aerosmile

I don't reject anything - there's no question that the median citizen lives a more comfortable life in Scandinavian countries than in the US. But there's a nuance to human nature that might be difficult to admit, and that's that people are inherently ambitious, to the point that both things can be true at the same time:

1) The median Scandinavian citizen is living a more comfortable life than the median US citizen

2) As a Scandinavian citizen, you're more likely to want to live in the US than as a US citizen to want to move to a Scandinavian country.

If you found this exchange weird, I hope you didn't find me disrespectful or anything of that sort, but more like challenging some long-firm beliefs that have been repeated so many times that it's difficult to hear any other point of view. And if you still don't agree with me, that's totally fine - I might very well be wrong. The whole point of being on HN is to hear POVs that are contrarian and hopefully thoughtful.

> 400 years ago

If you read the children comments, you will see a more nuanced take on those stats.

> Continue to think the US is a dreamland while the median Dane have a much higher quality of life.

I don't doubt that; the US is not optimized for the median citizen. But neither is Hacker News - I suppose a median community would be some kind of an offline newspaper with readers' comments. If that excites you, more power to you.

> The population of the US (328 million) is roughly 55 times that of Denmark (5.8 million).

Your logic is reversed. Assuming that the US and Denmark have equally favorable living conditions, and the US population is 55 times larger, there would be a 55 times higher chance of a US citizen deciding to jump the fence than the other way around. The fact that this is not happening, shows that the US is perceived as a more desirable place to live.

Agree on the sources but not on the position. Perhaps we should limit the immigration stats to the last 50 years or something, but no amount of hair splitting will reverse the overall point - which is that far more Danes immigrate to the US than vice versa, despite the fact that there are far more Americans than Danes.

Btw, nothing against the Danes. There's no country in this world where the same is not true. You hear about the Swiss tax laws, or the German unions, or the Italian lifestyle, or the Swedish health care. And yet, all those people are playing the Green Card lottery (just like I did and everyone else I grew up with).

> I’m Danish and our laws regarding advertising may seem a little totalitarian to Americans

Apparently not just Americans... There are around 10k Americans living in Denmark [1], and around 1.3M Danes living in the US [2]. While I am sure that everyone you talk to in Denmark will tell you they love it there, that's due to the survival bias. The immigration streams tell the true story, which is that the Danes are voting with their feet and overcoming incredible financial and cultural challenges to move their families to the US.

With that in mind, no, I am not really keen on learning about all the wonderful hurdles your government has come up with to destroy every last bit of a chance that an entrepreneur has to advertise their business. Surely, the intentions were all good, but you know what they say about the path to hell...

[1] https://www.thelocal.dk/20190402/where-do-denmark-based-amer... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Americans

> I've never once seen a Suggested link that wasn't to some kind of obvious click farm. Never once.

Great. I have had nothing but the opposite experience. What now? If I can deconstruct your argument that easily, it must not be a very strong argument to start with.

A lot of people here are justifying why from an employee's perspective it makes sense for a company to fire their founder CEO. But it's worth noting that a material percentage of HN readers are also current or future founders, and from their perspective it's 100% valuable to know the track record of VCs. As you build your company and go through multiple rounds of funding, you are going to occasionally have to make a choice between two or more VCs. While I have been lucky to have never been on the receiving end of VC shenanigans, I know enough people who can't say the same thing. It usually starts very innocently, like: "hey, look at this COO candidate, wouldn't they be amazing to help you build this company?" Except that the COO has a long relationship with the VC, and you can pretty much assume that every little thing that happens at the company will be immediately telegraphed. Another VC favorite is to be "helpful" in building the company and meet a bunch of your staff (or, worse, take them out for coffee). Again, thanks but no thanks. One more: 360 reviews that are shared with the board (why don't we get the board members' 360s from their previous CEOs?). And then the most damaging and highly unethical one: a CEO coach with loose lips (a very close VC friend has told me that he's successfully using one that works with many top companies - no, I won't share any details). In all these instances, I fully expect the employees to say - why not? But if you've ever been in the hot seat, you'll understand what you're up against, and if you're smart you'll say no to all of these (assuming you have the ability to choose, which often times you will not).

I've been wondering what stops politicians from gaming the democratic system by introducing legislation that has short-term benefits for the electorate and long-term negative consequences for the country as a whole. I know that I wouldn't vote for someone like that, but I can't think of many people around me who wouldn't.

I suppose many would think of it this way: "what's good for the long-term future of the country is good for my kids, but that's not going to help them much if I can't pay the next month's rent, or if I have to work so much that I never get to see them and raise them properly. So why not vote for someone who will help me get more money and spend more time with my kids now?"

I mean, it's absolutely mind-blowing that there isn't an entire line around the corner of politicians pushing for higher minimum wage, free education, free healthcare, basic income, etc. There are obviously some voices supporting all those measures, but I am surprised those individuals are not more popular. I suppose this is a very basic political science question, but I don't have any background in this field and today's topic once again made me wonder what's stopping us from adopting that and many other similar measures. Surely, those who stand to benefit something from it in the short-term outnumber the people who are going to be negatively impacted?

That's good and bad. On the one hand, it riles people up, on the other hand, it helped elevate the importance of developing and approving vaccines faster than ever before. I do share your sentiment though that it's troubling that the media's business plan is only partially aligned with what's good for the society.

Related thought: we are super mad at Facebook for isolating us into similar belief bubbles. Where's the outrage at CNN and Foxnews? Yes, you hardly ever hear anything positive about them, but there's no threat of regulation, their CEOs didn't have congress hearings, etc.

That's unfair. Imagine that we suddenly find out that Kennedy was not assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, but that one of the alternative explanations was accurate - you could still write down those same three bullet points, and by doing so, you would unjustly deflect from the outrage of getting it wrong the first time around. Sometimes you just have to take things on the chin, hold people accountable, and learn from it.

> No jobs are or will be lost, and very little utility is lost, except being able to sign up for 1-2 weeks.

Contrast that with the quote from the article:

"Shares in Tencent plunged 9.0% in Hong Kong on Tuesday amid widespread market jitters over Chinese regulatory crackdowns on high-growth sectors, including online platforms and, most recently, private tutoring. Hong Kong's benchmark Hang Seng Index (.HSI) fell 4.2%."

The stock price may not correlate with short-term budgets, but it absolutely has an impact on long-term budgets. So what the investors will be asking themselves now is: "Is this disruption just a short blip on the radar, or did we just witness a long-term change of the Big Tech landscape in China?" Getting on the shit list of the Chinese government sounds like a long-term problem to me.

Does it make sense to have strong principles and not be guided by financial incentives alone? Sure. But would it make more sense to have a solid regulatory framework to start with, as opposed to being loosey goosey for a very long time and then course correcting in a way that evaporates billions in value overnight from domestic and foreign investors?

Countries and companies have a lot in common. Consider this analogy: would you want to join a company that has an excellent business model and is poised for strong growth, but the CEO is a nut case and has done several mass layoffs that have completely blindsided internal and external people?

I, for one, am happy that China is tripping over itself and will give us a bit more room to breathe and figure out our own mess, so that when the inevitable takeover of Taiwan and all the other shit storms happen in the future, we'll be at least a tiny bit more prepared.

This would be a personal opinion so take it for what it's worth. I doubt that on a relative basis we have as many people left today who are as convinced in the concept of heaven as compared to a thousand years ago. Just think of all the instances where you would give someone a choice to denounce their religion or get burnt alive, and people chose the latter. Comparing that on a relative basis, I think fewer of those choices would be made today.

As to why, a thousand years ago you didn't really have a strong counterthesis to the Intelligent Design thesis. As the Evolutionary principles became better understood and more accepted, religions have had to shift their position a bit (initially the Earth was the center of the universe, etc).

Long story short, even if people do believe in heaven, they wouldn't mind having a small hedge, just in case.

That can be easily answered - just look at the decline of Christianity (and other global religions) in the Western World [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Christianity_in_the...

It's always good advice to reread things later. But please know that I would never take anything on the internet personally. I am grateful for the insight that came out of that conversation, and see it as one of the benefits of actively participating on HN.

Winston Marshall had to leave Mumford and Sons to be able to stand up for himself. For anyone willing to throw away a life's worth of investment into their career in order to speak their mind, that's a good piece of advice. For everyone else, apologize.

Or better yet, avoid getting into hot water. I have found HN to be a great barometer for what's "acceptable" and what isn't. Recently, I learned a valuable lesson - I shared an accurate statement about FB's targeting precision, which I am pretty sure nobody would have objected to. But as soon as I tied it to their financial results, it instantly offended one person and others felt they had to jump in as well.

Lesson learned: the fact that Facebook is printing money is such a thorn in the eye for many people that the minute it's brought up in an unrelated context, it will 1) derail the conversation, 2) get people to disagree with what would have otherwise been a straight forward argument, and 3) get people to vilify you.

So now that we know about this thorn, we can not just avoid it in future conversations, but we can also leverage it to our benefit. For instance, all you have to say is: "Man, I wish we could somehow get Facebook banned. Here's how effective their targeting is..." - and voila, everyone is agreeing with you!

Long story short - don't piss against the wind.

You're just confused about how marketing works. The fact that you're dissociating tracking sophistication from performance tells me all I need to know. To learn more, dig a bit into the iOS14 impact on the Facebook performance results.

I guess we have to define effective. Is it effective from the consumer point of view? That might be a long discussion, and we might assume that a world without advertising might be the most effective way to live your life, etc. But is it effective from the advertisers' point of view? Unless you want to call 5+ million marketing teams around the world total idiots, you have to assume that they are meeting or exceeding their ROAS targets and therefore pouring a lot of money into Facebook.

> It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.

Facebook doesn't sell ads. Marketers choose to sign up and spend money, because their jobs depend on being able to achieve ROAS targets. Contrary to popular belief, the world of marketing is very quantified and apart from experimental budgets, most of the money is spent on channels that are proven to work.

But without getting any deeper into all of this, I think I found my answer - it appears that at least a subsegment of people on HN believe that over 100BN of ad dollars (25% of overall digital ad market) is spent on Facebook in an unprofitable way, and that 5 million marketing teams get away with it, year after year. Hence, it's possible for Facebook to achieve great financial results without their ad platform being effective.

Everyone's first inclination is to raise the minimum wage (which I am not against). But let's not dismiss the fact that we could also work on lowering the cost of rents.

I used to think that rents are simply a function of supply and demand, but recently I realized that there's also a floor for rental prices regardless of the demand. That floor is a function of the cost of buying a house, property tax, and the opportunity cost (eg: stock market will give me an ROI of X, so real estate has to be within that range or I'll just move my assets accordingly).

I am only familiar with the SF market so the rest of the country might be totally different, but having looked into buying a house there I can totally understand why the floor for rental prices is as high as it is. The property tax is 1.2%, and good luck with buying something under a million dollars where you can expect to attract people with steady income. Last but not least, if we're really going to compare this investment with the stock market, then I shouldn't be expected to worry about water leaks and clogged toilets, so we should also include the cost of a property manager. In short, no thank you.

Raising the minimum wage would lead to higher prices, lower sales volume and lower sales tax. Is it possible to take that same budget and instead make more land available for development, lower the property tax, and make other moves to make home ownership more attractive? That should also lower the cost of rents.

Would you mind to elaborate? I am genuinely wondering if you're a troll or if I am mistaken in my argument. To summarize, I responded to the claim below that Facebook's ad platform is ineffective:

> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.

I pointed out that Facebook wouldn't be profitable if the ad platform is ineffective, and you called that argument fallacious. I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.

Call it what you want, the outcome is the same. You want to say [A], but before you say it, you have to start with [B] just not to get the conversation derailed by call-it-what-you-wants. And it turns out, the call-it-what-you-wants are still going to do their thing, pretending this is Reddit.

> That doesn’t work because we’re assuming that most marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.

Those are someone else's words, not mine. I never argued that winning on Facebook is "easy" (and for the record, neither is it on Google). It's not easy, it's just doable. And for those who have the skills and resources to do it, it's massively profitable. I would even argue that if you're letting an agency run your Google or Facebook account, you're lacking the resources to do it right. What you need is top-level talent competing against your nearest competitors, and winning battles inch by inch. An agency will never give you the talent you need to go up against a company that just raised $100m and is running their performance marketing in-house (and if you don't have such a competitor, then you're either smarter than anyone else in the world, or simply not pursuing a VC-investable market).

So no, it's not easy at all. But it's doable and totally worth it.

I went out of my way not to give Facebook any moral high ground, and yet you still managed to get offended.

Alternative conclusion: as with all things in a capitalist society, there is a small minority of people that is killing it, and they are not making it easy for everyone else to discover their playbooks.

> Advertising "in the bubble", as opposed to "in the world"

Is this an argument for the open web, or is this an argument for Google being more popular than Facebook? If the former, I am with you. If the latter, the gap is not as big as you might think - 4 billion worldwide users of Google Search vs 2.85 for Facebook [1]. Slight advantage to Google, but how many US advertisers really care about international buyers? When it comes to advertising, you want people with money burning holes in their pockets. Facebook's financial results show that they plenty of access to this demographic.

> The general idea of targeted advertising misses the concepts of state of mind and focus of interest entirely. There's a (significant) difference in delivering a message in context and out of context.

You're slightly lagging with this argument. This exact reason was why Google was so dismissive of paid social back in the formative years of Facebook ("who gives a shit about what college students talk about on social networks?"). And then the oh shit moment happened in 2011. Eric Schmidt had to step down and Larry Page tied bonus payouts to the success of Google Plus. You have to give Larry some credit here - while a bit slower than Zuck, he did see the writing on the wall before the rest of the world did. If you tried advertising on both platform in 2011, Google would just crush you with their results. By 2016, Facebook was already competitive with their interest and lookalike targeting for a large group of advertisers (and even enabled Trump to win the presidency), and by 2018 the game had advanced to the new concept of "creative targeting" which is basically entirely driven by the algorithm and takes minimal targeting input from advertisers. At that point, paid social became so good that it got creepy and turned the public sentiment to negative and incentivized Apple to jump on the band wagon with iOS 14.

So I wouldn't agree with your argument that Facebook has a fundamental problem with recognizing intent. If anything, they are too good at it for their own sake.

[1] https://review42.com/resources/google-statistics-and-facts/

You're clearly under the impression that all that Facebook does is get you good click-through rates and low conversion rates. Similarly, you're under the impression that Google's conversion rates are through the roof. Did you ever stop to ask yourself if your world view might be limited to a small sample size (eg: your own experiences)? I know plenty of businesses where the conversion rates are exactly the opposite of what you described. It turns out, the right marketing platform is related to the product you're selling. For example, if you want to buy a vacuum, Google will do a great job in connecting you with the right advertiser. But what if you just started a new hobby and don't yet know what it is that you need in that hobby? Eg, you started racing, but have no idea that upgrading your suspension will get you more performance than upgrading your exhaust? The advertiser selling suspension components will use Facebook to share this information with you (and Facebook will do a much better job than Google of identifying the person who needs that component but doesn't know it yet), and they will also advertise on Google as well, but Google will only be relevant once the buyer starts researching suspension solutions. Kind of nice to be the first one to pitch a suspension solution to a willing buyer, don't you think?

> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.

This is very common on HN these days - stating something with a lot of confidence that turns out to be some self-constructed mental model that has nothing to do with reality. Then, add the obligatory "all related studies are showing it" and you have met the publishing standards.

Legally or illegally, morally or immorally, for better or worse, Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements. You want more proof? Look at all the companies that went public on the back of Facebook's ad targeting engine. Again, perhaps it shouldn't exist in the first place, but trust me, it works.

Total nonsense. China is on the path of world domination, and they very much care about global alliances (as is clear from their global investments and collaborations, which were utterly lacking in Sadam's Iraq). Comparing China to a guy who was found hiding in a tunnel is highly misleading. China of 2021 is as sophisticated in diplomacy as anyone, and they only fall back to the 1970 version of themselves when it suits their interests - which is a brilliant strategy. They are very carefully playing their chess game when it comes to getting Taiwan back, but when it comes to Covid-19, suddenly we encounter a different face of the same regime.

It would be the concept of "tradition," which means very different things in the US and Europe.

First and foremost, there's the pure frequency in which that term is used. Good luck spending a day in Europe and not being exposed to one tradition or another. It's kind of cute in a superficial way (the way that people dress up for balls in Vienna), and very counter-progressive in others (the way that doctors are more respected than programmers).

I would also wage to say that the pure interpretation of the term is a bit different. In the US, using the term "traditionally" in a sentence could have a positive connotation (eg: "traditionally, we celebrate new launches with some drinks") or a negative connotation ("those traditional companies are usually lacking in technology"). In contrast, invoking the term "tradition" in a sentence in, let's say Germany, would be to describe a near-religious ritual that cannot and must not be changed or even questioned (eg: "for Oktoberfest, people dress in traditional outfits that include lederhosen and dirndls.") I struggle to think of a frequent context in Germany in which the term traditional would have a negative connotation.

All this is to say that tradition is a wonderful thing if your circumstances lead you to invoke as little change as possible. But for those seeking social mobility and other types of change in their lives, I would argue that traditions can be very negative.

The minute the PRC government destroyed the evidence, they lost the presumption of innocence. Let's also remember - we're dealing with very smart people who very well knew the price they were paying by not cooperating with the international community, and yet that path seemed more attractive than just "coming clean."

I wonder what the judicial system would have to say if a murder was committed in my house, and there was evidence that I destroyed the evidence. Also, I don't have an alibi, and have multiple prior felonies. Would that be enough to put me in jail again?