clove

Behold the new "Google it."

Have you tried drinking cherry juice? I heard moving to Washington can help due to the air there.

Sure.

My prediction is that the pluralistic axes will come back to China, but they will be superficial and strictly controlled. The recovering axes will be aesthetic and consumptive such as fandoms, hobby subcultures, fitness, foreign credentials... They will give young people somewhere to hold face when the main ladder rejects them.

Notably, these axes will be different from the pre-1949 ones: lineage, religion, and reputation came from institutions that were alternative sources of authority. The 2021 crackdowns on fan clubs and gaming showed the state will regulate any subculture that starts organizing people outside the approved channels. So I expect a split: people with exit options (e.g., overseas degrees, foreign income, portable skills) get a real pluralistic status life, while everyone else stays on the single entangled axis, where competition likely intensifies as the pool narrows to those who cannot leave.

As this progresses, we basically just watch to see if any new axis produces its own gatekeepers not credentialed by the state. I'm guessing every one instead gets an official association within a few years of reaching noticable scale.

It seems like everyone is saying that the root cause is economic scarcity, but the Cultural Revolution's destruction of pluralistic status hierarchies deserves a large part of the blame.

Before the rev, your social standing in China could be judged by dimensionS (plural emphasized): lineage, academics, religion, business reputation, regional identity...

The Cultural Revolution tore each of those dimensions down, by design, for teh purpose of creating a new single dimension (politically sanctified identity).

The main issue with doing this to a Chinese culture, specifically, is that now the concept of face - already extremely important culturally - becomes basically everything. Every social interaction becomes zero-sum because there's only one thing to compete over.

In a pluralistic status culture, you can lose face in one domain and maintain it in another.

The Cultural Revolution removed that defensive buffer.

IN the past couple decades, China has added a second dimension, wealth. But it's hardly a real axis due to wealth being easily achievable through party alignment. In other words, the two dimensions are entangled. I doubt a principle component analysis would find them to be separate domains.

In any case, the younger Chinese generation who has access to global online subcultures, international credentials, professional specialization, etc., is recovering the pluralistic status axes. So... well, I could write my predictions, but that wasn't the point of my comment, so I'll end it here.

Based.

An immigrant visa is a privilege a country grants and can withdraw. It's not like two parties signed a contract, and the contract was broken. Applicants bet on a slow, arbitrary system, and now the odds are moving.

I am one such "gambler" in this process, and it's happening to me too. I don't like the turn of events, but I also do not feel robbed.

Playing victim bestows no benefit.

The site is far from strong evidence for what most people in this thread believe. It is also AI-generated, if you cannot tell.

"Canada is taxing you back" frames a Canadian tariff as a charge on Americans when it's really charge on Canadian importers.

The site reached the front page of HN because it confirms the mainstream opinion here, which is "go team go," anti-Trump admin US.

I'm not pro-Trump admin btw; But I am anti political team sports on HN and will continue saying so until HN reverts to its previous culture of objectivity that we had before this culture of blindly signal-boosting anything that portrays the current boogieman as bad.

Am I misreading this or was "rogue" really not the right word for this?

Dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs are a tax on Canadian buyers of US goods.

The Federal Reserve studies on tariffs have shown basically no net tangible benefits to tariffs: any import protection industries gain from tariffs is cancelled out by the cost of the tariff on consumers.

And of course, the two governments' accounts of the collapse of the talking are in direct contrast: within hours, both placed the failure to make a deal on the other party.

It appears to me that any discussion in support or against tariffs here now isn't data-based but just political teamsports.

The old HN would just note the studies on tariffs and move on. But not today's HN!

So here we have a really long thread on HN saying "go team go."

I don't have a dog in this fight (I live in Japan), but I'm a bit disappointed to see the responses here refusing to engage with the assertion.

reply1: "The alternative is bad, and Trump is evil" reply2: "Uhhh, source for that? /reddit" reply2a: "I bet he subscribes to the wrong politics" reply3: "Americans are idiots" reply4: "I bet you have a personality disorder" reply5: "You're dumb but I'm not going to expound" reply6: "WTF dude" (proceeds to uphold a murderer as an example)

Can no one explain why the ideas the OP fears will not come to fruition? Can anyone explain the safeguards of the UHC system? Or do discussions about policy now all fall under the teamsport known as modern politics?

Is this what hackernews has become? It wasn't like this a decade ago.

"Online society?" How did the online society treat him? I didn't witness a consensus.

What I saw was people who thought he was insane, people who thought he was a genius, people who considered him a racist, people who saw him as a racial hero, people who pitied him, people who respected him...

You might have a lot to say about online society, but you're the bird staring at the monitor. There are actually no conclusions to be drawn.

I do like this comment, but I've gotten reprimanded for posting similar comments. It might have been dang that told me that for the purpose of keeping discussions serious, we should refrain from sarcastic posts. I've been posting and reading in that spirit ever since, and so when I first read your comment I assumed you were serious.

Buy what, exactly? GPUs? Are they "low" right now?

I'm not saying your wrong, and I'm not trying to be antagonistic, but when I read your comment, I uncontrollably began imagining I was reading one of those reader-submitted comments in a newspaper about the internet in the 90s. Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I was somehow teleported to a future in which AI is ever-present in the same way the net is now and trying to reconcile your viewpoint, which was impossible.

Of course, my hallucination does not dismiss the possibility that we are in a bubble. Wasn't CSCO something like 200x PE during the dot com bubble? People see immense potential in an idea but don't know how to properly price it, and so we get what is seen as essentially infinite expected growth priced into companies and their products.

My $3k laptop has nearly the best components on the market right now. The problem is that it has a poor build (MSI) and is falling apart in a way that's not repairable. I looked into purchasing an equivalent-or-better laptop, and I couldn't find anything under $6 for essentially the same specs, and over $10k for a significant upgrade. Though I need my laptop for work, I decided just to ride it out till it's death.