LiquidSky

You don't know how to build a home. I do.

Do you? Sound like the people you hired built the home. Do you know how to do what they did? Did you do it? What did you do to earn that $50k?

Today a Hacker News user discovers the concept of qualia.

I feel like in the US if you punched a cop the cop and his colleagues are much more likely to just shoot you, or at least unleash brutal violence on you and the rest of the crowd. I guess the idea is to provoke these kind of battles in hopes that the cops can be overwhelmed or at least public opinion goes to your side?

Seems like that'd just discourage people from going above and beyond at work. Why do more than the bare minimum to avoid being fired if nothing else you do counts?

the well is now poisoned for companies that do care

Because there's no such thing. Or rather, there are until it's unprofitable enough that caring seriously threatens the bottom line, or the nice owners sell off to someone less nice.

You need to be careful here, you're falling into the inverse "Elon is a visionary genius" trap: "Elon is an evil genius". For example:

buying an election through Twitter

It's weirdly forgotten now, but Musk didn't want to end up owning Twitter. After making the impulsive buy offer, he spent that summer and fall desperately trying to get out of the deal. He finally gave in when it became clear he was going to lose in court. It was a major failure for him, and it's odd seeing this aspect of the Twitter purchase memory-holed and reframed as some 19D chess move.

Yet!

That reminds me of an interview I heard with comicbook artist Chip Zdarsky. He was talking about how we all love to draw as kids, but eventually around 10 years old or so we start to become aware that what we see in our heads isn't anywhere near what's appearing on the page in our drawings, and that gap acts as a powerful filter discouraging most people from pursuing art any further.

But who cares about the long term when you could make a killing this year or even just this quarter and walk away with a fortune.

Do we think that's impossible?

Yes. Even if it weren't, it doesn't even seem to matter anymore. Making better products doesn't seem to lead to more money than churning out shit and financializing it, so why would anyone bother?

I associate the concept of pronatalism with also wanting to be involved in your kids' lives

Then don't because it's just wrong. Very few, if any, of the "more babies, bigger families" types have any interest in or concern for the children after they're born. In fact they're usually the ones fighting tooth and nail to prevent any kinds of programs or services that might help the resulting children and families.

For them it's just a pure numbers game/bizarre sexual fetish disguised as a philosophy.

Sure, WFH has some downsides as does anything, but it's always funny to me that we have 150+ years of basically everyone who's ever worked in an office despising it as a place where productivity goes to die mired in pointless meetings, office politics, etc., but when WFH becomes a realistic option all of a sudden the office is now Plato's Academy reborn.

I know that this is Hacker News and so all rich and important people must be geniuses making only rational moves, but consider the slim possibility that most aren't very good leaders and make poor decisions.

Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.

I don't think Musk and Andreesseen are who most people would associate with the concept of pronatalism.

Musk is for sure. Doesn't he have like 100 kids because he's constantly trying to get women to become pregnant by his sperm?

The second one is mostly accurate, yes. There aren't really many good rational arguments for requiring full-time in-office attendance.

Well, there was the previous whistleblower complaint that members of DOGE accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data without the awareness of agency officials, which the government denied...until this January when they were forced to admit in a court filing that it was true. [https://archive.is/efY6S]

That is to say, there is no reason to extend this administration or anything DOGE-related the benefit of the doubt.

Everyone adapted.

I like the phrasing of this because it tells us nothing of whether your family liked the change (or felt better off with it) or not. You can adapt to a lot.

Does it even actually matter what you do? How many lawsuits/investigations have there been in the last decade revealing that some company or another that swore up and down was following privacy laws, protecting your data, and not selling it actually were. I'm at the point where I figure anyone who wants to track me is, and any privacy pop-ups or the like are just for show.

No, it's very much yours and the way you phrased it. Perhaps you didn't mean it this way, but you sound like some kind of "pickup artist" type giving advice on "negging" women.

I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place

Money.

I'll take "begging the question" for $500.

We're talking about environmental regulations. It is no more good for a small business to pollute than a large one, and it's precisely the poor who are most harmed by environmental pollution.

You're noting how they describe themselves, but my experience has been the same as the parent comment, that "independent" always means conservative/Republican but not wanting to call themselves that.

When skiing in the US, people see it as an opportunity to use a hobby to gain an advantage, to network, to talk business, to flaunt, to compare, to use an escape as a entrance.

I'd like to see any evidence of this because this has not been my experience at all, ever. I've skied all my life, just went with my family over the holidays, and neither we nor anyone we met, or anyone I've ever met on ski trips, was doing it for any reason other than fun.

why else would a ski lodge need a boardroom?

Just because a venue has the capacity to host business events does not mean that that is its sole or main purpose. The obvious answer is that offering this amenity gives the lodge the option of attracting corporate clients in addition to its normal patrons.

This is like saying because the Tour de France exists no one in France bikes recreationally.

That's true, but he thought of himself as Dogbert, a superintelligent being superior to everyone around him.

I don't recall any of his rightwing stuff, but I remember one of his 90s books had some stuff at the end about how quantum physics meant you could control reality by envisioning what you want and then you'd enter the universe with it. I was a teen and remember being utterly baffled.

How or why Scott Adams went completely of the rails is perhaps something we'll sadly never understand.

The key is that it seemed like he was Dilbert when he actually always thought of himself as Dogbert.

This is premised on promotions and other work rewards having any kind of rational basis or connection to the work.

It could simply be that spending time with your boss makes them know and like you more, and people tend to reward people they know and like, making up some post hoc rationalization about performance or whatever to justify it.

No one wants to think of themselves like this, though, so they would never admit, even to themselves, that this is what's going on, but I suspect for most people it's the actual reality.

Isn't this just how the tech world has functioned for the last few decades? Silicon Valley had a great scene about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

Like when CEOs openly salivate at the prospect of firing all workers and replacing them with AI.

I saw a series of ads in a train station the other day for some company claiming to offer "AI employees" that had slogans like "our employees never complain about overtime", "our employees don't ask about vacations", etc. and was just shocked at the brazenness of it.