I'm just in the process of setting this up using logs from a tree that just went down in a storm, so thanks for pointing that out, I had not thought of it yet! Last year I did have to build a cage around our strawberry patch and it makes sense that we will need one over this project as well. Much appreciated.
Being optimistic and positive on tech in the first place is the root issue here. This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient. Being overly optimistic about an industry or field is in my view a worldview error, and a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
> Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
This sounds like it's better to work within the system rather than try to overthrow it. You need more than a little angst to completely reset cultural norms. Maybe you're optimizing for a local maxima instead of realizing the true potential of saying "fuck everything" and replacing it.
I'm mostly playing devil's advocate, not saying the correct response to all adversity is to plot a revolution. But my point is sincere - sometimes it is the best thing to burn it to the ground and start over. Private healthcare seems like a pretty good example of a system that should be abolished rather than massaged (assuming your goal is better healthcare at a more affordable price) and we have decades of data from our own country and others to corroborate that.
I think what you are saying is orthogonal to what they are saying.
You can be positive and optimistic about big scale societal changes that throw out all the established notions. Likewise, you can also be cynical and jaded about small scale changes that just aim to incrementally improve things.
Aiming for big changes doesn't necessarily imply you have to be cynical. In fact I think you're more likely to be able to achieve big changes if you're optimistic about them.
If you're willing to accept small changes as a win in a fundamentally broken system (in the sense the incentives aren't aligned and there is no real accountability feedback mechanism) then the problem is you aren't cynical enough to attempt something drastic. I'd actually go even further and argue it's a form of being brainwashed, usually as a byproduct of effective propaganda. Going back to the example of private healthcare - I don't fucking care about small incremental changes when the system itself is still structurally broken. We need more cynicism about the status quo so people say "fuck this" and replace it with something better. And it's not even a complicated or abstract idea - literally every other 1st world country has solved this problem and laugh about how broken healthcare is in the USA.
I think people tend to think too much in terms of black and white. Jaded cynicism is sometimes a good response, and sometimes less so, and other times won't make too much of a difference or can go either way. The trick is to know how to balance it all.
Same story with "tear it all down" vs. "work within the system".
The point is: what are you going to do if single-payer healthcare does not materialize in the US? You have many options; plotting a revolution, working for reform inside the system or impotently complaining on social media. What is actually workable for you?
The same goes for the article's author. Sounds like they're shocked—SHOCKED—that private companies are just out to make money, and don't actually have our best interests at heart. The real issue is that they bought into the fantasy in the first place. But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world? If it will have no effect, why let it get you worked up at all? If it will have an effect, go out and do it.
> But now that the veil is lifted, how will it change your actual behavior in the real world?
As the author said:
> Stop giving them your money, time and data as much as possible for you. They won't bring us closer to these ideals they promise.
It's not changing the world, but I just do what I can to not contribute to it. And if any alternatives do pop up I do try to support them, sometimes financially.
The internet's outskirts are emptier than ever with this centralization, but I have made the active choice to de-activate pretty much all the mainstream stuff and use extensions to minimize their ability to track me. So knowing this did change my behavior on how I interact with the internet.
>a better approach is to be optimistic about one's own potential to contribute to the betterment of humanity, no matter the field. Also the understanding that there are and always will be bad actors should not dissuade one from being part of creating solutions, as one sees it. Being jaded and cynical will not help in the long run.
Easy to say this, but these two aspects contradict each other. You become jaded and cynical precisely because your potential to better humanity is locked down in beauracracy that has the opposite interest. One can only fight back so much against the tidal wave that was setup decades before you were born.
I'd even go so far to say that the ones who do rise to the challenge need to be jaded, and channel that into overcoming the wave. Being cynical means understanding a need to deeply understand every little action, no matter how simple and otherwise "objectively good" it is in the short run.
It's how you use that cynicism that matters, not the state of being cynical.
> This reminds me of my mom in medical school who became disillusioned when she experienced the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry and it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit, not always in the interest of the patient.
That sounds like a story of its own. Would you care to share the story about the corruption she saw? We so often hear the stories about companies hiking prices for lifesaving medicine fo no apparent reason other than profit, but it would be interesting to hear what she saw from the inside?
Someone who's in medical school (or finishes and goes into medicine) isn't really "inside" the pharmaceutical industry and typically has a very, very poor understanding of how pharmaceuticals are developed and brought to market.
The most substantial corruption in the health/life sciences/medicine world is simple profit motive at hospitals, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and insurers, and especially when those three entities combine into mega "pay-vidors" like UHG.
Tiny anecdote: I worked on the campus of a children's hospital. The pharma reps had parking right by the main entrance. The parents of sick children? Expensive, paid parking a mile away.
Here's a fun one that just happened recently. A doctor I know works for a giant conglomerate as a general practitioner. Recently the business development team realized that insurance will pay them to take pee samples for diabetes tests for every patient. Now every single time someone comes in the medical assistants are made to get a piss sample for a test that is totally worthless for most of these people as they have little risk of diabetes(far high chance of false positive than true positive). When the doctor told the medical assistants to stop he received an angry email from an MBA which became a huge pain in the ass. At the end of the day we have to remember that the only goal of a business is to make money and even if everyone inside that business is trying to do good the banality of evil tends to rear its ugly face. The MBA actually believed the policy was helping people here believe it or not.
Personal financial payments to physicians are a common marketing strategy used by the pharmaceutical industry. These payments include both cash (typically for consulting services or invited lectures) and in-kind gifts such as meals.
You've got to separate the tech from human nature. Penicillin, modern medicine, travel, communication etc. are good. Greed corruption and self interest are a human thing irrespective of whether you have high tech or not. We may make some progress there but it's not really a tech issue.
> it's influence of the entire industry for it's own profit
I continue to be fascinated by how easy people priorities profit over doing the right thing. Sometimes they don't even stand to personally gain all that much, they do it for the benefit of some soulless company.
If you aren't actively making things worse for the general public I'll even let the sole focus on profit slide, but how can you justify to yourself going out and actively causing suffering.
Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.
It's easy for people who face no real threat themselves to pretend to take the moral high road by refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers. Not everyone has that luxury.
> Things like pensions are frequently refusing to invest in weapons manufacturers, because of the harm their products do, but why? At least they are honest about what they do and they can justify it.
Not to mention, their justifications are much more legitimate than anything advertising industry could come up with, and yet, marketing is a respectable occupation these days for some reason, and ad industry funds everything.
I think the argument made in the CNN clip is that it's users are now more equally distributed politically, which is reflective and a microcosm of the actual demographics of the country. I think it's a fair point. But I also agree with your take that many (like me as well) don't follow any political party (I kind of opted out around 2016). I do wish we could see a multidimensional politics rather than the polar system we have now, I know for example in some euro countries there are 5 or more parties debating policies in their houses of parliament.
> equally distributed politically, which is reflective and a microcosm of the actual demographics of the country
But it's not, for the reason you and I both gave: almost half the country identifies as independent, and party affiliation is at a record low[1]. So Twitter is not a mirror of the US, it is a representation of the extremes of the US (which is why taking Twitter seriously has been so dangerously wrong in the past).
> I do wish we could see a multidimensional politics rather than the polar system we have now, I know for example in some euro countries there are 5 or more parties debating policies in their houses of parliament.
This is and always will be impossible because many of our institutions (such as committee assignments in the Senate) are functionally locked into a bipolar structure that only a two-party system can conform to.
If you want more dimensions in your politics, you can look for more Bernie Sanders/Dan Osborn[2] candidates. They run as independents, but then they "round up" to caucus with whichever party they agree with. The key is that they eventually choose a side, though, because if either Democrats or Republicans split into separate parties, the other side (likely a minority party) will then dominate the country indefinitely.
Thanks, those discussions do provide helpful context! The new development here is the censorship or erasing of procurement contract records that previously existed on fpds.gov and usaspending.gov . The author considers this censorship because the deletion itself is not recorded in the official database of deleted contracts.
I've been watching the Whole Mars Catalog channel on Youtube for a while ( https://www.youtube.com/@WholeMars/videos ), he's been trying out FSD beta versions for some time now and posting the unedited drive videos, and recently I've seen the results he's getting with 12.3.3 are substantially better than v11 from last year. I do think it's at the threshold of robotaxi capability from what I've seen there, very little if any intervention for long drives through the city dealing with construction, stopped delivery vehicles, jaywalkers, etc.
My take - if the US is still the "land of the free" then the government should not be banning citizens access to apps.
The idea of politicians in the house and senate (or president) deciding which apps to ban from the app stores will likely lead to similar actions against websites, from the article:
As written, any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States” is covered.
"National security" is a nebulous term that feels like an excuse to ban competitors on behalf of lobbyists at Meta or elsewhere, this is not in the interest of the majority of citizens.
> My take - if the US is still the "land of the free" then the government should not be banning citizens access to apps.
That's nonsense when phrased so broadly. I mean, your condition would even include apps that, say, drained the user's bank account without authorization. A twee libertarian might insist on that, but practically it can't work (sort of like arachno-capitalism, the Ununoctium of political ideologies).
> As written, any “website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is “determined by the President to present a significant threat to the National Security of the United States” is covered.
You've omitted the "foreign adversary controlled application" language from your quote, which is an important qualification and the omission is misleading and inflammatory.
To your last point, China is on that list though (as a "foreign adversary"). In my view this is a political designation as China is actually our deeply integrated trade partner, manufacturing most of the hardware we are all discussing this on, it seems absurd to label a trade partner as a "foreign adversary" IMO.
To your earlier point, of course if an app is "draining the user's bank account without authorization" Apple or Google will block them, but that is not the job of politicians in Washington.
> In my view this is a political designation as China is actually our deeply integrated trade partner, manufacturing most of the hardware we are all discussing this on, it seems absurd to label a trade partner as a "foreign adversary" IMO.
It's nonsense to consider "deeply integrated trade partner" and "foreign adversary" to be mutually exclusive categories. You can thank the hubris of 90s American politicians for the fact that China is both, and it will take some time and effort to unwind the situation.
> To your earlier point, of course if an app is "draining the user's bank account without authorization" Apple or Google will block them, but that is not the job of politicians in Washington.
No. It's totally within the remit of politicians to ban such apps, just like it's in their remit to make theft illegal and do a great deal of other things. That fact that a corporate pseudo-government might also take a similar action is irrelevant.
> It's nonsense to consider "deeply integrated trade partner" and "foreign adversary" to be mutually exclusive categories.
Fine, but it's also unfortunate that we have corporate-pseudo-government entities (like Meta) lobbying and leveraging the power of actual government against the will of the people through FUD campaigns (see their Targeted Victory contract, for example). Restricting American access to their biggest competitor is arguably corporate-government collusion.
Facebook's actions or interests in no way eliminate or excuse the risks posed by TikTok's ownership.
To refrain from action on the TikTok problem to avoid benefiting Facebook is a clear priority inversion.
It's also odd that you were appealing to corporate-pseudo-governments to justify inaction upthread, but now are trying to invoke negative feelings towards of one to justify inaction.
>It's also odd that you were appealing to corporate-pseudo-governments to justify inaction upthread
Not really, it's just "how it is" right now, personally I would prefer open web apps and distributed social networks, but those are niche, with most people using the big apps and social networks.
In a more "open web" world, I could publish and viewers could view anywhere on the planet. China was one of the first to "firewall" their citizens from the open web (likely due to their internal political arguments about national security etc) and unfortunately now I see a bipartisan trend in the USA following the same path, to the competitive benefit of few (at Meta for example, in this case), and given the text of the rule the next targets will be banning of websites based on nebulous/political security arguments for similar competitive advantage of entrenched players.
Anyway, @tivert thanks for the conversation and sharing your take as well!
Good question. I think an array of these as cells in a series would bring it up to levels that could power an eInk display, etc that practically never needs additional batteries for its lifetime. Super cool.
HN (Hacker News) is mainly News for a lot of regular visitors. I would suggest checking out some subreddits in the niche you're looking for feedback in, as Reddit better fits that expectation, in my experience. A few other options are telegram groups, discord servers, sites like quora, and of course old fashioned forums.
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