pc_edwin

Its not that your claims are false, they appear to be mostly correct. My original point was that its a net positive despite those negatives.

It comes down to Chesterton's Fence which basically suggests we shouldn't get rid of something until we have some idea of why it was put there to start with.

It used to be really ugly. Exploitation, slavery, tyranny and worse were the norm. The only business in town was survival where both the price and churn was high. Señor Dang wont let me truly express myself here so I suggest you do your own research because its really hard put in short polite words how bad things used to be.

Compounding entropy is the default for human affairs. Everything you see around is so precious and fickle, all of it was hard fought and won over generations.

While we should strive to continually improve our bargain with nature, the ideas you and your kin share will bring about the end of modern civilisation as we know it.

You guys don't just want to make incremental change, you want root control over the system to rm -rf inequality, poverty, racism, xenophobia.. When in reality these are crucial underpinnings of civilisation.

There is no equality between me and Usain bolt. John Carmack has probably forgotten more about programming then I know. This is where it ties back to Chestertons Fence, you can't just rm -rf stuff you don't understand.

John Carmack talents are exploitive and is making feel very not equal (Victim™). The NBA is the most racist organisation in America for hiring 73% blacks whilst only 13% of America is black. The nation state experiment (borders) is by definition xenophobic.

The biggest perpetuator of systemic poverty and inequality is collectivism. Its inflation. Its embedded growth obligations. Its byzantine regulations. I suggest you look into the Cantillon effect, IMF & World Bank Expolitation by Alex Gladstein etc.

Yes having a job almost guarantees a positive contribution to society.

Fossil fuels are the lifeblood of modern humanity, without it we'll still be share cropping for feudal lords (if we are lucky).

Sweatshops pull millions out of dire poverty. Nobody willingly works at sweatshops out of an abundance of options.

Tobacco hires millions of people and makes a huge impact to world wide productivity. Its an extremely powerful stimulant (& nootropic) that arguably fuelled the industrial revolution.

Planned Obsolescence creates millions of jobs and increases product accessibility to the under privileged.

Arms manufacturing prevents permanent global conflicts and bloodshed. You don't attack an adversary may be able put up a formidable defence. Pre 20th century world was full of permanent conflicts enabled by technology/weaponry asymmetry.

Maybe you forgot include positive impacts of all these things before subtracting the negatives. It appears, every example you just gave is a net positive to society on balance.

Its a little backhanded but I will take the compliment. :)

I relate to your experience a lot, I've got so many similar stories!

Funnily enough we have very similar ideas on how to handle welfare (atleast when it comes to food). I also just think the food should be prepared and distributed on prem via religious institutions.

Thats the only model I've seen which is at least somewhat fraud resistant. For example, India is a notoriously low trust society where getting fast food is like rolling the dice with food poisoning but not with temples. You can get free healthy food from most religious institutions, nobody (ish) will mess god. Some of the best food I had during my time in India is from the church. I've never had food from hindu temples but I hear its the same. I know when travelling, the guides would always tell us to eat from brahmin (hindu version of orthodox jews) restaurants.

I'm tempted to say this should be extended to non profits too but in my experience non profits are like an opposite perpetual motion device designed to increase accelerate world entropy.

This is probably where our similarities end. I believe this model should apple to all forms of welfare and entitlements. All of it (incl Social Security & Medicare) should be scrapped and replaced with an essentials program.

This is basically what I was suggesting in the OP with the "if you commit to xyz, we will assist you". I think we should get very creative with XYZ too. community services comes to top of mind. It all comes down to the basic idea that none of this is free so it shouldn't be free for the recipients either.

Same goes for student loans, I think the program should be scrapped entirely and replaced with a different program where the money is a lump sum instead of a loan. The catch is military service or civil service. Maybe an reimagined form of USACE and a reimagined apprenticeship concept.

P.S. The coming across as a dick part is because you guys (HN) are the most smug self righteous group of people I've ever interacted with (South Park Smug Alert) and it messes with my autism because you guys are smart so you do the 1+1=2 thing yet when it comes to certain areas you just choose to completely shut off that part.

I mean we have service oriented architectures, separation of concerns, domain driven design, incentives, KPIs, resiliency, efficiency etc but when it comes to the real life (where it matters more since the non linear complexity) you guys are like lets scrap all of that and build the tower of babel, a big federal monolith which will be managed by either ladies/studs from HR/marketing (AOC, Greg Casar) or 80 year old MBA/Lawyer (Pelosi, Biden) types who are "not good with technology". Utopia Baby!

I mean how can a city of the smartest people in the world also think legalising petty crime and enabling public degeneracy & indecency is a great idea.

I'm sympathetic to your comment but I do think he has a point, it seems both of you guys are speaking past each other.

I think modern society is quick to cast criminality as either circumstantial or biological.

There is a non zero percentage of the population that are sociopaths and psychopaths with a top percentile disagreeableness trait yet most of these people are fully integrated functioning members of society.

Although their might be predispositions, I think its moral narratives that turn an otherwise "normal" person into criminality.

This goes back to your point, we should not be empathising of excusing those among us who have missed the mark with their moral narratives and downstream actions that follow.

It goes both ways..

How many more shop liftings, car thefts, sons/daughters killed over a wallet do you think it takes before these thugs get hunted and put down like rabid dogs?

Beneath the thin layer of tolerance and civility lies a level of barbarity most of us can't even fathom. This is coming from somebody who studies this stuff (history) as a hobby and even I wont be able to make sense of it.

For some reason, we are fed this idea of post history. The idea that, we are somehow fundamentally different to our ancestors who bashed peoples head in with a rock and called it a normal Tuesday.

We are still the same, there is just a tiny little sliver of civility. If you want to take that away, be my guest. This is what I think about every time I see a video of a shop owner get beaten to an inch of his/her life or I see some crazy left leaning political thing. I don't fear that stuff, I fear the counter reaction. I fear what comes next, thats when things get really ugly, like the stuff you read in the history books..

Unrelated: Please don't ban-ish me señor Dang. While it may leave a bad taste in some peoples mouths, this comment offers very interesting philosophical and socio-economic insights that are directly related to their previous comment and the OP.

Its not free nor is it low cost. The bill is paid by the taxpayer and costs are very high hence why food delivery is correctly perceived as a luxury.

Large companies vacuuming up benefits is the rule not exception hence why its a bad idea to create blank check situations. To give an example many of you may* sympathise with, look at military contracts. Its structured as costs plus so these contractors are incentived to increase the costs to increase their profit. This would be upside down in a free market where your heavily incentived to decrease costs.

P.S. "fixed income mobility impaired" Sirs you have outdone yourselves with the euphemisms this time.

I don't disagree but it should proportional with strings attached.

In a civilised society nobody should starve to death or die because they can't afford healthcare.

But neither of these things should come without any strings. These people only exist because we fortunately live in a society where most of the rough edges are nerfed out.

That doesn't mean we should be accepting or normalising this. It should be frowned upon and be something not to be proud of.

Something like:

You are poor. Your living off other people. You provide less than zero value to society.

However, heres a path to redemption: If you commit to XYZ we will assist you in your journey to becoming worthy of participating in civilised society.

If you chose to not commit then society reserves the right to forsake you.

P.S. Lol I know this post is going to get downvoted to oblivion probably even flagged. Deep down you guys know I'm right but you'd rather live in a world with compounding dysfunction than accept uncomfortable truths.

P.S. If you don't think instant fast-food/grocery delivery is not a luxury, to put it politely (I really don't want to) I'm of the respectful* opinion that you might wrong here.

Also if you think these people who are on welfare are mostly normal hard working expedient enterprising people who just happened to get a bad hand. Again I have politely* with all due respect* disagree.

I grew up around poor people all my life, in India, in the UK and finally America. Almost always its their own doing. Almost always its people who can't help themselves.

This is not usual false virtue signalling privilege checking either, when I say grew up around I mean family, neighbours, friends. People I lived with, people I grew up with and hanged around with.

Its always either people who fall under these categories or people who have never interacted with the former that come up with these postmodern notions and utopian solutions.

No they should be 3rd class citizens.

We live in the most wealthiest nation in the world. You have illegal aliens coming here with no wealth and no access to welfare who manage to not only survive but also send money back to their families.

Giving people with crippling financial education/management problems and worse access to luxuries via welfare checks is to put it politely (so that señor Dang wont ban-ish me) very silly.

Its like giving free clean needles to addicts (oh wait), you're explicitly enabling and implicitly encouraging their dysfunction.

I'm not a huge fan of welfare in its current form but if we are gonna do this and by this I mean steal money from the best capital allocators in society and give it to those that can't help themselves, at the very least it should come with a lot strings attached: 1. Heavily discourage dysfunction with penalties. 2. Heavily encourage KPIs such as reduced discretionary spending and improved efficiency.

I can dive deeper into what would strings look like here but I think you guys get the gist of it. Giving checks to these people without any strings, is in my opinion the worst of both worlds. You're giving them just enough comfort to continue suffering in their current station in life.

Dear sir, Akida Toyada very very surprisingly unbeknownst nobody just so happens to be the grandson of this random guy Kiichiro Toyoda who shockingly was the founder of Toyota Motors.

Just do you know I'm using all the restraint I have in me to not question your mental capacity using slurs (pls don't ban-ish me señor Dang, grant me this sentence).

I tried to address this in the latter part of my post.

I'll start by saying there is a lot of nuance here with cases where I might even agree with you but I'm going set aside nuance in service of getting to the core of my point.

The guy who pushes around a trolley, unpacks a box of goods and puts it in the shelfs of a local branch of a nation wide grocery chain is not just worth 30x less than the CEO of that multi billion dollar grocery chain.

The key distinction here is that the difference isn't just linear, its non linear with a steep gradient. You can replace that guy with a 12 year old disabled girl and it would make almost no different to outcome for the multi billion dollar grocery chain.

Whereas if you hired a slightly less competent/experienced CEO and I mean like 0.5% less, the difference is tens or even hundreds of millions.

The non linear nature to this is not just something to do with humans, its a natural phenomenon. Its the Pareto principle & distribution.

Maybe things can be in the realm of 20-30x when we are talking about CEO vs the rest of the C-suite.

P.S. Just to directly address your civilised society claim: There is nothing civilised about the proletariat or their puppeteers dictating by fiat how far high a person can fly before their wings get chopped off. Btw in such a society, those who chose are an order of magnitude more powerful than the most richest and powerful in our current society. You just replaced one set of elites who "atleast" "somewhat" earned their station with another set of elites whos only skill is in being a good orator.

I tend to agree with you. I was generalising quite a bit for the sake of conciseness (& being a little cheeky)

Its not uncommon to see people in these roles because of nepotism, they write the checks or they are good at short term games (machiavellian, gift of the gab, office politics).

That said, such exceptions tend to not last long because of the unstable nature of these situations.

In other words, those who match the description I made earlier tend to eat these peoples lunch given enough time.

I remember getting downvoted then flagged for making a reasonable argument against a bunch of employees from Tesla unionising.

While its not exactly a vindication, I feel super vindicated right now and I'm not gonna be reasonable this time.

These companies have no way out, they are going to die! All these people will lose their livelihood and worse their options to monetise their skillset/experience will be next to zero. Is this your utopia?!

I've been researching Ford for a while, they have so much debt and an extremely small margin for error for the EV transition. It was gonna be so tight and now their fate is sealed.

I'm not proud of this but a part of me find a bit of joy in what comes next. There is this Thanos side of me that feels like a grave injustice have been done here. These people have no right to have this much power over a company.

You really think a CEO isn't worth 300-400x more than a line worker? Honestly I can't fathom that level of ignorance/cognitive-dissonance.

Replace CEO with any sort of leadership role in any kind of organisation/entity with skin in the game (where outcomes can hurt). Whether if its football coaches, generals, head of state etc.

I know nobody (sane) disputes the difference between a c-suite employee vs a line worker but what I'm talking about is the exponential nature.

These people are barely human. Imagine the stakes, the leverage, the consequences and the sheer amount of context you need. Being in the top percentile of IQ, EQ, competence, industriousness etc are just tablestakes. You need to be ruthless while at the same time have an immense capacity for empathy. You need to be extremely conscientious/industrious while at the same time having a large reservoir of creativity. Its like the infinity stones, you can't just be a galaxy brain or just have the gift of the gab or be a psycopath. You need it all and more while competing against people just like you for rarified roles.

To top it off, all of this just gets you into the ring, you also need to actually win and win consistently over period of time. Usually this requires sacrificing your entire life. Btw this where the barely human part comes in, these people thrive on this. All these CEOs have enough money to retire on a beautiful ranch or oceanfront mansion, instead they work 70 hour weeks.

And you think these people are somewhat similar to the guy who screws in car parts? You think society should value these people in somewhat the same realm? like a linear nature (50% or 300% more).

This kind of thinking is what leads to the end of civilisations. These people should be revered. We should be grateful.

I still can't accept there are people in the world who think its somewhat similar. This is not an IQ thing, its not even a being well read thing.. This is common sense. We all have met people in our lives where we go "oh there are level to this game", like freaks of nature.

How can you not think its the same for you know, leading a multi billion dollar public corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees.. Its mind boggling. How can people no see the asymmetry!

"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

You either die as a cool edgy app/platform or you live long enough to face the innovators dilemma.

Surprisingly, I think its a good thing on balance. It creates room for disruption from newcomers.

They really want to but Lina Khan will blow up the acquisition before the ink even has a chance to dry.

Especially after the bruising FTC for from the Activision fight. Unlike Activision, the FTC actually has a case here.

I'm not an industry expert (mobile gaming) but currently (14/09/2023) App Lovin (NASDAQ:APP) is worth more than Unity (NYSE:U) and they make twice as much in revenue with a higher profit margin (less negative).

Its seems like advertising is where its at with mobile gaming and I don't why that will change anytime soon.

I see the rationale behind your point but I tend to differ. I have faith in humanity.

If anything, we are not creating enough people. There are both implicit and explicit growth obligations underlying the functioning of society, a population collapse would almost certainly result in extreme destabilisation.

On one hand I agree we as a species have passed a threshold where we are playing with fire in many regards.

On the other hand, I tend disagree with the claims of fragility. My (somewhat shallow) readings of the data both past and present suggest these systems are much more anti-fragile and multi-dimensional then we give them credit for.

There is no doubt we are manipulating them at a scale which will almost certainly come with consequences. That said, the consequences appears to me as more of a mixed bag than existential in nature.

There are some studies that suggest our contribution may have staved of the next glacial period by as much as 50,000 years. Tbf, I don't give much cadence to such predictions from both sides, these systems are way too complex for us to make claims beyond the fact they ware messing with them..

Side note on Oil Barons:

The evil Mr Burns trope is a tree hugging hippie fantasy. Most of these companies are public corporations majority held by institutions (index funds) which are mostly made up of pension funds, 401Ks, sovereign funds, college endowments etc.

There are outliers but they at the exception to the rule. Oil and commodities in general are a very hard line of business. You have a short period of supply/demand mismatch where you get to pretty much print money but supply catches up real quick and then its a decade of survival until the cycle repeats. A lot of companies die during this time, usually the small/independent ones..

And even when he had Oil Barons like Rockefeller, should they be really considered as evil? Arguably they played a critical role in not only the rise of the American Empire but even modern civilisation as we know it.

If haven't noticed it yet, I really think we are underestimating the role fossil fuels played in creating the world we see around us by an order of magnitude. Beyond that, I believe people are equally underestimating how bad things used be in the past. We as species were under the tyranny of nature in a manner not so dissimilar to a chimpanzee or a wolf.

Its not about FAANG, big tech or even VCs for that matter. Its about resources, incentives and vested interests..

Building anything interesting at scale requires a group of very talented people collaborating over a period of time. This is not easy and its definitely not free or cheap.

While hobbyists and tinkerers might invent groundbreaking tech, it takes resources to propel such projects to their full potential. Resources require vested interests (skin in the game).

If it wasn't for Googles and other early adopters strong financial motive (vested interest) to avoid paying Microsoft/IBM licensing fees, linux would likely still be a niche operating system for hobbyists.

Every major OSS tech you can think is supported by either a consortium of commercial interests, a single direct commercial interest or public grants. Public grants are extremely unreliable because of reasons I will refrain from explaining to avoid the wrath of señor dang.

P.S. Git was invented by Linus out of necessity because linux crossed a threshold of complexity and scale.

Let say you have a cool pretty printing library on one end and on the other end you had a new kind of in memory data store that is an order of magnitude better in performance and efficiency while providing exceptional horizontal scaling.

What I'm getting at with "interesting" are projects that look more like the latter.

There are plenty of exceptions where you have projects that fits (barely) into the interesting category while staying just below the complexity threshold that it can be maintained by one guy and a few community contributions.

Yet they are still the exception to the rule and even then you often have one of the following outcomes: - The features or the project as a whole get stolen/integrated by FAANG, hobbyist burns out and hobbyist ends up depreciating/archiving the project. - The project gains a lot of momentum and gets supported by FAANG. - Hobbyist burns out and depreciates/archives the project - Hobbyist commercialises the project.

P.S. Entropy is a ditch and this is what many of the HN utopians fail to understand, it takes a immense amount of work to build a somewhat self-sustaining entity to fend of entropy. I have theory that its one of the blindspots of being young and technical. You see the world as a massive legacy monolith that you have to refactor into these cool edgy microservices which is super easy and all the problems will be solved and happily ever after. While I don't disagree with parts of the original claim, the solution IMO will end modern civilisation as we know it. I have a bunch of labels for this kind of thinking and the people who preach it but I know señor dang wont be happy about it so I digress..

The thing is its not the 90s anymore, pretending otherwise is how you get LibreOffice or Inkscape.

Tech has come a long way since the creation of linux or python. Even these projects have gotten to a level of sophistication that it would implode without big tech support.

Why do you think you don't see any interesting oss tech from hobbyists is these days? All the ones you see are either incubated inside FAANG or VC backed.

To build, grow and maintain anything thats interesting these days will require a group of pretty talented people and these people have plenty of other prospects where they'll get paid pretty well.

Most of you guys are missing the forest for the trees. HashiCorp has been around for over a decade now and they've never turned a profit. ZIRP is over.

If you guys keep sending these companies to the graveyard, there will no longer be an incentive to fund them. Then OSS will be reduced down to projects incubated by FAANG or stuff created by hobbyists.

Imagine you are a capital allocator, why would you burn your (LPs) money for what amounts to free R&D for MSFT/GOOGL/AMZN.

If you are going trash a company for taking the only viable path to maintain its existence, at the very least provide a feasible alternative.

In this case its not about clearance, its about immigration status.

I'm not an expert on any of this but my understanding is you can work straight away as a refugee with a pending status. This is fine for normal companies but it gets very tricky for companies under ITAR.

If the asylum application gets rejected, the work the person did when on pending status could be a violation. All the work they do after rejection would be an ITAR violation (so the company would have continuously monitor status).

Yes it is extremely difficult and expensive but thats besides the point, what I'm getting at here is its unworkable/unfeasible.

You will inevitably break ITAR, this is why most companies under ITAR (& gov agencies like NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/careers/working-with-nasa) does exactly what SpaceX is being prosecuted (persecuted) for.

This is a cut and dry case of political persecution. Not only was this practice not scrutinised, its commonplace and recommended by other agencies (intelligence/enforcement). Refugees/Asylees is a common way to get spies into the country.

SpaceX (any other company) would love to hire cheap labour that would be extremely gracious for the opportunity. They are literally using videos by Elon Musk in the case where he is saying ITAR laws are silly (I disagree btw).

Every company that has to follow ITAR does this. Its simply not feasible to determine and continuously monitor the legibility of asylees and refugees.

Set aside how expensive it will be, you will inevitably end up breaking ITAR laws which is significantly worse.

I know most people on HN heavily lean a certain way but come on, blatant persecution of political enemies.. No matter how you try to rationalise this you know this is wrong.

Weaponisation of the judicial branch is what you see in countries we look down on with pity.

Hate him all you want, the guy is not a racist or a xenophobe. He would much rather have geniuses from all over the world come work for his company.

Even if he set up a very expensive system (probs breaks INA & civil rights) to determine and monitor the legibility of refugees and asylees, he'll still inevitably break ITAR. Most companies that has to follow ITAR does the same thing, this is as cut and dry as it gets when it comes targeted prosecution.

How is this not reasonable? What is your alternative?

Put them in housing? THEY WILL BURN DOWN THE HOUSE! Allow them to stay? THEY WILL BURN DOWN YOUR STREETS!

Why tf do you think its ok for you to be too scared to let your kids play outside IN THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!

THIS IS NOT NORMAL. THIS IS NOT OK! YOU GUYS ARE F** CR*ZY!!!!

I just don't get how is this not obvious.

There are a lot of seriously SICK or DISREGULATED people who are ILLEGALLY staying in PUBLIC AREAS causing PUBLIC HARM. They are taking part in ILLEGAL activities that are generally degenerate, indecent and uncivilised.

Any normal functioning society handle this with a proportionate response and its really really simple. YOU REMOVE THESE PEOPLE FROM SOCIETY.

They forfeited their right to participate in society through their actions and/or their condition.

This is how we have been handling this issue for ever!

Simple does not mean easy!

Societies have been dealing with this since the dawn of modern civilisations. ItS ridiculous for us, the most advanced human civilisation by far, to struggle with this. Its dumbfounding!

The solutions are simple, they are not easy because we have a small minority of *** who refuse do or let others do anything that would be actually EFFECTIVE.

I try my best to be civil in the comments but this is one issue that triggers me. ITS CRAZY! How can you guys not see these people are evil or deeply sick... USUALLY BOTH!

One of the most richest areas of the richest country in the world inhabited by the smartest people in the world SHOULD NOT have this issue. ITS ***NG CRAZY!!!

I'm guessing you've never had any experience with addicts, especially at the late stages.. Just google what addiction does to you, especially to your brain.

You can't have it both ways.

These are either people with a physiological disease or people who are wilfully and consciously causing public harm.

These ideas aren't ridiculous, we just happen to live in a society where there is a loud minority of people who believes tolerance is an unimpeachable value to uphold at all times with no exception.

This goes completely against reality and when we meet reality like the (disproportionate) crime situation, homelessness, drug addiction, welfare abuse, mass (economic) migrations etc. These people refuse to do anything or let others do anything effective.