There’s no single answer to why infrastructure is ludicrously expensive in the United States. It’s too easy to delay, so the costs go up. (Especially in California with its multiple rounds of public feedback.) Laws requiring American contractors, mean no one has experience building large complex projects, so things get delayed. Add in contractors along every link in the chain charging a government job premium, and the fact that government agencies have been gutted so whose left is easily bamboozled by the private grifters, or forced to hire expensive consultants to do jobs that used be done more cheaply in house, it’s no wonder everything is expensive.
It’s simultaneously too much regulation, and too little government oversight.
I know it's easy to feel that way when the user asking for help has been labeled $bad for whatever reason. But I doubt you would say that about most of the users who ask for this help, and if we're going to do it for some, I don't feel comfortable picking who gets helped and who doesn't. Nor do I think the community would support us in doing it that way.
It’s not about picking. It’s about doing it at all.
Now you’re active participant in a cover up. They want to delete something, edit something? Fine. The controls are there. Everyone knows that. But that’s not what this is. This is taking extraordinary action to gaslight and coverup. That’s what’s trash. It’s the secrecy. It’s changing of the archive. That’s what trash.
In all my decades of dealing with public forums, I have never seen this as something done in a reputable forum, outside of a court order.
It’s a betrayal of trust. The fact that you’re not defending it on the merits, but rather that it’s supposedly open to all that knew about the secret door is just the chef’s kiss of abuse of power. If I was asked to do this, I would quit.
Dang, every time you do this, it shows contempt to everyone on this forum. It’s absolute trash. It is bad, and you should feel bad. But of course, you don’t feel bad about doing it. You feel good about it.
I just don't think you would say that if you saw the full range of requests we get. Some feel excessively fussy to me (ok, a lot feel that way) but some are coming from people in genuine distress.
Usually when people say that, they're putting more on other persons ("they fucked up") than they would on themselves ("but, circumstances"). If you're not doing that, I respect your position. But that's a hard karmic row to hoe. Personally I'd rather bail people out because I might want to get bailed out myself in the future.
The worst thing about browsing old Reddit threads is when half the discussion has simply disappeared because the user hates Reddit and edited/deleted all their comments. There's an awful lot of information lost there, and sometimes it's extremely difficult to find elsewhere. The same goes for the occasional deleted accounts and posts I've seen on other forums around the web by people the forum administrator have deemed "toxic" and purged posts instead of simply banning the user (I only have a single vague memory of a forum other than Reddit where a user voluntarily removed all of their own posts, likely due to the difficulty of doing so).
Wouldn't it be worse if HN didn't honor its users' requests to delete data? I legitimately don't know, it seems like both approaches would cause issues.
ISAs are equity in the student's future performance, up to a cap. This can result in paying a huge premium for relatively small amount of effort (a $30k cap for 6 months of online class is comparable to a semester at uni), but with 2 key advantages: a money-back-guarantee and accessibility.
With a fixed-cost tuition program, students who can't afford to pay don't go. This prices out students who would benefit from the program. There is also no recourse if you can't get a job from uni. How do u know if the teachers instructed you properly? Imagine paying $20k for the wrong instruction. Yikes.
The only time an ISA works against the student's favor is when the schools go after students who got a job working in something unrelated (which Lambda appears to have done a lot of) or students who were super successful, because they overpay for the instruction. The latter isn't that bad given the risk-free nature of the ISA, and the former can be resolved with legal action and regulation (which is what's happening).
That's just my $0.02, although I was a Lambda Grad who did the ISA and didn't have any issues.
Another piece of anec-data: I had a non-CS degree coming into Lambda, which definitely helped me during recruitment time. I think that had I gone into a CS program, I would have done fine and possibly even landed a better gig than I got after Lambda, but I didn't want to shell out $50k over 2 years on the chance of that happening, so I was happy to take the ISA. 5 years post-grad, I'm making 4x what I was making pre-Lambda, and my ISA was paid off after 2 years, but as is true with most things: your mileage may vary.
Buying equity in a person is literally what indentured servitude is.
Someone making a deal to give up their future earnings for several years in exchange for a trip to the American colonies and a better life isn't fundamentally different than giving up your future earnings to a coding bootcamp in exchange for a trip to FAANG.
The difference is in the degree of future earnings ceded.
Isn’t there a big difference in the amount of freedo between an indentured servant and somebody with an ISA?
An indentured servant was generally forced to work a specific job until things were paid back (and often at below market wages). Somebody with an ISA is free to do whatever they wish, they just have to pay
yOu cAn'T tRulLy bE fReE iF yOu cAn'T sELL yOuRsELf iNtO sLaVeRy.
I remember this take. It's the kind of thing that only makes sense in a dorm room full of financially secure people that ignore that this is simply creates a slave class of economically disadvantaged.
There's no logic on earth that can simultaneously say that ISA is slavery and an income tax isn't. The only difference is that you have to give your consent for ISA.
Non-dischargeable debts are unconscionable, something we recognised when the bankruptcy code was originally set up. Sadly "child support" has been used as the thin end of the wedge to bring them back.
If the percentage of earnings is capped (as it was in most agreements), it's far better than a loan-- worst/best case you pay the capped amount (like the loan amount); if you do worse than that best case, you pay proportionally less.
But trying to claw earnings from jobs that didn't relate to the school violates the letter and spirit of the agreement and shows the disproportionate power of the parties.
Percentage of earnings is just equity. They're different, but not ethically. Slavery would be forcibly taking 100% of an individual's equity, but given that ISAs are both optional and a minor percentage (Lambda's was 18% when I went thru), the comparison is unreasonable.
I believe they're capped to a maximum time and fixed amount, so it's like a loan where the payments depend on your revenue no? And if you don't reach the max amount during the max time you end up paying less.
I'm assumed that was why the karma scores for the top ten users aren't visible - you can karma farm your way to the top ten but after that you're blind: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Maybe psychologically that helps people think "why bother?"
It reminds me of the old West End Games / Legends description of the game sabacc in Star Wars. Instead of being played with normal paper cards as seen in Solo, the players received cards with screens on them At certain parts in the game, the cards would randomize. '
A completely baroque way of playing, but fits with a world where actively powered antigravity technology has replaced wheels.
It is 100% enshittification. The definition is even in the linked article:
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, (..)
The core point here is "abuse the user", not "make features worse". Price gauging would be included in that definition.
Are you sure you read the article? The very first sentence of the article is, "Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products[.]" (Emphasis added.) If the quality remains the same, or improves, it's by definition not decreasing, and therefore not enshitification. Furthermore, as other people pointed out, this is a reference to two sided marketplaces.
Just because there's a new buzzword, doesn't mean it applies. In fact, it usually doesn't.
Enshittification usually refers to companies that run two-sided markets ("platforms"), like rideshare and delivery apps. Adobe raising prices on everyone isn't really the same thing. Enshittification works by first subsidizing everything for everyone, then alternately squeezing the sellers and buyers on the platform by increasing their cut and raising prices. It's about playing a game where you alternately squeeze one side or another of a marketplace that you control.
Adobe doesn't really run a platform, they're selling a product and finding ways to raise the price.
I don't think any of that stuff really follows the definition as quoted though. That definition is all about a middleman squeezing buyers and sellers. That people use it to mean "any scummy business practice that uses lock-in or corner-cutting to squeeze customers" doesn't make those uses fit that definition.
That stuff is not new, enshittification was coined to refer to the relatively new ways that platforms started to squeeze people.
The original word is really just descriptive of the unpleasant side of optimization you see in commerce.
Walmart finding the minimum product quality they can sell is no different than Facebook finding the maximum number of Advertisements people will tolerate.
> "I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them." (emphasis mine)
All I'm saying is that citing back to the original definition (which is talking about platforms) does not bolster the case that what Adobe is doing counts, because it plainly doesn't fall under that definition. Adobe is not running a two-sided market. For it to be enshittification you need to use a much more expansive definition. Which is fine, but in that case you can't cite the original definition!
In his own words the enshitificstion of Google is: “curse of bigness.”
> With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, “growth” has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.
Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much.
How did a company like Unity — … — turn into a protection racket?
So, while he may describe Enshittification as platform decay he’s not limiting its use to such.
> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
I am not saying he is using it to say ‘things are getting worse’ but rather ‘things are being optimized in ways we don’t like by large companies’ which is meaningfully different.
However, because he’s using ‘platforms’ so broadly it’s not just marketplaces but basically any business. It’s hard to draw a meaningful circle around Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Google, and Unity that excludes Walmart’s online store.
They subsidized things for everyone by turning a blind eye to personal piracy for so many years. They got entrenched as a defacto standard, and then they started tightening the vice.
It's enshittification. Why defend a multibillion dollar corporation who doesn't care about you one bit?
I'm not defending them, I'm saying that their behavior is probably a different sort of bad. There are lots of ways for companies to extort consumers, they can't all be "enshittification".
If enshittification is anything a company does that involves delivering a worse product for more money, that's fine, but then it becomes a less useful concept.
My attitude in general is that diluting useful ideas to the point where they encompass an entire vibe is unhelpful. If anything anti-consumer a company does is enshittification, the causes are so disparate that solutions seem impossible. If you draw a tighter boundary around it, you can try to nail down causes and solutions.
The point I mentioned isn't enshittification by itself so much, but combined with the predatory dark patterns, I personally consider it enshittification as a whole.
Your questions are right, but the conspiracy theory is dreadfully wrong. If you want a motivating force for banning, but not actually competing by leveling the field, it’s ideology. The US government doesn’t do subsidies (except when they do).
The saddest thing about these decline of American manufacturing, and the fragility of supply chains is that all of this was predicted 30 years ago, but Wall Street and the billionaire management class did their typical shortsighted profits taking instead of sustainability, soured on by ideological capture of both parties.
I often think about how the world would be different if the people actual won the Battle of Seattle.
You’re going to have to eliminate first past the post for that to work. Both parties are essentially coallitions. Christian nationalists and big business, and their apologists on one side, and everyone else on the other.
This obviously isn't true unless you think half the population is "evil". It doesn't help anyone's cause when you try and position it as "us vs. Them, and they're wrong"
They may or may not be wrong, or evil, but they are almost certainly not going to take your opinion into account if they win.
An election is fundamentally binary: it has one winner and everyone else is equally a loser. There are other structures that don't fall prey to that, such as multi member districts or party lists. As long as the election has a unique outcome, everyone else is equivalently irrelevant.
hah, I see Unions/forced votes and bought naïve votes (anyone falling for "free" healthcare, student loan cancellation, $10k for a house, etc) on one side, everyone else on the other. That has changed in the last few years for sure.
But you're getting paid a good salary for many while they probably might not. Also I'd be sleeping well at night as I can jump ship the second I'm not happy, my reputation won't be tarnished by that.
So I am not sure it's that easy.
Of course, the idea is to keep the same work/life balance one would have at a more established company.
It is that easy. Employee 1 is getting paid below market. That’s why they offer 0.9% equity. Meanwhile, the founders are also getting paid. No one is working for free. One of the first things VCs tell you is to make yourself comfortable so you can concentrate on the company. That’s literally one of the reasons why VCs tell founders to sell equity early, to make up for lost income, while Employees 1+ has to ride the rocket into the ground.
It’s simultaneously too much regulation, and too little government oversight.
https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...