This is the kind of action that can have long-term positive impacts. Maybe it won't change the world, and it won't get you Zuckerberg "I'm ending all disease" press, but it's immediately, tangibly beneficial to masses of life. I respect the hell out of this.
Reminds me of Douglas Tompkins (the founder of Esprit and The North Face) who has done this on a much larger scale in Chile and Argentina.
He's used his profit from selling his share in both companies to buy over 2 million acres of land, and is in the process of restoring the it to original conditions (which is sometimes at odds with the interest of local ranchers).
Sadly, after his death it's unclear what will happen. His widow and the foundation have stated that they're likely to return the land to Chile (it has been controversial that it was privately held) and hope that the government will treat it with the same care.
A conservation easement is not a payment.
Sweeney didn't actually pay $15 million. He just gave up the right to develop on a piece of land he wasn't ever going to develop on anyway. This gives him a $15 million tax deduction over several years that he can use to offset his tax liabilities. Since he donated $15 million worth of property rights, he probably has a lot of them.
Not very different from Trump's conservation easement donation in New York.
The article explicitly says 'Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney has reportedly paid $15 million to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to permanently protect 7,000 acres of undeveloped land'.
In our current system, yes, but should we not reach higher to say that this land is common land and that it is a resource not just for us but for all generations going forward.
When we say that all land is for sale and once owned is at the disposal of the owner in perpetuity, we rely on the good-will of the owner. In the majority of cases this is not enough.
We need to look at land ownership differently if we want to achieve real change. We have to bake in behaviour into the rules of our society. Right now we bake in land speculation and exploitation of natural resources for private good and often the public purse picks up the pollution costs later.
I think it's worse than that. This particular person is in a position to likely make enough money to not need to worry about the cost of management of this land. What if his kids aren't as rich or don't care as much about nature? What if he has 6 kids and they split the land equally; will 5 generations down the line still feel attached to their distant relatives to be able to hold the land together?
The conservation easement is likely to be durable. So the protection should survive sales and such.
This donation, earmarked as a "conservation easement" (which typically require landowners to forfeit the right to develop, subdivide, or otherwise interfere with the preservation of a natural landscape),
Yes this is my point. He snuffs it and his kids decide they want to turn it over to something highly non-environmental.
Which is why we should not have any form of hereditary hand-me-down, including power and land, at best you are expecting benevolence which isn't even fair, why do they get to inherit such power.
I'm sorry but there's no way a well-off geek is going to off-set what Trump's EPA is capable of doing. The proposed interim chief is a global warming denier with dreams of privatizing our national and state parks for development and has issues with the Endangered Species Act and other "big government" regulations.
This reminds of previous elections when the GOP candidate would talk about gutting social programs and protections and that private donors and churches and such will take up the slack. Its fairly unrealistic for even large amounts of private wealth to make up for federal cuts. The EPA and DOI collectively have a near $30bn budget. If Bill Gates liquidized all his wealth and donated it, it wouldn't even pay for three years of their budget. Practical plans to keep animals from going extinct require non-stop work, sometimes for decades. I doubt we'd have bald eagles today if Reagan tried to privatize these agencies, gave away their lands, or removed their regulatory powers.
In the worst case, the citizens can simply deny attempts to, for example, develop on a national park by sitting on the park. See: the pipeline protests from the last 2 months.
Yes, it shouldn't come to that. Yes, that means abandoning jobs, income, etc and hanging out in a field for god knows how long. But, well, things aren't hopeless.
We presently have government leadership that's more amenable to such protests. I'd expect stronger crackdowns against protesters under Trump's administration (on Federal lands, states will still do mostly what they already do).
You can only get thrown in jail so many times. Donate to your favorite socially progressive group: bail funds go a long way towards enabling people who can to do.
Less government regulatation, government doing less and citizens doing more? Sounds like a political ideology I've heard of before...name is slipping me right now.
Just randomly: one of my great internet regrets is flaming Tim Sweeney about boring type system wars on "Lambda: The Ultimate" without realizing what an impressive fellow he is :).
I made a joke about Walter Bright's (of so many famous things) username without knowing who it was. That was a distinct "Wow, I feel like an asshole" day. So it happens to all of us, I guess; take your lumps and keep on trying to be awesome.
This is nice, but really it's pissing in the ocean, as somebody said. In Sweden, we have "the right to roam". The idea is that all land is accessible by anyone. Any citizen can walk on any private property, subject to not damaging it or coming to close to an abode. You have rights but also responsibilities. There's none of this nonsense of breaking your leg on somebody's property and then suing them (as is done in Ireland, where private property is king).
This is a tax scheme to offset massive amounts of income. I have looked at many of these deals. You can generally get multiples of 3-10x the value based on the government discount tables.
Please provide a source(s). I appreciate this kind of knowledge because I have little faith in american upperclasses approach to good will. But unless I see proof, I dont want to feel like ab angry fool
And by the way, Trump uses these deals extensively. When he builds a golf course he'll donate the right to build condos on ~30% of the property to avoid taxes.
You're right, and in the last ten years or so (after the IRS took notice and started cracking down on abuses) it's become an intentional conservation strategy. The recent legislation to increase the valuation demonstrates this.
This is become a popular way to avoid paying income taxes. This year it moved from being able to offset 30% of income to 50% of income. It can be 100% of income if you are a farmer.
What happens a couple of centuries from now, when the Eastern Seaboard is overpopulated and we have 40,000 acres of land being held in limbo by the Sweeney Foundation?
Having this land being preserved in its natural splendor for future generations to enjoy is a worthy and noble goal, but what happens when we need housing more than we need forests?
Granted, I know this is only a small portion of the land in North Carolina (62.5 sq. mi / ~53,800 sq. mi or roughly 0.12%), but if 2-3 billionaires every generation pay to keep land pristine and untouchable forever, it'll add up over the centuries.
1. By an extension of your logic, NYC should bulldoze Central Park and replace it with massive housing developments to meet overwhelming rental demand in Manhattan.
2. You're not going to solve overpopulation, which is the result of a growth trend, by adding a constant amount of land to the equation. If you capitulate and give up the forest, then eventually you're left with overpopulation and no forests.
3. The literal answer to your question would be to develop elsewhere in the world, or in space.
Are you saying the process that creates risk is ending or that we are simply hitting a boundary condition (i.e. The edge of the Petri dish)?
TFR is synthetic based on population behavior (I.e. Not solely intrinsic, such as genetic).
My point is that there is a feedback-loop at work here. Educated women self-select against reproduction because the consequences are more obvious. But under-educated women still have high TFR-- they will need to hit hard boundaries (starvation, dieback).
I don't think the process of overpopulation is ending, just clamped.
All the pictures of the Box Creek Wilderness (and the Google map of Union Mills) make it seem like it is a poor candidate for housing. The map of the wilderness looks very mountainous (it's very close to the Blue Ridge Mountains) and the Google Maps seems to show any human development, protected wilderness area or not, mostly limited to the rivers and valleys. So that will not be a concern in my opinion for a long time if ever.
From the notes in this article, (http://www.citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2016/11/08/box...) I get the impression that Sweeney bought the land a fair bit of time ago (perhaps when the real estate bubble burst as indicated in the article). The inspiration for this recent protection came from an eminent domain issue a couple years back where a power company wanted to run a power transmission line through his property.
It would be interesting to get a more local perspective; my first impression though is its not completely walled off from the public (guided hikes and a 10K trail run are mentioned). As long as local opinion is relatively in favor of keeping things unspoiled I see this as a positive.
Had it been musk though, oh you people would have sacrificed a small child in his name. I applaud this guy, doing more than most of the people that claim to be saviours or at least perceived that way.
I've found that undeveloped land in low-demand, rural areas tends to go for about $2,000/acre. It jumped out at me in the headline that the donation was about the same rate.
Maybe its the same reason as Sam Altman has for owning a remote patch of land so that in case of things going really bad, he can fly there because he has all the important stuff (water, food, antibiotics, gold etc) stored there.
I am a little cynical maybe but I wouldn't be surprised if they built a luxury resort next to it and only wealthy clients can access it. I would be more positive if it were run like a national park accessible to all.
It's a problem in the sense that more and more area is accessible only to rich people. There is a good reason that ocean beaches in the US are accessible to everyone.
- Setup non-taxable charity
- Inject $15M in charity
- Purchase $15M of land, make it accessible to wealthy only for a price of $X with monthly/annual dues of $X
- Accumulate $15M in non-taxable profits
- Purchase $15M of land
- Make first segment open to public, repeat process.
Only in California though--most ocean beaches in New England are private. Limiting access to rich people does raise inequality, though it is very effective at keeping human impact low.
“It’s still in private ownership but the easement ensures it can never be developed,” Sweeney said. “It’s not open to anyone in the public at any time, but people can email and get a permission card and go and enjoy it.”
In Quebec, there are a huge number of Zec's[1]. Basically non-profit, co-op hunting and fishing clubs. Quebec does have the advantage that there is a huge amount of mostly empty Crown land, but they are pretty common in the denser section south of the St. Lawrence as well.
Hopefully we see similar efforts from others. The incoming president has stated he plans to gut the EPA and potentially even divvy up some state/national parks for development. Private donors will have to win out over commercial interests, as far as conservation is concerned.
The guy who's in charge of Trump's EPA transition thinks that climate change is a hoax, that the Clean Power Plan is illegal, that the Endangered Species Act should be repealed, that the Paris Climate Agreement is unconstitutional.
The likely pick to head the DOE is a lobbyist for the oil industry who wants to open up Federal lands for energy exploration.
Good lord this election is going to have far-reaching consequences.
Not that Trump's gov't doesn't need watching, but I'd note that Clinton's pick for her transition team was a lobbyist for the oil industry. The root failure wasn't in the general election it was during the primaries.
As far as this metaphor goes, the data is already corrupting. Climate change needs to be acknowledged, and the President shoving his head up his ass about this issue isn't going to help.
One candidate was telling you that they were going to do nothing, the other was telling you they were going to do something, but planning to do little to nothing.
I guess my point is that if you want significant action on climate change (I do too!), you were always going to have to fight for it with your representatives (R or D) vs the industry donors.
It's not just Trump, the entire government is seeing red. The Republicans have control of the House, Senate, Presidency, and they will take control of the Judicial branch as well. It's a conservative wet dream.
In four years, we'll either have a 1-party system or an N-party system.
Man, c'mon - why you gotta lump all conservatives in with these people? You can be a conservative without being an absolute anti-science/anti-intellectual/anti-environment/etc lunatic.
you can be a liberal without being a bleeding-heart.
but you can't vote liberal without voting in bleeding-hearts. it's the same for conservatives. sooner or later you're going to have to vote for an absolute anti-science/anti-intellectual/anti-environment/etc lunatic.
when partisanship trumps all, almost none of it is so black and white. it becomes shades of grey.
I'm sorry to say this but your country uses an outdated, deprecated implementation of Democracy. While we respect it greatly for its historical value as one of the first stable implementations, it is no longer recommended for production environments due to its many known critical bugs, most famously the first-past-the-post issue in its election algorithm.
Instead we'd recommend one of the European-republic forks (E.g. Germany's federalism 2.0) or, if you're feeling adventurous, one of the smaller forks like 'Direct Democracy' or the nordic-style forks.
Please note that those newer implementations have significantly higher system requirements, usually calling for a well educated population that is willing to debate and compromise rationally.
there are more realistic choices (left, left/green, far left, conservative (but very centrist, even sometimes a bit left-leaning), liberal (unfortunately economic-liberal) and idiots), also if you don't vote for a mainstream party there is a real chance that they might make it (threshold is 5%). In the last years we saw more political experiments in the form of new parties. On local elections there is even more choice, depending on the state.
It's still not electing policies, but there is one party proposing such a plan (pirates).
I don't know your specific situation, but HN folks tend towards "Money-rich time-poor"... so, donate to 3rd party candidates. 3rd party candidates have enough grass roots support to get started but many struggle with getting funding to get visibility.
Not just $5 here or $20 there. Donate to match your desire for a better future.
That's a self-imposed problem. There were 22 choices for president on my ballot. Until people wake up and start looking at the other 20 parties the current system is what we get.
I'm hoping that Maine's Ranked Choice Voting[0] (instant runoff) is an answer to some of the problems inherent in our current winner-take-all system. It passed in Maine; hopefully it achieves its aims and spreads.
..and there were only four on mine. I wrote in pretty much the only write-in candidate (write-ins must still be approved with the state or else they're tossed away) - and I was one of only a handful to do so.
There are some simple changes which make pretty well understood improvements.
For example rank voting. You rank the candidates when you vote. When counting, you count all the votes for each candidate. You eliminate the candidate with the fewest votes. Everyone who had that candidate as a first choice reallocates their votes to their second choice. Repeat until there's a winner.
Suddenly it's okay to vote for that third party, because through rank voting you can ensure that your third party vote does not end up propping up the candidate you like the least.
That's genius! As it stands, if I were to vote for a 3rd party candidate then I'm essentially throwing away my vote. However, if what you suggest were in place then the risk of a meaningless vote is vastly decreased, essentially eliminated.
Oh I totally get that conservative voters have a wide range of opinions... but they're still in control of the government.
Socially liberal fiscal conservatives might not like this administration's social changes, but conservative fiscal legislation will get much less scrutiny since the Democrats have almost no power. Vice versa for the rare fiscally liberal social conservatives.
Being anti-science, anti-intellectual, and anti-environment are core planks in the Republican platform. You have to decide if your conservative values, whatever they are, are worth voting in favor of politicians who are anti-science, anti-intellectual, and anti-environment. This isn't something new we've discovered this election, either. Every vote for a Republican for the past 40 years has been a vote in this direction. If you voted Republican in the past 40 years, you are to blame for the current government. Nice work!
Given the republican track record, in 4 years we'll be in a serious economic crisis, at least one war, and they'll be incredibly unpopular. Fortunately for them, they're well funded and well gerrymandered.
That will only make a difference if people are voting for Democrats for their state legislators and governors. The gerrymandering feeds itself. Also the wide land mass vs population centers split between Republican and Democratic bases doesn't help either.
> In four years, we'll either have a 1-party system or an N-party system.
This is the same thing I heard from Democrats in 2000 and 2004, and the same thing I heard from Republicans in 2008. It is unlikely to actually happen. People are too complacent, and a good chunk of America will be perfectly satiated by cheap prices at the pump.
My understanding is that there are other options he could go with, but it is indeed alarming that the seeming "top pick" would be this guy of all people. It's a shame.
Yeah, Myron Ebell is the person I'm referring to for the EPA. He's the odds on favorite to get the job in the end, but today he's leading the team to transition the department to a Trump White House. Even if he doesn't end up with the job, he's the person picking the eventual department head.
I am sorry for you guys and girls from the US of A. You seem to be really traumatized by the result of the election. But keep calm: the fact that the majority (OK, a small minority) of the land of the free voted on the wrong/right mascot won't change the outcome of the game. Or do you really think that the people sitting on billions of dollars would risk loosing their power because of your vote? They didn't get there where they are because of paying attention to your opinion but because of ignoringt it. So relax, everything will be OK. Or not. But not because of Trump.
Disregarding the rules of the game because "the elite cheats anyway" is a terrible idea. There's a reason those rules still exist and politicians pay their lives and livelihoods to get to and stay in power.
There are cheaters and people making.. "clever use of game mechanics", let's say. But the vote does matter.
In fact, one of the main reasons the system is so broken today is because there isn't enough vote. Trump, like Obama, was able to get to power by inspiring people to vote.
> They didn't get there where they are because of paying attention to your opinion but because of ignoringt it.
You know, if it was that easy, I'd be the one sitting on billions of dollars right now.
>> Disregarding the rules of the game because "the elite cheats anyway" is a terrible idea.
We have to play games all the day where "the other party cheats anyway". But there are only two games where your efforts to make things work out are divided by 140.000.000. Election and lottery.
>> There are cheaters and people making.. "clever use of game mechanics", let's say. But the vote does matter.
Yes, votes does matter. And your vote matters as well. But its relevance is divided by 140.000.000. Good luck, man!
>> In fact, one of the main reasons the system is so broken today is because there isn't enough vote.
And this is because the non-voters have better things to do with their lives than playing the sucker's game.
>> You know, if it was that easy, I'd be the one sitting on billions of dollars right now.
Only because we could not cheat our way to the top does not mean that the people at the top are saints. Maybe they are just better cheaters than you and me.
Where are you pulling that 140.000.000 from? You're so focused on it.
Once you remove the percentage of people who don't vote and take the electoral college into account, that number is way lower and we haven't even begun to touch how one person can mass influence votes.
Just because you yourself have one single vote doesn't mean your voice is one in a sea of hundreds of millions. Far from it.
> And this is because the non-voters have better things to do with their lives than playing the sucker's game.
Why do you think so much effort is spent on preventing various inconvenient groups of people to vote?
It's funny how a lot of people downplay their own voice in a democracy. You have far more influence than you can imagine.
You strike me as quite terribly close minded though, and I don't really feel like convincing people when they adopt such a cynical attitude, so if you're actually interested you can read the excellent Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.
I know. It is kind of "occupational disease". I do statistics.
>> Once you remove the percentage of people who don't vote
Not voting is also a voting. In fact it is voting against all of the candidates and / or against the voting system.
>> Just because you yourself have one single vote doesn't mean your voice is one in a sea of hundreds of millions.
Actually it does. Having one single vote among hundreds of millions means having only one single vote among hundreds of millions.
>> It's funny how a lot of people downplay their own voice in a democracy.
You mean the people who can divide 1 by hundreds of millions? It's funny how not all of the people can do the math.
>> You strike me as quite terribly close minded
You are right. Just because I have a different opinion than you I am terribly [put some negative attribute here].
My take on democracy: you have the right to build your own opinion and talk about it and you have to accept the opinion of others as well as the fact that they talk about it, even if you do not agree with them. Not agreeing with you does not mean being [put some negative attribute here] and you do not have to convince others of your being right.
You're close minded because you refuse to hear arguments out, not because you disagree with me. I don't think you even realize where you actually agree with me, since you're reading hostility in my replies.
One option for people with some money to spare, but not enough to personally buy thousands of acres, is to donate to a conservation land trust, which pools money to buy up land and preserve it. These are usually local or state/regional organizations, such as the Texas Land Conservancy [1] or the John Muir Land Trust [2]. There's a directory of them here: http://findalandtrust.org/
Maybe also think about donating to http://earthjustice.org. They are a non profit that fights cases in court to protect wild spaces, destructive legislation, and corporate rape of public lands.
There's a great documentary "You've been trumped" about Trump's great ambition to build a golf course to Scotland. This is a nice example what the future president thinks about nature and wilderness.
Full doc seems to be available in youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCfaYlRyTGA
There's a lot of this going on in some places. It's useful for people who already own a lot of land but don't want to pay property taxes on it. Agree not to drill for oil or cut down timber in your enormous back yard and get a huge tax discount...
Isn't the purpose of a land tax to encourage the most productive use of land? So if we value wilderness, then a tax break seems like the correct way to facilitate that.
One organization I support is the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance[1]. For those of you that care about the redrock desert, please look into them. They were very effective in the Bush years and I'm hoping they will be again.
One note of caution, is that sometimes when private individuals buy up these big chunks of land from the government or big land-management organizations, they restrict access and traditional activities on that land in ways that mightily piss off the locals. It's a not uncommon point of contention in the north woods of Maine where I grew up; IP or Meade or Plumb Creek tends to be pretty lax about hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, etc, as long as their lumber is left alone and the roads aren't ripped up. Millionaires from away have a tendency to lock it down and post everything, in a modern-day form of enclosure.
I come from Scotland, and that's one of the weirdest things to get used to in other countries: that someone can just fence off a patch of wilderness, say 'that's mine' and stop anyone from going in. It feels oddly alien; I can't think of a worse way to teach respect for the countryside. If it's land that's being used for something, that's one thing. Generic wilderness? That just seems wrong.
(Scotland doesn't have trespass is the same sense that other countries have. The legal system is quite different from English law, which I believe (vaguely) is what the US system was based on.)
tl;dr - The Land Reform Act 2003 codified the long-held tradition of unhindered access to open country. This includes the great estates, forestry land, etc. Basically, as long as you behave, you can hike, camp, cycle anywhere you like. Obvious exclusions would be somebody's yard adjacent to their home, areas with active livestock activity, etc.
Scottish-American here, and every time I visit family, I wonder how we got it so wrong over here in the US.
And it's not just millionaires and wilderness. Anecdote: A friend lives in Oklahoma, on a few wooded acres. One day, he posts a photo on Facebook of some guys riding horses across the corner of his property. He didn't care (no reason to), but the first response, "Why were they there? Did you go after them?" Makes no sense.
I love this part in Guthrie's "This land is your land":
As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!
Jill of the Jungle was one of those shareware games where the technology (and graphics) was not great, but the gameplay was!
It came after id software had developed smooth scrolling games (albeit only in EGA) and the scrolling in Jill just felt pretty bad. Smooth scrolling was certainly possible in 256 color VGA, and they could also have used mode X to perform fast blits (4 pixel moves). They didn't use the smooth scrolling registers, and it didn't seem like they used mode X - at least the game did not feel like it.
However, I think, keeping the scrolling implementation simple, enabled them to focus on gameplay and sound on the Sound Blaster -- a relatively cool and unique thing at the time! Thus a classic example of not getting distracted by the tech side of things, but focusing on user experience.
I dazzled quite a bit with side scrollers then, and it took me a long time to uncover the possible ways to use the VGA hardware on the 286 and 386 for scrolling -- It was really hard to find information about the VGA hardware registers around 1990/1. By the time I had it nailed, the 486DX was already common and fast enough that everything could be done trivially on the CPU. Thus everything I had struggled to learn about smooth scrolling on the VGA hardware became obsolete. That was how I learned, not to spend too much time trying to optimize (prematurely) for current hardware!
> I dazzled quite a bit with side scrollers then, and it took me a long time to uncover the possible ways to use the VGA hardware on the 286 and 386 for scrolling -- It was really hard to find information about the VGA hardware registers around 1990/1. By the time I had it nailed, the 486DX was already common and fast enough that everything could be done trivially on the CPU. Thus everything I had struggled to learn about smooth scrolling on the VGA hardware became obsolete. That was how I learned, not to spend too much time trying to optimize (prematurely) for current hardware!
I did the same, but with the 486 in 1993! And I wasn't connected at all, no BBS:es, just sharing copies of copies of copies of floppies (etc etc). It's hard to imagine the dearth of information nowadays, and how valuable every scrap of information was. Now and then you'd get across this goldmine of information (in the form of some source code), and spend weeks/months understanding it all.
I spent so much time experimenting with Turbo Pascal, inline assembly and VGA mode 13h and mode X. And trying to build the ultimate sprite and tile engine...
The good thing about not being connected though: it was easy to stay concentrated on one issue at a time.
I guess my non-native command of Americanese shows again.
What I was trying to say:
"Wow, it's so awesome that someone who started out with a little self-developed PC game in the early 90s got so rich that he could afford this."
Just a reflection: people are really downvote-happy on this site - in the case when something perhaps, conceivably could be perceived as being negative. I think this is a bad thing. I find my self guarding statements, sprinkling in superfluous positive statements ("And I like X").
I think the unofficial (?) "be positive" motto has gone full circle in this regard and is now being used to downvote neutral statements.
Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah, some people (well, particularly including myself) are on way too much of a hair-trigger. I also un-downvoted, for whatever little that's worth.
Awesome, wish we had more of this kind of silent heroes, investing into biodiversity and keeping a little bit of nature save from the worst animal on the planet.
So does pissing in the ocean, technically, but I hope you still understood what I meant. This scale of action won't alter the course of world affairs in an appreciable way, and yet is still demonstrably positive.
For all you know, people reading this post are autistic, or have an autistic sibling (or child!). Nobody comes to HN to feel bad.
I have no horse in this race (not the original commenter) and I support the idea that people should speak freely without fear of off-topic chastisement, but it just seems a little more good hearted to find a different word.
Suggest one? Is there another word to describe the inability to detect the subtle greater context and meaning of an interaction and instead obsess over the literal meaning of individual words?
It's tech, there is very high chance nearly everyone is on the spectrum in some way, and if fact its a trait that gives you advantages (but comes with some drawbacks depending to the degree you have it). It's almost self deprecating humor, we all have tics/obsessive behaviors where we miss the forest for the trees during social interactions where we know what they "meant" but it's not exactly "what they said" and so we give each other grief for it so we can try to do better when interacting with others.
There is nothing wrong with actually being autistic, but certain characteristics we should try to keep in check.
Let's be candid here. Usually, people who use "autistic" as a pejorative really mean "clueless," or worse, "addle-brained." Both are far better alternatives, and neither alternative will collaterally insult autistic people. If you want to insult someone, go ahead. But don't accidentally insult a whole bunch of other people in the process.
If there is nothing wrong with being autistic, then it's poor communication to use it as a pejorative. And if there is something wrong with being autistic, then it's cruel to use it as a pejorative. Either way, there are other, better ways to express oneself.
I'm not going to discuss a blanket assessment of all tech industry workers as "on the spectrum." That's not my area of expertise.
I had a friend who is really short. I used to tease him a little about his height (we didn't exactly see eye to eye), but one day I noticed that he seemed hurt by my jokes so I stopped.
Autistic people have enough social challenges and confidence issues. You'd have to have ice water in your veins to intentionally add to that. They deal with enough difficulty as it is.
Sometimes it's about sensing how the other guy feels. The coolest guys try to draw attention to their friends' good qualities, big up the confidence of those around them, and help their peers stand taller. Obama did this once in a crowd that said a cutesy "aww" when a fourth-grader came up to ask a question; the President immediately interrupted the crowd, said that the boy was a big guy, and suggested that they let him speak.
Clueless isn't what they really mean, clueless means you have no idea what's going on. You can know what's going on but obsess over minute details or exact accuracy of statements that have no real bearing on the larger conversation. Clueless doesn't describe the tendency to do that. People call others obsessive compulsive all the time, no one's defending the self esteems of people with actual diagnosed OCD, because its understood its said with some levity and not being seriously derogatory to someone with serious issues with it.
Yes, I recognize the irony in pointing this out. I also recognize the irony we're even having this conversation because its due to the exact tendency the person was trying to describe, when in the grand scheme, no one cares.
Addendum: To be clearer, it's usually short hand for the spectrum, or more accurately someone on the shallower end of the spectrum (like a Sheldon or a Sherlock/House to draw from pop culture versions of it) whose an adult who can deal with criticism, not like that kid or someone whose closer to what people think of as "Rain Man".
There is even someone in the comments whose Autistic who says they're fine with it, they're adults, give them more credit. the coddling betrays a lower opinion of them then an average person.
I'd still recommended not using that word this way.
I'm afraid it helps cement a certain understanding in the readers.
Or, perhaps more importantly, it will be used as training data for someones AI based HR startup which will go on to filter out perfectly good candidates for being "autistic".
> Or, perhaps more importantly, it will be used as training data for someones AI based HR startup which will go on to filter out perfectly good candidates for being "autistic".
I did not expect that point... crafting comments with future ML efforts in mind. I don't think we should care that much about it - you can't feel personally responsible for every idiot using overhyped technology to do stupid things at scale.
I read the post as it's intended (which I agree with) but the pejorative use of a human disorder is both unnecessary and adds negative value to those with or are impacted with autism. It's loose usage to colour a point encourages its usage in natural language, degrading people with the disability. Basically it's not needed and has detrimental effects - we can do better.
I'm autistic and I personally couldn't care less. In fact I sometimes call some my friends and coworkers that when they're being OCD, which usually gets a chuckle out of them.
Yeah, it would have been more correct to use autism spectrum disorder[1] rather than vanilla autism.
Features of these disorders include social deficits and communication difficulties, stereotyped or repetitive behaviors and interests, sensory issues, and in some cases, cognitive delays.
There's so many things wrong with this comment, I don't even know where to begin.
1) There are 320 million people in the US today, which puts 1% at 3,200,000. Where on Earth did you come up with 40,000?
2) There have been 1,100 missing persons from National Parks in the last 100 years. That's 11 per year on average. How did you stretch that to almost 4000x the real number?
I'm not sure why you're assuming your downvoters are liberals. This is a private citizen donating his own money to conservation, so everyone from liberals to conservatives to populists to libertarians can be for it.
I'm always curious about the model fans of this approach are using. What is the "correct" amount of conserved land? Given that the government essentially never reverses these kinds of easements or grants, you have to be extremely confident of future possible uses of the land to say that deeding it in perpetuity is a good idea.
The HN crowd tends to realize that a policy of "never build anything ever again" is a bad idea in SF, but is a great idea as long as the area in question is mostly trees not in their backyard.
This is stupid. He should have bought the area and protected it himself. This donation will be used to finance wars and hire government employees that will stand in their desks the whole day waiting for someone to bribe them, not a single penny will be used to protect land or animals. Never give your money to the government, it doesn't matter what are you thinking, it is never a good idea.
The article links to a more accurate piece. He did buy the property for $15M. He then created an easement preventing development and donated that easement to US Fish & wildlife.
He has also bought other property for the same purpose.
He created this easement partially because a developer sued to use eminent domain to force him to allow them to construct a power line across the property.
