> I recently had an exchange with someone that reminded me how important trust and mutual respect is and how the lack of such tends to cause problems to escalate.
What feels like a breakdown of trust in society has been on my mind a lot recently. Without trust, it seems communication and collaboration becomes impossible. How can society solve any of its problems when people can't discuss anything about those problems or potential solutions without it turning into a fight?
I've been on Hacker News over 11 years. I would like to think I've been building bridges, but it seems like nothing I do is ever enough to reassure people I'm not some SJW Feminazi here to just piss on the guys and let them know what misogynistic assholes they are and it gets hard to keep trying when most of the community has watched me starve for years and openly told me "Not my problem. Get a real job." (while my writing hits the front page, but people don't want to support it financially, knowing I'm handicapped, etc).
I don't have a whole lot more to give and I've spent much of this year wondering if it's time to throw in the towel and leave HN. It feels downright abusive at times to stay in a community where I feel I have done so much to reduce sexism and open doors for other women and improve participation of women here and it's the funnel for a multi-billion dollar business, yet I remain dirt poor.
It's a rather jagged, bitter pill to swallow and I think I deserve a helluva lot better.
But then I don't know where I would go if I left. HN is the least worst thing. Other places are worse.
Metafilter was a toxic cesspit that banned me for supposedly "self promoting." They like to wrench their shoulder out of place patting themselves on the back for how what awesome, wonderful people they are and the mods were actively encouraging the membership to bully me at a time when I was homeless. One member of Metafilter that had a hobby of harassing me while I was homeless was a female ER doctor. Another was a very privileged American pursuing their PhD while living in Europe.
When you left your comment, I was staring blankly at some other open tab wondering how in the heck to talk about rape prevention and best practices for dismantling rape culture without using the word "rape" at all, in part because it's a triggering word for people who have been assaulted and in part because I get accused of being full of bull for thinking I know anything about such topics.
Some problems are just hard to solve. I do what little I can, which doesn't seem to amount to a handful of sand in the grand scheme of things.
I guess the upside is I'm mostly well at this point, in spite of the entire world telling me I'm a deluded fruitcake so it's not like I'm ever going to get taken seriously or given any respect.
And this is probably all the wrong things to say, as usual. I wish I had an answer for you. There doesn't appear to be one, as best I can tell.
I vouched for your comment. It had been auto-marked [dead] due to containing some blocked keyword -- perhaps the very word that you talked about trying to avoid. I have noticed that a few words cause posts to initially show [dead] even when they are from high karma members such as yourself.
You can see if one of your own comments is dead by checking it in a private/incognito browser session. The status isn't visible to the comment poster while they are logged in.
Or if you log out, if I recall. It just generally doesn't occur to me to wonder if my comments are dead. I'm enough of a social outcast here that if it gets ignored, I figure people were just ignoring it.
For what it's worth, I think your contributions are important and you're a valuable member of this community. You've got a different perspective from many of the users of this site, and unlike many of them, your writing has actual _substance_. Regardless of whether or not I agree with what you say, if I notice your name on a comment, I know that I should pay attention to it.
> But tech companies want to talk to the humans they're hiring, so race and gender are (almost) always available as information inputs during the hiring process.
This is actually kind of funny to me, because in the open source world plenty of people have extremely productive working relationships without ever seeing or hearing each other, and in many cases without even knowing what country the other person lives in, how old they are, or what their legal name is.
So while there are definitely arguments that face to face communication is "higher bandwidth" or has other advantages, it doesn't seem out of the question to me that the hiring process could be "blinded" to a similar extent to orchestra auditions, without any significant reduction in hiring accuracy.
(Ok, maybe not quite the same extent; language fluency and style of speech are still significant signals even if everything is done over text)
To conclude that these are properties of capitalism you need to examine both capitalist and non-capitalist societies and observe that capitalist societies exhibit poverty, crime and violence (true), and that non-capitalist societies don't (false).
Not really. If I state that humans are mammals and one of their properties is that they need to breathe air, I'm under no obligation to demonstrate that there are mammals that don't breathe air. And nor does the existence of non-mammals that do breathe air invalidate my point.
But I understand your point that perhaps these are not necessarily inherent to Capitalism. I believe they are, as Capitalism structurally enforces inequality which inevitably leads to these things.
> Capitalism structurally enforces inequality which inevitably leads to these things
That's of course nonsense. It's human nature that enforces inequality, which doesn't necessarily lead to crime and violence either because again - human nature does.
Every social animal displays hierarchical structures, that's just biology. I don't know why so many people hold the belief that humans are special somehow and above biology.
Every economical, political, and social system will result in some form of inequality, if only because education, training, and skill need to be rewarded unless of course, you are willing to trade fairness for equality.
Finally, crime and violence aren't the result of (economical) inequality. They are correlated, sure, but crime isn't limited to property crimes and most of the other crimes don't need inequality.
A crime after all is nothing more than an action, which is defined as being against the law. You can in principle get rid of all crime by abolishing the law...
It's not nonsense at all, and nothing you wrote contradicts what I said. You can blame any human activity on "human nature". At one time human nature gave us the slave trade, but we still made slavery illegal. Calling it "human nature" doesn't mean there's nothing we can do about it.
When I say "structurally enforces", I mean that it amplifies the natural urge to have more, or do better, than someone else.
For example, we might say that someone with $100,000 is fairly comfortable. And perhaps someone who's more ambitious might have 10x their wealth. Or, let's be more generous: let's say 100x or even 1000x. That last would give you someone at $100,000,000 which most folk would agree is pretty wealthy.
Bit it's a bit much when you end up with someone who has 10,000,000x the comfortable persons wealth. That's not human nature: that's a structure set up to funnel the wealth that ordinary people have created, to a tiny number of individuals. And I see that as a problem even if you don't.
> Bit it's a bit much when you end up with someone who has 10,000,000x the comfortable persons wealth. That's not human nature: that's a structure set up to funnel the wealth that ordinary people have created, to a tiny number of individuals. And I see that as a problem even if you don't.
That is not enforced by capitalism, though. Capitalism isn't a single incarnation of an economic system, it's an entire landscape of systems. Crony capitalism isn't the be all and end all - just look at the Gini-coefficient worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient); there are plenty of capitalist countries that do quite well.
> When I say "structurally enforces", I mean that it amplifies the natural urge to have more, or do better, than someone else.
And you base that assessment on what exactly? I happened to have experienced two worlds (communism and capitalism) first hand and I can tell you for a fact that no "amplification of urges" was necessary to have people striving to have more than others.
The main difference is that in communist countries common folk had no way of (legally) getting access to most consumer goods (apart from food and basic supplies).
Corruption, stealing (mostly public property, e.g. from state-owned factories or farms), moonlighting, and under-the-counter sales were the norm and overall everybody suffered the consequences of an economy of scarcity.
This however, didn't stop party officials, former squires, factory directors or high ranking government officials from owning big houses and villas, driving western cars, and having access to luxury goods that were unavailable to the general public (both domestic and imported from the West).
The main difference between capitalism and communism that I experienced are a higher standard of living (in capitalism), less corruption, actual opportunities for those who seek them and much less state sanctioned despotism.
There's downsides, too of course, but I live in a country where it's incredibly difficult (and somewhat frowned upon) to get obscenely rich and many of those that are inherited their wealth (something that could be easily fixed by 100% inheritance tax for sums exceeding some still generous threshold).
That's why I don't see mega-rich people as general problem with capitalism (it's more of a result of a global economy and financial markets anyway - the bulk of most billionaires' wealth is in stocks and options, not actual cash or physical possessions).
Just to give you some perspective on how "shit might go down": there was this guy, Markus Persson, who programmed a computer game that became the best selling computer game to date (200 million copies). He became a billionaire when he sold his company and the rights to the game in 2014.
Then there was this other bloke, John Carmack, who worked on 42 games and created genre-defining masterpieces like Doom. His games sold well, too, but he was 30 years too early and thus "only" became a millionaire (~$60 million).
The difference? Opportunity! Back in the early 1990s there was no internet and (PC) gaming was a niche.
I guess the lesson here is that the size of the market has changed and getting obscenely rich relatively quickly is easier than ever before. But that's just a direct consequence of the average person being wealthier than ever before and thre being more capital around.
> This however, didn't stop party officials...[gaining massive wealth]...
Well, exactly. And you don't think they earned that wealth, I presume? You think they took it from the ordinary working person. So why are you arguing that this exact same behaviour is acceptable under a Capitalist system?
Your other points are worth addressing and you argue well, but there are too many for one post. I don't like the funneling of wealth that happens with Copyright either, so I'd like to see it abolished, if that answers some of your later stuff.
Do you think Carmack could have made 60 million under a communist system? I don't know if he really "earned" it (this seems extremely subjective), but wealth accruing to the people who make cool video games seems better than wealth only accruing to the people who make the rules.
Sure, there's a fair amount of wealth accrual to the people who make the rules in capitalist systems as well--that effect is perhaps orthogonal to the economic system in play, but the fact that capitalism provides opportunities for people to accrue wealth also by their own initiative is what makes it so attractive.
According to Google maps, Southam is about 25 minutes drive to Coventry or 15 minutes to Leamington Spa. It's not in the "middle of nowhere" in any important sense.
And Leamington is quite attractive - not a bad place to live. Coventry is probably ok too. Personally I would much rather be in a town like Leamington Spa than Birmingham or Milton Keynes. In general, small and medium size towns in the UK are far nicer than the big cities.
Yeah, once you're outside cities, most non-retail businesses tend to be found on the outskirts of towns (in business parks) or further out than that. My dad would usually drive 25-30 minutes to get to his office, so 15 minutes from Leamington is basically nothing.
Remote can mean isolated and disconnected as much as faraway and distant. Plenty of the UK is remote in that sense. I work in a part of Surrey where, despite there being frequent trains to London, the actual town and surrounding area is very hard to get around without a car (and the public transport options there are are significantly less frequent than trains away from the place).
Infrastructure is as much a factor as proximity I'd say.
I have worked in Coventry for a year and I stayed in Birmingham as the hotels in Coventry and area are depressing. As the restaurant options are much better in Birmingham compared to Coventry.
Did enjoy the small Chinese place in the city centre though :)
Also Leamington has a few big developers too(Ubisoft has a studio there) so it's not like it's a complete games development desert out there - there is big industry around.
With asset build pipelines that do lots of preprocessing, compress everything, and pack things with a layout that tries to minimise disk seek time while playing, it's conceivable that relatively small changes in the source data can result in touching large amounts of the final compressed assets.
But I don't work in the industry, so read my statements as just the ramblings of an interested amateur.
Regardless of the technical reasons for them, I personally dislike the reliance on day-0 patches.
For viewing objects I find a turntable style view best in most circumstances. For landscape or architecture (where you're in the scene), mouselook with WASD + vertical up/down.
Neither of these control styles are 6dof; they don't provide a roll control, only elevation, azimuth and position. Roll is rarely useful IMHO and including it in the normal control scheme makes things hard to use. Put roll behind an explicit modifier key, and have a reset-roll action somewhere.
The fences aren't a locking mechanism, at least not on their own. The lower (hardware) level locks are the steps in the cache coherency protocols (potentially including explicit cache line locking signals) that allow an execution unit to, eg, perform a correct atomic compare-exchange operation on a 32/64/128-bit piece of data.
See also, eg, the LOCK prefix on x86 instructions.
(disclaimer: I only have approximate knowledge of anything, I'm not an expert)
Agreed. But! Not all architectures implement atomic operations by locking the bus, as x86 does. The Power architecture uses load-linked, stored-conditional (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-link/store-conditional) where when you load a value, you can say "pay attention to who modifies this value," and when you go to store the value, you can say "only actually store this value if no one else modified it."
> Trump on twitter is literally just Donald Trump, not the president.
There has been a specific legal battle about almost exactly this question. So far, the US court system disagrees with you.
> "These tweets are published by a public official clothed with the authority of the state using social media as a tool of governance and as an official channel of communication on an interactive public platform," [2nd circuit] appeals court Judge Barrington Parker wrote.
I'm not American so I wasn't aware of the legal battle, or the precise law, but I agree with this statement from the article
""By ignoring the critical distinction between the president’s (sometimes) official statements on Twitter and his always personal decision to block respondents from his own account, the opinion blurs the line between state action and private conduct," Wall said in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case."
The role of the presidential office and the private citizen Trump should not be treated as synonymous. Of course Trump is probably the worst particular case here because he blurs the line intentionally. For the reason outlined in the argument Trump ought to communicate through official channels and users on twitter should all be subject to the same rules. Or alternatively we acknowledge that Twitter is now the public square which means nobody gets to ban anyone else.
What feels like a breakdown of trust in society has been on my mind a lot recently. Without trust, it seems communication and collaboration becomes impossible. How can society solve any of its problems when people can't discuss anything about those problems or potential solutions without it turning into a fight?