zer8k

Yes, the government by force of law can wholesale strip citizens of their second amendment rights by having a list of gun owners. The ATF not even 5 years ago was doing this with all sorts of guns that were formerly legal. In particular, ex post facto laws seem to not apply with the ATF. Once they issue a new "opinion" it becomes defacto law because of the Chevron Defense. The result, is ATF door kickers visiting people who were, possibly weeks ago, entirely law abiding citizens. "Ghost guns" in particular were used to justify no-knock raiding several law abiding citizens when the ATF "opinion" came out. In that case however, the ATF more-or-less told manufacturers if you don't give us names we will send you to prison for life.

The government having any list of any kind of person is never good. Ever. The government already "has" a list of gun owners. 4473s are kept forever. If a gun store shuts down, the 4473s are shuttled to storage in the ATF's buildings/containers/whatever. They have, historically, used these for all kinds of questionably legal "enforcement" procedures.

However, since the 4473 list isn't entirely accurate - for example, gun transfers do not require a background check in many states, you could have destroyed the gun, lost it in a literal boating accident, etc there's plausible deniability. A government run list would certainly be designed to eliminate this - and that's a horrible, horrible thing for the 2nd. Presently the only "real list" is for NFA items. I'd imagine a government-run list would have the same privacy invading, civil rights abusing powers the NFA-owners list has.

A manufacturer on the other hand could be coerced, as "ghost gun" 80% lower manufacturers were, to narc on their customer base. However, there are legal avenues to at least slow this process down significantly. It's far better, if we have to choose, to let manufacturers have the data. They have historically been far better stewards of the bill of rights than the ATF ever has.

4473s are a different, far worse, form of privacy invasion. Ostensibly used for background checks, kept forever in order for the ATF to do fishing expeditions.

The point is to not allow a company to be able to buy out the entire country. Maybe Novo Nordisk is a good steward but historically companies like Google and Amazon act only their own best interests. Breaking up these massive companies ends up doing the better thing anyway - a surge of competition emerges and offers better and often cheaper services. Look at the break up of Bell. The short term was marginally negative (higher long distance costs) but the market was better for it.

Google has a substantial amount of control over the flow of information in the United States. To the point it can literally redefine truth. This is a problem - and one that is easily solved by breaking up a de-facto monopoly. Moreover, the acquire-and-kill strategy stifles innovation. Imagine what we would have if Google didnt have the capital to buy and kill so many small companies.

> The value of the super wealthy’s net worth is paper. It only has value because we all agree it has value. If you started to seize their paper wealth and give it to everyone else, the value of that paper would immediately fall, not just from the threat of seizing it but their lack of ownership and stewardship would make it crumble.

I don't think ownership and stewardship is the problem. The fundamental problem is still there: whether they have 1T dollars, or 300M people have their share of 1T dollars, the dollars in the system will increase the second they spend it. Their "stewardship" is a tenuous position - commanding enough capital to cause massive inflation. Politics aside, it's lose/lose for a single person to command that much power over an economy. If every billionaire decided to liquidate their assets all at once the financial system would absolutely fold. The fact these people can accumulate this level of wealth is not only an income equality problem but a symptom of a cancer in our financial system. The Fed's policies and the existence of lobbying have, by and large, created these people. It's less a money problem but rather a political problem.

I agree with you that the idea of charging capital gains on unrealized capital is financial and political suicide. Even if you suppose you only do this for people worth, say, 500M or more history has shown that this never sticks. Eventually, the government will continue to get more hungry and continue to make abhorrent financial decisions. Eventually, it will effect everyone. As you stated, the investment from regular people over the next 30-50 years would trend towards 0 - and then a new way to tax would need to be made. Negative interest rates on bank accounts, perhaps.

That's not to say however it's ok that these people are allowed to possess >= 80% of a countries net wealth. The money isn't the problem is the power it brings - and that's a huge problem. The safest way is probably a progressive inheritance tax but it still has the same problem. How long before Joe Plumber is effected by it? 50 years? There's no simple solution.

Equating TikTok to Rock 'n Roll, TV, Video Games, and Heavy Metal is a bit reductionist don't you think?

Numerous studies have been done on the effect of "dopamine hijacking" that is common to platforms like TikTok. The effect this has had on children's attention span has been measured. In particular CocoMelon has been at the forefront of this. Colloquially this has been called "brainrot". The pacing, colors, frame timing, etc are all studied in a lab to achieve maximum engagement. This isn't necessarily a problem for content designed for adults. Ostensibly, adults can make a choice whether or not to consume addictive entertainment. However, for children this type of material is sold as educational. There's a direct line from attention span to screen time that is suspected to be the reason for poor performance in Gen Alpha.

However, anyone, child or adult, that has spent time on these platforms has found themselves locked into a doom-scrolling loop.

This is all so well known at this point it's common knowledge. The only people shilling for this content to be unmoderated work for these companies themselves.

If we are to say TikTok is a moral panic than we should also say cigarettes are a moral panic. After-all, all you "have to do" is stop smoking. No harder than stopping scrolling. I would challenge you to sit through CoCoMelon or "gagagadee Chicken Nugget" and determine if it's a moral panic or a crisis originating from terrible parenting. Hell, just click over to Youtube Kids and leave it playing for a while. It will quickly diverge into brightly color, precisely measured, loud, fast paced, and nonsensical videos labeled as "educational".

> All the while these people never seem to get too concerned that a significant percentage of American children only get fed at school by the school, don't receive proper medical care and have very little wherewithal to get an education beyond high school

FWIW this is a classic misdirection. I care simultaneously about these things. But the lowest hanging fruit that I personally can understand is preventing our kids from watching the social media equivalent of a gallon of ice cream. There wouldn't be a "moral panic" if kids were binge watching full length episodes of Nova and National Geographic.

Derangement? Stalin was extremely suspicious of the west and even went so far as to accuse of us collaborating with Hitler himself. Not only that, the Soviet regime was excessively brutal. One of the worst in history despite not being mentioned much in modern history books. The treatment of captives during wartime, the Eastern Bloc in total, etc. While not a primary source "Soviet War Crimes" has a massive Wikipedia entry detailing just how bad the soviets were. At least related to WW2 alone we can look to how their treatment of the Polish was after pushing Germany out. They murdered Finnish civilians en masse during raids. Further, their deportation campaigns were enough to make most period despots blush.

To believe that anti-Soviet sentiment was "derangement" is extremely delusional.

Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to execute people with knowledge that would otherwise be useful to the enemy. If we didn't, the soviets would. There was a lot to learn from them that didn't have to do with their prior allegiances that proved valuable for weapons development, spycraft, and space exploration.

Or alternatively they could take some of their record profits and upgrade their 30 year old infrastructure. The modern world is internet-enabled and these people are the ones with their foot on the hose selling water.

Very familiar with Cox as they are the only cable provider in my area and fiber largely has not made it to any other part of the city except the really new and wealthy areas.

While I have not yet run into any caps with my gigabit plan I am painfully aware of how limited the so called "unlimited" gigabit plan is. During COVID it was particularly egregious. I was paying about what Mike was paying except from the hours of 11am to around 9pm my download would be capped at 10Mbps or so and my upload halved from whatever it is to around 2Mbps. Cox didn't have the common courtesy to tell anyone that they were QoSing entire city blocks because their "infrastructure couldn't handle it". I only learned this by isolating the network and running my own tests. After what felt like 30 escalations with their tech support and a large portion of my night they all but confirmed they were doing this to handle the "streaming services". I work from home - this was a major problem. Despite this I was simply upsold yet another super-duper plan rather than given anything I could work with.

I get regular outages with them and run my own tests on the coax. Despite having noise levels that are pretty good for the most part their service still doesn't work right all the time. Despite my insistence calling a tech out their labyrinthine tech support tree all but prevents you from talking to anyone but a moron with a flowchart where all roads lead to "reset the modem" or "upsell hardware" and a hands free phone.

I used to run my own modem as I prefer to control my hardware. When I upgraded to gigabit years ago I was forced to lease a modem from them as prior to this they refused to service my house with third party hardware installed. All problems were always blamed on my modem, or my router, or anything they could point to that wasn't them. Dealing with their technical support or on-call techs was worse than pulling teeth. It was like performing dental surgery with a sledgehammer.

I won't get into what it was like cancelling my cable TV. Yet another mess made more complicated by the same situation. At least it was easy to drop off the set-top boxes at the local store.

I hate the amount of control ISPs have over us with the last-mile laws. Companies like Cox can more-or-less do whatever they want in my town because they're the biggest players with the most pipes. The result is as expected - terrible service, fine print bear traps, and high cost.

Actually, they do, regularly. But you've used the term "highly specialized jobs" which is unassailable. No matter which example I provide you can provide an even more specialized job that hires less people over a longer timeframe due to the skill gap.

I can tell you with certainty it happens in tech. This is probably not "highly specialized" but unless I am to ignore the very obvious anti-white anti-male undertones of the monthly all-hands HR segments the sorting algorithm based on victim hierarchy is well and truly alive. I work for a coastal company though so perhaps this effective is magnified significantly.

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Labor unions in America were largely controlled by organized crime and likely still are today. They didn't do this to help the worker they did it as an extension of a collection racket. AKA - their own interests. Despite this they did accomplish some historical good. Yet, I am still working a 40+ hour week bullied by my employer and jobs continue to be shipped overseas. How many more decades before the unions do their job?

You can't continue to give labor unions credit for what they've done in the past as justification for their continued existence. Labor unions are also the reason the police are untouchable even when they commit horrendous crimes. Anecdata, but of the union members I know (who by the way were forced into it lest they be considered a scab) none of them believe the union works for them. These people are in medicine, education, construction, and food. The union rep likely golfs and drinks with the CEO where they agree after "much fighting for your rights" to grant you that 25 cent raise.

Rarely unions do their jobs. During COVID hospitals in my hometown were allowed to bully nurses into dangerous situations as their union would not halt care in order to make sure they had functional N95s. The unions didn't stop the mass exportation of labor to third world nations after the GFC. These things alone are enough for me to say they have outlived their usefulness.

You're conflating processed food with ultra-processed foods. Bread and soy milk are processed. A lot of food that isn't necessarily bad for you is considered processed.

Ultra-processed food is better described as a chemical soup that is turned into something resembling food. A good barometer is whether or not the ingredient list makes sense to a lay person. Bagged chips, candy bars, white bread, sodas, energy drinks, etc are all considered ultra-processed.

I agree there needs to be more education. There are several documentaries on this you can find with a trivial Youtube search. The conclusion most of them reach is that the food lobby is so strong (here in America) that research rarely gets out. The companies responsible have an army of morally and ethically bankrupt PhDs pumping out garbage research to lower the SNR enough to muddy the waters. Ultra processed food companies are more-or-less the modern equivalent of the Tobacco lobby.

As a final note on news - you should take a look at who is giving advertising money to the major news companies and movie studios. As always - follow the money. They'd never bite the hand that feeds.

Hezbollah already attacks civilians indiscriminately for one. Second, "won't someone think of the children" is a tired argument. Hate to be that guy - but maybe this will be a lesson on allowing these terrorists to roam your streets. Avoiding civilian death in a warzone is an impossibility. Limiting it is all you can do. Knowing that, this was an absolutely amazing job at target selection. Of all methods of target selection this is probably the most precise you can get with the exception of snipers, AGM-114-R9X, etc. The psychological damage from this attack alone is probably worth more than any other method. Hezbollah will be crippled at least temporarily and likely afraid to use any technology they don't control the supply chain for.

> which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against

This is not why. It's shied away from because it's extremely difficult to target effectively without causing mass unwanted causalities and the associated killing mechanism is considered cruel and unusual. "Being hard to defend against" is exactly something factored in with weapons. Why would I want to use a weapon that is easy to defend against? If that's the case, the US would march with clubs and bows, you know, "to make things fair".

2 and 3 are and always have been counter-productive. You’re some kind of -cist or -phobe if you don’t want to listen. Normal people have normal people problems. Normal well-adjusted people don’t want to go to the movies, play video games, go to work, go outside and be constantly bombarded with what the “correct” viewpoint should be. The group preaching tolerance seems to always tend towards moral panic and intolerance.

The ship on changing the pendulum back to the average has sailed. A lot of people who’d normally be amicable to listening have been run off by the impossible constantly changing moral standards of the group pushing 3. It’s gone from “good to know” to propagandizing. People just want entertainment that doesn’t make them feel horrible. People want to be entertained without the feeling certain aspects of some movie/video game/music only exist to “convey the message”.

HR is a job program for the bottom 3rd of the IQ curve.

It must be nice to not ever worry about compensation. I havent gotten a raise in 2 years and there's no promotions available despite work enforcing horrid on-call and "team player" work hours.

I personally cannot wait for the market to improve so I can be compensated fairly. Pizza parties while the product, sales, etc teams get massive bonuses because "studies show employees wont ask for more money when they're appreciated" is a hyper-dense sphere of pure bullshit. When inflation stops effecting me and I can buy food with appreciation I'll care more about it. The best way to appreciate an employee is cold, hard cash.

I shouldn't have to drug myself to cope with the stress of constantly half-assed released, features getting pushed in without thought, and 3AM pagerduty alarms because of these things.

We will likely see a large cohort of people who got into tech in the mid 2000s dying off from stress related disease.

Mr. C is a counter-example to all of what you just said. Mr. C is an otherwise successful and intelligent person embittered by society doing him wrong. In literature Mr. C would probably be the anti-hero of an acclaimed revenge movie. He should be secure but he isn't because humiliation is a wound that doesnt heal.

I think the statement "secure people..." is a really broad generalization that misses the point being made here. It does not take much to make someone insecure. There are thousands of examples: food, money, romance, work, housing, etc. Every person effected by one or more of these is a Mr. C. They simply just need the right catalyst to fully realize it.

One may wonder if society in general wasn't so cruel to certain people would Mr. C even exist. To quote the article:

> He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

> Probably for the best, no way a truly "edgy" and zany hacker con would've been able to find venues to host at nowadays anyway.

Best for business, perhaps. I stopped going several years ago when the conference got too soft. Yes, the antics were sometimes too much and it's understandable why SOME THINGS would need to be reigned in. For example, concrete in the toilets, flares in the elevators, windows getting broken, ATMs being hacked etc. 100% understandable.

The defcon today is completely sterilized. It's an extension of corporate culture in it's truest sense. There's no interesting things going on anymore. The noted "inclusivity" breakouts and villages are growing, the goons are more serious, the "hackers" are mostly Joe's From Accounting, etc. Part of the allure of old defcon was everyone was just a hacker. It never, ever mattered who you identified as or what you were. Can you hack? Great, you're in. Everyone serious never gave names and cameras were very seriously frowned upon. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

If I'm being honest it's gone from the high point of my year to something I'm glad is just a memory for me. I went for ~15 years. It's sad to watch it turn into this sterilized "dont offend anyone or anything" after being counter-culture for decades. But, you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I'm once again glad I didn't spend the money to go.

Personally, I am more concerned with the cumulative drop in productivity that will control for all variables including this one. Again though, sponsored clubs for a particular gender are a luxury good. If these initiatives were self-organizing it wouldn't be a problem. However, the implication here is they are not.

On a numbers basis the rules still apply: there are N members of this club. Each are paid an average of X dollars per hour. If the meeting is only an hour a week thats still N x X x 48 annually. Add in a food budget, perhaps bringing in a guest or two once and while. This quickly gets unsustainable as N grows.

The issue I take with this reframing is that it is once again Men vs. Women in this completely fabricated war in tech (and only tech). RTO is a negative for everyone involved. The division here makes it sound like, once again, women suffer more than men for an isolated reason, not considering that men suffer in a different but comparable way. Or they are quitting at a dramatically higher rate over the baseline RTO quit-rate (and "women with children" quit-rate across industries). The actual reason boils down to simple MBA spreadsheet math.

Productivity be damned, RTO makes fiscal sense when you have a 15 year lease on a building you can't get out of. I don't agree with it, but I can see why you'd want warm bodies in seats when you pay 20,000 (or more) a month for your modern-tech cube farm.

Women with children in other industries that have never had these luxuries are clearly doing something that women in tech aren't. The question I have is - what is it? Is the actual solution an economic one whereby we could once again afford to live on a single salary so someone is staying home?

This is bunk anecdata.

DEI initiatives across all industries are considered luxury goods. They provide no measurable impact the bottom line. Ignoring that, I've yet to find someone who has thought hiring these DEI experts over more engineering or management to be the fiscally intelligent choice.

When money supply shrinks the fat gets cut. The DEI initiatives were excessive levels of fat and in a value-driven economy this stuff gets cut.

This doesnt mean that RTO wasn't used to get people to quit. It's just this anecdata is a thinly disguised political op-ed rather than what most major news has reported for the last 2 years. Correlation is not causation. The majority of the first cuts from 2021-2023 came from these initiatives (and HR in general) as paying someone 250,000 dollars to browbeat people at the company all-hands is neither productive nor fiscally responsible.

> I'm not sure if it's MBAs at Google sending Reader to the graveyard, or perhaps engineering management reading the usage tea leaves and making a cold calculated numerical decision rather than considering for other customer factors.

Who manages those managers? The answer is probably MBAs with spreadsheet driven metrics for cutting projects. Reader in particular was egregious because it very easily could've been productized and sold.

> Google, famously, is an incredibly engineering-driven companyGoogle, famously, is an incredibly engineering-driven company

Perhaps it once was. Sundar has next to no experience in the industry he leads. This is not uncommon. A brief look at several of the Google executives now shows a dramatic lack of experience in actual software engineering. Some of them have high-flying CS degrees but that is a meaningless metric.

Coincidentally in my startup-filled career I have rarely met an executive that was an actual engineer. When I do, they are typically 10-20 years behind current technology (even ignoring the new-framework-a-week nonsense). Actual, hardcore, born in the trenches engineers seem to have their heads held underwater by the sociopathic business school leadership.

To me it's not that either. SaaS can be done well and has been done well historically.

The difference between then and now is the MBA-ization of tech. The MBA cancer infests and does the only thing it can do. Create spreadsheets to force people to track time (points) and other stupid metrics. These can then be boiled down to near meaninglessness but make the non-technicals feel like they have control.

The result is people like me who want to do good engineering can't. You budgeted 40 points for a 70 point project. Congratulations, I have a gun to my head where I can't write good code so I end up fixing it when it eventually causes some level of SEV. That is, if I'm lucky. If I'm not lucky I have to bandaid the bandaid and hope to god I can run out my tenure so I either get promoted out of dealing with it or quit. Only to do it once more at another company.

If tech companies would be run by engineering, like they used to be, things would not be this way. Non-technical garbage Mckinsey level MBA consultants are the problem. Second to them is completely incompetent project management. Typically these two groups intersect on more than 80% of traits.

So can plenty of prescription drugs. I suspect you wouldn't criticize someone for suggesting, "unwarranted", that someone tries anti-depressants or any number of potentially dangerous anxiolytics.

Cool it with your moral authority.

I wish I could enforce meeting rules at work but they are dictated by TPTB. We recently had cameras forced on because management suspected people weren't paying attention. That is correct. The meetings are regularly derailed by someone, typically some kind of Product Manager, waxing poetic about whatever they think is important. Cameras-on made life even worse. Now I have to sit prim and proper in my chair for 30 extra minutes because no one will shut the malignant extrovert up. Work gets delayed, boredom sets in, etc.

I don't even know who to blame for this. It's really not much better than it was in person. In person meetings sucked more, as you had to be physically present to be talked at, and at least with a remote meeting I can just minimize the meeting and try to get back to work.

I would estimate 90% of my meetings are useless. 50% of the 10% remaining could be emails, and 50% are probably worth it. Why can't I just build software? Perhaps PMs and management should get their own meeting where they can just listen to themselves talk.

> $2000 is the minimum amount

Need a source on that one. I am involved in this and new professionals do not even make that much. For "on-demand" fights (where the promoter gives you 0 notice ahead of time) you will make several hundred dollars, perhaps $1000 for a win at a large venue. Even UFC pays terrible until you're a main card, and even then, you're not making much. Most of the money is made by promotional deals due to the win. I wanted to correct you here as I agree both that they aren't paid enough, and it is often exploitative. The number of fighters making a living wage from UFC and UFC-adjacent combat sports is extremely low. Of the fighters I know, 0 of them live off that money. It's a hobby that pays a little but most of them either have a day job, or more likely, live out of a van so they can travel to the next venue+camp on a moments notice.

> Selling what is almost certain permanent bodily harm for pennies is exploitive and should be fixed,

UFC-style fighting and bareknuckle style fighting have the lowest incidents of brain injury of any combat sport. This is due largely to the lighter gloves and training that doesn't involve getting punched in the head all the time. The incidence is lower than many non-combat sports as well.

> I have seen one of these events, and it is certainly barbaric, but people love it.

It is one of the few true displays of human physicality and performance. It's not all about the violence. The guys in the cage are typically the absolute peak of human performance.

The implication that it's about ego is a relatively pathetic, naive, cosmopolitan view of reality. I wish I could live in such bliss.

MMA has lost a lot of it's luster in recent years with it's major commercialization.

It became popular because people were tired of Karate/TKD/Kung Fu/Krav Maga morons telling everyone their martial art can "kill in one touch" or something. So, Pride and UFC started and the entertainment was watching martial arts compete against each other in a near luta livre style. The idea of course being to find the best martial art. BJJ, Wrestling, and Muay Thai were the only survivors.

Once the global maxima was found it became relatively boring. At least to me. But lord was it fun watching "masters" of traditional martial arts get beaten up and down the ring and all the magic of their martial art going along with them.

Im sure they are.