I hope you will consider one thing, and please don’t mistake it for political correctness. The phrase “from good people” is distasteful and I think we’re all better off not implying such a thing as “bad people”. If the intent is to define a division, it’s important to be specific lest we undermine our egalitarian goals. I know you don’t mean it to be exclusionary, and probably instead aim to evoke positive feelings. But, for me it does the opposite. People accustomed to being excluded are likely to read “from good people” and wonder if that includes them or not.

They all have healthcare when they need it and have no health-related bankruptcies or anxiety over such. Having a part-time job isn’t crippling to their health and safety. Their transportation systems are cutting edge as well.

If you combine only the tangible cost benefits of healthcare and transportation availability, that should account for approximately the difference in disposable income.

”We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. ”

Sounds pretty similar to the thinking behind the German setup.

Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.

When you treat a government like a business, it falls behind on it’s maintenance schedule, and begins to resemble one. There are a lot of people who wish the government was their business, and will encourage you to play along. These people work night and day to lower your expectations of what you’re capable of.

Stop falling for it!

The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.

But, in any nation, that fingerhold can exist when enough people come together en masse.

https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-45-the-not-so-ben...

You would be surprised how this works.

I don't think he "made it up", and I don't want to accuse him of blaming somebody, but I don't know how else to put it. In so many words, he basically says that, at the end of the day, the culture he's writing about is riddled with it's own shortcomings and needs to be brought to an end. Whether he alludes to historical economic strife or not (he does some), his ultimate assessment is that it's too late to do anything but save these poor souls. He communicates this idea with a lot of contention, because otherwise he would have been dismissed much sooner. A lot of the issues he writes about are legitimate, but he takes a mistaken turn towards accusing the traditions and personalities of his family.

It's not a 2-dimensional issue. Those traditions and parsonalities exist, but they are far more principled than the neoliberal traditions he promotes. And for whatever truth there is to his historical explanations, there is loads more that he avoids. His insistence on attributing present-day tensions to something like "outdatedness" is extremely ignorant.

The word for this turn that he takes is just hopelessly congruent with neoliberalism, and, unfortunately, it does serve his agenda quite well. He's got a partnership with a VC who aims to capitalize on techish business deals in the rust belt. Presumably, the VC aims to play savior and ultimately rip a lot of people off.

Can we really assume the social media we know today would exist in it's present state without advertising? I think it would be inconsiderate and wholly unimaginative at best to suggest that it would. I think separating the two is a mistake.

The internet forums I grew up with in the late 90s were, I would argue, nothing but healthy. They exposed me to worlds of encouragement and knowledge. The social media we have now seems to be no comparison.

"Making people watch ads" is not the problem with advertising. The problem is the existence it creates for ourselves. Advertising, at it's current levels in the US, dictates our whole conception of the world we live in. I wonder if many will ever realize this without studying humanities and working in the ad industry; two things that combined have depleted my faith in humanity unless we can reverse this grave mistake. To think this is just an issue of time lost sitting through ads is just a misunderstanding of what advertising in 2018 even is, or of how it defines the world you think you live in.

So, advertising and entertainment are separate categories, and it's important to respond to them separately.

Entertainment does not present with ulterior motives in the way advertising does. There are a lot of blurry lines in this discussion, but I think they should be the focus. I think it's the manipulation in blurring the lines that we are really contending with. Entertainment does not generally present with blurry lines, but that's gradually changing, whereas advertising has been blurring the lines for far longer, and tech does so more through utility than anything else.

So, if entertainment is generally what it claims to be, advertising is more shape-shifting. As popular culture has subsumed it, logos have become decoration on clothing, brand names find themselves in pure art forms like musical lyrics, etc. and all the while serving to promote. It's easy to consider these conflations as notable chaos, but as long as it all remains conceivably easy to ignore (something I think Aristotle would readily debate), we consider it excusable.

Tech does not conflate the business intentions of it's product with entertainment like advertising does, but instead with something that is conceivably more difficult to ignore: utility. Social networking tools that the tech industry provide have become critical to a citizen's well-being. Getting a job that pays the bills generally means needing to promote one's self on social media. Even if it doesn't, one can never know if their insecurity is a result of avoiding thus, so they are by all accounts forced to participate. This goes quite a bit deeper than the repercussions of, say, modifications to T-Shirts and music. The utility of technology has a deeper correlation with civic duties and every-day utility. If it didn't, social media would unlikely seem so critical to adults, and teens alike.

It's important to remember how useful electronic communication is when discussing social media. There should be no debate over this. It's amazing.

And, I think it's worth asking if psychological damage of social media (assuming it exists) is exacerbated by advertising. The most obvious exacerbation is in funding through ad sales, and that can hardly be overstated. And such funding strategies probably undermine product design. But I think there's even more to it...

As we know, advertising abstracts our conceptions of who we are through archetypal narratives, and plays to the weaknesses of the self-identity problem. It does so in a purely intentional way. I worked in advertising for years, and this is what it's all about. But, I don't think that's how the tech industry works. It is providing unquestionable utility. But, an increase in communication can exacerbate the issues that undermined self-identity creates. So my point here is that I'm not sure this should all fall on tech, and I can't help but wonder if we need to shift all of the blame to advertising. This would at least give us an idea of where we stand.

> It's ironic that an entity dependent on ad money would create such a title.

No, it's not. As you say, they are dependent on ad money, which should not suggest they choose to be. I would assume quite the opposite. I would assume they would prefer integrity, and are aiming for such the best they know how. Again, it's the advertising.

I know he claims the subjects are his own family, but I’m not buying it. The subjects are his agenda.

I don’t personally use this language, but for what I think is a different reason: if removing a noun-forming suffix yields a verb which defines the extent of a category, I just think this results in an extraneous lack of specificity (you could instead just describe the subject as performing the action). I also think it’s collectively beneficial to not go out of our way to categorize each other, but I wouldn’t be so quick to apply that to personal situations.

So, I can’t understand taking “climate denier” to be personally offensive or vulgar. If you don’t like your own view, you’re entirely free to just change your mind.

> Syntax is never a barrier to legibility of code

I’m not sure many would admit it even if they agree, but I don’t know if “legibility” wholly describes the concern. I think there’s something more like feng shui, or aesthetics at play. A lot of Python idioms are hard to defend on legibility alone, but the result has ultimately been a language that is comfortable to read more often than not.

There are very few code bases I would want to read in bed as I fall asleep. When I realized I was generally comfortable doing that with most Python code bases, I decided this language might add a subtle quality to my life if I worked with it every day.

Programming in the real world rarely cooperates with this ideal, but I think the ideal still has some meaning. To me, what you call curmudgeon/conservative efforts of Python devs is more a humurous pseudo-enlightenment mentality, so more a humanist project.

For the record, I have no plans to rigidly defend this view and can see how it might sound ridiculous. At the end of the day, I guess I just appreciate the passion, for whatever that is worth.

Housing by market value is a losing proposition.

No, they’re not. If anything, the distinction should be more clear for these entities than other private businesses who could at least be contracted by the government. Political campaigns are entirely private marketing arrangements. The extent to which they are “quasi-government” should be perfectly obvious in light of their intentions, which is to become elected in the future. Even if the candidate is serving in office, that office’s duties and the campaign they run are separate projects. There is no blurry line here.

The bottom line is this rhetoric will never be confronted. Some people will be chosen and those people will retrospectively be deemed “outsiders”, thereby proving Pioneer’s mission is pure.

If you read the founder’s autobiographical blog post, you’ll see they openly admit they were not passionate about anything until they found Y Combinator. For them, passion and the pursuit of popularity are one and the same.

They seem to miss the fact that many people are passionate before getting funded for their pursuits. They definitely miss the fact that the “outsiders” they are looking for are driven by their own passion, and not the approval of others.

This is more insulting SV marketing gimmickry.