HN user
edit: well, I'm out. I realized that on HN, after you go against the main liberal narrative enough, all of your comments are down voted by bots from then on...even when you are trying to have a conversation with adults.
Time to create a new account. rinse and repeat.
We have bred a culture of anger and jealousy toward anyone with money. The mainstream media is responsible for this as much as many of the politicians that don't believe a person should be able to obtain any sort of wealth.
It's no surprise that the wealthy don't really want to socialize with people that have less money.
Unless it's proprietary hardware, it will be circumvented pretty quickly.
The music industry is so large, nobody will be able to defeat them or their pack of lawyers in court. Napster was supposed to be a revolution, but all it did was put all of the indy artists out of business and create the environment we have now where music is virtually worthless and the only way to make a living as an artist is to sign with a big company and tour.
Music sharing took away all of the power we had to defeat the music industry. You need big money to make big changes, and now it's way too late.
The only real way to change the music industry is to start your own label, get the rights to all of the musicians' work, and then charge what you feel is right for the music and give them their fair share.
Nobody wants to do this because it will take years of sacrifice and money. I suspect that most people that start out with this intention, end up becoming the exact company they aimed to stop in the first place, because they didn't realize the cost and risks involved with the music industry.
I've never heard this... and people should stop thinking that a satirical comedy show is somehow based on facts.
To me, your race and gender aren't special. You are a person, just like everyone else in the world.
If we truly wanted equality, more people would think this way instead of allowing it to define you.
Climate change is a fact. The causes are just theories based on computer models.
To say that it's a fact and needs no further study is not only anti-intellectual, it’s criminal.
I worked in academia for over a decade. Knowing what I know about the process and how much ego, money, and politics are involved, it really makes it difricult for me to believe any study isn't biased.
Thw entire system needs to be scrapped and started over.
Just like with music and file sharing, this will not hurt the large corporations. It will only hurt the researchers that depend on these papers for funding and make it more difficult for them to make a living in the future.
It will also push companies to keep research more private and proprietary. Why would I spend millions of dollars on research, only to have it freely distributed to everyone, including my potential competitors?
I've never witnesses a time where more people fight to give up more and more of their own power and hand it over to governments and large corporations on a silver platter...and then complain when it's all gone.
well, the same thing happens when people would like to discuss alternative theories to the causes of climate change. The BBC, for instance, outright bans anyone that talks about it (and so do many other forums), which is outright censorship.
We should be fighting for the freedom to discuss any topic, not just a select few that matches up with the current narrative.
"May be there's less violence, but the amount of suffering has skyrocketed over the years. A more than significant amount of people are dependent on tranquilizers and anti-depressants to make their life bearable, because for them it has become mundane and meaningless without."
I don't think this is very accurate. People get hooked on painkillers usually because they had some sort of accident and need them for pain...and since opiates are extremely addictive, continue to take them after they no longer need them.
"also these numbers don't show how much exploitation and environmental damage our alleged 'prosperity' causes in other parts of the world."
You can't blame us for countries that decide to have no rules and ruin their environment. When you compare the environment of the US to pretty much anywhere in the world, it's one of the cleanest (if not the cleanest).
..and 'exploitation'? We built the middle class of China. Before we started going overseas to build factories, the majority of people in China were in complete and utter poverty.
Hardly what I call exploitation.
"I’ve had much luck in my life: being born into a middle-class family and having any natural ability nurtured by my parents and then by the education system"
This might be lucky on the part of the individual, but parents that sacrifice their own time, money, and life for their child's future definitely isn't luck. It's a choice. If more people saw it this way, we might have parents that actually cared about their child's education and less people in abject poverty.
..and 'nurtured by the education system' is kind of a joke in the US. The K-12 education system is terrible for everyone.
"Yet there is a dearth of thinking about how we can make these jobs more fulfilling, better paid and more respected"
The problem is that low-skilled jobs will always be low-paid in a capitalist system because pretty much anyone can do them. The only way to counter this is to artificially limit the amount of people that can actually do the job by limiting the supply or create some sort of union to force higher wages. Both bad ideas for the long-term.
"and to increase the relationship between effort and success."
Effort has never equaled success. You might put all the effort in the world into something and it you will still fail. You can always learn from your failures. I failed job interviews, businesses, and many other things before I succeeded. We should be stressing to our youth that you aren't entitled to success. You need to earn it.
"it is not uncommon to find graduates working in a bar on a zero hours contract"
What was their major? STEM majors have little problems finding work. Liberal arts? many can't find a job. We should be encouraging students to pick a major that at least has chance of being able to get a job that pays well enough to pay off their debt. Otherwise, it's just a gamble. They might as well start their own business and skip college altogether.
We should be talking about the trades. I know people that are carpenters and electricians and they can't get enough young people even interested enough to apply for the job.
Mostly because they don't want to start out from the bottom and work their way up. Many feel like they should be making $100K right away.
Those arguments are usually when in context of the rich not paying their 'fair share' in the US. When the stats come out and show that the top 10% pay 90% of the federal taxes (not including all of the taxes you mentioned), it really puts things into perspective.
If this is true, it proves that this rich individual was paying his fair share in taxes.
Why would they accept it?
Most scientific climate change reports call for massive problems in a century, not a year. All of the people that voted will be long dead and we don't really know what things will be like in 100 years.
It may actually be a success. Although it causes this to happen with passengers, most probably won't attribute it to Zappos. They will attribute it to the security practices of the TSA, if they even think about it at all.
The whole point was to remember the Zappos name, like on a billboard. Even this article got you thinking and talking about the brand.
"Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound Is Associated with Favorable Views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism"
There is just as much bullshit on the liberal side. All I need to do is take a look at Twitter and Youtube.
"I didn't know a single one who wasn't worried about putting food on the table"
You can put pretty much everyone that owns a business or works into this category. Unless you are the top 1% or have a VC subsidized lifestyle, you are always worried about putting food on the table.
Most businesses in that industry have thin margins. But it doesn't stop people from being successful. In my hometown there are at least 5 competing independent coffee shops that are all doing pretty well.
"developers tend to be very understanding and supportive of other developers who leave stable jobs to start their own company."
Have you ever started a business? Most people are not supportive, including developers. You might even lose friends over it. You are going against the norm and most people can't relate and find it strange. The only people that are supportive are those that have a business mindset.
"I'd say you're in the minority. Startups are much riskier, and "stability" would be one of the last words people would use to define them. Everyone knows that."
All businesses have some risk. It took a year or two to get to the point where it was stable. But I was profitable from day one.
I'm not sure what you define as a 'startup', but if you mean create an app and hope that people come to it with no real business plan, I didn't create a startup. I formed a company around a business model and slowly built it up.
Too many people in IT think they aren't replaceable or that the good times will last forever.
This is why I started my own company. All of my developer friends that told me I was stupid 5 years ago are now on their 5th or more job (and are scared about the next round of layoffs).
While I've had continued stability. I would rather not get pushed out of my own industry for being too old or demanding too much pay. I think I would be pretty depressed if a snot-nosed kid out of college was managing me.
As a side effect, my company can now hire all of the new cheap labor that will be poured into the marketplace after the next bust.
It's especially good for hangups on some new library that needs to be used.
I wonder what this means for ITTT?
Quitting my soul-sucking job and starting my own company. Been going strong for almost a decade.
mine's average. Take that white privilege!
You are exactly right.
"Plutocrats, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans, get the most benefit from a weakened IRS. Because they have the money, the lawyers, the lobbyists, the accountants, and the secret campaign funds, they are able to ensure that the IRS won’t have the resources to effectively collect the money they owe to it. "
Since when is generalizing an entire group acceptable?
Also,
How do you explain this?
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/12/news/economy/rich-taxes/
In 2013:
top 10% paid over 70% of total federal taxes 47% of all Americans pretty much paid nothing in terms of federal taxes
This also doesn't include the multitude of other taxes the rich pay (property taxes, use taxes, gas tax) and the fact that they employ many people that also pay taxes into the system (indirectly paying more into the system).
There are definitely some people using off-shore accounts, but it's not nearly as bleak as this article would like us to believe.
The US also has one of the highest corporate tax rate in the world.
If people are taking the risk and leaving the country with their money, we may need to take a look at our existing tax laws and figure out why they are taking the risk.
I don't understand why we are giving the trolls so much attention. I've been using the Internet for 15+ years and have heard and seen pretty much every bad comment imaginable.
I don't even think of them as real anymore. If someone comes along and says something nasty about me, I just ignore it.
The problem with all of these 'safe spaces' we see on college campuses is that we aren't giving our youth the skills they need to just ignore assholes, which will always be there. When they do come across something like this, it ruins their life and they need to go see a therapist...and the trolls love it because they get to control the person they are tormenting.
We also don't know the age of many of these posters. If you play any game on Xbox live, you will see and hear pretty brutal comments. You also hear the high-pitched squeak boys whose voices haven't changed yet.
Everyone is so quick to blame entire industries of adults without even having the ability to do a proper age or location check on the people posting these terrible comments (which is virtually impossible with the use of proxies, VPNs, and TOR).
I suspect 99% are teenagers and kids under the age of 18.
The problem is two-fold. The average users doesn't care about security and probably never will.
Many developers like to hack software together. To make it secure requires discipline and more time and knowledge when developing it. Most businesses don't really care about this. They just want it finished fast.
The only way it will change is if the government starts fining companies for software that has a crazy amount of bugs or requiring developers to be certified.
I honestly don't think many developers even have the ability to write software without the obvious bugs we see popping up today. For sure we would see less companies outsourcing to countries like India.
If you don't use one and have a complex app, it will eventually turn into a spaghetti mess of callbacks. You will end up writing your own framework that hasn't been battle tested on thousands of sites.
For simple apps, it's probably not needed. The issue also is that you app could be really simple now, but have features added to it regularly making it complex.
The problem is that you can't prevent a stranger from sending you something you don't like, unless you block all strangers from sending you messages or block the stranger after they've already sent it. You reported the person to Instagram. In my experience, this works pretty well and the user account will most likely get banned.
I feel like you want a digital 'safe space' like on many college campuses. The real world is much darker than this. There are no safe spaces.
The 'edge case' that you discuss is just reality. The only way around it is to only communicate with a circle of people that you completely trust.
Teenagers still don't have the wisdom or experience of someone in their 30s and I would hardly call them 'young adults'.
I knew so many kids that had parents that would treat them like adults..and they still made all of the stupid mistakes as the rest of us.
It's most likely a culture change. So many teenagers are becoming non-social and filling their time with the phone rather than sex.
I've been using Linux for more than a decade and have tried almost every desktop variant. I've settled on Ubuntu.
Many, many companies and individuals have tried what you are proposing, with marginal success.
What will you be doing that hasn't already been tried?