piva00

Sure, what kind of business should a person who has US$ 5k in total liquid savings can start that they can keep 100% of the delivered value?

This person is a father of two, works two jobs at odd shifts but has to refuse some shifts because his wife also works part-time, 1-2 days a week he has to take care of the kids. Childcare is expensive and they can't afford it, they get some help from friends and family sometimes but can't rely on it.

Give me your best business idea that is worth the risk of time and money invested for this family.

> The P/E Ratio of the S&P 500 is at a historic high level. Interpreted another way, there rarely is a better time to create a profitable business -- You can get paid $30ish dollars per annual dollar of profit you create.

While in reality, where you take into account the statistics of business success vs failures, this is one of the riskiest things a person can do if you don't have any access to a safety net in the very likely scenario your business will fail.

A business can fail for many reasons completely out of control from an individual's agency, a person who needs to provide for a family might not have the risk appetite for plunging their families' lives into that, it's impossible for everyone in a society to become a successful business owner. You are advocating for an impossible situation, and by negating that a majority of society won't have the means to access the successful-business-owner class while gatekeeping the fruits a society collectively built to only that class you are being inherently unjust.

No successful business can exist in a vacuum, the better educated a society is the better chances a business owner can find skilled people to build successful products, the better chances there are for these workers to innovate, and create a disproportionate return to investments.

You completely left out that these business are only possible because of the society that supports them, it's an extremely extractivist mindset which I deeply challenge you to think deeper about...

> A value could be that we do not support ill gotten gains, to the extent that the majority votes for free things paid for by the minority it could "benefit the majority" and still violate the value

You are entering into a circular argument:

> My whole point is that to the extent accumulated wealth is happening by playing by the rules, there is no injustice in accumulating wealth, nor in accumulating more than those who did not do the actions which relate to wealth building

Ill gotten gains would need to be defined as "not playing by the rules" but you already prescribed that the rules supersede that so there's no way to potentially redefine that such accumulation was ill gotten. Your argumentation makes us stuck in the status quo which is visibly not working for the benefit of the majority, which is objectively true by inspecting the discrepancies between the increase of productivity vs increase of wealth between different cohorts of society.

Isn't an ill gotten gain to extract a disproportionate amount from the gains of productivity? One can still be filthy rich in a society that distributed it more evenly, not equally but at least more evenly. In Western societies this distribution has been severely skewed to the top in the past 40 years, why is that the people labouring with increased productivity do not see the fruits from it? Isn't that an injustice, unfairness, etc.?

I share your view, it's a discussion I commonly have with friends who are too blinded by individuals' actions instead of the systems that these individuals are part of, and from which those actions come from a series of rational but misplaced intermediary steps.

No single individual is controlling what their peer group does but by being a part of it those actions compound. Like you said, not even the most brutal dictatorships take actions single-handedly decided by someone, it's all part and parcel of the system they decided to (or ended up at) participate.

I think Byung-Chul Han hit the right spot when talking about "shitstorms" on "In The Swarm". Societies after the digital age got too narrowly focused on explosive bursts of outrage against individuals, instead of discussing more in-depth the issues that create systems these individuals live and navigate, and eventually take actions that are immoral, unjust, evil, etc. from the incentives of their environment, we only discuss things in binary terms (acceptable/transgressive), focused on the performative act of a monologue of outrage, without solidarity but with solitude, in our screens.

I've had this feeling for more than a decade, reading Byung-Chul Han so eloquently describe many observations and feelings I've had was refreshing for my own psyche. It's just extremely hard to try to instill some of these concepts unto others...

Wealth is power, you're too narrowly focusing on specific applications of this power (like your mention of Citizens United) but if that wasn't a thing there'd be innumerous other ways for wealth to be leveraged as power.

Power accumulation is inherently unjust and immoral, it corrupts, the utopic benevolent benefactor is extremely rare in real life because power accumulation begets power, those who have it do not want to lose it.

Also wealth accumulation is inherently unjust even in your framework of meritocracy, its accumulation and compounding nature is not meritocratic.

Whatabout is quite tiring, we are talking about the farmers you are defending as "rational", and absolving them from being the source of issues...

Can we keep on topic?

That's the trap I described, it's really hard to tell since price is not a good signal.

To me it was trial and error, recommendations, and shopping at physical stores, and like I mentioned as well: it's time-consuming, frustrating, and I wouldn't expect a person not interested in this quest to be able to find good quality items consistently.

That's the usual trope used as an escape for the question: where are your sources?

Provide them or stop being so defensive about it, being defensive just shows you got not substance to your claim. Show, don't tell, if you can't show then you might have to do some more thinking by yourself to figure out why you ended up that way.

These same farmers? [0]

[0] https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/08/two-killed-on-a59-as-tracto...

Haha, yeah, completely understandable, I have a few linen pieces (shorts, shirts, a couple of t-shirts) for the occasions I go to a hot place during summers but I live in Scandinavia where summers are, to me, the perfect level of warmth. I generally avoid the peak summer in southern Europe (both due to the heat but also overcrowding), and when I visit my family in Brazil it's also usually off-peak summer.

I really cannot handle very hot weather, it's nice for a day or two but a week of constant 30+C is definitely not my happy place.

> I wish there was a line of brands and even better shops that focused on quality fabrics and sewing processes for clothing that lasts for ages as it used to.

They still exist, at least here in Europe.

I quit buying cheap clothing a decade ago, getting quality items is much more expensive but at the same time I've had basic t-shirts that I wear most days last me 5-8 years; trousers that are almost 10 years old and the only blemish is a bit of faded colours; underwear lasting 5+ years, etc.

The issue is very few people have the disposable income and are willing to pay 40-80€ on a good quality t-shirt with heavy premium quality cotton (280-300gsm) sewn in Portugal, Spain, or Italy, or 45€ on a 3-pack of underwear made in Scandinavia, or 20-30€ on a pair of great quality woolen socks.

I do it because I have experienced how much longer they can last, and also had the experience of overpaying on what seemed to be a good quality item and didn't last, it's really hard to find a good signal for what's quality since price alone doesn't do it, you need to buy the stuff and hope it will be good quality and if it's not you learn to not buy it again, it can get expensive if you are unlucky or didn't do proper research.

In the end it can be exhausting for a normal person just looking for good quality to find those items, it took me years to settle on the brands I buy from.

Neologism is a somewhat common word in my native language (neologismo), it's a term I learnt in middle school during language classes, sorry if it sounds "pretentious" to you but it's a perfectly apt word to describe what I wanted.

"Small majority" is of a different kind, much more akin to weasel words. Hence: say what you mean, don't hide behind a neologism that tries to masquerade as something else.

That's your attempt at a neologism, I had no idea what you meant until you tried explaining it and honestly it feels a bit unnecessary...

Say what you mean.

I don't think anyone is capable to sit in a 90-100C sauna for a whole hour without breaks, otherwise with breaks I surely have been in a sauna for more than an hour.

Just this summer I was at a cottage by Vänern (the largest lake in Sweden), the sauna was built right at the lake with a pier setup for jumping into it, we had a party going late into the night where you constantly moved from the sauna into the lake, out of the lake, have chats, a beer, into the sauna again, rinse and repeat for some 8-10 hours. I have no idea exactly how long I was in the sauna but it was definitely more than a couple of hours in the whole affair :)

I think one of my most repeated tropes on HN is bringing up that scale and degree matter. A problem of a kind is of a completely different kind when the scale is another order of magnitude.

A simple example: with picture editing software people have been able to create believable fake content for a long time, it did require skill which limited the scale, with genAI creating in seconds, by anyone, a much more plausible fake image than most people were able to before creates a whole other kind of problem that didn't exist before.

It's a tired argument to reduce issues to analogous which existed before and discard how the scale and degree of it changes the class of problem...

> The regular anti: Musk, Ellison and Zuckerberg crowd out with their drums and masks again.

You understand that if you left this sentence out of your comment it'd read as absolutely reasonable, right? With that addition it verges on inflammatory for no added purpose whatsoever to the message.

Fuck the poor ones that can't afford that, right?

No, the full suite: ChatGPT Work, Codex, chat, Deep Research, etc., same for Claude with Code, Cowork, etc. And any new release of model or tool is trialed and assessed.

Just too many products to exhaustively list, it's a big tech company, we're trialing a lot under the sun to find workflows, tools, integrations, including a lot of bespoke internal research, there's a large ML department since almost the inception of the company.

Same experience, all my other friends in the industry report the same; at work we went from a huge push for ChatGPT last year to switching to Claude, back to ChatGPT when it became cheaper than Claude, and in parallel a deployment of open models being trialed with mechanisms to route to other models when needed (and based on pricing).

Over time I can imagine us becoming mostly open models on our deployments when hardware is more accessible and the need for expensive frontier models is constrained to very few use-cases that might demand their capabilities.

Brian Krebs' article is, in my opinion, a much better read for this story[0].

[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...

It will do for about 15 minutes until the battery complete discharges.

Riding at 60km/h on a bike consumes a lot of power, aerodynamics are a bitch of a force.

A cyclist that can do sustained 60km/h in narrow streets is an elite athlete.

Have you tried biking at 60km/h? Even on a very good bike with a gigantic gear ratio I don't think you'd manage to get close to it on flat ground.

Quick edit: just to give you some figures, if the bike + cyclist weighs in total about 80kg the cyclist needs to sustain an output of about 1000W (on an aggressive position down on the drops) without wind to ride at 60km/h on flat ground. Very few people on Earth can do that...

> And you can see here "normal" bikes clocked at 36 Km:

These bikes are not going at 36 km/h, whatever device she is using to measure it is incorrectly calibrated or simply not made to measure people on bikes.

In Sweden it's commonly 30-50km/h for inner city streets, I think it's a good sweet spot, 60km/h has 44% more kinetic energy than 50km/h, and since most time lost in urban areas is due to stoppage (traffic lights, intersections, etc.) there's minimal change on travel times at the lower speed.

One good developer can start a shift but only if there's absolute buy-in from management (and you) to carve out the time the rest of the team needs to get up to speed.

Since you say the current developers are also decent but otherwise inexperienced with the kind of work you expect there's a chance that with the right organisational changes and support (i.e.: allowing the experienced new developer to work more as a mentor than being responsible for deliveries right away) and given time those people could become more effective.

The issue will land squarely on the engineering management though, they need to accept the current team is not up to par for the deliveries while not making them scared for their jobs (that would just make the current developers cynical, and doing whatever they can to claw back power before retirement). It's a long road ahead that requires a very competent engineering management team to pull off.

Not at 30-50km/h, the noise from engines revving from traffic lights overpower the constant tyre rolling noise.

Engine noise from traffic is so normalised that it can be hard to picture how it can not exist.

I only got the feeling of how much calmer it felt without engines revving all around after visiting Guilin, China a couple of years ago. Most cars, trucks, scooters were electric and the only noise I'd hear were tyres rolling, the odd ICE vehicle sounded like a banshee among the rest.

Sweden pushed for FttH even though all outdated cabling was already buried, no idea why just a city like SF cannot do the same.

Probably a main difference is that the Swedish infrastructure was deployed by municipalities with an open access model, so no need for 10 different ISPs to dig their own cabling.

Externalities have costs and if they aren't accounted for then there's no incentive for reducing those.

Taxes are used as a way to account for the cost to society when products and services aren't pricing it.

The one who invested in LLVM?