China has forcibly implemented strict birth control policy for decades. They're also forcibly sterilizing ethnic minority populations, Uyghurs in particular:
Ok yes, some people are forcing people. Clearly the person you responded to meant that they, and most people concerned about overpopulation, don't want to force anyone.
> The real problem isn't technology or even adoption, it's that people who work at giant companies suck at making games.
Many companies besides Facebook have developed games for the Quest. I guess you could say Facebook sucks at working with game developers, but I’m not sure if that’s true either. Unreal and Unity have well-developed integrations with Oculus [0].
I think where Facebook really falls down is tying customers’ FB account to their Oculus Store purchases (and ability to use the Quest at all). They’re applying a social media platform’s aggressive algorithms to suspend or ban accounts which violate their expansive TOS, which is wrong in consumer product and digital marketplace space. For that reason, mixed with personal experience at the hands of Facebook's algorithms, I have no interest in developing for Oculus.
Having owned every Oculus headset since the Kickstarter, I think the Quest is the first truly consumer-ready VR headset. At $300 it’s competitively priced against gaming consoles, without requiring a gaming PC or separate tracking sensors. It has a healthy library of games, 6DOF position tracking, and hand-tracking controllers with excellent haptics.
I was tremendously excited about it, to include messing around with VR development in my spare time, until the Facebook account debacle dropped my enthusiasm to zero. I’ve used my Quest maybe twice since my account got caught up in all that. I have no plans to develop any software for such a closed platform with arbitrary gatekeeping.
In a similar vein,
George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate - today privately owned and operated as a living history museum - has an excellent series of exhibits which puts names and stories to the Washington family’s enslaved servants and laborers:
The re-enactors are all fantastic and very knowledgeable. It’s unsettling talking to a black re-enactor who’s firmly in-character as a slave, which I suppose is the point:
Washington is always the one that gets me. His will freed his slaves not when he died but when his wife died. So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
> So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
I'm pretty sure Washington's will freed his slaves on Martha's death because he didn't want to break up slave families (her slaves were part of her dowry and as such could not be manumitted so easily at will). Manumission law was quite complicated, and IIRC Washington himself lobbied to liberalize Virginia's law somewhat so that it was not as difficult to free slaves.
One of the most appalling aspects of US slavery was that it did break up families quite often. Washington doing this to keep the families together is hardly evil compared to what the alternative would have been.
EDIT: The parent post has grated on me a bit more. Why are we so arrogant to assume we know the whole context of what was going on two or three centuries ago? Every time I review the literature of historical situations, the richness and complexity is remarkable. We tend to think of our time as "more complex," but I think we are comparing the complex reality we experience with the simple stories we have been told (and continue to tell ourselves) about the past. In reality, much of the past was comparably complex to our own lives today.
I think the behavior is timeless. Topical drive-by commenting seems to be quite in vogue on your typical modern platforms; we get plenty of it here too. Trying to put together a good context requires a lot of investment!
> That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
The average middle/upper class person today is the same, living on the fruit of foreign slave and subsistence laborers for clothing, food, and toys, and eating from the suffering of factory animals.
One of many reasons I’ve stuck with the default “Mail” app on iOS. Labeling, attachments, search, etc. all work fine. I manage my filters (an infrequent task) through the desktop web interface. The Mail app UI hasn’t changed much in the last ten years.
If Google ever breaks plain old IMAP support, I’ll complete my
migration to Fastmail.
He goes into exquisite detail on the ways in which private info is shared, sold, amalgamated, and analyzed by private and public entities, and how law enforcement uses (and abuses) these resources. That particular talk is from 2016, so things are probably even worse now.
>1: an illegal act for which someone can be punished by the government
And from the Code of Laws of the United States of America, linked previously:
>Any alien (including an alien crewman) in and admitted to the United States shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed if the alien is within one or more of the following classes of deportable aliens:
>(1) Inadmissible at time of entry or of adjustment of status or violates status [...]
To reside in the U.S. illegally is prohibited by law, and the government shall punish you with removal to your country of origin. In other words, residing in the U.S. illegally is a crime.
EDIT: Downvotes because I'm mistaken, or because you don't like the U.S. Code? If the above analysis is wrong, please correct it.
Despite the downvotes you’ve received, you are correct. The under-reporting of crime among illegal immigrant communities for the reason you identify has been studied and documented:
Since most victims of violent crime know their attacker [0], this may imply an under-reporting of crime committed by members of the undocumented community as well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26306020
In that instance, the canceled person was one of the United States' top reporters on the COVID pandemic.