The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.
this seems to run parallel to the "i have nothing to hide" / "well they have everyone's data, so who cares about mine" arguments.
this is too narrow a view on the issue. the problem isn't that a colleague, acquaintance, neighbor, or government employee is going to snoop through your data. the problem is that once any government has everyone's data, they will feed it to PRISM-esque systems and use it to accurately model the population, granting the power to predict and shape future events.
Normalized or not, the risk is you get something akin US drug enforcement: ignored for certain demographics, enforced for others. The ability to see someone's porn history is irrelevant until a government (or employer perhaps) wants to weaponize it.
The problem isn't my peers, it's the people in power and how many of them lack any scruples.
>most people are rejecting contemporary right-wing policies and politics.
Hmm...
>No longer are we going to tolerate the intolerant. If you are willing to look past the moral failings, you are seen as part of the problem and should expect consequences. Social dynamics are at work
The woke left forcing ideological conformity loses them a lot of support from the center-left, which turns out is not a winning electoral strategy. At which point one must wonder if the wokeness is just performative and virtue signaling, rather than an attempt to gain actual political power.
You’re totally right. Rampant government cuts, attacking healthcare subsidies, attacking LGBT Americans, threatening universities, ego-driven tariff policy, and just generally poor economic stewardship, should be the electoral strategy. It sure seems to be working out for republicans.
>Rampant government cuts, attacking healthcare subsidies, attacking LGBT Americans, threatening universities, ego-driven tariff policy, and just generally poor economic stewardship, should be the electoral strategy. It sure seems to be working out for republicans.
I agree with none of these policies. I also just disagree with the woke left's focus on identity politics, because I see it as a losing battle, electorally. I prefer the left to focus on labor and economic issues, which apply broadly to all, regardless of their identity.
I believe in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and insofar as it informs my political views, food shelter and jobs are far more important issues than identitarian issues. Solve the basic needs first, and when everyone has a fair piece of our wealthy country's economic pie, I suspect we will find the identity issues are easier to address, with broader support.
You keep saying “the woke left’s” identity politics as the Trump administration uses the government to enforce right wing identity politics and stifle free speech. Do you also find that objectionable? Or do you think this is purely a problem on the left?
My guess is the only difference is you agree with conservative identity politics and not liberal identity politics, so one is seen as “natural and normal” and the other seems “manufactured and forced on people.” I could be wrong, but that is generally my experience in these conversations.
>You keep saying “the woke left’s” identity politics as the Trump administration uses the government to enforce right wing identity politics and stifle free speech. Do you also find that objectionable?
Yes.
> Or do you think this is purely a problem on the left?
I am not a member of the right wing parties, so I have no pull with them. I also think they are less likely to change.
>My guess is the only difference is you agree with conservative identity politics and not liberal identity politics
Your guess is wrong. I think all identity politics are bad politics until we solve basic human needs stuff like feed and house everyone and jobs that pay a living wage for anyone who wants one.
I get it, I don't fit into your preconcieved box, but the boxes are designed by the oligarchy who wants to keep us in separate boxes, so we can't unite.
It’s not about a preconceived box. It’s that you keep saying “the woke left” and only “the woke left” despite the fact that it is Republicans controlling all three branches of government right now. It is republicans doing the thing you’re claiming you’re against. Yet (again) it’s all “the woke left, the woke left.” Omissions can be louder than words, and yours are screaming.
Also in my experience, most people who keep grinding their axe against “the woke left” are not as moderate/above party politics as they make themselves out to be.
It's not about forcing conformity, it's about having basic human decency. Right-wingers belittle and dehumanize so many groups and people it's hard to keep track
see also: Paradox of tolerance
> turns out is not a winning electoral strategy
umm, did you look at the election results from yesterday?
#1 economy (i.e. emotionally driven tariffs)
#2 people don't like seeing children and neighbors disappeared by masked thugs (i.e. due-process and rule-of-law)
So the major, common and probably most destructive, theme is the ecosystem of specialised tender companies. I mostly know this from the software side, but if you start working on such projects, you'll quicky find out that there's a persistent ecosystem of companies which specialize for these tender signups.
People employed there optimize for winning them (at any cost - quid-pro-quo agreements aren't rare in my experience). It's common for several such companies to collude in a way that they get awarded the tenders in a circle ("I get this one, next one is for you.")
Afterwards, they outsource the work to the cheapest lowest bidder (usually IT studends in the cases I've seen for software development, but essentially they'll be bottom of the barrel juniors). The quality of such products is about the same as the quality of any outsourced product which is built only to satisfy a checklist at the end. The US equivalent of that would be a corporation getting a defense contract and then basically have everything built by the cheapest outsourcer in India or similar location.
Funny enough, university labs (or spinoffs) tend to be major part of this ecosystem, using grad students as workforce - their credentials tend to give them legitimacy over smaller companies.
The results are as disastrous as you can expect - companies a HNer could expect to win usually don't (due to lack of specialized knowledge on how to game the tender process, lack of connections and cost) and those that do are really there to do the bare minimum, shed the work as much as possible and deliver something they can't get sued over.
It's also not uncommon to see whole chains of such companies - the winner sometimes shares some outsourcing work with "losers" they outsource work further, skimming the funds on top and essentially outsourcing everything to the cheapest engineer they can find.
Dealing with any public EU project has been nothing but misery for me personally (as you can imagine from this post :) and this environment bred some of the most toxic workplaces I've worked with. The products were universally terrible and rarely actually useful for the purpose.
As much as I want independent EU software ecosystem, I don't think using public funding can breed anything but more corruption.
The system as bad as it is can be good as well. Let some consultants find out how to get the bids, and others how to do it well, and can be a outsourced third party. It gives differentiation without everyone needing to be large enough to actually bid on the contracts.
> As much as I want independent EU software ecosystem, I don't think using public funding can breed anything but more corruption.
Well, you described what happens when you outsource everything.
Governments used to ... gasp ... employ people to do tasks so that you didn't have to outsource every single piddly task. And since those employees could do the tasks, there was a floor such that selecting nobody and doing it in house was always an option.
Yes, that has different failure modes. However, you have more levers over those failure modes as opposed to a single lever of "Head to court and try to win a legal case."
He is describing how bidding for publicly funded projects fails, because the bidding process designed to avoid corruption has been poorly designed (or corrupted by lobbying) such that it effectively sidelines honest and qualified bids.
I would say this is a typical outcome with well meaning bureaucrats in a democracy, not capitalism
It sounds exactly like how business works in my experience. It’s just the principle agent problem showing up in the government that same way it does in the private sphere.
I mean, if you’re at a place that uses staff aug and managing a project it’s just something you have to watch out from your vendors as table stakes. Whenever a new vendor was hired my fellow low level managers would be making bets on how long before they switched out their best guys with some fresh out of college junior that they’d give a fancy title to.
I understand what gp is nominally describing; I asked the question, after all. I am just pointing out that the exact same pressures/dynamics that were described also underpin capitalism.
As someone who barely interacts with the people that care about tenders, my impression is that people that usually win are the ones better at playing the game rather than better at the job. The job later is potentially repackaged in chunks and offered to other players that in turn will do the same downstream. Something like Romania gets EU fund money to build roads in Romania with a German engineering project, German contractors, German supplied materials, but Romanian workers.
Or in a more particular case part of recycling trash in Germany is basically being dumped illegally in Poland for a while and the same companies keep operating and winning contracts because why not.
You create a political class full of lawyers, and you get a country where lawyers thrive, who would have thought?
This is one of those things that is so obvious as to not require a source. Just sharing my perspective on this conversation, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question to ask if you’re unfamiliar with the space
I think this repartee encapsulates a huge frustration with the tech sector:
> op (as legacy business): BAU
> you (as tech): disrupt! disrupt! disrupt!
> me: no thank you; that's not necessary
> you (as tech): stop being mean!
Not wanting your "disruption" is not being un-nice. Your disruption was not asked for in the first place. Forcing it (Uber, Doge, et. al.) on marketplaces, often illegally, and vacuuming it up the income ladder to the already-wealthy IS the "not nice" thing.
The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.
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