gozur88

>Even folks on HN are separated from that reality by a year or so of cushion, if even that.

Not sure why you would assume that. I know people in their late 40s who could retire.

Larry Ellison had two big advantages, though - a well-circumscribed problem domain and an obvious business model. Recycling has neither. It's a much more difficult problem.

>Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge, good scores in kids strongly correlate to kids coming from upper middle class families with well educated parents, etc.

Why do you assume that's cause and not effect?

>It really looked like the only thing the Mensa folks had going for them was having done well on a test.

Maybe not even that. I don't know if it's still true, but Mensa used to accept anybody with a PhD. I used to know a not-at-all-brilliant woman who was a Mensa member by virtue of her doctorate in Library Science.

When I was a kid there was a Pop Shoppe store by my house that sold different flavors of soda pop in thick little glass bottles. You'd grab a crate, fill it up with whatever mix of flavors struck your fancy, and pay a deposit for the bottles. When you'd drank them all you brought your crate of empty bottles back for a refill.

Seemed like a pretty good idea to me. It went out of business, though, I think because people wanted Pepsi and Coke brands.

>In the US, various bulk stores have tried to introduce the packaging reuse notion, but all have gone out of business because we take convenience over reuse.

It's not just that. Stores in the US don't trust their customers enough to move away from bulky packaging that takes forever to open.

Producing a Twitter clone and dealing with toxic materials are two entirely different skill sets.

You're underestimating the amount of pollution other countries produced during industrialization. There used to be rivers in the US that were flammable because manufacturers discharges so many volatile effluents into them.

London's "killer fog" is quite famous, and Russia's Lake Karachay still holds the distinction as the most polluted spot on earth.

Sure, China affects its neighbors. China is a big country compared to Sweden.

>What's humiliating is that we have a budding Hitler in our midst...

No we don't. That kind of hyperbole isn't productive.

Trump is just exploiting a weakness media companies created themselves with sloppy work and a reliance on cheap talking heads shows. They made it easy for him.

>That means you can only write accounting software if you are an accountant, in addition to a developer. You can replace "accounting" with anything else you want.

That's overstated. You don't have to be a full-blown accountant; you just have to have enough accounting knowledge to do your job. I worked at a funds company for a few years and I didn't know anything about the business when they hired me. But the amount of domain knowledge I had to learn to be effective in my little area wasn't that difficult to pick up.

>The real bad news for software devs is this : you'll do a lot better as a bad developer with expert domain knowledge than vice versa.

Nobody is going to thank you for producing software that would have been great if only it worked the way you intended.

>...receive care that (1) is not life-threatening but (2) can't wait till dawn.

How often does this happen? If it's not life threatening, why can't it wait until dawn?

I don't fly, so I'm just kind of curious if, in the US, we've reached the point where it's cheaper to mail your luggage to the destination if you have time.

True. I switched from Firefox to Chrome when Firefox stopped working. Literally - it would freeze and make me reboot my PC. Not gonna switch back as long as Chrome works.

Well, sure. And if there were no legal gun market, they'd come from the illegal market like they do in places like Brazil and France. What's your point?

I've read getting a place to stay has become easier, but I still hear people complain about getting a bank account without help from an employer.

It's not an attempt to derail "a necessary conversation". There's no conversation, since neither side is going to budge. And it's not a semantic argument, either - you're using misleading rhetoric to misrepresent the law as it exists.

This isn't a new trend. In 1820 72% of Americans worked in "farm occupations". Today it's less than 2%.

The amount of acreage it takes to be profitable goes up every year, and as a result people get squeezed out of the business. That's going to be tough on a guy in his fifties who never wanted to be anything but a farmer.

Not many people will deliberately throw away money just to avoid taxes that would have been cheaper.

Farmers aren't stupid. They're doing what makes them the most money in the long run.

"Fair" is so subjective in the context of taxation it's virtually meaningless. You can't assume other people share the same assumptions rolled up into the word.

The article doesn't give any indication there was a decrease in drug use:

> While drug-related death, incarceration and infection rates plummeted, the country still had to deal with the health complications of long-term problematic drug use.

Well, okay. In that case the word doesn't actually mean much beyond "this is the way the law is". What makes the "gun show loophole" rhetoric dishonest is it has nothing to do with gun shows.

I'm not a big fan of Portugal's drug policy. You can buy drugs and take drugs, but not deal them? So you still have much of the crime associated with distribution.

I'd like to see drug use legalized (not "decriminalized") in the US, and I'd also like to see distribution handled by regulated retailers, so potency and quality are uniform.

>That said - gun show loophole is just that - a loophole. Should be fixed.

The "gun show loophole" is a misnomer. It's not a loophole. It's simply the case in most states in the US for private sales you're allowed to sell your gun to another person without checking with the federal government first, something that's not true of dealers.

The school shootings are irrelevant statistically. They make the news because they're upsetting, but you're more likely to be beaten to death by someone's fists than shot with a long gun in the US.

The vast majority of gun crime is done with handguns, and much of it is already illegal - i.e. felons in possession of guns or people carrying when or where they're not legally allowed to do so.

>Writers rally around the laid off, are eager to commiserate. “Failed” coders are shunned in tech culture. They don’t even want to acknowledge your existence.

This is true. When you get laid of from your coding job, your former coworkers treat you like you have a terminal disease, like they might catch it by spending time with you.

Not really sure why this is.

I don't see why movies should be any less "classic" than books. A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859 and is still a classic - why not Casablanca many years after its creation?

Which is fine - but the point is you know what you're getting.

That's the last book I'd buy from that author. If you want to write about politics, write about politics. Don't try to sneak your political views into a technical book.