Hacker News: abvdasker

New comment by abvdasker in "How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post"

abvdasker — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 20:47:15 +0000

It would take one or two not especially complicated law taxing wealth and loans against equity. Congress could do this tomorrow but guess who controls congress. And cap political spending like every other sane democracy.

New comment by abvdasker in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

abvdasker — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:23:06 +0000

To anyone with half a brain not poisoned by conservative ideology this always was, and is, obvious. Crypto has always been pitched as a get rich quick scheme which only appeals to the financially illiterate.

New comment by abvdasker in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

abvdasker — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:15:23 +0000

Yeah the best way to fix this would be to enforce the separation of distribution and production via the Paramount Decree. Separate content production from the streaming service itself. Get rid of the vertical integration plaguing the industry and we'll get better content since quality will be the territory on which studios have to compete with each other again.

New comment by abvdasker in "I Want You to Understand Chicago"

abvdasker — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 01:37:18 +0000

When this is all over and Trump has been consigned to history's dustbin, at the very least the public deserves to know the names of the individual federal agents and entire chain of command responsible for these atrocities. The people responsible for this wanton cruelty need to be charged and tried criminally for their actions. Nobody is going to forget this and I think a lot of Americans will demand justice and accountability once all is said and done.

New comment by abvdasker in "Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas"

abvdasker — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:29:25 +0000

> If only it weren't for those few tweets, it would be successful and done by now.

Not what I said. I said he did it to try and kill high speed rail, not that he was solely responsible for its failure. And Musk did a whole lot more than tweet.

Just because you are ignorant of the significant evidence that this was (and remains) Musk's goal doesn't mean it isn't true. Ashlee Vance wrote about this way back in 2015: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990 . Just this year he used his involvement in DOGE to cut federal funding for what remains of the project: https://gizmodo.com/musks-doge-takes-aim-at-california-high-...

New comment by abvdasker in "Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas"

abvdasker — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:13:48 +0000

At this point we all know Musk only did this as part of his general "hyperloop" boondoggle to kill California high speed rail. Why do we have to continue to pretend this was anything other than an idiotic PR stunt?

New comment by abvdasker in "Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo"

abvdasker — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 13:10:55 +0000

From what I have heard it wasn't just the US but other governments as well which came down on them quite hard. States broadly do not like it when a bunch of huge corporations get together to issue their own currency.

New comment by abvdasker in "Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo"

abvdasker — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 20:16:27 +0000

Didn't a number of companies led by Facebook already attempt to do this with Libra (Diem) and basically got nuked from orbit by US regulators? I have to assume this is primarily happening now because there is a more favorable (nonexistent) regulatory environment.

New comment by abvdasker in "We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]"

abvdasker — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:44:59 +0000

> I never owned a car, so should I advocate to stop all fundings for streets?

Streets are generally paid for by taxes, which are categorically different than corporate profits. In theory taxes are under democratic control. If you don't want to pay for streets you don't use, you can vote for a politician who passes that law. You have no control over the governance of a private corporation, but it can still pass its costs on to you via externalities (in the absence of regulations preventing it from doing so).

> Now, if I don't consume drinks of the Coca Cola Company, what if my cleaning lady enjoys those in her break?

What are you even talking about? What is the externality here? The wages you presumably pay your cleaning lady are hers to do with as she wishes.

New comment by abvdasker in "We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]"

abvdasker — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:36:57 +0000

> Most people use capitalism to describe a system where people trade goods and services with as little interference from government as possible.

This is not a real definition. Saying "most people" use the term to mean what you want it to mean in this argument is ridiculous.

Capitalism is a system of private ownership of capital. We live under that system. Anything you see that happens now is the result of that system because it's the one that exists.

There is no such thing as "crony capitalism". What came before crony capitalism? Was it regular capitalism? Did regular capitalism turn into crony capitalism? Or — more likely — is it all one continuous process and system of accumulation?

New comment by abvdasker in "We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]"

abvdasker — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:27:37 +0000

In scenario 1, a corporation externalizes some of its costs. Those costs are then paid by people who may or may not actually use the corporation's product — people who never chose to be part of any transaction. This is coercive because the people paying for the corporation's externalities are forced to: they may not use the product, or do so to different degrees not proportional to the price they pay for the externality.

In scenario 2, the corporation does not externalize costs and raises their prices, offsetting costs by passing them on to their customers. The people paying the additional cost are those who know the price of what they are buying and willingly engage in the transaction for the good or service.

Do you understand why scenario 2 is bad and scenario 1 is less bad?

New comment by abvdasker in "We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]"

abvdasker — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 14:00:24 +0000

> socialism in disguise

I really dislike this kind of rhetoric. This has nothing to do with socialism. Corporations profiting from externalities and pushing costs onto regular workers is just capitalism. If you have a problem with it, maybe you have a problem with the inevitable concentrations of wealth and power which result from capitalism.

New comment by abvdasker in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

abvdasker — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:32:46 +0000

It's always pretty suspect when you first hear about the opposition to something in its rebuttal. I've heard lots of critiques of the abundance movement and this is my first time hearing anything about housing cartels. Maybe someone had this critique but it isn't the dominant strain of criticism of the abundance people. It feels like Thompson picked the weakest argument to debunk rather than one of the many stronger ones.

New comment by abvdasker in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

abvdasker — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 18:46:40 +0000

I think if you're China the smart thing to do would be to immediately send Iran a couple nukes. Would put an end to the conflict pretty much immediately.

New comment by abvdasker in "Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust"

abvdasker — Thu, 29 May 2025 05:53:51 +0000

Honest curiosity — why did you choose a service like Redis over a more straightforward embedded solution like SQLite? In my head Redis seems better suited to distributed solutions but I've never actually built a desktop application so I'm probably speaking from ignorance.

New comment by abvdasker in "Milwaukee police considering trading mugshots for facial recognition tech"

abvdasker — Thu, 01 May 2025 04:16:36 +0000

Can you tell us more about that?

New comment by abvdasker in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract [updated]"

abvdasker — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 13:01:24 +0000

Democrats haven't put anyone into a reeducation camp as far as I'm aware. Your enemies are imaginary while the parent comment's enemies are all too real.

New comment by abvdasker in "US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU"

abvdasker — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 14:43:49 +0000

If the Trump admin's goal were to reduce the national debt it would make way more sense to use fiscal policy (increase taxes) rather than some roundabout way to force the Fed's hand on monetary policy. The tariffs do basically function as a massive regressive tax increase in the form of a sales tax, but that comes with truly immense risks on the demand side of the economy. Guess what happens to tax revenue during a recession.

New comment by abvdasker in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

abvdasker — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 16:48:25 +0000

If I was a foreign adversary of the US I would be salivating at the idea of several unvetted 19-25 year olds with unlimited access to classified government computer systems. The security implications are apocalyptic.

New comment by abvdasker in "Trump to impose 25% to 100% tariffs on Taiwan-made chips, impacting TSMC"

abvdasker — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 03:49:43 +0000

Genuinely insane to the point that I don't believe he'll actually do it. I have no idea who this is for. It will certainly alienate the US tech sector that just spent the last month bending the knee to Trump. It will push Taiwan into the arms of China. I have no idea how this is remotely compatible with all the hawkish AI rhetoric. Baffling on all fronts.