tossmeout's comments

It's not just iPhones. Even access to food is dramatically better thanks to technology. We no longer have wide-scale famines that we used to have in the past that would kill thousands. Even in the US, to my knowledge, food insecurity is much less of a problem today than it was in 1960.

So I don't see the point in implying that technological progress is worthless.

I do think it's correct that the rich benefit from societal structures more, but I'd rephrase: the rich are more capable of leveraging societal structures. Which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, so long as others are allowed a shot at utilizing those structures, too.

In other words, the fact that more money gives you more benefits isn't something to be sneered at. It's kind of the whole point of money. It should make your life better. Otherwise it fails as an incentive. What shouldn't be the case, however, is that people are unfairly barred from being able to make more money in the first place.

I think we focus too much on equality of outcomes, and not enough on the three important questions:

- It doesn't matter who can leverage societal structures the most. Kudos to the people who can. What matters tax-wise is, who is stressing societal structures the most? An example for illustration's sake: if Amazon is placing an insane burden on the road system and causing more maintenance work, theoretically they should pay more for that than the rest of society does.

- Why don't people have more opportunity to make money? Is our educational system failing them? Are there laws and regulations that are keeping people down? Is rent-seeking behavior edging people out? Etc. This idea that people can't make money because rich people are "taking it all" is silly and not the real problem.

- How can we raise the floor? How do we make it so being poor in America isn't so terrible, and ideally, is okay? We have so many problems with rising healthcare and educational and housing costs, segregation, crime, etc. Collecting more taxes doesn't seem to solve this. Look at SF. One of the most tax-rich cities in America. But do we even know how to deploy that budget effectively to curb homelessness? It doesn't seem so.

One of my good friends is a highly-paid engineer at a tech company, and he told me, "Businesses want to keep people poor, so they have cheap labor." Which is about as sensible as saying consumers want businesses to be poor, so we get cheaper products. This is actually a pervasive myth believed by many intelligent people.

Of course businesses want to pay as little as they can for labor, the same way literally anyone paying for anything wants to pay as little as possible. But other concerns obviously come into play as well, e.g. the quality of the people you hire, the affluence of the customers you can sell to, your top-level revenue numbers, etc. This should have been obvious to my friend, who works at a tech company that's happy to pay him and others $200k+.

The reality is that businesses actually prefer wealthy societies with wealthy customers who can buy more things. It's a chronic problem that poor communities are under-served by businesses, because poverty makes it harder to profit.

And yet the myth that businesses want people to be poor persists.

As does the myth that you can only make large sums of money through cheating, scamming, lying, stealing, etc.

It sounds like it's saying that Trump et al are okay, they're just exercising their right to speak, and if people are violent in return then we should punish those violent offenders.

But I suppose in reality you're saying the tech companies are okay, they're just exercising their right to police their own platforms, and if people are violent in return then we should punish those violent offenders.

* where your boundaries lie along the spectrum from self-serving to doormat

* your propensity to be generous to people on the good side of your boundaries

I myself trend close to what you'd call a stoic. Probably out of fear of being a doormat. My boundaries are healthyish, but I don't quite trust them. So I don't seek out help from others, and in return I hope they don't ask for generosity from me. Being generous without crossing my boundaries is something I have to work on.

I know some narcissists who can actually be quite generous. This fools them into thinking, "There's no way I'm a narcissist!" because they can easily recall past instances of generosity. Yet they're still regarded by others as selfish. Their boundaries are shifted so far in their favor that they feel taxed being generous to others who most would deem worthy of generosity. And they expect sympathy, attention, and generosity in situations where most would not have that expectation.

These abusers often do end up ostracized, but that doesn't always look like solitude. They become victims, upset at their crummy relationships and unable to garner sympathy from others, yet unwilling to ever point the finger at themselves. Some end up alone, yes. Others befriend other victims who they can commiserate with, but those relationships don't last long for obvious reasons. So it's sort of a fleeting, on-again off-again ostracism.

Of course I'm speaking in generalities here. Plenty of victims aren't narcissists, etc. And I do have sympathy. Nobody chooses to be a narcissist. I think some people are just wired that way, or perhaps set on that course by environmental factors early in life. Either way, it's not a choice. So I think it's somewhat of a tragic condition.

My advice would be that if you're consistently getting negative feedback about your personality traits, take it seriously. It'll be tempting to deny and seek disconfirmation, e.g. by changing the subject, blaming your accusers, deflecting to other causes (e.g. race or gender), or running away to find people who will say nice things about you. But for all our follies, human beings are naturally pretty decent judges of character. If you're getting consistent character feedback from lots of different people, it's probably accurate.

And we all know that nobody is going to "go do their own research" because you snarkily disagreed with them. People do research when you make it easy for them to do, not when you drive-by insult them with an unreasonable reply. Drawing conclusions without providing reasons is literally being unreasonable.

There are billions of people with bad opinions on the internet. Nobody is forcing you to educate all of them. If you decide to try, it's predictable that you will at some point become tired of repeating yourself. At that point, you have two choices:

A) take a break

B) post crappy comments and justify it by saying you're tired

The result is that I have no reason to believe you, or to even understand your point. Because you've essentially made no point.

It's not interesting to you. Not every comment needs to be interesting to everyone.

> Every major thread on HN has at least one comment trying to force the America Bad angle into the conservation

This is an extreme exaggeration. Plenty of large threads don't discuss this. I'd wager the vast majority.

> If the primary conversation - derived from the linked article - is about the US and about a topic having to do with something negative about the US…

There are plenty of sub-conversations on every thread that aren't explicitly about the main topic. On this post alone, there are comments about the definition of terrorism, bitcoin, health insurance laws, American military action, etc. It seems like you're singling out "criticism of America" as the only taboo topic for no real reason.

> Imagine if every large thread had someone trying to force comments about all the bad things France or Britain have done.

Nobody is "forcing" comments. People are leaving comments. About all sorts of opinions, including those criticizing other countries. And absolutely none of this happens on "every large thread".

> someone being triggered and unable to control theirself

Didn't sound like the commenter was triggered at all.

And, presumably, if the company is making political contributions to help it accomplish its goals, I'd imagine workers could discuss that and make suggestions inside work. But when you're just discussing your personal politics, you can do it elsewhere.

Can't anyone just give to charity and get a deduction? And doesn't everyone get taxed later when they're paid later?

He would let his excitement for some new idea take hold of him, and he would share it with everyone without first taking the time to sit down and reconcile how the feature fit into the rest of the app, what problems it solved, possible alternative solutions to that problem, the cost and complexity of implementing the feature, how the feature should be prioritized, etc.

This stuff and more is what sets good product people apart from mediocre product people. The problem is that it's all invisible and optional, so mediocre product people aren't even aware they're not doing it, and thus it's easy for them to believe they're great product people when they really aren't.

At some point he got the message that he needed to stop disrupting the team with these frequent ideas, so he switched to writing them out in gigantic Google Docs that he'd send to people. At least that was async, so it was less interruptive than him stopping at your desk, but it was still super time-consuming to read his docs. Eventually the entire team started ignoring them.

Tech represents an existential threat to the media. The media has always controlled distribution channel, and enjoyed a monopoly on advertising and on getting messages across to the general public. In the last couple decades, however, that has changed, and tech companies are increasingly holding the keys. A few examples:

* People rarely buy their news from newspapers and magazines anymore, but instead find it via Google search, Twitter, Facebook, their mobile phones, and other tech channels.

* When the App Store first came out, Steve Jobs famously required a 30% cut of The NYT's mobile subscription revenue, while also retaining all of the subscriber data e.g. credit card numbers and email addresses. Very bad for the NYT and other media companies who always controlled this stuff. Amazon has done similar things to the book industry via the Kindle.

* Facebook has famously made a killing off of controlling distribution for media companies, e.g. which stories appear in users' feeds, and how much these companies need to pay for the algorithms show their posts to more people.

* Google News aggregates news stories and their algorithms control which sites get traffic.

* Twitter breaks news faster than any media-controlled platform, including TV and radio. This often forces media companies and journalists to tweet before publishing articles.

Consequently, the bulk of advertising revenue and readership now goes to tech companies and comes through tech channels, rather than going directly to media companies. The media has lost a lot of the power (and resulting income) that it once had. This is EXTREMELY scary for the media. Like I said, it's an existential threat. Think horse and buggy companies looking at the early adoption of cars.

So, what to do about it? Well, the media works like literally any other for-profit industry. They're going to fight back against competition. Why wouldn't they?

What that looks like from a strategy perspective is to use the strongest tools in your arsenal. For the media, that's the fact that they're still the ones doing all the writing. They can dramatically affect public opinion.

The playbook is simple: Hire a bunch of journalists who are anti tech. They'll naturally write a bunch of negative stories about big tech companies. They'll write about the dangers of an ad-funded business, not mentioning that this was a model literally invented by the media. They'll write about the dangers of monopoly, not mentioning that the media has always had a monopoly on distribution. They'll write about the dangers of censorship, not mentioning that media companies have editorial teams and hiring bias for their journalists, and that they allow their advertisers to censor them. They'll write about how rich and out of touch the tech elite are, not mentioning that the media elite are just as rich and out of touch. They'll write about the problems with diversity in tech, not mentioning the lack of diversity in the media. Etc.

That's not to say the criticism isn't warranted. Of course a lot of it is. And imo the journalists are sincere.

But the journalists don't control or necessarily even see the big picture, any more than the average software developer at Google controls Google. At risk of sounding overly dramatic, they're all just pawns on a chess board. If you control a media company, you don't even have to tell your journalists what to write. You simply hire editors and journalists who have already proven sympathetic to your viewpoints and let them go to work.

So beneath people calling each other names on Twitter, there's a lot more going on.

According to VICE, the "audio chat had spiraled wildly out of control" because what, it was critical of journalists?

Also, notice that none of the tech people in any of these conversations said that tech should be above criticism. They've literally simply said that the media should be accountable, too. Do you disagree?

For decades the media has NOT been accountable. They were the only organizations able to reach the masses directly. Now other people can to, and those people can criticize media coverage without having to go through the media itself, and so you get whiny pieces like this one that hypocritically try to argue that others should be open to criticism but they're assholes for criticizing the media.