HN user
"But today, in a period when employment and earnings are vastly better than what they were in 2010, the delinquency rate for student loans is more than 11 percent..."
Might wanna check your crystal ball on that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
That'd be a pretty neat trick considering the world record for a basic cube is 4.73 seconds.
Scott has some really weird alt-right tendencies that make me pretty nervous.
Rationalizing xenophobia as doing what's best for America (with absolutely no evidence to back up his actions) isn't, 'wanting to be right'. I mean, you can demonstrably show that immigration to the US has done this country a lot of good.
Trump's entire platform is completely devoid of evidence-based decision making and is much closer to that of a temperamental child who wants to just go with his gut at every turn.
In the extremely unlikely event that CA actually attempts to secede from the States, I'd say there is a non-zero chance that WA and OR will probably come with.
That ends up being about $3,000B of GDP lost, and more importantly, it means that the US no longer has a west coast. The implications of all that go well beyond that as well. I think there is a very real chance that a second civil war would break out as a result. The States wouldn't want to lose the West Coast and it seems super unlikely that they'll just let it happen without some kind of intervention.
All this is contingent on CA actually making a move to leave the Union though, which by itself is very unlikely.
I guess we said that about Trump presidency a year ago as well, but here we are...
If you think 'millions' of parents have that kind of wealth, you are sorely ill-informed of what the socio-economic state of the country is.
What irks me, like I said before, is that so much of this is attributed to 'individual decisions' and 'responsibility', and no doubt a non-zero amount of one's 'success' is determined by these things, but the political agenda I push is one of rationalism.
Consider this: Imagine a olympic athlete -- This person has been training since a very young age, has had private lessons and has competed all around the nation in top teams. Some would say this person is truly 1 in a million because of the talent they demonstrate, but I ask you, "how many people have the resources to even realize that kind of potential?"
The lessons, the travel, the time parents need to take to ship their kids to these things and competitions. The costs of coaching and training. These things are all very expensive in terms of raw money and time. To say that everyone has access to them, or even 'a lot' people have access to them is mistaken. The truth is, that only families with wealth have access to the kinds of resources that give a person the best chance at being a world class athlete.
This applies to nearly every aspect of life -- Whether it's a sport, or career, or an extracurricular in some other field, if your family has the resources to commit to your success (time, money, connections, 'i know a guy who...), then you are more likely to succeed there.
There is a comic here that explains the idea much better than I ever could:
http://www.upworthy.com/a-short-comic-gives-the-simplest-mos...
The family's achievements are 'having lots of generational wealth'.
If you are suggesting that having a lot of money growing up, whether or not you have direct access to it, isn't a Very Big Deal, then I will gladly present you an endless body of research that suggests otherwise.
Edit: Just to be totally clear, the biggest determinant in financial success for an individual is their parent's wealth. This isn't an opinion -- This is a well-studied fact. It is of critical importance to understand that the way my mind works is one that is based on evidence and study. I do not sacrifice my research rationale at the alter of bootstraps.
actually, I think a lot of the points he makes about raising kids are applicable to less-fortunate families. Doing chores, their approach to schooling, food, family vacations, community service, backpacking and camping and in general self discipline do not require having lots of money. It just requires that parents be attentive.
What?
In what world do Vacations and Backpacking and Camping require little to no money? Those are expensive activities in both time and raw cash. When you don't have a lot of money, food is also not something you get to be picky about because you don't have a choice -- You can eat what's on the table or you can literally starve. That is the real circumstance for people living below the poverty line in this country of which there are plenty (http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html).
What bugs me is there are a non trivial number of people, yourself included, who are entirely blind to the circumstances of the poor and struggling. These are the people who insist that if you 'just work hard' you can make it, or that education is some kind of great equalizer. These are the people who also generally have a lot of influence in politics, both locally and otherwise, and proceed to campaign against what little social safety net we have because they couldn't be bothered to give up a fraction of their disposable income so millions of people could have food to eat and running water.
Then why write it at all?
The entire piece is structured as a piece to inform. It's not written as a piece to entertain -- That structure would include things like anecdotes, stories, little events that happened that reinforce or express a point, e.g. "This one time Sam really did a bad job fixing his car and...".
The piece is clearly a piece to inform. Yes, he acknowledges his affluence at the very beginning, but that doesn't mean he's aware of what a 'normal' income is and the problems and struggles that entails or his circumstance is wildly different than that of the average family.
It's great that a wealthy family tries to instill good values into their kids, but the idea that this kind of model could translate to everyone is a prime example of socio-economic ignorance.
The thing that actually sets kids up to succeed are a stable home life and financial security as a family. 'Doing Chores' and focusing on education and extracurriculars is nice, but there are a couple really important things:
Being able to focus on education and being able to encourage your kids to do extracurriculars is a privilege that is borne from money in the first place. If you can't afford extracurriculars and the various expenses they incur, or you don't have time to monitor and enforce a 'no TV/Computer/Games' time because you have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, then I guess you make a sacrifice there. If you don't live in a neighborhood when your kids can safely go outside unsupervised, then that's a sacrifice there. In a lot of places, community support services don't exist.
This shit right here:
"When the kids turned 16, we bought each a car....Here are the repair manuals. Tools are in the garage. I will pay for every part, but will not pay for LABOR.”
A garage, a manual, tools, any kind of car, the parts. This is a ton of money for one kid, let alone several. To think that this somehow teaches anyone a lesson about the real world is the definition of socioeconomic privilege. That is an entirely insurmountable expense for most people.
This entire article is just that though: It's a wealthy baby-boomer piece written from the stance of someone who's never wanted or struggled for anything. Their idea that you can project their methods onto other kids is unbelievably ignorant of the economic climate of working class America and is so disconnected from the real world as to be painful to read.
You want to raise kids that can pay for college by themselves? Be wealthy in the first place and reap all the implicit rewards that come with it.
Workstation with 4 monitors, but I truthfully use only 3 almost always.
Do you just blindly take whatever the doctor prescribes to you without doing your own research?
Yes. I'm do not have a medical background and at best, I could gain a surface-level understanding of the drug, which is not useful to determine which drug(s) are best for me.
How do you know your doctor is an expert?
They went to 10 years of school and several years of residency to do doctor things. These things are also regulated by several boards which have the power to revoke medical licenses if doctors suck.
For nearly all the products I buy, I'm definitely 'dumb'. I have a narrow expertise that gives me insight into a narrow set of consumer products where I can effectively evaluate product quality and value. For nearly everything else, I'm 'dumb'.
If you show me a rack of food product, I probably can't identify which is the best for a particular person given a set of goals. I probably can't even tell you which ones are 'bad' or 'good', because I don't really know. While food is but one subject, this applies to nearly everything I purchase. Which plastics are the best for a given task? What ingredients in a shampoo would actually give me results I want? What kind of bed or bedding is the best for my comfort? To all these questions: I have no idea. I'm at the mercy of google or a salesman, the latter which has a different motive than me which immediately calls that in to suspicion.
I'd be a fool to say I'm an all-knowing consumer, but so would anyone. Most people don't know what the need. They know what problem they want to solve, but they have no idea what the best product or solution is to solve said problem. Acknowledging this, we can easily see why when it comes to our health, it's probably best to see some regulation lest people do what they do best: make really dumb choices.
That's not at all true, and that level of ignorance is actually quite dangerous.
Scientists in no field are punished for disagreement. Even in really fringe science, disagreement is not only well-funded, but encouraged. A great example is String Theory: It has a lot of supporters and a lot of people saying it's untestable bunk, but research for both sides continues.. Consensuses happen when there is sufficient data to collapse to a consensus, not because 'funding'. Disagreements are extremely common in research and suggesting that the overwhelming consensus on the state of climate change is somehow a conspiracy or due to research pressures (that don't seem to exist anywhere else...) is complete garbage.
The science behind nutrition health is extremely complicated and expecting it to remain constant represent a total misunderstanding of how nutrition research is done and how results are determined.
The history of medical reversals -- and in this case, nutrition reversal -- shows that the government isn't magic.
What it shows is that nutrition science is hardly 'solved' and you'd be hard pressed to find a researcher in the field suggest otherwise.
A whole raft of restrictions could be converted to warnings and recommendations, freeing up industry to innovate and consumers to take a little more responsibility for themselves.
The problem with this is that the average consumer is both A) dumb, and B) doesn't know what they need. Alternative medicine skirts very cleanly around FDA regulation by not making any medical claims on it's product. They still market their product as a solution for various diseases and conditions, but they never make a formal claim. It's a $30,000,000,000 industry of people buying stuff that does nothing, or worse yet, can cause potential harm. To suggest their is no value in regulation of the drug markets is to suggest that people's health has no value. The defense of, 'well, people are responsible for their own decisions' doesn't hold any water when we know that the direct consequences of that mentality can be measured in literally tens of billions of dollars.
Carbohydrates are not a bad thing and are indeed an important part of health. The current suggested diet doesn't say, 'bread'. It specifically calls out Whole Grains, which a great deal of evidence suggests are a Good Thing. Suggesting that grains, or even carbs, are somehow worse than literal fat is misleading at best, and delusional at it's worst.
Ayn Rand was wrong about a lot.
The problem I foresee with Thunderbolt 3 is that it's serving a use that few people need at a price that no one wants to pay. The price-point issues might disappear with the USB-C compatibility, but even then, the only time I can ever foresee me actually reaching for Thunderbolt is for a display when DP 1.3 isn't an option or when huge data xfers were commonplace.
Unless it competes on price point with USB, I can't see this being any more popular than previous iterations of the protocol.
Maybe that'd change some if Intel actually put it on the enthusiast chipsets, but even then, I think the price point is a pretty big turnoff.
I was going to write this up as well. Also, you can probably extrapolate as far as, 'Most people's politics don't make sense.'
The general electorate is extremely uninformed and disinterested in the details of policy creation and enforcement. It's not a Millennials problem. It's an everyone problem.
Close, but more something like:
"Liberals seem to universally believe that the status you are born into will probably be the status you stay in your entire life."
The important distinction here is that competence isn't a factor and that the above statement is true in every measurable way.
Do you consider losing %98 of its value "stable"?
Yeah, I don't understand how inflation works either.
That's the American dream if you were born into the means of achieving the American dream.
Libertarians seem to universally believe that everyone is just born with wealth, or that if you bootstraps hard enough, you are just bound to trip over wealth.
Dedicated Bitcoin News site says, 'Bitcoin's future is Just Fine!'
Dedicated Alternative Medicine site says, 'Homeopathy is A OK'.
If your job sucks and makes you depressed, you probably should quit. If you can't quit, you should re-examine your values. If you are willing to give up your happiness for someone else's more power to you, but then you better be willing to live with that decision or else go re-examine your values again.
It's less about the customers and more about the folks that work there. "Getting a different job" is not always an option.
Regulations are great for libertarians, but only if it makes them richer!
If it makes anyone who's not in the rich people's club richer, than it's 'redistributing wealth' and 'big government getting in the way of innovation'.
John McAfee: "I'd really like some more attention please!"
You are the person I'm talking about when I say that people that blame Windows for problems are their own worst enemy, and it's way worse when Dunning-Kruger is in full effect as well...
Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause ntdll to break. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause Windows activation to break. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause shutdowns to take hours instead of seconds. Inexperience with a computer doesn't cause suspend to spontaneously bork.
Inexperience causes all these things. Listen, my experience goes way, way beyond 'anecdotal' when it comes to managing end users running Windows. Never, ever, ever with the exception of a small handful of updates, does Windows fundamentally break itself. When you see a bluescreen, 100% of the time it is your fault or it's your hardware's fault. 100% of the time. Sometimes it might look like it's not your fault. Sometimes it's McAfee removing important files that break the OS because it's being stupid, but that's not a Window's problem.
If shutdowns are taking awhile, something is broken. Your inability to diagnose that isn't the fault of the OS. Ever.
If your computer 'suddenly borks', then your hardware failed, or you are bad at computer. 100% of the time.
If you can't manage to upgrade Windows, than I can't help you. Someone did it from 1.0 to 6.2 in a straight shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WP7AkJo3OE
When stuff like this happens:
According to jjoonathan, the ntdll segfaults started happening after an update
It usually means that some third party software, usually legacy/dated drivers or your AV solution, has fucked up. The aforementioned McAfee bug is pretty famous for that, which you can read about here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/mcafee_false_positiv...
Your inability to diagnose the problem isn't the fault of the OS.
The half dozen Windows computers I own and the close to 600 I manage never, ever have these problems that seem to plague other people who seem to insist 'it's just Windows'. So, why is it that my customers never have these problems that you insist are ubiquitous to the platform? It'd be because I can manage them. I can leverage GPO to make sure my AV solutions at least report when it's doing something fishy. I monitor my computers so when something bluescreens, I get a copy of the dmp file and I can peel through it immediately. I don't let my users have unrestricted access to absolutely everything. I can use and manage the OS and leverage the extremely potent tools Microsoft gives me to diagnose problems and use that knowledge to prevent problems in the future.
And here's the thing: I don't really enjoy white-knighting Windows, but I also really don't enjoy people in the field of IT acting like Zealots in regards to products and platforms they don't know anything about.
I'm not a huge fan of Linux. I'm not a big fan of how esoteric the OS is and how management is unintuitive and complex. I'm not very good at fixing the problems that show up on the platform because quite frankly, I'm just not experienced enough to take any problem and pave a path to a solution. I've sworn more at my SAN running Openfiler because of Openfiler than I care to admit and if I could do it all over again, I'd never have put Openfiler on that box, but here's the thing: I'll never say, 'Linux is bad' or 'Linux isn't stable' or 'Holy shit I'm so mad at OpenFiler because if you have an iSCSI implementation and your boot device fails, your arrays are fucked unless you can rebuild', because I'd be speaking from misunderstanding, inexperience, and an incomplete understanding of the tools I'm using and I might look like an idiot by saying as much.
So, this kind of list of complaints seems to be really common among folks who don't like Windows. Some times the list varies and wonders from one category of problems to another, but the core theme is still the same: The end user isn't capable of using the computer.
Now, it isn't fair to say, 'You must have 5 years in desktop support to use this product', but it harkens back to the problem of that people are making judgements about an OS that aren't really caused by the OS. You can say, 'I had issues with drivers' and 'I felt that the UX here and there was poor', but to say, 'Windows is broken. Here's the problems I had that say it's broken' is dead wrong.
Furthermore, a lot of people do this kind of stuff on 500 dollar laptops and other equally crappy hardware and expect the same kind of quality as they got from a $2000 MPB. You want a rock solid PC? Buy a Dell Precision. Comparing the cheap hardware put in the budget-line laptops to the (mostly) decent hardware put in the line of portable Macs is pretty foolish, and again comes back to the idea that it's not Windows that's broken, it's your crappy hardware.
Windows is unbelievably stable and while it isn't without it's problems, 99% of the problems that people actually report as 'problems with Windows', aren't.
Yeah, that is not at all how taxation works, or how the reserve works, or how really anything works at all...