floor2

What lives did he ruin?

The USA has an incredibly robust, tightly monitored and regulated financial market. The SEC, FDIC and associated regulators and auditors carefully control bank reserves, prosecute insider trading, prevent and insure against fraud.

Some people decided to opt-out of that system and send their money to an unregulated entity in the Bahamas to buy imaginary money without government oversight.

Honestly the government shouldn't have intervened here at all. The people who lost money should have been laughed at and told that's why you put your money in the regulated market. If you intentionally try to avoid taxes, anti-money laundering regulations, audits and securities law by buying crypto overseas, then taxpayer resources don't go bail you out.

We've all secretly been benefiting from the dreaded "trickle down economics" which has shifted as interest rates have increased. What percent of HN users salaries are actually paid by the revenue from the customers of their business rather than burning down investment funding?

Most of us have had high paid jobs funded by some billionaire VC burning their wealth on unprofitable ventures, because they were willing to lose 10 bets to win 1.

Today, investors (whether VC, private equity, public markets) want to own businesses that are profitable or can reasonably be expected to be soon. Correspondingly, far fewer jobs paying six figure salaries while the company loses millions of dollars for their investors/owners.

This headline is infuriatingly backwards and offensive.

Extending the government-enabled monopoly power of the establishment media to prevent new art, technology and creativity from competing should not be treated as a good thing or as "protecting" them.

Rather than extending copyright to unprecedented new levels to strangle AI in the crib, we should be overjoyed that billions of people will now be enabled to use new tools to create art, music, poetry, and literature tailored to their specific desires.

We could be on the cusp of a new utopia, of empowerment of the average person and incredibly diversity of the creative arts... or we could watch as a handful of corporations get laws passed to give their cartel exclusive control of what music, film, art and literature gets published.

Your last paragraph makes no sense to me.

There were plenty of places which published long, complex, nuanced data and explanations about ivermectin.

But lots of people are unable to understand complex writing or statistics. And most people have little understanding of biology, medicine or disease. This led to widespread misinformation, which in turn led people to try to simplify out all the complexity, and trim it down to basic things like "ivermectin doesn't work" and "don't take horse medicine when your doctor refuses to prescribe ivermectin to you".

The messaging you think would have "prevented a lot of wasted time" was exactly the messaging in the medical reports that started the whole problem. Dumbing it down was a response to the "internet arguments".

Taxes should be used to pay for government services, not as arbitrary attacks on people you don't like.

Also, raising taxes just raises costs for renters. The solution to housing affordability is building more housing. Align the market incentives to build more housing, don't try to fight against market forces.

Daily reminder that the term "ultraprocessed food" is a label meant to encompass the complex set of unhealthy things in modern, mass produced food products and not literally about "amount of processing".

I can't never tell if comments like this are genuine confusion from overly-literal people with poor language skills, trolls, FUD from manufacturers or what.

Food is complex. A healthy diet is going to be a multi-variable equation including different fats (omega-3, omega-6, omega-9, etc), proteins (9 different essential amino acids needed in varying quantities), carbohydrates (with varying insulin and other metabolic impact by chain length), vitamins, minerals, fiber (soluble & insoluble). As well as uniquely modern things like artificial colors, emulsifiers, anti-caking agents, anti-microbial preservatives, etc. And then overall calories tailored to an individuals size and level of activity.

It's too many variables to include detailed, nuanced descriptions, so we need to use terms like "ultraprocessed" as a shorthand approximation to capture the diverse set of food products which cause obesity, diabetes, GI issues, cognitive issues, etc.

I'm not sure who the "we" is in this comment, and I can't think of any group I know in real life that it aligns to.

Because everywhere I've lived and every community I've been a part of, "we" absolutely do give motherhood profound levels of respect. So much so, that being a mother is an almost sacrosanct role and puts the holder of the title above reproach in many situations.

Also "we" do pay them for it? If you feel better thinking about it that way, their income-earning spouse can be seen as paying them (by having the single income pay for all household spending). Also society at large pays them, by virtue of the myriad subsidies, deductions, services, and programs for children and parents.

The biggest challenge I've witnessed to praising motherhood as a full-time profession, is that mothers who work corporate jobs feel attacked or disparaged if they hear any comment which suggests they are doing any less mothering than the full-time mothers. So we end up in a tricky position culturally, where you can call someone a full-time mother, but a phrase like part-time mother is seen as offensive or inappropriate.

It's very challenging to balance giving respect and recognition to full-time mothers in a way that won't offend mothers who work for companies.

Hurray I get to spread some good news today. The issue you're describing was fixed by the 2022 "No Surprises Act". See this for details: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/no-surprises-unders...

That often quoted (or misquoted?) study was wildly misleading and became complete misinformation through the retelling.

People who said they'd pay using a credit card got reported in the media as being "unable to afford" the expense. The original study might have been an interesting finding on the transition to a cashless society, but for millions of Americans, paying using a credit card is the default rather than carrying cash and dealing with change, and not actually indicative of lacking funds to pay for something.

Limiting opportunity is directly causal to a higher social mobility index though. Preventing people from earning high wages or accumulating wealth will directly increase that metric.

A country where everyone is in extreme poverty could have the top score for social mobility.

"Social Mobility Index" always seems like a particularly weird metric to me. Not just in the usual issues of vanity metrics or gaming the system or whatnot, but also because, I'm not sure that maximizing it is even a desirable outcome. It's a weird measure of like, societal churn.

I'd much rather look at quality of life metrics across all citizens than just check if the outcomes of children are uncorrelated to their parents decisions.

> We need people who are interested in the science, not those who (pretend to) do it for money.

In the US, the problem is mostly the opposite. Lots of people would rather do science, but it's hard to choose using your skills for real science when some company will pay you 2x-10x to instead optimize ad clicks on their website or algorithmic trading or whatever.

In some of the humanities, liberal arts, social sciences etc academia may pay better than other options for those people. But for most STEM folks, it's a tradeoff between "low-paid meaningful work" vs "high-paid meaningless work".

Medicine and AI research may be the only two areas where people can simultaneously do cutting edge research and make high salaries.

Weird Al does not do covers. His albums are a mixture of parodies and fully original pieces. The parodies often use the same melody as the source work, but with original lyrics. Sometimes the music is itself parodied, and performed using an accordian or some other unique instrument.

In terms of creativity, artistic vision, lyrical difficulty or any other metric, Weird Al should be understood as an incredibly talented musician.

> What am I even supposed to do with this info?

Seems like a weird question. Are you a researcher in a related field? Then maybe incorporate this finding into your models for how things work or tweak your future experiments based on this data.

Are you an unaffiliated Rust developer? Then you're not really supposed to do anything with this.. it's not particularly for you. Read it if you're intellectually curious, to expand your knowledge and understanding of the world in general? Or ignore it if you don't care?

> Everyone, even the staunchest libertarian believes in equity

What? No, not even slightly. You've just listed off a bunch of highly contentious and often unethical things and then acted as if they're unassailable.

Farm subsidies have been disastrous and should be massively overhauled or done away with. A desire for a flatter tax structure is a fairly mainstream, though minority political opinion. I don't believe I've ever seen people queue up for a standing-room concert and then give up their front row position to a shorter person who arrived later.

"Equity" is probably the worst weasel-word in contemporary America, in order to give favor to some people at the expense of others and to create systems where different rules apply to different people. Fairness, justice and equal rights would be for more universally held opinions.

"Equity" is a dog-whistle to treat people unfairly and unjustly.

> youre not here to decide what problems to solve, youre here to solve the problems the product team wants solved they get all upset and moody

Please be very up front that you hold this view when recruiting, it will be better for everyone. This may need to be an "agree to disagree" situation, but my experience goes completely the opposite direction of what you're suggesting here.

One of the biggest dysfunctions in tech over the last decade has been the rise of the product role and re-subjugation of engineers. We've recreated all the dysfunctions of the "pointy haired boss" just now with a PM title instead.

The 90s had the trope of incompetent business/managerial class folks being in charge and engineers being expected to do as they were told. Then in the 00s/10s there was a renaissance as engineer-founder companies (Google, Facebook, etc) elevated the status of developers and gave them increased autonomy and influence. This period saw technical innovation, business growth and increased wellness for employees.

In the past few years, the people who couldn't thrive as developers realized they could rebrand themselves as product managers and do all the fun parts of making things while leaving the difficult implementation work to developers. Unsurprisingly, the outcome is worse business behavior, worse customer experience, and burnt out developers who don't want to just be a cog in a machine building someone else's idea.

Huh? We already have taxes to fund spaces for teens to hang out.

Taxes pay for parks, libraries, nature preserves, swimming pools, schools (with after-school sports, musicals, various clubs), museums and galleries. Many local organizations receive grants from taxpayer money to provide services and activities for teens.

Within a 10-mile radius of where I'm sitting, a teenager could skateboard at a taxpayer-funded skate park, swim at a taxpayer-funded pool, read a magazine at a taxpayer-funded library, play basketball on a taxpayer-funded court, walk through a tax-payer funded art gallery, etc.

It looks like you've been misinformed about American high school- biology and chemistry are standard required classes for graduation.

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison between countries. Americans' concepts of equality and fairness are highly averse to the sort of separation-by-test-results that is core to the German secondary education system, so every school tries to cater to every type of student, with varied results.

It seems to me rather, that you are using a definition of "capitalism" that is distinct from and perhaps at odds with how other people are using the term.

The definition you're using seems to be clearly a far-left, anti-capitalism interpretation which has essentially inverted goals/motivations with side-effects/externalities compared to what a pro-capitalist, market-oriented type of person would suggest.

Basically, you're suggesting that regulatory capture is a goal of "capitalism" and while most people would say that's an anti-capitalist failure of government.

Everyone agrees regulatory capture is bad, so maybe we could all work together to fix that badness regardless of abstract differences of opinion.

I think the critical difference between US and EU here is that the regulators in EU who are supposed to protect people actually work to protect people.

The regulators who are supposed to protect people in the US work to set themselves up for their next job going to work at the companies they're currently regulating.

But SVB was solvent and basically fine long-term. If VCs hadn't panicked at herd-mentality stampeded $40,000,000,000 out of the bank in a day, forcing it to sell 10 year treasuries at depressed market rates, it would have been fine.

SVB isn't like the 2008 banks that held mortgage-backed securities that turned out to be full of people who lied about their income and assets and would never get repaid. SVB had treasuries that absolutely would have been repaid.

SVB was trying to do an equity raise to solve their short-term liquidity issues. If they'd done so quietly, and gotten money from a big institution before going public, they'd probably have been fine. Instead, the public equity raise spooked people, caused a bank run, and made their liquidity go from "risky" to broken.

Or, they are exactly what they say they are: people more focused on effective altruism than feel-good or look-good acts.

If you were trying to run an orphanage, hospital or refugee camp and someone donated money that was going to let you save more lives, would you rather let people die than accept a donation from a crypto founder who a few people said was sketchy (but was also getting fawning press coverage in mainstream media and fundraising from legit financial institutions)?

I think your statement "We call people who do the farming 'farmers'" is accurate to my usage as well, perhaps with then some nuance to what work is "farming".

I didn't mean to imply that land ownership was central. But maybe "operating the business of a farm" is farming/being a farmer, whereas "doing labor on a farm" is not.

For instance, if person A owns 100 acres of farm land, person B rents that land and makes the decisions about what to plant, when to plant, when to harvest, how to manage the transportation and sale of the product, etc and person C is hired by B to do some work on that farm, I'd probably only call person B a farmer.

This is a deeply flawed premise. Tech sector grew headcount by like 100% over a couple years, and then did layoffs of 5-10%. They still have massively more employees today than they did pre-covid.

People are significantly overreacting to the current layoffs and ignoring all the massive hiring spree of the last 3 years. If you hire 100 people and then layoff 8, the narrative shouldn't be that the end is nigh.

> Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor

Huh, this statement is so weird to me that it was a "lightbulb moment" about what words mean to different people online. I wonder how much misunderstanding this causes. I'm guessing your background is urban and coastal? I'd love it if you'd share, I'm genuinely curious.

I would never use the word "farmer" if I was talking about an immigrant laborer picking fruit or whatever. I'd call them migrant laborers or pickers or farm workers.

In the standard dialect of people in the 90% of America designated "flyover country", they'd would use the word "farmer" to mean the people who own and operate farms. Generally a middle-class, small-business-owner type person. Likely educated in some mixture of agriculture, business, finance, real estate. They're highly financially savvy, as they have to manage selling futures vs taking the spot price for their crops balanced against storage costs, land rental agreements, machinery leases or repairs, tax and crop insurance complexities, not to mention the science of how to optimize yield on their specific land.

Calling the laborers "farmers" is like calling an uber driver a tech worker, at least in the dialect of English I speak.

What an offensively stupid article.

Completely ignores the costs "granny" is forced to bear when her house floods or burns from every increasing severe hurricanes and wildfires. Ignores the costs to "granny" when an entire grid collapses for multiple days in a resource-rich area (Texas, last year). Completely ignores that "granny" benefited her whole life from profligate use of cheap fossil fuels that now everyone else is suffering due to their emissions and pollution.

Fossil fuels aren't cheaper for society, they're more expensive. They're just cheaper for the person burning them at the expensive of the other people who get harmed. I care more about the "granny" who's going to die from fossil fuels than the "granny" who has to pay an extra 5 cents for solar.

We've had calculators that can do arithmetic for decades but we still teach kids how to do math.

Also, ChatGPT in particular is a terrible "source of truth". It gives plausible sounding answers, but they may not be factually correct.

I just asked ChatGPT to write a press release for a new scientific discovery, which would be impossible to actually happen. It happily did so, making up a name for a new element along with creating a fake quote from a made-up researcher at a made-up National Laboratory. You could do the same for historical events, current institutions, anything.

That's kind of shocking to me. The normal narrative is about how much better the European model is for healthcare, but then you're saying it's missing one of the most fundamental and effective aspects of healthcare (preventative care & early intervention)?

Do you go to the dentist for regular cleaning & exams or only go if you have a toothache?

Annual checkups seem so critical to overall health outcomes- it's far better to catch cancer at stage 1 than stage 4, or to address blood pressure before having a stroke or heart attack rather than after, I'd have thought they'd be strongly prioritized and incentivized my government-controlled healthcare systems.

> If they haven't figured out how to turn a profit now will they ever?

The corporate entity Spotify will never turn a major profit, but that's by design.

Spotify made a deal with the devil to come to terms with the record labels, and is now fully baked into a "Hollywood Accounting" set of terms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting) which ensure the real money goes to the power players of RIAA cartel.

It turns out, if you have good lawyers, you can structure a set of entities such that neither the artists nor the public shareholders of the streaming service get the money, but rather, the opaque production company or record label that sits in between it all.

Literally everything on this list is supported by publicly available, peer-reviewed papers that could be found by 30 seconds of googling, but people downvote instead of being curious and learning something.

Here's a layman-friendly article that covers several papers on red dye #40: https://www.verywellhealth.com/red-dye-40-adhd-5220957

Here's a page from Columbia university on BPA: https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/research/columbia-cent... with quote "Researchers have linked BPA to developmental and health problems in children, including learning and behavior conditions like Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), anxiety and depression"