You've taught me the name for what I was attempting to explain in my first post :)
6,997 karma · joined October 14, 2018
You can both feel the urge from your own brain, and far more comprehensively understand the consequences, of not doing a thing (employment, meeting a long term partner, friend, ...).
By contrast when you see a person on the street it's easy to think "rules say no hence bad".
As others state, you're also wired to think of the novel/interesting case and ignore the people holed up at home because they're invisible.
The alternative is that you end up with nonsense like hungry grads working at FAANG to fuck the world.
Channeling people into useful pursuits pays dividends.
His point is that true social mobility would be literally hitting the random button repeatedly. It's obviously not a workable idea.
Someone has to lose, even if you perform a magical full reset once per year, in any given year half of the people will be below average.
The goal of course is that we make sure that everyone has a decent life even if they're not at the top.
I think you've jumped on his comment and assumed that he doesn't care at all about anyone who's not in the top N% which isn't a charitable reading.
Well, I suppose you could perform random shuffling. 50% of people will still end up with a below average outcome, though.
For you it might be.
I tip delivery drivers and I received tips when I worked. Tips made up >20% of my pay.
Rich people generally would not tip, poor people would.
Google like to think I'm Arabic at the moment, bouncing around various Middle Eastern countries. Google Maps sends me to the UAE right now. Y tho?
I'm not claiming there is no issue here, but rather that this situation seemingly can arise with no ill will at all assuming countries exist.
Imagine that I own a house.
You stay at my house for a night and pay me $1. Let's call it rent or whatever.
I then spend $3 on bricks and stuff and improve my house. My cash outflow is -$2.
The work done on my house improves the value of my house by $4 (consider this to be the "internal economy").
In that year then, my net worth has increased by $2.
That is to say that it seems possible to me that you could have a negative trade balance and still be winning as you're increasing your wealth at a rate faster than you give it away.
Am I missing something?
I don't want that shit on my machine, my friend's machines, my family's machines, in fact I'd prefer that it didn't exist at all.
I think that people who think this stuff is acceptable and implement it are passively acting in evil ways.
I don't really care to play some pissant game around how you choose to define a word, but if you must, let us do this logically:
A JavaScript tracker created for a reason which serves only to degrade the user's experience is definitionally malware.
A standard advertising banner isn't malware because there's no software involved, but in the case of 90+% of ad banners out there, I generally feel comfortable in calling them malicious, sure.
Did you miss the response in-between? :)
> They have included software which does things explicitly counter to what the user wants. That is what malware is. Unless of course you want adverts, in that case, more power to you.
I also provided a list in the original post.
As far as I can tell the Overton window has moved and the definition slipped over the past 10 years. I consider Microsoft a major contributor to that. The proof of that is in the fact they've shipped it in a mainstream OS.
They have included software which does things explicitly counter to what the user wants. That is what malware is. Unless of course you want adverts, in that case, more power to you.
Right now, today, they're shipping literal malware on mainstream desktop computers around the world. Oh, and it's not open source either, lol!
The bloody operating system has targeted advertisements, intentionally unremovable (or at least very difficult to remove) components, telemetry, a keylogger-esque search function, the list goes on.
It pains me to see people shill Microsoft as if they've "turned a corner". All they're doing is the minimum possible in order to be taken seriously by some particularly easily swayed subset of developers whilst simultaneously ratcheting up the pain on the main product that they're known globally for.
If you have a job that's ultimately pointless, then you want to work as little as possible so that you have time for leisure and/or useful work.
I have no children. I like my job. I spend my free time doing things that aren't software development.
I theoretically could work outside of work hours, sure, if I were a boring person with no interests.
I think that most people who treat their jobs as their 'calling' and burn themselves out on them ruin the world for both themselves and the rest of us. Races to the bottom everywhere.
It doesn't bother me too much though, since ultimately the selection pressure is such that the brown-nosers end up being abused by their managers whilst the stubborn lot get promoted. YMMV.
What matters is that we provide an environment within which we can trade amongst each other as (relative) equals, not one in which the Great Overlord owns all of the means of production.
This isn't a border dispute, this is about behaviour within a country.
The current percentage is almost irrelevant anyway, the endgame of this is monopoly whether or not they have it right now, the vertical integration of delivery alone is enough.
I'd split up the major supermarkets as well FWIW, but that's a different discussion.
Now try only ever eating shit food like that for months, years on end, and you're not on holiday wandering around a cool city, it's your life.
It's not like online retailers don't exist. Well, for now. They _will_ go under if we just let Amazon run everything unchecked.
The problem is that a massive company essentially owns online commerce, anti-trust legislation should be addressing this and somehow it's not. Let them own a few % of the market, don't let them literally take over.
We don't need what is essentially a monopoly, or at least targeting becoming a monopoly, controlling internet sales. It's not beneficial. It may have been in the very short term, but now the effects of pushing out small businesses are clear, we can just not have it.
The labour practices are almost besides the point, anti-trust should break them up.
By definition in order for you to make more than the market, someone else has to make less than the market.
Assuming that knowledge has superlinear returns (I consider this to be obvious without proof required), of course less than 50% of participants will 'win' - those at the bottom are totally useless and burning money, whilst those at the top are quite skilled indeed.
It's fair to say that one should not expect to be in that upper echelon, but I don't think it's reasonable to state 'most people lose' and just leave it at that, it's blindingly obvious that most people lose, it would be impossible for them to not.
(Adjusted for balances - a guy with 20 billion quid can lose 1 pound each to 7 billion market participants and in that case 'almost everyone wins more than the market')
Maybe SF really is a parallel universe. Here in the UK, basically anyone earning a tech salary can afford to live within 10-20 mins cycle of work, even if they want children.
You won't have a home with a garden and all the rest of the knick knacks, sure, but that's a different discussion.
Compare with, say, 'advantage'.
Underprivileged, and disadvantaged, are also often used as synonyms within the social context, whilst outside of that they're not at all the same thing.
White privilege absolutely exists, as does 'male privilege', 'health privilege' (mental or physical), 'preference/motivation privilege' (e.g. do you enjoy, or can you at least tolerate, doing things that are financially viable) and a whole host of other inherent advantages that a person can possess from birth, or obtain later in life and hold on to.
Quite literally, 'privilege' (less aggressively known as advantage) is obviously a thing. Even if you don't consider the 'white' variant, people win and lose the game of society based on pretty arbitrary attributes.
We generally don't run around speaking about those issues in those terms, though, because it's just not a very tactful way of addressing them (attacking core components of a person's ego), it's much more politically manageable to discuss equality/empathy/representation for example.
It would be equally unpopular to talk about e.g. the 'transgender plight', despite the struggles trans individuals face. Words are important.
Perhaps I'm just getting old, or I'm stuck in a specific social group?
I don't mean to belittle the author at all, Linux just feels like an absolute default to me nowadays for a developer, in the late 90s that may not have been the case, sure.