jiscariot

If we're going to put the SF homeless problem on "neoliberal ideology", we should also give "neoliberal ideology" (e.g. free markets/trade/globalization) credit for lifting almost a billion people out of poverty in developing nations (mainly China, India) in the 00s.

I think there is also value to the general online/web community, in keeping the reddit community on reddit.

I know a lot of people like Shop Class as Soulcraft, but I found the author's rosy glasses and philosophy about the "dignity" in manual labor to be extremely tiresome. There is an irony that really didn't transition to crappy m/c mechanic like the book would have you believe, but rather to an author with a best selling book. Granted I also think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of the most overrated books ever, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

> That's like saying the person who leaves their car unlocked is the root cause of the theft.

Funny that should come up. Minnesota Attorney General Kieth Ellison is blaming Kia and Hyundai for our rash of auto theft and associated crime.

https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-minneapolis-keith-elli...

This case is the whole reason the "disparate impact" phrase exists and its had a chilling effect on employment testing. If you're a large FANG company hiring programmers, you risk testing (validating someone can write code), but if you don't have the pocketbook and legal team, there is not much incentive to put your company at legal risk of being sued. This is especially true when you can just use "college degree in X required" as an extremely inefficient and costly proxy for what could have been a test. And we wonder why tuition is so high.

You have lots of things such as pensions, social security that have embedded growth obligations. Like a ponzi-scheme, everything is cool, so long as you grow the number of people paying in. Instead of reevaluating the economic foundations of these EGO schemes and ask if they are sustainable, it's easier to blame people not having children or countries that don't want open boarders, and call it a crisis.

Seems to me the US and Dutch societies have moved even further apart when it comes to social trust/social capital. e.g. Fukuyama's warned the US about in 1992's "Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity" has happened.

Everything gets easier, when you live in a high-trust society--unfortunately I don't think the US has been high-trust in quite some time. The bad part is that it takes generations to build and a decades to erode. My local bodega doesn't have free groceries, but rather a sign on the door prohibiting people from wearing ski masks, because groups were walking out with merchandise.

So it's actually capitalism at fault--not the publishers rewriting the original texts? Interesting take.

The lesson is you want to own the platform. Because then you get to brand the META/GOOG ad opt-in "tracking" and yours "enhanced digital experience".

Much of this is new. Governments have taken much heed to anything that could be construed as having "disparate impact", and are running a reverse broken-windows experiment on the ground. When in the past did we decide we were going to prosecute theft only if the total value was greater than 1k?

And when you own the platform like Apple, you get to call Facebook/Google ads "tracking" and Apple ads "enriched digital experience".

My favorite part of Apple podcasts is going to Library | Shows and then having all the show icons rearrange themselves every-time I'm about to click the one I want (as they update).

Only been happening for like 5+ years.

The other thing the Western media bemoans and digs on is Japan's birth rate. That they have aging populations, yet haven't taken drastic immigration measures we saw in 2015 in Germany under Merkle, or Sweden. Measures that have created massive cultural clashes, general chaos and the resurgence of far-right parties, all under the loose guise of funding pensions and other embedded growth obligations.

Title of this should really be coder/influencer/marketer/guru TILs the alias command exists.

If this was done in 2022, it'd be written in javascript and funded from attention-seeking ad tech revenue, so perhaps we did?

He was the #2 donor behind Soros to Democratic candidates. It's not every day that the number two gets indicted for a multi-billion dollar fraud. It is good to see questions around influence arise.

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) does a pretty good job. It compiles the stats through interviewing victims of crime, so they aren't coming from enforcement branches.

My understanding is those "usage rates" are uniform only if we look at "used in last year", but ignore "used in last week" metrics where they diverge (according to Bureau of Justice Statistics). SSC did a pretty good deep dive on race and the criminal justice system, that covers this and other things such as underreporting, below:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-...

When we use phrases like "generational trauma" being passed down, we end up misleading a lot of people on how genetics work. This phrase is often used in a political context, and to my knowledge there is not a good scientific foundation for it.

Yes, but Minnesotans actually have a higher % of German heritage than Scandinavian.

Exactly. They've got great investigative journalism when focused on direct competitors, who they assure us are all peddlers of misinformation.

It's also laughable to watch them do the daily Meta hit piece, pretending they're the good guys and were never advertiser funded. A gate-keeping, deeply-embedded mono-culture of an institution funded by 5M well-off subscribers, going after a platform that 2.9B people use on a daily basis to connect with each other.

It's not that they are doing it, it's that they do it and pretend they are taking the moral high ground.

It could be a story about mushroom cultivation or mid-century architecture, and NPR would find a way to make it about disparate impact in the black community. The game I play now, is I'll listen until they start in on identity politics. It usually doesn't take longer than 3-4 minutes.

Apple calls this "personalized ads" when they do it, and "tracking" when FB does. They're the good guys(TM), so it must be true. It is no wonder why Zuck wants to own a platform.

I read much of this a while back and really enjoyed the section on "pirate law".

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsCo...

I'm right there with you. When he starts writing about Phaedrus, everything goes south in the book. He's talking about quality while needlessly adjusting his tappets every five minutes, then throwing shade at John. Treating every little incidental thing as a deep metaphor comes across as a little too on the nose and self-important for me.

Two attempted reads and I consider ZAMM one of the most overrated books of all time.

I was always under the impression the innovative part of TM's "service" is taking the bad wrap/reputation hit that comes along with extracting more money for venues, artists and (or course) themselves. So essentially being paid to be the "evil Ticketmaster" we all know.

Artists, venues get to blame them while keeping the base cost of their tickets lower (for perception purposes), while still making money on the TM fees.

It is pretty amazing that Apple gets to pull the "we're the good guys" while their market is affluent people able to spend 1k+ on hardware. They call their ad-tech "user tailored experience" and label FB's as "tracking".

Meanwhile FB provides free services to two billion people and get to be the scapegoat for NYT and Apple. Yes, they sell adds--just like the entire media landscape going back hundreds of years.

The NYT writing FB hit pieces every week for the last three years, hasn't helped that perception.

What about the EU contributions to the web stack, like requiring every website on the internet forcing an accept cookies mouse click?

Just think of the dividend they could pay if they admitted they are an advertising company, instead of distracting people with the carousel of "innovation".