act - just like you are expecting others to do so.

<comment><USER25> The trouble is, making sacrifices for yourself, as a voluntary moral choice, and just expecting other people to do the same is not going to be a successful strategy, because you're up against human nature itself.

Any pragmatic strategy to reduce the impact of climate change must start with international cooperation. From the point of view of the USA, this must start with a new administration. Then, with this cooperation we could find actions not strictly rooted in dreamy idealism, including enforcing the changes in lifestyle you mention at scale. (Through agreements, tariffs, etc.) A real global strategy also needs to involve some very bitter pills and compromises, e.g. taking a fresh look at nuclear, geoengineering research, and having the hard conversations about global population growth in emerging countries, and what people will do in the vast regions of the world which won't be habitable for much longer.

Any other strategy is just wishful thinking, and avoiding the cold hard facts. And the facts on this will catch up. All the trees you can plant or the most frugal lifestyle you are capable of will make precisely zero difference if it isn't based on global cooperation. Andrew Yang in the most recent democratic debate was right: a lot of the damage is already done and some of the discussion needs to be about how we can move to higher ground.

<comment><USER26> > making sacrifices for yourself, as a voluntary moral choice, and just > expecting other people to do the same is not going to be a successful > strategy, because you're up against human nature itself.

I have the opposite experience in my life so far (40yo), and I am a perpetrator of this "strategy".

Ask yourself, for example, why the nature of humans is that hopeless for you. How are the humans around you? (also those in the news)

What if - before fixing earth - i fix myself? My circle of friends, of colleagues, the family... from my most intimate partner to the whole society it looks like a long way .

But I will be surprised how many humans can change for good, just because I was the one changing first.

it will never stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Eh surely RonaldSchleifer comment shouldn't have been killed by flagging.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't even know why I have to be called a climate change denier or skeptic. The onus is on people who believe the climate is changing to prove it. As to say, it is not my job to disprove something that hasn't been proved.

Now obviously there is "proof" in circulation. But what is it proving? Have any prediction targets been met at all? How much will the sea tides rise and when? How much would have they risen given natural cycles? Even if man mad emissions weren't affecting the temperature would a climate scientist be able to predict the temperature 5 years from now?

Nasa has a few articles about how Earth is much greener than 40 years ago due to global warming -> [https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/3/graphic- warmer-...](https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/3/graphic-warmer-..).

Are we simply waiting for this new vegetation to mature and reduce carbon emissions? Is anyone factoring in potential plant growth? Could they even measure that? Maybe the earth knows how to naturally cycle?

As I've aged, all I have seen is men make futile predictions about everything under the sun. The more and more variables and extrapolations added to a problem generally leads to an exponentially bad answer. I'm sure anyone who works in a job that does heavy spread sheet work can twist any bunch of numbers to fit a departments desired figure.

Furthermore, the mass fervour of the world for climate change should induce skepticism. Where is everyone getting their sources from?

Arguments such as:

"Think about the children" "Save the planet"

Are typically go to answers of people who can't make a real point.

Now it is not anyone's fault that they should act hysterical, the authority that is trickling down all this information should be a bit more out spoken. The media also needs to drop the term "experts" and "scientists".

I'd just like to know, in 10 years from now, if carbon emissions were at 19th century level, what would be the temperature be? and at our current rate of carbon emission what will the temperature be? With what degree of accuracy will the figure hold up to? Other then reducing man made emissions, what other planetary behaviour will also reduce carbon emissions? Can they be predicted and have you included them in the report?

Not even going to bother with the political aspect of this all, which actually may well be the majority of this movement. If I truely believed climate change were a real problem for the world, as the above posted said, I would be going after all the billion person populations first and foremost.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've gotten a vasectomy exactly because it's clear that some of the worst outcomes of human-created climate change are inevitable, and I recommend anyone who cares about the environment and the well-being of their potential children to do the same.

My only question is what to do when the world actually ends in 10 or so years. I'm thinking of quitting my job in SF and moving to a rural area in northern midwest far from the oceans, but I haven't been able to get my family or friends to join me. I'm worried about the _ahem_ political affiliations of those areas as well.

Does anybody have a good plan for what to do when the worst disasters occur? Like food shortages?

<comment><USER29> Wouldn't diving into the world of doomsday preppers assist you in planning? (I mean, stereotyping aside that they're all crackpots or w/e surely they'd be useful for the literal thing they're trying to do.)

<comment><USER30> "Doomsday planning for less crazy folks" is pretty good:

[http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/)

<comment><USER28> This is great, thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bringing Vulkan to Apple's Platforms: Open Source MoltenVK 1.0 and SDKs - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/12465/khronos-group-extends-vulkan-portability-with-opensource <comment><USER2> Great. One less lock-in to worry about it. Kudos to Valve for paying for open sourcing it.</comment>