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Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

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Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#141

Post by stcredzero »

zerostar07 wrote: post #34
projectramo wrote: post #11

"I am unprepared for people who don't understand jokes" -- Anton Troynikov 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.

Sarcasm and humor are a big deal. They are active attempts to identify resonance with a crowd and common ground, and can be used to assess if there is a strong cultural basis in a community. In the internet it's become very hard to have cohesive communities, so sarcasm has to be labeled (perhaps hoping that it will help people learn to identify it without labels in the future - in vain, i think).

In the internet it's become very hard to have cohesive communities, so sarcasm has to be labeled

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.

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#142

Post by closeparen »

ryandrake wrote: post #93
closeparen wrote: post #63

> living five adults to a two room apartment 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%.

See also the “dense urban apartments are the only morally acceptable housing solution” trope that emerges from every Bay Area Housing thread.

They’re all interrelated. Irrigating your lawn isn’t necessarily wrong, either, until there’s a drought. And we could probably have all maintained our moderate water consumption through the drought if it weren’t for a few truly excessive users. The same applies to land and the housing shortage. If a few areas didn’t insist on being rural, maybe we could all have the suburban dream. But they did, so now even suburbia is egregiously wasteful.

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#143

Post by stcredzero »

Semirhage wrote: post #19
projectramo wrote: post #11

"I am unprepared for people who don't understand jokes" -- Anton Troynikov 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.

Ironic that this is getting so much traction on HN, where humor is actively crushed with downvotes and flags most of the time. I’m not even disagreeing with the rationale of keeping the site for intellectual inquiry rather than endlessly nested references and jokes. A lot of what people think of as humorous is inherently off topic or frankly not very funny or relevant. Sadly though, I’ve seen some genuinely funny and…

> there are some inveterate literalists about...

Better inveterate literalists than invertebrate figurativists.

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#144

Post by [deleted] »

danharaj wrote: post #92
neuland wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure how the 2nd Iraq War is a testament to American evil. It sounds to me like you're saying the invasion was unjustified? 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…

> Even if the only outcome (as it seems to be) is getting rid of a dictator, Innocent people died, friend.

[deleted]

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#145

Post by d0lph »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #79
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcasm doesn't always carry clearly through text-based media. I wouldn't be so sure that the reader is always at fault.

This is one of many reasons that McLuhan attributed text-based media to symptoms of civilizations already in decline.

Has there ever been society without text based media?

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#146

Post by eeeuo »

notlob wrote: post #107
coldtea wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll go ahead and say the United States is the greatest country the world has ever seen. It's not perfect, but once you live in other countries for a bit, even if you enjoy the experience, you appreciate the U.S. a lot more. 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 wo…

> 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). FYI, using "redneck" as a pejorative, as in this context, can be interpreted as pretty offensive, and maybe this is unintentional. I for one consider it offensive.

The term derives from someone who works in the sun. It's unambiguously elitist. I don't think you need to hedge here, it's quite clear.

I also enjoy the pejorative aimed at a sectarian group immediately followed by decrying "ignorant people".

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#147

Post by golergka »

mc32 wrote: post #44
zug_zug wrote: post #12

"- being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you" 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…

The one thing that you didn’t get in the Soviet Union was everyday crime, well, what we understand as crime. Sure they could and did send people off to the camps for weird [political and crimes against the state] offenses, but property crimes and such were close to non existent.

This is one of the myths that a lot of former Soviet Union citizens believe themselves. Unfortunately, crime levels isn't a thing that can be accurately reported from your own experience - you have to rely on some objective outside measure. And while any crime-related news (or any bad news, for that matter) were heavily suppressed, soviet police was equally reluctant to open investigations, because of statistic-based reward system in place.

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.

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#148

Post by KirinDave »

bepotts wrote: post #110
KirinDave wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was true briefly for a few years. The EU is itself a fairly well-armed nuclear power. psst They're also quietly better at cybersecurity than the US government.

This isn't true at all. The EU is just now starting to think about self defense because of Trump. Trump's insurgence is putting into question the US-led world order and NATO alliances. Without the US, NATO is functionally useless. The EU is under the security blanket of the US, whether it likes to believe it or not. Hell, most of those countries pay less than 2 percent of their budgets towards their own defense, and…

It is true that the EU has worked with NATO. However, it's not clear that America needs all the military force it has since a lot of it is quite cleary force projecting on economic adversaries.

Suggesting the EU "needed" this is a bit misleading. And I say this as an American exasperated at our refusal to reduce force projection on foreign nations.

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#149

Post by AnimalMuppet »

imbokodo wrote: post #80
WindowsFon4life wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Links?

You can just go to Wikipedia and look Russia: American Expeditionary Force, North Russia - American Expeditionary Force, Siberia China: Second Opium War - Eight-Nation Alliance ...I could point to dozens more for China, the latest article would probably be... Hainan Island Incident Saudi Arabia: United States withdrawal from Saudi Arabia

First: Many people read a comment. One writes it. It's kind of nice to take the time to put the links in, rather than making all your readers go to Wikipedia and search for themselves.

Second: The US withdrew from Saudi Arabia. That doesn't mean they got there by invading. They didn't.

Re: Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

#150

Post by atulatul »

mrnobody_67 wrote: post #105
petermcneeley wrote: post #42

HyperNormalization looms large. "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" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

Most of society is built on shared fictions. Corporations, The UN, Governments, borders, the value of the $20 bill in your wallet, only exist because everybody accepts it's real.

That's from Sapiens, right?
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