I keep hearing this. But for that to work, the elites have to have a bunch of money available, that didn't lose value when everything fell apart. Well, where are they parking that money right now, that won't lose value when everything else does?
Tax havens aren't immune to economic disaster though. If the US dollar becomes worthless, then it doesn't matter how many dollars you have in your offshore bank account. Ditto if you're storing wealth as equities or bonds. Real estate value will collapse if tenants can't pay rent or if the local government decides to confiscate land.
I suppose that you could keep gold or bitcoin wallets in a vault, but then it actually belongs to the vault guards, not to you.
Basically you need a collapse that's bad enough to shrink asset prices but not bad enough to break the social contact.
Yeah, it's weird to me that an atomic transition can create something with a wavelength so much longer than the atomic radius.
(Yeah, I know that it's a really low-energy transition, and I know about the relationship between energy and wavelength. But the net result I still find highly counter-intuitive.)
What helps me is thinking of it in term of period instead given that the wavelength is the spatial propagation of a change in field. It’s big, but that’s because C is high.
I think it's more that every single post about Musk or Trump gets flagged to oblivion these days. (I mean, that's about the same thing, because just about every post that's about them is critical of them.)
Some of it is Musk fanboys and Trump shills and Russian political operatives and such. I'm sure some of that is going on.
But some of it is just regular HN users who are sick and tired of political stories. There have been a huge increase in political stories in the past three months. And even if some of the stories are interesting, to some people, the second story in 12 hours isn't interesting, and the third similar story this week also isn't interesting.
Some people are here instead of Reddit for a reason. They don't want HN to turn into Reddit. So they tend to flag political (or politics-adjacent) stories, unless they are directly tech-relevant - and maybe even then.
I agree with you but FWIW I think a lot of folks on this site want HN to be Reddit. I think a lot of people these days use HN as another big subreddit and modulate their content and voting behavior on that basis. If anything, I think a lot of people left Reddit because they disapproved of the API changes and began to use HN the same way they used Reddit because they felt that HN's ownership aligned with their ideas of how to run a site better. The draw to them is the different ownership not different decorum or voting behaviors. If anything, the decorum and voting behavior on Reddit is probably their expectation for engaging with upvote-based social media. You can see this behavior leaking into a lot of other threads on this site, not just the political ones.
I don't flag these stories, but I do think this "fight" is one we'll eventually lose. The majority of users here want to use HN as another Reddit. They don't really care about what made HN different. As such I think it's time for us to accept the new normal. Our party is over.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
>so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
It makes sense, media glamorizes these people and amplifies their actions, and some of the insecure folks crave attention. Look at that one guy who somehow works harder than all of us but is able to tweet all day every day...
And yet, this one is the one that's torching the US's reputation across the world. What does that tell you? Maybe the rest of the world thinks Trump is worse than an empty suit?
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
Here on HN, we're not telling Zuck and Musk anything. We're telling each other things about Zuck and Musk. Zuck and Musk aren't dropping by to find out what we think of them, ever.
Figuratively speaking, we're telling them, since we're saying it loudly in public. You bet they know people are saying it. They might even peek in - we know some of their friends (arguably friends) who do, and Musk is among other things famous for being a bit of a social media addict.
Rich people's bubbles are thick, and their "outside-the-bubble" communication tends to be write-only. I highly doubt Zucc or Musk spends any time at all on places like HN or Reddit, and their comms on their respective social media platforms tend to be broadcast sending/writing and not reading comments or feedback. They rely on the sycophants in their orbit to give them the summarized, sanitized, positive feedback, and downplay/hide the negative.
We know Musk spends time on X. We also know he reads as well as writes, because he often replies to random things.
But even for a slightly wiser billionaire who does what you suggest - they wouldn't do that unless they knew they would get public hate, and were bothered by it. You don't have a thick bubble unless you understand that you need it.
"They're having a major drought. Hey, here's an idea: Let's go invade them, when there's no food for us to take!"
But if you mean it as a conquest instead of a resource raid, then maybe it makes sense, because you don't expect the drought will last forever. So invade while they're weak and disorganized, and then try to hold it after the rain comes back.
reply