HN user
Why is Pinterest such a shining example when it doesn't have a fully developed market model yet and hasn't shown a single profitable quarter? What makes it more than just another overvalued company waiting for the next burst?
Congrats, you've sort of discovered bizarro-marxism but phrased it in ridiculous terms based on a poor grasp of economic realities.
1)Peasants absolutely exist. There's an enormous invisible labor force in the US that is paid a fraction of minimum wage, let alone a living wage, and that's not even counting the literal prison slave labor employed in multiple states. Further, while the US may export a great deal of food, there are plenty of food types and a majority of manufactured products that are imported from places where they are made through the exploitation of third world laborers.
2) Your claim that business-ownership used to be a widespread individual experience is historically nonsense.
3) The article is full of tautologies like "If you have the human and social capital to start a business, it means you don’t have to worry so much about money." Yeah, if you're rich enough to not have to worry about the world crashing down around you tomorrow, you're rich enough to not have to worry about the world crashing down around you. Brilliant insight, and also not the lived experience of 99% of the world's population. Your suggestion that people simply "choose" to be this way is ridiculous.
4) The assertion that middle-class people spending a majority of their income as it comes in is "cultural" rather than a reality of saving being a LUXURY afforded to the few wealthy enough to afford it is both wrong and incredibly insulting. You're hardly the first person to perpetuate the "poor people just don't have good money sense" myth but it doesn't make it any less noxious.
And that's just for starters! Wealth is a zero-sum game and capitalism is built at its very foundation on the upward mobility of wealth through exploitation of labor. You can't change that with fairy-tale ideas about everyone magically being able to afford the risks and costs of business ownership if they just want it bad enough.
No, see, that was the "cool" thing about Vilerat. He wasn't just some Joe Goon "ironically" shouting racial slurs. He was the moderator of the "serious" discussion subforum on SA, where he frequently expressed such terrible opinions in complete seriousness and actively suppressed discussion that "hey, maybe you shouldn't share opinions with the BNP, just a thought" as moderator sass.
This is the man whose funeral Obama will solemnly attend and whose death Romney will use as the rallying cry to up the US government's murder-rate of non-whites. A terrible little internet nazi cum computer janitor for imperialism.
How else do you define a group led by royalists and other rich western expats, backed by the IMF and armed and supported by NATO, taking over the country and installing themselves as a puppet government in service to western interests? Is a South American coup not a US assassination just because the CIA only supplied the training, money, coordination, and intel and someone else pulled the trigger?
Gaddafi was hardly a beacon of good government, but debt-slavery to the IMF and open doors to the ransacking of national resources by western corporations is hardly an improvement. Not to mention little things like the incidents of ethnic cleansing.
Yes, why on earth would a population subjected to invasion and ongoing occupation by imperial western powers find an attack on their culture objectionable and representative of their entire daily situation?
MUST BE THOSE IGNORANT SAVAGES AND THEIR MYSTICAL NONSENSE
Tell that to the author of that post. Oh wait....
Africa would have been subjected to a bloodbath of proportions unseen in history if the white man hadn't destroyed their culture first.
Examples I point to are as follows -
The Zulu nation was happily destroying not only all of it's neighbors, but many of their own people as the leadership happened to be certifiably insane. Shaka for example had a small penis (actually historically accurate) and killed thousands of people because of it. The zulu empire was actually not the bad one as the Matabele under Mzilikali after his loss to the zulu, took his tribe and conducted a scorched earth campaign across the lower section of africa destroying all in his path.
Lets not forget the laughable Xhosa girl Nongqawuse who said she saw visions that if everybody killed off their cattle and burned their fields the dead spirits of their ancestors would grant not only tenfold cattle in return, but destruction of the new white Anglo/Boer civilization in the southern cape. Needless to say after they slaughtered and burned everything no ancestors were forthcoming and 25 thousand of the Xhosa tribe died. The tribes of africa were largely barbaric and vicious groups of people who really only understood killing for the most part. There were exceptions to the rule as there always are, the hottentots, and various smaller tribes, but for the most part african culture was set up to destroy other cultures to begin with.
I'm not going to say that they are better off having been colonized by the europeans, but the alternative was pretty vicious as well.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer racist apologist for imperialism. RIP Viletat
"Real Actors Reading Yelp Reviews" justifies any amount of sock puppetry.
"Real mass-market VR is just around the corner" is something I've been hearing since I was a little kid (I'm 30). I'll be super happy when/if it does happen, but won't hold my breath until it does.
Consider TrackIR, a phenomenal gaming technology that has been around for years and significantly increases immersion and "natural" input/control yet has failed to find meaningful traction with developers outside of simulators and a few other niche titles like Arma. Or 3D, which is still little more than a quickly-tiring gimmick despite a much wider range of titles being developed with support for it. Or Kinect, which, after the initial rush, has proved to still mostly be a solution in search of a problem.
Even if VR hardware has finally reached feasibility for mass-market production and pricing, without a large developer commitment it won't take off. It faces the same catch-22 as every add-on technology, requiring large developer time investment to support yet not having the market share to warrant such an investment, and the market share never getting large enough to warrant it because the investment is never made. The announced "launch titles" for the Rift don't really indicate that this hurdle is anywhere close to being surpassed.
It's cool to think about these things but "the future is now!" is inevitably premature. The article frames the entire thing as hypothetical to try to avoid this, but is still pretty gushing to the point of walking past these obvious and serious challenges.
Normalizing the "ironic" use of slurs normalizes the unironic use of them as well, and further entrenches privilege as a norm.
It doesn't take spending a lot of time in any nerd culture group to see that the racism, sexism, and homophobia are not ironic at all. Case in point, the enormous administrator/moderator-led backlash on SA in the past ~year against anyone daring to not openly welcome the death of anyone who is not a white cis male.
This is the weak link imo. The entire premise is that variance in developer preferences of environments is what leads to problems, but editors are where preferences tend to vary the most. If you're an open enough shop to not standardize systems, your devs sure aren't all going to want to be locked into the same editor.
In fact I'd guess most devs would be willing to sacrifice environment choice for editor choice if it came to that.
The Indian people do not passively wait for government permission to have a voice, they buy it every day with action and sometimes with their lives. Large areas of India have reduced or virtually non-existent government control thanks to the efforts of the Naxalites to free themselves from a government still mired in racist traditions and an economy shaping itself to the worst excesses of neoliberal capitalism.
If the poor have no food or homes it is because they have been taken from them by a greedy government and a brutal police force. They will reclaim their lives and achieve justice not through waiting for liberal reform or by surrendering further control to a government instituting bare-minimum programs in an attempt to appease away the inevitable, but through continued people's war.
It's pretty telling that even an article trying to question the culture of unquestionable-exceptionalism is still chock-full of jingoistic language that says "if we just fix a few things we'll be the best country on earth again", as if such a thing was or is factual or even possible.
Not "exceptionalism is a myth" but "exceptionalism needs a new paint job". This is what passes for dissent in mainstream American discourse.
Bitcoins in general are really interesting as a sandboxed, time-accelerated microcosm of capitalism. You get to watch the entirely predictable boom/bust cycle, inevitable follies, manipulation and theft play out in years or even months instead of decades.
Yet you still see people going "but this time the bubble's legit guys!"
Rape-culture and patriarchy are definitely major society-wide issues but they undeniably find a special welcoming home within geek culture.
A culture which supposedly prides itself on merit and intelligence at first glance ought to be most receptive to actually picking up a book and studying social issues, but the reality is instead that we get a social group full of men's right's advocates and evopsych true-believers and other terrible terrible people.
When 1 in 4 men get sexually assaulted during their lives, I will start giving one iota of care about poor poor dis-empowered men.
THIS is what prevents more women from going into tech fields. From academia to the workplace, IT/CS has been built into a self-reinforcing boys club. Until on a large scale it is no longer socially acceptable for geeks to treat women like shit, there won't be many women in technical fields.
Compact communities don't have to involve large populations. There are already small and medium-sized villages in Europe that have successfully converted to 100% car-free walkable spaces, and it isn't inconceivable for many existing US suburbs. You just have to move away from this design philosophy focused on strictly separating residential and commercial zones.
This article is more than a year old, has there been any real followup?
It's utterly baffling to me to see them specifically call out editor gender disparity as an issue and then seriously suggest that a ui redesign will fix this.
The issue isn't the software, it's people. People being allowed to be terrible to other people. People pushing euro/american-centric, white-centric, male-centric viewpoints. People creating a feedback loop of intolerance by making the place only habitable by the intolerant.
You can't graphic design these problems away.
This post is a complete non-sequitur. You can hate Java AND hate antiquated practices. They're not mutually exclusive and there's plenty of room for more hate in this ol heart of mine.