HN user
One of the better comments I've heard is from philosopher Bernardo Kastrup: if you build a computationally perfect simulation of a human kidney on your computer, no one expects it to start producing urine on your desk.
“$40 million…a small fortune” — inflation has gotten out of hand!
There should also be a counter article titled the real cost of NOT owning a home. At least in the macro sense, there are consequences for a generation spanning the global that is willing but unable to afford to purchase a home.
I’ve disabled YouTube recommendations does anyone have a good resource for discovering things based on interest or even better a one time dump of some form of my recent watch history?
I interned at a few places like this when I was younger, and in my current role I used to visit a fair number customer sites like these. I agree, it was less creepy than it was oppressive. I think the kids might call it an NPC vibe you just got. Definitely an urge to want to get out as soon as possible to get some fresh air and natural light.
Anyone know if vanguards VTI is immune from such practices?
More specifically a few oil companies and their shareholders. Everyone else suffers. Ie privatizing profits and socializing costs.
Beautiful. I recently saw a youtube video [1] on radical neighboring that really inspired me. Led me to another book on the gift economy [2]. All which to say, I now always bake two loaves of bread. One I keep for the family, the other I give away.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dynQV-oKM0E [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/208840291-the-serviceber...
I’m not sure where we go from here. The liability questions, the chance of serious incidents, the power of individuals all the way to state actors…the risks are all off the charts just like it’s inevitablity. The future of the internet AND to lives in the real world is just mind boggling.
A very powerful meditation practice is called self-inquiry. One version of it is after you calm your mind down (say with breath meditation) you look for where u think u r. Wherever that is, ask yourself if that’s where u r, what is looking at it? Keep going, don’t intellectualize it, and keep looking.
dropsitenews has been doing much better reporting than most outlets.
There’s also a lot of self censorship happening in the mass media.
lol yeah at first I was annoyed that they seem to be applying pressure on people without the history feature cause they certainly kept recommending videos to me even though I had that feature off. But a few weeks ago, the screens are all blank imploring me to turn on the history, but I actually quite like it. No more youtube doom scrolling on my phone.
If u turn off search history they turn all recommendations off which is actually a nice feature.
If you enter in a US city, another takeaway from the rendered table is that U.S. living standards (measured economically) continued to improve for some time after the 1970s despite weak wage growth largely because *more households relied on two earners instead of one*. While productivity kept rising, the gains were increasingly captured at the top and not shared with the workers. Of course that buffer is now long gone, but wages haven't kept up.
From the de-industrialization of a country, the privatization of previously public goods, subsidization of the wealthy by everyone else, the decoupling of national wealth from labor, I mean we can go on and on. And lest you think I’m partisan, both parties are complicit, but this is hardly an American phenomenon.
One small change, replace idiots with monetization.
The root cause of our issues is the economic austerity imposed on the public causing disaffection of the masses. Dividing this public and redirecting this anger against each other and scapegoats leads to what you refer to.
After not logging into Twitter for years I logged back in because I wanted to follow some posts regarding some breaking news. Omg the amount of garbage and fake videos and pictures was overwhelming. My guess is bot content is now so realistic and engagement manipulation is so sophisticated from even a few years ago that people will disengage even more.
Any other recommended writers like this exploring similar themes?
It’s interesting—playing devil’s advocate on the purse example, I’m not sure I’d actually call that meaningful. It’s certainly a kind and thoughtful gift, but meaningful?
What if meaning isn’t only about the relationship or the recipient’s satisfaction, but also about what the gift costs the giver in terms of personal value? In the yard-sale case, the purse may be rare to the mom, but it’s essentially cheap and disposable to the giver. Nothing important was surrendered.
By contrast, giving something you personally prize—or investing yourself in a way that reflects what you value—seems to carry a different kind of meaning. I’m not claiming effort alone creates meaning, but that the giver’s valuation of what’s given might be a missing dimension in this framework
I’m not claiming CEOs are legally required to chase every conceivable revenue dollar or that they’d lose a lawsuit if they don’t. Corporate law doesn’t work that way, and no serious person thinks it does.
What does exist is a well-understood governance and incentive regime: boards evaluate CEOs on long-term shareholder value, compensation is tied to financial performance, and strategic restraint has to be justified in those terms. That doesn’t require lawsuits, and it doesn’t require explicit mandates. It’s how large public companies are run.
The fact that Apple could charge 50% and chooses not to doesn’t refute this — it just shows that extraction is constrained by regulation, backlash, and platform risk. But once those constraints weaken, dominant platforms reliably increase extraction. That’s an empirical pattern, not a legal theory.
To everything you can find exceptions, no one's arguing what you're claiming. And you have to read between the lines here, a board doesn't have to remove a CEO for a decision, what I'm trying to point out is the CEO knows their job, and the board knows their job. Just like there's things you know if you do you won't get a good pay raise or bonus (or gasp, get fired), the CEO knows how to avoid that in the long term. The board also knows what they must do over the long term to keep their nice board seat. No one has to get sued to get the message.
I’m not sure we’re actually disagreeing. Boards are expected to maximize long-term shareholder value, not mechanically maximize short-term revenue at every opportunity. Sometimes that means pushing harder on extraction; other times it means holding back because of regulatory risk, developer backlash, or brand damage.
The claim isn’t that Apple must raise fees to 35% or be sued—clearly that’s not how fiduciary duty works. The claim is that, over time, dominant platforms tend to increase extraction once they’ve locked in users and developers. That pattern has been observed repeatedly, and it’s what people are pointing to when they talk about “enshittification.” Individual fee levels can vary, but the long-term direction for monopoly or duopoly platforms is fairly consistent.
They could do a lot of things.
And the board would replace them. It’s their fiduciary duty.
This is the machine. The behavior is much larger than any CEO or even trillion dollar company.
I’ve heard it said that monopolies aren’t a flaw of the system—they’re its product. What else could perpetual, cutthroat competition lead to? This isn’t an unintended consequence. In every new era, even when an industry is disrupted or reinvented, a small number of dominant companies work aggressively to prevent real upheaval—by acquiring smaller competitors, engaging in regulatory capture, and shaping the rules in their favor. Historically, governments have often served the interests of their corporate patrons. The system itself is built for maximal extraction, and there is no “invisible hand” waiting in the wings to protect consumers. There are no evil and good CEOs, just cogs in this machine doing what they're incentivized to do, accumulate.
At the societal level this trend has been happening for decades, and not just in the west. It’s a global trend correlated with the degree of integration into the “global machine.” This machine commodifies and extracts. It extracts more money if you’re lonely. If you’re isolated. If community is replaced with cold market exchange. If all your needs and wants are solved with a purchase or a monetized distraction.
Yet even when the system makes it hard to imagine anything else, we’re never too far from our true nature. We need only take a step towards a neighbor and carve a space, no matter how small, separate from the machine. That’s the only way out.