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It's also a really convenient place to get news, because since all news sources are government approved then there's no fake news to worry about.

Comments like this remind me that totalitarianism doesn't need to be forceful or hostile, implemented by a shadowy government from above. People themselves will often happily serve as salesmen for the regime - with a 0% commission, to boot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945808

These articles scare me. Another one with exactly the same message: Things are worse than we thought, it was already bad, we are not coming close to doing enough to save us, there isn't even much of a plan.

And then I see most of the west handling covid-19 just like we handle everything: No clear direction, minimal effort, leaders asleep at the wheel, politicians trying to get the better of each other, rich people get richer.

Climate was an important theme in our last elections, but even the green party had no clue whatsoever, and the voters made it clear they did not even remotely care.

Now Covid-19 is easy stuff compared to the climate. I was hoping Covid-19 could serve as a wake up call for the cost of incompetence in our organisations. But that does not seem to happen.

Covid-19 has a pattern I also see in the climate: First, nobody cares for some theoretical crisis far away, then its in our countries but still not personal, and by now everybody knows about a specific person who died. Climate is a theoretical crisis far away for now.

So how do we proceed from here?

comment on "Wildlife Collapse from Climate Change Is Predicted to Hit Suddenly and Sooner"

In case you hadn't noticed, the government is currently on its backfoot and disruptive social policy reforms are back on the table. They want to make sure that corporations get everything and the people get nothing.

The encryption fight has been going on for decades, but at root their complaints about terrorists and child trafficking are covers for expanding a lazy version of COINTELPRO. Lazy meaning that they can just sit in an office and see everything. Let's not forget the FBI's role in trying to get MLK to commit suicide. These shadowy agencies are not in any way the good guys.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827617

Investigate why social pressure, not evidence is used.

Zed Shaw

"The Scams That Derail Programming, Motherfucker"

There's this awesome book called "The Anatomy of Fascism", you should totally read it, 'cause like so much marketing in programming and software and everything is actually like a Nazi propaganda tactic. It's really bizarre.

Zed Shaw

"The Scams That Derail Programming, Motherfucker"

I agree that we have huge amount of talking heads around with zero skin in the game and zero consequences when they are wrong, but I disagree covid-19 pandemics changed anything. There are literally dozens of politicians who have been disastrously wrong and gave advice in public which is diametrically opposite to what should have been, and suffered absolutely no consequences. And everybody's reaction to this is as tribal as it has ever been - if it's my tribe, "he may be wrong this once but it's an understandable mistake", if it's the opposing tribe, "yet another proof these vile creatures is literally the worst scum of humanity". Nothing changed. All tribes of American politics, at least, that I can see, are happily turning the epidemics into the fodder for their tribal causes, as they did with everything else before that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22796162

For those of you joining us (probably because you heard a blood-curdling scream from down the hall), this syntax is exactly as ambiguous as you might think.

Erik McClure

"A Rant On Terra"

When you say that my concerns are valid but that I am expressing them in problematic ways, you are tone policing. This is a typical technique used by management: First, break up the original complaint into small pieces, then estrange the emotional content from each piece, minimizing and shifting as necessary. It is a useful way of dodging actual responsibility.

The attitude you are displaying, where you would have given a substantiative reply, but only for the way that the complaint was phrased, is a common empty rhetorical technique that comes with tone policing. Odds are strong that you don't actually have any substance to reply with, but you need to ensure that my tone isn't allowed to flourish or even gain sympathy or support.

[..]

Edit: After reading the rest of the thread, you've indicated that you do in fact have coding experience. Okay; in that case, I apologize and retract my guess. But I am then forced to conclude that you have a tremendous lack of empathy for fellow engineers and have decided to side with management, not just in terms of their emotional duplicity but also their manner of speaking-without-saying. I am, as before and as ever, disappointed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22761962

Leben wie ein Baum, einzeln und frei
doch brüderlich wie ein Wald,
das ist unsere Sehnsucht.

Nazim Hikmet

Our evolution within terrestrial physical reality "forced" us to participate in well-calibrated local marketplaces of ideas, and our psychology evolved specifically so that we had a fine-tuned balance of what we subjectively "wanted" and what we found ourselves coming to believe, despite that initial-condition "want" -- dissenting views in a room have both a repulsion but also a very specific gravity -- a closeness that emerges amongst holders of opposing ideas, when these ideas have manifested and are walking around in human bodies within shared meatspace -- we start to empathize with holders of countering views that we're forced to share physical space with. We talk about empathy like it's feelings for the other pieces of meat, but it's perhaps better conceived as a kinship of one tight bundle of ideas for another. It's evolved and it's ancient and it's a very specific foraging strategy for 2D terrestrial creatures finding information/food under those constraints.

And now, we've designed systems that aren't nearly as clever and well-calibrated as our meatspace selves evolved to be. In the purely physical space we evolved for, we had to share space with people we probably disagreed with, and we developed unique tendencies based on the nature of living on a 2D terrestrial plane. Heck, we'd have different psychology favoured if we made it to this level of the great filter, but happened to evolve in the air (3D grid) or within a more one-dimensional environment or some hyperdimensional space.

Speaking of high-dimensional space: enter the internet. Might our prior foraging strategies and adaptations stacked onto our prior foraging strategies... might they fail now? Foraging strategies are informed by the math of the landscape. [..] Our psychology is tailored to adapting to physical reality on a plane, and the internet might totally fuck that up. (What is an internet bubble? Maybe it's just my stepping out of the 2D terrestrial grid and engaging through a hidden, non-spatial dimension with some foraging target I can sense near me?) It's like all places are piped into one another, outside physical reality. This isn't Kansas. It's the formation of a hyperdimensional object. It's no longer a 2D grid, and our predispositions and adaptations for navigating such a grid might drive us to extinction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22745052

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

Frederick Douglass

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man's hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man's ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.

Kahlil Gibran

Laß die wilden Tiere
in Ruh:
Keines mordet
wie du

Erich Fried

Der eine sagt:
"Wie schön
das gewesen sein muss
als wir noch an Pest
und an Syphilis
an Scharlach
an Lungenschwindsucht und
an Krebs
an Herzverfettung
und Schlagfluss
verreckten wie Tiere!"
Der andere fragt ihn:
"Sag was waren das, Tiere?"

Erich Fried

It's the standard tech company mentality: Deliberately make your product different and incompatible with everyone else and compete instead of cooperate. Best case outcome is monopoly and customer lock-in. Most likely case is no one solution gains enough traction and you end up with 15 incompatible chat apps.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632886