The question from the poll is

If I took the poll I would have felt obligated to answer "never held true," not because I don't believe in the "American Dream" but because this is not and never was the definition of it.

Better descriptions of the "American Dream" that I would have been able to agree with might be:
1. Opportunities exist to get ahead without requiring that you be "born into them."
2. You are more likely to get ahead if you work hard than if you don't.
3. The American economic system is better at providing these opportunities than the economic systems of many other countries in the world.

I don't think I'm nitpicking on grammar either, I've met plenty of people who think that working hard is or should be a guarantee and if it isn't in their case it's because the whole concept is bullshit. That's not healthy both because it blinds some people to opportunities that really do exist, and it bolsters support for other systems that are downright bad for people.

My comments (and TFA's observations about the European economy) are not limited to startups, or even tech. The sluggishness of economic growth in Europe is quite broad. I hope it will improve.

It sounds like you're thinking of regulations around consumer protection e.g. privacy, which is in the news a lot. There are a lot more regulations in play than that. Labor regulation is a huge space just to name one example.
 

It's possible that some regulations might be effective in doing that, and could come at a reasonable cost.

There's a bit more to the overall issue of regulation and economic growth than just this one thing though, in a community of half a billion people.

Worth mentioning that Torvalds, van Rossum, and Berners-Lee all moved to the US. The business and research opportunities may have had something to do with that.

But look, the claim isn't that no innovation comes out of Europe. It's just that there would be a lot more, and stronger economic growth in general, if regulation were more sane.

I hear you, I share many of your concerns. I would just underline your point

All your talk about "stated values" makes me wonder if you don't hold your fellow Americans to a different standard than others. It's true that US policy has an outsized effect on many people around the world, but it's also true that your average farmer in Iowa never asked for that responsibility.

I don't think it's a free speech thing, because nobody's telling you you can't say something, only pointing out that if you say certain things it might not help the conversation, might not have the effect you actually want. Another part of free speech is being willing to consider another point of view, so thanks for that.

I'm not. I think racism is a real problem but I also see people crying racism to bully people into silence on topics that really need to be discussed in the open. I also see people who don't consider themselves racist saying terrible things about one group of people that they would never feel comfortable saying about another, and now and then I call it out.

It's true that the US has done some stupid things, but here you're applying a seriously inaccurate and unhelpful generalization to a diverse nation of 350 million people. I'd call it racist. That doesn't mean you're saying it out of some sort of hatred of Americans, but maybe you're affected by the endless propaganda out there that amplifies anything negative an American does while minimizing accomplishments (the same technique used by people who don't like immigrants). Or at the very least you've been conditioned to think it's completely normal to say "Fucking Americans" in response to some office worker in Maine making a simple mistake using unfamiliar technology. To take your example...

... if you went around saying "Fucking Jews" because you heard some Jewish office worker in a small far-away town made a clerical error, I might be led to believe you're antisemitic. It certainly wouldn't help the conversation.
 

Funny, every time I've been asked this question about group X, it's been right after someone made generalized disparaging remarks about group X. If you don't want to use the word "racist" because you don't consider them a race that's fine, use some other word. The concept remains the same: when the rhetoric strays into disparaging others because of where they were born and who their parents were, it doesn't help the conversation.

Totally possible. Or maybe you did not have racist intent but your words can still have racist effect, which doesn't help the conversation. After all, people don't know who you are.

While I may not agree that this story of a relatively trivial office blunder proves that, it's certainly a more articulate and constructive thing to say than "Fucking Americans." I'll take it.

Yeah, and I mentioned it in another comment. Though honestly, a case like this is unlikely to exhaust the local jury pool, if it goes to jury at all.

We're all happy to listen to your helpful suggestions on how to best optimize police procedure in a small far-away town, but there's no need to be racist. It doesn't help the conversation for anyone, and it just makes you look bad.

There was apparently no evidence tampering. The photo was not evidence. It was a photo taken for PR purposes. A photo of evidence. There's no indication that the photo, original or doctored, is being presented as evidence to any court.

The need for validation is understandable. Which is why, according to TFA,

It's not even that. The photo isn't evidence, the objects in the photo are evidence and they'll be going to court. The photo itself was taken specifically for PR purposes, as mentioned in TFA.

Also from TFA:

It appears that the original photo isn't evidence either. It's a photo of evidence. The actual evidence that would be presented in court consists of the various physical objects you see in the photo. It's plausible that this photo, not being evidence, was not subject to any of the procedures that would be applied to actual digital evidence, for example, a digital photo seized from a suspect's computer. So it's not clear that this casts significant doubt on their handling of actual evidence. I could see a scenario where this kind of PR snafu could affect a jury pool though.

A contest between people with and without exoskeletons would be pretty awful, but a separate Olympics just for people with powered exoskeletons would be excellent for promoting the development of exoskeletons, awareness of their value and limitations, a culture around practical and responsible use, etc.

... what can be explained by incompetence.

It's only getting harder though. AI makes the incompetent more capable.

Inexpensive != less expensive != easy

Long-term cost optimization != cutting corners

We're not. Current goals != Apollo goals. For example, SpaceX goals include launching a much bigger rocket, reusing the stages, automating many things, and establishing a mass-production pipeline.

Willingness to fail in the short term != lack of seriousness

"Go fast and break things" != a PR strategy. In fact it's rather the opposite, a willingness to ignore medium-term PR and political opinions in favor of longer term achievements.

Public money != private money

There are such people in the Republican party and I respect them. It's possible to have a conversation with such people, and it's true that there are many ideas coming from Democrats that don't look practical.

However to claim that Trump, his cabinet, Republican congressional leadership, or Republic party leadership are in that set flies in the face of so much documented easily-verified fact that I fear you are being outright dishonest. I mean these people are literally saying the problem does not exist, are actively working to limit access to data that suggests that it does, and are gutting environmental regulation wherever they can.