everdrive

A bit of a tangent, but Google is doing everything they can to stash more "recommendations" everywhere. Even now, you need a browser filter to keep them out of the subscriptions view.

Quite a twist, no? This generations of parents are telling their children "Well all your friends are jumping off a bridge, so you need to as well."

In my case, I don't think most people who claim HN is social media are making a serious argument. They are taking two different things which have a few points of inter-comparison and using that as a basis to claim those two things are actually equivalent. This is done as a retort (eg, "you say you hate social media, but you're on social media _right now_") rather than in service of a larger argument.

It's quite scary. I think a lot of these HR types are true believers. They think that

1) these tests are valid and objective

2) they are qualified to understand how personalities would interact in a complex system

It's astrology for professionals, and companies have let themselves be captured by what are effectively religious zealots.

Social media is now exactly what cable television used to be, but worse; it exists solely to coerce you. You make you feel insecure, you leverage your emotions for someone else's aims.

Due to the changes in technology, social media is far more effective at this than cable TV ever could be, but the concept is the same. It's some remote person attempting to manipulate you by also packaging something enticing along with that manipulation. It's long past time to leave it permanently.

And no, HN is not social media in any normal sense of the word. The pedantry involved in that comparison is extremely tiresome.

You taunt but you've described the ideal state.

What essays can you recommend?

I've even considered printing off essays from the internet I find insightful. I want to reread them, read them in bed, preserve them for the future. Archive.org does exist, but everything on the internet seems to be ephemeral.

I'm quite relieved as the S&P should be stable and slow. But with that caveat said, is this why the S&P 500 dropped off a cliff on Friday? If so, why?

Yes, but it's a false equivalence.

Ah yes, the hellscape that is Japan. The Japanese are currently fleeing to South Sudan and Darfur in hopes of a better life.

It's got an effect but agreed it's not the biggest effect given what else is going on. I think time might be the bigger factor here when simply discussing biology. If you have kids every ~3 years and don't start until you're 35, you have maybe 1.75 years of kids left in you before it starts getting tenuous. (ie, before the woman is over 40) That same math works out differently if your first kid is at 20.

None of this touches on industrialization and higher education, which seem to be the more universal effects, even if one of their bigger effects is merely to delay motherhood.

Nearly every metric gets worse

- likelihood to get pregnant

- likelihood to bring child to term

- health risk to mother during pregnancy and child birth

- health risk to baby during pregnancy and child birth

- increased likelihood of multiple birth defects

- increased likelihood of genetic abnormalities

I'm not casting aspersions. My wife and I had kids when she was 38 and 40 respectively. But, the numbers for the risks are stark.

Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30, but this is downplayed because the extreme sensitivity of the issue.

Potentially. You're mixing "fitness" with "intelligence" -- there's no guarantee that "intelligence" will guarantee fitness.

Everyone claims it's the cost, but poor people used to have kids constantly. When I lived in Baltimore the guy on my block grew up there. They had 12 kids in a ~1100 sq foot row home with two bedrooms and 1 (or no?) bathroom. You can find similar stories everywhere.

"Did cars increase traveling deaths?"

"Cars are just a tool. The drivers who piloted the vehicles and weren't careful enough [are responsible for the deaths.]"

I've really yet to see a coherent discussion about what's even _wrong_ with schooling. It's possible that coherent discussions are happening and I'm just not aware of them. I see two different patterns:

  - A list of complaints about what people did not like about school. eg: "The teacher yelled at me too often and then I became discouraged in this subject."

  - Working backwards from bad outcomes. "Numbers are getting worse. It must be that we're not _empathizing_ with kids enough!"

Neither seem to offer a real, coherent theory. The first argument totally fails to address if school is doing the most good for the most kids, and it was just a poor fit for you. The second problem is more general -- it's really difficult to build meaningful theories about complex systems.

The topic seems politically fraught enough (and for good reason, I suppose) that it's hard to imagine landing firmly on the correct answer. No matter how many good ideas you have, there will be so much complexity in the system, so many schools and systems that don't fit your model, that it will be possible to point to failure for any reform.

Disgusting. Meta does not care about the harm they do so long as they make money.

NYTimes was the only subscription in well over a decade that was just sitting there collecting money when we thought we'd canceled it. It was for some crossword type app game, but it was just eating ~$7 monthly without any use. The only reason I noticed was my credit card bill. I really, really hate subscriptions.

I don't think it's childish nonsense to wish better things for people, or to express disappointment when people err.

In general, people who complain about power hierarchies do not want an end to hierarchies. They just want the hierarchies to be reshuffled so that they are the ones on top. There are exceptions, there are certainly true believers, but for the most part it's just another tired power grab by another name.

It's incredibly depressing that the concept of "bias" has been shrunken down to solely mean "bad attitudes about an ethnic or gender ground" (and perhaps on the right, "bad attitudes about conservatives")

Bias could mean so, so many other things. Was the amyloid hypothesis incorrect? How should we use semicolons? How do you know when meetings waste more time than not? etc. People understand the world via mental shortcuts, via theory-rather-than-fact. We're stuck doing this because we're limited in so many ways. We are so biased about so many things, and this could interact in so many interesting ways. But damned if anyone cares about that. The only thing they seem to care about is how you feel about the "right" or "wrong" groups of people. It's a catastrophic waste of time and energy.

I never said I wanted it to be changed. Even if you dislike or disagree with my take, I want to make that really clear; I don't think we should modify art because we find it unpleasant.

I think you make a fine analysis, but I would just offer that real life can be quite jarring and uncomfortable. So a story which paints a very real picture of life (rather than constructing a narrative) might just be unpleasant. I don't think her story is poorly written, and I think it is quite memorable.

For reference, I also really enjoyed the Catcher in the Rye, and there are some superficial similarities: a young person is scarred by events in their lives and succumbs to depression. (there are a myriad of differences between the two stories -- I'm not drawing an equivalence, just making one comparison)

Catcher in the Rye is probably best read as an angry teenager: you meet Holden Caufield and he's witty, cynical, funny, defiant, etc. You might fall in love with the character, but what you ultimately learn is that he's a miserable failure; he lost the battle with his depression and so many of the people he was cutting down were just normal, decent people trying to enjoy their lives.

Crucially, we never meet Holden when he is young, bright eyed, and innocent. The narrative structure shows us who he is right away, and we the reader learn that this is actually quite a bad thing throughout the course of the story.

Persepolis works a bit differently: we spend the first half of the book with innocent, bright-eyed Marjane and we fall in love with that character. The character we fall in love with is taken from us by the events of the story, by living unsupervised in exile, etc. It's nothing but sad. It's well-written, it's very memorable, but I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling unhappy about an unhappy turn of events.

I refuse to read the story since I assume this would mean I'd need to see advertisements. Of course, all advertising should be avoided as aggressively as possible. Except for old fashioned sort of stuff (a phone number and business name for a local plumber in a local newspaper) nearly all advertisements should be dealt with in an adversarial manner. If a company is trying to tell you something is good, then you should just assume the opposite. It's probably terrible in some way. You could be wrong, of course, but this is a much safer starting position. And more crucially, the company that has attempted to persuade must pay some sort of penalty for their attempt do so. They didn't earn some right to try to persuade you; they are not a trusted friend or lover. They just want something from you. So your default position should be "these claims are false and against my interest, and to the extent possible I will forget this company exists. Failing that, I will never patronize their services."

Agreed, and there really is nothing positive to say about the modern-day Iranian government. The Persian culture has not been fully stamped out, though, and I think there is a lot of good there even if proper regime change may not be realistic.

I always enjoyed the first half of Persepolis. Told from Satrapi's perspective, it was a very relatable story about a young child who was swept up by the world events around her, and tried to rebel in very normal, child-like ways. It was very relatable in that abstract sense, even if most of us have not been through a violent revolution. (and even more violent subsequent war with a neighboring state)

The second half of Persepolis was much more difficult for me, and I never know how to feel about it. I think above all else Satrapi deserves a lot of credit for describing herself realistically rather than trying to paint herself as a good person. (not that she was a bad person, but that she didn't shy away from parts of the story that show her in a poor light) I have a lot of respect for her honesty in the second half of the story, however her time in exile in Europe seemed to be one of self-indulgence, meandering, and minor self-destruction. All of which are understandable for someone who has been through such a traumatic turn of events, however it was a bit sad that the young, rebellious child that was so likable did not seem to survive the conflict.

There were two large exile groups subsequent to the Iranian revolution: France and Albania. MEK has a large presence in both. I don't know enough of the history to say whether France was chosen because there was _already_ an affinity or not, but interestingly "merci" is one of the common ways to say "thank you" in Persian.

>Did you ever notice you almost never read anything good about Iran?

You can read plenty of good about Iran if you read something other than geopolitical news. It's a very interesting country with an incredibly interesting history and language. The news is a pretty poor source for much of anything except for "events are happening" or "politicians have an agenda in [area]" -- I don't mean to belittle those. Both of those matter, but really no one should consider the news to provide thorough treatment for any large topic.