Wyoming23

Wow, another New York Times article that's against West Coast technology companies.

At this point, I don't think the NY Times needs writers, an LLM can easily cover their mandate to disparage tech and anything that rivals the American Northeast as a center of political, cultural or economic power.

These posts are tiresome. They all boil down to "my view should be the middle".

You could just as well claim the Democrats are far left and the republicans center left.

> The main purpose of "problems", and especially of homework, was a show of social submission, designed to persuade the teachers to reveal the next secret.

Of all the weird misunderstandings kids have about the world, this might be the weirdest I've ever heard.

I'm kinda fascinated, do you recall at what age you believed this? What was the context you grew up in (country, culture, school). Do you recall where the seed of this idea got planted?

Oh come on, no there isn't.

Have you seen what life in Tokyo looks like for the average person today? The size of apartments, the crowds on subways, etc.

People's quality of life would be far better if the population density were lower.

I'd much rather have a world with a steady or shrinking number of people and a rising quality of life, than a world with an exponentially growing population and declining quality of life.

Your experience doesn't match mine for US. Either SF is unique (almost certainly true) or the specialists they're referencing are extremely in demand for specific conditions.

With my regular PPO health insurance from my employer, I've had no trouble getting appointments with various specialists over the years. Occasionally I call one place and get told they can't see me for 2 months, so I just call the second name on the list and get an appointment sooner.

Spanking a child and beating a child are two completely unrelated things.

It's my understanding that spanking isn't the optimal way to discipline children and still shouldn't be done, but conflating it with beating a child is ridiculous and offensive.

No one should be shocked that a gimmicky reality TV show that had 600lb contestants with lifelong eating disorders shed weight incredibly rapidly while living in a house for a month with fellow contestants didn't provide long term solutions to their underlying mental health and food addiction issues.

The biggest loser was the equivalent of turning drug rehab into a gameshow and putting it on TV.

It's maybe interesting in the context of addictions and disordered eating habits, but not really relevant for general weight loss, weight management or physical health for most people.

Dang, how does this title not qualify as flame bait?

I once read a comment from an expert in that field who said that it was essentially impossible to prevent contamination, and that they had to constantly test and then shut down and sanitize when they discovered a different species of algae in their system.

How do you mitigate that issue? (And good news if you have a solution, that same person said they figured whoever solved that problem would be the world's first trillionaire).

Doesn't the service provider (AT&T or whoever) have a copy of the messages they could subpoena?

It seems shocking to me that deleting the messages off the phones makes them inaccessible to prosecution, when presumably there are backups on multiple servers controlled by telecom companies and other government entities.

Which is why a million Americans died and tens of millions have long term neurological, lung or other organ damage from the disease.

You're overthinking this.

Yes, you could buy a second AC and do complex wiring and control trickery to hack the system... Or you could just not sign up for the voluntary system and pay an extra couple bucks a year.

Any effort to hack the system is going to be far more cost or hassle than just not signing up for the program, for people who are following financial incentives. If you want to hack the system for the fun of it, sure you could, but the utilities aren't really worried about that.

Frustrating to see NPR going to clickbait and such silly dramatic reporting.

I'll save you a click - a female representative proposed an update to the dress code, to bring the women's dress code more in line with the men's. The men's dress code wasn't updated because it was already more restrictive. That's it. That's the news.

Your example is kind of unintentionally hilarious, because "hard work works" is in fact an incredibly controversial stance, and one that has caused people to lose jobs, "get cancelled" or be called racist, unsympathetic, privileged and out of touch, tone deaf, etc.

Even here on HN, where the users are far more entrepreneurial, aspirational and self-improvement focused than the population average, people are still cautious to ascribe only a small portion of their success to hard work and to make the obligatory statements about luck, privilege, community and circumstances as the major factors.

Texas has been doing far worse things.

Allowing fracked gas power plants to operate without proper winterizing so they fail in the cold, unfairly shifting costs off of the fossil fuel operators who control the state government onto solar and gas, hamstringing residential solar.

This system also obliterates the middle class and penalizes saving money while rewarding irresponsible behavior.

It essentially makes the system be "tell us how much money you have, and that's what the price is for you".

If you spend 18 years saving money for your kid's college, or they work and save during high school, the university just takes all that money. If you spend it all instead, you'll get more "financial aid" to lower the price.

Which, if you're a socialist school administrator is great news. No one keeps any money, everyone leaves school equally poor and dependent on the state, regardless of their previous labor or financial responsibility.

You're confusing "teaching assistants" with teaching a class.

A typical setup would be to have a professor give 3 lectures a week, along with open office hours, and design the curriculum. Then to have an assistant or two who are graduate students (people who have a bachelor's degree or master's degree in the subject) who help grade homework, set up lab work, and answer student questions in a 1-hour recitation/discussion meeting.

My current employer has stock options and annual bonus for all employees. A previous employer did too.

There used to be fairly common stories of people who worked as receptionists or whatever becoming millionaires in IPOs because they'd received stock options so early in companies.

Building maintenance is often employed by someone other than the tenant of the building, but if they were employees of the company, I wouldn't be surprised if they were getting RSUs as part of their comp.

I don't get what the issue is here.

Option A- you task some employees with buying office furniture and equipment and then waste everyone's time by having some extra meetings and emails and bureaucracy where someone asks "is that a good price for 50 desks? Did you get multiple quotes?" and the employee says "yes" and then they approve the expense.

Option B- the same employees make the same decisions, but without the extra meetings and emails and paperwork.

Being more efficient, giving employees more autonomy and focusing on what actually matters is why startups displace incumbents. These are good things.

This reminds me of the early days of every new technology when the media predicted doom and gloom.

Every time an electric vehicle caught fire it was national news, and then someone in the comments would point out that they weren't catching fire any more than gas cars, but that wasn't newsworthy.

The early days of the Internet, the media constantly portrayed it as full of child porn and hackers.

Now the ultra-critical lens is on meat alternatives. But in 10 years that'll be the default when you order a Big Mac and nobody will think of it as any weirder than any of the other ingredients in packaged and prepared foods.

Vietnam isn't free by any measure of freedom. Even in the context of a college classroom students can't say anything that goes against the government.

Obviously. Why else would people on hacker news advocate for all the socialist economic policies that humanity just spent the entire 20th century proving don't work?

Sadly history repeats so we'll probably just have another "cultural revolution" and "great leap forward" in the 21st century.

Hilarious framing, kind of like banks pushing their failures onto unsuspecting victims by calling it "identify fraud" when they give money to a scammer.

Your friends aren't "leeching off your subscription", Netflix is leeching off of a a dysfunctional system of copyrights that makes you pay them to stream a video your friend would happily freely share with you.

It's not like the chemicals causing dropping sperm count are doing only that.

We have dropping testosterone levels, outrageous obesity levels, anxiety, depression, autism, other gender and sexuality abnormalities, cancer, auto immune diseases, cognitive problems, etc.

We figured out that we shouldn't put lead in paint & gasoline, that we shouldn't put asbestos in our houses, shouldn't handle mercury with our hands. But there are thousands of petrochemicals coming into contact with our bodies every day now, and surely some of them are endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, cause reproductive health issues, etc. Yes it's a crisis.

Every choice and action a human makes is on some spectrum of consent.

At one extreme is a literal "gun to their head" moment where it's obvious there was no real choice and correspondingly the person shouldn't be held responsible (eg, someone points a gun at you and says hand over your wallet. That doesn't mean you really "gave" your wallet to them).

At the other end of the spectrum is a person with a tremendous amount of power, freedom and choice- eg, a rich person living in a Western country, making a decision where they have lots of options and/or can opt out or decline an opportunity freely.

It's easier to forgive a person doing something unethical to survive than a person living in luxury doing something unethical to have slightly more luxuries.

Your guess is close to correct but with some critical differences regarding the power dynamics and incentives between Spotify and record labels.

The record labels pulled off the ultimate coup right when technology was making them irrelevant. Ethically, they should have negotiated for a larger revenue sharing with the artists, and then taken their percentage from that. But they realized they could make far more money by forcing Spotify to give them equity in exchange for screwing over the artists.

The end result is that the record labels simultaneously were negotiating supposedly on behalf of the creators against the streaming platforms, while simultaneously becoming owners of the streaming platforms. They agreed to terrible terms for the artists, in exchange for making themselves the beneficiaries of the crooked deal.

Of course the real problem is that dividends shouldn't be taxed in the first place.

The entire economy operates on a rule of no double taxation, except for dividends. It's income that's already taxed at the corporate level, then taxed a second time when that post-tax income is transferred to the shareholders.

No, what you're describing is non-discriminatory hiring. Removing bias and discrimination from hiring is non-controversial across the political spectrum.

Diversity initiatives are the opposite. It's explicitly not about who's best, it's about the unrelated goal of a workplace that is racially diverse.

It seems like we do know all the reasons though?

It's multiple factors, but they're all mostly easy to observe, measure and identify.

High-sugar, high-fat, packaged foods with preservatives, emulsifiers and artificial colors became cheap, abundant and normalized. These are essentially the perfect cocktail for obesity (by perfectly mixing calories, insulin response, gut microbiome changes, satiety, dopaminergic effects, etc).

Simultaneously fewer Americans are working physical jobs, the jobs that are physical have reduced physicality and society in general has shifted to more car-centric and sedentary leisure (watching TV instead of going fishing on Saturday).

Finally social changes. Women's liberation movement means more dual income households (and single adult households) which means less cooking from scratch and more fast food, packages food, etc. Also strong anti-bullying, body-positivity and self-esteem cultural norms prevent people from getting any peer feedback about their health/weight until it's a doctor telling them that they have diabetes and high blood pressure.

They're incredibly innovative in the intellectual property space. Their lawyers have successfully sued an incredibly diverse range of people using a wide range of unique and esoteric arguments.

Even when they're not successful in court, they're still generally successful in a business sense by forcing smaller companies into bankruptcy, takeover or into accepting licensing on terms favorable to Oracle.

They're doing lots of "cool" things, it's just all evil corporate legal things. They don't do anything "cool" in terms of developing technology.