I'm not sure it is - I initially agreed with you as I've perceived it cropping up a lot recently, then checked c8d3f7b49897918's feed and saw that it actually hasn't been 'shilled' much, at least by her/him [1].
I think in my case at least it's just because I happened to have been searching through JS-related threads a lot over the past few weeks and have derived a false pattern :)
I've been pretty disciplined about not shilling it too frequently. You can check my comment history.
I don't enjoy it, but a well timed shill is what got it to the front of hacker news one day, and got it a ton of exposure. When you are a solo dev without the reach of facebook, google or 37signals, you do what you have to do to get the word out.
Especially since you are all doing web programming wrong. ;)
A daily reminder that the US spends more per-capita on socialized medicine than any other country except Norway, and spends more on socialized medicine per capita than many first world countries (e.g. france, australia, japan) spend on medicine in total, both public and private. [1]
Conservatives (I am a conservative) who say we have a free market system are wrong. Liberals who say we are too heartless to pay for a socialized medical system are wrong. Anyone who says our military spending is why we don't have public healthcare is wrong. Anyone who suggests the US is competent enough at public administration to implement a public health care system is also probably wrong.
Balance in all things: a design should be minimalist where that is called for (the background, unimportant or repetitive elements, etc.) and should increase in visual complexity/depth/color/brightness in areas that are important and need to draw the users eye. (NB: minimalism does not mean "nothing". Sometimes a slight texture completely changes the feel of a UI, but it requires a deft hand.)
I'm glad to see the flat-ui/material-design over-application of minimalism is coming to an end and designers are getting back to more complex visual treatments. My hope is that, rather than casting back and forth between the various schools of thought, designers start thinking in context-sensitive terms: not "Should I use flat design or skeumorphic design for this app?" but rather "Where in this UI are flat design AND skeumorphic designs best utilized?"
Poor economies (think underdeveloped economies) do incentivize repair over replacement. Cases in point, cars in Cuba, Former USSR republics, etc. You will also find repairshops for electronics in many developing economies as well. Labor to repair a unit makes a repair affordable whereas buying a new unit might be prohibitive.
In developed nations, labor is too expensive to make a repair worthwhile for things people can regularly afford. It's only as things become expensive that repairing something makes economic sense (a $100 replacement screen for a phone is economically viable vs buying a new $600 phone). Conversely very few people in the US for example would think of repairing an old Microwave when buying a new one is only marginally more expensive than getting a new one.
Indeed, a good example of that is the fact that people export very old used cars from Europe to Africa, because due to the much lower cost of repair their value in Africa is higher than their value in Europe (nil), enough to make it worth the shipping!
Unless you can find repairpeople willing to work for a great deal less than minimum wage it's going to be hard to make this work on most gear. Labor alone is enough to kill repair efforts. Even if corporations tried to make more repairable gear it wouldn't help if labor is still too expensive to make it worth it. (And if that's true, then making the gear less repairable and cheaper becomes a rational response to the market rather than a conspiracy.)
Sigh. I disposed of an otherwise perfectly good 49" television last week because something on the IR receiver board failed. What leads I could find for a replacement board (a) had them listed around 50% of what a comparable replacement television costs today and (b) didn't actually have any to sell me.
Upside, I now have a much bigger and nicer TV that was 40% of what the old one cost.
This headline is a good example of getting the target (you) to think past the sale: if you deny bitcoin is "something worse" you are implicitly conceding it is, in fact, a waste of energy (when contrasted with HFT server farms, I suppose?)
Trump did this with the "and mexico will pay for it" addendum to building the wall. By getting people to say "Mexico will never pay for it!" they are mentally conceding the wall.
I dislike these sorts of verbal tactics, but they are effective manipulations.
This might sound weird, but we should teach rhetoric in schools, which includes these kinds of dishonest player verbal tactics, because my thinking is that if we can name and speak openly on a meta level about these types of manipulative tactics, we can defend against them more effective.
Similar to teaching people how to hack for the sake of improving computer security, or maybe more similar to the old fantasy trope of the monster / sorcerer or whatever losing it's power if you know it's name. I feel like most people know of these tactics, but they can't call them out effectively, because it's cumbersome and awkward to do so.
We used to: the ‘liberal arts’ originally referred to the ‘quadrivium:’ arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy; and the ‘trivium:’ grammar, logic, and rhetoric.
"Thinking past the sale" is not a thing. It's some gibberish Scott Adams made up to sell books and podcast ads.
Let's take your example. Is there a documented case of someone who started out being against the wall and then got confused into supporting it by the "Mexico pays" canard? I'd love to see that.
There are various rhetorical tactics and yes they can be effective... but none of them amount to Jedi mind tricks.
edit: to test my assertion, google that phrase. then google it with only results from 2015 or earlier. Scott Adams all the way down.
Much of news is based on the same style of rhetoric. You're asking both the pro and con positions to be neutral in their speech. That's not going to happen.
Media with positions I agree with do this, I recognize it. It's not going way. NPR likes to say during their pledge drives that they only give us facts... Uhhuh. I mean Innskeep is notorious.
Tangent and slightly off topic... but I'm interested in the thinking here.
Maybe I take propositional statements a bit too literally? I don't see the trick, or it's not even a good trick.
Is bitcoin a waste of electricity:
1. No. something worse? No.
2. No. something worse? Yes. <-- doesn't make logical sense.
3. Yes. something worse? No. It's just a waste of elec.
4. Yes. something worse? Yes. <-- really hate bitcoin here
So in case 1, how is it conceding that bitcoin is a waste of energy? Case 3 & 4 already agrees that bitcoin is a waste of energy regardless of "something worse".
Maybe the better statement is "Bitcoin is worse than wasting electricity"(???) Then the target needs to deny that it's "worse" before considering "waste of electricity".
We must cancel everybody's debt for the economy's sake, but we also have to do it in a fair way. Thankfully, we have Steve Keen, who has already worked out a solution:
> However, because older generations are typically in a good financial situation, having profited both from the pre-80's social contract, and often, from its disassembly - it's not at all narcissitic to care about personal concerns! It's absolutely rational - they aren't going to become homeless if they decide to go on a buddhist retreat, or engage in a messy divorce, or start a new career.
Thank you for your earnest and thoughtful post.
I'd like to say that it is to some extent narcissistic to sacrifice future generation's wellbeing to satisfy present desires and I think it is reasonable for millennials too accuse baby boomers and, to a lesser extent, genX'rs of that fault. I am an X'er and, admitting their faults, I get upset when I hear millennials held up for undo scorn, given the cards they have been dealt.
Xers were cast as cynical and fatalistic. And I think often when one's desires are presented as harmful to the future, it helps to look at the source of the framing.
11) http://intercoolerjs.org lets you add an AJAX front end to your app with simple HTML attributes