In general I agree with you, but it also makes me wonder how these people got to this point. I think most people would burn the Mona Lisa if it meant surviving through a cold night.
Our society has failed these people in many ways.
Local copper thieves that were busted stealing telco lines... they were just looking to make a quick buck regardless of legality or care for the impact it had on other people. They're more like tech company CEOs, really.
And these thieves were already well cared for in a healthy society with all sorts of opportunities available to them regardless of social status, skin color, and mental heath?
Crime goes down when the gap between the rich and the poor goes down.
Some people can't stomach the idea that some individuals can be blamed for their own bad behavior, so this lie that all crime must be society's fault is the only way they can avoid rethinking their worldview.
I believe that most people are good, but others do not have good character. They are the ones who ruin things for everyone else. They even ruin things for the people who are "good but victims of bad luck." By refusing to deal harshly with the bad actors (e.g. by locking them up), we create a world where you can't really trust anyone, including those who are just down on their luck but have integrity.
Right, why didn't everyone just get good education, dental care, and healthcare, get a car when they're 16, have their parents help them go to college and work for a VC and get rich. Just can't understand it. Truly, an enigma.
This is what nobody wants to admit, whether it's nature or nurture doesn't matter because you're not in control of either of them. You were born into so and so of a family, and they brought you up with such and such care and values.
The idea that you've been "force of willing" it through your whole life since infancy and are therefore solely accountable for your outcome is absurd. We know that at some level and yet still can't help taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others for their failings.
This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
> This site is so fuckin out of touch with the average American I can help but get pissed off after a few beers on the weekend. The tech stuff is good, but the social/political stuff here drives me nuts.
A lot of people on this site have no concept of what it is like to grow up unprivileged (they think they do, but to them that means growing up merely upper middle class as opposed to ridiculously wealthy) but as bad as it can be sometimes it has actually gotten a bit better in recent years.
There used to be an even higher concentration of ultra-libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" posters who clearly never had to do that themselves to anywhere near the extent they believed they had.
A lot of people on this site grew up lower middle class or below and benefited from the generosity of a lot of other people. But they leveraged that generosity into an education and a skill set that improved their economic security. Then they see schools that provide 3 meals a day to every single student, food stamps, WIC, CHIPS, etc. and think that anybody with any gumption at all could achieve what they achieved even easier.
Some people here interact frequently with youth who are completely unmotivated to pull themselves up because they aren't really down. They have food, shelter, a $1200 cell phone with a $75/month data plan, an XBox, a $3k wardrobe, and free taxi service. And nobody is teaching them that all of this luxury comes at a cost.
So sometimes it is hard to see the kid in real difficulty. The kid with the $80 discarded phone on the $25/month plan. The kid with the difficulty processing math that isn't just the lazy excuse of all the other students. The kid with no internet at home. The kid trying to look after a younger sibling--not raise them, just helping them survive. The child in desperate isolation. These folks get lost in the sea of people pretending to have a hard life. And the pretenders can slip down into the reality without people noticing.
Yes. It's hard to see the bottom clearly after you've climbed some distance. And sometimes you can never see the steeper mountain face that is not the one you climbed. And its easy to get sick of listening to the belly aching. But try volunteering for an after-school club and recognize that the youth in that program are often already in a home life that gives them a life advantage. Not necessarily because of wealth (but maybe), but mostly because of culture. They have caregivers that provide a culture beyond living off of handouts. They might receive a handout, but they are going to use it as an investment to build a better future.
Some of the people on this site recognize the difference between engorging and investing. Sometimes they mistake people who don't invest as people who engorge. It's an understandable mistake.
The disconnect I see a lot between where I stand, and your average 2026 "proud Democrat" is this: They believe humans are perfectible, and therefore that the plan should be to keep transferring resources, from those who work to those who don't, until such time as we achieve full "equity" of outcomes. So if any people are poor or committing crime, it must mean we just aren't giving them enough.
I question both the wisdom of increasing the tax burden on the workers past a certain point, and whether the goal of getting every disadvantaged person to a successful life is even remotely achievable anyway.
The above is admittedly probably (?) a strawman in that I guess (?) most Democrats today would not be foolish enough to believe 100.00% equity is possible, that every last person in the country can be gotten to "great" quality of life - even with ruinous amounts of welfare expenditure. If that is a strawman, then the only actual debate here is what percentage of people is an acceptable amount to be given up on, to be left where they are, with society telling them "You'll have to do some of the work yourself before you'll get further help."
Also, importantly, it would be nice to make sure we are working with the same set of data. If one side says fine, 2% of people being quite poor is fine, then let's be honest about what the line is, how many are below it, and very importantly how numerous is the actual cohort who is staying there -- it's fine with me if we have 4% in poverty at any given time if half of them are only temporarily poor, and are using the existing resources to get their lives back on track. Even if you believe humans are perfectible, it's unreasonable to expect that no one will ever even temporarily get into a jam.
I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion. 9 times out of 10 they're junkie lowlives who would amount to nothing with all the opportunity in the world.
wanna bet that in a few days there will be a follow up with mugshots and short bios of the perpetrators, and each one will turn out to be a worthless fuck with a long rap sheet?
> I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro. romanticizing thieves into some kind of noble morally grey antiheroes wronged by the society and struggling to feed their kids is a uniquely bohemian delusion.
The concept of a "luxury belief" makes a lot more sense of it. Believing that thieves aren't just scumbags is like driving a Porsche, it's a way to signal to other people who've never had to struggle in their life that you're one of them.
> I don't think the average American sympathizes with random shitheads, bro.
As a gross generalization, they don't. But not because they don't understand being poor, but because there are various powerful groups that benefit from pitting the lower class against themselves.
But "poor people" aren't a monolithic group with an absolutist view on the issue. There's a nuanced understanding of low level crimes in impoverished communities. People are much more likely to be pissed at a crackhead that stole their neighbors stuff, than a mother stealing food from a chain store.
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. If you run the math, there's not many places in the US that a mother can raise a child on a minimum wage job without relying heavily on assistance.
don't move the goalpost. "raising" is expensive, sure, but that was not what I replied to, I replied to the image you tried to evoke with "mother stealing food from a chain store", and I'm telling you that it doesn't make any sense. US wages - even the minimum wage - are incredibly high compared to your very low prices of food. "share of household income spent on food" is a common metric, and it is very low in the US.
"mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Moving the goalpost? Every household has expenses other than food.
People who resort to theft don't allocate the theft proportionally to each of their expense categories. They do it based on opportunity. If you're $50 short at the end of the month, you can't retroactively take it out of the rent check you sent at the beginning of the month.
> "mother stealing food from a chain store" is what people far removed from poverty think poor people do.
Rich neighborhoods don't lock up the baby formula.
Reminds me of seeing posts from my local police department where baby formula was being stolen -- in quantity -- not by mothers, but by garden-variety criminal dudes, who resell it because it's valuable. It's also, believe it or not, a popular choice as the inactive ingredient to cut drugs.
The Internet commenters who cheer "Yeah, mama, you stick it to Grocery Chain! Feed them babies!" really want this narrative to be true, but it just isn't.
Actual poor moms with hungry babies and kids have entire government programs dedicated to help them that are easy to get, called WIC and SNAP.
I'm well aware that people with drug issues exist -- that doesn't mean that there are zero poor people who struggle to afford food.
SNAP and WIC are great but there are gaps (and they are getting bigger as congress has further restricted them and this administration have started dismantling them administratively)
> taking credit for our nice things and passing judgment on others
Do you think it's more Fundamental Attribution Error [0] (not exercising empathy or an incomplete view of others' problems) or more Just World Fallacy [1] (believing the universe works a certain way)?
Realistically, if these are the minimum conditions to reduce this kind of low-gain amplified damage, then I suspect that most people will rapidly conclude that the cost-benefit leans in the direction of immediately severing these people from the rest of society. Since the cost to deliver a sequence of events like you describe to everyone is extraordinary (and realistically unavailable even to the richest nations today) a more feasible solution is incarceration of people for a first offense for a sufficiently long time that they are simply not present to commit the crime again.
If it isn't, your solution is interesting because it's already been tried. The United States has one of (maybe actually?) the highest incarceration rates on Earth. We've spent decades locking up enormous numbers of people, often for nonviolent offenses, tearing parents away from their kids, destroying employment prospects, and creating exactly the kind of instability that feeds more crime. There's people in prison serving decades for fuckin weed. Yet somehow your conclusion is that we haven't imprisoned enough people for long enough.
What jumps out is how quickly you write people off. You look at poverty, addiction, untreated mental illness, failing schools, broken communities, and a criminal justice system with a well-documented history of racial disparities, and your answer is basically: "Sounds expensive. Put them in a cage."
The really wild part is calling that the practical option. Education costs money, healthcare costs money, treatment costs money, rehabilitation costs money. But decades of policing, courts, prisons, lost productivity, broken families, and repeat incarceration are apparently the cheap, sensible alternative.
If this isn't sarcasm, you are a disgusting ghoul. There's a name for people like this that we hung in the 40s. Sorry HN, but I just can't with this shit anymore.
These people who steal copper and whatnot used to be day laborer ditch digger types but "certain people" decided that the sorts of businesses that employ that kind of labor need to jump through hoops (for various reasons with various degrees of legitimacy) that make it not worth it.
I don’t think Marijuana is likely to land you in the ED in quite the same way but the habitual smokers I’ve met tended to way underestimate how impaired they are by it and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them drive and operate equipment while suffering those effects. Even the framing of Marijuana as a non-addictive substance seems to be a marketing framing.
I don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?
Comedy is about putting butts in seats. No comedian can be successful without promoting themselves to get attendees at their shows, and Bill Hicks was no exception.
Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc.
And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing.
All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.
The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.
Performing is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful.
He aggressively promoted and marketed himself!
Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly)
He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.
> their Ukraine coverage is basically Russia-lite, and extremely anti-Ukrainian
This is very surprising to me, I thought they were kind of pro Ukraine biased.
I asked an AI and it came back with this:
> The New York Times' coverage of the war is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine in its framing, tone, and attribution of responsibility, though critics argue this manifests as omission of context regarding NATO expansion and US intelligence involvement rather than direct support for Russia.
Of course it is and always has been. However, since 2023 with the failure of the overhyped summer counteroffensive, the mainstream narrative has shifted in a slightly more realist direction, which infuriates a lot of people.
I think that's not true for me and a lot of other people. If I read a specific criticism/review of a movie or book I often make a decision not based on good/bad but based on what the criticism is about. If a movie has slow pacing for example, I might be ok with that depending on the mood I'm in.
I'm not sure what you mean by separating review from criticism. Can you expand on that?
> I'm not sure what you mean by separating review from criticism. Can you expand on that?
Let's start with applying both to "Eraserhead":
A critical approach might have a thesis on how it links with Lynch's interest in Buddhism and how those concepts surface in the film, how different events and characters in the film can be read through that lens and how the resolution of the film makes sense in a Buddhist context. Absolutely none of this tells you whether the person who watched the film was enraptured by it from the first scene or whether they got through it out of academic obligation and immediately bitched about it on social media afterwards. Criticism has a thesis about a work and defends it, which doesn't usually involve how enjoyable the work is.
A review of "Eraserhead" would tell you about the experience of watching it, whether the person writing the review thought it was a well-constructed and engaging film, and maybe some thoughts on how much sense they made of it, but the analysis wouldn't be the focus. Thumbs up, thumbs down, that's the meat.
It's entirely possible to mix the two realms, but there's a difference in focus and intent. The better YouTube channels (Folding Ideas) mix the two quite deftly, in fact, but I'd put Folding Ideas in the realm of criticism more than reviewing because he does tend to have a thesis and defends it in addition to saying how much he enjoyed (or, more often, didn't) the films he talks about.
For example, in his video about The Nostalgia Critic's review of Pink Floyd's movie The Wall (that is, his video about another person's review of a band's movie made from their rock opera album) his thesis is that the person behind The Nostalgia Critic character is creatively stalled and fundamentally lazy. He defends this thesis while lambasting the video he's talking about, but the thesis is centered. That's criticism.
General jargon like foobar is not that far off in meaning from "unfinished software". I think it's possible there's not really a contradiction between the different sources. The "unfinished software" meaning in the NYT article might have just been an example of one possible use of a more general nonsense word.
Yes that’s the original spelling & meaning. But using the spellings foobar, foo, bar, and sometimes baz, have been used for decades in programming as examples, temporary names, stand-ins etc. I just assumed that spelling it foo was meant to distance it from the curse word slightly while simultaneously making the pronunciation more clear (i.e. foo not fuh); foo just makes a good nonsense word.
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