meinmissoula

For what it's worth, I have never lived or worked in the Bay area.

Your point is still probably directionally accurate, just expanding "Bay area" to include all the hubs of technology- Austin, Seattle, NYC, Research Triangle... probably plenty of people have the same story as me while living in Boston, Denver, Washington DC.

Your experience matches mine- I only ever heard "trickle down economics" used by people on the left making mocking, derisive commentary about Reagan and neocon politics.

Then someone pointed out to me that my entire affluent, privileged, comfortable life is due to trickle down economics. In the last 15 years, I've had high salaries paid by various money-losing startups, financed by rich people investing in VC funds. Now I'm a millionaire, entirely as a transfer of wealth from the rich. I haven't had a job where my salary was realistically paid by customer money/business revenue since before 2010 or where any of the VCs ever made their investment back.

I don't know if there's any lesson to learn from that or if it's just funny or ironic, but it is kinda entertaining to me to realize the entire Venture Capital backed economy can be seen as trickle-down economics "working".

Are we seeing that? I'm certainly not? I suppose "psychopaths" will attach themselves to literally anything given the right opportunities, but EA seems like a relatively poor target all things considered.

At it's core, I struggle to see how anyone can disagree with effective altruism as a basic principle. People want to do good in the world, but we're all monkey-brained and emotional, so that often manifests in ineffective use of time and resources to do things that give an immediate, visible outcome so we can feel good instead of what would actually do the most good.

EA to me is basically just shifting altruistic desires from emotional-payoff (volunteering at a soup kitchen around the holidays, donating to a local animal shelter) to things that have the best outcome (volunteering at a political action group to improve laws, donating to an NGO distributing mosquito nets in malaria zones).

The irony of this post.

If you over-simplify, stereotype and demean people who disagree with you, you're part of the problem.

Honestly if it was that simple, then maybe we should just say no more killing babies and let the hunters shoot their deer and otherwise move forward with the rest of the Democratic party's platform.

It looks like you've been misled about the US. The US welfare budget is mind-bogglingly large, over a Trillion dollars per year. Yes, Trillion with a T.

Healthcare costs can be very important for Americans working in low-wage positions, but are essentially irrelevant for tech workers.

Here's how healthcare costs impact my life on an hours-worked basis:

Monthly health insurance premium: 20 minutes of my wage per month

Office visit at a primary care doctor: 12 minutes of my wage

Office visit at a specialist: 15 minutes of my wage

Maximum amount I can possibly pay in a year (eg, if I get in a car accident and spend months in intensive care): 20 hours of my wage

To be clear, the American who is driving Uber full-time or cooking food at McDonalds would have a drastically worse situation, and their costs might be multiple hours worked to see a doctor or multiple weeks of wages to cover a catastrophic hospitalization. But on a tech salary, healthcare is trivially covered.

> Of course, mined diamonds aren’t blood diamonds, but her impression was still they were a little ickier

For all intents and purposes, they are. The voluntary processes the diamond cartels adopted to supposedly reduce diamonds coming out of "conflict areas" are a joke. Most diamonds are mined under exploitive conditions, often with severe ecological impact, and the owners are almost without exception "blood on their hands" people even if one particular mine operates more ethically.

Ironically, the narrative of "right wing rabbit hole leads people to <whatever scary bad thing>" is itself far more concerning to me for the stability and functioning of the US.

I frequently talk to people across the full spectrum of political beliefs, and something that's become very clear to me is that there is almost no overlap between "what Republican-voters want" and "what liberals think Republican-voters want".

I read online that everyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi full of hate for everyone different from them. Then I talk to Trump voters in real life and they're generally decent people worried about their jobs and the safety of their kids who just have different ideas of how to solve problems and different priorities for which problems are most important than I (a purely Democrat voter) do.

The "rabbit hole" might be a problem, but the "shining a magnifying glass on the 0.0001% of people at the bottom of the hole" problem is bigger.

> The reason local newspapers are failing is because nobody reads them

I don't believe that's true. The subscription cost for most newspapers barely covered the printing and distribution costs. Small, local-focused newspapers were surprisingly largely kept alive by the massive margins on printing classified ads.

The person who used to spend $1-per-word at their local paper to advertise they were selling a car or having an estate sale can now list that for free on craigslist or facebook. And the local business can buy more targeted advertisements on facebook, google or twitter.

As odd as it seems, Craigslist probably did more to kill the local newspaper than social media, search engines or private equity firms.

We could trivially fix the "80 hour weeks" piece by increasing the number of places available in medical schools and residencies, but the AMA intentionally keeps that number small to maintain the status quo of intern hazing and high salaries.

It takes similar effort and abilities to get a STEM phD, but the researchers working on drug discovery or mitigating the climate crisis or whatever other socially-beneficial thing make 1/3rd what an MD makes. The power of the AMA in guiding the entire healthcare system to the benefit of MDs shouldn't be underestimated.

This seems like a concerning level of charity being given to cops who ruin people's lives.

Would you accept a world in which "1 in 1000" planes crashed because the pilot was on 3 hours of sleep?

There should be a media storm every time a police officer abuses someone, we should all collectively be outraged. A functioning society has to start with the front-line enforcers being responsible and trustworthy.

Bit of an aside, but the socially acceptable levels of casual-hate when directed at "white men" is sometimes shocking to me.

> Post-election analysis would show that the Bernie Bro trope was entirely constructed; there was no evidence to show that young white men made up a majority of Sanders’s supporters.

The author just takes it as a non-controversial statement of fact that "white men" are inherently evil and that if they support a political candidate that means the candidate is also bad, and that she needs to distance herself from the whole thing.

The story arc isn't that anything changed about Bernie's policy views, history or anything else. The bad thing that happened is a rumor that "young white men" liked him, which was bad, and the good news was that Bernie supporters were actually from the morally good races and genders.

It seems like several different things are getting intertwined here and people are arguing past each other based on perceived "sides" and largely imagined positions being projected onto one another.

You can have gender equality and feminism without casual sex. Many young people today, both male and female, feel like the current system they're embedded in is frustrating and unfulfilling.

Everyone's personal preferences are equally valid. We should accept that people who express unease or unhappiness with the current dominant cultural norms pressed upon them have legitimate feelings, rather than attack and insult them by suggesting their desires belong in "the 19th century".

This whole thread really just makes me realize how severe our filter bubbles, echo chambers and distrust of "the other side" has become.

Nobody wants poor people to die and nobody has a religious adherence to "rugged individualism". If you go actually talk to people who disagree with you, instead of reading ridiculous descriptions of their motivations from people inside your bubble who hate them, you might gain an appreciation of their concerns.

I'm amazed at how 4 years of the Trump administration didn't result in Liberals becoming much more open-minded to Libertarian concerns about concentrated power in the federal government. How did we come through that experience without more people saying "OK, I get it now, maybe I don't want so much power and control over my life held by the white house".

Because chain restaurants are generally kinda gross.

The typical American chain restaurant is going to serve you something that starts with low-quality ingredients, then gets a bunch of sugar, corn syrup, seed oil, artificial food coloring, emulsifiers etc added to it until it roughly approximates the flavor, texture and color of higher-quality ingredients (at the cost of being unhealthy). Then it has various chemicals added to it to act as preservatives or maintain texture or appearance during shipping and storage and re-heating. Then it's packaged into cheap single-use plastic bags or containers that slowly leach endocrine disrupting chemicals into the food, or rapidly leach them during reheating in a microwave.

The end result is that you get something that is edible, but probably kinda gross tasting unless your palette gets used to packaged foods and fast foods, and which is going to make you fat, depressed, distracted and tired.

There's a reason America has an obesity epidemic, diabetes epidemic, falling fertility rates and widespread prescriptions of drugs for depression, anxiety, adhd, etc, and it's the food the average American is eating.

> The best you can do is to highlight how bad sugar is to health in general, and hope it influences people to change their habits

We've been trying that for years and it's clearly not working. Obesity, diabetes, pre-diabetes, heart disease, diseases of chronic inflammation, etc are all at epidemic levels.

Humans aren't perfect automatons that will make perfect choices if given information. We develop addictions, we prioritize the short-term over the long-term, we get tired and choose what's easy and available.

We should align incentives to better outcomes. We restrict alcohol and nicotine and opioids. Taking steps to reduce the societal harm of sugar is a good thing for society.

The comment I'm responding to goes against several HN guidelines, but I'm hoping I can use the opportunity to turn it away from low-effort trolling into an opportunity for education and clarity.

The 2-party system in the US causes hundreds of distinct groups and ideologies to be lumped into either a D or R, regardless of any ideological cohesion to any particular label- left, right, liberal, conservative, authoritarian, libertarian, etc.

The state-level government in Texas is controlled by the Republican party, but specifically by a neoconservative, nationalist, social conservative-Christian cohort. The fiscal conservatives and libertarian small-government conservatives are essentially powerless, minority members of either the Democrat or Republican party, and individuals whose views match those labels will likely vote split-ticket in most elections rather than a straight-party voting pattern.

In essence, while the comment I'm responding to is alluding to a hypocrisy of beliefs, a better interpretation is that the "small government" conservatives don't really hold any power in the Texas state Republican establishment. To the extent that any of them vote R, they're mostly doing so in a "choose which of 2 bad choices seems least bad" context.