This isn't even a strawman in this case, since the company in question is literally cutting pay to its workers for the sake of minorities.

The capitalists are very good at starting a race war to keep workers from uniting.

This is economics 101.

You're a Nazi if you want to get paid.

Pretty much, I was planning a system for bug bounties in 2011, after doing some back of the envelope calculations it turned out you would need 150% overhead for a $10 bounty with human due diligence and using master card/visa/pay pal. Oh and you could never support any project that has anything that the banks don't like, which then included porn, lgbt rights, fair use drm exemptions and a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember any more.

So you either had to convince people to use some alt-coin that wasn't a pyramid scheme, then build an escrow service on top of it, then use that service to fund the bug bounty program. Or you could just do everything terribly and end up with Patreon (which for the above reasons will get even more creator hostile in the coming years).

Computer systems have gotten fast enough that a 00s Pentium 4 can handle all of the US economy, with the rest being a problem of gathering inputs.

You are welcome to move to China if you think they are better.

After all I moved to the West because I thought it was better.

I think this describes Gawker more than the current howling mob. There is someone to blame at the end of the day, and there is a clear malevolence in motives.

Today what we have is closer to the medieval village in winter where there is nothing to do but go to the town square and watch the witches be humiliated.

And yet China manages to fail this low bar stunningly. To the point that they are running actual concentration camps for Muslims. Something no Western government has done, and the last one to do finished paying reparations to the victims 4 years ago, 70 years after it happened.

There is no such thing as indefinite growth, there is logistic growth between steady states. Pretending that immigration is always good is like pretending that drinking water is always good. Useful when you're in the Sahara, less so when you're drowning.

The US is currently in a situation where the labor market has an oversupply of people which is why real per hour worked wages are still at the level they were in '72. Adding more immigration now will only lower the living standards of the people already here, this will be the case until we increase the carrying capacity of the US economy with better labor laws, more government spending on fundamentals and better targeted research.

Gopher is a success when you browse wikipedia on it.

It is rather unfortunate for us that everything that's come afterwards has been in some way even worse.

The problem is not that there is some magical loss of essence when something is made by a machine, it is that mass market products in the West prioritize looks over function: strawberries that are the size of eggs and taste like cardboard, bread that is white and puffy but mostly air and mush, milk that is pure white and tastes like chalk water.

And in our industry, UI that look amazing on video and images but reduce your productivity to that of a brain damaged chimp.

The problem isn't that things are machine made, it is that we are making the wrong things because the wrong things look better in ads.

On 60Hz my wired and wireless mouse feel exactly the same.

On 240Hz, yeah, there is a lot of difference.

The 'bread' you get in the Anglosphere is a crime against humanity. Not because it is machine made, but because it comes with a philosophy: looks matter more than taste.

Meanwhile Eastern Europe still uses the old soviet factory bread and the thing tastes like manna when you get it fresh.

To use an analogy from heart surgery:

Fixing a car is easy.

Fixing a running car is hard.

There comes a point at which starting from scratch is better than trying to fix the original mess. Which in our business means the company goes out of business and is replaced by something new.