Capitalism is very simple. Capitalism as an economic system is essentially defined as the process of private expropriation of public wealth. Technically, the Earth is every creature’s inheritance but we in our late modern wisdom have conceded that only a select handful of people will get to profit from its resources while the rest are forced by either gunpoint or starvation to serve them forever or die.
Yeah, no.
Look, I'm not a rah-rah capitalism guy, but the fact is that the vast majority of wealth is based on human labor, the labor of individuals, applied to nature. While the latter certainly has a strong claim on being public wealth (a commons) the wealth produced by a human's labor belongs rightly to that person. (Economic rents then tend to concentrate that wealth, but that's a separate topic.)
There is an economic third way alternative to capitalist rent seeking and socialist totalitarianism: distributism. For a modern introduction to this idea, this is a good book:
Some people will be put off by the catholic moral basis, others by the term "Social Justice", but it's a good read for a different way to look at both the history of economics and the economic situation we find ourselves in today.
> There is an economic third way alternative to capitalist rent seeking and socialist totalitarianism: distributism.
It should be noted that Milton Friedman, who was as capitalist as it gets, advocated for guaranteed basic income, which is at its source an income redistribution scheme.
Whether the income is financed by taxes (taking cash out of the rich to distribute it to the poor) or through monetary policy schemes (printing away cash) the end result is that such a scheme results in redistributing wealth around the whole society.
Many, many code horrors exist today due to a deep and abiding fear developers have of appearing insufficiently smart.
Most of the web apps that are being built today have no need for a complex front end and, if they do, it's only in a few places. But, as you quote, programming is pop culture, so every new Form => Datastore app is going to be built using a toolchain more complicated than quake was built with.
You are married to someone who makes enough money to push your marginal tax rate on income to the point (it can hit 55%+ in places like CA) that you might as well take a flier on a startup rather than pulling a W4.
This is more than a little self serving, but when I switched us over to intercooler.js it made a huge difference in our app.
When I pulled the trigger on it I was terrified that I was screwing us over by not using Angular (which was the cool tech at the time) or some other more javascript-oriented solution. Thankfully it has worked out well, and my co-founders don't hate me any more than they already did before hand. (And maybe even a bit less.)
This isn't surprising to me at all. Having the creator of a framework working with a team using a framework is a huge benefit, almost regardless of the framework quality (within reason). And that's not a dig at intercooler's quality (I've never used intercooler, and am no fan of Angular), but I do think it's a huge confound.
Meaning, if I had access to creator of framework A on my team, and was choosing between framework A and B, and objectively liked B better than A (but not by too much), I would still choose A.
Sane western cultures don't allow citizens to fall into debt-peonage. This is why we forbid usury for so many centuries, based on the late roman empire experience.
More and more Americans understand that anti-Iranian sentiment here is mainly due to propaganda, not any rational considerations. Iran should be a natural ally of the US.
The Iranian hardliners do a lot to stoke that flame too. Much like us, they have a polarized society. Their support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and other problematic groups complicates things too. Add to that the fact that it would be tough to repair the rift with Iran, while managing our Saudi relationship.
All that said, I think it's a worthy undertakings to normalize relations with Iran. And selfishly, I look forward to the day when I can freely visit Persia as an American.
Honest question, how does Iran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas directly affect Americans? I'd argue that Saudi Arabia's support for ISIS and Al-Qaeda had more/actual negative effects on Americans.
Iran had nothing to do with 9/11. Perhaps you're thinking of Iraq, which also was not behind 9/11, but a similarly named country that we happened to go to war with shortly after 9/11.
Since you haven't stopped despite repeated requests, I've banned this account until we get a guarantee that it won't do political flamewars again.
I suppose I need to add that this isn't any kind of position on Israel, Iran, the U.S., terrorism, 9/11, bombs, or wars. It's just a position about what sort of threads aren't ok on Hacker News. One could flip all the political bits in your comments and its status for HN purposes would be just the same.
My colleagues and I have a lot of empathy for the feelings of loyalty and love that drive a person to fight these battles. The feelings are important and the issues are important—much more important than Hacker News. Nevertheless the moderation job here is to protect HN as (1) a community and (2) a web forum dedicated to what gratifies intellectual curiosity. Nothing threatens that more than political battle, so we have to be proactive about this.
I'm down-voting you (and not only you, to be fair) because you are hell-bent on creating a discussion against Iranian politics in a thread about the tragic, early death of a brilliant mathematician who happened to be an Iranian-American (and also, more notably, a woman). It's not the time nor the place.
You've done more than anyone else to take this thread into flamewar hell. If HN can't discuss Maryam Mirzakhani without degenerating into a shitstorm about "the terrorist act of 9/11", then we've failed. It's time to stop this now and never do it on HN again.
We all have strong emotions about the life-and-death issues that affect our nations, tribes, and families (or feel like they do). Mostly such issues are off-topic on HN and their mesmerizing power needs to be resisted—or else every thread can easily become about nothing but that. Considering how fire consumes everything in its path the term 'flame+war' is strikingly apropos for the phenomenon, and every HN user is responsible for containing it.
As an Iranian, I can't wait for the day where the online post of my death – should I become half the person Maryam Mirzakhani was – mutates into an argument about Iran's ties to terrorism and 9/11.
I hope you're right. I have met quite a few Iranians here in the States and it often leaves me feeling very sad that government & media rhetoric is so negative and narrow-sighted.
Another example of how the macro reality we create can become massively misaligned with ground-level truths.
Iran was a natural ally until the US dropped the gold standard and now it's in the middle of a proxy war with Russia for control of the trade of its oil and gas resources. That has led to a pretty massive disintegration of culture and governance. Go ahead and compare photos of Tehran in the 70s vs today.
Okay but to be fair there was an article yesterday about taking the blood of the young to revitalize the old that looked pretty amazing in a yellow/black color scheme.
There is such a thing as a gifted child.