anemoiac

I enjoy reading posts like this, which delve into personal setups and the intentions behind them. However, I found this a bit puzzling:

> While not an absolute requirement, integrated speakers would be a nice option on the monitor so I wouldn't have to buy separate ones and find a place for them on my desk.

For such a methodically constructed workspace, especially one that goes out of its way to avoid fan noise, I'd assume the OP would have wanted at least middling audio quality. I wouldn't consider myself an audiophile, yet I've never used a computer monitor's onboard speakers by choice. Almost any other solution would likely be superior to whatever microscopic "speakers" are crammed into that 21.5" monitor...

Does the laptop cooler actually work?

That's definitely strange. I order stuff to the US from AliExpress probably every other month and haven't had any real issues.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying that influence doesn't influence? That human behavior is an incomprehensible black box?

I wasn't implying that more redistribution would create more altruistic citizens, but that a more redistributive society (or any departure from the status quo, really) might alter the behavioral incentives that exist today. The desire to "get ahead at all costs" doesn't exist because Americans simply love hard work and competition - it's a result of social + economic incentives. If you reduce the "cost" of not constantly striving (for example: improve the social safety net, the average American's work-life balance, etc.), those incentives shift.

We seem fairly well-insulated against the reality of the "Average American's" life here on HN, but it's not as comfortable as US GDP-per-capita might suggest. The way out of stressful financial insecurity, at least for most Americans, is the (necessarily) selfish pursuit of individual advancement. Likely no one will fault a low-level employee competing for a promotion that would enable them to afford a more reliable car, however Machiavellian their approach, but those same tendencies will look very different when exhibited by someone with a 9-figure net worth.

I don't think today's "greedy assholes" are anything more than people responding to existing incentives. You want fewer greedy assholes? De-incentivize being a greedy asshole.

> A more redistrutive society would have the exact same number of greedy assholes as we do today

Are you sure? Doesn't culture impact human behavior? Won't a society that encourages getting ahead at all costs produce a different social environment (with its own distinct behavioral incentives) than one with alternative priorities?

Malcolm Gladwell oversimplifies things. There's nothing magical about spending 10,000 hours practicing a skill, but you'll obviously get better at anything you spend a lot of time on.

To answer your question: it depends on your specific context. At 43, you could theoretically still gain the required qualifications for most careers and work for ~ 20 years (ex. you'd be 67/68 after 4 years spent earning a new degree + 20 years working). The more relevant consideration is will you actually be able to do that as a working 43-year-old with normal responsibilities?

Another question you seem to allude to is "will ageism be a limiting factor?" That answer is also context-dependent. At a lot of trendy companies mentioned here on HN, I'd suspect that it would be. That said, those companies are only a fraction of the job market and I'm not sure more "boring" companies would be as concerned with age as with your skills. Outside of tech and some competitive (+ conservative) industries like finance or consulting, I don't think it would be as big of a deal.

A little aggressive, no? No one's "deciding" anything for anyone in my comment.

You don't get to decide how much work/social engagement/widget purchasing makes you content any more than you can "decide" how many drinks it takes for you to get drunk.

All I'm saying is that many people could both reduce their consumption and improve their quality of lives by optimizing for factors unrelated to material consumption.

Decreasing consumption doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in quality of life. In the West, at least, we generally work too much, have too little social engagement, and spend lots of money and resources on things that don't really improve our lives. Many things that could actually make us happier don't require much consumption, but they're essentially luxury goods because of the modern lifestyle's high demands. I'm thinking of things like relaxing with friends and/or family, volunteering/contributing to your local community, exercising, eating healthily... even getting enough sleep on a regular basis!

As a young-er person in the West, I'm well aware of the term's general meaning. The linked article you provide fails to define it in any way that would be empirically meaningful with regard to the study of birth rates. You haven't given us any reason to suspect that American college students, or their European peers, engaging in casual sex (the focus of the linked article) has any impact on birth rates.

Based on the above, as well as your lack of engagement with any of the fertility-related factors I provided, I'm assuming you're more interested in voicing some sort of cultural critique than discussing actual drivers behind trends in birth rates.

To begin with, you haven't even defined "hookup culture," much less demonstrated that its prevalence is significant enough to influence birth rates or, further, proven that its influence on birth rates would be negative in the first place.

That said, why assume a nebulous concept like "hookup culture" is causing declining birth rates when a simple google search will reveal plenty of well-studied factors with demonstrated influence on fertility (not to mention far more cultural universality). For reference, some examples include: increased educational attainment among women, increased labor-force participation among women, increased urbanization, increased cost-of-living

You think that “hookup culture” is the reason for the “West’s” low birthrates? This is a well-studied topic and I haven’t heard anyone else making that claim…

Your link doesn't seem to establish a connection between DUI enforcement and reduction in deaths FYI (unless I somehow missed it...). Driving deaths from DUI may have decreased while states were enforcing DUI laws, but the causality isn't all that clear. Meanwhile, distracted driving has exploded since the arrival of the smartphone and made it even harder to understand the dynamics behind road safety.

That said, I once read that the most important enforcement factors, with regard to actually reducing DUIs, were 1) increasing the likelihood of being caught and 2) minimizing the time between being caught and experiencing consequences. Notably, severity of punishment wasn't a significant factor. I know that states will differ in enforcement approaches, but the US states I've lived in haven't seemed at all interested in adopting a data-driven perspective - what I've seen has been a very low likelihood of DUI detection coupled with prosecution that can take a year or more for a routine DUI (let's not forget needlessly harsh punishments that are more likely to destroy one's family or finances than decrease the likelihood of future DUI...).

The contentious nature of this topic seems to make it hard to find rational discussions online. I've found plenty of emotional anecdotes, but few evidence-based suggestions mentioned (aside from the obvious but unrealistic suggestion to make cars unnecessary...). I'm no expert, but the "traditional American" perspective - 'Drunk drivers are horrible people who will go to hell when they die. Let's just charge all of them with attempted murder and lock them up for good. [commented on reddit via phone app from driver's seat of car in left lane on I-95]' (my characterization) - seems completely useless, in terms of actual harm-reduction.

What does seem clear is that drunk driving is caused by poor judgment and/or inadequate risk-assessment (its correlation with # miles driven could be a third factor worth mentioning). If we observe the two largest demographic groups among drunk drivers, young men and chronic alcoholics, it's clear that they share these characteristics - young men because their frontal cortex hasn't matured enough to reliably assess risk in general and chronic alcoholics because their constant drinking necessarily impedes good decision-making. If we're not developing solutions that target those particular deficiencies (i.e. not a small chance at having a harsh, but essentially abstract punishment a year or more in the future), I don't think we'll see real progress on this front.

In any case, I certainly don't think bringing enhanced surveillance into privately-owned vehicles is the solution.

The current system has existed for long enough that we can observe the results of its incentive structures. We can see that people continue to suffer from heavy student loan burdens which limit their ability to fully (and productively) participate in society, even well after they graduate (or don't) university. The incentives you allude to clearly haven't aligned social behavior away from this outcome, so why should we expect that to change?

Given this apparent reality, what we're considering isn't whether or not to risk negatively impacting the existing incentive structure - which isn't producing an optimal outcome to begin with, but whether or not to assuage the suffering of a significant number of student loan holders. Would you prefer taking a purely moral stand for "personal responsibility" if it meant preventing a measure that could help lots of people live fuller lives and contribute to society at a higher level?

FYI, hosted Nextcloud is offered by a variety of providers and is hardly more expensive than self-hosting on a cheap VPS somewhere. I've used Hetzner's "Storage Share" service in the past with no issues, but I don't know that they're any better than their competitors. Less than $5/month for a 1TB Nextcloud installation and no maintenance required.

As a counterpoint, at least for the WFH crowd, it's far easier to afford a space that accommodates 1-2 comfortable home offices in the suburbs than it is in a walkable urban environment.

Not to mention the other conveniences rarely afforded to urban apartment dwellers...

Point being - I'm not sure I see the suburbs disappearing just because car-centric development is suboptimal.

Although you may not hear about it on the news, plenty of American conservatives hate Donald Trump. He's a narcissistic philanderer who's spent his entire life schmoozing around elite liberal enclaves while demonstrating no particular attachment to conservative principles.

I'd love to hear more of these "many examples" of Maynard being a left-wing nutjob, but my definition of "left-wing nutjob" doesn't include possessing opinions that might normally be associated with the run-of-the-mill Democratic voter.

Where do you see politics in this story? There's no discussion of Maynard's political views in the article, nor any indication that they may have influenced his behavior.

> the primary reason for punishment is that if you don't punish the perpetrator, the victim, their family, and their loved ones will consider the matter unresolved, and attempt to carry out what they think would be an adequate punishment themselves

Are you sure about this?

Please refresh my memory - why is the World Cup being held in Qatar???

My reply was a little ambiguous - I simply meant that many anarchists would find the minarchist and libertarian positions you lay out to be self-contradictory. Namely, they both claim to (mostly) oppose state involvement in the economy, yet (generally) support a free market economy that needs to be enforced by the state.

I'm agreeing with your premise that anarchism consists of many competing strains, just adding a point of clarification for the audience here (...which is probably more familiar with the libertarian perspective than the others you listed).

> Can you really be free from the state if the state needs to tell you how to structure your commerce?

Wouldn't many anarchists take issue with the minarchist & libertarian critique you list above, claiming that the state is necessary to enforce capitalistic markets?

What???

I have never meant anyone who's concerned about Earth's ability to perpetuate its ecosystems in 800 million years. People are concerned about its ability to (comfortably) support human life 20, 200, or (maybe) 2000 years from now.

It seems as if you're trying to imply that industrial humanity hasn't had a uniquely destructive impact on the natural environment over the past two centuries.

Why is that relevant? The cost of maintaining a reasonable standard of living is what matters, not the amount listed on your paycheck (as long as the latter is >= the former).

The value of old-growth forests (at least in the secular world) is ecological, not spiritual.

That's not a bad trend, but such data has to be interpreted carefully. Throughout much of the (so-called) developed world, the past several hundred years of growth have seen large amounts of old-growth forests cleared. Replacing those forests, ecologically speaking, will take many human lifespans, and filling the void they once occupied (as well as land that was traditionally not forested and therefore provided different ecosystem services) with human-planned monoculture will do little more than inflate oversimplistic statistics that provide cover for those seeking to avoid taking responsibility for the health of the natural environment.

To be clear, I'm not questioning your intentions, just pointing out that the data you cite isn't (necessarily) as encouraging as a superficial examination might suggest. I'm not an ecologist, but I'd imagine that measuring biodiversity levels, soil health, cleanliness of air + water, etc. would paint a better picture of environmental health than forest cover.

There will always be enough until one day there isn't...

Well college grads typically make significantly more than those without college degrees, so if there's enough of an educational attainment gap between men and women in a given city, it shouldn't really matter what anyone majored in. A bachelor's degree in anything is the difference between earning $30k/yr and $50k for many people.

That said, the prevalence (or lack thereof) of high-paying industries with gender-imbalances could also contribute to the scenario described by the article. For example, a notable lack of STEM jobs or a local economy based around healthcare could both lead to a city's young women earning more than its young men.

I don't have a particular source on hand, but I think it's pretty widely accepted that women outperform men, in terms of attending and graduating college, in the US today. That may not be true within certain STEM specialties, but I'm not sure that (potential) exception to the rule would be sufficient to overwhelm the general trend (outside of a few major tech hotspots, perhaps).

Obviously other factors, such as the availability of high-paying, non-degree-requiring jobs in male-dominated industries (ex. oilfield work) might obfuscate other trends in some cities, but I'd expect young women to increasingly earn more than young men across the country if they continue to outpace them in educational achievement.

I don't think it is (or should be) viewed as a problem in itself, but my guess would be that this phenomenon, where it exists, reflects the disparity in educational attainment between men and women. That disparity may warrant some concern, but it's essentially a separate issue.