So I don't really follow the news, except that adjacent stuff that pops up on hacker news... Is the administration serious or is this like just a distraction while they do something else when no one is paying attention?
I feel like not knowing about the tariffs and your cost of living being on an exponential graph is more than "not following the news"? The administration is serious and causing harm to everyone it can.
ICE isn't the Gestapo. The Gestapo didn't hide their faces.
If history is any guide, ICE may be better compared to the SA. Their job is to make it safe for the future Gestapo to operate unmasked... at which point the unprofessional street thugs in ICE will find that they've become a liability to the regime.
Note that Noem has already declared that any video evidence of ICE's criminal activity is itself illegal and inadmissible [1,2].
As I understand it, the right to record police has never actually been tried definitively at the SCOTUS level. The Republicans certainly have the tools on the SCOTUS bench to prohibit it now, so look for a case to be brought at some point.
Gestapo was proud of their work. If they could and had phones, they would post selfies.
But, they were actual police, highly effective. (Torured, murdered, commited genocide ... buy were actual trained cop good at being cops and good at genocide).
You can only threaten your friends so many times before they cut you out, and Trump is going on a year straight of threatening us (Canada, but also Greenland) with annexation, and the EU with sanctions and tariffs.
It doesn’t matter if the US government are serious or are posturing, the message is clear: prepare for existential warfare (economic or militarily) or be faced with it.
I think Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech yesterday captures the shared sentiment outside of the US very well. It’s worth listening to and lays bare the cracks in international diplomacy the last 80 years.
I personally find the argument that it’s about masking something clever weak. There are two things going on: repeatedly admitting US manufacturing can’t keep up with China and desperately trying to bring it home, and “Donroe Doctrine” colonialism where the US wants to lean on the weak to extract money out of them.
Maybe next year Trump is going to say “look how strong I made NATOs military, no more freeloaders here, this was all a ruse”, but I doubt it.
And my personal raw take, as a Canadian: we’ve shown we will take a punch to the nose for the US, it’s going to be impossible to look at our relationship the same for a generation. I’ve worked for US companies (as do most of our best and brightest), we have tight security integrations, this all feels incredibly unnecessary.
Agree 100%, this whole thing was incredibly dumb from the beginning. Trump's dementia and ego will ruin (has ruined?) the US's standing in what was the former West. What a sad day to be alive.
Neither. Trump is a reality TV guy and he's running things as if it's a TV show. He's making drama for the sake of drama. He's basically one of those kids who never learned the difference between good attention and bad attention.
He's also never gotten what drama addicts get as kids that kinda steers them in the right direction: someone to firmly tell him "no" and someone to kick him in the balls when he acts out.
People should end up in jail, unfortunately it's the people responsible for enforcing the law that are breaking it. I expect impeachment attempts within the next year or so.
What is the difference? When threaten or invade in order to distract from Epstein, how is it different from threatening or invading because they want glory and look masculine as a primary goal rather then second?
> Prediction markets to me are a natural consequence of the post-truth world we live in
My best strategy for dealing with people who have been radicalized is to make wagers. Even making the wagers is hard because they are often about individuals who's job it is to gaslight their constituents... but its still been working pretty well. I'm up probably $1000 off of these little bets and they have helped me win later arguments.
1. I made a prototype using LLMs
2. It worked so well!
3. Software Development is dead (just kidding, I finish the article by saying its not)
4. Everything we know has changed, my prototype proves it!
^^ Its been a rough couple of years with these kinds of upshots being constantly posted.
Yes, things have changed. Is the entire software development world about to collapse because of LLMs? Sorry, no. I'm impressed by the capabilities we now have at our disposal, but the LLMs still do a bunch of dumb stuff. Some of the worst bugs and edge cases I've dealt with this year were almost unnoticeable things an agent added. With that said, there is still a ton of juice to squeeze from this paradigm. I really just wish everyone would stop pretending the sky is falling.
This may just be me... but is anyone else in their head saying: "whats the catch?"
~~Meta~~ Facebook has made their money by de-stabilizing people's emotional state to keep them engaged and buying stuff via ads. I'm having a tough time connecting the dots between that and nuclear power.
I get that and scanned the article. they are currently, and have been, working on "AI" for a bit, but strategically they aren't positioned to provide a service offering right now. Even if they are going all in and they got regulatory love, it would make way more sense to go after an energy source/provider that could provide it on a faster timeframe. they'll get their energy in what? 7-10 years?
I was about to make a comment about skepticism, thank you for adding it. Its likely that its all bunched in together. Looking at material with a critical eye is a positive feature of HN not a negative - thats a very very nuanced thing to evaluate though and likely we do not have the technology
Pandora's box has been opened, per the story all that remains is hope. You can't go back in time and change history.
If you want to make a better world from a better internet you need to save people from the tyranny of the marginal user (https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). It's not the web, its the people. Those people incentivize enshittification. People will need to change, not the companies, the government, or the creators... the supply is purely filling this demand. The indie web isn't going to help a grandma see photos of her grand kids as easily as facebook will. And the indie web won't help you find a used guitar as well as craigslist will.
I would often do general consulting while mainly helping with tech, marketing or sales... and I noticed that all of my most important advice no one would follow. It got so extreme that I would often joke that "I know my advice is good because no one ever takes it". David Maister acknowledged a similar thing in his book "Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy"
This article strikes a chord of course because its right in line with that thought. Deathbed regrets in that sense are kind of cheap - they knew what they were doing and did it anyway. I think the author is however missing a key feature of this genre though - those regrets are almost always things that are there, that have no deadline and are easily delayed. Spending time with family, working on hobbies or creative pursuits, and so on. What the regretters are failing to attribute is their lack of discipline... and that there is a valuable take away. The genre could really be just a derivative of: "I wish I had been more disciplined in my life"
People on their deathbed are not deploring their lack of discipline. In very real sense, what these people are mourning is the opposite. TFA links to another article, "The Deathbed Fallacy", which lists some of the most often mentioned regrets, namely:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I didn’t work so hard.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I wish I didn't care that much for others' opinion.
It's not about having discipline. It's about enjoying our own unique human life and our world with all its possibilities. About not working the machine until we become machine-like ourselves. If I need flex some will-power muscles and employ a well-oiled personal productivity system to get me to spend time with those friends, it's either that I've become a machine, only gaining satisfaction from climbing whatever ladders my ambition set its sight on, or I'm slacking off on another important human life-task: finding and making friends which bring joy into and enrich my life.
Yes, deathbed regrets aren't actionable self-help advice. They are confessions, really, and no, they are not cheap. They are messages from those who've reached the fifth level of relating with death, that of acceptance, whereas we're still loitering on the first one, denial [1]. They uncover something deep and painful in ourselves, they say most of us are missing something important when we are afraid to go the uncharted routes and follow the safe pre-written ones instead.
[1] "The Denial of Death" is a book worth checking out.
I think this is an infinitely more useful way of saying what the blogger was attempting to.
There is a flawed prioritization happening that we are seeing have it's natural conclusion on the deathbed - delaying things that feel forever available (spending time with the kids) for things that feel urgent (that critical meeting).
As you said, it takes discipline to avoid this trap. There will always be another urgent meeting, but your children will grow up and go have their own lives.
"Fake urgency" is a terrible poisonous thing that often seeps into the work world. It is the cause of many ills and most deathbed regrets.
There are a lot of people who more discipline would help, but in many cases it seems to me that they just don't know what to do. For example, if someone lying there dying has a regret like "I wish I hadn't worked so hard" or "I wish I had let myself be happier" it is hard to say that their #1 problem is that they lacked discipline. I know a couple of people who are extremely disciplined ... at making themselves unhappy for no good reason.
I think it is more likely that a lot of people either didn't know how to relax - or potentially have internalised something about the nature of happiness that isn't true and that they can't let go of.
It's a bit like climate change. Every day we wake up in our comfy beds, we have aircon, gore tex, big cars, hurricane proof buildings. We see that there's a big problem unfolding over the next generation or two. Or three. Maybe a crop failure or two will lead to high coffee prices. Perhaps avocados will disappear from the shelves of the supermarket for a month or two and we'll just pause, say "huh?". Someone might mention a species of shellfish we never heard of which is now extinct, or there'll be even more wildfires "somewhere I don't live" that are awful and everything but does this transatlantic flight really make a difference or does it matter if I upgrade my phone/laptop/car every year... Anyways I need to get the kids to creche and get to work. I don't have time to think about this stuff.
Slow burning problems are the worst because they're so easy to ignore until it's to late.
I imagine this is being downvoted because it suggests consumers need to change their behavior. As the Reddit hive mind knows: corporations produce the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions. But at the end of nearly all those supply chains are consumers, without which the enterprise would not exist.
Individual action cannot solve a tragedy of the commons. Refraining from consuming the commons literally just leaves more for others to consume. Which they will.
A tragedy of the commons can only be resolved through collective action. Carbon tax is the obvious example.
GP technically didn't suggest otherwise, and in fact the same "selfishness" highlighted in that comment also drives people to vote against the sacrifice of collective action, so IMO they're correct. But if you forget about that (implied) step, and instead read "we should all individually just get rid of our ACs and stop flying, to solve climate change" (which GP didn't say), then that would be incorrect.
I largely agree and I attributed it to the same problem; Moloch is a larger class of problems that includes tragedy of the commons (see other comment for a much better link).
I agree also that legislation like carbon taxes are the only ways to really solve the problem, and mostly read GP's comment with the more generous interpretation.
But I don't think that we should see the lack of that as a license for unhinged consumerism. I think people should hold on to their phones and cars awhile. They should prefer more fuel efficient vehicles if they can afford them, etc.
Yeah my point about aircon (and to an extent, big vehicles) is that we have the ability, to a degree, to avoid or work around the problems that climate change is throwing at us. I personally take individual action on climate but I don't think it's possible to make other people change their lifestyle so I don't even try. Do what you want to do people. I live my way because of my own conscience, that's all.
This is an oversimplification. Collective action is driven by a mass of individual beliefs that are strong enough to suppress bad actors. If you are one of the bad actors, it's more difficult to force the other bad actors to stop because they can accuse you of hypocrisy.
See e.g. Al Gore taking flights to speaking engagements about climate change. From one perspective, this is an effective tool and probably even carbon-negative if it leads to effective change. On another level, why is a guy with so many frequent flier miles telling me to fly less? Why is a rich guy who can eat the cost of a carbon tax telling me my plane tickets will cost more? Etc.
I am reminded of the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" refrain, which is sometimes used by people who don't like capitalism to justify taking the absolute least ethical option available.
> why is a guy with so many frequent flier miles telling me to fly less?
Maybe this is nitpicking but just to satisfy my own record more than anything: that would be individual action and I agree Al gore shouldn’t be telling anyone to fly less.
> Why is a rich guy who can eat the cost of a carbon tax telling me my plane tickets will cost more?
Carbon taxes affect big consumers more than small ones, and I would absolutely support eg a Canadian “carbon price” model where the money is doled out to everyone at the end of the year. And if anyone is still worse off, tax oil companies more until poor people are least-bad-off :)
I think you're misunderstanding me: the proposal of a carbon tax is fine, but if you're the person who spearheads it then it's most effective to already be individual acting. That way, you can't be accused of hypocrisy.
You can't support the tax as effectively unless you prove by your actions that you believe in the cause. While individual action won't directly solve the problem, failing to take individual action might jeopardise your ability to support collective action.
No. If you purely advocate for collective action and explicitly against individual action, people won’t hold you up as a personal martyr with higher moral standards. This happens when the conversation turns to blaming the individual. Stay on message, focus on collective action, and people will listen.
Individual blame and responsibility has become inexorably linked with the anti climate change movement unfortunately. It is a Trojan horse for those willing to derail the movement. But if you stay on message, and lead with “no individual action, only collective action”, any counter of “but You!” only serves to reinforce the message: “Yes, Me, because Us or Nobody.”
I agree with your overall point but the messaging is so crucial that even “people downvoted this because individual action, but…” no—no but: that’s the whole point. No but, no individual action. Moloch has nothing to do with an advocate or lack thereof. We need to stay really clearly on message: collective action solves a tragedy of the commons. The end.
Moloch becomes relevant when we fail to take collective action. At that point: yes, shame. On Us.
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