Frondo

I don't mean this to be snarky, but this sounds like someone who has no family, no kids, never been in a serious relationship. Once you're committed to one or more other people, you're pretty much putting their interests ahead of yours most of the day. If my friends who are parents are to be trusted, their kids are their priority in every substantial decision they make.

Also, it's surprisingly cynical to say that people don't put their interests above society -- most of the people I know have taken on work and hobbies that don't maximize their personal gain, because they'd rather improve society somewhat.

In a 2016 audit by the then-Republican Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, 54 potential cases of voter fraud were found, out of more than 2 million votes cast.

> Richardson said the suspicious ballots broke down into several categories: 46 voters appeared to vote in Oregon and another state; six individuals listed as deceased voted; and two voters registered in Oregon voted twice.

From: https://www.opb.org/news/article/voter-fraud-oregon-secretar...

If you have better evidence, not conjecture, please say so.

This is also why, until the Roberts court gutted the VRA, the courts looked at outcomes of policies and not just intent -- anyone can say the intent was to stop fraud, but if the outcomes are suppression, that used to matter. No more, and that's why state legislatures have jumped at the chance to enact so many laws that "stop fraud" (a problem for which there has not been, and still does not have, any evidence.)

I would have said that public universities in the US are accountable to their boards of regents far moreso than the sinister "bureaucrats in the federal government."

I didn't think much about this until the recent news that the University System of Georgia was effectively ending tenure for its professors, and the drivers of that policy were the USG Board of Regents.

> To many professors, the most alarming proposal is that a faculty member may not only be separated from the university for clear cause, but also reasons “other than for cause," pursuant to other board policies. “Such other policies shall not be governed by or subject to the following policies on Grounds for Removal and Procedures for Dismissal,” the proposed change also says.

From: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/10/04/tenure-under-...

So I looked up the USG Board of Regents: https://www.usg.edu/regents/members

And it turns out that most of them are CEOs or work in finance -- the people who represent "capital" more than any others I can think of. For these people to decide that it should be easier to fire "tenured" professors makes sense to me, in that these are the people who would benefit most from being able to silence, for example, expert witnesses, far more than federal bureaucrats meddling in academic freedom.

The very article you cited disagrees! You said they have "an obligation to maximize shareholder profits" while the linked article says they have to "operate in the interests of the shareholders." Those are two very different things!

Hunt around for just a few minutes on the google search, "do corporations have a legal obligation to maximize share value," and you'll see that what you said is the myth that gets repeated -- this one link probably summarizes the argument against the myth in the most neutral way:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-co...

This model is not good for society as a whole.

"Fair" is whatever they can negotiate. Who are you or I to say what's "fair" for someone else haggling over prices?

Good. I applaud all workers who successfully negotiate for as high a salary as possible. After all, I'm not in the room with them when they negotiate their pay, just like they're not in the room with me when it's my turn -- if they're making six figs, good on them.

Not the OP but guessing the difference is that he wasn't driving a loaded tractor trailer at freeway speeds to get home from work.

> clearly it has an agenda.

So does suggesting that a poor person could join the moneyed elite by foregoing their $13.99/mo Netflix to purchase assets -- if that isn't an agenda, I don't know what is.

Why, by saving that $168 a year, they could easily afford a single share of Alphabet (currently at 2,846.31) in, what, 16 years?

No one is getting rich by diverting that $13.99/mo Netflix subscription -- that's $168 a year -- into asset purchases.

As a nearby comment said better than I could (thanks whakim! for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28907429 ), the "culture of poverty" idea has been discredited for decades, yet it persists because it's certainly easier to blame individuals than change a system that so severely disfavors them.

Nearly everyone in the US lives in a state with a sales tax (only five do not have a state-level sales tax: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon.) And, of course, nearly everyone buys something regularly, whether food or clothing or other necessities of life.

It's 100% absurd and untrue to say "a very large portion of Americans don't pay for any of government" when most of us pay something every time we get a box of crackers or put gas in our tanks.

And if you're going to follow up and clarify with a much narrower way that your statement could be taken to be true, then I'd like to know why you opened with "a very large portion of Americans don't pay for any of government" instead of that much more specific -- and much less "the poors are getting a free ride" -- statement.

It is without vitriol that I can note that Colin Powell had a long and respected career that started with covering up a US military massacre of civilians and ended acting as the mouthpiece for an unjust war in which many more civilians died.

He lent an even-toned dignity to horrible injustices and held an esteemed position in the US power structures that led to many innocent lives being ended prematurely.

I have no first-hand experience but I'm sure he was also a family man, and he always seemed like a warm and personable individual in interviews, and proud of what he helped the US military do to people overseas.

Is this dispassionate and even-handed enough for you?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th... --

"Pinkertons and militia at Homestead, 1892 - One of the first union busting agencies was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which came to public attention as the result of a shooting war that broke out between strikers and three hundred Pinkerton agents during the Homestead Strike of 1892."

Maybe not "hitmen" as such, but certainly the violent enforcer arm of capital hired to attack striking workers.

The top performer is not necessarily (and, in my experience, is seldom) the best negotiator.

There is a financial incentive, maybe not for the manufacturer but certainly for the people involved in schemes like these:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/covid-telehealth-hydroxy...

Not trying to nitpick, and not arguing with the sense of sadness you feel -- I sympathize -- but I wouldn't call "passively keeping in touch" with thousands of people "relationships." It's something, but I'm not sure what, it seems like we may not have a good word for "casual strangers," the level of familiarity beneath acquaintance that we know because we met them once and then know only what they post in one social media database or another.

Also, to be honest, I felt the way you did before I deleted a twitter account with about 2k following and 10k followers. I felt like it was dominating my attention, and that made me mad. In a fit of pique I deleted it and it's almost funny how quickly I realized I didn't know any of them, and the passive consumption of their social media database entries was scratching some kind of itch but the same one I get from e.g. binging Star Trek series.

Very strange all around.

I was never aware that the purpose of anti-trust legislation was to hurt people (e.g. Rockefeller) or prevent them from making money. I thought it was to promote competition, which it apparently did.

It's worth remembering that the slippery slope is maybe best known in the context of the slippery slope fallacy, i.e. you probably aren't gonna get there (iron-clad rule by technocrats) from here (Twitter not allowing likes/retweets of vaccine misinformation.)

Well, a few days ago we had this article on HN...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682582

(Tesla suing people for defamation over social media posts)

On a basic level, you don't know what someone's material circumstance is when they A) decided to have kids vs B) any future time when they might need childcare. Life situations change and it's very much in society's best interest that we care for most vulnerable, like kids, no matter how rich or poor their parents are.

> Like it does hearing people from the US on HN talking about guns. It just sounds crazy. I read on HN someone from the US saying Australians wouldn't be under lockdown if only we had guns etc. It just sounds insane, disturbing even reading that. What am I gonna do with a gun?!

As an American, the gun discourse especially on tech forums like HN sounds insane to me too.

In Southern Oregon, people with cancer or who are at risk of heart attack or stroke are being made to wait for care, because the hospitals are filled with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients:

https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2021/09/absolutely-he...

In another rural region (Idaho, maybe?) there was just that, someone who had some treatable condition who was unable to be seen for all the unvaccinated COVID patients, and who died from the condition. I couldn't find the article, but it was just published on some authoritative news service a few days ago, in case you'd like to look for it.

You know the phrase, "you can't take it with you"? Turns out that's literally true -- when you're dead, there is literally no use for possessions anymore. We all end up in the cold, cold ground with exactly the same amount of "stuff."

The estate tax is a "government double dipping," it's a tax that's been around since the founding of the country, put there by the people who very specifically wanted to avoid generational wealth forming dynastic rulers over their newly-hatched nation.

With an exemption on $11 mil, I wouldn't shed a tear if every cent beyond that were taxed at 100%.

I've been in some really, really poor parts of the world, and nearly everyone's home I ever visited, they had a tv set. What they didn't have was round-the-clock electricity (sometimes it was scheduled, sometimes it was just off and on at random) or running water.

What language is that? The only abbreviation I've ever seen is USD (the three non-romance languages I speak a little of use a variation on "dollar" which, by context, is always clearly USD.)

Speaking as someone who just upgraded from an early 2014 MBA 11" to a Air with the M1 chip, while the old machine always felt adequate to my uses, having used the M1 for a while now, I could never ever go back.

Programs start much faster, quit much faster, web pages load much, much, much faster. Compiling is anywhere from 4x to 10x faster, as is interpreter startup time for scripts.

Now, granted, it's a jump from one architecture to another and a time span of 7 years, but this upgrade felt magical the way the mid-90s hardware upgrades felt.

Correct, because you live in a society and the society imposes some obligations and constraints on you, as all societies have done since the dawn of humanity.

I cannot tell you how much "the labor unions are using environmental groups as muscle to shut down the good work the energy industry is doing" sounds like propaganda.

I have noticed, more and more, energy concerns (like NS Energy seems to be) attempting to discredit environmental groups with this exact accusation:

"We, the energy industry, came up with a Green Solution but environmental groups stopped it for reasons x, y, z"

Where x, y, z is some plausible, fungible combination of "they care more about the spotted owl/some other endangered species" and "they care more about punishing us than being solution-focused" and "it's more of a modern-day religion" -- whatever the reader needs to be willing to accept the energy industry's story about how they're trying to do better but it's the environmental groups' fault.

What's interesting about this to me is, where seeing the propaganda round the Iraq War was obvious and obviously crafted, this is much sneakier.

But I think you'll see this more and more -- the energy industry is trying to solve our environmental problems, they say, and would be able to lead us to a greener world if not for those irrational, quasi-religious, badly-prioritizing environmental groups.