firstOrder (u/firstOrder)

firstOrder commented on New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity blog.ycombinator.com/new-... · Posted by u/sama

firstOrder · 10 years ago

This is a horrible idea. The Panglossianism that will result from this is indicative of the bubble hype which will destroy Silicon Valley, Y-Combinator and Hacker News. In fact, this is the worst idea I ever heard in my life.

So continues the descent of HN...

firstOrder commented on Saeed Malekpour, programmer and political prisoner in Iran github.com/saeedmalekpour... · Posted by u/omosanzalettere

firstOrder · 11 years ago

This reminds me of Javed Iqbal, an American satellite dish repairman who was thrown in jail for allowing Americans access (Hezbollah and supposedly Iran backed) Al-Manar television.

Actually the article from NPR, a station often described as liberal, doesn't seem all that incredulous over it happening when the shoe's on the other foot. Headline: "N.Y. Man Charged with Aiding Hezbollah TV Channel". First sentence: "This past week, the Department of Justice charged a New York City man for aiding a terrorist organization.". Geez, to the average American it starts making it sound like he did something wrong and kind of deserves to be in jail. I guess Iranians feel the same way with their guy.

firstOrder commented on Kevin Mitnick Now Selling Zero-Day Exploits wired.com/2014/09/kevin-m... · Posted by u/privong

drzaiusapelord · 11 years ago

It amuses me to hear how middle-class people are baffled by the fetishization of criminality in hip-hop culture, when we fetishize the same type of assholes in our culture. Mitnick is a criminal and all the pro-hacking sympathies have been wasted on a very, very undeserving person. Funny how easily you can manipulate public opinion with the right PR and anti-government message. Everyone wants to be the rebel against "the system." Everyone seems to think they're the Ayn Rand hero amongst the idiots, when in reality, the rebels and the intellectually vain are easily co-opted politically. The rise of libertarianism in geekdom seems to fall under the same dynamic.

firstOrder · 11 years ago

> Mitnick is a criminal and all the pro-hacking sympathies have been wasted on a very, very undeserving person.

Wow, he hacked into some corporation's computers, that's just so awful. Pacific Bell - a shady monopoly who is granted a monopoly by the government, and in return showers politicians with bribes, I mean donations, and sends our calls and web history off to the NSA for monitoring and permanent storage.

> in reality, the rebels and the intellectually vain are easily co-opted politically

In reality, he has been doing security consultations for corporations, so he has already been co-opted. "The service has offered to sell corporate and government clients high-end 'zero-day' exploits". That doesn't really smell of rebel. Of course, everyone has to grow up and make a living.

I can think of a number of IT companies that were founded in the past 20 years, sold for billions of dollars, or worth billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars, that were founded by ex-hackers, or at least people very associated with the hacker scene and whose first technical hires were ex-hackers. It's mentioned in the tech press, in interviews, in blogs etc. It's easy enough to look up if you want to. I mean, one of YC's founders is rtm, and he was around back in Viaweb days.

It's difficult for me to perceive of a modern working class kid interested in technology today, it seems he has more resources at his disposable (although not many - a dinky Vic 20 booted people right into a programming environment, whereas a kid with an iPad and iPhone today would find it very difficult to program his own device - it is pretty much that definition of an embedded system of a device that can't program itself). Back in the 1980's a working class kid with a Vic 20 and 300 baud modem could only call people locally, call local BBS's, and be stuck with poor computing power.

If he hacked and phreaked, he could call around the country, access teleconferences, call BBS's around the country, access powerful Unix, Vax/VMS etc. systems, access the Internet, access x.25 networks and x.25 chat networks in Europe etc. He could follow the law and accept his straitjacket of being designated by the Relations of Production to be one who works a menial job, and for the privilege of being allowed to work he can kick up his expropriated surplus labor work time to the idle class job creator heirs who own his company. Or he can bend the rules, see new vistas, and somewhere down the line maybe co-found a billion dollar company, or a hundred billion dollar company. Then he, or his apologists like you, can then go around complaining about the kids hacking into his company's computers.

firstOrder commented on Entrepreneurs anonymous economist.com/news/busine... · Posted by u/elmyraduff

BSousa · 11 years ago

I'm not op, but will tell two stories that may interest you.

My cousin, mid 30's has FU money. Took him around 8-9 years of hard work (not in technology). He's the guy that buys a 5k rolex (or whatever big brand of watches) for fun. Last 'toy' he got was a 250k euro car for himself to drive maybe 1 month a year (he travels a lot). He is still an amazing person, tries to help people. He will have no problem spending a day with you trying to help fix a problem you may have. He will lend you 5k, no questions asked.

My parents try to badmouth him every time they can, and try to bring his accomplishments down at every party/gathering. From insulting his business partner to just saying he is an exploiter of people/resources/whatnot. I noticed his friends, behind his back do the same, even though he throws parties for them, welcomes them in their house, lets them use his pool even when he isn't there. The car I just mention before, he lets anyone drive it if they ask. But still, the envy is there.

On a smaller scale, my wife's family and friends. My wife decided to quit her job to raise our kid. I still work, but due a good amount of effort, I'm making a good amount of money. There is no need for my wife to work so we both prefer that she stays with our kid. We also live a decent life (near the beach, pool, etc) but not FU money like my cousin. The amount of flak she gets for our choices is just amazing. From her mother telling her she is kinda useless, to her friends making snide comments about getting a 'rich husband', etc. We never show off, we invite everyone to spend some time with us for free in the summer (saving them 1000's in holiday rentals and food), but still, I can feel the jealousy in them... Hard to explain completely.

I never thought this, but last few years what I noticed is in general, people are an envious bunch. A few are really happy for your successes, but most will resent you, because you are doing better than them, or 'showing' to them that some of the decisions they made in the past were the wrong ones, and they can't really come to terms with it, so it is just easier to excuse/criticise you.

firstOrder · 11 years ago

I know nothing of your family, deduce nothing about them and have nothing to say about them.

However younger people often have little or no idea what happened before them. Perhaps among the aunts and uncles of a family, an older brother or sister sacrificed for years working at a dead-end job in order to put a younger brother through college. Then as things work, the younger brother moves across the country has some success, and the older brother is working in a dead-end job. This was the story in "It's A Wonderful Life" 60 years ago and the story wasn't new then.

Then they have kids - the better-off ones go to a private prep school, the ones of the guy who sacrificed go to public schools. The children don't even know everything about how one brother sacrificed his potentiality and even to some extent his children's potentiality for the other brother. Some kids go to Ivy League schools, have great financial success, and develop a conceited attitude. The sacrificer's kids might not even be able to go to college.

If you look at the Forbes 400 richest list with tech CEO's, we see Bill Gates, who was born with a million dollar trust fund, Larry Page, whose father was a professor, Mark Zuckerberg, who went to Phillips Exeter Academy etc. These are are all white, male people born on third base, or at least second base. You look at Silicon Valley CEO's and you see people whose success was shaped to a large extent before they were born. Why have they succeeded whereas some black kid, whose family moved from Mississippi to Oakland in 1947, did not? Or maybe some Ohlone's whose families "owned" large tracts of lands in the Bay Area before whites came and stole it?

It's a self-serving narrative that people succeed solely due to initiative, hard work, flexibility etc. Are white males from upper middle class families the only people who possess these traits? Of course for the self-serving narrative to be tautological, there will always be murmurs among those people that that is so. Of course once in a while a white woman from an upper class familiy will slip through, or someone from a wealthy Brahmin immigrant family, but that should go without saying.

If one brother sacrifices in a family so that another can have success, the successful person will often have a wife and kids with a vain attitude that they're better than the sacrificer and his family. The repayment for the sacrifice is contempt that they're now better than the sacrificer, and that the poorer family has some innate flaws, are uncouth and so forth. If they feel some resentment toward that, they go on HN and whine how their family resents them driving around in a flashy sports car. The only real excuse the golden child has is he has no knowledge of what went on in the years before he was born.

I know a few (computer-interested) people who went to expensive private prep schools as their families are rich. They really live in a complete bubble. In the documentary "Born Rich", one of the rich kids talks about how much of a bubble his parents live in when he introduced his normal, middle class friend to them and they ask him "where did you summer last year?" This is certainly the case, these people have no idea how the average American worker lives. It's kind of like Mitt Romney, whose father was a CEO and who went to the exclusive Cranbrook prep school blathering on how 47% of Americans are dependents who see themselves as victims. Americans were smart enough to throw him to the curb. These people who are born to the manor, and who live off the wealth they expropriate from the workers who create that wealth, are ever increasingly disconnected from the real world and reality. Why shouldn't they hold themselves in ever high regard? Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette did in the years before they wer

firstOrder commented on The Unexotic Underclass miter.mit.edu/the-unexoti... · Posted by u/spitfire

firstOrder · 11 years ago

> If you're itching to start something new, why chase the nth iteration of a company already serving the young, privileged, liberal jetsetter?

Because those are the projects which angels and VCs bankroll. Because those are the people who have disposable cash.

I was just reading an article on a conservative web site, actually one run by Ben Horowitz's father ( http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/cbs-colbert-and... ). It talks about how TV doesn't care about older viewers, rural viewers, and increasingly only cares about young professionals on both coasts, and how television programming is being focused on such people. Not sure how true it is but it makes sense.

Audre Lorde once said that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, and capitalism is not going to solve the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, other than by imploding, as so many economic systems before have done (feudalism, slavery, primitive communism).

Also, anyone who has done work organizing working class people knows the solution is not for a genius from MIT to swoop in with some corporation to try to fix problems wrought by corporations. You see what is possible and organize around that. The American white working class once had power, and it chose to send bombers north of the Yalu river, support a war in Vietnam, on and on up to modern day with Obama's support of the Honduran's military overthrow of Honduras's democracy etc. The AFL-CIO saw it's steepest decline under someone who never worked or ran a union, but was involved undermining foreign unions in cahoots with the CIA and American big business. And on and on. Now they go down to fundamentalist churches and watch Fox News as they age, and slowly become a minority in their own country. Empowering white, blue collar Americans gave us No Gun Ri and My Lai. Thanks, I'll pass. I'm glad to see the sun setting on the white American working class.

firstOrder commented on Job Guarantee vs. Basic Income neweconomicperspectives.o... · Posted by u/seoguru

firstOrder · 11 years ago

Unemployment is one of the pillars that capitalism is built on, it is a structural necessity for profits to exist, so any efforts to relieve it via reform are doomed to failure. Structural unemployment did not exist in Europe prior to Europe moving from feudalism to capitalism several centuries ago - structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism. One need only pick up the Wall Street Journal or Businessweek during times of low unemployment - there is great fear that unemployment is getting "too low", meaning everyone who wants a job can get a job. Since the purpose of capitalism is to generate profits for rentiers, this makes sense.

The schemes mentioned here and being floated about in Slate and the like are done in anticipation of how to respond to a sudden, massive increase in unemployment for low-skilled workers in response to advances in things like AI. These schemes wouldn't contradict what I said before, because they would be due to an economic shift where the lever of unemployment for low skilled workers would mean less, since the increased quantity of unemployed would change the quality of what unemployment is. The threat of sudden mass unemployment would mean less to increasing profits, and could potentially cause social unrest. Like Larry Page's grandfather wandering around a GM plant with a weapon in his hand during the Flint sit-down strike.

It's obvious that structural unemployment is a creation of capitalism, as it did not exist in centuries past. From reading the business press's fears of unemployment getting too low, it should be obvious that big business feels unemployment is an essential pillar of what they need to keep the system running as they wish. Despite this history and current expression of views, people seem to be blind to the reality that not only is the government not interested in helping unemployed people, but that it is actively promoting unemployment, and will fight and do anything to keep structural unemployment in place. It's not an accident trying to be fixed, the existence of ~0% unemployment is what would be seen as the accident, and any levers to throw some of those people out of work would (and have been) utilized. While this is the reality, the standard corporated owned and sponsored hegemonic press is of course oblivious to all of this. Unemployment isn't an accident government is trying to fix, when unemployment gets "too low" business and government actively work to increase unemployment among happily employed people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

firstOrder commented on A Start-up Guru Has Enraged Israeli Techies nymag.com/daily/intellige... · Posted by u/drumdance

firstOrder · 11 years ago

The article has a tweet from someone who says:

> what about the fact that 170 people died in Homs on July 19th? any mention about those "Atrocious Actions"? no. antisemite.

One reason to mention what is going on in Gaza and not in Syria is that US voters/taxpayers are financing, directly or indirectly, what is going on in Gaza. The Ron Reiter's of the world want me as a worker and taxpayer to bankroll his country. Then if I have a critical word for what his country does with the money, say I do something outrageous in his mind like quote what the head of the UN says about it, then I'm an anti-semite.

Shut down AIPAC and stop having them tax my money to send to Israel, and my criticism of Israel will subside. These people bite the hand that feeds them.

firstOrder commented on Love People, Not Pleasure nytimes.com/2014/07/20/op... · Posted by u/ghostwords

firstOrder · 11 years ago

Someone telling me I need the strength to love God is not someone who is making a rational argument to counter. I can't even conceive of how to address the "argument" that I'm weak because I don't love this deity who he seems to be high on.

There is no argument to address. He is not someone with an AEI hat on talking about monetary policy or trade agreements or so forth, he is jabbering on about how I should live my life, what my values should be, dressed up with a lot of superstitious hokum.

firstOrder commented on Love People, Not Pleasure nytimes.com/2014/07/20/op... · Posted by u/ghostwords

firstOrder · 11 years ago

The author is the president of the American Enterprise Insititute. AEI's board are the CEO's of ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical etc. Including the CEO of Enron until he was ousted. They are bankrolled by Ford, GE, Chrysler, AT&T etc.

What is his message to us?

"when money becomes an end in itself, it can bring misery"..."People who rate materialistic goals like wealth as top personal priorities are significantly likelier to be more anxious, more depressed"..."the moral snares of materialism"..."it requires a deep skepticism of our own basic desires"

The majority shareholders of the companies bankrolling his institute own the lion's share of this country's stocks, bonds and other assets, and are continually at war with the workers in the company's they own so that a larger lion's share of money coming in goes to profits and not wages.

So of course in this zero-sum game, the parasitical side is going to tell the workers, the wealth creating side, that they should not be too concerned with money, that wealth isn't everything, that uneasy lay the head that wears the crown, and all this other nonsense. They used to have priests and reverends dress up these ideas with superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but nowadays more people are smart enough to see through that BS ( although he does talk about "Saint" Paul, the Dalai Lama, Buddha, the Love of God ).

This crook is so full of hubris, he wants to lecture me on how to live a better life - that being that I should ask for a smaller piece of the pie that I work to create, and perhaps instead dwell on "the strength to love others - [...] God", the thoughts of "Saint" Paul and other nonsense.

Why doesn't he tell his contributors to stop employing psychologists and Madison Avenue to try to figure out how best to create conspicuous consumption so that people will buy the commodities they're pumping out. The advertising business is one of the biggest forces out there trying to tell people life is more enjoyable if certain commodities are purchased, and he is at the center of that world. He likes quoting the bible? Try Matthew 7:

"Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

firstOrder commented on A “nationwide gentrification effect” is segregating us by education washingtonpost.com/blogs/... · Posted by u/dctoedt

djokkataja · 11 years ago

No, Smith used the term "invisible hand" more generically to describe how the actions of individuals when optimizing for themselves can produce outcomes that may be optimal for greater purposes. In The Wealth of Nations, he uses it to refer to the way in which the actions of domestic businessmen support domestic industry in the best possible way (as though orchestrated by an invisible hand).[1]

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith says that the actions of the wealthy produce beneficial effects for all of society, as though guided by an invisible hand. This idea is commonly referred to as the "trickle-down effect" today.[2]

In modern economics the term is mostly used to refer to the way in which markets tend to self-regulate,[3] and it's known as THE invisible hand, which is a bit unfortunate since it's such a vague metaphor that it can easily be used to refer to almost any gestalt concept.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations#Book_IV:... "As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." (Book 4, Chapter 2) [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand#Other_uses_of_t... "The rich … consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species." [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

firstOrder · 11 years ago

You quote exactly what I am talking about from Wealth of Nations. How is the "support of domestic to that of foreign industry" free trade in modern parlance? That is protectionism. Your paraphrase echoes what I am saying as well. The modern conception of the invisible hand is not one which leads to tariffs and protectionism, but international free trade. This is the opposite of what he said though.