Charitably, this is an astroturf that accumulated 200+ upvotes in about 20 minutes, which I suspect is highly irregular for HN. Along, with a very clear concerted effort to quickly downvote anyone pointing out this is isn’t HN. If this is the case, what is HN admin doing about it?
Less charitably, HN is not where hackers hang out anymore. The hackers have moved on and HN is now this.
When talking about Israel, it's always couched in terms of universal human rights. When confronted with their lack of advocacy for the human rights of practically anyone else, their cognitive fallback is that they only care for what they feel the U.S. government is responsible for, and that it's not really about universal human rights, and never was. Then, when no one is paying attention anymore, they swing back to being avowed universal human rights activists who just happen to be condemning Israel.
There has been much prognostication about the internet blackout but it misses the real issue. The internet blackout only works perfectly when there are no media backed journalists on the ground. The absolute absence of any reporting from foreign journalists on the ground anywhere in Iran is striking.
There was even some reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989, and from Baghdad in 1991.
News media has ceased to be a meaningful investigative endeavor.
> Also what's up with the people hiking (by themselves) with a bluetooth speaker. You're by yourself, in nature. If you want to listen to music wear headphones!!
I used to hold this same opinion. Unfortunately, times have changed and now everyone is constantly in their phones, isolated in their own universes, typically with earbuds or headphones. At least the obnoxious speaker dude is present; in a shared physical reality with the world around him. A lesser evil.
> And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
I agree. It's objectively nonsense with regards to AirPods and Apple Watches in particular. Both are extremely dominant in their respective categories for many years at this point. Objectively, Apple is not alienating its "long-time customers". Someone raging about his perceived wastefulness of AirPods is out of touch with the vast majority of people.
But people love to rage and be enraged on the internet. So anyone pointing the vacuity of the enraged is downvoted and cast aside.
America is founded on the principle of human selfishness. People are selfish, so let’s harness it instead of pretending that people are utopian selfless creatures.
More recently, selfishness has taken second seat to hurting the “other” (whatever other happens to be) even to the detriment of one’s own self interests. America is not built for this.
Maybe you don’t understand the role of the BLS or what it does. Maybe you’ve been sold a bill of goods that it is supposed to be an infallible oracle, when it is, in fact, a useful measurement device with limitations that have been well known for decades.
> I think the disagreement may be on the definition of “reasonable”.
Agreed. It very much does depend on the default rate.
FWIW when I now see 10%+ APRs on unsecured loans for presumably highly rated borrowers and much higher rates for riskier borrowers, I’m no longer shocked.
You’ve drawn yourself a caricature of a hard scrabble borrower who’s just trying to make ends meet and has the best of intentions with regards to their debts.
In my Prosper experience that was the rare exception. The typical defaulting borrower bought themselves a shiny new toy and literally felt entitled to the money. As if their success in securing the loan was sufficient justification to have earned the money outright.
The drama on the Prosper lending forums, where lenders and borrowers could directly communicate with each other, was epic and educational.
As a very early P2P lending participant in the early days of Prosper Lending, I've seen the other side of this.
Many borrowers adopt a mindset that they have earned the money they borrowed and don't feel that they need to pay it back.
I came in to Prosper with a distaste for the apparent predatory lender tactics and came out with an appreciation that not everything that seems predatory really is. While there are plenty of legitimately shady lending practices, reasonably high APRs and the collection tactic you described are not some of them.