Seeing what people in other countries go through, willingly, sacrificing for their families and persevering in relative poverty, I can't help but feel that sentiments like these come off as weak and entitled. If anything it shows that life in the first world is too comfortable, which understandably makes it hard to appreciate how easy we have it, even in the "roughest" of tech jobs.

It seems we've brainwashed an entire generation into believing that all differences in male and female are purely social constructs - which is total nonsense.

Because toxic masculinity is an exaggerated catch-all boogey man used online to shame men for their innate nature, taking for granted that society functions better if we act more like females.

Conversations around toxic masculinity typically implicitly deny thousands of years of sexually dimorphic specialization by blank slateists. What's more, it's men who get the blame for the socially reinforced aspect of this so called toxicity, with the conversation universally denying the role that female sexual selection plays in reinforcing these behaviors - women are innately drawn to masculinity, and to a large extent what is and is not culturally masculine is not limited social pressure. Men and women evolved with differently shaded psychologies. Why do you think male and female norms have so much overlap across almost all cultures? And have for thousands of years?

>There is no consensus on whether climate change has yet affected the statistics of tropical cyclones, owing to their large natural variability and the limited period of consistent observations.

Which is exactly what I was pointing out, and exactly what laymen have come to totally disregard in their rush to blame everything on climate change while believing that "this isn't rocket science." Just like denialists and snowy winters, only in reverse.

This is on the scale of rocket science - in fact in some ways it is more difficult than rocket science, because it is fundamentally an empirical and non-experimental science, and it takes decades, if not centuries, to collect enough evidence to refine/reject theory.

This is the same kind of cherry picking that denialists have been using for decades. Locally rare events appear frequent if you gather trials from enough localities. The fact is that there has been no increase in storm intensity or frequency over the last 100 years which correlates with greenhouse emissions. There was an increase starting in the 1980s [1] but this is simply not enough data for climate prediction, which normally changes on scales of hundreds of years at the quickest - even if you assume that we are expecting catastrophic temperature increase over the span of a century.

Its worrisome that proponent hysteria is driven by the same kind of fallacious reasoning as that of denialist.

1. https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-...

Ridiculous that the subject has become so dogmatic that one must prostrate oneself before stating anything even potentially critical

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/24785997/

>No. Banning Nazi content won't suddenly make it appealing to young people.

It absolutely does, because edginess is appealing to many teenagers/young adults. Not only that, but laws to this effect against blanket "hate speech" are regularly used by white supremacists and the like as evidence of, for example, Jewish people using laws to unfairly elevate themselves with the priveleges of a protected class while simultaneously suppressing thought that can lead to dissent.

Holocaust denial laws lead to increased suspicion with the justification that scepticism is banned to preserve a false narrative and prevent the lie from being discovered. It's easy to see how preposterous this is while the atrocity is relatively fresh in our collective consciousness, but what happens in 10, 20, 30 years when all survivors have been dead for some time and people rightly start to wonder why investigation of an event is illegal?

This is a weird form of puritanical censorship and the unintented consequences to society are far worse than any imagined benefits. You have no right to control thought in your image.

Edit: also, your hyperbolic mention of incest and necrophilia doesn't quite support your claims, as sexual arousal is quite strongly linked with taboo for many people, as evidenced by the wealth of voyeur, BDSM, and even incest pornography. It seems like these kinds of authoritarian proposals tend to come from sheltered minds.

So we're not allowed to use labels to draw attention to the fact that the majority of people who believe in [1] and spread information about things like spirituality, crystals, anti-vax, anti-gmo, etc are women?

Often times x-ist tropes are rooted in reality. Dancing around these associations doesn't do anyone any actual good beyond cheap virtue signaling.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/01/new-age-bel...

You have no right to quarantine information like you would a virus, because there is no way to agree on which information is "bad". Further, even overall hateful or dangerous content can have meritful parts - not everything Hitler said or did, for example, was unreasonable or evil.

Another example, what about the Unabomber Manifesto? Yeah, he was a terrorist and he wrote some arguably hateful things about liberalism/leftism, but there was also a wealth of thoughtful observations regarding the human condition in his work.

All information should be free for study by anyone.

Your anglocentric view severely overestimates the similarly between our standards of cleanliness and theirs. I doubt these women are washing loads of clothes daily, if they even have more than a handful of items of clothing, or mopping dirt floors with any frequency.

Cooking on charcoal isn't that much worse than cooking over a modern stovetop.

You also seem to imply that men are just sitting around all day, based on the context of the message this is responding to - but I don't know enough about the culture in these remote African areas to say if that's wrong.

I don't understand this habit of bending over backwards to show that women have it harder everywhere. Aside from hauling water from long distances, the work you describe is hardly grueling - and says nothing of what the men in these areas are experiencing.

If you want to talk about gendered violence and lack of rights as second class citizens, that's one thing, but there seems to be a tendency to exaggerate as a signal of virtue or something.

There's no reason to presume that it isn't possible to retain our current standard of living while also solving the problem through technological innovation - we've arguably had the solution for decades in the form of nuclear, and we're inching closer every day with developments in non-nuclear renewables and outside of the energy space with innovation in farming (outdoor and indoor/vertical, GMO) and material design.

Despite the doom and gloom, talk along the lines of 12 years before irreversible runaway into catastrophe is really a worst case estimate. Chances are we will have plenty of time to develop technology to slow climate change and adapt to its effects in the coming decades, particularly given that it is a rising concern among citizens the world over.

Honestly, given how much of our infrastructure is dependent on fossil fuels and environmentally unfriendly materials, it simply isn't practical to make the kind of radical transition you're advocating for - our entire food chain, for example relies on modern plastics and ICEs for delivery/storage. The waste you describe from e.g. Starbucks and packaging is probably a small percentage of the waste that our modern civilization is structured upon, even if you convinced everyone to drastically lower their standard of living overnight. Balancing risk with cost, this is a transition that cannot happen overnight anyway.

This of course presumes that any discrepancy in pay among genders is based solely on discrimination.

Probably related to the modern polarization of the nation, though which is the chicken and which is the egg is hard to say.

Make VE the next buzzword.

Well, this seems a little dangerous. I would argue that any invention or innovation generated by an AI should be made public domain.

As we rapidly approach the possibility of genuine AI, the gap between the haves and have nots will increasingly be defined not by accumulation of capital but by accumulation and control of information. If the explosion of technical progress we've seen in ML recently continues, it's quite likely that future designs and breakthroughs will eventually come from neural nets themselves - and if we define these innovations as IP and afford the usual legal protections to the nets that generated them, as the question seems to imply ("other than natural persons"), then I imagine by proxy the ultimate owner of the patent is the owner of the net. Which forms the foundation of a dystopia defined by unprecedented "wealth" inequality where one or a handful of first movers become irreversibly entrenched as the gap between AI powered innovation and human powered innovation will widen exponentially once that door is unlocked.

I think much of the progress in the ML explosion is owed to the beauty of open source and open access publishing on arxiv, and I can't help but feel like getting neural network designs mixed up with patent law would stymie the iterative collaboration that defines ML research.