NietzscheanNull

Genuinely curious, as someone who was exposed to porn on several occasions as a kid (with seemingly no negative long-term consequences): what makes you think it's "really bad"?

> We don't have enough tags to distinguish a 28-year old NYC lawyer earning (or soon-to-be) $200k with $200k in student loan and negative equity RIGHT NOW from a 55y old working 2 minimum wage jobs at Amazon, sleeping in a trailer park.

Well, fortunately, the graph makes at plain as a clear blue sky that neither of those hypothetical individuals are anywhere near the demographic that ought to be targeted by a wealth tax. When people say "eat the rich," they're not referring to late-career millionaire lawyers or doctors; those people work for a living just like the vast majority of us.

Under the first amendment, Americans have the right to celebrate the death of anyone they please. It might not be tasteful or respectful, it might be inflammatory, but that's an American freedom enshrined in constitutional law; freedom of speech is integral and fundamental to the US national identity.

As to your last point, I don't recall BLM ever storming the capitol and defiling the building by smearing the walls with their own feces, but in any case, rioters are criminals under the law and should be tried and charged according to due process.

The problem with that is that consumption doesn't scale remotely as fast as wealth. Wealth would still continue to concentrate.

In ecosystems, progressively fewer individuals are supported at each higher trophic level.

> She probably gets paid market rate for cleaning services. And while that isn't extravagant, it's probably not a poverty wage either.

The median annual wage for a hotel cleaner in Ohio (as an arbitrary middle-of-the -road example) is $28.4K per year.[1] (And on average, immigrant workers earn 6% less than their native counterparts.) And in Ohio, the official annual household income poverty line--based on an outdated food-cost-heavy model that doesn't properly account for the explosion of housing and healthcare costs--is $27.3K for a three-person household.[2]

To me, that very much is a poverty wage. I agree that tipping is a subsidy to business owners and ultimately depresses wages at the expense of consumers, but that doesn't change the fact that under the status quo, tipped workers absolutely rely on their tips to provide for themselves and their families. The type of work they do is, by and large, grueling and thankless; they deserve fair compensation from the business that benefit from it, but in the absence of government-driven intervention, those business will continue to externalize that cost to workers and consumers regardless of whether you and a handful of others decide to tip.

Refusing to tip on principle results in a direct and tangible harm to those workers, but doesn't move the needle at societal scale. A true solution would require top-down overhaul of our wage-and-hour regulations to eliminate tipping loopholes and impose steep penalties for businesses that subsidize employee wages through the expectation of tips from customers. Any bottom-up approach is likely to fail as it's a prototypical collective action problem, and a patchwork implementation of that strategy would disproportionately harm those who can least afford to shoulder the burden for a long time before ever impacting the businesses and policies directly responsible for the current state of affairs.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/IAG/TGS/iag70.htm#:~:text=Earnings%20and... [2]: https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/v1778780151/jfs.ohi...

This is great!

FYI for the creator, I'm hitting an error when attempting to change the mix-in font (Webkit/iOS):

  Something went wrong: Out of bounds memory access (evaluating '_PyRun_SimpleString(r)')

This is a specious argument because it neglects to take into account information asymmetries and change over time. When Facebook was first launched, there wasn't any widespread understanding of the breadth/intensity of their data collection and its downstream implications.

People initially chose Facebook because it truly offered a novel and improved service, and the true cost users would pay for it wasn't obvious to anyone yet. The "wall", chronological friends-only feeds, etc. provided genuine value, and at that point the public at large were almost completely oblivious to how much personal data was being collected from them (and even less as to how it might be used in ways counter to their own interests). Once they'd fully captured the vast majority of user share, Facebook clawed back value by deprecating the chronological feed, serving ads and "high-engagement" posts in place of friend submissions, and generally ramped up their data harvesting significantly further since.

Most people would agree that the service is far worse than what they initially signed up for, but feel like there's no longer a viable alternative that would allow them to maintain the same level of communication with the people they care about.

Facebook users are not "choosing convenience" by staying on the only platform that all of their friends and family use exclusively. They're effectively held hostage by network effects that were intentionally planned and designed around producing that lock-in effect and guaranteeing that all potential alternatives either withered on the vine or were absorbed (e.g. Instagram). To the extent there's a "choice," it's a coerced choice on purpose.

I'm not sure what you're referring to regarding game theory (that's a much more recent invention); a huge chunk of both civil and criminal procedure law hinges on the Enlightment-era notion of a "reasonable person" [0], and that becomes murky when humans aren't the only entities capable of reason and agency.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

I know! I should have made that clearer in my original reply. I think it's a bad line now in general, but an even worse justification for the ultimate ruling at the time.

Legal doctrine that boils down to "trust me bro" isn't even bad doctrine (it's not proper doctrine at all), but I think the comparison is still valid here, because both sentience/non-sentience and art/porn may just be fundamental category errors.

Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists.

For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't.

If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).

Isn't that essentially what they trained with, anyway?

Was that really honesty? I'm sure some who were caught in the layoff were truly underperforming, but everyone has peaks and valleys in their output quality over the years, and tons of performance reviews are purely political (i.e. does your manager like you).

It doesn't read so much like "honesty" to me as it does arrogance and spite (which, to be fair, aligns with everything I've heard about their corporate culture). Fundamentally, responsibility for layoffs is always on the shoulders of corporate leadership; regardless of individual employee performance, each of them was vetted extensively and ultimately hired by Meta; the company could have elected to work with them to bring performance up to a higher standard (if you believe their claim that it wasn't), but instead they chose to amputate them en-masse.

It's not "honest" to punish and blame a huge swath of your workforce in a single stroke for your hiring and management mis-steps, it's cowardly and lazy.

If you acknowledge that police regularly fail to act on crimes even with positive ID, why on earth would you allow a private company to collect all that information just for them to ignore/misuse? How is dragnet surveillance a fix for inept/corrupt policing?

Police have been granted wildly more powerful capabilities and arms over the course of my lifetime, but from what I've seen, those haven't improved their ability to solve crimes or better serve their communities nearly enough to justify their erosion of civil liberties; in my estimation, it's been an opposite trajectory, with violent escalations by police increasing and community trust in police decreasing (nearly monotonically) across the country.

This showed up at the top of HN for me today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713395

Read the linked article; does that seem like "absurdly small" amounts of abuse to you? Besides, when we're talking about a surveillance network so vast you can't avoid it anywhere in the country, the law of large numbers kicks in: there IS abuse, and there WILL be further abuse at some level. The extreme reach of such systems means they should absolutely be treated as 4th amendment violations; the authors of that amendment could never have conceived of such a panopticon and its impacts on individual privacy and autonomy.

You would rather infringe on the privacy of your community and invite a company known for indiscriminate multi-pronged dragnet surveillance (plates/faces/bluetooth beacons/etc.), with a nation-wide blanket coverage network that has already been provably abused by police on multiple occasions, all because of a handful of petty package theft cases?

Honestly, I'm at a loss for words.

Many webcam mics have auto-gain enabled, so having it on in a silent room will cause it to crank the gain to the point that the noise floor becomes audible (or in this case, visible). You might want to try recording a sound clip to see if the same effect occurs (i.e. you can hear the static fade out when louder sounds like speech hit the sensor after a period of auto-compensated silence)

Yes. Otherwise, only those with money get to choose what messages are shown to the public.

I think your example is stilted in exactly the direction that the anti-sideloading-as-a-term crowd fears is increasingly becoming normalized.

In fact, I think it's actually a perfect demonstration of how incredibly subtle and pernicious even small changes in the language we use can be, especially over a period of years to decades. Those changes are capable of reframing public perceptions in ways that inhibit our ability to recognize what would otherwise be obvious attacks on our expectations of rights and individual agency (were they couched in the existing terminology instead).

I would propose a modified counter-example to illustrate my point:

"Google is banning installation of apps they don't approve!"

vs

"Google is banning sideloading!"

This makes it clear what's actually happening: ownership of a Google device is no longer truly ownership. You are only allowed to install apps Google deems acceptable, and are denied the agency to install apps that are not. The device is fundamentally Google's to control; you're merely a user.

This is either completely misinformed or disingenuous. Texas just had to freeze all data center development pending audits because their energy supplier (ERCOT) reported that it had received data center load requests totaling 474 gigawatts.

That figure represents ~40% of extant grid capacity for the entire country in just a single state.

edit: I'd also add that historically, power generation has accounted for 4% of all water consumption in Texas. The highest recorded load demand on the ERCOT grid, to date, is ~87.5 GW. Scaling generation capacity by 500% is not possible to achieve within a short-term time frame, but even if it were, the water demand of the additional generation sites would completely drain many critical aquifers and result in skyrocketing water rates for citizens of a state already suffering terrible droughts regularly.

Per the linked article, about midway through:

> Obesity can’t explain the entire decrease, however. One large-scale, recent review found a testosterone slump despite researchers’ adjusting for the subjects’ body mass index. “Even among normal-weight men, we see that same decline,” Eisenberg said. Some analyses, he added, have suggested that testosterone has dropped off most profoundly among normal-weight men.

I can't speak to the parent commenter's precise meaning, but I interpreted them to mean they oppose the current domestic and foreign policy of US political and business leadership (a distinction that blurs to the point of indistinguishability of late, courtesy of said domestic policy).

I believe that many Americans that were previously dismissive or ambivalent regarding critiques of US activity at home and abroad (either due to patriotism, realpolitik apologia, or general naïveté) are now re-evaluating some of the beliefs they hold about their country in light of the chronic political dysfunction and an absolutely breathtaking extent of corruption being perpetrated in broad daylight today (as well as indications that extensive corruption has long festered among our elite class, surfaced via the Epstein revelations).

I've seen this cited around here frequently, and I don't doubt that there were good intentions for implementing it that way. However, in my anecdotal experience, I've noticed that otherwise high-quality and thought-provoking posts that happen to be critical of the tech industry (or other VC/SV-aligned interests) seem disproportionately impacted by algorithmic deranking.

I acknowledge that it may be pure coincidence, but the problem with an opaque system is that deliberate antagonism can't be categorically excluded as a possibility. And considering the financial interests of the platform's ownership, I'm also not convinced we should extend the benefit of the doubt very far, either.

> From a biological/evolutionary standpoint, that's the correct approach.

I believe the science disagrees on this point. In the case of humans, adaptations that contributed most to our success as a species are a constellation of pro-social traits that enabled us to cooperate in organized fashion in relatively large numbers (which empathy plays a major role in mediating).

Evolutionary fitness is not always meaningful at the level of the individual, particularly in social animals. IIRC, there are a number of species in which individually-disadvantageous (i.e. purely altruistic) behaviors are conserved, despite their apparent adverse effects on individual fitness.

The problem isn't the surveillance of land; nobody is getting up in arms over someone pointing a camera out of their window to watch their neighborhood street occasionally. The problem is the scale. Flock is running a massive network of cams equipped with ML classification and segmentation algos, running 24/7, to identify and catalog plates, faces, and voices of everyone in view. It's a nation-scale realtime surveillance dragnet, and obviously not what our current legislation on public camera use was written to address.

In my area, I pass by at least five Flock cameras driving to my grocery store, meaning that Flock knows how often I get groceries, who rides along with me, which stores I visit, and how long I spend at each location. They can infer my working hours and routine travel routes. They have the technical capability to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of my movements, and could "flag" me when I travel at odd hours or to unusual locations if they so chose. I would have no knowledge of or recourse against that invasion of my privacy. Flock is profiting from arbitrage of the mismatch between current laws around camera use in public ("no reasonable expectation of privacy") that, when legislated, did not envision a future where cheap always-connected hardware would enable a single company to blanket the country in ML-enabled camera/microphone turrets. These aren't "just cameras in public", these are full-featured surveillance stations networked to a centralized database and powerful edge compute capability, enabling the systematic tracking of every citizen at a precision that rivals placing GPS tracking bugs on every car (which is typically illegal). And because it's a private company, none of this information is auditable by (or accountable to) the general public that is subjected to the surveillance. In my view, what Flock is doing is deeply unethical and a gross exploitation of both US citizens and the spirit of the law.

> Most tech workers will readily drop all of their ideals for a fatter paycheck. And don't even get me started on all the leftist friends i have in the tech circle that have been profiting off the rise of stock prices

This is a completely disingenuous critique. Not only is it possible to advocate for a more just and equitable system of wealth distribution while simultaneously striving to maximize resources under the current system, it's absolutely the correct thing to do.

In the current US political and economic environment (as well as most other places, to greater or lesser degree), to be poor is to be powerless.

Relative to inflation, wages have been mostly stagnant for decades now all while asset values have skyrocketed. The fact that leftists are aware of this (and act to secure their financial well-being accordingly, despite firmly-held beliefs that our pro-capital system is an engine of inequality) is not hypocritical because the alternative would be voluntary self-disenfranchisement. The poor have scarce means and time with which to engage in political activism, and conversely, the only groups which do are those with stable financial prospects and predictable/reasonable working hours.

How about the $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic agreed to pay authors and publishers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...

Several consolidated cases against OpenAI:

https://www.bakerlaw.com/in-re-openai-inc-copyright-infringe...

And these plaintiffs are representative of only the best-organized and most well-funded of those who believe that these companies stole their data. Countless independent writers, artists, and other individuals whose data was ingested unknowingly and without consent lack the resources to litigate claims, but that doesn't change the fact that their copyright was violated in service of for-profit LLM/GenAI model training. It's not a trope, it's just what happened.

I'm of the opinion that "true art"/cultural artifacts can't be automated by definition, as they derive their value from the human experience embedded in them by their creators.

OTOH, I think we absolutely SHOULD automate necessary "drudgery" type work wherever we can, but we're going to need a radical reconceptualization of how we distribute the spoils of economic productivity as a result. Unfortunately, I think the type of reconceptualization we'd need would entail a complete overhaul of many long-established and deeply-internalized concepts (rights and duties of ownership of intellectual and private property, decoupling of identity and occupation, etc.), and from everything I've seen, that will be a long and painful process assuming it's even achievable. (Especially in the US, where decades of pro-business messaging has yielded a culture that equates income-earning ability/entrepreneurial success with individual human worth. I really struggle to imagine a path toward unwinding that, but there's little chance it'll be a smooth ride.)

This misses the point entirely; wealth redistributive policies aren't intended to significantly boost the wealth of low wealth citizens directly, they're intended to dissipate the incredible concentration of political power that corrodes our democratic basis of governance. When individuals control more wealth and capital than a significant number of nation-states, barriers to regulatory capture and overwhelming information/narrative control (via media/platform ownership consolidation) effectively dissolve. We're seeing the consequences of that playing out in the US in realtime.

Adopting redistributive policy is the only way in which the US can return to an even remotely representative "democracy." We'll only see progress if we can disarm the campaign finance firehose currently wielded by private interests. Only then, with a subsequent government consisting of politicians more beholden to constituents than financiers, will we be able to return to enacting policies to close tax loopholes, tax more progressively, and improve consumer/labor protections; those would do the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of improving QoL of the lower income classes. This isn't a new idea, it was well understood by trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt.

Sure. Hedge fund owners, VC firm owners, cosmetic surgeons, the Walton heirs, and Zuck/Jensen/Jeff/Elon own 97.5% of all wealth in the United States. The former three, while each representing cohorts, are very small cohorts. The latter are billionaire individuals.

If you're an American and not among those specific groups, your share of the remaining 2.5% is split with the rest of the US population in that slice (i.e., the overwhelming majority of the population). It's an illustration of our extreme wealth inequality. (Whether it's an effective or good one is a matter of opinion, but I do think it broadly conveys what it intends to.)

Do you have any data to back up your claims? Because from what I understand, unions were the backbone of the recovering US labor market following the Great Depression, which punctuated a period of extreme speculation and inequality (the Gilded Age) similar to what we're seeing today.

The data I've seen largely show that union membership is highly correlated with better pay, benefits, and working conditions. It seems clear to me that individuals are at an extreme disadvantage in wage/salary negotiations due to the enormous information asymmetry present when the counterparty is a corporation, and collective bargaining seems the most straightforward way to reduce that asymmetry.

As far as I'm aware, the reduced effectiveness of unions in the US is a direct consequence of union-busting legislation at both the state and federal level (e.g. so-called "right to work" laws, Reagan's actions against unionized/striking flight controllers). If that's the basis for your conclusion, I would agree in the sense that we need a strong political push to undo anti-labor legislation to ensure unions can be as effective as possible.