This is the one that resonated with me.
Obviously "the system" as a whole isn't objectively crumbling by traditional measures like GDP, but there were things that could give that feeling: Homeless sleeping in the subway and on the main streets, the smells, crime so rampant it's basically ignored (my car was broken into > 5 times), working relationships are brief and cold and high-pressure
The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry, it is caused by the homeowners who have been blocking apartment building construction in 90% of the city for 50 years.
I'm glad not everybody had such a callous experience as mine.
> The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry
I don't buy either tech nor housing as the root cause, but at the end of the day I didn't really care who to blame, I just wanted to be able to walk down the street without feeling like I was going to get ebola. But nobody felt safe even acknowledging the problem ("How dare you admit that a half-dressed drug-addict screaming sexual profanities at the woman in front of you makes you uncomfortable! Privilege much?"). People just wanted to blame someone or not even open that can of worms.
Independent investigations now show that there was actually a lot of everyday crime. Even serial killers were just as common in USSR as they were in US, I've read a whole book about the notorious cases - but while in US media elevated them to celebrity status, in USSR the whole thing was heavily suppressed, and most people only heard rumours.
Please, don't perpetuate soviet propaganda.
Also, don't forget that USSR is not only Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev and few other big cities. Rural USSR was very poor, and full of all sorts of crimes. Life in SU was not rosy as they might have tried to describe.
Edit: Formatting.
Having lived in SU there absolutely was normal crime - violent and nonviolent. Levels of crime were presumably like everywhere else.
Why wouldn't there be property crime?
There absolutely was everyday crime:
Burglary Stealing (personal and state property) Hooliganism (always a favorite in the news) Frauds / Confidence Games Firearms and Narcotics related offenses were less prevalent than in the US Rapes (not mentioned loudly) Sex related crimes in general were suppressed in the news Murders (also rarely heard at the time but they were there)
only one I cant find is Carjacking.
There were also economic crimes which even had a special KGB section to deal with them in addition to police.
-Meaning large scale stealing within state enterprises(ie stealing from the corporation that you work for) by higher up directors -Various black markets / money exchanges -Illegal enterprises down to midnight video services
In fact during that time official newspapers did not cover the murders as much as they did cover the lesser property crimes and performed various awareness rising functions.
Now with the opening of police archives a lot of more brutal crimes have been brought up.
Whaaaaaaaat? Well, according to official statistics.
From my father's side, we had relatives living in a closed down military city, but they were totally paranoid about break-ins during "Peak Brezhnev." Break ins were 50/50 annual events.
Street poverty existed as well, just not in big cities, where classless were either branded as substance abusers and locked away in jail, or being labeled as mentally ill and locked away in jail.
The regime tried really, really hard to make it appear that there were something wrong with the classless people, and "you keep your head low and everything be alright"
This isn't about the Soviet Union, but another Communist country. I recently visited China, and was surprised to see that literally every apartment window had aftermarket bars installed (and every enclosed balcony was surrounded by a cage), even 20 stories up. Apparently there are buglers that will repel down from the top of a tall apartment building, so no apartment was safe from them. On buses and public places, the locals I was with were constantly warning to be on the lookout for pickpockets and thieves on public transit.
I don't know what the official crime statistics say there, but the perception of property crime risk was certainly very high.
I grew up in the Eastern Bloc, now I live and work in the Silicon Valley, and the whole thread resonated with me.
I don't know who he is but I really like this quote. That's consistently my biggest surprise on the internet. The #1 question I get for my posts is "Is that sarcasm?"
I never answer.
I wouldn't be so sure that the reader is always at fault.
[Edit: I got a severe telling off once from an Intel lawyer for using very mild humour in a conference call.... I learned my lesson. I think in the middle of a multi hour conference call of mind numbing tedium I said 'I'm not sure what a Quad Pump AGP Port is but I want one...' - I got a bollocking for a good 15 minutes].
Sarcasm can be culturally dependent. As a child and high schooler, I thought that my parents didn't understand sarcasm. I remember when I realized that my immigrant parents just had a different form of it than I did in grade school and high school.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
That might cause you to be declared a "class enemy". The downfall will be swift.
Is that because you are trolling ?
It probably doesn’t help that there are some inveterate literalists about...
Better inveterate literalists than invertebrate figurativists.
about what?
I thought it was a documentary!
"everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretense of a functioning society... Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the "fakeness" was accepted by everyone as real"
Corporations, The UN, Governments, borders, the value of the $20 bill in your wallet, only exist because everybody accepts it's real.
> So, soon they'll invade Afghanistan and get monthly limits for buying sugar and socks?
> I don't want to alarm u but they've been in afghan for 17 years
This one has become terrifyingly normalized - even within the industry, people who don’t live this way are decadent irresponsible pigs. People who resent living this way are entitled redneck whiners. And despite all that, don’t you dare suggest you’re not really a member of the evil elite 1%.
Many of the younger employees do live in shared housing, but then, so did I when I moved to SF and that was nearly 3 decades ago.
Loved this thread, but I think this one lost me. Does anyone know to what this is referring and mind explaining? Is this a comment on news feeds in apps, or is it a comment on the odd housing supply / zoning decisions? Or neither?
Edit: I based my guess about Google using Hyperion for their financial planning based on the job adverts....
> - 'totally not illegal taxi' taxis by private citizens moonlighting to make ends meet
> - the plight of the working class is discussed mainly by people who do no work
> - the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless
So true it hurts.
> - mandatory workplace political education
Is it really a thing?
Not quite sure what that is a dig at. Unless you are dealing in fresh produce or something, everything can be considered fake and worthless...
As for the political education thing: I don't think they would be overt (or perhaps even conscious) but they do have various team building exercises, no?
and thus nobody wants to work in somewhere more affordable than SF, e.g. Charlotte, where a roving pack of bloodthirsty rednecks will surely swarm out of the woods and tear them to pieces.
A U.S. hating defeatist will point to this list as proof that the U.S. is just as bad as Russia while giving no room for evidence to the contrary.
A loyalist can laugh all this off as hilarious while ignoring the reality of Trump's autocratic leanings.
In polls most voters are crying for moderate representatives and they just want people to reach across the aisle and get things done. But then come election day the polarizing extremist candidates end up getting the votes. As a population, the U.S. is in this self-torturous cycle where they cry for movement and change but in action they only perpetuate the gridlock and partisanship.
This climate really gives me respect for Sam Harris's approach: he really tries to interview others that have just enough of a different opinion so as to give rise to alternative viewpoints and interesting conversation while simultaneously striving to maintain an open, honest, and dispassionate discourse on emotional topics.
That's my pick of the bunch
So true. The USA is viewed worse than China, Russia or Saudi Arabia.
I also see a lot of it on HN.
A friend of mine made the same comment recently in regards to condemning human rights abuses in Israel. You can condemn until your face is blue the human rights violations in Iran, but there's not a lot the Iranian population can do about it. Israel is a democracy, and therefore (at least in theory) the government represents the people.
Another point to note is that HN is US-centric. Most people here will have first-hand experience of the USA, but not necessarily of China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia.
Israel has a different problem: its political spectrum is defined as doves on the Left, hawks on the Right, and real dovishness became a causalty of the Second Intifada. Coupled to extensive corruption, the Israeli system has become considerably less democratic than it used to be, but it still has the problem that nobody is willing to run against the current government on a winning platform more than that legions of candidates or parties aren't allowed to stand for election.
The problem with that line of thinking is that it twists perceptions, which can and does lead people to believe falsehoods. Harm can come when those falsehoods are acted upon (for voting, policy, activism, etc.).
To use a little hyperbole: if you focus on condemning democracies for human rights abuses and ignore (to various degrees) the worse abuses of non-democracies, you may end up just delegitimizing democracy in the eyes of many, because you've created the impression that democracies are the bad guys and are the main human rights violators.
Netanyahu says the West Bank is Israel, and within Israel de facto and de jure it is. Yet Palestinians in the West Bank can not vote, and there is talk in the Knesset of disenfranchising Palestinians outside of the West Bank. Yet a Jew from Brooklyn can move to the West Bank, seize a Palestinian's land, and vote in elections.
Yet this is termed a democracy in comparison to Iran.
To me this implies on some level that the people of the country like their government.
I think this is a reaction to the perceived hypocrisy of the US. Like any country, the US has a complex history as well as a variety of cultural and political issues that need addressing. However the US also consistently and loudly bills itself as "The Greatest Country on Earth". I think this contradiction fuels a lot of hyperbole about how bad the US is when it fails to live up to its own marketing.
All of this is exacerbated because US cultural exports (Movies and Television) have such huge global reach. When you're a kid - whether in the US or not - and you see the pro-American messaging in many popular films you definitely believe it. The disillusionment can hit hard.
Now, if you want to argue that somewhere else is in fact better, that could be valid, but it's a different argument.
If you're the richest and most powerful nation in history, why do you have the highest incarceration rate in the world? Why do so many sick and injured Americans end up bankrupt or die prematurely? Why do parts of Michigan look post-apocalyptic? Why are many of your schools still de-facto segregated? Why is there a Wikipedia article titled "List of tent cities in the United States"?
We could understand a claim like "America is really weird - we're ridiculously wealthy, but our government is profoundly dysfunctional in ways that are hard to fix, which causes a great deal of avoidable suffering". That makes sense to us. A claim like "America is the greatest country the world has ever seen" sounds obscenely callous without some very strong caveats attached.
My system two thinking, given what people say about things rather than personal experience, puts a lot of caveats on top of the China comparison.
However, basing my judgement purely on direct personal experience: regarding “greatest the world has ever seen”… I’d rather have been born a random citizen of France, Netherlands, (west) Germany, Switzerland, or the UK, than a random citizen of the USA — and again, that’s just out of the places I’ve actually visited or lived in.
Going back to second hand impressions: Canada, Ireland, and most of Scandinavia seems better than the impression I have of the USA from three visits of one month each.
Something tells me you have not seen (let alone lived in) that many countries.
If you had, you'd know different societies have different ups and downs. Some countries have more taxes, they also have more perks (e.g. schools and healthcare are not a lottery); some have less money, but also less problems (lower crime rate, low pollution). "Greatest" is meaningless.
How the bloody heck can you quantify this, and provided you can, why not just throw out the blindly nationalistic rhetoric and use the measurements?
What makes you believe that what you say is true?
Depends on whether you have lived in an advanced Western European country.
It also depends of your tolerance of rednecks, prudes, puritans, and ignorant people (which exist everywhere in the world, but have particularly large concentrations there).
Or on your tolerance of a messed up party system, a messed up legal system, a messed up prison system (and the biggest incarceration rates in the world), cops that have an open license to shoot people, and the worse and more widespread racism this side of South Africa. Or on your tolerance on very bad statistics on violence (especially gun violence).
Or on your tolerance for businesses having near feudal reign on their workers.
That said, if you have the money, and the connections, the US is a pretty good deal to spend them. Not to mention very nice landscapes, and generally good hearted and optimistic people (besides the aforementioned negatives).
Plus, for some industries (basically IT and movies), they're tops.
It's weird how a lot of people simultaneously hold a view of the US as an uncorruptible beacon of freedom but can also name heinous things the US is doing or has done that they hate. Not paying sufficient deference to the former ideal (often, dispensing with it as perfunctory performance in the vein of a daily pledge of allegiance to a flag) often makes people think that the US is regarded as especially evil.
For background, as facts matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
"After 9/11, the Bush Administration national security team actively debated an invasion of Iraq. On the day of the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked his aides for: "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit Saddam Hussein at same time. Not only Osama bin Laden."[72] President Bush spoke with Rumsfeld on 21 November and instructed him to conduct a confidential review of OPLAN 1003, the war plan for invading Iraq.[73] Rumsfeld met with General Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S. Central Command, on 27 November to go over the plans. A record of the meeting includes the question "How start?", listing multiple possible justifications for a U.S.–Iraq War.[71][74] The rationale for invading Iraq as a response to 9/11 has been widely questioned, as there was no cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.[75]"
Is this good, neutral, evil?
But, is there really anyone who thought Saddam was a good guy? He was very obviously a brutal dictator. So, at the very least there's one fewer of those around.
Sure, WMD turned out to be a total fabrication and the Iraq War ended up being a misguided attempt at democracy building.
But saying that it shows America's inherent evil nature is very odd from my point of view. Even if the only outcome (as it seems to be) is getting rid of a dictator, that seems like a good thing. Though, you could argue the cost doesn't seem to have been worth it looking back now.
I guess I'm failing to imagine how it could possibly be in the evil bucket and not just neutral or good.
Also popular in these parts.
edit: Every one of these is hysterical. Can we write a pilot?
I think a lot of people view it worse than the propaganda image it presents (we export democracy, we put human right first etc). Russia, China and SA don't go out of their way to publicize their human right record or freedom or exporting any such values to other parts of the world. At least not in any believable way.
Another way to criticize something is to compare a place based on its history. Things are better or worse than before during the era of <X>. We were so much better then and now things are worse. Or vice versa.
And then there is comparative criticism, that is criticize like you mentioned, US vs Russia, China or SA. I have lived in Soviet Union and US, never lived in SA or China. But I would at least say US is much better place for me than the old Soviet Union was. But even then it is not black and white. For example at least hope of getting some subsidized housing, free medical care, university degrees etc was there.
The same can't be said for the US.
They might be whatever they are internally, but that's a problem for their citizens.
Granted though, not on the same scale that US wars do.
>thinks bitcoin is worthless
So this guy is the person that serves the programmers... right? People arent trusting him with user data at facebook... right?
Edit: I accept that I didn't get the joke.
For what it's worth, I agree with you and still found the thread to be very funny.
