Five Banana Lessons | Hacker News Reader

Five Banana Lessons

allensthoughts.com

14 pointsherbertl15 comments

Regardless of whether it's AI-generated, the number of em-dashes the author uses is ridiculous—33 em-dashes makes the post unreadable.

Are we sure this isn't satire?

> A banana feeds you once. A tree feeds you forever.

This guy has never met a banana tree. They also only feed you once.

not really, a stem does so only once, as long as new ones grow from the rhizome the tree* will keep on feeding you.

source: have a dozen banana trees* in our yard.

*it's not a tree (it's technically a herb).

Sure but you kill the "tree" when you harvest it.

The only thing from my trees that will fruit year round is coconuts, and that's really more of a flavoring than a food. We give it to the ducks though and they like it.

HOOOOOOL up here. You feed coconuts...to ducks? How does that work??

For some reason, I'm imagining a man dressed as a medieval knight followed by a man clapping coconut husks.

I guess I now know where the interior fruit went to, and why it is so notoriously slippery.

It gets grated and mixed with the corn.

This makes me think as a father of middle class kids... Kids with middle class parents get one shot in life. If they blow it by getting hooked on drugs or getting a DUI, they will likely struggle to recover for a loooong time. Kids with lower class parents don't even really get that. Kids with upper-middle class parents get to fuck around a little bit. They'll get to party a little but need to be careful not to let it ruin their lives.

Then there's the rich kids. They will get to go to party's, wreck their car, spit on cops, do drugs, buy their homework, and still go to college until they succeed. They will get bailed out of jail, won't have to work, and will go on to write books about how "nobody wants to work" and "jobs chase capital" and "pick yourself up by the bootstraps." And they will get a free ride to the top in daddy's limo.

Kinda like OP.

In case someone's wondering, that's a pretty accurate rendition of the parental wealth, but limited.

Rich kids - hang out with rich kids and get jobs from other rich kids parents - get every opportunity to improve themselves through better schools and access to extracurriculars - can always risk failure at a business because they know their parents won't let them go hungry

That last benefit? Turns out rich kids are really in the top 25%, not the top 1% as you might have been thinking.

I hate that my first move when I see an em dash has become to check the old posts of the author to check whether it's a new "habit" of them.

sigh skip

I used to use em-dashes all the time, same with semicolons, in my academic writing. I love obscure punctuation rules (yes I'm a loser). I've stopped using most of them as AI advanced. Whilst I have a back catalogue of work using them it just wasn't worth the risk of having my work questioned. I'm sad about this AI ruins all the good stuff!

Remarkably, I found a blog where I thought "This sounds like AI" but I wasn't sure, so I went to their back catalogue from decades ago, and the writing was similar so I gave them a pass.

Then I checked the internet archive.

They had replaced all their back catalogue with AI slop.

TL;DR: Canada has an entrepreneurial self esteem problem

Compared to the US, everywhere has an entrepreneurial self esteem problem. A culture that promotes and encourages entrepreneurialism is the US’ special thing.

The Great American Dream is to start your own business and strike it rich. The Great Australian Dream is to own your house rather than rent it.

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