knuththetruth

It’s about 40% for Gen X and Boomers:

https://www.fool.com/retirement/2018/01/29/guess-how-many-ge...

Or they have trust funds, inheritances, profited from dead parents home sales, etc.

>Also, you can game with these laptops now thanks to USB-C external graphics enclosures, giving you a work machine on the go, and a gaming machine at home.

What setup do you use with your X1?

It does seem to be the paperclip maximizer of ideologies.

Not sure why you’ve been downvoted. History from the 1990s onwards seemed to demonstrate that past a certain point, democracy becomes an obstacle which Capitalism has to overcome or devolve into crisis. If anything, the US is hemming more towards the authoritarian technocracy of China than away from it.

Actually, lots of people have that conviction. Over a thousand people inside Google signed on against the company’s collaboration with the military, there was all kinds of internal outcry and contention at internal forums, they pushed strongly back against executives bald-faced lies. It already happened:

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military...

And here’s the thing about labor struggle: the reason why Capital owners try to quash it before it gets started is because it’s transformative. Once people see the power they have when they act collectively, what really turns the wheels at work and in society, they’re changed.

It’s deeply atypical of the US labor movement because the Taft-Hartley act was specifically designed to curb union power and, correspondingly, class consciousness and class solidarity. This combined with the vicious (not to mention deeply anti-Semitic) purge of socialists and communists was intended to narrowly circumscribe what union membership meant and furthered.[0] It’s far different in Europe, where labor unions are much more expressly engaged with the formation of political parties that serve their interests[1]

If tech workers are waking up to their class position as labor, learning the power inherent in collective action, refusing to help further US imperialism, that’s something to be celebrated. And if anything, it’s a brilliant recognition of their position relative to other laborers (highly paid and benefitted), that they first use their power for the sake of ethics before pursuing their self-interest.

[0] https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/taft-hartley-unions-right-to-...

[1] It’s a bit hard to explain in an HN post, but essentially, the way that labor-oriented political parties are constituted and have their priorities decided in the US is backwards from those in Europe (top-down vs bottom-up). Seth Ackerman outlines this in this podcast episode, if you have time to listen:

https://www.blubrry.com/thedig/35556305/a-new-party-of-a-new...

It speaks more to your disposition than anything else that being troubled by other’s suicides is “emotional manipulation.”

And I don’t have “beefs” with fictional boogie man cooked up by Uber, however bought in you are to that narrative. I certainly don’t remember “taxi cartels” stealing and passing around the medical records of rape victims, but that was probably a conspiracy by their “click-hungry sympathizers in the media.”

I don’t know how far, but possibly beyond glib dismissals of people’s suicides as a “real tear-jerker.”

They’re similar to all the government support(subsidized mortgages, education) given to white people post WWII that allowed them to build the generational wealth and greater proportion of middle class standing they enjoy today.

Rent controlled or rent stabilized? Because those are two very different things and I can find no evidence of the former being true.

Conflating a very real and common concern (fragmentation in the android market) with “toxicity” seems a bit excessive.

Is there a community site that outlines recommended builds? I haven’t looked at Hackintosh stuff since the Snow Leopard days, but am reconsidering now that all my macs are getting up there in age (and none of Apple’s new offerings are appealing).

>The good news is that, eventually, automation will reduce living costs.

I’m not sure even this is true because of the degree of hyper-financialization and rent-seeking in areas like housing and healthcare. For example, with housing, even assuming we clear the zoning barrier, you still run into the problem of housing being an investment vehicle for global Capital. They’ll let it sit vacant or be consolidated into rental conglomerates in exchange for a relatively secure asset with marginal returns.

It’s possible that systems in Europe with a greater degree of decommodification will benefit from automation (e.g. easier to build public housing and easier to administer socialized medicine), but this seems unlikely to hold true in the American context, barring some massive political change.

No it wasn't. They specifically tried to misrepresent what the project was, minimize the scope of their involvement with it, as well as Google's plans to expand it further.

From the article I linked, which is an interview with a Googler who helped lead the resistance-

Interviewee:

...

They also tried to downplay the scope and involvement of the project. But that rhetoric dissolved when we found out that leadership had been lying.

Interviewer:

What were they lying about?

Interviewee:

From the beginning, they told us that Project Maven was a small contract purely for non-offensive purposes. They said that we weren’t building anything custom. They said that this was a one-off project only worth $9 million, and that it wasn’t part of any further collaboration with the Pentagon.

Those all turned out to be lies. On April 12, DefenseOne published an article that landed like a bombshell in the company. Drawing on conversations with Pentagon officials, it revealed that Project Maven was actually a pilot project for future collaborations between Google and the military. In particular, Project Maven was part of Google’s push to win the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.

JEDI is the military’s next-generation cloud that will network American forces all over the world and integrate them with AI. It’s basically Skynet. And all the big cloud providers want to win the contract because it’s worth $10 billion.

When we found out that Project Maven was an audition for JEDI, people started becoming extremely concerned. And as the media attention to the story increased, we learned a lot more. For instance, Diane Greene had told us that the Project Maven contract was only for $9 million, but internally they expected it to increase to $250 million per year. And they weren’t just giving the Pentagon access to open-source software — they were going to build a massive surveillance system that gave military analysts real-time information on people, vehicles, and buildings in a Google Earth–style interface.

Exposing all of those lies damaged leadership on this issue just as much as anything else that we did. That loss of trust really hurt them.

>Yeah, high-ish salaries

Judging from the conditions in their warehouses, I doubt this would be true for all the other labor needed to run the city...

They said the same thing about their participation in the drone program, until an internal revolt forced them to reveal their true hand (they were actually doing it and hoping to do more of it), and subsequent internal backlash put a stop to it altogether.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/google-project-maven-military...

I too hope that Googlers block what their execs are planning to do in China, but we're not there yet, and it should give one pause that their leadership are onboard with doing this in the first place.

>It feels like a happy family of devices all working together for a more scientific future.

With this philosophy, I’d suggest you’d avoid paying attention to the trajectory of Chinese society, perhaps even more so now that Google plans to get in bed with the CCP’s censorship and dissident quashing regime...

I think the parent might be arguing that this should all be government-run/funded, like in European social democracies. Tech has been increasingly moving into middleman spaces like health insurance, which only exacerbates the problem.

Link to underlying research/paper:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3226574

This is honestly the most horrifying post in this thread.

Out of curiosity - was this because of their homophobia or something else? I’ve read they’ve been terrible about data security.

>the US was upholding a fledgling government in the South, in that context it's pretty hard to label the US as 'aggressor'.

The fledgling government was only “fledgling” because the CIA installed and then helped destabilize an unpopular, anti-democratic government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_South_Vietnamese_coup

>And I also agree that 'Imperialism' is a stretch because US actions in Japan, South Korea etc. aren't even remotely related to classical Imperialism. Heck, the US gave Japan a constitution, democracy, and even made sure that women had the right to vote, despite Japanese objection!

Japan was a democracy prior to the war, with universal male suffrage beginning in the late 1920s. It devolved into fascism through a series of internal coups.

It’s great that suffrage was extended to women post war. What wasn’t so great was when the US government absolved, rehabilitated, and financed the former fascists and more or less handed the country back over to them to stop talking the rise of any legitimate, democratic left-wing rule of the country. And this was despite the fact that many leftists in Japan had fought, been imprisoned, and died trying to stop the war and atrocities by the fascists. Amazingly, this effort was led by the CIA-backed war criminal, Nobusuke Kishii under the guise of stopping the “socialist threat” to Japan (quite rich since he and his pals dragged the country into a war that caused untold devastation and destruction).

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

In South Korea, the US backed Syngman Rhee, another fascist who killed tens of thousands of people he perceived to be his left-wing opponents. This unchecked political violence legitimized the cause of Kim Il-Sung and threw the country into a devastating civil war that has been terrible for everyone on the peninsula for the past 70 years. And in spite of all of this, the US continued to back right-wing dictators in South Korea until they were pushed out by a popular uprising in the 1980s (the true origin of South Korean democracy, not the sham the US installed).

If you want to understand the reality of US imperialism, I suggest you not blindly accept popular narratives about what the US did postwar, especially in SE Asia. There are plenty of history texts written on the subject.

Absolutely. The USSR was an imperialist State Capitalist regime.

I would argue the opposite. US backing of Japan has allowed them to maintain an insular chauvinism relative to their neighbors that has put them in weak diplomatic and economic position when faced with China. If they had instead become more tightly coupled with their neighbors like Korea and Taiwan, they’d be in a much better position to check the power of a rising China (think Germany within the context of the EU).

Of course this isn’t entirely Japan’s fault, as the US funded and backed right-wing nationalists in just about all of these countries, so they could play them off each other as was useful to their interests.

This is just shifting goalposts to justify the horror of the US war machine, whose interventions since Vietnam have followed the same disastrous pattern. And quite the minimizing elision to call this “poor judgement.”

Staging coups and killing leaders, not imperialism. Engaging in false flag attacks so you can maintain control of a foreign country, not imperialism. Covering up civilian massacres and lying about how many of your troops are dying to maintain support for the war at home, not imperialism. And so on and so on and so on.

Again, what to your mind constitutes imperialism if these actions do not?

The country devolved into civil war after the US deposed and had executed the country’s leader, who they had previously corruptly installed, but I guess found insufficiently compliant.

If it’s not “imperialism” to fix elections, then overthrow and murder the people you help elected, pushing the country into horrific violence (which you then exacerbate), I’d like to know what rises to the level of your definition of the term.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_South_Vietnamese_coup

Yes, a small cadre of extremists did this, after they were kicked out of the Japanese Communist Party for being violent nut jobs. They were by no means exemplary of the movement.

At the same time, the right-wing in Japan (who was composed of former war criminals and had deep ties to organized crime in the country), was extensively funded and provided counterintelligence on their political opponents by the CIA. This intentional subversion of Japanese democracy guaranteed that the country could be used (at great cost to the Japanese people) as a forward operating base for US imperialism in SE Asia, something which was, and continues to be, deeply unpopular, even by those who are not “radical leftists.”

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/09/national/contam...

I’m not sure that Silicon Valley thinks politics don’t exist, so much as it’s that elites (VCs, big corporation CEOs) spend a lot of time/money defining for labor what is and is not political (e.g. their class position as labor relative to elites). This frees up elites to then nakedly use politics to serve their own interests, speaking as the "voice of tech."

This article seems to fall into the trap of collapsing that class divide, even as more and more tech workers are awakening to the power of labor solidarity. That's unfortunate in the face of things like workers at Google acting collectively to stop the company from pursuing work with the military.

Whatever the case, as someone inside Google, I’d urge you to resist this effort like many of your colleagues did with Project Maven.

Helping the Chinese government consolidate power by censoring information and silencing dissidents (among whatever else they’ll end up doing within the context of this partnership), is a dark road to go down. It will also undoubtedly set a dangerous precedent that will be demanded by like-minded regimes outside China.