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Comment by spunkie00 | Hacker News Reader

Posting their cool essay on a computer that needs internet that needs electricity that needs power plants that needs natural resource extraction that needs heavy machinery that needs metallurgy that needs large factories that needs engineers that needs universities that needs thousands of years of human capital etc etc etc

If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods.

Why is it always other people that need to change? You change.

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You did it, you posted the meme.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

If your main complaint is product bad, yet you personally buy products you have no real need for, the meme is true. Stop telling everyone else how making unnecessary things is evil if you are the person buying them. Its like complaining about consumerism next to your funko-pop wall.

Yeah, don't give negative feedback at all. If you don't like a feature of the product or the supply chain, fuck yOu (in a Randy M. kind of way)

Their negative feedback consists of stating the obvious, with such gems as the economy makes things that go to waste, and the economy should make happiness, instead of products. They are stating blatantly obvious things. Yeah, everyone wishes things didn't go to waste. Everyone wishes they were happier. Say something new or stop being a hypocrite; pick one to be taken seriously.

"They" are not always stating that which is obvious to everyone. "They" are usually suggesting better ways and these ways are often enough based on engineering and science. What is put on the front page of media is, of course, the obvious, the nonsense, the sensational, the clickbait.

You don't have to say something new to a younger generation if that younger generation hasn't understood or even heard the old, the obvious, yet.

Youngsters might have heard some of it but their brains are often high enough on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ... and then there are the 'media-sigmas and cool kids' who sing that shit in choirs and canons.

A lot of things go to waste and yet there is tons of useful stuff coming out of recycling and up-cycling and that's just two methods with a very small "margin" and undeveloped.

There are those design and architecture blogs and firms and there is cool shit all the time and wonderful projects everywhere but the pointlessness of the over-engineered financial reasoning behind yearly sursurpluspluses is stacked against that.

You don't catch and bring a culprit to justice if you drop the investigation, which might have to circle long enough for some other brain or pair of eyes to find the final puzzle piece.

And not everyone wishes they were happier.

There's enough to criticize about anarchist, leftist critiques and groups and collectives as well, though, just as much exploitation of youth, gullibility and pain and crisis, and problems, really, but not systemically.

And there's that fallacy, something ad hominem, I think, so we should focus on what is said and written and, if obvious but unsolved, get to the bottom of it instead of saying "I don't care", "nobody cares", "human nature in the 21st post marketing psychology and decades of punched food, drink, drugs, meds and media century"

And this investigation consists mostly of just repeating the same thing over and over again? Acting like work or having to put it real effort to survive is some new invention is stupid and incorrect. To live fairly, you must work. To pretend otherwise is foolish. Once again, say something new or give a new way to solve this "problem". This anti-work bs is stupid and has been stupid for all of time, in all of the many forms it has taken.

Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation.

The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.

Stuff like this:

> Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything.

The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty.

A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed.

The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm.

Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement.

It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order.

This wasn't that long ago.

We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article)

Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't.

But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}

The first comment:

> If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods.

You, with derision:

> Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation.

> The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.

So... Is it okay to decide to change on a personal level to not work or does that make you a dingus like your brother?

The whole point is that we have achieved insane productivity without the commensurate increase in quality of life and leisure due to the idiotic status quo.

> But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true.

Indeed.

Ironically, the first two panels in this comic are themselves a meme, i.e., a sort of lampshading. It is of course at least a little bit hypocritical to use your iPhone to post about how terrible Apple is. The second two panels are just strawmen.

oh, it's a matter of means, opportunity and peace of mind.

this little dependency sequence is exactly how I, again and again, come to the conclusion about what climate change is driven by and climate change (re-)actions should be.

but in terms of change: others need to change so that change can hold the line.

example: good teachers are scarce. and when there are a few or only one at your school, most of their good impact is offset or entirely negated by their colleagues. and that's not life, that's not what it is, that's not how it goes.

It's because people in the dependency sequence refuse to change and instead serve someone who poses as a devil because the motherfucker gets them high on punched drugs (food and drink and media) that fuck with their brains to make them think 'I don't care', 'that's not my job', 'I don't care', 'I don't even care about not caring', 'People don't care', 'nobody cares' ...

AND: at almost every step in that dependency sequence, there are better ways to do things. implementation takes quite a bit of time and so there is no surplus to last years surplus, something that hasn't created any added value to civilization since the beginning of time.

everything is going on and these 'nobody cares' people are f u c k i n g annoying and so are all these 'normalizers' ... instead of adding value, they just serve those who ruin games and playing fields in exactly the ways that others are actively trying to change for the better, which is why there are demands for bottom-up change: your bossies won't tell you to change so you have to get it yourself instead of 'just doing your job', ffs.

you are right, of course, it's a personal matter, fuck whoever; but from a rational, game-theoretical, and super-rational perspective, what you said is nonsense and so is using that dependency sequence as an argument. Especially in the lights of all that shit in storage, or cleaning out storage for new shit that can only be marketed via deception and cross-media priming, and so on ... ...

just provide people with means, opportunity and let them have peace of mind, then you'll see what side they pick, which is where we end up, again, "burning men" with psychedelics and our decades of experience in cool fields and wonderful remote places, 'just doing our jobs' ...

we really ruined too much potential of capitalism. it's sad, but the wall-street rich did to capitalism what communist leadership did to communism; only that communism didn't get to develop that long ...

Title: Portfolio Communists threatening to ruin Capitalism and America from the Inside. ... no, needs work, any ideas?

Hypocrisy is a baseline human aha-moment, btw, you can't use it in or as an argument. There should be a fallacy for that, if anyone has time to formulate one.

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