> people who don't entertain any thoughts of poking their consciousness in some way are missing the point of life. If you don't ask "why am I here" or "what's this all about" then things get pretty bland pretty quickly.

I didn't get anything "spiritual" out of them. If anything, it made me realize that spirituality is a complete sham

Hot take, the "spiritual" reason for doing psychedelics is this: they hate their own lives and think that some "transcendental experience" will change that

There's only one legit reason for doing them: to get high. The "spirituality" reason is just a bunch of BS. The people who buy into it are the last ones who should be doing them

Most people who contribute to gcc aren't doing it for free, they work on behalf of large corporations.

But more importantly, most people who complain about the CoC are not contributors.

> But stability deteriorated elsewhere. Striking workers in Greece, pension protests in France and deadly clashes in Israel and Peru reduced scores in those countries.

???

Who is this list meant for? Seems kind of odd to penalize France because of pension protests

Am an American so might be lacking details, but my understanding is that Macron decided to raise the retirement age which was highly unpopular, and people were pissed off because of it? How do those protests make France "less livable"? If anything, it makes it more livable by my book.

Seems like Economist is just airing political grievances. Usually whenever I see these lists (e.g. "livability index", "democracy index", etc), the list maker shuffles around the top 10-20 countries in order to grind some political axe

Strikes in European countries can be very inconvenient. I work with a mix of British, French and Belgians, and trying to coordinate visiting one another without a rail strike in one of those countries has been very challenging in the last year.

Burning cars on the street would sure affect the livability in my neighborhood. The French are passionate people when protesting. And they protest a lot. Makes sense to me to me to mention it. It’s not about the right to assemble, otherwise I’m sure Hong Kong would be on the first spot on the list.

> Burning cars on the street would sure affect the livability in my neighborhood.

Especially if it's my car. If these guys want to burn property so badly, why don't they bring their own cars to the area and burn them, in a sort of political protest burning man fashion?

If they touch police's or public administration's property, their professional and family lives will be over. No one will torch their own property, duh. So basically you hit the next person you see, ensuring beforehand they're not police or someone well connected.

The French regularly burn police cars though.

Strikes meant to disrupt the public do so by causing inconvenience. Regardless of whether or not you support the cause, it’s still inconvenient.

Have you ever worked with French people? If they decide to be abrasive assholes, they will go extra mile to prove it. Somehow it equally applies to both white and Maghreb French.

> Have you ever worked with F̶r̶e̶n̶c̶h̶ people? If they decide to be abrasive assholes, they will go extra mile to prove it.

Fixed it for you. Source: have worked with people.

This is only tiny spectrum of attitudes. Some people pass, give up, walk away, sue.

More like, a concerted media effort to nudge people to churn out kids. People can chill on the rat race, so long as they churn out kids so that the wheels keep turning

Just acknowledging the trend as I see it

> What do you think society would look like if you just did away with all the modern conveniences and the "ruling class".

You're drawing an association the ruling class and modern conveniences. Those are two incredibly different things.

I have a really hard time believing that because a small group of people have a disgusting amount of wealth, somehow modern conveniences are "divined" from that

> I love how you hardcore Marxists only take the good parts of what you say while conveniently leaving out the guy that's gonna be wallowing in the ditch for you

Uhh no? I just think that the people working in ditches should be compensated a living wage, preferably through forcing the ultra rich to pay their fair share in taxes and redistributing

It doesn't work like that. Everyone gets brought down, not up.

Would not do this, current job market is not favorable, you're most likely better off working towards degree (assuming it's undergrad)

> but got put in “10x developer” expectation projects where I’d churn something out, get a big shiny star sticker for it, and then 2 years later it would be abandoned

I feel like I've fallen into this hole at my current gig, where I just churn shit out to solve a problem as quickly as possible

I get away with it just bc general code quality was already not good to begin with

Biggest mistake was going fast the first time, now I'm getting assigned way more shit

Word of advice to readers: don't make the same mistake I made. You'll just get taken advantage of

> When we tried to decline testing, we were threatened with a CPS case and the removal of our just-born child.

Pretty sure that test is voluntary in a bunch of states?

That was my understanding, and the provider confirmed that, but we were told that it may count as neglect and that as a mandatory reporter she would be required to "submit a complaint." Phone calls were made, and she reiterated that a case would be opened and they may need to remove the child until the completion of that process.

So yes, voluntary.

> The bottom line us that these 3 businesses make money. Billions per quarter. It's coming in so fast they quite literally dont know what to do with it all.

Revenue might be going up, but are they actually providing additional value to users? Or just gutting them more thoroughly?

I look at the amount of utility that Google's products provided back in 2013, and I look at how much they provide now. Can't say the improvement has been anywhere close to stock price

Are you measuring utility to people who were searching or watching YouTube in 2013 and 2023?

Or measuring the utility to advertisers on Google’s platforms in 2023 and projected into 2033, many of whom weren’t using Google ads in 2013.

Google didn’t give me individually a ton more utility (arguably less in search), but I think it did give their actual customers (advertisers) a ton more utility in aggregate.

>> look at the amount of utility that Google's products provided back in 2013, and I look at how much they provide now. Can't say the improvement has been anywhere close to stock price

The stock price I'd not a reflection of utility. Its a reflection of future profit.

As a user, you are not Google's customer. Their customer is the advertiser, and the utility to them is just fine. Advertising on Google and Facebook delivers measurable returns, and if that measure is positive then people continue to do it.

These companies feel like parasitic house guests, you let them in and things start disappearing.

A weird thing with this article and others: they shit on Google and Facebook, but they never shit on Apple?

Why? Is Apple just a serious company in comparison? At least, with Apple I get the impression that some of their products (e.g. mbp) are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. I can't say the same for any Google or Facebook product

Apple is valued leaps and bounds over the others. For having half the world on Meta, it’s a shit performing business

Apple also does not slaughter golden cows, they execute with long term vision and they slowly agressive with competitors not users.

Also haven’t laid off.

So really, they are in a category of their own.

Meta makes $30 billion a year. It is not a shit performing business. In fact it is one of the best businesses in history. Their stock bounceback isn't because of the layoffs, it's not because investors were actually worried that meta's business was bad. It was because they worried Mark had gone rogue and since he's the controlling shareholder investors have no way to stop him. The layoffs were just the way for him to signal that he still has investors interest at heart.

For having half the world on it, it’s a shit performing business.

Ironically that part of the racket - everyone thinks they should be performing better in the future, aka growth. But objectively almost every bet for unlocking money failed (commerce, libra, web3, messenger, motors, real estate, sports, news) - the ones that didn’t were forced on them by Tiktok showing them how it is done.

It’s a badly run business, yes one that has a money printer, but badly run nevertheless

Apple makes their money from selling products and services rather than selling the user. At least that's the perception. Apple also gets their share of this kind of criticism, but it invites much less of it in this way.

Microsoft could be in the same category. They've both had some pretty bad periods, no doubt, but they have been smart and quite diversified for the last decade at least. Same generation of startups too. There might be some insight in that, what changed?

I don't agree. Microsoft is obviously transitioning into user selling pretty quickly and apparently with great pleasure. It's on a completely different level than Apple. (To be fair, it's not looking very great there either recently.)

Just one exhibit to underline my point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34886732

I see this all the time. Not sure why. Personally the way this guy feels about over valuing companies I feel about the way apple over values it's products. But people still buy them though, same as the companies this article talks about the companies market share going up. There's something wrong there