Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is everything falling apart?

nonzero.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 970 posts

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#411

Post by floren »

mbg721 wrote: post #360
floren wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who follows gun laws, "compromise" often takes this form: Lawmakers: "We intend to outlaw all semi-automatic rifles with scary black stocks" Gun owners: "Please don't do that." Lawmakers: "Ok, let's compromise, we'll only outlaw scary rifles with collapsing stocks and vertical handgrips on the front." (time passes) Lawmakers: "There is a terrible loophole in our gun regulations..."

I've heard that the definition of "assault rifle" is mainly cosmetic; to what extent is that true?

Per Wikipedia, the US army defines an assault rifle as: "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges."

Selective-fire means it's not just semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull), it can also be set to fully auto (shoots as long as you pull the trigger) or burst (shoots a few rounds when you hold the trigger, then stops). These are essentially unavailable to the average civilian.

In popular usage, though, "assault rifle" means a short semi-automatic rifle with a plastic stock--anything that looks like a modern military rifle. Heck, I bet if you chopped down grandpa's bolt-action .30-06 deer rifle and put it in a black plastic stock, somebody would call it an assault rifle.

Personally, I think the AR-15 pattern rifle is a deeply boring and unattractive firearm. It's also become a symbol in a culture war: a terrifying "weapon of war" to some, a statement of rebellion and "owning the libs" to others. At the end of the day, though, there's just not a hell of a lot of difference between an AR-15 civilian rifle and, say, the Ruger Mini-14, except that the latter has a less scary wood stock.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#413

Post by aaronax »

User23 wrote: post #145
jimbob45 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wait for the market to cycle again - crash, boom, then crash, etc. Parent poster might have been in their 20s/30s though and implying that waiting for the next cycle would waste prime years of their life.

Or you hope that your boomer parents don't reverse mortgage the house to fund the Margarita-ville lifestyle at some compound in Florida. For many young people today inheriting a house is the only plausible way they're going to get one.

Anyone can move to my town and get an $18/hour starting wage job and buy a $150,000 house. Hard to imagine that this is unique. Look outside the cities...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#414

Post by DaltonCoffee »

Tomte wrote: post #70
DaltonCoffee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate?

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

Strange because I've always seen the saurdukhar/fremen as a literary interpretation of a real aspect of human nature - the ability (of some) to perserverve and excel in stressful/difficult situations.

Some real life examples I've pointed too are the ghurkas in WW2 or Russian hackers.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#415

Post by throwaway15908 »

oktroomer wrote: post #236
throwawayN0W wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you tell me, what gender a person with male physique and female brain structure has? What actually happend is the break up of over archaic role models and scientific progress. Some people today, have a decent answer to that question.

Could you explain precisely what you mean by a "female brain structure", and how you would determine that a male has such a brain structure?

From broad brain traits like sexual orientation down to smaller ones like spatial perception or emotional intelligence, a young brain has certain development windows in which a trait or ability can get more or less developed. You could even add in personality traits like competitevness or deference once you associate it with a gender role.

With "female brain structure" i mean traits that are commonly overrepresented in what you might see as a regular woman. I know its inaccurate but so is the opposite, by saying there are only 2 genders and men are all men. Gender is a spectrum in many dimensions and my example of male physique and female brain structure is just a simple counter example against this.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#416

Post by namelessoracle »

throwaway15908 wrote: post #112
namelessoracle wrote: post #73

The elephant in the room is that the Industrial world wanted alot of people, and the post Industrial world does not. Not only in terms of production, but in terms of having a livable environment for everyone. So what happens to what are now "excess" people? The answer to that question is gonna define pretty much everything.

This is dangerous bs. Easy to swallow for the uneducated masses. Putting all moral consideration aside, imagine you could totally depopulate two continents of your choosing. Why should any problem of modern economics be solved by that? The concept of depopulation is simple enough to fit in a single sentence, it leaves out the real problem and its vast complexity (our linear economies and lifestyles attached to it), c…

> The real problem is our unsustainable system, which is independent from any population count

I mean it's just science that the planet can only sustain X people at Y life style (you can swap out "life style" for "level of consumption"). Like there is hard rules of physics about quantity of water, minerals, et cetra. So you can either lower X, lower Y, or try to side step the problem entirely by going to other planets/mine asteroids/magic to increase the resource pool.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#417

Post by hunterb123 »

4ggr0 wrote: post #364
hunterb123 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GND is not about being green, it's about redistributing wealth and laundering taxpayer money. It's about spending trillions more, causing more inflation, and things falling further apart. AOC is a radical, and honestly she has no idea what she's promoting, like most of her followers.

> The GND is not about being green, it's about redistributing wealth No idea what the GND does and what they proclaim, the Greens I mentioned are the ones in my country, which isn't the US. As far as I understand nothing else than Reps and Dems matter anyways. > AOC is a radical I don't think so, but that could also be due to me not being from the US. Lots of things my country does would be wrongfully labeled as soci…

> In order for you to understand me a bit better - If I'd be able to vote in the US, I would've voted for Bernie Sanders.

You'll have to clarify specific policies because saying you support Bernie Sanders just makes it even murkier.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#418

Post by dv_dt »

basisword wrote: post #401
dv_dt wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at life expectancy in the America, it has been flat to reversing. Understandably with added pressure from Covid, but at a rate higher even with Covid higher than all other well resourced major nations. This not because we are unable, but because those with the power are unwilling to engage fundamental issues. Covid is not the only issue for which this is the case - it was happening before covid. Multiple…

>> If you look at life expectancy in the America, it has been flat to reversing. >> Multiple major issues with scientific and economic root causes are simply being ignored as stability and promises of improved prosperity provided by civilization is going backwards. How much of this can be explained by the fact that one third of adults in the US are obese as opposed to major scientific and economic issues?

IMHO, falling life expectancy is a macro measure of multiple failing institutions, not a singular cause.

Obesity is driven by systemic commercialization and sugaring of our food supply, combined with inequality of too low a pay, too many hours, to little vacation. Even funding of highway and road infrastructure over other areas is a contributor here.

Another large part of it is because we elect to keep both private health insurance policy which ends up being racially and economically biased, and what little social safety we provide is riddled with self-imposed rules of means testing and other red tape cutting the effectiveness of even the meager allocation of resources. Many very easily and economically preventable illnesses and deaths keep happening and that is a decline to me. e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/black-diabetics-lose-limb...

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#419

Post by svachalek »

basisword wrote: post #389
oicU00 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah no doubt; I collate trends into reports for rich investors. Lately they have been focused on youth trends, and some numbers are wacky. 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it, leading to forec…

>> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared. Is it urbanisation? I've noticed this trend in the suburbs in my country too and there seem to be a couple of reasons: 1. Driving tests have gotten progressively more difficult and more complex over the last 10-20 years. 2. The cost of learning to drive is insane and getting more expe…

Hmm, I don't know what country you are in, but this doesn't sound like the US at all. There's a recent spike in the cost of driving due to gas prices and car supply, but afaik driving tests here have always been fairly trivial and still are.

Re: Is everything falling apart?

#420

Post by giantg2 »

_gabe_ wrote: post #354
giantg2 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an example of that? I haven't seen a lot of debate about the data (facts), but usually it's about the information (how it was formed from the data). Of course there are a small group of leaders (and/or crackpots) on either side spreading blatantly false info, but I feel that's rather small and receives outsized coverage.

I think one of the most basic facts that we can't agree on is what constitutes a man or a woman. It's a very simple problem that a 5 year old can point out, yet we somehow lost sight of this very basic fact.

I suppose that's a perfect example of what I was talking about. The only reason it's controversial is due to the ways we apply them. The man-made contexts can convolute the meaning of man or woman.

For example, are we talking about sex, gender, or something else? In the context of reproduction, sports, or something else?

Most people agree that the various labels exist. It all depends on how we want to define them.

It can get even more complicated because we have this artificial tautology of man or woman, but in fact there are naturally occuring intersex individuals who fall in between and are mostly forced to choose.

So in closing, I feel the facts are not at issue here (xx vs xy vs intersex). It's how we are utilizing them and applying them to our social constructs which do not necessarily follow nature. If we are are talking about gender, then we take it a step farther into artificial labels and buckets built purely on one's preference (no way to factually check claims). The facts of the subject are simple and agreeable, yet the way we apply them make for controversy around our policies.

Post reply on HN