Americans are the proverbial frogs in the pot. They've been ratcheting up the heat over the last 30 years, the first signs of danger are well past, now its 300mm people being held captive by abusive leaders and insanely greedy profiteers.
This entire story exemplifies everything wrong with the USA and its form of corporate run government. Socialize the risks, privatize the profits and foremost, let the foxes not only guard the henhouse, give it to them!
World, if you're listening. We need a pepperoni pizza.
When you can buy a SCOTUS Justice, you buy a SCOTUS Justice or 6.
When you can buy a POTUS, you buy a POTUS.
Elon bought them all and many of you cheer. Says more about you than Elon but speaks mountains about the core of our culture and our national ethos but mostly about how easy it is to pervert people and their false ideology with money.
Isnt it amazing how few people actually pay attention let alone ask themselves "why?".
The worst part? HN users are much better educated and tend to be much smarter than the average person. If this audience is so easily manipulated, it's no wonder the larger population is being controlled by such obvious tactics.
The "spaceman bad" crowd is so dumb that even when you're arguing something bad against spaceman they just dislike it because their shallow understanding of it is just "spaceman bad so I downvote".
If you took my comment as anything other than asking how your broad strokes trite criticism of "people in power bad" relates to TXSE, you're the one who needs some reflection. I wanted to know more about how your conspiracy laden poem directly connected to TXSE but I guess HN likes to just accept low quality content for real discussion now.
In many municipalities, it would be cheaper to run on demand van service for people than run busses. Not only would it get people to and from their actual homes and work, vans are cheap and readily available. Paying more drivers is cheaper than buying and maintaining multi million dollar busses that are empty a lot of the time.
In most of CA, most homes are far from bus lines. Making their use prohibitive for all but those who must use them. I know they do something like this in LA. People love it.
Metro micro doesn’t scale at all. It is still limited to pilot study areas. Cost per trip is absurd compared to traditional bussing. One of the stated goals of the next gen bus plan in LA was to get a bus stop in a 10 min walk of 85% of the workers in LA county and this was achieved.
The real trouble with transit is people choose where they live based on car convenience rather than transit convenience. So they open an app and go “gee I can drive to work in 30 mins but I have to take two or three busses and three times the time on transit.” And write it off forever, rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work. The way LA county is developed is that there are apartments basically in every neighborhood anyhow without very strong neighborhood specific effects on pricing. Housing a little more neighborhood specific but that changes as townhomes and other sort of not-detached-sfh buying opportunities come to bear generally in neighborhoods with demand for a song compared to detached housing.
Hard to figure this one with busses costing millions to purchase and tens of thousands a year to maintain. Not too mention drivers, bus stops, paint, etc.
No way that using cheaply available vans and part time drivers would ever cost more over time.
In my city in SoCal, busses are mostly empty. They are rarely full, and only at special events.
> rather than considering that they could have optimized their housing for a 30 min single bus transit commute when seeking housing convenient to work
In many places I've lived, this optimization would need to be re-done every job change and you would probably need to move, because it's as much about where the job is as where your house is.
The thing about optimizing for a good commute in a car is that you're way more likely to be at least average or better even if your job location changes.
With the way traffic works in LA county that isn’t so much the case. Rush hour speeds are like 15mph or less no matter surface streets or freeways. Really large geographic area too. Other metros where you can move at more or less 60mph even in rush hour I agree.
The hardest working people in society are paid the least. We created a system of financial engineering that has bifurcated society. The sad part is it's only going to get worse as those with money will have access to the tools and resources that will allow them to accelerate their position.
Conflating wealth for success is a big part of why we're here. Success in life is not the same as success at life and as we all personally know, money is no indicator of one's intelligence, abilities or personality. In face, any idiot can make money and it takes a true sociopath to earn billions without pure luck...
I'd say that this is a take only for your time, not for all time. For all time, learning about the humanities has shown to further one's ability to reason, create and imagine. IMHO Curiosity paired with an understanding of humanity (social skills) will become the most valuable job skills. The ability to talk and connect with people will outweigh any technical skill. You can only do this by understanding humanity and living in a society that promotes and fosters humanity.
In the near term, AI will override any and all non-physical skills. However AI is not able to create or imagine, it can only mimic and regurgitate. Additionally, it cannot fix a leaking shower, and it cannot make your bed. Add in physical real-world limitations and complexities,(randomness and disorder), and you have a world where physical skills and artistic abilities will dominate.
People will value authenticity, human touch and the magic that is human creativity (love) more and more as the non-physical world becomes less and less real.
Makers, Do-ers, Designers and Caretakers will dominate the workforce in 25 years.
People do value human creativity, but why do you think that comes from the degree mills and monocultures of the humanities departments? I don't agree that these departments foster creativity, rather the opposite, they foster conformity. There are lots of concrete real life examples of this.
I think that creativity doesn't come from humanities departments, but more likely, organically from counter culture. Who doesn't know what a rick roll is? This did not come from a humanities department.
Edit:
Forgot to add my second point: AI is going to let people outside the mainstream produce genuinely credible, professional-level work without a massive budget.
That means further devaluing of establishment institutions like humanities departments. It strips away the gatekeeping power, deciding who gets to count as legit. AI blows that up.
I'm not sure why you're being down voted. Art degrees aren't aimed at artists. There are dedicated schools to go to for things like graphics design and other creative degrees, but those aren't the sort of humanities degrees that we're talking about.
I vaguely recall even creative art degrees as being looked down upon by artists as teaching you to conform to certain styles, essentially mimicry rather than creativity (though it has been some years since anyone in my network attended one).
In any case, despite the waxing philosophical of the personal growth value of a humanities degree, there's still the fact that every college and university also advertises job placement rates of their majors. Individual courses may focus on specific topics, but the people taking your money are promising job opportunities to parents and school councilors to convince them that the over inflated price tags are worth it.
> There are dedicated schools to go to for things like graphics design and other creative degree
Yes, there are dedicated trade schools for graphic design just like there are coding bootcamps.
There are also university degree programs designed for creative artists. (And yes, there are universities that specialize exclusively, or nearly so, in those degrees and are highly regarded within them, just as is the case in STEM.)
There are some art-adjacent degrees that aren't primarily focussed on doing art (Art History being the most common and well-known one) and some of the creative-focussed programs may have options to focus on more critical/analytical vs. practical concentrations available, as well.
But creative degrees focussed on actual creative output whether writing or film or theater or dance or music or photography or other visual art are a very big slice of the humanities.
> But creative degrees focussed on actual creative output whether writing or film or theater or dance or music or photography or other visual art are a very big slice of the humanities.
But the result doesn't seem to be very creative, so what is the point?
Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools. One would argue at least banning (often recently written) books with adult content/porn makes sense, saying a classic is "culturally insensitive" and banning it is just another word for political indoctrination
> Let educators rather than politicians decide which books should be in a school library
We already don't do this though, between state laws, federal laws, and the department of education. I am fine getting rid of the department of education though since it seems you're opposed to it too.
And it was 20 years ago, you'd have to look up the specific policies. The point is acting like this is the first time people have tried banning books from young children in school is ignorant of all recent history
Making a claim and supporting it by effectively saying "go look it up yourself" is hardly compelling. It might be accurate, or perhaps not incorrect but misleading.
This smells a lot like the old "both sides do bad stuff" argument, which often gets over applied to pretend there is no difference in magnitude of the egregiousness when two sides do similar bad stuff.
And even if we did it would still go to shit because "educators" is not an representative cross section of the population and their choices would be ideologically skewed and/or subject to industry circle jerks and fads.
Generally institutions have more Democrats serving in them (I suppose it’s a culture fit thing) so it’s less needed for them to pass explicit laws vs just issuing organisational memos or other internal orders.
> it’s less needed for them to pass explicit laws vs just issuing organisational memos or other internal orders.
But issuing organizational memos is not illegal, whereas passing explicit laws is banned by the Constitution. Probably because one is a really bad idea that chills free speech for the whole nation, while the other is just how any community organization operates.
Banning should be an extreme measure only applied in some extremely limited form for the shortest duration possible, if ever. For instance when the book is directly being used to institute violence or hate. While porn should be restricted, it should be in the hands of parents, not the state. Same with abortion, a deeply personal matter, not in the hands of the state or whatever some church things, just because they think they are right. Justice should be blind, not carry a bible or creed.
It should appear evident, and a pretty apolitical stance, but here we are.
>Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive", while republicans were the ones who opposed book banning in schools
Source? I was an adult alive 20 years ago, that wasn't a thing.
> Although I hate to get political on HN, barely 20 years ago Democrats were the ones banning books in school for being too "culturally insensitive"
And it was rightfully opposed by the majority and by folks who understand the tenability of our rights to the whims of authoritarians, as many, many, many of the actions of the current administration should be.
It seems like every side wants to ban content nowadays. It’s really quite sad. One side wants to ban books with two men kissing and the other books that use the wrong pronouns.
With these "both sides" arguments why is it always "heres thing one, which is definitely happening and has been for decades. And here's thing two, which could hypothetically happen but never has and almost certainly never will"
I mean, it's absurd. It feels like a psyop. Is this a targeted propaganda campaign?
Stop trying to both sides. I see crazed MAGAs banning books here and I would bet if we look at numbers the crazies censor at least an order of magnitude more than whatever you're referencing. I can't think of an example of books being banned by non rightwingers, but will look into it now to learn.
I feel like there are a lot of conservatives who are unaware about what sex and gender actually are, and rather than looking for understanding they prefer to mock because they are lazy and chose the easy route rather than understanding other people.
Real rough to have a society when one side just wants to openly mock the other.
You're making the same sort of mistake I make in situations like this. You assume they're good people because you're a decent person. You project that onto them. You don't consider they actually are bigots, and lacking curiosity :)
I mean, if there really was a book that was too harmful to allow at all and it was successfully banned, we likely wouldn't know about it at this point.
I am extremely against book banning, but the possibility of some time in history where they really needed to disallow access to a book seems at least _possible_.
Which books on the list covered in this article are equivalents of Mein Kampf in mid-century Germany? I'll save you the effort. The answer is "none of them." That makes it pretty black and white for me. There's not some massive overlap here that makes it all shades of gray. The two situations and the works of literature are entirely different and the Germany case is an abberation, an exception, and hardly a good basis for drawing global conclusions. It is black and white. Either you're for or against the wholesale banning of books or you're for it. Countering with "but this one time in this one place" is hardly convincing.
It was essentially banned via copyright for a long time. The only reason that it is available now is that 70 years have passed since the authors death.
It actually was forbidden in other countries. But that's not the point. I do not consider banning this particular book bad, nor on the wrong side of history. Do you?
Being German I think it's important to point out that possession of Mein Kampf or reading it was never banned, the idea wasn't to hide some evil esoteric secret knowledge from the German people, to a large extent it was a pragmatic decision because the state did not want Neo-Nazis to benefit financially from the sales of Hitlers legacy, so they just held on to the copyright and didn't print it. There are now since 2016 annotated academic versions of it.
Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.
The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.
This entire story exemplifies everything wrong with the USA and its form of corporate run government. Socialize the risks, privatize the profits and foremost, let the foxes not only guard the henhouse, give it to them!
World, if you're listening. We need a pepperoni pizza.