I gotta be honest, given the LLMs we have today, it takes less words to get a list of references and context to read than it takes to type out your comment.

If you're genuinely curious about why people's views on Israel have shifted you could've got yourself excellent information with a simple prompt as such:

"Give me a brief neutral summary backed with reliable sources on the state of tensions in the Middle East today and the role played by Israel and other states. Help me understand why people's views on Israel have shifted so much since the start of the war in Gaza?"

Note the Israeli training data scandal to influence AI responses. AI is not reliable for this purpose.

Keeping the other response in mind: I cannot think of a worse idea than to rely on black box tech for output on your political opinions. That on its surface simply feels like a top 3 dystopia cliche that I hope we avoid.

I said list of references. You'd read the primary sources and make up your political opinion. But LLMs are good at providing pointers, much like wikipedia.

Uber has ~ 34,000 corporate employees. What sorts of inferences do you want to make from an engineering blog post with the names of 4 employees?

IIM as in Indian Institute of Management?

Absolutely not.

Sundar's education is: IIT-Kharagpur Bachelors in Eng Stanford Masters in Eng Wharton MBA

Maybe you're thinking of the last one

I was thinking of another Indian CEO maybe.

He is an MBA. And his reign has been full of managerial bullshit

> The video footage doesn't show how disruptive he was being; but I find it reasonable that he was clapping in a way that the the person running the public comment meeting had specifically asked people not to do in the name of expediently getting to as many comments as possible.

You're suggesting that the bar arbitrarily set by a councilmember on what counts as sufficient disruption to hurt expediency* trumps what seems like just clapping and agreement -- one would argue is clearly protected speech per the 1st amendment and I'd argue squarely within the spirit of why we have public comments in the first place?

I think that's a pretty slippery slope and enables projecting power through process, not something we want from our elected officials.

*an aside - why is expediency the goal? if this is a contentious topic, schedule more time so the focus is on receiving public feedback!)

I'm struggling to find a counter argument in your response. You say it is a deeply prejudiced argument? Why? You say blinders? What are those?

What is a philosophical statement?

One tendency I've noticed is that people well versed in philosophy can communicate well. Just anecdotally. Not something I am seeing here in this response.

Because it simply isn't. Philosophy isn't about wordy refusals (ironically the same complaint you try to levy) but about reasoning, knowledge, and abstract ideas. None of which come through in your comment, nor can come through refusing to engage in communication.

Then that is a category error because you are assuming people on HN need to act like philosophers 24/7.

I don't think you know what category error is. Or at least, back to my point, you're not communicating as though you do.

I think you're strawmanning my point - no one asks you to act like a philosopher 24/7, but this exchange shows you're very far away from that bar.

Honestly there are so many levers we could pull off within Capitalism to both meaningfully improve the lives of people while keeping together all the things that are genuinely good about it (such as the central thesis of rewarding risk and innovation).

- better safety nets paid through higher taxes and closing down loopholes (such as buybacks)

- stronger regulatory enforcement to reduce the power of monopolies / monopsonies

- stricter rules around tax-payer investments / subsidies into companies (sure SpaceX gets to have billions to shore up our competitiveness but there must be a mechanism for the tax payer to have board representation)

etc. etc.

The list goes on. Honestly it doesn't take a lot (besides political will and escaping the capture of Citizens United) to move the needle so that the median income or bottom 10th percentile lifestyle meaningfully improves while we no longer have wealth horded to the level of having centibillionaires.

It does require a government that operates with much less corruption than we have, so it is more idealistic than not, but very easy to imagine.

What does this mean? I thought Meta has something like 80,000 employees. Meta had about 1,400 H-1B employee petitions last year. Even if we assume that number held for Meta's entire existence, that's less than 25,000 H-1B employees. Less than a third of Meta are presumably immigrants.

Have I got something wrong or is there this belief that Meta doesn't hire any Americans?

I don’t know why you think Meta accumulated most of its Chinese engineers through H1B. It’s top tier pay so most people move up to them from elsewhere.

No, and that's exactly the problem. There should be plenty of CEOs facing direct consequences for their actions in "the west" too.

There's a whole wikipedia article discussing how it is both a logical fallacy and how it is often used as a tool of propaganda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Please don't engage in whataboutism. One should be able to criticize China's actions without calling into discussion actions of other nations.

Do you go about threads criticizing US govt actions drawing parallels to similar actions in other regimes like China or Russia?

What facts would you point to, to argue that the Democratic party is "owned by Israel" more than the Republican party?

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind... is one