I’ve seen that error in just about any discussion of charitable giving, including on HN. I doubt it’s due to a lack of knowledge/skills, because these people would tend to give away all their earnings in the belief to somehow make a profit.
So you left Twitter 5+ years ago expecting them to soon fail, and you feel vindicated by the very-much-still-existing Twitter of today purging some accounts?
In a sense, yes. When I was there the company had a ton of other issues too. Mostly how to monetize the service. They couldn’t figure out how to make money, but they were spending money like they were Facebook.
Facebook at least had ad revenue. Twitter really couldn’t figure out how to sell ads.
The concern was to me, fake accounts and fake retweets/followers creating fake user growth. That’s purely my perspective and likely not how the company saw it. I wasn’t comfortable investing my time into a place that gave me that feeling.
Building roads, writing traffic rules or enforcing them just isn't amendable to optimisation using your preferred mechanism of free-market economics. Or, more accurately: competition only works for rather large competitive difference needed to overcome the natural friction introduced by the difficulties of moving.
It's painful to see that people seem to not even be aware anymore that our societies have yet another organising principle beyond capitalism, namely democracy.
Sure, you never agreed to be somewhat dependent on "society". But there just isn't enough land to live in the anarcho-libertarian fantasy where you don't have to find compromises. And the standard hyperbole of the "threat of violence" makes even less sense if you unquestioningly champion capitalism while rejecting democracy, because capitalism also relies on the ultimate threat of violence, as anyone not paying their rent will notice sooner or later.
Private prisons seem to be a good counterexample here. Not only does the profit motive lead to inhumane conditions and perverse corruption, such as the Chicago(?) judge getting a kickback for every juvenile sent into the system. The outsourcing of that "monopoly on power" OP decried exaggerates any problems inherent in the government<->citizen relation: civil servants at least have a certain professional ethos, swear an oath, are usually invested in a long-term career, have pensions to look forward to (and not risk), are subject to far more rules (FOIA etc), can mostly not escape liability through bankruptcy, and so on.
Privatised security is an almost prototypical dystopian nightmare. Look no further than TSA. Millgram might have fudged his data, but the idea that giving someone a uniform and power over others tends to awry is still somewhat plausible.
Other examples: those rent-a-goons shooting civilians in Iraq for sport. (With, by the way, double the salary and many military toys not relevant to the job at hand). The US health system also comes to mind, only that you would have even less choice to chose your local police short of moving.
I've generally had better experiences with airports whose TSA screening is contracted out to third parties (eg. SFO) than those where it's done by the government agency itself (eg. JFK, Boston Logan).
I seem to recall similar stories from Louisiana and Florida, except the Florida one also involved digging up bodies from unmarked graves around the "boot camp" for delinquent juveniles. My memory is suspect, so maybe do your own research.
There's also the movie "Holes", the book it was based on, and the reality it was based on. "Boot camps" are plagued with corruption, abuse, and neglect all over the US. Wherever you are, if you dig deeply enough, you are likely to find someone profiting from children's misery.
As someone who used the ability to setup custom piece arrangements in Battlechess to see all the animations:
Place the enemy king in middle. Use four rooks at the edges of the board (two on the left, two on the top) to ensure the king can't move off his square. Give him a pawn to move to avoid a stalemate ending. Then place your desired checkmating piece where it can take one move and threaten the enemy king.
It's commendable that the author counteracts the tendency towards cynicism with the occasional rebuttal, although to fully embrace the spirit of kindness, I would maybe skip the Dilbert reference.
Remember: If everyone really were as stupid and/or evil as some of these maxims postulate, it'd be highly unlikely that you just happen to be the exception. Also: management, design, law, marketing, journalism, social sciences, and politics are all disciplines just as challenging as programming or engineering.
And if you can't think of any reason why one of those fields should be difficult, you're just as likely to better at it as that field's practitioners being better at your job.
"Vapours" actually were a major thing in medical research once, cured by bloodletting and mercury IIRC.
There are all sort of models still widely believed today. Some are unassailable (evolution, germ theory), some seem right more often than not ("don't eat bacon"), and some seem so right but nothing based on them works ("cholesterol is bad").
So this sort of naive belief in our ability to model the processes in a body or a cell has out of fashion at least since WW2. It's still used to come up with ideas to try. But even there, purely random exploration of the search space is not consistently worse.
