VictorPath

Eugenics research is disruptive?

Why not phrenology?

people born with family whealth (sic)

Most successful Phillips Exeter graduate doesn't quite have that ring for the Horatio Alger idea that is being pushed.

Ok let us go down Forbes 2022 billionaires list

Musk - father owned diamond mines

Bezos - alluded to in article - big loan from parents

Arnault - father owned Ferret-Savinel

Gates - born with million dollar trust fund, grandfather ran bank, mother on board with IBM's Opel etc.

Buffett - grandfather owned chain of stores, father a congressman

The US military just shifted its bloody campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya to a bloody war against Russia, a focus of its new massive military budget while it cries poverty regarding the needs of even its own workers for domestic programs.

That the Christian holiday is tied into the US military apparatus with its imperial bases and adventures throughout the world is no surprise.

This article goes on about progress for blacks in the US...a half century ago the New York City magnet school Stuyvesant had hundreds of black students (over 300). In recent years the number accepted each year has been 7 or 8 each year, with a student body of over 3000. Efforts to bring students in from different neighborhoods have resulted in massive political efforts against that. This is just one data point, but would shape local people's perceptions toward progress, and opposition seems even more vociferous in other parts of the country.

I put my trust in how the average person thinks things are going, not from people on high telling us everything is great and why don't we recognize this. In the past year our industry has seen stocks tank, and layoffs increasing along with the fed funds rate. Someone having to push a story of how great everything is will get a cool response. People can assess how things are going, despite efforts from on high that people are mistaken in how great things are going.

The security clearance he was stripped of was set to lapse a day afterward anyhow. After all his effort and contributions, he was attacked out of spite.

The Russian military has been in the Crimea since the time there were British redcoats stationed in New York City, before the USA existed.

Karl Marx said unemployment was a foundational necessity of capitalism (although not the feudalism that preceded capitalism), so I don't see this program lasting long ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ).

This was published seven years ago. Its arguments are very sketchy - as if settling nurture versus nature for humans were not social science, as opposed to science.

If identical twins are raised in a wealthy household versus a poor household, how can one determine traits coming from inheritance versus environment? This analysis does not really answer it.

The data of identical twins separated at birth is very light, as one can imagine. A look at the data of the major studies shows there really is not a lot of data - twins are separated at the age of 9 or so, or sometimes are separated at birth and then reunited.

Many of these twin studies are funded by the strange but well-funded Pioneer Fund. You can check out what they were up to in the 1930s if you're interested.

The only body that makes decisions about Taiwan is the Taiwanese government. It has 100% control of the land within its borders.

Being that the Taiwanese government claims Beijing and Shanghai as being within its borders, I don't think that this is the case.

Taiwan as a sovereign state

Does the USA recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state? No.

Does the PRC recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state? No.

Does Taiwan recognize itself as a sovereign state separate from mainland China? No.

we can _learn_ to want to be another gender

If that is true, then cookie cutter expected gender behavior can be "learned" as well. In fact much of it was illegal in the US a few decades ago.

Actually Marx talked a lot about automation. Marx's prediction was this would lead to a lower rate of profit for invested capital which - mainstream establishment sources say is what has been happening.

It's not like a socialist country could invent things like a satellite, and be the society that figures out how to send a man into space, probes to the moon and other planets - oh yaa, a socialist country is the first country to figure out those things.

The argument he is arguing against is that the workers create the wealth, and profit is that unpaid surplus labor time that the LPs/VCs/founders expropriate from the workers creating wealth. You can't "share" profits with workers when workers are creating all the wealth, the LPs/VCs etc. expropriate profits from workers.

It's a strawman argument for founders, but I am fairly sure it is made out of ignorance.

Let's say a sole founder buys $100,000 worth of Amazon Cloud, Nvidia cards, smartphones etc. Yes, one person is at the company, but others made those goods. The founder may not have directly exploited the person who made the smartphone they're using, but someone did.

Also, let's say I sell my small company which is well positioned in a fast growing market. The buyers are not buying based on what happened before, but on the future work and revenues that will be acquired from people working on the product.

At the end of the day there are people who work and create wealth and get a wage or salary, and there are idle class heir LPs who do not work or create wealth. The heirs survive on the wealth created in expropriated, unpaid surplus labor time of workers who do work. VCs front for the LPs, and founders deal with the VCs.

I don't think Graham even knows what he is arguing with. I'm not trying to make a convincing argument for the other side, but a clarifying one.

Incidentally, pretty much every economist up until the mid 19th century agreed with my view in some form - Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, David Ricardo - all the people who made economic arguments which economists still use. They said they studied political economy. It wasn't until the 1870s that arguments against new value being created by labor were started in full swing, although some of the ideas go back to the 1830s.

I read this and Chomsky says what I said - the civilian deaths due to the US ground invasion and carpet bombing are ignored.

Also, as I said, the US began arming the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and began openly arming them in the 1980s. So if the Khmer Rouge had committed a genocide, then that's who the US was arming to put back in power.

Chomsky condemned the US ground invasion and carpet bombing of Kampuchea, which destabilized the country and I'm guessing the mass death of civilians from does not fit into your genocide definition.

In 1975 the coalition led, nominally or not, by Sihanouk gained control of Kampuchea (again, in the case of Sihanouk). The US and west said a genocide was happening between 1975 and 1979, but immediately somewhat covertly, and then openly, began arming the coalition with Pol Pot and what the west called the Khmer Rouge.

I have to laugh about all these comments talking about the left and pedophilia, as if conservative religious organizations are not rife with child molestation.

Prepare to wait for another 30 years until this can be openly and honestly discussed in Germany: until the perpetrators and their then-allies are all dead.

In 1977, a date the article mentions, the president of the Confederation of German Employers Associations was a former SS Untersturmfuehrer. The BND was founded by former SS/SDers under Gehlen. Talk about waiting years to discuss openly.

a blind eye to Russia occupying Crimea

The Russia military was "occupying Crimea" back when there were British redcoats occupying New York City. The Russian military has been there since that time. The only new development has been the US, UK, with some continental support, demanding the Russians leave in recent times and pouring financial and military supplies into the Ukraine to accomplish this.

Also if we want to go back to the 1700s, then Russia should hand Crimea over to Turkey, not the Ukraine, because Ottoman Turkey is who occupied Crimea before Russia.

Fertility rates in the US cratered after 2008...These women would probably have more kids if it was easier to have a single income household...Our education system and economy, in particular, causes people to spread out and move away from family.

You might as well talk about how women might raise their children on Mars. Outside the Amazon jungle, for the past 10000 years women have been raising children under class-based society under class-based relations of production. The ruling class makes decisions about production, that's the point of a class-based society. Thus the world is turning into a place where the purpose of women's fertility is reproduction of labor, not an increase of it. The ruling class prefers two educated, productive children to three or four less educated, less productive children.

It doesn't matter what working class women want in terms of children, because this is a class-based society, and the ruling class has things aligned to what is good for them, not her.

Well let's see which health experts signed it...

Roger Severino, vice president of the Heritage Foundation.

He's a lawyer with no medical training. I guess his credentials for health is Trump appointed him as an HHS lawyer to undo what Severino called the "radical gender ideology" of Obama.

Coronavirus hit New Zealand in 2020, and by May 2nd twenty people had died. New Zealand implemented lockdowns and ordered vaccines, although they took a while to come. By the end of October 2021, 28 people had died of Covid in New Zealand. They had massively attended sporting events at the height of the world pandemic as coronavirus was undetectable in the country. Once pretty much any one who wanted to be vaccinated got vaccinated, they loosened the rules.

Whereas in the US you have immediate resistance from these Christian fundamentalists (Hillsdale is Christian fundamentalist). Over one million Americans are dead of Covid, lots of people have long Covid, and anecdotally hospitals were full and all hospital patients saw delays in care, so I am sure people who could not get cancer treatments died due to these nuts.

In France the largest political party until 1956 was the communist party. In 1948 the communist/socialist alliance was almost elected to power in Italy, and the communist party was getting over one third of the vote to 1976 (the Italian socialist party with hammer and sickle logo got about 10% of the vote, and Maoist parties got hundreds of thousands of votes). Too much widespread support at the time to ban.

Not in West Germany which reinstated the Nazi ban on the communist party. Not the USA which banned the communist party, criminalized the party and jailed its leaders ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_195... ). South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia wtc. all followed the same path.

Dissenting parties were outlawed in western and western aligned countries all over the world, and many of them like Japan, South Korea, France, Italy, Australia etc. became one party led states.

Australia did not outlaw the Labour party, but we can see what happened when the Liberal party interrupted the 1949 to 1983 Cold War rule led by the Liberal party - pressures national and international undermined any ability to rule until a foreign monarch had her footman toss him out.

Enough people think Gough was bonkers

There is much discussion about how in the cold war, a swath of countries from East Germany to China ran as states led by one party. Not much discussed is how many western aligned countries did as well. As the Cold War heated up, from 1949 to 1972, the Liberal coalition ran Australia. In 1972 another party is elected into power, and an extraordinary amount of energy from within Australia and without (UK and US) went into undermining anything but the old one party led coalition. Whitlam was undermined every day for his less than three years in power, then ousted by the retainer of a foreign queen, so that the one party led rule would continue to 1983. Of course the undermined <3 year interruption to one party led rule was "bonkers" to those supporting decades of one party led rule.

One party led rule from 1949 to 1983, with the one elected other party with less than 3 years ousted by a representative of a queen. These people then had the gall to criticize the one party led coalitions running China and East Germany as being one party states that blocked political pluralism.

The same thing happened in the other western aligned countries in the Pacific during the Cold War - Japan, South Korea. The same case in South Africa, Italy, France etc.

Three years before this Clinton, the US Congress and corporate media cheered as Yeltsin shelled the Russian parliament with the help of the Russian Army. The idea was to support a strongman Russian president with tight connections to Russia military and military intelligence against the elected parliament. He appointed Putin to take over for him when he left.

Nowadays the same US politicians and press bemoan Putin and the lack of democracy in Russia. It's a complete farce.

what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?

This is a board run by an incubator investment firm, so I don't really view it as an outpost of hacker culture.

I have been reading here over the past week here about private Amway rail cars, underperforming CEOs being replaced, notes about Stripe/Twitter layoffs. Most of this is peripheral, or even unrelated, to hacker culture, but I don't really read here for Hacker culture.

I've seen a lot of hacker culture in the past few months, and a lot of innovation, not necessarily here, although there's been references to it here. For what I'm interested in a lot of it has been based around Github recently, but it varies over time.

I don't see the angels, incubators, VCs, startup founders, FAANG business development and product managers, and occassional programmers talking here to have much influence on hacker culture one way or the other. I'm sure a lot of people hacking on stuff have read this board, or even commented. Not all - I know a lot of very good programmers who never even heard of this board.

Five years ago we could see the continuing national oppression of the Lakota by America, during the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy. Imagine if Russia was trying to ram an oil pipeline through the Ukraine right now. Americans complain the Russians don't respect the sovereignty if the Ukraine, but Americans don't respect the sovereignty of the Lakota.

In the same manner Africans are nationally oppressed by America. This was more evident in my parents time when they couldn't vote, use white bathrooms, drinking fountains, play major league baseball etc. During Robert's life as well. Some of those restrictions have been removed, but looking at statistics we see how Africans are kept out of these places. The Supreme Court generally lessened the overt oppression against Africans since the 1950s, it looks like they are headed back to the old days now.

I don't think Europeans can comprehend the schizophrenia of America's attitude towards those of African descent. Like here, their friends at the Economist (probably some 20 something factotum just out of university) carry this idea on. Of course painting America's national oppression of the Africans it kidnapped to here as just, the natural order of things etc.

the corporate environment I found myself in was something I'd never done before and it was completely unsuited to me as an individual

There are two things here. There is your (correct!) realization and recognition of your alienating corporate environment, then that acts as a catalyst to your reaction - your resulting behavior.

My grandfather used to meet people who were in the original class divide in the United States - the masters and slaves from the cotton fields in the south. You are a wage slave, and the corporation controlled by the capitalist bourgeoisie exists to exploit you, and doesn't ultimately care if it burns you out as there's another young guy coming down the road.

Other than your exploitation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour ), the unpaid expropriation of your surplus labor time ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value ) by your corporate employer, there is also the feeling of alienation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation ) you are describing, which flows from a number of things I won't go into here, but that others have described in literature over the past two centuries.

Making this even more unpleasant is the idea pushed that the problem is you. That is due to the hegemony ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony ) of the superstructure ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure ) by the current ruling class. This is ever-present - one example, you post this message on this board, but the Verizon/AT&T corporations mediate your access to this board, which itself is run by another corporation. While this is an example, the cultural hegemony of the rentier ruling class's superstructure us ever-present.

So you have come to the correct realization. You work for your enemy. Your boss is your enemy. They have worked to turn not just your workplace against you but the entire society.

The comfort, fellow worker, is that your fellow workers are not your enemy. Some of them vye to be managers themselves, and will side with the bosses against you, but many will act in solidarity with you, their fellow worker. And you will act in solidarity with them. Learning about all of this, and organizing with others to push back where one can at this point of history can be comforting as well.

Your feelings are natural and will not change, but your reaction can change. I work for an alienating corporation as well, but I can cope with it. I'd prefer to work for myself or a coop, but can not afford to currently, and even that is not an ultimate solution within the existing relations of production - the entire system has to be overthrown, just like it was in France and England and Russia when their kings and czars were eliminated (well I guess in England the kings came back).

I still feel unpleasantness at work, much of it things my fellow workers complain about. I probably react to micro-management more strongly than some, or worse workers trying to become managers who think they're my boss.

In addition to this, why should I do a good job and create a good product for my exploited? This is real cognitive dissonance because the exploiters don't care if you churn out crap if it's profitable. But we have a need to put out a good product for those who consume the fruit of our labor. My uneasy compromise is I spend my 40 hours a week making a good product, but I will not work over that to do a better job if I am rushed (unless not working unpaid overtime threatens my job). That is some cognitive dissonance - I do a good job for myself, my fellow workers and the consumers - not for my company.