Workers in 2026, even non-tech workers have an easier life than workers alive at any other point in human history.
Yes ofc there are problems - collectivist land use laws that ban construction near homeowners continue to drive housing costs higher for example. But if you asked any worker today if they would have preferred to be alive 40 or 400 years ago I would be shocked if any said yes.
The mega corp is making 3.98% profit. Sure you could focus all your time at Starbucks on that 3.98%, but most of us would focus on the other 96% which is helping customers.
If you find that sort of work, tedious and monotonous, then I think that says more about you than the job. I’ve been a janitor, a barista and a software developer, and they all are fascinating and fulfilling in different ways. Of course if purely measuring on status, comfort and financial renumeration software dev currently beats them all handily, but to imagine there is nothing you could learn, nothing interesting, nothing fulfilling in other types of work is pretty arrogant. The lefties might even call it privileged.
If service to others and to society mean anything to you, working in Starbucks or any fast food job will teach you more about humanity and human society than most college grads learn from a humanities degree.
Just because they already spent the money yesterday, it does not follow that the best decision today is to just carry on as if was still the correct decision. Yes they cannot get that 70B back, but if they have to choose between:
1. a long dragged out distraction over decades trying to make it work
2. a painful but quick 40B write down and the ability to refocus the company on better projects tomorrow
.. then they are, quite rightly imo, going to pick #2. In fact I would assume this going to be the next announcment.
Imagine that AI lives up to its promise, gets captured by unaccountable bureaucrats and socialist dictators, ushering in a world of untouchable über-oligarchs that de facto rule the world. Would it have been worth it then? Can this problem even be solved?
How is it surveillance for an organization that operates a fleet of trains, to know where the trains are?
Even if there were no such thing as GPS, simply the act of running a fleet of trains or trucks or buses on a schedule, means that anyone could do a bit of math and roughly calculate the position of every vehicle based solely on the schedule.
What you neglected to mention is that your app is free.
If this is something you’re able to do and people like it, I think that’s great.
However, the post is about a paid app and that’s going to have a significant influence on the type of support requests you get, and whether or not it makes financial sense to develop according to those requests.
This is poster’s last show HN; homepage features some 16,000 user claim. App appears to be free, which I suspect will rather drastically change the composition of incoming support messages.
There is nothing about collectivism, socialism or communism that guarantees they would be any better stewards of our environment than the status quo. Again, there’s a track record and it’s not good.
There are many ways our economic system is entirely compatible with stopping global warming, but it would require putting prices on things people consider sacrosanct like unlimited driving and unlimited municipally treated water for lawns. Wake me when the socialists are willing to talk how they will equitably tell citizens that they can’t do environmentally destructive things when the citizens are telling them that they want to do those environmentally destructive things. I’m not saying there’s an easy answer, in fact, I’m convinced that there isn’t. He had every day we are told that if only we have a revolution, suddenly these hard problems just disappear, and I don’t think that’s true. After the revolution, people will still be selfish. Perhaps the selfishness won’t be measured in dollars, but it will still exist.
That people of means could assist those who do not, does not at all imply that people of means who say they are assisting are actually assisting. The road to hell and involuntary collectivism is paved with good intentions.
> These were not people starving; they were aggrieved that they were in the 90th percentile rather than the 99th. Surveys show progressive activists are wealthier, whiter, and more highly educated than the average American. They are nearly three times as likely to hold a postgraduate degree.
> Many assume the central conflict in society is between the haves and the have-nots. In reality, much of the struggle is between the haves and the have-mores—people who are already doing well but want the money, resources, and status of those above them. They often disguise this ambition as concern for the have-nots.
> The affluent were the most likely to agree with statements like “I want a position of prestige.” Elsewhere, a University of Edinburgh study found that malicious envy—resentment at others’ success—was one of the strongest predictors of support for coercive redistribution. The impulse, in other words, is not to lift up the poor but to tear down those who are one rung higher.
It does, but then we have to decide which context is relevant, and who decides which context is relevant, which quickly gets us back to "me good, you bad" unless you have something else to bring to the table. History did not begin in 2022, 1948, 1095, 135 AD, or even 3021 BC.
> I want to pose a question: Is it possible that online users just have nonstop shiny object syndrome, and even if forums worked correctly and did the job, users would still move onto something else because we’re never happy? I think the argument is pretty strongly yes.
This is definitely part of it, but the other side of it is the network effect that allows a minority of the population who happen to be especially afflicted by shiny object syndrome, to drive population scale moves from one platform to another. I feel a good analogue is the way that new restaurants become the hot place, the place to see and be seen, but they can usually only sustain this for a time and then the buzz moves elsewhere. The difference, of course, is that the scale is much much larger, and restaurants generally don’t have a way of attempting to directly addict their users.
Why does it seem more ethical for the organization that makes your daily bread to be democratic?
I have no doubt that there are people who wish to attend meetings to vote and argue about minutia involves in the running of bakeries and other organizations. But just because people exist does not mean that the most ethical organization is one that gives them the most opportunity to exercise their particular interest in attending meetings.
The vast majority of people do not want every organization their lives to run like a mini democracy. Not only is this not necessarily more ethical than other alternatives, but it is definitely less efficient and that matters when it comes to the supply of material goods. I don’t want a vote on whether or not my bakery puts sesame seeds on the bread. I just want to buy a loaf of bread thanks.