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This is silly - it's more about the mismatch between the custom of buying a person's time and paying for the outcomes an employer is looking for. The flip side of this is that employees are stealing from their employer whenever their attention wavers from the job, for example talking with co-workers or texting or web browsing or whatever.

The reality is that hourly pay is almost always a poor approximation for the expectations between employer and employee. Calling any deviation from strictly kept time for an employee in 100% service to their employer "theft" is just silly, whether it's an employee chatting about their weekend, or an employer asking for some extra minutes. Each should (and outside of artificial constructs like this article does) weigh total compensation against benefit / effort and decide if the relationship is worth continuing.

Judging by the replies a lot of people agree with those concerned citizens. I hope that the majority are terrified by this. It is one thing to recommend masks for legit health concerns, but it's a very slippery slope that we've already gone far down towards them becoming a religious/ political talisman that signified whether you are willing to shut up and agree with your leaders, or be an "anti-masker". We need to be more outspoken about all these baby steps toward complete submission to superstition.

> The escalators I take to work are filled with the same desperate faces and vacant eyes I feel staring through me on the subway, except instead of standing still, they’re bounding up it, subconsciously aware that below their feet is yet another opportunity to optimize on an existing convenience.

This is a super pessimistic take on what the author is seeing. I the last five years I have worked between two cities in my country, one where the federal government is the major employer, one the financial center. Getting off the train downtown in the financial core, I see engaged, enthusiastic, and hungry people heading to work to make something of themselves. They bound up the escalator because they have energy and drive and want to improve theirs and their family's lives.

In the government town, I see lots of people with unfulfilling, boring, and secure jobs, and the whole vibe of the town is defeat.

For many people, competition and pressure are essential to enjoying life, and we want to optimize what we do to support that. Without the pressure we atrophy. There are lots of places (like a lot of government work) where you dont have to work hard and can enjoy other parts of life. But what I've seen is that usually it doesnt work that way.

If they cant support themselves, they should find something people do want to pay for. The universe doesnt owe the website creators a revenue stream.

I think there is also an element of short term vs long term reward. Things that are more likely to be worth paying for often are harder and longer term in some way (like university or even reading a novel) while ad delivered content generally is optimized to be easy to consume, and almost consequentially is very shallow. Because the goal is to keep attention, not to be comprehensive or useful.

So I think there is an argument that ad support, and attention focused platforms in general, do have a negative effect on the content.

I think part of the tension is that advertising (and other data harvesting) attempts to monetize content that has virtually zero value for a lot of people: take any of the articles on a typical HN front page - right now the top two are "Booting from a vinyl record" and "Exotic programming ideas". These sound interesting (and are already somewhat well targeted to me as a HN reader), but the content is still worth almost nothing to me if I have to sign up for something or watch an ad to view it. Now apply the same reasoning to most web content that I value even less, like random medium articles or Forbes techcrunch or something that are pretty much designed just to get people to click on them. Most internet content that we are considering here is just there to get you to look at ads, and so ironically not worth "paying" for in any way for most people.

So ad blocking puts the user in a funny position. It let's them continue to look at things they don't value much. And I think content creaters looking for views probably would rather complain about ad blockers than give users an ultimatum that could result in them just going somewhere else.

The timing of this is funny because I literally only switched to a mac from linux a month ago. I may be an outlier but I prefer the "polish" and user experience of ubuntu to apple - I find the unity gui to be easier to navigate and understand than mac, and I find the OS way less intrusive.

But what caused me to switch to a mac was the constant CPU and memory problems I was having with ubuntu.

Chrome and zoom both seemed to kill the machine when used for too long or in the wrong combination. That is the kind of problem I dont want to spend time debugging, and switching to Mac, it is gone, and my productivity is way higher, even accounting for the new annoyances.

But now between the new architecture and the moves for greater control over how I use my machine, I really dont know how to think about what I want my next computer to be. While I dismissed WSL in the past, I'd say it is becoming a contender again.

It looks good to me! One suggestion I did not see was to be able to add hair color and complexion. Some of the suggestions I had I would not have gone with because of mismatch with my skin & hair.

This whole discussion is a good reminder why any analysis is always subjective. If there is an actual fault in the underlying numbers, fine, but what I see reading the thread is people finding ways to justify why the data is incomplete, there are still more people dying, we need to fear covid, etc.

I've seen the articles that talk about excess deaths, and then the posts are all affirming that yes, we need to fear covid, people are dying, etc.

I think there is obvious evidence that covid is a real disease that kills people, but the cherry picked reactions that people have to data saying different things drives home that analysis is always political, not some kind of objective thing we can hold up as beyond criticism.

See climate change...

And lots of media fed panics also only become clear in retrospect, e.g. Y2K.

Market value is hypothetically based on present value of future earnings, not immediate value to society. Unless Moderna's business plan is to ransom humanity to extract the most value possible from covid, it should not be surprising that there is more value in a longer term business.

It also says something about the in incentives that drug companies trying to maximize market cap have.

Just because you believe that there is some benevolent authority that we can just "give up liberty" to an everything will be ok doesn't make it the only opinion, even if it's easier to think about.

It's easy to see how if there is attention and power that comes with a big enough crisis, everything suddenly gets framed as such a crisis (see rights violations, climate crisis, war on drugs, bullying, etc.) So you better hope that whoever gets to exercise absolute power in the case of a crisis is on your side and shares your values.

Those who trade liberty for security get neither as the saying goes. But I think the above is well understood, and I guess rejected by some, because I see so many positions that think giving away our freedom is ok.

What we really need are stronger politicians who can unite people and find compromises between freedom and public health measures, that help us collectively move forward. This crisis has shown how weak politicians have become (and how horribly technocrats and corporates have been at filling that void). Leadership is not forcing people to do stuff, that only makes society more divided and undermines attempts to solve problems. We need leadership and we don't have it.

Normally I'd ignore that, but yes, that's the classic argument to try and short circuit real debate by making us think that one death anywhere is worse than small actions we can take. I disagree, just like I think we should be able to create other social policies that don't save everyone but that try to compromise between the kind of world we want and the safety of its inhabitants. It's hard to think about and takes strong leadership to navigate, but instead of talking about that we focus of hyperbole and hashtags