The improved efficiency of steam engines in the past did not reduce coal consumption; instead, it enabled people to accomplish more work with the same resource.
Interesting to see discussion on Reddit from r/AmazonFC are pretty negative , wonder if these are genuine employees comment for PR team hired by Amazon
as a union diesel engine mechanic i can guarantee most, if not all these comments are complete PR.
I went on strike about ten years ago to protest mandatory overtime and lack of chemical PPE. the minute we authorized the strike, we had news channels from three states covering us and a billboard up the road that demanded an end to the strike by "concerned" truckers was erected in hours. Every day I could count on at least four emails from various sources, everything from "your union is cancelled" to "union declared illegal" and everything in between including offers to work for more pay but no contract. weekends were nearly a dozen phone calls, mostly robo, threatening pay cuts and layoffs and asking to cancel your healthcare and benefits.
we stuck out 19 days and won, and the very same news crews showed up again with no interviews from us, only management praising their great negotiation effort.
Would union supported/enforced comments count as astroturfing as well? I think it’d be interesting to ban pay for picketing & comments, though I’m not sure it’s enforceable.
If the union pays you because you are not working, and you choose to use that time to talk about how much you value unions on the internet, that's not astroturfing. If the union pays you TO post about how good the union is on the internet, that IS astroturfing.
At one point, amazon had a literal program where warehouse workers could opt to sit at a desk and post propaganda comments instead of doing their normal manual labor job.
Strike pay (at least often) requires picketing to qualify. Unions also often pay people to post comments online and otherwise present the union’s perspective to media or the public. Sometimes these people are listed as unit leaders, or have other ‘union management’ positions.
This seems like something a disclosure would reasonably solve. The anti-union PR posts aren't going to disclaim that they were paid by Amazon to post the comment but the pro-union wouldn't give a shit.
Officially, but Reddit enforcement of rules went to shit about the same time as the rest of the internet. Now they allow whatever brings them money and disallow whatever doesn't.
It wakes a ton of people up rhat thought they could righton,righton with different decorations. Its going to be worse, the moment trump is revealed as a failure when it comes to system takedown ..
Either you think the CEO was an undeserving victim, or you think that only billionaires and their enforces deserve a monopoly on lethal force.
So, what's your take on this recent scenario:
Ukraine assassinated a Russian general that authorised plans for chemical attacks that killed civilians. The general never directly murdered anyone in person, never "pulled a trigger", but was ultimately responsible for many deaths.
Was Ukraine morally wrong in this act? Should they just let someone sit comfortably in a Moscow office and sign paperwork to cause suffering and death in Ukraine? Should they bend over and take it?
If not, why not?
If so, why?
Either way, please explain why Americans should or should not "bend over and take it" where "it" is death to the tune of tens of thousands a year -- orders of magnitude more than killed by that Russian general.
Why not? They are the very real choices people are making.
Some would argue that lethal force is always wrong, even when you're being killed for money. Sorry, sorry... allowed to die without care ... for slightly enriching people that are already very, very, very rich.
Others, like the rebels in Syria, or the defenders in Ukraine, would argue otherwise.
> this statement is just pure mindfuck.
If you've never seen things in this way, you should start.
The billionaires see it that way.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
These laws, these norms you cling to... these are not designed to protect you.
> I'm not going to condone lynching or vigilante killings in any civil context.
Things stop "being civil" when death at an industrial scale becomes wildly profitable, legal, protected, and enforced by violent police.
The same police that will stand outside a school for an hour and tackle parents who do try to protect the lives of their own children.
> We're at civil war already,
You are, you just haven't noticed.
In case you do notice, you'll realise you're on the side that's losing because while you wring your hands in fear of things turning violent, the other side has been feeding your side into a meat grinder for profit at an industrial scale.
My Boomer Dad was a Teamster. I remember there was a several-weeks-long (might have even been months-long?) strike when I was a kid, probably around the late-70s. Shit was real. One day I saw him loading baseball bats and clubs into the trunk of his Buick before he left the house. I was just a kid; I had no idea what was going on. I asked him about it later in life and he just said, "That's how it was back then. We had to fight for what we wanted." And he was being literal. He talked about people who were even suspected of crossing the line or talking to management would get a severe beatdown. He even said people would harass management and their families. Dudes would sit outside their homes, just to intimidate them. And, he said they rarely got punished because the cops supported their union and would look the other way. Different times.
our local PD was union at the time. we never got any overt support but there were a few kind gestures. on a cold morning an officer dropped a box of chemical hand warmers by the dumpster and made it very clear he was disposing of them because they were "the wrong size" and he wouldnt be back today to check on them. about three days later his supervisor made a trip to the dumpster and left out a box of donuts and a big take-out coffee jug, warning us we absolutely shouldnt consume them after he left as the donuts were the made the wrong size and the coffee was too hot.
reddit is no longer a good place to try and get a pulse on general sentiment. comment section is filled with bots and the front page has the most random content i have ever seen, like occasional random creep shots of celebs that get like 3,000 upvotes that gain more transaction than current events.
I used to use search engines with the "site:reddit.com" keyword to get more genuine reviews about products and services. Now it more than not leads to posts where the top comment is some gpt'ed text with a clear referral link and far more up votes than an obscure subreddit on some niche object would warrant.
It's interesting, because I know a few warehouse workers, and they all sing the praises of the job (all in the Bay Area). But yet I can see what the conditions are. I feel like every warehouse is a semi-independently run fiefdom and some are run a lot better than others.
Two things can be true:
- A particular class of job may be very challenging, or worse
- The same class of job may be the best available option for some folks in some regions
And, of course, some folks may have a good experience even while others do not.
How is objectivity possible? Your writing and the reader’s interpretation of it are entirely dependent on individual sensory input and mental models, which are influenced by cultural differences in upbringing and other environmental sociological factors.
The writing inevitably leans towards “objectivity” in your worldview.
I just moved to Kagi last month. Here’s my experience:
Searching for real time information that happens within a day is way worse than google. I realise how much I missed the shopping search of Google. Google map is still irreplaceable. Google search has better UX, I particularly missed the favicon that identified the site next to URL.
You picked the exact three things that Google does better than Kagi: Maps, Shopping, and realtime information. I'd also add local business information to this list.
But you didn't mention the things that Kagi does better than Google which is in my experience: everything else.
Google is still "free" though so there's nothing stopping you from adding !g to your Kagi shopping searches.
I have a bookmarklet for Kagi's Universal Summarizer, and if a long article or video doesn't immediately tell me "what it's gonna tell me" then I just click it.
Protip: Youtube changed something recently, and now I think you have to show the transcript and watch/wait a little bit before Kagi can find the transcript and summarize the video.
> Searching for real time information that happens within a day is way worse than google
This is fair. On the other elements, I’ve found Kagi to be superior. In particular, having shopping results separated from recommendations (and summarising them with quick answers). As for favicons, uprank or even anchor your favourite domains [1]. That’s what the favicon was proxying.
You can put the favicon next to the url in the settings (appearence).
Ime image search is far better in kagi. I found some specific images that i was looking in google _for months_ and i could not find. Just because they were some older blogposts probably and google penalises older posts, and because of the AI generated cesspool that it is becoming.
I agree on the first part. Having used kagi for about 6 months it often lacks behind on recent things. I find myself automatically adding !g on such queries
Would be great if you reported it with screenshots so we can try to debug what went wrong. I encourge you to do that next time via https://kagifeedback.org
I always don’t understand this argument? By this logic, should every companies publicise their trade secrets and redact all the copyright and patents to maintain a dominant market position?
That would be a reasonable strategy. Businesses built on trade secrets are quite workable but strategically weak because if the secret gets rediscovered they have a real problem. It is better to use a strategy of real advantages. And there are some really interesting case studies here the big tech companies actually rely from an environment where open source is big.
The real issue with IP is that it is an artificial government monopoly and largely unjustified. As we see in China, if you want to grow at maximum speed it makes more sense to operate without respect for IP law because it is an anchor. We saw something similar in the US where it was the in-practice failure of IP law to be executed that allowed the software ecosystem to thrive. Banning people from implementing good ideas has devastating economic consequences.
You're missing a few components here: time and originator investment.
No advantage, resources aside, is permanently durable. Most are instead temporary advantages -- advantages when you have a technology but your peers do not. IP enforcement is one tool to maintain that window of advantage.
China, like US before it, grew at maximum speed when it was reverse engineering already discovered technologies and applying them.
Like the US, it has already begun to pivot towards IP-enforcement, as it begins to originate novel technologies. To do otherwise is to pretend that copying competitors' discoveries and making them yourself cost the same -- and it very much doesn't.
Let say government nationalise google search or force to make it a non profit 15 years ago. How would that prevent SEO from happening? Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention? How would anyone prevent it from happening?
>Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention?
different Search engines with different rules and so forth would lessen the benefit of the O part, because it seems unlikely you could efficiently optimize for every particular algorithm and ruleset.
Perhaps SEO is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine and also made worse by that search engine not really giving a shit about making its search work that well for years and years but only about how many ads they could push at people and how much they could charge for those ads.
I agree with your assessment that maybe this is an inevitable outcome of one big dominant search engine.
But I would argue one big search engine is unavoidable since no one would want to use the second best search engine.
Google search didn’t come the best because the other service like mail map and YouTube. So breaking up Google does nothing to stop google search from being the monopoly it is today.
If different search engines optimized for different niches, there would be an user base for "second best" search engines. For example, nothing beats Bing for porn search.
While I don't have the answer, what we might consider is the incentives that come with each model.
In the current model, the incentives are clear. Google's incentive was to rent-seek all usefulness out of web search, privileging advertisement and their own profitability over usefulness.
I am not sure if a search engine beholden to the government would be ideal. Governments do have their own sets of interests (legitimate or otherwise) that may at times go against users.
Web search is in the end a piece of public infrastructure, used by billions across the world, very much subject to the Tragedy of the Commons.
Perhaps it should be some sort of nonprofit, as other projects are (Linux Foundation comes to mind, being a successful one).
> Let say government nationalise google search or force to make it a non profit 15 years ago. How would that prevent SEO from happening? Isn’t SEO an inevitable outcome of website trying compete for attention? How would anyone prevent it from happening?
I've said this before (on HN) and I'll say it again: a search engine that refuses to index sites containing advertisements absolutely kills off SEO.
What's the point of getting to the top of the search results if you are unable to monetise it?
The only way forward is to refuse to index sites with advertisements. Google will obviously not do this (and, in fact, to me it looks like they do the reverse - downrank non-monetised content - because it's in their best interest to serve sites with ads).
The same way people make adblockers happen. By making block lists of SEO garbage cruated by human beings.
Nextdns and the RPi alternative do it. Kagi has all the infrastructure in place to make it happen at the search level, it just requires more manual work right now.
What power? The power to push a github commit? That’s up to each blocklist owner.
There is no one list to rule them all. Tons of people curate their own block lists and make them available. It’s entirely up to you to pick and choose which ones you want to use that most align with your views on SEO garbage. You can override them with your own preferences too, as I do all the time with NextDNS. Like I said, all the infrastructure to support this is already in place in Kagi, they just need to implement the support for external lists.
