First past the post doesn't meaningfull affect primaries and that's where major change could happen.

Hell, that's what trump did. He was a third outside party and won the republican primary.

Bernie sanders came fairly close to doing the same thing.

That's sort of like saying you're not sure if the earth is round or not-- says much more about you and your understanding than anything else.

Yeah, the (untrue accusation) is the important part of the political prosecution phrase.

Crimes that are not known about are frequently not punished.

Rubbing it in everyone's face is not a great idea.

But, and this is the much more important point you are missing, is the difference between prosecuted for a crime you comitted regardless of how people learnes about it, and using completely unfounded accusations in order to use the prosecution itself as a punishment.

Trump has been prosecuted, several times, for actual crimes he committed. Hilary clinton as an example, had to deal with the obviously fake prosecution attempts of benghazi and email servers.

This is a gigantic and meaningful difference.

Have other people done some of these trump crimes and not gotten prosecuted? Sure, but that's not exactly a good thing.

Directing the doj to manufacture crimes in order to prosecute is much much worse.

This is an interesting article about a relatively foreign culture, although I can't speak to its veracity it certainly sounds true.

It makes a lot of points about culture, both where it came from and where it's going and undoubtedly the things it mentions, missing women, bride prices, family honor, etc, all play a large part in what's going on, but for all of the article's references to an economic theory of dating I feel like it missed a really obvious factor: vastly increased supply for the same demand.

You can see similar things in good ol' waspy america when you get on a dating website; no longer are you competing against the dozen guys in the bar or the 100 guys in your school, you're competing against tens of thousands of other potential mates, all easily comparable and considered with the flick of a finger.

It also, presumably, makes it harder to compete against the more virtual companions: influencers, singers, actors, etc.

It's difficult an average guy to compete against, say, the ideal of george clooney in full makeup/clothing/movie romance mode, but at least being physically in the room gives you a few advantages over the movie star, being an image on a dating site removes even that.

The article mentions, a couple of times, (presumably appealing) information about the potential boyfriend that wouldn't fit on the advertisement his mother is displaying at the park. Why wouldn't it fit? Paper is cheap. Presumably the reason is that attention is expensive and the implication is that the people doing the shopping have a lot of choices to get through and hence don't have time for a detailed resume.

(Personally I found the above to be an issue in my personal life in america, so I solved it by going to speed dating events which put you back in a situation of only competing against a dozen or so other people in the room with you.

I went a dozen or so times before being taken off the market but it honestly wasn't a bad way to spend an evening and it was considerably better for my self esteem than sending out 500 messages a night on okcupid and getting 0 replies)

> pressures of high taxes

This is something I never see mentioned so I'm curious what brought it up. Are you personally paying a lot of taxes or so much that you can't afford other things or is this a thing peers talk about? Is this a state or federal thing?

Some cursory googling shows you have to make capital gains of between $185,000 and $250,000 to have to pay $37,000 in capital gains tax. This is between three and six times as much as someone in their 20s will earn in a year. I think you need a bit more perspective of what it's like to be a young person outside the extremely well compensated tech sector.

Ironically, capital gains tax rates are essentially regressive as they are lower than the typical marginal tax rate for someone earning at those levels. They are a big handout to the capital class, not some special punishment.

So to whine about them shows a baseline belief that income should not be taxed at all, I guess?

I wouldn’t call it “well compensated”, I work really hard for my money and it’s not like my company is just giving it away to me out of the kindness of their hearts. I also worked in food service while in college and know what it’s like to make ~$15 an hour which is one of the reasons why I went to college and learned the skills needed to create value for my employer. A big point of mine is that my grandfather went to a community college for $3 (the price of his ID card) and got a job as a machinist to pay for his multi-lot house in Southern California in 2 years. He was the sole earner so his wife could raise three children. Nowadays that house is $2M, AI didn’t exist the way it did in the 1970s when he bought the house and AI didn’t cause the increase in the ratio of home costs to wages, which is arguably the biggest issue of our time and is not hypothetical.

Housing to wages has been going up every year for like the last 20 years, I'm not sure we can blame AI for that?

Regardless of how hard you worked or what you deserve, having 30k in capital gains puts you into a very, very, verrry small minority of americans.

I think you are understanding my point here. America has and has had plenty of problems. I don’t think AI is one of them. In the same vein, reporters and journalists are a very small subset of American population that are very vocal about AI because it probably threatens their hegemony.

Don't the vast majority of young people entering the workforce have no capital gains to deal with at all? That tends to be more of a problem for people who are already well off. Are you talking about a narrower demographic or something?

The amounts you paid in capital gains are about 50% higher than I've ever paid. That was the second year I worked at a big tech company and suddenly had stock, which was about a decade into an my extremely lucrative career as a software developer. Most of my friends don't have to deal with capital gains at all because they're not part of the investor class. On average the rates of trading must be much lower for people in their 20s, no?

Dear lord, what percentage of the Gen Z (the population mentioned in the article) do you think pay capital gain taxes???

Congrats I guess, you are clearly rich enough to pay taxes. Most young people would consider themselves lucky to have $5K to rub together.

I hate to be uncharitable but the comment seems to simply be parroting conservative talking points, rather than being an accurate (or sincere) representation of young people's pessimism about the future.

> high housing costs which driven up by overregulation, entitlements to retirees and H1B/immigrant cases driving down wages

Anyone I talk to under 40 despairs at low wages, rising prices, and a political class that is incapable of going after blatant corruption, especially those identified in the Epstein files.

There is more anger at capitalism and billionaires (capitalists in the Marxist sense) than in any time in living memory. The notion that young people are generally upset about regulation, entitlement and H1B visas is laughably out of touch. It might be true for a tiny number of spoiled techies in the Bay Area! But outside SF, Seattle and NYC, young people are angry about a lot of things, and strong regulation and generous benefits are about the last of them.

Nobody is perfect, even "professionals" and I think there's a reasonable difference between "I, a novice, am skeptical of your conclusions" and "I, a novice, have come up with an entirely new theory".

It's rare, I think, for a project to have such a well defined and singular purpose that has not changed in 10 years nor have any bugs been discovered or its dependencies changed underneath it.

It's not impossible, of course, but if I saw even a qr library that hadn't changed in 10 years I would worry that it wouldn't build on current systems (due to dependencies) and that nobody was actually using it (due to lag of bug reports).

I have several of those projects. I avoid dependencies as much as possible, striving to only use things which I know ship with my target OS. I code for a level of correctness and longevity. That benefits everyone, including myself.

A QR (or barcode) library is exactly the type of thing I’d assume would still work fine, since there’s nothing new to do, the parsing rules don’t change, it’s a static, known, solved problem.

> A QR (or barcode) library is exactly the type of thing I’d assume would still work fine, since there’s nothing new to do, the parsing rules don’t change, it’s a static, known, solved problem.

I agree with you - and yet the barcode library I used recently for a variable-data-printing project was last updated 13 hours ago, despite having been around since 2008!

This was such a genuinely weird moment for me when reading the article.

"yadda yadda and then also the secretary of defence agreed it was bad"

I'm just reading along and going, "yeah that sounds really bad if a secretary level position is being cited... wait a second, isn't that actually the guy who is literally famous for being stupid??"

I never expected to be living through a real life version of "the emperor's new clothes", like, how is anyone quoting this guy about anything?

Very often the fact that the herd is going in that direction causes it to become the right direction, e.g. the stock market.