Aunche

Socialists like to frame everything as a class war, but reality is not so black and white. Rich people aren't a monolith and this was especially not the case with civil rights. The American elite were thoroughly embarrassed by their European counterparts laughing at their countrymen being so boorish as to lynch people for the color of their skin. Civil Rights came from the top down just as much, if not more, than it came from the bottom up. Without the Supreme Court that gave us Brown v Board and LBJ's warm reception of the NAACP, we would not have Civil Rights as we know it. At best, we'd get half measures that the kind we got under Reconstruction.

AKA it's purely vibes based. The "ideal" distribution more extreme than just dividing GDP and dividing it equally every year because old people naturally have more time to accumulate wealth.

Suppose 3sat is solved in 2^sqrt(n). That's subexponential. An n^2 reduction from sat to 3sat is polynomial. However, an algorithm using this reduction with the discovered solution, would run in (2^sqrt(n))^2 which is just 2^n.

Do you seriously believe that this person only tagged once in their life and got caught the first time? Even they just happened to be very unlucky, do you think they would never do it again? I'm not talking about how the law should treat them. They should still receive a punishment fit for a $500 crime. The person responded claimed this was a waste of everyone's time and money, but that's missing the point. If the vandal has absolute no consequences they have no incentive to stop.

Not sure where you got that idea. No where did I express interest in punishing the perpetrator for anything more than what they were caught. My point is that their "solution" to justice does not solve vandalism the way that it they think it does.

$500 was the damages that they were caught doing. Not the total damages they caused. If every "empathetic" person volunteers to pay $2 every time someone wants graffiti on their property removed, regardless of how often graffiti keeps reappearing, then maybe the DA wouldn't feel a need to prosecute.

This is a solution looking for a problem. Right now, Meta products are the most efficient way for people to organize a protest, even when it's not reliable, so that's what people will use. If it's no longer a reliable way to organize, people will naturally move to something else without much convincing like they do in places like Hong Kong. It's good to have a backup, but it does not make sense to expect them to avoid the largest social media platforms.

It is economically positive to separate healthy assets to prevent it from being dragged down by a business that will collapse regardless. Meanwhile, Eddie Lampert was just about the only billionaire who basically didn't make money during the longest bull market in history.

It's not just an Internet opinion. It's a cultural change that has been occuring for decades. Less than a third of nonprofits even know how to lobby if they want to.

Lobbying spending isn't really "incomprehensible." The small group HN readers can easily fund lobbyists if they really want to.

https://apnews.com/article/nonprofits-lobbying-less-survey-1...

The idea that lobbying is corruption is ironically helps corporate lobbyists the most. Lobbying is what gave us Civil Rights. The only thing calling lobbying evil has accomplished is reduce grass roots lobbying, which means corporate lobbyists get more bandwidth from politicians.

In this case, the established norm is for a business to legally avoid paying as much tax as possible. It's more than just a norm. It is extremely unusual for any business owner to do otherwise. It's 100% up to the government whether they approve this tax break.

The most nefarious behavior I've seen is when the mods shadowban every argument they disagree with that has positive upvotes but leave arguments they disagree with that has negative upvotes to give the impression that everyone on the opposing side is stupid.

This is the AI CEO equivalent of saying your biggest weakness is "working to hard".

How does this have anything to do with what I said?

1.5 billion is an order of magnitude less than what Anthropic just had bought the books in question. And like I said it's infinitely more than what any private has ever paid for doing the same thing.

Even if AI companies were literally doing the exact same thing as Aaron Swartz but not getting punished for it, that still doesn't make Swartz's punishment retroactively their fault. If you have a problem with powerful people being powerful, then I suggest you direct your complaints to the heavens.

> You can download all the pirated ebooks you want, as long as it's for large-scale for-profit commercial use.

It's literally the opposite. Anthropic paid a $1.5 billion settlement. Litigation against OpenAi is still ongoing. Meanwhile, no one has ever been punished just for consuming pirated media.

Is that the explanation your boss forced you to accept when you did 90% of the work and he took all the credit?

Yes, the road is long and these sorts of investigations take time. Eric Adams is an old-school, working-class New Yorker. They tend to be corrupt, but they do get stuff done. His administration resolved a $20M Chipotle lawsuit, then launched and resolved a $39M Starbucks lawsuit.

Even though the press likes to give Mamdani all the credit for these types of things, this started with a law passed under DeBlasio, and most of the investigation was done under Adams.

I agree overall. That said, there isn't really a difference between 14th Street and the other nearby numbered streets in Manhattan. Market Street connects 2 different grids and doesn't have a clean alternative.

> Chinese acquaintances are rather horrified by how, in the US, cops can use state surveillance systems to stalk women and get away with it and people regularly end up homeless due to medical bills.

This sounds more a product of censorship rather than China being particularly better in those aspects. Police in China are less likely to kill you because guns are uncommon, but they are just as shady if not more, especially in more remote areas. Healthcare access and affordability are also worse than what you'd expect from a communist country. Homelessness in China is definitely a lot worse than what state numbers suggest. They just drive out homeless people who they're less visible.

This is a settlement between Meta and 48 states. Individuals can still sue them for harm, and one notable case had them pay 4.2 million. There are hundreds of thousands of claims pending. The federal government still has the ability to sue or fine Meta as well.

> rhetoric about needing to copy-paste big parts from other countries distracts from how achievable it is

When have you ever heard "rhetoric" that actually brings up the details of how universal healthcare would actually implemented in practice? If you have an idea at work and a coworker brings up a caveat that you missed, do you dismiss it as rhetoric? If you are to be worried about rhetoric, it should be about how the general public talks about policy like it's sports whereas corporations talk about policy like it's work.

It would fine if it were just internet comments. However, this article is talking about a paper from one of the most prestigious university in the world and yet it's devoid of meaningful analysis. It literally does the "copy-pasting" that I'm talking about.

> Hospital and clinical fees are paid at Medicare reimbursement rates, which are below the rates paid by commercial insurers and above those paid by Medicaid.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.22.26358689...

Medicare also isn't something that you can copy paste from covering only old people to everyone. For one, margins from Medicare patients are much lower and often negative for hospitals, and that money has to come from somewhere. Medicare doesn't cover a lot of drugs that people are already used to their private insurance covering like GLP1s for weight loss. Of course, a transition from point a to point B is possible, but there will inevitably be a lot of kinks and bugs to work out, which MFA proponents seem to be unaware of.

That's their point. Congress isn't going to get $10 million from providing universal healthcare (at least for any system that is any good), so they have no incentive to pass it. The year the ACA passed, Democrats suffered one of the worst legislative defeats in history. Nobody wants to be the person to tell millions of people that they can no longer see their chiropractor for free or that their healthcare is not longer paying thousands of dollars a month for weight loss medications.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_elections

People talk about policies like they're something like can be picked up off the shelf at supermarket. If you could take the policies and Sweden copy-paste them to the US, then sure, we could save $1T and a hundred thousand lives. This would be a very difficult thing to replicate if you're a country without any existing healthcare system. It is impossible in a country with an extremely mature healthcare system, which accounts for nearly 20% of GDP.

No politician is going to want to deal with the fallout of massive layoffs or millions of people having their coverage changed (e.g. no free chiropractor appointments or GLP-1s for weight loss), especially since the Democrats suffered one of the worst Congressional losses in US history the year the ACA was passed. There are ways to make this transition less painful, but the only people interested in health policy are those who make money from healthcare, so you generally only see solutions that involve throwing money at the problem. We need regular people to develop an understanding of health policy or else we'll end up with a policy that merges the worst parts of a planned economy and capitalism even more than today.

> I can't help but shake the feeling that the federal reserve is here for the wealthy, the bankers, and not for the rest of us

Kashkari was part of the minority opinion. The Fed voted to keep rates steady, so I guess that means that the Fed is against the wealthy, bankers, and for the rest us?

It turns out that having lots of money is useful, including at taking advantage of the macroeconomic landscape. In a high interest rate environment, you get free money from yields. In a low interest rate environment, you get free money from leverage.

The Federal Reserve is one of the last competent parts of government. You don't blame the ER doctor for atrophy caused by being hooked to a ventilator after getting a heart attack caused by consuming only fast food. The ER's job is to keep the patient alive by making sure that oxygen is circulating well enough for the body alive. Likewise, the Federal Reserve's job is to make sure that money circulates in a way that keeps the economy alive. It's not their fault if the voters vote for politicians who enact terrible policy.

Our building installed destination dispatch system to their elevators and it seems to help overall. However, it breaks when say a team wants to get lunch together, but only one person presses the elevator button. The elevator thinks that it can keep on accepting new passengers so it stops at floors even though it's already full.

The ocean breathes in and out too. Very little carbon sinks down to the sea floor. The ocean does happen to absorb a lot of CO2, but that's from acidification rather than photosynthesis.

At your job, would you like your 1 on 1s to be publicly available to the world? Are you even able to have a productive discussion when you're second guessing how other may react to what you're saying? Now imagine you're a politician with an army of enemies ready to clip anything you say out of context.

> I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians

Thanks for bringing AIPAC up because it illustrates my point. AIPAC has plenty of publicly available material for you to read. It's not going particularly specific, but it most likely broadly aligns with what their lobbyists discuss with politicians: Israel is a valuable intelligence partner, aid to Israel brings stability in the Middle East, Iran is a destabilizing force that needs to be kept in check, etc.

How much merit do these arguments have? Maybe some. Maybe little at all. Even so, there is no mistaking that APAIC is talking about Earth here. The same cannot be said about the pro Palestinian side in America. "Stop funding genocide" is a fundamentally contradictory. The entire basis for a overwhelmingly better armed Israel giving Palestinians any sort of autonomy at all rests on American security commitments to Israel.