1. The margin of victory does not matter—If Trump won, the Democratic establishment would have largely accepted the results and if Harris won, the GOP would have fully rejected the results. Everyone knew this was true. There is a fundamental asymmetry in respect for democracy between the parties.
2. Harris actually did just ruin it for women going forward. The Democratic party has now put forward two women against Trump that arguably both failed in spectacular fashion. It's not really clear to me why they did this, but they did it, and I don't know why we'd see a woman secure a major party's nomination for president in the next couple decades as a result.
1. Maybe. I am happy to not be testing this hypothesis.
2. I think the problem is inserting women that the voters aren't asking for. They could try asking who to run instead of telling people who to vote for, and they just might get a woman into the office.
There are women out there that have their own real following that could probably get there with the machine behind them, but the machine doesn't want any of them.
Depending on how things go, Tulsi could be the next best chance, if people stop making up shit about her being a Russian asset. But shes on the red team, so the dems will tear her down if she tries.
Regarding (2), I agree, but I don't think the electorate is in for such nuance. Two women failed to win the presidency, and that simple fact is all that matters. I agree with the other commenter that we won't see the dems put another woman up for president for decades, and that's a damn shame.
We might even see the GOP successfully get a woman into the White House before the dems do it, which is just embarrassing.
Amy Klobuchar is probably the Democrats best example—she just once again significantly outperformed the other national Democratic candidate (Harris) in Minnesota. Personally I wouldn't trust Tulsi Gabbard to win anything. what the Dems need is someone who is a strong political force that has a track record of winning elections and winning over people who voted for Trump. I don't think gender is necessarily important but I do think that the results of Clinton and Harris against Trump should rightfully scare Dems away from that idea going forward.
Because of the pandemic, the aftermath of which was awful inflation. This has been the pattern globally for a few years now. And US-specific, because of immigration.
Yes, Harris was treated by voters as the incumbent, and the incumbent administration was unpopular. That is usually an uphill battle for the incumbent.
It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative! Plenty of people wrote about the possibility that this would be a pretty bog standard "reject the incumbents" election.
> It was never the dems election to lose. It's too bad you only saw that narrative!
I find this baffling. With the dems tying themselves to biden and then Harris, it was absolutely an uphill battle. But that was an unforced error.
If they had a robust primary, you have to assume there was someone on the blue team that could beat Trump. If not, then they deserved every bit of this anyway.
No, it was an uphill battle regardless of the candidate, is the point. The fundamentals were always difficult for Democrats in general, for non-candidate-specific reasons. Primarily this was due to inflation, which in my view Biden actually handled about as well as he could have, it just still sucked and pissed everyone off. But also because of immigration, which was indeed a policy error, but one which happened years before the campaign began and was not fixable at that point.
Yes, and that's one of the problems: the DNC defers to tradition and "politeness" rather than what will win elections and keep the party in power. Right up front they should have told Biden he was not going to be the presumed nominee, and that he would have to fight it out in the primary like everyone else.
IMO the fact that Harris is a black woman meant this was always going to be an extremely uphill battle. Someone like Harris winning would be completely unprecedented. I'm not surprised she lost, but I am disappointed.
I think the results demonstrated that it would have been an uphill battle for a white man as well. I think this result was pretty much a foregone conclusion after the 2022/2023 inflation surge.
Edit to add: I now think that. It isn't what I expected to happen until the results actually came in last night.
Well ... yeah, of course. This isn't some unusual thing.
Lots of things are foregone conclusions for a long period of time before you have the data to know it.
Think: A competitor is working on a product that massively outcompetes yours, but you don't know that until it is launched. Or you have cancer that is progressing but you don't know until it is diagnosed.
Hillary Clinton still complains about the election being stolen by Trump (there were riots by Democrats back then too). Democrats still complain about Bush beating Gore in 2020. To say that Democrats would simply accepted the results if Trump won only the electoral college defies past history.
Election denialism is found in both parties in large quantities.
If you work in knowledge fields, I'd imagine it's not too difficult to immigrate to certain countries. But also those fields pay far more in the United States than any other country in the world, so it's a tough thing to commit to.
Another example of Democrats being really poor communicators on specific important issues—they could easily frame renewables as a protectionist issue and make it relevant but instead they don't know how to talk about it so they just avoid it whenever possible.
I do wonder whether democrats will shift to post-conservative messaging. "Let's preserve what we have left of our beautiful American forests" might be able to resonate. Idk.
That exact message has been tried and energy independence/stick-it-to-OPEC remains fairly common way of trying to sell it. Actual measures to onshore renewable industry were successfully demonized as corrupt, didn’t go over well.
I'm sure in some meeting somewhere someone floated that exact idea and then got promptly laughed out of the room by a bunch of people who live in a filter bubble in which protectionism is too politically close to populism to be palatable.
I mean considering the degree to which people on this site style themselves as intellectuals, it would be pretty astounding to me to hear that most of them voted for Trump this time around given his fairly disastrous economic agenda. Mostly tariffs—I don't really believe HN is that protectionist
I don't know if variety is actually the most important thing, but it certainly helps. It's probably more like:
1. Eat whole foods—prioritize nutrient-dense vegetables and some fruit in moderation.
2. If you can, vary your whole foods
3. Try not to eat too much sugar, especially with high triglycerides
4. Try not to eat too much salt, especially with high blood pressure
Everything else does seem quite overcomplicated. Nutrition has always been an area rife for capture by grifters, health gurus, and everything in-between.
I don't think the universe can have "meaning" in the human sense, because any potential "meaning" is outside of our field of observation or understanding. If something indeed created the universe or some definitive sequence of events spurred it into existence, I think that would constitute "meaning" enough for humans to be satisfied. But there is almost certainly not way to observe that fact because it is outside of the realm of our possible experiences.
But even then, if we knew what caused the universe to exist, we would then be looking at the cause of the universe and wondering what caused that cause to exist. And so I think we'd still be left wondering why anything exists at all at the end of the day.
I think this is why Christians posit that the Creator actually entered into humanity, so we could understand--or at least be as much less wrong in our speculations as we can handle, small as we are.
They even got as far as describing God as "uncaused causality" centuries ago, which lined up pretty well with the translation of the name God reportedly gave one of their forbearers from a burning bush, "I am who am," or colloquially, "I'm the one who just is. I am being-itself, not contingent in any way, outside your concepts of 'before' or 'contingent upon.'"
Sure, but it is a meaningless take. It posits into existence this being with this property, when you can just as easily posit that the universe itself has this property.
But the universe can and does change. Something that is, in that most fundamental sense, does not also have potentiality. Anything that can change, that can be "other than it is," must have some potentiality un-actualized, must not fully "be," because there are some things it is not but could be (and, indeed, later will be).
According to the Bible, God also changed, in several ways. He made a covenant with Noah, he chose a people and negotiated with Moses which commandments to give them, he came down to Earth to live and die as a human, and there are probably others.
If you say these are not changes, only actions, then the same can be said of the Universe: it didn't change, the rules of physics have always been the same, it just does things according to its rules.
Being able to interact with changing things does not require changing if you're outside the things that change. For example, if you're outside of time (which, admittedly, is really hard to wrap our heads around), from Noah's perspective, you went from "not having made a covenant with him" to "having made a covenant with him," but that's only true relative to Noah's position, not yours. You have no "before" and "after" because you're not inside time.
I'm not going to pretend I have anything like the math or theoretical physics knowledge to grok the latest perspectives on whether the universe actually had a beginning or an end, or whether it goes through singularities, or any of probably a dozen other theories that I've vaguely heard of and are over my head, never mind all the ones I don't even know about. I'm not aware of any that posit the universe is truly unbound by time, though, that time is not somehow a constraint on the state of the universe such that it doesn't actually change, except from our own perspective. Is that even what you're suggesting? Or have I missed your point entirely?
I think you responded to my point, but not in a way that is convincing to me at least. If God was willing to destroy the world in a flood before the covenant, and is no longer willing afterwards, then I would say that God has clearly changed. I accept that you could posit that God was always in the same state, one where he was willing to destroy the world before the flood, and not willing after.
But this can be done for any system just as well: instead of saying that the egg was broken to make an omlette, you could say that the egg has always been in the same state: the state where it is whole before the omlette, and broken afterwards. The egg itself is a timeless concept, but we just experience it differently as time passes for us. I don't see why this argument works for God and not for my egg.
I think I would summarize it somewhat differently, that God is (as a constant state of being) willing to destroy the world with a flood whenever it is as it was in Noah's time (which criteria determine this are not necessarily known to us, except insofar as they were met then and are not met now).
So from our/Noah's perspective, that situation has come and gone, has changed, because we're bound by physics and the passage of time and cannot exist in that circumstance any longer. But from God's perspective, that world is always destroyed by flood. It may be the case that the criteria that categorize a world as "destroyable by flood" never exist in our experience of time again, and it may equally be the case that God knows this will be the case.
But God's willingness to destroy the world by flood under those criteria has not and will never change, because God's will does not change.
> The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP - your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers.
This mythical idea that certain successful tech founders are successful because they are highly contemplative intellectuals is so exhausting to me. The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane. I can no longer take seriously the "I make software and then sit and think about ancient political philosophy" trope.
I'm not sure most people would claim their success comes down to the intellectual stuff. It's just that a certain type of nerd who is also very competent at what they do likes hanging out around other nerds of a similar type. If you read the descriptions of the actual work, at least among the FDEs, it seems striking how much it sounds like a relatively normal consulting engagement — we're not really talking developing foundational new algorithms or infrastructure here. But the kind of person who enjoys working at and does well in places like Palantir probably wouldn't enjoy Accenture. I agree it can veer pretentious, but I think it's more about clustering a certain kind of person together, similar to what you hear about e.g. places like Jane Street.
I agree with you if we're just talking about the people who work somewhere. I would say that the founders I'm referring to certainly at least partially delude themselves into believing that their intellectual prowess encompasses other realms of science, philosophy, engineering, etc. when all they did was create some software. I also do not believe for one second that these founders are actually as interesting as people have mythologized them to be.
> The amount of self-aggrandizement engaged in by people who merely _interacted_ with these founders is also insane.
It's the same thing as self-aggrandizement by interacting with (texts of) ancient philosophers.
Somehow the lessons learned always come out as, 'more power and money for me'. Ancient philosophers, and many since, certainly had much to say about that.
In tech, founders tend to pick philosophers based on the ones that flatter their politics. That suggests they aren't actually engaging with the ideas so much as trying to appear smart for having the opinions they already had.
When you onboard at meta (circa 2020) the execs like to make vague references to this rare out of print book on media studies that they say presaged everything and explains a lot about how they think about their role in the media ecosystem. They liked to lift quotes from it to justify certain decisions or whatever. They encouraged you to buy the book “if you could find a copy”.
I like reading old books and philosophy so I found a copy. It was basically completely unfollow-able, and at best tangentially related to anything they were doing.
I think having some biblical text to appeal to, in order to justify what is otherwise completely self-dealing, self-serving behavior is some foundational principle of the VP lizard school in Silicon Valley.
It’s a sleight of hand. People will come up with brilliant illusions to distract you from the convenient hand that’s wrist deep into your coin purse.
Not to say there aren’t interesting or valuable intellectual ideas in these books — in Girard, or what have you. But ultimately you have to judge people objectively on the sort of behaviors they exhibit, not on the “illusions” of the intellectual or philosophical explanations they give for those behaviors.
That's fascinating, and yeah it's just the kind of thing I was thinking of—the concrete example is nice. There is indeed something quite perverse about the fusion of philosophy and unfettered laissez-faire capitalism in the information age.
I wonder if it's more of an adaptation or coping mechanism than a foundational principle. I think these people cannot bear to actually digest the cynical view of what they are doing in the world so they grasp for something more esoteric and hold that up as guiding principles.
If they were actually doing something good, they wouldn't have to find a book that explains why what they're doing is good in some indirect way. If you look at Jimmy Wales' guiding philosophy, for example, it is clearly and directly correlated to the work being done at Wikipedia. There's no jumping through hoops, because most people agree that Wikipedia is a good thing.
I agree, that it can be a coping mechanism. You find something that's esoteric enough that you can project your goodwill onto it and use it to justify your weird behaviors.
I also agree that if you're doing good, your work speaks for itself, and does not need to be justified. I think Rockefeller, for example, struggled with this a lot later in life when he tried to pay for the cruelty his career with a later devotion to philanthropy. But I don't think it worked. Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bezos will need to wrestle with this, too, regardless of how much they "donate" to "charity". I don't envy them their positions in life.
The book was "Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man" by McLuhan, Marshall. You can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150.
Marshall McLuhan was the most famous and influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century, and the one whose ideas are probably the most obviously relevant to Facebook. He’s not some sort of obscure figure at all. I’m sorry if he wasn’t your cup of tea and it’s totally possible that Facebook execs weren’t understanding and applying his ideas correctly but frankly I would be a lot more worried about the company if the top leadership wasn’t reading McLuhan.
I didn’t say the author was obscure or that his ideas were not relevant, but rather that this particular text was rare.
I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential (it’s a framework for analyzing media that makes some vague but bold claims about what constituted effective content on varying mediums for media at different points in time).
But he can be “famous” and the material can be relevant and the original point can still stand — they found something sufficiently relevant and mysterious and famous enough to point to as an external appeal to authority to justify the sale ads on the serving of visual opium to children. I don’t think that would have been McLuhan’s cup of tea, eh? But if you do it in his name, maybe it’s easier to swallow.
> I didn’t say the author was obscure or that his ideas were not relevant, but rather that this particular text was rare.
I’m frankly puzzled at your assertion that this is a rare, out-of-print book when it’s the top search result on Amazon for “Marshall McLuhan” and costs $31.22 in paperback: https://a.co/d/dhOl4EJ
Your claim that “you can find it pretty regularly on biblio for ~$150” seems approximately true if you insist on only buying a first edition hardcover, which is fair enough. I don’t know what changed between the first edition and the 1994 edition currently available on Amazon. But if the Meta execs are sticklers for the first edition in particular, that’s an indication that they’re taking the ideas in the book more seriously rather than less.
> I was overly dismissive in referring to its contents as tangential
You also referred to it as “basically completely unfollow-able”. In other words, you weren’t really able to follow or grasp what McLuhan was writing. Maybe it’s not your fault and McLuhan was just writing incoherent nonsense—I can’t say either way since I haven’t read him—but this admission on your part undermines your attempts to assess the relevance of Understanding Media to Meta’s business model.
Having read McLuhan, I'm honestly surprised anybody at Meta would be a fan. His work can easily be read today as a pretty damning indictment of the inherent problems with social media.
The bleak reality is that most Americans trust private corporations more than their own government. Government-sponsored search is literally 1984. If it's just a competitor, we've seen that unless there is an external force driving the initiatives, government ventures are often just less successful than unfettered private corporations (e.g. NASA post Space Race).
I tend to agree—however I think the point of the article is that, regardless of whether this an ethical or "good" practice, it represents a pulling up of the ladder in a social media landscape that most users would agree is not in a great place with regard to the big names.
Maybe we already have enough social media apps, but also maybe the ones we have aren't very good, and things like this probably make it harder to compete in that space if you believe that you can create something better.
Also to be clear, while I'm sympathetic to that idea I'm not sympathetic to garbage people like Nikita Bier, who is basically saying this is what helped enable him to make two identical apps marketed directly to high-schoolers rapidly acquire a substantial userbase. He then subsequently sold these apps to Meta and Discord. So maybe this change is for the best.
I don't think pulling up the ladder is the correct analogy here.
The inability of users to prevent companies from slurping up all of their contacts creates an environment which greatly benefits those company which simply take the data since nobody can stop them.
Yes having that data has allowed the current crop of social media companies to grow very quickly, but look at the societal costs of that rapid growth. If we want social media companies of a categorically different kind, we need different rules so that the kind we currently have don't dominate again.
Yea, this is more of a "better late than never" security fix. While you can't go back in time and fix past apps that exploited a vulnerability, you can at least close the vulnerability for future apps.
On the contrary, it allows users to better than current "all or nothing" which today leaves users holding their nose and feeling forced by social monopolies into feeding their entire graph to resell to advertisers, data brokers, government monitors, and the like.
Note that a minority of social apps have done the work to match your contacts with your contacts' affirmative disclosure on the social network, without giving themselves new shadow contacts from your phonebook. Only those who "want to be found" will match up.
> So maybe this change is for the best.
It's possible to ... slurp respectfully?
If everyone did that, this feature wouldn't be needed. If EU wanted to legislate something, they could mandate something like an extrovert flag: this is my name tag, I want to be found! Given an app respecting this method of matching, then allow matching to be seamless after the first OS level prompt.
2. Harris actually did just ruin it for women going forward. The Democratic party has now put forward two women against Trump that arguably both failed in spectacular fashion. It's not really clear to me why they did this, but they did it, and I don't know why we'd see a woman secure a major party's nomination for president in the next couple decades as a result.
reply