I'm not sure how power was shared between the Koch brothers, but who fills in this power vacuum of a person who probably had more influence over the US than any president? I'm sure there is a succession plan, and I'm willing to bet they can be even more successful in the Koch agenda.
First of all, humans are the only sentient beings in the known universe. Second, most humans have children because that is maximizing their quality of life - it is a living organisms instinct to replicate, and (most) humans are no different. If you feel different, check the stats on how many have children, and think, you may just be in a bubble. Humans have endured millennia of starvation and disease, try to keep our upcoming hardships in perspective.
Beyond reasons why it would not maximize our quality of life, collectively deciding to not have kids just would not do any good. You are taking people 'like you' out of the gene pool, while people who choose to not go with the collective will procreate.
most humans have children because that is
maximizing their quality of life
Citation needed. I have read several studies about which factors improve quality of life. I cannot remember a single one that had "children" in the list of factors that significantly improve happiness.
Parents often say their children bring them joy
but most research suggests kids cause financial
worry, stress and anxiety.
Second paragraph:
However, the latest research suggests children
do actually make people happier – but only once
they’ve left home.
That is in line with what most studies come up with as one of the central aspects of a happy life: Having friends. I would think that kids kinda fall in that category after they left home.
I don't believe for a second that buying a phone installed with HarmonyOS will ever be compelling to consumers. This is microkernel based, which makes me believe that it's not an AOSP fork, which means having compatibility with Android apps is not going to be straightforward. Think of the problems that Amazon has had filling their app stores with quality ports, and they are only selling tablets now because they are nearly giving them away for free, and also have tight integration with Amazon services, which some people like. PurityOS has a slight chance, but only if they can make it work within the niche audience that they are targeting. Microsoft couldn't make a phone OS work. Firefox couldn't make a phone OS work. It takes years to develop a catalog of apps. If Huawei were truly to be using this as a backup, they would need to start working on getting developers on their platform yesterday, not "in the future".
> Harmony OS is not compatible with Android apps out-of-the-box, confirms Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group. That means you won’t be able to merely side-load any Android app of your choosing. In a press conference, Mr. Yu says that app developers will have to make “small changes” to their apps in order to compile them to run on Harmony OS. He states that it is “very easy” to transfer Android apps to Harmony OS.
Not sure what that means, but open source is pretty much irrelevant in this market, for one because we already have Android and it doesn't help much.
If you want to fork Android, it's easy and except for Google's proprietary services, like the notifications, you get compatibility with the entire Android ecosystem out of the box.
So why is there no successful fork around, except for Amazon's, which is very niche and doesn't count?
Open source is defined by the freedom to fork. However if the market forces are such that forking isn't feasible, then the open source nature is irrelevant.
Going back to your usage of quotes in "open" source, if that's what you meant, well, unfortunately Huawei is not the FSF.
I would say, their source code should be available for anyone to see, especially security researches. And what is installed on the phone should be exactly what is available in public.
I don't know if Sprint would survive if not for the T-Mobile acquisition. They have a lot of debt. I think the most these states will get is some restrictions on T-Mobile.
No, I think stating that dark on dark is hard to see is just stating facts. As a former tattoo artist, I can tell you that the more pale, the better the tattoo and especially colors show up.
But comparing modern men to tribesmen, that might be a little...
>I think stating that dark on dark is hard to see is just stating facts. As a former tattoo artist, I can tell you that the more pale, the better the tattoo and especially colors show up.
Well, obviously, but this is slightly different in content than "unsuited to tattooing", which is false as the rich history of African tattoos shows, and very different in connotation, which was my point.
We need to stop this culture of taking single sentences and vilifying people over them. People get tired, they get mad, temporarily confused, and can be good people 95% of the time, and a bit of a jerk other times. But the internet never forgets, so we as a people need to learn to forgive a bit more.
...I don't think that applies to Musk. This isn't the case of someone making an ill-considered tweet and getting eviscerated; this is about dozens and dozens of tweets, lawsuits, and interviews. Even so, if Musk took responsibility and said he was going to change, I'd certainly say we should give him every opportunity to do so. But to state the obvious, that hasn't happened.
As much as he's an amazing engineer, it's demonstrably obvious by this point that Musk has severe social issues.
But then, so do a lot of us. We just aren't in the media spotlight.
On the flip side, it's indicative that the company Musk is more closely running is experiencing high turnover at senior levels. While the one he's not as involved with isn't.
accusing specific individuals of sexually abusing children isn't some mild misstep, it can ruin the lives of people and in a fair world their would be significant legal repercussions for billionaires who think they can drag someone through the mud on twitter, where Musk has millions of rabid followers. The idea that Musk is the victim in this reminds me of that "affluenza" case with the drunk rich kid years ago.
There are a lot of high profile CEOs and executives who have very stressful jobs, Musk isn't alone in this. The overwhelming majority of them manage to behave in completely sane, professional manner.
I assume Nadella and Pichai and Bezos all have a lot of work on their calendar, curiously enough they don't go on rants on twitter.
It wasn't a single sentence on a single occasion, he doubled down on the accusations repeatedly. He went as far as saying something along the lines "why do you think he hasn't sued me?" He got his lawsuit.
95% of people aren't billionaires whose social media presence is followed globally and whose every public comment is repeated by the media, and 95% of people don't accuse someone else of being a pedophile because they're tired or mad or "momentarily confused."
Like it or not, we live in a society in which words have social and occasionally legal ramifications. Elon Musk trying to ruin someone's life for bruising his ego isn't something society should shrug off and forgive simply because "people aren't perfect."
>...isn't something society should shrug off and forgive simply because "people aren't perfect."
...but isn't the recourse that society has agreed-upon the very same lawsuit that is going on? Is this not adequate? Wouldn't it be more "woke" to fix the aforementioned avenue of recourse, if not?
>..but isn't the recourse that society has agreed-upon the very same lawsuit that is going on?
>Is this not adequate?
Humans are emotional and social beings, and we do not (nor should we want to) live in a society in which the proceedings of law, when found to be appropriate to remedy some social offense, become the only permitted form of public expression relative to it.
It's perfectly reasonable to find Elon Musk to be an objectionable person in the public sphere, regardless of the legality of his actions. Those are two different axes, and human beings don't live on only one.
>Wouldn't it be more "woke" to fix the aforementioned avenue of recourse, if not?
I don't know what "woke," is supposed to imply. I'm assuming (from the typical context of such things) that it's supposed to be a glib disparagement of something related to identity politics, which seems odd and inappropriate.
>Humans are emotional and social beings, and we do not (nor should we want to) live in a society in which the proceedings of law, when found to be appropriate to remedy some social offense, become the only permitted form of public expression relative to it.
What does the form of public expression hope to achieve if the recourse is adequate? Emotional release? Were it that it was you that was directly wronged, I could understand your subjectivity on the matter; however, being a third-party to whom there is no direct or indirect impact, it makes no sense.
In other words, using your statement, there is some assumed emotional or social end-goal of the behaviour is there not? Isn't that n+1 from the recourse already defined from society? The behaviour is designed to illicit something, is it not? Otherwise, why would you do it at all?
>It's perfectly reasonable to find Elon Musk to be an objectionable person in the public sphere, regardless of the legality of his actions.
The OC wasn't about whether it was unreasonable to find him objectionable but whether it was unreasonable to continue the "hate campaign" (apologies for a lack of better turn-of-phrase at the moment).
>I don't know what "woke," is supposed to imply. I'm assuming (from the typical context of such things) that it's supposed to be a glib disparagement of something related to identity politics, which seems odd and inappropriate.
Woke seems to be common parlance for people who have "woken-up" to some perceived injustice and are fighting the good fight, as it were.
An example of how it is apt and applicable is when Beto O'Rourke was continually forced to apologise[0]. In this case, we can draw the parallels by your statement:
>It's perfectly reasonable to find Elon Musk to be an objectionable person in the public sphere...
At what point would he no longer be objectionable and/or for the behaviour to stop? His death? That doesn't seem to matter in the case of lot of people previously hated throughout history, correct? So what overall, overaching purpose does it hope to achieve? When in the history of history has it achieved any appreciably good and desired outcomes?
Even if he profusely apologised, prostrated with guilt and remose today, wouldn't the behaviour still continue?
>In other words, using your statement, there is some assumed emotional or social end-goal of the behaviour is there not? Isn't that n+1 from the recourse already defined from society?
Society is not an algorithm whose purpose is to derive formal logical proofs of type "recourse" for any particular set of inputs. There is no n+1, nor is there necessarily an emotional or social end-goal.
>The behaviour is designed to illicit something, is it not? Otherwise, why would you do it at all?
Most people don't orchestrate their emotions in order to elicit a specific response. People find Elon Musk to be an asshole because he acts like an asshole, they find his behavior objectionable because they object to his behavior. There need be no more complexity to the matter than that.
>At what point would he no longer be objectionable and/or for the behaviour to stop? His death?
And now the slippery slope argument... I don't see anyone calling for Elon's death, do you?
>Even if he profusely apologised, prostrated with guilt and remose today, wouldn't the behaviour still continue?
Maybe. But then again, he could also eat an infant on live television and people would still defend him, so in the end it all seems to even out.
The pedo thing wasn't a single sentence. It was something Elon doubled down on. And repeated. Many times. He deserves to be vilified for trying to abuse his wealth to destroy a critic who was correct about his grandstanding during a crisis where people's lives were at stake.
It's a pattern with Elon. He found out Twitter critic's identity and called up their boss to try to get the guy fired. There's pretty credible allegations that he retaliates against whistleblowers as well.
Elon Musk is not a nice guy that has temporary blowups. He's vindictive.
Typical WSJ rubbish. Focus on anecdotes, like the guy who sacks over half of his staff because of a < 15% increase in minimum wage.
Having grown up solidly in the class of the "working poor", I can tell you a side of the story that is not often told - there is not enough difference in quality of life between "working poor" and just being on public assistance and unemployed. When you are unemployed, you get government benefits, and most people either have a side hustle (odd jobs under the table, or sometimes something blatantly illegal), or commit some type of fraud like claiming to live on their own when in fact they split rent between many people. I'm not judging here, it's just what happens.
So you get these people who make minimum wage, they aren't really living substantially better than those who don't work, yet they have to work 40 hours a week for some ahole with a Nepolean complex, and we wonder why so many people choose not to work?
The right-wing position is that we should slash benefits because of the lazy ones taking advantage of the system. The left-wing position is that all the poor are just misunderstood. My position is that, from experience, yes there are able-bodied people who are choosing not to work, it is a problem, and the proper way to deal with it is to make sure there are substantial benefits to having a job.
Yes, raising minimum wage will make a minor increase in unemployment, and will make a bit of hardship for a very small number of restaurant owners, those are valid points, that in my opinion are not terrible enough to keep the minimum wage low.
>>>Yes, raising minimum wage will make a minor increase in unemployment, and will make a bit of hardship for a very small number of restaurant owners, those are valid points, that in my opinion are not terrible enough to keep the minimum wage low.
Whats your plan for handling the resulting inflation, and the 2nd-order impact that rising prices has on both people on fixed incomes (retirees) as well as savers (destroying the long-term economic power of frugal citizens).
Also, below is a paper from 2014 that studied OECD economies and concluded minimum wage hikes cause unemployment, with their model predicting $10->$15 hike would result in a 3% unemployment increase. But hey, studies can manipulate the data to prove what they want. Check out the 2nd link to the SF Federal Reserve, which comes to similar conclusions.
Retirees and savers are not entitled to below market labor rates (nor interest rates high enough to live off of savings and investments [1] [2]). Save more and/or get a job.
Unemployment is at its lowest in 50 years [3]. This would be the ideal time to implement minimum wage increases, so any workers let go are reabsorbed into businesses that can pay the new minimum wage (while those that can’t go out of business). "Creative destruction" and all that jazz. The more disposable income minimum wage earners have, the more mobility they'll have, and with it the ability to move to locales with better housing affordability.
The Fed can’t generate a small bit of inflation with trillions in quantitive easing and holding interest rates down (and as a side note, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has even said "Pay more" to attract the workers needed [4]); raising the minimum wage is unlikely to cause inflation any appreciable fashion (compared to existing housing and healthcare market dysfunction).
Previous HN thread 15 days ago [5], with WSJ article showing the federal minimum wage bump to $15/hr can be implemented with little downside, along with the CBO report the article is based on [6].
In a well functioning market, inflation is purely a monetary phenomenon, raising the minimum wage should not affect it.
But you're right, rising rents are likely to capture much of the gain in the lower class. But that's because the rental market is not a well functioning market.
Rising rents should encourage more apartments to be built, stabilizing prices. Instead, NIMBY rules prevent them from being built, allowing rents to soak up all the gains.
How do you fix it, except dismantling democracy, simply sending unhappy locals NIMBYsts to gulags, or dismantling the capitalism, making the Valley just as unattractive as any other place? We had both of these in the Soviet Union and it didn't look nice.
But they are created at the will of the people, who live in those cities. They can't afford these rules to be broken - they will literally lose their life savings, their retirement, everything, if the housing cost drops. They would vote for everyone who promises to do exactly one thing: prevent any new residential construction around, and prevent (meaningful) mass transit from being built. Because both things depress their home values.
No other way around it except destroying democracy (or hollowing it out, when you vote but it doesn't matter, Putinist style), or destroying capitalism.
These things are just healthy signs that both capitalism and democracy actually work in your place, and are not fakes.
> there is not enough difference in quality of life between "working poor" and just being on public assistance and unemployed.
> My position is that, from experience, yes there are able-bodied people who are choosing not to work, it is a problem, and the proper way to deal with it is to make sure there are substantial benefits to having a job.
This is the fundamental appeal of the UBI to me as a replacement for means-tested benefits. If the benefit is truly universal, then every bump in income actually does give you an increase in your personal revenue. Some people will choose not to work and just live on UBI. But I don't actually care all that much about them. UBI isn't enough to make anyone rich, and realistic proposals are still pretty minimal. The fraction of people who will take advantage of it to live a better life are the ones I care about.
In a perfect world, subsidies and welfare wouldn't exist because cost of living isn't artifically inflated by supply-favored laws. The reason college, houses, and health care are expensive are because of the laws preventing competition and increase of supply.
We don't live in a perfect world however, and I absolutely do not have the answer for what is the correct balance of subsidy and hard work.
The real question is what the competitors will do.
Every change in economic policy, and in market situation, causes some participants to benefit, and others to be hindered [1].
When a business fires some of the staff, it may either end up improving efficiency (good for the business and the customers), or may open up a part of the market for competitors (good for the competitors and the customers). Watch the trend: if the competitors step up, build out, service more customers, perhaps even hire more staff, then the increase of minimum wage was good for the economy as whole. It would indicate the change closed up an existing inefficiency - people's effort, money, resources was being used suboptimally.
However if you notice the trend of the competitors not expanding out, or perhaps even undergoing the same contraction, then you read it as a signal of the economy being hindered by the change. It would indicate the change increased inefficiency - people's effort, money, resources starts being wasted.
I'm gonna preemptively note that the later scenario[2] would be consistent with the theory of several competing schools of economy.
--
[1] Obviously it's not a zero-sum game, but there is always a degree of give-and-take.
[2] It gets even more complex when businesses skirt the legally mandated minimum wage. Some work lines are partially exempt, like waiters. Some businesses hire undocumented workers, exploiting their aversion towards going to authorities.
>So you get these people who make minimum wage, they aren't really living substantially better than those who don't work,
Supporting yourself (by basically selling your labor) instead of relying on the government is worth something (non-tangible value, obviously) to a lot of people (though I suspect there are few of those people on HN). It makes you feel good (less bad) about your situation and frankly having your existence be dependent on some entity you have nearly zero control over sucks and is stressful.
Obviously on some level it comes down to personal preference but clearly a large subset of the population feels that minimum wage or nearly minimum wage jobs are a good enough deal relative to government benefits that they do them.
The people who I'd personally want to hire are the one's who are gaming the system by getting benefits and working under the table or having a side gig because they clearly know how to optimize for a given set of constraints. Unfortunately those are the ones that aren't in the job market.
I think you should indicate somehow that you've edited your comment (e.g. customary "EDIT" following your original comment), granted in your case, you changed your original comment entirely (after the apparent backlash at your disagreement with GP's comment), which is IMO somewhat disingenuous.
I added two paragraphs. I didn't feel saying it was edited was warranted since it was an expansion rather than a change of meaning.
Also I agree with the GP comment, I was just expanding on the point about the people who aren't working and don't want to. I thought it was worth noting that that is not something many people can rationalize.
Working for a petty autocratic bureaucracy is so inherently and intensely fulfilling, it's no surprise that so many rich people do it, even though they don't need to. /s
Having worked with people on social welfare. 80% to 90% can do some form of work, but don’t. Personally, I think most people find it appalling.
An easy solution is to cut the benefits.
My personal thought is that we should lower minimum wage, but combine people who work under an income level benefits. With only full social welfare being allocated to people who can’t work.
Essentially, a minimum wage, but it’s a differential made up for after all options are exhausted.
No, an easy solution is to make it worthwhile to work by increasing the minimum wage.
The bottom has been so eroded that full time at minimum wage works out to $14,790/yr--and you seriously want to lower minimum wage? Less than $15k for an entire year of someone's life is less than how much my salary has increased in the past 3 years (w/o a job change). The idea that people still want to cut minimum wage and cut benefits is disgusting.
Having lived in sub $15k a year, it’s pretty easily doable. That being said, they also rarely make just $15k, most have multiple jobs. Finally, you assume they should be making more or have a better quality of life. Unskilled labor really doesn’t have anything to bargain with, because they don’t provide much value. Arguing in relation to your salary is silly, because your skills have value (and from the sounds of it are growing in value). We can’t make up value, that’s why other people go from $15k a year to $0 a year when we take away their job by increasing minimum wage
There is a Catch-22 in choosing to breed less, in order to be responsible. You are choosing to limit your genes, and in many respects limit your impact on our culture. Irresponsibility continues to breed, while responsibility doesn't. I absolutely agree that our CO2 emissions would be much lower with fewer people, but choosing yourself to have fewer children is not the answer. A lot of the world is choosing to have children at an older age, and this almost always means less children. A better strategy is to try to get more people from all cultures to share this trait (not forcefully, of course).
There’s an “easy” solution to this quandary, IMO: you can adopt.
You’re not directly contributing to the increase in carbon associated with having a child because that child would exist regardless of your actions, and you have the opportunity to pass on your cultural values and sense of responsibility.
Best of both worlds, plus you’re providing a home and family to someone who might otherwise not have one.
The foundation of the MS empire is MS Office. People use office at work because it's the path of least resistance, due to fewer conversion errors (no conversion when you are using what everyone else does), and because that is what they used in school. Have the kids learn on LibreOffice, and MS Office only has one shaky leg to stand on.
It's not that hard. I required my kids to grow up with Libreoffice (and Openoffice before that). There where hassles but they where manageable. I made sure to explain why this restriction was in place. I also was willing to fight any battle with school authorities over this issue should the need arise. Fortunately that was not necessary.
Exactly why I would love to see this fail. I try to be a non-Facebook user, but everyone uses Messenger, and my local Craigslist has deteriorated because everyone sells on Facebook now, so I use it for certain things. Every once in a while, I find myself getting sucked into the "feed" view on my way to the Facebook Marketplace, especially since on mobile, every time I press "back" from a listing that I go into details on, it takes me back, not to the listings that I was looking at, but to the news feed. Facebook knows exactly what they are doing.
One of the best things I did was unfollow everything (i.e. friends, family, pages, celebrities, the kitchen sink, EVERYTHING) on Facebook. This explicit unfollowing took a few weeks and wasn't something done in a day.
Now, I have the advantage of using facebook for all the useful things I need such as "Login with Facebook" and Messenger without having the risk of ever succumbing to the "Feed"
Part of my experience here showed me how Facebook would automatically "make me follow" all my House/Senate representatives even if I never explicility followed their pages/profiles.
Ocasionally, I still have to unfollow these auto-followed pages when I log in. But for the most part, I've been feed-free for a 5-6 months now. It's great!
I did this a few years ago when I found myself at a party, looking through my feed, and it made me start questioning what the hell was wrong with me.
Eliminating the feed entirely was fantastic. Soon I stopped checking my notifications (if I'm not seeing things on the feed, I'm not reacting or commenting, and not getting feedback.) Thus the only people I cared to check in on were literally the people I cared about. As a result, I grew much closer with those individuals.
Then messenger slowly started being useless, as all previously mentioned good friends were already either on hangouts/discord and preferred those (Mileage will obviously vary on this one.) I can still keep it around for my weekly check to make sure no-one is desperately trying to get a hold of me. And if they do, I immediately direct them to my chat platform of choice.
Events is still pretty handy, unfortunately, but not something I need to check in on often at all.
Honestly, I don't miss it at all, and I haven't really lost any value. I'm about as social as I was when I stopped, and in fact I consider the friendships I've had in my post-social media era to be stronger than ever.
The only people I have followed right now is a friend currently trying to break out as a social media author presence, in which case following her actually matters, and a band that one of my childhood friends is in, who I'm supporting for the same reason. (Though I often give them engagement elsewhere when I can.)
News Feed Eradicator essentially does this (browser extension) - I've used it for years can't tell you how much time it has saved me from the FB timeline!
