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winston_smith

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OP already addressed that. When it's time to vote or choose your charitable donations or whatever, you can:

...go read Wikipedia for 30 minutes and be just as caught up as anyone else because you know the end result of the news cycle instead of suffering through it as it happened.

Gaining acceptance by a tribe and finding ways to not die if you ever become disfavored seems like part of the whole hunter-gatherer package, don't you think?

They tend not to be very wealthy by modern standards. Maybe you could ingratiate yourself to them with them gifts of things that require modern manufacturing infrastructure.

Ethically, everyone deserves all the blackjack and hookers they want, because we're all beautiful and precious creatures.

Practically, giving someone a direct incentive to do worthwhile things works out far better than some central planner deciding how much they should produce and how much they deserve. Somehow it always turns out that the central planner deserves way more than everybody else.

You're assuming government regulation is the only solution.

When Facebook or Comcast or Google start censoring opinions they don't like, I want to hear about it on other places like hackernews so that I and my friends can use them less.

Take a deep breath and step away for a minute. You're not alone, and lots of other people right here in this thread are also opposed to censorship. Dying on a hill isn't what we need, and in fact given that you're here, you're probably uniquely qualified to help in the great effort of building the next generation of censorship-resistant technology. Haters gonna hate, but coders gonna code. It'll take time, but we've succeeded before and we'll succeed again.

Huh, that's pretty crazy, especially with AOC herself writing up impeachment papers:

"Sunrise planned a sit-in in Pelosi's office and asked Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to help them publicize the event, which she instead decided to join herself...The sit-in took place on November 13. Over 250 protesters showed up to occupy Pelosi's office, with 51 being arrested by Capitol Police."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_Movement

You're the one using ridiculous examples: dentists, boulders, canyons, rolling rocks up hills, pouring water on fires.

The original topic was that various charities are saving lives in measurable ways, yet most people make excuses not to contribute, preferring to spend their money on additional luxuries for themselves.

Thank you for providing excellent examples of those excuses.

I too have seen the Facebook chain letter about how we could end world poverty for only $XX billion. But yes, let's definitely not fund malaria relief in the meantime.

I'd absolutely sign up for a wealth-proportional share of a tax

Very gracious of you to be willing to help but only if all of society signs up to do it with you.

system that's designed to punish me for doing so above and beyond the intrinsic cost of providing for the kid

Bullshit. Nobody's going to punish you for giving to charity.

New Defaults 6 years ago

The key is correctly assessing what part of the life cycle you're in.

If you're building a bridge for millions of cars to drive on, that's something we've done many times and which needs to be done correctly and carefully, so you should definitely pay attention to all the carefully collected wisdom embodied in standards.

If you're inventing clever new algorithms, then you should experiment as efficiently as possible, because 99% of what you try will be thrown away. Carefully planned waterfall style development will actively hurt you at this stage, because you have no idea where you're going yet. If you find something promising and want to scale it, then you slow down a little and check your work. This continues as you scale, and by the time your billion dollar business depends on your clever algorithm, the update process for your production version should look a lot more like the bridge building process.

I've tried white lies like that and had them immediately backfire, plus they make me feel dishonest. "How is the conference going? Oh, great. I thought about going myself but didn't see any when I googled it. What was it called again?"

With a little thought you can almost always avoid dishonesty. "Hey, I'm thinking of visiting your town next week. Could we get lunch?".

Reputation matters.

As a Canadian you pay up every time you pay taxes, and you don't negotiate because you take what the government gives you. If they say your orthopedic surgery happens in six months, then that's what you get, or you start shopping south of the border.