hnuser847

Nah, I don't see it. They've been trying to make smart glasses a thing for over a decade and it's not working. Nobody wants them. I don't think it's necessarily a privacy thing, it's just that smart glasses don't solve a real problem. Same with VR.

> if you think the president can go to war without congressional approval then you are unamerican

The last time congress declared war was 1942. That ship long ago my friend.

Exactly. As distasteful as it is to put it in these terms, some slaveholders had massive "balance sheets" consisting of thousands of human "assets". Outlawing slavery meant reducing the value of these assets to zero.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, prior to AI tools you spent 1 hour per week coding? And now you spend 30 minutes per week?

The sole purpose of companies hiring foreign workers is to pay less in wages. This results in lower wages for Americans. It’s that simple.

This law needs the addition of a third kind of person: one who is neither devoted to the goals of the organization nor the organization itself, but merely wishes to use the organization as a vehicle to push their own social and political beliefs (such as DEI).

Are the Elites in the room with us now?

I mean, it sounds like your kids are just following the example you set. They're watching you sit in front of a screen as a form of recreation and they're simply doing the same. I think it's also worth noting that your hobbies are solo activities, so even if your kids did want to connect with you in a non-screen hobby, you'd be unavailable anyways. Maybe you could make the first move and invite them to do something outside with you?

Yes, only the best buildings from hundreds of years ago have been preserved, but that still doesn't explain why we build ugly buildings right now. You would think we would be able to draw on centuries of architectural trial and error to determine what is objectively pleasing to people. Instead it's like the past never existed. Architects keep building hideous blobs of steel and glass and wondering why people don't like their creations.

This article has a graph going back over a century. The percent of young adults living with parents in 1960 was only 29%, so I'd say the current value is pretty significant.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/04/a-majorit...

That's not why the electoral college was created. The three fifths compromise was appended to the electoral college system, but it was not the reason for it being created in the first place.

The reason why we have an electoral college system, according to James Madison in the Federalist papers, is because the United States is intended to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. States within the US are not meant to be mere provinces; they are intended to be mini-countries with their own laws and customs under a broader federal umbrella. The electoral college system allows the states to cast the votes for President, instead of the majority of citizens voting directly.

It's sort of like how an HOA works, where each unit has one vote. The units themselves comprise the voting body, not the individual people living in each unit. The individuals in each unit might have different opinions and preferences, but at the end of the day they must submit a single vote representing their unit. The electoral college system works the same way, with the caveat that the number of votes apportioned to each state is relative to the size of the population.

If Amazon did that, sales would drop to zero and retailers would leave Amazon. eCommerce is a low-margin business. Sellers will only stay on Amazon as long it's profitable for them.

> You pay these fees so the products aren't cheap.

Except they are, otherwise consumers wouldn't use Amazon. Whenever I want to buy anything, I check Amazon first. 9 times out of 10 it's the same price as every other retailer with the added benefit of free shipping and free returns. If that wasn't the case, I would have no reason to use Amazon.

The “hidden tax” described in the article is to sellers, not consumers. Free shipping is subsidy for consumers that costs Amazon billions of dollars. I have personally never seen what you’re describing.

The TL;DR is that the “hidden tax” is onerous advertising fees paid by third-party retailers to have their products appear high in search results.

I don’t really see the issue here, since this appears to be a win-win for both consumers and sellers. Consumers get the cheap stuff they want with free shipping, and sellers get access to hundreds of millions of customers and the volume of sales needed to survive in a low-margin business. The fact that sellers are willing to pay these fees suggests that’s it worth it for them to be on Amazon. If it wasn’t worth it, they would be somewhere else.

> For his final presentation at architecture school, Hedström proposed Inxect Island, an apartment complex built around mealworm farming, sustained by ocean-borne plastic, on a decommissioned oil rig moored outside Tórshavn.

This sounds more like the set of a Balenciaga runway show than an a helpful vision for the future. Complete with a dash of "zey vill eat zee bugs", it's hard to tell whether or not this is satire.

> For me, it's harder and harder to find the initial novelty that made programming fun.

I struggled with that for years before finally accepting that the magic wasn’t coming back. I’ve since moved on to other non-tech interests that are giving me that sense of magic again.

I think what a lot of us found to be so magical and entrancing was the initial process of discovery and learning. At least for me, it was downright addicting to figure out how to bend the computer to my will, but the thing about that phase is that it’s kind of a one time deal. Once you’ve learned how to write software to a professional level, the only way to keep the magic alive is to keep going deeper. And frankly I got to a point where I didn’t want to spend any more time in front of screen.

Homeownership by age demographic has been surprisingly stable over the past 20 years.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

Because nobody would want to use FedBook. People on all ends of the political spectrum have reasons to not want to share their most personal and sensitive data directly with the government. Plus, because FedBook would have to be very careful about how it moderates content in order to not infringe on users 1st Amendment rights, it would likely be a cesspool of racist and conspiratorial content.

The problem with the concept of covid-induced brain fog is that the symptoms of brain fog are indistinguishable from general anxiety. I'm still not convinced that brain fog is a legitimate, medical outcome of having covid, as opposed to a culturally-conditioned response that's dependent on one's perception of the severity of covid. Anecdotally, among the people I know in real life, the only ones that have complained about post-covid brain fog are those that already tend to be hypochondriacs or doomers.

It’s fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree with his ideas without realizing it.

I'm glad you brought up Singapore, since they can actually force people with mental health or addiction issues into shelters. Imprisoning people for being mentally ill or addicts is a viable to solution to homeless and it clearly works for Singapore, however this will never happen in the West. For better or worse, individual liberty is sacred in our cultural tradition, and it will never be politically palatable to force people into shelters.

Nah, it’s caused by mental illness and drug addiction. Short of rounding them up and forcing them to get help, there’s actually nothing we can do to get these people off the street.

React was released back in 2012/2013. The web was already broken without JavaScript back then, and had been for quite some time. Remember jQuery? And FB placing tracking codes in cookies has nothing to do with React.

Opposite experience for me. After I had kids, I realized how shitty and neglectful my parents had been. They kept me alive but they otherwise didn’t do much. They were more like roommates than parents.

I definitely felt this when walking through the city center of Florence last fall. The streets and piazzas were jammed with thousands of tourists but it felt remarkably quiet, due to the almost complete absence of cars.

^^^this. I would find this infinitely more interesting than cloning a wooly mammoth or a dinosaur.

How long did it take you to forgive them? Are they still in your life?

For me personally, I think it's too soon to forgive them. The past six months have been the first time in my life that I've allowed myself to feel all the pent up rage I have towards them. It's the first time that I've stopped making excuses for their behavior too. I feel like I need to process all this anger before I can forgive them. And even then, I'm not sure I want them back in my life. They've continued to disappoint me even well into adulthood. For example, they chose to go on a long vacation instead of being in town during the birth of my first son (their first grandson). They missed his first birthday party as well, despite living only 45 minutes away.

That's interesting that you advise staying away from shrinks. Did you have a bad experience? I've been relying heavily on my therapist (and books written by therapists) to help me process these realizations. It's been extremely painful but overall I've found it helpful, especially the books.

My entire life I believed that my childhood was pretty decent, and fairly privileged even. My parents provided a safe and stable home environment in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, sent me to some decent public schools, took me on nice vacations, and paid for my college in full.

After having kids of my own, a flood of disturbing realizations came to me about all the things they didn't do. For example, my parents never played with me. Ever. They never asked me about my day, asked what I was interested in, asked for my opinions on things, or tried to get to know me. We never hugged either. They were both completely incapable of comforting me when I was upset, and would get angry at me for expressing my emotions. They didn't teach me anything. Nothing. They didn't teach me how to cook, how to do laundry, how to manage money, how to fix stuff around the house, or how to manage my time. They gave me zero structure or rules, and simply did not care what I did or how late I stayed up. I was a latchkey kid starting at the age of 9. I spent the majority of my free time playing video games in my parents' basement.

My dad was also a "functioning" alcoholic. He was functioning in the sense that he could hold down a well-paying corporate job, but was otherwise totally checked out. He would get home from work at 6, pour a glass of scotch, plop down in front of the TV, and stay seated there for the rest of the night. Weekends weren't that different. Although he was physically present, he may as well have not been in my life at all. My mom wasn't much better. Although she didn't have a drinking problem, she enabled my dad's drinking and was obsessed with her own career, and was basically checked out as a parent as well.

It took my until the age of 34 to realize that my upbringing has had a disastrous impact on my mental health. Although from the outside my life looks pretty successful and prosperous, my inner world has been a jumbled mess of anxiety, fear, denial, and avoidance for my entire life. When I learned about the concept of "hypervigilance", it was like having my core personality trait summed up as a trauma symptom.

It's been a massive uphill battle for me to learn, essentially from scratch, how to be a good father. My number one goal is be emotionally present for my sons. My oldest isn't even two yet, but I try to: comfort him when he's upset, give him the vocabulary to express what he's feeling, play with him on the floor everyday, teach him the names of things we see on our walks together (birds, plants, trees, etc.), read to him, and give him choices that he can make on his own. As he gets older, I want to help him discover who he is and what he likes, rather than force him to like the things I like. Above all, I want to be present in his life, and for him to truly feel that he's loved and supported by me.

It would be worse in different ways.

1. There’s a lot of backlash against Twitter’s new owner for his change in editorial policy. Users or tweets that would have been previously removed are no longer being censored. On a government-run platform protected by the first amendment, no censorship would be permitted. That’s mean you would have, for better or worse, a ton of racist content, conspiracy theories, violent images, pornographic images, and fake news.

2. There’s a lot of concern of data security and privacy. If you don’t trust Zuckerberg with your data, would you trust the government?

3. People flock to services that other people widely use. There are numerous social network alternatives these days, but people still flock to the major ones like FB, IG, TikTok, etc. Would anyone want to use FedBook? I have my doubts that a government-run social media platform would gain any real traction.