What’s wrong with extreme wealth concentration? It’s not like hoarding cash. The wealth is the stake in companies they built or own.
We need more wealth concentration, simply because opposite of this is the prevailing normie zeitgeist. You can just write it off based on how popular it is to hate wealth.
Wealth is power. Power decides what we use our collective time and resources on. The more concentrated power is, the less we use that time and resources on things that improves the life of the average person, and more on things that matter to the few with wealth.
I’m going to assume that this is just some edgy post, but you should read up on the relationship between wealth inequality and corruption, social mobility, and similar factors.
Not trolling. It has served me better than most heuristics.
If there is something subjective and if you cannot find a critique of it, it’s usually a super power to assume the opposite is true barring obvious exceptions.
I would say if there is a decline in society, the normies are wrong. And if there's steady improvement in quality of life, then the normie zeitgeist is correct. But there's always a delay in these things, at least a generation.
I don't think that applies when the normies lack power; which is precisely the problem with wealth concentration. That would be like blaming the serfs for the failures of feudalist governments.
There's a reason we don't have feudalist governments. It's a "solved" problem.
The normies may have much less power, but it's never zero. Wealth isn't the only form of power. There's law/politics and there's military power. Whenever a group oversteps, you get the Magna Carta, you get secularism, you get civil wars and your Second Amendment. This is why the French Revolution and The Civil War(s) are in the textbooks.
When Venezuela's economy collapsed, a South American friend said that they deserved it. Every other South American country fought corruption and died for independence.
We never want violence, but it is there as an option. Laws and economic policies are there to make sure the violence is never the best option. Non-democratic capitalism doesn't work because it puts the law and the wealth in the hands of a few and leaves force as the only option. The world didn't suddenly convert into communism because Marx and Lenin were handsome demon lords; they converted because capitalism pushed them into a corner.
When you have this decline, it's because a society had weak and corrupt lawyers, statesmen, and economists. These may not be your normies, but they're pretty close to the middle class.
But you don't get to praise capitalism for the cheap air conditioning and then criticize it when low costs push production overseas. You can't negotiate for the high salaries then blame greedy CEOs when you get replaced by someone cheaper. You don't get to charge "as high as possible" and then wonder why your doctor is charging your life savings to save your life. The normies built a culture around winning and lopsided power, then are shocked when power is used against them.
> simply because opposite of this is the prevailing normie zeitgeist
We'd love to be able to have reasoned discussions about economics and the pros and cons of wealth concentration vs redistribution here. But this is not the way to do it, and the comment led to an entirely predictable flamewar. Please don't do this on HN, and please make an effort to observe the guidelines, as you've been asked to do before.
Man it's hard to read stuff like this on the internet. When has wealth concentration ever been a good thing? Wealth is power and power leads to abuse almost universally.
You underestimate the resources the subset of society who it actually benefits can, will, and do use to distort views on how wide that benefit actually is.
Like all of the startup founders and all of the folks here working at tech companies and investing in their 401ks, happily cashing out RSUs, and such right?
I don't know about the IT worker part but I dare you to talk about capitalism to the nurses, school teachers and police officers who cannot have lucrative business models like us HN folks.
Are these the same nurses who are anti-vax and the police officers I'm supposed to want to de-fund, or just the ones you're thinking of?
Are you going to be the one to tell the teacher's or police officer's union they have to divest their pension and buy fiat currency? No more stocks allowed!
Why people here brandish Communism when someone critics Capitalism? It’s like we’re still in the coldwar. Those two views have many sub-categories and there’s others in-between and on the sides. Just a few in the last decades:
- socio-democratic countries are the norm in Europe, namely Norway, Denmark and Sweden.
- Ordoliberalism: Germany, Switzerland
- cooperative economics: Japan, Spain
- market socialism: China, hungaria
- Parecon: brasil, Argentina
- Ubuntu: South Africa
- Anarcho-syndicalism, The third way, Islamic economic…
What a weird comment, so disconnected from reality. Norway is fully capitalist with income inequality similar to the USA. China, despite being nominally run by communists, is actually a fascist dictatorship. And "Ubuntu" isn't a real thing: South Africa is a failed state run by kleptocrats who can't even keep the lights on.
The income inequality in Norway is roughly half that of the US, and the quality of life of the bottom income bracket is much higher there, due to social policies. Why lie about things that can easily be looked up?
The Gini coefficient is similar so I have no idea where you're getting the idea that income equality in Norway is "half" that of the US. And the US has consistently had a positive net migration rate with Norway so regardless of your nonsense claims about quality of life people seem to be voting with their feet.
Because they have been conditioned to do so. The ultra-wealthy have been fighting the war against socialism for over a century, and part of that strategy is to polarize the topic. If you’re not explicitly pro unfettered capitalism, you must be a communist.
Ideologies have associated talking points. If you start spouting 'blood and soil' rhetoric don't be surprised or offended when people start to call you a Nazi.
In this case communism's obsession with talking about Capitalism as a proper noun as distributed process as if it was a monolithic discrete object with clear intentions and something which can be 'abolished' with no idea as to what the particulars would entail.
It encourages the 80% into group think. Flagging is a signifier that “you should not dare to think that was a good comment. Move on and don’t think for yourself”.
I expressed that poorly. Just 'boring' alone doesn't warrant a flag.
There's a subjective element.
As an example of something I would flag: a one sentence 'hamas supporter!' or 'genocide denier!' accusation in reply to someone's thoughtful comment. If the same sentiment were expressed in a more original way, I might upvote.
Edit: In regard to news stories, sometimes a story breaks and the main and 'new' pages wind up a dozen links to it. At some point, I might flag that. I'm not sure if that's kosher, but there's little purpose in having users wade through identical articles. Maybe @tomhow or @dang can set me straight if they happen to read this.
>but the apparent reason for many, many flags here is that the content is unoriginal.
Unoriginal to who? What's unoriginal to you might be original to someone else. So your justification for flagging only reinforces the groupthink argument even if you don't realize it.
Our branch of the thread seems to be drifting away from the original issue.
Whatever combination of user behaviors it is that HN's moderation promotes, it appeals to some people more than X, 8chan, gab, reddit, etc.
Perhaps some of the other sites contain the 20% of comments - with its pearls of contrarian wisdom - that HN flags. There is an audience of people (like me) to whom that absence doesn't matter.
I have no interest in wading through posts where there's no minimum bar for garbage. Some people do, and good for them: they can pan for gold on reddit, etc.
HN works well, as-is, for a certain segment of the public.
I agree somewhat, you can feel the tension on HN with respect to labor vs capital. Which is funny because the entire premise of YC is to infuse capital and get a huge leverage over bootstrappers.
It's a pretty common turn of phrase on "lefty" (Western, English, very online, progressive) parts of the internet. I've always found it silly because it takes some pretty interesting nuanced problems (how do you give credit to folks who executed Ive's vision, many who probably boldly innovated to create what they did? How do you realistically situate Ive's flaws given his aura?) and wrings the nuance out of it by polarizing the readers (you're either with labor or you're with capital, pick your side of the picket line!)
But then these days lefty and righty parts of the Western English-language internet are all polarized and beating on common enemies is part of their conversational language. I think for a while HN was small enough that it resisted this polarization but at its current size there's no escaping it.
Chess engines should come with another metric bar: "The twitchy-ness" of the position aka the gradient of primary eval metric as you pareto the possible moves from best to worst. The stronger this gradient, the more risky it is to play, and more changes to make a mistake.
This ignores the question how hard it is for a human to find the best (or a "good enough") move. It's easy to find games with 10 "only move" 's in a row where even a beginner could easily have played all if them.
Is it? TBH it sounds like "climbing a tree is a start on getting to the moon beyond just jumping up and down". Yes, it does "more". But whether it will actually get you to the desired end state is highly dubious. Nobody knows if that will make chess bots more human-like, despite decades of research into the topic.
This is not a new request; many people, including engine authors, have suggested it throughout the years. The problem is that it's seemingly very hard to reliably quantify something like this and propagate it throughout the game tree.
You don't need to propagate it, you just need to show the gradient of the current position alongside with the classical evaluation, to give more context to the viewers.
Agreed. I always thought of it as 'how close to the cliff edge are you' metric. It'd probably be easy to do, look at all the possible moves and add up the resultant evals. If you're currently tied but you have only one good move to keep it tie while the rest of your moves give mate in 1, well, saying the board is tied is not helpful.
Except a lot of the time there's an obvious threat that needs to be responded to, and a couple of obvious good responses that even terrible players spot.
We need more safetyism culture. We need to ban root access completely by 2030. 10-factor security for login. 256 digit OTP and you must insert a drop of blood to login.
so cool, if there was some startup to give you a full health info with that. Imagine - with your login attempt it comes a proper analysis if you are fit for purpose.
If we're going this route then maybe drop HTTPS all together, go back to port 80 and instead PGP encrypt each file with a different key and add the cool peoples public keys. This would keep malicious people and bots away from the content.
No, launching big heavy explosive things into space shouldn’t have fewer regulations. That’s insane to think they should be able to just do it without much oversight.
Sure the safety part of it is something that should be verified before launch. But when they are launching multiple of these things and the variables are all mostly the same you don't need to do the same analysis over and over again.
A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.
There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21
Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k
Regulations probably are not going to fix the rot that's inside Boeing. It's like putting water in groundhog tunnels, clamp down on one area and it will pop up somewhere else.
They need to die off and get replaced by better competition when they mess up. And their market centralization ground to a halt instead of encouraged by the gov because of jobs and total risk aversion.
If by the size of government you mean the budget, there have been multiple instances of the government shrinking. As a percent of GDP the 90s saw cuts to federal spending, the 2011 sequestration saw a drop in spending even in nominal terms, and obviously the end of WW2 saw a massive collapse in government spending and the end of multiple different programs
The booster landed on "pins" that are structural load points and designed to support it's weight.
Here is a brilliant profile shot looking down one of the "arms" after the catch today, you can clearly see it resting on the "pins", not the grid fins.
They also use those "pins" to raise/lower it with a crane when they need to during construction and during transport to the launch tower. It's the primary mode of lifting the thing
