Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.

My neighbors, friends, family, all of us

That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.

We have to usher in the collapse of [permanent hierarchies]

That would be nice, but is it realistic? It’s not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It’s that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.

Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.

If capitalism collapses, we’re most likely going back to feudalism, not ten-forward to Star Trek.

The problem is that they’re not doing anything illegal.

The bigger problem is that they have the power to keep anybody from passing new laws that would make what they’re doing illegal.

The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.

Or his PR firm suggested it would be effective, which it has been.

I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth

Even if it is just a scam?

He’s one of the worst billionaires, it’s just that since the 2010s he’s been trying hard to soften that image.

His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?

In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.

I prefer my mental image.

How so? Why is the alternative killing?

The thing that completely takes me out of the movie / show whenever I see it is people who get knocked backwards by bullets / shotgun blasts. The maximum amount of momentum transferred by a bullet or pack of shotgun pellets is the same amount as the shove it gives to the shooter’s hands or shoulder.

If it’s in a Chinese Gun Fu, Wire Fu, Gun Wuxia type movie where everything is slightly fantastical, I can accept it as a kind of over-the-top element of that style. But, it really bothers me when it happens in something that’s otherwise fairly realistic.

The movie version of being “knocked out”.

Someone is knocked unconscious for long enough to be moved to a new location and probably tied up. And they wake up just fine. They’re able to engage in witty banter with their captor. If they manage to break free they’re able to fight effectively.

The reality? A massive concussion. Extreme disorientation. Likely to puke if they have to move much.

If you ever watch a “knockout” in boxing or MMA, the unconsciousness lasts a seconds at most, mostly not even a second. Someone’s knees go wobbly then they recover, but they’re still disoriented and uncoordinated. If they’re out for longer than a second or two, everyone’s concerned and the fighter is rushed to the hospital.

No one secures the neck strap on motorcycles

It’s been a while since I rode a motorcycle, but apparently things have changed a lot.

I don’t see anything unprofessional there. Just naughty words. But, the naughty words are somewhere where they warn you that the code below doesn’t behave as expected, or complain because there isn’t a better way to do something. That seems like the best time to use strong language.

Cleaning it up is a great idea in theory, but in practice almost everybody has higher priority things to be doing. Leaving a comment in the code for why something is ugly is the best thing you can do when you don’t clean something up, so that someone coming along after you doesn’t struggle with it. We have no idea how many “naughty” comments are no longer there because the issues they addressed were cleaned up.

Most of the places I’ve worked I’d have been told to get rid of the cursing before checking something in. But, my own personal codebase has tons of this sort of thing.

But, aside from the cursing, these actually look like excellent comments. Comments should warn you when the code isn’t what you might expect. These are excellent from that point of view. If this is what a random sampling of the comments in the codebase looks like, it is probably a very well commented codebase.

Meanwhile authors, who you might imagine might be most upset at their books being “given away” by libraries, actually love libraries and are delighted to hear stories of people checking their books out.

Great comment. And you have to acknowledge that it’s really hard to actually have these conversations. You might actually find out you’re wrong about something because you hadn’t considered something that’s fundamental to their view of the world. And, doing it the way you suggest is even harder than just arguing about it. Because you have to swallow your pride/anger when they talk about stealing the statue of liberty, and instead try to get the conversation back to something more reasonable.

My mom has become a crazy conspiracy theorist, but for most of my life she was a lefty. The result is that she’s not fully right wing, and instead has this weird jumble of beliefs that often clash with each-other. And it’s obvious that a lot of the time she’s just parroting the last thing she heard, without ever having thought about it. I have to admit that often I just dodge it when she brings up her latest conspiracy. It just takes too much energy to engage. Other times I get drawn in and actually just shoot down the ridiculous conspiracy. But, the most productive times are when I can put in the energy and effort to try to understand her underlying fears and why she wants to accept these fantastical stories.

It’s easy to forget that no one is the villain in their own book.

Incidentally, why I hate a lot of movies where the villain is Dr. Evil who is part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or something. Also why I think the Good / Evil alignment axis in D&D is bullshit.

ultra racist uncle as a man that’s simply absolutely frightened of change

Or just someone who grew up in a different time and was taught different things and doesn’t believe that what they were taught is out of date. Similarly, a kid might think they know everything but doesn’t have the wisdom and experience to know that things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. Both can be pretty obnoxious at a thanksgiving dinner table.

Take, for example, a discussion about how voting is done. The racist uncle might think that mail-in voting is a scam, and that the only way to vote should be in-person. He might not understand that poor people in cities sometimes have to wait in line for hours to vote, and that some might not be able to do that while holding down 2 jobs. He might not believe that the small number of polling places was a deliberate choice by a past government to discourage these people from voting.

But, at the same time, the kid might think that online voting is the obvious answer. The kid lives her entire life online and often votes on things. She knows a bit about encryption and has heard of blockchains and thinks that the only people against online voting are luddites who are afraid of technology. She might not understand the danger of being able to prove that you voted and who you voted for. She might not appreciate how sometimes low tech things are much harder to manipulate and fake.

So, there’s “cautious of change happening too quickly” vs. “too eager to embrace change without considering the consequences”. Everybody likes to think that they’re smack dab in the sweet spot between those two things, but everyone else is going to judge them as being too far to one side.

The modern red-hat wearer would probably use terms like woke, libtard, communist, etc.

But, I would bet that if this same kind of confrontation happened a quarter century ago, the conservatives might be saying “He’s super irrational and emotional”. Like, I think conservatives believe that they see the world as it is, and that liberals are blind to the realities of life. They believe that liberals want to change the world, but don’t understand that it is the way it is for a good reason.

It’s similar to how when women were campaigning for the right to vote, men who didn’t support hat would say things like “I love my wife, but she’s a woman so she’s not capable of making the hard choices.” Or, “My mother is a wonderful person, and full of love, but her emotion clouds her judgment.” Or, “I love my daughter, but she’s too unstable, she jumps on any new trend, running a country requires a steady hand.”

Yes, the reality is that the racist uncle is super racist. But, it’s still worth trying to understand how they see the world. If for no other reason than it’s easier to defeat your enemy if you understand them.