yterdy

You've given individual solutions to try to fix a systemic problem, which of course does not work. They are good ideas; they are also not enough, and don't even begin to address the issue at-scale.

What does is recognizing that the "be realistic" bluster is just that: a bluff, from people who hold real power in the status-quo, but who realize that that status-quo can be changed, if only the walls would fall and nature could take its course. The reality is that older generations have created a zero-sum situation, and the only way for the younger ones to thrive is for the older ones to give up some (many) of their advantages. The reality is that this happens when political and economic forces are finally incentivized to stop protecting them.

One last thing I feel the need to mention whenever it comes up:

At that time, there were many subprime mortgages floating around that should've never been written.

This is true, but not because they were written for people who were financially unfit to be homeowners. It's because these loans were written intentionally to fail, knowing that banks could steal the homes back in illegal foreclosure proceedings, knowing that the mortgages would be wrapped up in financial vehicles and sold off at profit, knowing that the government would backstop them when it all came crashing down. Given fair loans, most of these mortgage-seekers would have been able to keep up their payments - but that woukd have been less profitable for banks than what ended up happening. Instead, these financial institutions were able to siphon billions from the middle class, and buy up the remains of their failed rivals for pennies on the dollar. Which is despicable, of course. But to understand this, you have to reject the notion that we're living in a just world whose past mistakes can't be corrected. It isn't and they can be.

Monetary expansion underlies and significantly influences if not drives, everything you mentioned (save the nature of US mortgages, which is still related in the sense of it being a part of financialization of as much of American life as possible). The QE boom drove immigration, and low interest rates drove hiring and wage inflation; the COVID bust dampening immigration, and the extremely low interest rates driving a hiring frenzy that was itself followed by mass layoffs when the FRF was raised, essentially proved this.

Underutilized RE is a red herring.

So you've stated. Please prove it, at the very least showing how RE isn't underutilized (this is going to be difficult, because it is).

You're comparing ideal to ideal, not practical reality to practical reality. Here's a fact: the Chinese middle class is the size of the US's entire population. The whole thing. Citizens, residents, undocumented immigrants. That's an economic freedom that Americans would - and sometimes do, if you consider law enforcement and the downstream effects of the actions of financial, medical, and industrial professionals - kill for. Which is actually a part of the way American censorship works: empower a buffer class who is preoccupied with maintaining (and lecturing the rest of us about) their political freedoms while most can't access any practical benefits from those freedoms because we can't afford to, in this society where money is speech. This isn't even getting into the more overt and baldly authoritarian ways Americans have their nominal rights infringed upon, simply speaking to the way economic/class-shaping does much of it for us.

Meanwhile, Winnie the Pooh memes say that you're ironically buying into the overstated projection of Chinese control.

But to get back to the crux of the issue: "bad actors" in America (like Google) are not unlike Chinese censors in kind, only degree. That is the conclusion an honest assessment and comparison has to come to. And however much you may want to turn this into some sort of geopolitical pissing match, my message is not, "Let's be more like China," it's, "Let's be what we say we are instead of becoming more like China."

Deflating prices on existing housing means either the lender (ha!) or the homeowner takes the loss.

Okay.

(Expand or they're going to flag you for snark.)

The cohort that is currently at prime home-buying age (and, really, most people under the age of 50) have had the wealth that was generated by their labor and productivity systematically siphoned to mostly-older higher-earners, in order to shore up unsustainable compensation and retirement funding for the professional managerial/executive class and Silent Gen, Baby Boomer, and Gen X workers. The value of the overbuilt, low-density, transit-access/amenity-access-poor housing that they've built or speculated on plummeting would be not only economically healthy (as it would act as a stimulus for non-asset-speculation activity and finally incentivize density and transit access, while disincentivizing the socioeconomic/racial exclusion that characterizes most American suburbs and which drives so many of our objectively terrible NIMBY-focused municipal planning decisions), but also just deserts.

You have to ask why housing prices doubled, and ask how easy or likely those underlying conditions are to reverse.

Massive monetary expansion via QE and low interest rates. Resolved by raising interest rates and taxes on wealth holders (and particularly those holding unused or underutilized real estate) to deflate the asset bubble.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Continuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring order to freedom, while we nominally tout our "opportunity" while actually limiting it to a degree such that conversations like the one we're having take place. (Your argument's only refuge is in casting your opponents in this debate as hysterical, which is ironically a hysterical position to take in-and-of-itself. Measure the actual merits, please.)

Recently: Google refuses to turn up old pages. I was recently searching for a person who used to have a notable web presence before passing away about a decade ago. I had to dig to find a few links, through DDG and Yandex.

Again, some things aren't worth fixing, and they build up. The fabric on my headliner detached. Quickly went from "foam slightly exposed" to "sagging across the width of the backseat". Car is worth less than 5 grand, would be almost 1 to fix. It's a good thing I didn't, because brake troubles cost about as much and were necessary to fix.

I think a lot of waste goes into maintaining cars cosmetically.

It would be nice if I could "work with" a mechanic. Pay 1/4 the labor cost and she guides me (I also rent tools and shop time from her so it's more like 1/2).

Exactly. Its failure was a self-fulfilling prophecy imposed by PE (and other malicious financial actors). Like Toys R Us and many others, it was a stable but unremarkable business that might have been in dire straits at some point in the future if changes weren't made to update its approach. It was not, as others allege, "failing" - at least, not until PE came along and forced it into an untenable position. But that's what they do.

Property values keep increasing because demand is exceeding supply.

Not quite. Property values keep increasing because the monetary supply keeps increasing, one effect of which is that large property owners can corner markets by buying up properties and warehousing them until they see the prices they want to sell for. This appears as a lack of supply (not enough houses) when it's really a lack of market forces forcing sales (not enough houses on the market). The remedies to these two situations are very different.

It should be noted that "told they must" is not simply bad Boomer advice, but a reflection of the reality that the vast majority of white-collar work (even work that must mostly be trained on-the-job, due to the particular policies and protocols of any given business) requires a Bachelor's degree be on your resume if you don't want your application binned immediately.

But why doesn't this happen to restaurants, or super markets or car mechanics?

It does. The reasons you cited just makes it worse in medicine.

That's not true at all. In war? The Nazis took great pains to preserve (stolen) art; the Islamic State went out of their way to destroy it. Americans vigorously catalogue war efforts, with much risk to photographers. Even going back to ancient times, weapons and armor were lavishly decorated. What's the enduring symbol of the space race? An American flag, planted on the moon. And the way out of the Great Depression was the WPA, including its art and architecture initiatives. One of the few fully-intact survivors of Japan's economic crash in the mid-90s was its animation industry; the US gaming industry grew while the rest of the economy languished following the GFC. I could go on.

Art is political; it stirs passions, which is to say that it's the motive force behind (public support for) many great undertakings. In these cases, you've mistaken pricelessness for worthlessness. You're just one in a long line of very incorrect people to mis-define "intrinsic value"; designating that as a "brutal reality" is ironic, since you won't face the actual reality.

For sources with similar protocols/track record that you can actually see the work of, I'd look at people like Sarah Kendzior and Cory Doctorow. One focuses on how corruption and autocratic rule become entrenched in a society, the other on tech issues, with an emphasis on corporate malfeasance wrt user freedom and safety. Both are a bit melodramatic, but they also both emphasize that their predictions are based in, as you say, inferring future state from patterns of past behavior.

It's a double-edged sword. Without that ubiquity, 4 years ago today, George Floyd would have just been known as a junkie who slipped a fake bill and had a heart attack, if he was known at all. Instead, we were able to see with our own eyes what actually happened.

There is certainly a hammer/nail aspect to the issue (which is itself one of degrees), but I do think that part of the blame that gets put on the technology and its use lies more correctly with the society that makes judgments off of that use's outputs. Ideally, in a functional society, no one would bat an eyelash at coeds sharing platonic nakey time.

Depending on who you ask, Google's search issues started as early as 2010 (Instant) or 2016 ("brands"). Many of the things people complain about regarding Google's culture - shuttering projects arbitrarily, hiring issues (the interview gauntlet, anti-competitive practices, etc.), the slow erosion of Don't Be Evil - are 2010s products, also. I don't think this is WFH, at its root.

This argument has been had a thousand times before, and it would be a waste of time to relitigate it. Suffice it to say that "intrinsic value" is subjective, artists absolutely contribute to the productivity of any society made up mostly of human beings (the subgroup of artisans being strictly necessary for tool-making, if nothing else), and even if they didn't, a "dumb load" is objectively more constructive than the net destructive activity of many whose primary activities have so-called "intrinsic value".

But I'm not here to argue the points I've raised, only to state them, and that the debate you're trying to start is old and counterproductive and not something someone with any amount of introspective ability should want to continue further.

https://youtu.be/XL7Wxqr2ZRk

https://youtu.be/0SvfNhMlnBE

Even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by hand.

It's a bit of a stretch to call musical instruments - which are often handcrafted and not manufactured because an object that produces a particular sound requires tolerance that shift with the source material and that are difficult to generalize to a machine process - "soulless". On top of that handcrafting, they're objects made specifically to tap into one of the deepest parts of the human psyche (again, by hand, ephemerally). It's hard to think of something less soulless.

Because, half a century ago, it would have been built by a government research agency or a designated monopoly that was obliged to share it with the public, instead of the quasi-monopoly - that can keep secret whatever it needs to wreck your sh*t - like today.

We know a better way to do this ("this" being "the development of foundational technology for the next century of human civilization"), so of course it's frustrating to see the way it's actually being done.

Note that my root comment got flagged. It really hurts my faith that people in this forum are reasonable.

You can search and find a few from the day, but the flaggers specifically targeted the posts with multiple comments. The only ones specifically focusing on the death that are still accessible only have one or two comments. A few tangentially about the accident or his philosophy slipped through.

I remember seeing complaints in replies to people mourning, saying absurd things like, "I've never heard of him before," and, "He's not important/famous enough."

To this day, I don't know what combination of "hackers' general disdain for athletes" and "internet's general disdain for black people," caused this response. I struggle to think of another explanation.

This is a good perspective from around that time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166309 (archive link: https://archive.is/nzFGy)

The idea that "I'm not getting everything I want right now means that government is irreparably broken," is ridiculous on its face.

It's weird that you would put those words in my mouth when the actual reason for the dysfunction

That those folks represent less than half of the electorate

is readily apparent to you.

The point is that Congress is terminally dysfunctional. Avoiding shutdowns and passing grift doesn't change that. I don't want to hear all the reasons why things can't be done (perhaps the most unhelpful thing to do). I just want them done. And I have every right to be pissed abot the state of things until that happens.

No one's arguing that Trump isn't forceful. It's to what end. The "kleptomanic" part is important, exemplified publicly (at the very least) by the way he changed the tax code to advantage wealthy individuals and businesses, while middle class and working class Americans have seen their tax bills rise. (Again, Biden is not so good on this either, as he didn't repeal Trump's changes).

Of course, the books go into more detail. Unfortunately, if you don't read them, your opinion that the issue was "cooked up" remains baseless and bereft of value. :)

To answer what can be done, as an industry: stop overfunding and overemphasizing attempts to leverage cutting-edge technology, with all its unknowns and bugs, into The Answer To All Our Problems. Instead, take existing, well-understood technology, and fulfill a dream deferred. A concrete example: back in 2012, what was all the rage? Cloud. Everything's going to be in The Cloud. The Cloud is going to solve all our problems. (Aside: A decade on, couldn't it be argued that cloud-enabled SaaS has become the source of a lot of our problems? Oops.)

Then, a guy in his garage goes, "Oh, btw, did you know that we could totally take cell phone screens and make relatively cheap virtual reality headsets with them?"

"If only we had~" mindset versus "Look what we can do with-!" mindset.

If you'd actually read her long-form work (specifically, her books Hiding In Plain Sight and They Knew)... Humor her for the length of those, then see how you feel.

Her thesis is that "Russiagate" wasn't cooked up; that Trump is, in fact, simply an agent of a class of wealthy oligarchs who don't have loyalty to anything but their own money; that people are drawn to him because their correct instincts about the dysfunction in DC are being misdirected to him as a savior, in a way that is identical to the way autocratic, kleptomanic strongmem have been put into power in the past in other countries.

Give her work a chance. If you come out of it still supporting Trump, then I suppose you've made the right decision. But see why she's come to her conclusions first; I personally think that they're compelling. Otherwise, it's kind of weird to disagree with an argument you don't even understand.

"Infrastructure projects" is just another term for crony capitalism. Just look at funding for telcos to build out infra, or EV charging stations, or solar panels, or anything else they fund as "infrastructure." It's always just a massive kickback scheme, and nothing gets built.

This is the most baffling one. Everyone seems to forget that they also failed to pass the bill that contained the provisions that most working and middle-class Americans wanted. I've had multiple conversations where the counterargument was, "Well, at least they got part of it passed." No, that's actually worse. We got all of the expensive giveaways without any of the mitigating funding and policies. We literally would have been better off if nothing had passed.

Kindly read or listen to any long-form work by Sarah Kendzior.

But I don't know if the statement you quoted is correct either. Trump isn't the politician who has people tracking their stock trades because they so consistently outperform the market (that would be legislators, including Democrats, who trade on insider information, but face no consequences because the arbiters of such judgment are... themselves). Unfortunately, I'm not sure that even a second Biden term will save us.

To be fair Congress does some work. They have avoided 2 government shutdowns. They funded the war efforts in Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. They passed the infrastructure bill.

That's just three different ways of saying, "Wrote checks to fill the pockets of monied interests, the bill for which will be paid for by the generations which explicitly oppose such policy."

Talk to me when they pass Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, campaign finance reform, and a border/immigration bill that finally puts that issue to rest. Until then, it's just another round of avoiding addressing the issues that are easiest to run on if they haven't been fixed in a prior term.