I'm not sure how this contradicts, or even has anything to do with the parent post. It seems like you're reading excessively far into a turn-of-phrase.
It is relevant to the parent post because there's legitimate reason for the poor to have animus against the rich, and not vice versa. The parent post is attempting to treat "poor" and "rich" as something like rival sports teams that are on equal footing, because that's required to criticize the poor mad at the rich in the same way you'd criticize the rich mad at the poor.
>It is relevant to the parent post because there's legitimate reason for the poor to have animus against the rich, and not vice versa
The parent poster is specifically referring to a specific type of unfounded animus. Namely: having no argument other than "they have more money than me" to justify said animus.
The parent poster wrote "poor people who have nothing more to hate on rich people about than that they have money", which sounds like well-founded animus to me.
Here's a way to think about it - what is the corresponding thing for the rich to hate on the poor for? Are the rich jealous of not having money? Are they envious of those who cannot pay more for housing simply because a building of questionable merit faces it (one of the examples given in the article)? How is that founded? The rich can easily get themselves into that position, should they be desirous of it.
There is an arguable parallel in the rich who see the poor as being a moral failure for merely not having money and the poor who see the rich as being a moral failure for merely having money, but a) I think the poor have a better claim to well-foundedness there, even if it is slight, in that the rich quite clearly have the ability to stop having money with a snap of their fingers where the poor do not obviously have the ability to start having money, and b) the article does not seem to say that merely having money is a moral failure - at best it says that misusing money is a moral failure.
>The parent poster wrote "poor people who have nothing more to hate on rich people about than that they have money", which sounds like well-founded animus to me.
Let me make sure I understand, because I fear we may be talking past each other.
Are you suggesting that the simple fact that one has more money than you is sufficient to justify animus?
(I'm happy to discuss the rest of your post once we clear up this particular point; it seems fundamental.)
I think it counts as logically reasoned animus, certainly much more so than animus towards fans of an opposing sports team. Whether it's justified is a question of one's particular moral worldview, but there are coherent ways to justify it, especially if you change it from merely having more money than the opinion-haver to having money past a certain point, usually correlated in some way to one's practical needs. It gets even stronger if you change it to those who keep money for the sake of keeping money or spend it in vain ways instead of putting it to good use, where there are lots of possible definitions of "good."
(I'm not totally sure where my own worldview lies, for what it's worth. Almost certainly the strongest form, and almost certainly not the one you stated. But I think it is defensible that some worldviews believe all of these and they are not the worldviews of people too irrational to be worth understanding.)
> Are you suggesting that the simple fact that one has more money than you is sufficient to justify animus?
Not if the difference is trivial, but absolutely when it is as enormous and as unmotivated as it often is. Why would it be strange that obviously unfair inequality would be a source of animus?
Saying "I hate you for having more than me and I want your stuff" is just straight up jealousy, and it should be easy to understand why wealthy people respond with hostility to this, creating a negative feedback loop.
Your quote is a straw man, but what does it matter if jealousy is involved or not? You can disregard any animosity stemming from social injustices with that logic. Women are just straight up jealous because men are paid more. Blacks are just straight up jealous because whites have longer life expectancy. LGBTs are just straight up jealous because straight cis people don’t have to conceal a central part of who they are.
I think my interpretation of the thread was that anger towards people with money just for having money was legitimate. If your thought is that those people are actively retarding the ability of the poor to improve their situation, then I think you have some ground to stand on, but otherwise I don't think it is reasonable. I think it's ok to wish things were different; I think it's ok to be angry at a system; I think it's ok to be angry at people who have personally done you wrong; but I don't think it's ok to be angry at people who haven't personally done you wrong just because they have something you don't. I actually happen to fall into one of those minority groups that you mentioned, and I don't hate the other people that can do things that I can't; I hate the system and the people perpetuating the stupidity. That may predominantly be composed of people in that other group, but it is certainly not anywhere near all of them, and I have the ability to make that distinction and avoid prejudgements. That being said, all of that nuance went unstated in my original post, so my bad.
When (enough of) the people who benefit most from a system that's already biased in their favor unironically tell the folks on the far end of that benefit curve that they just need to work harder, they had the same opportunities as anyone else, it's their own fault, or whatever, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable for the people on the receiving end of that "wisdom" to develop a general sort of resentment for their "betters."
"Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed." — Herman Melville
> I don't think it's ok to be angry at people who haven't personally done you wrong just because they have something you don't
The difference with wealth is that you can choose to become unwealthy on a moment's notice. So each day you remain wealthy is, itself, a choice. And the process of becoming unwealthy itself has direct benefits for the poor.
A white person cannot choose to become black and thereby remove oppression. A straight person who does not marry does not thereby yield the ability to marry to a gay couple. Even someone assigned male at birth who decides to present as female does not get to transfer her former male privilege to anyone in the process.
But someone who can afford a $10M condo that is as functional as (being generous) a $1M condo could directly transfer that $9M to people who don't have a place to live at all. So their choice not to do that—their choice to merely have money—is a decision we can justly evaluate morally, in a way we cannot evaluate merely having white skin or male presentation morally.
In my religious tradition, in our ritual confession of our faults, we apologize "for what I have done and for what I have failed to do." There is a story of a rich man who dutifully kept the ancient laws but refused to sell his possessions to the poor, and chose his possessions over the way of the religion. To remain rich (at least beyond one's needs and beyond the needs of one's credible plans to help the world) is an active choice, and can be criticized as any other choice.
I've noticed that a lot of the animus that the more-fortunate of us humans have against the less-fortunate is based in a very deeply-hidden, but very present understanding that it could have easily been you. Like, you have to distance yourself from unfortunate circumstances, lest you become victim to them.
This is just a denial of the reality that no one is really given a choice about the circumstances of their lives. That goes for abilities and outcomes. It should be self-evident, that all men are created equal - not in ability or outcome, but in the fact that no one has a choice in the hand they are dealt.
The less-fortunate you are, the more grievances you have - legitimate grievances. My original post wasn't meant to de-legitimize anyone's founded grievances. I'm just starting to see this in these types of discussions, both online and irl, that the more we rail against members of difference classes, the more rigid those class structures become. Of course this is a slippery slope to telling people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. That's not what I mean either.
edit: I got a little (ok, a lot) carried away with the language, and it definitely detracted from my point, and added nothing to the conversation.
Whatever point you were trying to make could perfectly well have been made without "some graduate student bourgeoisie cunt".
Seriously, what does that add here? It was already perfectly unambiguous you find her and her perspective abhorrent. Such hateful vulgarity actually detracts from your argument, IMO; you come across as rageful, not rational.
EDIT: Parent comment was edited to remove the quoted bit, and also significantly for tone, before being flagged to death.
> Plenty of underprivileged people in the world would literally kill for the chance to live in a mcmansion. I wouldn't, but that's me. I won't begrudge someone who does.
So this gets complicated. Plenty of underprivileged people would kill for the change to have a decent and fair shot at life with a reliable roof over their heads, and certainly I wouldn't begrudge them that. But there are also plenty of people who are stably renting a small apartment or own a small one-family house in the suburbs who would also kill for a McMansion, and I think the unfortunate but fair judgment of those people is that, were they rich, they'd behave in the ways we stereotypically dislike the rich for. The fact that they do not because they cannot is not, I think, itself a reason to avoid making that judgment.
That turn of phrase is the key indicator in the original comment. It means they think of poverty and wealth as unrelated phenomena. Generally it is our most casual statements that say the most about our underlying assumptions.
I think people are talking past each other when discussing "unnaturalness". Opponents of homosexuality often use the word "unnatural" in the sense of "not in humankind's nature". This is distinct from "unnatural" as "not occurring in nature".
The argument is more like "eating dirt is okay for earthworms, but it's unnatural for humans", so appeal to the behavior of other animals completely misses the point.
This is a profoundly metaphysical debate about the nature of a life well-lived and the nature of a healthy society. Whatever one thinks of it, that's the level on which it ought to be discussed.
It should be made clear that "unnaturalness", when used by opponents of homosexuality (and in many other debates of moralistic kind), is used in a question-begging way which carries no information at all and is nothing more than a shorthand for "I don't like it and I think it's bad". But, alas, it does sound like it has some meaning beyond that, which is why it's used in debates in a first place.
I think they're talking about spiritual aberration, and not merely what's biologically common for humans. By natural people mean a perspective rightness, as opposed to merely some notion of statistical frequency.
Zoom is objectively a good software solution but being de facto forced to install yet another piece of software just to take business meetings has left a sour taste in my mouth.
It's objectively impressive that they managed to "force" me to install software. Hats off... but I plan on ditching them as soon as a viable alternative appears.
I have no real point here, other than this: I wonder if my sentiment is general, and whether or not this might bite them later down the road? Probably not.
I like HN because you see such a diversity of views and realize there's no "best" solution out there. So many people here complain that everything is run through the browser or Electron and that nobody makes native apps anymore. Here's Zoom with a native app and someone complains that they _have_ to install something new.
I suspect the desire to not install new software is the dominant market position (HN is clearly biased sample).
It’s interesting. I think the bias against app installs is a psychological holdover from the “Add/Remove Programs” era of Windows where a program could install weird drivers, CPU-sucking daemons, software license protection crap—once you finally open the app up—a bloated and confusing GUI that ignores the platform’s sensible UI rules.
iPhone apps aren’t perfect but at least you know that they’ll uninstall cleanly and completely.
Generally I prefer not to install apps, but with zoom the cost of installing the apps is worth the value it provides, which is good sound, good screen sharing, good video, all of that even with lowish bandwidth, and without eating all my memory and CPU.
I spent 5 mins installing it once and it becomes transparent and reliable.
>Zoom is objectively a good software solution but being de facto forced to install yet another piece of software just to take business meetings has left a sour taste in my mouth.
No kidding. I can't tell conferencing clients apart anymore. I have the following installed: GotoMeeting, WebEX, JoinMe, Zoom, Hangouts Meet, BlueJeans and every other week I'll get invited to a meeting hosted by yet another one (last week someone hosted a meeting with one called 'ringcentral'). They are all about the same, and I can't tell them apart anymore.
Just want to warn people about RingCentral. We were a paying customer for years but usage was quite low so we decided to replace it with Twilio for telephony and Zoom for video conferencing. Saves us $100/Mo or so.
I called RingCentral to cancel the service (can’t cancel online) and was assured we wouldn’t be billed again. What do you know, we were indeed billed again. I called in to dispute this and was told they had no record of my previous call and my service was not canceled. They refused to refund the money. I hung up and called back 1 minute later. They changed my security questions so that nobody would be able to talk to me about my account. I ended up filing a chargeback.
I thought so too ... but everyone I work with at other companies has switched to zoom in the last 24 months ... so it really feels like the last install needed for teleconferencing. And it's far better than the web-based solutions.
Jitsi Meet is not perfect, but better about this. It doesn't make a P2P mesh (where I have the same experience, parts will always fail), but instead WebRTC connections to central servers that distribute the streams, so each participant has only one upstream. They have a public testing instance on https://meet.jit.si/, but running your own is better.
Won't you feel the same way about the next viable alternative forcing you to install yet another piece of software? (unless someone completely figures out something that's entirely browser-based)
I really hate the way zoom on full screen works on macos (while listening to a meeting but also working on a laptop). Trying to switch and it nmitr to answer a question is still fairly painful.
> Incidentally, it's quite common that people can't be trusted to make good choices about such things.
How much of that is being constantly bombarded with marketing (psychological priming) that brainwashes us into making poor decisions? Totally agree though, we as humans are our own worst enemies.
Marketing is not just psychological priming - it's also, first and foremost, dishonest communication. Given its prevalence today, it's getting difficult to expect adults to always make right decisions if most of their information sources are garbage.
I use go daily and have come to really like it, however I van completely relate to your pain points. I think there's a lot of confusion over the "go is simple" meme. Go is simple, but it's not easy.
The price one pays for simplicity is the need to discover and master various design patterns; it requires a bit of planning beyond syntax and module exports. It took me quite a bit of time before I felt downright fluent in Go.
I did get there, and I really enjoy the language, but I wasn't immediately productive.
I characterize it this way: Many people who have learned lots of languages are used to having a problem, and then poking through the new language for the feature that solves the problem. Languages designed by and used by these people tend to grow lots and lots of features.
In Go, you are expected to use the features that exist to accomplish the goal, so instead of knowing a ton of features at a somewhat surface level, you need to learn what is there fairly intimately, and use them to their full effect. For a simple example, there's no such thing as "class methods" in Go, so obviously anything best solved via class methods is impossible, right? Except of course it has "class methods". Class methods are just methods that don't reference the instance itself. Go doesn't have any syntactic label for them, but they exist just fine and I make fairly heavy use of them.
Personally, when I read someone complaining that they tried Go and it was "full of boilerplate, repetitive code everywhere and they kept having to copy&paste functions" that they were either A: in the completely wrong domain (see my other comment about how I don't think Go is good for math at all), or B: they didn't do this and were probably trying to jam a map/filter/reduce-heavy workflow, or an inheritance-heavy design, or something else not native to Go, into Go. My code isn't particularly repetitive. Even the error-handling in my mature code tends to be between 1/3-1/2 not "just return the error". (In prototyping it often starts out that way, but by the time I ship something, there's usually a lot more going on.)
As another for instance, you really need to learn to use interfaces to their fullest, as integrated into the type system. You can put methods on anything, even functions or other non-struct types, and anything with methods can conform to an interface. It's really helpful to be able to do that. If you reject all these options as "that's not how I want to design", you're in for a bad time.
Bizarrely, despite their incredible distance on my internal "map of all programming languages", this is one thing Go and Haskell kind of share in common, and something I took from my experiences with Haskell, where you are also handed a certain set of tools and expected to make them work. If you try to take Haskell and force it to be an object-oriented language, you're gonna have a bad time, and you'll complain about how stupid typeclasses are and how stupid immutable data is and how stupid it is that all your code has to be written in IO so why is it even separated out and all kinds of other things. But the solution is to learn how to actually do things the Haskell way, at which point you'll find that while it may not be the best choice for everything, it certainly has some interesting things to say. Go actually does too, around the virtues of structural typing and the privileging of composition over inheritance. It's much less profound than what Haskell has to say, but it's still something.
Neither Go nor Haskell are unique in this characteristic. You really ought to come in to every language you learn with the viewpoint to learning how it does things, rather than coming in and trying to make it be some other language. It's just the simple languages that tend to really put this in your face. The languages with bazillions of features usually have something on offer that looks close enough to what you want that you can force your way through into turning the language into a different language. (And when you ponder what it looks like when you've got a team of 50 people doing that, you start to see some of what Go is designed to fix.)
If I could upvote this twice, I would. You've managed to put words on something I've been struggling to articulate.
Your point about using Go's type system (esp. interfaces) rings particularly true. When I finally figured out how to effectively use the type system, I suddenly found myself writing extremely malleable code. You can move data types and functions around quite freely, and this makes it easy to design & refactor without losing your place.
The flip side, as you say, is that extreme flexibility requires you to build your own skeleton.
BTW, are you github.com/thejerf? If so, I've contributed to Suture, and use it quite often, so thanks for that.
Right, but I'm asking if FlatBuffers' approach to encoding is similar to Cap'n Proto. It seems like the answer is "yes", but I might be missing something.
1) I'm the author of Cap'n Proto; I'm probably biased.
2) A lot could have changed since 2014. (Though, obviously, serialization formats need to be backwards-compatible which limits the amount they can change...)
Cool, thanks for this! I'm happily using Cap'n Proto in a side project, and so far have really enjoyed working with it. It's a really impressive piece of engineering.
I had to truncate the title due to character limitations. Full title is: The Repatriation of Foreign Fighters and Their Families: Options, Obligations, Morality and Long-Term Thinking
Abstract:
As Islamic State (IS) loses control of its so-called Caliphate, the question on what to do with foreign fighters and their families has become more pertinent. The announcement of the US withdrawal from Syria in December, as well as Trump’s tweets mid-February that the US would release 800 fighters captured in Syria if its allies would not take them back, has led to even more urgency. In this Perspective we will discuss the issue of the (possible) repatriation of foreign fighters and their families, especially from Syria, addressing several options, and taking into account legal, moral and (long-term) security perspectives.
At the risk of sounding all "woo-woo", this statement bears some qualification.
How do you define existence, here? Are you equating it with consciousness? Surely your constituent parts (atoms, molecules, particles, etc) existed before your consciousness, and continue to do so afterwards.
I think you'll also agree that the arrangement of matter and energy you call "your life" is regulated by natural processes.
In principle, it's possible for the thing you call "your life" to be a brief window within some larger process (a meta-life, if you will) of which you have no recollection.
I don't know if I believe any of this to be true, but metaphysically speaking, it's not at all obvious that we "didn't exist before birth".
>How do you define existence, here? Are you equating it with consciousness?
Yeah, I, for one, equate it with consciousness. I could not give less fucks if my "atoms, molecules, particles" existed before me or will exist after me.
I want the whole conscious being, able to kiss, hug, think, love, hurt, eat a steak, and so on to extend.
>I think you'll also agree that the arrangement of matter and energy you call "your life" is regulated by natural processes.
In principle, it's possible for the thing you call "your life" to be a brief window within some larger process (a meta-life, if you will) of which you have no recollection.
If I don't have "recollection", then I still don't care.
No, I've got the point being missed. I just don't find the distinction useful at all.
The whole point being made was that "metaphysically speaking, it's not at all obvious that we "didn't exist before birth".
Which I say is irrelevant, if we need to distort "exist" so much as to mean some "larger processes" or our "atoms and molecules" existing.
Metaphysically speaking it might not be obvious, but the way the grandparent, me, and almost everybody else uses the term existence (i.e. regarding the conscious person, or at least their soul) it's obvious that we very much do not exist.
