floor2

>sell a new product to help solve the mess that one of their previous products created

That's gotta describe like 75% of US healthcare budget, right?

Red Dye #40, BPA, preservatives, emulsifiers, PFAS -> ADHD, Anxiety, Depression -> Adderall, Xanax, Prozac

Sugar, seed oils, preservatives, endocrine-disrupting chemicals in food, water & air -> Obesity, hypertension, diabetes -> Lipitor, Insulin

Alcohol, smoked/grilled meat, tobacco, microplastics, pesticide residues, air pollution from cars & factories -> cancer

> age appropriate leadership roles

This fallacy is so common, but so obviously illogical. By definition, "leadership" roles require a larger number of "followers". Corporate structures are inevitably pyramid shaped, with a tiny number of executives at the top and then more middle managers below and still more ICs at the base.

But unless you're in a country with exponential population growth happening, that structure clearly doesn't represent the populace. There are going to be way more older workers than there are spots at the top of the pyramid.

As a society, we really need to embrace reality and stop pretending like the 5% of people in the upper ranks succeeded and the other 95% of people failed, if they don't rise to the top and then stay there for the rest of their career.

There is no such "contempt". You're misunderstanding the world view of middle-America.

Their motivations, however misplaced and due to misunderstandings, are about fairness, justice and functioning government. The simple truth is that, to many Americans, the idea of "working from home" means "not really working".

They believe that people in the office will do real work, whereas those same people at home won't. It's a wrong and harmful worldview, but it's not malicious or coming from a place of contempt. A solid "never attribute to malice ..." moment.

Note- this is not providing citations because this is not true.

The law is clear that discrimination based on gender or sex is illegal. Enforcement of this law is rare if the victims are male.

Bit of an aside, but I genuinely laughed out loud at a youtube link being used as your source.

I know it's against the guidelines to comment on quality of HN going downhill, so I won't. But if I could...

This is such a weird thing to say, I'm kinda fascinated by it.

I once had a life-saving surgery, which was a relatively new procedure and that I felt could sort of reasonably be called a "miracle surgery" (to make an analogy to your comment).

The surgery required all sorts of right settings- a sanitary operating room with lots of light and climate control and space for multiple medical staff to be in the right positions and complex after-care that involved medications, IVs, monitoring of vitals in a specific setting.

I would never say "since my surgery required the right setting, it's probably because it wasn't a miracle surgery". Nor even, "since my surgery required additional medications..." or "since my surgery required required subsequent physical therapy" or anything else.

Lots of treatments for lots of conditions are going to involve a mixture of many modes of treatment, or only be successful if multiple independent things are done in unison.

Please don't troll or make bad-faith arguments on HN. This post contains two instances of moving the goalposts and using extreme language for strawman attacks.

People are pointing out that moderation is often biased and that the power of controlling the narrative and topics & viewpoints that are allowed is a motivator for many moderators. Your strawman argument that "all moderators" being "exclusively" motivated is just rhetoric to try to win against a claim no one is making.

That much-repeated factoid is the result of sloppy, clickbait reporting of a lousy survey.

People were asked "If you had a sudden $500 expense, how would you pay for it?" with options like ["cash", "checking account", "credit card", "pay-day loan", "borrow from family"] and unsurprisingly many people said "credit card". This then got repeated and reported as "Americans can't pay $500 without going into debt".

Sure. But this is a pointless thing to complain about.

OP could have given a long, complex nuanced statement to appease pedants like "Due to climate change making warm weather and lack of snow in January far more likely than in the past, there was in fact warm weather and lack of snow during my planned trip, so I had to cancel my plans. The odds of this happening without decades of carbon emissions from fossil fuels would have been very unlikely".

Or, you can skip all that excessive cruft which is understood by almost everyone as being implicit and just say due to climate change.

Except in this case, the person they murdered was holding that gun in self-defense from the actual criminal.

Millions of Americans have some sort of weapon for self-defense. That might be a gun in their home. That might be pepper-spray in their purse. That might be picking up a knife or golf club when they hear a window break in the night.

The police shouldn't shoot first and ask questions later. They should always, always, always establish what is going on and who is a threat before killing an innocent person who was trying to defend themselves against an attacker.

It's hard to know exactly what you meant with this single snarky sentence, but it does make me think about how a global scale culture handles nuanced spectrums.

To me, it seems obvious and intuitive that "fake it till you make it" is a mostly harmless comment on mentality for confidence. You act calm and confident talking to the person you want to date when you see them at a party, even though internally you're nervous and scared. You act like a big business deal is routine for you even though it's actually make-or-break for your company.

Suggesting that it means "fraud is ok" seems preposterous to me, the sort of thing that my intuitive reaction is to think "Nobody could honestly believe that, they're being intentionally difficult". But the world is a big place, full of people whose brains work very differently, who process language very differently, who grew up in different cultures and were taught different lessons about how the world works.

Which is all to say, no of course this isn't "fake it till you make it". But that it'd be interesting if some sociologist did research on what level of acting, deceiving, misrepresenting, etc different folks see the line between "fake it till you make it" and "dishonesty" or "fraud".

Fun fact, animals don't produce B12. Historically meat contained B12 because animals got it from drinking water and eating food that had the microorganisms which do produce it, but in contemporary industrial scale agriculture, where animals are drinking chlorinated water piped into their pen, eating grains from a trough and being given antibiotics, they no longer get it from microorganisms which would have been in their natural environment.

The people running hog confinement operations, cattle feedlots or chicken warehouses give the animals B-vitamin fortified food to make up for the deficiency.

So vegans should take a B vitamin directly, but it's the same B vitamin being given to the animals for it to end up in meat.

> "Stuff I made up and then assigned arbitrary value to"

This pretty well summarizes all of crypto.

Maybe I just need anti-depressants, but how does everyone else just carry on with the absurd hypocrisy in the world?

Elon says he's going to tweak Twitter moderation from "ban" to "don't spread, but don't delete" for problematic posts. Reaction: American corporations publicly proclaim they're leaving the platform and cutting their advertisement budgets.

Qatar builds stadiums using slave labor, sends rape victims to jail, treats gay people as sub-human. Reaction: Carry on advertising and sponsorships as usual.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the situation or maybe complying w/ Qatar now somehow eventually makes the world a better place in the future? Or if someone can just tell me Prozac/Adderall/Zoloft/something just makes this feel fine and lets you carry on, that'd work too.

Wait until you see the photos of what goes on inside meat packing plants.

Just kidding, you won't. The political power of the meat industry is so significant in government that they actually made it a felony to record and publish what goes on inside hog confinement operations, meat packing plants, butchering, etc. https://aldf.org/issue/ag-gag/

This is why it's frustrating that America has no right-wing political party.

Every freshman-level economics 101 course when discussing the basic mechanisms required to have a functioning free market has "no monopolies, no cartels, no anti-competitive agreements between market participants" as necessary conditions.

But functionally, in America today, the Republicans are happy to have money-printing monopolies because their donors are profiting. And the Democrats are happy to have money-printing monopolies because their donors are profiting and large stable incumbents are easier to control with regulation than many small, changing entities.

In a better world, we'd break up the monopolies, and have thousands middle-class-owned small-businesses operating competitively, rather than one corporation.

As always, the linguistic and cultural divide between US and UK is significant in what "middle class" means.

At no point in American history was "2 weeks of holiday abroad" a norm for middle class Americans. In 1990, only 4% of Americans even had a passport. By the year 2000 that had grown to 17%. Today it's 42%.

That means Americans today are 10x more likely to have a passport for international travel than they were 30 years ago. In other words, it would have been incredibly rare for a middle class family in the 1980s to go to Europe for vacation. Meanwhile, it's not that rare for a lower-income American to go to Mexico or the Caribbean today.

This argument has never made any sense. It's literal survivorship bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

You're saying "If you survive getting covid without serious injuries once, then you'll be less likely to get serious injuries on a re-infection later". The vaccine is to make it less likely that you get serious injuries from that first exposure.

Making the statistically best choice is still the best choice even if you get an undesired outcome.

Good poker players can lose all their chips at the table to an unlucky draw and walk away knowing that they made the right play and that they'd do it again, even if they got unlucky on the river card. Good basketball coaches will still draw up plays to get the ball into the hands of their best shooter at the end of the game even if they miss sometimes.

If you're choosing between option A that has a 0.0001% chance of hurting you and option B that has a 10% chance of hurting you, and you choose A and still get hurt, that doesn't mean you made the wrong choice or that if you have it to do over again you should choose B.

Note the large box at the top of your linked article warning readers:

> Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that the conclusions reported in this manuscript are currently under dispute. The journal is investigating the issue.

You basically found the one publication saying "Vaccines cause autism" while 1,000,000 different independent ones say "No they don't".

This is just willful ignorance. We're having "Once-in-a-hundred-year" floods, fires, droughts and hurricanes every few years now. The Mississippi is at historic lows. Temperatures everywhere are at historic highs. Basically every measure of temperature, weather and rainfall everywhere is something like "7 of the top 10 extremes in recorded history have been in the last decade".

> who says how much complying with labor laws costs?

Basic accounting? If you used to pay $X for something and a new tax goes into effect that makes it $X * 5% tax, you can hide that into the overall price or be transparent to your customers about why your prices are increasing.

> they can shut down and find a job

Love it. The financial equivalent of "Why should I care about farmers? I buy my food at the store".

> Owning a business isn’t a right

If you're not allowed to independently make a living, but must be a wage slave for a different entity, then none of your other fundamental human rights really matter. The right to start your own business is one of the most fundamental human rights.

Bit of an aside, but how long are we going to keep doing this calling out the parent-child company dynamic in every single headline for Alphabet and Meta?

It makes sense for the first few weeks or months after a rebrand, merger or acquisition to remind readers that X owns Y now or A used to be called B. But at some point surely we just start calling corporations by their name, right? Does anyone reading tech or financial news not know who Meta or Alphabet is at this point?

Then you've read some terribly misleading, romanticized false version of history. Hunter-gatherer lives should not be romanticized as being desirable. They were (and are, in the few places they still exist) incredibly hard, dangerous and miserable existences.

Think of it as the most extreme form of poverty. No clean water, no shoes, malnutrition, limited protection against the weather. Every day going about basic tasks carries the risk for death, disease and disablement.

There is a reason that human population didn't rapidly increase until relatively recently in our collective hundred-thousand-year history. It's because most humans died before reaching reproductive age. Even in the few pockets of the globe with conditions favorable to survival, periodic events (weather, disease, rival groups, over-hunting, etc) wiped out entire tribes in terrible ways.

Ya, it's been an interesting thing to see play out over the past few years.

People figured out that Congress was too hopelessly corrupt and beholden to oil sheikhs and fossil fuel multinational corporations to pass any meaningful legislation to tax carbon emissions or limit pollution or even clean up after coal mines, so they decided they could at least "vote with their dollars" and invest in mutual funds that wouldn't invest in things like coal mining or fracking.

After a few years, that went from a tiny boutique service (mutual funds with no "blood money" from fossil fuels, slave labor, etc) to a major industry under the more expansive ESG label, until it reached a significant enough market pressure on the polluting, extractive corporations that they're now passing laws that prevent people from NOT investing in those companies.

Texas and Louisiana have had similar things, requiring banks, pensions, etc to invest in fossil fuel companies. Often their rationale is self-contradictory, where they will in one sentence claim it's a fiduciary duty to maximize returns without considering things such as harm from pollution, but then in the next sentence stating that it's to support local fossil fuel jobs or whatever.

My experience is that 99% of the people who hate Atlas Shrugged never read the book, they just heard that the people they hate like it, so they hate it.

I don't even really understand why people map it onto politics in the way they do. It seems to me fundamentally a story about people trying to accomplish something big, innovative and disruptive but being stymied by the various forces who resist or fear change, whether because they're profiting from the status quo or they're lazy or ignorant or entitled or whatever.

Like one of the central set of "bad guys" are the rival owners of other railroad companies, who are trying to maintain their monopoly/cartel. Another set of "bad guys" are the privileged family members who expect to have wealth and power by birthright. I don't see why a person who had left or far left political views wouldn't resonate with the protagonists struggles against these various entrenched, privileged rent seekers.

That's one heck of a stretch, essentially anti-American propaganda.

The US was one of a dozen countries which supported Syrian citizens standing up for human rights against a murderous dictator's violent suppression of the Arab Spring. The pro-freedom Syrians would likely have been successful with less violence if not for Russian backing of the Assad regime.

Granted, without US support the rebels would have just been rounded up and killed by Assad without the conflict really reaching the point of civil war, so if you squint at it enough, ya you can kinda see that technically some of the displaced people wouldn't be displaced, they'd just still be living a terrible oppressed life under Assad.

The motivation is what matters for the folks calling it Orwellian.

If someone is deleting their posts because the facts don't align to the worldview of a religion, a political party, a corporation or some other powerful group, many people will be more concerned about that than if the posts had been deleted for more routine, functional business reasons.

I think you probably have some fundamental cause & effect arrows backwards here.

Specifically, every single tech recruiter and tech executive is doing everything they can to increase the diversity of their company. The fact that you're getting interviews for lead or architect but then being assessed as a better fit for senior shows that you're actually getting preferential treatment in recruiting stage and opportunities that an otherwise identical non-minority candidate wouldn't have even been interviewed for.

> It's weird as fuck that they are interested and crawling over me until they talk to me as a person

That's not weird at all. That's incredibly common. That's a sign that your resume looks good, but you interview poorly. Maybe you're the "talented jerk" who they fear will negatively impact other employees. Maybe you overestimate your abilities.

It's possible that the whole world is just out to get you and refuses to acknowledge your greatness. But it might be more likely that if many different groups of people have all been interested in you on paper but then you didn't meet expectations, that the common element here is how you interview and/or interact with others.

One challenge is that so many Americans live in climates that humans don't really belong in, and thus rely on air conditioned cars & buildings. 29 million people live in Texas, 22 million in Florida, 7 million in Arizona, 5 million in each of Louisiana and Alabama, 3 million in Nevada, etc.

Walking anywhere when its high-humidity and over 90F (33C) isn't workable for most people because they don't want to arrive covered in sweat. And that's not a temperature that is a brief high for the day at 3pm, it's that hot at 9am on the way to school/work and still that hot at 6pm when headed home.

> that uncle that claim to be three-seventh Scottish

Bit of an aside, but I find it odd how hostile people are to Americans retaining any connection to their European ancestry.

If I tell people I'm half-Indian and half-Persian nobody bats an eye. If my wife tells people she's half-Irish and half-Czech she gets treated like she's not supposed to have any heritage or culture other than whatever people imagine as "white American".