I don't know if bittorrent has improved - but 20 years ago I had a personal issue with it.
At that time our son was using it for games. He goes away to college and came home for the first school break. I get a phone call from our internet provider asking if our son was home. I was so shocked and handed the phone to our son.
Apparently at that time bittorrent was optimizing for the most efficient path to a host. Since we had relatively good connection, the mighty weight of the internet was funnelling through our tiny internet provider to our son's computer. The provider (without our knowing it) had made a deal with our son that he would only turn on bittorrent between midnight and 6 AM. I doubt other providers would be so generous.
I have been sceptical of bittorrent since that day.
All clients today (and probably back then) have options to limit bandwidth consumption including throttling, scheduling, and total data transfer caps. For serving mostly HTML and images, dedicating even 10% of a home broadband connection to serving content would allow many, many people per day to access archived pages.
Kodak was well aware of what was going to happen. Company culture killed digital photography.
I was at Apple when we worked with engineers from Kodak who were working to change various format standards to allow digital photos. This was in the late 1980s or early 1990s.
But, from the perspective of today, Kodak would have had to basically eclipsed Apple.
Even displacing the big Japanese camera manufacturers, who by then had dominated high-end photography, would have required reversing decades of a shift away from high-end cameras like the Retina line.
I don't doubt there was company DNA against digital photography but it's not like non-smartphone photography, especially beyond relatively niche pro/prosumer level, has had such a good run recently either.
The 35mm system was a huge consumables business down through the food chain. That basically doesn't exist with digital. (Aside from ink jet supplies and I'm not sure how true even that is any longer.)
> I feel like these articles are written for and describe younger people.
I think the opposite is true. I first read Jane Austin as a teenager. I had no concept of the economic environment of the book. I thought meh.
Now that I am retired and re-reading Austin, I view them more in terms of the economic environment. I didn't have this context when I was young, and the books are awesome. In several passages she give a critique of the economic system so sublimely that it passed over my head when I was young.
FMLA only covers companies with 50 or more employees.
A friend was fired in the US when she told her boss she was pregnant and discovered this limitation. Her previous work experience was in France so she did not realize this could happen.
Dno. The roads here are way better than other places with lower taxes, it’s beautiful, the air and water are clean, and so on.
Everywhere has plenty of things to complain about. I’d like to spend less in taxes, always.
But at least it does feel, objectively, like we live in a mostly lovely place that actually does protect employees, have access to great healthcare, great roads, great charging infrastructure (relative to the rest of the US) and so on.
Anecdotal, but I have driven across a majority of US states, from Florida to Alaska (and also, on both the East and West sides of Canada) and haven't noticed any strong correlation between the quality of the roads and how high a states taxes are.
Did you drive between Texas - Louisiana? It is a massive difference almost immediately. You go from 55mph top speed limit with many potholes in LA to smooth 75mph Texas roads. Texas roads are much better and I have heard the same opinion many times from people making that drive. Louisiana makes their roads cheaper by making them much more thin, and they don’t get repaired often in rural areas.
That might be part of it, but far and away the main reason for that is to offset the state’s ability to tout about having no income tax.
There’s a list floating around by some personal finance blog that ranks the states based on effective tax rate across most taxes citizens are subject to and Texas consistently ends up remarkably high on that list due to the other taxes being relatively high.
Texas is essentially the personification of a low sticker price with hidden fees (e.g., “starts at $0”).
There's probably a lot of noise in the data. Off the top of my head, climate (whether roads are exposed to freeze-thaw cycles) and population density/clustering (how many miles of road do you need to maintain per person), are probably more strongly correlated with quality than taxation levels.
Since you mentioned Florida, the roads go from good to bad as soon as you cross the border into Alabama, which is a really interesting experience on the interstate. But yes, the roads are bad in Deep South states, although the taxes aren’t really that low either (just people don’t make much money to get much out of them).
For a state that often bemoans the federal government and its out of control spending, Texas takes an impressive amount of funds and puts it into a very high-quality and modern interstate system.
Texas will receive over $27 billion (with a B) over the next ~5 years in federal funding for highways and bridges alone. $10 billion was allocated across 2022-2023. Many of their roads are quite nice and only going to improve. Thanks, Uncle Sam!
Texas has high property taxes. It's actually not a low tax state as measured by overall tax burden. Texas is also very proud of its massive, well-resourced public schools (and their football teams!), and pours a lot of tax revenue into them.
It depends on your income since income taxation in California is extremely graduated. If you make less than $60-70k, you’ll pay less in CA, otherwise you’ll do better in TX.
I don’t notice much going between the two on I-80, well except you go from pretty straight desert roads into a freaking mountain range. Are mountains involved in the border at I-15 also?
California is rated poorly on roads on average because they have a lot of rural/mountainous terrain to cover. In the cities where most people live, the roads are actually pretty good.
I’ve driven track cars with bone shaking suspension from LA to Vegas and honestly don’t recall any difference.
Funny, because it's in the Las Vegas newspapers every six months or so how the mayor of Las Vegas and the governor of Nevada are always begging California to upgrade its side of I-15.
Almost every month there are 14-hour traffic jams on Sunday night as the SoCal crowd scurries home only to hit the bottleneck at the California border where I-15 goes from six lanes to four, then twists its way through the mountains.
I've driven it many dozens of times in the last ten years, and it's well known among people who live in Nevada.
Maybe Nevada could provide the money for it? Building roads on flat ground is easier than a freeway through the mountains is it not? And the primary beneficiary of the road is Vegas? Why would I want California taxes to subsidize Vegas gamblers? A road that is totally fine except Sunday night? Think about the two bits of road you are comparing: they are not representative.
Cross from IL to WI on 94. The toll road ends and the reads are so much better. Of course WI will pull over any speeder with out of state plates. They even take credit cards to pay your fine on the spot.
I grew up in the suburbs. My town had pretty much no commercial base. The next town over had a huge mall. They had much better roads, a much better library, a sports complex, a swimming pool complex, the list goes on. It was obvious to a 10 year old how much of a difference the tax base made.
Of course, we just got a library card in their district and I enjoyed the use of the nicer library as well. But still.
I noticed an immediate degradation in surface quality on the interstate when I crossed into Alabama. Aren't the states responsible for upkeep using federal dollars? Some states are better than others at this.
Initial roadway construction is using primarily federal dollars, but long-term maintenance is usually primarily funded by the state or local municipality.
Tell that to Mississippi which has s*t roads and no winter freezing/thawing or salt to consider. Broke ass red states can barely afford to keep their roads passable for the most part. There are a couple of exceptions where the states are willing to starve their children to keep the roads up, but most red states fail at both feeding kids and maintaining roads. If it wasn't for the cash infusion from the well off blue states, the red states would literally be third world.
It truly depends within CA. San Diego or suburbs of LA? It's pristine. Bay Area? The roads flood with the slightest bit of rain and have potholes the size of a basketball.
My experience is that the Florida roads are significantly better than the roads in the bay area. And Florida has no income tax and lower sales taxes than California.
Bay Area, but I’m from NYC, so my standard for “bad road” is relatively high - there are a lot of potholes right now from the rain, but in general they get fixed quickly, the roads are wide and many-lanes, and generally don’t do insane things like loop back on themselves or anything like that.
I disagree with this. I live in SF and the roads range from terrible to just-ok. And not just in the city; US-101 is just kinda ok (despite vaguely-regular maintenance), and many local roads I see in nearby smaller towns and cities (South SF, Daly City, Belmont, San Mateo) are -- at best -- just ok. Similar situation when I drive north toward Sonoma.
A major issue in SF proper is that crews are constantly digging up parts of roads to work on pipes or whatever, and then patch them in a haphazard, crappy way. Roads get fully resurfaced rarely. As an example, there's a super nasty patched and re-patched and re-patched and re-patched section of 18th St (between Minnesota and Tennessee) that has been a nightmare for at least 4 years now.
A section of Tennessee between 18th and 19th was resurfaced about a year ago (in part because there was building construction along the road that did heavy damage), but just this past week they were digging up a large section in the center of the road to do some work underneath, and when they patched it up, they as usual did a crap job, so the road sucks again.
I grew up in New Jersey (80s) and Maryland (90s), and the roads were much better maintained in both of those places, Maryland especially.
I agree SF has shit roads. I do not find that to be the case almost anywhere else in CA.
I’ll put it this way too: while I’m mindful of potholes, generally, I have yet to have a single issue popping any of my 21” thin sidewall summer tires on my >5500lb EV.
My counterparts in the South have popped between 2 and 10 depending on who you ask. The answer each time is: hit a pothole.
Some of that’s driving. Some of it is also just the roads. They’re far from perfect. But they’re better than most other states.
> The roads here are way better than other places with lower taxes
I live in San Francisco and absolutely disagree with this. The roads are garbage. And lest we think that's just a city thing, whenever I leave the city and drive out on local and state roads they range from garbage to ok-ish.
My family moved to Maryland when I was a teenager, and the roads there were pristine (90s, not sure about nowadays). It felt like some section of some road or highway near me was always being resurfaced.
> Though Texas has no state-level personal income tax, it does levy relatively high consumption and property taxes on residents to make up the difference. Ultimately, it has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household at 12.73% than California's 8.97%, according to a new report from WalletHub.
Obviously there are more than two states, but it’s not so simple.
Plus, someone’s got to pay for everything:
> [California] receives $0.99 in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes paid, which is below the national average return for states of $1.22 per dollar paid, according to its review of a 2015 New York Comptroller study.
Bizarrely, even experts miss this obvious fact. If not income taxes, then how does government pay the bills? Income taxes are usually the most progressive tax, so no income tax usually means less wealthy people pay more. If government spends less, what services are cut?
Yeah it's very funny hearing my dad talk about how nice it is to have no income tax in Washington (he's a dentist). But when you tell him that the relatively higher income tax is worse for poor people he doesn't seem to agree. Washington is certainly a progressive state on the whole, but the taxation is horrible.
Poor people spend more of their income on things that have sales tax. In other words, someone who is worried about their 401k is probably spending less of their income each month by percentage compared to someone living paycheck to paycheck.
What solution does that offer? People have been debating what to keep and cut for generations, as well as ways to improve spending; I don't see any low-hanging fruit or big improvements there.
Really? If people weren't forced to pay as much taxes as they have today they would have more resources to invest in what really matters to them instead of having a bunch of bureacrauts wasting it.
> I don't see any low-hanging fruit or big improvements there.
There are tons of low-hanging fruits, at least in South America, the issue is that government doesn't exist to provide services and seek the interests of the population. Government is just a big mafia and things are corrupt and inneficient by design because their true goal is to fill their pockets.
You see libraries and schools barely having enough funding to function while consumers spend thousands on entertainment. I don't really trust the average Joe to know "what really matters". Or at least not realize it matters until it's too late.
Not to say government spending doesn't have its share of inefficiencies and outright corruption. But they at least have some checks to keep it from going off thr deep end (both literally and socially via elections).
My point exactly. They barely get funding by people whose job is to allocate and get people to fund them. How many will actively think to fund these institutions if optional? And how much would they fund? And to which schools? Can't you see all the emergent issues?
>Average Joe live paycheck to paycheck. It doesn't have disposable income.
Average Joe makes 70k and pays 1300 in rent. Average Joe is fine, problem is half the people by definition aren't average and average is only a decent living with no kids and two incomes.
The truly poor Joe isn't taxed much or at all. This would affect them the least.
Are you surprised I'm just not accepting the trope as God-given truth? Get used to it. :)
> If people weren't forced to pay as much taxes as they have today they would have more resources to invest in what really matters to them instead of having a bunch of bureacrauts wasting it.
And they'd have less services provided by government.
Anyway, your claim is a trope, but let's actually examine it:
People want government to do certain things; government does things that "really matter". Nobody gets exactly what they want from anything - the restaurant, their family members, employers, etc., or from government.
I know the word 'bureaucrat' has been demonized, but that's not evidence (in fact, it's evidence IME of right-wing propaganda). I personally know some government bureaucrats well, and they are serious professionals, completely committed to their job and to public service.
Government waste is long been a trope of the right-wing propaganda, as a way to persuade people to cut taxes (for the wealthy) and reduce government's influence (which democratically counters that of powerful people), but I've never seen evidence that government is more wasteful than other sizeable institutions - if you've seen the inside of a mid-sized corporation, you would recognize it. Same with churches, non-profits etc etc.
If you have evidence, that's one thing. Just repeating these claims doesn't make them true. It makes them ripe to be challenged.
> There are tons of low-hanging fruits, at least in South America, the issue is that government doesn't exist to provide services and seek the interests of the population. Government is just a big mafia and things are corrupt and inneficient by design because their true goal is to fill their pockets.
Who is there only to provide services? Don't businesses also want to fill their pockets? Also, we are grouping all of South America, from Columbia to Argentina, into one broad generalization?
> Who is there only to provide services? Don't businesses also want to fill their pockets?
Business don't put me in jail if I don't buy their services. Choice, freedom is an important distinction. Also this is nonsense because taxes are a one-way obligation, government has no obligation to provide services just because you paid taxes. There's a distinction between taxes and fees.
> Government waste is long been a trope of the right-wing propaganda, as a way to persuade people to cut taxes (for the wealthy) and reduce government's influence (which democratically counters that of powerful people), but I've never seen evidence that government is more wasteful than other sizable institutions - if you've seen the inside of a mid-sized corporation, you would recognize it. Same with churches, non-profits etc etc.
I have experience working for big-sized organizations including NGOs. The bigger the more inefficient. And you know what are the biggest organizations in the world? Government. e.g. California budget for 24-25 is $291.5 billion.
The truly wealthy are able to circumvent high taxes. They can have fiscal residencies in tax heavens along dozens of other loopholes to avoid taxes.
> If you have evidence, that's one thing. Just repeating these claims doesn't make them true. It makes them ripe to be challenged.
Honestly I think your worldview is limited to "Democratic" vs "Republican" parties. There's ample evidence. Historically socialism and big government lead to poverty. This is explained both by economical and political theory.
I lived in Texas making six figures as a SWE. Texas was not far better tax wise. Texas does a lot to ding you in ways that aren't taxes, and buying a home that doesn't involve an hour and a half commute one way is unrealistic.
Yeah. I totally get why people conceptually hate the idea of paying taxes, even if my values lead me to a very different conclusion. That said, most of the arguments I've encountered about places with higher taxes being worse places to live strike me as either glib and uninformed, or in bad faith. That's not a partisan-specific folly by any measure, but it's a folly nonetheless.
It is an honest argument. No point in a secure job that can't even pay rent. But people with families can't exactly engage in multi job hustles and expect to remain a healthy unit.
It depends on how high the taxes are and what protection is offered exactly. The extra protections I would get in California are not worth nearly enough for it to be worth for me.
Totally agree. When taxes are the highest in the country and take almost 40% of your income and the only people who own houses are the ones that bought them 20-50 years ago that is very employee unfriendly.
Now, the housing market is not great but again, greatly overstating your case is not an effective strategy, and it isn’t a uniquely California problem even though prop 13 makes it worse there than many other places.
Show me a married couple both working in tech in California which is what this website is for and show me their average tax rate. It will be almost 40% at the lower end of this income range. This stuff is not rocket science.
Then do the sales tax as well. I’m not exaggerating anything. This is why my family and so many others moved from the state during COVID.
Have fun buying tiny $2-3 million dollar homes paying 40%.
>Show me a married couple both working in tech in California
I didn't know everyone on this site met their spouses at work. Statistics say that's been dwindling for 15 years or so. Then you account for the 20-30% of women in tech (and the fact that not every woman wants to marry a techie)...
Still, congrats on your situation.
>Have fun buying tiny $2-3 million dollar homes paying 40%.
Well, I'm single (with worse rates) and CA is 9.3% for my bracket + 24% federal. Doesn't seem too unreasonable. Sounds more like a housing issue than a tax issue.
It's also why I live out in a suburb. I know people online these days glamorize walkable cities, but California right now isn't very "walkable", even if we could redesign everything tomorrow. Lot of other deep seeded issues to solve first.
You’re the one making the claim, why can’t you show us your calculations? I can’t reproduce your numbers unless you’re assuming a truly massive real-estate assessment.
These are the rates and includes a over million 1% tax for mental support.
California 13.3%
Hawaii 11%
New York 10.9%
New Jersey 10.75%
District of Columbia 10.75%
Oregon 9.9%
Minnesota 9.85%
Massachusetts 9%
Vermont 8.75%
Wisconsin 7.65%
Tax burden is a different measurement including property. Parent poster has no property.
So, yes, if you’re making millions per year in taxable income, California’s top rate is higher. That is not a concern for anyone outside of the 99.5th percentile, which is uncommon even in FAANG circles.
Tax burden is also the best metric to use because the money has to come from somewhere. If you’re trying to decide where to live, looking at state income tax only is as foolish as only looking at housing purchase prices without also considering your commute, utility, and maintenance expenses.
> So, yes, if you’re making millions per year in taxable income, California’s top rate is higher.
But isn't that what "top rate" meant in the first place? It doesn't mean "median".
Seems like you're moving the goal posts over a few percentage points. Whether it's 12% or 14.4%[0], it's very high.
And at some point those very wealthy and highly mobile people start thinking, "maybe we should crunch the data and do what other wealthy people are doing: find a state with a more reasonable tax bite."
Remember that I was correcting someone who hyperbolically claimed California “taxes are the highest in the country and take almost 40% of your income” in a thread claiming that taxes were high enough to make California employee-unfriendly. Whether it’s the 2023 or 2024 rate, they were arguing triple the actual rate and very, very, very few employees in the state are paying even that top rate. Even the WSJ editorial board–hardly neutral–clearly state that this only applies to people making over $1M a year (the top 1% starts around $550k, so that’s pretty elite!).
If you want to accuse anyone of shifting goalposts, start with the people trying to portray the concerns of the top .1% as employee issues.
I find it weird that people quote top-tax-bracket rates and try to use tha tto directly compare state taxes.
That's nonsensical. You need to compare the effective tax rate that people pay.
When I was making bank at tech, sure, I was in CA's top tax bracket. But I never paid that rate across all my income. My effective tax rate was quite a bit lower.
> But I never paid that rate across all my income. My effective tax rate was quite a bit lower.
This seems to be a strangely common cognitive pitfall - I’ve seen so many people talk about progressive tax rates that way, even claiming that a raise would cost them money, and it’s not like this is a secret or requires advanced math skills.
But it does require thinking about more than just the headline. A lot of people are lazy (I don’t mean that as a moral issue, just literally) and don’t want to think for themselves, so often they simply parrot.
We bought a home 11 miles from the Googleplex in 2009 and paid it off in 15 years and did it on a single salary working in non-profit tech. Your assumptions here are deeply flawed or your reasoning is broken.
So, two years after the nearly existential crash of 2007 and only one year after Sequoia's famous "RIP Good Times" memo, when housing prices were at their absolute lowest and investment in the Bay Area was at its lowest ebb since at least the dot-com crash.
He was responding to the absurd assertion that nobody has bought a house in California in two decades. It’s not cheap but that’s pure hyperbole, and Asa was reminding him of that.
Yes this is one of the risks of working for a very small employer. A lot of the normal rules don't apply. But if a company is big enough to have "HR" I'm guessing they likely are bigger than 50 employees.
This article answers one of the questions I had about this year's Hugo awards.
R. F. Kuang's Babel was on many other lists of top book of the year. I was surprised that it did not even on the nomination list. Now I find out that it was pre-emptively removed from the nomination list before the vote!
I am not a big fan of Babel (and posted my issues on Goodreads) but I do want the vote to be fair.
I just looked at the votes - and Babel would not have won in any case. It was ranked #7 when it was disqualified.
Netflix's Sandman was also disqualified. On Bluesky Neil Gaiman said he was never told why it was disqualified. He also said he was one of four disqualified authors.
The lesson learned is do not have a world-wide vote in a country with censorship.
People are talking about them miscounting nomination votes to eliminate Babel. It is very strange that the #3 position would lose to #7. Like there would have to been no ballots that ranked Babel in lower position. The only thing makes sense is that they disqualified it early and stopped counting votes.
Although Babel was removed during the final vote count, here is what the interim vote count looked like. It looks like it would not even be on the short list.
People have been pointing out the numbers are bogus [1]. Notice that huge drop in votes between #7 and #8, that doesn't happen with normal voting. It can happen with slate voting but this would have to be pretty extreme. Also, the weird votes are only for some awards like novel.
I don't know what the score means, but notice that for Babel it starts lower and never changes, while the others increase presumably from lower ranks being added to score. I think the only way Babel happens if there were no ballots who put it lower only top position. It is also suspicious that it goes out at the seventh position, just losing out to the lowest slate.
Also, why would they the disqualify it if it had been eliminated. It makes sense to disqualify at the beginning or end of nomination. Also, there is no final vote count, there is nomination count and the final vote. It was removed before the final vote.
California provides awesome homeschool support. A lot depends on where you live.
In California the student enrolls in a home school program through a local public school. You are assigned a homeschool liaison and can enroll in public school classes. The kids and parents get a weekly checkin and support. You have to pass public school tests. You get a budget from the public school to use for materials.
My grandsons are getting homeschooled through 6th grade. My daughter decided it was just too hard to duplicate a high school education at home so she is phasing them into public school in middle school.
She gave each child the choice of home school or public school. The Covid lockdown made that choice easy for the kids. They know that if they don't keep up, she will send them back to public school. That is quite the motivator.
Just like your neighbors she works with other parents to keep the kids socialized, take them on field trips, and to form a support system. She also signs the kids up for sports.
The downside (from her observation) is since some of the early homeschoolers were bible based, she had to really review the school material. A surprising number of text books use the bible as history or have questionable science. She also noticed that many parents homeschool their kids because they can't participate in regular school (for various reasons). Her kids homeschool as a choice.
The biggest upside is that time is more flexible and the liaison is flexible. The family took a trip to NYC and the liaison was asking the boys quite a few questions about what they saw and learned.
You have to put Tocqueville in the context of his era.
Europe was still in the era of monarchies. In fact, even though France had just beheaded their monarchs they tried to recreate various flavors of monarchies for decades. They even installed an "emperor" in Mexico.
Tocqueville was trying to figure out if other forms of governance could exist.
I find it comforting that the same flaws we see in democracy today also existed in the time of Tocqueville. That does not mean that I think other forms of government are better. I agree with Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried.”
Can you please stop it with the ideological flamewar? I'm bending over backwards not to ban you, and you keep posting things that are not the curious conversation we're looking for.
If you want to have curious conversation, you're welcome here, along with all of your opinions and views. If you just want to smite enemies, please go do that somewhere else.
We don't need you to tow any ideological line (trust me, we really couldn't care less, besides which I'm all in favor of having well-read communists in the conversation) but we do need you to stop it with the generic flamewar tangents. They're predictable and uninteresting.
Also, you've been crossing into personal attack regularly and that sucks and is not ok. It's also beneath you, or at least I would have thought so.
It would be helpful if you would take to heart that we want HN to be a web forum where people don't make habits of such things.
This is like a cop saying they're trying to be fair in mediating between the dozen people mobbing me and unjustifiably downvoting all my posts, and me for simply saying well-founded, well-cited things that disagree with the liberal ethos of this place.
Why so much self-delusion? Just let it be, ban if it makes you happy, you know just as well as I do that this place is crawling with fascists.
If possible, though, I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone. My MO is always the same: keep cool, cite quotes that upset people because they tarnish the images of their idols. You keep saying I'm breaking the rules and attacking people, and I don't see where?
I'm trying to help you here. If you can't agree that you've been posting flamewar comments, past the point of trolling in many cases, and just keep blaming others (including the mods) for the entire problem, it's hard to see how this is going to work. Ironically, it's your right-wing counterparts that I most often have to tell this to.
You're not just "simply saying well-founded things" and "keeping [your] cool" - you're inundating the threads with provocation and snark. The effect of this is predictable and we have no choice but to moderate it. HN's survival depends on not burning to a crisp, and you're starting and feeding flames all over the place. I'm not saying it's arson, but it's negligence, and the flames are just as damaging either way. The fact that other people lose their shit in response is not only not an excuse, it's an effect you're co-producing and are therefore co-responsible for. That doesn't make what they're doing ok, and we'll moderate it whenever we see it, as usual.
There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views. You can't just drop them like bombs in the threads without deranging people and destroying the environment. No doubt the majority is wrong, but it's your job to know who you're dealing with and to persuade them, not troll them. Otherwise you end up discrediting your own views and re-entrenching others in their errors (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
If you want to keep posting on HN, you have a responsibility to protect it for its intended purpose. It's only because most of the community does so, and moderators work hard to mitigate the rest, that HN has any value at all. You're benefiting from that, since you find it valuable enough to spend your time here. Trashing the place in return is a poor way to give back—and I'm sure you wouldn't do the equivalent in other cases (such as littering in a city park, or starting fires and leaving them to others to put out).
> I'd like for you to point out where I attacked anyone.
You needn't look far; you did it two sentences before your question ("self-delusion"). Here are some other places where you crossed the line:
1) Calling someone a bad writer isn't an insult, it's an honest appraisal of their literary talents.
2) Where's the insult? They themselves said they're the child of a CIA agent and that they think Russian culture is stagnant and worthless. I simply repeated exactly what they said but emphasizing how vile it was.
3) Again, where's the insult? They accused me of delusion, I said that they can choose theirs.
4) I told someone that they have a wrong theory of statecraft. Again, are you saying that telling someone they're wrong crosses a line? Is this a safe space for... being wrong?
5) Again, I fail to see the insult.
From my perspective, you seem to be arguing that all my engagement should take on the superficial form of "civilized engagement", even when people are saying rancid or provably incorrect things, attacking me, and mass downvoting me. I don't swear, I don't insult. This place has a problem with ad-hominem, as shown by the funny reactions to this post:
>There's an extra burden on people arguing for minority or contrarian views.
I think this is very much what's at stake, but I have the opposite view: contrarian views deserve a little support from neutral parties and authorities if they are valid and the prevailing challenge to them is subpar, not additional responsibilities to coddle those who dismiss the unfamiliar from a position of smugness. Other than simply kowtowing to "might makes right", why should the members of the numerous and overpowering status quo have less responsibilities than challengers to it? You can say that them's the breaks, that's how things are, but it's a construct just like everything else on here.
You probably think that I "generate work" for you with my posting, but what you'll find is that in the absence of communist types (ideally many and more belligerent ones than me), this place will continue to descend more and more into people talking about the need to exterminate the Chinese, the importance of appreciating the fundamental IQ differences between races, the need to eliminate homelessness in San Francisco at the human level, the celebration of war as a cult of death. You'll find that, as a mod aspiring for "neutrality", you'll have banished anyone who might care to "organically" oppose those views, and that suddenly upholding "neutral" law and order will mean enforcing fascist takes.
But this is just HN, so it will be a farcical and goofy version of what you'll be witnessing happening everywhere else in society. I don't expect you to do anything differently, but at the very least you should stop blaming me for people finding Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin quotes scandlously upsetting to their own poor understanding of history.
Marx and Engels weren’t writing on American slavery and race relations.
But they seem pretty racist to me based on their frequent dropping of n-bombs in their writings [0].
I think the reason we don’t have 19th century racist essays by Marx and Engels is that they wrote almost always about Europeans and European culture.
Agree on Churchill. But does that surprise anyone? England was still literally colonizing India and South Africa during Churchhill’s time. It would be weird to find a non-racist world leader from that time period. Even LBJ, decades later, held pretty racist beliefs even while passing the civil rights act.
It's pretty easy to find non-racist leaders, actually, but not if you restrict yourself to ghouls like LBJ.
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A point to be noted is that in this respect Mr. Churchill and his friends bear a striking resemblance to Hitler and his friends. Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation. Mr. Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world. The German race theory led Hitler and his friends to the conclusion that the Germans, as the only superior nation, should rule over other nations. The English race theory leads Mr. Churchill and his friends to the conclusion that the English-speaking nations, as the only superior nations, should rule over the rest of the nations of the world.
Actually, Mr. Churchill, and his friends in Britain and the United States, present to the non-English speaking nations something in the nature of an ultimatum: “Accept our rule voluntarily, and then all will be well; otherwise war is inevitable.”
But the nations shed their blood in the course of five years’ fierce war for the sake of the liberty and independence of their countries, and not in order to exchange the domination of the Hitlers for the domination of the Churchills. It is quite probable, accordingly, that the non-English-speaking nations, which constitute the vast majority of the population of the world, will not agree to submit to a new slavery.
It is Mr. Churchill’s tragedy that, inveterate Tory that he is, he does not understand this simple and obvious truth.
So you agree that Marx and Engels were racist and rescind your point “I read a lot of Marx and Engels, who wrote at a similar time, and they don't sound racist?”
So you don’t think Marx and Engels are racist? That’s interesting, would you expand on why?
I can’t think of a reason why people would write n-word used in a diminutive and insulting manner and not be racist. And it’s really common too. Not just a single instance but many times and seems like it was in their regular vernacular.
Think whatever you want, but know that the idea that "everyone was racist", or that any Westerners were at the humble vanguard of anti-racism, is utter bunk.
I really don't know if trying to tease this out is worth it, but is there an eastern power you would hold out as an exemplar of "anti-racism" or whatever?
My take away was that Rosalind Franklin did support the Watson Crick paper but that there was some conflict leading up to the paper. She did not seem to think her ideas were stolen.
It did not help that after Franklin died - Watson wrote a hit piece on Franklin. I think that is what caused people to question if Watson was above board while Franklin was alive.
By coincidence I am moving off of Evernote right now. I broke down everything I used Evernote for right now to plan the roll off.
I largely use EN for the GTD system. The first GTD step is just capturing info. EN still does this better than any other tool.
EN used to be better at managing large data - but the last major release broke all that. For some reason they favored the new user over the power user.
Some of the things I used to use EN for are now baked into the OS. For instance, the latest release of MacOS now has text search on images. The rise of icloud also got rid of many of my use cases.
What I am doing now is putting files in files and notes in notes. I am converting some notes to files.
I took to heart the scalability issues in EN, and decided to run several note taking apps in parallel. After a while I will just pick a winner.
Sadly - I have not found a replacement for data capture. EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note. I might keep the free version of EN around for this task, but I am still looking for a replacement.
> EN seems to be the only tool that converts email to a note.
Do you keep the original mail format? As far as I can see (and I recall), Evernote just embeds the original mail and attaches an HTML copy as well (so you can view it).
The EN email note is somewhat kludgy. It was better before the last major upgrade. Before the last upgrade it was seamless to other EN notes. I suspect but don't know what broke.
BTW - they kept around the EN classic app because so many things broke. For a while I was going back and forth between the two.
The EN competitors want you to convert email to a PDF.
One of the competitors said they would have to have an email server to convert email to a note. They said this is hard.
I am OK that it is hard for everyone except Apple. Apple does already have an email server. Why are they forcing me to convert the email to a PDF?
It's hard to do right, because the mail format has to deal with MIME types, and all kinds of ancient kludgy stuff. They send mail in multi-part, and you see the part that your mail client wants to render. Sometimes they send only html, sometimes you get text and html. Sometimes it's a an image embedded in the e-mail message.
On top of that every mail service wants to do something different.
My experience was not as bad as some others on this list. I believe that is because girls are psychological bullies, and boys are physical bullies. My husband was chased and beaten up until he the beat up the lead bully.
I met my lead bully as an adult. I was surprised to find out that she did not realize she was a bully. She acted as if we were childhood friends. One of her friends apologized to me, so others certainly realized.
Her life did not go as well as my life. I suspect it was because the traits that made her a bully as a child did not work for her as an adult.
At that time our son was using it for games. He goes away to college and came home for the first school break. I get a phone call from our internet provider asking if our son was home. I was so shocked and handed the phone to our son.
Apparently at that time bittorrent was optimizing for the most efficient path to a host. Since we had relatively good connection, the mighty weight of the internet was funnelling through our tiny internet provider to our son's computer. The provider (without our knowing it) had made a deal with our son that he would only turn on bittorrent between midnight and 6 AM. I doubt other providers would be so generous.
I have been sceptical of bittorrent since that day.