Comment by wackget
8 days ago
I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet.
The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
It's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory.
Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.
Most software developers are not founders, but they like to hang out here for the news and community anyway. It used to be a lot more libertarian back when I joined (even more so when I only occasionally lurked) but things have shifted rather dramatically over time.
I don't think this forum has significant costs of running, especially considering it is not in development.
They switched the backend to Common Lisp in 2019, and at the time had two seperate Arc-to-JS compilers in development. [0]
The site may feel less changeable than many, but I would be very surprised if it is not "in-development".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123
It employs two full–time moderators.
It didn’t use to be this way but through evaporative cooling, most of the founder types stopped posting here.
Can you explain the connection to evaporative cooling?
2 replies →
Why would it require becoming a billionaire to benefit? A lot of big companies are able to purchased by the public. There are even fractional shares which lowers the bar even further in being able to get exposure to these companies.
> The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services
Some of us like the intent of the law but are wondering what the consequences of the law are.
We have already seen all the schemes that corporations use for greenwashing. We have already seen all the recycling that isn't. Most of us assume that these corporations will simply do the absolute minimum they have to do to comply with the letter of the law. That likely means "selling" crates of these clothes back to some country willing to discard or destroy them.
In addition, we already have a ton of problems from Always Late Inventory(tm), and this seems like it's going to add to that. Are you even slightly outside of the normal body shape? Sorry, no stock for you evermore.
I think the law is a good idea, but, sadly, laws mean nothing without implementation. The devil is in the details.
I am not against this in spirit but what are the higher order effects and unintended consequences?
The only thing that is more annoying to me than market fundamentalist, neo-liberal bullshit is emotional appeals that sound right on paper but have a total disregard for higher order effects and unintended consequences.
all that said.. most of the clothes are not so "branded"? Who cares if a GAP or something ends up in outlet or wherever..
"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." - (probably not) John Steinbeck
I guess with inflation we can update the quote to “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”
Socialism never took off in America because Americans know that disincentivizing work shrinks the economy and makes everyone poorer.