DistressedDrone

Why would that even be a problem?

It's almost like we can't force them to do things our way.

I suspect it can be solved in many different ways, but when you sell food by the pound, it's much more advantageous to distribute your limited quantity of nutrients in as much produce as possible.

This seems really, really hard to regulate.

You think the OP has never heard this before? This is the attitude that creates the guilt that weighs people down in the first place.

You, like most people, are talking about the future. I'm sure you're about the 1000th person telling this person to turn their life around. But this future is a projection, it's imaginary, whereas the pain is very real in the present moment. So start with the present.

Could be. I hope the intent is still encouraging!

The other commenter takes this somewhere interesting, but to me the main point is to not get trapped by guilt. That's why I say "you now" and not just "you". I'm not implying that you're the best you ever were, only that guilt (or pride) does nothing to change what you are in the present.

In other words, it's okay to just be you. In fact, the world is only better for it if you can live without guilt. Achievement and ambition are much less real to me.

This was always the problem with capitalism based on short-term gain, it will inevitably sacrifice loyalty for a quick buck. The same will happen or is already happening to online stores who do the same, eg by showing ads.

That said, at some point a failing business will realize the end is coming and cash out as much as possible, accelerating its own end in a calculated profit maximization scheme. Brick and mortar stores might as well self-destruct if they also believe they're going down anyway... It's not like anyone works there for the fun of it.

It's literally a therapist's job to help you figure this out, I don't want to undermine this.

Please speak to a professional, you are not alone.

In the meantime, here are some of my own "no bullshit mantras" I found comforting in similar times, mostly from Zen Bhuddism :

* You are not supposed to be anywhere. Your only real obligation is to be you, now.

* There is no "better" version of you now. There is no other way to be you now. In fact, there is no other way to be, but to be what you are.

* What you are is beautiful, no matter who you are. I don't mean the Aguilera song, I mean it's literally a miracle that you're here now.

* Everything is as it is. There's no point in feeling guilty for things being the way they are, rather than the way you or someone else would have them. In a world where time only flows one way, every "ought" is an illusion.

If you like these ideas, I highly recommend meditation, such ideas are much easier to contemplate with a calm mind. I hear Alan Watts has good talks about this available on Youtube. Mindfulness meditation has also been associated with improvements in mental health (you can find many studies about this on Google Scholar).

I'm pretty sure they've been trying, but our bodies have evolved to distinguish actual sugar from anything else for a very long time.

I can't read the article, but the fact that they include suicide in the list indicates a strong possiblity that they did not control for socioeconomic factors.

Maybe richer people drink more coffee, and also tend to die less?

Sorry if it's an easy critique but it's hard to believe the substance that basically only raises your heart rate is actually doing anything (good) long term.

Well, it's all relative. Assuming all corporations are equally amoral (or close enough), defense means war profiteering, whereas (traditional) media is a blight on our society that has largely abandoned any pretense of social function and actively holds us back by playing on our collective fears.

On the other hand, pharma as a concept certainly needs to exist to save lives. As a Canadian, pharma is not so bad here, but I believe their existence as a for-profit* entity is contrary to the purpose of universal healthcare, which I think is a common enough sentiment. American pharma, however, actively profits from the inequality inherent to the (rather evil) lack of universal healthcare system. Any positives for society seem strictly incidental, as exemplified by the price of insulin.

As a programmer with morals, I would never work in pharma, defense or media. I can't be the only one.

(b) they'd know you'd done it.

That depends entirely on how exactly you do it. And knowing something and being able to prove it are two very different things.

I tend to agree, although I hate ads on principle.

But there are a lot of things I hate and don't have to think about. I don't go around protesting the war because in my country that's not something I have to care about, for example.

But advertisers made me have to care. If I didn't have adblock, I'd be running JS from some unverified third party on every other site. Couldn't they restrict it to pictures? Of course not.

So now I have to care, and I'm not going to cooperate with advertisers, who - before adblock got so mainstream - were content to serve us literal viruses as long as someone paid them.

I use Linux exclusively. You don't need a zero-day when everyone forgets to patch or takes a month to do so. To say nothing of the documented vulnerabilities with no available patch.

And Digg.

If the universities wanted the problem fixed it would be fixed. I truly don't believe research universities are focused on producing value (other than to themselves).

Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.

Remember when more than one millionaire funded Juicero? I remember.

I don't mean to attack the author rather than the article, but it's hard to take them seriously when they use terms like "liberals hate" and "lol" in an article that aims to be empirical. It's just so needlessly adversarial?

Maybe it looked better, but I think it felt better because it was much faster.

This is a marketing push disguised as an aesthetic change. Mozilla, please stop trying to make Pocket happen, it's not going to happen.

You are right, I don't have rich friends who create wealth. But if I to choose one as a friend or mentor to make the world a better place, I'll side with the person not trying to game an entire society to get richer, regardless of the other's stated intention to "create wealth for everyone".

That said, I don't doubt that they do create wealth, I just think any benefits to society are incidental, and that the logical rigor of their ex post facto justification is lacking.

I was commenting about this earlier, here's a link to a study that says otherwise: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaau1156.full

Or rather, it says people who are advantaged (ie lucky) considerably underestimate the contribution of this advantage to their success, and overestimate their own contribution.

On the article itself, the stated idea of status is truly naive if not delusional, and allows them to put anyone who disagrees with their idea into the box of "status game players, to be ignored".

I'm not going to read the entire article, it reads like advice to people who don't need it (upper middle class people). I'm sure it must be comforting to the author, and upper middle class and rich people, but in reality there is no clear path from "poor" to "rich", or else everyone would be taking it.

What I will say is they seem to understand that our economic system is irrational, and to take advantage of it seems rational. But an irrational system is also unfair, and I would rather people not praise this unfairness as "good". The author seems to be paying lip service to the idea of "ethics" while teaching people to abuse the system. And they dare to talk about "virtue signaling".

The thing is, it's all luck.

Policies are made with the idea that someone like you must have somehow "earned" it, and you may believe it yourself, but no one chooses to be poor. You were lucky enough to get a good job, lucky enough to be able to work so much without burning out, lucky to be born smart, or a man, or white. It all adds up and it's all luck. You always made the most optimal choice you thought possible, as anyone would.

Yet the pervasive idea that one can "earn it" and become rich through sheer willpower has the unfortunate implication that those who are "still" poor must somehow deserve it. If some can grit their teeth through their misfortune and achieve upward social mobility, why can't they all? This is of course absurd of the face of it because your gain was someone else's loss, we can't all be "rich" as it is inherently relative. But also because any given poor person generally has the goal if not the priority of becoming less poor. Having grown up poor, no one wants to believe it's a permanent state of affairs.

Generally speaking, everyone works hard and no one wants to be poor. Yet modern capitalism (even our Canadian version) is largely engineered to punish the poor for being so, even though in the end, it's all luck.

Edit: Here's an interesting paper on the topic of misattribution of success: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaau1156.full

It's more complicated than that. It can look something like this: https://xkcd.com/882/

You got me there! It shows the kind of market that can emerge when piracy is less practical than purchasing the software.

My point still stands though for emulators on PC where I believe software piracy remains popular.

It surprises me the number of people who thought they could make money selling emulators, in what is and has always been almost exclusively dedicated to piracy.

I really don't understand this idea that is often repeated. You take someone who can code in a specific language and maybe a specific framework, and it takes them years to become useful?

Are people understating the capabilities of young devs or are they all really slow? Another possibility is that what they're learning in those two years are company-specific, in which case being senior wouldn't change much.

What do you think of this one?

I'll also mention: Exploding job offers aren't always b-llsh-t. If I have a 3 person startup and need a fourth person, and two strong candidates, I'll want to extend the offer to candidate number 2 if candidate number 1 doesn't accept. They're sometimes hardball negotiating tactics, but sometimes, business reality.

This point only serves to validate the article's point though. If you already have an acceptable alternative, negotiating with you is far less likely to be rewarding than negotiating with someone who doesn't have one.

At that point why not just use a globe?