As a Brit who visited Greece it shocked me how much of a political issue it is there. I kind of came to the conclusion that any slippery slope or historical argument is less relevant than "If they want them so badly and we don't really care, just hand them over"

>it shocked me how much of a political issue it is there

Not that much at all. Perhaps you encoutered it at all because you're a Brit and so got into related discussions. It's not like people talk about it that much there.

I agree.

The British Museum would be pretty empty if we had to give everyone their stuff back. I can see why they resist so much.

Museums constantly have borrowed items on display - borrowed as in not stolen. I'm aware this is a more common practice the more modern arts you're displaying but still. I'm sure an institution of such prestige as the British Museum could find ways to arrange temporary exhibitions of like everything (I'm tempted to make silly parallels to the handling of Brexit negotiations but I will better stop here)

Don't they usually arrange these as "swaps" though? (I'm no expert on this). I mean with other museums - I know there's the thing where rich people buy impressive shit and then lend it to museums so they don't have to worry about security.

I’ve never heard of this being an issue and I’ve visited Greece several times and have Greek coworkers.

Basically the marbles were stolen decades ago, and the argument was that Greece was in no shape to hold them, so England was protecting them. Now we have the Acropolis museum, that argument doesn't hold so well any more.

Just to make the history clearer, they were taken centuries ago -- they were taken to Britain between 1801 and 1812.

I saw it in (I think, it wa sa while ago):

Posters in the airport Museums Tour Guides Random conversations

So some touristic and some just random like airport and people

Another key difference is that we don't have the right to own guns. Whether you're for or against gun rights you can't argue that they don't seem to incentivise more militarized police. Militarized police means that you get tragic and divisive police killings but I guess it also causes more general distance from and distrust of police.

We also I don't think have the American civil war history and Jim Crow stuff, so it's not as much of a political football and the history of oppression diminishes MUCH earlier.

They have no competitor, their product is a fully featured open source browser.

Companies which are run for good intentions are often hard to work for, pay less etc. You can view it through the lense of employee as consumer - if people are likely to agree with the moral mission of the company, they're likely to be willing to work for less wages.

It's weirdly common and makes no sense to me this line of argument, I've seen independent newspapers attacked for paying less than (evil) big media companies. The devil pays well! That's the deal! Good guys can't/don't because they're trying to venture outside the huge raw capitalistic currents, and the employee-consumer effect. Ironically companies trying to do good which do pay well then get attacked for their profligacy with limited resources.

Underneath all this (especially on a still semi-elite tech site) I think a (societal) system with big problems pushing people into complicity creates a compulsion to attack anyone seemingly slightly nobler in their mission, in an to quash pervasive cognitive dissonance.

I find it really interesting as well. CEOs of large NGOs often get attacked for their 500k salaries, which is a senior SWE salary at a FAANG. I think it is because people just really hate hypocrites almost more than anything. If you plea the good cause, and you dare to deviate from that path, it's just a matter of time for the moral fashion to blow in your face. Another thing is that if you plea the good cause, you draw the ire of the people with an activist nature, while if you don't, you're just like all the others.

One could make an equally (actually more) compelling argument that anyone supporting (state-subsidised/recognised) marriage is being very discriminatory towards asexuals, polygamists, people who for any reason are unable to form a monogamous partnership.

George Bernard Shore: Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.

This is an excellent comment, it should be noted given the thread.

Something that bugs me about this metaphor is the foregone conclusion that the thing on the ground is identifiably a $100 bill. Clearly anyone seeing a great idea for the taking will do so, but the discussion is really more comparable to seeing a bit of trash on the ground and pondering whether it might be money or not.

The issue is having ideas but not the ability to determine whether they are good ideas nobody has capitalized on yet or bad ideas that others have abandoned. I find myself asking this question often about a lot of things -- am I somehow so fortunate or clever that I've conjured a great idea, or do I lack the clarity of thought or prior knowledge to understand why my idea is bad, useless, or somehow infeasible?

FWIW, the quote about money on the ground initially comes from a critique on the efficient market hypothesis, not commentary on the nature of ideas. So it's expected for there to be analogical disconnect here.

For it to work as intended, you'd have to construct (or buy into) some framework for an "efficient marketplace of ideas."

Absolutely and I am aware of its origins, but I've seen the analogy brought out at least a few times here on HN when discussing the merits and potential of an idea that seems obvious but has gone unexplored or uncommercialized. I get the sense that there may be some beliefs around the evaluating of ideas, at least in this crowd, that lead some to see it as being comparable to noticing a sum of money on the ground. I'd love to understand that.

Furthermore, I've seen it used in the context of hidden transaction costs in the markets. For example, you see security A trading at $100 on exchange X but $105 on exchange Y. You think "free money!" but on closer examination exchange Y charges $5.01 to transact. These are totally nonsensical numbers, but they do extend to the analogy on ideas.

The Children of Ruin series is somewhere between an homage and a rip-off of the "Zones of Thought" series, they're similar quality though in my opinion, I'd read the originals first just 'cause.

It's been a while since I've read Fire Upon the Deep, but while they have similar sci-fi themes, the plot and antagonists are way different.

Read the sequel (if you haven't ;) )

Helm allows one to specify their interface in the form of a class (helm-source) between (arbitrary searching code) and (helm-core = a standardized way to represent/navigate that in a buffer) which one can plug in his candidates for searching (anything).

So if one eg. used shell or remote tools, it would still plug into helm, one would write a "helm-source" which communicated to helm how the source was updated and provide actions to communicate back and update/filter the source.

I think there's a mixup between what most people who have no idea what they're talking about (almost everyone including self) mean when they say fractional reserve banking and the technical meaning.

People mean: Bank has less "hard cash/assets" than deposit liabilities Technical meaning: The bank is legally/practically constrained to a fixed minimum reserve fraction of liabilities to harder assets

So banks DO have a "fractional reserve" even when not practising technical "fractional reserve banking"... I think