Western Union had, hands-down, the best rates and the least hassle for me sending money to my home country. The old reputation of WU just doesn't hold ground any more.
160 karma · joined November 17, 2018
Although, I'm thoroughly fed up of what I liked to do earlier; now I'm looking for a new career path. Let's see how it goes.
I was so scared for a while, then I found that all of my family members have the same issue. Then checked HN and breathed a sigh of relief :)
This is HN. Quite a few people here know how the world is working in favor of these things because there's a good chance they built it themselves, or at least know a few people who have.
Of course these products are not for me, and I very much understand that there's a market for the things they sell. Music might be a private matter for me, but it is definitely part of the social lives of a lot of people I know; they derive a lot of enjoyment from comparing different bands/partying/recommending new things. But looking at what the past years (and even before that!) have taught us about the so-called social aspects of technology, it is very difficult for me to believe that communities aren't being pumped for money. Every facebook action (for pure profit motives with no heed to possible harmful consequences of their actions), political agendas festering on social networks, and attempts and successes of being able to manipulate minds of people using such platforms has definitely left a sour taste in the minds of most tech people.
What angered me specifically was the tone-deafness of the article; it didn't mention any of these issues at all, but talked about the topic in a way that it was the best, unbeatable thing ever, and any company not following the mandate would be doomed to irrelevance, which is completely false as quite a few replies here have pointed out.
NO.
For me, music is an intensely private experience. I do not want people around me when I'm listening to music. I don't share my music tastes with others. Music is part of my me-time.
I get where the author is coming from, but music is not social all the time. I agree with another comment here, this article just clashes with me in such a way that I want to throw my laptop in anger after reading it.
It's the same thing with games right now, they just pester me to keep connecting. I'd rather prefer playing with random people and then not see them again. The "social+ money" part is so scary that I hope that I am actively going to stay as far from it as I can.
Now I've essentially realized the value of subscriptions over free things powered by ads and "social" wizardry. I'll pay for the good stuff on subscription/donations if the good stuff keeps on being what it is and not some ad-infestation/"social+" injection which keeps ruining the experience.
I have no issues against alcohol and people who drink. If people want to judge me on my teetotalism, it's up to them, but their judgement is not going to have any effect on my choice. I made mine and I'm going to stick to it.
I've found that Stoicism helps a lot in dealing with this. The choice to drink is in your hands. Other people's thoughts are theirs, and different people will think differently. You can only control whether you drink or not, so leave the judgement (if any) to others and don't think too much about it.
The issue here is that this is being given as advice, when a lot of this is standard operating procedure which comes semi-automatically for most people in this situation (this I do know, because you need hustle to even survive poverty in a third world country). Most people have multiple jobs by default; it’s not a discussion of if you can leave your day job here, it’s about how many jobs you can cram in a day, and that too without even the possibility of “maneuverability”. A mobile phone and an internet connection in such a situation is a rather significant investment even if it is widely available; it’s not something you can just get without thinking too much, which is what I feel the post reads like. While yes, the internet connections have become so good that you can watch YouTube videos for entertainment, few will be doing that without checking their daily limit caps first, and do it only when there’s nothing else to do. If you’re thinking of blogging/videos, you’re already thinking of it as an investment, if at all you reach that point. And this comes only when a person has escaped poverty, and has at least some sense of stability.
Add to it the plugs of Hacker News and Patreon at the bottom, and things start feeling very dissonant. Which is why I wrote about the potential target audience of the post.
Few poor people in the third world would know what blogging even is, forget about even wasting precious resources like time, money for a smartphone and an internet connection just to read/write some ideas which few are ever going to read and you won’t be making anything out of.
This feels like being written by a person who knows that she’s writing for people who like to think about the idea of poverty living, but haven’t experienced it much first or even second-hand, only knowing about it from the news or glossy donation pamphlets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520545
Has quite a few of the books mentioned in the post and the comments here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Peterson
This is not a good year :(
https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t...
Even Firefox Focus, considered to be a "privacy-focused" browser, has this notification pop up every time you add a character to their address/search bar.
I talk about vegetarianism because the GP talked about it through the lens of caste, and I stated that I thought otherwise.
And this is the nuance I'm talking about. I understand vegetarianism definitely has positive connotations in India, but it's rarely about caste, which is what we're looking at here.
There's a lot of different opinions in a country of a billion people, but just labeling it as caste isn't going to do any of it favors.
> It’s not a light subject
None of it is. It's not fun being a vegetarian in the States; doesn't mean people have ostracized vegetarianism because they love their meat burgers. Two different things here, we can't get to the root of things if we don't parse them properly.
But let us be real here, there are a lot of people in poverty following vegetarian diets, especially because meat doesn't always come cheap in India, and dal/milk relatively are. Some follow it because they were raised in a vegetarian culture. Some do it because they dislike the thought of eating animals.
Brahmins aren't always rich/powerful, and the "lower castes" aren't always that hard off, and this has been the case throughout history.
Some of my friends my well-to-do friends eat meat (sometimes including beef) just fine, some don't. Same with people from different socio-economic levels. This just doesn't reflect reality any more.
> definitely a major part of marriage discussions
Again, not all of them; speaking from personal experiences. Most of those sites have a "don't know/don't care" field, and many have that option set :) I agree that the field itself shouldn't be there, but I tend to highlight progress wherever possible
I don't deny this happens, but it doesn't happen _all_ the time, or even the majority of the times nowadays (I can only say what I've experienced, I know others would have seen differently).
The level of conformance (or even awareness!) to caste is different for different Indians even. Some don't even know much about the system apart from what has been taught in the textbook, being raised in a liberal environment. Some are steeped into it. Most are in the middle, and many are very very confused about the whole thing, which would mean that even if they tell you, their interpretation might be different from someone else.
In my opinion a lot of caste stuff is just hogwash. But certain remnants remain, and these remnants vary from person to person and place to place (some might put an emphasis on diet/religion, some on the education you receive, some on the gods you worship, etc). A lot of it has been used to divide people in the locality against each other, which is essentially just classic politics. But much of the new generation (depending on where they're from) is quite ignorant of/against all this, which is good.
I'm not a Brahmin (and am technically from a much "lower caste") and I wouldn't eat lard (I'm a vegetarian). IMO caste and vegetarianism are different concepts. While certain castes/communities/regions might promote vegetarianism and some might not, I'm not sure if they're always an identifying marker. A lot of people in India are vegetarian for a multitude of reasons and a lot of them who are new to the States might not know what contains lard and what not, so he might have been looking out for you in case you didn't know. I for one didn't know about rennet until much later, and am much grateful to an American dude who pointed that out to me.
I think it sucks that people conflate two different things, because it gives someone who isn't from an Indian background incorrect details. I'm not saying that that Indian-origin guy isn't casteist (given that he reacted against your "brahmin" comment that way), but certain nuances are lost here.
> has to be based on the employer's decision to continue their employment and not some politician's whim
While everyone here would love for this to happen, clearly nothing's working as it should be, or how we want it to be. It hasn't been, for quite a while. This is realpolitik.
This image now is a lot nearer to reality than it previously was. When this leads to people not having US-citizen children, or not buying houses, or just not jumping on the boat to reach the US come what may, or just not being too optimistic in general (essentially not tying yourself to a country when the country hasn't done the same with you in terms of citizenship), things will maybe get a bit more sane.
The only way this nonsense will change is when more people who do have other options take them. This is mainly an image issue; in the Obama years, even though it was probably as bad as this today (just not overt), the risk-reward ratio of surviving all this was viewed as better than going somewhere else. All this changed with Trump being this transparent. There is going to be a lot of hesitation now for anyone who wants to immigrate. Anywhere except the US, and only if necessary.