1,786 karma · joined October 6, 2010
beatpanda at google mail.
just google my name, you'll find me
"WordPress has managed to keep chugging and even bought Tumblr off Verizon."
It's because Matt Mullenweg and co have held the line on open source and the open internet for more than a decade now, and we should all be grateful.
Everything cool I've gotten to do in my life I owe to learning to code via building WordPress websites. I hope in the next decade WordPress and companies like Automattic become the example to aspire to instead of people throwing more fuel on the never-ending VC trash fire.
But now, as you can already see proliferating in the comments to this piece, the new acceptable contrarian take on climate change is that of course its happening, but since life thrived on the planet during other climactic conditions there's nothing to worry about.
The message is the same as it's always been: trying to do anything in response is foolish, and we should all continue to just focus on making as much money as possible.
But the real issue with climate change is and has always been that it will socially and politically de-stabilize the planet, because quite a few people live in places that will become less livable in the near future, and those people will want to go somewhere else.
Those people will have a quite strong claim on land and resources in wealthy countries that emitted most of the pollution and have lots of mostly empty and more habitable land. This will cause global conflict on a scale beyond any that exists in living memory.
Yes, "life" will survive. Our societies in their current configurations will not, and decisions we make now will determine how messy or violent (or not) that transition will be.
Pedantic retorts about geological time should embarrass you in the face of the leaders of the tech industry evidently using their immense wealth to prepare for social collapse[1].
And although these people are clearly willing to spend money to prep for climate change, I still can't get a single one of the recruiters who cold-call or email me about HOT NEW SILICON VALLEY OPPORTUNITIES to find me a single credible company working on anything climate or energy adjacent. I can just hear their jaws slackening every time I bring it up.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
Please tell me which media source you consume that's telling you the other media sources are lying to you.
Staggering numbers of people are dying from opioid overdoses, many of them from opiates that doctors were incentivized to push onto their patients by drug companies, or that were illegally distributed from pharmacies who looked the other way when there were enough pills going out the door to kill the entire population of the town they were in. It's bad enough that someone might even finally be held criminally liable for it.
It isn't the media's fault that any of that happened, and it's largely because of media attention that anyone is being held accountable for it. Blaming the media for accurately reporting on the state of the world is always the last refuge of the person who's run out of real arguments.
The argument from people who would rather not engage with the state of the world for a long time has been that anyone who complains about the state of the world is just watching the news too much, because "the data" always show that the world is getting inexorably better, all the time. That was always a specious argument, and now that life expectancy in America has been declining for three years in a row, that argument should finally be laid to rest entirely. But here you're reviving it, by blaming the decrease in life expectancy itself on the media. It's very innovative! But it's just as wrong.
Not with that attitude
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/summary-for-policy-makers/
> C.1. In model pathways with no or limited overshoot of 1.5°C, global net anthropogenic CO2 emissions decline by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030 (40–60% interquartile range), reaching net zero around 2050 (2045–2055 interquartile range).
This report came out in late 2018. As of the publishing of this report, in order to keep global average temperature increase under 1.5°C, CO2 emissions must fall to 45% of 2010 levels in 12 years.
There has been a predictable amount of misstating what this report actually says by environmentalists with poor reading comprehension, and a similar amount of bad-faith readings and intentional obfuscation by climate science deniers, but in any case, this is the source of the "12 years" figure that's been going around.
Nobody is "predicting doomsday in 12 years", but you can set your clock by the outpouring of bad faith "I Told You So"s that will occur in October of 2030 when the world has not ended.
There were, before Facebook, hundreds of apps that did the same thing, and there still are.
The author is annoyed that people like him (according to him, the smart people, the good people, the people on whom the entire society and economy depends!) are treated with such disrespect. But how does this author treat the people around him?
He writes about the Bay Area like he's observing it from an alien spacecraft, as if he's entirely separate, outside of time and space. He evaluates the various objective factors of the Bay Area solely in terms of their benefit to him, and finds it wanting. And the author, with an unlimited ability to simply uproot himself, darkly insinuates that he, and all the other good, smart people like him, are going to do it, and soon.
But why should anyone care? By the author's own admission, he and his fellow good, smart people aren't meaningfully a part of the culture or the social fabric of the place. The author clearly has contempt for the people around him ("If you can afford Pacific Heights rents and rideshare everywhere you can pretend you don't live here!"). He clearly has no intention of contributing to the place. He clearly sees it as a pool of resources for extraction and nothing else.
It's clear that the author sees it this way because if this wasn't the case, he would be involved in some effort, any effort at all, to fix some of the problems that he's describing. Yes, California and the Bay Area have their problems. And our problems and our fortunes are the result of generations-long processes. Whatever comes next will be the outcome of people digging in, working to fix the problems, putting their shoulders to the wheel, and not just bailing out because moving somewhere else would maximize certain values in their personal spreadsheets.
A few people that I consider friends were doing that work before the current round of good times. They're people who've been in San Francisco back when it was considered frightening and dangerous, and the set of problems the city had were completely different than the current ones. They stuck it out. They made the city a much better place. As a result, we now have a new set of problems to fix. The cycle repeats itself.
Right now, we don't need any more people who are just looking to extract resources for themselves. We need people who are willing to engage, to become part of the social fabric of this place, and to figure out what the future looks like. So I want to enthusiastically encourage this author, everyone else who's written a functionally identical article in the last few years, and everyone on Hacker News who constantly complains about how much they hate San Francisco, to get out.
If you're among that group, and you don't leave, you're actually cheating yourself. There's likely some place in the world with which you could find the same profound, transcendent connection that I and many others have with San Francisco.
It's a tragic waste of a life to live in a place you hate, and that you have neither the commitment nor the desire to make any better. It doesn't benefit you, and it doesn't benefit the people around you whose home you hate so much. Everyone would be so much better off if you would simply show yourself the door, and find a place you can call home, for better or worse.
Most people don't have any real access to capital, and most people's labor is totally alienated from its actual value. For most people, advice to "Work Hard" amounts to "Sacrifice More So Your Boss Can Get Richer".
Also, as far as "working hard", Americans are an extreme outlier: https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product.... Maybe if Sam is hearing pushback against "Work Hard" as good advice, it's because Americans already work harder than other people in advanced economies for a lower quality of life (meaning less access to healthcare, less paid vacation, less self-reported happiness, etc).
Sam's a smart guy and knows all of this already, so it's baffling why he would include such a stupid throwaway line in this essay.
The Supreme Court refused to take up Khosla's most recent appeal, leaving in place the requirement that he leave the gate open to the access road to Martin's Beach.
It will be interesting to see what Khosla does now, given that he has exhausted his appeals in the court system.
* It's free * It's decentralized * It works
Is it the absolute best and most efficient method for treating addiction? Maybe not, but unless you have another method that works, which also does 1 and 2, it probably won't become as pervasive and long-lasting as AA.
How does this apply to programmers? Look at every dumb project that ever tried to "disrupt" email. That's a field littered with dead bodies. Email survives. Why? See above.