mrphoebs

I don't know why the lens you view this through is retributional, us vs them, or about taxing success of developed nations or rewarding people of a particular geography. Population growth is not an independent variable, it depends on availability of arable land, resources, education, urbanization, regulating structures/incidents. All human populations tend to have similar trends based on the above. Just because someone draws a line on the map around a lot of arable land doesn't mean it is overpopulated.

Climate change is going to effect every one even if those in developing nations suffer disproportionately. The quicker we transition our energy architecture away from non-renewables the better off everyone is. Those with surplus capital have the power to make this happen faster by helping those without. The alternative is choosing to suffer by delaying this with an us vs them narrative.

This sounds like someone standing on a sinking ship asking why everyone onboard needs to be given their share of available tools to help plug the leaks, when those tools could be used to create surplus for those having tools.

Those who benefited from the carbon emissions at the cost of others on a per capita basis need to take accountability of funneling the accrued capital to those who are suffering because of it.

https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2

The profound number of changes are in tact only if those changes aid in the natural selection of the organism against selection pressure.

Such changes are replicated more successfully (more offspring) making the change/mutation more resilient to disappearing from the genepool.

Over time any organism that's living/thriving is going to have a lot of these mutations stacked on top of one another in a resilient way(size of population with the same mutations). Any mutations that are disadvantageous to natural selection and proliferation are weeded out of the genepool (go extinct)

My mistake, I presumed incorrectly, that the argument you were making came from a place of defensiveness, rather than a more holistic framing of evolutionary success. Thanks for providing further clarity.

I doesn't seem like the above commenter was making a value judgement.

This is an insightful way of communicating technical and domain debt that software can accrue over time. Thanks.

Mission to unexplored south pole of the moon and investigating the presence of surface water at the bottom of craters that don't receive sunlight.

Simultaneously capability development and demonstration for ISRO

I didn't claim sex work in all countries is a result of human trafficking. I said forced prostitution is fuelled by human trafficking.

"In some countries, sex work seems to be illegal and problematic. But in other countries, it's regulated and successful."

My take is similar to yours, I'm just communicating to the original commentor that the societies where sex work is legitimate, regulated and safe is a minority compared to the societies where it isn't.

No it's not, it might be acceptable in a few societies but in a vast majority of societies across the globe sex work is both frowned upon and illegal.

You are naive if you think all prostitutes are willing participants that chose this as a career. Across the world forced prostitution/sex work is fuelled by human trafficking of women and minors.

In an ideal world human beings should be free to make their own choices based on their context and society free to judge them based on it's context. One can't have it both ways. One cannot have absolute individual freedom within a social substrate and be an accepted member of said society without adhering to the norms of the social contract, what ever that might be.

I don't know why you feel the need to give people your background/ability/level to bolster your argument. I'm sure you can string together a coherent argument without the need for an appeal to authority. I'm not calling you a junior engineer, merely observing that the quality of the argument you are making being worthy of a junior engineer's rant.

The bigger companies get, the worse quality of talent that comes in. Most late stage+ employees are there to rest, vest, and cruise. Don't be naive.

Straw-manning much? I don't see any part of my original argument making a point to the contrary or even addressing the notion of org size.

But I'll bite -> An alternative way of looking at this dynamic in large tech orgs is, that the org sets up a game where people who play the game well can succeed (interview well, do what looks good on impact resumes and against perf rubrics ) without contributing much to the success of the org.

Blame the game not the player, the rest and vesters are resting and vesting because they are achieving optimal utility within the interview/perf/promo game the org has setup, hence dysfunctional orgs.

It's not that flat organisations/startup aren't dysfunctional or that large orgs always end up being dysfunctional but I agree with you that larger engineering orgs often tend to be dysfunctional in many similar ways.

There is certainly scope for a more intelligent and nuanced discussion to be had here than what reads like a junior engineer's half baked rant on the uselessness of engineering managers.

Yes there are awful engineering managers just as there are great ones who are force multipliers for their teams. I've known great engineering managers who were great engineers who naturally became an interface for their teams and some who weren't very technical but were great people managers that got great outcomes for individuals and teams.

Org design, culture, complexity, needs determine the necessity of an engineering management function. Do orgs and engineering management functions become dysfunctional? Yes. Can this be resolved by just eliminating the management layer? Hardly.

There's no evidence to support this assertion

Like all your other assertions this one feels self serving for your point of view when a rudimentary google search provides references to the alternative.

Consensus on efficacy of lockdowns flattening the curve with relevant bibliography.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02823-4

N of 1 as in what worked in Sweden (ranked 3rd in the global healthcare index and has a population lower than some cities in india) does not in any way shape or form meaningfully imply what would be good for the rest of the world (though it might certainly inform it)

I wasn't referring to the presence of fake/false/sensational/agenda driven narratives or your allusion to them, I was referring to your following offhanded assertions.

" Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity.

That was the claim, certainly. But as we predicted, this never actually happened anywhere in the world - not even in places where people live in poverty, and healthcare is virtually non-existant."

Lockdowns did help flatten the curve, many countries health systems were overwhelmed regardless, but without lockdowns the fatalities and outcomes for severe cases would have been an order of magnitude worse.

-> personal experience: I survived only because I was able to get an ICU bed at the right time as did millions more in my country. Millions more didn't because the health systems were overwhelmed.

It's hard to take your argument in good faith when you offhandedly say stuff like this -> "A lot of that stuff turneded out to be fabricated, but it spooked a lot of folks."

Look at the hell china is going through right now and the hell we went through(India). The wounds are still deep and fresh, loved ones dying because they can't get a bed, or oxygen. Bodies rotting because crematoriums couldn't handle load and cities ran out of firewood.

I think there is room for discussion about the merits and demerits of various public/social policies around the pandemic without reducing it to a binary point of view and making it evidence based instead of offhandedly invalidating the pain and suffering of millions over the last few years as "fabricated".

I think you were half way there taking charitable view on one of the arguments, I think taking a charitable view on the commenter's perspective/intent would have gotten you all the way.

With that adjustment, I think you can go from "weasel words" to "Your perspective might be flawed..."

Apologies, if this comes off as patronising.

While I agree with the points you are making and think they are important, they could have been made just as effectively without resorting to an Ad hominem format. Though the quality of civil discourse on HN has degraded over the years, HN is still the one of the places I expect to live upto a higher standard.

(I'm sorry to any readers that this comment is not adding anything materially useful to the wider discussion)

Thanks for the detailed analysis. It was quantitatively informative.

The article reads like a self serving western narrative loosely based on cherry picked facts.

India has clearly stated it will buy cheap oil where ever it's available on the market, there is nothing special about russia, look up the actual quantities of oil and LNG imports from russia to india vs india's other suppliers.

What made india load up on russian oil is the incredibly short-sighted and ineffective sanctions on russian oil from the west that only made russian oil available at a discount.

EU didn't stop buying russian gas, russia and the nord stream pipeline saboteurs didn't give them a choice. And if you want to talk about war profiteering look to the profits of american oil and LNG companies that are replacing EU's supplies and rift it's causing between EU and USA.

Energy is the lifeblood of any human society/economy, A country of 1.4 billion with a per capita GDP that india has cannot afford to take a hypocritical moral Highground when doing so in an environment with rising energy prices means people starve.

Not trying to defend India here, I don't think there is anything to defend. I don't think people truly comprehend how deeply rooted agenda driven narratives are in western media. I mean it's not unique to western media but the diversity of narratives in the west unlike the sanctioned narrative in china gives people in the west this false illusion that the lens their media is seeing the world through must be accurate(it isn't).

Another agenda driven narrative recently being put forward is Saudi Arabia siding with russia over the US. Why? because OPEC didn't follow US's lead on market manipulation (price caps, crude supply) and dared to think and act independently.

There is no love lost between india and china due to events in the recent past.

The Indian people and government are furious with china's flouting of the agreed upon status quo at the border and it comes with all the nationalistic fervour that fury entails. It has also eroded india's trust in china at a diplomatic and military level.

India has been trying to counter and contain china's influence in the region with limited success and all of India's politcal, diplomatic and military institutions see china as our biggest threat.

The nuance in the "bugbear" thing is that this accelerated re-orientation against china is not coming from a place of fear, it's coming from a place of "Come at me bro".

While on paper it might seem like India is militarily outmatched by china the geopolitical and tactical reality is that china is incapable of mounting a meaningfully successful attack against India without itself suffering politically, militarily, economically and diplomatically.

Wow, an analogy as spectacularly useless as it is distasteful.

I don't see how domestic policy is relevant to a discussion about perspective of India's foreign policy alignment concerning the west. And don't mistake me for a champion of Indian government either.

I'm not a fan of the Indian government's tendency to behave like a nanny state over the past decade by arbitrary filtering/banning content on the internet. I'm not a fan of a lot of things that the Indian government does or how it goes about doing them.

As far as tiktok, there are plenty of reasons to ban it and there are plenty of reasons not to, though it seemed more reactionary than well thought out.

I don't think nuanced decision making is a strong suite of Indian government when it comes to technology especially censorship(VLC was blocked for god's sake) in direct contrast to how well it seems to be executing the India stack at scale.

I haven't ascribed an independent perspective to india exclusively, merely pointed out india has an independent perspective. And I did not say west are arrogant morons I said "Some in the west".

I agree with you and as does anybody with even a passing familiarity with international diplomacy, foreign policy by its very nature is about engaging with other countries to further a nation's self interests.

The problem is western democracies need to create a narrative of being the white knights of the world in order to justify use of force, coercion or influence to their people no matter how hypocritical that narrative might be considering their own actions in the past. This absolute narrative by extension also means anyone who isn't falling in line with the party line is painted as being on the "wrong side of history".

India is neither aligned with the west nor russia because of a single policy issue like china, and india does not see the world as a bipolar place like west vs russia, west vs china, whoever vs whoever...

India always engages and will always engage with nations where mutual interests are aligned, help where it can, and be assertive where it needs to be.

India is already aligned with the west in containing china amid other common objectives in the indian ocean through QUAD.

Also china isn't that big of a bugbear for india as some outside india think it is. China is the dominant strategic regional threat but is by no means even remotely close to an existential one.

India is not anti west. The west has this binary/absolute way of looking at things, "either somebody is with them or against them". India recognises the world is a much more complicated place and sees the world through its own perspective rather than whatever self serving agenda driven perspective the west deems as the only valid one.

India has a long track record of being a non-aligned power. If anything india has been moving closer and closer to the west since the 90s. I think this misinterpretation of india being against the west by some in the west is because they expect their allies to be cronies who'll toe the line.

This was eye opening. Thanks.

Space-time isn't a gravitational field. Gravitational fields curve space-time.

lol, once more on cue.

Or, you know an asteroid hits us causing the 6th Extinction Level Event killing humanity. As long as we are doing wild speculative Sci-Fi the Great filter in our future is a real possibility to consider.

For now, we are an incredibly young species who has time and again demonstrated our penchant for chasing after short term incentives at the cost of longterm harm. We are making the earth unliveable faster than we are progressing towards being a multi-planetary species (which seems like an insurmountable leap given the candidates and the cost structure we have to work with). But humans are inventive and resourceful so here's hoping we grow beyond living on earth.

You thinking it is worthwhile is all that should matter, just as a farmer thinking it's worthwhile to build a wall that lasts. Both instances are us giving meaning to self actualisation of individual drives be it preservation or propagation of genetic information or building something that will outlast you.

Agreed, and no matter if we manage to beat our fate or not, doesn't make this thing called life any less precious.

Fossilised remains in the sediments on earth are all that remain of the species that have come and gone before us. Many species are lost to time, because they weren't fossilised or their effects preserved. And our fossilised remains will be lost to the cosmos as well. You experiencing humanity in the midst of it might make it seem substantial. But we are a genus a mere 2 million years old and a species as young as 200000 years. For comparison, the dinosaurs roamed the earth for 165 million years. All of human history is 200000 years, again seems of consequence to us because we are participants in it but on the grand scale really isn't.

Does that mean we shouldn't just bother, absolutely not, we are given this gift of experiencing life. Something rather than nothingness...etc. But we can do with a little more perspective on how utterly inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of things. Having kids seems consequential in the context of human existence, but when human existence is inconsequential (there is no lasting impact or transmission of information beyond our temporary side-effects on the environment) it puts our existence into perspective.