349 karma · joined April 20, 2022
I don't believe the rioters represent "the left" and I don't believe the capital stormers represent "the right". And most of all, I wish people didn't tend towards exaggerating one and excusing the other based on allegiance to a two-party system.
The good news is, nothing in your second paragraph is true, that's all QAnon-style made up stuff, no different than stories about pedophile rings hidden in pizza shops or the Earth being flat. The bad news is, you probably need to find some new websites to get reliable information from.
Intentionally so, because humans are animals and that's an imaginary distinction. Modern western society likes to pretend like we're these abstract minds that are attached to bodies. We're not, we're primates, only a tiny bit different than our ape cousins.
If you want to stick to humans, for about 99.9999% of the 315,000 years humans have been around, no mother was pumping breastmilk and sticking it in the refrigerator so that the father could do the 4am feeding.
Your comment is essentially putting a causal arrow backwards. Biology and nature would have us behaving in far more strongly differentiated gender roles. Contemporary western social norms and modern technology allow us to go against that nature. "Maternal instincts" are as real and fundamental as any other survival instinct humans or any other animal experience.
I enjoy gardening and cooking as hobbies, but I don't want to work a job as a landscaper or line chef. After 20+ years of coding, I absolutely hate it despite having started out loving it, but I recognize that my cushy job is less hours for more pay than I could get doing anything else.
In some mammals, fathers have literally no contact with their offspring while mothers care for them for years (eg, bears). In others, the mother and father both remain as part of a pack, but the mother does all of the direct care and the father is doing hunting or protection. In some, the father may have a minimal role in early life but then become more involved later as their offspring learn to hunt or fight.
The social construct of both parents having equal and identical roles in parenting at all stages of child development is very new and very culturally unique to Western, industrialized and affluent societies. Across all primates and all evidence of pre-industrial humans, maternal and paternal roles were very different.
"The system" is a hodgepodge of thousands of different laws, programs, agencies and organizations under a multitude of federal, state, county and city jurisdictions and operating under rules and budgets that were approved over numerous different sets of elected and appointed individuals over decades, each of which had to strike compromises and try to work within the existing system.
If you don't do enough to prevent fraud, you get a lot of fraud (see recent issues with covid payroll protection and other related measures, or homeowners insurance issues in Florida after hurricanes). If you do too much to prevent fraud, you get legitimate cases not getting the support they need.
No matter what the system is, you're going to have some amount of both "false positive" and "false negative" outcomes from it.
Because essentially any regular "office job" or "desk job" would work.
If universities have a massive, bloated and overly expensive legion of administrators, does it matter if the person pointing that out is doing so because they want to reduce the burden on students who are forced to take out massive loans or to reduce the burden on the taxpayers who ultimately pay those loans when the government "forgives" them?
I quit eating meat a few years ago for ethical reasons but I still like to have a burger or brat or have a meat-like product in a pasta sauce or whatnot, and Beyond meat fills that role well.
The issue of land being inaccessible by virtue of being surrounded by private land without roads is solved by the unrelated, separate legal notion of an "easement" to allow access. Easements are used regardless of if the landlocked plot of land is publicly or privately owned.
I agree with you in the general notion of "It's bad that this public land is inaccessible and that should be fixed". But just clarifying on the terms.
To anyone living in a rural area or working in agriculture, conservation, timber/lumber, mining, ranching, hunting, etc, the idea of a finding a random stranger walking across their property would be as alarming as finding that stranger in their living room. The tourists may unintentionally cause damage, disrupt operations or create an unsafe condition even if they were well-meaning. And of course, many people will not be the ideal "leave no trace" expert and many will cause problems- they'll leave litter, they'll gather sticks for firewood, they'll clear areas for campsites, they'll walk on wet grass, they'll leave human waste, they'll leave fire rings with charred remains, they'll pick flowers or fruit, they'll take fossils, they'll carve their names in trees and paint on rocks, etc.
Ethically, if we're going to start taking away people's property rights, I'd rather we force vacant urban housing to be made available to rent before we start forcing farmers to clean up rogue campsites on their fallow fields.
Even with a large staff of park rangers and a budget for trail maintenance, trash bins, toilet facilities and informational signs about "leave no trace" ethics, it's still hard to minimize the damage tourists do in parks. And even within parks, we don't let people freely roam, we ask them to stay to trails to prevent erosion and we shut down areas seasonally to protect critical nesting, feeding or migration paths. To ask private citizens to deal with such damage to their property is unfair and unreasonable.
Further, the average city dweller has no ability to assess what land is safe for them to hike on in America. Again, for parks we have dedicated staff to put up signs and set clear rules about closures and access, but agricultural lands are far more complex. What looks like "unused" land may be grazing for cattle, flowers for bees or habit for wildlife (whether for conservation or hunting). It may have been recently sprayed with chemicals which are harmful if humans come into contact with them or it may have recently been planted and footsteps will trample early crops.
"Freedom to roam" is like suggesting that the solution to homelessness is to just let homeless people choose to sleep on anyone's couch who wasn't using it. The millions of acres of managed public lands in the US, which can have appropriate usage policies depending on environmental impact, historical significance, number of visitors, etc and which can be properly managed for the long-term balance of many diverse stakeholders needs is a far better system.
Surely you can see the flaw in this?
They're exploiting their near-monopoly to expand their ownership and control of user actions and make more money. They know most of their users won't notice, and many won't care.
It's absolutely bonkers how much Apple gets away with today, when Microsoft got torn apart for abusing their monopoly 20 years ago for things that weren't even 1% as abusive as what Apple is doing here. Microsoft got attacked for bundling an internet browser with their OS. Can you imagine the outrage if Windows started swapping Google URLs for Bing ones or iTunes links for Microsoft-owned properties?
European fast food workers, garbage collectors and store clerks are mostly living more comfortably than their American counterparts. American engineers, doctors and other professionals are mostly living more comfortably than their European counterparts.
It'd only be a tiny percent of people who found themselves underwater, but with so little equity they didn't care to lose it, and who also didn't care about tanking their credit score for the next decade.
From HN guidelines: Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
ADA requirements are incredibly complex, at times very specific and at times very unclear and open to interpretation. The truth is that almost every building could be found to be in violation, no matter how hard the builders tried to make it ADA compliant.
In practice, this rarely matters. 99% of people with disabilities are just trying to get around, not looking for an opportunity to sue. But, the risk is still there, all it takes is one litigious individual to make your life a lot worse.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where getting even the most basic policy changes to protect the environment is a herculean effort, so people rationally focus much of their attention on the largest or most urgent things.
If you had a friend who was playing with Uranium, smoking cigarettes and eating food with artificial colors, it'd be fair to say they should stop doing all of those things to avoid getting cancer. But it'd also be fair to focus mostly on the Uranium.
A short list of the major things that I think set Apple-quality apart: Zero effort towards backward-compatibility or longevity, just force users to buy new hardware constantly. Actively hostile towards hardware interoperability, just force users to buy adapters. Actively hostile towards independently developed software and interoperability, just steal ideas to incorporate into an apple-owned product or use marketing to convince your users they're superior for being locked into your platform. Don't bother to make software that works for diverse users, just use marketing to convince users that flexibility and functionality are inferior to whatever the Cupertino designers decree is the one right way to do things
Apple isn't a technology company, they're a fashion company. They can sell an iPhone for huge premiums for the same reason that Chanel can sell a purse for $10,000. It's not a product-quality question, it's a brand-quality question.
This question is silly. The Pixel or any top-end Samsung is equivalent or better than the iPhone in hardware. The Android and iOS user interfaces are similar enough that it's mostly personal preference and familiarity.
Having kids does not solve substance abuse issues, mental health issues, relationship issues or any similar problems. People may believe that having kids will fix whatever problem they're facing, but instead find that it just adds tremendous amounts of stress, burden and additional hardship on them.
The point was that it's better to have a student struggle and make adjustments earlier rather than later in their education. Regardless if that adjustment is "spend more time studying" or "change from STEM to something easier", it's better for it to happen in a students first year than fourth year in college.
The system seemed to work well to me. Lots of smart kids who didn't have to work very hard in high school learned early that they were going to have to work harder in college. Other kids realized they were better changing majors. Everyone who was still in the program their junior year had the confidence that they could graduate.
If I were a fact-checker, I guess I'd rate this as "mostly false". He's not "bankrolled by Koch Industries", but he runs a non-profit which publicly discloses donors and one of the Koch brothers donated some money to it.
But it did lead me down an interesting far-left rabbit hole, where the worldview is that a guy saying "respect people doing blue collar jobs" and encouraging people to keep working to improve their lives is treated as a nefarious enemy, so that was fun. A good reminder that QAnon doesn't have a monopoly an eyeroll-inducing political views.
For instance, the Texas Land Association gives guidance of 50-75 acres per cow for natural wooded pastures. If you develop a "managed pasture" (ie, you're driving tractors over it to spray fertilizer, have irrigation, etc) you could get that down to 2-6 acres per cow. Source: https://landassociation.org/how-many-cows-per-acre-in-texas-...
I never bought any "veggie burger" products for at home, but would occasionally order one in a restaurant when it was the best option and thought they were always just sort of tolerable.
Beyond meat has been such a game-changer for me. I probably eat about 3-5 servings of a Beyond meat product per week now. Anecdotally, the only people I've seen who had a strongly negative reaction seemed to be overcooking them significantly.
I know much of America is incredibly excited to see these fail, but I'm a huge fan of Beyond Meat. I don't really care what the stock price is or how many other people are buying them, my freezer is always going to have a few Beyond burgers and sausages, they've become a staple for easy to cook meals for me.
Sometimes I wonder how much faster we could end the gender gap if instead of giving a megaphone to everyone who had a bad experience at some point, we instead told girls in middle school and high school the uncomfortable good news that they'll probably never have discrimination impact them in any significant way and that literally every single school, scholarship, corporation, conference and governmental organization is trying to recruit more women, and that their resume will always go immediately to the top of the pile, they'll win every "tie" against a male candidate and any deficiencies in their resume/CV can be made up for by diversity goals.
If you want more women in tech, maybe step 1 is telling pre-college girls "you'll have a good life if you pursue a career in tech" instead of constantly indoctrinating them with the doom and gloom?
It seems like we could simultaneously fight against sexism if it happens around us, without discouraging the next generation by making the problem seem more likely to impact them than it really is.