marcuskane2

And just like the panic over cell phones, this too shall pass.

Maybe half of HN is too young to remember (or old enough to have forgotten?) but when cell phones with cameras were becoming mainstream, there was media panic over them too - people could be discretely filming in bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. There were even a few high-profile salacious stories where people did use their phones to film inappropriately.

And then we collectively decided that having cameras with us was generally beneficial and rarely harmful, and people realized that creeps who wanted to hide hidden cameras could already do so, and we all kinda moved on with our lives.

I can't leave my house without being on a dozen Ring cameras, Flock cameras and probably a handful of satellites, along with devices tracking Bluetooth and WiFi IDs every time I enter a store or a cop car drives by or having my license plate scanned by passing tow trucks. Drawing the line at glasses seems pretty arbitrary.

It's particularly sad that we just proved this with the massive Covid-era stimulus and yet didn't collectively learn the lesson.

We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.

Or they're a student who has to work a part-time job after school. Or they have a long commute. Or they have hours of practice for a competitive sport or extracurricular. Or they have to take care of their siblings, grandparent or sick parent. Or they were told by their parents and teachers that because they're smart and do well in school that they don't need to worry about studying. Or they know their parents can't afford an elite school anyway, so they know they just have to score well enough to get into a school with in-state tuition and noncompetitive admissions.

Two kids who both went to the same school, were told the same things about the importance of the SAT and dedicated equal time to study and preparation can probably say that the difference in their scores is indicative of differences in intelligence.

But any two random students? There are so many factors that could cause students to underperform their hypothetical max score if they had perfect conditions in the months leading up to the test and day of.

This was posted on a Saturday night (in the US). A story posted at lunch time on a Tuesday is going to get 100x or maybe 10,000x more views than a story posted on a Saturday night.

It's not that HN readers lack intellectual curiosity or have some character flaw or narrow worldview, it's just that few people are reading and commenting between the late hours of Saturday and early morning of Sunday. It's 6 am Sunday in California as I post this.

> hence more promotion-worthy

Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions.

But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.

> here is where I get confused

It doesn't seem like you're confused, it seems like you're using that as a rhetorical device to be pedantic.

> I'm not trying to be pedantic, but

Followed by 4 paragraphs of pedantry, after moving the goalposts from "added sugar" to all sugar.

Eat less junk food. Spend less time lawyering the definition of junk food.

Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.

Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.

But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.

It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.

There's no legal mechanism for the vast majority of what the president has done.

Often it happens anyway, along with some protests, some resignations and maybe an eventual court case reversal months or years later.

That "huge gap" is probably 3-10 years.

A relatively tiny percent of mortgages not getting paid in 2007 & 2008 caused a global financial crisis. If even just 10% of current office workers lose their jobs and quit paying their mortgages, their car loans, their car insurance, etc things will go bad fast. And realistically, it's going to be more like 80% of office jobs gone in the next 10 years.

> a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth

That's bad and a central part of the problem.

I accept that my car is depreciating in value every year I own it, and but I need a car so I buy one. I don't need it to be a good long term investment, despite it being a major purchase.

The entire mindset of treating a family's home as being an investment class rival to bonds and equities is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that's clearly been detrimental to many.

This is much ado about nothing.

The US has so much excess capacity in farmland that we do absurd things with our excess corn and soybeans. We refine soybeans into ethanol to put into our gasoline. We feed corn to cows which kills them in fairly short order, but we just slaughter them before they die from the diet. We put high fructose corn syrup into everything. We use corn and soy derivatives for random industrial and chemical feedstock.

Data centers won't take up even .0001% of farm land, and "food production" wouldn't be meaningfully impacted unless we lost many, many orders of magnitude more land than that. This is panic about a rain drop in the ocean.

I've gotta know which side of Poe's law this falls on.

Was this written in earnest or as an ironic/facetious joke?

There are a lot of misunderstandings in this post. I'll try to explain a few of them, which maybe can help realign your whole understanding.

For starters, American insurance has a "maximum out-of-pocket" amount, which means the maximum you can possibly pay for healthcare costs. My plan, from just a regular unknown company doing boring things, has a maximum out of pocket of $5k for an individual. So there's no scenario where I'd ever benefit from spending "a couple tens of thousands of dollars" because even if I spend the whole year in an ICU bed at a cost of millions of dollars to the hospital, I only pay $5,000.

Also, "a lot of people either bankrupt themselves, and end up paying much more than that" doesn't make sense. Declaring bankruptcy means you don't pay the debt, you wouldn't pay a lot AND declare bankruptcy. You'd see the amount was too much to pay, declare bankruptcy, and have the debt wiped out.

Keep in mind that millions of Americans have essentially no assets that aren't protected in a bankruptcy (car, home and retirement accounts are generally safe). It's not like millionaires are going bankrupt from medical costs, it's people who had nothing to begin with declaring bankruptcy when they got hurt while uninsured and going back to zero (instead of negative).

The real problem of the US system isn't the subsidies for the poor, it's the opaque, convoluted billing system between insurance companies, pharmacy benefit managers, and providers. Billions of dollars are siphoned out of the system as profit to insurers and hundreds of millions are wasted on salaries for the bureaucracy of managing the billing system.

> your personal (not hosted by a corp) website

I'm not sure that's enough. A few years ago there were some set of websites that wanted less censorship than the main corporate sites (or at least, a different set of censorship rules), I forget all their names now - voat, rumble, gab, parler, etc and people who didn't like the content they saw there just went upstream to cloud providers, app stores, registrars, payment processors, CDNs, ISPs and anywhere else in order to shut them down, cut them off or prevent access.

Tons of sites that failed to perfectly comply with American media conglomerate's interpretation of copyright have been forced offline, had their domain names seized, etc.

There was a period of time where the MPAA and RIAA were routinely suing random teenagers and grandparents for life-destroying sums of money because they used Napster to share a song they liked with a friend.

I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed and can't result in people getting arrested, losing their jobs, their visas or their funding for saying things that the people in power don't want said.

It's crazy to me that you're still blaming the poorest, most exploited, least powerful person in the economy for the problems instead of the people actually responsible.

Since you moved the goalposts after I pointed out the absurdity of suggesting that the underpaid Honduran laborer is also bidding up the price of housing to a broader, indirect impact, I'll go ahead and point out that your argument still fails there. That low-cost labor you're complaining about? That makes construction of housing less expensive. The migrants are building more houses than they're occupying.

Be mad at the top 1%. Be mad at the people who inherited land, wealth and power. Be mad at the people raising your rent and preventing people from building more housing. But don't be mad at some guy just trying to make an honest living doing hard work to stay fed and sheltered because he wasn't born as lucky as you.

Kinda.

Maybe I'm too optimistic and we're just doomed, but I think the average voter would have cared more if a handful of things had gone differently.

For starters of course, Biden's rapid cognitive decline and the poor handling of it from the DNC made a mess of everything and prevented a unified platform message to tout the successes of those programs.

Also, the timelines were tough to make work for short-term political gain. There's necessarily going to be a span of time between a law being passed to eg, create tax incentives or loan programs to support building a factory and when those factories are actually built, operational and impacting the economy.

Finally, most of the programs from the Biden administration were hamstrung by trying to jam every left wing and liberal ideal into every program. Instead of saying "Go build a battery factory" they said "Go build a battery factory that's owned by racial minorities and run by women and employs union workers paid at a minimum of 110% of the prevailing wage and provides childcare onsite and doesn't negatively impact local housing affordability and ..." until the whole thing became impossible to implement.

Basically, I think an Ezra Klein type of Democrat could succeed. To be determined if that's the direction the party goes though.

For years, we've talked about how much of the workforce was "bullshit jobs". HN would be full of incredulous comments from people confused by the headcount at various companies, wondering what all those people were doing every day.

Now we're in the worst case scenario- hundreds of thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs (say, in clean energy, non-polluting manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, medical technology, biotech, public transportation infrastructure, housing construction, etc) we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment and government policies that are openly hostile to anything helpful for society.

America could probably still be saved by a "Green New Deal" type of program which spurs massive investment and employment in industries which have positive externalities. Things don't exactly look like that's likely in the next few years, but maybe the 2024 election was the wake-up call the Democrats needed to reorient away from the "woke" social issues and reengage with the average American voter.

> by having a Honduran guy come into the country and do his job for half the price, then use that to compete with him for an apartment, increasing his cost of living

So the immigrants are making half the income, but also paying more for rent? So your thesis rests on the notion that the Honduran is paying like 80% of his income in rent?

Feels... unlikely.

I think like, 90% of the crypto trading volume is by people who know it's all a grift, but are hoping to get rich while the music is still playing.

People knowingly buy into pump & dumps, gambling that they're on the early (pump) side and hoping to get out before the dump.

People will happily collect commissions selling products they know are scams or will happily collect management fees for parking investor's capital into grifts.

You'll never get truly everyone to recognize it, and it only takes one sucker at the poker table to keep every seat filled.

Man, your anger is just pointed in the wrong direction here.

Be mad at the CEO & hedge fund managers making millions of dollars a year by exploiting the working classes, who will happily move all the jobs overseas tomorrow if they can't hire in America. Not your fellow worker who was born on the other side of an imaginary line.

You're not losing wealth because of the Honduran guy mowing your neighbor's grass. You're losing wealth because the top 1% is accumulating an ever larger share of total wealth.

> Especially South Park I think desensitized the millennial generation

Desensitized some people, who understood and appreciated the irony, absurdity and inversion of norms.

It hyper-sensitized others, who often doubled-down on the type of authoritarian political correctness that South Park satirized.

There is clearly a huge segment of the millennial generation who don't agree with the South Park "make jokes about everyone and everything" ethos, and instead believe there are numerous individuals, groups, topics and issues which should never be joked about, and feel very offended when someone does.

Sending innocent people to prison would absolutely be a horrible form of violence against those people.

That's why we have trials, with independent judges, juries and rules.

Remember when the Boston marathon bombing happened, and Reddit users identified dozens of different people as obviously, and definitely, the bombers (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/reddit-regre...)? Remember when the LAPD opened fire on multiple random civilians who they thought might be Christopher Dorner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a...) remember when the DC sniper was active and the tip line received thousands of calls from people claiming to have 100% certainty that they saw the sniper, then describe people of conflicting races, ages and physical descriptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks)

We have trials so that we make sure we put the bad guys in prison, not random innocent people who were misidentified. They're for the benefit of everyone else, not for the criminal.

Or perhaps, that is the centralist position.

To take an apolitical comparison, think about an ordinary crime- a murder, a rape, an arson, etc.

There is some set of people saying "We know that this man murdered these victims. We think that is very bad. We think the murderer should go to prison so that he doesn't murder more people".

Does a neutral centralist say "Yes, the murderer should go to prison" or do they say "I'm remaining central, I don't want to join the side that is condemning the murderer. I think they hate the murderer. I think the murderer should remain free."

My belief is that a neutral centralist agrees to send the murderer to prison. And if someone supports letting the murderer carry on murdering people, then they can reasonably be said to be supporting the murderer rather than claiming to be a centralist on the murder issue.

There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills".

People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.

People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.

Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.

As a thought experiment to check your own biases, how do you feel about people like Colin Kaepernick speaking out about police abuses and racism in the justice system?

There are people who made roughly the same argument you're making here- since this individual became rich and famous within the current system, they shouldn't criticize the flaws in the system that have victimized others who they empathize with.

32 hours per week is about 10-20x what the average American household uses for cleaning/lawncare.

Most people have a cleaner or lawncare crew come like once every couple weeks for a couple hours, they're not hiring a full-time employee for their 3 bedroom house on 0.1 acre lot.

> how to buy stocks, what ETFs are, what a 401(k) is, etc.

I've seen this before, and I remain incredulous.

We learned about stocks in 4th grade and did a mock exercise picking stocks and tracking their performance over a few weeks. We did calculations on mortgage interest and investment returns in middle school math class. Every news source has a finance section and talks about stocks regularly. There are advertisements for brokerages on every TV commercial break and everywhere else ads are found. Every company I've ever worked for had a mandatory training about the 401k as part of employee onboarding and usually ongoing mentions at least once a year. There are a zillion personal finance websites, podcasts, blogs and youtube channels.

It seems like if an alien landed in the US or a time traveler arrived here, they'd learn about ETFs and 401ks within the first 24 hours whether they wanted to or not.

People have to be actively, intentionally avoiding learning these things or actively tuning it out or forgetting, because they're dead simple and information about them is incredibly easy to find.

It wouldn't need to be some plan signed off on by ULA's top brass.

It could have been a single person acting alone for whatever reason. Plausibly an employee of ULA who formerly worked at SpaceX and was mad as mistreatment there, or mad they interviewed and didn't get hired, or mad that SpaceX was beating them at whatever and making them look bad or whatever.

Or it could have been a person unaffiliated with ULA who just found a way to access their roof.

History has a handful of pretty significant events that were basically "one guy with a rifle".

> the police does not show up to a fire or an emergency, why would they?

Because they're trained first-responders, who have medical first aid training, vehicles with lights and sirens to move quickly through traffic, knowledge of the local area to navigate around road closures or ambiguous location descriptions, etc.

There are many situations where multiple sub-specialties of first-responders (police, firefighters, EMT, etc) are useful. The police aren't just showing up to arrest or shoot people, in a functioning society they can and do provide valuable service in assisting injured people, controlling traffic around car accidents, etc.

Almost any of them?

Asking a candidate about how fat someone is definitely does sound like something that would get an interviewer in trouble.

Many people are deeply insecure about their weight, many women feel very uncomfortable when men make any comment about anyone's weight, body or appearance. The candidate might post on Glassdoor or LinkedIn about the hostile (and possibly sexist or "bro-y" or noninclusive or discriminatory) environment.

Even aside from the HR type concerns, it could legitimately negatively impact the candidate's performance. Imagine an overweight applicant being asked that question, feeling flustered and embarrassed while answering "... about as fat as me?" and then trying to reverse a linked list or whatever as their next question.