On the third hand, the idea to ask "is more actually better than less" can only occur to people after they've become accustomed to a certain level of prosperity.
5,181 karma · joined February 24, 2010
1. It was a box on the sidewalk with a locked swing-out door facing forward.
2. You put coins into the machine and the door unlocks.
3. Inside are all the newspapers. You put your hand in and take only one.
4. You close the door and it locks.
The first thing my relatives asked after seeing this was "why do you only take one?"
If you model society as a Nash equilibrium, the impulse to veer towards social betrayal is present in all people and societies. It's an obvious instinct and the fact that people are so open about indulging it only indicates that we're returning to the historic mean for humans, that the trust required to have a society based on mutual cooperation is vanishing. The only galling thing here is that the people to whom the most social benefits flow -- software engineers, product managers, executives -- are so brazen about betraying it, or cheering the betrayal of others.
I don't know where you emigrated to, but unless it's Saudi Arabia or Singapore, I would doubt your observation. Americans and Euros have a tendency to view everyone else as Rousseau's "noble savage", i.e. a romanticized alien.
- the cause becomes prominent enough that there is influence or prestige associated with the role now, that it attracts power-seeking personalities
- the original founders are too burnt out to care, or clueless/trusting such that they get outmaneuvered by savvier entrants
Personally, I see it as the entropic drift of an organization away from an original cause or mission (order) towards a vehicle for the pure exercise power (chaos).
Therefore "Columbus was bad" can't be meaningfully correct, unless we're presupposing a moral frame that stands outside of one's time and one's contemporaries -- and if we're doing that, I'll have a lot of other comments.
1. Arab slavers who made eunuchs of their captured (kidnapped) slaves, and
2. the Mesoamerican civilizations whose religious imperative was to keep their sacred pyramids constantly covered in flowing human blood
The corollary of your point, even if it was a fair and accurate assessment of Columbus' affairs, would be that Europeans were otherwise moral judges -- although by today's standards I'm sure you'd also condemn them just the same.
Columbus was a product of his times, as were the slavers and the natives.
Bad compared to who? Whatever faults you'd lay at his feet were not only de rigueur for both Europeans and Muslims of his time, but exceeded in many dimensions of savagery by the indigenous cultures he encountered. At any rate, disease and lack of immunity was far and away the agent of the demise of the natives, not Columbus or those who followed him over the centuries.
> Have you read 1491 and 1493. I have, and they are a couple of the most eye-opening books I have read.
Have you read Rousseau? The man never met a native American, and what accounts he read of their lives were certainly exaggerations, if not fabrications. In his own life, he was notoriously irresponsible. He fathered and abandoned for the orphanage -- a death sentence in those days -- five children. He was habitually leeching off friends and nobles who were susceptible to his charms, until he exhausted their patience and good will, including by e.g. seducing their wives at times.
In short, he was a scoundrel, and he saw in the the story of the natives something which he desperately wanted for himself, but which wasn't there: the possibility of a life free from societal constraint, obligations to be decent, to use one's life productively, to be responsible for others, to live morally. The man confabulated for the natives a lifestyle free of the bonds under which he chafed in France -- and we have been laboring under his romantic "noble savage" delusion ever since.
I mention all this to say, anyone who would read about the lives of natives would do well to read a little Rousseau, then read a little about the man, and mentally subtract his influence which is virtually omnipresent in all subsequent popular thought about natives.
TLDR; nobody wants to consider that the colonel may have been the good guy in Avatar, and Sully a delusional loner.
Here's merely one (of many) better articles that explains why people of San Francisco, than as now, might not favor having an openly lawless neighborhood in their city: https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/california/arti...
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity
This article is on HN only for such a reason. There are many better treatments of the history of the Barbary Coast neighborhood, if that's of interest.
In American films, if someone does extreme, superhuman stunts, the filmmaker typically feels pressure to explain that the character is actually superhuman in some way and not an ordinary guy with an office job. And he or she will be in peak physical shape.
In Indian film, an utterly ordinary character in "office job" physical condition will catch bullets, run faster than a full speed train, etc. No pressure to explain the seeming contradiction with ordinary reality. The film could be considered a romance, having ordinary people as protagonists, and these characters would be doing the above-mentioned stunts as part of the plot.
These aren't hard and fast rules, both sides of the divide deviate from them, but that's been my observation.
The embarrassment is for the comparably unsophisticated tastes, and I don't share the feeling but I can understand. It's like everyone discovering that your uncle is addicted to something cheap and insubstantial that only children like, like junk food.
1. you expect us all to have about the same definition of those terms (yours), and
2. you expect/condone zealous policing of those boundaries, (because these are by definition intolerable and one does not lightly oppose the intolerable)
Taken together, it's pretty clear how good intentions lead to puritanically speech-constrained society. The real tolerance paradox is that even the intoler (-ant/-able) speech must be tolerated.
"This episode of Law & Order, but if Jerry Orbach never left the show"
"Final Fantasy VII as an FPS taking place in the Call of Duty universe"
"A 3D printable part that will enable automatic firing mode for {a given firearm}"
Reading the history of man shows that the opposite is many times true.
The post-IPO 2021 price stabilized for a while around $50, so $50M is about 1M shares. The article says about 1,000 people were laid off, so if split equally that's 1,000 shares per employee. Since then, the price has come down to about $9, so it's a severance of $9,000 today.
I would hope everyone getting laid off receives at least that much.
0: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-...
Asking as someone who's only had a Pixel, or iPhone before that.
So why would I engage? Because you seem to be advocating policies that would directly (and potentially negatively) affect my health outcomes, and your justification is "but you're just a statistic".
I'm a median to upper-middle American, and I get great value from my healthcare. It's not obvious to me that a system that raises the experience for mean, or even the bottom end, of the distribution would be a good thing for me in many respects: emergency wait time, access to top percentile specialists, out of pocket costs, just to name a few. It also seems to me that you neglect to factor in that people of means, the world over, come to the US to access care from world leading treatments in many conditions. So they might not want American care in their country, but plenty surely want it for their own bodies.
Put simply: your "good effect" often smuggles in assumptions about which part of the curve to treat, and implicitly undervalues degradation of the status quo for others. You, as is the habit of liberals, would like to have a debate wherein your moral values about who deserves what and who should be deprived, is taken for granted. I'm sorry, it's not immediately obvious to me that a system where 10,000 people wait 6-12 months for lifesaving operations is better than one where 1,000 people can get the operation in a month and the other 9,000 might have to go into debt to do the same.
[0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=49344#
I was able to find some incomplete data that suggests the US is pretty good on the metric of wait time, compared to many European countries and Canada:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index....
I personally don't think mandating all actors to altruistically abstain from transacting at market price would be a sound policy, but that seems to be what liberals want.
But there are already commercial and free libraries of commonplace items like furniture, cars, and buildings. So isn't what I described pretty close to the same situation today already?
Your ideas are bad and naive, and because you seem to be disavowing my natural right to refuse to participate in this poorly thought out ideological regime which you would have rule the world, you are also proposing tyranny.
I don't accept that your idea of what "bad" is, is anything other than "stuff I personally don't like," only you have not examined your beliefs enough to realize that. In my view, you are unreasonably optimistic about the prospects for success for any of what you described, and I assume it's because you are unaware of, or view unrealistically, the history of these and related ideas.
Put bluntly, I don't want a world where you can tell others whom they should value more than others. That strikes me as an incredibly arrogant proposition and I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings.
Please no.
I would like to exit the bureaucracy of mother hens pecking me to death as they enforce ever-narrowing boundaries of permissible thought -- that is, when they are not decking my neighborhood and workplace with messages demanding my homage to the current thing. You, apparently, would like to make that the universal condition.
Some people read "a boot stamping on a human face -- forever" as a compelling vision, and not a warning.
But even if full cremation is not the goal -- I have laid out a sketch for what the logistics of a large scale field cremation operation would have to look like. This is perhaps the most video recorded war ever, and certainly a candidate for most propagandized. Has any Ukrainian partisan produced anything remotely resembling this shape? Even if my estimates of operating temperatures and corpse throughput are off, they are off by fractions, not magnitudes.
Where is the evidence that anything remotely resembling this operation is occurring? Where are the freshly dug up fields that would be required to inter these half burnt remains? Where are the convoys of flatbeds carrying incinerators into the country? Where are the giant plumes of smoke? Stacked bodies?
Do you have literally a single thing? Or do you have a substantial reason (instead of convenient preference) to believe that the operation would have a different shape instead?
It is simply amazing to me that you feel you have any right to be smug, given the fact that you nakedly and unabashedly believe a conspiracy theory.