HN user
presently life in western society
Let’s be clear, this “kill the poor” precarity is mostly an American problem (maybe to a lesser extent in the UK and Canada). There are huge swathes of western society (i.e. European social democracies) that don’t fall prey to this insane ideology.
Some countries may have more welfare but I don't think anyone in America is trying to claim otherwise
Actually, this is the party line of the right-wing in the US. It's not more, it's less, because...freedom?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
It only works when you're talking massive, government-backed support for basic scientific and technological research. The tech industry likes to lean on this narrative, but the reality is they just exploit the gains of basic research and are probably reaching the limit of what can be drawn from the last time this happened (i.e. when governments created the internet). This is why you see tech shifting into so much rent-seeking nonsense and bizarre financialization strategies that mirror Wall St/the banking industry. They're scraping the bottom of the government-financed research well and don't have much actual ability to create fundamental technological innovation themselves.
The good news is all we have to do is shift back to massive government investments in basic research to course correct and compete with entities like China(who seem to have a clearer picture of how Capitalism actually works in practice).
Well, then wish Swedish-style social democracy for us all, but maybe where the Marxists get to win out in the 70s.
Sure, I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but in the end it's also really hard to define what is 'good spending' on tax dollars.
Most social services in developed European countries that allow people to be better off and not squeezed and abused by companies like Amazon? Healthcare, transportation, public housing, higher education? Literally almost anything besides what is spent on the USA’s unwinnable, forever wars?
It’s not hard as soon as you set aside American Exceptionalism as having any legitimacy.
I think one of few good outcomes of monopolistic tech companies, like Amazon, is the degree to which they expose the lie that is American free market Capitalist ideology. There’s never been anything other than highly-subsidized State Capitalism and it’s outcome is massive, private command economies in the form of corporate dictatorships. These dictatorships then seek to assume the power of the state so as to achieve a monopoly on subsidization, while at the same starving the ability of the state to subsidize others and provide a challenge to their control.
More or less, actually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War
EDIT: Sorry about...history, I guess?
The British tried a similar narrative with the War of 1812, and we in America are still alive and kicking. I hope the same for Taiwan and their independence.
Be critical and unsupportive of American businesses that work with the CCP. Cite explicitly their human rights record and policy on Taiwan. Don't swallow narratives about the vaguely positive outcomes that could come from collaboration with the regime, nor unquestioningly embrace ideologies that requires expansion into the mainland as a moral or logical necessity.
I understand that you’re just using analogies, but since psychopathy appears to biologically instantiated and heritable, I’m not sure they’re very useful.
More concretely, it’s a neurological variation that is “fit enough” to survive within human populations at a low threshold, so it persists. There’s no “guiding hand” beneath it all.
The authoritative tone of your comments bothers me. What are they based on?
A moderately extensive reading of the popular and professional literature on psychopaths. I know this is an internet message board, so it’s best to doubt such claims, but that’s the answer.
The claim that psychopaths pursue long-term relationships doesn't jive with the antisocial nature of this condition
You’ll notice that I prefaced that with “high functioning.” High functioning psychopaths often come from financially and emotionally stable families/backgrounds, which help inhibit what we’d think of as overtly anti-social behavior (e.g. violence). And as you say, psychopaths are not without reason. Given a set of sufficiently pro-social developmental circumstances, some can learn to delay their “gratifications” to obtain greater “rewards,” just like anyone else.
I'm also troubled by your view that any engagement with a psychopath is wasted.
It’s not so much wasted, but about reducing your exposure to harm. And it’s not my view, you can find the same stated in the work of people like Hare, Stout, and Babiak.
A premise of your views is that you are able to unambiguously diagnose psychopathy in others, and that it is appropriate to treat those people radically differently based on your casual diagnosis.
I claim no such ability. I’m speaking only to a fuzzy heuristic intended to reduce my own exposure to psychopaths after damaging experiences with people who quite consistently match their patterns of behavior.
To be frank, I feel like I'm reading paraphrases of Pieter Hintjens' self-help book "The Psychopath Code" which is quite popular with this website's users.
I’ve never read this book, so I can’t speak to it. Again, you’re well warranted in your skepticism because it’s the internet.
It’s touched on obliquely, but psychopaths are impulsive and in constant need of stimulation, which, because of their diminished emotional responses, they largely derive from anti-social behavior. Its adrenaline inducing response is one of the few ways they can “feel.” High functioning psychopaths will often pursue long-term relationships because they provide a consistent source of this kind of stimulation, while also allowing them to modulate and practice the “masks” they use to deceive others.
The interviewee more or less admits this in speaking about how her “friend” would frequently ask if she was unwelcome around the interviewee, despite her not doing anything explicit to suggest this. It’s a typical psychopathic lapse into bragging about one’s ability to manipulate or inspire fear in others, albeit under the guise of the ability to “feel concern.” I guess it’s kind of a clever manipulation within the context of the interview itself, if again, it wasn’t so remarkably predictable. Few psychopaths can seem to go very long without slipping in examples of their inherent superiority or delighting in some prior act of sadism.
Do you think it’s something that people suspect about you? Or do you think people’s perceptions are so off that they wouldn’t really know what psychopathy looks like?
No. Psychopaths use what we call a ‘mask.’ It’s basically an entire affectation of being like everyone else. We learn at a really young age that if we respond to things the way that we naturally respond to things, people don’t like that. So you just learn how to affect the behavior and how to appear like everyone else, and that’s just what you have to do.
Psychopaths always believe this to be true, and to their “credit,” it does deceive many people. But it’s also symptomatic of their narcissistic delusions.
It’s been my experience that people who have had the misfortune of spending a lot of time around a psychopath can quite quickly identify others. It’s hard to describe exactly, but psychopaths are very deterministic in their behavior patterns. It’s as if the dulled emotions and fear response subtract some of the randomness that makes people without this pathology actually unpredictable. They can still be surprising in the moral thresholds and social boundaries they’ll cross without hesitation, but in terms of what they pursue (opportunities to deceive and manipulate, power over others), they’re dully predictable.
So, many do actually see completely through them, it’s just that this knowledge isn’t very useful. Social hierarchies and asymmetries of power do more to preserve their capacity to cause damage than anything else, so without the opportunity to fundamentally change the context you’re navigating, there’s not much you can do. Your boss will, in most cases, still be your boss, even if they’re transparently psychopathic. And their power to harm you is inherent to their title, not the specifics of their personality.
This is why if you ever read a book about dealing with psychopaths, the first thing they’ll almost all tell you is that nothing is gained by confronting them and your best recourse is to disengage as completely as possible. It’s a realpolitik approach to social dynamics, because only in rare and limited circumstances does a deep understanding of the psychopathic mind allow you to transcend them.
It’s of course totally beyond imagining that execs would plan such a leak to avoid further disclosure and sway favor to their side. Especially when they just lost to employee organizing on Project Maven and their entrance into the Chinese market is on the line...
India?
Yes, they would need to organize, but what’s happening at Google is a nascent form of this kind of struggle. Before there were ever such things as unions, workers banned together and rebelled in precisely the way employees at Google are doing so now. Over time, they recognized the need to create a formal, more durable structure, which culminated in what we today think of as unions.
In terms of the practical realities of organizing developers, check out Tech Solidarity or your local DSA branch. Both groups are deeply involved with helping workers organize and restore a sane power balance to the American economy.
How are unions a centralized decision-making process relative to companies that are ran like dictatorships by unelected executives? If anything, labor organization decentralizes decision-making and power within a company.
I’m not sure that ethics aren’t valued on an individual-level by tech employees, so much as they’re denied opportunities to coordinate and express them.
Google, because of historical quirks with its culture, has provided employees a platform to do this, if only in a limited form. And what we see there is workers using it to organize and impose change from the bottom-up.
They’ll probably soon realize the limits of acting without a parallel power structure, such as a union, when executive power crashes down on them to curb this growing rebellion. But like I said, I’m hopeful that all the very smart people at Google will come to understand their true class position as labor relative to management and build something more durable that can help put the company back on a better, more ethical track.
I hope that between this and the defeat of Project Maven, Google employees are waking up to how much power they have when act collectively. Hopefully, more formal labor organization follows, so there can be an ongoing check on the poor, executive-level decision-making that keeps pushing the company into these unethical pursuits.
Perhaps in a free, highly competitive market. But that doesn’t seem true in a state-controlled market like Chinese IT, where collaboration with the government is required. The CCP is free to pick winners and losers, intrude and interfere with little recourse for the companies who disagree with their decisions or end up on the wrong side of them.
How would this work? It seems more likely that Google’s collaboration could allow them access to technology that they will copy and iterate upon. This is what Japan did and they now exceed the US in several technological domains (e.g. automotive manufacturing).
It’s odd that you’re willing to so vehemently question sourced reporting, while simultaneously postulating, without any evidence, that a very narrow, favorable to Google scenario is likely to be the case.
Fact 5: The Chinese Government, which Google will collaborate with to operate in China, has upwards of two million Uighurs and Muslim minorities in what the UN calls a “massive internment camp.” Uighurs are also reported to be being detained upon re-entry into the country, with some then “dying in custody”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-un/u-n-says-...
In a swimming pool? In a tweet?
It probably depends on the market where you’re job-hunting. In tech worker starved areas like the Midwest and South, it’s probably a sufficient credential. Either of the coasts, obviously less so.
...such as the ability to rescue children with a magical submarine?
Samoans have a similar construct:
Taft-Hartley
Which was made explicitly illegal by US labor law in the face of rising union power to prevent workers from having this kind of say.
Is HackerNews accessible from mainland China? There’s been a lot of discussion here recently about Google working with the CCP’s censorship regime, kidnapped dissidents, and the interment of Muslims in Xinjiang. What impact will this move have on the featuring and discussion of these stories?