StackRanker3000

Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.

How is this due to capitalism?

I mean, I can maybe see how you can tie it to NIMBYism, and from there to capitalism through the desire to maintain or increase property values. But that's a stretch, and only one mechanism

There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go away simply because we ceased private ownership of the means of production

The way I understand it (and my understanding is certainly poor, so I welcome well-supported pushback on it), is that few, if any, components in the food that we in developed countries eat today are actively harmful in themselves (with the caveat outlined below)

The main issue is overconsumption leading to overweight and obesity. Food that’s high in refined sugars and/or saturated fats tend to contribute to this, because it’s palatable and calorie-dense

So in that sense, yes - I believe that as long as your diet is varied enough that you get sufficient intake of all, or at least most, of the essential nutrients, and you don’t eat too much (i.e. in moderation), the ratio of macronutrients doesn’t make a big difference to your health outcome

The crux is that moderation is hard when the food is jam-packed with calories, and it’s so delicious you just want to keep stuffing your face

So the only two options you can imagine entail his detractors being irrational and emotional? You can not comprehend that anyone can have any valid complaint regarding him and his behavior at all?

Musk has accomplished some remarkable things, by having grand visions, ruthlessly executing on them, and being willing to repeatedly take on a massive amount of risk. If that had been all, I don’t think many people would be decrying him like this. It’s still easy to justify admiring those bits, if you’re so inclined

But he has also done a lot of things that make him unlikable and are harder to justify. He happily whips up massive amounts of hype, regardless of how likely his claims are to actually manifest (which is a large part of why the Tesla stock price is where it’s at). He sucks himself off at every possible turn, and takes dubious personal credit for a lot of things his companies achieve. He is vindictive and has exacted retribution on people with much less power than him (or pouts about it in an undignified fashion when the opponent is too powerful to crush, like the SEC). He has an easily bruised ego and lashes out in a very childish manner (remember the diver he called a pedo on Twitter). He enters into realms he has no expertise in and proclaims to the whole world that he has all the answers. He directly interferes in US and world politics by wielding his wealth and influence, sometimes with disastrous results (it doesn’t help that his political views usually are unsophisticated and immature, especially since he acts so certain of them). Etc, etc

Basically, he’s a dickhead that thinks he’s the best in the world at everything, and many of whose actions are detrimental to both individuals and the world at large. He doesn’t get a free pass for that just because he’s done some impressive things with his businesses

Free speech by foreign governments (or controlled by foreign governments) has never been protected by the US constitution, right?

I do agree that Trump, in both his administrations, has made it starkly clear that its checks and balances are quite impotent against a person or party that doesn’t care to follow the rules, so long as they have enough supporters that also don’t care, or are misled

Hm, those are all valid, but they're also from the perspective of only caring about external forces. It's as if the work itself is only relevant insofar as we get something out of it.

From the perspective of the organization that pays you to do it, it is? At best there may be another mission that it genuinely cares about, usually there’s only a profit motive (which is also fine). If you want to create software as an end in itself or enjoy the craft without compromise, it usually can’t be in the context of a job or a business

Our job is to produce the best possible outcomes given the constraints we’re faced with, and inform leadership so that they’re aware of the tradeoffs when they make their decisions. Sometimes those decisions are going to be bad, and obviously it’s justified to be frustrated then. Other times they are correct, even when it means compromises on the engineering side. That’s when we have to just suck it up (or go elsewhere)

I still think there’s room for enjoying the work of creating software even under imperfect conditions. Striving for perfection is for hobbies, or the very rare circumstance when it’s justified by the goals of the organization

I don’t think anyone is arguing that the basic idea of offshoring was invented after the COVID pandemic… But rather that workplaces and workforces geared towards remote working has made it more feasible and accelerated the process

Spotify offers lossless now. But before that the highest quality was 320 kbps AAC, and if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier (and in that case, sure - go for the lossless option)

You can also download up to 10,000 songs per device for offline use, which should be enough for a plane ride

I can see other issues one might have with Spotify, but I don’t really think those are among them. I’ve had it for about 15 years, and I’ve been consistently happy with it for my own use

Not saying you’re wrong in this particular instance, but there are all sorts of areas where we accept that harm will occur at scale (e.g. that 40,000 people per year die in motor-vehicle incidents just in the US). How do we determine what is reasonable to expect?

Do you have any thoughts on these reports from 2019?

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house...

The U.S. government concluded within the past two years that Israel was most likely behind the placement of cellphone surveillance devices that were found near the White House and other sensitive locations around Washington, according to three former senior U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

A synecdoche can either be when you use a part to represent the whole, or conversely use the whole to represent a part

I think it’s valid to consider the US government a part of the US. Thus, referring to the US government when saying that the US did something is a synecdoche

I can mainly speak for Sweden, but basically the answer there actually is ”everybody who wants to and meets the minimum requirements (essentially having graduated high school)”

Sweden has higher gross enrolment in tertiary education than the US, and a larger proportion of older students (people who go back later in life to progress their education or change paths)

I’ve heard that in countries like Germany people are often ”locked in” by choices they’ve made at an early age. There’s an element of that in Sweden too (more vocationally-focused high school programs may not give you all the courses that you need to enter all university programs), but that is not too onerous to overcome if you change your mind later (you can do ”foundational studies” to bridge the gap, or just sit exams to prove that you’re qualified)

Edit: but it’s maybe also to your point that universities have limited seats, just like everywhere. Maybe your high school grades or score at the equivalent of the SAT aren’t high enough to study mathematics at the top-rated institution even if you’re qualified, because there are too many people ahead of you. But you will be able to go to uni somewhere to study something

For an extreme example: Harvard's tuition is nominally $60K per year, but for families earning $200K or less it's $0. Many prestigious universities follow similar patterns resulting in a large percentage of students paying no tuition, the middle ground of students paying some fraction, and a small number of students from wealthy families subsidizing everyone else.

As someone from a country (Sweden) that to a larger extent has decreased people’s reliance on their families, and grown the welfare state instead, it’s weird to think that your parents wealth or income should have any impact on things like tuition, once you’ve reached the age of majority

Once I finished high school, my parents had nothing to do with my business as far as any institutions were concerned, and vice versa. But uni was tax-funded and free at the point of use. And when they get too old to care for themselves, it will likely be the government supporting them financially, not me (unless I strike it rich first, in which case I suppose they’ll spend their sunset years in style)

But that doesn’t explain why this particular justification is especially ”wild”, does it?

It could, it just doesn’t want to. Or at least the inertia and obstacles of gaining enough political support for doing it, paired with the reluctance of the powerful entities that gain from the existing system, prevents it from happening. But there is nothing that makes it fundamentally incompatible with still allowing private enterprise and profit

Yes, it’s similar in the UK.

If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%

That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000

So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k

One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead

Why would they resign? Their beef is with the government, not their employers

To what extreme do you take this? Would you rather be killed than scam someone? That’s a principled stance if so, but I’d personally rather you try to scam me if the alternative is you being beaten up, or worse

I personally have no sympathy for these people whether or not they're victims

That’s an interesting moral philosophy. Do you think that no one ever deserves sympathy for something they were forced to do? If a Mexican drug cartel threatens to kill someone’s entire family if they don’t perform a reprehensible act, no one should feel the tiniest bit bad for them if they don’t stand on principle?

I assume you don’t actually think that, but when you hear that people are being kidnapped, trafficked abroad, and forced to work in clandestine Burmese call centers, what do you think their options are?

And are more or fewer people able to put in that time now than before piracy and streaming became a thing? The answer to that question is not obvious to me, but I lean towards ”more”, or at least ”roughly the same”

Even if the answer is ”fewer”, and we thought that was such a horrible thing that we had to have a massive social movement or introduce strict regulation to move away from streaming, how would you put the genie back in the bottle when piracy is so easy, and people have become used to the technological advancements we’ve made?

Is this actually happening though? I don’t have actual numbers and would be open to be proven wrong, but my impression is that there are more people making music than ever (barriers to entry have been lowered) and more people making a living off their music and related enterprises such as touring and merch than ever (markets are globalized and contain more people with more disposable income)

I’m not sure why people believe that artists selling copies of their music being a viable source of income in itself is something that’s necessarily critical and/or a moral imperative to preserve. Humans made music for thousands of years before technology made that possible, and after some decades technology has now made that particular business model less lucrative (it’s now very easy and basically free to share essentially unlimited copies of a piece of music, which has tanked the monetary value of such copies)

As long as music is being made, I don’t think it’s a disaster for society that some artists’ preferred way of making money isn’t so viable anymore (if it ever was - what percentage of acts were ever making real bank selling albums?)

Thanks! I’ll take a look

Cheers. Do you have any citations handy for the old studies? I’m open to being wrong, but after some very brief searching and reading I’m skeptical that they properly controlled for increased feed intake (possibly due to palatability) to conclusively determine that some other mechanism was at play

This seems like a fancy way of saying “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.

What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency?

What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?

If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.

Yes, the US was in a particularly prosperous and exciting period compared to much of the rest of the world in 1995. If you’re, say, Chinese, chances are you find life in 2025 much more appealing

Overall, life is better in 2025 for the vast majority of humans. Life expectancy, child mortality, health (despite the obesity epidemic, which is a result of an abundance that has eliminated hunger and food insecurity from large swathes of the globe), purchasing power, access to technology and entertainment, etc, etc…

That some people in the US are feeling disillusioned because housing has become more unaffordable (partly because of regulations and technological advancements that have improved their quality and safety) and that they don’t have the same incredible economic trajectory as the preceding generations, especially since WWII, doesn’t negate that. A run like that can’t last forever, especially since it to a large extent depends on having a relative advantage over the rest of the world - at some point, they’ll start to catch up

Much of the same dynamics apply to Europe, too

This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.

It maybe doesn’t adress the point you’re interested in, but it doesn’t miss the point I was making, that the goals and mechanisms revolves around how well a person manages credit. For the credit provider everything else is secondary or irrelevant, including whether it’s because you’ve made poor decisions or external factors have screwed you over.

Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.

This is probably the crux of why we’re not on the same page, because I don’t understand what this means. I’m genuinely asking, what do you mean when you say that they treated it as a social credit score marker? What business did you have with them (or they with you) that didn’t involve whether or not to extend credit? What does the term “social credit score marker” mean to you?

This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.

I don’t see how you explain that it’s a fallacy, and I don’t think it is, but I concede that it’s a confusing word choice - I should probably have just omitted the word “uncaring”. My point was once again that their sole goal is determining the risk of extending a person credit - whether that would be a nice or moral thing to do or not doesn’t factor into it.

We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”

I assume here that you mean that people’s financial status, including their access to credit, determines a lot of aspects of their lives, too (correct me if I’m wrong). I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees with that. I do however think that you underestimate how constraining it can be when additional variables are factored in to more directly control what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and how.

I realize that you responded to a specific statement, not necessarily the entire context of the thread. However:

Saying that a person’s credit score is entirely due to their own financial decisions is incorrect because it’s overly simplistic, that’s true, although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story). It can also depend on circumstances specific to the person but not directly related to their own actions (e.g. their credit provider revises credit limits across the board due to external factors, so their credit utilization changes too, without them having used any more or less of it).

In addition, and what you’re alluding to, is that these models are continuously revised. A set of behaviors and circumstances that lead to a higher score in one economic environment may not do the same in another.

Credit scores as implemented in for instance the US are not a direct reflection of a person’s moral character or intended as a reward for good behavior. They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits. This also enables credit providers to give out more credit overall, based on less biased criteria (not unbiased, because models are never perfect and financial circumstances can be proxies for other attributes).

One can feel however one wants about whether this system is good or not. But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.

I don’t know if you didn’t read or didn’t believe what the other poster said about Atlantic Airways, that they have the equipment to manage the fog and the ability to refuel in Iceland and therefore can try again the same day if necessary. The implication being that SAS have neither - that’s presumably the ”reason they choose to do what they do”.

It’s not unreasonable to think that Atlantic Airways, being a Faroese airline, are better equipped than others to get people to the Faroe Islands.

ID cards are also a thing, and in principle every grownup should always be carrying ID although its not like everybody really does when walking around the park etc.

Tangential: I may be misinterpreting what you mean by ”should”, but no one is required by law or regulation to carry identification on them in any Nordic country (except for in certain circumstances, like while operating a vehicle that requires a license).

If the police have a valid reason to ascertain your identity as part of performing their duties, and you refuse to tell them your name, date of birth and address, or they have reason not to believe you, they can detain you until your identity has been confirmed. An id card can save you that hassle.

So if you’re just saying that it’s a good idea to always bring your id with you, then sure.

What do you mean when you say ”work”? That you personally find them helpful? Or that they’re the only ones that can’t be easily avoided even if the viewer wants to?

I think it’s pretty clear that other forms of sponsorships also drive revenue to advertisers (whatever people may feel about that)

Contradicting someone describing their own experience based on assumptions and generalizations that may or may not have a basis in reality is pretty arrogant. How are you so confident that you can presume to tell that person what’s going on in their mind?

More generally speaking though, I do agree that comments probably tend to give people more of a dopamine hit than the content itself, especially if it’s long-form. However comments on HN often are quite substantial and of high quality, at least relatively speaking, and the earlier point about reading the articles often being a poor experience has a lot of merit as well. Why can’t it be a combination of all of the above (to various degrees depending on the individual, etc)?

Are you really not understanding that there are people who have different preferences than you do?

I grew up in a rural area, with a decent-sized house and garden, surrounded by nature. It had its pros and cons. I’ve now spent a couple of decades living in large cities, and I love it. I personally don’t need all that private space, I enjoy having many people from all over the world around me and the endless options for culture, food and entertainment. When I get older still, my priorities may change again, or maybe they won’t.

I don’t think you’re insane for making other choices than I have, but you seem to lack both imagination and empathy if you can’t wrap your head around why not everyone feels the way you do.