modwest

the fact you're asking means you wouldn't understand the answer

Trauma is poverty's handmaiden.

https://www.keranews.org/post/kids-living-poverty-living-chr...

Based on the abstract in the OP, the study seems to focus on acute war-related trauma. Poverty can be a kind of slow-rolling, unending trauma of its own. Not criticizing the article/headline, just a cautionary note to avoid extrapolating too much from this.

Another aspect to consider is dealerships make much more money off used than new. Sometimes they'll even cut a deal on a new car just to get the trade-in.

A used car price collapse will have big impacts on dealer franchises. I know they're not necessarily a sympathetic group but it will definitely have an impact on the economy in many ways. Tighter margins, consolidation of territory as dealerships go out of business, and so on, means those dealerships are spending less on contracts.

There will be some kind of auto dealer market in a year or two but, barring massive government intervention to keep everything right where it is, it's going to be different in ways that touch many parts of our economy.

That is a very efficient mechanism for building cognitive structures that entrench oneself in orthodoxy, in my opinion.

I think it's a built-in cognitive pattern in the brain to create categories for sure. But organizing those categories into a hierarchy? I don't know.

How I model it, personally, is that as we learn more about the world, or learn about more things, we can increase the resolution of our categories, i.e. have more of them at a finer level of detail. From this process, my personal mental model goes, hierarchies tend to emerge as kind of "meta-categories." It's our attempt to overlay some predictability.

Mostly, it works okay, but when you hit a certain level of resolution, hierarchies get exposed as a very leaky abstraction. Busting out of that hierarchical mindset is, in my model, what happens when I "think outside the box:" Putting things which aren't "supposed" to be on the same level on the same level.

In my experience, thinking through things in this way leads to interesting places.

The most interesting applications of this idea lie outside software development, in my opinion.

Often, I find, hierarchical taxonomies are “the box” I need to “think outside” of.

not the same thing, no

Look man anyone trying to convince you in 2020 that "plastic is not a significant pollutant" is not arguing in good faith.

Please, for the love of god, learn about the climate and the impact of human industry on it.

Yeah this essay is a mess. Smacks of sociopolitical myth-making, not credible analysis. The thing it seems most like is a vehicle to lump scientists into the same category as religious figures. Bare tribalism wearing the clothes of public intellectualism

This essay is a total mess. This “neo-clerisy” thing to me smacks of tribalism dressed up, ironically, as public intellectualism. It’s a fractal of cognitive dissonance

> US fundamentally won’t take strong-arm approach

I disagree

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

This is correct

people are bad & should be avoided

Don’t think they were speaking metaphorically

Oh shit I didn’t know about remapping. My iPad Pro is my main personal computer now but I’m constantly toggling capslock. Next up, assignable hotkeys for switching between apps??

Last time I saw a pg blog post on here there was a lengthy discussion about whether it belonged on HN. One of the comments was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21894583

On one hand, you gotta hand it to pg (insert dril tweet about not having to “hand it” to anyone). According to his own writing, he knew he was in danger of sliding into something he didn’t want to be.

On the other hand, he expressed in his own writing he knew he was in danger of sliding into something he didn’t want to be, but he doesn’t seem to have adapted.

For the record I don’t have any feelings on pg as a person. Like everyone else his history is a mixed bag. Just saying: to me, his writing often seems to emanate from a place where his empathy for others & technocapitalist value system are having an argument he doesn’t hear. Again, not a knock on pg’s skill as a writer or worth as a person. We all have blind spots. I just think that’s his, and we’ve entered an age where patience for people who dwell in that blind spot is running very thin.

> most people no longer believe in the nobility and glory of war

Sounds like you live in a nice bubble.

> Much of the modern recruitment efforts I've seen focus on benefits like paying for student loan debts, workforce training and healthcare.

highly branch-specific. They cater recruiting messages to the target audience. Look up Marine recruiting material.

> I would bet that most people who join the military today (at least in the US) do so hoping to avoid ever having to see action, rather than looking forward to killing for their country

you'd lose that bet

Aliens land? Monsters emerge out of the ocean? :P

There'd be a big war and after that who knows what the world would look like. The fact you still see the world as necessarily dipole, a tension between great powers vying for control over "the little people" kind of makes my point.

There is no difference between an American and a Chinese hegemony. The problem isn't that the hegemony we have is American. The problem is hegemony.

That question is essentially impossible to answer, IMO.

The world we live in, our perceptions of it, the language we use to describe it, is deeply anchored in the technocapitalist empire America was empowered to establish in the unsettled world order left in the aftermath of WW2.

So, what are the alternatives to American hegemony? I don't know. What are the alternatives to capitalism? What are the alternatives to accumulating and hoarding wealth? Not doing that, I guess, right? So, the only answer I'm equipped to provide is that the alternative to American hegemony would be not American hegemony.

(Note: I could definitely articulate a market socialist position here that might reflect my political views but that could and would be picked apart in an Internet forum. The point is that we are all so institutionalized to this hegemonic world that any alternative will be seen as inferior. It will take revolution.)

Yes. War is a racket ESPECIALLY in the post-WWII era, when America became both the world’s armory AND the world’s bank. Every single conflict that America has been in since has been a war of choice designed to pursue capitalist interest. Our wars are imperial wars designed to perpetuate American hegemony. That hegemony is designed to continue/enable the pilfering of global wealth by a relative handful of elites. It is all about centralizing power & wealth.

When I was growing up in the 90s this was pretty fringe thinking. Now, though, 20-30 years later, multiple combat tours & a military career under my belt I realize we should have been listening to Butler all along. It’s painfully, agonizingly naive to think that WW2 of all things would somehow be a counterweight to Butler’s point.

The American economy captured the American government in part, at least, due to the booming defense industry in the post-war era. (Not to mention becoming the world’s banker in the same era.)

So maybe it’s good Canada never really got lift-off in that way.

Also this story reminds me of the F-22 story

EXACTLY. Nailed exactly. Strong individual performance, ime, is a product of the right conditions allowing me to do my best.

> As the only tissue that modifies its consistency when under stress (it’s your body’s shape-shifter, of sorts), fascia is [...]

the cervix also modifies itself under stress (child birth), stimulated by oxytocin (aka cervical ripening) or other hormones

Thanks for restating it, because that’s a very useful reframing I’ve not heard before.

In that case, in my defense, I don’t have the option of downvoting anything, even comments! So I’d do my part but I don’t have that tool

Are you saying this post is being artificially maintained on the front page by moderator intervention?

edit: sincere q, I have no idea how these things are handled

The burden on you is to explain why it would be “censorship,” a word with a specific meaning that does not have any relevance in this context.

The fact that poverty exists at all when there is unfathomable amounts of wealth[1] is a glaring sign of capitalist failure. Pointing to a reduction in the rates of poverty is not proving capitalism’s success. It’s pointing out capitalism’s most damaging and least ameliorable problem: poverty!

Poverty does not have to exist. Having “only” 750million people living beneath the poverty line globally (and a similar proportion in the U.S., about 11%) is not success!!! It is a mitigation of failure!

[1] - One commenter on this site last week or so in the VC community commented there are “trillions sloshing around.”

There are alternatives. We in the U.S. simply choose not to exercise them.

No, this argument you’ve made is question-begging.

What I was referring to has more to do with the labor theory of value https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

I understand why I got downvoted, it seemed like a political drive-by comment. I should’ve explained what I was referring to in the first place. But this implication that socialism somehow naturally leads to slavery/internment in ways capitalism doesn’t is a canard.