serviceberry

I'm pretty sure that a good chunk of this article is generated by an LLM.

Governments try stuff like that pretty regularly (you can only buy certain things with food stamps, etc), but it's typically expensive to administer and inherently prone to abuse. Buy groceries with food stamps, sell groceries, buy drugs. On top of that, it's just inherently difficult to structure this in a way that's fair and useful to every person. If I inherited or built myself a nice rural home, I don't want a government-issue apartment - either instead or in addition to what I have. Do I get nothing? That's unfair. Do I get the stuff I don't want?

"Lump sum in cash" is the most flexible and equitable system. But then - and that's a major problem with UBI - you end up with people who spend it irresponsibly and then need help to survive. So you end up with UBI in addition to all the existing social safety nets.

I don't think capital has any special attachment to real estate specifically. It's just that we have policies that essentially require your money to be invested into something (because inflation); and we turned real estate into a safe investment asset through policies that create perpetual scarcity.

You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.

> The most hated companies [...] Johnson & Johnson, 3M

You're living in a serious bubble if you think people hate the company they most readily associate with shampoo or scotch tape.

Almost all "most hated company" rankings can be broken into two categories: the ones many consumers had direct negative experiences with (Equifax, Comcast) and the ones they were told by the media they should be upset with (Anheuser-Busch).

For better or worse, government jobs are perceived as something you get for life. That was part of the appeal: yeah, the pay is less than in the private sector, but they're unlikely to fire you even if you're not good or if the role no longer makes sense.

But that aside: even if we want to alter the deal, there are good ways and bad ways to do this. Jobs are important because they are a big part of your life and because you need one to pay the bills. So you should try to avoid "haha so long" / "oops, clicked the wrong button, come back" kinds of situations.

What's the damage to the society done by Disney holding the rights to Mickey Mouse? Like, if we're being honest?

Patents, sure. They're abused and come at a cost to the society. But all we've done here is created a culture where, in some sort of an imagined David-vs-Goliath struggle against Disney, we've enabled a tech culture where it's OK to train gen AI tech on works of small-scale artists pilfered on an unprecedented scale. That's not hurting Disney. It's hurting your favorite indie band, a writer you like, etc.

It's probably a matter of pragmatism. People are gonna use instant messengers, might as well recommend the least bad one. I've seen it in corporate environments too. If you have locked-down workstations, there's usually some list of free software that isn't officially supported, but doesn't require special approvals.

I'm guessing it's annotated by an LLM. Would be a lot of thankless work otherwise, so don't really blame the author, but it means you get the occasional nonsense summary.

Edit: yeah, the "methodology" page confirms this.

Note that this is gonna be skewed pretty heavily toward domains that have existed for most of HN's history, at the expense of any newer domains that had fewer chances to rack up points.

If you look at any 2-4 year period, the ranking tends to be quite different. Well, Paul Graham is there pretty consistently, but everything else changes.

More importantly, a lot of it was hidden from view. Your washing machine and laundry detergent might be not as good as 30 years ago, but... do you know that for sure? And when did that happen? Maybe you're just imagining it.

Your old home had a gas furnace, and then you bought new construction and it's all-electric. Did the government do this? Are you even gonna think about it when making an offer? Your bill is gonna be higher, but how much of it is just because it's a different home?

And even then... you get away with it for a while, and then it all of sudden becomes a political talking point.

You can run Arduino code on anything, since it's mostly just a bit of syntactic sugar around C. But I'm sure you know what I mean.

My point is that people who are attracted to Arduino are, by and large, not the kind of people who want to geek out about the inner workings of the MCU, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I used to say things like that, but come on: Arduino is targeted at hobbyists. More specifically, it's targeted at hobbyists who don't want to spend too much time learning hardware. If they did, they would be using a "bare" microcontroller better suited for their needs and costing one tenth the price. But they're not interested in microcontroller programming, they just want to get their art project done.

It's the same thing that happened with computers. Billions of people use them, but most just want to access Facebook or use MS Word, not learn OS internals. It's a different world from where we used to be 30-40 years ago, and that's fine. We design simpler, more intuitive products for them.

If a product meant for that group can't be used effectively by the target audience, I think the fault is with the designer, not with the user.

Because a lot of environmental movements aren't rooted in utilitarianism, but in deeper beliefs that the endless pursuit of growth is inherently evil. The basic idea is that tigers and wolves have as much right to the planet as we do, and we've already taken too much. Hence the degrowth movement, etc.

This is why many environmental activists see cheap, abundant energy as problematic. It would mean less air pollution or less climate change, but it would allow humans to "consume" more of the ecosystem.

To be clear, this isn't my worldview. But as with most other movements advocating for social change, the underlying ideology is usually more complex than it appears.

The author isn't posting angry rants about it. I think one can look at it as just a quirky collection. No different from cataloging the movies that feature the Wilhelm scream, and how many articles have been written about that?

> Like it or not, "eyes glued to phone" has become a pretty clear indicator of distraction, and I'm fine calling this out.

This is not like work meetings: 99% of meaningful policy work is happening behind closed doors. The publicly-televised sessions is where people give speeches for the cameras and then cast votes with (typically) pre-negotiated outcomes. So, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be upset if someone is browsing Reddit while an opposition politician is saying their piece.