> When DJT talked about cancelling the Dept of Edu, I got ahold of all the teachers I knew and asked them what impact it would have, and their response was mostly that they would lose their school lunch benefits.
Sounds like a great way to avoid alcohol addiction, prevent drunk driving deaths, and save countless generations from being negatively impacted in one way or another by alcohol.
Prohibition doesn't work because people want to modulate their consciousness, chemically force-relax, reduce inhibitions, etc. It didn't work before, and it won't in the future. The more things are forbidden, the more taboo and attractive they become.
This banal, smiling, petty authoritarianism sickens me. Bodily autonomy trumps "common good" arguments, and where it somehow doesn't, injustice abides. Society's job isn't to crush individualism in order to create the safest and most financially efficient outcome. Shall we throw everyone in prison for their safety and protection next, and control their diet to ensure maximum healthspan and potential for participation in the labor market?
Rather than banning anything, point out at an early age that cigarettes stink, get you addicted, cost money forever, and cause health problems. Point out that alcohol makes you fat and causes heart problems and cancer. The accept that each person has the right to make a decision for themselves about what risks they're willing to accept to achieve a desired outcome, and that they have to own those consequences.
Don't want to pay for smokers' lung cancer treatment? Then only fund palliative care for smoking-related cancers. Man enough to smoke a pack a day, man enough to buy smokers' insurance. There, now we can live free.
Smokers already more than pay for their healthcare so punishing them further is silly. Not only is their lifetimehealthcare cheaper, because smoking disqualifies you from many procedures and kills most users right around retirement age before the expensive age-related care becomes common, but the sin-tax collected from smokers in most countries is larger than the average lifetime medical care cost.
It's basically taxing people for saving everybody else money.
An interesting point. So over the next ~60 years, the UK has committed itself to having to find a replacement for all the tax revenue that will be lost by eliminating tobacco products. Additionally, the number of people with longer lifespans will increase, necessitating more late-life care delivery through the NHS, which will also have to be funded.
Outcome: this will cost everyone a lot of money. Time to raise the retirement age to 80!
> But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on.
It was never any of these things, and you're misremembering if you think it was. There's never been a mono-opinion held by some all-encompassing hivemind.
I'm not misremembering. You can easily find monoculturey threads about all of these things. Just because there's a small slice of counter views, doesn't mean the average HN positions on these things isn't or wasn't decidedly negative.
When you use the term "luddite" in the way you do, you reveal that you aren't aware of who the Luddites actually were. Luddites weren't anti-technology; many of them were experts at using advanced machinery. What they opposed was the poor quality output of automated factories and the use of machinery to circumvent apprenticeships and decent wages.
As for your promise of a great leap at some vague point in the future, that's such a widely-mocked AI industry trope at this point that it's a little embarrassing you went there.
The only thing that will be embarrassing is how badly your comments, and those like yours will age.
I don't know what happened to this place, but it went from actual young people sharing information on the newest things in tech, tech philosophy, interesting stuff; to now old men yelling at the clouds about the new tech.
I agree with your basic point, but it’s not just an age thing. There are plenty of older people enthusiastically using AI for software development now. Just as an example, Steve Yegge, who vibe-coded the Beads and Gas Town AI projects, is around 57. I’m a bit older than him, and I’m working with Claude, Gemini, and Codex on a daily basis, having great fun and learning tons.
What we seem to be seeing with AI is that the prospect of completely changing the way you work is threatening for a lot of people, and of course so is the prospect of losing your job. When people are faced with something threatening, a common reaction is to criticize it in every possible way - you can’t admit anything about it is good because that risks encouraging the threat. It’s not exactly rational, but it’s what people often do.
HN has never been exempt from that, it’s just that AI is a big change that brings out this instinct in many more people.
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