> Maybe people in America like a "service heavy" experience, and the only way to get it is tips?
Interestingly enough, I find the service worse in the U.S. Part of the reason is that the tip system leads to waiters wasting time talking about a table, and waiters who aren't your own feeling like they don't have to do anything for you. It usually takes me 5-10 times longer to pay the check in the U.S. than it does in some other countries.
I wish restaurants started offering self service sections where you could order by phone and pick up the food yourself. Having to use waiters gives me the same feeling as when I drive through New Jersey and I'm not allowed to pump my own gas.
That belief has reached prominent political leaders as well. I listened to a bit of the Ocasio-Cortez/Tim Walz Madden livestream on Twitch, and they were talking about how something needed to be done about the greedy developers who were driving the housing shortage.
> We're often so down on journalism on HN, and I believe a big part of that is we tend to read so much opinion and analysis and so little basic reporting.
I think a large part of it is that major news organizations too often don't do this kind of reporting, and often just seem to chase the same hot button topics as the rest of the crowd over and over again. And even then, few really dive into the details.
You're larger point is entirely correct, that there's a ton to be learned from old school journalism, and there are people out there doing it. But it's unsettling how much of it only gets covered by citizen journalists doing this in their free time, not by professionals who are supposed to be doing this for a living.
For example, the D.C. Attorney's Office had been simply dropping 2/3's of the criminal cases that came to them. No one noticed this until a anonymous internet account, DCCrimeFacts, went through the records and realized that this had been happening for years. Once that account wrote about it and it gained traction, major papers like the Washington Post started reporting on the story, it eventually ended up being an issue in Congressional hearings, and lead to changes in the way the U.S. Attorney's Office operates.
The account spent a lot of time digging through records and reporting on issues with the criminal justice system you wouldn't find elsewhere. But it was someone's side project, and there haven't been posts in a year.
Another example is the FAA scandal, when the best information has come from a single blog post by a law student who happened to go through the legal paperwork and was surprised that this hadn't been reported on.
The professional news media outlets do have some good reporters, and sometimes there are important deep dives there as well. But they feel few and far between, usually opting to chase infotainment (or sometimes the pet projects of a particular journalist).
It's amazing how many big stories we only get if some random citizen happens to spend their free time doing a personal journalism project, and if that project happens to get enough traction that people actually read it.
> I think a large part of it is that major news organizations too often don't do this kind of reporting, and often just seem to chase the same hot button topics as the rest of the crowd over and over again. And even then, few really dive into the details.
The point of most media is to drive agendas, not uncover the truth. Doing proper reporting would create a problem and get in the way of what you want people to do.
Right, Reddit banned any sub that disagreed with the progressive positions on Transgender issues, any mainstream subs would ban users for disagreeing with those positions, and heterodox subs were warned not to discuss them or else they could be banned. For instance, here's the Moderate Politics sub discussion on why they banned transgender topics[1]:
> The first of these banned topics: gender identity, the transgender experience, and the laws that may affect these topics.
> Please note that we do not make this decision lightly, nor was the Mod Team unanimous in this path forward. Over the past week, the Mod Team has tried on several occasions to receive clarification from the Admins on how to best facilitate civil discourse around these topics. There responses only left us more confused, but the takeaway was clear: any discussion critical of these topics may result in action against you by the Admins.
Also mod efforts to enforce an ideological view across the entire site. For instance, in the run up to the 2020 election, mods on the boardgame sub started going through the history of users and would ban anyone who voted for Trump.
But subreddits are free, and unlimited. You can make one yourself if you don't like how another one is moderated. People that like your approach can gather there. Of course that takes effort and is not easy, but Reddit itself (for the most part) is not banning you or your sub if you want to make a right wing house plant subreddit. If you want to make a pro Luigi anti transgender house plant subreddit, it probably gets banned.
Leftist subreddits also get banned for breaking site wide rules. The /r/chapotraphouse subreddit got banned in 2020, for example.
Reddit is best experienced in general by ignoring default subs and finding smaller ones that are relevant to your interests.
Moderating a large sub is hard. The scale is just too big, and it's individual volunteers doing it.
The fundamental contradiction is here: "someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices" yet is "even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros."
Many people can accept that someone is so incapable of making the right decisions that left on their own they might die. That since they're a danger to themselves and others, the state has to step in and take care of them.
The issue is that many of these people then turn around and argue that these people are capable of making their own decisions. Housing first in the U.S. gives these people apartment with no conditions attached. In a lot of cases, the people, since they are "clearly not capable of making Right Choices," make life hell for the other residents of the building, and usually aren't able to escape their problems.
There's a similar disconnect when people say "the shelters are extremely dangerous places, of course homeless people won't stay there" and then turn around and say "how could anyone think that putting a homeless person near them could increase their danger." Apparently, the homeless are the only ones who are allowed to consider the danger of being around homeless people.
Empathy is great. It would be nice if homeless advocates occasionally had empathy for other citizens as well.
A great many people who would be generally accepted as Successfully Schooled in the art of making Right Choices, when left truly on their own - and not out in the woods somewhere, but out here, in the very bowels of this right here civilization - would also rather quickly encounter misery and death.
Do you believe that what I noncoincidentally capitalize as "Right Choices" are actual right choices in some absolute, or at least universally shared, or at least non-self-contradictory frame of reference? I see them more like unilaterally mandated moves in some arbitrary social game that we all have, voluntarily or not, been recruited into (and which persists not in spite of, but because it is fundamentally nonsensical).
Of course, my viewpoint is incorrigibly biased by having witnessed manifestations of empathy significantly more often among the "dregs of society" than in what one would call "polite company".
Anyway, empathy is only the first step. Effecting systemic change takes significantly more right thought and right action than is generally permitted. And those aren't really things one can delegate. (I've found the lack of those things among the "down and out" vs. the "better off" to be about equal, the comparison I was making was along another axis.)
In other words, if the social safety net that you have experienced leads to the outcomes you describe, that means it's a bad implementation of a social safety net - not that we shouldn't have an actual one. Outside of Kafka, people don't just randomly wake up one day to find out they've somehow transformed into helpless monsters. It's a gradual process, and there are people at every step of the way, who are making the choice to allow others to slide into poverty and insanity, for the sake of not disrupting some comfort zone which may not even be particularly comfortable.
I see this argument a lot, but it's contradictory. You're simultaneously arguing that people don't understand statistics because they're treating a 25% chance as no chance to win, but then you're doing the same by saying that the other predictions, in the 15% to 2% range[1] are "cope forecasts" that people who followed them "looked extremely foolish" (the only major 99% forecast was PEC, but Wang said that's because the model broke down and the actual forecast was around 5% [1]).
25%, 15%, 5%, even 2% chances happen with a decent amount of frequency. I don't understand how people can say that people don't understand probability because they think a 25% chance won't happen, but then turn around and treat a 15% chance the very same way.
Like the Rationalist's "Bayesian priors," the election models were a remnant of the "big data" hype from a decade and a half ago. This article is a decent overview for anyone who forgot about it[1]. Like with many hype cycles, there was something actually important underneath the surface (useful statistical modeling), but then people with a poor understanding of the limitations ran wild thinking it could do things far beyond its capabilities (in this case, the degree to which one could use statistics to predict the future).
Industry gave up on the more extreme claims fairly quickly because it wasn't able to produce. But it lingered on in other places where there was less direct feedback or it was telling people what they wanted it to hear.
To add to this, it became obvious that many of the leaders in this "field" were people who believed they had an expertise that was far beyond their actual capabilities. Nate Silver ended up accusing much of the polling industry of fraud recently, because he wasn't able to do basic statistical math[2].
There seems to be a coordinated effort to control the narrative. Grok3's release is pretty important, no matter what you think of it, and initially this story quickly fell off the front page, likely from malicious mass flagging.
One thing that's taken over Reddit and unfortunately has spread to the rest of the internet is people thinking of themselves as online activists, who are saving the world by controlling what people can talk about and steering the conversation in the direction they want it to go. It's becoming harder and harder to have a normal conversation without someone trying to derail it with their own personal crusade.
How? After an enormous investment the latest version of some software is a bit better than the previous versions of some software from it's competitors and will likely be worse than the future versions from it's competitors. There's nothing novel about this.
NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang: “Building a massive [supercomputer] factory in the short time that was done, that is superhuman. There's only one person in the world who could do that. What Elon and the xAI team did is singular. Never been done before.”
Largest supercluster in the world created in a small time frame is pretty important. 4 years typically, cut down to 19 days. That's an incredible achievement and I, along with many others, think it's important.
Okay but that's obviously a nonsense claim. Find me a computer on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500 that was built 4 years after the chips it uses debuted.
> There seems to be a coordinated effort to control the narrative.
Do you have any evidence for this?
Who would want to coordinate such an effort, and how would they manipulate HN users to comment/vote in a certain way?
I think it is far more plausible that some people on here have similar views.
> [people] controlling what people can talk about
That's called 'moderation' and protects communities against trolls and timewasters, no?
> and steering the conversation in the direction they want it to go
That's exactly what conversation is about, I'd say. Of course I want to talk about stuff that I am interested in, and convince others of my arguments. How is this unfortunate?
Is it? It's Yet Another LLM, barely pipping competitors at cherry picked comparisons. DeepSeek R1 was news entirely because of the minuscule resources it was trained on (with an innovative new approach), and this "pretty important" Grok release beats it in chatbox arena by a whole 3%.
We're at the point where this stuff isn't that big of news unless something really jumps ahead. Like all of the new Gemini models and approaches got zero attention on here. Which is fair because it's basically "Company with big money puts out slightly better model".
I'd say Grok 3 is getting exactly the normal attention, but there is a "Leave Britney Alone" contingent who need to run to the defence.
> I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?
This is true, and that's why housing first is a terrible policy (I've seen it fail spectacularly first hand). Many of these people simply can't take care of themselves, and putting them in free apartments doesn't fix their situation, but it does make life miserable for long-term residents. All while being extremely expensive.
> Maybe they go maybe they don’t
Here they have frequent wellness checks. It doesn't solve anything. This shouldn't be a surprise - someone who's incapable of living civilly when given a free apartment likely isn't going to be a person who's going to put the time and effort into mental health classes.
You seem to be assuming a specific version of housing first that is by no means the only option, and then dismissing the concept as a whole on that basis.
My "specific version" is the version used by government agencies, which specifically states that the government is giving people free permanent housing without requiring prerequisites.
HUD[1]:
"Housing First is an approach to quickly and successfully connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements."
California Department of Housing and Community Development[2]:
"Housing First is an approach to serving people experiencing homelessness that recognizes a homeless person must first be able to access a decent, safe place to live, that does not limit length of stay (permanent housing)...Under the Housing First approach, anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history."
Presumably you're aware that's not the only option, as your last comment before the one above was on a thread about the Finnish approach, which has found it to be cheaper and to act as a gateway to get people other help.
The classic US exceptionalism "but we're bigger" argument is almost always nonsense because you can subdivide. You're already split in 50 states. You have cities, counties. A system doesn't need to be perfectly applied everywhere at once to start to help.
Furthermore, the Finnish example shows savings per homeless, despite a far cheaper healthcare system. US savings vs. having these people cost a fortune of ER capacity would likely be far higher per homeless.
US potential savings are vastly higher.
Why US taxpayers are so consistently willing to burn taxpayer money to keep things worse when there are more efficient alternatives always confuses me.
Well we spent more time ignoring the issue. Of course we need to climb more to get out. I don't think "but it's hard" is a good mentality when it comes to solving hard problems.
It's not even "but it is hard", but the perennial excuse of "scale", as if the US isn't split in states, and cities, and counties. This comes up so often when someone don't want to acknowledge a solution that works elsewhere (everything from trains to, well, this), and ignoring that you don't need to solve the entire problem everywhere at once to make things better.
If this was some super-costly policy that needed a big apparatus around it, then they'd have a point, but e.g. in Finland, one estimate is that it costs them up to 9,600 euro a year less to house a person first vs. leaving them homeless. As such, just starting to provide some housing units and gradually grow it would be a win for every local government with a homeless person.
It only starts to become a challenge if a few local governments reaches such a level of provision that it attracts homeless people from surrounding areas that don't do anything themselves, but that's not a reason not to start.
Sometimes it feels like US taxpayers wants the government to burn money if the alternative is to do something that might help other people with it.
The problem is that there are very different groups of people we're talking about, so much so that throwing them all under the "homeless" umbrella doesn't make sense. It's like saying car accidents are a traffic design problem, not an alcohol problem. Sure, both things can lead to traffic accidents, but they're pretty different problems.
People who temporarily need some assistance to get back on there feet are in a categorically different group than the people who are currently unable to function in society. These are fundamentally different problems.
I've seen how D.C. has tried housing first. It's given thousands of individuals free apartments, for life as far as I can tell, some in very expensive areas. It's been an enormous failure, since housing doesn't actually solve the very serious underlying problems that many of these people have. A lot of long-term residents to flee places that were once (comparatively) affordable because of rising crime and violence. The Washington Post has occasionally covered this [1][2].
I watched a neighborhood meeting recently about the issue. The city does wellness checks on the people in the program - but they can just completely ignore them, and nothing happens. Long term residents have been forced out after people in the program have attacked them or threatened to kill them and the city doesn't do anything, and doesn't even remove them from the program. A councilmember was taking part in the meeting, and had nothing to say other than he was looking into ways that the city could provide more help to people in the program.
The linked article is bordering on misinformation by not mentioning Finland's compulsory commitment, and also ignoring the failures of housing first in the U.S. like D.C.'s that haven't included that aspect. That's why a lot of these programs end up failing - people try to pick and choose the elements that they want, and ignore necessary elements that they find inconvenient. In the end, that doesn't help anyone.
Downright shocking that a policy like this would be adopted without the necessary social supports in place. There should be regular visits by care workers, addiction councillors, mental health professionals, access to education and jobs programmes etc. Even in the absence of mental illness and addiction (which are of course both rise in unhoused populations) living on the street leaves people with enormous unaddressed trauma, skill deficits and physical health issues.
The policy gets the street people out of the line of sight of the wealthy and vocal while minimizing their participation in society (ie. their tax burden). In other words it buys them their own peace of mind while letting them keep more for themselves.
An actual effective policy would mean the privileged giving up some of their privile. Keeping one's privilege is a far stronger motivator than ending someone else's suffering or doing good.
Agreed -- It also helps the rich by keeping rents & home values high (compared to the ideal solution of "allow tons of housing to be built, increasing supply and decreasing cost-of-living.")
The problem is that one of the achievements of the counterculture has been the creation of a steadily increasing tranche of the population that has little ability or inclination for self-sufficiency.
As long as there is steadfast refusal to recognize what got us here, and instead focus on red herrings like speculators and crisis counselors, we’re going to be stuck with the problem.
Interestingly enough, I find the service worse in the U.S. Part of the reason is that the tip system leads to waiters wasting time talking about a table, and waiters who aren't your own feeling like they don't have to do anything for you. It usually takes me 5-10 times longer to pay the check in the U.S. than it does in some other countries.
I wish restaurants started offering self service sections where you could order by phone and pick up the food yourself. Having to use waiters gives me the same feeling as when I drive through New Jersey and I'm not allowed to pump my own gas.