marcuskane2

And just like the panic over cell phones, this too shall pass.

Maybe half of HN is too young to remember (or old enough to have forgotten?) but when cell phones with cameras were becoming mainstream, there was media panic over them too - people could be discretely filming in bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. There were even a few high-profile salacious stories where people did use their phones to film inappropriately.

And then we collectively decided that having cameras with us was generally beneficial and rarely harmful, and people realized that creeps who wanted to hide hidden cameras could already do so, and we all kinda moved on with our lives.

I can't leave my house without being on a dozen Ring cameras, Flock cameras and probably a handful of satellites, along with devices tracking Bluetooth and WiFi IDs every time I enter a store or a cop car drives by or having my license plate scanned by passing tow trucks. Drawing the line at glasses seems pretty arbitrary.

It's particularly sad that we just proved this with the massive Covid-era stimulus and yet didn't collectively learn the lesson.

We gave millions of people unemployment checks that were larger than their actual income had been, gave low and mid income workers stimulus checks, gave business owners forgivable debt for payroll and a year later we didn't have increased quality of life, we just had fast-food that cost twice as much, apartments that cost 50% more and billions of dollars spent on gambling, crypto and meme stock option trading.

Or they're a student who has to work a part-time job after school. Or they have a long commute. Or they have hours of practice for a competitive sport or extracurricular. Or they have to take care of their siblings, grandparent or sick parent. Or they were told by their parents and teachers that because they're smart and do well in school that they don't need to worry about studying. Or they know their parents can't afford an elite school anyway, so they know they just have to score well enough to get into a school with in-state tuition and noncompetitive admissions.

Two kids who both went to the same school, were told the same things about the importance of the SAT and dedicated equal time to study and preparation can probably say that the difference in their scores is indicative of differences in intelligence.

But any two random students? There are so many factors that could cause students to underperform their hypothetical max score if they had perfect conditions in the months leading up to the test and day of.

This was posted on a Saturday night (in the US). A story posted at lunch time on a Tuesday is going to get 100x or maybe 10,000x more views than a story posted on a Saturday night.

It's not that HN readers lack intellectual curiosity or have some character flaw or narrow worldview, it's just that few people are reading and commenting between the late hours of Saturday and early morning of Sunday. It's 6 am Sunday in California as I post this.

> hence more promotion-worthy

Relevant for big companies where people intend to have decade spanning careers with multiple promotions.

But for the tech worker who is going to have a series of 1-3 year stints at different companies, their promotions are more likely to come from switching companies than from showing loyalty or commitment to their current employer.

> here is where I get confused

It doesn't seem like you're confused, it seems like you're using that as a rhetorical device to be pedantic.

> I'm not trying to be pedantic, but

Followed by 4 paragraphs of pedantry, after moving the goalposts from "added sugar" to all sugar.

Eat less junk food. Spend less time lawyering the definition of junk food.

Internet commenters try to get me to hate lots of people for lots of reasons, but "Parents trying to send their kid to a school that fits their kid's needs" seems like such a hard sell.

Like, I get the desire in a hypothetical, that you hope that people in power would use their power to make public schools better if their kids were forced to go there.

But in reality, the actually powerful can just pay for private schools out of pocket and the vouchers help a lot of middle-income families send their kid to a school that can provide a better environment for whatever definition of better is relevant to that individual.

It just seems like such misplaced anger and energy. You could just advocate for improving public schools, without attacking regular families trying to do their best while trapped inside a system they have very little influence on.

There's no legal mechanism for the vast majority of what the president has done.

Often it happens anyway, along with some protests, some resignations and maybe an eventual court case reversal months or years later.

That "huge gap" is probably 3-10 years.

A relatively tiny percent of mortgages not getting paid in 2007 & 2008 caused a global financial crisis. If even just 10% of current office workers lose their jobs and quit paying their mortgages, their car loans, their car insurance, etc things will go bad fast. And realistically, it's going to be more like 80% of office jobs gone in the next 10 years.

> a home is the largest purchase they will ever make and the bulk of their net worth

That's bad and a central part of the problem.

I accept that my car is depreciating in value every year I own it, and but I need a car so I buy one. I don't need it to be a good long term investment, despite it being a major purchase.

The entire mindset of treating a family's home as being an investment class rival to bonds and equities is a relatively new phenomenon, and one that's clearly been detrimental to many.

This is much ado about nothing.

The US has so much excess capacity in farmland that we do absurd things with our excess corn and soybeans. We refine soybeans into ethanol to put into our gasoline. We feed corn to cows which kills them in fairly short order, but we just slaughter them before they die from the diet. We put high fructose corn syrup into everything. We use corn and soy derivatives for random industrial and chemical feedstock.

Data centers won't take up even .0001% of farm land, and "food production" wouldn't be meaningfully impacted unless we lost many, many orders of magnitude more land than that. This is panic about a rain drop in the ocean.

I've gotta know which side of Poe's law this falls on.

Was this written in earnest or as an ironic/facetious joke?

There are a lot of misunderstandings in this post. I'll try to explain a few of them, which maybe can help realign your whole understanding.

For starters, American insurance has a "maximum out-of-pocket" amount, which means the maximum you can possibly pay for healthcare costs. My plan, from just a regular unknown company doing boring things, has a maximum out of pocket of $5k for an individual. So there's no scenario where I'd ever benefit from spending "a couple tens of thousands of dollars" because even if I spend the whole year in an ICU bed at a cost of millions of dollars to the hospital, I only pay $5,000.

Also, "a lot of people either bankrupt themselves, and end up paying much more than that" doesn't make sense. Declaring bankruptcy means you don't pay the debt, you wouldn't pay a lot AND declare bankruptcy. You'd see the amount was too much to pay, declare bankruptcy, and have the debt wiped out.

Keep in mind that millions of Americans have essentially no assets that aren't protected in a bankruptcy (car, home and retirement accounts are generally safe). It's not like millionaires are going bankrupt from medical costs, it's people who had nothing to begin with declaring bankruptcy when they got hurt while uninsured and going back to zero (instead of negative).

The real problem of the US system isn't the subsidies for the poor, it's the opaque, convoluted billing system between insurance companies, pharmacy benefit managers, and providers. Billions of dollars are siphoned out of the system as profit to insurers and hundreds of millions are wasted on salaries for the bureaucracy of managing the billing system.

> your personal (not hosted by a corp) website

I'm not sure that's enough. A few years ago there were some set of websites that wanted less censorship than the main corporate sites (or at least, a different set of censorship rules), I forget all their names now - voat, rumble, gab, parler, etc and people who didn't like the content they saw there just went upstream to cloud providers, app stores, registrars, payment processors, CDNs, ISPs and anywhere else in order to shut them down, cut them off or prevent access.

Tons of sites that failed to perfectly comply with American media conglomerate's interpretation of copyright have been forced offline, had their domain names seized, etc.

There was a period of time where the MPAA and RIAA were routinely suing random teenagers and grandparents for life-destroying sums of money because they used Napster to share a song they liked with a friend.

I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed and can't result in people getting arrested, losing their jobs, their visas or their funding for saying things that the people in power don't want said.

It's crazy to me that you're still blaming the poorest, most exploited, least powerful person in the economy for the problems instead of the people actually responsible.

Since you moved the goalposts after I pointed out the absurdity of suggesting that the underpaid Honduran laborer is also bidding up the price of housing to a broader, indirect impact, I'll go ahead and point out that your argument still fails there. That low-cost labor you're complaining about? That makes construction of housing less expensive. The migrants are building more houses than they're occupying.

Be mad at the top 1%. Be mad at the people who inherited land, wealth and power. Be mad at the people raising your rent and preventing people from building more housing. But don't be mad at some guy just trying to make an honest living doing hard work to stay fed and sheltered because he wasn't born as lucky as you.