throwaway156503

You make some really good points. Thanks for your thoughts.

The HN crowd always suggests technical aspects they want out of online communities. No one cares about that crap.

Instead, what about online communities that: don't incentivize shallow responses, don't incentivize like or karma gaming, do encourage great content, do encourage participation to a slightly greater degree than most places where 80% lurk.

I think good online communities are actually small. At a particular point in time, as population scale goes up, you don't find people familiar anymore and as a result no one has a reputation. The site has a reputation.

How do we create good online communities? Someone has done this homework, yes. At least, I believe there are studies out there somewhere which talk about the threshold of people that we can recognize with any meaningful context.

I no longer know how to view these concerns. The only mechanism I now know of that creates money in modern economies in order to purchase goods and services directly, without obtaining funds from circulation from other businesses, is debt created from financial institutions. In order to have healthy economies and create money and move capital, you must therefore have debt.

How did western economies function prior to this? I wish I was educated on the matter. I've not found good reading for this topic outside of the enclave of academia.

So further increasing tax burden on American citizens by allowing unlawful migration, when they already bring in 1 million plus lawfully and have been for the last decade, is morally just?

Their illegal immigration problem is literally an order of magnitude larger. Think about that for a second: 10 times more unlawful migration occurs in their country.

"It's immoral" is even more intellectually dishonest: you're just calling it bad.

I can appreciate the effort expended on compiling such a great wealth of information, but the execution needs work. This site would essentially label all RPG games as dark games, and anything board game-like as healthy.

Further, I don't think there's anything dark about games being addictive. They should be, otherwise they're boring. If you obtain no dopamine kick from playing a game, you're doing chores. When addiction becomes something that is taken advantage of, then it's a dark pattern.

Maybe that's actually correct, but frankly I find it plainly wrong. So, I agree with what you have to say. It's clearly subjective-in your words-but this seems egregiously conservative.

I'm glad someone else understands this. Every time I read about the Electoral College on HN or reddit, it reads as if Americans don't know about their own country's history, nor do they understand the definition of representative democracy.

If I remember correctly though, the fault was in them not following the reference layout for a particular circuit diagram.

None of the people working on this spec are idiots

There are a lot of very smart people in the world that lose sight of simple concepts and their value, however.

At what percentile in the net worth distribution?

None of them. I'm not sure what your experience has been like on the World Wide Web, but for me, immediately preceding social networks were just forums, and the best Internet community experiences of my life were on those websites. So there are entirely different models of communities outside of "social networks." The latter most is just the most recent phenomenon. And it will be replaced sooner or later.

In fact, I think we're overdue.

Anyway, at least forums were actual communities, where you recognized people's usernames, people had reputations instead of likes or karma, and people made up their own mind about things instead of having signals tell you what to think.

What we have with social networks are too many people spewing their worthless opinions with such velocity that any meaningful discourse or information you might hope to extract is drowned in uneducated or uninformed quips and blurts.

I have the privilege of doing this, and have professional contacts utilize such an address. For the layman, this would take considerable effort.

Correct.

Thank you for sharing this. This is one of the types of issues that I’m afraid of: the insulation Google has from its users. I don’t believe I could simply call a legal representative or get in touch with the staff of an elected official to resolve such a matter.

Google is unlikely to kick out users unless there's some bad behaviour (which may seem innocent to you)

I don't believe I've ever violated any terms of service Google has ever outlined. In practice, I have nothing to worry about. This concern of mine primarily revolves around legal protections, and rights as a "digital citizen" of sorts.

My concern is primarily that I already have this email address attached to a plethora of services, many of which I've even forgotten. I parted with an older email address many years ago when I was much younger, but now I'm faced with an account I've had for much longer, which is attached to many more important websites and software.

I appreciate your first hand experience, but it's not at all what the actual demographics of Audi, BMW, or Mercedes-Benz are.

"Actual luxury vehicle owners" are just the mass affluent. There's really nothing special about them. The upper 20% household income demographics of just about any developed nation. Read the sales numbers for literally any of the German big-three. They're just what you expect. A4s sell more than any other Audi sedan; Q5s sell more than any other Audi SUV.

The typical owner isn't someone with a 7-series.

Makes for a nice story, though. And sure, the mass affluent frequently lease. They also often live beyond or max out their means.

It certainly sounds like they need to do more. I wasn't aware of these loopholes. Thanks for pointing that out.

As much as I appreciate some historical commentary on the matter, none of this is revolutionary thought, and the concept is widely understood by the most common everyman. There's nothing left here to ponder nor any insight to extract.

I'll try add to this, though. Yes, rent and land forces down wages, but it's not just your fellow countryman doing it anymore (in so much as a citizen who is not a proprietor of a real-estate driven capital venture), it's companies like Progress Residential and other REITs that are fueled by the financial world to purchase homes and be your new neighbor.

Yes, soon capital structures invested in such companies will mean that organizations like McDonalds and Starbucks will, in the grapevines of their institutional accounts, own a share of an REIT that owns homes in your neighborhood. They will be your new community, and soon your new landlords.

I think the developed worlds should do as New Zealand and other nations caught on to, and protect their citizens from unscrupulous investors, foreign and domestic, looking to prey on the common man looking for a home to purchase.

If a new wave of residential economic folly were to come upon us, the people waiting in the shadows are not individuals with deep pockets looking to become your future rent seeker, but entire institutions looking to purchase neighborhoods wholesale.

I think we owe it to our children and those around us to push for non-partisan legislature that prevent such cancers from overtaking our countries.

Since Valve stopped producing games, I wonder what their net income per employee is based on assets they own less revenue produced by third-parties through Steam.

If you look at just the assets Valve produces minus rent seeking, are they losing money?

So let me ask, why make this comment? Why reply like this? To shut people's concerns down? There's no value here. There's nothing to be gained. Conversely, sometimes it's OK just to let people complain: without the sentiment, how do you know if people still care?

Consider sharing this sort of content anyway! Even for younger audiences, it's really cool to be exposed to new-to-you things.

Yes, that's true.

That’s sorta Honda/Toyota territory.

A kid in my office said the same thing and I have no idea where people are getting this from. A brand new Model 3 costs about as much as an Audi A4, BMW 3-Series, or Mercedes-Benz C-Class.

The Model 3 is a compact executive car, and competes directly in that category. It is for the mass affluent. Not the mass market.

Technical analysis is pseudoscience.

where nobody knows their neighbours, nobody attends church

In America, plenty of people know their neighbors and have their phone numbers for security purposes, and over a 1/3rd of Americans attend church. So, in the context of discussing an American company, these are very off-the-mark statements.

Who cares about reality when there's a narrative waiting to be pushed.

What narrative? These are hard numbers. There's no debate. If you took my income and compared it against American tax law and Swedish tax law, I'd be paying literally over double, nearly triple in taxes if I was Swedish versus if I was American. There's no "extra 10%," your math is just plain wrong.

What a perverse argument; I don't even try to justify anything in my original statements.

It would be helpful if people commented on why you were downvoted.

Americans have no appreciation for businessmen and businesswomen with experience. Sales people at Levi's who don't know how to measure your waist, roofers who don't know how to repair roofs, only replace them, dealerships who don't know how to repair, only upsell to the newest car.

Too much bullshit and not enough hardwork. Too many charlatans and not enough seasoned tradesmen, salesmen, and otherwise.

Yes, but compared to an effective tax rate of 2X.XX%, most Americans do not pay 40% of their gross income to health care, and they like it that way.

Everyone wants affordable healthcare in America, the question is a matter of where Americans spend on line items, but the debates in America revolve mostly around ideological concepts and not budget concerns directly.

What's not often discussed in the same conversation is how high your effective tax rate is. Most Americans think the idea of, for example, a 58-61% effective tax rate in Sweden is simply ridiculous.

I often read from sites like Reddit and HN people espousing the idea that people seem to be either non-religious or religious extremists.

It's helpful to be reminded there is a quiet demographic in the world of religious peoples who don't have any of these problems at all because they have peace in their faith.