appreciatorBus

Or a coworker with an ax to grind.

Who decides whether or not there was intent behind your words?

What do we do when people disagree about the intent behind a word?

Who decides what is antisocial?

What do we do when people disagree about what is antisocial?

I don't believe there are neat clean answers to any of these. The closest we'll get will involve mutual respect, assumption of good faith, and dialogue. We can't have any of that if our starting point is, "I believe your words are secretly not what you say they are" or "I will hold you responsible for anything bad that anyone does that might be tenuously connected to your words"

When people say things they often have a hidden motivation, and who they are is a strong signal about what their hidden motivation is.

Citation needed.

The idea that most statements contain hidden meanings or only serve to cover up hidden motivations suggests an incredible level of paranoia.

I would posit the opposite - when people say things you can & should generally take them at face value. Sometimes people will disappoint you some of the time. Some people will do it so often that you would do well to discount their future statements. If you find yourself believing that anyone who doesn't share your opinions & values is secretly a facist/nazi, carefully curating their public image until it's time to strike, then you should really consider finding some grass and touching it.

Ostracizing X-ist and X-ism is a noble idea.

Creating an intellectual culture where all political ideas you disagree with can be construed as X-ist... not so much.

This is an absurd standard that no society can hold members to.

If you are judged not on your actions but on the actions others may take due to words they heard from someone who heard them from someone who heard them from you, then we might as well close up shop.

The responsibility for actions remains with the people who those actions.

The exceptions we have traditionally made, "You can't shout 'fire!' in a crowded theatre" same quite reasonable next to, "You cant discuss the sexual dimorphism of humans because someone somewhere might feel bad about themselves"

Oops, my bad fixed now, but probably too late.

Some simple words may express the wish to end the existence of a particular group of people.

There’s a strong case to be made, that if there’s any ideas that should be considered heretical it’s ideas like that. On this, I think you’d find broad agreement.

However in the current orthodoxy, politely declining to agree that men can be women, to cite one example, is treated as literal genocide.

If we are allowed to paint all ideas we disagree with as literal genocide, then not only have we destroyed the meaning of the word genocide, but it’s not really possible to discuss ideas anymore.

This is great individual strategy, and is an important part of being polite generally.

But the article isn’t about people not wanting to be polite, it’s about perfectly polite people being told that some ideas are off limits in all context of life except sitting alone in a dark room with your thoughts. And of course, there are some ideas so extreme that they do belong there and do belong in the ranks of heresy, but the current mania has expanded this category rather generously.

Capital markets have existed for hundreds of years. They are not doing anything today that they were not doing in 1602.

I am familiar with the 737 MAX critique and I'm very comfortable saying that Boeing was sloppy and cut corners. I just don't think the decisions they faced and failed on are new. 300 years ago someone built someone a ship and cheaped out in some way and it sank. Call it cheating/lying/scamming if you like, but the word "financialization" does not help anyone understand what's going on.

Cancer is a disease that attacks living organisms, similar to how collectivism attacks living societies.

"Financialization" is a 7 syllable word with no definition.

There is nothing about how Boeing builds & sells planes today that is qualitatively different than how they did it 50 years ago. Yes I am familiar with the concern that engineers hold less sway than previously and I agree this is a concern. I would not be shocked to discover that it's true. But this is not a new thing.

People who sell a thing, be they multinational airline manufactures, or a kid selling lemonade, have been able to profit by lying or skimping on quality since the dawn of time.

If your concern is that Boeing will skimp on quality & safety, then say that, instead of a buzz word like "financialization"

I have no idea where you came across the word, but when I see it used, there's generally a lot of handwaving and some vague implication that it's some new concept/activity that started in the 1970's. The only consistencies I've observed in attempts to define it is that money = financialization or "number go up" = financialization, and the speaker is generally uncomfortable with money as one of the tools we use to organize society.

Which will do nothing about demand from your fellow citizens to consumer refined oil products such as gasoline, so another refinery will be built and they will carry on as usual.

As long as it's free for individuals to pollute, we are going to demand polluting products & services without regard for the environment.

The solution is to price externalities, but your fellow citizens will vote out anyone who suggests those cuz they like polluting for free.

Collectivism will fare no better unless it's a dictatorship (which they all devolve to eventually, but putting that aside...) After the people's revolution they will demand the right to unlimited driving for $0 and stage a revolt should the vanguard elite suggest that unlimited driving for $0 might not be good thing.

Sure they might do that, just as a for profit company might.

The decision by either would face the same trade off - an increase in costs that their customers/patrons may not care about or be willing to pay for.

The answer for both is the same - price externalities so that the decision to pollute less is economic rather than moral.

A nonprofit, co-op, or government entity, serving the same customer the same product would produce an identical amount of pollution as the for-profit factory.

What is the factory exists to serve 10,000 houses?

To be clear, I think you’ve got the right direction – free stuff for humans up to a point and then market rate for everyone/everything after that. I just think it’s silly to pretend that companies are polluting for shits and giggles. They’re polluting for us.

I think that pricing pollution is the right way to go, I just know that the outcome isn’t going to be some magical world where companies pay for pollution but consumer don’t. The only way it works is that the costs get passed on and the consumer pays.

Yes it is but there are 2 items at issue: - if we are concerned about environmental externalities (as we should be IMO) then we have to ask if current taxes were designed to price those externalities or if they were just designed to pay off infrastructure. As far as I understand, it's the latter, so if we want to ensure polluters pay, whether they operate an AI data center or an Acura, we might need to charge more. Importantly this need not be tax - it can just be something immediately refunded to all citizens, so you end up with a scenario where people who use a lot are paying people who use little.

- the original poster seemed to feel that some gas consumers should pay much more than others. If we do policy based on vibes, this makes sense. Big = bad vibes = pay more. But IMO vibes are a very bad basis for good policy and will just make things worse.

The reason an industrial use uses x times more than a consumer is because the industry is selling products and services to x consumers. You can't compare them 1:1.

Companies at every scale speak marginal gains/losses. Microsoft looks at this the same way your local drugstore considers shoplifting. They will look at property damage in the context of potential revenue & margin, possibly accounting for cost of mitigations. If it continues to make sense, they will continue. If it doesn't they will consider raising prices until it does make sense, or relocating to jurisdictions with fewer elites play acting as activist proletariat. Since your local drugstore won't be local if it leaves, it's only options are to close down or raise prices or lock everything up.

I don't know a single person under 80 outside of tech who isn't using ChatGPT or more on a regular basis. If you really think everyone hates it, you are being very selective in your information/opinion sources. Yes 100% of lefty journos probably hate it, but they are an unrepresentative elite, jockeying for cultural power.

amid growing worker opposition

lol this is not "worker opposition", these are the antics of over educated downwardly mobile elites.

I think fossil fuel taxes are a great idea, but if one consumer, data centers, should pay it, shouldn't all consumers (private car owners) pay it too? That's the only way we'll be able to make good decisions about what types of fossil fuels are useful (i.e. more good than harm) and which are pointless luxuries.

Productivity is important, even if the immaterial aspects that contribute to it can’t be precisely measured.

Productivity is the reason that only 2% the population works in agriculture and the only way we can afford to maintain a space station.

Of course there are MBA grifters who are pumping out articles about how you can measure and optimize human relationships and of course, most of these are bunk. But that doesn’t mean that productivity doesn’t exist or isn’t useful or isn’t worth thinking about how to optimize.

TBF most ppl reading/posting on HN are part of the elite.

Elite doesn't imply "more money than I know what to do with" it simply means being closer to the upper end the of income and/or wealth distribution, or failing that, being part of some cultural generation that gives you more influence than the average bear, i.e. journalist, university prof etc. The cutoff for being in the 20% of household income in the US is $175K. From what I understand that's one entry level FAANG income.

With all due respect, if you bought a house during a frothy market, and you use words like “mid-century modern, you are 100% part of the elite class, even if you don’t consider yourself rich. Maybe you are part of the top 10% instead of the top 1%, but that top 10% or 20% is exactly the class I was referring to.

I am skeptical this is the origin of modern decor. The trend away from ornamentation, toward simplicity, flatness, etc in design goes back several generations and transcends interior design.

If the thesis was true, we'd expect rich people who will never be compelled to move against their will, or to move into less space, would prefer cluttered homey interiors, and poor people would prefer sparse & modern. In reality, the biggest boosters of modern decor are rich people.

I would wager that almost every civilization has been some other civilization’s sea people at some point in it’s history.

Nah.

Workers in 2026, even non-tech workers have an easier life than workers alive at any other point in human history.

Yes ofc there are problems - collectivist land use laws that ban construction near homeowners continue to drive housing costs higher for example. But if you asked any worker today if they would have preferred to be alive 40 or 400 years ago I would be shocked if any said yes.

The mega corp is making 3.98% profit. Sure you could focus all your time at Starbucks on that 3.98%, but most of us would focus on the other 96% which is helping customers.

If you find that sort of work, tedious and monotonous, then I think that says more about you than the job. I’ve been a janitor, a barista and a software developer, and they all are fascinating and fulfilling in different ways. Of course if purely measuring on status, comfort and financial renumeration software dev currently beats them all handily, but to imagine there is nothing you could learn, nothing interesting, nothing fulfilling in other types of work is pretty arrogant. The lefties might even call it privileged.

If service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.

Just because they already spent the money yesterday, it does not follow that the best decision today is to just carry on as if was still the correct decision. Yes they cannot get that 70B back, but if they have to choose between:

1. a long dragged out distraction over decades trying to make it work

2. a painful but quick 40B write down and the ability to refocus the company on better projects tomorrow

.. then they are, quite rightly imo, going to pick #2. In fact I would assume this going to be the next announcment.