I work on the code every day! or at least if I don't, it's a bad day.
There are a lot of changes, just mostly not visible, or only subtly visible. That's on purpose, because (a) users hate design changes and (b) pg-style minimalism is encoded into the DNA and it would be a mistake to mess with that.
That's not really a passenger vehicle though, it's a truck (it's right there in the name "pick up truck"). Just having more seats doesn't make a truck into a "passenger vehicle", my brother used to drive a 40,000 lb heavy truck that had a crew cab that seats 6, but no one would classify that as a "passenger vehicle".
It was so heavy that when he took it home, he couldn't drive it all the way home, he had to park it a half mile away and walk because there was a bridge with a 10 ton weight limit that he couldn't cross.
Listen, I can haul sheet goods on the roof of any car all day long and he happy doing it.
But the problem is that YouPeople(TM) (as opposed to you personally) won't be happy about it. Instead of screeching about the environment you'd be screeching about safety. But it's not really about the environment or safety, it's about class. The fact of the matter is that moving any sizeable amount of goods (like some plywood for a garden shed, or a new stove, or similarly mundane things) with a car or crossover just doesn't pass for acceptable behavior for the slice of society that we're talking about here. People need more vehicle than they "need" for the same reason a 30yo finance professional "needs" a couple sets of nice clothes. It's what his peers expect from him. The quirky college professor can haul a sailboat on the roof of his prius and the tweaker won't be bothered for running scrap with a minivan but outside of that it's just not what "nice people" do (not that either of them care about the opinions of the kind of people who deride them). Meanwhile white collar people with three kids won't even shove them in a crossover once a week if they can avoid it. They'll commute in a 3-row SUV that costs twice as much to operate instead.
People buy crew cab trucks and 3-row SUVs because YouPeople(TM) expect them to "act their income" and they "need" the capability of these vehicles often enough to justify it.
> People need more vehicle than they "need" for the same reason a 30yo finance professional "needs" a couple sets of nice clothes. It's what his peers expect from him.
I'm afraid you're projecting your own issues on others...
While I didn't reply with the same degree of hostility as the GP, I had the same emotional reaction to your comment. My immediate thought was "who are you to say what I 'need'?"
I'm self-aware enough to realize that this is because of a larger cultural struggle in the US between "rural" and "urban". It's not quite that simple, but that's a close enough approximation for the conversation at hand.
The rural people on the US feel like we are constantly fighting a system in which we have no voice. We're subject to regulations that we feel to be frankly ridiculous; regulations that get in our way, make our lives more difficult and expensive, and most of all... don't even serve the purpose for which they were ostensibly designed.
In that context, the GP's response to your comment is understandable.
This is a common sentiment but it always makes me chuckle. People living in rural areas quite literally have more of a voice (as much as that counts for anything with political corruption) than people living in urban areas due to the Senate and gerrymandered congressional districts.
It was tongue in cheek/sarcasm. Point is people with the money to buy new buy more vehicle than they "need" because it is what society expects of them so in some sense they "need" it to meet the expectations of those around them.
> Point is people with the money to buy new buy more vehicle than they "need" because it is what society expects of them so in some sense they "need" it to meet the expectations of those around them.
I'm afraid that you are guilty of what psychology would call "projection". Unless you can back your views with hard facts. I have yet to meet anyone just blowing away $100k on a truck that don't NEED.
> In EU you don't see trucks or many heavy vehicles like that at all.
It’s a side-issue, but I see this type of statement all the time about “Europe” and have to say, in Sweden - and even on the suburban streets of Stockholm - these enormous American pickups and SUVs are amazingly common (although most of them don’t go over the 3500kilo limit).
They are not as common as in the US. And crucially, they are not (yet) a status symbol. Someone who can afford a vehicle like that as a daily driver (not a contractor) will get a huge-ass Merc or Audi instead.
> although most of them don’t go over the 3500kilo limit
I bet most not even go over 2000kg. My SUV is 1900kg (4k lbs) and is hybrid so has extra weight due to batteries. I think it's a very heavy car and considering downgrading again.
Please do not imply were dumb. We're not spending 100,000$ just to show off. We do need them, because we need to haul 2000-4000lb at a time over hundreds of miles and tow 5,000lb to 30,000lb on a regular basis. My biggest haul personally was about 20,000lb (of actual payload) over 500mi, and I regularly max out my 2,500lb capacity dodge 2500.
You ain't gonna move that shit with a Citroen C2.
Also, it's not just a matter of payload. The bigger wheelbase and larger tires make them much more drive able in snow or mud or ice which is common weather around. Small cars are a safety issue on black ice.
I don't think anyone has a problem with professionals using tools fit to task. (I certainly don't.) I just personally don't want to have to walk or bike on streets where trucks are moving a combined weight of 5 or 6 tons at high speeds. I think this could be solved with smarter street/highway design, which would also help drivers get from A to B more efficiently.
And FWIW, I grew up in rural Indiana (USA), soybean and corn country. It's definitely not just professionals driving these vehicles. Actually I'd say most trucks on the streets growing up were NOT used by professionals, the real farm trucks were often barely street legal and could never seem to get past 30-40 mph with a load (or without heh).
I'm not an urbanite, but on the rare occasion I need a pickup truck, I rent one. I don't like owning things I only need occasionally, I use our communities tool lending library too when I need a tool for a project.
Just as if you could plan which tool you'd need for a job... You'd be surprised how quick you can go from using a ratchet, to an impact, to an air driven 3/4" impact, to requiring an oxy-acetylene torch for a given job...
How about we agree that we just don't have the same lifestyle ?
Oh, I agree we don't have the same lifestyle, but I don't agree that everyone that "might" need a pickup (or an oxyacetylene torch) should own one because they might have a use for it 6 months from now.
I'm not sure I understand the problem -- you said you need a big truck to provide a service (haul your food, your mail, etc), which is totally fair, we all use things that were hauled around on trucks, you can't build a road by hauling in asphalt on a Prius. So if there's, say, a carbon tax on fuel, when fuel prices go up, everyone that uses fuel to provide service will see higher costs, so the providers will all increase their rates to make up for it. Many transportation providers already charge a fuel surcharge when oil prices go up.
Why would you start a civil war over it?
I'm sure that externalizing environmental costs is attractive, but that just ensures that no one is going to optimize for it.
The problem is that most farmers in the modern era are completely reliant on a combo of government subsidies and massive amounts of bank debt in order to stay afloat. It's a pretty huge problem and part of why the industry is massively consolidating. Also there are things like being required to license patented seeds, tractor/combine companies prohibiting personal repair of vehicles/equipment.. I don't think medium/small farming as we think of it will exist in a couple decades.
That's the problem, you just repeating the Gospel without understanding the externalities involved in the regulations you advocates for.
Many times, you are not free to set the price of goods, especially in today socialist / regulated economy. Your costs go up, your margins profit go down. There is so much you can squeeze. Heck, DEF sounds nice to save the environment & all, but when your combine three a DEF code and pretty much blew your engine 400 miles from the nearest dealership right during harvest before a storm, goes into limp mode and prevent you from harvesting, you're literally fucked, your all farm might even go bankrupt. Don't even count on insurance to save your ass, because you already had to cut back to focus on other coverage to mitigate skyrocketing fertilizer costs, which doesn't matter anyway because the price you'll sell your production 6 month from now has been set a thousand mile away by a white collar asshole right after his daily jerk off and line of coke. But what a beer sipping urbanite would know of actual hard constraint while at the same time, accusing us of social grand standing. Just GFY.
You pretend yourself smart, but you're not. You sound like Marie Antoinette "let them eat cake". Next thing you know, your head hang on a spike in front of an angry mob.
You seem to have strayed far from "I drive a big truck because I need to haul heavy stuff", now you've moved on to "If I can't pollute as much as I want to, I can't make a living".
A DEF code is not the only thing that can make a combine fail, and if you're one mechanical failure away from bankruptcy, it's not the DEF that's the problem.
A lot of them just use them for driving to places that they could do in a car. How many truck you see driving which are completely empty? Or how many you see who are transporting stuff that could easily have been done in a van?
That's complete bs, see my comment above. Pickups are much more flexible than vans.
The problem is the insurance model which insure the vehicle rather than the driver. Thus why some people daily drive their pickup because maintaining another beater is too much cost.
Every now and then their 5' 100lb wife will use that truck to go for groceries and then you'll see them there, because you have no life in the real world, and you'll judge them based on that single interaction alone.
Meanwhile, the next day, her hubby and the family will tow an 8000lb boat to enjoy the lake, and heck they can even stop at the hardware store pick up a couple 1000lb of concrete / 2x4 for their home improvement projects.
I've personally saved a few grands this year in various fees alone by being able to haul shit and do DIY home improvements.
But sure, that's only for social grand-standing...
CDO at least had an underlying asset. They went wrong because they became a tool to game the rating agencies. Crypto is something else, it's like a way to circumvent any common sense and past learning about securities, and let the common person buy in to a mlm and / or ponzi scheme with some confusing words to make it sound legit.
How is bitcoin more ponzi than any other asset? Less demand will decrease its value, more demand will increase. The supply is predictable so no surprises here.
Bitcoin has a value because people believe it has a value, exactly like the US dollar. No inherent value for either. In contract to the US dollar, at least formally, no one can create more out of thin air, unlike the US dollar, it has an integrated, digital and remote exchange mechanism guaranteed to work (if implemented correctly).
We can have an open discussion regrading other cryptocurrencies, but even there, their value exists because it's being assigned to them. The problem is the expectations and the lies being told by the main stakeholder of that blockchain and that's a different story and not intrinsic at all
I don't get how you can work with something that you perceive as a scam? So when you tell your friends or your parents you say "yeah, I rip people off for a living. Haha"?
I build tools other people are free to use. I have historically refused to implement tools to be used for censorship purpose. Here, you're free to invest/yolo.. or not.
You're free to invest sure, but I assume it doesn't say that the guy who programmed it thinks it's a scam in big fat red letters?
I assume you think it's morally wrong to censor and that's why you don't want to build these tools. But how does it differ from thinking it's morally wrong to scam people? Is there some level of degree difference here?
Having n way to answer "why shouldn't I..." for yourself is no small thing. Don't take it lightly. Many people are incapable of defending themselves. Why shouldn't you...?
Leaving out the pretty extreme lack of morality going on here, one reason that may resonate in this community of rich programmers and capitalists is that we shouldn't do it because fraud is inefficient. It is a huge drain on your economy. It is not a good use of capital or time. If for instance it is all a scam and everything collapses to nothing, that's ten years of completely wasted human effort. If you built it and profited from it, you are to blame.
Don't give me that China bullshit, the poors have been explored tough morality and honesty forever by the various churches, nobility, ruling classes/party, INCLUDING in China.
I've already been called Nazi, mysogynist, racist, baby killer, pure evil here (on other now-banned accounts). Do you think "sociopath" is gonna affect me the least ?
For anything it actually strengthen my no-fuck-given stance.
You should aspire to be merely useless since by your own admission, you're even less than that. Every one of your posts is some dumbass movie villain cliché - "who cares that I'm a scammer, everything's a scam, maann."
I'm not biting the whole "thrive on what you like" SV mentra. The money is good, I dug my hole, and I'm fine. Just like with 2008, the problem wasn't CDO dogshit, but people with subprime credit rating buying large house with variable mortgage rate.
(1) You having money and being fine means you have the power to leave.
(2) You cannot explain away 2008 as being the fault of the people who couldn't pay their mortgage. WTAF dude.
What I'm getting from this is that you have wrapped yourself up in a nice blanket of ignorance and a nice comfy salary, and while you have come to the conclusion that the business you're engaging in is fraudulent, you've convinced yourself that anybody but you is responsible. Participating makes you responsible. If you don't have the scruples to leave something like that and have no financial pressure to stay, then you don't deserve any work in tech when the dust settles. I for one would never hire you.
If you start to question the morality of who pays your salary, you will soon find that there are very little companies that you would allow yourself to work for. I can think of renewable energies, and not much else.
In truth, I already work for an evil company. All companies I worked for in my long career were morally bankrupt one way or another. I never had any trouble sleeping at night.
A lot of today unicorns started illegally. Uber, Spotify, Airbnb. Yet, nobody comment about those because their goal was supposedly "noble". That's the problem with the variable geometry morality of the left.
"If it's moral from our point of view, but illegal, the laws are the problem. If what's you're doing is immoral from our point of view, but legal, then you should be ashamed of yourself and repent (or die)."
In other words, it's nothing but dogma and proselytism.
"bad things" is a subjective concept. A former roommate was building a website in the mid 2000 for a dildo company. You probably don't care, but a religious zealot might consider it "bad".
We're gonna make a deal, I'll let you work in ad-tech, and you let me build tool which allow people to shoot themselves in the foot.
Taking a fully relativist perspective on morality is just an excuse to justify taking no ethical stance on anything at all. It's certainly your choice to exist in society this way, but you can't be surprised if people correctly criticize it as selfish, self-serving, and morally bankrupt. At least embrace it.
> (2) You cannot explain away 2008 as being the fault of the people who couldn't pay their mortgage. WTAF dude.
When you are subprime rated, you would have to be a complete moron to take a variable loan on you life. But sure, poor them, it's not their fault, it's the mean evil banker who gave them a tool to shoot themselves with ...
That the difference between you and me. I'm gonna give people the freedom to shoot themselves. You, well, you know better how each and every of them shall live there lives.
> When you are subprime rated, you would have to be a complete moron to take a variable loan on you life.
And loads of people were that moronic, do they really deserve to have suffered because some other people wanted to profit as much as possible from their stupidity? It's not like these morons had the tools to really assess what the fuck they were doing. Not excluding the fact that many of these loans were basically predatory, using the naivety/stupidity of these people against themselves to cash in.
Does all the world deserve to suffer through a major economic crisis because some morons are totally free to be predated upon by forces much more educated and sophisticated about the financial markets (and by extension doing that knowingly, pretty fucking evil)?
Libertarian ideology doesn't really hold much to reality, full freedom to do whatever is only achievable when the population is educated enough, humanity is not there yet.
This thread is a horror show that is pretty hard to watch, and I knew it would be, but I think it’s worth it. But if you we’re wondering what the rich asshole tree vandals were doing earlier in life, this is it.
No, only ad-hominem against people carrying the Gospel are frowned upon. There has been plenty of ad-hominem against me and I don't see you condemning those.
I believe that HN is very far from left-wing, not sure why you feel singled out, ad hominems are frowned upon anyone here, call them out and move on.
This defensiveness is really off putting, it seems like the only argument you can carry is "the left has a Gospel and I'm against it" and I still have absolute no idea what exactly you refer to and why you are against whatever you are referring to.
You just feel victimised and attacked for some reason.
Ad hominem is when you say someone’s argument is wrong because they’re a bad person. Ad hominem attacks are frowned upon because they cause good discussion to devolve into a shouting match.
In contrast, this thread has simply been establishing that jlcoff is a bad person. It’s not a fallacy or a derailment of the discussion to do so, rather it was the discussion. I can imagine why they feel attacked, it’s because they are literally being told they’re a bad person for their personal views. It would be implausible to expect a debate about the morality of working at a place you believe to be a scam, with such a person, to go without challenging them for it. And I wouldn’t expect such a person to respond without raising some form of “let ye without sin cast the first stone” defence and eventually just dribble out insults. My point is: you don’t have to worry about using community standards or HN policy to protect me from ad hominem attacks from them; all of this was priced in. It is inseparable from the nature of fraudulent schemes and the people who push them.
The current mainstream [radical] left Gospel meets the definition of dogma, as in, they are just as bad as the darkest religion they themselves condemn. Not very difficult to understand.
No, it really is difficult to understand given that you are using circular logic to justify something.
I don't know what you refer by the Gospel of the left, and from there I can't figure out what exactly you are attacking.
What is even "radical left" to you? These are such non-specific terms that just got even less defined with this whole culture wars shit.
I don't know what you are talking about and you haven't exposed anything that I can talk about, just empty platitudes and terms that actually mean nothing...
You might have a point if the only negative outcome of 2008 was that a lot of people lost homes they could never afford.
It was the banks' and regulators' responsibility to not allow bad loans to be issued and resold as mis-labeled AAA investment vehicles. That is the part that broke the global economy.
Looked at from first principles, the market cannot work efficiently if people are allowed to lie. Lies create an enormous amount of waste through direct and indirect effects.
Government as the monopoly on power (and locking people up) has an important role to play in policing this.
But (in the US at least), it actually is the government's job to keep the economy stable in order to "insure domestic Tranquility [... and...] promote the general Welfare"
> it's the mean evil banker who gave them a tool to shoot themselves with
Well, since that tool was largely fraud from which the bankers expected to profit (and did, in the short-term, until they got taken down by the rest of the industry doing the same thing) by externalizing risk, yeah, it is.
I don't recall anyone getting prosecuted for fraud even though the democrats would have dearly loved to have done so.
The bankers packaged mortgages and made a profit just like they always did. The difference was, local banks were pressured to loan to people with dreadful credit, and the guarantees by FNMA and the optimistic ratings by S&P made it easier to package and sell the mortgage backed securities.
In the end, the homeowners got to default on their mortgages but the bankers lost their livelihood.
You're putting the blame in the wrong place. I'd start by looking at FNMA. Don't take my word - read up on it.
> It should not be a controversial statement to say that soldiers are expected to follow orders.
Quite the opposite, a soldier duty, at least in the US is to protect not the Government, but the Constitution. If the government betrays the Constitution, it is the duty of the soldiers to disobey. At this point, civil war is upon us and history will be the final judge, not a military tribunal.
That's why it's the job of soldiers to follow "lawful orders", not orders generically.
On the other hand there is basically zero jurisprudence of a soldier ever getting in trouble for following an order they thought was given under competent military authority, even though it was illegal. So it can be hard for a soldier to rely on the mercy of the courts in this situation. Though that is still not justification for carrying out an illegal order.
> On the other hand there is basically zero jurisprudence of a soldier ever getting in trouble for following an order they thought was given under competent military authority, even though it was illegal.
Are you kidding me ? It was called the Nuremberg trials. Following orders has not been a valid defence ever since.
Were any U.S. soldiers tried at the Nuremberg trials?
A comparable incident would be the My Lai massacre, after which 20+ soldiers and officers were tried of various charges, only 1 was convicted, and even that 1 soldier was promptly paroled by the President.
Despite that, it is still theoretically possible to be tried and convicted of crimes despite having a military order to do so (and this was true even before Nuremberg). My point is that in practice having an order to do something counts for a great deal.
Is it ? I'm using a 4 years old $200 phone which suits me just fine, if not for stupid apps requiring more resources for a worst experience. The only reason of upgrade is battery wearing off.
Any Google related issues might be mitigated switching to LineageOS as the hardware is relatively open.
There's a certain level of truth to it, as none of the Android phone makers appear to be able to push for a customized SoC, even the ones with own designs (Samsung) appear to keep a "wall" between mobile and SoC divisions.
This means that relatively easy wins like throwing a lot more cache on high end phone, are unavailable because instead they are just one of the many customers for the SoC with different priorities resulting in a compromise design.
FWIW, I recently purchased maybe 21U worth of servers for less than $2000. Mostly IBM 2U servers (all dual 6-cores / 12-threads Xeon, most for spare parts), NAS (enough for triple >12TB redundancy), and LTO-4 loaders and drives to go in a rack I picked up for free locally which also came Cisco switches.
I'm gonna run my private cloud merging 3 different un-backed up physical computers, and migrate services off Google.
That's my second free 42U track, but the other was mostly used as shelf space. I've got a third rack rusting in my backyard which I bought for locally for $200, originally intended to run my former employer test infra, that I brought back home after they laid us off.
