Bjorkbat

We've all heard the WallStreetBets crowd call themselves "apes". First thing I thought of when I saw a bunch of NFT apes and heard the name of the project was a bunch of apes holding GameStop.

That being said I can actually kind of buy the other arguments. When you put the logo next to the Totenkopf it's pretty hard to deny that they look alike. Add some crossed bones behind the skull and it's almost a spitting image.

Maybe we software engineers should get wise to the fact that, in theory, we’re as easily replaceable as a driver working for Uber. Sure, in practice, it may not be so easy to replace a Bay Area engineer with an engineer from a substantially less expensive country, but it’s doable, and perhaps that should give us reason to pause. We shouldn’t so easily enable bad actors because our compensation makes us believe that we’re fundamentally different from a factory worker. We’re not.

We should wholly expect to one day have to live in the world we created. We should expect to reap what we sow.

Very expensive for New Mexico, and expensive in general. Getting around can take some getting used to (certain roads predate the US). Wouldn't recommend moving there if you're young as most of the population is of retirement age and most businesses cater to that crowd.

That being said, I enjoy visiting every now and then. There are good restaurants and no shortage of cultural attractions and events. I particularly enjoy visiting for the Farolito Walk.

I would recommend living in Albuquerque and taking the Railrunner or simply driving when the itch to visit strikes.

It's very inexpensive, and sits at the foothills of the Sandia Mountains and Petroglyph National Park. It's almost always sunny, yet is rarely too hot for outdoor activities. As far as bike infrastructure goes it may just be in the top 10 for US cities. You almost need to go out of your way to not be an outdoorsy person here. It has a decent amount of restaurants, breweries, things to do, but if you're particularly starved for entertainment then there are cheap flights to Austin and Denver. Indeed, what makes Albuquerque really great is that you could use it as a nice place to decompress in-between destinations.

There are some downsides though. Crime is pretty bad, as is the poverty rate, but a lot of places here in the US are struggling with that right now. Truth be told the thing that annoys me the most may be the Gross Receipts Tax. Basically, if you freelance, your services are subject to what's basically a ~7% sales tax, only for services.

But given how inexpensive everything is, and how much I get, I can't really complain too much about the GRT.

He's the one getting stiffed by Google, but "gamers" always love playing the victim, especially when a game developer draws a line of any kind.

On the one hand, it was allegedly quite gorgeous and housing there had many amenities considered quite modern for the time. The town also had a very low mortality rate due to how clean it was.

On the other hand, George Pullman founded the town partly as a social enterprise, believing he could make his workers happy and productive through urban planning and strict rules. This partly meant eliminating businesses catering primarily to vice (the only establishment that served alcohol was the hotel, which workers rarely entered). He would also regularly inspect workers homes to ensure that they met certain standards of cleanliness.

It was also, first and foremost, a company town, and one that was expected to be profitable at that. As a consequence, you could only rent housing, not buy it, and the rent was expected to subsidize the town rather than the town subsidizing worker expenses. Additionally, public gatherings were prohibited unless sanctioned by the company, hence why visitors often remarked that the place looked empty.

In the end the company wound up cutting wages after the panic of 1893, but not cutting the already-high rents. This led to the Pullman Strike of 1894, which would go on for 2 months and would eventually end with the company being forced to sell its residential holdings, essentially ending the Pullman Company's reign over the town of Pullman. George Pullman would die 3 years later from a heart attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pullman https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/blood-on-the-tracks-in-pullm...

Oh, sure, these are tech companies, not railroad companies, but you have to remember that the Pullman Car Company was a tech company back in its era (a railroad car that functions as a hotel!), and George Pullman was regarded as a benign industrialist, much like how we might see Bill Gates today. The town of Pullman was considered bright and modern and "smart" for its time, much how we'd likely view a tech company town.

In the end, as much as we like to bemoan the inefficiencies of city government, we're probably better off. Nonetheless, I'm rather curious to see how this goes.

I think JS is quite fine by comparison.

On that note though, perhaps relationships might be less common. Who knows, maybe we'll turn into bears.

Got a chuckle out of the Genghis Khan comparison. If I was an archer on a rampart, and I saw one of these guys on horseback dressed in Mongol armor, I'd probably laugh so hard that I'd fall right off the wall.

I mean, who decides to create a startup incubator focused on "sports technology" (whatever that is) after their "conference business" (again, whatever that is) becomes nonviable?

Not that it matters, hustler types and people with money and privilege often overlap.

Things like this will go on indefinitely so long as the controversy around fake animal rescues isn't big enough to upset advertisers. I would even go as far as to wager that commenting on these scams probably carries a greater risk of impacted ad revenue. Can't have family-friendly advertising on a channel with a reputation for exposing the dark underbelly of the internet.

I like working in tech, but moments like these really get me down.

I'm pretty intrigued by stories of how certain shows flopped in their first season (or two) but managed to persevere through some persistent TV exec who kept it funded until they got the story right.

Plenty of examples of mainstream TV shows that went this route. Seinfeld, The Office, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the list goes on.

TV execs really care about the product. By contrast, I don't think Netflix cares about the product. I think Netflix cares about the data about the product, which ultimately means dropping an original after 2 seasons.

It works I guess, but I've haven't had a Netflix subscription in a while, and on those occasions where I do renew it I just take a peek for a month before leaving again. More than enough time to watch 2 seasons of TV.

I would feel like I've made it if I can make the same salary I would otherwise make as a developer building something I actually care about AND possess a degree of ownership over it that feels more real. Everything else from that point is just bonus.

Being involved in a VC-backed startup probably makes way more sense if you really, really like wealth and money. It's probably the rational course of action. I don't want a ton of money though, nor be wholly guided by what's rational or logical. I just want to really live.

But I think that's because open-source software development companies are the exception rather than the norm. No one expects you to open-source your software and then hope someone hires you for your services or buys one of your t-shirts. It's still the norm in our industry to write something and sell copies of it.

Plus, software pays more. Software developers generally don't get squeezed. Musicians, on the other hand, never seem to catch a break.

EDIT: Or, even better, it's the norm to sell a monthly right to use what we wrote.

Also, freemium games have business models very similar to music. Yeah, there are some successful freemium games out there, but in general it's pretty brutal and depressing.

It's one thing to speculate on taking over a company through unconventional means, but gradually chipping away at a company using the very thing that powers it is pretty interesting. It's hard to imagine doing that in 2005, even harder to imagine doing it now.

Doesn't help that online ads have a certain arcane quality about them. It's crazy that you can make money from a blog just by creating an AdSense account.

I now have a strong urge to keep peace on the continent and rough-ride over a company under an antitrust investigation.

https://quillette.com/2018/06/07/explaining-monogamy-vox/

The show itself seemed to suggest that since our closest primate relatives engage in polyamorous free love it's likely that we do as well. This can be further supported by observation of hunter-gatherer tribes, or so they argued.

The author had a different take. He didn't necessarily suggest that monogamy was necessarily the norm nor was it natural. However, he also didn't believe that humans naturally gravitate towards egalitarian polyamorous societies. Instead, the norm tends to be polygeny, societies where the upper echelons of men have more wives, while the lower-rung of men simply don't marry or are forced to share. Indeed, a good way of garnering loyalty if you're a higher-status male was to share your wives with your inferiors. Many of the very hunter-gatherer tribes mentioned in the Vox video were themselves polygynous rather than egalitarian polyamorous societies, and frankly quite misogynistic.

To be clear, wife-sharing isn't polyandrous (one wife many husbands). The difference is that the wife doesn't get the final say and probably doesn't even have a choice. These societies are polygynous. Polyandry is rare and often occurs in certain environments, or so the author suggests.

Monogamy came about likely because those societies that embraced it had less sexual competition. They were less violent. More cooperative. Societies that didn't embrace it were easily subjugated by the societies that did. Progress is not the norm in polygynous societies.

Frankly, between a polygynous future where you're either being stabbed in the back or doing the back-stabbing, or a future where a software glitch causes a world-ending exchange of nuclear weapons, I'd pick the nuclear exchange. At least the latter is over in an instant.

This isn't necessarily because people who think they're smart are melancholic. I think it's because praise ultimately sounds the same in the end. Because it sounds the same, it doesn't sound smart, it doesn't get upvoted, you're better off just not posting it.

On the other hand, you can sound smart and original with criticism if you word it right.

Hence why I take the critical comments with a grain of salt and pay attention to the fact that the original HN post is on the front page with 256 points at the time of this writing. A lot of people clearly really like Notion.

https://www.recurse.com/

I'm not sure though, I haven't tried it myself. Anyone who's been care to chime in?

As in prefabs? Of course. But trailer/manufactured homes take it further. It's one single unit.

If "the VW Bug of" means a willingness of the manufacturer to modify the traditional chassis and body layout to better accomplish design goals, then GMC did build something along the lines of what you describe

Close, but again, no RVs. I'm looking at trailer homes, which at the moment all come kinda country and kinda kitsch. That's all you get. I think it would be incredible if there was something that was contemporary, reasonably cheap, and has personality. Like a VW bug.

EDIT: Forgot that double-wides are typically transported in two, so not one single unit, and they kind of are a trailer home. Yeah, nevermind then.

I like tiny houses, but really only in the sense that I'm fascinated by unusually small things. Otherwise I think they're actually kind of ridiculous if your motives are to downsize and not pay $300,000+ on a house

Trailer homes are pretty incredible when you think about it. They're the closest we've come yet to building houses on an assembly line in a factory. The entire thing ships in one piece. Just plunk it down on the property, hook up the utilities, and there you go.

And the kicker is, they're competitive with tiny homes in terms of cost, but they're not tiny. They're small, certainly, but not tiny. This is because trailer home manufacturers have got it all figured out, whereas most tiny houses are these bespoke, custom numbers.

Alas, if you live in a trailer home then you're considered "trailer trash".

I wish some brave soul would undertake the task of creating, I don't know, the VW bug of trailer homes. Doesn't have to be a luxury thing, just something with character and identity. Something you can be proud of because it has a personality, just like the millions of others like it.

Until then, if you want a break from the norm of homeownership, then it's either a condo, a tiny house, or a refurbished bus.