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e5india

122 karma · joined September 1, 2009

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e5india··on Apple has threatened to ban Parler from the App Store
> They can't possibly all be violent bigots.

And yet Parlor is being de-platformed specifically because it refuses to police the portion of the conservative conversation that is so. It's not because they believe in smaller government or lower taxes.

Conservatism plays this game where it uses this violent rhetoric casually and then acts all surprised when its own members act on that rhetoric. They tell each other that anyone who disagrees with them is an anti-american who want to make this a communist/socialist/fascist state. That voter fraud is rampant and that they will need to overthrow the government with violence. They do this is, in much more graphic detail than I'm using here.

Then, when something violent occurs, we're all just supposed to sit here and pretend like it's just some happenstance and we shouldn't judge them by their own inaction in stamping out the rhetoric from their midst.

e5india··on Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump
No they stormed the capitol because they refused to accept the outcome of an election after their candidate availed himself of every legal avenue of challenge. Fuck those people. The rhetoric that drove them was Trump himself and his stooges in conservative media.
e5india··on Vue vs React: Best Choice for Startups
Re-read what they wrote.
e5india··on Ask HN: Why doesn't Starbucks beat local coffee shops?
Part of the challenge is that most people won't like coffee's actual taste. Good coffee is best drank black. Once you start adding milk and sweetener the coffee taste itself goes to the background.

People do a similar thing with tea. In the US tea is mostly drank iced with a crap load of sugar.

So if you're trying to sell as much coffee as possible, you'll be serving it mostly with cream and tons of sweetener anyways so its pointless to worry so much about quality coffee. With volume you also have to worry about getting people in an out as quickly as possible. Most of the boutique coffee shops will be making single pour brews that take forever to make. You simply can't dedicate that much time per cup if you have a line of people inside and a drive thru to manage.

e5india··on Sailor pictured with laser rifle on board USS Minnesota nuclear sub
Not a protest per se, but riots did result from police violence against the gay community.

https://www.history.com/topics/gay-rights/the-stonewall-riot...

e5india··on The FBI is secretly using Sabre as a global travel surveillance tool
You have a really low bar for freedom if the destruction of property is all it takes for you to start justifying unmarked federal agents grabbing people off the street. Further the leadership in these states already have sufficient resources available to handle these protests if they decide it's gotten out of hand. People not from these neighborhoods are proclaiming these protests out of hand summarily.

The people protesting have been exceeding clear about what they are arguing for precisely. Holding police accountable is not some fringe political opinion and in fact the right, according to its own professed beliefs, should be natural allies in this movement. The further this continues the more evidence we have that these concerns about police in the United States acting with impunity are legitimate.

What is clear however, is that a significant portion of the people who have claimed themselves champions of freedom and states' rights always held the caveat that it be in the service of a particular group of people. It is interesting how people who in every other circumstance hold individual liberty as central to their beliefs now place law and order at the center of their arguments at the expense of individual liberty. Where in the Constitution are our rights subject to conditions on behavior? Fucking nowhere. The second amendment itself grants the people the right to violence against a tyrannical government so why then would "not destroying statues" in any way be considered some kind of pre-requisite for legitimite protest?

e5india··on U.S. attorney general: Hollywood, tech companies “pawns of Chinese influence”
No it would not necessarily be better, on balance. A critique of a system is not meant to be an attack on it nor an argument that there is necessarily some other better system. In fact, I would argue that the difficulty with having these conversations nowadays is precisely your response.

In the American context at least, most of the time when people point out the failures in Capitalism people mean it more in the way that you might point out edge cases that need to be accounted for. The problem in having these conversations is people take it as some rhetorical device meant to actually promote Communism or some other philosophy.

The point OP is making here, as I understand it, is that there is a paradox in a Capitalist system in that if self-interest and profit are at it's core, then by definition that self-interest will override any other consideration to the point that any company will be more than willing to sacrifice any other concern for the possibility of making money.

We have known for the past 30 years at least that China is on a trajectory to surpass or challenge American supremacy and yet corp after corp was willing to send them technical knowledge and jobs that grew their economy to the point that they can build artificial islands in the South China Sea. Let me remind you that we won WW2 primarily on the strength of being able to outproduce our adversaries, not on technological superiority.

So now though, we're super concerned about Chinese influence in the tech industry, specifically. I am worried too, of course you have to be. But it's tremendously silly to act like now it's suddenly a concern and single out one sector or company (e.g. NBA) as if the sacrifice of values in order to make money is not an inherent characteristic of Capitalism.

e5india··on Wealthy Buyers Reportedly in “Mad Rush” to Leave San Francisco
It's hilarious to me how hard people keep pimping this notion of people abandoning the SF Bay Area. As long as I've visited this site there's been a constant rotation of here's why people are leaving.. Feels like a good portion of the population is forever waiting for California's comeuppance for whatever reason.
e5india··on Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get around price gouging rules
No I know how you meant it but I was indeed precise in how I meant it. I meant specifically that for many of the Libertarian set it is a belief in the theological sense.
e5india··on Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get around price gouging rules
This comment is exactly what I'm talking about.

The free market theory, if we want to call it that, has always also carried the implicit 'in the long run' and this is what we're quibbling about. Natural disasters, pandemics etc are short term conditions that don't allow enough time for the normal market mechanics to come into play. This is the argument essentially.

Your belief in the markets is such that you cannot even allow for any instance where the free market is an imperfect solution and any kind of critique means that the person is anti market. I am not anti market. I simply do not consider the free markets some infallible system that works in every context.

This is not some rhetorical device meant to sneak in Socialism. It is in fact possible to recognize the efficacy of the markets, over the long run, but still recognize that there are contexts that require some amount of intervention.

I want to also comment on the following: "even if you don't believe in it"

I don't consider this something to believe in or not believe in. It's just a system, a tool, it has strengths and it has weaknesses. Sometimes it's the right approach, sometimes it's not.

e5india··on Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get around price gouging rules
How does that line of thinking work with something like baby formula? If I have a hungry baby now, what good does it do me if I have to wait two weeks because I'm priced out of baby formula today?

In emergency situations we pretty much already know what peoples needs generally are. We don't need price as a market mechanism to know people need access to food water etc.

Additionally, price gouging is sending artificial pricing signals. The rise in price is not the result of organic demand but people taking advantage of a short term supply constraint, so if I'm a manufacturer/distributor I can't react to this rise in prices the same way I would in a normally functioning economy. I may not even be able to.

e5india··on Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get around price gouging rules
> libertarians genuinely believe

This is fundamentally the problem though isn't it? Belief is a matter of faith, and so regardless of how much experience we have with these situations no amount of evidence is going to sway them.

e5india··on Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get around price gouging rules
Unfortunately, it's pretty much a religious belief for many people where they can't acknowledge any kind of edge case where the market mechanism breaks down.
e5india··on CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth
It's so interesting how these surveillance/data-gathering companies (Palantir, Banjo, Anduril) are founded by right-wing types. Professed small government libertarians building that very same government's intelligence apparatus for profit. It's exactly this double-speak on government and individual liberty that makes minorities distrustful of conservatives.
e5india··on CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth
No, it depends you see, when minorities claim police misconduct, those claims require evidence before we accept them. In the case of a 'former' Neo-Nazi claiming Jewish heritage we accept the claim without evidence.
e5india··on CSS Zen Garden
I think they mean to say that sometimes you might want the visual structure of a table but you don't necessarily want it announced as a table via screen readers since it isn't data that's being represented.
e5india··on BMW’s new flat logo is everything that’s wrong with modern logo design
It's occurred to me for some time now that design has suffered from globalization in that while surely there is some good in the more rapid exchange of ideas, there has also been this hyper convergence in design where it all just kind of looks the same. Consider that in this particular domain, automobiles, you used to be able to clearly delineate design along national lines. There was a clear distinction in Italian design vs American, German, British, Swedish etc. But now?

The thing that bothers me the most about this minimalist trend is how pervasive it is. I quite like minimalism myself, but I feel like 40 years ago even within minimalism you would have expected to see some difference in execution across the globe.

Which brings me to how trendy the design field is in general. I don't think I've seen a field so uniformly go from one trend to the other and then defend it with such dogged bullshit. Who in God's name is fooled by the poetry? You're using the same design language and aesthetic as everyone else, the only thing creative is the nonsense you're writing to defend it. Why is a field full of 'creatives' so uniform in thought and expression? How many trends have we witnessed so far in web/graphic design? We've built all these powerful creative tools just so they can end up all making logos that look exactly the fucking same. Surely machine learning models can create a good percentage of the design we see today.

e5india··on Google veterans: The company has become ‘unrecognizable’
This is what happens to every tech company once they enter growth mode and bring in a ton of mercenary sales people from Oracle and the like.

The irony here is people point to social justice activity as the reason for decline but really all that social justice activity is a smokescreen for betraying other values. We'll do what we're bid by totalitarian regimes and then make ourselves feel better by putting rainbow colors on our logo during Pride Week.

e5india··on Reasons so many people are getting the hell out of the Northeast
Look at the authors' page and all five of her articles are about people moving from the northeast to the south. Clearly an agenda.
e5india··on Apollo 10 Stopped Just 47k Feet from the Moon
https://www.denverpost.com/2007/02/05/diaper-wearing-astrona...
e5india··on Millennials and Mainframes: How to Bridge the Gap
Your comment made me curious and I ended up finding a great article on the story behind the layoffs at SS&C.

https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/feature-story/article/210195...

e5india··on Detroit Was Crumbling, Now It's Reviving
Perhaps it's me that misunderstood, but I took that 'nothing shameful' to be more about the 'calloused hands' portion of the sentence. It was meant, I think, to be a poetic way of referring to people who perform manual labor.
e5india··on Stop Disrespecting the Turboprop: These engines are fine for modern air forces
|who in the USAF would be willing to fly it?

Warrant Officers. The Army had a program during OEF/OIF where enlisted servicemembers could take a test and qualify for flight school to become helicopter pilots as a warrant officer. I found this tremendously attractive as an enlisted service-member and would have gone that route if I hadn't planned to leave and go to college instead.

e5india··on Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective
The word you're looking for is 'gals' but people stopped using it for some reason.
e5india··on Joist lays off 60 employees in Toronto as company relocates to SF
Yeah this really stuck out to me. Why does Joist require top talent anyways? It seems to me that the technical work they'd need is pretty routine web application building. I really don't see Joist attracting top-talent in SV anyways. Unless they're planning on offering top dollar why would any top talent go work for a startup in the home improvement space?
e5india··on What happens to ex-cons who go from prison to startups
I'd be interested to hear more about your story.
e5india··on Why Is Europe Failing to Create More $1B Startups?
I stand corrected on Boston! I'm in SF so maybe I'm showing my lack of awareness a bit here. I'll definitely be paying more attention to Boston. Thanks for the correction.
e5india··on Why Is Europe Failing to Create More $1B Startups?
Oh I absolutely agree. That's why I meant to limit that to the national sense of 'we'. Of course internally we still have our debates about spending and certainly other states would prefer if Silicon Valley where part of their local economy. But ultimately California's success is still part of our national success and so ultimately the spending happens however much we would prefer it be spent differently. And the complaints you mention in our own country which does have such a strong national sense of identity makes it even less likely in the EU.

Is the sense of being 'European' so strong that member states are willing to spend billions of their own taxpayer euros to build up a tech sector largely centered in some other member state? I dont think so.

e5india··on Why Is Europe Failing to Create More $1B Startups?
There are a couple things missing from this article that really need to be fleshed out:

1. You're comparing the unicorns which is like comparing the top of the pyramid without measuring the base. In other words, where are the figures for seed-round startups? What is the amount of capital available to startups at the different stages in the business life cycle? Without those numbers we can't really tell if this is a matter of investors in the EU being less efficient in their investments or if its simply a matter of scale.

2. The other mistake that people I think when making this comparison is in comparing the success of the US market compared to Europe as a whole. First of all, you have to keep in mind that much of the success in the tech sector is highly localized. Now obviously the definition of 'tech sector' can vary wildly but generally when we talk about The Tech Sector we mean Silicon Valley. Almost every other state not named California has tried to replicate Silicon Valley and met with the same lack of success you're speaking about here. The major two exceptions are New York and Texas in that order. The rest of the American States see the same kind of out migration of tech chasing money that the essay sees among foreign tech entrepreneurs.

3. Expanding on the above: on a national level we don't care if the tech sector concentrates in California or Texas or wherever as long as it is in the US. The EU might refer to itself as a union, but are the French willing to invest in a tech sector centralized in Romania for the benefit of a Europe as a whole? Not likely. Silicon Valley, as much as we celebrate the free market aspect of it's success, also benefited from massive federal government spending in that region that played a huge rule in establishing its tech ecosystem back in the 50s and 60s.

edit: I've been editing for grammar.