HN user
Take a second to remember we live on an incredibly beautiful planet
Or we could build on and enforce the 300+ years of thought and trial that went into copyright law so that individuals are re-empowered.
But nah, let's do the most radical, least thought out thing, and absolutely destroy small scale creators. I'm sure Amazon will be benevolent and continue to pay writers in your scenario.
What is with 2026 and just conceding civilization to the worst actors, and then adopting the worst tactics/thoughts/concepts?
Many communities are water limited. Many communities limit housing construction permits to available sewer hookups. Many communities are carrying expensive bonds that citizens are paying off to fund water expansion projects.
I do not want one penny of infrastructure that I have paid for in order to grow/better my community going to subsidize infrastructure for datacenters.
Since the 1980s Republicans have had a plan of 'starve the beast'. They intentionally structure government to be underfunded yet at the same time high debt and as dysfunctional as possible, so that they can point and say 'see, government doesn't work'. All because they are agenda over country/their fellow Americans.
We've had 40+ years with half of our politicians intentionally working to undermine our nation with intentionally bad policy.
I had responsible friends whose savings plans were destroyed in market crashes.
The whole point of social security is a safety net. There are plenty of cases where 'responsible savers' have needed that net. What do you propose, a second safety net to cover 'responsible savers' should something happen to them?
Yes, society owes a social contract where if you work you can afford to live and have a roof over your head, food to eat, and clothes that aren't Temu plastic rags of worse quality than dystopian sci-fi fiction 'clothes issued to people on basic'.
When you have to start shopping down market because you can't afford your normal store that is an indicator that you have less buying power now.
Saying 'everything is fine, you just have to shop down market, you can no longer afford your normal store, you need to go to the poorest store now because you are poor now' is just rephrasing what is being said.
e-bikes are a terror. Motorized vehicles operating in places where motorized vehicles aren't allowed (so like all modern tech, the benefit is the abuse/loophole they allow a small subset to benefit from). People treating them like toys and riding horribly resulting in lots of accidents. Nah, they aren't a plus.
You would also need to adjust for the huge medical expenses Americans face if you are doing that as Germans don't have that. Maybe the 401K savings Americans do for retirement (if Germans have a better societal retirement payout than Americans). And the other social benefits that are accounted for by German taxes that Americans still have to account for in some way. You can't just lump those in on the Germans and not account that Americans pay it some way as well.
I had skin cancer. I talked to my doctor and to the local skin care clinic. Because of my deductible, the final cost for removal would be the same with or without insurance. If I bypassed the American insurance hellscape, I could have the removal surgery that week. If I used my insurance, went to all the specialist referrals they wanted, etc it was minimum 3 months before I could get the surgery because of wait times for appointments to have confirmation what the skin care clinic tested/told me same day.
It's sickening to watch America go from everyone being fairly equal to this sort of elitism. 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you are under 50 and have a great job, life is great'.
If you are 50+ with a average job in an average town, America is much worse now that it was prior to the 2000s. And nobody cares because 'America has some of the best hospitals in the world' 'if you have a good job, aren't really all that sick or are on someone elses insurance plan, and if you are under 50'.
"estimates suggest that inability to afford costs of medical care contributes to at least 530,000 personal bankruptcy filings annually. Approximately two-thirds of personal bankruptcies in the U.S. are associated with medical expenses or illness-related loss of work."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2026/04/05/increasi...
Police are extended 'good faith' all the time simply for the fact that they are police. Including in situations such as loss of chain of custody for evidence, etc. We have the appearance of what you outline, with a blanket 'good faith' exemption that allows quite a bit of bad behavior/breaks the systems/rules the public believes to exist/be enforced.
I miss the old style small government conservatives that understood the threat that mass surveillance is.
I wonder if this position was taken from the Muslim slaver behavior who had been conquering/enslaving Christians for quite a while at that point. Especially as Spain was being taken back from Muslim colonizers at that time, and you have lands that had been under Muslim practices (enslaving non-muslims) now having the roles reversed but perhaps the engrained Islamic thought (only enslave non-believers) entrenched.
In addition muslim traders also exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa.
My country (the USA) just cut taxes for the wealthiest 1 percent by a trillion dollars over the next 10 years
https://itep.org/year-one-of-trump-republican-tax-policy-con...
It is not a matter of being realistic with limited funds. Tax income is not an act of God that we are helpless to control. We chose to lower the tax floor versus having a civil, functioning, improving society where people have something to work toward, optimism that their life will be better, and an ever improving nation. Instead we want social Darwinism pushing people down instead of raising them up (benefiting us all), and people too busy fighting for scraps to improve anything.
I don't recognize post 2000s America. And I don't recognize post 2000s 'conservatives'. They definitely aren't trying to conserve American values nor the American dream. They don't care about fiscal health (see above tax cuts). They don't seem to care about anything. They claim they look out for 'the tax payer' but only in a breathless, we have to do something about this right now, low information high propaganda informercial style reactionary jerking about bullshit kind of way, not in a 'we are building a strong civilization' long term, thoughtful thinking kind of way.
Sweet, open the borders then. It's not the government's job to take care of that (we had government long before we had 21st century style closed borders, so it's definitely not a requirement of government). More people = more money coming in.
Since the 1980s the Republican party had adopted a position of starve the beast, of screwing up these very numbers so that people can make exactly the argument you have.
What happens when half of government acts is bad faith purely to poison the well, one half of government and an entire political party make it so that the numbers don't work (and via the fiscal policy they intentionally inflict/structure/design) purely so that they can promote their policy position of 'the numbers don't work'?
How many unfunded tax cuts have we had recently? Those aren't acts of nature. The numbers you speak of not matching aren't acts of nature. They are intentionally designed to 'starve the beast' in the 1980s Republican way, and in newer ways the party has come up with since. All so the exact argument you gave can be made.
Sorry, zero bad faith on my part
You waiving away poor business behavior (the behavior being discussed being wage theft) because 'good behavior is hard':
if being a trustworthy employer is so easy why aren't you and many other people doing it
You saying companies are practically forced to steal because government/regulation:
the issues you point out are not due to employers, but due to government regulations or lack thereof, and the issues of the way the economy and financial systems are setup to incentivize, which the government is also responsible of regulating and enforcing. Without proper regulation and enforcement to even the playing field, the only ones who manage to stay in business will be the unethical ones
You completely ignoring that the tyrannical statement came from the post I responded to I and simply redirected their ridiculous premise from workers to business to highlight their ridiculousness:
It's easy to just say employers are tyrannical when
Why are you defending/waiving away wage theft? Not stealing from people and following the law is the absolute minimum an employer can do. It is not the governments fault when you break the law. Should it be ok for an employee to steal because someone else stole from work? Because society is complex and hard and has rules and laws but can't police everything 24/7?
I've been an employer. I've been a manager. My family owned factories. None of us were forced to steal wages. If you are in that situation you are a zombie business that can't actually afford to function properly.
Here's OPs tone that I simply echoed back but directed at the actual identified largest thieves in our nation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48788134
And they are the largest thieves without even going into abusing 1099. Hiring undocumented workers under the table. And all kinds of other 'acceptable to civil society' society undermining behaviors.
In the USA the most untrustworthy among us who in your words are "destroying society for the rest of us" are employers, as wage theft by employers is the largest form of theft in the country.
If workspaces are as much a community as anywhere else, the fact that the rot starts at the top should be the most major concern. People taking sick days seems like it falls way down the list of concerns in trying to get the American workspace ethical and overcome the tyranny of the untrustworthy (employers) of which you speak.
https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
"In 2019, the total cost of every robbery in the country was $482 million. The cost of wage theft was more than 100 times that number." https://www.workingnowandthen.com/blog/wage-theft-the-50-bil...
"More than $1.5 billion in stolen wages recovered for workers between 2021 and 2023" https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/
It perfectly fits the current timeline that the top 'feel good success anecdote' for this is about Starlink making raping the most remote areas on earth more enjoyable.
These guys get paid outsized rewards for exploiting our/everyone's oceans. Imagine a giant blimp getting paid outsized pay hovering for days over national forests hauling in every last animal they could get until the blimp was overflowing with dead creatures leaving behind a biologically weakened forest. We wouldn't hype them as working hard/dangerous jobs, we'd label them as crappy people/a crap industry. So glad we're making them more comfortable.
People who have been aged out of tech aren't going to be able to physically pull off 16 hour days in Alaska.
I have 3 product ideas that I do nothing with because I'd have to sell on Amazon and if they were successful the upper case alphabet shops would eat my lunch I can't compete with their production. So the options to the world are a little bit smaller because I can't afford the patent process. Spreading that industry wide seems like it would make society poorer, not richer.
Patents make us richer, in the short term with new ideas/products that people can only afford to invest in/bring to market because of patent protections, and in the long term with public access to those things as the patents expire. We have hundreds of years of seeing this model be successful, the same with copyright.
Location: PNW Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No
I have written POS applications (VB to SQL Server), managed large parts of the PCI stuff. Wrote medical applications (VB, Crystal Reports, SQL Server). Managed small dev teams. Acted as the implementation team with those products when new. Provided third level support/final person to call support. Did report writing/SQL optimization as data sets grew. Provided IT support from old RS6000s through to Windows Server/SQL Server. Later moved to IT management and ran a small (me+3) corporate team. Managed things like ERP/MPR upgrades/process improvements, custom factory floor dash boards, etc. Good a big picture stuff, troubleshooting.
Then I blew up my life and am now un-employable with a unsavory criminal history. My software skills are out of date (maybe my SQL skills are still useful) but would be willing to work fairly cheap for any role. My home is paid for and my costs are low. I would love to move out of physical labor and use my mind again, and find someone willing to give me a second chance. But my history will be off putting to most.
into reforesting entire mountains
I noticed that PR campaign on reddit to. Hope they planted the right trees (not like Eucalyptus in California, American pines in Sweden that weren't ideal). Meanwhile European and US tree cover is expanding naturally, we just don't really hype it. For example:
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/italys-forests-larger-than-a...
China is also all in on on building out new coal power plants.
https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-solar-climate-carbon-e...
Yes.
I've found most of the people who don't trust don't want to trust, not they actually don't trust, because they know nothing about the bodies that establish this, the standards they hold, specific issues that cause their loss of trust. Zero real background.
What actual bodies that establish credibility/verification do you currently not trust? What examples of their failures prompted you to stop trusting them or even be interested in the topic of if they were trustworthy gatekeeps? Most of the time that answer ends up having personal politics as the root, not actual trust issues that actually occurred and got the doubters attention. Normally if they have any examples they are politically sourced/politically generated laundry lists, not authentically generated concern or personal knowledge/care of the topic past wielding as a political weapon.
Please give examples of these agencies. What you list seems more like how business captures control via 'knowing more than government officials' then how technocrats do. At least that's what conservative politicians tell us as they defer all oversight/domain knowledge to private industry and private industry 'best' practices. Are you also saying that government should stop that practice and that is is also a trap of some kind? Or is it just a trap when it's for the betterment of society?
So the pitchforks will be the poors forming a mutual fund and busting/pump dumping the riches stocks?
I want a bill that prevents employees from using their phones at all for work cases. I've seen people who can barely afford their smart phone having to use it for work and then dropping it/breaking it where replacing it is a weeks salary.
Companies should be required to provide the tools needed, and that should include phone if a phone app is required to be used as part of the job. I'd say a replacement guarantee could work, but these sorts of places will fire someone if they requested such a guaranty be fulfilled so the only way is total ban.