If that makes you sad, don't look up, because all around us, even whole societies are being homogenized, ironically, by the ones who cry "moar diversity", while in reality creating nothing but muddled and polluted homogeneity. All the diverse cultures of Europe and America and all over the world really, are being erased and eradicated and stamped out through conformity at an ever increasing speed. It's a mass extinction event that people don't even have an understanding for, let alone the exponentially increased risk conformity introduces to a system that was fault tolerant and hedged against risk through localized, diverse homogeneity across the globe.
It is the black swan that no one sees, in spite of it being right before our eyes ... not even only because this comment is censored by the fools on the ship heading for the cliffs.
I guess a prayer at the demonic altar of Soros could get your startup funded. It can't hurt, can it.
Soros along with all the tech tyrants that have been emerging from hades itself are all disassembling and deconstructing the whole basis of the civilized world and the most core concepts of self-governance, freedom of speech, freedom from tyranny, and the most fundamental and core, basic concepts and necessities for any form of democracy, let alone the middle class; yet you laud Soros?
But I guess as long as you see yourself benefitting from the plunder and pillaging, you will support such depravity and degeneracy.
In a world where the citizenship and nationhood has been intentionally shattered to usher in a new globalist aristocratic feudal type system, where foreign threats are intentionally injected and infested and imposed upon “citizens”, you are going to see ever increasing rationalization and justification and threat events to push ever more authoritarianism to turn on their own “citizens”, more accurately described as human capital, that the elite need to shuffle around until they’re no longer needed when AI and automation and robotics takes over.
I wonder if YC readers can see this comment due to YC censorship.
But to answer your question; it was recently shown that hundreds of millions of Chinese had never even heard of Tiananmen Square, let alone ever seen the picture that is iconic in the west through it's propaganda.
But to be fair, look in the mirror, folks. As we wag our fingers at China, the is currently doing exactly the same thing as the strangle hold of authoritarian thought control cinches up ever tighter. Only in the west it is taking an ever more pernicious and, in many ways, more lasting form; when, e.g., Twitter (Muslim controlled), Reddit (Chinese controlled), Facebook (global domination of all of humanity inspired), YC (foreign national and Indian and deranged liberal VC tech tyrant controlled), Google (beholden and submissive to China), etc. all censor what they deem heretical and use the very same types of tactics against the wrongthinkers.
Just saying something here that is not glowing about "immigration", aka, the disposition of wealth and control over one's society in order to shatter democracy and the middle class and to advantage, empower, and enrich the wealthy at the expense of regular people through bribes and the plundering by foreigners ... the soldiers of the wealthy elite trying to destroy democracy and the middle class exactly as they are doing.
That's really on the people. Reality is that no one forces anyone to use Facebook or twitter for that matter, even though in many ways the latter is almost becoming a necessity and therefore there is also an argument for Twitter violating the Constitution by censoring anyone in what is a de facto public space, as has been established by the court ordered ban of the president blocking users.
Not that anyone will see this, but unfortunately for all of us, what is totally missing from this line of thought is the religious restraints regarding jealousy and coveting that are direct responses to the most primitive impulses of humans, that the more you have the more it's not enough, especially when you didn't work for it. It is just as true for the elite who don't work for what they have, as well as the parasitic savages that have been allowed to infest the civilized world (ironically, to enrich and empower the elite) that become ever more greedy and covetous with every bit of thing they are given without having earned or deserved it.
Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but that is the biggest lie and ruse and deception about the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve is a privately owned entity that controls our money, owned by nebulous owners that are not at all clear, but hopefully at the very least owned by American banks like JPM and WF.
Seriously, you should look into it, but be prepared to be utterly stunned to find out the reality of matter and how a private banking cartel controls our fiat, aka, made up fantasy currency. It will shake everything you have been trained to believe like a good slave.
This is going to be a bit of a challenging point for many, so if you are one of those feeble minded types that gets offended not only on your own, about all the things in the world you have been trained to be offended by, but also project your offense on others ... this is not a discussion you will be prepared for and I ask you to kindly not read on, since it will upset feeble sensibilities.
In America, people have an inalienable, God given right to free speech. I understand that is not the case anywhere else on the planet, but consider stopping the abuse cycle by not perpetuating the interests of those who deny you the freedom of speech.
--------- Please stop reading here if you are too weak for free speech ----------
Even beyond the fact that the involuntary income tax that is used to fund the lives and lifestyle of others is slavery, people don't realize just how few people also actually pay net income taxes of any significant portion in the USA.
Even most of those who pay any income taxes whatsoever, which makes up about 112 million, don't realize that what they pay doesn't even cover what they consume, like if you contributed $10 to a garden party that cost $100 per head in costs, because you forced those high expenditures. Unfortunately, those types ... you know them ... feel justified and rationalize their entitlement because they "paid their taxes".
Unfortunately for all of us, things simply don't add up and unless you are willing to freely engage in this type of thing to support others at your expense, you are being enslaved on a bell curve on an income scale. Peak tax slavery is probably somewhere around the $60-70k level where you are most heavily burdened by the crush of taxes and get the least benefits. By estimate, at that level you are probably roughly 20% slave as an American.
It's a bit difficult to peg down exactly without thorough investigation, but if you remove all the government employees, who are not only not net contributors, but negative "contributors", aka, cost centers, to income tax receipts; and you then control for those who contribute some significant number higher than the cost of what they consume, you are left with very similar numbers as in China ... if those numbers can even be believed, which they far more likely than not can not.
Only around 3% of all income tax payers in the USA, or less than 1% of all residents of the USA actually make net positive contributions to the tax burden. I know this is not going to be well received because it's contradictory to the indoctrination and I say it as someone that is no fan of the elite and wealthy in general, but it's fact that somewhere around 99% of American society is living off or freeloading on 1% of the population.
People don't really know that, and are not told that, and it's also clearly obviously hidden from them, but it is more or less reality. Even if the rate were as high as 2% of the population, which is simply in no way possible, that still would not change the ramifications. Would 2 people supporting 98 freeloaders make any significant difference?
It's quite stunning actually and some people simply cannot and do not want to accept it for varying reasons.
It's really really not a good situation regardless of how you look at it; whether by the number of people who are not contributing members of society, or the fact that the government has enslaved the middle and lower upper class people to support both the unproductive members of society and use them to further enrich and empower the elite by taking their slaves' money from them against their will and giving in to the non-contributing masses in order to essentially buy their authoritarian power through democracy. It' essentially what is going on right now with the immigration debate, millions of low wage foreign people are going to enrich and empower the elite against the middle class that is being gutted and democracy fracked through immigration.
Ironically, it's not really all that different of a model than the slavery the British and Spanish aristocrats and elite introduced to the Americas, import slaves to undermine providing a fair wage and increase their profits and power. Same model, just a bit of a pivot to outsourcing the slave management and from taking large profits on a few slaves to taking lower profits from many more less, outsourced slaves.
Because in the end, income tax is slavery, whether it was 100% income/labor tax in 19th Century Brazil, Hispaniola, etc, or whether it was the indentured servitude and company stores, or whether it was sharecropping, ... a Progressive shift from high margin, high management cost, low volume; to low margin, low management cost, high volume.
But we are largely the beneficiaries of this slavery here, so most of us cannot see it or simply do not want to see it. What you don't accept can't hurt you, of course.
Here we have an example of how all the deconstruction of society is resulting in ever cascading and mushrooming abstraction and complexity.
Ok, so let's assume it is valuable to have caused and produced the majority of those "falsehoods" that were largely the result of only the last couple decades, outside of regional/language complexities. Why stop there though?
Why is it not a "falsehood" that names must be written in text?
Where is the support for names that are only phonetic?
Where is the support for names that change every n microseconds?
Where is the support for names that are only images?
Where is the support for hames that are mathematical equations?
Where is the support for names that are JS injections?
Where is the support for names that are graphed in a dot plot?
Are you discriminating against those who graph in bars, you bigot?
Of course you would not want to prove you are a Nasi for discriminating against those who's name is expressed in video and only in 5k form that rotates between 50,000 clips every 5 minutes, would you? Where is your support for that?
... and the list of deranged deconstruction and destruction can continue ad infinitum.
Of course that is all ridiculous in a somewhat exaggerated manner, but I can assure you that the vast majority of the subject "falsehoods" we are being lectured about would have been equally as ridiculous in a far more efficient and effective and cohesive time just a few years ago.
Wait, where is your support for that symbol that The Artist Formerly Known as Prince used? Darn, is "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" title capitalized or just regular capitalized or at all???
BTW, if I were more offended, I would protest that my name ... that is written in neolithic stone age hieroglyphics ... is not supported and would call everyone that does not know how to pronounce my name a bigot.
Is this satire, or humor, or am I serious? We have lost out collective ability to tell as we descended into madness.
Not just entrepreneurship, but even competition itself, in a world that has seen nothing but consolidation and centralization of power and wealth over the last 20+ years as ever fewer organizations have been gobbling up and devouring and squashing any notion of competition and entrepreneurship in its infancy. It is arguably the sole model of the technology sector, the pump and dump, setting a "startup" up to appear as appealing to one of the monopolistic behemoths or titans. It's even somewhat of a model in the smaller tech company sector as free money paid for by tax dollars is sloshing around and companies are consolidating and creating ever larger conglomerates that take ever more air our of the entrepreneurial landscape.
It's not healthy, and no matter what the consequences will be, I cannot envision an outcome where any of this leads to positive things. But maybe it's just my own "bias" that I have positive associations with not being a subject to a hive mind of centralized power and control.
Does it really not bother anyone else that we are heading down a rather dystopian world of a kind of hyper-meritocracy that eschews with all other rights and privileges as it commoditizes humans to nothing but a function of their skills and abilities as put on paper, or even exhibited in practice?
It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments ... that you are not better than the last widget you created compared to the next person you are compared in preparation for creation of the next widget.
Does anyone else realize this is really just a sneaky way of introducing the degenerate nature of communism into the equation? ... that your humanity means nothing if you are not a featureless and characterless humanoid with zero of your own "biases" that contributes to the hive mind collective. I really don't think people have thought this thing through and the ways in which it can go wildly out of control once edge cases start gripping.
So you are hiring totally blindly, without consideration for anything but merits ... it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor
None of that seems remotely healthy or sane to me, and really just smacks of the idealistic and self-deluding narrow view of the effete and decadent who live sheltered in a bubble, without any fear of their own replaceability (whether rightful or not), let alone possessing event the remotest understanding for the wider consequences of their actions and outcomes, even fore themselves, if that bubble were to burst.
This type of technocratic and authoritarian mentality that somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans, ideally in their minds, a mixed master race devoid of "bias" and therefore devoid of their humanity; is really a rather detestable and clearly inhumane ideology by its inherent characteristics.
I think the real problem that is totally overlooked is the whole authoritarian nature of this paternalism of monitoring people as to their "offensiveness". It's pure and unadulterated authoritarianism and controlling to declare yourself as the moral arbiter of what is and isn't offensive and what should and shouldn't be allowed. And no, it's not a matter of whether you CAN legally do so, it's a matter of whether you SHOULD be an authoritarian dictator.
How about giving people a choice instead of playing Little Lord Fauntleroy and controlling everyone's actions. How about just giving users the option to block "offensive" or even just possibly "offensive" names and terms and words, instead of going all paternalistic jerk.
It is something that has bothered me for a long while now, especially in places like Reddit, where the whole fundamental concept of the site was totally and utterly undermined by the authoritarian mod squad that makes the whole community voting/self-regulation a facade when it's not being used by the angry mob to metaphorically burn the witch that dared to say something that wasn't their favorite thing to hear.
Unfortunately, the underlying issue here is that the federal government has stolen $10 billion from the American people ... mostly of the people of the future ... against their will, and now people who have no vested interest in how to dispense with other people's money to any degree that is commensurate to the level of responsibility and with virtually zero real accountability or consequences, to offer that money that belongs to other people to monopolistic tech companies that are utterly tyrannical in their spirit as they take over the internet and the whole economy and government and society
It is the black swan that no one sees, in spite of it being right before our eyes ... not even only because this comment is censored by the fools on the ship heading for the cliffs.