Schmerika

If humans only work so that they can live, and wouldn't ever work if they didn't have to - then why do so many of our best inventions and advances come from people who didn't give a toss about profit?

If we have the technological means and capability to reduce employment to 10% - why wouldn't we?

Is it so impossible to imagine a world where people only work when they want to? Where the jobs that "no one would do if they weren't desperate" just pay very well instead?

Also, if you really think every UBI study is fundamentally flawed, feel free to design and run your own. Until then, maybe you could do better than waving a hand and invoking a hypothesis to try and invalidate literally every study that speaks against your claim, lol.

> The psyop is perfectly okay.

Is it?

You really don't mind if everything that gets put in front of you is controlled?

What if the people who talk about class war, the people who speak up about US and Israeli terror and torture and atrocities, the people who speak up for the voiceless are never/very rarely permitted to surface by the 'tastemaker' algorithm's controller?

Because it sure seems like that's at least partly the case today, and rapidly getting worse.

And the inevitable continued degradation of all our resources leads where, exactly...

Because once you answer that question for yourself, you'll hopefully care a lot less about the "many of good sides".

Oh look at that, Quarrelsome's going for the 'righteous anger' dollar. That's a good; that's a good market.

> Perhaps only 10% of workers (the most unattached and lacking in obligations) would voluntarily work.

That's not even close to true. Basically every study on UBI, everywhere, has shown that either more people work, or employment stays about the same, but in each case happiness and health go up vs the control.

Since it's very clear you haven't researched your claim whatsoever - why are you making it? Why would you say something so wrong with so much confidence?

Yes - but OP would need to take off their blinkers to see any of that.

As long as they refuse to do that, they can keep claiming this war was a big cool success.

> It is really hard for me to see how any of this has made the IRGC more stable in the long run.

It's not really that hard to see - if you open your eyes.

If you refuse to do that, to the point where you see nothing but the hint of a silver lining in every carcinogenic cloud, then yeah I guess things must look pretty silvery.

Being against genocide isn't a "value". It's not idealistic, or naive either.

It's a duty. Moral, and legal; domestic and international.

Drawing a hard red line at genocide is damn near the very least any human must demand from their leader; perhaps only exceeded by "don't threaten entire civilizations with nuclear weapons".

Same with prosecuting rapist insurrectionists, and going after billionaire's child-trafficking/murdering blackmail rings. These are not "nice to haves" - ya simply gotta do it.

If you're not "mad" when people fail to do these things, then are you really "interested in politics", or are you simply caught in some kind of us-vs-them death spiral?

> folks like you will go to the ends of the earth to make excuses for anyone who's complicit in the use of these tools

Settle down would ye.

> in exactly the same way, to use your example, that smoking cigarettes is bad.

No one said Facebook isn't bad. But "in exactly the same way" - calling cancer victims (who were lied to by tobacco executives and victims of disinformation campaigns and media blitzes) "complicit" in all the tobacco companies various crimes is unhinged. As in, not tethered to reality. And deeply uncool.

> There is no need whatsoever to use any of these products.

Correct.

> You just don't want to, because you'd rather things be a bit easier and you're willing to ignore the negative externalities.

I do want to. Yet I don't, mostly for the reasons I described above ("network effects, captured systems"). I acknowledge the negative externalities, much as I acknowledge them when I use my phone despite the fact that makes me complicit in slavery; or when I acknowledge that it's easier to pay taxes to the US, despite their complicity in genocide, than it is to go to jail.

There's absolutely no need to invoke some sort of divine power to know my true motivations - unless you're just arguing this dead thread to feel superior or something. You know that meme with the guy popping out of the little hole, saying "You condemn society, yet you partake in it! Curious!"? ... Join the dots mate.

That's exactly what it is; and it's worse than negligence for the Atlantic to pretend not to understand this*.

The phenomenon of the Epstein class explicitly calling wars and coups and crashes "full of opportunity" gets virtually zero analysis in Epstein-class owned media, and it's past time that people connect those two dots.

* Did I sign in to the Atlantic to confirm that they pretended not to understand this? No. But I would be shocked to be wrong.

Nice review; covers all the best points of the book, and its place in the world, without too many spoilers.

> It has been very revealing in a "see who your real friends are" kind of way.

Nah, not really.

If I had 'friends' who went about kidnapping and assassinating leaders, mass murdering little girls, bombing literally hundreds of schools in a month, blowing up civilian bridges and power plants, etc etc etc... I wouldn't need to invoke "the newsfeed algorithm" to explain why people are genuinely happy to see the people committing those atrocities get a tiny taste of what they've been inflicting.

Friends don't let friends commit war crimes. And indeed, from that perspective, America might never have had any real friends. We've just been the biggest bully with the biggest stick, the kid whose parents owned the biggest local news channel and industry.

And frankly, friendship with America doesn't even come with the same perks as it used to. You want Europe to buy all their oil and weapons from the US at inflated prices? You want to stir shit up all over the world and then use the ensuing refugee crisis to bolster far right parties across Europe? You want to have a go at Greenland??

... And then complain that we don't have any "real friends" except Israel any more?! Well shit dude, I wonder why. Spoiler alert: It's not because Hitler comparisons are being amplified by the evil anti-genocide media.

> What I fear is that regulation will be informed from the false and dangerous equivalence you've made there comparing addictive drugs to looking at an audio-visual screen.

Let's be extremely clear - I'm not the one who first made that comparison. That would be the tech bros, who hire all manner of addiction and gambling specialists and scientists in order to make their products as addictive as possible.

> the screens and the radio are not the problem and they are NOT LIKE DRUGS

For a fully competent adult, you can make that argument. Kinda.

To an unsupervised 9yo? An 89 yo? Facebook is a lot like drugs, only with the mind-altering effects much easier to direct. No, that's not the screens fault (or the radio), and no one said it was.

> That drug comparison will lead to government's treating computers' like drugs which means heavy regulation of end users and violence against them.

If I really believed that avoiding such a comparison would prevent government from over-regulation and violence toward social media users, then I'd avoid it. But I don't.

Also, using the insanity and violence of the drug war to self-censor obvious comparisons is certainly a choice.

> We need regulation of the corporations intentionally doing random interval operant conditioning. Not regulation of the medium they do it over and the people enjoying using that medium.

No one anywhere was arguing for regulating your screen or the internet - except maybe the government which you insist on doing the regulation, and the corporations who are large enough to own politicians. If you got that impression purely from the tobacco analogy (which you then morphed into the drug war somehow) I'd encourage you to try and reinterpret the point.

You're on HN; a platform where the founders and CEO are big cheerleaders of DOGE. Where talk of many third rail topics is quietly flagged into oblivion, and discussions on the flagging processes are explicitly banned.

YC were best buds with Peter Thiel... And literally had Sam "scan everyone's eyeballs" Altman as Pres for 5 years. They are actively seeking out "defense" tech to invest in; even during a US sponsored genocide, and now-daily war crimes.

The users here aren't tech-clueless like a lot of Facebookers would be. In theory we're better educated, better informed, more tech savvy, and higher paid. As a group, we're far more deeply connected and complicit with the tech bros than Whatsappers and Instagrammers.

So, we have that much less of an excuse to be "shitty people [who] use shitty services made by even shittier people because they need their little hits of dopamine."

I despise Meta. I also use their services sometimes. Maybe it's not simply a matter of voting for Zuckerberg, but there are network effects and captured systems and manipulation of addictive behaviors. Maybe things aren't as vanta-black and ultra-white as you're insisting.

I'll put it like this - what you're doing with that comment above is a lot like blaming smokers for feeding the tobacco companies. Despite all the lies and ads and manipulation, despite all the dirty tricks, despite the hard-core science used to get people hooked from every possible angle. Despite the cancer, the lung disease, the heart problems suffered by the victims.

Punch up dude.

> haven't we always had that weird eccentric dude(tte)

I would bet the first human to do lots of stuff was that weird eccentric dude(tte). Who else would come up with writing, or words, or carry fire, or wear clothes, domesticate a wolf, etc.

> what did crazy cat people do before cats???

I have no idea, but that's a great question.

> Later re-verification of the same data produced figures around 6.5-7.5 hrs.

Well, yes, climate and ecology matter a lot. Still, I believe that figure is including things like making sure a pot doesn't boil over, ie low intensity chores; and includes 'social' tasks which look and feel very different to, say, factory work.

Still, the idea that life was "nasty brutish and short" for most of human history is thoroughly debunked. Life wasn't constant misery for everyone, despite what many people learned in school.

I think it's important that we remember what we've lost, as much as what we've gained. Whether we worked 3 hours a day or 7.5, no one (outside slavery) was working 60 hours a week and just keeping their heads above water despite thousands of years of 'progress'.

Honestly not sure how necessary that /s is.

Like, without cats storing grain becomes so, so much harder; maybe basically impossible/unfeasible. Without storing grain you don't get cities as easily or as long.

Same with transporting food by boat; you gotta have a cat on your trireme or what are you even doing Andronikos.

Countless poets, writers, scientists and artists have been directly inspired by cats. I could easily believe yoga was inspired by them too.

It seems likely that models, royalty, and the concept of grace itself are all directly inspired by cats.

And then there's the profound cultural significance of Toxoplasmosis over the millenia; cats are (usually) calming; introverts can hang with cats all day...

> Can't imagine having to live with anxiety of just staying alive.

Spoken like someone who easily affords both rent and food.

> Constant diseases, infestations, starvation, animal attacks.

Not really, no. Sometimes, sure. Not all the time. A lot of food was more abundant, and a lot of modern diseases weren't an issue. Animal attacks were probably a 'constant threat' - but not likely a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence.

> You would never feel like you have time to just, be.

Anthropologists are in pretty wide agreement that the nature of life back then was like 3–5 hours/day spent on food gathering, with the rest spent socializing, resting, storytelling. All with 100% organic food, all manner of delicious animals since hunted to extinction, cozy hides and grasses to sleep and lounge in and wear, water completely untainted by microplastics or agricultural pesticides etc.

We even have bone flutes that are 50-60k years old. Pentatonic tuning!

I don't think my tone was 'raging'. Very strange takeaway - but also interesting...

"Keep raging" is a good example of what's known as a "thought terminating cliche". You might not want to terminate your thoughts so easily.

That, or just a way to save face: when you can't argue the point, argue the tone... If that's what you were going for - do you feel like it worked?

Global wildlife populations have dropped 69% since 1970.

Virtually all climate scientists agree human activity is destabilizing the climate, the oceans, and entire biospheres.

Military spending is at record highs while housing, healthcare, and clean water remain out of reach for billions.

These are some things people "don't like", which share a common thread...

Defending the idea that large-scale civilian harm is acceptable is where your argument, such as it is, becomes truly dangerous.

Aside from all your debunked claims, and aside from your ahistorical misunderstandings of very recent history... Trying to justify "total war" against a mostly civilian population - ~50% of whom are children - is so, so far beyond the pale that I truly do not know how to reach you. For that reason, I'm out of this conversation.

> Thank you for being honest about where you get your news from (the links at the bottom of the post). This helps explain your worldview.

What a weird leap to make. Nope, I just searched to find those; with a search engine.

> I would recommend trying Ground News, which helped me understand the biases within sources, and helped showed me the blindspots in news coverage that I'd missed.

I know Ground News; thanks though. I assume you're unaware how patronizing you're coming across, but trust that my media literacy is not the problem here.

Now, if you can point to where anything I said is falsifiable, great and thank you. Otherwise, maybe drop the insinuations and assumptions.

> I'd like you to cast your mind back to the acts that started these two horrendous wars - Gaza's genocidal invasion of Israeli towns where they massacred teenagers at a music festival, paraded raped women through the streets of Gaza to the cheers of onlookers, and forced young people to watch as their parents and siblings were blown up with hand grenades.

You think everything started on October 7th? ... You think there was evidence of mass rape? You have credible evidence of these young people "forced to watch"?

Do you also still believe in the 40 beheaded babies, the baby in the oven, the boobs being cut off?

... And you are out here questioning the media literacy of others? Physician, heal thyself.

> This isn't hyperbole. This isn't a politicised Western interpretation (a la "truthout.org") - this is an account of the videos shared by Hamas themselves, which were shown to Western journalists.

There is no widely verified reporting that the videos shown to journalists contain:

* Women being paraded through Gaza streets after rape

* Crowds cheering raped victims in public processions

* Families being forced to watch grenade executions of relatives

Yes, there were some videos shared by Hamas of them doing murder and other bad stuff. But that's not what you claimed.

> Hamas had to be stopped by force, and I support Israel's right to defend its own existence.

Very few people thought Israel had no right to respond to October 7th by force.

Responding with genocide? No. No they do not have the right to do that.

> If Hamas wishes to use human shields (as it has outright admitted it does), then the tragic collateral civilian deaths are the responsibility of Hamas.

A, Israel uses human shields too. They have done for years; long before October 7th. Not to mention their long history of mass rape, child abuse, torture, false flags, terrorism etc.

B, Even if human shields are used, the attacking force must still distinguish civilians from targets; avoid disproportionate harm; take precautions to minimize civilian deaths.

There's simply no way to claim that's what Israel has done and believe it without some form of lobotomy.

> And in Iran, the systematic rape and torture of young people and LGBT people. The massacre of 30,000+ peaceful protesters.

The 30,000 figure is widely disputed, and Israel have openly admitted to having had agents there stirring up that specific trouble.

And if you want to bring up systemic torture, you're going to have to explain why that's ok for the US and Israel - but not Iran. Myself, I'm consistently against torture.

> And the outright genocidal intent of its leadership ("Death to America, Death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews").

Calling it “genocidal intent” in a strict legal sense is debatable and probably overstated. However, killing tens of thousands of children and bombing entire cities into rubble; bombing 500 schools in Iran and basically every school and hospital in Gaza, etc - that's more than genocidal intent. It's genocide. So I'm very confused how you think Iran is somehow worse in this comparison.

> The Ayatollahs had to be stopped before they built nuclear weapons. There will be tragic collateral civilian deaths, but fewer in the long term than if the IRGC are allowed to continue roaming the streets unchecked.

A 40 year old claim, with absolutely no evidence. Let's try comparing that to Israel's nukes, and their 'Samson option'. Or, try comparing it to the only country ever to actually use nukes during war. Again, I just don't see how Iran comes off worse in this comparison without massive baseline racism and ignorance of history.

... There's a good chance that I'm wasting my time here, but hey - maybe some of this will stick with you. Try sourcing any of it on Ground News, if you like.

And even 50 year old computer games generally have better UX.

Huh; that seems like a way better etymology for the "tada!" flourish than any of the explanations in this rather heated discussion: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/33564/origin-of-...

I was gonna say, we already dragged Garry for writing like this a couple weeks ago [0].. But this is a new incident of him measuring value by lines of code. Carry on.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47418576

> The hyperbolic statements in your comment suggest your worldview comes from an online echo chamber.

No, nothing hyperbolic whatsoever. Everything I said is trivial to source.

If you believe otherwise then you might follow your own advice - this is all well documented stuff. You can even see the video of those premature babies that were left to rot by Israel, if you don't believe me.

No, I'm not saying that to shock you; it's an important documented fact. Like the prison rapists being celebrated on national Israeli TV, or the zip-tied teenagers run over by steamrollers, or the ambulances shot up and buried in a shallow grave, or Hind Rajab being used as bait for another ambulance, or any of the other thousands upon thousands of well documented atrocities which the US has helped to arm and enable.

> I suspect none of your favourite media sources mentioned the illegal cluster munitions that Iran used to destroy an Israeli kindergarten (among other civilian buildings) on Saturday

A kindergarten! Wow. That really is atrocious. Were there 100 schoolgirls in it, like the elementary school America blew up? Your source says no, but you seem really incensed by this property damage.

Is that worse though, in your view, than the 498 Iranian schools [0] targeted in the last months? Is it worse than destroying just about every school and hospital in Gaza?

> War is an ugly business

Being at war doesn't excuse war crimes - especially when the war begins because you don't like how well negotiations are going so you bomb a school killing 100 little girls, while killing the leader of a country with his grandchildren and torpedoing an unarmed ship.

> hopefully once you've examined the facts objectively you'll see that the Israeli government is more ethical than Hamas

To say this after the last three years requires something fundamental to be missing within you. I can not help you find it again. I wish I could; I truly do.

> you'll see that the American government (yes, even Orange Man Bad) is better than the Ayatollahs of Iran and their IRGC

Even if that were true, by whatever undefined metric you're defining as 'better', how does that give you the right to commit hundreds of war crimes and atrocities to change their government?

You might want to read up on recent US history btw - and how we're perceived right now [1]. There are many very good reasons why the world considers the US to be the greatest threat to global peace, stability and democracy [2], [3]; not just since "orange man" but since 2003 [4]. Iran never even come close.

0 - https://truthout.org/articles/us-israeli-attacks-have-damage...

1 - https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/14/america-allies-divi...

2 - https://truthout.org/articles/people-worldwide-name-us-as-a-...

3 - https://brilliantmaps.com/threat-to-peace/

4 - https://www.democracynow.org/2003/10/31/headlines/poll_israe...

Also, let us never forget that the Epstein class are extremely skilled, and experienced, in making money off of things going to shit.

> sub-optimally

Optimal for society? Optimal for the Epstein class? Or do you mean optimal for the owner, personally, in the very short term?

Because that's the choice people are making these days. It's not really "partisan political posturing" to divest from countries running pedo blackmail rings on the world, or arming genocide, or bombing hundreds of schools. Targeting journalists, then lying about them to try and justify it. Pulling the plug on incubators. Targeting entire families with shoddy AI. Bombing civilian power plants and ambulances and hospitals and so on and on.

There's nothing partisan or posturing about saying "fuck all that". That's just your duty as a human being, the basic bare minimum. That duty doesn't get discarded just because you run a company or have evil competitors trying to race you to the bottom.

When companies are complicit with committing heinous atrocities at scale, and screwing up the world economy for their own gain, I find very little 'merit' in that. Is 'meritocracy' a purely financial term in your view? Do 'respect for life' and 'trust' and other nebulous concepts (which don't immediately affect the balance sheet) have merit?

The enforcement gap is real. That doesn't mean IHL doesn't exist.

Legal norms and international courts still influence state behavior, slow and relatively toothless as they may be. That's why you haven't seen Netanyahu or Ben Gvir doing much travel lately, for example.

That's why Israel and the US work so, so hard to delegitimize and demonize the UN, the ICC and the ICJ - and here you are helping them do it. Please, stop doing that.

Yes, there are real problems with IHL. Throwing it out and declaring it meaningless doesn't solve any of those problems, and makes many of them worse.

> a) You'll have to back that number with a reference.

I did, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47552783

> Then demonstrate that they were targeted, not just hit.

If you want to believe that 498 schools were hit by accident and not by targeting then you are free to do so. Personally, I think that's a profoundly silly and genuinely harmful choice to make, and would urge you not just to reconsider, but to reflect on how you ever thought such a thing.

> But war is excused!

Well, no. There are long and lasting consequences for wars of the type America has been spending trillions of dollars on for decades. Millions of lives lost. Tens of millions displaced. Massive political and reputational costs. Incalculable opportunity cost.

> It's just incredible to me that people are totally unable to grasp that concept that war isn't some friendly board game, or guns at ten paces, all civilised, orderly, and confined entirely to willing participants. It's the deliberate infliction of death and destruction!

Do you actually think the people who drew up international war crimes legislation were unaware of this? ... Really? Like, they lived through WWII and then just forgot about all the horror while writing up the legislation to try and prevent it ever happening again?

> They pointed at a error, not a crime.

That is a categorical lie. You're lying now. People pointed you to detailed statements explaining why this is a war crime, and rather than address any of those points you insist that these 498 schools are all errors because we can't prove intent. You can't seriously expect people to believe that, so I have to wonder why you're saying it at all.

Maybe you believe this lie, somehow, but it's extremely disrespectful to bs like this. It disrespects the victims of these war crimes, the people who will be hurt by the normalization of these war crimes, and the people spending their lovely Saturday time to educate you.