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.

What are you talking about? Trump is *literally a climate change denier*. It is his stated opinion, on the record. It's his administration's and his party's stated policy. It's not like they're trying to hide this.

They're not just failing to act, they are actively working to undo the (inadequate, as you point out) federal US policies intended to combat climate change. That and decades of environmental regulation of all sorts. They're even going so far as to put aside their "commitment" to "states' rights" and try to negate states' ability to enact their own policy, especially in California (the world's 5th largest economy).

This is all well documented, and I know you're just trolling, but it's worth repeating this anyway.

If the goal is to stop the warming, we need to look at who is contributing to the warming _today_, and in the next few decades, and talk about what can be done about that.
If the goal is to find someone to blame so we can feel better ignoring our own current contributions to the problem, then concentrating on past contributions to total CO2 on the planet is the way to go.

$500K buys a lot of Kool-Aid.

If you measure Bloat in lines of code, yes. But if you measure Bloat in the amount of time and effort needed to maintain and extend, maybe not. Not that AI has achieved that goal yet, but it wouldn't hurt for us to all start using the right metric, so we'll know a good thing when we see it.

I remember around 2010 there were some helpful suggestions from Russia that the US should plug the BP oil spill in the Gulf using nuclear bombs. It seems they've done so a few times.