timthelion

I believe that it is actually unhappiness and loneliness which are the drivers of consumerism and not the other way around. I believe that happy people are lazy and I think that is why western civilization has outstripped the others. I think, that since our social bonds have been destroyed, we work hard to try to seek happiness that the other civilizations already have. And then our civilization spreads, like a disease, infecting other civilizations and making them unhappy and hardworking as well.

I think that this is a relatively new phenomena, which occurred during the urbanization caused by the industrial revolution. Urbanization caused social bonds to be broken, and people became unhappy and hard working.

There is a super creepy tshirt from one startup I know, which has the text "the pyramids were not built by happy people". I've always wanted to ask them about what this means. But I've never had the nerve.

But it has always haunted me.

While I hate consumerism, I wonder why you say that it has caused our loneliness. Wouldn't it be possible to buy large numbers of board games, and other social goods while not becoming isolated? It actually seems to me that consumption is for the most part social. I mean, if I spend all day at home on reddit, what do I need to buy besides cereal and soylent powder? But if I'm going out all the time, I'll buy clothing to keep up with the local fashions, I'll buy wine to bring as a gift, ect. Even the constant home improvement, that basement cinema and the pool room, are initially understood as social purchases. "We need this patio so we can have parties." "I'm gona invite all my friends over and we'll play X-Box."

I believe that social media is a symptom, not the cause, of the great loneliness that our modern aloneness has caused. We are alone much of the time, especially in American suburbia. Even when we are in the city filled with people, these people are just blank faces whom we do not know. We are seeking any form of connection that we can get. And when the only connection to others that we have is through the computer, we become addicted to it.

That said, I believe that once addicted to social media, the bubble of safety that we feel from "eating social junk food". The screen bubble, can become alluring and some people fall into it. I remember at the Prague hackerspace, how we'd all be sitting around the table, and I'd be confused, why people were laughing and interacting without words. It was a while till I realized that they were chatting on IRC.

Isn't there a law of UX that the viewport should be large enough for the user to see the article's text? I can see like half a paragraph between the top stuff and the bottom stuff.

rubber gaskets are easy to manufacture if you have a mold for them. It's really awful that philips stopped making them without giving the mold to someone. With the mold, you can make a rubber gasket with nothing more than a kitchen stove and the raw materials.

Thought experiment for both scenarios:

Every significant national government has a major agency in charge of protecting the environment from harmful emissions with many paid engineers devoted to emissions testing.

None of the major national governments except Germany have an agency devoted to ensuring that devices do not en fringe on user privacy.

If you think that Volkswagen is a bad example take AstraZeneca [1]. No one had to prove that they had committed fraud by missmarketing their drugs. Much of the marketing material was publicly available. Everyone who knew the law, knew that they were breaking it.

Or perhaps you could look at Seimens, which outright bribed, using bags of cash, government officials, in order to close deals [2].

Moral of the story, corporations break laws.

If Facebook is listening to you using your phones microphone, that's not even illegal outside of Germany.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Health/astrazeneca-pay-520-mi...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/business/worldbusiness/16s...

Volkswagen

Wouldn't a bot be pretty good at capitalization? Seems more plausible that it was written by a German. Afterall, in German, nouns are capitalized.

This is pretty much impossible to debunk because:

A) Given Facebooks policy of A/B testing, it almost certainly isn't listening all the time.

and more importantly,

B) Now that everyone is talking about it, Facebook would have been stupid NOT to turn it off at least for now.

I believe that the 90-90 rule [1] proves that many superior alternatives will fail to catch on. If something is not revolutionary better, and has the potential to compete with a product, but has not been developed to the point of actual competitiveness, it will lose out.

Combine this with network effects, and it seems that it would be impossible for superior techs not to fail.

Take email headers as an example. They are objectively inefficient and hard to parse. Everyone agrees on that. But we still use them despite the obvious possibility of a better format. Why? Obvious network effect.

The 90-90 examples will be less obvious. You cannot easily tell which tech is better, until you have invested the same amount of effort developing all of them. Superior products will be more likely to eventually succeed in markets where such parallel development is justified. Currently, most speakers are made by gluing a permanent magnet to a piece of plastic or paper, and using an electromagnet to pull on the permanent one. Through parallel development, we now know, that we can make much much better speakers by making the membrane magnetic, by gluing copper traces onto it, or statically charging it. We can make objectively better sound with these lighter membranes which don't have a heavy permanent magnet glued to them. Slowly, expensive speakers and headphones are using the new tech, but most speakers sold sill use the inferior tech. The superior tech was developed parallel to the inferior one, only because speakers are such a large market, that this parallel development could be justified financially.

Now take braille displays. A much smaller market. We think that the current tech used in Braille displays is worse than a set of other techs. There isn't enough money for the parallel development, so despite the fact that alternative, probably superior, technologies exist, we haven't developed them to the point of competitiveness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

There is a fallacy which says "if I understand the steps which got me here, than I understand where I am." Or "If I understand each change that has been made to a system, then I understand the system." This is simply not true. A myopic understanding of each change does not equal an understanding of the system. Human memory is simply not good enough to remember all of the previous bits of code, and comprehend whether a change won't happen to interact in a bad way.

With lots of testing, yes, you can incrementally build a working system that you don't understand. But by myopically staring at diffs all day, you'll only get farther from the truth of how your system works.

The major refactors that I do, are because I've come to the realization that my data model was not correct. A realization, that often happens multiple times during a project. My utility functions are still useful, but I have to rewire everything. There is no meaningful way to do that incrementally. Why would you even try to do that incrementally? It's like, if you have a salamander and you want to turn it into a horse incrementally. Of course, most of the RNA is the same. But testing and code reviewing the steps between salamander and horse seems to me like a waste of time.

My personal methodology is to alternate between iterative development and large refactors. I do very little testing during the large refactor, and test as thoroughly as possible afterwards.

I'm not sure why so many people consider "refactoring" to be a synonym for variable renaming. Refactoring is a non-functional change which makes the code base more manageable [1] . Renaming is a kind of refactoring, but not a terribly important type of refactoring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_refactoring

Is it actually better to do it one file at a time. Every single change has to be reviewed anyways.

Housing prices would rise even if money wasn't being printed. Because when I buy a house, the money doesn't disappear, it goes to the seller.

Imagine there was only one bank, we'll call it Banky Mc Investment Inc. or BMI.

Fred wants to buy a house. That house "costs" $1 trillion dollars. Bob owns the house and decides to sell.

Fred goes to BMI and says, "can I have a loan for $1 trillion?" BMI says "sure thing Fred" and BMI transfers "$1 trillion" to Bob's account. BMI then goes to Bob, and says "hey Bob, it looks like you've got a lot of cash in your account. Would you like to invest it in the BMI morgage investment pool, ultra low risk, backed by valuable real-estate? Bob says "sure thing!" and BMI's books balance. Sure, Fred now has a lot of debt, but there is no reason why this couldn't happen, even with a "limited money supply".

You don't need cash to put IOUs on the books.

How are you supposed to do a real refactor then?

"The pull request has 221 comments, most of which are arguing over the definition of 2MB blocks. "

For me, as a young adult, the most important part of growing up has been learning to not engage in bike shedding. It is hard not to bike shed. When design questions come up, and I see one thing as being WRONG, it is really hard not to become myopic about it. But this is a great example of how bike shedding can be harmful.

Yeah, lets hate on poor people.

Not at all. This is a good proxy for the activities of wealthy people who don't care about privacy. I'd be interested in this map if I wanted to know where to put up ads for overpriced energy bars. But this isn't a map of physical activity.

I agree with you that the unethical nature of what he did was black and white. But why is consumer behavior any different?

"I'm drinking on average 5 evenings per week, between half and a full bottle of wine" would a full bottle of wine be enough? Doesn't it vary based on weight and alcohol tolerance?

"A common myth about alcoholism is that it is a personality trait, and people who are alcoholics will always be one." There are people who are biologically predisposed to alcoholism.

I would like to second the "think of the children" argument. My father drank a similar amount and also said "(which is not that much, certainly I got used to it, so it doesn't put me in the drunk mode neither)". But he was irritable when he drank, and I remember playing a game where I'd come up and talk to him, and then run away laughing as he chased after me and knocked into the furniture.

It is easy to think you're sober when you're drunk.

You don't even have to tamper with a car to exceed the speed limit.

Where do you live? How did you come across this highly unusual impression?

maybe they don't want to be anything other than factory workers. That doesn't mean that they are fundamentally less valuable and less worthy of being paid their fair share.

But did they lose because of the drugs or because they were massively outnumbered and made ridiculously stupid mistakes on the eastern front and ran out of fuel and didn't have nukes in time?

Why do you say it didn't work out well for the germans?

Imagine a future in which every North Korean has this tech and is actually truly happier in NK than the west. And NK starts sending these people out to actually "follow the generals start and bring the Juch idea to the world." Now, we bank on NK not wanting their countrymen to discover how much more technologically advanced the west is.

> They are doing a superb job of giving the impression they have little control over money leaving the country.

Well, the US tries to promote the ability of Americans to engage in foreign investment, because foreign investment is a great way to suck money out of a country. If I buy a countries companies, then all the profit from that country goes to me. It's actually in China's interest to have "money leaving the country". And it is more in China's interest to have no one fight back.