The overarching problem here is herd mentality. Using Angular is a bad idea, but lots of companies are using it anyway because The Herd stampeded towards the new shiny thing, mostly because of how cool two-way binding looked in Angular's demo toy app.
Now all those companies are bogged down by Angular, but feel like ejecting it would be too costly. Elsewhere, lots of new developers are introduced to Angular and invest time and effort into learning it because they don't know any better.
Herd mentality is a big problem. It's basically the polar opposite of thinking for yourself, and as such, extremely detrimental in other aspects too.
The couple of times I've worked with angular, some things went incredibly smoothly, and when you hit those edges, it really reminded me of ASP.Net 1.0, it was nice for about 80% of your workload, but the other 20% took 10x the effort, and was a much bigger headache to work around.
Honestly, if/when browsers have better support, I think something closer to Polymer may be the best of all worlds with web development... for now, I find that React code tends to be the most sensible (with a decent framework around it)... not to mention shared client-server code with node/io.js
I'm guessing his point was that we're so accustomed to relatively comfortable living (especially here on HN), that we take valuable things for granted.
That leads to a sense of entitlement and confusion. We don't see how valuable the things we have are, so we end up thinking they should be "free", without realizing that nothing of value is actually free, because otherwise it wouldn't have value.
So if we experienced real hardship, our thinking would shift, and we'd appreciate valuable things more and we'd feel less entitled.
My point in another, heavily hissy-fit-downvoted message, was that everything of value costs something to produce, and therefore things can't just be handed out for free, because the things themselves are not actually free.
The same applies to "free money" in the form of Basic Income. People like to fantasize about not being personally responsible for their choices in life. Instead, they'd just get free money every month without having to work. "We have the technology!! Why aren't you giving me free stuff?! Damn capitalist oppressors!!"
People should think about how things work in the real world.
nothing of value is actually free, because otherwise it wouldn't have value.
That's not how it actually works; price is only bounded by the value is brings, not proportional to it. For example, air is literally indispensable to life, but good luck selling it.
things can't just be handed out for free, because the things themselves are not actually free.
Sure they can; they've always have! Roads, cops, healthcare, education; hell, you're European, you should know. And plenty of people already live without working.
Maybe expanding it to the levels of allowing everyone to not work is (still?) unrealistic, but claiming "things can't be handed out for free" is silly.
> That's not how it actually works; price is only bounded by the value is brings, not proportional to it
Price can be whatever the hell someone feels like asking for something, which already invalidates your claim. I can ask for $500k for a bucket of shit, but you probably wouldn't be willing to pay it.
But there's a set price already, staring you in the face, making your claim look silly.
Now what you might be getting at is that the price you're willing to pay is bounded by the value you perceive in something, and that's certainly correct.
People aren't willing to pay for air because they have all the air they could possibly want to use at their disposal already. Air just is there. The fact that you can't survive without air doesn't mean you assign an extremely high valuation to it. You don't even think about air, let alone how much you'd be willing to pay for some in some specific situation.
> Sure they can; they've always have! Roads, cops, healthcare, education; hell, you're European, you should know.
You're just showing your ignorance here. None of the things you listed are actually free, as in, without cost. All of the services you listed are provided by people working in exchange for money, and the money has to come from somewhere, and it's not free. Someone needs to do something productive to pay for all of that, and.. well, it's actually our hard-earned money they're spending. Go figure.
> Maybe expanding it to the levels of allowing everyone to not work is (still?) unrealistic
That much we can agree on.
> claiming "things can't be handed out for free" is silly
Nice strawman there. That's not a claim I've made. Read again.
> People like to fantasize about not being personally responsible for their choices in life. Instead, they'd just get free money every month without having to work. "We have the technology!! Why aren't you giving me free stuff?! Damn capitalist oppressors!!"
People also like to fantasize about what others would do within a Basic Income situation. Not themselves, of course, they're better than that. But all of the unwashed masses, why, they'd waste all they were given, and demand more!
> People should think about how things work in the real world.
People should also do a little research into what happens when people try it in the real world before spouting their mouth off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Pilot_Programmes ...but why ruin their own perfectly good superiority complex?
> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living
Right, because valuable things don't actually cost anything to produce! That's why they can just be (automatically) handed out by some big Magic Nanny-Fairy Machinery.
We should all just get whatever we want, because we deserve it!
Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint. This made me curious and I am really trying to understand what life experiences could have led you to have such views. I have a few questions that might help paint a clearer picture if you would be so kind? If you decide to answer please answer honestly.
Where did you grow up?
What were your parents jobs?
How much did your parents earn in yearly income?
Have you ever not eaten for multiple days on end because you couldn't afford to buy food?
What do you work as?
How much do you currently earn?
How do you personally calculate the cost and value of a good or service?
Do you understand the difference in the meaning of the words 'want' and 'need'?
Sure, anyone is allowed to hold such opinions. There is no right or wrong. The point is that opinions should be based on critical thought and then articulated in a way that reflects this. Take Marc Andreessen for example. Many of his views are very different to mine but he articulates them well and can back them up by showing his thought patterns. I respect, listen to and learn from him because of this even though I often do not agree with him.
All I was doing was pointing out that his life experiences are nothing but a fantasy to all but less than 1% of the world's population. I have never met someone who has no choice but to work in a whatever job they can find have such skewed views so your subsistence farmer proposition is highly if not completely improbable.
Sillygoose was born with more economic purchasing power than most people will ever achieve in their whole lifetime no matter how hard they work.
If sillygoose wants to be taken seriously he should first of all deal with the core premise of what we are talking about rather than make up something that he can then argue against even though it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. When he says "We should all just get whatever we want, because we deserve it!" he has made up a premise that no one else suggested to discredit a perfectly viable suggestion (UBI). That adds nothing to the conversation and deserves to be called out.
Where "skewed views" primarily means "opposing the idea of a universal basic income based on the moral principle that people should earn what they receive"? Because that's what I got out of his comment.
Exactly. How can someone who was born with more economic purchasing power than what most of the worlds population can achieve in a lifetime have the view that people have to earn what they receive? Did he earn the right to be born into a wealthy family? The world is not that simple and doesn't work on such one dimensional premises. Once that is acknowledged then there is a foundation upon which a discussion can be built.
Why not? Someone whose mother died giving birth to them can still believe murder is wrong. Heck, even someone who has consciously murdered another person as an adult can believe that. Humans are rarely capable of perfectly following their own moral codes, but that doesn't make that morality invalid. Especially when the "violation" happened as a circumstance of someone's birth that they themselves had no control over.
So I guess 2 + 2 makes whatever the hell you want it to?
> he articulates them well and can back them up by showing his thought patterns
What if his thought patterns are all fucked up, and completely detached from reality? Wouldn't it be better to change your views based on reason, logic and evidence?
I'll be throttled again real soon, if I can even post this one anymore, so I'll paste a reply that was meant for another comment of yours.
-------
> As I suspected you have never experienced any financial hardship. This is fine in itself but is very telling in how you perceive the world.
Having experienced it wouldn't change anything about what's rational and objective though.
> It's easy to calculate the value of something that has no direct value to you. It's called a cost benefit analysis and it is the corner stone of any business education but is applicable in many fields beyond business.
I can't help but wonder if you're trolling me, but here goes..
Since value is subjective, it cannot be calculated, because calculations require units, and there's no unit for how much you happen to want something at a particular moment. It also can't be measured or represented externally, outside of your mind.
If you're engaging in a cost / benefit -analysis, that implies that you do perceive value in something. That would be the "benefit" part. But you still can't put exact, objectively accurate numbers on the benefit.
You can, however, decide how many dollars you're willing to lose through a course of action, and you can expect to gain a number of dollars from it. But that only represents your subjective evaluation of how much something is worth to you, in terms of monetary units.
> It is however impossible to do this accurately if you are incapable of any thinking apart from ego-centric thinking.
That's insulting, especially coming from someone who's woefully unequipped to correct me on economic matters.
> If you do understand the difference then you are purposefully corrupting the discussion. Please stop doing this.
Yet another wild-ass accusation. Could you please stop?
> Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint.
I don't think it's a liberal versus conservative issue so much as an individualist versus collectivist issue. I think social conservatives, who have a predisposition towards thinking of communities in terms of reciprocal social obligations, have a role to play yet in pushing forward things like basic income.
Everyone has a role to play. I wouldn't think it healthy to ignore or disregard certain view points out of hand just because they are different to mine. That is not the point, rather it is important to base discussion in critical thought and not purely emotional reaction (though this has some value in itself too).
I don't ever recall reading either of you or GP's comments before so maybe I'm missing something. But since when is saying "producing things has a cost" a 'highly conservative' viewpoint?
"Producing things has a cost" is n obvious, meaningless assertion; the actual suggestion here is that everyone only deserves whatever they manage to produce. That's a fairly conservative viewpoint.
It's interesting how you can recognize an Anarcho-Capitalist viewpoint when you see one, but can't recognize that being an AnCap basically just boils down to being moral, sane, rational and consistent.
Most self-proclaimed "Anarchists" I come across are actually something like Marxists, nonsensically railing against evil capitalist oppressors, without wanting to even discuss what capitalism means.
I went to one of their gatherings once, and out of around twenty people, only one seemed rational and open-minded.
The rest were intent on figuring out what kind of "activism" they'd engage in, and didn't want to discuss whether what they were doing actually made any fucking sense at all.
> Every time there is any thread about anything remotely socially progressive you are there espousing your highly conservative viewpoint.
Oh? Well, from my point of view I'm espousing independent thinking. Questioning things is a sign of doing that.
> Where did you grow up? What were your parents jobs? How much did your parents earn in yearly income?
I grew up in Finland, in an upper-middle class family.
> Have you ever not eaten for multiple days on end because you couldn't afford to buy food? What do you work as?
Nope. A developer.
> How much do you currently earn?
Around three thousand euros per month, before taxes.
> How do you personally calculate the cost and value of a good or service?
I don't. Something either has value to me or it doesn't. If you've actually read my messages, you may have noticed me talking about how value is subjective. In a nutshell, Value is utility as a means towards an end.
For example, how do you "calculate" the value of something you don't want at all?
> Do you understand the difference in the meaning of the words 'want' and 'need'?
As I suspected you have never experienced any financial hardship. This is fine in itself but is very telling in how you perceive the world.
It's easy to calculate the value of something that has no direct value to you. It's called a cost benefit analysis and it is the corner stone of any business education but is applicable in many fields beyond business. It is however impossible to do this accurately if you are incapable of any thinking apart from ego-centric thinking.
It was not clear that you understood the difference between want and need from your post. If you do understand the difference then you are purposefully corrupting the discussion. Please stop doing this.
No, we should all be able to get whatever we need because for the first time in history, we can.
If individuals would like to pursue even more (ie the things they want), they should be free to do so, so long as those wants don't occlude the afore stated needs of others.
The interesting thing is that we (humanity) could now actually do this if we wanted to. In the past, the laws of physics (and our lack of knowledge) prevented this. Now only politics do. The "Magic Nanny-Fairy Machinery" is real, and it looks like in the end, all it will require to operate is natural resources. We are piss poor at equitably distributing preexisting natural resources amongst ourselves.
I'm guessing his point was that we're so accustomed to relatively comfortable living (especially here on HN), that we take valuable things for granted.
That leads to a sense of entitlement and confusion. We don't see how valuable the things we have are, so we end up thinking they should be "free", without realizing that nothing of value is actually free, because otherwise it wouldn't have value.
So if we experienced real hardship, our thinking would shift, and we'd appreciate valuable things more and we'd feel less entitled.
My point in another, heavily hissy-fit-downvoted message, was that everything of value costs something to produce, and therefore things can't just be handed out for free, because the things themselves are not actually free.
The same applies to "free money" in the form of Basic Income. People like to fantasize about not being personally responsible for their choices in life. Instead, they'd just get free money every month without having to work. "We have the technology!! Why aren't you giving me free stuff?! Damn capitalist oppressors!!"
People should think about how things work in the real world.
------
Suppose Service X costs you $500 per month to produce. If you keep giving it away for free, you're incurring a loss of $500 per month. That is not sustainable.
In a similar fashion, running the Nanny-Fairy-Machinery and producing things with it would definitely cost something, and that's why giving the output away for free wouldn't be sustainable. It's a Marxism-tinged pipe dream.
>Suppose Service X costs you $500 per month to produce. If you keep giving it away for free, you're incurring a loss of $500 per month. That is not sustainable.
>In a similar fashion, running the Nanny-Fairy-Machinery and producing things with it would definitely cost something, and that's why giving the output away for free wouldn't be sustainable. It's a Marxism-tinged pipe dream.
The reason any of this is being discussed is because the cost of producing basic needs should be going down because of automation, technology, etc. and won't be stuck at $500 or whatever value you choose over a long period of time. It's not impossible for Service X to get to the point where its cost to customers is not worth handling actual currency from its customers (which is what happens if the number you pay always remains at $500/mo).
Eventually we get to employ robots to do hard labor better than any human can for longer periods of time until we're paying fractions of a penny per hour in 'wages', initial cost and maintenance included. The ability to do this just wrecks any intuition we have about what it costs to produce things.
The idea is that $500 is not a fixed cost. First technology came for labor (ex. farming that used to take man-years of labour now takes hours and will soon require effectively 0 man -units), now its even coming for capital as well (a small lump of clever sand can perform what millions of dollars of capital equipment used to do). The only real fixed cost in the long run is going to be the natural resources required to produce things, which are here already. All that remains to us is to decided how to distribute these amongst ourselves.
Most of our political effort right now seems to be spent maintaining an ugly clot of laws and regulations attempting to artificially maintain that hypothetical $500 "cost" and not answering that deeper question.
Sillygoose should get whatever they want for playing the game of capitalism the luckiest and the best (but mostly the luckiest), and everybody else who is unluckier or less good should suffer, to provide for all of sillygoose's wants as cheaply as possible, rather than having their own basic needs met.
You know, if EU countries were genuinely concerned about their beloved citizens coming into contact with damaging chemicals, they could warn them on the evening news or something.
Hey there Dear Citizens, these products have been found
to cause cancer. Please avoid using them, and tell your
friends to avoid them too!
Best Regards,
Your Benevolent, Caring Overlords
Do you think that just might have an effect on the companies producing the toxic crap they force on us?
"Those naughty companies haven't stopped putting cancer-causing
chemicals in their products. You should still boycott them."
If they really cared, they could just keep informing the citizenry until they were safe.
Uh-huh, right, because EU governments have editorial control of the evening news, and also have bigger marketing budgets than the companies producing such chemicals.
Sure.
If they really cared, they could just keep informing the citizenry until they were safe.
No, if they really cared they would ban or strictly regulate the use of such chemicals.
But even if they didn't, surely news organizations would co-operate for a noble cause, yes?
> No, if they really cared they would ban or strictly regulate the use of such chemicals.
Sure, and if they really cared, they could do that even despite the TTIP, or they could reject or re-negotiate the TTIP. There's no way around that, regardless of whether you trust that governments are operating with our best interests at heart.
> But even if they didn't, surely news organizations would co-operate for a noble cause, yes?
As privately run corporations, news organizations go where the money is and I trust them even less than I trust the government. The number of ignoble causes they have cooperated on in the recent past leaves them with a very large credibility gap in my mind.
And while the government is not perfect, at least I live in a country where lobbying (aka bribery) is no where near as institutionalised and prevalent as you see in the U.S.
So while my government might not always have my best interests at heart, they are definitely more concerned and more trustworthy than a news organisation.
He didn't have a point. He just signaled that he can't think independently.
The video is a summary of what we were told happened, through the mainstream media. The story is absurd, which means it's not actually true! That, in turn, means that there was, in fact, a conspiracy!
Here's a few videos of an invisible plane hitting a building, which then collapses seemingly on its own: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWorDrTC0Qg .. but it wasn't on its own, of course, because an invisible plane hit it!
Feel free to start thinking for yourself any time now.
For the record, the video summarizes what we were told happened, through the media.
I shouldn't need to connect the dots for you, and you shouldn't dismiss me as some crackpot lunatic (even though you've been programmed to). Try independent thinking some time. It's pretty cool.
Alright, but if governments work for the people, as we're told, then they'd also erm.. "regulate" news organizations and make them actually serve the public. You know full well they could, if they wanted to.
That would include warning us of cancer-causing shit that we come into contact with all the damn time.
Strangely enough, they don't. What does that tell us?
There's probably nothing stopping the individual members from doing something about it and many of them probably will in the form of laws, not news. Sadly, assuming that it's evidenced based, it would be better if it was an EU wide thing.
Because there is freedom of transportation of goods within the EU, banning a substance in one country does nothing to prevent products containing the substance reaching consumers.
It might be forbidden to bar a product altogether, because you would be distorting the competitive landscape. That's the case with GMOs, there are a few temporary bans, but no solid and definitive legislation, because that would be forbidden.
This guy has 100k/yr in income but no savings at all? And his much highlighted Nissan 350 Turbo "pro street" was bought on credit? Where did the money go? He had people renting his house, presumably for a monthly profit? Did he fail to mention being a heroin addict, or where thd hell did all his money go?
He didn't sell his swanky car immediately, so he could rent a sucky apartment to avoid being homeless?
He gets attacked by a bunch of hoodlums who beat him up before he gets his gun out? But he somehow gets it out anyway.
Then his assailant pulls a gun right back at him, and instead of shooting in fear for his life, he proceeds to engage in a Mexican standoff (which the other guy is happy to maintain too!), and walks up to the guy to deliver a macho line, as if he's in a goddamn movie or something?
Then cops show up and somehow magically diffuse the Mexican standoff situation without using any force themselves?
And finally, there's a time when he's got thousands of dollars of "tax free" income (hah!) in the bank, but he's still homeless? Because having money in the bank sure beats having shelter?
I can appreciate your skepticism but it happened. I could have done a better job adding more detail to explain my story better so it made more sense to others. But I also didn't want to turn it into a small book.
I really don't care about attention, just figured others might want to read about a really rough spot in my life and might be able to relate somehow. HN points really don't matter to me, I just wanted to get this off of my chest after 6+ years.
Exactly. I am not monetizing my blog, looking to become famous, etc. I'm just a techie guy who wanted to tell his story. People will be skeptical and I encourage everyone to form their own opinions. In the end I was there and lived it and am so glad it's over.
I appreciate all of your taking time to read and comment whether positive to negative.
Your guess would be way off. I am neither of those things. Simply a person looking to share his experience. I have much better things to do with my time besides fabricating elaborate stories on the public Internet. Not trying to be defensive, but just saying that not everything on the Internet is rubbish.
I do however respect your opinion and view as an individual. That's your right, of course.
The state punishing people for not wearing seatbelts represents the idea that people need to be protected from themselves, by force.
If we go along that road, what's next? Should police officers be everywhere, ready to snatch a beer from an adult's hand if he seems to have had "too much" to drink already? What's too much? How do you know? The Nannier a state gets, the closer you are to complete tyranny.
Instead, we could just consider everyone personally responsible for their own choices.
- Didn't wear a seatbelt and got paralyzed in an accident? That's certainly tragic, but you're personally responsible for your choice to not wear a seatbelt.
- Didn't wear a seatbelt and nothing bad happened? Well good for you!
But the accidents are not usually single car incidents.
So, you are then leaving the driver of the other car having been in a fatal accident, because you did not want to wear a seatbelt.
If you want to drive on a private road without a seatbelt, drunk, whatever, that is entirely your choice. If you are likely to interact with other road users, then your choices impact others. (Note: your choices on a private road impact your family etc, but, you do not risk leaving someone feeling guilty because they had a car crash which killed someone)
It's a bit of a stretch to say that seatbelt tickets lead to tyranny--driving's mostly a privilege not a right. Seatbelts can affect other people due to an inability to control the vehicle after a collision, more likely use of emergency resources, etc. I generally agree with the sentiment about nanny states, though
Its a cause of death. We like to avoid those. And we know multicellular organisms exist that can maintain their telomeres and avoid senescence.
We are almost certainly going to be able to genetically engineer that into future people at some point, among a lot of other useful things. Dunno if we are going to manage to get gene therapy that can alter living humans so drastically before they die, though. And who knows when it will happen, just that it almost certainly will, unless we blow ourselves up.
This is not strictly true; aging is much like having AIDS -- it lets actual causes of death come in and kill you. Nobody ever died (directly) of AIDS, and nobody's ever died of old age either.
Sometimes I feel we should cure living. I would prefer to live only 70 years but fully, having built good human relationships, knowing how to learn, rather than 100 unfulfilled ones.
Most young people, including myself, do tend to think they would like to live until X years of age. Getting to know some older people, though, it's interesting how we tend to see things differently when we live that many years. I know quite a few people in their late 60s and I think they have Many good years left to enjoy their hard-earned retirement, watch their kids and grandkids grow up, or is some cases continue to do great work.
Ha, I hope I didn't sound like I rejected being 'old' or ageist. I too grew up[1] to be very fond of people of any age and love their perspective and experiences (or lack thereof)[2]. Nor to take away people opportunity to enjoy their closed ones. But I've seen many times broken lives out of misunderstandings that weren't related to biology or aging. When you're almost unable to relate to your family or couldn't build one, you have other things to improve rather than aging.
[1] although very late, maybe on average it's a coming of age thing.
[2] being into computer and technology, I think we have a special relationship to fads, newness, communication and history that makes us (at least I) interested in others in weird ways. How people managed to solve problems or live in a different context, what was the same, what really changed for them as a human.
Now all those companies are bogged down by Angular, but feel like ejecting it would be too costly. Elsewhere, lots of new developers are introduced to Angular and invest time and effort into learning it because they don't know any better.
Herd mentality is a big problem. It's basically the polar opposite of thinking for yourself, and as such, extremely detrimental in other aspects too.