iteratethis

What this world needs is pro-active legislation.

The current state of Amazon is the result of a very slow trajectory taking 20 years. It happened in plain sight and still we allow it to grow until it's a monster where most of commerce has to submit to.

We allow Google to become the leading search engine, advertiser, browser maker, mobile operating system maker. Effectively owning the internet. These should be 4 companies, not one. And even the 4 companies should not be of the current size.

Stop allowing companies to grow into platforms, gatekeepers, monopolists that squeeze everybody dry.

The current state is anti-market and anti-capitalistic. There no longer is any market when you allow these monstrosities.

They de-prioritized Firefox. Probably rightfully so, it doesn't stand a chance against Chrome and Safari being shipped as defaults on mobile. They can't really "organically" engineer it back to meaningful market share.

Anyway, somehow Google seems to keep sending them hundreds of millions anyway, so why not spend it on activist blogs that read like a HR DEI policy?

But why? Are you not interested in our weekly 4GB driver update? Even more ways to blink the lights now.

My guess would be in the app.

Enforcing it at the bridge level would break so many setups, apps, custom integrations that even if they try this, they'll dial it back from the avalanche of outrage.

The type of behavior you describe might be related to your electricity setup in combination with generic LED behavior.

I've had this behavior on a physical dimmer switch and an ordinary cheap LED. It couldn't be turned off. Somehow the dimmer always feeds it some power, which the LED responds to. If that low power is at the edge of its "activation power", you're effectively rapidly turning it on and off.

This kills any LED. LEDs die from actuations far before they die from hours in use. Hue bulbs are praised for their reliability, so something is off.

In my case, I changed the physical dimmer into an ordinary light switch. That fixed it.

Similar to the "UN journalists" publication that shared that 20% of journalists killed were women, and that women should stop being targeted.

Blatantly ignoring the 80% of men of course.

Not to mention, who are they talking to anyway? Do you think people killing journalists will now say: OK, sorry, I'll stop. Or maybe pick only men?

Recently the CDC shared an analysis on suicide statistics.

As one might expect, they concluded that there's disparities between demographics. And so they dutifully listed them: LGBTQ+, indigenous people, vets, various other groups.

Except for that one stat staring them in the face. The chart to crush all other charts. MEN. Whom commit suicide at a rate of 5x compared to women, and rising.

That chart was not included nor was even the word "men".

Which perfectly fits the totem pole of victim hierarchy in modern identity politics. Where men do not even exist, or only as oppressors.

Men killing themselves from despair does not fit the narrative. A micro aggression towards a minority though is like a Waterloo moment.

There's no first principles. No objectivity. No proportionality. Only narratives.

This Richard Reeves guy is one few people amidst progressives getting it on the agenda. Read his articles and note how every other paragraph he's almost apologizing to his peers for caring about men at all, as if they're about to eat him alive.

Don't get me wrong. Nobody ever cared about men. Neither men nor women do. Disposable utilities. But the problems and its harmful outcomes are growing.

Here in the Netherlands we've had a supply shortage since WW2, which makes a supply shortage the status quo. There's no hidden conspiracy or grand government policy that causes it.

There's multiple root causes but an overlooked one is the delayed supply shock effect of an economic downturn.

During the crash years of 2008-2014, we pretty much stopped building. Because nobody was buying. This has created a backlog of a few 100K homes never built compared to what population growth would normally require.

It is this backlog that creates a boom 10 years later where for a few years in a row homes appreciate by 15-20% per year. They always appreciate a little, but it is mostly these price spike events that makes homes unaffordable.

So ideally, you keep building even during a downturn, but nobody can subsidize that. The budget would be eye-watering and would be coming at the time of budget cuts, not increases. We're already working on a new deficit. A lot of projects are stopped because due to the high interest rates, demand has crashed.

Similarly, a lot of well intended policies have the exact opposite effect. We're more heavily taxing citizens renting out their second homes. As it then becomes barely profitable, they just sell it. Even less rental homes.

We're heavily constraining investors that do big projects. Fair enough, we'll just not do the project then.

We even went as far as to mandate some new homes to be exclusively built for particular professions, say a teacher. They need affordable homes close to the city. A builder looks at this and will simply build the same home elsewhere, and sell it for a 100K more.

You can tweak taxes for newcomers on the market, giving them more budget to buy their first home. This makes houses more expensive, not cheaper.

And I'm not even addressing the political realities of government and municipality budgets depending on tax revenue based on current valuations (or at least high valuations), or the fact that the voter majority is aging and this being part of their retirement.

You can take somebody from GenZ and give them dictator powers and they still can't solve it, without the "solution" being worse than the problem.

You can't fix this. You can tweak and improve, but you cannot truly move the needle.

You're saying goodbye to the old way too soon, and I'm not talking about the bad parts.

I'm talking about the roles. Even in the most advanced progressive societies women continue to select for male providers (marry up) whilst they continue to do more care-related tasks.

In other words, gendered roles continue to exist. None of which should be shocking because the idea that it's 100% a construct and men and women are entirely egalitarian is an academic fantasy not rooted in anything.

I couldn't agree more.

Progressive discourse has turned so ideological that perfectly normal mainstream conversations make people anxious.

People shiver to even discuss the idea/benefits of a heterosexual marriage. As if its some rogue legacy structure. As if single parent situations are some higher moral good to strive for.

A portion of men, especially the lower classes, are facing severe issues. But this can hardly be addressed as the very idea of men in need of social justice does not fit the "all men are oppressors" narrative.

These politics achieve worse outcomes, not better ones, and they alienate vast groups of people.

I think the truly new thing is that people can "want" children, opposed to this being a must (due to religion, lack of rights, it being a personal pension system, lack of contraception).

When people are free to WANT children and decide on how many, it's going to be 0, 1 or 2. Which might average out to 1.5 - 1.8 in most countries, far below replacement level.

There's nothing you can do financially to truly move the needle. Even people with no immediate financial challenges tend to not have more than 2 children.

Why not? Because a 3rd, 4th, .... adds no value whilst it does add immense logistical nightmares.

When you love children, 2 will keep you plenty busy. When you have 4 you'll have an issue with your car and home. You'll be spending most of your time driving them around to their schools, sports, hobbies, whatever.

It's not an economic issue, as tempting as it is to think that. When given the choice to want children, most still want them, just not many.

I don't have the studies at hand but did come across research articles earlier that suggest that girls are only mildly affected in a female-only parenting situation whilst boys are strongly affected.

It makes sense as they have no male role models. Not at home and close to none in most of their schooling trajectory.

As part of conversations with ChatGPT I often roast it when answers are incorrect. Then I feel bad about myself when it starts apologizing.

They lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on an issue that was in production for several days. On the one and only feature generating revenue: showing ads.

No unit testing, no integration testing (as was admitted) and no production sanity test at all. I guess the accountant was asleep at the wheel as well.

You have bigger issues than strong types.

This entire list will soon be obsolete as AI will link all your accounts by just giving it some of your text input.

I believe I saw an experiment of somebody doing this for HN content with a pretty high accuracy? Project that idea into the future.

Surprised by your labor estimate.

Here in the Netherlands, the norm is that it's a single day of work by a crew of two. That includes everything you described: rails, installation, repatching, wiring, inverter, basically the entire package.

Marl isn't born that way, Marl is made by the same tech you're talking about. You're not a victim of Marl, you actively produce new Marls.

Whenever you introduce convenience into the world, you reprogram people. You create the short attention span and passiveness.