They have each independently, on different cases, voted against the administration. Except one I think, but it’s also only been three months. And John Robert’s just rebuked trump. It seems they have enough backbone to not care about his ire, and have their own independent minds. Thankfully more than congress does.
Really, is any of this a surprise? Such studies have been saying roughly the same thing for decades. I guess the only thing that’s different now is a vocal group of deniers (fat liberation movement, National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, etc.) now with social media platforms but even they’re still quite fringey.
> I interviewed someone for an internship who was getting directions from someone whispering to them. I managed to hear it when they forgot to mute the mic a couple times.
What do you do when something like this happens in an interview? Do you ignore it, call out the interviewee, make a joke about it?
I ignore and cut the interview short in a subtle way, then ask HR to reject the candidate.
I'm not cold blooded enough to joke about this hahahaha
I do tend to give immediate feedback to most candidates, but I try to make it strictly technical and very matter-of-fact. A suspicion of cheating is not really something that I'd give feedback on. :/
I would tell the interviewee that I want to continue the interview with the other person since their answers indicate they’d be a good fit for the position.
Excellent reporting, particularly concerning the rivalries in the top levels of the Ukrainian military leadership. If only it was possible to do a similar deep dive into the Russian side.
One "what if" I am left wondering about concerns the U.S. frustrations and Ukrainian reluctance to lower the draft age. Maybe that ties into Zelensky and Budanov's belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years?
Definitely the demographic thing, but also the "Putin approaching death" meme feels like mostly a PsyOp from Ukraine. The unspoken correlary is, Ukraine doesn't have to outlast Russia, it just has to outlast Putin.
> belief that Putin has been "approaching death" for 2 years?
I truly believe this was a significant part of why Alexei Navalny was willing to go back to Russia knowing full-well he'd disappear into their penal system; he was betting he'd be able to outlive Putin.
What a great interview, with an unusual perspective … the son mainly knows Orwell secondhand, but understands him in a way that no scholar or fan or friend or journalist ever could.
I happen to be re-reading Burmese Days at the moment, which I think is his best after 1984. The movie 1984 with John Hurt is also very powerful - I watched it with my teenager a few years ago and he was transfixed.
Burmese Days is my favorite Orwell. It captures the state of the colonies under British rule extremely well - the British new-arrivals who are derisive and at best ignorant of the local customs, the British who've grown up in the colony and are more sympathetic but stuck in a world where they'll never truly belong, the extremely corrupt rich locals, the poor mob who are easily misled, the endemic corruption in everything...
This novel could have been set in post-independence India and a lot of the themes would have rung true.
> novel could have been set in post-independence India and a lot of the themes
The colonialists did, but the baggage never left. Turns out oppression/corruption/subjugation/feudalism/communalism/obscurantism/cronyism is politically and/or economically profitable. The current ruling class learnt well from their predecessors.
I've read 1984 as a poorly-drawn frame story meant to convey* Orwell's sincere argument, in the form of Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which baldly states that even without colonialism in the picture, you ("the Middle") probably will still have to live with the extremely corrupt rich locals ("the High") and the poor mob who are easily misled ("the Low"), etc. etc.
* or at best to provide a motive filling in the implicit blank left by TaPoOC's truncation: "deeper than this lies the
original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought DOUBLETHINK, the
Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards. This motive really consists..."
ПЖ would claim later that the oppression and continuous warfare are merely unfortunate side effects! (Joke?)
The motive consists simply of helping society be more effective!!*
(Riffing on 2-ish Nussbaum-Sen derived questions:
1. How to hand out capabilities to the effective/viral but not necessarily wise.[0]
2. How to immediately extract the foremost interesting issue with any framework... that some undergrad can fix before you even sit down at your studydesk in your chalet tonight.
*at learning/earning as a team. "too much information" is consensually the thing to insure against in the Overton; other things detractors ("prigs"/殺氣者) warn you about are to be reflexively dismissed as acts/will of god(s)
**Otoh info asymmetry foments corruption. "moral hazard" is translatable to irl outcomes.
***not touching the CFG analysis directly atm, indeed, because those tractability monsters pull you under when you forget to focus on interestingness
[0] S-N's "thresholds" I read as a placeholder for a thermodynamically grounded app of "festina lente". Colloquially: When your heat baths are way too mismatched, your Carnot efficiency...
I can't decide what my preference order would be, but I can admit that whatever literary criticism has to say on the matter, and I suspect it disagrees with me, I found "A clergyman's daughter" more fun to read than "Keep the aspidistra flying".
Sadly, those texts are not perfect. I noticed a number of OCR errors. Also, in "Down and out in Paris and London" there's a whole chapter about slang and swearing but nearly all of the swearing is replaced by ——! Perhaps all the printed editions are just the same; I don't know. Perhaps someone here has a modern critical edition and can answer that. It's chapter 32 and the 7th paragraph, for example, starting with "The swear words also change", has the sentence "The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is ——." Does anyone have an edition that has the last word of that sentence?
Fewer than one in 10 plans offer any kind of alternative investment, according to an American Retirement Association survey. Only 2.4% make private equity available.
Just what retirees need. PE and VC vultures don't have access to dumb institutional money anymore, so they're lining up to suck the blood out of tens of millions of little people.
They know that there are many who are either ignorant or desperate enough to go all in on crypto, AI, NFTs, inflated "unicorns" or whatever other hot scam that rises up in the future.
Bagholders will be retirees who have no recourse when 99% of these schemes fail, while the hyenas laugh all the way to the bank.
> Bagholders will be retirees who have no recourse when 99% of these schemes fail, while the hyenas laugh all the way to the bank.
And this is why I'm glad enough Germany has a public pension scheme that actually works and not some 401k crap. The last attempt to introduce something stock based here ("Riesterrente") ended up being an utter scam that made people distrust in the stock market ever since - and that's how things should be.
Stock markets should be for investors looking to raise investment capital to further the growth of their companies from other professionals, derivatives/futures markets should be heavily restricted (e.g. agricultural futures for a long time used to be reserved in trade for farmers and wholesale-scale buyers - nowadays the majority of trade is being made by speculative free-loaders), and pensions should be backed by the government because chances are higher there is still a government in 40 years than whatever hot tech startup is the utter hots these days.
Wow German has actual money saved in the pension system. Most public pension systems (whether in the EU or US) immediately pay out what is paid in, and are on track for bankruptcy.
Which is the flaw in most public systems. There is no way the pension system of the Netherlands will work for people currently younger than about 50. It seems pretty unlikely it will even work until death for people currently entering the system.
The actual problem is deeper. You don't care about money in old age. You care about living expenses, housing, and medical care. Most of that is effectively labor. Labor you get to use after you can't work anymore yourself. The money is a means to an end. And that's where just about every pension system fails, public or private. And that labor will definitely not be available in 20 years at the level it is today. Pensions being public or private simply change the method of failure: currency devaluation, raising costs or bankruptcy of the pension system, take your pick. It does not change whether they fail.
New York’s public system is fully funded. It’s pretty easy… you just fund it.
Social Security is a pretty amazing system. Inflation and a fixed cap for taxation has led to a relatively minor revenue shortfall, 90s welfare reform pushing welfare recipients to SS Disabilty, and a few other factors driving the spend side higher. We also tax those benefits for many, and fund Medicare through premium payments.
You need to raise taxes and push out the the cash flow issue a decade. Then demographic trends fix it. Instead, we’re exploring this cruel & destructive approach, which will trigger a depression in the end. Between housing defaults, implosion of medical facilities as Medicare funding gets slashed, and god knows what else, we’re damaging the country.
Demographics is the core thing that dooms all current forms of pensions, no matter if government, stonks or people just hoarding cash or other assets - in the end it's all fundamentally "IOUs" assuming that in 30, 40 years someone will be willing to trade that IOU from decades past into care. The one sole exception is real estate because a roof over the head doesn't need to be traded to be worth something for survival.
Up until now, this expectation has largely worked out over the millennia. People had ample children (by necessity), so there was always a healthy supply of working power to back the value of IOUs with work or consumables, old people plainly didn't live long (up until the 1800s, average life expectancy was barely 40!), and the young generation used to get at least some scraps of inheritance.
But at the moment, this is all broken across Western societies. People barely have children due to a number of factors (the pill, demands of employers, working too long hours, housing shortages, exploding costs of living, the economic and social poly-crises ever since 2001 9/11 ...) which will throw wrenches into the core promise of someone being there to trade the IOUs, old people live way too long (we're at about 80-ish years now) for any system to be sustainable because you can only get about 45 to 50 years worth of full-time working out of a human but they'll be living double that on the dime of society, and by the time my generation can hope to get some assistance in starting our families in form of inheritance we'll be long past the time where we could actually have used it.
Long term we're fucked, and I'd hope our governments show to be more deserving of our trust than tech and finance bros.
> (up until the 1800s, average life expectancy was barely 40!),
This is mostly tangential to your point, but life expectancy for those that survived the first five years of life has never been 40. The averages for older populations are massively dragged down by the deaths of babies and small children either in childbirth or due to infectious diseases.
There’s alot of things that just aren’t correct in your analysis. Most obviously, you don’t understand what life expectancy is.
The US doesn’t have a fertility problem, we have interest in immigration and do a great job at keeping people poor and ignorant.
Lack of inheritance as far as that goes is mostly because for regular people, the estate tax is a casino. If you’re lucky to die quickly, your kids let stuff. If not, you’ll end up expending your assets on long term care as we don’t have a rational healthcare system, and rich people can use trusts to avoid that landmine.
> And that labor will definitely not be available in 20 years at the level it is today. Pensions being public or private simply change the method of failure: currency devaluation, raising costs or bankruptcy of the pension system, take your pick. It does not change whether they fail.
Indeed but a government at least has some sort of accountability and long term thinking built in. The forces of the market are by nature short-term dominated and are accountable to effectively no one (but a few select billionaires).
A government's policies are dominated by the need to think about getting re-elected (democracies) or the need to get people to fight and commit violence on others (everything else).
Neither of which seem a particularly strong incentive to think long term.
Are you talking about the german Rentensystem or something else? All I've ever heard about it living in Germany was that it won't cover your expenses anymore by the time you retire which is why they tried Riester Rente (and yes that failed). "Privatvorsorge" is a must, so I don't know why you'd say it's working.
Also 401ks don't invest in single stocks, but mostly index funds...
Sarcasm is inappropriate for online conversation even when it's obvious to you because it leaves great room for misinterpretation when you least expect it. As an engineer, one must value precise and clear communication.
Only the first sentence is sarcastic. By sentence two it is abundantly obvious what GP meant in sentence one. This comment would be hard to misinterpret.
I agree with you. People type out the complete opposite of what they mean, leaving it up to the readers to make sense out of it. This is extremely prevalent on Reddit and has started to bleed into hn a lot more lately (along with politics but its obvious the mods are stamping that out).
Yea but the wealthy elite need more bagholders to continue transferring the world's wealth to themselves. And the wealthy elite are now in complete and full control of the US government.
Crypto scammers take millions, private equity takes hundreds of billions. It hollows out entire industries; kills hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs. In PE funded nursing homes the mortality rate is 10% higher. PE owned hospitals raise prices by 20-30% while cutting staff.
PE firms pay lower tax rates (carried interest loophole), ie, they steal from everyone. A 2022 ProPublica investigation estimated that tax loopholes exploited by PE cost the U.S. government $180 billion annually in lost tax revenue.
'Dividend recapitalizations' have extracted hundreds of billions from businesses, often leading to their failure.
The estimated economic damage from PE is well over a trillion dollars; and I'd say that's extremely lowballed.
Crypto might be riddled with scammers from top to bottom, but there is real potential there; and even if there wasn't, it still wouldn't have a patch on private equity as far as "sketchiness".
I can't speak for all PE. However, even their lauded 'success stories' - Hilton Hotels, AirBnb, Tesla etc - seem to generally turn out pretty evil.
How can they not... The whole goal of PE is to extract value from workers and the Earth, and funnel it into the pockets of the .01%. This, in a world where inequality is stifling our potential as a species, and as a planet, on a truly unimaginable scale?
Beyond the hype and the rationalizations, fundamentally, the investors always win and society always loses. They've turned our industries into a casino, and they're the house. Sometimes good people win in a casino, and sometimes they even get paid out, but it's a fucking mugs game that preys on our blind spots and is leading us into some very dark places.
Great. So this smoke alarm basically becomes a hanging brick in a few years?
I have a pre-Google Nest thermostat which I like quite a bit ... it's probably saved us thousands of dollars in the decade we've had it. Is this also destined for the Google hardware graveyard?
All smoke alarms have expiration dates. Mostly due to the isotopes used in them, which decay.
The alarms themselves should be able to work even without network connection, but you won't get to use any of the connected features, loosing all the "smarts" that they charged about $100 premium over other smoke alarms for.
It seems the current plan is to let the device reach their use by date before they shut off the servers, but Google being Google, who knows if they won't change their mind and decide to shut off the server before that.
> How do you arrange your time when you are independent founders?
You're independent. You can make decisions about when you want to work according to your own needs, and the needs of your business.
> I have also read many stories about independent developers or founders. They are basically crazy work and crazy ships, and finally get a little results.
If you have sales - real sales, with customers paying money - you will have a lot more freedom to run the business the way you want, not according to others' perceived or actual expectations.
Yes, in theory, this is the case, but seeing that people around you work for a long time is inevitable, and you will be more anxious when you don’t see hope.
Unlikely. SCOTUS is cowed, as shown by the latest batch of rulings (https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5351799/scotus-probatio...). They want to avoid his ire, and interference.
Possibly, they are saving dry powder for a bigger fight.
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