And if there are aliens? I'm being serious. Why does it have to be human intent?
And I think it is entirely feasible that at some point -- how far away, I don't know -- AI becomes superior to us in its appreciation of life and living.
Yeah sure, 35 miles is totally realistic for the average American. Sorry I was too lazy to double check the spelling of frappuccino when it didn't auto-correct on my phone, I'm sure that made it really difficult to tell what I was talking about!
People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
Like, they can write the best and most entertaining video game of all time, one that makes you pass out if not almost die from joy, and they have the right to sell only a single copy for $10 quadrillion and sue the shit out of anyone who plays it without their permission.
And there is no right, or need, to play a video game as far as I'm aware.
None of what you described is a moral downside. Yes, people already admit that it is illegal to engage in copyright infringement regarding stuff that it is impossible to buy in the first place.
That has little to do with the fact that it does not contain any moral downsides to doing that.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
IMO they shouldn't - not for intellectual property.
Look, IP laws like Copyright make a lot of sense when we're encouraging innovative and rewarding companies for putting something unique and desirable on the market.
But if it's not on the market, there's nothing to incentivize or protect. Then it just becomes hoarding, or, more often - using IP as leverage to artificially inflate the value of it. Basically, you can not sell things, thereby making the thing more scarce on purpose, so later on you can maybe scrape more cash.
This sucks. It's bad for consumers, it's bad for markets. So, maybe we should consider disincentivizing this.
Proposal: if you do not sell copyrighted material, you forfeit the copyright. You keep all the protections and incentives of copyright. But! You essentially legalize pirating old shit or you force companies to put their money where their mouth is and distribute said old shit.
If this old shit is truly a harm to someone's bottom line, then uh, you need to be selling it. Otherwise there's no bottom line to harm.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
Getting so tired of HN, every thread has these kinds of vague, ignorant, semi-political comments. Just a throwaway opinion with some unrelated quote to appear smart, not related to the posted link, nothing added to the discussion.
The Suez Crisis happened 70(!) years ago, the article is talking about where modern day UK spends its money. It's literally right there in the opening sentence, if you only bothered to open it:
>Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke?
Aside from strictly technical topics, this community is now worse than Reddit.
I think far too much effort was spent building critical frameworks in social sciences without the lesson sticking that it is a two way street. You build the critical framework to frame specific criticisms. By doing that, you can highlight influences that may be missed in another framing.
Which isn't a bad thing. But the key there is in building frameworks. Instead, we seem to have built large portions of the public into thinking these are the only frameworks that matter. And so everything has to be tied back to them.
The cultural emphasis HN has on original commentary and not doing low-effort link posting has its costs. Sometimes an FAQ model is just a superior line of inquiry.
The most plausible models for UK decline that I've encountered come from a Youtuber named Britmonkey.
He talks about housing as _ongoing existential crisis_, contra widespread apathy on the subject, and about how since Thatcher, the political rule has tended to integrate the worst aspects of center-left and center-right governments.
Ezra Klein's _Abundance_ has been in the news lately, and there are some very similar arguments made there, focused on the US context.
Yeah, Founders don't post here anymore, they are busy chatting on some secret message boards and group chats the riff-raff don't have access to. This site is now for bitter tech workers and wannabes and the comments reflect it. I'm guilty of being a member of that class I admit, and I'm not doing much to elevate things but the discourse has become incredibly uninteresting as a result.
I read the article. My comment was prompted by this:
> One reason for this is that parts of the British state are fundamentally misaligned with goals like ‘improving living standards’ or ‘increasing wealth’, whether that’s through hand-wringingly incompetent procurement processes, long-term failure to invest in the infrastructure and management required to support ‘moar frontline staff!!’, acute treasury brain, or endless cohorts of committees and quangos.
> The current level of ambition, of vision, just doesn’t match up to the situation we’re in.
It’s about a failure of state capacity. The article’s entire argument hinges on why British institutions can no longer turn wealth into functioning systems. The post-imperial loss of strategic vision among British elites is not a distraction: it’s the historical foundation of the current malaise.
Suez was the moment Britain exited the world stage and never figured out what it stood for domestically in the vacuum that followed.
You can’t talk about the failure to invest, coordinate, or reform over decades without asking why the ruling class stopped trying.
Of course not. The entire time Trump is railing against the deficit, he's talking only about goods. He wants to bring back manufacturing to America, didn't you hear?
By quoting "far-left" the poster is indicating that he himself does not believe that Obama is far left but that it is something someone has said or written about Obama.
reply