HN user
delete this account please 10/17/2025
European labor regulation and European tax rates have nothing to do with each other. The former is about restrictions on how employers can treat employees. The latter is about funding a robust welfare state. For what it's worth, both are good.
Because labor protection costs money
Labor protection does not "cost money". It is a limit on the degree to which workers can be exploited.
Because then the question arises: What if the current way of handling labor protection in the EU (as one of many components) leads to destroying yours and everyone elses standard of living, simply because it's unaffordable?
The GDP/capita of e.g. France is 10x what it was in the 1970s. There is nothing "unaffordable" about the European social safety net, except that there are political pressures to dismantle it (right-liberals like the Economist)
I'd rather live in a society with strong labor protections than one that is "more innovative", whatever that means.
There are commuter rails that go from NJ to NYC
I’ve used Adelie, which has its own postscript-like notation to render font and graphics inside a tiny VM. I love it
Perhaps on an individual level, but on a policy level, it makes sense that the safety standards for flying are higher for flying than for driving.
What's the back of the envelope on whether the 737 Max is more dangerous than driving?
Driving is an absurdly dangerous mode of transportation, so it’s probably not the best comparison.
Drugs did not cause rents in Seattle to triple over the last 15 years
I recently google searched "80cm to inches" and it gave me the result for "80 meters to inches". I can't figure out how it would make this mistake aside from some poorly conceived LLM usage
This will not bother most people. Most people are willing to use GMail, even though it snoops on their private emails and uses that info for advertising purposes.
While I agree with your larger point and am no fan of Google's privacy practices, they stopped this specific behavior in 2017
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...
80% of people in manhattan have no personal vehicle and I would not say they are "living like it's the 1500s". The problem is that most of America has car-dependent infrastructure.
This looks very similar to RRDTool's query language. Is this a fork, or was it just inspired by RRDTool?
There is a lot more software that currently exists written in C than in Dusk OS's forth dialect. The C compiler allows Dusk to run this software (once it's ported over)
It does have a GUI. Not much is written for it yet, though
=> https://git.sr.ht/~vdupras/duskos/tree/master/item/fs/doc/sy...
I would frame it differently, "collapse" can mean any number of conditions that exist in the world today -- internet access that is limited, censored/liable of being shut down, or nonexistent. Same with electricity. We also rely on institutions that may or may not represent your interests to build software that you rely upon (e.g. the decline of search, the locking-down of major social media platforms, etc), and so on.
Virgil's "collapse" mindset, to me, is about building resilience and independence, and IMO Dusk OS is fantastic at this purpose.
It's much, much, much simpler and more compact.
The core system is about 8000 lines of code. The C compiler is 1400. Its memory footprint is extremely small (1MB to have a C compiler running on bare metal in the PC architecture). From here, you have a system capable of building C programs as well as bootstrapping itself.
This is level of simplicity is staggering and empowering -- it is completely reasonable to read and understand every single line of code in Dusk OS. This would be incomprehensible in something like Debian.
One of the most interesting Forth projects to me currently is Dusk OS, a 32-bit operating system written in Forth that includes its own C compiler, with various porting efforts under way
arose as efficient
Capitalism does not drive towards 'efficiency' in some general sense. It is full of dead weight, destruction, forced scarcity, waste, and bloat. This is not accidental, it is essential to how the system functions.
their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit
This all sounds to me like DG's definition of 'bullshit'. David Graeber is an anthropologist, ie, he takes a wide view of humanity: many societies, including societies not that alien to us, manage to function without this kind of work. Why is it suddenly indispensable? It is not a business advice book about running an individual institution, it is a wider social critique about how we have set up our society and economy.
let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees,
Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist and would critique the idea of a top-down capitalist firm itself (ie, the deeper question: why do we insist on structuring labor this way?). He is not telling anyone the best way to run it.
But we're talking about New York city so you've already granted the port authority wide latitude and restricting your movements and controlling the population.
This is a bizarre argument. Cars are heavily policed: they must be registered and licensed. The state tells you where you can park it, and your ability to operate it is completely controlled by the state and can be taken away from you. In order for car infrastructure to function, there is a huge increase in police presence in people's lives to enforce traffic rules, parking, etc. None of this is true of, say, walking, biking, or taking transit, all of which are pretty unregulated, even in New York City.
The problem with small communities is that you don't necessarily have enough competent and available people to run the system reliably. Or worse, the people in charge leave, sometimes taking the servers with them, and no one else knows how to maintain it.
Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge these are problems. But I have so little faith in big platforms these days that I don’t really see an alternative.
communities can be both exclusive and publicly readable! I know many such examples
Sure, they vacuum things up, but people have agency. They choose to use platforms. They can choose to use different ones. I can't influence every person's choices, but I can choose how I invest my time and social energy, and present an alternative for people who are alienated with existing platforms (a very large and growing population)
The solution to a lot of problems is simply to not scale platforms past something like 1000 users. At that level, you can have a community that is guided by individual people and their relationships, rather than anonymized and centralized. And the infrastructure is much simpler to set up and maintain: we just need more tools tailored to being easy to set up and administer at this scale.
m15o has built a ton of examples along these lines. There are other communities and tools too, loosely referred to as the "small web"/"smol web"
Do you think people are more likely to abuse drugs if they are on the streets, or if they are housed?
My point is simply that policy should be based on what is effective and humane. Keeping people housed only based on the contingency of their sobriety is neither. Under no circumstances is it better for someone to be unhoused than housed. Housing should be a human right, full stop.
I'm open to giving someone free housing if they aren't on drugs
Sobriety is not a condition of housing. Many housed people drink and do drugs and don't get kicked out of their apartments for it. Why should we apply a harsher standard to our most vulnerable population?
- Direct patronage
- Nonprofits
- Public funding
Cheapskates will do the wildest of mental gymnastics to justify why they won't pay for the premium option. You're the reason why the internet sucks.
Ads make the internet suck