Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48277090

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Very very emphatic agree from my end, thanks.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48052537

Points: 370

# Comments: 122

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48047400

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Is this the best option?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48018881

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

https://factcheck.afp.com/sheikh-mohammed-did-not-say-great-...

It would be quite out of character for him to say this

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47893763

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.

People have always derived a tribal sense of belonging from a set of worldviews, but these views are now perpetuated by robots. These anti-immigration or anti-brown or post-renaissance worldviews are lived by very few people of flesh and blood - it's a set of interlinked concepts and ideals in an imaginary post-truth world.

But it lives more in silicon than in some Aryan ideal. And if you had to draw a line from this silicon to reality, you'd still end up in Crimea or in Pokrovsk, watching a 21st-century battle with echoes of WWI. It is about land and power and politics, like it always has been. But the person fighting "woke" in a comment section over a made-up story about a made-up Disney film doesn't know it.

I'm in India, so the second-order effects of all this are even more surreal here. You get Christians cheering the rise of a Hindutva nationalist government because it's "anti-woke" (only to get heckled and beaten up during Christmas) and Trump supporters doing religious ceremonies for the man for the same reason (only to get the nation's entire suite of exports tariffed), and you see cabs with giant Russia Today ads on their sides in the streets (but the discounted oil we buy from Russia has not dropped prices at the pump by even a rupee). Our lived reality has very little in common with these digital culture wars.

Sorry for the tangent.

Also odd that the tech behind this isn't more talked about. I lost the source but there was something about bot networks that could argue both sides of a topic to feign the illusion of a real debate - and this predated ChatGPT by many years.

Big platforms like Google or X have only mildly experimented with heavenbanning and discourse manipulation at scale. These Russian networks have had at least a decades' worth of experience with it.

Somehow, in reducing all political opponents to bots, the discourse does seem to forget that there's often someone behind the bots, a tangible nation-state of a target.

Thanks for making this project!

Also to better communicate urgency, a scrolling RSS feed news ticker might slap.

I can see myself chaining monitors together and having this in my spare bedroom, in the eventuality that I end up in a house with a spare bedroom

"I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melt away."

India's IT outsourcing-led GDP growth can benefit many almost-poor and poor people by giving them access to more spending by the "middle-class" (a very debatable minority in India) and the rich. But it will not benefit the poorest - social welfare schemes do that, but anti-homeless measures cancel it out. Access to formalised lending can do that, but anti-immigrant schemes and the Kafkaesque labyrinth of getting an id-card in India will negate that. And banks won't give you a loan if you're poor (so they go to loansharks).

You can have all the Apples and the Facebooks of the world in California, but putting spikes in places where homeless people could sleep makes Gandhi's talisman stand out far better than any macro-economic indicator.

Inflation can be positive or negative but if you're living in a place with less supply than demand, your rent will go up by far more than the price of eggs. This will hurt you completely independently of the price of eggs.

All this to say - if you care about the poorest, you'll find little to cheer about. But should you care about the poorest? Is that a good measure of healthy economic growth? Is economic growth the only priority after 1991?

You can be poor and destitute in a capitalist dystopia and you can be poor and destitute in a communist dystopia. This is why I hate the language of the Cold War so much - we lose an infinite amount of nuance with terms like "Capitalism" "socialism" "communism" and "GDP"