racketcon2089

Fremont is definitely its own thing which can really charming, but covid + the natural aging process definitely hit them hard.

Just a decade ago Fremont was a kind of cultural retirement community for the professional class in their 30s and 40s with an older generation of artists and small business owners. But now it's a retirement community for a lot of people in their 40s and 50s with school-age kids, and that older generation are either dead, retired, or priced out.

It's about an hour walk to Capitol Hill from Fremont and the walk around Lake Union is pleasant most of the year, but not so much in the winter. Driving to Ballard is probably your best option for nightlife around now, which I admit is pretty hit or miss.

So yeah, your perspective makes sense to me. Seattle has "at least one" year round nightlife neighborhood, but you're right that it's nothing like NY or Berlin where you have both full transit coverage and multiple districts to choose from.

Some of it is that H1-Bs can’t be founders and startups usually can’t secure visas, and Seattle is a smaller population overall with fewer developers coming from the metro area. The Bay Area and NY have some of the best STEM schools in the world right next door, all western Washington has is a pretty good public university (UW) with a CS program that’s been largely irrelevant to the tech scene until fairly recently.

I’ve gotten to know many talented non-us devs while working in enterprise but I can’t do a startup with them, couldn’t even hire them.

Their visa makes them indentured servants who will be deported if they’re doing anything other than working at a big company for the next 4-10 years. This exists in every city that’s big in tech, but in Seattle it’s a quantitative difference that becomes a qualitative difference. I’ve worked with at least a hundred developers in Seattle over the last decade and only three of them were from the region or attended undergrad here.

South Lake Union, West Seattle, and Bellevue must be the totality of your experience. Go up the hill and you’ll find a lively scene till about 3am year round, head downtown and you’ll see a dozen cultural events a week. I’m blown away by how many people project their depression and anxiety onto a large metro area without realizing it.

A text being objectively measurable as aggressive is a very different supposition than a text being subjectively, contextually aggressive.

It's fair to say that usually if the board isn't obfuscating or outright lying in their announcements, that itself is an indicator of acrimony.

But usually, the board can financially incentivize a CEO to "step down" or even help them find a soft landing at another company to make it look like a mutually agreed on transition. Since they know this oustered CEO isn't interested in making nice in public, they really had no choice but to try to get in front of the story.

Given the fallout which is still spreading, I think they would've rather cut him a fat check for an explicit or implicit NDA and thanked him for his amazing contributions while wishing him well on his future endeavors if that option had been on the table.

When you look at the written word and find yourself consistently imputing clear intent which is hostile, aggressive, sarcastic, and demeaning which no one else but you sees, a thoughtful person would begin to introspect.

Anyone who wants to change the legal system to deliver a specific outcome instead of follow a specific process is always going to be my enemy.

I would be happy to die for habeas corpus, the right to face your accuser, the right to a trial by jury, freedom from ex post facto expropriation, public trials, the right of appeal, and countless other things which literal wars were fought over for a good 700 years of hammering out common law.

To be ignorant of the protections this brings and the costs its absence imposes is legal nihilism, the focus on a single outcome in the present with no provision for the future.

I hope the prosecutor makes their case well and the jury follows the judge’s instructions and returns a verdict favorable to tenants. But if the prosecutor drops the ball or the jury makes a decision that baffles me, upholding that process is more important to justice than any single outcome.

Many Americans are not only willing to die to uphold this, but part of their job is also to kill in its defense. The pseudo-heidigerian stuff about government having a state of being just reads like you’re gearing yourself up to rationalize imposing your beliefs through nominative positioning.

I would disagree in very strong terms. The entire economic, legal, and taxation system of the US are organized in a certain way that's only a couple of hundred years old.

Returning some money to some tenants as a one-off and restricting some forms of landlord collusion is about as far as you can get from pure economics or structural reform. Both capital R reparations and reparations as a social justice hobby horse are ultimately intended to preserve and legitimize the existing system, even in their maximalist demands which tend to deflect and discredit more concrete advocacy.

Economics is a vast field with a long history and many possible futures so it's quite sad that the horizon for many people is "american neoliberalism with more regulation and redistribution" or "american neoliberalism with less regulation and redistribution."

I can think of at least three actual opposites of the status quo: one would be a georgist tax that makes holding land speculatively unprofitable, one would be a singapore style nationalization where the government purchases all of the apartment buildings at their tax-assessed rate but allows for a market in 99 year leases, and still a third would be ex post facto arbitrary expropriation without compensation in the style of many communist revolutions.

"Some landlords return .01% to 15% of their last 2-3 years of passive revenue increases and promise to raise rents more arbitrarily" is not a bad thing for those renters, but in terms of economic trends and policy it's quite literally using existing law to _return_ to the status quo.

This approach is at odds with rule of law and historically has not redressed injustices but rather created societies where power is even more concentrated and even less accountable.

The primary purpose of any and all reparations rhetoric in the US today is to divide the electorate by anything other than economic position in order to maintain a status quo whose legitimacy is beginning to erode. And it's working quite well, since you're delivering grandiose proclamations while advocating for nihilism and ignorance towards the existing legal processes that will actually impact the lives of millions of people in the coming years.

On Jezebel's comment section you would have been banned for asking this impertinent question. Obviously they're unprepared to respond with anything resembling evidence for their claims and will repeat it elsewhere rather than engage.

The OP's comment is really for themselves to feel an emotional charge of victimhood, it's a monologue not a dialogue.

You've missed the context that the "shoe" in the metaphor is the act of justifying politically motivated censorship by referencing public safety. Obviously bomb threats aren't protected speech and I've yet to see an instance of anyone of any political persuasion publicly defending them.

> There has to be a will to prosecute. This is nowhere near being followed in each instance where it should.

If a stranger who reads your comment later goes on to make a death threat towards a district attorney who doesn't prosecute, should you be censored or prosecuted for what they interpreted as an implicit call for extra-judicial violence?

Once you legitimize the power to infer hidden incitements to violence in ordinary speech, that power will eventually be captured by your worst enemy and used against you.

Having lived in a few countries without freedom of speech and freedom of press, this article looks extremely familiar. The basic line of argument is that a blogger/journalist/gadfly may not have done anything but amplify existing publicly available information without alteration, but this amplification influenced a third party to act illegally. Even if there's no direct incitement to any illegal activity, it becomes implicitly and self-evidently no longer speech but a criminal conspiracy.

The last line of the article is "How much are we going to tolerate?"

This framing seems to muddle concerns between someone's else's speech, policy violations being brought to the attention of someone's employer, and illegal activities. Harassment, defamation, concrete incitements to violence and credible threats of violence which meet well-defined legal standards are already illegal with both civil and criminal penalties.

Now of course TikTok is a private company and legally there's little obstacle to having a content policy which is more restrictive than the law. Even so, advocacy of censorship in the name of public safety because of potential second order effects on third parties is a fundamentally authoritarian principle.

The way I've seen it advanced in other societies is that first the government leans on the private sector, then implements rules in the public sphere broadening the definition of material and moral support for violence until it's so broad as to be totally discretionary. Finally, it becomes both legal and accepted within the mainstream political culture to punish anyone critical of arbitrary censorship as such.

It doesn't matter if it starts on the "right" or the "left." Once this achieves fixation within the political culture, whoever is in power currently and typically whoever takes power next (even if nominally their political opposite) will use this erosion of norms to treat opposition speech as criminal.

Failure to anticipate the shoe being on the other foot one day is extremely short-sighted, regardless of your political views.

You seem to be describing a theoretical model which doesn't fit with an empirical description of the events of the last 15 years of the banking sector in the US. It's an interesting premise for a work of fiction or as a description of the 19th century but seems orthogonal to any discussion of banking in the US as it really exists today. This line of reasoning is no longer persuasive within or outside of the US so it's sort of like reprinting old war propaganda rather than engaging with modern historiography.

I appreciate you clarifying your points where they were proscriptive rather than descriptive, it is certainly a common civc intention of government and a persistent ideal of governance.

In a previous era from 1890-1910, the purpose of "trust busting" and regulating industry was specifically to limit the threat of any single private entity from creating enough systemic risk to be considered "too big to fail."

There's nothing particularly pro-market about saying that habitual drunk drivers who no entity will sell accident insurance to must be retroactively insured for free by the government to contain the systemic risk they inflict on sober people.

The legitimate benefits of the technological innovations that've come from no-downside financial speculation appear to be increasingly portable, available to other societies either through reverse-engineering or commodities-for-technology-transfer or outright espionage.

So regardless of how much the top 5-20% of Americans and their cultural institutions have a moral or predictive-utilitarian argument for the societal and technological benefits of concentrated capital and financial policy that sees the wealthiest capture a larger percentage of GDP decade-over-decade, it appears to be internally destabilizing and internationally weakening by nearly any metric one could name.

To steelman the other side of this, one could argue the decline is overstated and temporary or attribute it to other factors. But it's no longer the case that a majority domestically or internationally is confident that this is the least bad system to emulate out of all the really existing systems.

Powers in decline and relative elites within them tend to spend a lot of time creating theories for why the majority is wrong to feel the way they do, but historically that strategy has failed, regardless of if what replaces the existing system eventually turns out to be even worse.

> "Government" is about designing a system of different people, doing different jobs, doing different checks and balances against each other.

This definition of government from an 8th grade civics textbook is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, since all the evidence we have from the historical records shows that states are captured by economic elites to the point of stagnation until that economic elite is violently displaced or is forced to reform due to external threats.

> That being said, in many cases we don't know what kind of system should exist to move forward. In these cases, having the free market self-regulate while we figure out issues is probably better.

This also runs against the historical record and requires extraordinary evidence or at least some walkthrough of how you reached the conclusion that self-regulation was probably better, or even possible.

Ie, without postulating a utopian society made up of some kind of post-human who is more moral and more intelligent than all hitherto existing humans, it's unclear why anyone would expect the wealthiest and most influential to refrain from engaging in both the expansion and the capture of state power for their own self-interest. Such a species would have to be engineered and universal because there's no way you could get such traits through natural selection nor can you find them in the cognitive architecture or evolutionary history of primates.

The only idea that could be worse is having a multitude of private lending entities that collect almost all the profits backed by only one public entity that's stuck with almost all of the risk. A marxist might call it "dictatorship of the capitalist class" but any honest libertarian would call it an obvious moral hazard.

I think it's really demoralizing to people who cherish free speech and the sharing of knowledge to see these inflammatory insinuations. Suggesting a moderator act to censor discussion in an attempt to limit the spread of the work of Iraqi scholars at rigorous and highly respected universities who are both in their area of expertise and speaking about their homeland does not have a charitable interpretation that I could find.

Given that you've been posting here for a decade and know or should know all the guidelines your comment is violating, I think there's a good case to be made that the community would benefit from an enforced break from your posting so that you can reflect on them.

Per the guidelines:

>Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate.

>Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity

>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

>Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

>Please don't post shallow dismissals

I would have simply flagged your comment if I had sufficient karma to do so.