My last experience with AirBNB, it's customer support, and eventually an insurance claim, all went quite horrible. Made me realise how stark a difference there is on the spectrum of customer support by businesses. On one side we have companies like Amazon (with their customer obsession) that would go an extra mile to support their customers, and then on the opposite we have AirBnb like companies.
I would be switching to Booking.com for now and not going to use AirBnb anymore. But from what I am reading here, seems like they aren't that good with their customer care as well?
I'd argue that HN cannot expect constructive and substantive discussion on an article people can't even read. HN is bringing (a lot) of traffic to these websites thus potential revenue. Allowing paywalled articles never made sense.
Will there be a time when in the modern world, no territory will be forcefully occupied? Or do homosapiens lack the mental maturity to reach that point in their evolution?
It's also useful to point out that Kashmir was neither a part of India nor Pakistan after independence from the British in 1947.
It was only after Pakistan launched an operation to capture Kashmir, that the then ruler of Kashmir signed an "Instrument of Accession" with India, in exchange for military assistance.
Homo Sapiens has evolved to the currently dominant species partly due to its tendency to conquer and subdue - others of the same species, other species or the landscape. If Homo Sapiens were to reach this "mental maturity" it would most likely stagnate and, eventually, make space for another species to rise in its place. War and strife may lead to suffering and loss but they also provide a huge impetus to innovate on all fronts.
> Homo Sapiens has evolved to the currently dominant species partly due to its tendency to conquer and subdue
GP asked whether it was in the cards to have a world where no territory is forcefully occupied. No forceful occupation means that the people who live in a region get a say in choosing their government. Nobody is really arguing we cede Kashmir to a competing species.
> If Homo Sapiens were to reach this "mental maturity" it would most likely stagnate and, eventually, make space for another species to rise in its place.
Are you arguing that science and other problem solving strategies at peace are dooming the species to extinction, and that only war and suffering can ensure our continued existence and progress?
Not necessarily to extinction but to loss of control - I mean, becoming peaceful often means not investing in defence capability thus becoming weak, and becoming weak means inviting violence by opportunistic neighbours or inside groups.
It's a coordination problem - as any subgroup of homo sapiens that unilaterally abstains from violent power risks simply being overtaken by another subgroup that doesn't; you can abstain from using violence, but you can't unilaterally abstain from participating in violence started by someone else. "Si vis pacem, para bellum" will be true while humans are built the way we are.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
People here love to quote that, but they rarely mention the very next sentence:
“Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”
Left to their own devices, people tend to devolve to the lowest common denominator-type news. I wish the moderators here (since we have them) would do a better job of keeping such “Off-Topic” stuff off the front page.
There's some subtlety to the arrangement of the words. "off-topic, but interesting" has the implication that 'interesting' is preferred. "interesting, but off-topic" implies that as interesting as something might be, it is still off-topic and therefore might not be permitted.
I did think about it. Before I posted I spent more than just a small bit of effort. I still don't see what the difference actually is though. Yes I know what "but" means. I know all those words... but...
I do not see any actual difference. Anything you apply those two descriptions to are both "off-topic" as well as "interesting", according to those descriptions. The "but" does not make any difference at all as far as I can see. The other replies say there is a preference implied (I already knew that that was the intention), but as I just wrote, however you parse it, you end up with both attributes and I don't see any preference actually being applied. I see the attempt, yes, but I don't see that there is any effect.
Given the circumstances -- OP being new to the company and the other person being "friend of manager" -- I would say it would be really difficult for OP to pull off a push back. The advice to put your head down and smile can work wonders when used at right occasion (which I feel like this is one).
I don't understand where these sweeping statements are coming from. I grew up in a third-world country too, and transitioned myself from belonging to a lower middle class family, into an upper middle class life. I don't have an iota of acceptance for any form of surveillance being put in place without it being approved through proper channels of well put process in place (i.e. democracy, representatives of people debating and agreeing upon it)
A majority of india uses aadhar, a biometric ID. The govt constantly coerced and frightens the remanant people into getting aadhar.
A biometric ID is as obviously a lynchpin of a surveillance state as the necessity of a unique key to run a database.
London and the U.K. had invested surveillance in old school cameras even before the internet blew up.
China is China.
A majority of the world is already OK with a surveillance state. And most of the affected aren’t in a position to understand why it matters.
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Further- after the impact of the American election and brexit on america and the U.K. respectively, all nation states are aware that other nation states can hijack their national “thought streams” or whatever you want to call them.
No matter what, countries are not going to let that happen to them.
The added bonus of political advantage is not lost on the political class.
It’s not much to make sweeping statements from that position.
Especially given that all of private tech enterprise depends on snooping on your private information.
Hah. We are well and truly the product being sold on the larger global market.
Perhaps Nations are simply building fences to keep their products from being stolen.
> A biometric ID is as obviously a lynchpin of a surveillance state as the necessity of a unique key to run a database.
That's disingenuous. A government is also a lynchpin for a surveillance state, so you'll support anarchy?
A biometric id is very useful for various purposes. Subsidy targeting, financial inclusion, simplification of various datasets, and cracking down on tax evasion to name a few.
Sounds like a sweeping statement. Not sure your example of aadhar is relevant. Everyone needs to have some form of ID so they can be represented in "a database".
My reply was in the context of the new mass surveillance equipment referred to in the article.
1) india already has a plethora of ID options which were not mandatory and not biometric
2) similar biometric ID programs have been shot down in the US and UK precisely because of the threat to privacy and surveillance
3) a majority of Indians, as you will see even on HN, support such programs. The support is under the same aegis that Chinese citizens defend their firewall - it makes their life better, cost to privacy, threat of surveillance state be damned.
Even more obvious surveillance tools are acceptable and championed by the citizenry.
Such sweeping statements are not sweeping but factual representations of the state on the ground in the second most populous nation in the world.
The only people I know who are now organized and trying to combat it are the IFF.
>I don't have an iota of acceptance for any form of surveillance being put in place without it being approved through proper channels of well put process in place...
I don't know man?
I'm an American, so I really have no dog in this whole "Third World Viewpoint" fight. Having said that, it sounds to me like you have no problem at all with the surveillance state...
Trust isn't everlasting, specially for a "person". I can put more of my trust in a "process" (e.g. democracy) and its continuous evolution towards betterment, than letting "someone else" make my decisions for me.
I would be switching to Booking.com for now and not going to use AirBnb anymore. But from what I am reading here, seems like they aren't that good with their customer care as well?