>Is this society’s fault that employees don’t contribute to their 401(k)s until they are in their thirties?
I didn't have the opportunity or even know what a 401k was except at a high level until I was 26 in my first 'big job'. I'm 28 and still haven't put any money into it because I cannot afford to in a corporate IT position. I'm still trying to pay down my health insurance deductible so I can get my medications. How can I ever retire? At this point, I'm going to work until I die.
Not sure how this is my fault when I'm educated and work 45 hours per week and am away from home for 60 when adding in my commute.
Duly noted. I’m not trying to be snide, but from your brief history you indicate you were ignorant of any sort of retirement actionable strategies. Frankly you are growing up in the most information abdunant age in world history with copious information on wealth management. Irrespective of personal upbringings which no doubt create wealth discrepancies, you clearly were not taking long-term decisions in your twenties. How else can we explain your lack of active pursuit of financial education? The buck has to stop somewhere.
More likely the converse. A person with a decent middle-class income who becomes addicted to opioids can end up unable to keep his job, lose his income, fall behind on debts, and end up evicted.
I largely believe it is due to economic woes in the US but they also realize there are many countries in the EU that have a drug epidemic despite have a better social net.
Previous generations had it way worse than us and they didn't have the suicide rates we have today. There's some things missing in modern society that I feel have faded with time, including family unity, community, ethical education (via church or similar), etc. It was reported recently that loneliness is on the rise in the U.S. and with that, I would expect that these health problems continue to rise as well.
Purchasing power through real inflation adjusted wages hasn't increased since the 70's, but costs of living have [1]. I don't think "previous generations had it way worse" than us in all regards.
You'll find Jamaica, Syria, Guatemala, Pakistan, Venezuela, Iraq, Egypt, Mexico, Kenya, and a whole host of countries that are far poorer off than USA but have much lower suicide rates. You'll also notice that Japan and South Korea are higher than ours. Why is that? Poverty or economic hardship is not a predictive indicator of suicide.
A tidy narrative, but not based in reality. Previous generations had easy access to decent paying jobs. Show up and work, that used to be commonplace, now it's rare. And that work used to pay enough to rent a room, pay for college, even set aside some savings, now housing is ridiculously expensive and college represents a massive debt burden. It's a lot more difficult to work your way out of poverty than it used to be.
Sure, millennials had to come of age during the big recession of 2008, but the economy has largely recovered...and graduates today have excellent employment opportunities.
Sure, if you consider only the unemployment rate. But it doesn't tell exactly whether it's skilled work, or how well the work pays. My guess is, when you compare it to purchasing power of the past, they're not any better off despite the lower unemployment rate (which also does not include people who have given up looking for employment).
Maybe if the workers had a say instead of only unlimited desire for large sums of capital and power having a say, Google would be in a more trustworthy, ethical, & moral place.
Can you point me to the requests to stop? I've seen exactly one, a long time ago. I'm not personally attacking people, and I do contribute here with a positive upvote score. I don't see the issue.
But the main issue is using HN primarily for ideological or political battle. That's directly against the spirit of this site, and destroys it more insidiously than incivility does.
Positive vote scores, alas, aren't an indicator of whether comments are good for HN or not. The most indignant and ideological comments routinely get upvoted. That's one reason they're insidious.
This honestly seems to be an issue with what my personal opinions are about certain topics. I do not "flame bait", I am serious in my positions and don't seek any type of nefarious response. I don't see how pointing out that nobody bats an eye when Google does what China does is "flamebait", it's just an observation. Other links were benign in nature or then sourced as factual right below 'mod' comments.
I'm sure you're serious but that's not the standard here. Nor is it based on opinions. We moderate users with opposing opinions just as heavily.
Flamebait is a matter of effect, not intent, just like tossing lit matches in dry forests. It's our job to prevent flamewarring users from burning this site down, thereby ruining it for the majority who want to use it as intended. The site guidelines distill long experience about what kinds of comments do and don't have that effect.
>Filling our landfills full of disposable products?
This is rampant capitalistic consumerism, nothing to do with China.
>Copying our IP?
Doesn't really matter. Who do IP's benefit? Not the consumer, only the already super wealthy. Hint: the very large majority of the world is not wealthy.
Taxes went up on products from Aliexpress. Shipping from China to USA is much more efficient than the other way around.
When I'm subsidizing health insurance, food stamps, and medicare on Walmart, Amazon, Starbucks, etc, to put billions more in Bezos pocket, I could care less about something that actually benefits lower income people with affordable products that would be well out of reach in USA. Raise wages and people who were using Aliexpress will start buying domestic.
> Who do IP's benefit? Not the consumer, only the already super wealthy. Hint: the very large majority of the world is not wealthy.
I'm no fan of copyright or software patents, but that's a bit too simple. Good R&D is complicated and favours highly educated/skilled workers. Even if you don't like companies, it's quite unfair that people who have have spent a long time becoming domain experts should lose their livelihood because of outside forces breaking the law - international law mind (AFAIK).
There's one example, the Nortel IP theft. I'm surprised it wasn't the first comment like every story on Huawei. The world trusts devices that come out of USA even though there is hard evidence of the NSA physically rooting devices with their own malware, but wont trust Huawei.
This is entirely trade propaganda at the behest of large cellular RF equipment manufacturers, and device manufacturers.
I also feel like they've changed search so much for profit purposes that it's impossible to find certain things without receiving pages of irrelevance. I've been using Google since the early 2000's and it's so easy to tell Search has dropped in quality. Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads.
It's still the best, but the profit motive is harming the amazing work that Google once did.
Not OP, and not sure this is what OP's talking about, but I have examples.
First, anything piracy related. Previously you could search something like "albumname zip rar torrent" and get vast lists of downloads. It's unclear whether the presence of scam links or the illegality of filesharing prompted the removal of valid results for this class of searches, but it's nonetheless true that this type of search returned useful results in the past and is now fully, intentionally, and obviously nerfed.
Second, the filtering GUI for searches has degraded over time. Timeboxing and verbatim searches will negate one another when trying to build some queries. I brought this to the team's attention [1] and received a response last June, and it's still broken as of last week. Attempting to bypass the GUI by combining the desired URL params from two searches also yielded broken results, IIRC.
Google's search is in many ways improved since 2008, but it's also worse in some ways. Subjectively, it feels that in the last decade, search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".
I liken google's transition, in search and elsewhere, to apple's. As they've grown, their customer base has changed from "small number of hackers" to "large number of laymen" and the preferences and tolerances of those groups shifts in a way that causes these products to be less useful for the HN crowd. One of the core shifts is away from "build abstractions to wrangle reality in custom ways" to "build abstractions that obscure reality in convenient ways".
I don't have the answers here. It seems that if you want your reality to be unbounded by such filters, you're doomed to be some kind of hacker/pirate/outlaw/non-normie.
>search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".
I'd say it has gone full; "Show me what your advertisers and other sources of income, would like someone like me to find on the internet."
I refrained from going so far in part because there's places you can still get great info on things like pihole, which would violate the interests of those departments.
But my gut says that it's not that google is defending the sanctity of such results, but that those results are an annoyance and not a real threat, so are just off the radar. When someone with enough sway wants them gone, I've got no doubt they'd be nerfed too.
That's an uncharitably reductionist take. Please refer to the original comment that started this thread.
> Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads.
A person asked for examples. I delivered examples. I'm not contesting that the search is illegal in some jurisdictions. Merely pointing out that there are searches for which google used to return results with utility, and now intentionally do not return such results, and fall back to irrelevant suggestions.
Although the comment I made said more than what you implied it to, I will explicitly make the complaint you're mocking: Yes, I am unhappy that such results are censored. But it's not merely "I want free albums". I want to be able to search the internet. Not someone else's ideas of what the internet ought to be. It's a legally and ethically difficult problem, to be sure, but I think mocking the idea of supporting searches that the government dislikes is a step too far.
The Chinese and US governments' censorship regimes are not equivalent in magnitude, so it's not fair to compare them simply, but just as we can entertain the idea that the chinese are unfree in their searches for information, and as a result the breadth of what they can think about and experience, let's recognize that so too are we in the western world.
When searching for roms Google will now return sites full of malware rather than sites offering the rom.
I don't mind that they're blocking rom sites. I do mind that they don't have the courage to just say "We're not going to return anything for those terms".
Which reality is it distorting? Is the old desktop search reality? Why is it more real than mobile results? In truth, none of them are reality. Google Search is an algorithmicaly curated list of web pages - it’s an unfortunate error to believe it represents any reality other than Google’s opinion of what its users want in that second.
> it’s an unfortunate error to believe it represents any reality other than Google’s opinion of what its users want in that second.
That was also true when search results were purely based on terms entered, barring the domain name affecting the default language, and user configuration.
> A filter bubble – a term coined by Internet activist Eli Pariser – is a state of intellectual isolation that allegedly can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history. As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.
I remember when was totally normal to settle how a word was spelled by looking what spelling had how many results. I'm not saying that wasn't silly, but I actually remember people actively using that "consensus reality" in forums, all the time. "how did you find that", "I entered X and then it was the third result", "oh yeah I see, thanks". The traditional exception was things blocked on youtube in various countries, but otherwise we took it for granted that if you visit a certain public URL, you get the page someone else would get.
That doesn't mean one confuses those Google search results with reality anymore than every person in the cinema seeing the same movie means they confuse it with reality. It just means that experience is part of the common world they inhabit. When I go into a library, the selection of books there is rather arbitrary, but that's still very different from there just being a clerk who might recommend one book to me, to then lie to someone else and pretend to not know that book.
Google has evolved; whether it's for the better is open to debate. But we agree that it was never reality even if it used to be the same for everyone.
One difference between Google and an old-fashioned library: however arbitrary the collection was, you'd always find the canon, the best selected by the people who could reasonably be expected to know the best. Today, especially on YouTube, there is no canon, no conception of best at all. It's just whatever Google selects according to the signals it deems likely to keep you watching.
Google consensus has never been a good way to verify words or meanings. Just look up the definition of the word "definition" in google. The google supplied definition matches no major dictionary online.
