eevilspock

   Oh that strawberry cake 
   Oh that strawberry cake
   Out in California them berries were grown 
   And into this city them berries were flown 
   For making that strawberry cake*

   Then I thought of Oxnard, just north of LA 
   Where I picked strawberries for many a day 
   Hard work with no future for the harvest was done
   And I headed eastward a-travelin’ by thumb 
   And nobody wanted me here in this town 
   I felt like a stray dog they all kick around 
   Them berries reminded me of my bad breaks 
   I’m hungry and I want that strawberry cake*

We enjoy our strawberry cake, all the fresh and organic produce we eat, at an amazingly low price if we are honest, yet we don't fight for the well-being and rights of the people who work the fields, so-called illegal aliens, who are paid slave wages, who have no health care, whose citizenship status leaves them even more vulnerable to exploitation than others on the bottom of America's caste system.

“Here am I, and there he is, but for the grace of God I’d be out there.”

~ Johnny Cash, in the OP video

I don't use Twitter (now X *eye roll*) anymore, but I used to try and get friends to follow the United Farm Workers. They post a lot of videos of workers in the field, both beautiful and heartbreaking. Here are a few posts:

Indiana strawberry harvester, age 7.

~ https://twitter.com/UFWupdates/status/1418834775280861192

Hundreds of thousands of farm workers in the United States are children.

~ https://twitter.com/UFWupdates/status/1418836903672094725 (see the thread)

Jose works in the Salinas area cutting strawberries. He shares, "I have been working in the CA fields for 21 years and in those 21 years I have not been able to see my parents again because I don't have legal status."

~ https://twitter.com/woodlandalyssa/status/141781224667613184...

MDN article Using data attributes describing HTML syntax, JavaScript access and CSS access, and a caveat about accessibility: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Howto/Us...

Also https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att..., which says:

> The data-* global attributes form a class of attributes called custom data attributes, that allow proprietary information to be exchanged between the HTML and its DOM representation by scripts.

People will game it. We don't need a transparent algorithm when we have transparent results, e.g. enable `showdead`, or the OP's project.

That's what supermarkets do. They void transactions (usually needing a supervisor's approval) and then re-enter the purchase correctly.

> Would it be better if high-performing people worked for lower-performing companies?

Per my value system, what we want is to match people to work that they are good at, and for any particular ability, we want to match people who have more ability to societal needs that are more important. "Higher performing company" does not equate to "more important company". I'm glad Einstein chose to be a physicist rather than be a Facebook engineer (or whatever the equivalent was in his time). I don't believe anyone should be billionaires or fabulously wealthy, but if I did, it would be people like Einstein, not Mark Zuckerberg, or people like Musk who would have paid Einstein some minimal market-driven amount more than Princeton would have (from the government subsidies Must gets) while convincing people he (Musk) is responsible for all the great technological advances resulting from Einstein's work, keeping all the profits for himself and pouring them into even more extractive schemes.

> Wouldn't an inability for higher-performing workers to move to higher-performing companies reflect a lack of worker freedom?

Doesn't the inability of lower-performing workers to not be coerced into working for slave wages under slave conditions represent a lack of freedom? What about the children of lower-performing workers who are locked into poorer schools, poorer nutrition, poorer environments, less quality time with their parents and many other disadvantages?

And what if higher-performing companies are those that are best at extracting the most value out of bottom-level workers, effectively acting as intermediate slave owners for consumers who get cheap goods on the backs of bottom-level workers and their lack of freedom?

"Positive" refers to positive correlation, not positive effects or desirability.

Those that believe that "high-ability workers" made themselves, that market valuation of a person is fair and reflects what that person deserves, will also view this positive correlation as positive.

Those that see otherwise, e.g. that grok the Matthew Effect[1], systemic prejudice in society, that no human created themselves, or that humans should not be "priced" like commodities, will not. As the paper points out:

There is sorting everywhere in the economy:

- Wealthier, more educated, more attractive men on average marry wealthier, more educated, more attractive women.

- Higher-income households reside in distinct neighborhoods and send their children to better schools than low-income households.

- Elite universities enroll the most qualified undergraduates.

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

I think how you interpret that line is related to how you interpret

> However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle

It is possible to give both an Ayn Randian interpretation.

But then: Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

I doubt Einstein would accept an invitation to Galt's Gulch.

i don't know whether to downvote, or upvote it as sarcasm gold.

That explanation tracks with the number of non-English results in this search: https://www.google.com/search?q=xnumx+-michigan&tbs=li:1 and the way XNUMX appears in these results.

(apologies. I only use google when I need to do a verbatim search)

Key extracts:

When writing the entire source code in TypeScript, types are checked throughout the entire code. That can be helpful at times, but more often than not it results in unneeded code complexity and build errors that slow down the development and maintenance of the Octokit source code. I estimate that the introduction of TypeScript slows down code develepoment by a factor of 4x-5x. I think separating the source code from the types will bring it down to 2x-3x, as only the types for the public APIs need to be defined and tested.

Solution: Rewrite the TypeScript source files into native JavaScript and add the .d.ts declaration files into the source code. Besides testing the code, add tests for types.

Benefits: Removes all build steps. We currently use @pika/pack which is now unmaintained. The source code in the GitHub repositories is 1:1 what is used in production. The runtime code will be easier to read, debug, and contribute to. Source code is production code. Easier to debug and contribute to.

Give https://github.com/textplainly a follow. I've got something in the works.

> Personally I'd be happy with...

There's a lot of armchair quarterbacking in these comments, this one taking the cake.

Just "5 years" is very misleading.

I have a 7.5 year-old iPhone SE and it has gotten two security updates this past month. In other words, the 5 years you mention is ONLY for entirely new OS versions which old hardware simply can't support. Older phones continue to be supported.

Add two so we can race! Player 1: AWSD, Player 2 arrow keys.

Feels like you're pretending that Amero-Eurocentrism is not a thing, that there is no agenda or bias to be examined or criticized.

If you've ever played Risk, the Amero-Eurocentrism is extreme.

https://cdn.matthewhaeck.com/content/images/2015/02/risk.jpg

https://freeprintableaz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/risk-...

North America: 9 territories, larger than Africa. Europe: 7 territories, as large as Africa. USA: 3 territories, Canada: 5, Australia: 2 China, India, Brazil which are all very large: 1

@dang this is a clickbait title. "iPhone security" is entirely misleading.

> I do think it's harder to be intentional about our value systems when we pass everything off to the optimizing machinery of capitalism and the free market - in my mind, it's too easy for that machinery to optimize for pleasures that skirt our values.

Agreed, but I think that will fall out naturally from having a non-selfist value system, which would dispense with the current world's elevation of selfishness from vice to virtue. As long as we continue to worship at the alter of selfishness, no alternative to capitalism is going to do much better. To your point about some monolithic value system: we wouldn't want that. Just as for physical evolution diversity of the values "gene pool" is healthy. But the selfish gene (intentional play off Dawkins' idea) needs to become recessive at most. It's both fine and healthy if people disagree with how to create a better community and how to share the world empathetically and morally as long as we share the same intention: sharing the world empathetically and morally. Selfism by definition is immoral as morality by definition by my reckoning is all about choosing the common/greater good over one's personal gain. Moral conscience is that voice that tells you "Yeah, I know you want that so much, but you have to resist because it hurts other people."

I haven't read the The Dispossessed yet. I'll move it up my list. I was introduced to LeGuin in a class at Berkeley titled Women in Religion offered by the Berkeley School of Theology / Graduate Theological Union (separate from UC Berkeley but they have a collaborative relationship, and students of each can take classes in the other) and taught by a feminist theologian woman... I'm an atheist leaning agnostic and it was one of my favorite classes I ever took at Berkeley.

I never heard of Big Thief and will give their music a listen, definitely!

It might be years before my writing sees the light of day, but if you would be so kind, shoot me an email so we can keep in touch. I'll send you one as well, given all the spam filters that hinder such first time comms.

Thanks for writing!

I love both your comments and am saving them as references to be used in a book or essays that I am working on that discusses the lack of non-selfist values in modern culture and how this is far more consequential than whether we choose a socialist or capitalist laws and economic system.

Also, if you've never read Ursula K LeGuin, you should give one of her sci-fi books a go. In Left Hand of Darkness a non-human character feels a deep sadness when they abandon a sleigh that has carried them across a frozen polar region, saving their lives. The human doesn't understand this, as the sleigh is just an inanimate object, a tool, and they had known all along they'd have to abandon it once it served its purpose.

The fact that you responded well to all the harsh feedback here bodes well for your daughter.

Also, assuming you aren't a single parent, don't forget to be good to and honest with your partner. Don't let your devotion to you daughter cause you to neglect your partner. This is important for all three of you.

I wish you all the best.

What your daughter learns/inherits/rebels against from you will derive from your actions, not your words. What choices you make, how you treat her, what your true motivations are, you emotional or lack of emotional response to situations. In essence, who you are. So really, working to be a good parent isn't different from working to be a good person.

Remember her early years are more formative than her later years. The foundation of her personality traits will be set in the first five years, and the subfloor in the next 5. Those will fixed for the rest of her life. She only remodel the things built on top, but she can't ever change those early layers. At best she can put lots of corrective/counteracting layers on top.

Focus on love, understanding, kindness, being present, listening, honesty, fairness -- and readily admit to her when you've made a mistake or are wrong. Don't demand that she apologize. Instead, apologize to her when you fuck up. Model the behavior.

I don't even know if you want advice from me or even if you'll see this. Feel free to email me if I am being helpful.

> Suffering is an unavoidable side-effect of love and other delights of life

It's not a side-effect. It's an intrinsic part.

This is expressed in ancient philosophy like Taoism and embedded in its symbol , but since you poo poo philosophy, give a listen to some old pop music: The Rose by Amanda McBroom and sung by Bette Midler, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxSTzSEiZ2c

I agree with you on all points except I've never thought about humanism that way. Perhaps I have the wrong definition or understanding of humanism.

But you single out "Western" humanism and perhaps that explains it. I already believe Western culture is deeply selfist and that selfism is fundamentally immoral -- Morality is all about transcending selfishness.

It's entirely self-centered. There is no mention of relationships, love, honor, sacrifice, or any values other than hedonism. It is materialistic and only mentions other people as means to self-serving ends.

There are no absolute "first principles". What you choose as first principles reflects who you are.

If I were to guess, I'd say this was written by someone who's young and has never been in love (truly in love, as opposed to narcissistic love). Has never been a parent and loved a child. Has a sadly ignorant understanding of poverty, wealth and social injustice, or simply doesn't care enough to learn (narcissism), and thus is not at all moved by a desire to better the world, but only better themselves (and will smother any stirrings of conscience by convincing themselves the best way to better the world is to better themselves as much as possible).

Or, if it was written by someone who's older or been a parent, narcissism prevented them from ever growing beyond themselves because they could never see beyond themselves.

A recipe for narcissism, loneliness, emptiness.

clearly your original comment was unfair.

Calling it a mind or "A.I." is confusing power with intelligence.

Imagine a person taking a test. This person has the power to look at everyone else's answers, and the power to quickly choose or calculate the answer that is the most common. This person will probably score well above average on the test (though probably not as high as the top score). This person is not smart, but powerful.

A CPU that can calculate a zillion additions in a second does not understand those calculations, much less be able to come up with mathematics in the first place. It is not intelligent. It is powerful.

ChatGPT is supremely powerful in its ability to generate "answers" that are the amalgam of hundreds or thousands or millions of answers or statements made by humans, but dumber than a bag of rocks.

@dang this is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35539687

I think the first step is acknowledging what you imply: Free markets and capitalism are just algorithms, not arbiters of truth or morality. (This is also the working title of an essay I am working on)

We can't have a rational discussion of the alternatives when so many people have bought into the notion that all forms of private property are an inalienable right and market-driven valuation of the worth of a person does represents what a person morally deserves. People also once bought into the notion of the divine right of kings. It took forever to shake that.

We can't evaluate algorithms unless we come to a shared value system on what we are after, what exactly we are trying to optimize. Aggregate material wealth, regardless of how it is distributed? Broad population well-being / happiness? Individual liberty? Greater good. Darwinian competition?

because those large protests were mainly young people. Most New Yorkers, especially the middle-aged and older white liberals, are pro-cop. New York city, the supposed bastion of progressivity and human rights, has the most segregated school system of any big city in the nation. Walk around liberal brooklyn and look at the color of the people being served and those doing the service, and you will see a caste system no better than anywhere in the South.