At this point we all know this is just a massive bubble. I'm done paying attention to it really. I'm prepared for all my investments to go down in the next 1-5 years. If you're nearing retirement now is the time to cash out. Yes, investments could go up in a value a lot until the correction, but I don't really think that is worth the risk.
> When I was in the ICU for a few days (thankfully due to medical confusion and not a real condition) people reached out to see if I was ok and needed anything. I know people who discovered that a mutual friend died unexpectedly when their phone had been at the morgue for several days.
I feel like this kind of information can be found out by just naturally talking with others. Viewing your friend's and family's location all the time is just so unnecessary and overkill. If something is wrong, you simply reach out to others, they don't need to be actively checking your location to determine that. Yeah obviously the exception is crazy emergencies, but I think most people would take their chances than be this open to location sharing. Kids too make sense. Other than that, I don't believe location sharing to this degree should be normalized at all.
Of course it can be found out other ways. The people I was closest to did not need the location sharing to figure out what happened to me. I do not have the impression that people obsessively check location - I certainly do not. But sometimes you see that someone is somewhere and you might reach out to them. Again - you are welcome to only have corporations know your location, but to me that seems silly.
Depends what you mean by "expose". Some people could read that as "exposed to the Internet". I'm reading it as "exposed to anything".
This looks like a good fun for doing lateral movement inside a network. I know of lots of environments with SNMPv2 wide open for "internal" networks to access.
Plus SNMP is UDP-based, so likely the exploit will work with a one-way path and spoofed source addresses.
There’s no way ISPs can function without SNMP. I think network management is like a 1/3 of all traffic. We process billions and billions of traps daily. These are not on internet connected networks and some have dedicated channels.
Agree, I do think Mazda gets it right though. No touch screen for most models. Screen is controlled with a knob. It’s a tiny bit clunky, but a million times better than all the touchscreen bs.
Consumer Reports' reviews of newer Mazdas always stress the infotainment system as a big negative, to the point that I would seriously reconsider them as a result.
Apparently it's a case of "right idea, wrong execution." The deep menu hierarchies and small text make the jog wheel knob controls even more awkward (in CR's view) than a decent touch-screen system plus a few buttons. [1]
Maybe that's one reason that BMW has just abandoned their Mazda-like wheel controller [2], despite having had it for years before Mazda.
(Interestingly CR says the latest Mazdas do have a touchscreen, but touches are allowed when the car is moving only for CarPlay/Android Auto.)
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/mazda/cx-50-hybrid/2025... - "the CX-50's infotainment system is frustrating and distracting to use while driving. [...] the text- and list-based menu structure forces drivers to glance away from the road for too long. Even simple radio tasks require multiple taps and twists of the rotary controller knob"
Gotta love the good old US of A. I feel like we have the worst of both worlds; dystopian surveillance, yet massive crime issues still. An amazing world we live in.
The problem is that when laws no longer apply to certain individuals in our government, we no longer have rule of law at all, because a law is inherently universal. The US is rotting from the head.
I suspect that in the very near future, the latter will dramatically decrease and the former dramatically increase. I wonder how that tradeoff will be perceived.
As surveillance increases the definition of crime will expand.
Consider the incentives. Surveillance is costly. The only way to justify increasing surveillance costs is to demonstrate increasing intervention in criminal activity. If traditional crime is reduced, new crimes need to be introduced.
Once all the enemies of the state have been eliminated, it becomes mandatory to introduce new enemies of the state so they, too, can be rounded up. Eventually there will be no one left to come for and the surveillance technology will go unmonitored.
You may very well be right about the outcome, though I doubt the government cares enough about justifying expenditures to make money the rationale.
In my experience, it's social crises that tend to be used to justify authoritarian power grabs - whether that's a political killing or a worldwide contagion.
Maybe. If we use our powers too capriciously then they'll deter behaviors other than criminal behaviors. Like that boat of alleged drug traffickers we recently blew up -- that looks more likely to discourage boating within 1000 miles of the US than any particular crime.
Yeah, figured that making it hard to parse would make it more likely people were thoughtful about their replies. In this climate, it's likely to attract a flamewar if I just spell it out.
The increase in crime is purely political problem emerging from the demands of a certain segment of middle and upper middle classes, not the government or working class.
> I feel like we have the worst of both worlds; dystopian surveillance, yet massive crime issues still.
One might be tempted towards the conclusion that dystopian surveillance doesn't materially impact crime rates and that if we want to solve the latter, we need a different solution than the former.
I think it's simply too late for real gun control in the US. Like how would that ever be enforced? There's too many guns already, and we have too many people down south that would be happy to smuggle guns back up North. And trying to control the ammo would be even more unrealistic. The gun culture America created over the past 100+ years is a massive mistake, and I don't think there is any undoing of it. Should have been more control immediately post WWII imo.
I'm not from the US so I only have an outsider's view of the culture, and FWIW I'm also not from Australia although I have emigrated here now.
Australia seemed to have a deeper relationship with guns previously, that stemmed partially out of necessity (farming etc), but there are also a lot of parallels with US culture here – the American dream, being a colony hundreds of years ago, etc, some focus on personal rights and freedoms, being a federation of states, etc. I don't think it was as deep a relationship as the US, but coming from the UK it seemed that Australia had a very different view than the UK.
Australia turned this all around. The culture shifted, and people realised that for the greater good it was something they needed to get past, and they did.
Maybe there's hope for US gun control yet, although the turning point for Australia was a (single) mass shooting. Maybe the US needs a much bigger turning point. I'm a little surprised that the Las Vegas shooting a while ago didn't provide that.
I live in the US. I don't hold much hope in gun control changing after recent years. Recent federal and state policy is trending towards less regulation and removal of the previous administrations regulations.
In 2024, estimated 16,576 deaths in the US from guns (excluding suicide, which is a very large addition on top of that), and 499 mass shootings.
Worst take today. The 2nd amendment was the SECOND thing the founders put in for a reason. They just got done fighting a war against the government with WEAPONS OF WAR. It was written specifically to enable fighting against tyrannical government, which is VASTLY worse than all mass shooters combined.
The 2nd amendment specifies "well regulated militias", but somehow this part is always left out by gun enthusiasts. The idea was to ensure states can have militias, and that those militias would be allowed to have guns. Somehow this has been stretched by the gun lobby to "everyone should be able to have a gun with absolutely no restrictions", when that's absolutely not what is stated in the 2nd amendment.
The members of militias at the time of the ratification of the 2nd amendment were required to supply their own guns by statue, which is how you get the individual right - from the duty to be a member of the militia. Which still exists today (though in statute it is often called the "unorganized" or "state" militia to distinguish it from the National Guard, which is actually a branch of the US Army by statue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_(United_States)...
The bill of rights are about personal freedoms, as is made clear during the discussion leading up to them. All states copied these in some form into their own constitutions, and if you go look at those, most are quite explicit this is a personal right. The claim otherwise is a very recent claim.
Congress around 1982 had the Library of Congress issue a study about this in great depth, with millions of citations to historical documents, which give ample evidence and quotes. You may have to dig to find it, but it's a good read to gain more understanding.
Also the second militia act of 1792 actually required all able bodied men to own guns, and this was the law for well over the following century.
The founders had no qualms about everyone having arms.
I've read the Bible at least four times. I'd rather not stone people for being born different. Nor inspire PTSD in children or adults with silly stories about punishment in eternal flames.
Good and evil are even more subjective than how people perceive colors. I hope we can at least agree that murder is wrong, and the tools which facilitate the most murder should be the most heavily regulated.
Might have read it but clearly didn't understand the point of the sacrifice and the new covenant. You shouldn't be telling young children they're going to burn in hell for eternity any more than you should talk to them about sex.
Murder is wrong.
Every citizen worth a damn should own guns and the idea that they should not be regulated by the government is enshrined in the 2nd amendment to the US constitution. Every gun law created since is an abberation that should be abolished.
The first three words of 2A is "A well regulated...". IDK where this idea comes from that guns cannot be regulated.
Shall we say prisoners have the right to bear arms? Felons with a violent past? People with mental illness? Surely there must be limits. Few rights are absolute in every circumstance.
If a person shouldn't have firearms, then they shouldn't be on the street. They should be in jail/prison. Period. I don't know that anyone that has argued that prisoners should have guns. You would have to be a fool. If a person shouldn't have access to guns, then they shouldn't have access to any other freedom. The ultimate purpose of owning firearms is to fight a tyrannical government. For that purpose, less limits is better for the people. This right is absolute, and anyone espousing otherwise is a tyrant or a fool.
I'm not personally against individuals owning guns, but the part that is somehow vehemently opposed is the "well-regulated" part. There's effectively no regulation, and somehow the 2nd amendment has been warped to leave out the part of regulation, to make folks believe they're entitled to guns without limit.
"well regulated" applies not to guns but to militias, and has nothing to do with legal restrictions. It means well functioning, well trained, efficient. It has nothing to do with legal regulations.
The word has many meanings. Learn which one the phrase in the Constitution is using.
So you're saying that we should be able to add training requirements to use a firearm, if well-regulated means "well functioning, well trained, efficient". Similar to how we require folks to show they know how to properly drive a car before we allow them on the road?
[As a necessity for a free state, A well trained and in good working order group of able bodies citizens capable of fight for defense of self and state, is required], the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Militia is just the people. Oxford 1800s has well-regulated to mean “in good working order”.
100%. The US took all that capability and could not win in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan against such a force. Same in Vietnam.
The US populace is vastly larger and better armed and capable than Afghanistan.
The US military requires a massive economy to function. If it tries to attack itself, those little armed people could stop it, the economy would crash, and the US military would crumble without needed support and supplies.
A final issue is the US troops would lose a lot of soldiers if they were told to go attack fellow citizens. The soldiers would quit, would hesitate, would not want to kill people they view as their own people.
So armed citizenry absolutely have major power against the govt.
Finally, if you were in a country where the govt set out to kill its citizens, would you rather have arms or be completely unarmed?
>The US took all that capability and could not win in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan against such a force.
We had no military objective in Afghanistan.
Our only goal there was to enrich contractors who had stockholders working at the highest levels in the Pentagon and White House. That goal was achieved spectacularly.
The US military would be the defending force, though, which would put The People at a disadvantage. Pushing through the defenses of a multi-trillion dollar military with AR-15s seems unlikely. I don't even think that China's armed forces could defeat the US military, let alone civilians armed with AR-15s
All being said, I am no military guru and I could be wrong
Citizens should be allowed to own UAVs, nukes, tanks, helicopters, and jets. It says in the text: "shall not be infringed."
Besides that, who do you think is going to do the fighting, exactly?
Ironically small businesses tend to be the most egregious violators of labor laws and humanity in general.
Mega-corp isn't typically evil, it just wins a lot by being incredibly advantaged in whatever it pursues. Teams of lawyers, armies of engineers, rows of consultants.
Small businesses on the other hand tend to be the ones dumping oil in the river, firing employees that they don't want to back pay, bankrolling family vacations with time clock funny business, etc.
When I worked for my first mega-corp after years of small business jobs, I was blown away by how by-the-book it all was.
As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.
I get confused by other small business owners who complain about this because it’s all stuff you’d need to do anyway.
I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP. This isn’t terribly complicated. I took courses on corporate accounting in college and I took the ERP training. Even if I didn’t have all of that, I’d still have to actually do the accounting in a double entry system because of the legal jurisdiction and corporate structure.
I think that this is a byproduct of the economy being filled with small businesses owned by people who aren’t competent at operating their business as a business, which isn’t the same thing as being successful at making money.
> As a small business owner, I spend a lot of my time doing things by the book.
You are an exception.
> I use a double entry accounting system in an ERP.
Not only this requires someone knowledgeable enough but it is also time/energy consuming. If you force this on every small business, you'll probably kill something like 95% of hair-dressers.
Honestly, I don't think this is a problem. If we are scrutinizing a bakery, I'd rather the scrutiny to be put on health/food concerns rather than employee hiring practices. That is assuming the bakery employs less than 6-7 people.
I agree with you whole heartedly that scrutiny on a business should focus on the offerings of the business.
As for whether I’m an exception — maybe. Subjectively I think I am because I perceive myself to be putting more into the “business of business” than most other business owners I know, but I also have a bit more time. The services my business provides benefits from heavily cross linking service, sales, and event/auditable data. It fits cleanly into out of box sales processes that business software assumes. When we adopted our ERP we just changed our processes instead of butchering the software. What we actually offer is, to a large extent, set-it-and-check-on-it.
I would think that is a great luxury in a way. I don’t have to do back breaking labor to make a delicious batch of croissants for the masses every day. I’d rather the croissants be tasty than the bakery’s books be perfect. As long as they’re doing what they need to stay in business.
I did have something specific in mind when I made my comment about “how hard can it be?” I think I was painting with too broad a brush. When I typed that I was recalling the FinCEN BOI filings. All of two or three pages of an online wizard asking for all the same information most secretaries of state require, and such a disproportionate outrage about even having to do it. From peers in the business community I heard a lot of “this is too complicated!” Having read the FinCEN documentation on BOI, it definitely sounded way more complicated than it ever was to complete.
No they don't. This kind of mustachio-twirling caricature isn't a helpful mental model of how business works.
Businesses are just large bunches of people, each trying to maximize various metrics given the incentives they interact with. None of those people, including the owner, is automatically pro-slavery, which is the other word for "wants free labor."
Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible. This isn't evil nor is it specific to "businesses," "business owners," or "rich people" either.
I find generally the most helpful thing you can factor in when trying to work out how a business is thinking is "what set of things would make my viable business predictable". If there's a factor HN threads tend to miss in these discussions, it's determinism.
> Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible.
...is exactly in agreement with what I said above.
The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures. E.g., If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.
I would also accept the other direction. That is, a tenant wants use of a property for no rent, ideally.
My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. They want money for free just like everybody else.
>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements.
No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they won't get a good price or even a sale. They want good reviews from people who pay rent on time (or hell, even the people who are occasionally late but come through in the end), and they just want to be a trillion light years away from the hoarders, squatters, and apartment-destroyers.
Seen from the other side, you'd come to realize that almost all the horror stories you've heard are, at minimum, far more nuanced than you were led to believe, and that some large fraction were just fabricated entirely by people you'd never want living next door to you.
>My point was that small businesses aren't noble somehow. T
That's the thing though. There's this gigantic middle ground between nobility and villainy which is people just trying to get along and do what they're obligated to do, but you have leftists everywhere constantly slandering them because a German miscreant two centuries ago liked to mooch off his rich friends.
I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something. Only children want things for free (because they know no better), and it's what separates them from adults.
I believe all of this but also want to say that in my life as a renter I never once had a landlord return a security deposit without me taking them to court. There's definitely some ruthlessness.
Interesting, but on the other side of the coin I can tell you that in 10 years of renting I've only foregone small fractions of my deposits and always by choice (pre-departure inspection tells you what they'd charge for anything amiss, and you can choose to clean/fix/etc. or pay them out of your deposit). If you don't get a pre-departure inspection you're definitely set up for ambiguity and shadiness.
In one apartment, I even spilled some bleach in a closet, and sneakily replaced the piece of carpet from the scraps I found when they were recarpeting a nearby unit. They didn't notice or care.
I've been a perfect tenant my entire life, and I was still always treated like trash by every landlord I've rented from. I don't think they make a distinction.
> I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something.
Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live. It's not creative, it's not original, and it's only possible because they aren't making any more real estate, but they're always making more people.
I said above to another commenter: I would also like to be a landlord one day. I'm sure I'd be a decent one. But, I won't be pretending like I'm doing anything productive... I'm just extracting money from the fact that my name is on a deed. Nothing more, nothing less.
It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it. I won't be kidding myself, though, that I'm somehow a productive or noble small business man.
>Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live.
And, I expect, as a point of fact... you haven't bothered to be a landlord.
>It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it.
That's how you perceive it. But the reality of it is that while many are hustling, few are prospering, few enough even that reasonable people might wonder if the few successful ones are the result of luck more than having figured out the get-rich-quick thing that everyone's been trying to figure out for millennia. Good luck, I suppose.
I am a landlord. I charge below market rent because it is enough to meet my financial goals and turning over a new tenant is annoying. I spare no expense on maintenance because I value my assets.
You may have a more reasonable stance than most landlords, but that doesn't change the essence of the transaction.
If you could get higher rent without getting punished by the market (turnover), you would do it. If you could spend less on maintenance without getting punished by the market (turnover and reduced resale value), you would do it.
Many, if not most, landlords push both of these levers to their absolute limits.
The essence of being a landlord is that you've got your name on the title of a scarce resource that is difficult or impossible in some cases to duplicate: real estate in a particular location. The fact that your name is on this title means that you can extract value from people who need a place to live and did not arrive there first so they could buy the cheap property, build the building, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I hope to be a landlord too some day. Ownership is what matters when there's nowhere else to move. I look forward to the rent checks. However, I won't be pretending there's anything noble or fair about what I'm doing. It's just how the rules of our economy are set up.
> The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures.
This isn't a business. And if you found a way to do this, you'd be subject to endless audits and AML/CTF suspicions because actual businesses don't look like this.
Business owners come in a range of personalities, just like everyone else. Some are selfish and unreasonable. Some are altruistic and generous. Some are purely in it for the money, others really love building teams and working in a friendly environment. Some have global ambitions, others just want to get by with as little effort as possible.
You can claim depreciation on all your hardware (including your desk and chair).
You should be claiming some of your rent/mortgage as office expenses. And, obviously, your broadband cost, your electricity bill, your heating bill (if different), etc.
You can claim all the coffees you buy potential clients.
Having zero expenses is absolutely not what you want to efficiently run your business.
> The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures.
> property but no rent
I mean, I guess sure, but... only lunatics think that exists legally and sustainably.
Certainly no one who has managed to get a business degree, or attain any leadership role, thinks so foolishly.
Normal businesspeople know that if you pay minimum wage you can expect only a weak effort, and also they don't waste their mental energy fantasizing about anybody 'working for free.'
As a manager, I fantasize about getting everyone under me paid enough to hold turnover very low (because turnover sucks), but not so highly that my team becomes a poor ROI that economically should be replaced with (AI, an offshore team, a couple people from a consulting firm, etc.) -- and I'm sure the CEO and any non-crazy shareholders want that equilibrium as well.
> Every business owner, regardless of the size of the business, wants free labor.
Yeah, no.
I’m no longer an entrepreneur - ran out of runway - but it was always my goal to have aggressive profit sharing as part of my company. Acceptable salaries - years of those salaries saved “in the bank” and profit-share the rest.
I never wanted free labor. In fact, the reason I didn’t have employees is because I couldn’t afford them at the rate they deserved. People deserve to be treated as people. People deserve to be treated well.
I want to play the “game” of creating things I want created and making enough money to comfortably sustain myself and help those I care about.
If I’m hiring people, I want people that want the same things as me and are paid well, or people that are willing to exchange their labor for both a respectable base earning and also extra earning based on how we, collectively, are doing.
Some people, curiously, believe that business is only valid if it operates as a caricature of the worst traits of modern corporate America.
That’s the game, and some people believe it’s the only game.
I’m with you though. For me business isn’t a channel for hoarding all possible resources and assets. It’s a combination of a craft and a means to an end. I’d still do it if I needed no profession, because it’s a craft I enjoy.
It’s fun to share that craft, and it’s good to share that craft on generous terms.
The subtle irony is that the version of the “game” as referenced in that other comment is the same, expect that all those niceties only apply to executives and people who already have lots of money. A socially perverse arrangement, to be sure.
I think you're leaving out a few "all things being equal" and other caveats. Compensation is not necessarily monetary (especially in the US), costs are more than just salary, etc.
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