yeah i was replying to the comment that selling intelligence on private citizens to police would be a revenue driver. not that it couldn't be done, just that it would not make significant money. the median critical thinking level on HN has imploded over the past year.
> if you really believe the 40% number or anything like it, you're giving yourself a false worldview.
> The majority of people aren't racist nor do they have a problem with government
helping them out.
40% is ....not a majority
the current POTUS has a 37% approval rating and this is considered to be historically low, due to wars, corruption, etc.
but even with all of that corruption and failure, 37% of surveyed adults, *still approve*. This includes his frequent, deeply racist tirades on Twitter. They approve!
But it's not even approaching 40%, nor did I tie the two together. If you think the 33% of people who voted from Trump did it because they are racist you are wrong. Some did, a lot that wasn't their primary concern. It's viewing pepole wrong to think that.
Yes, I've talked to Trump voters and I know people who aren't especially strong Trump supporters that voted for him because the economy was shit. Their reasoning wasn't racism. There is a huge chunk where that is their reasoning, sure.
Once again, if you think it's 40% of 33%, you're wrong. Not everybody who voted for Trump is a racist, it's just not how people work.
Voters don't pay attention to or they justify their votes. That doesn't mean they are inherently racist, it means they don't care enough about politics or they care about other issues to the point where they either aren't aware of it or they excuse it away. People pay attention to or remember a lot less about politics than that blog posts suggests.
The majority of people are seeing a variety of headlines from news sources they may not trust (for good reason and bad) and remember a few events over the year, some have such a strong attachment to party that that's the defining thing above all that they're voting for. They're being propagandized and lied to as part of a political campiagn. That they are making the I'd argue wrong choice does not mean they are racist or even intend to be. That racism isn't the defining thing for the majority of them.
It goes back to the original claim, I still think it's obvious that most people aren't voting for a guy because racism. That's inverting how people operate, which is seeing their own needs as the center of the world. If you're unemployed and hurting for money and you are racist, what is your primary motivation for voting? It's probably to get you a job because that's the fastest path to improving your life. But that's presupposing a lot of people are racist, and living around Trump voters, or knowing Trump voters that are minorities, something else is happening other than racism.
I don't think individuals care more about other people than they do themselves. Some people are that spiteful but the majority of people are not because they cannot afford to be.
I don't mean to over argue this but I think it's important that we understand people as they understand themselves.
Well - the fact that they don't pay attention (or lack critical thinking skills and a baseline reasonable education) is a large part of the problem.
But - with a person like POTUS - and those he surrounds himself with, they will throw every possible promise to get the votes - but, each of those issues are only part of their overall agenda and platform. When they got called-out on controversial issues, they outright lied about knowing about things like "Project 2025" during the last election cycle.
Choosing to live in ignorance - or abstaining from voting is accepting that agenda and platform, regardless.
Yes, but I'd argue those people are victims as much as anybody else. To truly be ignorant is to not know, and if you are in a situation where you've never been trained to need to know or you simply don't know there's another world out there, that's not a choice, that's a situation you've been placed in.
You have to win these people to fix the system. Casting them as hateful rubes only voting because they are racist is wrong, not on a moral level but on an intellectual one. We've got large chunks of of the country that haven't been effectively educated for decades, no wonder they are ignorant.
For the record, I choose not to vote not because I accept Trump's racism but I think a valid way of signaling you are not happy with either party (but especially Trumpsim) is to not engage in the system. If the system isn't offering better it isn't the people at fault, it is the system. Non-votes are as valid as any other. If I vote for a process that I believe is fraudulent, that politician will see that as an indicator they have some kind of mandate (see Bush in 2004). I'm not giving it to them, it's the job of either party to be better not to just not be worse.
The Dems must be better and the biggest part of that to me is to engage and understand working class people and not do what they did in 2024 and say everything is fine because it wasn't and it certainly isn't today (and that's Trump's fault). I was never especially leftist but as I've grown older I think the economy is the biggst driver of artificial divides. When people hurt, they look for others to blame. If both parties (or either) were genuinely focused on helping the poor to get a foot up, a lot of this discourse wouldn't be happening. I hate Trumpism but I don't think the corporatism that has captured the Democratic party is much better.
It's really a problem of the system, being forced into an artificial duopoly. If you want to lose me further by saying I'm choosing that platform by not voting, then you're just further disengaging people and I argue you're choosing not to understand my posittion. You need the "racists" and the non-voters to win.
> 40% of the people in the US would rather starve to death themselves than live in a world where people they hate for their skin color get anything without toiling for it.
Do we truly believe that's 40% of people in the US? 33% of US voters even voted for him, so you're saying it's pretty much all of them and another 7%. I just don't see it, it's rhetoric and it's not helpful because if your goal is to win over the people that need to be won over, you can't call them racists when they really aren't.
It's a misshaped worldview formed in bubbles. People don't work that way because you're literally assuming that their hate for somebody else overrides their own well-being. Their actions might end up with that result, but I've interacted with enough people from all over the spectrum to know that imagining that many people have that much hate is just wrong. People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
If people had jobs, a lot of of this division would disappear but the govt for years has treated low income workers as people that don't matter and can just be displaced without any answers. It's whey the Democratic party which was traditionally the working class party has struggled against Trumpism, because he pretends to care.
(back from my two hour Hacker News ban - "make sure all the tempban knobs are turned to the max for that zzzeek guy"
look this is the thing with racism - racism to the degree "races" are fit (randomly, or forcibly) into different ethnic / cultural / etc categories (e.g. "in-groups" and "out groups") is largely, due to the in-group/out-group differential, a natural tendency in humans that has to be actively worked against (hence the term "anti-racism"). Nobody who has grown up in modern society with extreme separation of "races" / cultures into disparate groups can really say "oh I'm not a racist" amongst people who study this at an anthropoligical, sociological, or evolutionary level, biases towards those in societally placed in "out groups" have to be critically challenged on a regular basis.
This is why it's not enough to be some MAGA who says, "oh Im not a racist! i just agree with trump's policy", they of course have no idea how their words and actions are linked to racism because they've never looked at it (and by my experience with Trump voters, they angrily, adamantly refuse to even look at contrarian evidence to their belief systems if you try to show them, much less have the critical thinking skills to actually understand them). They are marinating in distrust and contempt of "the other" (if you know me in RL I'll introduce you to people who wont listen to a single fact you give them if it was not on FOX news).
> People care about themselves first and foremost, it's a necessity.
they care about their in-group. Countries like those in Scandanavia have developed very deep social welfare systems largely because of their history (now being challenged by immigration) of being culturally homogeneous meant that everyone trusted each other implicitly and had no issue with their government dollars being used to help their neighbors [1] (this is a really interesting article btw). A diverse society has a steeper hill to climb in establishing social trust between different cultural / ethnic groups.
A president could literally shout Korean slurs all day long (I'm Korean) and get a Nazi symbol tattooed on his forehead, and if he continued to do a good job of policymaking I would approve in that poll, though hate the guy. This is what you are not understanding about Trump voters. We really don't care if Trump is racist at all. But that's not because we are racist ourselves. That's just not relevant to the political platform. If he starts passing racist policies, that's bad, but otherwise we don't give a shit.
Leftists, on the other hand, are very highly concerned with the moral purity of their candidates, even above their political efficacy. I don't understand it myself.
> Since Trump returned to office in January last year, Pete Hegseth, the rumbustious defense secretary who has made it his mission to remake a military ethos he denounced as “woke”, has fired or forcibly retired 24 generals and senior commanders, with no performance-related reason given.
> About 60% have been Black or female, an approach seemingly driven by the administration’s proclaimed onslaught against “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] hires”.
so..it's not "racist" when it's "oh all those Black men and women are obviously DEI hires", is that the logic?
60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below. 50% of people are female, and more than 10% in the USA are black. A random selection of citizens would likely turn up as 60%+ black or female.
I'm not saying this firing wasn't statistically suspect, since I don't know the demographics of that cohort, but I'm guessing based on this misleading phrasing and the lack of information about the cohort that it wasn't.
this is upper military leadership. Black individuals account for 6.5%-9% of general officers/admirals, senior female leaders (colonels, generals, and admirals) represent less than 5% of all senior military leadership.
> 60% of any cohort being "black or female" sounds like the population average or below.
doing the math this means a Black or female senior military leader has 8.5-11 times higher chance of being fired by Pete Hegseth compared to a white male counterpart
That seems bad! But at the end of the day it is not bad enough to warrant voting for the other side's policies. I choose conservative policy with some likely *ist firings thrown in over the alternative, for now. Fwiw I voted Obama; the Democrats can win me back, they just haven't.
the parent poster is trying to say "well where's your evidence that a society not based around human labor is possible?" which is sort of a silly question
you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!
No, your quote is a much too strong version of what anyone in this subthread is trying to say.
The issue isn't that there isn't any evidence that a society based around human labor is possible. I expect it is!
The issue is that our current society is based around human labor, and that there is plenty of evidence that changing that even over the time period of a lifetime or two would cause huge societal upheaval (likely including war, possibly of the civil variety) and massive existential problems for lots of people.
And here we're talking about a massively disruptive technology that could change all this in the span of a decade or two? We're screwed, if AI actually bears fruit.
did Chad, or whoever posted this for him, post this as a jpg with no alt text? wow, thought Chad was a bit better than that (I can't even read this thing easily and im not considered to be visually impaired)
"but it's a real typewritten letter! you dont understand!"
yeah but you didn't snail mail it to all of us, you or someone put it on the internet on a webpage. if you can scan a letter as a JPG and scp it to a server, you can run an OCR and put alt text in.
I dont think it's welcome on hacker news here but I pasted your comment into Gemini and it has a lot of interesting things to say about it (needless to say it's skeptical and points out a lot of reasons for this), I recommend trying it out.
oh heck here's it's response to the Venus part:
"Climate scientists and astrophysicists have looked into this extensively. The definitive scientific consensus is that a Venus scenario is physically impossible on Earth from burning fossil fuels. To trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that vaporizes the oceans (like Venus), Earth would need to receive much more solar radiation than it currently does. Even if we burned every single ounce of fossil fuel on the planet and triggered all feedback loops, the Earth would become devastatingly hot and hostile to human civilization, but it would eventually stabilize. It would not turn into Venus."
It isn't welcome here. We're here to have conversations with human beings, not robots. If rekabis cared about what an LLM had to say they could have done that themselves.
well then parent posters inaccurate doomerism will sit there unchallenged
a gemini query is like a google search with natural language embedded. ill do my "google search" and just rewrite the text next time, ta
unless google searches are also illegal for hacker news commenting
> If rekabis cared about what an LLM had to say they could have done that themselves.
I post stories here hoping for just that human interaction you speak of, plenty of scientists here who could have added to the topic, but none did. Doomerists are not typically interested in researching their claims, it would make for much less sensationalistic claims. From my own human perspective, the best I could offer without research is "that looks like a really ridiculous claim". I think a researched claim is a lot more valuable here.
>unless google searches are also illegal for hacker news commenting
Posting verbatim from google searches would not be allowed either. This forum is for conversations between human beings, not machine generated content. I don't know why you bothered to ask, though, since it seems you don't actually care.
>From my own human perspective, the best I could offer without research is "that looks like a really ridiculous claim". I think a researched claim is a lot more valuable here.
You're not required to participate in a thread. If the best you have to offer is a low value comment you can consider not making it versus intentionally breaking the rules because you feel compelled to add something. It's OK. This isn't supposed to be work. You don't have a quota to meet. If you feel no one is adding to a topic you're under no obligation to try to maximize its quality by any means necessary, including means no one here actually wants. It's OK just just move on.
This story is one I posted, and nobody replied to it. Not to mention I did no such thing as "post verbatim from a Google search" as though I wrote it, I would never do that and feel free to look through my nearly two decade posting history to find that, it's a quote which I attributed.
If you don't like my posts, the downmod button is right there. I can otherwise do without the moralizing lecture which is definitely something nobody wants here. Did you just search for "AI" posts that needed policing to even find this totally dead thread ? Talk about HN being a "job"
i dont think employees are expected to prioritize one customer of (we would assume) little monetary consequence in this way. amazon would rather everyone keep heads down, dont let the casualties slow down the machine or create exception cases, and definitely dont bother upper management with your personal salvation quests.
Well then you get PR disasters like these, I have moved off of AWS and helped several services that use AWS at atleast 4 companies, who used to pay AWS mid 6 figures, and been paid chump change to do it, but I helped just cause AWS sucks I didn't spend much time really, 1 weekend each.
Was the pay worth yeah, was seeing AWS's revenue hopefully take a minor hit worth it, most definitely would do it again hit me up if you really need help. If you pay Amazon over 10M I am certain we can bring it down below 1M lmao.
AWS is just unhinged in terms of pricing and costs.
Jeff Bezos went on NYT dealbook and had the gall to say "we did layoffs at the WP because it needs to be profitable; if it's not profitable, it's because people are not willing to buy the product it's selling"
after he literally single-handedly ruined the product by personally censoring the editorial team and/or firing large numbers of journalists on multiple, extremely high-profile PR-disastering occasions [1] [2]
from that perspective, Bezos seems perfectly content to weather PR disasters from his companies and drape them in bizarre rationalizations.
A single wronged customer can cause 100-1000x the PR damage across the internet across 1-10 years. It is not an exception case; it is the textbook case. Management who don't understand it don't deserve to be management.
the identification of populations with a loss-of-function mutation in the PCSK9 gene having extremely low rates of heart disease (and otherwise being perfectly fine with little-to-no functional PCSK9 present) looks to be a game changer. There is already fast growth of so-called PCSK9 inhibitors such as Repatha which I'm now on. These treatments seem to be superior to statins in most ways except price + it's an injection, for the moment.
> the city must start the relocation process now to avoid chaos.
I've no reason to doubt this is absolutely true.
that's not what they're gonna do though....
> The region has “crossed the point of no return,” the paper’s authors wrote, adding New Orleans “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century.”
I followed the advice on this site and actually got very bad news. But the good news would be, that I'm on a strict medication regimen now and maybe I'll live to see my son's graduation.
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