They mostly enter a low activity state and cluster in the hive to stay warm and save energy/honey. If it gets warm enough outside on occasion you will see them leaving the hive to poop and push the dead bees out.
'Stock manipulation is cool, especially when you change executives pay structure to be based purely on said manipulation. Totally creates healthy incentives not perverse ones.'
Sorry, buy backs are not stock manipulation. Let's step back from emotions and political skew. A company is able to take their capital and deploy it how they see fit. This can include purchasing percentage ownership of their company back from stockholders. Whether or not you agree doesn't make it manipulation in the general sense. It's just a way for a company to use their money.
Why do they repurchase the stock? In order to impact the stock's value (also known as manipulating it's value). That is the definition of stock manipulation. No emotions involved, no need for the passive aggressive attack that I'm somehow being emotional.
It's not just a way for a company to use their money. It is a company intentionally using funds for stock manipulation, many times by executives who directly benefit from said manipulation. Companies even take out loans purely to re-purchase stock.
You have a shallow understanding of economics and the stock market. Sorry but your cynical view is not something that generalizes to stock buybacks. And the example of taking a loan out can be financially sound. Using debt when cheap to deploy capital can be beneficial.
By manipulating the value of the stock that shareholders. In order to do what you claim it does, it has to.... manipulate the stocks value, aka stock manipulations. You give a distinction without a difference.
And shareholders only 'benefit' from this return if they sell their stock (ie give up being stock holders) versus the traditional method where stock holders receive and dividend and maintain their stock ownership. A dividend benefits all stock holdres, stock manipulation only benefits those that sell, a smaller arbitrary subset. Why chose a 'return' method that is only for some investors?
In what sense is it a manipulation? If I have a billion in cash and spend it all on a stock, that stock price will go up; that’s not manipulation. That’s supply and demand.
>Why chose a 'return' method that is only for some investors?
The investors control the company, so they get to decide that.
It seems odd to me that you are speaking as if your choices are not decisions you have to own the consequence of. You get married, you have kids, you made those choices but refuse to acknowledge that.
> It seems odd to me that you are speaking as if your choices are not decisions you have to own the consequence of. You get married, you have kids, you made those choices but refuse to acknowledge that.
Where did I refuse to acknowledge that, exactly?
Our choices indeed have consequences. And it is popular to paint "moving abroad" as a universally positive experience, so I want to counterbalance that with information about some of the common real-world consequences that come with that choice. How is adding some information and nuance a problem?
You are blaming the place as the issue when the reality is your choice to get married and start a family is what holds you to a place. That would apply to lots of people regardless of where they live. Painting this is a con to moving abroad isn't really, to me, not obvious. I get married to someone with family ties in a geographically disparate place to me, I should not be surprised that we will have pulls to our family.
When was the choice to get married and have kids not an obvious choice with consequences. That happens when you get married and have kids in the city you grew up in all the same as it does if you find a partner abroad. It's not abroad that I read as your issue, its your marriage and family keeping you in a place. That's obvious.
Am I the only one that is not excited about the next four years being constant banter of this nature? I loathe it. Nothing personal against your comment but the new administration hasn't even gone into office and I cannot get away from this.
Let's not pretend everyone is aghast at the goals of this administration. We just had an election and these viewpoints resoundingly won the day.
A non-trivial component to this election was this constant, smug nagging. "We know better, you're all so stupid".
If you turn out to be right, enjoy your smug "I told you so", but until then - these views are a minority and are very tiring to constantly see/hear/read.
That's a pretty simplistic analysis. People largely voted on immigration and inflation. You can't infer anything about what they thought on other issues.
The last COVID stimulus package added from 1 to 4% to inflation, but that was transitory. The wider rise was largely due to other factors such as supply chain disruptions from the pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The latter significantly raised oil prices worldwide which in turn raised costs for all kinds of things.
Here's an article that covers a lot of the factors [1].
I trust a survey of economists over a random study. That study might be right, but it also might be wrong, and I don't have the expertise to say which.
Wait, when you see someone say "department of government efficiency" and mention corruption you hear "hitler hitler hitler"?
Maybe you're just really tired of hearing any criticism of blatant corruption and I'm sorry you're feeling that way. I bet that feels really discouraging and tedious and adversarial.
To me this comment reads as a callout of corruption, not fascism. The hitler criticisms you mentioned, in my experience, have been for things like the maga hats with the nazi font, the republican convention stage in the shape of the SS glyph, and the claim that immigrants are watering down the proper American bloodlines.
To your other request that people stop sharing their concerns: just because a lot of people vote for something doesn't mean it's inherently ethical nor does it mean people should be silenced. My assumption is most people don't want corruption or abuse or racism or fascism; if you think that too then you might have better success helping people understand why they are mistaken about what looks like corruption instead of telling people to just stop sharing opinions you're personally tired of reading.
Doesn't Fox News have the highest viewer numbers of any of the news stations? What fraction of local news stations are owned by Sinclair? I don't think you get to call "legacy media" out for being liberal when such a large part is not.
I'm not Nielsen Ratings or anything, but that would be consistent with what I would think. Fox viewers being older, and older being consistent with tv viewers. Younger being consistent with TikTok, YouTube, InstaFaceTwit intake.
Fox has the youngest demo (500,000 for Jessie Watters) and most viewers. At night or during the day. Interesting cnbc has the oldest audience and least. Gutfeld crushes all late night shows (Tonight show, Late Show, Kimmel).
“Young” among tv viewers is different from “young” among social media tiktok’ers. The article you linked actually says that exact thing:
> “suggesting younger voters were either less engaged, or getting their election night information from other sources such as social media and at-home streaming, which are not tracked by Nielsen.”
Young people won’t watch tv unless there’s a game or tv series on they’re interested in. Even then, a lot of them will DVR it on Hulu or something. If you want those eyeballs, you’re going to need to be creative. And tv networks can’t be as creative as instaFaceSnap, Netflix and TikTwitGram.
The vote was like 50.1 to 48.2 at latest (accurate) count. Which is terrible news to everyone. Because, unless my math is wrong, that means there were more people who were so unmoved by either party that they couldn't be arsed to go out and vote, than there were voters for either party.
And all those people are pissed off.
Personally, I think stuff like comments on HN and Twitter are gonna be a good pressure valve over the next few years. Maybe even some Onion, Saturday Night Live and Daily Show for those masses. Because if those people ever get what they perceive to be a reason? I mean, they've already shown fairly consistently that they're no longer interested in the whole non-violent democratic norm of voting thing. And if a guy like Trump can't even bring them out, that means they're not at all interested in anything either side is selling.
After looking at those numbers, I guess I just wouldn't be so sure that the people making these comments are liberals. Or even independents for that matter. Independents on the sidelines are, at least, reasonable and vote. What we have boiling outside the stadium, so to speak, is something different entirely. And if they'll satisfy themselves yelling insults at the people inside the stadium then we should all probably let them. Don't make the mistake of thinking it's a bad thing.
If a lion starts chewing on your football, let it have the football. Don't be foolish. Just back away and go get another ball to continue your game with the opposing team.
Not only do other HN commenters largely agree that it belongs to HN, they decided that it deserves to be the top comment on this discussion, at the time I authored this comment
Which is sad for someone who has been here for well over a decade. I never came here for political banter, I came for technical discussion. Facts, truths and subject matter experts. HN is slowly becoming less concentrated version of that.
"I don't want to discuss politics" when it's directly related to the topic at hand, is a complaint from the decadent class. It affects peoples lives, it's relevant, it's entirely plausible given the situation.
People are going to have to deal with the presence of politics in regular life for the unforeseen future, because the luxury of avoiding politics is generally the sign of having good governance.
Pretending that “politics” exists as something separate or invasive is not only ignorant, it’s dangerous.
If this were a thread about IBM machines of the 1930s, would it be playing “politics” to note that those machines were sold to Nazis and supported by IBM through sub-contractors even while we were at war with them? Is it crossing a line to mention they were used to facilitate the Holocaust?
You are not alone in this sentiment. It is beyond the pale that the denizens of a 'hacker forum' are often so narrow-minded when it comes to engaging those who think outside of the personal zone of ideological preference. The same people who have been yammering about the importance of 'diversity' are dead set against diversity of opinion. Grow up, folks, get outside your comfort zone and engage some of those deplorables, irredeemables, garbage, rednecks, hillbillies and bible thumpers instead of howling along with the masses. Go ahead and try, you may find they are more like you than you've been told by the chattering classes. Sure you'll have disagreements over certain things but that does not make them the evil monsters your moral mentors have been claiming they are. Just... grow up.
I’ve engaged with these people a good bit actually. They’re very normal people, in that they largely don’t know much about politics but have strong opinions.
Hacker News' eventual death started the moment it joined the hysteria over the Lab Leak Theory. Since then it has trended more and more to be like Reddit, with ideological tribal concerns occupying an increasingly large mindshare. This drives away people who want to have earnest conversations in good faith, giving even more power to the ideologues. It will be a long death spiral but you can see it happening day by day.
I've genuinely never seen "hysteria" from the people talking about the lab leak theory. The closest I've seen is from people who were extremely keen for no one to mention the theory. Not because of some cover-up, but I think just because that was what everyone was telling everyone else to do, hysteria-style.
The idea that the novel coronavirus didn't escape from the local coronavirus R&D laboratory never had anywhere near enough evidence to be credible.
It was pretty much the WHO simply repeating the claims of the Chinese government, who had already tried to cover up the outbreak (with any warnings sent to the WHO coming from Taiwan instead).
It was about as believable as the completely baseless claims that the emergency use authorised vaccine was safe and effective.
In this context, diversity refers to characteristics, not to differences of opinion. That said, diverse thinking can be valuable when used for prosocial purposes.
Respectfully, why not?
That's the whole point of campaigning. I seriously hope an incoming administration has a plan before they get to office. "I wouldn't change anything" fortunately doesn't seem to win elections when everything's sideways.
Campaigning is done right happens between elections. In most countries you only have 4/6 weeks. As Kim Campbell of Canada famously said an election is not the time to debate issues. Now the US has a much longer campaign period.. and elections every 2 years. They are always campaigning.
Every US President is constantly campaigning. Not necessarily for his own re-election but to create public pressure on Congress to support his agenda, and then to get votes for his endorsed successor.
Many other countries have that. It’s like not giving you admin credentials before you contract start. But there’s no credential, the admin power comes from talking. And as a manager of managers, they has to restrain themselfes.
A certain faction always think the rule on keeping politics out of forums doesn't apply to them, because their politics are too correct and important. I experience this problem in groupchats where the very people who furiously demanded people not bring politics into the group and to make the group politics-free routinely push their own politics. They say their politics are too important to not bring up.
These same people LEFT other groups dedicated to politics so presumably if others respond in kind by discussing their own politics, they will leave the last groupchats too. This is why a certain faction is such an echo chamber. Incidentally, I was just banned from r/Archaeology for arguing that a post arguing that archeologists should prepare to fight the fascist takeover was too political.
It doesn’t suck for the majority of people in the country. For them, it’s what they’d love to see.
Funnily enough, comments like yours are also what they’d love to see. Seeing leftists in tears over the policy changes we’re going to see is a great form of entertainment for many people.
They are planning to appoint a nutjob who has publicly that he admitted cutting off the heads of whale carcasses with a chainsaw and dumping dead bears in the Central Park for "fun". Presumably he is also consuming those rotting animals carcasses that he keeps finding somehow (how else do you get brain worms?) to be the new US health secretary.
What do I need to know? Tech oriented, factually grounded discussion. The thing I come here for that allows me to partially escape reality and enjoy the finer things in life. I can tune into Fox, CNN, Facebook, or a myriad of places for political banter.
You oppose moving away for inflammatory seed oil that is known to cause cancer? You oppose removing incentives that have drug companies writing health policy? People with gilbert's syndrome are happy to remove fluoride from the drinking water.
Educate yourself before someone else does and sells you short.
Fluoride can damage the liver in a number of ways, including:
Liver function enzymes: Fluoride can increase the activity of liver enzymes like transaminases and phosphatases, which can indicate liver damage.
Liver cell membrane: Fluoride can rupture the liver cell membrane.
Mitochondrial damage: Fluoride can damage mitochondria in liver cells.
Protein synthesis: Fluoride can prevent the liver from producing important proteins like albumin and clotting factors.
Glucose metabolism: Fluoride can disrupt the liver's ability to regulate glucose metabolism, which can lead to metabolic disorders like diabetes.
Histological changes: Fluoride can cause histological changes in the liver.
Fluoride is a small, active molecule that can easily enter cells and cause damage to tissues and organs. Studies have shown that fluoride exposure can cause liver damage in a variety of animals, including rats, mice, goats, and cattle.
To treat fluoride toxicity, you can try:
Calcium chloride: Lavage with a 1-5% calcium chloride solution to bind the fluoride in the stomach. This is most effective when done within an hour of ingestion.
Hemodialysis: For critically ill patients who don't respond to other treatments.
Regardless, this kind of straw man argument isn't very convincing. You can be against someone's stated policies while holding either supporting or opposing views on any particular topic; implying otherwise is baffling since it would require someone to PERFECTLY align with every opinion you have. Thinking RFK will be a good or bad leader has nothing to do with if someone opposes "moving away from seed oils".
Seed oil removal is part of his agenda. If you like that idea things may be better than what the media is selling you. The dead bear is part of an entertaining story. At most you could say he initially didn't to waste the meat but lost track of time hunting birds then had to meet someone for dinner in New York before boarding a flight an hour later. He creately solved the issue.
I do agree about his view on water fluoridation. So what? That doesn't make him any less of an unhinged lunatic. Again, I'm not even talking about his specific views or qualifications at all only his personal behaviour and character.
These people have been inundated with the drivel of a billion dollar propaganda machine run by the most expensive campaign in history.
It's gonna take a while before they're back to normal again. I've heard so many "office of government efficiency" jokes in the last week I am tired of it too. But, in their defense if all you hear is how this administration is going to be the fourth reich (lol), destroy the country (lol), introduce fascism (lol), kill people (lol), etc you're going to react in a sarcastic way to anything you can grasp onto.
Though tbf, again, "office of government efficiency" seems like an oxymoron.
edit:
But then again P.A.T.R.I.O.T act etc is a thing so hard to tell if actual joke or just going with how US politicians like to be witty while naming stuff.
I love the argument you’re making. If you’re against socialist policies, it serves as indication you don’t like the things I find good.
Please don’t ask me to fund anyone else’s EV purchase. It doesn’t matter to me one bit who’s in office to get rid of that evil policy, I’d still love it.
They have already announced what they are going to do, with the pro-Trump side saying he's not serious or will mellow out the plan before he takes office, and the anti-Trump side saying he will do exactly what he says he's going to do.
not a repeat of 2016 at all. he's got every lever of the government at his disposal. stacked supreme court, three branches of government on his side. hiring the worst people for every job possible and hiring only for fealty to him.
He had both chambers in 2016 too, on similarly narrow majorities. The hiring has consistently been for allegiance. The court has changed a little. One thing you don't mention that is perhaps the biggest thing is temperance for reelection. But overall, I don't see much reason that it will be that much different from last time. Talking about things being much worse seems like an emotional statement.
You may wish to revisit your timelines. COVID-19 and the associated widespread shutdowns occurred throughout 2020 and 2021. The national debt (e.g. the thing the "money printing" goes toward) rose by a staggering $8.4T from 2017-2021 and only $4.3T from 2021-.
Unfortunately complex systems cannot be fixed by simply going full forward in the opposite direction of a bad direction.
And yet we not only want to revert any decision that was made that we think correlates with an unhappy situation, we also want to choose people who are as different as possible from the guys we think are responsible for the unwanted status quo. So if the current politicians are serious people who talk in an articulate way we conclude that seriousness is a problem, because it's two faced. We conclude that being articulated is a problem because it's judgemental, it's a symbol of being elites.
If you conclude that serious looking articulated people are two-faced lying elites there are many alternatives in a multidimensional solution space. You could desire honest serious elites, or honest serious commoners, or many variations on the theme.
But no, we obviously want to get exactly the opposite, because that's the monodimensional thing to do! It's simpler. Let's pick the exact opposite of the people we have. Current people are too serious? Let's pick an unserious person. The current elites are too educated? Let's pick people that don't have formal education and/or that actively denigrate higher education. Etc etc.
I understand the human urge to flip tables. But if I stop thinking about it for a moment, I don't think the strategy is good. In rare cases it might be the necessary strategy, but in most cases it's destroying something that has plenty room for improvement and replace it with something that is much worse and will take even longer to improve over the previous one
I really can't take such hyperbolic rhetoric seriously.
I had someone try to claim we had "complete lockdown for years", which is news to me. We had one year of sporadically enforced lockdown-ish measures. Although, we did go out to eat a few times.
Hell, I bought a house during end of 2020/beginning of 2021. By the time we closed, I was back in office, we weren't wearing masks, and people didn't seem too concerned.
Depends on where you lived. In some places they enforced longer lock downs and required vaccines to eat in public and this went on for years. Texas was different compared to Minnesota for example. Canada was locked down for a long time.. New Zealand too.
Politicians bend the truth or promise what they are later unable to deliver (and often had no chance of delivering). But I think Trump usually tries to deliver on whatever he said in the campaign (like in 2016), like you can expect wide reaching tariffs in January or February (especially since half-way competent advisors, congress, and the courts are probably not going to moderate him as much this time).
Maybe make any computer purchases in December just to be safe.
Why would it be ironic? He has less regard for the political group and general stability than a more run of the mill politician and now there is explicit immunity for anything he wants to do, like when he sold classified documents but "declassified them in his mind" right before once he got caught.
We watched four years of this already, including a rally with gallows being built in the crowd being told to march on the Capitol (he claims figuratively, and everyone just misunderstood, despite all the posts and planning and travel and tour groups). Last time it was absurd news headline after headline just to distract from the other things going on. We saw some bonkers stuff that would have disqualified other candidates in the past (or at least most candidates probably thought it would).
At this point I think his promises are easier to deliver on and he doesn't care about (and has been made immune from) the consequences that usually temper a politician's ability to deliver. Tariffs, no health plan, another wall (remember when he pardoned bannon for stealing the money they raised for the wall?), "stopping the war in Ukraine" but without a free Ukraine at the end, and decimating government regulatory agencies.
The weirdest part of this narrative for me is how the supporters say he wont do what he promises and the detractors fear he will. I don't know enough history to know if that is common but it sure feels backwards to me.
"The weirdest part of this narrative for me is how the supporters say he wont do what he promises and the detractors fear he will. I don't know enough history to know if that is common but it sure feels backwards to me."
That's pretty common on all highly polarized topics. Happens all the time with stuff like democrat candidates and firearms seizures - supporters walking it back and detractors believing ever word.
Trump is probably the first politician in history where supporters claim he isn’t going to do what he says he is going to do (“take Trump seriously, not literally!”) while his detractors claim that he is. It’s already a weird spot in history.
That's pretty common on all highly polarized topics. Happens all the time with stuff like democrat candidates and firearms seizures - supporters walking it back and detractors believing every word.
To expand your last paragraph, I've been wondering about how the whole thing will affect geo-politics (as well as national politics). I wonder if there's a forum of people doing thinking about all possible scenarios. Things like the world pivoting towards China because, hey, Xi is a despot, but at least he isn't volatile...
The joke was, when Putin invaded Ukraine everyone turned from epidemiology experts into geo-political experts. I wonder where the proper experts are now.
Ever heard of Chestertons fence? Coming into a government for over 300 million people without the faintest clue how it works, removing stuff that doesn’t look too useful is the worst possible strategy to improve efficiency. You don’t renovate with a wrecking ball.
What's 4D chess about saying they'll diminish the government capacity to regulate their business and proceeding to doing so? It doesn't take an evil genius master plan to go about that.
The genius would lie in planning that in advance. You'd need to buy Twitter for quite a lot of money, use it to influence elections or at least give the impression that you'd been instrumental in influencing the election so that the new president will want to give you a new department with a funny name you made up.
I don't know man, my Occam's razor cuts another way.
> You'd need to buy Twitter for quite a lot of money
On the other hand, if he had been forced to buy Twitter against his better judgement, he may have an axe to grind against the "overbearing" administrative state and use the tools at hand to achieve his ends. No evil genius required, just happenstance and humans seeing patterns in chaos.
It doesn't take genius for an opportunistic rich person to expand their power and wealth. You're just creating a narrative from a string of cherry picked events. The Twitter acquisition also destroyed a ton of value.
Try not to dismiss my comment for what it is. I'm not taking a stance on political affiliation or preference. I'm trying to highlight a behavior that is the result of elections of recent past. I'm not excited about another 4 years where communication diminishes to snarky comments that point finger at the side they oppose. It makes me want to just go outside and smell the fresh air.
I come to HN for substantial conversation, not this elementary unsubstantial conversation.
Your presumption that it was snarky banter and not a deductive prediction based on publicly documented behavior is itself a political stance and affiliation.
With that in mind, "Am I the only one..." is not substantial conversation, because it is rarely the case where one person is the only one who holds a certain viewpoint.
They are like this literally any time a Republican is in the White House. They were like this when Dubya was President too, even though today they act like he's some sort of elder statesman just because he hates Trump.
What? Dubya was selected by the Supreme Court. He started a war after peddling bullshit evidence in front of the whole world. Dubya was and is a piece of shit.
There were some people (former staff of his) openly asking him, before the election, to denounce Trump. He didn't do that. November 6, he issued a congratulations to Trump. A piece of shit and a coward .
As a non-american watching the election, this was one of the reasons I didn't want the result to be the way it went. Just for having to hear about it constantly from everywhere.
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