It's even worse. The capital class is disconnected from employees because they have the managerial class running the business, so it's actually the managerial class that creates the employee experience. But, it turns out that "the capital class" has a large component of 401k funds, and so "the capital class" has a very large component of small shareholders, and so they don't really even have any influence whatsoever.
Why wouldn't supernatural beings work through representatives? For one thing, they are presumably only going to work through people that are committed to their (the beings') agenda. And why would supernatural beings necessarily be populist? Until the Christian revolution, the dominant thought was that the supernatural beings were elitist; all of the heroes in Greek mythology were nobility of some form.
Quit reading after it suggested Lotus Notes was a Microsoft product [1], which it wasn't. The last time I used it, about 2002, it had become an IBM product. If the basic facts aren't right, I'm not interested in the conclusions.
[1] "... what made Notes so important to Microsoft ..."
Citing a 100 km bike ride as a counter-example is not very helpful. Sure, technically, the parent was worded as an absolute statement, but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier that it is irrelevant to a discussion about diet. The implicit assumption is that we are talking about relatively normal diets, and clearly biking 100 km is well outside normal.
Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you? And if not, perhaps a 100 km bike ride is far enough outside the body's design that you need to give it relatively pure glucose because the calorie requirements, if satisfied with more fibrous food, would not physically be able to contain the required calories. And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.
> but I think a 100 km bike ride is such an outlier
I don't think it is, there are a lot of bikers, runners, triathlon people between my colleagues and friends that regularly do that much energy output. Several of them even do much longer rides. And we are not even that young or sport-mad.
> Besides, are you sure that eating that sugar with more fiber would not have been better for you?
Yes, you don't want to get your bowels very active/full during biking.
As an aside, top road cyclists (and I'm sure also long distance runners etc) are currently consuming up to 120g of glucose/fructose per hour during their performance, and have to train their guts so they are able to consume that much.
> And I don't think the latter case is relevant to a discussion of general diet, even if the post lacked explicit qualifiers.
And the point of my post was exactly that I think that either there should be always explicit qualifiers around 'sugar bad' or better just don't write that at all, because it's plain wrong. Sugar as a reasonable part of a quality diet is fine. It's different for children and obviously some other groups of people, but it's not bad in general (and if you want to lose weight, try to eliminate starch, not simple or short-chain sugars, but that's too hard for most people, and might not be healthy either). And messages like that just destroy the credibility of the speaker.
Extreme sports is definitely nothing "normal" - whether I define "normal" as a today's statistic, or as evolutionary history. Your needs and metrics are nothing Joe Regular can use in his daily life, which the OP pointed very clearly and you don't need to refute. Your body is a completely different beast and we would be comparing apples with oranges, only confusing an already confused domain. Because I don't believe that any of your guidelines about guts training is coming from "general surgeon advice" - you are using specialized forums and special indications, while this discussion here is on a general forum, about general indications.
There is nothing extreme about doing a 100km ride from time to time, I don't even have the body of an athlete. That bit about training the guts was an aside and clearly marked as such. I don't do it.
'sugar bad' is a clearly wrong advice that only confuses people in any context.
Arguing that a 100km bike ride is not an edge case seems disingenuous. Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives. "Added sugar bad" is generally good advice for most the population which statistically is fairly sedentary and doesn't require a huge amount of immediately available, low fiber energy.
> Most people could not complete a 3-6hr bike ride without weeks of training and my guess is most people on hacker news probably live fairly sedentary lives.
I do live a fairly sedentary life too. The point of aerobic exercise such as cycling is to counteract that. I log my exercise on Strava, which reportedly has 50 million MAU. I'm sure at least half of them (+ many millions of non-Strava users) could do that easily (or equivalent in their chosen sport). Still an edge case?
"Watch your energy balance", "watch your weight", nutrients, processed foods, etc. I would consider generally good advice. "Sugar bad" or even "added sugar bad" certainly not.
Religion is a lot broader than Christian fundamentalism and zealots. It's sort of like applied philosophy: how do you live a flourishing life in relationship to other people and to the god(s). Modernity has an implicit materialist worldview (matter is all that is) and an explicit rejection of the divine. However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world. (And if we cannot flourish with materialist consequences, that is some evidence that the materialist assumption is incorrect.) So religion is not just some silly, backwater thing, and Marx was absolutely wrong.
The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)
The modern west is still very religious, they just switched to a new religion without a mascot.
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.
People who don’t believe it are bad.
If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.
People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.
People think we should spread it to other people.
Functionally, how is that different from religion?
Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
> we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.
And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.
> People believe it because they learn to believe it in childhood.
In human rights or democratic rule of law?? What a preposterous notion. Precisely what separates religious belief from non-religious is the fact that the latter is dogmatic while the latter is not.
The fact that a government that isn't derived from the will of the people is unstable and likely to be overthrown can be logically and empirically observed, but we can and should test different forms of democracy by experimentation and observation. We can and should test which rights should take precedence over others. Holding the particular rights encoded in the Bill of Rights as sacred is a fallacy rooted in the deification of America's founders. Ultimately, individuals are interested in their own survival and should rationally build societal structures that serve that goal.
Then you define religion as information about a god. Other people define religion as metaphysical beliefs. Other people just define it as irrational staunch beliefs.
Religion and values are two different things. Human rights, universal equality, democracy are values, not religion.
They are also result of constant wars, genocide and general destruction. And Europe mainland was war free better place to live when we seek to sort of have those things. They dont even need to be perfect for making life better.
The foundation of human rights, universal equality, & democracy is empathy, which is basically a peer-reviewed scientific theory at a personal level that those with similar capabilities to you deserve equal respect ...or else, violence.
How did you miss out on learning this life lesson as a child?
Yes, life has no inherent meaning in and of itself. It's up to you to find what's meaningful. If that's praying to the FSM, father of all pastas, hoping his sauce never goes bad, so be it, if it's a more mainstream religion, or something else entirely that's all on you. I don't understand how you connect that to not flourishing though.
>However, if matter is all there is, then there is no meaning in the world. This is not a way to flourish in the world.
Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.
You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.
And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.
That's true, you don't need to be a practitioner of science to live a modern and fulfilling life.
Are you trying to argue that some things I consider valuable were first developed within religion (which I won't argue with, though I think there's more to dig into there than might be immediately obvious), or that I need to personally practice religion to live an ethical and fulfilling life, and I just don't realize it?
Because, if it's the latter, you're again refusing to consider the possibility that I don't need religion. And again, my argument isn't even that that isn't true, though I fervently believe that, it's that telling me that I'm wrong and I need religion even if I don't think I do is a terrible way to convince me that we can find common ground.
the contradiction is with the words - ethical:religion ~ modern:science.
ethics comes from religion. modernity comes from science.
if you say - "I don't need religion to tell me not to kill people"
then i say - "ok. so, why don't you go around killing people?"
you say - "i just don't have the desire to". or "i am compassionate"
i say - "ok. you do you. what about me? I wish to kill people. what's stopping me?"
you say - "consequences. police. law & order"
i say - "so if there was no police in a suburb, or no punishment for killing, I can kill people?"
Your argument falls dead.
Because religion tells us one thing - the law of Karma - there is no place or time in the universe where an action does not have a consequence. Regardless of your belief in God or the soul or spirit or afterlife or past lives.
Almost sounds like newton drew inspiration from the old golden rule - Treat others as you'd like to be treated.
Why? Because every action has an equal and opposite reaction - you WILL be treated exactly as you treated others, whether in this life or the next. Ergo, if you don't want to be killed, don't kill. if you want to be killed, go ahead.
And I can attribute something you enjoy today to a butterfly, flapping its wings on the shore of the Atlantic, seventeen years ago. People love to take a selective view of complex systems (for example, by picking only some nodes in the web of causality to call "attribution"), using biases like "relevance" and "significance" and "a non-omniscient positionality", and many especially love to call other views "ignorant" or "short-sighted".
You need stories, preferable positive stories. Not those about endless wars and horrors, those stories work like a contraceptive. They are pure poison, no matter how true, scientific and educational.
I don't know how to say that you can have positive stories without believing in god without feeling like I'm arguing against a strawman. Can you please give me something with a little more substance?
If the article is about the craft of writing, then no point. But if the article is about communicating ideas, AI is just the means the person with the ideas chose.
However, in this case I think both were fairly vacuous. Also, sentence fragments are a hallmark of bad writing that high school English teachers try to train you out of, apparently unsuccessfully if the training data makes them so likely.
I don't think software was ever sold as a high variance career. Start a startup! was sold that way, particularly by PG's early essays, but not not W2 employment. You do W2 because you want low variance, and you either love software or it pays well. Either way, I don't think most people were okay with terrible outcomes. (I don't think getting laid off is terrible, I think it should be an expected possibility. I've found that contracting/freelance has helped reduce my fear of losing my job, since you expect the job to end when you start it, and since you're regularly looking for a new job, you get a sense of how long it takes.)
Generally you can only profitably expand into adjacent products. Making and selling cars and HVACs are completely different, meaning that your expansion will be starting from zero knowledge. Furthermore, the sales channel of HVACs, sales strategies, etc. is not likely to have much in common with that for cars, so you are essentially creating a whole new startup company. (In the case of HVACs, it would be a startup in a commodity market, which would make no sense, because commodity markets have no real profits.) Doing one thing well is not just Unix philosophy, it is also a sound business strategy. Of course, usually adjacent things that could be done well suggest themselves, but often there is a limit to these.
Perhaps you've heard of Mitsubishi, Toyota Group or Samsung? Notably, Mitsubishi is involved in making cars, HVAC and heavy equipment.
Or, for that matter, Apple. If they subscribed to that philosophy, the iPhone wouldn't exist. Honestly, they would have kept trying to make the Apple II.
Society should care about people making profits because otherwise those people do something else instead of providing goods and services. What happened in Communism is instructive on this point. Now if you want to argue that the pursuit of maximum profit as an end is a problem, there's a case to be made. The US had something like a marginal tax rate of 90% around the 1940s/1950s, if I recall correctly, and it obviously didn't hurt innovation, but people got paid in perks and corner offices and status instead of just money.
I think people are misled by Marx and derivatives, and misdiagnose the problem. I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources". However, the philosophical materialism of Marx & Co. pretty much makes this inevitable. (The secular view is also materialism, so you get it on both sides.)
> I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources".
How about both? Both are pretty terrible for society IMHO. Some shithead's making 6000x of what average worker at their company because they're on top and they're treating everyone under them as interchangable tools with zero compassion. If they were limited to only making like 3x then they'd be on a much more equitable place with their underlings and might even be more likely to see them as fellow humans instead of disposable work units.
Lots of people claim "greed", but the stereotypical Tech billionaire doesn't simply roll around in gold like Scrooge McDuck, doing nothing and demanding more. They invest and reinvest it into new enterprises.
Of all the ways of dealing with massive wealth, this is probably the second least disruptive one. (The first one would be just giving it to honorable causes.)
You don't know in advance what is going to make you money. Investments are risky.
In 2026, we know that SpaceX is a huge success. In 2002, it was just one of very many space startups, the vast majority of which ended up bankrupt, and before the last Falcon 1 flight, it was already on the brink of bankruptcy. They were incredibly lucky that the last rocket they had money for actually reached orbit.
During the same time, John Carmack invested into Armadillo Aerospace, and lost money.
Was he less "greedy" than Musk only because in retrospect we know that one didn't pan out and the other did? Or were they both simply risk takers in an uncertain field, motivated by a mix of incentives?
That is a complete distraction from Meta in particular selling social media hard to kids even knowing that their work explicitly caused mental harm.
This is not a I own stock am I culpable issue, it is a company knowing their product is dangerous and ignoring the issues because it doesn't make them more money.
Same shit as the tobacco industry. People do banally evil shit for money.
"Capitalism is the problem" by itself is like saying "unix operating systems are a problem". There are so many flavours, so many parameters (laws, tax, etc.) that I do not see value in generalizations.
I think morality is quite hard to define and any system should take into account unboundedness of some human attributes (being greed, stupidy or other) in some humans.
Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans.
Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material needs.
This is an economic system that isn't even 50 years old and you're already going with the Marx scare quotes as if US branded capitalism hasn't already killed 10s of millions of Americans in the pursuit of profit.
Let's not even peel back the founding of this nation, a colonial white slaver state with minority protections baked into the constitution to impede people's chances of progress with every life.
>Call me crazy but society should care about giving people meaning, providing healthcare, and an education. You know the three things that lead to productive humans.
Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes.
It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy.
The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy.
Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized.
I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.
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