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It would be great if MIT Tech Review dropped its political agenda and just, you know, reported on technology.

These "rich-getting-richer" addresses may actually be held by businesses, and the reason they are gaining more links and BTC is because more people are storing their BTC with that business.

The study doesn't provide nearly enough evidence or context to justify MIT Tech Review's politically-loaded rhetoric. There are ways to report on the Bitcoin network without mucking it up with divisive classist rhetoric.


If this article is slanted, it's because reality has a bias, not MIT.


A) Your argument against H-1B's is disingenuous at best. And I'm curious, are you against expanding H-1B's but in favor of increasing the amount of low-skill immigrants and/or granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? If so, how do you reconcile your seemingly-contradictory stances?

B) Heritage is staunchly conservative, NOT libertarian.


>B) Heritage is staunchly conservative, NOT libertarian.

Apologies. I often find myself lumping them together. Granted, I see themselves lumping each other together as well when it's convenient, but that's beside the point.

>A) Your argument against H-1B's ... against expanding H-1B's ...

What argument against H-1Bs? I made the observation that the rhetoric of seeking out the "best and brightest" was largely unsubstantiated. I'm not against granting visas to highly skilled workers. I'd prefer we dispensed with the temporary, company-locked permission slips and proceeded directly to green card, or at least a long-term visa that didn't tie them to a sponsor and had a clear default path to citizenship should the bearer pursue it. My observation was that the "devil is in the details." Specifically the nature of what constitutes "skilled," particularly within the context of the rhetoric that drives the H-1B.

> ... but in favor of increasing the amount of low-skill immigrants and/or granting citizenship to illegal immigrants?

I don't have an issue with the presence of low-skill immigrants either and don't have a problem granting them visas. The rules behind work visas for "low-skill" labour are just as out of whack as they are for highly skilled labour. As for amnesty, I don't see much of a point in granting illegal immigrants automatic citizenship, primarily because a majority of illegal immigrants don't really want it. I'm sure they'd prefer not having to live in fear of ICE, but whether they wanted to be a citizen or not is another matter completely.

Though of course, comparing highly skilled labour with low-skill labour isn't an apples to apples comparison. Migrant labour isn't so much an immigration issue as it is an international economics issue. Which leads into what you're really asking me:

> how do you reconcile your seemingly-contradictory stances?

The real question you seem to have for me is far broader than "should we let highly skilled foreigners into our country if we cannot find a suitable native citizen to take the role?" Your question is one of what the role of immigrants are in a country. Under what basis are we to let people in? What does it mean to be a citizen and not just a tourist? Better yet, what is the motivation of someone who wants to immigrate? Why are they uprooting themselves?


Great design is art. You can master the principles, techniques, and skills, but in the end great design comes down to vision and imagination.

However that doesn't mean developers can't be really good designers. Anybody can learn how to emulate the good design of the present and create products which fulfill the design demands of consumers.


Are you serious? The Daily Show is no more "news" than Hannity is.


I've never watched Hannity so I really can't make an informed reply. There's no question that the Daily Show has a Liberal point of view, but there's a difference between having a point of view and intellectual dishonesty. Humor is a trap in portraying the truth because the funny thing may not be the true thing, but it's less of a trap than the Cable news cycle.


Al Jazeera and BBC are both solidly on the left. I'm not disputing the quality of their reporting or the value of exposing oneself to their reporting, but you're fooling yourself if you think they're neutral.


"reality has a left-wing bias"

The ABC (Australian version) gets comments that it's heavily left-wing, yet they have their own internal metrics that watch for evenness of opinion, and these have to match up with an external auditor.

Of course no-one can be neutral about a subjective topic, but it's interesting that those news organisations with strong reputations for quality general-news reporting are always seen as 'left-wing rags'.


I don't know anything about ABC, but generally speaking, I imagine that the likelihood of a media company's internal team declaring that their own company's reporting is biased is about as likely as BP creating an internal team that reports offshore drilling creates uncontainable environmental risks.

I don't think it's surprising that the majority of established media companies lean in a certain political direction. People on one side of the political spectrum may be more attracted to journalism than the other side, which would naturally lead to media companies producing journalism more sympathetic to the political arguments that their employees are sympathetic to.


No-one can be unbiased about the news because it's inherently subjective. I agree, an internal-only team can't help but be biased, which is why they try to balance it against an external team.


Like The Economist?

Are the ABC's internal metric's available? What about the audits?

Their selection of journalists on current affairs shows is interesting though. Chris Uhlman's wife is an ALP MP, Barrie Cassidy was a Hawke staffer, Maxine McKew became an ALP member, Kerry O'Brien was a Whitlam staffer. It's almost like there is a pattern....


True, I was probably a bit hasty in 'always', but think that 'usually' fits.

My knowledge came from a friend of mine who had some reason to be at an ABC office at one point and witnessed a meeting between the ABC staffers and the external agency, and they were concerned that their week's tallies didn't match up, as they were out 2 minutes. I imagine that the ABC's numbers would be public info somewhere, and I have no idea about the external agency.

As for the list of journos, it doesn't really say much about the content itself, if the content is monitored. I mean, if you want to do quality current affairs on TV in Australia, there's ABC, and there's SBS, the latter of which doesn't do much domestic stuff (as it's not their bailiwick).


It depends on the monitoring. If you cook that you're golden regardless of what you do.

Actually determining bias is difficult.

There is also Meet the Press on the commercial stations and Sky News is actually well worth watching if you have it. Richo's show and Peter Van Onselen's are really good.

But reading news is far better at any rate.


I agree that the organisations are on the left but as far as I can see (for the BBC, do not know al-jazeera) they do not let their organisational bias affect their reporting as much as other organisations.


BBC looks right-wing from where I'm standing.


There's also a certain arbitrariness to what the media establishment chooses to cover and how they choose to cover it. It often seems as if the "news" is nothing more than what entrenched political and/or private interests want people to be thinking that day.

That's one of the reasons I'm really enjoying the new Vice show on HBO -- they're covering topics nobody else is touching, they don't censor or clean up the horrific aspects of the human behavior they're covering, and their presentation doesn't try to pretend that their reporters are anything other than human beings who possess their own viewpoints (rather than "objective" beings capable of transcending their own subjective perceptions and beliefs, like poor CNN still claims).


No such thing as a neutral news source. The closet thing is a news aggregator which will expose you to a variety of different viewpoints.

For US political news realclearpolitics.com is pretty good. They also aggregate news on other topics but I haven't explored those personally.


"Rules of Attraction" was far more entertaining than this drivel.


WASPs in the US act similarly.


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