Nazism is pretty popular on HN, comes with the territory when most of the board's users are well off westerners. Doesn't hurt that the mods are way more concerned with anti-capitalist rhetoric. Not surprising considering who owns the site though.
It's not really amazing, HN is incredibly xenophobic, just look at literally any thread that happens to mention China, even tangentially. I guess that's what happens when the majority of the userbase is well off Americans.
Last I ran the numbers, 50% of HN users were in the US. A lot of those are not Americans, since many HN users have come to the US from other countries. Moreover, a lot of the American userbase on HN are not "well off". So your assumption is far from correct.
What HN certainly is, demographically, is majority Western. What you're seeing on China-related topics is the growing rift between China and the West, the same trend that shows up in Western media and no doubt Chinese media as well. I spend a lot of moderation time and energy arguing for understanding about this. But there's no way we can expect HN to be immune from macro social and geopolitical trends.
There's no reason to believe that "HN is incredibly xenophobic" except insofar as human beings in general may be.
> There's no reason to believe that HN is "incredibly xenophobic" except insofar as human beings in general may be.
While he said what he said and you refuted, I think the thought behind what he said was influenced by the rise in anti-Chinese xenophobia of late, and to my mind that is a real phenomenon both on HN and off of it. It is accompanied by, it must be said, a sharp increase in xenophobia in China as well.
I "agree" with the general xenophobia, meaning the lack of progress and backsliding toward China aligning with western democratic and individualistic ideals that I hold dear is very disappointing, but I can also see that indulging in one's xenophobic feelings might not lead to a desired outcome either.
I just say that because, counter to your last statement, there is reason to believe that HN has become incredibly xenophobic (compared to where it was a few years ago), which similar to what you also said, is accompanied by a qualifier.
I don't disagree with any of that. I think we're just scoping the word 'xenophobic' differently. To me that word conveys something deeper and more permanent, especially if one uses 'is' with it, as in "HN is incredibly xenophobic". (which was actually a rather silly thing to say)
> There's no reason to believe that HN is "incredibly xenophobic" except insofar as human beings in general may be.
And that's likely the case so in a way the GP was right. HN is rapidly approaching being large enough to represent a fair cross section of the communities it is active in, with the note that it skews wealthy, educated and tech oriented. Whether that slice of the population is more or less xenophobic as a rule is an open question. I fear for the answer.
Exactly. These behaviors seem to be context dependent, rather than engrained in some people vs. not others, and the context seems to be shifting right now.
Sure, and equally obviously there are a lot of users below the median/mean. Millions of them, in fact. Some are below the poverty line.
HN is more varied than you're assuming. That is actually the leading problem facing the community. People develop a distorted image of what the HN community is, and then when they encounter posts that contradict their image, they resort to antagonistic explanations that are harmful.
The actual dynamic is this: many people here have wildly different backgrounds, and therefore strongly different views, than your own (I don't mean you personally, but all of us)—views which they come by as honestly as the rest of us come by ours. Yes there are bad actors, but users grossly overestimate the significance of that. We're far too quick to consign each other to the bad actor bucket, because we underestimate the variety and size of the genuine differences between us.
I'm not saying that it's exclusively people below the median/mean, I'm saying that due to the content the site focuses on the board is going to skew towards the more wealthy in whatever market they live in. Obviously I don't have the demographic data to back this up, but it's just the reality of the situation. Inside the US, this board's users are going to be wealthier than the average US population. I suspect that would hold true for any group you look at, whether its a global perspective (probably even more skewed if you look at the global average wealth). Beyond that, you need an internet connection at all to come here, so right there you're going to be skewing wealthier than you would if you picked an "average".
I'm not consigning anyone to the "bad actor" bucket, but when we talk about filter bubbles we should at least be honest about the composition of groups and what traits they might have. There's no reason to think that the average HN user is representative of the average individual given the content.
Beyond that, due to the upvote system, the majority is amplified, so even if there are millions in poverty on this site, their views are going to be pushed lower than the tens of millions not in poverty. This is a bigger problem than HN obviously, but it does nobody any good to deny it's existence. The same could be applied to any minority group, whether its gender, sexuality, or race for that matter. This is a consequence of the system and you see the same thing on various subreddits (the fact that they split things into smaller boards mean there are communities where the site minority might be able to actually have a larger voice than the majority)
I don't disagree with that. It's just that it still leaves many people, hundreds of thousands if not millions, who fall outside the description you're making, and thousands of them post comments here. There's simply a lot more variance in the community than it feels like there is. That mistake has a dramatic effect on discussion.
Edit: I was replying to the first version of your comment. I do disagree with the part you added later about upvotes. I think it is overinterpretation of the sort that feels-like-it-must-be-true, or feels-like-it's-probably-true. If there's one thing I've learned from moderating HN it's that those perceptions are extremely in the eye of the beholder and need to be bracketed if one wants to assess anything objectively.
p.s. Just to avoid misunderstanding, your account is still banned because you've continued to break HN's rules since we originally banned you. I restored your comments in this thread in order to reply to them. Users can also do that by vouching for good posts which shouldn't be [dead] (this is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
Most front-page threads mentioning China lately were actually about Zoom and yes there was a lot of criticism of Zoom's actions and there were many people angrily attributing that to xenophobia. Was it? Or is that your perception? People here tend to generally be very supportive of Hong Kong protesters. Is that also just xenophobia? Beyond that I've very rarely seen openly xenophobic or racist posts and when they happen they get downvoted into oblivion immediately which I think is a better representation of the HN community.
There has been a concerted campaign to paint China as the world's bogeyman mostly by the alt-right.
Topics such as BLM often involve whataboutism with many complaining about the lack of support for Hong Kong by supporters of BLM, see Senator Hawley's comments.
This is part of the coordinated anti-globalism, nationalist movement that Bannon and his cronies are promoting.
I am not convinced that they actually care about Hong Kong or the Uihgurs given how opposed they were to helping out the Syrian migrants.
China is doing some bad shit, but it's hard for me to judge them much more severely than any number of other countries.
I feel like you consider any criticism of the government which has Uighur muslims in camps, harvests organs from them, sells their hair as "hair extensions", bans blacks from restuarants as "alt-right". You are doing the very thing you accuse others of doing - making any criticism of China as an alt-right bogeyman.
I support criticizing and sanctioning China over the Uighur situation and HK.
What I don't support is when people use China as a tool to discredit movements like BLM because supporters aren't more broadly speaking out on injustices in other countries.
Bannon is strongly supportive of Russia even though the situation there is just as grim, see Chechnea, the loss of human rights for gays, and a Putin dictatorship of the country.
It's hard not to conclude that these criticisms are because China is a global economic power and a communist country.
Never forget that Meritocracy the term was created to mock the idea of it even being possible, now it's become a mainstream accepted thought. Usually the tragedy comes before the farce, I guess this time is different.
Comments typically start as dead because the poster is "shadowbanned", for some string of particularly unconstructive comments in the past. (I don't know if enough vouches can cause a user to be un-banned.)
Robert Watts said this about the draft during the Vietnam war:
> They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1—A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.
L.B.J. meaning president Lyndon B. Johnson. Watts did this in front of a crowd while miming aiming with a rifle. The crowd applauded him.
SCOTUS ruled it legal under the first amendment.[1] I agree with their decision and I wish more countries had such stringent protections for freedom of expression.
> They have gone though the whole plane with a fine toothed comb, Identifying any other potential problems. It will probably be the safest Boeing in the sky.
More like they've done the bare minimum to get the planes back in the air. The entire point of the plane is to avoid having to certify a new frame ie avoid doing exactly what you're implying they've done.
They've already recommended simulator time as a requirement to fly it. The shared type cert to avoid retraining is kind of moot.
The sad thing is this could be seen as a successful (in the Pyrrhic sense) business move by Boeing in that they were given an impossible goal, secured sufficient sales to airlines, and show all indications of being on the road to getting away with it if there are still sufficient people out there who are still willing to fly on one afterward.
Just gotta be willing to crack a few eggs, and cash in on that goodwill on occasion, yet the business churns on regardless.
It's a bit sickening to be honest. To be faced with what we're finding, and to show all indications of just moving on with business as usual.
It makes it hard to take anything seriously anymore. Cripes, I used to hang aerospace over my teams as a "you could be in a situation where I'd reject this work wholesale because you haven't convinced me you've thought it through, and I don't feel like killing people down the road."
Now the tables have turned... Even there, in what I thought was the last bastion of "it absolutely must be provably right", it seems that wasn't ever the case, or if it was, the rot has set in so badly as to leave it unrecognizable.
Leaves me feeling like a Diogenes, searching desperately for someone who isn't cutting irresponsible corners, and is dedicated to not just achieving the mission, but caring about how they do it.
Sorry, bit of a tangent there... But jeez. I figured it'd be bad. Not this bad though.
Easy, stop letting them dump other services for free on the backs of their other businesses. Search can stay ad-supported. Youtube, Gmail, Drive, Cloud, Stadia, Android, News? Should all be broken out into their own businesses and forced to be profitable on their own. As it is, nobody can enter those spaces without being willing to lose hundreds of millions (billions?) of dollars.
Prevent a global company from giving away products? So other big company can gain space?
All of the virtuals you mentioned have different stories. Cloud is profitable, and is not the top company anyhow. News is not a product it's a grouping of news stories. Youtube makes money through ads and better access and could be considered a loss-leader but shutting it down will not make the field more competitive. Android is open source.. and perhaps could be seen as dumping to prevent others. Gmail is a mail service, others exist.. and starting a new company will not cost you billions unless you plan on serving billions of people. Drive is one of many companies that didn't cost a billion to start but might be worth it now.. try dropbox or box.com or rapidgator.
Yes, global companies should not be able to give away products or operate services at absurdly unprofitable rates (see: Ridesharing, a myriad of other Google services) just because they have billions to burn. It's horrifically anti-competitive and raises the barrier of entry unnecessarily. It's not like vertical integration is some new invention, its historically been fought against by anti-trust regulators. We just live in a world where they effectively don't operate any more.
Where exactly do you think the money is going to come from? These people are taking $2k and making trades that are losing $500k. They never had $500k. Robinhood is still out of that money, regardless of their guilt or whether they are convicted/sued/etc. There is no money to chase after. That's why this sort of thing is so insane.
What happens in a normal brokerage when someone, despite the brokerage’s risk management checks, manages to get a margin deficiency that they cannot possibly rectify by liquidating their holdings or depositing cash? Serious non-rhetorical question, I have no idea...
Brokerages are exposed to a lot less of it than e.g. credit cards, because it isn't baked into the model in the same way (and, indeed, the opposite is baked into the model), but it has been known to happen. See the Interactive Brokers 2018 annual report:
Over an extended period in 2018, a small number of the Company’s brokerage customers had taken relatively
large positions in a security listed on a major U.S. exchange. The Company extended margin loans against the
security at a conservatively high collateral requirement. In December 2018, within a very short timeframe, this
security lost a substantial amount of its value. The customer accounts were well margined and at December 31,
2018 they had incurred losses but had not fallen into any deficits. Margin shortfalls were met in a timely manner
by delivery of additional shares by the customers. Subsequent price declines in the stock have caused these
accounts to fall into deficits, despite the Company’s efforts to liquidate the customers’ positions. Through
February 27, 2019, the Company has recognized an aggregate loss of approximately $47 million. The maximum
aggregate loss, which would occur if the securities’ prices all fell to zero and none of the debts were collected,
would be approximately $59 million. The Company is currently evaluating pursuing the collection of the debts.
"Whose money did IKBR lose?" IKBR's. (Mechanically, it's a hit to their shareholder equity, which you can verify with toy math if you like playing balance sheet games.)
The more interesting question here is what Robinhood’s clearing house is exposed to. It’s been a while since I looked but they don’t clear themselves and the clearing house may have had exposure.
If that’s the case you can expect the relationship to change. Robinhood will either lose some capabilities or will pay more for clearing.
On Jan 15, 2015 (aka Black Thursday), the Swiss National Bank unexpectedly floated the Swiss Franc. Some major, well funded brokerages nearly failed as a result of the huge price movements -- their small customers who made a profit kept the profits, but too many small customers ended up with negative balances, the brokerages couldn't practically recover the losses.
Literally they go out of business. Best example is Barings Bank:
"The bank collapsed in 1995 after suffering losses of £827 million (£1.6 billion today) resulting from fraudulent investments, primarily in futures contracts, conducted by its employee Nick Leeson, working at its office in Singapore. "
