I thought you were talking about economic efficiency, not maximizing enjoyment. You can do anything you want with your time if you're not worried about economics, but that sort of contradicts your original statement.
346 karma · joined February 23, 2024
The often quoted: "Infinite growth is the mentality of a cancer cell" is fairly accurate for describing human growth (when there is no real concern for any externalities such as environmental preservation or resource conservation). The abstract comparison does not bother me in the slightest.
Humans are a species like any other animal/insect. Ants have workers and drones, soldiers and queens (some ants evolved to do nearly nothing as a reserve work force). Trying to defining the worth of sentient beings based on abstract value functions (positive/negative, success/failure) is a narrow and sad way of looking at the world.
I have no idea what "game" you are referring to. Are you talking about life? I think that is a sad way to look at the world. Life isn't a game and there are many ways to live a good life while helping others (kin or not).
Not having children can be a noble sacrifice if someone is doing it to prevent passing on chronic illness or to prevent suffering. Someone caring for elderly parents and choosing to delay having children indefinitely does not make them "weak" as you like to suggest. Giving up something you want for the greater good of the world around you is worth understanding, maybe even worth emulating.
You seem to be looking at life and existence through an extremely narrow lens and judging people without really knowing anything about them. Hurling insults around casually as if you have everything figured out, which you do not (nobody does).
I would suggest you take time to talk to people more about their life and experiences before judging them so harshly. Try to hold back your insults and practice empathy instead; you might learn something about life and its vast breadth of expressions.
Maybe we, as a species, would have better long term outcomes if we reflected more before blindly charging forward exactly as our parents did (and their parents before them).
Maybe they feel we should choose a different course and look for better/different ways of living and being as a species. There is no such thing as infinite growth, we should probably act accordingly.
I normally really like Chiang‘s writings so the complete disregard for the possibility of unknown complex emergent properties in large neural networks and the stunning lack of curiosity shown about this new and powerful technology and its potential shocked me from someone like him.
His being so sure about something he can’t possibly know felt like an insecure zealot desperately clinging to an object of faith rather than a calm, rational actor searching for truth in the face of the unknown.
Wouldn't the wise position be that since there is no evidence of souls at all that the default should be that both humans and machines do not contain a soul until proven otherwise?
If we can't agree as a people that the Constitution applies to everyone equally then it isn't a problem with democracy, it's a problem with fascism and must dealt with as such.
It’s not an easy problem to solve and is hard to balance fairly, so I think your painting of the content policy as being crystal clear is a misrepresentation that isn’t properly taking into account the subjectivity of what is viewed as political and what counts as intellectually stimulating to different HN users (as it seems if something is “interesting” then that tends to override the “political” in many instances on the home page, and is entirely subjective).
Your own cited stat (“<9,000/month”) is Border Patrol apprehensions between ports of entry. CBS is explicit about that, and even gives the recent months: July ~4,600; Aug ~6,300; Sept ~8,400 apprehensions. That’s a major reduction, but it’s not “zero,” and it’s not the same thing as “flow eliminated.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-crossings-immigration-u...
The 249,000 figure you’re comparing it to is typically cited as “encounters” (often BP apprehensions + OFO inadmissibles at ports). That’s a different series than “BP apprehensions between ports.” Apples-to-oranges comparisons are exactly how people accidentally talk themselves into certainty.
“Do you have a better way of estimating?” Not really, that’s the point. Encounters/apprehensions are the best consistently published measure, but they are not total successful entries, and “gotaways” are estimates with their own uncertainty. So the accurate claim is: recorded apprehensions are way down.
On “no headway”: if the unauthorized population fell from 2007 to 2019 (Pew shows that), that’s literally headway, even if it later reversed and is higher now. What you mean is “no net improvement vs 2007,” which is a different claim.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...
If you want to say “huge improvement at the border relative to the peak,” totally reasonable. But “flow largely eliminated” + “big dent in illegal-alien stock” is stronger than what these measurements can support.
“Many hundreds of thousands per month” isn’t what the Border Patrol encounter series shows. Pew’s analysis of CBP data puts the peak at 249,741 encounters in Dec 2023, and 58,038 in Aug 2024 (a 77% drop). That’s “down sharply,” not “eliminated.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/01/migrant-e...
Also, 58k/month annualizes to ~700k/year. You can argue that’s a big improvement, but calling it “largely eliminated” is rhetorical.
Encounters aren’t total entries, agreed, but that cuts against confidently declaring victory, not in favor of it. If you want “better,” the only “better” conceptually is something like encounters + estimated gotaways, but “gotaways” are themselves estimates and not as consistently published/transparent as encounters. So the honest phrasing is: “recorded encounters are way down.”
“No headway for decades” is false on the standard stock estimates. Pew (and others) show the unauthorized population peaked around 2007 and then declined through 2019 before rising again in the early 2020s. That’s headway, then reversal; not “none for decades.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...
It is fair to say: we’re now above 2007 again (Pew estimates ~14M in 2023), so the long-run problem wasn’t solved. But that’s different from “no headway has been made.”
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...
On the ABC/Brookings “negative net migration” point: net migration does not equal unauthorized population, and the article itself notes the change is mostly fewer entries, with removals only modestly higher year over year. So it doesn’t support “dutiful removal has made a big dent” as the main story.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-1st-time-50-years-experienced-n...