I don't think anti-capitalist is a useful label in this context. There doesn't have to be a contradiction in being pro-capitalist and also being pro-eat-the-rich. A situation of extreme inequality that is likely to precipitate an eat-the-rich sentiment is probably not an effective example of capitalism at work.
He means that if the state, courts and other systems don't get people justice or something you can squint at and call justice when they are wronged some fraction of those wronged will go outside the systems and seek to get even instead.
The (rare, perhaps crazy) people who shoot CEOs or armor bulldozers are what check the power of the state to ignore this part of its job.
An interesting individual I know is fond of reminding people that the Magna Carta has been a useful document for over 800 years, but the actual enforcement of the Magna Carta is that every time a monarch started acting like they were above it, a critical mass of people with the power of violence showed up to remind him that he was, in fact, just as mortal as everyone else.
Not this commenter, but how I've often heard it expressed was we created the justice system as a better, more civilized alternative to putting people in holes just outside of town. At such a time the justice system stops working, as it increasingly seems to have RE: the rich, then we resume holes.
This entire line of thinking just seems to be essentially advocacy for a return to that exact system. "Do what we want or we'll go back to random murder".
I wonder if the original commenter would have put the same comment if the article were "man shoots his wife and her lover on discovery of adultery"
shrug I'm not an accelerationist, I do not want to live in any more historically significant times than I already have. That said, our systems continue to fail us at basically every turn so when I see stuff like this, I'm not surprised either. If you put people in a situation where they feel they have nothing to lose, you shouldn't be surprised when they start acting that way too.
People demand justice, whether they're right to is a secondary concern, as is the methodologies they choose to seek it. Some become activists. Some become politicians. Some pick up guns.
>People demand justice, whether they're right to is a secondary concern, as is the methodologies they choose to seek it. Some become activists. Some become politicians. Some pick up guns.
That is a true, but We should discourage and condemn them picking up guns. There is a feedback loop at play
It's one of the so-called "Four boxes of liberty[1]". When the soap, ballot, and jury boxes are no longer effective, we should not be surprised when people increasingly reach for the ammo box.
There is a big moral and social difference between an overwhelming majority of the people and a dissatisfied group.
The ammo box is not justified and should not be tolerated simply because someone doesn't get what they want. That route is a quick decent to societal collapse.
That is how you end up with your incels, anarchist, communists, and Christian fundamentalists shooting anyone who doesnt agree with them.
I was not defending its use, but its existence means it could be used, and that fact acts as a sort of invisible check on what corporate/government power can realistically get away with. If the ammo box didn't exist as an option, then even in a democracy the "overwhelming majority" could do pretty much whatever it wanted to.
Based on impressions I'm seeing online (and freely admitting that this is hardly statistically-rigorous or -defensible sampling) I'd suggest at the very least that dissatisfaction with working within the system is highly palpable. Revolutions are rarely majoritarian viewpoints.
You're assuming his objective was to change healthcare policy, I doubt it was. I think the objective was good old fashioned revenge.
Like this is pure speculation right? But I have a strong feeling that, should the person be caught, we'll learn that they have or had a family member or even themselves insured with UHC who has suffered some harm, and that person felt UHC was responsible. Whether they were correct or not is immaterial: the CEO paid the price.
And you can feel whatever you feel about that, like I said, I don't want to live in a world where healthcare CEOs get gunned down in the street. But I also am acutely aware of how abusive insurance companies are, both from reading about those abuses in the news of others, and experiencing a handful of my own, and I also don't want to live in the status quo, where unelected, unaccountable private companies get to decide who lives, who dies, and who goes bankrupt via inscrutable bureaucratic practices.
In my ideal world, accountability would be these rich bastards getting hauled into congress and charged for the abuses their companies inflict on American citizens. But since our system seems unwilling to do that, if the alternative is they get to walk around just a bit scared that someone will [ censored for HN ]? Well, probably won't fix anything, but I'd be a liar if I said I'd lose a wink of sleep over it.
>In my ideal world, accountability would be these rich bastards getting hauled into congress and charged for the abuses their companies inflict on American citizens.
My point is that these rich bastards are playing by the rules the American citizens set up. American citizens have the power to change those rules if they want, but cant agree on anything they think is better. People like to imagine a grand corporate conspiracy while ignoring half the population that want the opposite thing.
In my mind, it is the same type of vigilantism that justifies shooting up a school, LGBT club, or killing women who wont date you.
> My point is that these rich bastards are playing by the rules the American citizens set up.
Mmmmmmm.... yes and no? Like it's cliche to blame everything on Reagan but the number of modern social ills that can be directly traced to the Reagan admin and the political movement behind it really does baffle the mind. Ills such as, for example:
- The deregulation of corporate finances, that permits the massive stock buybacks that allow corporations to kick absolutely stressful amounts of money to their shareholders and executives
- The tying of the hands of the FTC regarding anti-trust/monopoly regulation, which has led to the greatest era of corporate consolidation since Standard Oil, and all the problematic things that come with it
- The citizens united decision, which unleashed the ability for corporate America to pump shit fuck tons of money into political parties that would then work for their interests
- The repeal of the fairness doctrine, which let an entire wing of disinformation networks form and spread, masquerading blatant propaganda as news (sorry, "entertainment")
And like, you're right in one way, because the Republicans didn't come out to the American people and say "hey we want to enable corporations to rat fuck you for every dollar you have, along with every dollar you don't have, and to make them effectively the funding that both parties need to accept in order to have a snowballs' chance in hell of winning an election. Sound good?", obviously. But the various "mandates" that they've received from conservative voting blocs over the years are dubious as fuck, and if you scratch them just a little bit, you oftentimes find that their voters are so incredibly bullshitted at this point that they don't even truly know what the fuck they're voting for. Citation: literally in the last presidential race, there was a shit ton of people after the fact who both:
- Didn't realize tariffs would drastically increase the cost of goods in the United States, because exporters do not pay them, importers do (and in fact, if the rumors are to be believed, neither did their candidate)
- Voted for the party promising to repeal "Obamacare" despite receiving benefits from and in fact, needing the Affordable Care Act, not realizing that Obamacare is literally a made-up bullshit name given to the ACA by Republicans.
So like... yes, technically, the Republicans (and Democrats, make no mistake, their fingerprints are all over this shit too, just to a lesser degree) have built exactly the America that Americans want. However, it is impossible to fully divorce that from the just incredible amounts of propaganda Americans injest, both from the political parties who decide what is "feasible" to the corporate media.
That is very close to my point. It is very easy to focus on a shady cabal and ignore the plurality of our countrymen that actively think and want something different.
It is like there is a deep denial that real humans often want something different, and that we are forced to share a democratic society with them, which means losing on issues where we think we are right.
So should we as “real humans” also set up our own lobbying channels in Washington? Or are there some problems that make that somewhat unfeasible for us “real humans”?
Yes, that's the essence of social contract theory. Which, it should be noted, is a historical falsehood, in that we're pretty sure no ancient tribe ever really started with people sitting down and saying "It is mutually beneficial if we curb our violent inclinations for the safety and security of blah blah blah"... but is a useful shorthand for the observed notion "A government lasts only as long as it provides a better alternative to picking up a 2x4 and settling your own scores for most people who support it."
"You rule because they believe," in essence.
(This is why, historically, you'll often see societies keep their pattern of government until, say, famine comes along. Because if you're going to starve to death, the likely outcome calculus on picking up a 2x4 starts to change drastically and quickly).
The distinction would be that you can still seek legal redress in court for your spouse committing adultery. It may not be the redress you want, but it would at least get you something, e.g. grounds for divorce.
Increasingly, though, people in the United States feel that the rich and powerful have become effectively insulated from the legal system, such that the common person is denied any redress. At that point, one no longer feels any reason to continue working within the legal framework, because it seems clear that the framework is not at all "equal" under the law.
Hence, when all other options feel exhausted: murder.
And, frankly, I imagine this will only continue with time, unless this country decides to actually provide some mechanism to hold people in power accountable. Like, I'm frankly surprised no one has attempted to assassinate members of the SCOTUS yet recently, given that they enjoy a lifetime appointment to make wide-impacting, scrutiny-free decisions.
> Increasingly, though, people in the United States feel that the rich and powerful have become effectively insulated from the legal system, such that the common person is denied any redress.
They're not insulated from the legal system, the problem is the public is being misled.
It works like this: The media lies to the public and tells them that a CEO or Public Figure is getting away with X, so they get some washed up lawyer to do an opinion piece on it, a politician or two co-opts it, and possibly throws in some bait about the working class being screwed over, and then the public buys the made-up story- hook, line and sinker.
Since TV Law is not the same thing as real law, the person in question is put through actual due process and the allegation or accusation turns out to be unsubstantiated. The public then feels outrage because "The man on TV said this person was a criminal and he got away!".
There are two outcomes here. Either they are insulated from the legal system (and in many cases, they absolutely are by virtue of having enough money to squash and drag out cases into oblivion), or the legal system is deficient.
Consider the Yotta/Synapse situation. Many people have lost a huge sum of money and the two companies involved are simply shrugging and saying they have no clue where it went. In many countries, either this problem would've never been allowed to occur in the first place or the government would start jailing people from the top down until someone starts to talk.
You're missing the point. The people running corporations are NOT flagrantly violating the law-as-written, with the courts just refusing to enforce it (for the most part). Rather they bend the law, often through tiny repeated violations of the law-as-written, and also through lobbying/bribing to undermine the creation of directly applicable new laws, to produce abjectly terrible outcomes that end up being de facto legal. So when the average person feels ever-more subject to the law themselves while seeing the terrible corpos continually getting pass after pass, they become ever-less invested in the general idea of the rule of law.
There are still the factors of exposure rate and a difference between legal reality and expectations.
Fundamental to this is that people are increasingly siloed and have little idea how closely the legal system reflects the will of the majority. They just think that their opinion is the majority and anything that deviates is the product of a corrupt system and public disenfranchisement.
Sure, that gap exists. But that doesn't mean it explains away the whole topic the way it had been invoked.
Furthermore I'm quite wary of hand waving arguments about the "will of the majority". "The majority" just complained about price inflation, while electing the former president that approved most of the monetary inflation they were complaining about, while he was actively promising even more inflation. And that is on a topic the average person should be able to understand! Never mind more subtle points about the downstream effects of more abstract policies. The way I see it, most everyone is extremely frustrated with the current system (hence spitefully voting for more destruction by President Inflation). But most of the energy gets used up arguing about which direction we should go, while the corporate machine stands ready to latch onto and nullify whatever attempts at reform that may arise.
I wouldn't do it, but I actually do understand and respect the argument, "neither political side is going to materially help me, so why not vote for a wrecking ball that will surely change something?"
I don't respect it because it was not an overt message being campaigned on, but rather the same 4d chess contortionism of people pulling out their own wishful signal from the noise of a double-talking con artist.
Furthermore even taking that argument at face value, it takes for granted how much we still do enjoy - even people on the shit rungs of society. The US military and world alliances making it so that we don't have to worry about military invasions, USD as the reserve currency making it so what we consider high price inflation is actually quite tame, bureaucratic authoritarianism keeping corporate authoritarianism from completely taking over, federal law enforcement keeping armed gangs in check. The economic meat grinder wealth/hope extraction machine is abjectly terrible, but also things can be so much worse.
I don't know about the original commenter, but societies only work when the vast majority weigh the cost and benefit they derive from the status quo against the cost and potential benefit they incur by fighting against it, and decide that they're better off playing along.
Rightly or wrongly, we now have a situation where a lot of people believe that they no longer benefit from society, and are in fact harmed by it, while they also see a few benefit greatly. I believe this is why many people who understand the implication of that choice would still rather vote for Trump, who promises to break things, than for Harris, who would have only made minor changes.
This is not advocacy for anything. I think these people are perhaps not exactly wrong, but they don't correctly estimate the cost of breaking a democratic system, even a poorly working one.
Yes it's not advocacy for anything: It's up to everyone how they respond to their situation if they feel disenfranchised and I'm in no position to judge them one way or another.
The point is just that it's a tale as old as human civilization itself. It would be disappointing if we've not yet learnt enough from our history to avoid more change via trauma.
All you're saying is that your imagination and appetite for experiences should not exceed the means already available to you. Sounds unimaginative and boring to me.
What if I said the interesting person is the one that will tolerate being bored doing something boring, in order to be able to do the thing that satisfies their imagination and appetite for interesting experiences? Like you were forced to at school? Unfortunately many people are trapped being bored doing boring things as a means to an end for much longer than just childhood: That doesn't make them boring.
I could go even more extreme as an example and go back to the year I worked in a factory. I could have been bored out of my mind while sequencing and examining car parts, but instead I let myself daydream and think about things like crazy, and wrote down notes for various thoughts I had and things to do after work when I had a spare moment. In some ways I miss that, as my current job robs a good chunk of my mental energy for the day, also I was a lot more fit back then because I was constantly moving during my job (I don't miss the 90 degree heat with only an industrial fan to cool me off though, nor the fraction of the pay I was making then compared to now).
Sometimes people that are bored come across to me like my partner when she says there's nothing she feels like eating out, despite us living in an extremely restaurant rich area (we could go to almost 100 different restaurants and almost two dozen different types of regional cuisines in about a 15 minute drive). Although she's already decided she doesn't ever want to eat at like 20 of them, and there's still at least 50 she's never tried eating at once.
Meanwhile I once worked at a place that was far enough away from anything that you had to bring food from home for lunch, except on Fridays, when we'd pool money together to make a big delivery order of wings from a pub 15+ minutes away (lunch was a hard 30 minutes, and you'd get in big trouble if you were late, so no time to go get lunch). Same place as that factory, actually. Our current situation feels luxurious compared to that.
They are being overly picky about how they want to spend their time and attention, when there's so many options out there, even cheap or free activities (and even the non-cheap things can at least be saved towards, usually, barring some health reasons that prevent you from doing it in the first place...like it's probably a bad idea for me to go whitewater kayaking at my current fitness level, but if I really wanted to I could lose some weight and build up some muscle and maybe practice doing some kayaking on a calm pond first).
Which completely fails to account for the fact that a boring person with great means may use those means to avoid boredom, while an imaginative person with little means may be trapped in boredom because they are forced to use their time to meet basic, boring needs.
So it's a shallow and naive statement that ignores externalities either way.
Imagine there is a blackout and both the rich and poor are equally affected. One person decides to go for a walk and notices a few interesting things along the way. Another stays at home feeling bored.
I know which person I'd rather converse with, wealth doesn't really matter.
"People can be boring or not regardless of wealth" is orthogonal to the original assertion of "Only boring people get bored": I raised the incredibly common situation where wealth does matter that dispels the original assertion. I don't disagree with your assertion.
I don't think you've dispelled the original assertion at all. Your assertion that 'wealth does matter' is as orthogonal to the original as 'wealth doesn't matter', and there are plenty of examples in favour of each position.
> I don't think you've dispelled the original assertion at all.
I did though. Otherwise what you're saying is that you've never known someone whose imagination and appetite for experiences was not constrained by their wealth. You've never know someone who had to endure boredom doing boring things in order to have a shot at doing the things that did interest them. That would be quite the luxurious and unencumbered circle to inhabit.
> Your assertion that 'wealth does matter' is as orthogonal to the original as 'wealth doesn't matter'
Re-removing the constraint from my example to make an orthogonal point has nothing to do with why I introduced it in the first place to disprove the original point - that's not really how the logic works.
> and there are plenty of examples in favour of each position
Yes and I only need one to disprove the original assertion. Thankfully I don't have only one - there are literally millions (billions?) of non-boring people who have been in that situation.
Except I didn't raise the orthogonal point, you did by introducing wealth into the discussion.
My example demonstrated the orthogonal nature of your argument and that it doesn't hold true in all circumstances, and according to your criteria of only needing one example to disprove an assertion, then yours has been dispelled as well.
I'll add that I also dislike the adage 'only boring people get bored'. However I think there is some truth to it, perhaps a more accurate phrasing would be 'people who are always bored are boring people '
Ok, imagine the original assertion was “All square numbers are even”.
I only need to introduce a specific example/constraint to disprove the original assertion: 1
My introduction of the example/constraint is directly relevant to disproving the original point. That is the whole point of introducing it, so it is absolutely not orthogonal.
If you then remove my constraint (1) and say: “but 4 and 16 can both be square numbers”: Sure you're not wrong, but that also has nothing to do with why I introduced my example in the first place, nor does it invalidate my example, and is thus completely orthogonal to proving/disproving the original point.
Yes, I understand the point and agree with the logic (of course). I still don't think the original statement has been dispelled.
A person 'doing boring things' isn't necessarily a bored person. The experience of being bored is entirely subjective. One person staring at paint dry could be driven insane but another could be meditating upon the physical experience of the passage of time.
The saying 'bored people are boring people' isn't supposed to be taken literally. It is as logically fallible as any other quip in English, I think the difference with this one is that it is used in a more directly negative and judgmental way (and often perceived as such by the recipient).
Sure, I think your characterisation of "people who are always bored are boring people" is much more credible! Thanks for the thoughts - I must return to doing the boring things I need to do today that I'm avoiding :)
China’s competitive advantage is cheap labour brought about by poor workers rights and a low quality of life. Innovation has nothing to do with it. It is hilarious that you think European economies want to compete with that. The tariffs eliminate the exploitation that China can leverage that European manufacturers cannot. They are actually levelling the playing field in this market - you know - making it more competitive through innovation (the thing you apparently like) vs maximising exploitation of the workforce.
I see YC as doing what every successful mature business does, which is come to rely on its experience and market position (it’s hard to disrupt yourself), which for better or worse creates habits, which in YC’s case means very coarse investment heuristics. As an outsider they seem very obvious. I’ll omit how that relates to my own experiences and biases (I’ve only ever made one half-baked on-the-deadline application so I don’t think they are relevant). Just my 2c as a long-time follower.
I think it would be awesome to see YC break at least some of itself off into some more elite and disruptive units (where elite refers to the quality of the intake and YC expertise, not the founder education history).
Very sad to hear. We’ll certainly miss having his perspective to ground us in this era of AI hyperbole, as thousands of engineers start confronting the ambiguities of consciousness with incongruent mental frameworks.
I find Daniel Dennett's framing of competency vs comprehension a good place to start. He did a nice talk at the RI on it some time ago[1]. A previous one overlaps with similar ground[2].
Fair, I post it as a starting point to establish ones own interpretation of self-awareness, so as not to wade into the philosophical rabbit hole of bringing my own definition.
The reason I think it can be useful as that, is because I see competency and comprehension as requiring 2 very different levels of "self".
