President Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program [1] where used cars in good condition were destroyed to increase sales of new cars seems to have been based on the broken window fallacy.
Although in this scenario, there’s (theoretically) an externalized benefit of improved fuel efficiency. So it’s possible that it is a net positive for society?
This is like complaining of unequal vehicles at an airport: A relatively few can fly very fast and hold hundreds of passengers, but most are earthbound-bound and can carry only a few passengers. Of course Silicon Valley has inequality: it’s home to some of the most impactful people on earth. Hobbling these people will do nothing to help the poor, just like crippling airliners will not improve the cars in airports parking lots.
One person is an airline, another person is a car...
Not a very good comparison considering the basic needs of all people are practically the same: food, water, and shelter
It's like you're saying that "impactful people" "need" the Atherton mansions they live in to the same degree that the homeless need housing
Or in vehicle terms you're saying that one car needs a hangar as much as another car needs a parking spot (because the first one is driven to "more important" places)
I have seen poverty in a lot of places, and huge contrasts of wealth, but never the disparity I saw in SF. I’m talking about a Lamborghini parked next to a person lying on the floor, with no shoes, marred in their own excrements. It is crazy.
> Hobbling these people will do nothing to help the poor
I have been to several developing countries. There was definitely more poor people there.
However, even if SF beggars might end up having more dollars in their pockets at the end of a day than someone in a developing country, the quality of life that they get is not so different. No shoes, spending the day sitting on a street, begging, sleeping on a cardboard box somewhere. SF weather is more benign than other what most developing countries have, granted.
My point is: I expected more from the wealthiest nation in the world. They have more than enough to dress, feed and shelter every one of their citizens, many times. Developing countries simply don’t. The fact that you are putting them together in the same phrase kind of makes my point. “Better than a developing nation” is an incredibly low bar to apply to the US.
Where is our resident homeless/hopefully formerly homeless HN resident? I hope she’s doing well.
I don’t think enough people realize that once you fall below a certain threshold, it’s virtually impossible to get back out without a lot of assistance.
I have spent a lot of time in GCC countries (Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Oman). It’s worse there in the sense that more people are dirt poor, but SF is worse in terms of more people being rich.
What I mean is, in UAE/Saudi, the poor people are just as bad as the poor people in SF. But there are very, very few rich people. There’s also a lot of not dirt poor people (still poor).
SF had so many many rich people and there or there are just as bad as the poor elsewhere.
Come to Asia. You'll see people far richer than those in Silicon Valley next to people who parasites and diseases the Western world eliminated 100 years ago.
That's a very weak criticism. I think his analogy was fairly clear in what it was saying. "Bizarre" seems to mean "I don't like what it implied." But why bother to tell us that? Tell us why you don't like it. Better, give us a reason why you think it's wrong.
This is one of the most disgusting things I've read in a long, long time.
> it’s home to some of the most impactful people on earth.
It's home to some of the most entitled jerkoffs on earth. This website needs to call out this rhetoric, because it's riddled with self-congratulatory garbage.
Go ahead and flag me or downvote my comment, but I really can't believe what I'm reading here sometimes.
Please don't fulminate or post in the flamewar style to HN. It's against the rules because, regardless of how right you are or feel you are, it leads to shitty threads. We're trying for better than that here, and you can make your substantive points without it.
You are on a website focused on tech startups. The people who succeed at tech startups become absurdly rich. I’m in agreement with the parent commenter that hobbling the superstars to give more to poor people is the wrong move. I’m disgusted that people disagree with me, but I also understand why most people remain poor.
Monero has proven at scale some cryptography that can be used to change everything. I recommend reading the codebases of projects before you write everything off as a scam. Monero is a legitimate project with enormous value, and active research on problems that matter; it is the primary private / anonymous digital cryptocurrency.
No doubt the BBC has its flaws, but you take allies where you can find them. If you care about the truth, it’s important to call out government censorship. The foreign press is more likely to reveal unpleasant truths.
> Punishment by process is a favourite tactic of the Modi administration when it wants to intimidate or wear out those who dare to find fault with the prime minister or his party. In 2020 Amnesty International was forced to close its India operation after its bank accounts were frozen. Last year Oxfam India and the Centre for Policy Research, a think-tank in Delhi, suffered tax raids. Indian media outfits, journalists and activists who have offended suffer worse. Reprisals, whether carried out by the government or its enraged admirers, have included pulled advertising, detentions without trial and, for Gauri Lankesh, a journalist and critic of chauvinistic Hindutva ideology, assassination.
I read this article after posting one [1] on the muzzling of Seymour Herst’s revelation of how America blew up the Nordstream pipelines. Politicians of every country love to use state power to silence their critics. In America, the preferred method is currently to work through the media companies. [2]
To the extent that writing is like playing an instrument, one should try writing simply before trying to be stylish or entertaining. And for many purposes, simple writing is enough.
It seems to me that at the implementation stage, the things that never change and the things that do change are the same. For example, customers will always want low prices and fast delivery. Internet ordering and robots in warehouses are things that change. But the changes are better ways to fulfill the unchanging needs. So Bezos sees investments in internet ordering and robots as investments in what does not change. Whereas Andreessen sees the same investments as betting on change. So what difference does their point of view make if both entrepreneurs end up making the same investments?
A mistake that I've made before, that I think is quite common, is to assume government will enforce laws the way I would. Regarding speech, because I am a person of good will, tolerance, and open-mindedness, I assume government will enforce the law this way. This is a grave mistake. The people who would seek out jobs in which they can control other people's speech are exactly the sort of people who should not be given that power.
Even if the actual enforcers of speech law were honest, they would never be allowed to enforce the law where it is most needed, namely government itself. Wars are usually supported with lies. [1] [2] Will speech laws be used to punish government officials who lie the country into war? I think not. Instead, such laws will be used to protect powerful people, especially people in government. For example, in Citizen's United, a case that Democrats still criticize, the government was prosecuting the members of a small non-profit with felonies for publishing a 90-minute documentary critical of then Senator Hillary Clinton. [3]
You are correct. There are honest politicians that clearly state in subtext about the honesty of public information. Disinformation is nothing else. It is how politics work these days and we can hope it will improve with time.
I don't know how the parent can compare an instance of a crazy person to government sending people in war that kill hundreds of thousands of people. Because these lives are no media personalities?
To me this is nothing one should base an opinion on. Information needs to be free of course and if government gets their hand on some platforms, these will become unreliable sources with far more and significant disinformation than we have seen before.
