DubiousPusher

It's not that simple though. For example, my son is 11 and wants to work. He wants to earn more money than I can find house chores to pay him for. He could absolutely help in an office or retail situation. Neither my wife nor myself have encouraged this. He came up with it all on his own.

I went to school with several kids who were gifted mechanically. They suffered in school. It wasn't just not beneficial. School was directly harmful. Had they been able to spend less time in school and more time working, they would've been much happier. Instead, school became a kind of purgatory they had to endure.

There are also situations in which kids are in a bad home environment but are essentially bonded to their parents by the fact that they cannot work. To be 100% clear, this bill sucks. I'm completly against it. But there is a form a child work reform that should happen IMO.

Maybe because being nice is an important social lubricant but is vastly overrated as a measure of character?

Yeah. I was maintaining a similar level of neutrality until I hit this line.

> The measure — championed by conservative lobbying groups, the state restaurant association and the state industry group for home builders, among others

Yeah, I agree. You can see something like this as a clear signal of a market and regulatory failure and yet recognize it as an ultimately pro-social stop gap.

If this becomes routine, it will mutate. It's an absolute breeding ground for abuses. Thus it should not be seen as a reliable source of relief but as another catalyst for the urgency we need to have regarding the housing crisis which is rising to the level of an emergency. Policy makers are the only ones who can swallow hard and make the decisions which will get us out of this.

Well, the country septupled its GDP over the 70 years of Soviet rule. For a time, between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of WWII it was one of the fastest growing economies in world history. While facing terrible famine and hunger before WWII, the Soviet Union largely ended starvation by the mid-late century. The Soviet government managed to extend the benefits of sanitation, healthcare and electrification to tens of millions of the people living under its power.

To me, while we might see many many problems within the Soviet economy and see many ways it could have been better, it is clearly not an economy that "didn't work". And by some measures, we can even say it "worked" better than the post Soviet economy.

This is great. I've been interested in understanding how the Soviet economy worked for a long time. I've found only a handful of articles like this one. Unless you're willing to delve into hardcore economic academic papers (I am not) it's hard to get an actual informed perspective. Most Googling around will basically return you the rote response that it basically didn't work. Which, despite the many issues with the Soviet economy, is obviously not true.

It's funny to me that there is a widespread perception that in 2023 life has become more regulated in most developed economies. Most of what is now the "developed" world reached its height of regulation and government involvment in daily life in the middle of the 20th century. Deregulation and market solutions have largely been the direction of most advanced economies. Those, more aggressively in the U.S. but fairly consistent none the less.

Absolutely, you have to localize or internationalize cultural products. Culture export mostly does the later, relying on the fact that colonialism and international consumer capitalism have created a veneer of "common" culture across many geographies.

I mean that from a physical standpoint it's easier to export these things. This because they can largely be exported without a great deal of material or persons moving across borders. For obvious reasons, it's easier to export a purse than a house.

Also, from a legal perspective it is easier. Cars are a great example of this. Car companies have had to expend an enormous amount of effort and money for even just the opportunity to build cars in another country, much less wholly import them there.

I believe they mean Facebook and Google.

The other problem here is that it doesn't account for differences between industrial sectors. Different industrial sectors have different amounts of consolidation. This lends itself to higher valuations. Certainly European engineering as a sector is worth far more than luxury fashion. But engineering has more resistance to consolidation. Some of this even comes down to how the different sectors are differently regulated. Consolidation in many sectors will face more intense scrutiny than in others. Lastly, we have to account for how global a sector is able to become. Certain sectors like construction, in large struggle to sell their services in a global market this limiting their size. Fashion, like movies is exactly the kind business you would expect to attain a global reach.

I will agree on one point though. As an export, LV demonstrates a grossly uncraftsman-like aptitude. My wife rebuilds and repairs designer bags. Late LV is some of the cheapest and most shoddily made shit she works on. The older bags are great. But since the 90s, the bags have declined tremendously. The same is true of Gucci. I think this is pretty clearly the product of those two brands absolute explosion in demand over the same period. Most other designer brands are tiny in comparison to these two. Except Hermes, which my wife rarely gets hold of so I'm not sure if they've suffered the same decline with scale.

But no joke, if you're looking for quality, Michael Kors is a far better bag.

I think the biggest change is that a lot of people just came out of an era where there was a national media narrative that was highly agreed upon and very New England, classically "liberal". Except around sex and drugs of course.

This narrative dominated TV, print and to a lesser extent radio. It really created the notion in people's heads that this narrow band was really what people thought about. What people are reacting to in large part is the newly visible presence of alternative perspectives. They were always there. They were just strategically locked out by people who decided what was "fringe". Basically anything that didn't support institutions was ignored or disparaged.

Waco and Cuba are two prime examples. Waco was written off in the national media because the people in the compound were so "weird". And for years the national media has underwritten the American foreign policy blob's almost neurotic fixation with Cuba.

I agree with you. I think America's system overall has more popular accountability in who holds power but "the foreign policy blob" does a very good job of diffusing that popular accountability in foreign matters.

Not in those words no.

I have an ongoing conversation with mine about the things he finds online. We talk about how people try to benefit from appearing "rich" online. We talk about how people have problems in their lives and find things to blame and rant about online. We talk about how people you don't know can try to get things from you or make you think a certain way.

He even started using the term "clickbait" before I even taught it to him. These kids are savy. I think the biggest thing we can do for them is to help them understand how to contextualize what they're engaging with because they don't get to grow up in the "before" and "after" worlds that elder millennials did.

And frankly, I see that my kid is just as saturated in propaganda from his public school as he is from online media. So far, in parallel to his education, school seems to be running one giant ad for the US armed forces.

I blame the broken ass left/right political spectrum that's so popular in the U.S.

Liberal != Leftist

And neither a leftist nor a liberal has to answer for Communist China. Nor do you gain any special "objectivity" about China by being either one.

That's not how it works though. The American system is reactive. Meaning, you could see something like this enacted with years of disruption, even if it is ultimately over turned.

Worse, if the court really wants to protect the law, they use "standing weaselry" to effectively protect it from being challenged.

This looks like a red-meat bill that won't pass both houses but it's a big deal that it made it through one. Usually these die in committee or never get schedule for a floor vote.

IDK. This seems like good advice for a particular kind of person. One who is content for the vast majority of their human experience to revolve around software and technology. All these side gigs add up and this looks like a life with very little time to broaden oneself. Either that or this person has somehow found the golden ticket of a boss that actually considers career development as something they are willing to pay salary for.

I would have to do these kind of things on the side and I don't want my whole intellectual inner life and my hobbies to become software. I don't want to write software blogs in the evening. I want to read history books and cook dinner. I don't want to do podcasts on Saturday. I want to tear the drywall off my entryway and frame in a new window. I don't want to do side hustle paperwork on Sunday. I want to teach my kid how to shoot. I don't want to take a day off to go to a developer meetup. I want to go march for Medicare.

> Those are primarily public health issues regardless of people’s puritanical views.

So why such a consistent obsession with making them stop or tolerating these acts done in private. If public health is the concern wouldn't needle exchanges, public toilets and street cleaning would be practical solutions? (I guess I should say Victorian rather than Puritanical.)

> We have a lot of rights stripped away from individuals (including you and me) to promote the public health at large.

Which ones?

> Furthermore, the constitution doesn’t get everything right and isn’t a backstop for arguing against anything

As far as I knew it was the basic document which outlined how rights between people and between people and the star should be balanced. And while it has a lot to say about rights to liberty, I find little to indicate we have a right to not see unpleasant things in public.

I don't think the status quo is good. I don't like avoiding shit on the sidewalk. I don't like explaining to my son why a man is stupified with a needle sticking out of his arm.

But I weigh those unpleasant events against throwing people against the system and taking their freedom and it's clear to me that their right to liberty outweighs my right to a pleasant Sunday stroll.

I think there is a moral imperative to change but I think turning once again towards creating a heartless state bureaucracy and pitting it against people who have absolutely nothing is not the change we need. I know that these people have been kicked over and over and over again and that to keep kicking is not a thing that makes sense. They are numb to the pain and you will not change them. You will only show how hard you can kick.

But that's a far cry from,

> lose control of yourself drugs are a scourge on society and the people they infect.

Is the problem shooting drugs or is it that you might see it happen?

> No, and you know that's not what anyone is saying.

In reply to the issue of how we should be punishing "petty" street crimes, the commenter I was replying to said,

> An exponential back off from society

In my experience, exponentials grow pretty quickly. So yeah, it kinda seems like that's what they were implying.

> Shitting in public, or in other people's private areas, shouldn't have zero consequences simply because the ultimate consequences sound harsh out of context.

Give me the context in which pooping anywhere, any number of times seems reasonable to punish with significant jail time. Yes, there should be some form of discouragement from this but making sure people have access to a toilet seems a lot easier.

> And yes, because jailing someone who has sunken to pooping on the street is generally an important part of their treatment plan. Not letting people live in squalor is actually kindness, even if the alternative is enforced.

Jail does not help people. It is statistically shown to make their lives materially worse, make them less healthy and make them more likely to commit further crimes. Treatment sure, I'm all for it. Even when it doesn't work.

> Oh my. Are you serious? Harsh measures?

Yeah, I actually believe depriving people of their freedom of movement is a really big deal.

What about people who do it in private? How vigorously should they be pursued? Should they face the same fate?

I am not opposed to involuntary treatment. I did not let "A Clockwork Orange" disproportionately shape my world view as it seems so many in the intervening generations have. I grew up with family members who required in-patient mental healthcare more than once. And I understand that letting people persistent in psychosis is not "letting them be themselves".

I believe though that making acts which people do in private, severely punishable when performed in public for want of private spaces is a depraved form of puritanical virtue mongering. I don't believe the constitution gives people an absolute right to "virgin eyes" or "virgin ears". And that is a personal judgement you will not convince me of otherwise.

While I deeply disagree with you and I recoil at the idea of a system under which a person might spend literal years in prison for taking a shit where they "shouldn't", I respect your honesty. Usually when I pose these kind of questions people lie about their true expectations because they wish for such harsh measures in secret but rather not be associated with them.

How much prison time does a person "deserve" for publicly injecting themselves with a chemical? How many more jails or prisons should we build to hold them? How much prison time do they "deserve" for doing it again? What percentage of the unhoused population should we continuously churn through the system? For the criminal justice system to contain this, I suspect you would have to create a large internment system which would something like double the size of U.S. incarceration.

As I see it, the system is not failing for a lack of cruelty. But because there is a sizable population who have nothing left to lose.

Heads up. It's not Bakunin.

I think the reality is that the useful part of meta-verse, the meta part, runs contradictory to the interests of a company like meta. Because it involves:

1) De-proprietorizing user data

2) Handing identity from identity providers (like meta) to open systems

3) Allowing foreign content into the walled garden

So Meta built the least useful but snazziest part of the meta-verse, the verse part. And they built it in the face of a bunch of other already extant "verses", like Roblox which offer a more intersting landscape for interaction.

> So I believe we put too many people in jail for too long. I think our justice system is pretty broken. Having said that, to fix it I never thought of just letting people commit crimes like areas in California seem to be doing. That's just as asinine but in the other direction.

> I never imagined letting people commit crimes with no fear of any repercussions.

This is a myth. Police everywhere prioritize violent crimes. Jails and prisons everywhere prioritize retaining violent criminals and when they have to, attempt to release the lowest risk offenders. When people have been prematurely released from jail it is not out of misplaced compassion. Mostly people are being released because the system is already at capacity. In fact many jails in the U.S. are well above capacity before they decide to release people. Some as much as 150%

No matter where you are, a lot of violent crime goes un-solved. That has been true for decades. People cover up their crimes and many are reasonably good at it.

The rise in crime during and following the pandemic has been significant for small, medium and large cities regardless of the policies adopted by those cities and regardless of the overriding politics of the state they are situated in.

Yup. The idea would be that you must be compensated in ownership and wages.

Google, Samsung, some other company in a market they aren't in today but may be in 10 years from now.

> Workers can as a group walk off the job. Workers are free to quit at any time.

Have you ever actually studied a labor action? How it happens? The power dynamic is vastly in the employers favor. By far the majority fail or are outright broken by targeted firings, strike breaking, etc.

> IME, that works much better than using the law to privilege either side.

You're begging the question that it currently doesn't favor a side.

Basically. I would expect a system where this happens over time would be more palatable though.