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I don’t give prospective employers a number. I just tell them that I pay rent on a 2BR in NYC. Then the ball is in their court.

Mono draw is in maintenance mode and non-free. Based on the name, pretty sure that Monosketch is an explicit replacement.

Monodraw got an update the other week. It isn't being changed, but it doesn't need to.

Great little app. And it's $10, once. Hardly breaking the bank.


But it's not open, and can't be edited by those who want to. We should always support FOSS.

Absolutely we should. But this one isn't FOSS.


Why have you sent me the licence page for Monosketch? I'm commenting on comment about Monodraw...

I would assume they sent that because they were suggesting to support FOSS over closed-source software.

> Based on the name

I think in this case the name alone is not enough to suspect a replacement; perhaps it’s just a similar product in the same domain (_mono_space visual editors).


Maybe it's just more or less feature-complete? Was curious, as someone who hadn't heard of it before, so I checked the blog. Last post is from April last year and concerns public testing of a new release. That's not particularly old, if you ask me?

This is why the saying has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order.

Reducing is the best. Don’t buy or make surplus stuff, and that reduces waste overall.

Reusing is second best. If we did make something, the best thing to do is get as much use out of it as possible to prevent it from ever becoming trash.

Recycling is the last resort. Regardless of what is being recycled, it is an expensive and difficult process to try to salvage any value from the waste materials rather than just abandoning them.

Because recycling electronics is such a difficult problem, if we want to reduce e-waste a better idea is to increase our efforts to reduce and reuse them as much as possible. Installing Linux on an old laptop to keep it useful for somebody is easy to do, and much more effective than trying to recycle it.


This is why every device should be bootloader-unlockable (with legal enforcement). There's billions of old phones and IoT devices out there locked to outdated software. This has to change.

If it can't be unlocked, it can't be sold. That should be the law.


> always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” in that order

my dev machine for boring CRUD apps is from 2011 :-D

the only thing I upgraded was RAM and a SSD - its a 4x 3Ghz board; it works quite well despite the fact that its 15 years old :)

(honestly, the only thing why I do not switch is because of reinstallig the whole setup)


Re-install? Just set the bootloader, and rsync the stuff over?

Not sure: Its a Windows machine? :-D

With Linux you could probably just move the drives over and it would work.

Probably.

I could try but then propably I have to open a thread like: "Tell HN: I crashed my 15 year old machine setup this evening by trying to switch to Linux" :-D

But this time would be really a great option to finally switch on this machine, you are right - I thought about it for years now and I found out in the meantime that most of the apps are running without any problems in virtualization (if required)

The thing is - by now, I'm too lazy :-) (Esp. I should add a backup machine for this procedure, since this old Windows setup is in productive use)


Nuke it from orbit

I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading.

Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly important issue.


I think you are forgetting about time. If the rate of stuff needing to get recycle is lower, then there is more time to recycle. If there the rate is too high then the facilities are overwhelmed and resort to less optimal strategies.

This is why reduce and reuse are important.


It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working. People on the average are increasing their consumption, not reducing it. That means the actual problem — the waste at the end of the pipeline — is growing every year.

Waste management is the actual problem that needs to be solved. "Reduce and reuse" can be a part of the solution, but people are not doing enough voluntarily to make it a major part.


I'm genuinely curious about your position, it's interesting.

But I can't figure it out what it'd look like in practice, might be hangover, might be I need more caffeine, whatever it is, it's on me. Don't read following as "you're saying X and thats silly!"

(A) Are consumption rates in general unsustainable?

(B) If (A) is no, are consumption rates of specific items unsustainable? For example, is the legislation you're thinking of like the deprecation of plastic bags for paper? Or something that covers a much wider amount of consumption?

(C) If (A) is "yes" or (B) is "more global", at huge scales like an economy, legislating quotas or rationing or anything at all, in practice pushes activity onto black markets.

If the concern is changing individual behavior, and individual behavior isn't changing on it's own sufficiently, what sort of legislation would change it?


> It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working

Of course it is not working. The bloat and planned obsolescence of "modern software" is legendary. I had to replace the hard drive on an older computer becsuse Win 10 is slow as a dog on it, even with LTSC version and even with most of the crap disabled. And making things require the incompatible latest and greatest instead of fixing things (hello Google) , does not help either.


Maybe it's because people spread FUD about the effectiveness of "reduce and reuse" instead of convincing others that "reduce and reuse" has value as a concept.

In addition to the volume issue, there's the composition issue. When I was a kid, we recycled all our flint cores. Well, not quite that far back... Milk came in glass bottles, and the person who delivered the bottles of milk to our house picked up the empties to take back to the dairy. There were also steel cans for canned food and soft drinks (which eventually rusts away), and of course lots of other glass bottles. Now more and more of those kinds of things come in plastic, of which little gets recycled. And cans are often aluminum, which doesn't rust away.

Furniture was wood and fabric and (maybe) springs, with a little bit of pressboard (which was itself recycled paper and textile, usually used on the back of desks etc.). Now furniture is particleboard (made from sawdust), with lots of glue and some kind of plastic veneer if it's in a place that shows. Wood is genuinely recyclable (or re-usable as antiques!); I don't think particleboard is recyclable, although I could be wrong.

Automobiles were steel, fabric, glass and copper wire (with rubber insulation); plus of course rubber tires. Now they are those things plus a lot more plastic. Tires, both then and now, are essentially un-recyclable (although occasionally turned into artificial reefs).

I could go on, but there are probably more authoritative (= better) studies of this. But I suspect in general that we have lots less recyclable "stuff" these days than we used to.


(Replying to myself...) I should have added that back then, automobiles started recycling themselves even before you were done using them: they rusted something awful, at least where I lived (in northern US). My parents owned one car where if you were sitting in the back seat, you could watch the road go by under your feet.

When I grew up in Sweden, soda was sold in standardized glass bottles. All brands used the same bottles and they just put paper labels on. You'd return the glass bottles for a deposit, they'd take them in, remove the label, wash then and refill them. You could tell how old the glass bottle you were drinking out of was by how scratched the label was.

In the 90's, they were all replaced by PET bottles. We were told at the time that this was because the oil used in the plastic bottles was still less than the extra oil used to ship the heavy glass bottles back and forth.


So the idea of reducing consumption is misleading, the real solution is to reduce consumption (via the law forcing quotas on manufacturers and rationing on consumers)

Durability also cuts consumption. One can make the parts that break easy to replace and/or learn to do it at scale.

To put this in perspective, there are huge issues recyling lead acid batteries exposed this year.

I consider lead acid batteries relatively simple with all materials being large and not particularly binding.

But it's somehow easy to outsource this to a smelter with inappropriate smelting, and no controls on worker safety.

So anything smaller, more complex, or more interewined, with things like silica involved...


Interestingly lead acid batteries are the most recycled consumer goods.

Of course that’s not to say there are no problems with the process.


Reusing is better than reducing because “reducing” is only meaningful in terms of reducing consumption. The only way to reduce what you already have is either disposal or recycling or reuse.

I heard they changed it to 5Rs.

Refuse, reduce, reuse, recyle, rot.


It’s even better when you make it 10 Rs: refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, repurpose, rehome, recycle, rot.

I think it’s twice as better.


  $ grep '^re' /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
    5374
rewind, revive, refill, retrieve, retouch and a thousand more...

Let's just call it re*


Some say that `git rerere` was invented for this purpose.

Ignoring the ambiguity of the word "refuse", that often means "turn into trash", it's also completely redundant with "reduce". To the point that it doesn't add anything new.

Anyway, "rot" is a good one.


I hadn't heard the "rot" one, but I imagine it's referring to composting. We have a county-run composting site (https://www.princegeorgescountymd.gov/departments-offices/en...), and apparently when done right it produces a whole lot less methane than letting organics get buried and decompose in landfills.

There is overlap but I can see some distinction. Refuse might be simply not in first place buying some product group say a smartwatch. Where as reduce would be buying one but updating it less often. One could argue that refusing entire products is easier than reducing use.

I think the idea is "buy nothing (in that category)" instead of "buy fewer things (in that category)" but I agree it's both ambiguous and ham-fisted.

How confusing. There's no appreciable difference between "refuse" and "reduce". "Rot" is only applicable to organic waste, which is rarely considered part of "recycling" since the other Rs don't really apply.

Seems like change for change's sake.


Consumers have the option to "refuse" products from irresponsible or predatory vendors: ones which brick or obsolete devices.

Vendors should at a minimum open source APIs for abandoned hardware and allow unlocking it. "Refuse" to buy from those that don't. Ask for legislation forcing it.

I have a wonderful old ipad mini that's useless. I'd love to jailbreak it and put my OS on there but Apple wants a new sale instead.


I read it as refuse categorically and rot regardless of type in a big sweep from best to worst

refuse to use any, reduce your usage, reuse yourself, recycle them into new products, or else they'll just rot

I like it.


Rot is about using bio-degradable options where there is one

if all fails, just leave an option for nature to do it for you


Bio degradable packaging is not really suitable for composting yourself. Most of it takes a really long time to break down naturally or requires high composting temperatures that can be hard to achieve in a home compost pile. This is true even for basic stuff like cardboard and paper. You also need a lot of "green"[1] (high nitrogen) composting material to balance out cellulose from packaging.

The net result is that this is still an industrial process. Though probably less energy-intensive than recycling.

Source: we have a compost pile and it's not all sunshine and roses.

[1] https://www.thespruce.com/composting-greens-and-browns-25394...


They also sometimes coat your "compostable" bowls/plates/boxes in PFAS: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/pfas-compostable-food-packag...

You have to be careful with that phrase through.

> using bio-degradable options where there is one

A lot of "biodegradable" will use a literal interpretation, in that it it degrades in nature. 500 years you say? But it still degrades...

Home compostable is really the only one that makes sense. Even industrial composting requires a high heat environment as the catalyst, so if something contaminates the batch and goes into general refuse then it will never break down.


500 years is only a blink in Earths lifespan.

But its a lot longer than most people expect biodegradable to mean.

Organic waste can be reused. Ever watch Human Centipede?

I like that a lot -- going to start using it

My family came to the US via Ellis Island. Compared to what people have to do today, their legal path to US citizenship was relatively easy. I see no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century. Open a 21st century equivalent of Ellis Island, and let people become citizens.


The growth of a welfare system seems like the major change. How does that plan interact with the welfare system? If someone is impoverished in Asia can they get a plane ticket to the US and expect to eventually be entitled to a state-sponsored minimum standard of living? Maybe healthcare if the left's plans for that get through eventually?


The welfare system requires a stable population pyramid and currently the US is under-reproducing for that to happen. Without some immigration, the existing welfare system will become impossible to maintain.

The reality is that many rich industries are built on the backs of illegal workers. If countries would punish those who hire illegal workers more than they do the illegal workers themselves, the resulting collapse of the agricultural and food industries alone should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.

The people who would've come through Ellis Island are still coming in, they're just not getting registered anymore, and the people and government have turned a blind eye so they can cheaply dismiss them when they're no longer necessary/when they need to act as a scapegoat.


The experience in Europe is that immigrants from most of the world are not net contributors to government finances: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t...


> Many fear that refugees are a drain on their welfare state

At least the excerpt of the article you linked say that people fear that, but does not provide any numbers to say that this fear makes sense or not.


The article has a chart based on data collected in Denmark: https://share.google/ilc3koVJx2YOokuXa


So, based on this chart, only migrants from "MENAPT" countries are a net negative in terms of contributions irrespective of age?

It's difficult to evaluate on others.

For example "other non-western immigrants" are net positive during their work years, but net negative in their ols age. But people typically don't become migrants in their 70s, they become migrants mostly during work years.

This chart is bad for multiple reasons. It does not separate migrants by type of visa - are they on some sort of critical skills visa? Are they undocumented? It doesn't say.

It also does not indicate the proportions. If 99% of migrants are on their working years and only 1% of migrants in their old age, then in general it is a net positive even if some are a strain on welfare.

Any evaluation on migrants that don't account for the type of migration going on is very flawed. Are we talking about refugees? engineers? medical doctors? nurses? academic researchers? low-skilled undocumented migrants?

All of those will be dramatically different in terms of how they integrate into society, how they contribute to the welfare state, how mucch they pay in the taxes, etc.

Painting it with broad strokes sound to me way too much like fear mongering.


> should prove that the current systems are already being held up by people who do not participate in the welfare system.

Well, yes. If there is a pool of workers who aren't covered by the welfare system then it would work out fine to just let them migrate. Big wins for everyone. Probably works great every time it is tried. And if you're arguing that in practice there is an underclass in the US that isn't getting welfare and that works then sure, easy to see.

But, and I'm just going by vague rumours from reading US political news, there seems to be a significant number of people who would want US citizens covered by a welfare system. Phrases like "Universal" and "Basic Human Right" turn up from time to time. The people arguing against offering everyone in a country general support have lost a lot of arguments in parliaments around the world since ... around the late 1800s with Bismark as I vaguely recall. It comes off as unfair and unreasonable.

Frankly I imagine the US political process will start asking why undocumented migrants aren't getting welfare of some sort fairly soon if it isn't already resolved that they get something. That seems like it'd be in line with the general trends. If they are there to stay they're locals.

How does all this square up with easy, formal migration? In a practical sense? Rough numbers?


I've heard this argument going back to Milton Friedman, but the immigration discourse these days is quite detached from any economic concerns. Forget impoverished people; there is rabid opposition to pretty much all immigration including, for example, investor or employment categories. It's a lot more tribal than rational.


Sure. But hypothetically, if we pretend people are rational for a few minutes here, how does the Ellis Island idea interact with a functional welfare system?


I would imagine more young, ambitious working age adults would help the welfare system, not hurt it.

If you look globally at countries which have issues with their large social services, they're almost all mostly homogeneous and declining in population, especially among the young. Which makes sense if you sit back and think about what social services are typically offered and where the money comes from.


Friedman's argument was more so to just keep them as illegals but not deport them. That way they can support the welfare system but not use it. Friedman didn't want to make them legal until the welfare system has been crushed.

Of course that might require some changes to make it actually true illegals don't use state benefits. You need to cut off WIC for illegals, public schooling for illegals for instance before they will actually not be using public benefit. Also their children become legal via jus soli.

The obvious down-side is that those citizens / legal residents who have the skill level of illegal immigrants (sad, but commonly true) will see their real wages depressed and more competition for the job.


Man I'm ashamed that I wanted to see H1B reformed and was a part of this crowd.

I want more immigration I just don't want companies able to abuse people/people be treated any different/having less rights/power than anyone else in American. I think I'm just going to be full 'open borders' now because otherwise it always ends up with trash manipulating things in racist/corporate power way.


High skill immigration still brings cultural change. My parents came here from Bangladesh, and while they superficially assimilated, they’re still culturally Bangladeshi. They, like virtually all the Bangladeshis and Indians I know, still overvalue formal education, undervalue risk taking, elevate familial over civic obligation, don’t value economic modesty, believe elites should rule over “the common people,” etc. And this was despite spending 35 years almost completely isolated from other Bangladeshis. Culture is very deep and not easily changed.

Libertarians assign culture zero substantive value, viewing people as fungible economic actors. Like many libertarian assumptions, that one isn’t grounded in empirical observation.


> Culture is very deep and not easily changed.

This seems somewhat incorrect to me, as people change jobs and with it, culture, basically all of the time.


The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitudes toward trust persist in second- and fourth-generation immigrants—in the adults whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants. People from high-trust societies, like Sørensen, transmit about half of their high-trust attitudes to their descendants, and people from low-trust societies do the same with their low-trust attitudes.”).

You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.

These deep-seated cultural variations, in turn, have a strong impact on societal prosperity: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric... (“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world.”).


> You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.

OK, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that book.

However, what's going on in this chart?

https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-trsic/tru...

I can see that (as you said) the Nordic countries have much more trust than Italy, and Italy, Spain and France are similar (along with a similar language and large inter-mixtures over time).

However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust (I'm sceptical of the metric here, would like to see it very density as I suspect that drives a bunch of the results).

> Think about your own life. How important is food to your family and friends as a way of social bonding? Do you think you’d be able to change that easily?

In terms of my parents/culture, not at all. It was much, much, much more about drinking alcohol rather than food. And yet, while that part is still there, there's far more emphasis on food as a socialisation tool in my generation.

Some of that is because of drink-driving laws being enforced, but some of it is definitely a cultural change which would seem to argue against your suggestion of long-term impacts due to culture.

> The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

Again, I'm not convinced this is true. Like, if a company in Ireland has majority European employees but American leadership, what culture will it have?

> You can see this just by going around the country

I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.


> However, look at Ireland vs the UK. Basically the same genetics, an extremely similar culture (particularly given the amount of cross migration back and forth), and yet very divergent amounts of social trust

Ireland is culturally distinct from the U.K. For example, the U.K. is historically predominantly Protestant, while Ireland is historically strongly Catholic. That manifests in many ways. For example, the Anglosphere tends to have the latest gestational limits on abortion among European and European-derived countries. By contrast, abortion was illegal altogether in Ireland until recently (2018).

There is also the fact that the Irish were brutally colonized by England and Irish society developed a strong cohesiveness from that external pressure. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million people out of a population of about 60 million. The Irish Famine, by contrast, killed 1 million people out of a population of only about 8 million. Indeed, the Irish population peaked in 1841, a few years before the start of the Great Famine and never returned to that peak.

> I think that the particular outcomes of one country, predominantly founded by Europeans, tells us very little about how culture works.

Europeans are culturally quite different from each other! For example, the Swedish practice of not feeding guests (https://www.the-independent.com/voices/swedengate-sweden-din...) would be mortifying to Americans in the southern U.S.


Not OP, but UK has experienced massive amounts of foreign culture immigration recently that Ireland has not.


https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-the-taoiseach/collection...

According to official stats, 16% of Irish residents are citizens of other countries. Keep in mind that this number will exclude foreign nationals that got Irish citizenship through naturalization (and therefore became Irish citizens).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the...

Most recent numbers from the UK list 16% of the population being "foreign-born". While this number may be similar to Ireland, it still counts someone as foreign born even if they became UK citizens by naturalization.

Also, consider that one of the most prominent migration sources for the UK is of Irish nationals (that can live and work in the UK even after brexit). Irish culture is not too dissimilar to UK culture (especially considering that Northern Ireland is currently part of the UK).

If anything, Ireland experienced more foreign culture immigration than the UK, not less.

Your point is invalid.


Do they count North Ireland as 'foreign born' even though they are notionally Irish and born in Ireland (but not RoI)? Those have got to be one of the major 'immigrants' to RoI.


Irish numbers are not based on being "foreign born". It is only based on citizenship status.

As far as I know, those born in Northern Ireland have automatic right to Irish citizenship for being born in the island of Ireland.

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/moving-country/irish-c...

> The Good Friday Agreement, which was signed between the Irish and British governments in 1998, confirmed that people born in Northern Ireland could choose to be either British or Irish citizens.

> Since 1 January 2005, if you are born in Northern Ireland, you can claim Irish citizenship if your parent (or parents) are either British or Irish citizens, or one of them has lived on the island of Ireland for at least 3 out of the 4 years immediately before your birth.


Huh, I guess I'm wrong about this one. I'll update my priors!


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> With recent legislation here in Australia

Are you of Aboriginal extraction? Otherwise, I'm not sure an ethnic homeland for you would be Australia, right?

This stuff is so weird, as basically all humans migrated to wherever they are now. Like, I'm pretty sure that I have Celtic, Norman, Viking and other ancestors, despite my official ancestry being Irish (and all of my last 3-4 generations being born in Ireland).

Is it culture? That would seem to be what people are actually looking for, and I can definitely see the appeal, but culture is something that is generated from interaction with other members of a culture, and isn't dependent on genetics (consider how you or I might behave in OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Goldman Sachs).


Yes it is culture. The desire for an ethnostate is a proxy desire for a monoculture, somewhat easier to implement because it's easier to see someone is white than to see their behavior patterns. There are also studies that show most people have subconscious tension among other races even from the same culture, though.

But the outright desire for an ethnostate or a monoculture are both politically untenable in the West. Never mind that every country we idolize, e.g. Japan, Scandinavia, are essentially that.

America is not a good candidate for that for various reasons, but I see no reason that Denmark or Japan shouldn't be able to codify their ethnic makeup and adjust immigration policy accordingly. As a Korean, it is really nice to visit Korea and feel among 'my people', even though culturally I'm an American. I've heard very similar things from my white friends who move to Utah or visit Scandinavia. It's a feeling that seems to be deeply embedded in the lizard brain, to be among your tribe, identified visually and then culturally. Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens.


> Never mind that every country we idolize, e.g. Japan, Scandinavia, are essentially [ethnostates].

In Sweden 25% of the population has foreign background, in Norway 19%, in Denmark 14%.

Hardly "ethnostates" at all.


Okay, but those are very recent developments to which the historical sentiment hasn't fully caught up. To the extent it has, it's via negative memetic sentiments, e.g. "Stockholm is now the rape capital of the world!" Sweden, at least, also, doesn't capture racial demographics, so we don't know the makeup of the foreign born population. Walking around Helsinki, you don't need statistics to notice the homogeny.


Didn't have time to check Norway and Denmark before, but looking now it seems most of the foreign born population is still white/European.

> figures from World Population Review suggesting around 83.2% are Norwegian, and another 8.3% are other Europeans, totaling roughly 91.5% of European descent, though exact "white" percentages vary by source and definition, with estimates often placing the broader "white" or European-origin population well above 90%.

Another source I found puts non-Danes in Denmark at 9%, putting their white/European percentage at 95%.

For approximate parity comparison, Japan is 98% Japanese, UK is 82%, and France is 71%, all falling. Imo Norway and Denmark still qualify as ethnostates, though maybe not for much longer.


Whites visiting scandinavianis a funny one, because today we treat all white people as one race but unless that man was of origin from scandinavia it's most probable its the governance system and culture he likes not a racial kinship.


> Countries have the right to cultivate this feeling among their citizens.

I disagree, because what seems to always be the logical next step is "My monoculture is superior, and deserves dominion above your monoculture, which deserves eradication. And oh by the way, if you don't like our monoculture and try to escape it, we'll invade that place too."

That's kind of what the "mono" in monoculture implies. Multiculturalism isn't an asset because it's the most stable form of soceity, rather it's best we've figured out when the alternative is bloodshed between warring tribes.


I don't see it that way. From my perspective, America would be more stable socially if it balkanized. There is a lot of tension borne of cultural heterogeneity. Coasts vs South, most of Texas vs Houston, etc. Nothing about it is positive, except maybe economically.

I guess this might lead to wars via a more cohesive national identity, like how diversity in the workplace reduces unionization efforts, but I largely doubt it would turn out so poorly.


What makes you believe that a hypothetical American balkanization would go any better than...say...what happened in the balkans proper?


I don't necessarily think it would. But what makes you think that a hypothetical status quo will go any better than what happened in the Roman empire? There are no great options imo.


What is the Roman Empire worse than in your mind? It lasted centuries, its literally perhaps the longest running in history. If it's the fate of the Roman Empire we have to face, then I can't wish for anything better. You can of course say it slid into dictatorship, now prove it was due to the race admixture. Anyone can read anything into the transition and fall of the Roman Empire.


I believe the current status quo is the fault of oligarchs successfully fooling people into blaming scapegoats while we're all being robbed blind.

Recognizing what is going on for what it is would be a good first step.


[flagged]


Suppose a future world where all the world, every country is thoroughly mixed up by today's racial standards. There is no "white" country, no "chinese" country, no "black" country. How do you think race wars would be organized, "Lets kill all the [racist slur] bastards of this country" wait what, there's no easy country to point to, already making race war quite difficult. Or do you like having race wars? Again, I fail to see what exactly is the "loss" or "gain" of a race existing or not? What has it ever given us? It's like religion and nationalism, very little benefits and pure destruction and waste of human life in the balance of history.


I suppose you will then say, you fear your country would become "Muslim" or insert whatever religion you hate. But Muslim is an idea it's not a race. A religion can convert a country without even a single marriage or mixup because it's an idea, so tell me again how do you feel you are safe from a foreign religion just because your "race" is different? And the nice thing is the arabs or whatever race has you wetting your bed will also have had thoroughly had to mix up with the locals by that point, already rendering them "impure". And I have you covered with a great anti-democratic solution for that: forcible state mandated atheism.


If you do believe in anti-democratic system of governance, then I propose we force every person to marry a person of a different race and forcibly make every locality thoroughly mixed up using information theoretic entropy definitions. Why not, why's mine better or worse than your idea of anti-democratic rule?


Why do you feel among all the cultures there, you know which one among them would will out. I see no point in being among my race if it's a communist or fascist country. The race has already failed me then. Hell give me aliens from mars and I'd gladly live among them if they are liberal democratic and capitalistic. To me these three principles are paramount, the identity of the agents executing them is irrelevant.


I absolutely don't feel comfort based on common ethnicity. I find comfort more or less in any democratic, capitalist liberal society and I absolutely hate life in anything not this even if it may be my race people or anyone else.


Most countries in Asia already have universal healthcare so they definitely would not be coming to the US for that.

If anything, expats from Asia come to the US to make a higher salary to support their family back at home. They are not asking for a handout, they are asking for jobs.


There were only two requirements at Ellis Island:

1. You were free of contagious medical diseases

2. You were not in danger of "becoming a public charge" (welfare)

That plan is perfectly compatible with your concerns.


It isn't quite that simple though - you're saying the standard is something like no danger of being a net welfare recipient. Apreche said he saw "no reason that becoming a citizen today should be any more difficult today than it was in the early 20th century".

Those are different. The standard of not being likely to be a welfare recipient is a much higher standard than what was around in the early 20th century. The US federal minimum wage came in in 1933 [0] for example following work that started in the 1910s. Ellis Island migration was completely finished fairly soon after that in the 1950s after what seems to be a wind-down period [1]. I don't know my US immigration history of when they started reviewing migration in relation to welfare but it'd be a complex question and it isn't obvious that the standards that were traditionally used on Ellis Island would even guarantee that the people migrating were skilled enough to be allowed to work in the modern era.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island


These new immigrants will work and pay taxes.

And of course, taxing the rich can cover a LOT of people.


No, your assumption is false. Even if all those paper valuations, etc., were real money you could use to pay for school lunches today, a 100% tax on the total wealth of U.S. billionaires wouldn’t even fund the federal and state governments for a year.


Total US wealth is ~170T so obviously it will be enough to cover federal and state government for a year (and more like 20 years).

Even considering obvious issue of wealth going down like crazy in such hypothetical scenario in its ends this would be enough. Because in the end it’s all part of same economy.


That’s including everyone. The wealth of U.S. billionaires is about $8 trillion total, while the government at all levels spends about $10 trillion annually.


You missed the "total wealth of U.S. billionaires". The billionaires own a tiny fraction of total US wealth. Most of the wealth is owned by people like me, who own a house, and stocks in retirement account.


My bad.

However billionaires don’t own tiny part of US wealth, more like 5%-10%. And top 1% (and grandparent was talking about rich people) own 1/3 of US wealth.


The point is that billionaire wealth is not that much compared to the government’s current spending, much less what you’d need to support large numbers of immigrants on welfare (as suggested by OP above).

The top 1% have a lot more, but the cutoff for that is $11 million, and that includes home equity, family farms, etc. The bulk of those people are retired professionals and small business owners. For example, 4% of 75-79 year olds are in the top 1% of wealth. These are rich people, but not the kind of rich that AOC is talking about taxing.

I’m a huge supporter of taxing upper middle class people, but we should just tax them instead of playing games about wealth. The top 5%, that is people making above $260,000 a year, have an income of $5.6 trillion a year. They only pay $1.3 trillion in income taxes. Just double that.


Your family had to leave everything behind, risking a weeks-long journey at sea costing them everything they ever had, going into the unknown - at a time where nobody could travel. The US was not as rich, or built, or anything.

People today get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area.

You don't see why things need to change?


> People today get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area.

> You don't see why things need to change?

Are you asserting that the current system of legal immigration needs to change, with an unsubstantiated example of a rare $50 dollar plane ticket as if people can easily move to the US by plane? Do those people leave behind most of their belongings, or do they instead make multiple plane trips to move them? And what about all of the paperwork and approval and unpredictable waiting [1]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912126


I'm talking about maintaining an immigration system which is consistent with the realities of the time we live in.


I took issue with the specific example you used ("get a 50$ plane ticket and move straight to the Bay Area") because it was too reductive (and unsubstantiated) to represent "the realities of" the immigration system "of the time we live in" in a way that would let me "see why things need to change". I think you should have fleshed out your example or chosen a better one.


Where can I buy a international plane ticket for $50 ?


With Ryanair, Easyjet and other similar carriers. Not to the Bay area though, at least not yet.


Buddy, what are you on about? This sounds just like all those welfare queens in Cadillacs GHW Bush was telling us about.


> This sounds just like all those welfare queens in Cadillacs GHW Bush was telling us about.

I don't think George H. W. Bush did that. Do you mean Ronald Reagan [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen#Origin


Interesting. I think the senior Bush must have used it during the '84 campaign at the RNC? My memory is slipping plus I would have been like 8. But I was a nerd who followed politics for a while before that.

Nowadays, there's both welfare and voting concerns that weren't the same in the 1800s.

If the USA offered food and shelter security, billions would come in


This is why you must block all ads always. No exceptions.


I've argued for a long time that adblocking isn't just a quality of life thing, it's an essential security control for browsing the Internet in the same way that patching your system and running malware protection is. I didn't expect it to be protecting your physical security quite so soon..

This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.


OS security was in the previous step:

> Intellexa also uses malicious ads on third-party platforms to fingerprint visitors and redirect those who match its target profiles to its exploit delivery servers.

-- https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/12/leaks-show-in...

Not blocking ads is bordering a self-destructive behaviour now.


>This sort of thing should also help put the "adblocking is unethical" argument to bed.

Finally. There are a lot of high profile YouTubers who have been saying this like LinusTechTips.


It's not about blocking ads, but blocking tracking. If you connect to internet you are being tracked even though you block known tracking URLs.

e.g. Hacker news uses no tracking url but uses Cloudflare which tracks the user across sites for things like bot detection.



The prominent link there not protected by https redirects to the wikipedia page for "uphill battle"...who and why about that redirect is the question being posed perhaps but how alarmist do we want to be?


I love your URL!


Not sure that blocks device ID tracking through timing metrics for example. You can turn off java but then you become a beacon of suspicious activity.


Do one better, block ads and give them false data on your profile using a solution like Ad Nauseam.


Ad Nauseam unironically gives ad networks massively more information and data points to track you than if you just straight up blocked the ads.


Do you have a source besides yourself?


If compliance is so difficult for a business that they will fail if the law is enforced, good.


The reason I waited in line and bought an iPhone 3G the day it came out is because I was tired of carrying several different devices everywhere. Even just carrying the flip phone and the iPod was a lot. I remember the reason I made this choice, and nostalgia isn’t going to send me back.

The key is to use the smart phone responsibly. Delete all the bad apps, especially the doomscrolling ones.


Global Rank 7089 | World Count 62,677 | Percentile Top 0.92% | Game of Thrones Volume 0.21

This would be pretty cool for other sites. My Reddit stats are probably way worse.


Mine was similar. I thought it was pretty shocking that I was in the top 0.90%. Surely I don't really post a lot here.

Global Rank 6948 / 774235 Word Count 63,737 Percentile Top 0.90%


How does this compare to https://strudel.cc/ ?


This is very much fun. Since I do not know what I am doing I simply ran Gemini on it to add a beat to pyramid song demo [0]. Is there music repls with LLM assistants built-in?

[0] https://strudel.cc/#Ci8vICJQeXJhbWlkIFNvbmcgKFJhdyBBYnN0cmFj...


Have you heard of Switch-Angel? If not, check out https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hbZb1Q0mM7k (to pick one) for a taste of what Strudel is capable of in "real time".


It’s been a lot of fun watching her subscriber count go through the roof. She’s outrageously talented.

It’s also funny because usually it’s hard to reproduce what a musician does. I can listen to someone play guitar, but there’s so much nuance to how it’s played that you need to be pretty good to reproduce it.

But so much of her music is code, and she shows you the code, so she’s really teaching you how to reproduce what she’s doing perfectly. It’s awesome for learning.


Thanks! I saw a few live vids. However it is cool to see someone saying what they are doing (guess that would be perfect training material for an LLM ;)). Seriously, I do not think an LLM can replace any artist. It is exactly that live thing that makes it cool. However I remember some research projects that were trying to reinforce also music selection with crowed movements in a club. iMHO would be some fun to create actually some live reinforcement from audience reactions and see where this is going.


I made one a couple weeks ago, it also has visuals. You can use a key or use a local LLM running right in the browser. I'll drop it online somewhere, maybe do a Show HN. Would you like me to email you when I do?


Cool, yes: I just send you DM (aka email) with my contacts.


There are tons of podcasts out there made by people with no extrinsic motivation. They aren’t looking for fame or fortune. They just like making podcasts, and do so for free. Usually Creative Commons Licensed. Yes, I am one of those people who makes a podcast that way.

The problem is you will never find our podcasts on the front pages of the directories like Apple or Spotify, but we are there if you search hard enough. If you are tired of ads, look harder.


Imagine if a podcaster with 21 million subscribers distributed his videos over BitTorrent as a proof of concept, e.g., own tracker, magnet links, no DHT, download not streamed (watchable offline anywhere, anytime)

Big Tech wants the public, specifically their employees, investors and followers, to believe that there is no alternative to the use of third party intermediaries with data centers and billions in cash flow

With this PoC, the ISP makes money from internet subscriptions, the hosting company makes money from hosting trackers, but there's not _necessarily_ a business model for the podcaster. It is up to the podcaster (not a middleman^1) whether to "monetise" their work. For example, it is within the sole discretion of the podcaster, not the middleman, how the podcaster's work is used. If the podcaster wants to use their reach to promote or sell something to the audience, then that's an option, but not a requirement

Under Big Tech "feudalism", where access to the podcaster's (sharecropper's) work is intermediated by a third party, the podcaster is required to allow the intermediary to perform data collection, surveillance and advertising services with respect the podcaster's audience

The third party. not the podcaster, gets to choose the advertisers. The podcaster generally has no negotiating power. The deal is "take it or leave it"

There may also be issues around "censorship" or at least "discoverability" (as noted in parent comment) as the third party mediates access to the podcaster's work in furtherance of its own business goals, which may not always align with the goals of the podcaster. For example, the podcaster might have non-commercial goals as in the parent comment

I'm not sure it's possible to argue against a hypothetical PoC, e.g., "Don't try it", "It will never work", "It's been done before and it failed", etc. but no doubt HN replies may try

It stands to reason that the only effective argument against a specific PoC, real or hypothetical, would be for the PoC to be executed and then to fail


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