Where did you live 10 years ago that wasn't run by corporate greed and corruption, or were you just too young to remember it?

If anything, things are better now than they were 10 years ago, and things were even worse 10 years before that. One reason that things are getting better is that more people are paying attention, which makes that fun paradox where a bunch of people who are new to this whole thing perceive the world as getting worse.

I think the general attitude was not that these people are conspiracy theorists and making these things up but that there response would be something like "Why does it matter, how does it affect me?" and the answer would have been some theoretical bad thing that the average person can't imagine happening to themselves. Now its happening which makes it real for people.

> If anything, things are better now than they were 10 years ago, and things were even worse 10 years before that

While things are truly better in certain aspects, the percentage of people relying on these companies now - as opposed to then - makes up for the less bad-ness.

Very curious what specifically makes you see things as less corrupt or people as paying more attention. The CARES Act was as bad as anything passed during the financial crisis and sailed through Congress with nary a word of objection or media scrutiny.

Is there a specific metric you're thinking of? My understanding is that income inequality is at an all-time high, and I'd be very surprised if it were worse 10 and 20 years ago.

Examples: https://equitablegrowth.org/eight-graphs-that-tell-the-story...

I was mostly speaking in terms of corporate crime/greed and the general public's willingness to let it slide, which is admittedly a pretty hard thing to quantify.

But why do you believe that it was worse 10-20 years ago? How can you tell?

"Morality police" was once a 80's or 90's trope or meme against the religious right coming from the left. Now, those with interest in policing morality from a leftward slant and those with special interests at other entrenched mega-corps have both found nearly unlimited use of puppet strings at SV firms to wield their power with frightening alacrity.

R. Stallman did talk about all of that.

You are both correct. Richard Stallmann was always treated a bit like a conspiracy theorist.

However, there was no conspiracy. This is just the result of human greed at a massive scale.

Can he be both?

He seems like a fucking odd guy, but he's not stupid in any way.

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

- George Orwell, "1984"

Stallman, like most of us (and nearly all prominent historical figures) can posses both positive and negative traits simultaneously. The good isn't always outweighed by the bad, and vice versa.

Nuance is a difficult thing sometimes...

I think this isn't doublethink at all. I agree on the latter point.

In some contexts you do have to consider both, i.e. there are some loonies in every corner but the actual philosophy behind cancel-culture isn't necessarily a bad one of it wasn't the focal point of an extremely violent culture war and being aggressively pumped by social media not designed to encourage introspection or even basic humanity in its participants.

This isn't doublethink, because "he's weird and unpleasant" and "he has insightful ideas" aren't "two contradictory beliefs".

One can simultaneously be a genius and a misogynist. To some people, the former is unacceptable so long as the latter exists.

To understand an individual can indeed be both is the doublethink.

Richard Feynman probably fits the former description at least for some parts of his life.

Misogyny was just an example. All great people (and arguably all people) have good and bad traits - particularly if you go looking for the bad.

I think it’s more likely emergent behavior born of individual executives making decisions that benefit their image and career, rather than some conspiracy. Having a diverse team looks good and deflects the political eye of Sauron from the largely white male upper management types, who are de-facto racists/sexists/etc in the pop culture lens. Who knows, maybe some of them genuinely believe that preferential hiring of diverse candidates is actually morally righteous.

> I think it’s more likely emergent behavior born of individual executives making decisions that benefit their image and career, rather than some conspiracy.

https://archive.fo/1khJw#selection-1877.0-1877.86

Thanks for sharing this, I had no idea there was evidence of this being real.

As a (very!) low level manager, I’ve been espousing that diversity prevents groupthink for years. If we have too much groupthink, we risk driving off a cliff, high-fiving each other the whole way down.

> diversity prevents groupthink

Ideological diversity prevents group think. The modern "diversity and inclusion" movement actually strictly enforced a procrustean ideological homogeneity, ironically. It's probably the biggest modern example of group think.

Every time my company does a push for diversity, they hire the same kind of people - middle to upper middle class, college educated, comfortable to well-off suburban upbringing.

Diversity of what prevents group think?

I agree it’s emergent behavior; that’s not inconsistent with my comment.

The unionization risk thing isn’t made up. Amazon’s warehouse unionization risk rubric includes racial diversity as an anti-union measure.

> racial diversity as an anti-union measure

Could you elaborate?

The effect is measured to exist, but any attempt at explanation is just conjecture. That said, it seems pretty clear to me that racially homogenous groups tend to have closer social ties and are therefore more likely to unionize.

Generally speaking, regardless of race and sex, upper management types tend to be sociopaths who are actually racist/sexist (see all the scandals about this every time an executive sexually harrasses someone). Embracing the idea of a "diverse workforce" is a great deflection tactic.

The mega corps are driving the wedge between the blue collar working class and the white collar working class. Should the two groups ever unite they would tear the mega corps back into a pile of tiny toothless startups, and that’s against all moneyed interests.

Not only that but this "diversity over meritocracy" doesn't apply to Asian Americans, especially in academia, medical, law professions, entertainment etc.

It's like there is two classes of minorities: Asians vs Non-Asians and the diversity narrative and standards differ radically for both groups.

In fact, studies have shown that this ideological drive that pushes "diversity over meritocracy" only antagonize racial relations between the groups that find themselves on both ends of "punching up".

Correct; “diversity” is shorthand for “racial Leninism”. It’s primarily about paying people off with status subsidies. Asians don’t need status subsidies so they don’t benefit from this system

I don't really see any political reason for this type of discrimination. It's just racism that nobody talks about because it's Asians who are seemingly well off economically when in reality the wealth disparity in this demographic is one of the widest.

People see fu er dai students driving Lamborghini and think thats how all Asians live when in fact Asia is not even a country.

For instance, its socially acceptable to make fun of Asian accents or other racially insensitive remarks but other minority groups are a no go.

I recall when Justin Kan moved into his new home he was welcomed with a vandalized garage door with racial slurs. This supposedly the "most socio progressive and liberal state".

It's the latter self titled label is an excuse to be even more blatantly racist while patting themselves on the back for having X number of friends from X ethnic group therefore I can't be a racist, not even realizing Asia isn't even a group of its own, its literally describing half of the lands on earth.

Again you are grossly generalizing. Wealth disparity gap is one of the widest compared to other demographics.

Basing your model on stereotypes and statistics is exactly why we have the issues I spoke about earlier.

> If you’re confused about any of this, your model is broken. All you need to know is that East Asians are high IQ (within 0.3stddev of anglo or Germanic whites). This predicts everything else, including economic outcomes.

wait wait wait. So you think IQ and race are correlated. So Africans are poor because they have low IQ is what you are saying.

> Slurs against Asians are less offensive because the connotation of being Asian is bad.

wow. I can't believe I just read this on HN. "Its okay to be a little racist to Asians because nobody thinks its offensive". Who are you?

Sounds like you have a really skewed view of Asians (who are we even talking about? East Asians? South Asians? South East Asians?

> Slurs like “kraut” or “nip” don’t really have any weight because they’re basically complements.

WTF??? Who are you to gatekeep what is offensive and what isnt'?

I just read you trying to justify racism against Asians. HN has truly fallen far from grace.

> So you think IQ and race are correlated.

Of course - we have several decades of twin and sibling studies confirming this effect.

> I can't believe I just read this on HN

Sorry, I dropped a word from my comment - I meant "the connotation of being Asian is not bad". That is, no one really has a problem with Asians or thinks it's bad to have them around.

> Who are you to gatekeep what is offensive and what isnt

I'm making an observation, not "gatekeeping". There are definitely slurs that are more offensive than others.

Stallman predicted this for decades and was labeled as such until Edward Snowden came about and showed the evidence right in our faces.

As usual, Big Tech strikes again with a lesser role this time. It won't be the last until some 'action' is done to keep them in check.

People may have taken him more seriously if he didn't eat the crud off the bottom of his own bare foot and sexually harass female colleagues. Dude undermined his own message by being a complete creep.

>People may have taken him more seriously if he didn't eat the crud off the bottom of his own bare foot and sexually harass female colleagues. Dude undermined his own message by being a complete creep.

The fact that he remained in his position for so long and the degree to which people melted down and swore bloody vengeance against the "cancel culture mob" when he finally faced any consequences at all demonstrates how little his behavior actually mattered within the free software community.

If anything has undermined Stallman's message, it's been the failure of free software to adequately compete in terms of quality and UX to proprietary offerings in the marketplace. Their answer to Photoshop is Gimp, FFS.

I think you're right but I also think the recent Parler/Q stuff is relatively small fry. It was bad already, twitter finally getting the bottle to ban someone who'd been clearly violating their rules for half a decade is pretty minor.

If anyone thought that big tech wouldn't do this 10 years ago they were naive.

Big is they key word. Big everything does the same thing. Which is why we need to not let anything get big.

You can draw that line of reasoning all the way back to the dawn of agriculture.

Note that I'm not necessarily disagreeing.

Things are slowly shifting and decentralizing with gab, parler(when they return). Now maybe new startups in the Robinhood space.

I wish I could find it, but 10 years ago, probably longer now, there was a prescient video where there turned out to be only 4 tech companies left. Something like amazgooglesoft or something. The narrator had a deep voice and I think it was funded by a media company.

Edit: Found it through the keywords, "old prediction video where amazon microsoft google buy everything" lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s&feature=emb_titl...

When all the tech companies merge, they will in turn be bought by Taco Bell.

A short squeeze is how Taco Bell won the fast food wars

Maybe a 30 Rock bit (or just coincidence):

GE. Proud to be one of America’s 6 companies

Cyberpunk is a thing since 80s, FYI.

Yeah, I was. Multiple times. On this site in particular.

It's the same if you talk about it today.

Modern surveillance capitalism is far beyond the wildest fever dreams of 90s shortwave radio conspiracy nuts.

agreed, at least jack-booted thugs are visible to those they oppress

If you told Markus Wolf in 1989 that in 2021 most citizens in the world would write each other private and political communicatons via a tracking device that can’t be turned off, and that device has both microphones and cameras, he would raise and eyebrow and ask “How did we win the Cold War?”

Absolutely would, he could not concieve of a spying machine as powerfull and pervasive as we have today

The problem with "Stalin would've loved it" is that it's obviously an unsubstantive flamebait comment, and so was correctly downvoted. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? We're trying for a specific kind of conversation here: thoughtful, curious, respectful. That requires avoiding flamebait.

Re HN: I think you might be falling prey to the notice-dislike bias, which is a variation of sample bias where the comments we dislike or cause us pain start to feel like they're dominating the whole site. They don't dominate the site—HN is divided much as society (all over the world) is divided. But it feels like they do, because painful data points land harder and make deeper impressions than the things one likes or agrees with. The people who have opposite views to yours see HN as dominated by their opposite side (which is to say, your side), because of exactly the same mechanism.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098

If anyone predicted Trump becoming president 10 years ago, they would've been labelled a lunatic.

Reality is stranger than the fiction we all live within, because fiction has the constraints of being something we can comprehend and live with. It has to be redeeming and hopeful, reality doesn't.

Well, Reagan became president back in 1981, which wasn't much different. If anything he was just an actor (before getting into politics, which is even less qualification that a salesman/real estate guy.

And, aside from spending on BS like "Star Wars" and escalating things with USSR, Reagan also established the neoliberal greedy nightmare we live in since.

> If anything he was just an actor

Well, he was also a union big shot for over two decades, eventually elected as president of SAG.

Then, he was governor of California for nearly a decade.

So, quite a bit more qualification than "just an actor."

>Then, he was governor of California for nearly a decade.

Yeah, so like Schwarzenegger.

> If anything he was just an actor

He had a longer political career (and one more directly relevant to being the chief executive of a government) than Obama before each became president.

You could make that argument for every President since Woodrow Wilson at least...

Doc: Tell me, Future Boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?

Marty: Ronald Reagan.

Doc: Ronald Reagan? The actor? [rolls his eyes] Ha! Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis?

Seriously, reason from first principles. The incentives are the outcome. It was predicted in mainstream media (granted as a pessimistic joke):

https://www.joe.ie/movies-tv/simpsons-writer-reveals-how-he-...

Kind of like right now, how Simpsons predicted a global recession after President Trump's term is being jokingly brushed off even as it seems like we are in a bubble.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

A throwaway joke in a Simpsons episode does not "predict" a recession to any degree of reasonableness.

just like Trump's presidency right?

Do not speak without knowledge. A cursory glance at history will show it is not a unique phenomenon of one worldview.

They're just ahead of the curve.