tl;dr: Nobody is steering the ship because they don't know they're on a ship. Or that the ocean exists.
It's hard without doxxing myself or calling out specific people and organizations which I'd rather not because I'm a nobody and can't afford lawsuits, but for various reasons I ended up political education and marketing for civics advocacy. Ish. To be semi on topic, I know some people who are published in the WSJ (as well as the people who actually wrote the pieces). I'm also a 3rd generation tech nerd in my mid 30s so I'm very comfortable with the digital world - easily the most so outside of the actual software engineering team.
I've spoken with and to a lot of politicians and candidates from across the US - mostly on the local and state level but some nationally. And journalists from publications that are high profile, professors of legal studies, heads of think tanks, etc.
My read of the situation is that our political class is entangled in a snare of perverse disincentives for action while also being so disassociated from the world outside of their bubble that they've functionally no idea what's going on. Our systems (cultural, political, economic, etc.) have grown exponentially more complex in the past 30 years and those of us on HN (myself included) understand this and why this happened. I'm a 3rd generation tech nerd, I can explain pretty easily how we got here and why things are different. The political class, on the other hand, has had enough power to not need to adapt and to force other people to do things their way. If your 8500 year old senator wants payment by check and to send physical mail, you do it. (Politicians and candidates that would not use the internet were enough of a problem in 2020 that we had to account for it in our data + analyses and do specific no tech outreach). Since they didn't know how the world is changing, they also haven't been considering the effects of the changes at all.
Furthermore, even those of them that have some idea still don't know how to problem solve systems instead of relationships. Complex systems thinking is the key skill needed to navigate these waters, and none of them have it. It's fucking terrifying. At best, they can conceive of systems where everything about them is known and their outputs can be precisely predicted. At best. Complex systems are beyond them.
Add to this that we have a system which has slowly ground itself to a deadlocked halt. Congress has functionally abandoned most of its actual legislative duties because it's way better for sitting congresspeople to not pass any bills - if you don't do anything, then you don't piss any of your constituents off. Or make mistakes. And you can spend more time campaigning.
I left and became a hedonist with a drug problem after a very frank conversation with a colleague who was my political opposite at the time. I'm always open to being wrong, and hearing that they didn't have any answer either was a very 'welp, we're fucked' moment. I'm getting better.
As a software developer who found myself elected to state level public office and had to spin-up my education around the legislative process and all of politics, I concur.
Their are only a couple of things I'd add.
As much knowledge as I brought in about technology and the idea of being aware of system thinking, I also brought in a great amount of ignorance about all the other areas that are legislated (healthcare, interplay between local, state, and fedearl issues, budgetary concerns, tax policy, banking, etc.). Good legislation is truly collaborative.
Sadly, for the second part, good legislation is rarer than it should be as much of legislation is about politics and perception of the voters. And voter perceptions are not necessarily logical or reasoned.
This makes it all the more important, IMHO, that everyone who is reasonable, logical, and educated spend their precious, valuable time involving themselves to advocate for elected officials who behave similar in what is essentially a zero-sum game.
p.s. Have faith. I saw enough during my time that gave me reason for that faith. (But that faith requires time and effort -- we don't get good government or democracy for free.) I'm glad to hear you're getting better.
I'd say much good legislation is collaborative, but some necessary legislation is not. FDR's changes for instance. Industry did not want it. Arguably health care in the US needs this too.
Isn’t history full of examples of governments being slow and seemingly incompetent? Standard Oil was broken up many years after everyone knew that they were a ruthless monopoly which made too much profits. Note also that it didn’t take senators to figure out the monopoly, it was everyone, including the voters, who did.
There is one big benefit that democratic governments have though. They have a monopoly on physical force.
I thought they were using tennis analogy, where player hitting the ball out or on the net without being forced to by the opponent counts as an unforced error.
For some reason many of these people that lose trust in traditional media immediately start trusting "independent media" on YouTube that happens to agrees with their views or ways of seeing the world.
Yes, because the education system failed them and taught them to blindly trust in the media and so when they lose that they go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Some of them will come around and find some middle ground, and others will be be content in spewing misinformation as long as it makes them feel better.
I've wondered if the gimmick distracts people from the presentation. It's a comfortable way for me to present the talk, but maybe it's not so good for the people following along.
The features you explained are exactly what I was looking for in a mobile browser. In fact, i wish they launch Focus for Desktops operating systems too.
If you don't log in into websites, I don't see why you would leave yourself exposed and very easily hacked with Firefox or private browsing if there's Tor.
Private browsing is NOT secure. It's just a shortcut to avoid clearing your history manually. ANYONE can see who you are, and what sites you visit with easy-to-use tools that are available online for free.
Security is not an absolute. The best you can do is talk about whether something addresses a particular threat model.
There are different tradeoffs to Tor. A big downside is that unencrypted traffic is now easier for intermediaries to read and even change, because of how exit nodes work.
> In fact, i wish they launch Focus for Desktops operating systems too.
Yes, I was just thinking the same thing. I can almost imagine a world where software believes me about what kind of experience I want, "full site" on mobile or "mobile site" on the desktop, rather than browser sniffing followed by awkward clicking around to correct its misapprehensions.
Do you have good resources in mind on Walmart's harmful practices? Yes, I can search internet but looking for long sophisticated essays or even good books on the topic that you may have come across.
I am not from US but currently studying here and haven't thought much about this topic. Walmart, Walgreen and Amazon feel too convenient. I would love to learn more on the topic before it becomes a habit.
You don't avoid shopping at Walmart because of "Walmart's harmful practices". You avoid shopping at Walmart because you're better than the kind of people who shop at Walmart. Then you start talking about Walmart's harmful practices to try to confuse other people.
This wikipedia page[1] is a good start. In particular the last section about dead peasants insurance is the first story I encountered about Walmart's harmful practices.
> Critics, as well as the United States Internal Revenue Service, charge that the company was trying to profit from the deaths of its employees, and take advantage of the tax law which allowed it to deduct the premiums.
Going back a quarter century or so, the biggest complaints against Walmart have commonly been thus:
- Extremely aggressive about interrupting unionization attempts.
- Relatively low pay, particularly for the bottom 1/2 of employees.
- They squeeze suppliers to restrain prices to the benefit of consumers. This essentially adds another aggrieved voice in the crowd.
- Then there's a very broad, vague, low value argument about the soul of communities being destroyed by their presence. This premise was particularly common ~15 years ago. It has turned out to be almost entirely bunk, so it's an argument rarely used against them today. Today, the focus is overwhelmingly on pay, specifically that their low wages force tax payers to subsidize said wages.
Most of these arguments collapse upon rational inspection. For example, they universally pay better than mom & pop local stores and employ far more people in small & mid size towns / communities. Then the argument gets flipped: it then gets said that they intentionally pay higher than local competitors, and advocate in favor of higher minimum wage laws, to crush local competition (ie damned if they do, damned if they don't).
The same people that dislike Walmart, you'll find, will frequently lodge 'for the common good' arguments economically. Walmart acts for the good of the many, as they squeeze supplier margins to hold prices down. Somehow saving 200 million people money is turned against them as a negative.
Their low pay is an interesting issue unto itself. Their margins are hyper low, at 2.5% net income margins; their sales have been flat and profits have been falling for years. If they pay each employee just another $4,000 to $5,000 per year, they'd go bankrupt (particularly as they begin the long hard war with Amazon). They're often contrasted with Costco, which pays meaningfully higher wages; however Costco manages that by employing far fewer people per dollar of sales. To match Costco on that, Walmart would have to fire at least half a million people, most of whom have few skills to do any other higher paying jobs.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the low pay / tax payer subsidy issue, is who the tax payers are that are doing the subsidizing: mostly the rich. The top 1/3 in America pay almost all the income taxes that go toward subsidizing Walmart's bottom 1/2 of employees who earn low wages. This almost never gets discussed when the topic comes up, in fact it's aggressively dodged. The people doing the arguing, are overwhelmingly in favor of the rich subsidizing the poor, but for some reason it's not ok when it comes to this (ie they're actually arguing it's bad that the rich tax payers subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, it's comical). This is just a baseless attack on Walmart, because of what they are. The only alternative to having the top 1/3 subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, is to have those employees lose their jobs and then the subsidy goes to 100% instead of being partial as it is today.
>A great preparation they should learn some math or ideally be having fun with their friends, running around outside or perhaps art or something creative.
Not sure why there is a dichotomy between this and playing a game on phone for 30 minutes to learn coding.
>You want to compromise on the stuff that other people find important and hold fast on the stuff that you find important.
Isn't the definition of "important" what people disagree over when it comes to compromise? My girlfriend can say X is super important to her but in my eyes Y is more important than X and hence I will have to let go of X and hold on to Y. Convincing someone of why X or Y is more important than the other is where most of the conflict happens.
>"You need to show love in the ways that other people want to receive it, not the way you want to send it."
This is true and easy to follow but it doesn't capture my concern above which seems to be much more complex than this scenario.
In many cases you can have both X and Y, eg. if X is camping and Y is hackathons, go camping one weekend and go to the hackathon the next weekend (or have one partner go camping and the other go hacking, if you value the individual activities more than the time spent together). If X is a clean apartment and Y is more time spent programming, throw money at the problem and hire a cleaning lady. My wife and I had a fight early on in our relationship over whether the Brita should be cold or lukewarm, and we solved it by buying a $1.50 pitcher, putting my drinking water in the fridge, and putting hers on the kitchen counter. Or for a more complex example, if X is kids and Y is a startup, you figure out what else needs to change in your life to accommodate both (eg. pay money for childcare, set boundaries on work time, babysit the kid while answering support emails so your partner can take him when you have to do customer site visits) and make it happen.
There are some issues that really are mutually exclusive, mostly because they cut to the heart of what a relationship is. If one partner wants kids and the other wants no-kids, there isn't really a way to resolve that and still have what people would consider a marriage. If one partner wants to live on a farm but the other wants to live in the city, or one is a neat-freak and the other is a compulsive hoarder, you're headed for problems. If one wants the kids raised as Orthodox Jews and the other wants them to be fundamentalist Christians, this is probably insoluble within the conventional definitions of those religions. These are beliefs where you really want to make sure you match before you get married.
But even a lot of things that look totally contradictory at first can have solutions if you're willing to give up other stuff. I know couples that live in different cities and only see each other on weekends, or ones of different religions where they've just decided to mash their different cultures together and create their own religion for the kids.
