Comment by MrMcCall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrMcCall | Hacker News Reader

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All of our problems are caused by our not prioritizing compassion in our systems' designs and implementations, including how our economic transactions are structured and performed.

Compassion is the root of all virtue, and the balm for all vice. With a greater attention to compassion, every member of the chain of persons that grow, pick, process, market, sell, and even own Kenya coffee will help contribute to a better, fairer, and less deleterious to the Earth, system of farm-to-table.

Being compassionate includes being honest in one's business dealings, as well as not being greedy for exhorbitant profit. It also endures that everyone in the pipeline is actually performing a useful service, not just being an unnecessary middleman adding needless cost and other encumbrances.

And, of course, the Kenyan system was set up by the English Empire, so its parasitic pattern of worming its way into the fabric of all economic transactions is baked into their system. Yes, it's going to be difficult to extricate that selfishness from their system, but it's difficult for every culture to rid itself of the parasitism of selfishness in our societal systems. Note that ALL our current systems have that oft-dominant component present in them, causing waste and grief for all but the callous owners.

In our every endeavor, compassion is the only guaranteed path forward that has no intrinsic negative elements or effects, only difficulties due to our idioticly selfish inertias -- selfishly callous disregard being the opposite of compassionate service to the whole's well-being.

I admire where your heart is at, it’s wonderful to see that empathy has a large role in your life. Although I encourage you to look deeper at where compassion comes from. There are people in my family who believe being gay will commit your afterlife to eternal torture, and it is their compassion that compels them to act in intolerance of people’s choice to love.

Empathy and compassion are social virtues, however if you bake it into the underlying governmental systems, you can end up in situations where those who are in control get to decide which type of “compassion” to enforce.

>>There are people in my family who believe being gay will commit your afterlife to eternal torture, and it is their compassion that compels them to act in intolerance of people’s choice to love.

All you should have to do in cases like this is tell them you simply do not believe in the things they do and to not press it again. If they continue, things are obviously not coming from a place of compassion – they’re just selfish intolerant assholes.

It is truly sad, my friend, that you have to deal with misguided people who believe their religiosity is enough to countermand the Greatest Command(ment): "To love God with all your being, and then to love your neighbor as yourself."

Your family's views are unequivocally wrong. Acting upon homosexual desires, like all other choices we make, is a personal choice; so long as no one is being forced to do anything, and the object of one's desire is sexually mature (each society must define that, itself, but let them be adults, respect their choices, and help them understand the situation), there is no sin there that I know of, except for, perhaps, a bit of greedy waste of sexual energy, but that is ubiquitous, AFAICT.

No, what makes a person deserving of hell is to disregard the happiness of others, or to even cruelly create unhappiness via oppression. We are to love one another, not judge them for their personal choices. Besides, it looks to me like many, or perhaps most, gay folks were born that way, in the same way we understand the biology of trans folks' brains likely differ in ways that are counter to "normal" sexually dimorphic structures (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class from Stanford). Regardless, one's sexuality (and gender identification) is one's own business, so long as what we do is consensual with other adult participants.

No one is truly practicing religion if universal compassion is not the teaching or the goal. Of course, liars and hypocrites and the willfully ignorant say otherwise, but what they say doesn't count for sh_t. You can identify them because, beyond their ebullient, self-satisfied faces of perceived self-superiority, they are deeply unhappy and very likely to have no power over their own demons. Such is the fate of the cruel hypocrites. When we sow unhappiness, that is what we reap.

I disagree with your last paragraph, though. There is only one kind of compassion: gentle, kind, and respectful (at least to some extent), and it is not any one religion's purview to determine it. It is a human potential, and a human requirement, required for our personal and societal evolution towards peace and happiness, each and every one of us. Anyone who tells you "their" compassion is special or solely of one path or another is just another over-confident fool who has been deceived into believing their false sense of self-superiority. That way is the way of the oppressors, the tyrants, and their followers who cause so much mischief and misery in this world.

But, no, there is no compulsion in religion, so it should never be baked into any govt, but we can and should bake fairness in regulations regarding taxes, income reporting, and even minimum and maximum wages, so that the whole of society is, if not benefitting, at least not harmed by their commerce. No company can operate without either the consent of the state or this world's entire cultural and technological apparatus. We can at least ensure that their profit is not wholly destructive.

> Besides, it looks to me like many, or perhaps most, gay folks were born that way, in the same way we understand the biology of trans folks' brains likely differ in ways that are counter to "normal" sexually dimorphic structures

Interestingly, those earlier studies claiming to show that brains of the trans-identifying are atypical for their sex didn't control for sexuality, and many used exclusively homosexual cohorts.

So the findings were actually brain differences relating to homosexuality - later studies that controlled for sexuality (including same-sex and opposite-sex attracted transsexuals in the study population) couldn't replicate the earlier results relating to sexually dimorphic brain structures.

Instead, researchers found functional differences in brain regions relating to body perception, similar to what is seen in body dysmorphic disorder patients.

> (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class at Stanford).

There is a video where he discusses this, albeit without properly citing any studies, but his description of the research is out of date. Probably it's an old recording.

That's very interesting.

Yes, my understanding of Dr. Sapolsky's work comes from rather old videos he did, so, sure, I don't doubt that what you're saying is probably true, but I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm going to have to rely upon the expertise of others to validate any claims/results. Thanks for your explication.

Regardless, what is important is (IMHO) that our notions of how genderish traits can mix and match in different individuals in ways that don't match our classical notions of gender. The best result of that would be recognizing that we have to take each person as they are, and let them be their happiest self, by their measure.

At the end of the day, however a person justifies it, respectful, kind, gentle-as-possible compassion is the best policy for us all, to everyone, always. It is always our choice.

The problem is capitalism cannot function without an underclass, and while each capitalist country itself harbors an underclass that is brutally exploited, the countries themselves also become effectively an underclass too on the global stage, specifically the global south or the "developing world." Many of these countries are being exploited in one way or another, either by way of shady finance dealings that saddle them with untenable debt, which they must satisfy by selling their resources to western corpos at rock bottom prices, or via trade deals that inherently favor the western nations. The only countries I'm aware of that managed to avoid this trap in a big way were South Korea, which effectively created incubators for their home industries to grow in without needing to contend with the world market until they were in a fit state to do so, and China, which effectively is one giant state-run corporation.

The rest get fed to global capitalism in one way or another, the ways varying, but the outcome being pretty consistent: they're broke, they're in debt, and despite oftentimes being quite rich in resources, remain both of those things.

While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work. Capitalism may need an unskilled class of workers to work, but paying them like crap is not necessary as we’ve seen here in the US and seemed to have forgotten over the generations.

I mean, that's just late stage capitalism. Growth is required, every revenue stream must have all slack taken out of it. Any money left in the market is inefficiency which capitalism inherently rewards those who can remove inefficiencies. A perfectly balanced market means that every exploitable dollar is, in fact, exploited, which means the poors can't have anything. Whatever money must be paid to them must be then recouped.

And if you think you're safe in the middle class, it was predicted that and would seem to be bearing out as correct that once capitalism has largely completed exploiting the underclass, it can't simply stop exploiting. The next class up becomes the underclass. Then the next. Then the next until we're all broke save for the rich on top, at which point the entire arrangement stalls, money stops flowing, and the system collapses into anarchy.

The project of neoliberalism is difficult to fully articulate, but a major component at least is the "taming" of capitalist economic systems so as to make them sustainable. This project succeeded for a good amount of time, but that was also predicated on having nations to exploit, and room to grow markets. As those things become less true the entire system seems less stable overall. I mean personally I've witnessed three "once in a lifetime" economic crashes so far, and we're looking to be winding up for another one with the incoming administration and their bonkers non-understanding of tariffs.

You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers. Arguably when you empower a doctors and lawyers class driving bmws and buying flights to aspen, they are spending proportionally more of their money in the economy than the billionaire class ahead of them that would have sat on this money if they extracted it by now and dumped it into gold bonds and land or something stupid like that instead of something that generates actual economic activity. And if you had them so poor they could barely afford food then there would be no BMW and no Aspen.

I don't disagree with you in the slightest, but I'm not in charge here, and our current batch of elites in power seem content to coast out the collapse, pocketing every dollar they can as the world crumbles around them. I don't personally think it's a good long term plan, and to be fair, numerous economists and even billionaires have come out saying that the world is not in a good way. But they still use their power to maintain the status quo and not foster badly needed change, so it's difficult to assess to what degree this is legitimate thought on their part, or simply saying what they know will sound good as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth.

The solutions here aren't arcane magic or anything: Money needs to leave the rich, and get to the working class to re-stabilize consumer habits. But since the Reagan era's slashing of all manner of corporate regulations, the system seems either incapable or unwilling to let that happen, no matter how much of an imminent threat it presents to that system. So we go on and circle the drain.

> as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth

It truly is, too.

I do appreciate the tropes of "It is the year 4,000 BC, and you are immortal, the pyramids are being built. You make $10,000 a day, tax-free, and spend none of it..."

But even that is hard to digest.

I'm in my mid-40s. If I tell my friends, "Someone gave you a million dollars a day, every single day since you've been born. And yet, there are multiple people out there with ten times more money than you," it becomes more digestible.

And still just as unconscionable.

> You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers.

With increased financializarion and abstraction of tradable assets - the capital class no longer has to worry about "goods" or "customers" (in as much as they may be indicators of bad stocks with a dim future). Services are the future: as far as they are concerned, the amount of profits available in housing or healthcare may be infinite, of you need the chart to go up, increase the price of the cancer drugs in your portfolio.

Most countries have national healthcare systems which have pricing power over "cancer drugs". When those are expensive it's they're because genuinely very expensive to make, and increasingly they're personalized because every cancer is different.

> While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work

That was a temporary blip because the underclass had been temporarily exported to a bombed-out Europe that was unable to meet its production needs, giving the US a huge market and very little manufacturing competition. Then came the Nixon shock, stagflation, and Reagan.

It was because everyone was poor and so weren't capable of bidding up the prices of homes nor did they have expectations of living on their own.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cWvT

Also, 25% of homes in 1950 didn't have indoor toilets. It was very much not modern quality housing.

Note, more households in the US own their home now than they did in 1984. (I don't have numbers on this one back to the 50s.)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USHOWN

Fear about this is possibly suppressed memories of the 2008 recession, which was really bad!

>While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work

The underclass? Or the WHITE MALE underclass?

Black latino and asian people bought homes too you know. Thats what redlining was about: minorities and poor people were buying homes too close for comfort to the wealthy white people.

Literally the only thing every layman you're gonna ask knows about real estate is "location location location" which is exactly why redlining was harmful and has led to poverty that is measured in generations. Yes, racial minorities did buy homes (at a lesser rate than whites, and in worse places to buy homes) in redlined neighborhoods, with the added and so obvious it feels ridiculous I need to say it caveat that: the homes in redlined neighborhoods were worth substantially less, which not only meant they had a harder time being financed by colored applicants, and an easier one being financed by white ones for the purposes of rent extraction, but also meant even for the ones that did manage to buy, that the property was then worth substantially less when passed on to their children.

And, that's assuming that the neighborhood in question didn't get bulldozed for a freeway by Robert Moses or any of the dozens of urban planners that used eminent domain to rat fuck minority homeowners out of the meager scraps they had managed to acquire.

And, that's only racial minorities, that's not even going into women who thanks to being largely un-banked and the presumptions that finance was simply over their pretty little heads, and of course that their jobs were chronically underpaid if they even could get them, would be laughed out of a bank entirely if they tried to buy a home.

So like, was it ONLY white men buying homes? Nah. But it was predominantly white men buying all the homes you would actually want to buy and if you weren't a white man, you had an objectively, measurable harder time doing it.

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