thrance
thrance on Hacker News
Why the previous attack wasn't a strong enough signal to make every European retailer unplug their freezers from the internet is a mystery to me.
Advertising is not the reason I buy cars... The world was made car-dependent to maximize the profit of the automotive industry. Today, you need one to exist as a full citizen, that's a separate issue to advertising.
When I need a new car, I will look for one and compare available models based on their qualities and prices. I don't need to be passively bombarded by propaganda, daily and for years until then.
But how do you know which problems are worth making progress on? Traditionally, you'd find those by working on solving previous problems.
That's very nice, but... why WebGL2 instead of WebGPU?
Dumb question maybe, but aren't these two metrics supposed to be aligned? How can they keep me watching if they don't show me stuff I want to click on?
Social spending is redistributive, it reduces wealth inequalities. Shrink it and you make the actual issue worse. I guarantee you this 5% we recover wouldn't be used to balance the budget, but to grant another tax cut to the wealthy. And let's not even mention the consequences of cutting 1/20th of total social spending on human lives, this spending is not just a frivolous expense we can cut in when needed. We've been doing neoliberalism for 50 years, maybe it's time we cut our losses and find something better?
It's not actually about reducing spending vs increasing taxes, it's about regressive tax policies vs progressive tax policies. Inequalities are rising, because progressive forms of taxation (wealth tax...) are being removed in favor of regressive ones (such as this ridiculous internet tax), while the redistributive apparatus (social security, benefits...) shrinks year after year. The reason is simple: the rich basically own the government, evidenced by the fact that they are the only winners of the past decades.
We've been doing austerity and tax cuts for the rich for 50 years now, under neoliberalism. We have to stop and focus our attention on reducing the wealth inequality that are destroying our nations, before it's too late.
Hurray, a new form of regressive taxation.
Why start the article with an AI-generated skyline of Paris? You couldn't find a real picture? Fucking hell.
> As the publishers of a geographic reference tool, we believe that Google should not choose sides in international geopolitical disputes. For this reason, we've chosen to implement a uniform policy of
Primary Local Usage.
Yeah, right, until a wannabe despot comes in and demands Google come lick its boots. In which case Google immediately complies with zero objection.
Haha, they did! I posted a quote from 1984 on another thread. And they're completely wrong in their simplistic reading of the book, there's much more to it than "authoritarianism bad".
Quote in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50267521
The adult in the room here is the moralizing "enlightened centrist" that puts bothsideism in every conversation about politics.
We've never had this many billionaires, and they've never been this rich. So following your logic, the country should be more prosperous than ever, right?
I used to buy this sort of arguments, but then saw him fork $45B to buy Twitter, on demand, so...
> his companies are paying people and other companies that pay people
Yes, his companies, not him. He's not doing much, except distracting part of his workforce to work on vanity projects such as flying cars or mile-long vaccuum tubes, or spending some of his vast wealth to buy politicians that will further the cause of wealth inequality. Get rid of him, and the system works much better for everyone. Him and others like him.
Feels relevant:
> The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.
From George Orwell's 1984.
FDR served four terms and basically saved the USA from the jaws of ruin, fascism and the oligarchy. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
True, I think "poor, indoctrinated and hopeless" was a poor choice of words on my part. "Apathetic" fits better. The Russian population is so used to getting fucked over by their government, they don't expect anything better, and don't believe things can change for the better. This is the most dangerous feature of our age of Neoliberalism, creating apathy and hopelessness in the face of rampant corruption and austerity.
To be more precise, capital only seeks to grow its relative power over labor. Making everything shittier is part of it. If you want a clear image of what it is that these people want, look at Russia: a shithole where a few oligarchs hold absolute power, are bound to no laws and lord over a poor, indoctrinated and hopeless populace. Sure, these oligarchs would be richer if Russia was more prosperous, but they don't care about that.
The owners of these companies are very much conservative though, not out of any ideology mind you, but because they correctly identify that this is the party that best suits their class interests of fucking over everyone and everything else in order to get richer.
These billionaire ghouls need to answer for their many attempts on our Republics. Democracy can't survive when its most powerful members are working against it. We have to take them done ASAP, unless we want an encore of the 1940s.
I've found good alternatives for pretty much everything: search, mail, drive... But I remain pretty addicted to youtube, and haven't found a good alternative to that. Also, my (French) employer uses gmail for mails, calendars and meetings. So I couldn't really escape Google if I wanted to...
These protests started because schools are falling in complete disrepair. And you want to reduce their funding further? Maybe students should study outside? Taught by AI, because human teachers are too expensive?
Fuck this death cult that is neoliberalism. We've been doing austerity for decades, and things keep getting worse and worse. How come we're unable to maintain what we had 50 years ago, while work has never been this productive? Tax the rich.
There's no amount of defunding that will satisfy the capital class. They will take everything, unless we stop them from bleeding us dry.
No, you use logarithms when you expect the data to follow an exponential curve, but there's no reason to believe that e.g. shrimp aquaculture should follow an exponential trend. Using a logarithm there would be rather misleading.
Nope, there are galaxies that spin exactly as our current model predicts they should, while others are way off, as if there was something unevenly distributed across them. There's no simple modification to our theories that can account for these discrepancies.
1. I'm not proposing we tax "capital investments". I want to tax wealth, like unrealized capital gains. Because that's where the majority of the wealth is.
2. Why do you equate "capital investment" with "productivity"? If anything, the current situation should show you that record capital investments (in AI, mostly) are completely decorrelated from how the real economy is doing (which isn't great).
3. I never claimed that such taxes wouldn't cause harm to the economy, simply that cutting transfer payments would be much worse and wouldn't be enough to solve anything. We've been doing austerity for 50 years, it's time we think of something better.
If you want a healthy economy, you have to reduce inequalities. Transfer payments are a way to do it, wealth taxes are another. Cutting "entitlements" only worsens the problem.
> there's no profit in war
* There's lots of profit for military contractors and other insiders, which is the entire point!