> Before the pandemic, I already made a lot more money (as a lawyer) than my middle class neighbors. Now I also get to work from home three days a week, and get a lot more quality time with my kids, while they have to go to work every day because their jobs aren’t knowledge work.
With all due respect - so what? This seems like crab in a bucket mentality, just because some of us crabs managed to climb to the top of the bucket, we deserve to be pulled down because of some warped view of fairness? We should actually be trying to pull the rest of them out with us.
> In a culture that accepts widespread card fraud, costs increase to offset it.
Maybe, maybe not, but this is a very simplistic way of looking at it. If credit card fraud is responsible for X% of total charges, they can spend effort to deal with it, OR they can simply not deal with it and keeping the transactions going while eating the cost, they may be able to serve Y% more customers where Y > X and thus end up with more profit in the long run.
This works for a lot of businesses in America because the sheer scale is massive (take McDonalds for example, they would probably be better off processing their lunch rush quickly due to the margins they are making rather than take even 1 second to verify there is no fraud). This may not work in Europe, but IMO you're missing an entire dimension when analyzing the true costs.
If the fraud/benefit scale ever tipped away from favoring the companies, I think we would see all these major fraud prevention mechanisms kick in almost immediately in the US.
If foreign money decides to entirely stop spending in developing economies and only spends money in developed economies, it seems like the outcome would be even worse. As in, developing economies will never develop and developed economies will continue to hoard all the wealth.
You really think traffic is filled with 5 people in a car? Try looking around in a traffic jam, it’s like 95% 1-2 people occupancy. At 5 people, just paying the congestion charge starts to make sense. Also you could always split the difference, driving some of the way and parking along the PATH line, ie at Harrison parking is $10-15 per day and PATH fare is $2.75 per person, it’s still possible to get in cheaper and faster by public transit even in contrived situations like this.
That would still raise a lot of questions right? Who hired the babysitter and what kind of vetting did they do? How did the fire start, was it due to poor maintenance and who was responsible for that? Why did none of the automated fire safety equipment work and who manufactured and installed that? Etc etc. it’s pretty pointless to just blame one person in the chain and call it a day
My view is that this is entirely predictable: Once you start tying feedback to compensation outcomes, then it’s only the truly privileged who can afford to give that frank and critical feedback. Everyone else goes into survival mode and figures out how to game the system, because the stakes are too high. Survival at any cost is baked into our DNA.
It’s a bit dishonest, but also impossible to prove since feedback is completely subjective.
Not gonna lie, this sounds pretty personal from the way you're trying to rationalize this. None of this mental gymnastics you're doing makes any sense at all.
To be clear, you’re saying that memorizing a sequence of multiple choice answers (like ABBCADADD etc…) is not “cheating” and equivalent to properly learning the material? Yeah… I don’t think you’d have many people agreeing with you there. Imagine if that’s how your doctor got his medical degree.
> it's kinder to say, "your hair looks like my nana's and she's been dead for 10 years" then it is to let dozens of folks think the same thing of them. I have a couple friends who would tell me the first thing -- they're whose opinion I trust.
Honestly, you seem extremely naive with a very basic take on this situation. Your friends can say this stuff to you, _because_ you trust them, not the other way around. If a stranger were to make that comment to you, it would be unbelievably silly to take it at face value and not assume they are trying to sabotage you or get one over you in some way. And what exactly is the point of the insult, do you just go around assuming that everyone has the same sense of humor as you, and everyone who doesn’t is wrong? Haha.
Just take my comment for example. Am I being constructive or simply being condescending to you to make me feel better? Hard to tell because you don’t know me, isn’t it?
All of this deduction you just did requires prior knowledge of the existence of logic tests and that written tests work like that, which is purely modern cultural knowledge. No one is born knowing that a “written test” is a thing. There was a time period in history where this was NOT obvious, even though it is obvious to anyone now.
Ok… but you seem to be completely missing the fact that there literally ARE actually elephants in Germany. In zoos. So if you know this fact a priori, and the test says the statement “there are no elephants in Germany. How many elephants are in Germany?” - are you just blindly still going to take it at face value and answer 0 (which is incorrect in the real world) or do you think maybe the test is trying to trick you or is simply getting the base facts or wording wrong? You’d only answer 0 if you knew this was very specifically a logic puzzle (which is evident to us now, but not so evident to someone who has never seen a logic test before).
Is it though? It’s pretty easy to read the first line as something like “Elephants are not native to Germany” and then assume the Munich question is a trick question. In fact the person who answers 1 or 2 because of the possibility of a zoo is actually using smarter logic than someone who takes it at face value.
> If you care deeply about privacy, should you be online at all?
Er I’m not following this logic at all. If you care passionately about something that is at odds with current society, then you are no longer supposed to be part of this society? For example if I fundamentally disagree with capitalism that doesn’t mean I’m somehow absolved of getting a job and paying bills, we are all still human beings with basic needs that need to be met.
Not just an American thing, try jaywalking in Germany, they consider it so offensive that even some mothers will shield their children’s eyes to prevent them seeing you do it. You must be British, thinking you speak for the world ;)
How do you envision that happening? There’s no big database of people’s medical conditions out there that you can use to lookup their name and address, so it’s kind of like an impossible reverse lookup that would need to be done right? Unless you’re talking about a state level actor or something that is tailing someone’s movements around like Jason Bourne and cross referencing it with medical GPT queries, but in that case you’re gonna be compromised anyway in probably far easier ways.
To be pedantic, the US has never been a democracy, it has always been a republic and it was built in to give land equal or more power than individuals. Though I don’t deny that it seems to be either in or approaching a failure mode (though perhaps the observant may notice it never worked as it was advertised even from Day 1, there was never really a success mode).
These all seem super arbitrary - like Product development for example, who says that commercial development isn't artistic? So if there's money involved it's not art...? What about video games, I am pretty sure a lot of people consider those to be art, and it's also a collaborative commercial creative process.
Same with music, there are plenty of jam sessions where people create music together totally improvised on the spot. I mean pretty much all of them can be done collaboratively if people felt like it, and often do.
Pair programming? That’s multiple people being creative together with nothing to do with music or performance. I think there are plenty of examples of collaborative creativity.
To be fair, I think allowing flights a year in advance is probably far more complicated than just updating the underlying date format. Even if they were able to solve that problem, airlines probably can't easily operationally plan that far ahead due to so many moving parts, i.e. committing to routes and schedules, planning for staffing that far ahead of time, ever changing government restrictions, fuel price fluctuations, inflation, geopolitical realities, staffing, etc. I mean, imagine if they did, and something like COVID comes along again, it would cause far, far more disruption if they had booked out the next few years in advance (we had no idea how long COVID restrictions would last while we were in the heat of it, it's only clearer now in retrospect).
Also speaking as a software engineer myself, it's almost never just a software fix that will magically solve everybody else's problems, that always ends up being just wishful thinking
No, you are purely a number to them, it is very unlikely anyone cares or even is mildly interested in the full scope of the damage they’re causing. I have worked with companies like this, if you try to push them from the “guilt” angle they usually double down about how this is collectively the best solution (carefully omitting that what they mean is it’s the best solution for their personal ambitions and wallets)
Not directly related to the conclusion but I did find it interesting how they claimed the Mandarin study was identical but also clearly omitted some of the most initially “negatively” viewed topics like coronavirus, government, and politics (probably for obvious reasons, but also seems like it might affect the results too keeping things squarely in the positive category to start).
Attacks are a bit different than someone trying to access information, though. Much like it is illegal to punch someone in the face, unless they try to punch you first.
Is there really common sense though? A similarly low stakes example, when public drinking was banned in NYC in 1979, there was a direct quote from the council member who sponsored it that basically implied the same thing, that proper judgment will be used [1].
> “We do not recklessly expect the police to give a summons to a Con Ed worker having a beer with his lunch,” said Councilman Frederick E. Samuel, DemocratLiberal of Manhattan, who was one of the primary sponsors of the bill.
Nowadays, 40 some odd years later, yes, that same ConEd worker will definitely be cited if they crack open a drink. Judgment has long since been thrown out the window for a literal interpretation of the law, and it's likely the original context has also long since been forgotten.
Never implied that you are a shill at all. Just that I have noticed a common theme on HackerNews where people tend to comment as if they "know it all" (and maybe you do, how do I know). I just want to make aware that this article writer has earned credibility, and as a layman I am much more willing to put a higher weight on the article than a rando taking it down and calling it garbage based on what doesn't seem to be any special insight into the situation.
I have no dog in the fight, but I did find it interesting that the top comment on HN for the Alameda article written by this very exact author was very similar in tone completely dismissing the article and saying it's total nonsense, and that the author knows nothing. As we all found out a few days later, the article was 100% on the nose. So reasonably, it seems we HN readers would have to take the total outright dismissal of this article with a grain of salt...
This does make sense that cryptocurrency doesn't necessarily have any intrinsic value, but I also feel like there's going to be a bit of a "Bart Simpson" effect. If you tell people exactly what they _can't_ do, you are going to induce serious demand in many people who are going to attempt to do exactly what you told them they can't do, just for the sake of it. Which could then drive up value, and attract more people, etc... owning banned things is very attractive to a lot of people.
That’s only because we have limited the scope and definition of “work” to just mean doing a job or task to earn money doing tasks for someone else’s interests. Most people probably hate the concept of a job, but I think human beings have an innate desire to be useful to their community (I.e. the fundamental definition of “work”)
Banning is the "easy solution"--just as easy as banning alcohol, drugs, and gambling has been in the past. What banning money exchanges will do is 1) drive it underground to money exchanges being done by unsavory characters who have no issues committing crimes up to and including physical violence, 2) Drive up enforcement costs and create an entire police enterprise whose mandate and funding depend on hunting these unsavory characters, 3) Deprive Uncle Sam of any and all tax revenue from capital gains, etc, etc...
I mean, all of this literally happened with alcohol, with cannabis, etc etc. Are we just going to keep repeating this cycle forever.
Isn’t that unethical though? Preserving the right to make arbitrary decisions and favor some people over others? Most of the entire human history of conflict seems to be because of this reason of arbitrary unfairness.