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Andrew_nenakhov 34 minutes ago [-] There are hardly black people deep in the Ural mountains, where I happen live, near the Siberian border. Anyway. Affinity to classical music (or classical poetry, for that matter) comes not from cultural background, but from a certain level of intellectual sophistication. I don't buy the thesis that some people are born into an oppressed class and can't escape it. In our age education is easily accessible to anyone who has internet. One can learn any language for free, become a developer or a musician or a photographer, all it takes is some will to make yourself learn some marketable skills. Of course, now you'll likely say that some people are oppressed and conditioned to be unable to escape their caste, but it's just nonsense.
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Oct 15, 2019 18:53
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all takes are bad (ATAB)
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Oct 31, 2019 13:41
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Won't someone please think about the poor startup founders and their $100 million dollar businesses maneesh 17 hours ago [-] Here's a thought experiment: You're a HN reader. You have had ideas to build a startup that can help the world solve a problem. So you create it. You decide to fundraise, and that capital will help you succeed. You pay yourself a salary of $100,000/year, and put everything else into the company. You raise $4 MM in a seed round, valuing your company at $20MM. 10-months later, your company is doubling growth YoY again, has a solid SAAS model, and low churn. You decide to raise again. This time, you raise some more money for your company, and you're now valued at 70MM. About a year later, you're growing just as fast -- but you see a new competitor is entering the ranks. It's time to scale even faster. So you go and raise again. In a fantastic series-B round, spread across TechCrunch and HN, you raise again, at a $200 MM valuation. As the sole founder, you now own 50% of the company -- making you worth $100MM. Your salary has remained constant at $100,000/year though. And then the wealth tax hits. The new wealth tax says you're responsible to pay an annual tax of 2% on all assets over $50MM. Starting this year. Which means that you, as a private founder with no liquid assets, are now responsible for $50MM * 2% = $1MM in taxes this year. Even though your liquid income is $100,000, and you have barely that much in your bank account -- you need to come up with $1,000,000 in liquid cash this year. And since your valuation probably won't go down, it'll be at least that much, every year, for the rest of your life, until you shutter the company. So you go and try to liquidate your shares. But unfortunately, it's not a public company --- and it's not that easy finding private secondary-market buyers willing to buy the half of the founder's entire stake. So what do you do now? As far as I can tell, this is how the wealth tax would work for startup founders. reply
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Nov 8, 2019 15:29
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HN invents indentured servitude. Also an incredible username/post combo bernierocks 5 days ago | parent [-] | on: A Calculator for the Billionaires – Elizabeth Warr... I have great idea. Since poor people can't pay very much in taxes, how about we have required government work programs to make up the difference? IE: you won't get paid, you will work your tax bill off in the form of labor..during your free time and on weekends. Many countries have tried taxing net worth. The result is always the same: billionaires leave the country and investors think twice about building a business there...which means less jobs and a worse-off economy for the rest of us. The government just isn't good at innovating and will waste that money on 'administrative costs'. The funny thing is that the rich already pay the majority of federal taxes in the US. This isn't including all of the people they employ that are also contributing taxes to the government till. It never seems to be enough because all of that money is pissed away and nobody is ever held accountable. reply
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Nov 14, 2019 18:45
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Xik posted:hiram112 5 hours ago | parent | favorite | on: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushe... hiram112 1 day ago | parent [-] | on: Stamping Out Online Sex Trafficking May Have Pushe... I think the most unmentioned facet regarding prostitution is that for many men, prostitution may be the only way for them to obtain sex, which I feel is just as much of a "right" as is the right for women to obtain an abortion. No I don't believe taxpayers should be required to pay for prostitutes, nor for abortions. But the market for both should be decriminalized. Not only is this something that is morally right, though I'm sure feminists especially will not agree, I believe this is in society's best interest, too. There are more and more studies showing most men did not actually propagate throughout history, and this is also true with many other mammals. The alpha obtains a harem, and the rest fight over what's left (or die trying). I have a feeling that the institution of monogamy came about in almost all cultures simply to avoid the problems associated with large numbers of males, programmed by evolution to do one thing, unable to obtain it. Inexpensive and shameless prostitution might be an alternative as it seems monogamy is declining, and some version of polygamy becoming more normal with few men sharing many women (if you believe the online dating app stats and lots of anecdotes online). reply
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Dec 20, 2019 16:07
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BENGHAZI 2 posted:The kids who took Latin in my school in the mid 00s haven't eaten pussy either so did you do well in latin?
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Dec 25, 2019 17:16
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doctors have to interact with other human beings so programmers would make terrible doctors
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Dec 30, 2019 16:29
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fritz posted:lainga 5 hours ago [-] greatscott404 18 hours ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have union... The only reason labor unions are legal is that certain unions have outsized political clout, in a perfect world labor unions would be illegal under antitrust laws as forcing companies to pay workers more than what a free market dictates inevitably increases prices.
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Jan 1, 2020 14:47
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wruza 11 hours ago [-] We discuss porn industry and porn site’s implementation and ux details at work, both men and women. It’s 2020. Do you know I breathe air and eat food? reply
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Jan 4, 2020 16:08
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jimmyvalmer 8 hours ago [-] The answer should be apparent from the signal-to-noise of OP. He merely needed to ask "Are books worth the time?" to get his point across, but instead couched it in 350 extra words. Books are similarly inefficient. Verbosity is an existential threat. reply
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Jan 5, 2020 04:36
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you found the knower of women rjkennedy98 18 hours ago | parent [-] | on: Women now make up the majority of the U.S. labor f... What about marriage? If a man makes more money and he is married is HE talking more? Isn't that income split (or in reality spent by the women)? I have never understood why data on married men is treated as if the men are single and it's their money alone. reply rjkennedy98 3 days ago | parent [-] | on: Whatever happened to the noble art of the manly we... Its not so much as zero-sum but essentially schizophrenic. On one side we have a culture of extreme sexual liberation, with the media, hookup culture, and the porn industry, and on the other side we have the yes-means-yes, firings for touching a women's back (Garrison Keillor), special legal proceedings for sexual assault accusers, ect. How is anyone supposed to navigate a culture as complex as this? reply
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Jan 11, 2020 15:20
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jppope 1 hour ago [-] Here's what you're missing... Most of the major automakers: Ford, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, etc do not have viable business models in the near future. They are so far behind in sustainable transportation its only a matter of time until they lose their economies of scale and are no longer viable businesses. It's an "Iphone moment"... the other car companies have great "flip phones" right now. reply
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Jan 13, 2020 18:54
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fritz posted:growlist 0 minutes ago [-] freepor 22 hours ago [-] You have to forgive the diversity training industry a little as they are being hired to convince people of a fact that is known to be wrong. If you look at the most successful tech companies in history, they are all built by teams that are >90% white and Asian men, and as they grow hire more white and Asian women. Yet we’re supposed to believe that we can do even better through different methods, and become even more successful than Apple and Amazon etc. If virtually all NBA players were eating eggs for breakfast, and someone hired you to convince young basketball players that the key to success was instead to eat cheese, wouldn’t you need to rely on anecdata and pseudoscience?
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Jan 17, 2020 15:52
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epicgiga 5 hours ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: Burnout: 'Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired... A lot of companies are actively factoring this into their HR model. Their model is to hire fresh people and burn them out. Increasingly this is the direction western corporations are moving. Their ideal model is: place performance quotas above long term sustainability, people then burn themselves out, you then fire them for performance reasons, and you have them on an aggressive noncompete and threaten them with it when they try to work elsewhere after. Totally consume them. Basically institutionalised "f--k you", gleefully chewing up other human beings. In some ways we're moving to something worse than slavery. At least with slaves they were seen as "assets" rather than "temporary rentals". They had to take care of them out of necessity, so their evil had that limit on it.
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Jan 22, 2020 16:28
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also the people on hn are mostly white dudes making around six figures while complaining that they have it worse than slaves
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Jan 23, 2020 01:34
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dcolkitt 3 hours ago | undown | parent | flag | favorite | on: Bill Gates has stepped down from Microsoft's board The optimist in me wants to believe that this means he's about to be appointed as the head of the national coronavirus response. There's probably no better qualified person in the world to manage the coordinated effort. tuna-piano 2 hours ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: Bill Gates has stepped down from Microsoft's board 1. Bill Gates is extremely competitive, he's a bulldog, he fights and wants to win against whatever. He built Microsoft into a Monopoly and is fighting hard (and doing a great job) against diseases. 2. Bill Gates looks at problems logically, finds missing links, and solves those links. Whether that is refrigeration for vaccines, getting useful data for diseases, etc. 3. Bill Gates knows a ton about diseases, epidemics, etc. He's super curious and doesn't stop learning. Who could be more qualified for the job?
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Mar 14, 2020 01:35
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FireLiar 5 hours ago [–] I don't view anyone who has amassed anything under $10MM in networth as successful; I believe me and the parent are in agreement on this. You cannot amass this much wealth in a reasonable -- 40-50 y.os need not apply -- timeframe if you have a family commitment. Even significant others may become detrimental to that end, if they cannot accept that they're #2 now. Close relationships take time. An absolute fuckload of time. In order to gain that amount of wealth, it takes years of 70+ hour work weeks. You will neither have the time nor inclination to spend time with tour loved ones if you're truly operating on all cylinders. If you're not, that's fine. That's your choice, but there's many more out there that don't have those kinds of personal hangups and will dedicate more time to winning. You would not be able to understand unless you've been there. Oh and Warren Buffett is not a paragon of family values. He has had falling outs with and disowned one of his children -- the rest is washed away by PR firms. Gates too. Melinda would barely see him in the early days of MSFT. Neither would his first newborn child, while Gates was wrapped up in the antitrust suits. These people were businessman first and foremost. They did not get to the top of the food chain by spending quality time with their children. Theire businesses (or passions) will always be #1 to them. Invariably, these men have spent less time with their children and wives than any poor south americans -- who happen to have higher emotional wellness than their American counterparts. This isn't about not having a family. Many high perfomance men have families, but they always take a back seat to their missions. Perhaps in later life when they're more established, that changes; I've seen it happen. FireLiar 4 hours ago [–] I think it's because I was able to connect with people so well when I was young that I went down this path. It was just a game at the end of the day. Make the right moves, win the right prizes. But like any game, you lose the magic after a while. And unlike video games, you can't just step back and take a break from doing it, it's an unavoidable part of being human. But you're not off-base. At this level you definitely lose touch with everything people find "normal." I've found myself not caring about other people or their problems. Why would I? Group dynamics are emergent behavior that's coded into our DNA to increase survival, prisoner's dillema style. If someone does nothing for me or adds nothing to my life, why would I give them any of my empathy? Can't they fix their own problems? Do they wish some knight in shining armor would ride in and save them? Do they want a handout? My empathy, for free? How selfish is that. Every problem has a solution, endless complaining gets one nowhere. When I was broke and homeless, I'd get my own hands dirty. Now that I'm comfortably wealthy, I can throw money at whatever problem pops up. Whatever problems, emotional, physical, mental, sociological, economical, yada yada yada, that you have are your own responsibility. No one really gives a poo poo about anyone else; all relationships are transactional, and if you're not offering me gold beads, you're not getting my muskets. Ranting aside, that's a brief intro to my experience and worldview. If any particular piece resonated with you strongly, please leave a reply. I'm always interested in seeing original ideas, how infrequent it may be.
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May 19, 2020 15:43
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alexandriao posted:isn't the one a more closeted version of the other no hn is dumb as hell but it isn't full of nazis by and large
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Jun 12, 2020 04:35
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Consultant32452 1 hour ago [–] This is a great example of having the right ideas but not understanding workable systems with real people. Let's take just one industry and I can show you how it's not as simple as you make it out to be: socialized/single-payer medicine. This is a system which reduces incentives (profits) in exchange for some equity. This is a great idea because we don't like it when people suffer. But what are the costs? Basic economics/psychology informs us that when incentives affect behavior. When the profits in healthcare are reduced there is less incentive to create new products/treatments/services. This is the tradeoff we're making. What happens down the road? Of course no one knows exactly, but we do know what will tend to happen. A new drug that might've been created in 5 years takes 7 instead. And then the next advancement that builds off that one takes even longer still. The whiz-kid who might've invented the new surgical technique which saves hundreds of lives per year might go into finance instead. What does this mean? It means we've slowed the velocity/acceleration of advancement. So people who live 50 years in the future will not have as good of healthcare as they could've if we'd left the greater incentives in place. And the people who live 100 years in the future are relatively even worse off to where they would've been because we've had 100 year at the slower pace. Since the future is functionally infinite, we are causing infinite harm to people in the future (all the advancements they won't get) at the cost of providing some comfort for some people today. And this applies to every industry, every redistribution program, every set of regulations. It's not just politics/law either, we make these decisions in our own lives every day. Are you going to buy that Apple Watch, or are you going to put that extra $ into your 401k? Stoicism teaches us that all negative emotion is rooted in a lack of understanding. So when someone says they don't want to raise the minimum wage, or doesn't want universal healthcare, or whatever... it's helpful not to have that knee jerk reaction of "This person is bad and wants people to suffer." That's almost never the case.
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Aug 21, 2020 02:33
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mystes posted:GordonS 13 hours ago [–] lmao that guy registered just to prove this guys point
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Sep 7, 2020 00:59
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salisbury shake posted:It was a good one, too: https://web.archive.org/web/20201207190930/https://antipodes.substack.com/p/paul-graham-is-not-a-public-intellectual not gonna read all those words so I can't judge its merits but mchurch is a crazy person
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Dec 14, 2020 00:20
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Less Fat Luke posted:go on like he got banned from quora for sockpuppeting to post and answer questions like "Is Michael Church a genius" and then claimed it was because Paul Graham invested in quora just to get him banned he mr magoos himself into being right about stuff sometimes but he is nuts
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Dec 14, 2020 02:16
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fritz posted:i wanna hear some of those mchurch-at-google stories it's mostly boring stuff like he spent all day writing 2000 word essays to an internal off-topic group and was convinced he should be leading ML at google then after a few months of not doing anything he got fired but he's been real mad about it for the past 8 years
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Dec 15, 2020 23:04
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mystes posted:I find it hard to evaluate stuff like that because, first of all, it's hard to know who to believe from the outside in this kind of situation, but also because lots of Googlers seems to feel like it's their job to go on HN whenever Google is mentioned and defend it from any criticism. 20% time isn't dead, but it does depend a lot on your manager and not many people bother with it perf is a huge time sink, if anything 1-2 weeks a year is an understatement, it sucks and is the worst part of the day to day job you can't just write whatever language you want because there is a poo poo ton of tooling that exists for java, c++, python, and go that doesn't exist for something like scala python isn't deprecated but god I wish it was the andy rubin thing shows that he was right about HR but I don't think that's what he was talking about but you can also piece together exactly why he was fired: he got a bad performance review because he spent all his time posting on off topic discussion threads instead of doing his work so his manager wouldn't let him work on a 20% project and put him on a PIP, he tried to go to HR about it but they didn't do anything rather than improve he just kept ranting about how he was a visionary until he was fired after only a few months at the company usually that quick of an exit is reserved for people who say union too loud or call out systemic racism
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Dec 17, 2020 18:12
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HN is taking the death of Flash wellquote:Hell no. This is essentially the rise of authoritarianism...
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Dec 31, 2020 01:42
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top comment on the story about Apple suspending parler nicbou 1 hour ago [–] Someone brought an interesting perspective in another thread and I can't shake it off. The other side keeps deplatforming them. Their legal cases are rejected. The mainstream media refuses to take them seriously. We're not even listening to them, because it's science and they're *ists if they disagree. We're not debating anymore. We just assume we're right. We are slowly squeezing a significant segment of the population out of public debate, and they are powerless to stop it. Is it surprising that they are furious about it, and explode in unpredictable ways? Wouldn't you do the same? E: I accidentally hit submit halfway through my argument. You might be replying to a really different comment reply
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Jan 9, 2021 01:47
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dash2 5 hours ago [–] I live round the corner from a UK housing estate with a drugs problem. I very often deeply wish that 60-80% of my local tax money would go to the police. I often also frankly wish that 10% of it would fund a Sharia-style hangman, but perhaps that is my inner misanthrope. reply
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Jan 9, 2021 19:43
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f430 1 hour ago [–] Look the RCMP isn't going to raid a startup because they find human rights violation going on Sure we got watchdogs but those are meant for blue collar workers with union. > However, Canada is also filled with self-righteous descendants (I mean it culturally) of puritans who take it upon themselves to adjudicate others. I 100% AGREE. When I dated an 18yo everybody flipped and said I was the worst. > (Quebec excepted. They're cool. Also, not Canada) I love Montreal man. It is the Thailand of Canada. When I went there I felt free for the first time in my 30+ years in Canada. Where are you now? I am thinking of moving to Thailand or Japan where people aren't so uppity about dating young women (or men, I respect all orientation) reply
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Jan 14, 2021 07:01
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DuckConference posted:actually do pedophiles even want to hang out together? they do so that they can share pictures
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Jan 18, 2021 05:42
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quote:throwaway939333 7 hours ago [flagged] [dead] [–] lmao imagine sacrificing 10 years of your life to get a job at loving Microsoft of all places
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Feb 18, 2021 16:54
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HN is very happy that the defender of rapists and pedophiles Richard Stallman is back on the Free Software Foundation board userbinator 1 hour ago [–] The canary has been resuscitated... while I don't agree with everything he says, I think we do need an extremist or two to keep the fringes of opinion where they are. reply hda2 1 hour ago [–] Good. Congratulations to Richard and all the members of the FSF. Hopefully, he can help them fix the damage they did while he was gone. reply user3939382 1 hour ago [–] I think we can look to someone for their philosophy on software without them having to pass a wokeness purity test. I also respect and understand these issues are a quasi-religion to many and that they feel differently. reply deft 1 hour ago [–] holy loving HYPE. I'm glad I emailed advocating for him. He actually got back to me because the pansies running FSF's emails had no good answers to any of my questions. reply wrycoder 3 hours ago [–] RMS: "I'm not planning to resign a second time!" reply disposekinetics 28 minutes ago [–] This is wonderful news. The hero has returned from the cancellation underworld. reply
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Mar 22, 2021 04:41
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the hn consensus is that it's ok to be a pedo apologist because he's autistic despite the fact RMS has said publicly that he's not autistic
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Mar 22, 2021 14:22
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ActorNightly 2 hours ago | parent | flag | favorite | on: 'Fake' Amazon workers defend company on Twitter Imagine building a company from the ground up that is succesfull solely because it produces a lot of value to people, and yet random people on the internet still think all you care about is hoarding money and think they can make better decisions than you. Here is the summary of the issue. Firstly, pre-pandemic, unemployment was at an alltime low (and its trending that way to as places are reopening), very close to frictional unemployment rates, while Amazon was still able to roll out things like 2 day deliver and same day delivery. This means that it was able to staff accordingly. This in turn means that the pay that people recieve is worth whatever the working conditions are, and people can quit and go find easier job at any time. This is also true of people that are able to work overtime, for double the pay $30 an hour. Not to mention that benefits are also included, which as far as health insurance is a big plus for people. Secondly, the number of reports of poor working conditions are far and few in between. For the scale of amazon, its expected that some warehouses are going to be run poorly. There isn't a single shred of credible evidence that this is a widespread problem. Also, with unskilled manual labor, there are people that are going to have a harder time than others. Taller pickers for example, have an advantage over shorter pickers that don't have to use the step stool. But again, 3% unemployment rate. As far as unionization goes, this is the general gist of it. If the workers unionize, the service capability will undoutably go down. When workers realize they can take it easy and keep their jobs, productivity will go down. While its true that worker conditions will improve, the problem is along will come Walmart thats not as much in the spotlight, and offer better service and shipping while having poo poo working conditions, and people will just switch over because thats more beneficial to them. In no way shape or form the will continue supporting Amazon just because their workers unionized, out of the "good of their heart". So Bezos is doing the correct thing by being anti union. Unionization is messing with the free market, which never leads to good outcomes historically. If you care about the lower income people, then go out and vote for politicains that support higher taxation for the rich, social programs for the poor, so that ones living condition does not depend on ones job. Also, for your brain health, get of the domapine fix that is the outrage of the internet lefism.
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Mar 30, 2021 20:40
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The rare good post: dougmwne 34 minutes ago [–] I was shocked the other day on the Ethereum PoS announcement by the energy consumption per transaction metrics. It threw the whole crypto market into a new light for me. BTC is using over a megawatt hour PER transaction! That's almost 5000 miles in a Tesla model 3. BTC is using about 2/3 of the power of every data center on the planet! Many, many people have been imprisoned or executed for creating less societal harm and externality than Bitcoin. Satoshi Nakamoto may end up being the most destructive person to have ever lived. People are free to gamble, but could they please not turn the surface of the Earth into a black body radiator while they're at it? reply
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May 19, 2021 15:27
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In regards to poor people trying to take care of children: ixacto 24 minutes ago [–] Sterilization is usually covered by health insurance.
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May 22, 2021 17:01
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austincheney 1 hour ago [–] I find that my peers tend to fear data structures and present an extreme fear of original code. Call it Invented Here[1] or whatever you want but it is certainly there and it’s an irrationality I don’t want to deal with when I am writing an application. As an example of the hostility, yes that is the best choice of word, mention explicit use of events or the DOM and the common sentiment reminds me of reading history about lynchings in Jim Crow era and sun down towns. As an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27419965 I wish the attitudes in the above example were rare, but they aren’t. So, I remain an introverted developer working on personal projects. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here
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Jun 8, 2021 14:54
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tiahura 37 minutes ago [–] “Even though these problems are societal, not really caused by the minorities themselves but rather lack of opportunities etc” That’s the line of thinking that keeps many of them in that situation. We need to be honest -African American culture is largely dysfunctional and self-destructive. 120 years ago my ancestors were dirt poor, they didn’t have “equitable” opportunities in education, housing, or employment, yet they managed to not go around shooting each other, having children out of wedlock, or abusing drugs. reply
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Jun 24, 2021 16:19
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rryizgr8 4 hours ago [–] Even the phrase "company town" itself does not signify anything evil. In fact I'm wondering if such a place might be better than the usual government administered cities and towns.
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Jul 25, 2021 18:22
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halfjoking 6 hours ago There are more types of RNA than just mRNA. https://www.livescience.com/25988-rna-versatile-molecules.ht... I'm not an expert so I'm not going to speculate which type might be used, but the risk that the government is using (soon to be mandatory) shots as a way to insert a biological backdoor into the masses far outweighs the risk of catching covid again. They want backdoors into all software systems... why wouldn't they want a backdoor into your biology? If not now, then what about when we're on our 5th booster? If I was dying on my bed from some crazy variant that the government was fearmongering, I would still think that my risk assessment was valid. I'd have no regrets. reply
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Jul 29, 2021 01:45
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most of the comments on that seem surprisingly fine?
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Aug 6, 2021 22:28
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