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HN isn't just broadly a tech discussion site, but is largely focused on the SV/Bay Area startup culture scene that PG and YCombinator play a big role in.

The fact is, the current authoritarian political movement in the USA is being largely funded and driven by political extremists in our own community, who have become billionaires through tech, and are using their significant resources to inflict their personal fantasies on the rest of the world, without it's permission.

By all accounts, our own Peter Thiel hand selected the current vice president for his position. The very person that today claimed at a press conference that ICE agents have "absolute immunity" and are therefore presumably allowed to murder anyone they want in cold blood without any recourse or accountability. Elon Musk's involvement here needs no explanation.

Musk, Thiel, and their ilk that are often referenced by labels such as "Dark Enlightenment," "Techno Fascists," and "Neo-monarchists" are from and part of our community. Many of us were or still are engineers and business leaders that work or worked for or with them to give them the power and resources they now have. Some of us are even likely working at places like Palantir, developing government surveillance tech designed to accelerate the systematic dismantling of privacy, freedom, and democracy.

To now pretend that this has nothing to do with us and we don't talk about things like this when people are being shot in the street, and murderers are being protected by a corrupt government that was in part selected and installed by our own community is morally reprehensible. As a community, we need to take some responsibility here, and not censoring uncomfortable facts will be a good starting point.

Moreover, hacker culture is rooted in a historical ethos of freedom, anti-authoritarianism, and inclusion. If any of that ethos still persists, it goes completely at odds with the current status quo, where we refuse to talk about this issue, while members of our community continue to inflict widespread harm on the world.

Why would anyone want a smart speaker, when every speaker acts as one when hooked to the sound output of a phone, wirelessly or wired?

I'll admit, I don't want or use 'smart' anything, and am currently trying to disable smart devices that were already present in my home from the previous owner.

No, it is possible to register a homemade car for use on public roads, pretty commonly done actually.

That was always such a silly argument, even more so with the rise of cheap and reliable 3D printing. I download, print, and use physical objects every week and don’t know or care what IP issues might exist as long as it works for its purpose. I can’t wait until the day comes when you can download and print a working car at home.

You’re getting downvoted but your take is simply the truth. Trump does not think like a politician or leader- he does not listen to, care about, or consider things like facts or broader consequences. Insiders in his administration have repeatedly leaked that they are not allowed to communicate information or facts to him, and he never shares reasons for his orders, they have to creatively make that up after the fact for the media. He operates the presidency as a reality TV show, he is interested only in how an action will play with the public and his base in the short term- will it increase his power and help him shift public narratives the way he wants, or not?

Is this HN or Tyler Cowen’s blog?

Yep, I’ve spent time in Finland and loved this… but for me it works better to skip the warm part and just do the cold.

However, the Finns in the winter did not seem to be happy at all, but mostly quite deep in seasonal depression.

Your rant about Bay Area subcultures is suspiciously written in jargon that only someone deep in these subcultures would recognize- well done, very Straussian.

Religions themselves are a great example of a Straussian meme, it’s shocking how close they got to using that example but instead went somewhere else with it that made zero sense.

I suspect that the use of incredibly bad examples is some sort of intentional Straussian joke, and that the entire article itself, and not the examples in it, is supposed to be the real example of a Straussian meme.

Good to hear, I struggle with depression and cold plunges have been life changing for me also. I would love to find a community to do it with.

Yes, another thing Feynman is doing is teaching people how to think about and model problems in a simple but reliable way in their mind, something he was very good at. In a sense his specific subject matter is just an example to demonstrate the process.

A textbook that just plainly presents the facts about a specific phenomenon isn't necessarily training you to think like a theorist, in the way Feynman is.

In that case it wouldn't matter much to an individual making personal decisions about their environment. Either way, an environment with enough outdoor air exchange to keep CO2 low would avoid these effects.

But hypothetically, what other trace contaminants would you expect to be so universally correlated with CO2 in different environments that they could account for repeatedly observing these effects in different studies? That seems implausible.

Why would this be unlikely as a prior? High CO2 changes your blood chemistry and breathing rates. Different breathing rates have a well understood effects on lots of systems including sympathetic/parasympathetic activation. There is no reason to expect humans to be evolutionary adapted to CO2 levels that we couldn't have experienced historically.

Several other posters in here have posted peer reviewed studies replicating these effects, but personally I find individual direct experience with my own body to be massively more generally useful when making health decisions than studies in other people, or some known mechanism.