allworknoplay

Joined 13 years ago

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1,470
Submissions
346
Member since
Apr 1
Currently writing a game. Formerly Lead Platform Engineer @ Teachable (teachable.com) and some other stuff.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/allworknoplay; my proof: https://keybase.io/allworknoplay/sigs/wvbpxfGTbT2oLRgc8ExyWGlLdlRmK_cFwY9576VSVwM ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
There is no "point" of automation here beyond deploying capital to produce returns.

That this is the sticking point for the companies is inherently validating of the workers' concerns -- if the companies intended to solely increase throughput, they could guarantee the jobs.

It's total nonsense to say there's a "point" of using a tool except that for which it's actually used.

And no, the timing isn't interesting -- it's during negotiations where an agreement hasn't been reached.

Comment · 5 years ago
Surprise, organizing takes an enormous amount of work, which anyone who's involved in any participatory, decentralized, leftist, or anarchist space will tell you.

You may know this! Not clear from your response. Do you have a point about something he's factually incorrect about in his writings, or just that you (unlike many other Occupy participants) didn't like processes he created as much as others?

Comment · 5 years ago
* 6 years old

* hundreds of millions of videos

* many make fairly strong pedagogical claims

* mixed in advertising and product placement

The third one there is the most important here. This isn't comic books, because comic books largely didn't claim to be educational. Seems like a new phenomenon to me. We have truth in advertising laws for good reasons -- companies making obviously false claims about their products' educational value is one of them.

Comment · 5 years ago
Let me get this straight -- a commercial ad-driven marketplace supplies a very substantial amount of content consumed by children and markets it as educational (and/or allows such marketing), parents are not educational experts, and you think it's problematic that the government might see a need to step in, starting with some basic fact-finding?

Nobody is shutting the service down, dude. Maybe we find that nothing is really wrong. Maybe we challenge the company to more appropriately rate content that's marketed as educational, or do better ad filtering, so that parents can make informed decisions. Right now there are pretty clearly no requirements and lots of obviously false pedagogical claims, and parents can't afford to pre-vet all the content their kids might watch (and the marketing tells them they shouldn't have to).

I don't see what your problem is. This is a major new phenomenon facing parents, it's super weird that you think some fact-finding is nanny pearl clutching.

Comment · 5 years ago
This is insane. Phone companies published numbers because it was generally considered helpful and the costs of unsolicited calling were relatively high. By the 70s delisting was an option, and by the late 90s it was very common (in the US). The internet made this a no-brainer, and to suggest that it’s somehow ok just because it used to be (in a totally different world) is beyond ridiculous.

We don’t have the option here — people provide their number to a service to be able to use it, and the numbers are then compromised, in breach of that contract and because of the service’s failures.

The two are not remotely alike, what the fuck are you even talking about.

Comment · 5 years ago
Why on earth did you pick this username
Comment · 5 years ago
The value derived from public goods is mostly not factored into GDP growth and (when executed well) serves people both more efficiently and more equitably than the purchases GDP does account for (obvious examples, public or publicly funded healthcare, parks, libraries). The degrowth argument is that overall this increase in efficiency would reduce production/consumption while improving lives, but it does also not ignore that particularly wasteful nations/lifestyles may need to live differently.

Hickel and others who write on degrowth are mostly very clear about these definitions (and Less is More is exceedingly thorough on the matter), but obviously you have to read past the surface level to pick up some of the detail. That's not meant as a dig at you or to imply that you're not willing to do more reading, just to clarify that because oftentimes these analyses are miles apart from typical US/western thinking, a lot of digging can be necessary.

As I noted above, Hickel applies a historical materialist analysis in a lot of his work, which can take some time getting used to (and, indeed, did for me).

Comment · 5 years ago
Emissions are not down -- they've just been exported. The analysis you're looking at is a common one, but it's a shell game. Plenty has been written on this topic and on actual, hard, ecological limits we face; the book I recommended above also covers this.

Capitalism is obviously not "fine" with recessions -- we dump enormous amounts of money into the economy when they occur in an attempt to stimulate it, and inequality tends to widen permanently in the absence of policies to counteract this.

Comment · 5 years ago
Most people live there, and most food for those people is grown there. These are people, who are not responsible for the catastrophes destroying their ability to live.
Comment · 5 years ago
I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm vaguely moralizing -- elsewhere in this thread I recommend a 2020 book called Less is More (https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more) that contains analysis of these problems and very specific strategies for addressing them.

It's well understood that wealthy countries, and especially the US, generate far more junk than poorer ones. We don't need to, and there's a big difference between sustainable strategies for getting people what they need and hoping (because, without planning, that's all we're doing) that capitalism will solve this problem through even greater amounts of consumption.

Comment · 5 years ago
Great argument.
Comment · 5 years ago
"We can literally consume our way out of this mess" is my new all-time favorite HN quote. Sorry if you were being tongue-in-cheek, it's just too good.
Comment · 5 years ago
Yeah this thread is filled with reactionaries downvoting everything that offends them :/
Comment · 5 years ago
I said GDP and GDP growth, and if two countries are competing on GDP, the mechanism by which they compete is growth.

I know you've seen my book recommendation in the thread here; it's about the incentives behind growth, and how de-growth can work and still encourage human flourishing. Rather than just reacting negatively, why not look it up?

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