Hacker News: grunder_advice

New comment by grunder_advice in "Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back"

grunder_advice — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:15:24 +0000

I guess I'm pro-natalist. I do agree with you on the goal of eradicating poverty, although to me that's a goal in itself that does not need to be justified. But I don't agree that all people on earth are fungible, and a birth in Mongolia is the same as a birth is Sydney, Australia.

Your "human achievement" viewpoint is highly reductive. The culture of a place is maintained by it's local population. When you have a low birth rate situation to the point that you need to supplement the workforce with immigrants, that signifies that the local culture is slowly dying. While some mixing of cultures is beneficial, we should also try to perserve our local cultures. We should not turn every city in the developed world into a little NYC.

New comment by grunder_advice in "Japan Is What Late-Stage Capitalist Decline Looks Like"

grunder_advice — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 11:13:08 +0000

I mean, they need to wrap the statistics in a narrative. That's the medium of delivery. But the statistics don't lie: birthrates are well below replacement levels.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/05/japan-records-...

New comment by grunder_advice in "What dating apps are optimizing"

grunder_advice — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:15:12 +0000

Yeah, I don't think you're going to have much luck with that mentality.

Personally, I cannot think of a worst hell than having to be married to somebody who was forced to be with me. Yikes.

New comment by grunder_advice in "What dating apps are optimizing"

grunder_advice — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:52:51 +0000

I think dating apps are a flawed concept irrespective of profit motives. They reduce men to their appearance and the most overt displays of wealth. Then they line them up against the wall, and they ask women to pick who they like best... For the men among us who will be among the most handsome and wealthiest in any given room, it works really well.

New comment by grunder_advice in "What Drives Stock Market Returns? (2018)"

grunder_advice — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:10:53 +0000

Yeah, in particular now that index funds are well known and very common one wonders what risk one is exposed to when one is dumping everything into broad market index funds.

New comment by grunder_advice in "Hong Kong pro-democracy tycoon Jimmy Lai gets 20 years' jail"

grunder_advice — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:09:58 +0000

It's not like relations between China and the West aren't already as hostile as the West can tolerate.

New comment by grunder_advice in "If you've got Nothing to Hide (2015)"

grunder_advice — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:14:52 +0000

If I've learned something during my early adulthood it's that, it's impossible to not be in conflict with at least some people, because even if you're the most fair and considerate person on the planet, other people will prey on you to try to encroach on your territory and steal what you have.

So the idea that you have nothing to hide is completely banal. Those who are more powerful than you won't leave you alone just because you ignore them. They will eventually come knocking to steal your wealth and your freedom.

New comment by grunder_advice in "X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok"

grunder_advice — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:24:15 +0000

What makes Grok special compared to random "AI gf generator 9001" which is hosted specifically with the intent of generating NSFW content?

New comment by grunder_advice in "The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52T (2025)"

grunder_advice — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 20:08:43 +0000

That's only because you're using broad strokes. If you look at the top 0.1% and the top 0.01% and the top 0.001% you'll see that as you go to the extreme end the share of the total household wealth does tend upwards. Please see my other post for some numbers.

New comment by grunder_advice in "The wealth of the top 1% reaches a record $52T (2025)"

grunder_advice — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 20:00:40 +0000

I think this is just because wealth distribution is a powerlaw with extreme concentration at the far end. For example in this graph you can see a trend, the closer to the top, the steeper the line.

https://imgur.com/a/6omRYu3

As an extreme case, let's look at the top 3 billionaires in 2000 and 2025 respectively.

2000 Gates, Ellison, Allen $135 billion vs. $42.0 trillion ≈0.32 %

2025 Musk, Ellison, Zuckerberg $957 billion vs. $172.9 trillion ≈0.55 %

New comment by grunder_advice in "On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]"

grunder_advice — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:44:25 +0000

Exactly. Most propaganda is about embellishment and fear mongering that completely destroys the ability of the individual to accurately access the topic at hand.

New comment by grunder_advice in "On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]"

grunder_advice — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:41:37 +0000

I don't discount that people have different values and interests. I said that propaganda compounds on those divisions. I think aligning values is also something that is actionable, but that's another topic altogether. My general feeling is that our democracies would be much healthier without embellished fake new narratives about what is happening around us, irrespective of how different our values might be.

For example, let's take global warming as an example. The embellished fake news narrative is that any action at all to reduce our carbon footprint will bring about complete economic collapse, and that global warming is fake news anyway and extreme weather has a completely intangible effect on the life of people living today.

Both of those are false embellished fake news narratives that build upon real concerns. It's true that we should keep the economic health of the nation in frame when we discuss measures. It's true that we might to some extent insure ourselves against natural distastes. But the fake news narrative is the embellishment of these concerns.

New comment by grunder_advice in "On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]"

grunder_advice — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:33:27 +0000

Thanks for making this point. I 100% agree. I think previously the way politics worked, there was an element of people keeping each other in check. Now everyone can become as radicalized as their individual limits allow them to become because they live in a personally crafted narrative.

New comment by grunder_advice in "On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]"

grunder_advice — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:30:26 +0000

Propaganda always builds on real greviences that the electorate has.

It's good that you bring up housing. There are, to my knowledge no political parties that have made housing their top agenda item. They only use housing as a talking point to serve their message. For example the extreme right will just say, immigrants are occupying all the housing supply. The extreme left will say it's just capitalism that is to blame.

New comment by grunder_advice in "On Being a Human Being in the Time of Collapse (2022) [pdf]"

grunder_advice — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:14:16 +0000

Pretty much all western countries are experiencing a crisis of democracy. It seems to me that the biggest contributor to this is the vulnerability of the electorate. It seems to me that it has become possible to hijack the minds of individuals with sustained propaganda campaigns.

You have individuals who at best completely a BSc in Business Studies, and you are asking them to decide on COVID or climate change. That by itself is a hard ask. Then you infiltrate their content consumption habits and you bombard them with propaganda. And then these people are asked to decide on the future of the nation. This of course only compounds on the natural divisions that are already present within the electorate.

I'm not immune from this, and neither are you. I don't know what the solutions should be and how CS graduates in particular can help. It just seems to me that we haven't developed enough on a social level to deal with these challenges.

New comment by grunder_advice in "The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis"

grunder_advice — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:59:19 +0000

Yep, in all EU countries, this would lead to country wide protests with the usual result being the fall of the government and new elections. Seems like the US is missing this element of democracy.

New comment by grunder_advice in "The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis"

grunder_advice — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:51:47 +0000

SV was always full of limp wristed callous nerds who hate those they consider to be beneath them. Back them they called themselves libertarians or ancaps or something along those lines, but fundamentally nothing has changed.

New comment by grunder_advice in "Germany's Merz admits nuclear exit was strategic mistake"

grunder_advice — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:28:55 +0000

The fear was widespread across the whole European continent at the time. I don't think you can put the blame on any one person. I think it's entirely natural to be afraid of an invisible undetactable danger that will give you cancer. Many other such fears, due to other environmental pollutions are present today, however justified or not they might be.

New comment by grunder_advice in "Germany's Merz admits nuclear exit was strategic mistake"

grunder_advice — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:14:15 +0000

Fukushima sure, but a lot of women were traumatized by Chernobyl and the news of a cloud of radioactive dust that was going to give them all cancer. I think Fukushima just reingnited those fears.

New comment by grunder_advice in "Germany's Merz admits nuclear exit was strategic mistake"

grunder_advice — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:09:54 +0000

It's the same ridiculous situation as with the Greenland saga. The transatlanticists don't want to let go of the past, but America isn't looking back.