Both of these views are consistent with each other. Most people are honest and issue few referrals. But the few people who are dishonest issue loads of referrals. Therefore, most of the referrals a company gets are from dishonest people.
Both the people who voted for the criminal to be president. And the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump.
Yes, because that's several million people, and the elected democrat officials count in the hundreds.
It's actually tens of millions, if you count eligible voters that didn't vote. Not to mention the tens of millions of voters for the other Party.
People don't lose elections, campaigns do. And when they do, out of a refusal to accept responsibility, they cast blame outwards. They try to get people to blame each other, rather than the frankly quite obvious people at fault.
People who voted for Trump were pretty clear about what their issues were. They wanted to bully trans and they wanted to stick it to the libs. They were looking forward to liberals suffering. Some of them would never vote for a woman or black person. They liked masculinity Trump projects - aggressive insulting fraudster.
That's exactly the kind of simplistic thinking that I was talking about.
People had legitimate concerns about cost of living, food inflation (look at the charts of food prices 2020-2024), ballooning national debt, military adventures, crime, fraud, expensive housing and rent. I could go on.
Trump's government is unlikely to offer any solutions to the above, but that's a different story. Voting because they wanted libs to suffer... sheesh. Most people are not that dumb and have objective reasons to vote a certain way. Any party that wants to stay in power longer will have to address these issues.
Do you really think an average family is more concerned about trans issues than their inability to afford a house?
Unfortunately you are pretty much out of touch with reality. What parent wrote is true for large swaths of voters (sticking it to libs - any regular US forum I ever opened was full of 'libtards' and other worse insults even on completely unrelated topics... or just go to bible south, even completely ignoring racism and bigotry topic).
Sure, thats not all, then there are folks believing that a criminal, notorious liar, populist and suspected pedophile is going to do magic unheard of in reality. Very smart, what could go wrong...
Solution of the issues you write would move US to highly regulated country maybe like France, which is unpassable in US and would cause massive issues down the line. Also, the issues you list are valid for basically whole world, has many reasons and US republicans are the very last group of people in a long line of people who would tackle specifically those effectively, they usually go into opposite direction.
None of that favored Trump. National debt, military adventures, crime, fraud - all of those are consistently better under democratic administrations. They are consistently worst under republican administrations. Trump himself committed crimes and it was very clear he will be more corrupt then anyone before him. Trump himself talked like someone who will be aggressive ... and here we are with Venezuela, Iran clusterfuck.
> expensive housing and rent
People who genuinely cared about those did not voted for Trump. However, some used these as excuse.
> Voting because they wanted libs to suffer... sheesh.
Yes. I say so because I was actually listening to what conservatives said and did. Yes, if you do not read what they actually say, there was a lot of sane-washing going on. But, you have to ignore what Trump voters were actually saying in conservative places.
> Most people are not that dumb and have objective reasons to vote a certain way.
Their priorities are not what you say they are. It is simple as that.
> Any party that wants to stay in power longer will have to address these issues. Do you really think an average family is more concerned about trans issues than their inability to afford a house?
Frankly, yes, MANY conservative people were radicalized by that prospect. That is why Trump team made created culture war about it prior election and why they do it now too.
It does not matter what favors which administration (btw like I said, food inflation stats look awful during Biden's admin, although covid is probably more to blame). The grass is always greener on the other side, and people that cannot afford rent are just not going to vote for more of the same. It is always a swinging pendulum.
The more I think about these things, the more I am convinced that Marx was right, and we only have a semblance of democracy. There is no fundamental difference between the parties.
Like I said, I am more worried about paying real estate taxes, keeping the house, getting my kids through the college, paying car insurance and being able to afford food, and not having to leave the city downtown before dark. Trans issues... not my concern at all. Immigrant rights - I frankly do not care. The plumber who was unclogging my kitchen pipe today is a Trump voter who is not a fan of this war, and he was mostly complaining about skyrocketting cost of doing business and cost of labor that started shooting up about 5 years ago, and THAT likely was the main reason for his vote. Many people keep hanging out on the forums where niche party darling issues get discussed nonstop, and that creates an impression that most of the population cares about them, but I don't believe that's the case at all.
Anyone who manages to decrease the cost of healthcare, food, gas, improves an economy, etc.etc. will get my vote. That was not Biden, and it is clear by now that will not be Vance. Anyone who talks about immigrant rights ahead of my own, defunding the police and so on will not get my vote.
Unfortunately I always seem to have a choice between a bad candidate and a worse candidate. This time I had to choose between a word salad producer who was a VP of a senile president, and a baffoon. The democratic candidate was as unlikeable as the republican. I stayed home. You guys can attack my position as much as you want, but I am not going to put my financial well-being and that of my kids behind the issues that do not matter much for me, and that is not going to change. I believe the same goes for most of american families.
I'll give you a small example. I live in heavily democratic district. A local government had a referendum a few years ago on permits to build low income housing units, subsidized by local taxes. Housing immigrant families was mentioned. The referendum was a complete fiasco. You would have barely found any Trump voters in the room. People's concern about taxation took precedence.
Last years took us from Obama to Trump to Biden back to Trump who will likely lose midterms because of many things including the Iran adventure. Neither party offered any tangible advantage.
> It does not matter what favors which administration
It does matter. Republicans are supporting the Iran war right now. Americans in general are not, republicans are in. Conservatives and MAGA even more. So, no, they were not actually worrying about military adventures, they like them.
> The grass is always greener on the other side, and people that cannot afford rent are just not going to vote for more of the same
Oh yeh, actually, data shows they do.
> I am more worried about paying real estate taxes, keeping the house, getting my kids through the college, paying car insurance and being able to afford food, and not having to leave the city downtown before dark.
Funny crime was going down for years. Funny, actual crime rates do not even enter discussion about crime. It was republicans who wanted business like expensive college. Who are against students ability to discharge that debt in bankruptcy.
> Trump voter who is not a fan of this war, and he was mostly complaining about skyrocketting cost of doing business and cost of labor that started shooting up about 5 years ago
Well, maybe he should not have voted for Trump.
> Anyone who manages to decrease the cost of healthcare, food, gas, improves an economy, etc.etc. will get my vote.
It would be a mystery why would someone who want cheaper healthcare and better economy would vote for party that consistently pushes for healthcare to be more expensive and worsens economy voted republican. But republican voters do so while people like you talk about these as if matter for republicans
> This time I had to choose between a word salad producer who was a VP of a senile president, and a baffoon. The democratic candidate was as unlikeable as the republican. I stayed home.
Frankly, if Harris is as unlikable as Trump for you, then I doubt the economic concerns here were drivers of yours stay home action. Because it was super clear where Trumps administration will go - including economically.
> Trans issues... not my concern at all. Immigrant rights - I frankly do not care. [...] Immigrant rights - I frankly do not care. [...] Housing immigrant families was mentioned
Fun fact, Biden deported more people then any president before him. Democratic party was never all that pro-imigrant as conservative propaganda makes them.
As for trans, it was republican party that made that issue and they did gained vote on that.
War - history won't agree with you. Trump started Iran. Biden got us into supporting Ukraine on the other side of the planet. I like neither.
Crime - I don't care about "going down for years". I look at Chicago where I work, and people in my office these days make sure they are out of the south part of downtown before the dark.
The guy's business started nosediving 5 years ago, and you mention Trump again?
Jeez.
Anyway, you really sound like a (not very convincing) TV commercial. I am telling you that neither party improved the life of an average american (or mine if you don't want to generalize), and you are telling me these are not the droids I am looking for. That's the reason I don't like talking to die hard republicans AND democrats. Neither makes any sense anymore, and neither looks beneath the surface. Maybe instead of voting for the side that I like more I should start voting for the party that pisses me off less.
But there are still reasonable folks to talk to from either party, and they are NOT found in this discussion.
Bye.
Not to me.
Both involve us in wars that have nothing to do with us, both are sucking away the money that could be spent on improving things domestically instead of spending it on MIC. Both use lame excuses for justification (WMD vs "fighting for democracy".) One is about protecting private equity access to Ukrainian agriculture, the other one is about denying China access to heavy crude. Both are likely to be losers.
I am sick of both.
> Preventing Ukraine from being taken over by Russia improves US security. Just sitting and doing nothing would be incredibly stupid and amoral.
The only thing it improves is the pockets of the US MIC. It will be taken over anyway, being in Russian backyard. Why didn't you take your broomstick and go fight over there if you are such a believer? Or would you rather leave the meat grinder for the Ukrainians to experience? What's amoral and stupid is that now I have to pay three times as much for heating because of LNG exports.
> But actively bombing Iran is so stupid the US never did it until Trump was elected.
LOL. Obama and Libya 2011 come to mind as a close contender. But I agree with you on this one.
Hehehe. Nice try. All I am saying this is not our fight. If you really think it is, don't be a coward and join in, instead of having Ukrainians die for you.
Thank you for proving what I said at the very beginning of this conversation. Say something that makes perfect sense, democrats like you would label a Putin shill. Say someting against Trump's policy, get labeled a libtard. Both get us into moronic wars.
No wonder I no longer bother going to the polls. Take care.
You keep repeating stupid Russian talking points about the war. Russia invaded Ukraine with the goal of taking it all over and Ukranians are defending their country because they don't want to be part of Russia. This isn't hard to understand.
You must be really dense. I don't repeat anything. I am saying that I am paying through the nose to heat my house as a result. I don't give a flying duck about your Ukraine and Iran. None. Got it? Saving the patch of dirt on the other side of the planet will not motivate me to vote for your party. Reducing cost of living will.
Hopefully more and more people feel the same way.
If you really want to get to the root cause, on the Democratic side it’s the people who promoted/supported/covered up for Biden when it would have been obvious to anyone close that he wasn’t fit for the purpose any more. And Biden himself, for his hubris.
That was why things were rushed and there wasn’t a proper primary. Yes, they could have held a very late/quick convention and would likely not have picked Kamala, but anyone getting the nomination at that late stage would still have been hugely in the back foot.
There is no single root cause in a complex system of checks and balances. Many parts need to fail for things to get as bad as they are now. Trying to reduce everything to a single fault is either stupid populism or blatant propaganda.
IMHO the highest court, which is tasked with delivering timely justice, ought to make their decisions in a reasonable amount of time, and not allow legally questionable executive actions to continue while the legal question is unanswered.
You may consider that populist, but my opinion is that SCOTUS has derelicted their constitutional duty in these trying times.
I agree, but derelicition of duty by SCOTUS during this regime does not explain why a 34-times convicted felon and insurrectionist was even allowed to run for office again. Nor does it explain why the entire Senate keeps rolling over for every wet fart coming from the office of the Pedophile Of The United States.
You can find many other valid issues with the US system listed in this thread. Most of them are valid criticisms, and many of them identify a different underlying cause. Pointing them out or even focusing on a single one is not necessarily populist -- but insisting that there is a singular root cause is.
I love how the root cause is always the opposition, never the perpetrator.
Focusing on the Democrats (who are hot garbage) is such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture (yes, it's pretty clear from the Epstein files that they did everything they could to destroy those young children's minds and hearts for sport, and that was the real 'game' they were playing).
But by all means, carry on about bad tactics in the election, surely that is the 'root cause' here.
I don't disagree with you, but I also wonder what exactly the Biden justice department was doing with these files for four years. It seems to me like they were covering for the same people. Being "in the club" is more important to them than party.
1) You seem to think I'm some sort of GOP-pedo-billionaire sympathiser; nothing could be further from the truth. I'll help you slam the prison door and throw away the key.
2) No-one mentioned Epstein in this part of the discussion until you did - I thoughts we were discussing tariffs. I was responding to someone saying that, in the context of the tariff mess, they blame the people who voted for Trump, and "the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump". My point was simply on this specific issue, the root cause was the hubris and chain of events that led to Kamala being chosen, almost at the last minute, rather than that people "supported" her in that situation.
(And if you need someone to explicitly state that, yes, they also blame the people who voted for Trump or you get triggered, then consider it confirmed.)
You made a choice to focus on one (less important) half of the equation, and that choice comes with consequences - including obfuscation of the actual perpetrators, who commit crimes against humanity. We have had years of this which enabled our current situation. I don't think it is the right choice to make.
I was not going to pretend to understand your motives via text - not enough information. So I was responding to the concrete effects of your comment whether intended or not, and not to your personal opinions. I was pointing out the other (more important) half that you failed to acknowledge. It's so horrible that just stating it makes it seem like I am 'triggered', when I was just just stating facts.
The conversation is not strictly about tariffs, that was just the starting point. Once it was expanded to Trump and Kamala and the election, the context was far larger and naturally everybody reading would reasonably understand this. You contributed to expanding the conversation, it is normal that discourse would follow from that.
In brief, I think we need to be quite careful to explicitly mention specific evils at this time, particularly because a major tactic of those perpetrating them is making a lot of noise to drown out focus on their crimes.
I focused on the part of the comment that I was replying to that I disagreed with.
Without wanting to be overly reductive, this is the point of discussion: to focus on the points of disagreement, for the purposes of understanding, alignment, or persuasion.
I would have thought that this was obvious, and how people expected discussions to work. I would have said that needing to be thorough and explicitly state each point of agreement, alongside addressing the points of disagreement, was frustrating and unnecessary. But maybe I'm wrong on this, so thank you (genuinely) for giving me this to reflect on.
(RE: "triggered" - maybe re-read what you wrote. Responding to an ostensibly benign comment about the background cause of Kamala being chosen as the candidate, with "such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture" certainty comes over as disproportionately and inappropriately emotional and angry in word and tone, to this observer.)
Restricted representative size, gerrymandering, FPTP voting, businesses with resident/citizen rights, the restriction of 42 U.S.C. 1983 to not cover Federal actors...
So maybe consider that when you give up on obvious things that are good based on some conspiracy theory that the "man" is trying to keep you down, what you're actually doing is being part of the system and endorsing it. Changes like this do happen, they just happen despite you.
Why would you claim that my statement is defeatist? It is just acknowledging the reality of how things work nowadays without saying anything about giving up. If anything, it cautions people that change will not come easily and to be prepared for it. I vote, give money to political/public causes, to go meetings of my federal representatives, post my opinions on HN, ... I am just being more realistic about my expectations.
First, Florida killed tenure. You get reviews every 5 years and can be fired if they don't like what they see.
Second, Stop WOKE, means that Florida gets a say in what I teach.
So Florida took away the most important (and for many maybe only) attractive part of the job: academic freedom.
Almost half of Florida faculty are trying to leave. So yeah. Of course they get the bottom of the barrel. That's all that's left for them. With the ability to get a job almost anywhere else in the world you'd have to have extreme circumstances to consider Florida.
This is absolutely a factor; New College lost half its teaching staff when DeSantis took a wrecking ball to it over ideological disagreements, Florida is not a great place to be in the field right now.
I’d add that Florida higher education pays below average vs. nationally and the state is dealing with some serious cost of living issues at the moment (e.g. insurance).
Writing code was always cheap! You could outsource for inconsequential amounts of money and get massive amounts of code in return. Yet, the vast majority of companies do not do so. Because coding is not the hard part of being a software engineer / programmer.
That's like saying that photography killed painting because it saved you from having to draw things. Drawing is basically free now, I just take the photo. But the number of painters (and by that I mean, artists who paint) is dramatically higher today than in 1800. Artists didn't die because of mechanical reproduction, they flourished, because that wasn't the problem they were solving.
Yup. All the H1B haters are going to get what they want: silicon valley will lose its engine and the next major tech companies will be overseas.
I see it personally. People who are awesome. Their FAANG desperately wants to get them to come to the US. They can't for years. Then they give up and open an office in India or Eastern Europe and the US loses hundreds of jobs and great talent.
This teaches such companies to go overseas. And once they have taken on the burden of doing so expanding is much easier there than here.
It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago.
> It's amazing to see a country that has everything and every advantage throw it all away. But I guess Europe did the same thing a century ago.
The US is one country, "Europe" is what, 44 countries? You posit that 44 countries "did the same thing a century ago." How surprising can it possibly be that a 45th country might join that prestigious list... maybe?
As a parent, I'm happy that social bans are finally a thing.
But, I don't get the approach. It's not like social media starts being a positive in our life at 20. The way these companies do social media is harmful to mental health at every age. This is solving the wrong problem.
The solution is to take away their levers to make the system so addictive. A nice space to keep in touch with your friends. Nothing wrong with that.
If by roughly the same you mean 10% to 100% more (think cables for high markup) and I have to go to the store instead of having it come to me. With much worse selection. Then yes. That's an amazing experience!
Nearly every time I've bought cheap USB-C cables off Amazon they didn't perform as advertised. The few times I bought name-brand ones they looked different from the ones I've bought at in-person stores and once again failed to perform as advertised (likely counterfeit).
I mean, yeah, sure if you view having to go to the store as a negative, then you would prefer to order online and have it brought to you.
After years (my whole adolescent and adult life, more or less) of online shopping, I find that it's actually quite refreshing to go to the store, find the product I need, and purchase it. I have it immediately, I got to handle a demo unit and get a feel for it. If I need to return it, I go back to the same store and get my money back the same day.
There are pros and cons to both, for sure, but these days I find I'm valuing the offline experience more and more.
Fun fact, this isn't new. There's an entire discipline that has been doing this for 50 years: machine learning.
Literally the hard part that people deal with in ML is how do you specify the goal of a machine that's just going to blindly make it happen (the other half is how do you optimize that function but that tends to be considerably easier). Like, if I want a good image recognition algorithm what function should I use to compute how good my current approach is. Particularly when I don't have annotations for every output.
We're going to need to extend the methods that we developed in ML for many other fields over to software engineering.
If you're going to write with AI give me the prompts. Don't produce this strange tone-shifting full-of-fluff mess where most of it is machine filler content. The density of ideas to text is absurdly low.
Let's just be open an honest with one another. If I really want to read something like this my AI can generate it from your prompts just as well as your can.
Sure, you can always find a website with someone shady on it. But that's always been the case.
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