I am going to disagree with almost all of the advice about studying abroad or joining a club. Those are well-intended, but they are addressing the symptoms, not the cause. Judging from these descriptions:
> I’m socially anxious and keep to myself
> small talk tends to bore me
> it’s exhausting always having to text them to hang out, if I don’t then we never talk again
It's highly possible that you have undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. I say this because I am reading a book right now about ASD[0] and a lot of this is ringing true, especially the part about being confused why friends are dropping you. Speak to a psychologist and see what they think (or read the book first, and then speak to them). I am 30 now and am just cluing in that I might be on the spectrum, and oh boy do I wish I had caught it when I was younger. (It's also possible that you don't have ASD but some other condition like avoidant personality disorder, but whatever it is, it is so much easier to solve it once you've figured it out.)
By that measure, the people who had their life savings in FTX (and Celsius and Luna before that) have certainly succeeded.
Investing in total-market index funds is the single best strategy for the average investor. (In fact it's so good there's a proof! [1]) If you invested $10000 in the total US market in 1992 (30 years ago) and never touched it again, your inflation-adjusted balance today would be $72452 [2]. That's an insane 7x of real growth that requires absolutely no effort on your part. Even if you did a more conservative mix of 60% stock and 40% bond (VBMFX) you would have 4.5x real growth.
Recently I've been reading Vasily Grossman's A Writer At War, which is a collection of his journals from the Eastern Front, and the depths of Stalin's brutality are staggering. In the Battle of Stalingrad he forbade that any citizens flee the city since he thought it would motivate the troops, and special battalions were set up behind the front line to shoot any who retreated. In the battle itself Soviet snipers targeted the German water carriers, and so the Germans bribed children with food to fetch water for them, who were promptly shot since any collaboration with the enemy was punished with death.
Stalin also sent the NKVD to the Spanish Civil War to mostly root out “trotskyites and anarchists” from the Republican side(!) rather than against the Falange.
This is what disillusioned leftists who saw it first hand (like George Orwell) with the USSR
Unsubstantiated claim. He is used as a negative advertisement of Soviet era.
If you read carefull the trial in Nuernberg, Germany was not punished at all and they were worse.
For me he showd disrespect for his comrades. The battle of Kursk had much more casualties that it needed to be. The same happens for the war in total. He was completely incapable to be a leader. Useless and he did not care for his country. He also demonized communism and was in reality a dictator that pulled the right strings to become leader of a party (exactly what happens with leaders usually). He was also a racist and mass exterminated people. If he was different may the bloodshed of WWII would be prevented.
But the same was Pinochet and the western media covered all his crimes.
"For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that, when a Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress.[8] This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law."
I'm not sure what you mean by this, the crimes of Stalin are probably over exposed in Western media, if anything. There's no shortage of people eager to inform you that Stalin killed people, even if it's completely off topic!
They were determined to not surrender. This is not brutal. The enemy was killing kids and babies just because.
It was a very right decision and should be thanked by all free people for their sacrifice.
I understand and perhaps admire the GNU project's insistence on being blob-free, but that also means Guix won't run out of the box on 99% of all people's computers. The options are buy (old) hardware that doesn't need blobs (which sometimes isn't even possible), or compile the default kernel to include the binary firmware yourself (which the Guix documentation won't explain for ideological reasons). Both of these will sadly limit the appeal of this distribution to enthusiasts-only, which is unfortunate since Guix probably has the most advanced package manager of any Linux system.
Right, but now you have two separate operating systems to manage which are different at the kernel level (as your host is probably linux, bsd, esxi, etc.) This means you often have to manage twice the amount of tooling, documentation, scripts, etc. and makes it impractical for many cases.
There's already hundreds of distributions with binary blobs. It is very important that at least a few respect user's freedom. So it's great that Guix exists and that it has a serious stance against secret blobs.
The Turris Omnia and soon-to-be Turris Mox are the only ones that I'm aware of. I know Linksys has a special line of WRT "open source ready" routers that are supposedly OpenWRT compatible, but the Amazon reviews are completely trash. They're a little more pricey, but my next router will be a Turris.
> From a public relations standpoint, Apple had always been on the side of privacy advocates and civil libertarians.
Oh give me a break. Apple only cares about American user privacy, and only then because it aligns with their business interests. Where is the oh-so-noble Tim Cook protesting the heinous civil rights and privacy violations in the business they do in China? Nowhere. Apple only cares about user privacy so much as it makes them money - in the US that means resisting the government, and in China it means hopping into bed with Big Daddy Xi.
Edit: For example, Snowden leaked an NSA slide saying that Apple had given in to cooperate with Prism, but Apple denied-denied-denied as soon as the news broke. It was only post-Snowden, when privacy could be monetized, that Apple suddenly started to care.
You're downvoted because (ignoring for now the Apple fanboys who can't abide any criticism of Apple) your edit is wrong as explained elsewhere in these comments. Your initial China point is spot on.
... because doing so will hurt their competitors and not them. I'm glad for Apple's focus on privacy these days, but let's not chalk it up to altruism.
Even with secure boot disabled you can't install Linux on the internal SSD. Installing Linux on a Mac has already been very flaky for the last few years, but now is impossible.
The likely problem is a lack of driver support for using the T2 as an SSD controller. I don’t think, based on Apple’s white paper, that they did anything to explicitly block Linux from accessing the internal SSD - it just needs to go through the T2 for that.
Hopefully someone is working on the necessary driver support - these laptops are still very new so maybe nobody has gotten around to it yet.
Apple is actively blocking unsigned software from accessing the internal storage as a security measure and providing no means to add allowed keys. Its possible there is a defect in this security that could be exploited but it would be explicitly a bug and would be liable to be patched in the next version of the software. You have completely misread the situation. This is apple taking over your machine while still expecting you to pay for it.
I am deeply disturbed by what we are seeing in China. The Great Firewall, massive concentration camps in Xinjiang, a new "social credit" system - I think the dystopia of 1984 is becoming a reality. I am afraid that as a society we have the complacency that the "good guys" - democracy, human rights, freedom - will always win. Stalinism and facism eventually fell, but the Communist Party of China is still going strong, and seems to be more than able to extend its grip to the 21st century.
This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production. Whether it be the Chinese Government or Amazon, concentrated power leads that power to make anti social decisions. Harm to the environment, harm to individuals, and harm to society can be incentivized by concentration of power.
I believe a vitally important way to fight those powers is to build independent people-first power. We can do it. Our earth is so productive now that it’s possible to live like a king without hurting others. But we must abstain from buying this cheap plastic garbage like the product the woman found the note in. Buying products we know will become waste, or whose workers we can’t account for, means we are directly supporting the destruction of the earth and of society.
We have to stand up. We must. There is no other way to change. Not voting, not blogging. We must stop being consumers of harmful products and use our money to support organizations that truly represent change.
>This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production.
Absolutely. The reasons for social control/ownership of the means of production are more than economic, it is a question of democracy. Voting isn't good enough, it helps people control the part of the power that is in the hands of the government, but not the rest. The more power is in the hands of corporations, the less power is in the hands of people. Eventually, even in "western democracies" (let alone authoritarian nations), much of the power answers to an elite few and not to the people. One even reconsiders whether to truly call them "democracies" when this is the case.
Social ownership / common control of the means of production lets the people democratically decide how to best use those resources and those means to the best ends, rather than to the benefit of a select elite, whose interests may or may not, by pure coincidence, align with those of the general public. The latter system is broken by design.
>> it is so important that the people control the means of production
> Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too - they aren’t part of the government.
You left out a very important word from your quote of the GP that's critical to the GP's meaning. I quoted him more fully and emphasized the unquoted word, the, above.
The people != some random group of people who aren't part of the government. The people should be understood as all the people of the nation. "People," by itself, could be a small (or large) group of oligarchs. Those are very different things.
> Should we mandate that workers own 50% of every corporation?
> Decision making is going to be much harder as you have to poll the workers to get a majority vote.
Democracies have a lot of experience with representative bodies that can support faster decision-making while still having some accountability to the people. It's a straw-man to to present worker representation as being direct democracy for every decision.
> The people != some random group of people who aren't part of the government. The people should be understood as all the people of the nation. "People," by itself, could be a small (or large) group of oligarchs. Those are very different things.
That’s the thing. Anyone can be a shareholder of a corporation. There is nothing preventing anyone from buying shares. You just have to be willing to risk your money to buy said shares that may or may not yield any returns - i.e. risk throwing away your money.
> Democracies have a lot of experience with representative bodies that can support faster decision-making while still having some accountability to the people. It's a straw-man to to present worker representation as being direct democracy for every decision.
On a separate note, THE people already have democratic control over the most powerful organization in the land, their government.
The government can unilaterally (corporations have no real say) set laws and even break up corporations or even just outright seize them (i.e. nationalization).
> That’s the thing. Anyone can be a shareholder of a corporation. There is nothing preventing anyone from buying shares.
Are you serious? There's nothing preventing anyone from buying shares, except having lots of money to spare. The people include a great many who don't. That's the thing.
Then you have things like share classes with massively disproportionate voting power and individuals with massively more money than is typical.
The people aren't going to find representation and control through shareholding.
> On a separate note, THE people already have democratic control over the most powerful organization in the land, their government.
One difficulty with the current system is that the actions the people can take to influence the government are too remote from the use of that government's power, so in the end it does a poor job diffusing the "concentrated power" that the GGGP post was talking about. This is true especially in the present day, when that "concentrated power" has learned to wield its influence to blunt the people's electoral influence over the government.
> Guess it’s the same everywhere. Downvotes if you disagree.
BTW, if you're not aware, I can't downvote you.
I doubt the downvotes are due to an ideological disagreement or anything like that. If I had to guess the reason, it's that the ideas you're expressing here just don't have much merit and are pretty tone deaf to boot. They're not that much different than saying a penniless, starving man should just buy food, which you personally find pretty affordable as a well-compensated software engineer.
You can buy stock with just a few hundred dollars ...
You of course won’t have much voting power but you aren’t risking all that much money. If you have little to no money in it ... then you should have little to no say in how they conduct their business - it’s none of your business; Would you want random strangers to get a say in how you spend your time and money?
Regardless, no one buys stock to “have influence”. People buy stock to (ultimately) make money.
If said shareholders and their corporations are doing things that are harmful to society at large ... that’s what the government and the laws they enforce are for.
> has learned to wield its influence to blunt the people's electoral influence over the government.
Also Amazon’s shareholders do not democratically control the company, so most shareholders are beholden to the board of directors and the few very wealthy large shareholders.
While I do not propose mandatory changes, I think it would behoove us to consider how current power structures affect our freedom and the freedom of others. Amazon has a lot of power over us.
What I advocate is that, if we find the current arrangement problematic, we construct alternative power structures that are democratic in nature. And we use those power structures in lieu of centralized corporate power.
If a single democratically operated company got very large and used its power in anti social ways, I would again advocate that people consider seriously the affects of that power and change their support as needed.
I do think, however, that the “problem” of large democratically controlled powers is a better problem to have than large centrally controlled powers, so it would be an improvement nonetheless.
Ideally, the democratic corporations would also make collective decisions through a congress of rotating company representatives. This would provide some forcing function that would reduce anti social behavior in a single corporation, at the risk of trade embargoes.
We kind of already have that in that democratically elected government officials have the power to unilaterally (without corporations having a say) set laws to constrain the behavior of corporations.
Problem is most of the people don’t elect officials that do so - at least according to some people’s standards.
Institutional Ownership in Amazon is 58% - so arguably most of Amazon's shares aren't owned by people. Of course, eventually all this bottoms out in people....
>Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too
This is a vacuous truth. Technically, everything is people, governments are people, repressive megacorps are people, oil sheiks are people. Obviously that's not what the grandparent meant.
>This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production
The irony of this is palpable. The communist government, who got there trumpeting this exact ideology, would be stopped by the exact same thing? Is this the case of those who dont know history are doomed to repeat it?
"the people controlling the means of production" seems to be a much more basic demand than full-blown socialism or communism or a one-party state. I could also imply worker-owned factories or unions.
If that is already problematic, then this would imply to me that the means of production should never be controlled by the people who do the actual work, otherwise we'd get an authoritarian outcome - which seems a pretty authoritarian statement in itself.
>> This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production
> The communist government, who got there trumpeting this exact ideology, would be stopped by the exact same thing? Is this the case of those who dont know history are doomed to repeat it?
To be fair to the GP, that's not the "exact [same] ideology" it's more like the "exact same goal." There are different ways of achieving the same goal, and obviously the methods touted by the CCP in this respect are completely bankrupt (i.e. control by the people == control by a revolutionary one-party state that does not tolerate dissent).
Like how western CEOs pulled out of the Saudi conference... but sent other employees as representatives. They want to look like they are opting out, but they still have every intention of being “in”.
Or maybe taking to their "friends" in the royal family about how MBS is a liability and you know ought to go.
I used to work for a big Consulting engineer who did a lot of work in the middle east and we had our friends in high places (you can probably guess who I worked for)
Bechtel, Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root (now KBR), and Schlumbarger are among the larger energy-projects engineering firms in the US. For the UK, BP.
Even HN is generally overflowing with pro-authoritarian sentiment and people lamenting the slow pace of western governments when you talk about how good Singapore's healthcare is, how many opportunities there are for genetics based medicine research in China, etc, etc.
The power that lets a government steamroll opposition and quarreling over $good_thing can also be used to steamroll opposition to $bad_thing and when everyone's used to seeing the government steamroll opposition for $good_thing they don't ask questions when they see that power used for $bad_thing.
That's true. And the question - IMO worth investigating - is, is there a way to structure the system so that "steamrolling opposition and quarreling" over $good_thing is easier, while doing the same over $bad_thin is difficult? Maybe there isn't, but did we look at it hard enough? Especially that the inability of the western world to create and maintain infrastructure is starting to turn into a huge risk.
That, mind you, merely shifts the problem to "make governance-groups smaller". But no politician wants to reduce their job responsibilities such that they now govern fewer people, that's bad for their egos and their resumes.
And nobody seems to have figured out how to refactor the law so that ontology (which is finicky, takes lots of resources to get right, and could be applied globally, even if different nations will want some extra nouns and verbs for their own use) and preferences (which ought be as local as possible) are cleanly separated and the former are easily reusable across nations without obligating that such nations come to global consensus on the latter. Instead, every sovereign entity (USA and EU, not France nor Florida) is its own pile of spaghetti-code.
A steamroller is a steamroller; if all we have are steamrollers, then the only protection that $good has, is might. And I think most would agree that might shouldn't make right. That's why it's important to move away from needing global consensus on questions of law. Maybe even multiple courts could compete for customers in the same geographical areas. (But apparently the nonexistence of a monopoly in the dispute-resolution market - such a monopoly being the definition of "government" - is sacrilegious to most.)
That's an... interesting point, and maybe decentralizing law a bit would help create better societies (if people were free to move to where the law matches their beliefs), but we're talking infrastructure projects here. The kind that can require resources of whole cities to be completed, and that serve even more people. You can't avoid having to deal with many people somehow - either getting them all to agree, or overruling them by fiat.
> But apparently the nonexistence of a monopoly in the dispute-resolution market - such a monopoly being the definition of "government" - is sacrilegious to most.
It's not sacrilegious. It's just smart. A "monopoly in the dispute-resolution market", i.e. a government, is both a) something that groups of humans naturally gravitate towards as they grow, and b) an efficient solution to whole lot of problems of coordination between people.
In another thread, HN is discussing Trump's attempt at setting up a trade war. Although I honestly don't think the Kissinger school cares one bit about other people's genocides, or about dictatorships in other countries, (you've heard the quotes about how some US politicians wish our government would be more like China's, there's not a lot of moral outrage), if you want a belligerent US that gets in China's way then we probably have the ideal president for that.
FYI, you are being downvoted not because those things are not true or bad, but because those things are totally irrelevant to the topic of whether the actions of the Chinese state are moral.
(You are also further assuming that the person to whom you are replying is a US citizen, which is far from given on HN.)
> I’m socially anxious and keep to myself
> small talk tends to bore me
> it’s exhausting always having to text them to hang out, if I don’t then we never talk again
It's highly possible that you have undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. I say this because I am reading a book right now about ASD[0] and a lot of this is ringing true, especially the part about being confused why friends are dropping you. Speak to a psychologist and see what they think (or read the book first, and then speak to them). I am 30 now and am just cluing in that I might be on the spectrum, and oh boy do I wish I had caught it when I was younger. (It's also possible that you don't have ASD but some other condition like avoidant personality disorder, but whatever it is, it is so much easier to solve it once you've figured it out.)
[0]: https://www.isthisautism.com/