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This is pretty big departure from your original comment. (Which was, I believe, supposed to be something of a rhetorical question, but my reply was to point out

by mmt 8y ago

This is pretty big departure from your original comment. (Which was, I believe, supposed to be something of a rhetorical question, but my reply was to point out that it missed its mark.) > this is a fundamental problem in the world Although I agree with your sentiment regarding the corruption of systems, I don't believe merely calling out the problem, especially reducing it to the fundamentals, is helpful. > Somewhere, we lost our way and forgot that all of these things should serve the common good for humanity. This implies that (at least modern, Western) society evolved from some kind of kinder, gentler, common-benefit civilization in the past. That's inconsistent with my understanding of history, wherein people behaved toward each other in many ways that are reprehensible. > we sit around lamenting that this is just how it is and we are too powerless to stop it. > we loudly proclaim that this is the new natural order and there is nothing to be done about it. These are either straw-men or self-deprecation (since you were the one who used the shruggie originally). If you want to discuss how best to change the situation, then I would suggest at least proposing what can be done about it. If you merely want to complain, then I would suggest a different forum.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
To my mind, it's not a big departure from my original comment. But your stance seems fundamentally dismissive, so I think I'm done here.
- mmt 8y ago
  > To my mind, it's not a big departure from my original comment. Fair enough, perhaps "expansion" would have been a better word than "departure". > But your stance seems fundamentally dismissive, so I think I'm done here. To my mind, I'm trying to be responsive and evoke thought-provoking conversation. In this case, I hoped I could get you to share what you think could be done to improve the broken system, but I failed.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    There are better ways to do that than to suggest I'm in the wrong forum, I don't belong here and take it elsewhere. I'm a woman in an overwhelmingly male forum. It's a big problem for me to try to find a reply in the face of that. You may not have any idea. And it doesn't matter. It could have been someone LGBTQ or a person of color or any number of other reasons for feeling they don't really belong and aren't really welcome. Most people won't tell you their reason for feeling fundamentally unwelcome, but a fairly high percentage of people will feel that way. I'm not at my best today. Maybe under other circumstances I would have been more able to rise to the occasion. So it's also not intended to simply blame you either. I'm muddling through as best I can, as usual.
    - mmt 8y ago
      > There are better ways to do that than to suggest I'm in the wrong forum, I don't belong here and take it elsewhere. I realize that part of what I said could be construed that way, and I apologize. I do try very hard not be ad-hominem and avoid talk about the commenter, in favor of talking about the comment itself. So, to be clear, I was making no statement about you not belonging here. Rather, I was saying (and only after actually asking for the kind of content/information I was hoping for) that this isn't the best forum for illustrating a problem without an accompanying suggested solution. I do still hope to read your thoughts on making the system less corrupt.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        I don't agree with some of your assertions about the world having always been terrible. The US was founded by a bunch of small businesses owners, basically. Social stuff fundamentally works different in smaller groups than in very large ones. That doesn't mean nothing bad ever happens in small groups. It means that part of the problem is we have 7 billion people and a bunch of huge corporations. I had a corporate job for a time. I've done freelance work in recent years. I did that while homeless and eventually got off the street. I'm trying to establish a pilot program for helping others also learn to make money online while homeless. I'm also doing little websites for local artists in a low cost rural area with a bunch of small towns. I'm in the biggest city locally and it's under 20k people. So I'm personally trying to foster microenterprise as part of the solution to what has gone wrong. We need more small time operators. Another thing I do is participate as openly female on HN. I think that has more impact than is ever likely to be acknowledged by anyone. I tried once to do an AMA about it on Reddit. I was politely told to go pick myself, that didn't measure up to their standards of significance for AMAs and directed me to a second rate AMA forum. And yet in the past year, a lot of things I have been saying on HN for nearly 9 years are suddenly being parroted in various "movements" or whatever. I don't expect to ever get any credit whatsoever for any of that. I'm old and tired and grumpy and impatient with people being dismissive of me and yadda. But I'm quite confident I'm making a difference. There's other stuff I do. I wouldn't know how to explain it all and I'm not inclined to try in part because your earlier comment was incredibly dismissive and not just of me personally, and in part because I routinely get dismissed by people saying "No, you didn't actually do X. You are deluded." It's probably dumb of me to say this much. But I'm human and part of the secret of my success is my willingness to flail about and look the fool in public. Hopefully we are deep enough in the weeds at this point that there won't be too many eyes on it anyway.

by mmt 8y ago

DoreenMichele 8y ago

To my mind, it's not a big departure from my original comment. But your stance seems fundamentally dismissive, so I think I'm done here.

mmt 8y ago
> To my mind, it's not a big departure from my original comment. Fair enough, perhaps "expansion" would have been a better word than "departure". > But your stance seems fundamentally dismissive, so I think I'm done here. To my mind, I'm trying to be responsive and evoke thought-provoking conversation. In this case, I hoped I could get you to share what you think could be done to improve the broken system, but I failed.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  There are better ways to do that than to suggest I'm in the wrong forum, I don't belong here and take it elsewhere. I'm a woman in an overwhelmingly male forum. It's a big problem for me to try to find a reply in the face of that. You may not have any idea. And it doesn't matter. It could have been someone LGBTQ or a person of color or any number of other reasons for feeling they don't really belong and aren't really welcome. Most people won't tell you their reason for feeling fundamentally unwelcome, but a fairly high percentage of people will feel that way. I'm not at my best today. Maybe under other circumstances I would have been more able to rise to the occasion. So it's also not intended to simply blame you either. I'm muddling through as best I can, as usual.
  - mmt 8y ago
    > There are better ways to do that than to suggest I'm in the wrong forum, I don't belong here and take it elsewhere. I realize that part of what I said could be construed that way, and I apologize. I do try very hard not be ad-hominem and avoid talk about the commenter, in favor of talking about the comment itself. So, to be clear, I was making no statement about you not belonging here. Rather, I was saying (and only after actually asking for the kind of content/information I was hoping for) that this isn't the best forum for illustrating a problem without an accompanying suggested solution. I do still hope to read your thoughts on making the system less corrupt.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      I don't agree with some of your assertions about the world having always been terrible. The US was founded by a bunch of small businesses owners, basically. Social stuff fundamentally works different in smaller groups than in very large ones. That doesn't mean nothing bad ever happens in small groups. It means that part of the problem is we have 7 billion people and a bunch of huge corporations. I had a corporate job for a time. I've done freelance work in recent years. I did that while homeless and eventually got off the street. I'm trying to establish a pilot program for helping others also learn to make money online while homeless. I'm also doing little websites for local artists in a low cost rural area with a bunch of small towns. I'm in the biggest city locally and it's under 20k people. So I'm personally trying to foster microenterprise as part of the solution to what has gone wrong. We need more small time operators. Another thing I do is participate as openly female on HN. I think that has more impact than is ever likely to be acknowledged by anyone. I tried once to do an AMA about it on Reddit. I was politely told to go pick myself, that didn't measure up to their standards of significance for AMAs and directed me to a second rate AMA forum. And yet in the past year, a lot of things I have been saying on HN for nearly 9 years are suddenly being parroted in various "movements" or whatever. I don't expect to ever get any credit whatsoever for any of that. I'm old and tired and grumpy and impatient with people being dismissive of me and yadda. But I'm quite confident I'm making a difference. There's other stuff I do. I wouldn't know how to explain it all and I'm not inclined to try in part because your earlier comment was incredibly dismissive and not just of me personally, and in part because I routinely get dismissed by people saying "No, you didn't actually do X. You are deluded." It's probably dumb of me to say this much. But I'm human and part of the secret of my success is my willingness to flail about and look the fool in public. Hopefully we are deep enough in the weeds at this point that there won't be too many eyes on it anyway.