> In software, sadly, age isn't much of an asset. Most of what you spend your time learning today will be irrelevant in a few years.
Kind of—but everything old is new again. I was surprised to find I actually have a pretty good understanding of Babel/typescript/webpack because they’re just reimplementing the c compiler and linker in JavaScript, albeit with very little solid documentation. Most of the interesting language ideas are pretty old—smalltalk still looks futuristic to me. Thinking about systemic failure is really hard and that takes time to develop.
And yet, they still have ads. It’s not clear what I’m paying for. They aren’t just annoying, they are a clear violation of basic journalism—you don’t publish things that will scare the advertisers away, which is almost all news.
All I can say is that advertising has been a part of newspapers and magazines for essentially forever. (I would also add that I don't seem to get ads from The Economist on the mobile app.)
There are no-ad magazines out there but it's pretty uncommon and the subscriptions are relatively expensive to cover the lack of advertising revenue.
Management is a separate class, it’s called the petite bourgeois. It’s basically the same class as small business owners. Maybe you’re thinking of castes which implicitly preclude social mobility?
> The expired food might have come from a different seller initially, but you were sent it because of Amazon's supply line optimisations.
Amazon took my cash, amazon should be responsible. The fact that they can't keep track of the goods they sell (also seems to be a problem with counterfeits) is their problem, even if they do their best to blame their suppliers.
> The fact that they can't keep track of the goods they sell (also seems to be a problem with counterfeits) is their problem
They can keep track. The do keep track.
So it isn't a problem for them unless it causes enough issues for us (the buyers) that we start going elsewhere and affecting the bottom line. We don't have access to that information, so we can't track the matter. Perhaps even the vendors can't either (I've never sold via Amazon so don't know at all).
[though others are saying the commingling does not affect products with expiry dates so we may be a little off topic for this sub-thread, unless that only applies to expiry dates and not best before dates which have difference legal standing - the discussion has got to the point where speculation is getting wilder and an injection of some cited facts may be needed to rein it in]
I’ve seen people downvoted for highlighting that “libertarian” was a term invented in the context of anarchist and socialist struggle before being co-opted by the right, so I’m going to go with the latter...
There are a lot of techies on HN with no sense of history. I blame the "STEM uber alles" educational agenda we've been pushing in the US ever since Sputnik.
I can't take that claim too seriously, because a real Libertarian would welcome a free, and non-coercive association between employees as much as they welcome the free, and completely non-coercive association between an employee, and their employer... (I am, of course, not at all coerced to work under the conditions my employer sets upon me!)
But for some reason, many Libertarians have nothing but contempt for the former. It could be that the ideology has been a bit subverted...
Well, non-coercive association between employee and employer... let's talk about job-market monopsony and its distortions thereof. (I'm starting to use this "market-distortion" framing for class struggle.)
One of the more fundamental realisations of our time. Yet most seem unaware. I'm not automatically free in a liberal democracy. Just more free than in others.
This hypothetical “real libertarian” would welcome far more than that, and most of it not for the benefit of workers.
I’m simply stating it’s foolish to expect Google to actively work against their best interests. To provide material support and a platform for unopposed speech on a viewpoint they actively oppose.
There’s nothing stopping these employees from doing this on their own free time and with their own resources.
> I’m simply stating it’s foolish to expect Google to actively work against their best interests.
I think you're indulging in reification here. Google has no best interests because Google is just a legal fiction with no real-world existence apart from its constituent individuals. The investors have their interests. Management has their interests. The workers have their interests. But Google itself has no interests, and for too long we've conflated the interests of Google's management and investors with those of the company as a whole while disregarding those of the vast majority of the people associated with Google: the workers whose work makes Google's billions in revenue possible while getting pennies on every dollar of value they provide.
> To provide material support and a platform for unopposed speech on a viewpoint they actively oppose.
Management has no business having an opinion on unionization one way or the other. If anything, most managers should be pro-union since they're as likely to get thrown under the bus to keep profits up as their direct reports.
> There’s nothing stopping these employees from doing this on their own free time and with their own resources.
From an opsec viewpoint, the smart thing to do would be to organize outside Google offices and then blindside the company with a wildcat strike, but that's easier said than done when you're expected to work twelve hours a day to prove you're passionate.
"the workers whose work makes Google's billions in revenue possible while getting pennies on every dollar of value they provide."
Well, you assume that revenue represents value. How do you even know that? Maybe they are making the world worse on net. In which case, should the workers or investors be liable? I generally feel like it's a nice and fundamental feature of society that they aren't.
That's the standard capitalist assumption. Gotta make a billion dollars no matter who dies.
> Maybe they are making the world worse on net.
Maybe? Have you been paying attention at all?
> In which case, should the workers or investors be liable?
The investors and the management should be liable, under the "command responsibility" doctrine. If you give orders whose implementation makes the world suck more than it already does, then you should indeed be held liable for your orders.
Criminally liable.
> I generally feel like it's a nice and fundamental feature of society that they aren't.
I think that one of the reasons our society is broken is that the people in charge can get away with leaving working-class schmucks like me to hold the bag and take the fall whenever shit goes wrong.
> Management has no business having an opinion on unionization one way or the other. If anything, most managers should be pro-union since they're as likely to get thrown under the bus to keep profits up as their direct reports.
Unionization restricts the management's ability to adapt to new situations and challenges in the pursuit of profit. Shareholders hire and task management to do exactly that, which is why the two are almost always opposed to what is, in effect, tying of their hands.
That sounds like right-wing union-busting propaganda to me. Even if it isn't, why should I care if union representation makes management's job harder? I'm not management.
Free and non-coercive is the key. Things such as Card Check mean that employees as individuals are able to be coerced to sign the card rather than unionization via secret ballot. Furthermore so-called “closed shops” infringe on an individual’s right to not join the union (or pay required representation fees.)
Free and without coercion is fine, but in union activities in the US, it is rarely, if ever the case.
Also look at how “scabs” are treated by union employees. They are often subjected to violence and threats if they choose to exercise their choice to ignore a strike. That is the opposite of free and without coercion.
And no, you aren’t coerced to work for any employer. You freely accept employment conditions in exchange for the agreed upon wage. However when unions get involved, you don’t have a choice — you get paid whatever the union decides. A “software engineer 3” is paid whatever the rate is for a software engineer 3. You can’t negotiate anything better. And, raises are determined by how long you exist at the job and not necessarily your productivity. Traditional unions were designed around workers that were interchangeable — assembly line type work where worker A and worker B are completely interchangeable: as long as the widget screw gets installed at your spot on the line, the work is done: there is no difference between workers doing the same job because it’s rote. When things like judgement, creativity, and other soft skills come into play, workers are quickly differentiated and don’t necessarily deserve the exact same wage because their output isn’t exactly the same as it would be for an assembly line worker.
Join a union if you want— that doesn’t give the union the right to negotiate on my behalf against my will. Unions are no different than labor monopolies and they should be treated with the same suspicion as we treat other monopolies.
This is still a phenomenon worth examining. How is this cowardly? The author can’t do anything about the IRS. What else is there to say about megachurches that hasn’t been said?
I didn't say anything about the IRS and I didn't say the phenomena should be ignored. I think that the most impactful manifestations of the phenomenon should be the focus of study, on account of being the most impactful.
Cowardice seems likely when somebody ignores the high impact manifestation that enjoys popular support, choosing instead to lampoon the low impact fringe manifestation.
Could just be "this is in my ballpark, that is not".
Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach. There are deep subtleties to it on a sociological perspective that are far more interesting than its extreme fish-in-a-barrel status theologically. Maybe that doesn't interest the author?
Maybe you're right. The impression I got was that the author picked a soft easy target, but maybe that's an uncharitable take.
> Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach
I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be equally effective against both.
It is uncharitable. A lot of writing intended for very broad audiences surfaces on Hacker News. Writing intended for much smaller audiences also makes the front page from time to time. This is one of those times.
Diane Purkiss is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and fellow and tutor at Keble College. She holds a doctoral degree from Merton College Oxford, and an honours degree in English and History from the University of Queensland. She has published widely on the English Civil War, and on witchcraft and the supernatural in the early modern period.
She's writing about popular misconceptions relevant to her own specialty. She has no special background to bring to bear on contemporary American megachurch Christianity.
Her critique was published in the Athenaeum Review, "a new journal of arts and ideas for the general educated reader."
It's really not. Christianity is a rather uniquely vulnerable religion to getting rationalist holes poked in it because of its insistence on factual historicality of a particular set of events[1], and megachurch Christianity is a deeply weird, heretical offshoot that barely follows mainline Christianity, and it looks like you could blow barn-sized holes in it with a peashooter, because it's held together with ignorance and baling wire. You will note though, exactly how much historical impact this kind of attack has had, namely none.
Basically what you've got here is a cultural phenomenon dressed up as a religious one, borrowing some religious functions, taking over the public role of religion. But its foundations have a lot more to do with ingroup identity, shibboleths and the peculiar American take on the protestant work ethic. Trying to understand it theologically just hits a blank wall. You have to understand it as sociology.
([1] Other religions not of the same lineage shrug off this class of attacks. Disprove Shinto? Disprove what? It makes no historical claims.)
Christianity does not require insistence on "factual historicality of a particular set of events", or at least not disprovable ones. That's mostly a Western phenomena, to which American protestants seem particularly prone to the most extreme version of.
I think you can ultimately thank Thomas Aquinas for this movement. He was quite fond of a rational basis for God and repackaged the works of Aristotle for this end. But of course once you start down the road of adding rationalism to your religion then the whole mysticism of it can start to stand out to some. So some people started thinking it must be all literal and totally rational...
Eastern Orthodox Christianity still has no truck with that rationalism nonsense.
Yes, there are recognizably Christian subgroups that disavow all historical claims (and reinterpret Paul accordingly), but mainstream Christianity has always affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus and that (per Paul) this is essential to Christianity ... long before Aquinas.
N. T. Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God" is a very good read on this.
It's been tried. It doesn't work. It doesn't change the minds of Christian believers, just as pointing out the lack of evidence for the Burning Times doesn't change the minds of feminist Wiccans.
People don't follow religions because they're true. They follow them because they offer narratives and social interactions they personally find compelling.
Understanding the social interactions - they're not always obvious - might do more to make religions less appealing than yet another unsuccessful attempt to debunk the core narrative.
Arguably, modern "fundamentalism" of many religious forms is a reaction movement that says "if we cannot have both science and religion, let us abandon science". It's something people back as recently as the Elizabethan era would have disagreed with as heretical theologically. How could God be so untrue that the search for truth had to be abandoned?
“natural child raising”—what, baiting your child with hyenas on the bayou? This is just a lame excuse to explain your kid when you could just accept responsibility.
Kind of—but everything old is new again. I was surprised to find I actually have a pretty good understanding of Babel/typescript/webpack because they’re just reimplementing the c compiler and linker in JavaScript, albeit with very little solid documentation. Most of the interesting language ideas are pretty old—smalltalk still looks futuristic to me. Thinking about systemic failure is really hard and that takes time to develop.