bamfly

I'm genuinely puzzled why so many people believe in collectivism

The topic wasn't collectivism. You keep trying to make it about that, I suppose because that's what you wanted to argue about.

Failure to embrace/invent capitalism sooner isn't the main reason basically all graphs measuring anything related to humans start to shoot up in 19th century. Lots of factors contributed. There must be (given it happened) reasons that, while doing very well in some ways, more-free-market approaches didn't wildly outcompete everything else much sooner, though some efforts were made that way well before the 19th century (and, again, did sometimes experience notable, but not categorically-different, levels of success)

Fair. I don't find HN correctable when it veers off of tech topics—confidently-wrong and often ideologically-fixed while lacking basic education in a topic is a bad mix; some folks try, but it mostly just adds to the noise or ends up... well, here, which similar-tone tech-related observations do not, they typically have to get much nastier first and these kinds of general and ought-to-be-obvious expressions of bafflement get a pass, I guess because the HN "hive mind" more often experiences the same "WTF?" as the poster, in those cases.

... however, complaining about it doesn't help, sure, and I'm aware that posting (in basically any capacity...) doesn't improve it, so, shouldn't have posted. I'll leave it be, thanks for the deserved "bop".

I do wish there were a way for HN to get better at this specific thing, as it's always been about the same amount of bad, and avoiding non-tech topics doesn't seem to be something HN's interested in doing ("it's hard to define what that is" well, yes, but other tech-focused forums manage regardless—but they also get less engagement, and that does matter for this site's advertising purposes, I get it).

I think downplaying identity was a good idea to try and I like the ideals of it and appreciate what it's trying to achieve, but I'd say the evidence is firmly favoring the "failed" column for that experiment. We see the same people having the same extensive bad exchanges over and over, and identity helps avoid that with group-education about repeated behaviors by certain posters in certain contexts. Changing course might help with this and some of the other most-acute issues on the site. I expect nothing, just putting it out there. I know, unsolicited opinions are like assholes :-)

Failing that, user-managed blocklists would be a godsend—I know those come with their own problems, but it'd be well worth it on here. Bonus points if you could have separate lists for tech and non-tech posts (I know, tricky, that's why it's bonus points, haha). Some posters exclusively post uninformed flamebait nonsense (within the threshold of "HN Nice" so it keeps happening—not a dig at moderation, that's a Hard Problem in that space) in non-tech threads, but do contribute positively to tech threads. ("so correct them" -> folks do, that's how the threads keep happening, it's like sitting in on a 101 course mostly attended by non-majors who are nonetheless passionate about their uninformed position, and arguing with the professor and won't accept they may be wrong—it's not productive or enlightening) It'd be lovely to never see that again, but get to keep reading the site. Blocklists are the #1-100 features I'd add to the site, if I had a genie that could grant 100 only-HN-feature-related wishes.

Free markets do a fine job of justifying their value with straight facts, no need to reach like that. Apply whatever you're considering free markets to other places & times, and it wouldn't have had the same outcome. It took a lot of things coming together, but most of them were scientific advances or just luck (new world plants exist and are awesome, was a really big one)

I'm finding the responses in this whole thread a strong argument for making STEM majors take more social science courses. Econ too, probably, especially behavioral. Way too many are a freshman-level bad "reading" of the situation & systems at play, and of the positions staked out by the more-reasonable posts. And some of the posts are even worse than that—straight-up basic reading comprehension failures.

God's sake, you need to be able to think better about these kinds of things than this to understand business. It's all human systems—you ask for bad behavior, you get bad behavior, and sitting around tut-tutting over the people doing the bad behavior won't do jack-shit to fix things, no matter how good it feels. It's immature as hell.

This is a fine position to hold, while excluding more-useful ones as "condoning bad behavior" or "excusing bad behavior" or whatever, if you want to judge people but not solve any problems.

It's true, and also entirely unhelpful.

A behavior being bad, and a system being arranged such that it selects for that bad behavior, are separate things.

Observing that fixing the latter might eliminate most of the behavior doesn't mean you think the behavior's good.

Move to New Zealand. It'll be kinda OK, the government's stable and democratic, and they aren't gonna be machine-gunning waves of climate refugees (or else getting overrun and seeing QOL plummet) like most other democratic countries will in the next few decades.

I reckon that's why there's been a trend of billionaires buying citizenship there. Guaranteed entry if they get citizenship, even if things get bad, and they're not autocratic so they probably won't seize all their stuff.

True—it usually wasn't an amazing living. But it was a not-totally-implausible direction to go, if perhaps not the best move. Isn't even that, now.

IDK what the equivalent poorly-paid-but-is-a-career-in-fiction-writing move is now. Probably video game writing, though you won't be getting to come up with your own stories at the bottom rungs.

My (Boomer) parents made a bunch of serious and expensive mistakes, and my dad didn't properly start a career until he was almost 30. He had a high school diploma. He was literally raised in a barn (the girls got to sleep in the very-small house). My mom had a junior college degree but never worked for pay again after they got married.

He was upper-middle-management at a huge company when he was forced into retirement by the "professional" managers who had come in and filled everyone's work-days with meetings and had no fucking clue how any of the actual work got done. Between pension and savings, they were millionaires by then, back when that still kinda halfway meant something, so it was fine. I grew up with everydamnthing I could want, really.

Follow the same life course—put in the same amount of effort, make the same sorts of mistakes—today and you'll work until you can't anymore, and be destitute when you do. And probably not have a family. Assuming you don't succumb to depression and OD on opioids in your 40s, or end up in prison.

I doubt my kids will own a home. Like, ever. And they're pretty damn bright. Unless they go full off-the-grid in the middle of nowhere or something.

The future looks pretty fucking feudal.

It's definitely worse now than it was decades back.

For a time, you could make a living writing short stories for genre rags. A matter of a few decades, but still. Without needing to be a household name, even.

They're still the only places that pay non-famous and non-trendy people any money for short fiction. Most literary fiction publications below the tippy-top don't pay a dime, and lit-fic fosters a culture of accepting that state of things, even shaming people for asking about pay. Can't make a living in genre short fiction and the odd hastily-written pulp novel anymore—hasn't been enough demand for decades—but getting a check feels good, at least, even if it's two figures, and you won't get that in lit-fic.

We believe in abundance because of millennia of life experience incorrectly or not.

It's only not been near-universal to experience at least one severe famine that kills many people you know, in a full human lifespan, in the Western and (relatively—this goes back a while) developed world, since like 1600 (thanks, potatoes and corn!).

Even then, wasting away hungry for entire seasons was still something you were pretty likely experience a few times. Only industrial nitrogen production mostly ended that. Luckily, malaria and cholera and such kept the number of mouths to feed in check, LOL.

The past was horrible.

Oh thank god. These kids of mine were getting expensive.

The luddites lost, sure—but industrialization did make an absolute shit-ton of people miserable until the labor movement clawed back some of those productivity gains for the workers and curbed the worst abuses committed by capital.

If we don't see another wave of reforms soon—which is sure to require labor action!—a whole bunch of folks are in for another rough time (stretching to entire lives, as it did last time) which will not automatically get better through capitalism pixie dust or whatever.

The last time we saw a huge shift in human participation in the economy, it sucked absolute ass until a bunch of workers screamed and bled and died to make it somewhat better. That's what'll happen again if we don't catch it early. "It'll get better on its own, because markets" is magical thinking.

Also specially in the US with all the school shootings, banning kids from having phones that allow them to call for help seems like a really bad idea.

Run the numbers. This isn't a justification for much, really.

They're a shameful occurrence, but the odds of a kid being present during any kind of shooting at school (gang member standing in the parking lot and firing at someone not on school property, and not a student or faculty member; targeted jilted-lover killing of a teacher; targeted crime-related [think: beef over drug territory] killing of one student by another, with a gun; and yes, also mass shootings) at any point during their k-12 education, are low. Present, not killed or injured. Indiscriminate mass shootings are very far from being the most common kind of shooting at schools, so that's even less likely—being present at all, that is, not hurt or killed, that's vanishingly unlikely over all 13 years of school. Nb that's assuming even-odds of shootings at all schools, which isn't the case.

So you're harming all kids' educations and exposing them to some messed-up stuff (talk. to. some. teachers. What you think I meant by that? Shock images or something? Not as messed-up as I actually mean) in case they're in a mass shooting (rare) and also their having a phone makes a difference in the outcome (narrowing the slice of this-was-a-good-idea circumstances even more)

It's awful that they happen, absolutely, and they are one small but striking feature of our messed-up gun laws and culture and we really do need to fix all that, but perceptions of how common they are are completely out of phase with reality, which leads to bad decision-making.

Teachers want to treat cell phones like gameboys, but parents won't let them. They throw an absolute fit.

Hell, parents call their kids in class just to chat.

Anyone downvoting: talk to some teachers. Maybe start with junior high teachers and see if you can even stand moving up the grades. Your skin'll be crawling in no time.

If you don't share this view, you don't know what's going on. That's all there is to it.

Exactly. That's why I made my kids chain-smoke cigarettes for a month, then told them they couldn't have any more, but kept a pack in the open on the kitchen table.

Gotta teach self-control.

You'll need to move to a very few, probably-expensive places, or scout private schools. Probably not the cheap kind.

:-(

Mine can have one when they can pay for the phone and the plan.

I reckon if they can maintain enough income to cover that, they're ready for one.

Still can't have it late at night, though. And if they do anything too dumb with it, it's gone, and they can buy another when they graduate.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Locke's argument for private property ownership of land beyond space to live in not being obviously-unjust was built entirely on this: improvement of productivity of land through work and investment. Holding private land to sit on or to wildly under-use wasn't compatible with his ethical justification for private land ownership.

(not that the Second Treatise isn't full of weak reasoning—natural rights as anything "real" rather than arbitrary, LOL—but it's considering one of the top influences on the founders of the US, the founding of which was a major step in the rise of capitalism to global dominance)

I would love a car that does not have a single display and just connects to my phone or pad for setting things up and streaming audio.

You need a big screen for cameras and such, because visibility in a lot of modern cars is about the same as the driver's seat in a Sherman tank. Unfortunately.

Sure, I'm just not assuming it's entirely accurate :-)

To be clear, I'm not complaining about FAANG/finance comp rates. Anyone taking a bigger paycheck instead of that money going to capital is doing god's work (plus, building a foundation for future capital innovation, if you want the pro-capitalism slant on it—more people with investable capital and more people with cushion to try to build a business is very good). You should absolutely take every dollar you can wring out. They wanna spend stupid-money, see if they'll give you "stupid + $1". All day long.

Just putting things in perspective. "Bad" developer pay is still really good.

(of course, there's a worse tier of pay for developers and sysadmins under that one, but I don't think there's a lot of remote work in that tier that isn't also offshored work—in-person, though, yes)

Are we expecting colder, or warmer weather in NY and New England from this? It's not clear to me from reading some of these articles. The expected effect for Northern Europe—that I understand.

The current technology is not so adequate in this area yet.. We use google workspaces/chat and meet. I curse it every week..

I think this is the one place AR/VR is almost ready to really help out. "Teleport" your chair to someone else's space while they "draw" on the "whiteboard" to show you things—with their actual body and hands.

Rigs anywhere near good enough to make this non-terrible are gonna be expensive for some time, and maybe don't quite exist yet (but are the one valuable use-case within striking distance of current hardware, I think), sure—but isn't the claim that this kind of interaction is incredibly valuable? Four-figure cost per six-figure worker should be a no brainer, then (unless companies/managers are just bullshitting about that...). And meeting rooms ain't cheap.

it isnt “easier” to get an offer at lower ranges, those companies think they are taking a risk with their comp ranges too

The trick is not to job-shop in bad markets. "Expensive" and "risky" to a startup in, I dunno, Billings, is "holy shit, what a bargain!" in a lot of cities—and not even the top markets, but tier two and three cities. Or to established, larger companies.

Be wary of small companies scraping by in cheap cities. If the pay's non-shit, they'll expect you to be a literal wizard, performing actual supernatural feats, for pay that's still probably on the low side.

low-paying

For high values of "low paying".

$150-250k TC, instead of $300-500k.

Future routing protocols (already under development) that include end-to-end route verification will be the end of it, I expect. "Democratizing" part of the Great Firewall and building it into the 'net itself. Only way around it will be proxying, and that'll risk getting the proxying-IP partially blocked, if it's caught or any of the traffic is deemed "bad", and requires that you can route to the proxy itself in the first place. Won't be entirely immune to circumvention, of course, but will make selective and region-blocks and throttling more common and more precise, and significantly raise the bar for getting around it (which'll probably be illegal nearly everywhere, too).

Truly, unproductively fucking around with broken tools and terribly-designed libraries/APIs/SDKs is like 80% of the job.