Otherwise it would suggest you think the problem is they didn't ask? When was the last time you saw a customer read a terms of service? Or better yet reject a product because of said terms once they hit that part of the customer journey?

The issue isn't about asking it's that for take your pick of reasons no one ever says no. The asking is thus pro forma and irrelevant.

Ad driven online content is especially bad for kids. But let's not pretend the only way to find an alternative is to end the world.

The fact is the "bad" solution is popular because consumers say they care about these things but then in real life they act like they don't. If no one watched the problem would solve itself. Thus, I'm not sure the solution is even to be found in platforms, if parents are burned out or don't have ways to make better choices for their kids.

That's a reason for these laws, to essentially just take it out of people's hands.

In theory it makes the process more transparent and fair, although slower. That calculus has been changing as of late, perhaps for both good and bad. See for example the Pentagon's latest support of drone startups run by twenty-year-olds.

The question of public and private distinctions in these various schemes are very interesting and imo, underexplored. Especially when you consider how these private LLMs are trained on public data.

Part of the tradeoff the parent comment references is a lack of thinking about the moral ramifications. Thus, when you mention your position which is grounded in that tradeoff's opposite, the reaction is not surprising. They are largely incompatible. Because your position hinges on a moral component, you are thus passing a moral judgement on others. This is often met with scorn, most especially because people have an aversion to shame, and it doesn't help if it's on the behalf of someone essentially randomly declaring they are morally better than you anytime the topic of their employment comes up.

So really, I'm not sure why you would be surprised, though I sympathize with your general sentiments, in a way you should know better. Surely you are aware of the aversion to shame writ large. That seems a logical predicate of your own conceptualization of your position.

Maybe because I'm not especially interested in passing moral judgment on others, for working at a company that isn't a "moral high ground" company, but isn't exactly NSO or Palantir (I used to work for a defense contractor). I feel profoundly lucky to have found a company that made me feel good about what I did. It was worth the low salary (and other annoyances). I understand that I'm fortunate, and I'm grateful (not snotty).

I find that people take the mere existence of others that have different morals to be a personal attack.

I know that it happens, but I'm not really sure why. It's not like I'm thinking about comparing to others, when I say that I worked for a company that inspired me. I was simply sharing what I did, and why.

I read comments about people that are excited about what they do, and even how much they make, all the time (I spend a lot of time on HN), and never feel as if they are somehow attacking me. They are enthusiastic, and maybe even proud of what they do, and want to show off. I often enjoy that.

> I'm not especially interested in passing moral judgment on others

Earlier:

> I chose to spend most of my career at a company that did stuff I found morally acceptable (inspiring, even). I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.

Put more succinctly:

"I work somewhere that is morally acceptable. I could have made double or more if I had worked at a 'more dodgy', less morally acceptable place. Like where you work. No judgement though."

Honestly, I would have more respect for your sentiments if you would just stick to the logical conclusion of your position. Perhaps the scorn you meet is simply a reaction to this inability to simply follow the logical course of your own viewpoint. It has nothing to do with the mere existence of your morals it has to do with the fact that they are incompatible.

You want to have it both ways - you want to make a moral judgement and yet not make a moral judgement. Or you want to bound your moral judgement simply to yourself as if it is at all logical to not extrapolate it to others. If others can work for wherever they please, then what do you even mean by "morally acceptable" or "dodgy"? Simply places you prefer? That's not what morally acceptable means.

For someone who speaks of moral judgements, you don't seem to grasp their implications. I would suggest reflecting on this if you actually care about the reactions you elicit in others. This brief back and forth with you is certainly suggestive of a picture far different from the one you originally painted.

To me it's like with vegetarians. If someone tells you out of the blue "I am a vegetarian because I find it completely irresponsible to not be vegetarian. No judgement though", it's not the same as someone saying "I would like to inform you that I am a vegetarian, given that we are going to eat something and it is relevant for you to know it right now". Yet that latter situation will regularly offend non-vegetarians just the same.

From a purely consistency perspective I don't think you're incorrect, but humans aren't purely consistent

We are able to accept that our personal preferences aren't the same as others and still like, respect or love them anyway

I read the GP as stating:

- he wanted to work for a place that made him happy

- he voiced that pleasure to others, "I'm glad I work at a place I find inspiring"

- they took that as an implicit attack on them

There are at least two parties to a conversation, each of them gets their own opportunity to interpret what occurs

It sounds like in this instance they interpreted his position much more negatively than he intended

Now to answer why is in my opinion is much more complicated and I honestly wouldn't hazard a guess without either being there or knowing both parties very well

That's not what he said though. His version included a comparison to others:

> I made probably half what I could have made at places that were more dodgy.

That's where the offense comes from.

Most posts are "I worked at a company that did stuff I really liked, and was honored to work with some really inspiring people."

That's usually enough to cause people to assume that I'm insulting them.

I do my best to not be offensive, but some folks live in a world, where everything is a personal slight, and there's really nothing I can do about that.

And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understand your critique comes across as little more than entitled griping against a majority. You're the people he fought against the entire time, people obsessed with their own personal agenda/minutia with no understanding of the overarching mission or who the customer is. This video comes to mind https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o

Design without an audience in mind is not design. Don't dismiss the work simply because you're not the audience.

but lets never fool ourselves into thinking they are more useful, more efficient or flexible. That's tiresome, and it's repeated endlessly as well.

People buy all sorts of things that are not very good. Audience is an excuse; salesmanship is not about selling what the customer needs.

I'm no newb, just ranting about macs. I've been around, even before the mac existed. Written code for them, for nearly every platform around. I'm not sanctimonious; I'm educated. The Mac OS was a pile of bad code. The current Mac OS, dev tools, documentation, deployment environment is among the worst.

Not entitled; just very tired of fighting it.

They have some good things on the hardware side but you have pay a lot for it, and it's not just about the money.

Sounds like a clear "lack of a depth of understanding" to me.

I really find these "in 2025" takes tiresome. There is no golden age, only your own personal nostalgia masquerading as analysis.

That's a strawman. I'm pretty darn sure they're not claiming it never happened in the past. Only that it is becoming significantly more widespread than it used to be.

I think you're going to have an incredibly hard time making a compelling case that no such trend exists, given the statistics (even on this particular issue in the article, never mind other issues) would very likely strongly suggest the opposite.

The ‘winner’ is he who scams the hardest without getting consequences.

exactly. This isn't a new problem. But what has been new is the recent growth in funding to "help" those who are deemed helpless - at someone else's cost (it could be taxpayers, it could be, in this case, other fee paying students).

The problem isn't the grift - it's the lack of any real oversight, and the ease with which such help is given lately (i would call it overly-progressive, but that might trigger some people). It is what makes grift possible.

I think if you capitalise the P it's fine. It's not actual progress, but the Progressive movement has pushed it. Because that philosophy has a naive view of people, and assumes the best. So their policies and spending allow tests with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity.

There was a gilded age in the early 20th century and we appear to have entered another gilded age - do you think something structural or cultural has changed? I have a hard time a president like Trump getting elected in past elections - certainly he models himself after Nixon and even Nixon was a very very different kind of president both in temperament but also being less about self aggrandizement.

Obviously it has? For one thing, we have billions more people on the planet. For another, we have far more constrained resources -- from the environment to education to everything else -- even for a constant number of people, never mind for the ever-increasing population size. (And there are more factors, but these are more than sufficient to get the point across.) These make competition more intense... in every aspect of life, for everyone. And it's only natural that more cutthroat competition results in more people breaking the norms and rules.

It would be shocking if this didn't happen. If there's a question at all, it's really around is when this occurs -- not if it does.

Shame has practically been thrown out the window in certain places and we can see the effects of that - people scamming each other, lying in the streets, etc. Guilt is also being eroded across the west, leading to things like rampant criminality and punishments that are less than a slap on the wrist.

Fundamentally these emotions are designed to keep us in check with the rest of the group - does this negatively affect some: yes. But at the benefit of creating high trust societies. Every time I encounter this topic I can't help but think: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

No kings might be cringe in that way, but then again can you really say that the tea party wasn't? Are Sarah Palin and the like effective avatars for intelligent government reform? It seems to me evoking 1776 and literal revolution because idk the government might subsidize healthcare is about as silly as calling an opposing president a king. To be clear, I'm also going out of my way to be extremely charitable to your position despite my personal beliefs. And assuming you will also in good faith attempt a willingness to assess protests movements along lines that go beyond your individual sympathies.

I would contend the reason the tea party was "successful" is because mainstream Republicans co-opted it and thought they could control it to temper an extremely charismatic incumbent Democrat who they wanted to weaken as they feared the extent of his mandate. Cue mitch mcconnell saying he will make Obama a "one-term president". Fox News and others became incessant boosters of it. Of course, this turned against them in 2016 when their plans to nominate another Bush collided with Trump riding the grassroots insurgency, which now somewhat controls them (we'll see what happens in the coming post-Trump era).

Democrats have simply not had such an insurgency, although it seems obvious given the failures of both sides of the mainstream that such a thing is coming. In some cases vis a vis "the deep state" (as vacuous as I find that term) those farther from the center agree, even if from opposite sides of the spectrum. If nothing more one can say a move to populism on either side is self evidently a move to some shared common representation of "populism", even if both left and right strenuously disagree on implementation and so on.

So anyway, I wouldn't pat the tea party on the back too hard. Their success has more to do with institutional Republican hubris than their own effectiveness. It's not like the current administration is actually implementing limited government, if you haven't noticed. But I suspect any hope we have of a good faith discussion will quickly evaporate if I stray any closer to that topic. Fwiw I think the collapse of successful civil movements has far more to do with trends we see causing other declines in our society, that is the collective elevation of self-interest, greed, bombast and mob makes right. In that way, perhaps the lack of success of some movements - given the environment in which they operate - is actually in a weird way a credit to them. If you are successful in an increasingly inane society, what does that say about you? What benchmark would you even articulate to define a successful protest movement in the modern United States?

I think the comment you were replying to has a better sense of things. Government becomes an entity onto itself, and prioritizes its own existence, far past the original mandate at its genesis. A constitution becomes acculturated as a default, not because each successive generation ratifies and legitimizes it anew, but simply because with its perpetuation comes power that is hard to displace.

This isn't merely cultural. The powerful interests as the head of the state have an interest in maintaining such a thing. Yes there are benefits, but your modern list ignores the true driver, which is far less luxurious. State formation is simply another form of human domination. Dressing it up as economic efficiency might make for good academic papers after the fact, but the reality is they arose out of the need to dominate others or be dominated. Feats of engineering in the ancient world were constructed to revere the state or benefit in wartime. The United States used the same rocket technology it contemplated annihilating the Soviet Union with to put men on the moon. In all cases some benefits do trickle down to the common man, but always the state itself ends up as the highest priority.

I think the issue today is, on balance if you look at the real equation between whose domination do I fear, increasingly it is your own state, there are less trickle down benefits occuring, and far more avenues for such "benefits" - like the phone in your pocket - to be deceptive, ie appear as a benefit while actually being another instrument of control.

Plumbing doesn't spy on you. And it solved a real problem and improved lives. Increasingly today in modern societies people see states with more contrived demand, "bullshit jobs", less external threats, and yet more and more state domination. Democratic checks may prove even more fatal - turn over the ancient apparatuses of domination over to a mob.

So anyway, I just ask you not ignore the obvious. People didn't want states to get cheap electrical grids. They submitted to it because they didn't want to be hacked and pillaged in their own beds. The true "natural needs" of our species are far more dire than any of those relative luxuries you have listed.