Hacker News Reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076

"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."

baursakon Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter

The rich also kept buying mortgage backed securities all the way until they suddenly wanted to sell them all.

baursakon Ghost Villages for Sale in Spain

Rural areas have a much larger ecological footprint than urban areas, per capita. There's no way around that.

baursakon Can the world quench China's bottomless thirst for milk?

Yet another Western hypocritical "oh no, Chinese want to consume almost as much as we do, think of the consequences!".

baursakon WeWork’s Annual Loss Doubles to Nearly $2B Amid Rapid Expansion

I don't think they own most of their locations. They're just leasing long-term and subleasing short-term.

baursakon A Beginner’s Guide to MMT

MMT is both a description of the current system, a system that is already in place, and a set of policy proposals. So "believing" in MMT may simply mean understanding clearly the process already happening.

baursakon My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror (2018)

> It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force.

It could also be taking on a rival powerful establishment interests, like in Democrats vs Republican type bickering.

Chomsky in his famous Andrew Marr interview addressed Marr's example of Watergate scandal as one part of the establishment defending itself against another part of the establishment, thus allowing the story to be broken. He compared Watergate, which everybody knows about, to a much bigger scandal of the same time, COINTELPRO, which relatively few people have even heard about.

The entire interview is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow

baursakon Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers

How many times in your job did you have to implement reversing a string without calling a library?

baursakon Pictures from the Eastern Bloc in the 80s

Capitalism developed within the past 400 years or so. Markets existed for millenia. I don't want to sound rude, but these are just basic facts.

baursakon Pictures from the Eastern Bloc in the 80s

Markets existed long before capitalism. So saying "capitalism is just a market" is just plainly incorrect.

baursakon The Bootleg Video Vans of the Soviet Union

There was a period after the collapse of the USSR when there were a lot of private TV channels being set up, which would just show latest Hollywood bootlegs. Some movies which were still in theaters in the US would be shown on TV. That, and random soft porn after children's bed time.

baursakon The Devil's Hair Dryer: Hell is other people, with leaf blowers (2016)

Here is a pretty interesting philosophical take on the hated leaf blower: http://julesboykoff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Boykoff_L...

baursakon How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

> Israel is one of the least religious countries on earth

Not according to this Gallup poll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...

baursakon How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

I'd consider 51% to be a significant chunk of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun...

baursakon How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

Did he account for a religious population which thinks that suicide is a major sin?

baursakon How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart

> Suburbs are structurally lonely

I think it's a factor, but not a major one. Look at Tokyo, for example, which is probably very close to an ideal urban living arrangement in terms of density/comfort. Yet Japan also has a huge problem with "loneliness epidemic", from hikikomori to kodokushi.

I think the biggest factor is what grandpa Marx identified hundred and fifty years ago: human alienation is an intrinsic feature of capitalism itself.

There's tons of literature on this, e.g. see links below, but many people seem to be afraid to even read the arguments, let alone engage.

https://socialistworker.org/2003-2/467/467_09_Alienation.php

https://isreview.org/issue/74/capitalism-and-alienation

baursakon Gabor Maté on Addiction to Ideology and Social Media [video]

His son Aaron Mate is pretty good as well.

baursakon Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

That is nowhere near Iran's posture or policy.

baursakon Reasons to Fear Another ‘Great War’

> Since they are not doing so

What?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...

baursakon In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)

That sounds kinda strange, given the in the last 15 years there was plenty of reform going on, like the whole Perestroika thing.

baursakon In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)

I’m aware that there were money and shopping in the USSR, thanks. I’m also aware that there was no real estate market in the USSR, daycare and education of all levels was free, vacations weren’t paid for, etc. I’m assuming none of those are in GDP calculations? That was my question.

baursakon In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)

> Innovation works best in competitive capitalistic environments

Well, a huge chunk of innovation in capitalist countries happen on university campuses or within government funded organizations like DARPA or NASA, or within communist-like arrangements like Open Source (Linux, Apache, etc). Which are then appropriated by private interests to be monetized.

baursakon In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)

> I investigated case with planning in USSR and found that all planing was done by single woman.

That's interesting. Are you saying that the functionality of entire Gosplan organization from the 1920s all the way to the end was done by one woman? What was her name?

baursakon In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)

I think there were several different periods where things were not bad, and when things were not that great, like the 60s, 70s, or 80s, and different people who lived in the USSR refer to different periods, so you get people claiming very different things.

These data, at least, don't support the claims that Soviets were always starving: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

baursakon In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)

> A huge jump? Versus the tsar regime, probably - it was a catastrophe in itself. But compared to the Western world, GDP growth was miserable and clearly behind all "modern" countries in comparison.

I'm curious, how useful is a GDP measurement in a "communist" country where there are no monetary transactions to obtain the most important human needs -- housing, education, daycare, leisure, vacations, etc?

baursakon In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You (2012)

For those more interested in this, there's a follow-up to comments, which results in this (still on-going?) exchange:

- The original article (linked by OP): http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...

- A comment made by Paul Cockshott (a Marxist economist and computer scientist, most known for "Towards New Socialism" book): http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...

- Shalizi's response to Cockshott, among his other responses to other comments: http://bactra.org/weblog/919.html

- Cockshott's response to above: https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/plan-balancin...

baursakon Amazon raises minimum wage to $15 for all US employees

It's not just about signed laws. It's about pressure from many angles. I doubt Bezos liked Bernie's bill that was literally called Stop BEZOS. I doubt Bezos enjoys continuous media coverage saying Amazon workers need food stamps to survive. I doubt Bezos wants to be shamed in public by activists while eating out or something. All these add up.

baursakon How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels

There's a much older and a much more substantive article about this as well: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/magazine/a-patel-motel-ca...

baursakon Loneliness is pervasive and rising, particularly among the young

Atomization and social alienation has long been a charge against capitalism as a system. It's interesting that this trend is similar in both the US and Japan, so can't really be explained by something like American car-centric infrastructure.

A tangentially related article that this brings to mind: http://julesboykoff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Boykoff_L...

baursakon US bosses now earn 312 times the average worker's wage

The BLS statistic isn't filtering by enterprise size. Does it include self-employed guys who registered a company and named themselves CEO?