Your comment made me realize what a bubble of privilege I live in.
I raised my eyebrow at "everyone takes" standard deduction. How is that possible with home prices and interest rates? Even a modest 300-400k house at 5-6% interest, property taxes, local sales tax deductions and minimum charity would exceed the standard deduction. Where I live good luck finding anything more than a condo for less than a million.
Turns out 90% take standard deduction. This is another way to track the extreme "wealth" gap emerging. Only the wealthy itemize.
We have a house more expensive than that, an interest rate around the top of that range, live in a state with somewhat high property taxes, and had at least $4k in health care spending on top of insurance premiums (no big problems, that's just what a handful of minor kid-related issues in a year costs in the US) and still wouldn't have done better itemizing. We took the standard for 2024.
It’s more of a reality when home prices are over a million, or in a state with high property taxes. Be married, live in a state with low property taxes, buy a house for 700k… and you’re taking the standard.
If you want to see this idea explored even more, I highly recommend watching "For All Mankind" on Apple TV+. My description below hopeful does not contain spoilers.
A Fantastic show for tech optimists, imagining a world where Russians were the first to land on the moon. This spurred increased investment by the US, continuing the space race, avoided the cold war, adoption of EVs in the 80s, massive action on climate change, and many other fun things. I wishfully think of "what could have been", and a world that seems attainable.
One of the recurring plot points is Executive action taken by astronauts in space, wars avoided and caused by their decisions, brave rescues and other heroics. In one of the episodes a characters takes such an action.
Its certainly telling that this post got "flagged". Exactly what the opening lines of the article describe: "we don’t have the right to show humanity towards Palestine".
I don't think that's what's happening here. The flags are coming from users (as explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). We can only guess why users flag things, but when I looked at the flagging histories, they didn't seem focused on this issue; rather they were the most common type of flag, from users who don't want to see flamewars or too much politics on HN. For example, here are other submissions flagged by the same users:
I'm not mentioning these to start arguments about whether or not they are on-topic for HN—some are, some not—but rather to give the flavor of what the user flags look like.
We sometimes turn off flags, and I've done so several times on this topic and posted quite a bit about why. However, HN is not a current affairs site, and it is a site that gets damaged when threads turn into flamewars. So we have to be careful about which threads to turn off flags on, and I don't think an outright advocacy piece is the best choice for that. It's all relative; there's no way to avoid flamewars on a topic like this; but some go to the inner circles of hell faster than others.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply and explanation. Makes sense. It is an emotional topic indeed and most threads devolve into flamewars without careful moderation. Really appreciate all you do for HN!
That doesn't justify inflicting mass slaughter, starvation, and now preventable disease on an entire population, which is what's happening. We can argue about whether it's genocide, but unquestionably it's collective punishment, and that's a war crime: https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/24/a-short-history-of-the-wa...
I'm sorry to bring this up, but did you know that children are now having limbs amputated without anesthetic there? How is it possible to know that and not want it to stop?
> "Hamas is playing the land grab card against Israel".
What do you mean by that? Comparing Russia with Hamas seems like a massive distortion of reality, not sure you meant to do that.
Israel is occupying internationally recognized Palestinian lands of West Bank and a blockade on Gaza. Just yesterday the Israeli foreign minister suggested sending Israeli settlers into Gaza illegally and drive Palestinians out for good. Hamas is a terrorist organization, who kills civilians, but let's not pretend that the IDF is any better.
And the US is a colonial power of the 20th and 21st century. It just hasn't done it the same way as the Europeans of 17,18th,19th century, mostly because there are different tools available now: culture export, dependence on oil, dollar as reserve currency, global free trade, and the rise of corporations.
Noan Chomsky says the issue of Palestine is resistance against colonialism. [1] [2]
Lets not pretend that there is only a single guilty party here. No doubt pakistan tried to control mujahideen to fight their proxy wars. Just like Indian intelligence has funded the Balochistan insurgency inside Pakistan. This of course all started with US asking Pakistan to setup these mujahideen to counter Russia in 1980.
This is a false equivalency. The extent to which Pakistan used its military apparatus to train militias and other terrorist organizations is unparalleled. There is a reason Osama Bin Laden found a safe heaven.
This is the what aboutism that most politicians toy with when they want to fool the public. But like I said this is a populous that are truly detached and delusional. They brought it on themselves.
This article [1] "Accounting for Computer Scientists" may help. Visualize money movement between Accounts / Nodes triggered by Transactions / Edges.
This model is used to construct a "Fund flow" representation of how money should be moved. One of the essential concepts we use to verify that money is moving through the system is "Clearing", where we add up all of the edges and the balance should equal 0 - that is money reached its intended destination.
Your comment made me do a double take. Surely an individual is not to blame for a countries injustices, imperialism, and war crimes? Otherwise large parts of the developed world would have to be abandoned immediately.
We need to consider borders, immigration, work authorization, regulations, wealth, health, friends, family responsibilities, kids, partners and their own constraints - before being able to pass judgement.
It's takes incredible privelege to propose that one can just pickup their bags and go wherever they want in the world.
What is ironic is that there is an annual Award given to an AWS employee called the Cliff Stoll Award: For those individuals who see something suspicious, not working as expected, show ownership and drive it to resolution. As Cliff did to find a KGB spy, and documented in "The Cuckoo's Egg".
I wonder what would happen if someone at Amazon pulled on this thread and not only solved Cliff's problem but also the root cause that enables this kind of product hijacking.
I've won one in the past. It's no longer being awarded to the best of my knowledge. But the recipients did get copies of your book (it was my second copy!).
Allowing trusted sellers to be hijacked is not greedy behavior. Keeping 3rd sellers happy will result in less returns, happier resellers, and greater platform usage.
The root cause here is organizational failure from disempowered employees. At one point Amazon had great customer service with empowered represenatives. That's not Amazon today.
> Allowing trusted sellers to be hijacked is not greedy behavior
It can be if that's the side effect of a system designed to make selling as frictionless (and therefore lucrative) as possible. Thence, greed could be the root cause, if not the proximate cause.
> Allowing trusted sellers to be hijacked is not greedy behavior
Depends entirely on how much the sellers are selling. It’s entirely possible they like the idea of making a ton of sales for a bit. It’s not their reputation that gets destroyed.
I posit that it's not greed. It's laziness. Why do a great job, when "good enough" is good enough for 90% of the people? That's how business works today.
You could be right, Occam's razor and all that, but I think 'good enough' is a carefully chosen strategy tuned to maximise a bottom line rather than an accident.
Agreed, but I guess we're talking about slightly different things (and perhaps I missed the point of the 'oxygen' remark) - I was saying, Amazon's system is designed that way because Amazon are greedy (that's the root cause), and that it's cynical to say that it's just because they're human (and therefore implicitly greedy). Vaguely worded statements on my part though, I should've been clearer.
I raised my eyebrow at "everyone takes" standard deduction. How is that possible with home prices and interest rates? Even a modest 300-400k house at 5-6% interest, property taxes, local sales tax deductions and minimum charity would exceed the standard deduction. Where I live good luck finding anything more than a condo for less than a million.
Turns out 90% take standard deduction. This is another way to track the extreme "wealth" gap emerging. Only the wealthy itemize.
reply