I don't remember that particular observation being in the book since it's very much about the upper class, but that book is amazing. I used to keep an rss feed of new project gutenberg books and when that popped up I read it just based on the name and was amazed how pertinent it was a hundred years later. I haven't read anything else by him, but that one is absolutely worth it. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/833
Also since it was written when the vestiages of european feudal system still had some tiny amount of power, some of the observations about lords who owned massive estates but had no money and would refuse to take on any work, considering it "beneath them" while they starved was fascinating. It's both of it's time and timeless
I met someone who was an early employee at King about a year after they were acquired for 5.9b - it’s a little different since he wasn’t involved with the sale, but he was still processing the insane amount of money he had. A year on he hadn’t moved out of his small apartment, still contracted, still used the same cheap phone, and hadn’t started investing beyond just the normal mutual funds/bonds/etc. it struck me as the smartest move, take your time to come up with a plan and don’t just dive into recklessly spending it.
I also know a founder couple I was close friends with who had a sizeable exit, who moved to Costa Rica where they could spend little and focus on writing, a side interest that ended up leading to their next company.
I find it’s really interesting how people act when the financial pressure gets suddenly removed.
> I find it’s really interesting how people act when the financial pressure gets suddenly removed.
It seems so strange to me to hear stories about people suddenly coming into a bunch of money and not finding contentment or even ending up depressed. If I could afford to retire today, I would do it in a heartbeat and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't run out of things I want to do.
When the lotto gets to be above $1 billion, I'll usually buy a ticket because it's fun to imagine the life I could have with that money. Lots of it would be spent on hiring experts to teach me things.
It's almost analogous to having a video game totally completed for you in a way. Everything is "done" for you essentially since you just buy your way out of problems at that point.
Before coming into that amount of money, you can be distracted by the survival aspects of living in society where you're just trying to make money and live comfortably. There isn't any necessity to have to figure out what you truly want out of life or what your passions are.
Once you do have money, now you have to face that. You have to truly find who you are. Otherwise, you're depressed or you go and blow all the money on things to distract you from finding who you are.
> There isn't any necessity to have to figure out what you truly want out of life or what your passions are.
I most certainly don't have life figured out and I'm not particularly passionate about much but I do know as a 54 year old, I'm on the downward side of this mountain and there's so many things that are interesting to me. I'd love nothing more than to be a full time dilettante, living my life quarter-by-quarter, exploring a new topic every 3 months.
I guess what I'm really wondering is how some people with more money than they will ever need don't wake up in the morning excited to work on some topic they find interesting. A certain portion are just depressed or dealing with some other mental illness, but isn't the typical person interested in lots of stuff that they don't pursue due to life getting in the way?
> isn't the typical person interested in lots of stuff
They might be, but is the typical person interested in doing it alone? Everyone else still has their lives getting in the way. They can't realistically skip going to work because you want to spend time with them. While some people are comfortable exploring life by themselves, I suspect the typical person is not.
You could use that newfound wealth to buy friends, but then you're effectively back to managing a business again, assuming business is the source of money per the grander discussion here. If that is what drives you, you are apt to do everything you can to avoid the exit in the first place and thus not ending up in this situation. Like Zuckerberg once said, if he sold Facebook he would focus on building another tech company and therefore there is no point in selling the one he already has.
Even still, if you do go down that road, and you want people of quality rather than grifters trying to scam you, to fill that role you are going to need some semblance of marketable goals for them to get behind. "Played friend for Richie Rich" doesn't advance their career or look good on a resume. They don't have the luxury of not having to worry about that kind of thing. Now you are truly back where you started, which, again, questions why walk away in the first place?
It might not be impossible to find something to keep you going, but it is easy to see how it could be really hard.
> When the lotto gets to be above $1 billion, I'll usually buy a ticket because it's fun to imagine the life I could have with that money.
I buy lotto tickets for the same reason! Their expected value is very low but the maximum value is thought-provoking. For me, $50k would be life-changing. One billion is hard to imagine.
It feels strange to write about this, but resolving a health issue, paying off debt, and escaping the nerve-wracking cycle of short-term, low-paying gigs would be life-changing. I am the sole breadwinner, working 50-60 hours a week just to stay afloat, so I don't have the time to prepare for interviews and pursue a stable career.
When you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, even just $10K in credit card debt at 30% is enough to keep you down. ~$250/month merely pays the interest.
Maybe there's medical stuff that needs to get done. Maybe the car needs fixing. Maybe you haven't gone on vacation in YEARS and it's taking a huge toll on mental health. I mean, consider how many people work jobs that don't offer ANY PTO, so even going on a stay-cation costs money due to lost wages.
50k is enough to comfortably live on for a year even in Germany, much more so in other countries. Allows you to completely change perspectives or to pivot your entire career.
I know someone who paid off their credit card debt with an inheritance of roughly that size. It completely changed their outlook on life. Before every month was a struggle to just stay on top of the credit cards. Now they are debt-free and are actually able to save a bit of money every month. And for example able to go eat out without struggle.
Mind you by hn standards this is on a miniscule income. Still, many people are struggling hard and a windfall like this can make a huge difference in quality of life.
Found a place in a rural part of Missouri for $60k at the end of 2019. Everything has more than doubled in value since then. I had no idea what was about to happen when I signed that paper… but I’m sure glad I didn’t wait even a few months. Literally moved in February 2020 just in time to get really familiar with the new surroundings.
As somewhat of a counterpoint, my experience was we often romanticize these things that we’d like to do if only we had the time/money/etc. But sometimes you’ll find once you do have the opportunity to explore those things, it’s not as interesting as we had hoped. It might keep you busy for a year or so, but then boredom and lack of fulfillment rear their head again. I think this is why serial entrepreneurship is a pretty common thing.
I buy lotto tickets because my friends do a pool. I'm not sure I'd be happy with the money, but I am very sure I'd be very unhappy if I was a schmuck who didn't put in a very small amount (to me) of money to be in the pool. I consider it insurance more than anything!
Imo, it's mostly because our brains are still hunter-gatherer brains. While things like language acquisition and culture-instilling do fundamentally change us, our base hardware is still pre-currency pre-agriculture (pre-pretty-much-everything) hunter-gatherer. In Sapiens, it's noted that if a homo sapiens from 100k years ago ended up on an autopsy table in the modern day, you would never know anything was amiss anatomically. You might notice the teeth are unusually straight and free of decay (pre-grain diet, with huge amounts of chewing strengthening the jaw and allowing teeth to properly align), well-trained body with low body fat, and similarly free of many of the scourges of our modern diet and lifestyles). But that's it.
So, people suddenly get taken out of "the grind" which was their only approximation of the drive-reward cycle that their brain depends on. So what now? Unfortunately, they've been freed to confront man's ultimate foe: philosophy. And lots of people aren't cut out or ready for that. (One could even say most philosophers aren't, given how much many of them suffered).
Talk to some retired people. The loss of identity can hit you right in the ego. You might think retirement sounds great, but I’ve known several people who thought that, and then un-retired. Other people seem to do just fine; I’m not sure if it’s temperament or something else. And then again, there are some people who just fade away…
> It seems so strange to me to hear stories about people suddenly coming into a bunch of money and not finding contentment or even ending up depressed. If I could afford to retire today, I would do it in a heartbeat and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't run out of things I want to do.
Different goals. If your goal is pursuing hobbies or a certain lifestyle, work is a means to achieve that. Getting money just lets you skip the work part.
Their goal is creating a successful business. Having money and leaving the business means now they have no goal.
Agreed, I think I could find things to dedicate my time to that would be fulfilling. I'm not surprised, but maybe I do wonder what is in those folks lives who can't find something.
Having said that ... I'm also not in that situation, you never know.
> hadn’t started investing beyond just the normal mutual funds/bonds/etc
You'd be surprised how far you get ahead with S&P 500 + Treasury inflation adjusted securities.
It's really hard to beat S&P500. Most funds after fees don't beat it. If S&P500 goes to shit, inflation adjusted securities give you guaranteed returns.
The richest IMO people are those who live a modest lifestyle only from their interest, never having to touch the principle. Maximizing who and what they spend their time on.
Yeah I didn't mean to talk that down, it's just the most no-brainer thing to do. As in, it's so obviously a good idea that any good portfolio will have a chunk devoted to that.
> I met someone who was an early employee at King about a year after they were acquired for 5.9b - it’s a little different since he wasn’t involved with the sale, but he was still processing the insane amount of money he had
Is there a word missing in this? How did they join after acquisition and have a meaningful financial windfall? And being an early employee?
It's very ambiguously phrased in multiple ways because I don't edit my HN posts, but it is technically correct, just vague! He was one of the first employees at King, and I met him a year after King was acquired. The "they" in "after they were acquired" is ambiguous which I think led to your confusion.
Yes - this is exactly how I felt about the "Wokeness" essay. I am constantly afraid that PG is gonna fall down the same strongly right rabbit hole so many of his colleagues have, and he hasn't so far, so seeing the title of the essay was worrying.
When I read it though, I realized he was just using "wokeness" to mean the dogmatic surface level understanding of the subject (IE, not that he was being surface level, but he's talking about people who engage with equality/identity issues in a surface level way). It's kind of a strawman idea, but people like that exist and are annoying. It makes me wonder how many people who are really centrists hate wokeness because they think the most annoying wing of it is representative of the whole movement.
Reading PGs article, I get the sense of someone who doesn't fully understand the thing he's criticising, so makes me hopeful he can learn. But again, I'm always a little afraid that the legit criticizisms of his article will get drowned out by people who reinforce what he says in it.
> You might even convince yourself that these questions are “privacy preserving,” since no human police officer would ever rummage through your papers, and law enforcement would only learn the answer if you were (probably) doing something illegal.
Something I've started to see happen but never mentioned is the effect automated detection has on systems: As detection becomes more automated (previously authored algorithms, now with large AI models), there's less cash available for individual case workers, and more trust at the managerial level on automatic detection. This leads to false positives turning into major frustrations since it's hard to get in touch with a person to resolve the issue. When dealing with businesses it's frustrating, but as these get more used in law enforcement, this could be life ruining.
For instance - I got flagged as illegal reviews on Amazon years ago and spent months trying to make my case to a human. Every year or so I try to raise the issue again to leave reviews, but it gets nowhere. Imagine this happening for a serious criminal issue, with the years long back log on some courts, this could ruin someones life.
More automatic detection can work (and honestly, it's inevitable) but it's got to acknowledge that false positives will happen and allocate enough people to resolve those issues. As it stands right now, these detection systems get built and immediately human case workers get laid off, there's this assumption that detection systems REPLACE humans, but it should be that they augment and focus human case workers so you can do more with less - the human aspect needs to be included in the budgeting.
But the incentives aren't there, and the people making the decisions aren't the ones working the actual cases so they aren't confronted with the problem. For them, the question is why save $1m when you could save $2m? With large AI models making it easier and more effective to build automated detection I expect this problem to get significantly worse over the next years.
>Imagine this happening for a serious criminal issue, with the years long back log on some courts, this could ruin someones life.
It can be much scarier.
There was a case in Russia when a scientist was accused in a murder that happened 20 years ago based on 70% face recognition match and fake identification as an accomplice by a criminal. [0] He spent 10 months in jail during "investigation" despite being incredibly lucky to have an alibi -- archival records of the institute where he worked, proving he was in an expedition far away from Moscow at that time. He was eventually freed but I'm afraid that police investigators that used very weak face recognition match as a way to improve their work performance stats are still working in the police.
Grave consequences are not a rarity. Automated decision making in immigration and housing classify people with zero recourse or transparency, locking them out of a place to live (and in the case of Australia, locking them up in offshore detention for years).
I know it’s the wrong way to think but things like this make me glad about a digital footprint… good chance I’m liking a TikTok comment or reading an HN thread at the same time as any crime, just statistically.
that's not going to get you off the hook. anything that could be faked via account sharing is going to be discarded (not to mention that tiktok and similar platforms will not collaborate with you to build an alibi by giving access to this data, only the police to build a case)
I don't know, but it seems quite likely, unfortunately. There were quite a few other cases when fake evidence was planted by police.
It's not the only problem with technology -- it's claimed that there has been over hundred cases of false DNA matches not caused by malice or processing errors.[0] In theory, DNA match must not be considered by courts as 100% accurate, but in fact it is.
On the other hand, there were cases when human rights advocates or journalists were claiming that innocent people were jailed but that turned out to be false, like people getting caught on camera doing the same kind of crime again after they served their sentence.
Yep, I got the impression that courts consider polygraph only when the results implicate the accused. Good thing that by law they cannot force you to get questioned with polygraph attached.
Or this: "A former forensic scientist intentionally manipulated DNA evidence during her 29-year career at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, casting doubt on at least 652 criminal cases she handled, including some of the most high-profile trials, according to investigation findings released by the agency Friday." [0]
You chime in to showcase another thing where the USA is wrong, but you oversee the point that in no way russia is comparable to this.
In the article you linked, there is a criminal investigation, an audit and a re-test of evidence in order “to ensure the accuracy and completeness of its entire catalog of records because someone manipulated DNA evidence.
In russia, there is no investigation, because they make up evidence against their political enemies all the time.
It feels like you have some incentive to miss the elephant in the room.
The notion that the judicial system in democratic countries is in any way comparable to the judicial system in the dictatorship of russia is laughable.
In democratic countries such errors with regards to forensic evidence spark news because it is so unusual. In dictatorships like russia, nobody expects forensic methods to be valid because the court verdict does not depend on evidence, it depends on your connections to the dictator.
I'm not interested in figuring out which judicial system is worse, I'm sure russia would win. But you give the western system far too much credit, because the police frequently rely on unscientific methods to convict people, even after this fact has been known. Not just the article I linked, polygraphs, drug searching dogs which also have been shown not to actually be effective but mostly respond to their handlers. I don't know what things are like in russia, but for sure I do not like people pretending there is no problem because other places are worse. And I have very little hope AI won't be the next thing on that list.
> [...] my conclusion is that you're here to spill russian propaganda. [...]
The case described by the parent is that of someone who was wrongly imprisoned for 10 months on the basis of bogus application of faulty technology, even though they had a solid alibi. Therefore, the comment does not reflect well on Russia, the Russian state or the Russian government, like.. at all.
If there is a propaganda dimension to this (which I doubt), it is certainly not an attempt to say something nice about the Russian justice system.
It's a subtle form of propaganda. Same category as the "funny russian car crashes" or "awesome chinese acrobat" videos that are on reddit's front page all the time. One might wonder why it's always those two countries and not others who are getting thousands of upvotes.
The comment I criticized falsely implies that there is due process in russia, and that technical faults lead to unfair results for the people who are accused of something.
It is a cherry-picked example, and the big majority of russian court cases are decided without due process, because it is a dictatorship. If you try to get justice because you were harmed by corrupt officials or the tzar you're out of luck. Lawyers are getting shot on the street as a birthday present for putin. There are lots of examples. And once you're in prison they'll send you to the frontlines to murder Ukrainians.
I'm pretty relaxed about all this, but just a thought: Your comments in this thread seem very eager to talk about Russia instead of the actual topic of the thread, which is privacy and AI.
You wrote those comments in a very repetitive and mission-driven way. Which does not inspire confidence in the absence of ulterior motives.
Update this to a world where every corner of your life is controlled by a platform monopoly that doesn't even provide the most bare-bones customer service and yeah, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Imagine when AI will be monitoring all internet traffic and arresting people for thoughtcrime.
What wasn't feasible to do before is now quite in reach and the consequences are dire.
Though of course it won't happen overnight. First they will let AI encroach every available space (backed by enthusiastic techbros). THEN, once it's established, boom. Authoritarian police state dystopia times 1000.
And it's not like they need evidence to bin you. They just need inference. People who share your psychological profile will act and speak and behave in a similar way to you, so you can be put in the same category. When enough people in that category are tagged as criminals, you will be too.
All because you couldn't be arsed to write some boilerplate
We need strong and comprehensive regulations. Some places have enacted partial solutions but none anywhere near as complete as needed. EU has GDPR and some early AI laws, India has the IT Act that requires companies to provide direct end-user support.
It could also be used to eliminate political opponents, minorities, etc. Persecution with collective guilt bases on digital footprints wasn't easier ever.
"If you want to try it, be aware that it requires Intel Pentium 166MHz or above."
Made me laugh. Fun article, also really love the genre of "bored smart person goes too deep on something that the end result is obvious by common sense but proving it requires surprising amount of ingenuity and scrappiness"
And a great example that truth is complicated, expensive and uncomfortable. It's much easier to postulate an evil nation-state entity with a bad plan (without evidence) than to dig through the thicket of this article. It's much cheaper as well, certainly in terms of time and knowhow. And it's also much more comfortable to claim you're the victim and have uncovered a conspiracy, rather than realize this was just the result of the patchwork typical of engineering.
I would also add, it's not _unreasonable_ to be wary of something when a tool like a virus scan pops up a warning. The jargon used to explain what the executable is doing is gibberish to any 'normal' user, there's no way for them to know it's listing stuff you'd more or less expect it to be doing.
Of course, there's a bit of a jump from that to making bold claims about what it's doing, but the initial concern was understandable.
Yeah, the insane takes spread faster but it takes more time and resources to look into it than just come to conclusions early.
The worst thing is this creates an environment where most people are either completely credulous and buy into everything or completely incredulous and think everything is unfounded. It's just exhausting to have a healthy level of skepticism these days, and maybe 1 out of 1000 times (number source: from thin air) something that sounds insane actually has some truth to it.
The problem is that good journalism doesn't have funding. Otherwise this shit would never have made it into a newspaper, maybe outside of a really shitty yellow rag.
> The problem is that good journalism doesn't have funding.
The BBC and Reuters can be posited as counterexamples to your assertion. They’re good journalists and well-funded (and not primarily by advertising either).
Hmm... but do you think that they would produce such an article, funding the research into it?
From what I can tell, they would report accurately once these findings were published but would not find a researcher to dig into the claims before publishing that someone (named) said that these chips are at fault.
BBC is under constant threat of getting defunded, it's almost a meme at this point, and on top of that is generally under constant attack. Reuters doesn't do much local or regional stuff.
Yeah, for a substantial fraction of people, this case will stick to their minds as "oh the chinese
.. again" It's both sad and scary. It was even submitted to HN. Flagged by now, but still. Many people won't have read this follow-up, especially since it doesn't come as a 1-sentence TL;DR..
It's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate and should be one of the last communities to even remotely buy the debunked story.
It's scary because if even those in the know are not resistant to such BS, who else is going to shield the general public from populism-fueled pushes to anarchy or worse? Detoriation of trust in media is one of the building blocks of that, and if even the experts of subject areas are fooled and/or don't care enough, all hope may be lost.
The silver lining though is that the HN submission got pushback in terms of comments and an eventual flagging.
In the absence of further information, I would totally choose to believe the story.
Corporations cannot be trusted. Proprietary software is bad enough but proprietary drivers is on a whole new level. You really have no idea what those things are doing unless you reverse engineer them.
Here are example of corporations essentially pwning your computer with their "justified and trustworthy" software:
The driver literally provided privilege escalation as a service for any user space executable.
As far as I'm concerned anyone who trusts these corporations with kernel level access to their computers is out of their minds. I don't trust firmware but at least it's contained in some isolated device.
Sorry but you are blurring the lines between an actual malicious attack and a badly designed driver.
The first is what the original claim was, screaming "Russians!" and "Chinese!" at the same time with poor technical understa ding.
The second is what actually happened. It's no worse than inserting a CD-ROM and installing a driver. As bad as that is, and to be criticised in its own right, it's qualitatively different from the first.
Let's not muddy the waters by conflating the two and make the (IMO legitimate) criticism of one of them wade into a conspiracy theory about the other.
There is no muddying of waters here. I posted an example of a corporation who thought it was alright to ship literal malware to their customers. They had every intention of stealing their credentials. They did it on purpose, because they thought they were police officers and wanted to "track down" some notorious "pirate". They displayed zero remorse, only regretting the fact they got caught. They actually thought they were justified in their endeavours.
There are no "conspiracy theories" here. It's not a theory, it's really happening. It's not a conspiracy, they don't even think what they're doing is wrong. Corporations see themselves as utterly justified in everything that they do in the name of profit. There are no limits they wouldn't cross. Nothing is sacred to them. Not morals, not you, and certainly not your computer and the personal information stored in it.
>It's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate
I laughed. While there certainly are very smart people here, HN crowd is pretty diverse and large parts of crowd are startup/business/framework of the week/ai bros folks. Not someone who would know what spi is from the top of their head.
To add, there's a huge politically motivated anti-China movement going on right now, to the point where anything Chinese sounds scary or suspicious. This has been going on for years now, but only came to my awareness with the Huawei scare (as of today, no evidence was found that they did come loaded with backdoors and the like - but do correct me if I'm wrong, this is based on what I remember, not researched facts).
I mean I don't trust the Chinese, but neither do I trust the Americans so it's choose your flavour of evil.
Anyway that said, I'm sure it's politically and economically motivated, as for decades China has played catch-up in the global economy and they are rapidly overtaking, with financial interests worldwide. The US is trying to slow them down by trying to keep e.g. chip technology out of their hands, but other than that all they can do is to stop Chinese companies from earning money in the US.
Honestly there are so many claims about Huawei but I think the loudest ones were about the 5G network which were BS but there were some that were legit, and this is exactly my point - it’s exhausting to check this stuff, so the vast majority of people either believe it all or none.
For example it seems like the Supermicro spy chip thing has truth to it (it feels the thing OP was rebutting was inspired by this story), though it’s unclear, it’s very much based on statements from 3 letter agencies, so I just have to guess, yes probably China got their manufacturers to install hardware spyware on some devices.
These days, all countries are doing insane digital spying on other countries. I believe we’re in a modern Cold War. China is a unique threat not because there’s something uniquely evil about them but they own so much manufacturing and have an explicit tight relationship between companies and government. This is the main reason for moving manufacturing to US, nobody really cares about the workers, it’s a security threat.
All that can be true, and still also be true that most of the shit you hear about China is BS and xenophobic. It leads to actual violence and racism. That’s why it’s important to push back against, for the regular people just living their life. I’m never going to defend any country, these are battles the very richest people are fighting it’s not my war, I push back so don’t people don’t act as foot soldiers in their war or become collateral damage for something they have no part of.
Not the OP, but I think I get the "sad and scary" part. It seems as though there is some vilification going on and that's happened before with very sad outcome.
Truth lies somewhere in between. It's also a generalization to think everything related to the “evil-nation” postulation is nothing beyond a conspiracy theory. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Edit: quoted evil-nation since it’s a debatable term usually applied to any country not politically or culturally aligned with some intelligence activity presence.
Correct. Not more, not less. Question is what the default assumption is. With enough BS thrown around, the public seems to tend to tilt to "something is fishy" without any (non-debunked) evidence having ever been presented. Doesn't mean it never will be, but until then, a lot of debunked falsehoods shouldn't create more bias than just silence. Sadly, something always sticks.
fundamentally, it’s a ‘liberal’ (assume good intent/turn the other cheek) vs ‘conservative’ (cover your ass) approach. In the literal, not political meaning.
With enough problems, enough people get burned that of course this is where it goes.
It's fun, but I think this kind of thing is important because it underscores the xenophobia in the original post. A flash chip on a circuit board? Hoo boy, must be Chinese spyware!
That isn't to say Chinese spyware isn't a problem. But, if you don't have the baseline technical competence to detect it, it's bad to go running around yelling "CHINA CHINA CHINA!" That's how our politicians pick up a bogus news story and use it as an excuse to enact stupid policies. It's bad for society.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if he actually made it himself (though I agree the inscription is hardly proof). We have this view of Kings as fat, lazy bureaucratic blowhards because we're closest to the tailend of the history of monarchy. When this King was around there were a lot more regional leaders who fought and strength was admired the most, if a King was seen as weak he had just as much internal attempts that were way more physical than the political coups of today. You could not be a king or survive being a king without being a good fighter and knowing a bit about how weapons are made and used.
I first noticed a change with Elon publicly when he fired PR for Tesla and said in an investor meeting something about twitter being more effective and cheaper than a full PR team. This was around the time/soon after trumps first election, and I believe he studied trumps ability to dominate the news cycle and began emulating him. Ted Cruz started going this route around the same time, and both Cruz and Elon were quite bad at it at first. Cruz eventually gave up trying to be like Trump, but Elon leaned into how he was kind of bad at it and became like a clown. It's "no news is bad news" taken to the extreme - if he does something stupid and people talk about it, that's publicity!
I don't know how he's gotten as far as he has, both in access to power and down the rabbit hole, but it looks like he's drank the kool aid now. Maybe it's cynical opportunism, or maybe he surrounded himself with true believers who pushed him into it. But I have a feeling his story arc is far from over
Moderation matters. If you eat mostly whole, nutritious foods, it’s totally fine to eat processed food occasionally.
No food is inherently unhealthy or bad, so I don’t think there’s any issue with him eating McDonalds on a plane. Maybe he was in a hurry, or just wanted to be social and stopped there with someone else who wanted it.
What is unhealthy is when the majority of your food is not nutritious, which is currently the case for most Americans. So why not try to make common American foods more nutritious by default, as they are in most other wealthy countries?
It was awesome living in a European country for a couple of years as an American. You learn that ingredient lists at the grocery store really are shorter in ways you don’t expect. It’s easy to buy a fruit yogurt that is just yogurt and fruit, for example. Not “yogurt, sugar, artificial and natural flavors” as you’ll find in many popular foods in the US. It was noticeable with a lot of different food choices.
Also, whenever we would come back to visit the US, after living there for a year or so, we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so. This was common among many expats that we talked to. We visited over a dozen countries while we lived there, and the US was the only one that had that issue.
But when you say "whenever we would come back to visit the US ... we would always have mild digestion issues and stomach cramps for a week or so" this does imply that there's something wrong with American processed food, and this isn't an issue of moderation.
Despite not liking the man, I actually agree with RFK on the healthy eating and think it's good that he has raised awareness of it. Red dye has finally been banned, this is good! Heck, I'm very liberal, this kind of regulation is what the US should have been doing a long time ago and happy to see it happening.
My point about RFK was not that he eats processed food sometimes and therefore he's a hypocrite, it's that he's willing to compromise his values for access to power. But hopefully it's just that one time to get on Trumps good side and he actually makes some good regulation about poisonous foods! The market is good at a lot of things, but not at keeping things healthy, so I'm glad republicans are seeing the value of regulation over unwavering belief in the free market.
Let me be more explicit about my point. I believe RFK genuinely wants to promote healthy living, and I agree with that. But Trump requires loyalty to be part of his inner circle and forcing RFK to eat mcds is getting RFK to prove that loyalty. RFK obviously hated eating that burger. My point is, if he’s willing to compromise his values for access to power does he really prioritize his values or does he prioritize access to power?
No “gotcha”, I’m not a partisan. I don’t like Trump but there are a few things he’s done I like, but even with those I often don’t like HOW he did it. For example Greenland, I think that’s great for USs long term prospects (shipping routes), but to say military action is on the table is reckless. Not every criticism is a gotcha, and just because I disagree with 90% of what RFK believes doesn’t mean I don’t think his commitment to healthy eating is good. Maybe that you read a criticism as an absolute indictment of someone shows you have more purity tests than what you criticize.
I just don't see the rationale in framing it as a morality and value test in the first place that is worth reading into.
I have a diet I try to follow in general. I break it all the time and it's not a big deal at all. Sometimes I'll eat a cheeseburger with my coworkers. What does that say about my character? Should it say anything?
How much can one hate a burger? It's not like he is a Hindu or the burger contained his first born child.
I mean, he says "Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is, like, just poison" on a podcast, and a couple of days later he's looking unhappy eating a mcds burger with trump in a very publicized photo.
Eating a cheeseburger is one thing, but he literally calls it poison.
Anyway, I hope he does succeed in pushing more regulation on what chemicals we have in food. I'm pro regulation for things like this - the market's always going to go to what's cheaper so regulation is needed to prevent companies poisoning consumers. I'm glad the republican party has come around to this point.
I think the previous posters point was that an LLM DM is boring due to it's generality and lacks the specific quirks of having a human DM with their own viewpoint and understanding of the players, which I agree with. I did some experiments with earlier ChatGPT models for world building and DMing and found it to be so boring, getting it to do anything interesting or giving any kind of push back was so hard. Since they are an averaging of all knowledge / previous creativity you end up with a smooth surface, but part of what makes stories interesting are the rough edges.
However I also agree with you that being a DM is a prohibitive amount of work for someone, say, with kids and a job. It would be awesome to have an LLM as an assistant, maybe feeding in parts of the story and querying it for ideas when you're in a bind. But having it run as a full DM, at least right now, will likely lead to a boring experience.
Yep, my experience using ChatGPT as a helper is very good. It can very quickly cook up a custom monster, give it relevant stats, and create some flavourful actions and attacks to make it unique. Lately I've been trying to hook this up to D&D Beyond, as it's just some fairly simple POST payloads. If I can get to the point where I can describe a vague encounter, and run it in the Beyond encounter tracker with zero effort, that would be amazing, and a lifesaver when the party goes off and does nutty stuff. Beyond that, its story ideas are fairly generic but fine if you really have no time, and it can do a decent job of the occasional flowery monologue if you need it.
Also since it was written when the vestiages of european feudal system still had some tiny amount of power, some of the observations about lords who owned massive estates but had no money and would refuse to take on any work, considering it "beneath them" while they starved was fascinating. It's both of it's time and timeless
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