rndmize

I saw a headline a few weeks ago that American fast food had spread to <location> half a decade or a decade ago, and now obesity rates were way up in the past few years. There shouldn't be anything surprising about this - fast food is engineered and optimized to be as appealing/addictive as possible so that people come back for more, and likely breaks natural systems of recognizing fullness in the process. (Further side effects - zero optimization for human health; likely leads to pickier eaters, etc.)

In much the same way, tech optimizes for eyeballs and attention. Kids learning how to interact socially in person? Irrelevant. Constant advertising and status comparison driving users to depression? Doesn't matter, or can even be a positive if it drives engagement. There was an article on here just yesterday ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745630 ) about how people spend so much time trying to one-up each other on social media, endlessly trying to make it look like their life is better or more fun than it actually is. And of course, even if it sucks a lot of the joy out of doing things, this is exactly what social media companies want.

This isn't a problem with psychology or tech, phones or apps. It'd a core feature of the capitalistic system we operate in, and it warps everything within it.

> But not strongly enough, apparently, to get that statement any higher than the fourth paragraph of your comment. Which tells me you're more interesting in flogging the bad game and its developers than you are in instances of actual, real-world harrassment.

You're making a big reach there. The parent comment is responding to the article, which is towing the developer line that the release wasn't that bad, they hit their expectations, it was just stuff like missing butterflies - none of which is true. The harassment issue is a problem, but I see nothing wrong with a comment correcting core problems with the article first.

Other means of launching would be massive infrastructure projects, have huge power requirements, or simply might not be practical with current technology (as with a space elevator). I would guess that the most practical would be some sort of EM launch system + rocket/ramjet, if you could figure out how to transition from the first part to the second, but who knows.

What part of this is "can't"? No one wants to spend the money, end of story.

Your statement is worthless without context. The US has never had more than a 68% labor participation rate. To say that 37% of the US is unemployed, without qualifying that that percentage includes anyone over 16 (students, retirees, stay at home parents - in short massive numbers of people that are not seeking work) is to be deceptive.

A reasonable statement would note that the labor participation rate was at about 59% from 1950 to 1965, rose over several decades and peaked around 67% in the 90s as women entered the workforce in droves, fell 1% in the 00s and 3% following the recession. It would further be worth noting that the recent fall could be a result of a variety of factors - poor wage growth (might change the calculus of stay-at-home parenting), increasing numbers of young men that prefer to live with their parents and absorb themselves in entertainment rather than "getting ahead" (possibly also affected by the prior wage issue), or baby boomers retiring in increasing numbers, causing a bump in people moving out of the work force.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

Disappointing but unsurprising. There's little to be done at the moment aside from contacting your assemblyman/state senator and making yourself heard.

I would expect, generally, that if a company is going to spend tens of billions on an acquisition, a few tens of millions on marketing material, "citizen groups", "studies", third-party editorials, etc. would be par for the course; it's pure bad business to do otherwise.

But it's possible that with enough actual calls/contacts from constituents that some progress gets made and reps can be pointed in the right direction. Hell, this being California, perhaps something similar will make it onto the state ballot at some point.

> They allow unlimited multi-story flats to get built, the area is now full of the things. Population density will increase further, but major infrastructure won't, so now you need bigger roads, more roads, maybe a subway, smog goes through the roof, activity areas (e.g. parks, recreation) disappears into building or more roads, and now suddenly Cupertino is downtown LA at rush hour and nobody wants to live there.

Literally nothing you listed there necessarily follows. Growing populations is often specifically the reason greater infrastructure is built. SF, regardless of it's construction boom has yet to remove a park/rec area that I've heard of and, in fact, is building a new one on top of it's new transbay terminal. NYC has a wikipedia page listing it's parks (hmmm, biggest city in the US, why haven't they just paved them all over to support more people?!) Smog... you're actually bringing this up? Smog is created when people have to commute 1-2 hours to GET to Cupertino, often sitting traffic, not when people can actually live sort of close to where they work (further, smog isn't currently a problem in the bay and is likely to decrease as people transition to electric vehicles over the coming 20 years, but I digress).

If Cupertino doesn't want to be downtown LA, the prescription is literally the opposite of everything you've suggested, as their focus on building more office space instead of housing is what will turn them into a by-day business center for bedroom communities on other side of the bay. (Or, they could stop incentivizing businesses and office space and maintain their look/feel by letting some other parts of the bay have a piece of the tech boom).

Your post is optimistic to the point I choked on my coffee.

Our economy is predicated on consumer spending; we have a whole set of industries built on the backs of poor financial decision making and being near-broke (payday loans, credit cards, overdraft charge reordering, debt collectors, etc.) all of which pull power away from desperate people and give it to others (now your landlord/phone company/ISP/etc have legal grounds to kick you out, terminate your service, etc.) Never mind the difficulty of making use of a court system stacked against the poor...

> I hope voters and politicians recognize...

Actually, it appears that voters and politicians have zero interest in improving this situation, seeing as the current administration is making every effort to demoralize and defang the CFPB[0], which was literally created to do some of the things you're interested in.

I especially like how Mulvaney is moving everything into "financial education", as if an agency with 500M budget is going to make a dent against the billions spent on marketing related to financial "services".

[0] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-cfpb-student-loans-201...

You can still have an impact. Make noise in favor of things like open primaries, proportional representation, and instant-runoff/score/range voting.

Imo one of the biggest problems with our current system (single winner FPTP) is it results in two parties, with various side effects such as extremist candidates in primaries, complete lack of representation for minority voters, and gerrymandered districts. Moving towards better systems would help a great deal.

Many of them are, actually. See: https://www.spur.org/

A fair number of tech companies donate to SPUR, which does policy analysis/writing, advocacy, etc., including Dropbox, Salesforce, Netflix, and others.

That said, I was disappointed to see last year that Google apparently joined about the month I did (as opposed to, say, a decade ago) and were donating at some small level (sub-50k/year, Microsoft was in a higher donation bracket ffs). The amount of fighting Google is willing to do in Mountain View while ignoring the rest of the bay astounds me.

https://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2017-08-2...

https://www.spur.org/join-renew-give/business-membership/spu...

Going from "I see higher inflation" to "a nationwide measure is rigged" is a big leap.

IIRC this ad campaign wasn't a "trust only us" campaign; it was a direct response to the never-ending calls of "fake news" from the president and right-wing against CNN. In a world where the the president literally sends out his press secretary to lie on Day 1 about the size of his inauguration crowd, this is a reasonable (though I suspect utterly useless) response.

Simplified Chinese being the most common language (by far at 52%) threw me for a loop, though it probably shouldn't in this day and age. (For context: English - 23%, Russian - 7.7%, Spanish - 2.8%).

Efficiency aside, that feels like awful planning to me. Growing up in the Bay Area, the threat of a significant earthquake has been ever-present. My family always had several dozen bottles of water and a reasonable amount of canned/jarred/dried food around.

Because when it comes down to it, a lot of these things are supported on a local or state level. HN is California-heavy and reflects the politics of the state (and the Bay Area specifically). As such, the prevailing opinion is likely to be that this is voter suppression/racism in action/terrible policy.

The fact of the matter is though, this is a Texas law, passed by Texan politicians, elected by Texan people, who probably on a general level consider voter fraud to be a bigger problem than voter suppression.

While other parts of the US may not like this kind of thing, they're not in a place to do anything about it. Much like if France wants to pass laws outside of the domain of the EU that Germany doesn't like, Germany can't really do much about it besides writing some news articles.

And to some degree, I'm of the opinion that things are better this way. If other states want to shit on their education systems or fail to invest in public health or (insert other policy here), they'll reap what they sow (which is probably, to some degree, exactly what they want). I'd rather that their decisions and policies by limited to themselves rather than being applied at a federal level to everyone.

Disenfranchisement can be achieved on a greater scale if you make an example of people. If you take one person and throw them in jail for voting, you get a classic chilling effect.

The administration (ie. the Trump administration, ie. the executive branch) has no control over spending and the president's budget is more of a wishlist than anything else. Congress sets the budget and passes the bill(s) that fund it.

> China forced Marriott to suspend all online booking for a week at its nearly 300 Chinese hotels. A Chinese leader also demanded the company publicly apologize and “seriously deal with the people responsible,” the Journal reported.

I look forward to the coming years where China continues to grow in influence and power, and the useful things they choose to do with them. /s

The last time I felt like I was seeing a use of government power this idiotic was when Congress decided to investigate cheating in the MLB (or NFL or whatever it was).

Agreed. This comes down to a battle between homeowners and renters + new arrivals. Facebook/Google are moving to deal with the complaints they're hearing from their workforce that the municipalities have consistently ignored for years. I don't think people care if company towns are the result, as long as they get manageable rents/commutes. This all strikes me as a lot less "black mirror" than general selfishness and tragedy of the commons.

Why would you? If your home value is going up, your property taxes are mostly static, and rents are high enough to cover your mortgage and then some, there's no reason to sell when you can hire a property management company to take care of the place and rent it out. Doubly so if you can use your primary property to help finance a second one elsewhere.

This is probably going to sound like terrible advice, but I'd pick up an MMO. If you're stuck in a rural area and have physical issues with travel or can't afford it, your options for face-to-face contact are pretty much nil. Games with a heavy social component at least get you some parts of human contact - chat, voice, group problem solving and objectives, something in common to discuss.

Your new edit is also about the Model 3... and even appears to be citing the same original source.

> ...and the outcome is lower prices to consumers.

Not totally sold on that part.

Good intentions? Any time I read something like this: https://www.thenation.com/article/big-brothers-thought-contr... my doubts about them increase.

The prequalification walls stuff is bullshit and should be illegal. Twice now I've moved to a recently constructed place where it was impossible to get any information on offerings or prices before completion - and putting in neighbor's addresses is an infuriating process of trying to find one who has ISP A instead of B repeatedly until I don't get a "this address already has service please login" message.

So help me God I will get involved in local government if for no other reason that to advocate for municipal broadband and requiring fiber be laid for all new construction.

Shouldn't make much difference, at a guess. Poorer states will generally have proportionally cheaper cost of living, real estate, etc. and should be able to do more with less as a result.

Disagree. Moving funding to a federal level might be more efficient but gives me, as a resident of one particular state, less control over how much is spent on education. I have zero interest in seeing a nationally funded education system gutted because a party I don't support is elected from states I don't live in that have outsize influence.

Further, the "laboratories of democracy" model means that if I don't like how my state is doing education, I'm free to move to another one.

> People move all the time, focusing at the state level concentrates costs while defusing benefits.

Not sure I understand what you're trying to say here. You don't think states are big enough to get economies of scale?

Federal funding for schools shouldn't exist, imo. I'd prefer to see states handle everything related to funding and operating their education systems and the Dept of Ed perform a metrics/analytics/analysis/recommendation function, so that effective changes made by one state can be propagated out to the others, if they want it.

> I think it's impressive that the media made you think he was the one responsible for that narrative, instead of them.

I hold a similar opinion to the op, and don't really see how there's any narrative being formed. WikiLeaks own tweets and actions are concerning enough on their own.

> #PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros.

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/717458064324964352

> The US OCCRP can do good work, but for the US govt to directly fund the #PanamaPapers attack on Putin seriously undermines its integrity.

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/717459700367790080

I read a fair bit about the Panama Papers at the time and never came away feeling like the focus was on Putin - the main thread was wealthy tax evaders across the globe. The casual mention of Soros instantly sends up alarm bells for me, as he's been a favorite punching bag of the right since the Glenn Beck days.

Later, there was the whole process of releasing the DNC emails in batches week by week close to election time - this felt like deliberate social engineering to me.

And finally, more recently there have been the private messages on twitter between Don Jr. and the WikiLeaks that came out - the way WikiLeaks asked for Trump's tax returns so they could look less partisan, the way they were giving suggestions, that they were communicating to begin with.

There's other bits and pieces that I put less stock in - Assange's show on RT, word that they were offered Russian gov docs and turned them down, etc. But the overall tone and feel has changed a lot since 2010. Hell, you can look through their feed about a week back and they're talking about Clinton's emails and the "deep state".