“Digging in on dying technologies” is an interesting framing.
There is no appetite for oil alternatives that would stop this from meaning the deaths of hundreds of thousands or more people.
The fact is there is no effective way to power a stable grid with modern renewables. Increasing the energy mix sustainably is great. But if people truly want to divest from oil and coal there number one issue right now should be how to onboard nuclear energy effectively. This has been true for decades at this point, but purist policies on the right and the left have left it completely unrealized or actively dismantled it.
Solar and batteries get cheaper to build and maintain every year (almost to an absurd degree, seriously, look at the charts for the past 2 decades), while nuclear stays the same price.
That's not to say that nuclear power is bad to have, but there's an extremely obvious trajectory here of cheap battery-backed solar everywhere, with few regulatory hurdles and obvious incentives for people to have their own mini solar systems and batteries that take load off the larger grid.
We can debate how much nuclear is needed, but renewables can do a lot, and just hoping that AI will bring nuclear fusion in 5 years is not a great strategy
It's still not true for any complicated extraction. I don't think I've ever shipped a successful solution to anything serious that relied on freeform schema say-and-pray with retries.
It is really no different than having drug dealers set up shop on your corner and sharing footage with police. You have people who are likely committing criminal activity (multiple crimes in the day laborer case) and are sharing footage with the relevant authorities.
The politicization of enforcement doesn’t change that as a business owner I would not want to own the location people facilitate illegal transactions.
In your world view immigrants working jobs you find beneath you is the same as someone selling drugs?
> likely committing criminal activity
You understand that exploiting day laborers to circumvent labor laws puts the, mostly civil though vanishingly rare criminal, liability on the employer rather than the employee, right?
We use laws rather than your own personal hatred of immigrants to define criminality.
I’ve done landscaping, home repair, fence construction, outdoor painting. My family still actively does. I don’t find them beneath me.
Working under the table without work authorization is actually spectacularly illegal as an employer and employee. Tax evasion is also spectacularly illegal as an individual.
Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed.
"A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
The reason it’s dead is these are completely irrelevant and you aren’t having a conversation, you’re taking a pulpit.
California does not dictate federal labor law and I’m sure that you already know that. Your arguments are bad and aggressive.
You’d have way more influence and agreement if you argued about immigration processes as a whole (“why are these people with jobs not given visas already?”) than these contrived obviously ridiculous and irrelevant excerpts.
You’re arguing with me like I won’t actually think about what you say, which is the “not the HN style” comment I gave you before. I will.
You seem to not be reading anything I’m saying. I have family that works for legally operated blue collar businesses.
The difference is engaging in criminal activity.
Your arguments are spectacularly lazy so I’ll ask you to show me where people not authorized to work in the country have no legal liability if they choose to work in the country.
I don’t really know what’s ruffled your feathers so much here, but this isn’t really how HN operates. It seems like you got a bit flustered when the “you’re a bad rich person” argument didn’t work, and now you’re just flailing wildly.
Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed.
"A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly
$100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while
many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
I always thought having day laborers chilling in Home Depot parking lots was a net positive thing for the store and a bit of an untapped potential. Companies pay a lot of money to insert themselves in the hiring stream, and here is Home Depot as the defacto meeting point for a substantial amount of economic activity. Surely a more intelligent and less frightened company could make something positive out of this.
But that's what you get with a fear-based political leadership. ICE targets day laborers not because of the horrible damage they do to the US economy, but because they have been selected as the scapegoats du jour.
How can an intelligent company make money from illegal activity in your opinion? Day laborers hang in the parking lot because they can't work legally, if they could then they could use HD's contractor portal and bid on jobs there.
Vitamin D supplements don’t work consistently across different populations. Very few (~10%) of people can absorb dietary vitamin D. If you aren’t some form of Northern European, you probably need to take at least 10 times the daily recommended dose of vitamin D to influence your levels significantly.
Don't most people who take supplements just take 10X the RDA? It is still a tiny amount of supplement that is safer and costs a fraction of the indoor tanning or traveling often to somewhere with adequate Sun.
I’ve never talked to someone supplementing vitamin D who was aware at all.
I think that the correct approach would be start at 10x vitamin D with baseline bloodwork and adjust dosage from there.
But yeah I’m in the camp of “sun is good for you, in most cases.” I would be very unsurprised to find that there are precursor hormones released beyond vitamin D that impact efficacy. We don’t really understand the endocrine system very well.
I think that because we can see and understand the dermatological effects we overly weight them. Anecdotally older people I know who have not avoided the sun seem much better off mentally and physically, but I think because there isn’t a measurable reason we’re aware of, we completely discount any benefit.
This is ridiculous. What could you possibly mean? Everyone decides where they live. The cost of moving is not high, the ability to secure a job never easier.
This is a luxury belief and not borne out by any sort of reality. People have been deciding where they live for millennia and it’s never been easier than today.
Well, urban areas tend to be much more expensive to live in, especially in California. And most people don’t work in tech and enjoy relatively good job prospects.
“Regular” to who? Pro EU sentiment almost only comes from the EU, which is what you’re observing. Pro-US sentiment is relatively mixed (as is anti-US sentiment) in distribution.
Says who? But also, it doesn’t suggest what you imply. I could as easily conclude: “Oh wow, the people who actually experience the system like it that much? Awesome!”
Or one could conclude that the bots were posting at a time of day intending you as the reading target. As long as they post things that you are inclined to agree with, you'll feel positive reinforcement about an issue regardless of the actual popularity or even viability.
I value my kid not being exposed to porn as a child well above your right to privacy while watching it.
The ubiquity of the internet and children’s access to it is something we haven’t reckoned with yet. The differences between pre social media and mobile vs now is immense. The people seeking to capitalize on getting children addicted to something are numerous and well motivated by LTV.
Their incentives and the wellbeing of children are directly at odds. We already regulate things that are addictive for children.
People might give their kids a drink extralegally. Nobody is saying “hey kid, why don’t we watch porn together so you can develop healthier habits.” Nobody is creating a “starter Instagram” with their teenage daughter.
These forms of media are NOT SAFE FOR KIDS. They have observably negative population wide outcomes and are as reasonably banned as lead in pipes.
Oh, I don’t let my children have electronic devices at all.
But schools do. Their friends all have Internet enabled devices in their pockets. The library he goes to has poorly secured devices. The school library does too.
This is what I mean by the ubiquity of the internet. It is functionally impossible to control access to the internet as a parent and allow your children to develop independence.
I do what I can, and have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars at this point to opt in to like minded environments. My oldest at ten is observably different than children at his age and doing great.
His friends that come from poorer families, like the ones that I grew up in, might as well have Roblox as a third parent and suffer from ridiculous behavioral problems. The school curriculum in SFUSD is years behind my curriculum was in Georgia when it was a bottom quintile outcome program.
It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong. I think a lot of it has to do with the mass experiment of Internet access we’ve run on children.
Funny enough I lived in the Atlanta metro area from 1996 to 2022. I had a house built in Decatur in 2003.
I started dating my now wife in 2011. She lived in Alpharetta. As soon as I met my now step sons who were 9 and 14, my first thought was in going to have to sell my house and move. There is no way in hell they are going to survive Decatur public schools.
We moved to Johns Creek at first and then had a house built in Forsyth County. Yeah this Forsyth County
The attitudes in the burbs of Forsyth changed since then as people came from other places and it grew. But we very much stuck out. My son loved it there and still lives in that area and rents a house nearby where you use to live.
Strangely enough I live in the same general area - right in the middle of Gwinnett. What an odd coincidence that the three of us happened to come across eachother in an HN thread before knowing this.
"It does not take much looking to see something is thoroughly wrong."
Agreed, but observation suggests that it takes much more effort to do something about it—effort that the majority cannot muster or are unwilling to commit to.
I typically think regulation is ineffective and poorly structured. Banning social media for teenagers is such an obvious social good that I can’t see a downside. The kids are not alright.
No, not really. Any sufficiently motivated state actor already can. I would be unsurprised to be able to dox you as a mildly interested individual. It is usually not very hard.
People usually reference things that they are ashamed about as a reason to justify this fear of ID based services. I don’t find this compelling whatsoever. Every platform I’m on that is even mildly associated with identity is more enjoyable and interesting. The idea that the marketplace of ideas is slowed by identity is not something I’ve seen in practice. In authoritarian regimes we already see ways to circumvent internet anonymity. So no, I don’t see the downside.
Open to being persuaded here though, about 5 years ago I would have agreed with you.
You realize right now today the US is forcing people to have public social media profiles to enter the country and they just started firing people for saying mean things about an irrelevant racist podcaster?
This idea that regulation fails to destroy industries is farcical. Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy. Whether it is good or desirable is a different question.
The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass.
There will be side effects, but social media has been so ridiculously corrosive to the welfare of teenagers that I can’t imagine a ban would be worse.
>Most examples of “failed regulation” like American prohibition were runaway successes as public policy.
You pick one of the worst examples? Prohibition drove a black market for spirits . the 21st amendment repealed it because the government missed out on hundreds of thousands in taxes.
The reason to make the law and repeal it were both awful. The lessons learned were all wrong. It's just awful all around (and I speak as someone that doesn't really drink much).
Yeah, this is absolutely one post hoc interpretation of it. The black market for spirits absolutely pales in comparison to public health and legal data, which conclusively show that second order effects of drinking like liver disease, public intoxication, and domestic violence plummeted.
This prohibition era retcon is a way to justify the fact that people like to drink and there were many people who stood to make money on re-legalization.
Which is why I said the question of it being a good thing is different. I encourage you to look at the data, as someone who also enjoys to drink.
Government bans are surprisingly effective in most developed countries.
"success" can be viewed in different lenses. In your lens of "did it make America healthier", sure. I wouldn't be surprised.
My lens is "did America actually learn anything valuable from this period?". And all I see is "We The Government are fine poisoning our citizens as long as we profit from it". A lesson that passed on to cigarettes, then hard drugs, then fast food (which persists to this day), and now with social media. Then The Government wonders why no one trusts them to do the right thing.
In that lens, I'd say prohibition and its downstream effects on how to regulate in general was absolutely awful and damning.
That’s a fair interpretation! I meant in terms of the stated goals of the Prohibitionist movement. I imagine they would agree with both of us (and be very angry about it)
Human behavior is variable and can be influenced, even against our best interest.
At what point do we acknowledge advertising as a form of psychological attack that causes people to do harmful things they wouldn't otherwise do?
The government's role in this imo shouldn't be to allow corporations to try to convince people to hurt themselves and then to sell them things to hurt themselves with, but then turn around and restrict people's rights to slow down the self harm. Rather I believe the government should seek to annihilate corporations that try to harm the population.
Is not the implicit relationship between corporations, people, and government, such that corporations want to be allowed to exploit a population for profit in return for some nominal good, and the government allows that only so long as the good outweighs the harm?
Oh, nothing like a little radiation fear mongering to convince the public they need government approval for every single drop of drink and byte of food we put into our bodies. It's for our own good, after all!
Meanwhile, years after the actual Radithor radium water [1] scandal, the very same government was merrily blowing up atomic bombs in open air, in the desert [2].
And even today there are crazy people around the world happily consuming radioactive gas in specially designed spas [3]. They should be locked up for their own good, the government always knows better!
Nothing like a snakeoil-monger bemoaning pesky government regulations with misguided exaggerating of the dangers of Big Government.
I'm shocked the same government which supports global warming and mass species extinction, and which threatens to bomb "shithole countries" "back to the Stone age", has a less than perfect attitude about nuclear weapons. Shocked I say!
Next I suppose you'll say that this same government hasn't clamped down hard on coal power plants which, in addition to their CO2 emissions, generates ash which destroys waterways, kills people, and is full of radioactive waste?
I'm so glad our governments always know better than that!
It would be a shame if food and drug laws were in place mostly because even rich people and politicians can't ensure their food and drugs are safe.
It's time to take my protein powder supplements. I'm glad the government inspects every manufacturer so I don't have to worry about doing my own lead tests each time I buy some. Thank you Orrin Hatch for your diligence!
> The idea that someone is going to make an engaging experience on a “decentralized” network is honestly a bit silly to me. The market potential of this business is low. Decentralized networks with much larger incentives have failed to capture critical mass.
When decentralized networks win, they often win so big that they become invisible. AOL is dead, the web isn't. Email, the global telephone network, the internet itself, these are all decentralized networks.
The hardest part of doing this for social media is actually discovery. It's easier to show people an "engaging" feed when your algorithm has access to the full firehose to select from. But that doesn't mean doing it in a decentralized way is impossible, and if you pass a law that drives people away from centralized services, the incentive to do it goes up.
Aaannd then the mask came off, proving you were a moralistic authoritarian. I suppose you support cartels destabilizing entire nation-states with billions of criminal funds too
There is no appetite for oil alternatives that would stop this from meaning the deaths of hundreds of thousands or more people.
The fact is there is no effective way to power a stable grid with modern renewables. Increasing the energy mix sustainably is great. But if people truly want to divest from oil and coal there number one issue right now should be how to onboard nuclear energy effectively. This has been true for decades at this point, but purist policies on the right and the left have left it completely unrealized or actively dismantled it.
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