heedspin's comments

Regarding Trump and his immunocapitalist behavior: I understand the position of the "Great Barrington Declaration" would be to make a majority of the population "acclimated" as soon as possible. Only lock down the vulnerable population. This could be effective because covid is not as deadly as yellow fever and not dangerous to a significant portion of the population. Setting aside all the Fauci political piss matching, I do wonder what might have happened with that approach.

I used to live across the street from Golden Gate Park. I saw a homeless guy walk out of the park proceed to pee in the bushes next to our front door. In a moment of weakness I ran outside and yelled at him that he should be peeing in the GIANT PARK RIGHT THERE <gestures with hand>. I got a blank stare which is what I deserved....

Like many decisions in life, it may just depend on the spirit with which a plan is carried out. If it's intended to help the homeless, even a bad plan will likely do good. If it's only intended to get the dirty people out of my eyesight, then it will probably do harm. How do we know the spirit with which a state-level plan will be carried out? Not sure. The plan will not dictate how they would be treated on a personal level once on this fantasy isle.

My experience with the homeless has instilled that it can be very difficult to help them in a way that I would consider helping. I always accuse my wife of believing that each homeless person is just one protein bar away from becoming a contributing member of society. But if I convince you that many homeless people have a best case scenario of net negative to society, what do you propose then? Probably just help them as much as we can? I think there are probably best paths, but no total wins.

This is all based on my experience volunteering at homeless shelters (in SF) and trying to interact with the homeless near me (now in NC). 100% anecdotal. But now I'm just another member of society shrugging at the homeless. I suspect most of us here are. Lots of strong opinions, but not much action. I'm guilty of that too now.

The world can use more smart IT individuals.

7 years ago I left silicon valley and moved to Raleigh, NC. It was part of our grand plan to move all the extended family back to the same area.

As part of this move I became involved with a couple manufacturing companies. I couldn't help but start helping with their IT set ups. I built some web apps to provide access to information locked up in their horrible ERP/MRP systems. 7 years later and these folks still call me a hero. Some simple web apps made a significant improvement to their productivity.

What I did was not rocket science. But it required spending time to understand the business, their workflow, and the bottlenecks. The solutions were simple after all that time was spent. The work ended up being very rewarding. There were no project managers, so I was full stack from the metal to the end user. It was also not bogged down by scaleability / uptime concerns. If something crashes, my user base is something like 30 people. I deploy with an ssh and git pull.

Anywho, I hope you get my point. I'd love to help Elon throw someone at Mars and he's my hero on many levels. But your simple IT skills could make you something of a small pond Elon for lots of non silicon valley people.

Instead of basic income, what if "basic needs" were all free: Food, shelter, healthcare, and recreation. Money would only be free for people who work. Money gives the freedom to do consume goods that are not free.

Sigh. And now to tear down my own thought. Maybe "free basic needs" works (psychologically) for everyone reading HN. But I'm afraid it could destroy a percentage of the population. If someone has no fundamental drive to work, what happens to him/her when work is unnecessary? Hunger is a pretty good motivator. Maybe working any job is better than not working at all (i.e., better for our our mental state). I guess what I'm saying is this: once we meet everyone's basic needs and remove desperation, we still have the problems inherent to idleness.

Crap, let's move to Switzerland...

I believe that was Ayn Rand's point: Acting out of self interest helps everyone.

The social pressure of always being video recorded could be interesting. Same pressure you feel writing something on facebook: "What will my Mom think of this comment..." Now you see someone with Google Glass show up at the party and it's time to put your video persona on (and your pants).