It’s natural for people to care more about things that directly affect them.
Castro was in a foreign country I’ve never been to, and did most of his stuff before I was even born. His death was largely a realization that somebody from the history books had still been alive.
Cheney, in contrast, fucked with my home while I was an adult. He and his cabal did massive damage to my country very recently. I’m not going to make travel arrangements to visit his grave so I can piss on it, but I am tempted to.
Castro led a revolution that abolished an essentially colonial regime of sugar plantation labor. Under Batista "most of the sugar industry was in U.S. hands, and foreigners owned 70% of the arable land"[^0]. Rural men endured hard labor in poor conditions, for extremely low wages for half the year for the harvest and were left to languish without work for the rest of the year. Rural women were bound to their homes as domestic servants. There was no hope of a life beyond this for either. The revolution abolished this precarious existence, provided universal free healthcare, and gave everyone the opportunity to education through university. And that's just the effect of the revolution on rural life.
Cheney was a war profiteer who engineered wars that killed at least hundreds of thousands and probably over a million people.
What exactly do you want to say in here? The Castro is called evil a lot in that discussion. Welch is criticized. People here right now seem to complain about Cheney.
Jack Welch is very well-deservedly not receiving love.
If you had to say something positive about him, it would be something like "well if he hadn't done it, someone else would have". That is not a high bar.
You can give him credit for showing us that the foundations of our approach is rotten.
He's a bit like Trump in that :-/
> Jack Welch is very well-deservedly not receiving love.
He may have eventually have 'found religion':
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the 2008 financial crisis, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[69]
However this was probably much later and when his image was less influential; his earlier career and fame probably really helped accelerate financialisation, and was probably never reset by his later opinions (partly because they may not have been as widely publicized).
Though on climate change:
> Welch identified politically as a Republican.[66] He stated that global warming is "the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring", and that it is a form of "mass neurosis".[67] Yet he said that every business must embrace green products and green ways of doing business, "whether you believe in global warming or not ... because the world wants these products".[68]
> Regarding shareholder value, Welch said in a Financial Times interview on the 2008 financial crisis, "On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products."[69]
Rather odd to see this quote coming from Welch, the man who almost single-handedly destroyed the notion that corporations had a duty to employees, and society at large first, and shareholder value coming as a result of those.
His actions, and management style completely defined the era of corporate behaviour we live since the 1980s: the layoffs, the carelessness on axing whole departments of companies which underperformed for a couple of quarters, only looking through short-term financials, all the focus on quarterly reports and financialisation of the economy come from his "teachings".
It was very hard for me to believe he uttered these words, rot in hell, Jack.
actually I've been detecting a sharp increase in US rightwingness and nationalism comments on HN. I was wondering if it was just trolling or HN was now on some bot list or if there was a real change in sentiment in the US?
I doubt there has been much change in numbers, those on the right are just willing to be a little more visible now. It helps that HN is for the most part an anon. site.
There is a real change in sentiment in the US. Note the last election results.
But also there has been an increasing amount of polarization to both the left and the right from the center. Likely in part due to social media filter bubbles.
Current right wing propaganda utilizes a strategy of "flood the zone", based on the "Russian firehose" approach.
This means injecting all talking points all of the time, and disrupting any criticism anywhere.
LLMs make this easier and more effective, and HN is absolutely, 100% owned by bots. And in like a literal sense, given who YCombinator funds and is headed by.
couple of points.
1. I'm not a bot. I'm just politically right, we are around, we just hide because its still career suicide in tech. I know you don't see the right as human but most of us are people just like you, not LLMs
2. I just like to chat on HN, there is no right wing mass organized process for people to chat with others, or at least none that I am a part of. To think that everyone you disagree with must be a bot or part of a conspiracy is both dehumanizing and just... an odd way to see the world.
3. The OP I responded to specifically mentioned the difference responses to the deaths of well known people. Mentioning Castro and comparing to Cheney. That was the context of my response, not sure how this has now veered into organized conspiracy theories
IMO that is different than rank-and-file. My theory is that once you make a certain amount of money you run a high risk of becoming divorced from reality.
Most of tech leadership blows with the wind, they have no firm beliefs. Whatever drives shareholder value. See Zuck. Although I do agree those more to the right have been emboldened to speak up a little more. I think the vast majority of the rank and file including managers are still on the left
I think it's useful to separate "tech" from "the VC ecosystem" and "most of tech leadership", the former being a huge range of people, while the latter two being a small group comparatively.
Not to mention HN is yet another sub-section of the "tech" ecosystem with a small cross-section of VC and startups, although that was indeed the focus on the beginning, I think the scope of HN has grown quite a lot since its beginnings.
I think any article that espouses a political slant will have political comments which I welcome. I enjoy hearing from people with different leanings and discussing them. I just get frustrated when they are based on emotion and not reason
Where are you seeing orders of magnitude lower R2 bills? The storage price for S3 is $0.023 per GB, and the price for CF is $0.015 per GB. The operation pricing is even more similar - S3 is $5/million writes and $0.40/million reads, while Cloudflare is $4.50/million writes and $0.36/million reads.
They can focus on other things that are more impactful in the business rather than just slinging code all day, they can actually look at design and the product!
Maximum headcount for engineers is around 7, no more than that now. I used to have 20, but with AI we don't need that many for our size.
Yeah or start my own company since they're basically doing everything now it sounds like.
Someone barking orders at you to generate code because they are too stupid to be able to read it is not very fun.
These people hire developers because their own brains are inferior, and now they think they can replace them because they don't want to share the wages with them.
Management may see a churn of a few years as acceptable. If management makes 1$M in that time.. they wont care. "Once I get mine, I don't care"
Like my old CEO who moved out of state to avoid a massive tax bill, got his payout, became hands off, and let the company slide to be almost worthless.
Or at my current company there is no care for quality since we're just going to launch a new generation of product in 3 years. We're doing things here that will CAUSE a ground up rewrite. We're writing code to rely on undocumented features of the mcu that the vendor have said 'we cannot guarantee it will always behave this way' But our management cycles out every 3-4 years. Just enough time to kill the old, champion the new, get their bonus, and move on.
Bonuses are handed out every January. Like clockwork there's between 3-7 directors and above who either get promoted or leave in February.
I don't see how any business person would see any value in engineering that extends past their tenure. They see value in launching/delivering/selling, and are rolling the dice that we're JUST able to not cause a nation wide outage or brick every device.
So AI is great... as long as I've 'gotten mine' before it explodes
https://github.com/LukaJCB/ts-mls