seibelj

Government can track all money and its flows better. Can give directly to citizens without needing banks as middlemen. Can give money that “expires” - must be spent quickly to goose the economy and disappears if someone tries to save it. Can completely lock a person out of the economic system if the government doesn’t like them.

Every government on earth since the beginning of time is not without injustice. The Aztecs enslaved and brutally dominated their region which is how the Spanish were able to conquer them - the enemies of the Aztecs joined forces with the Spanish in order to destroy a society they saw as a great evil.

The African slaves themselves were sold to the slavers by African kings, such as in Benin, who profited from the export of their enemies.

Where do you want the self flagellation to end? Injustice has been happening since the beginning of civilization.

Unfortunately squandering your money on fleeting experiences is considered a positive by society, but patiently saving, building assets and businesses, and becoming wealthy is seen as an injustice.

Hopefully property rights continue to be preserved but I worry society is trending towards taking from the productive to waste on those who squander.

Also extremely strange is he received a liver transplant much quicker than average, in a state far from where he lived, which later received a $40mil anonymous donation

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2015/11/12/hospital-where-jobs-rece...

Both my wife and I have ancestors murdered by the state for the good of society, so we are a bit jaded.

I have absolutely no problem with helping my children get every possible advantage I can muster. My family is an institution and their upbringing, education, personal satisfaction, and financial situation is cared for deeply by the family - parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles.

I will do everything in my power to give my children all of my financial resources when I die (and prevent the state from taking it) and ensure their comfort to the best of my ability.

Those without children cannot understand the bond between parents and children. The thought of them being destitute when I could have prevented it is painful. I will use all of my business and personal connections to help them and have zero qualms about doing so.

Do you know why so many billionaires came from rich families? Because their great grandparents helped their grandparents who helped their parents who helped them. This is not an anti-pattern, this is called good morals, a belief in family, and strong dedication to the next generation.

You should be totally free to die and donate all of your assets to the government or total strangers. I myself will give every possible penny to my children so they can thrive. I pray everyone can make that choice freely and not be coerced into a decision they didn’t want.

If EMTs were so hard to find, they would be paid more money. In Massachusetts it’s significantly less training and requirements to be an EMT than a hair stylist (for whatever government-regulated reason).

McDonalds and Walmart jobs are often valued less by people (such as yourself) who see them as some sort of hell-on-earth so the wage reflects the value to the organization and what has to be paid to keep competent people there. McDonalds has created more Latino millionaires than any other company on earth, and I enjoy their food once in a while. I don’t denigrate people who work there. Maybe you should try and see that workers at all jobs have value and don’t hate their lives despite people poo-pooing their careers.

Here is an EconTalk podcast about what working at Walmart is actually like. It may be illuminating to the HN crowd https://www.econtalk.org/platt-on-working-at-wal-mart/

Boston is recovering quite well, as biotech, healthcare, and education need physically present people (for now at least). SF was so insanely focused on tech that it collapsed quite suddenly.

If I owned a $1 million+ property in SF I would be selling ASAP - the pain is just getting started

> Fossil fuels now supply about 83% of the world’s commercial energy, compared to 86% in the year 2000. The new renewables (wind and solar) now provide (after some two decades of development) still less than 6% of the world’s primary energy, still less than hydroelectricity.

> What are the chances that after going from 86% to 83% during the first two decades of the 21st century the world will go from 83% to zero during the next two decades?

This is a hard dose of reality for renewable maximalists. What is the counter point to these facts?

If you had a ladder stretching all the way into space, you could climb it without needing any rocket propellant

Technology increases productivity. Not all energy destroys the earth, see nuclear energy. More technology has enabled us to feed the earth with less people devoted to food production. Etc.

It is hard to reproduce the values returned by various instruments. Using modern technology and analytics tools it’s easier to check for fraud in the western blots, so this is where the fraud is often proven. The problem is that this is ipso facto fraud - you can’t say “ohhh I got mixed up and accidentally made an image that perfectly lined up with my conclusions”. If the authors were willing to fraud there then the entire paper should be seen as fraud and the authors responsible shamed because they are undermining the fundamental scientific process.

Your other post said you were demoralized and “quiet quitting”, or collecting a paycheck and fucking around.

That may work for a while, but long term you will be unfulfilled and miserable. It’s time for a change

Best of luck to your software development union collectively organizing to raise wages

My problem with these arguments is that there is supposedly a permanent class of “owners” and one of “workers”, and the workers are completely without agency nor ability to become owners themselves. Especially in software, a good idea can be converted into a business with minimal friction no matter where you live.

America has helped created more Latino millionaires than any other business through McDonald’s franchising model. These millionaires are now “owners”.

The Marxist class-based ideology ignores that fortunes are made and lost dynamically and your situation in life is not static. Even worse, once your viewpoint shifts to class-struggle you became a miserable defeatist lacking hope for the future. There is a reason communism died and Venezuela / Argentina are economic basket cases - once you view the economy as a zero-sum struggle, you start scheming to steal from productive private enterprise, and eventually everything collapses into shit.

My recommendation to OP, if you seriously want to raise your station in life, is to start hustling. Find a new job that pays more, start your own business, or immigrate to a higher paying country. No one is going to hand you anything. You have identified a problem - “my company pays me too little and I deserve more”. Option A is to give up, become demoralized, blame society, became a miserable complainer. Option 2 is to strategize about your situation and figure out a path to better compensation. Good luck!

You don’t have to be a republican (as if that’s a slur?) to disagree with the “science” of masking considering government officials said not to use masks, then to use masks, then we were all going to die if we didn’t wear masks, now no one is wearing masks… What is and is not “settled science” is up to extreme interpretation

Think about who your heroes are. Scientists, business leaders, artists, writers, philosophers, podcasters, actors, and on and on. You know about and respect people who accomplished great things that affected you and the world in ways you approve of.

Not one of them - not a single one - was a lazy do-nothing who watched Netflix (or birds, or whatever) all day and consumed mindlessly.

If you want to be a person who doesn’t accomplish anything of note, there is nothing wrong with this. Being a good person who loves their family and friends and helps their community is a wonderful thing and is an achievement in of itself.

But if you want to become one of your heroes - someone who accomplishes great things - then you must work very, very hard at your craft. There is no alternative.

My mother was one of 8 children born to Finnish immigrant parents in America. As an adult she used the local Mormon temple to research her ancestors, connected with them on Facebook, then re-established the family back into the old country. She then visited the matriarch and lived with her for 2 weeks as my distant cousins visited her and made their acquaintance.

Most recently my cousin, whose daughter has an extremely debilitating incurable illness, emigrated back to Finland on his sick daughter’s request. The whole family is attempting to learn Finnish but it is apparently a struggle compared to other languages they learned.

Totally off-topic, but Nokia is a sad story and Finland is a wonderful country with wonderful people.

HN is paternalistic to the extreme. An entire community of people who were one of the smartest growing up, and now think they should dictate how everyone else lives their lives, using guns (I mean the government). The tut-tutting that is rampant in comments is par for the course.

Individual liberty and responsibility has always been a tough sell, but it’s still worth encouraging. Taken to its logical conclusion, no one would even be able to raise their kids given the risks to the children from a bad parent - much safer to give all children straight to the government to raise safely. After all, if even a single child is abused by a terrible parent, isn’t that too many?

My comment is to counteract the knee-jerk HN opinion that "All unions are a panacea!" without ignoring the very real, very well-documented counterpoints.

And major unions such as the UAW have embezzled millions of dollars from their members, documented as fact

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edmi/pr/former-uaw-official-sen...

Let’s not pretend one side is sinners and one is saints

And whenever the union loses, they say the election wasn't fair to them. It's almost like both sides refuse to believe anyone can have an opposing opinion and everything is rigged

When the facts disagree with your world view, attack the messenger

There are no limits to growth provided technology continues to increase productivity. If we were stuck with the same output, then productivity would scale linearly with the working age population, and in a shrinking-population world our quality of life would decrease.

Luckily it takes less people to make the same goods and services, year after year, enabling humanity to continue to prosper. This will continue forever barring some authoritarian government that artificially limits human ingenuity and work output.

I work 70 hours a week. Surely you wouldn’t outlaw my ethic?

And if a run a company, surely I could require my employees to work 5 days, 40 hours?

The solution is to let business owners switch to 4 day weeks and then let the free market sort it out.

I am a contrarian by nature. Wearing my investor hat, I continue to be unimpressed with AI tools, including the latest image generation enhancements. I do find stable diffusion interesting, but I don't see the disruption. Similarly, I don't see the disruption from Github Copilot considering I run a company full of highly paid and extremely skilled developers and not one of them uses copilot.

How often have you wanted to hire a conceptual artist? I have never done so in my life. While I have visited many art museums and appreciated it, this has not affected my commercial endeavors.

I think if I was a creative writer or professional artist, the current generation of AI tools could be useful for inspiration. But the bar for quality is just so, so high in the creative industries, I am not concerned that AI will replace them.

It's September 2022 - where is my self driving car?

Is anyone actually using co-pilot? They claim “millions of users” but I seriously doubt millions of programmers opted into paying $10 per month for it. A lot of these stats seem highly suspect.

Why make a string when you can create a new StringValue class, StringValueFactory, StringValueFactoryIterator, StringValueFactoryIteratorFactory, StringValueTemplateDecorator...

Correct

Nothing stops anyone from structuring a new business like this. Many professional service firms such as private medical clinics and law firms are structured as partnerships, which is a co-operative type of entity.

The tricky thing is building a product-focused business like this. The risk-reward ratio is very different. Most fail and few succeed massively. Succeeding massively often requires extreme hard work and ingenuity from top employees.

Personally I would never work at, nor invest any money, in a co-op. Same reason I will never invest in a public benefit corporation. I don’t see the economy as charity and I prefer to donate money to overtly non-profit entities rather than donating to “I am willing to make you less money” for-profit entities.