jimmy1

If you were really trying to engage in a thought experiment with me honestly, I don't think starting with a mischaracterization and inventing a fallacy ("appeal to hypocrisy") to tear it down is a good place to start. That also seems, to me, lazy.

> Overpopulation is something that, if real, will have an impact regardless of the motivation for people's concern

"If real", that is the key, and I am glad you pointed it out. For the sake of argument, we would first have to define why overpopulation real. It seems to me most people start off with the assumption that it is real.

Who is defining overpopulation? What is the criteria? Not enough food? Well that's not true at all, we know that the US for example wastes more food daily that could feed the entire continent of Africa with 1/3rd of a pound of food. Not enough land for people to expand to? Well even a 5 year old knows that one is false. Is it not enough natural resources? Despite the fearmongering about water and energy resources drying up, we seem to be doing just fine. Capitalists reaping the country to sell to a nation of consumers? This is the most insidious form of the argument, but again, very wrong. Plus it assumes greedy capitalists somehow wouldn't exist with 5 billion people, or 3, or 2, or even 1, that wouldn't cause some kind of destruction to natural resources. The final one is one made more by hard left academics in favor of socialism. They need an easy explanation for why socialism always sounds so great in theory and never works in practice, so they point to overpopulation. If we simply had less people, then socialism would work!. Except, as we now know, this was in part one of the rationales behind the gulags and gas chambers.

So what is the criteria? Not comfortable enough for you and me -- that seems to be the essence of the arguments left after eliminating the ones above.

Plus, even if the above were remotely true, why rule out technological solutions? Seems to me pretty crazy people on a technology focused board would rule this one out (not singling you out, "overpopulation is a problem" is an opinion expressed here often, unfortunately), especially since it was technology that has allowed us to easily achieve our current population levels at the exploding standard of living the globe is currently undergoing.

People who think overpopulation is an issue by just pointing to some things "drying up" or some places "crowding" is by definition engaging in a lazy form of argument. So to me, until there some hard facts and figures on what overpopulation means, please excuse me if I take it for a hypocritical statement, as the great Carlin said, made by bourgeois liberals that have never experienced actual hardships and live in such an advanced society they have nothing better to do than ponder the scenarios where their cushy lifestyles could be threatened.

When you don't have any actual enemies to fight, you have to invent some in your head to keep you busy.

The replacing the existing keys is a good point. I don't feel the pain of the ESC key since I remap caps lock to it, I always thought "Function" keys were relics of a bygone era, (and unergonomic to use), and the little black doodad functions just as well as a power button as any other one I have ever used.

I'm adding onto this -- I have a 2017 edition of the MBP for work, and I have a faulty keyboard. I hated it. "The touchbar is stupid", I proclaimed.

I recently bought a 2018 edition for the wife because she has always expressed a desire of owning one of her own (my work always provided me with a mac). The keyboard is much improved.

Additionally, watching a "normal" user interact with a Mac and a touchbar, versus me, a developer was eye opening, and I suddenly realized there is a lot more to the puzzle we are so blind to. She loves it. Sure, it is an "emoji bar" when she is in iMessage, but she also loves the scrolling functionality it provides in Photos.

I still don't see much use for it personally, but I am no longer a rapid opponent of it as I once was. There's always been extra ports and features on other laptops I've used in the past, and I never seemed so critical of those as well. Maybe I bought into the mob mentality? Going back to my wife, her work provided her with a Thinkpad Yoga. It has a touch screen, and a stylus. Ok touch screens I am not the biggest fan of, but I happen to think the stylus is cool! I am sure there were many users of the previous Thinkpads at her company that were going "What!? A stupid stylus? Who needs this!" I realized I was doing the same thing with the new MBP.

Touchbar or not, it is still the most quality, aesthetically pleasing, well built laptop I use, and it still remains miles beyond any PC I ever used as well, Inspirons, XPSes, Surfaces included.

That's because the US made you as part of the Marshall Plan (assuming where you are from is Germany)

I am fortunate to have had the experience of growing up with a rabid Greek mother who would get to the bottom of any shenanigans with any sort of insurance agency, bill collector or anything. I now have my own experience. Yes the first time was stressful, but reading your story, trying to put myself in your partner's shoes this would not have ended up causing me any stress, especially if I knew the law is on my side. I certainly wouldn't paid any bill until it was all sorted out. I also have experience where a medical charge that was suppose to be covered as a legitimate procedure was not and charged off onto my credit (because again, I refused to pay). I was easily able to negotiate with the credit reporting agency to remove this negative mark on my credit. (Negative marks due to medical bills affect your credit much less than say missing a credit card payment, IIRC, I was still able to obtain credit cards, get loans, and generally had decent overall credit).

My father currently undergoing treatment for lung cancer. He has medicare and supplemental coverage through Humana. Bills are still in excess of 150,000, so I definitely understand the other side of it.

I don't mean this to be snarky, but if what you are saying is true (Congress can't do anything), why do you think the governmental disfunction will not carry over to an expanded medicare-for-all program? Medicare is not without issue and is wrought with fraud that needs decisive congressional action to help fix, yet they have shown inability there as well.

I think your phenomena might be due to startups? Obviously this is a startup focused board so I am not saying this to mean go one way or another, but I ditched the startup, job hopping life a little while ago, and had to deal with "insurance bs" roughly two times in 7 years.

I am either the luckiest person alive, or maybe there is additional benefits not obviously well represented here to working for a stable, revenue producing organization, but I don't seem to encounter what seems to be the well-represented insurance pains documented here (probably a little bit of both, in my guess).

I find HN more rewarding than any other social site I visit.

Healthy discussions, engaging topics and interests, no clear political slant in either direction, with multiple groups and opinions represented (you know, real diversity of thought). Finally no ads being shoved down my throat unless its engaging content disguised as an advert that reaches the top, in which case I am OK with because at least the advertiser tried, and it got support enough to be upvoted and shared.

And the option to choose the algorithmic filtering based on my needs, in the rare cases that the number of individuals or volume of their tweets may be too large to take in chronologically.

I guess some of us do. But then you have Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, The Saud family, etc.

I have heard the NIMBY argument many times before but I just don't buy it. It's too easy of a target. Plus there is so much land. Ok fine, won't build in your backyard, I'll build in the next yard over. We have this exact situation in a town called Davidson, NC where I am from. Builders can't build there. So they built in the hundreds of thousands of acres immediately right next to it. Problem solved.

Plus people exercising their right to let things happen or not happen on land and electing to do what is in their own best interest sounds fine to me and nothing to be vilifying. It sounds like to me the "NIMBY" finger pointers are just upset that low cost housing isn't built in neighborhoods they want to live in -- that is, it is being portrayed as some altruistic goal but really has self interest in mind.

Even if I conceded your point about NIMBYism, it may explain a very small part of the problem, but it absolutely does not explain why builders are not flocking to a state with a 117k/yr housing shortfall to figure it out.

Wow this is jaw dropping.

> By one estimate from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the state needs to build 1.8 million units over the next seven years just to keep pace with population growth

You need to build about 257k just to keep up with growth, not to address any sort of shortage. This to me should sound like a builder's gold rush. Why are builders not flocking to CA to build? Are there some stringent set of regulations that greatly reduce the economic feasibility? Is this Prop 13 proving to be a failure?

> It puzzles me that people hate taxes so much.

People's problems with taxes typically fall into two buckets, sometimes both.

1. On a fundamental economics level, the Government is an inefficient third party spender: it spends other peoples money on services it doesn't utilize. There is no feedback loop there besides bureaucracy.

2. We actually have a pretty moderate tax burden already, mostly footed by the average US worker. Everyone talks about the top rate, or federal taxes, but we also have sales tax, property tax, estate tax, in some areas a county tax on top of city or municipality tax, and additional education-related taxes, not counting the outlier states that have even more taxes on top of that. (There's a saying in NYC: Every day is tax day). The common worker pays the majority of the taxes, and they are the ones who are most sensitive to any increase in taxes, and feel pinched already, so they naturally, and very expectedly are against being taxed more. (Realize that the typical HN'er is not the average US worker, making ~60k median salary with few benefits)

Going to the bank costs something, if not the opportunity cost lost. When you are poor, every opportunity or cost matters much more. Most banks require some form of ID or address verification, which again could require travel somewhere. Finally, even if you assume the most seamless, easy to sign up online-only bank, you are assuming a stable, reliable way to access the internet, which again, can be issue if you are poor.

> There are no such equivalent mechanisms in private corporations.

To the contrary, you can view the free market as a parallel system of checks and balances where the people have voice and opinion: your wallet. Yes you can actually "vote" with your wallet in a free market.

And unfortunately unlike the free market, where greed of money actually acts as a balancing factor, greed of power is terrible in a democracy, and we have seen the power grabs of our court systems in not only this current regime, but previous ones controlled by democrats as well. Why is the court system so important? Why are senators willing to risk shutting down the government and achieving actually nothing meaningful session after session? Because there is absolute power there. And there is absolute power now in our imperial presidency, started by Bush, continued on by Obama, and now the loaded gun was left for Trump. If we restore power back to congress like the founders intended (and further restore power back to the people by eliminating political gerrymandering) we may return to the situation you describe, but I'll take free markets over the current broken system we have today.

At the end of the day, people have the choice to stop using Google Search, Youtube and use adblock to block Google's Ad networks. Consumers can simply elect to take a different action.

> they will either do nothing, or take an action that furthers their corporate interests.

> - and look at how the banks are regulated!

And you can view the US Government in a similar fashion, except exchange corporate profits for power. Power is the currency of the US Government, and they will either do nothing, or take an action that furthers their "corporate interest": the increase of power. Regulations serve that role very nicely.

And by the way I see this mistake made all the time, but my spouse is a regulator and here's the dirty secret (well, it's not so secret to astute observers): the bank shills might be going on CNBC or Money Talk radio and go on tropin' about regulations, but they love the regulations. They work with the US Government to create new regulations. Regulations are a wonderful barrier of entry for them. They already have their decades long established regulatory compliance structures in place that would cost billions for the small bank to try and replicate. It helps keep the competition out. It's now a symbiotic relationship. Airwaves are regulated for similar fashion: keep the small broadcasters out, keep the big entrenched players on air and control the message.

If you regulate Google, you will further entrench their position as monopolistic/oligopolistic. You'll create the same situation that you have in banks: only the big have the resources to lobby and comply with complex regulatory overreach.

> finance and banking, cable television, health care, pharmaceuticals, agro-business – are all instances in which the competitive, free market has been interfered with by the paternalistic and regulatory hand of the government. It is not the market that has “failed” in these corners of the economy, but rather it is the presence and pervasiveness of the interventionist state.

> this, too, is typical of market critics such as Professor Stiglitz. They deceptively call “market failures” instances not of competitive free markets but of “crony capitalism” under which special interests have successfully interacted with politicians and bureaucrats to rig the market for their own benefit at the expense of both consumers and potential competitors who are legally prevented or hindered from entering sectors of the economy where they would like to try to gain market share and earn profits by offering better and lower priced goods than their privileged rivals are offering to those consumers.

I feel it is too often we mistake crony capitalism (and address that issue) for "market failures" and then demand that the regulatory hand of the government intervene, which further worsens the situation.

Quotes from https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/governments-crea...

Making a broader point (not responding to something specifically you said but something I see often come up when discussing regulating Big Tech) -- I am not posting this article to say it is some dogma I 100% agree with, but it does offer a different vision than the leftist dogma that is often offered up by tech liberals as the solution to all their problems.

There are other ways out, and it involves freedom, which is neither easy to achieve nor free. It may hurt to get there, but you cannot complain about the surveillance state and government power and influence on our lives, and then be so willing to hand them more power the moment you feel threatened by the "big evil corp"

Sorry I brain dumped on your innocuous comment about a particular thing, Feel free to tell me "sir this is a Wendys"

Not what I meant to come across as saying. Increased self control can help us all, and it can especially help poor people get out of debt and poverty.

I learned the hard way the unit of measurement you use for R when calculating distance between two lat,long coordinates is what you get out. So if R is in meters, you aren't calculating the distance in miles. Hehe...should have paid attention in math class (to be fair to myself, American math education is horrible).

It's an extremely short term solution to make everyone feel happy and warm inside without any long term results. The lack of impulse control won't sudden vanish once the refund arrives, and they will be back in that situation again a few short months after.

We give content personalization far too much credit for the modern issue of both social and political polarization, it is much more fundamental. We've had "filter bubbles" since the dawn of civilization -- in fact it's where those concepts come from: tribal thinking / group thinking.

The mistake I see made time and time again is when we believe we are more rational than we really are! It's an evolutionary battle we are fighting, and evolution had a big head start.

Eventually, those terms of service will cover not-so-outrageous things. If it happens in media and corporate comms, it's only a matter of time before it trickles down into software. As more and more, cueing my inner George Carlin here, self-indignant, self-righteous SJW pricks (that is, distinguishing between real social justice inclined folk, not those who are mad their college micro-triggered them by having a Westboro baptist guy on campus, or Ben Shapiro) make it into these companies, you will see more draconian measures being taken to police thought. It's not a slippery slope if it is actually happening.

My personal opinion we do ourselves a huge disservice by filtering out these things. You should display its grotesqueness. Display the horrors of humanity. Teach people life isn't snowflakes and rainbows and that there actually are terrible, evil people out there, not a sea of undiscovered victims. Evil exists as a virtue in of it self, if not to simply show you what the opposite of evil is. Maybe you don't know what good is, but know that it isn't "that"

You conflate regulatory expectation with consumer expectation. Most people don't want to see things they don't like. So they don't tune into channels, (YT or otherwise) that play things they don't like to see. The marke corrects itself over time.

Broadcast stations aren't refusing to show that content because of a law, but because they are making a business decision.

> All it can do is move money around.

Not to be pedantic, but this is exactly how the economy works. One person's spending is another person's income and vice versa. An alternative definition of an economy is "the way money moves around"

It seems like a false choice. Can I go start my own oil refinery because I don't like Exxon, Chevron, BP, or Shell?

I think this meme needs to die. I run 3 massive electron apps on the regular, in addition to my multiple IntelliJ IDE instsances and RDBMS clients on a 16gb Macbook Pro, the latter category being the biggest resource hogs.

Seems like we need to relearn the concept of liberty, but again in the digital world.

Yes, liberty is sometimes difficult, and it allows people to make bad choices. Liberty is hard.

We've seen this story play out enough times to know that it isn't a slippery slope. It starts of as a play to "protect the users" or "avoid the bad guys", or as we have seen in the security theater of other domains, namely the aviation industry, "for your safety and security"

> . But there are quite few people in DC who desperately want it to fail to show that government is no good.

And there are quite a few others that want to expand it to cost even more, so they refuse anything beside perfection to achieve meaningful compromise.

And because the 99% use case is: "I plug it in and I want it to just work"

This type of protection parent is referencing is "endpoint protection" and there are many industry standard solutions. Why should an OS be more limiting? If you have physical access to a machine that stores things you shouldn't have access to, it's already compromised in my opinion. Why the eff are people overlooking physical security in 2019 is the better question.

Often times, what one thinks another should do may not be immediately obvious or even remotely close to on another's radar. The beautiful (and sometimes ugly) reality in America is anyone can start a business, and pay some employees. Within that range, you have infinite samples on the "this is how a well oiled machine should run" to "I am doing this for the first time, trying to do the best I can and I hired a few people I know"

Should you be required to know all of these things beforehand before starting a business? Who am I to judge. Ultimately these types of comments display the pure position and perspective of privilege that is so typical on this forum. I am not saying that is a bad thing, we typically talk about the elite companies, and what types of business practices should be followed, just know that this isn't anywhere near close to the majority of American businesses.

I am not one to participate in the current "woke" culture, but

> It takes almost no financial discipline to set aside enough for a couple of months worth of salaries.

This statement drips of pure privilege to me. A couple of months worth of salaries? Are you kidding? Sometimes you have to worry about paying rent on time! We all aren't bootstrapped, VC-backed unicorns. Most of the businesses out there earn every single dollar and have to make tough decisions such as whether or not to pay your employees on time or call the Hobart technician to repair the dishwasher so you can stay open. Oh by the way, the Hobart guy said you need to replace it and it will cost you 10,000 dollars. I think most small business owners are fortunate to have even a couple of weeks set aside.

I think you were emphasizing the participation part? And I agree, but curious to where do you draw the line on what constitutes participation?

Some argue simply paying taxes. Others say it is a list of things perhaps, called "civic duties". Finally, some more extreme believe you have to do it all: attend the town halls, keep up with the times, understand the various debate points, otherwise you are somehow disqualified from playing. (A side note, it has become impossible to keep up with all the ways government affects your life, and this is one of the exact reasons the founders were for limited government. They argued as the responsibilities and roles of government increase, it becomes impossible for the "commoner" to keep up and stay engaged, thus becoming a form of tyranny in of it's own.)

I think it's definitely a gray area, but the more participation, obviously, the better, while still somehow maintaining the ability to serve those who participate little just as equally. Otherwise you become a government of some people, not of all people.