16 ms·

Things That Happen in Silicon Valley and Also the Soviet Union

315 points by lavrov 8y ago

sidcool 8y ago
Most of these are on one company. Overall the silicon valley is way better. And remember it's not a country. Edit: I accept that I didn't get the joke.
- smt88 8y ago
  You make good points, but it seems to be meant as a joke rather than a serious attempt to suggest that SV is meaningfully similar to the USSR. For what it's worth, I agree with you and still found the thread to be very funny.
  - talmand 8y ago
    The reason it's funny is because there's an element of truth to it. Just like with most of the politically-based comedian routines over the years.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    If you go down into the replies, you’ll find the author saying “I am unprepared for people who don't understand jokes.”
- tclancy 8y ago
  Other than the joke about the car clearly being Tesla, they seem pretty widespread to me.
kimdotcom 8y ago
Blatmeisters?
21 8y ago
> the United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default So true. The USA is viewed worse than China, Russia or Saudi Arabia. I also see a lot of it on HN.
- MajorSauce 8y ago
  I hear a lot of that, but when comparing the US to the rest of the West. To say that they are considered worse than those 3 countries might be pushing it..
  - Aunche 8y ago
    It's a "with great power comes great responsibility" kind of thing, and it's not necessarily their fault. The US does a lot of things in general, so a lot of them are inevitably going to be bad.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  > mandatory workplace political education Also popular in these parts.
  - ibejoeb 8y ago
    This is #1 why I prefer remote. #2 is I don't want the flu from compulsives who insist on hanging around the low-budget "open concept" office while sick af. edit: Every one of these is hysterical. Can we write a pilot?
- jpzisme 8y ago
  I'll go ahead and say the United States is the greatest country the world has ever seen. It's not perfect, but once you live in other countries for a bit, even if you enjoy the experience, you appreciate the U.S. a lot more.
  - tdb7893 8y ago
    It might be the greatest if you have a decent amount of money. My experiences with poorer rural communities really changed my perspective on the US (and I assume inner cities communities would also have the same effect).
  - ben_w 8y ago
    My system one thinking has the impression the USA is better than Russia or Saudi Arabia but kinda swings and roundabouts with China. My system two thinking, given what people say about things rather than personal experience, puts a lot of caveats on top of the China comparison. However, basing my judgement purely on direct personal experience: regarding “greatest the world has ever seen”… I’d rather have been born a random citizen of France, Netherlands, (west) Germany, Switzerland, or the UK, than a random citizen of the USA — and again, that’s just out of the places I’ve actually visited or lived in. Going back to second hand impressions: Canada, Ireland, and most of Scandinavia seems better than the impression I have of the USA from three visits of one month each.
projectramo 8y ago
"I am unprepared for people who don't understand jokes" -- Anton Troynikov I don't know who he is but I really like this quote. That's consistently my biggest surprise on the internet. The #1 question I get for my posts is "Is that sarcasm?" I never answer.
- 21 8y ago
  > I never answer. That might cause you to be declared a "class enemy". The downfall will be swift.
- deadmetheny 8y ago
  That sentence pretty well summarizes why I don't really like using Twitter.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  Sarcasm doesn't always carry clearly through text-based media. I wouldn't be so sure that the reader is always at fault.
  - projectramo 8y ago
    Are you kidding?
    - saiya-jin 8y ago
      it doesn't have to be even on sarcasm level, sometimes i get misunderstanding on elementary level, ie when texting my fiancee, meaning somebody who is the closest person to me for years. once you don't see face of the other person clearly, misunderstandings will happen, better learn how minimize them or you and people around you will suffer from unnecessary conflicts
    - lostconfused 8y ago
      I can't imagine why that would be intended to be humuoruos. The content of the post seems like a genuine attempt at trying to point out the potential flaws in purely text based communication via internet. To expand on such, text doesn't carry any of the social cues that human beings learn during their development. There's no facial expressions, tone of voice, any form of body language such as posture or hand gestures. Communicating and being understood via text is very difficult, especially when one is attempting to be succinct. "Brevity is the soul of wit" does not only mean that one should strive to be brief but also that it takes great ability to accomplish such a feat aswell.
zug_zug 8y ago
"- being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you" This is the one that resonated with me. Obviously "the system" as a whole isn't objectively crumbling by traditional measures like GDP, but there were things that could give that feeling: Homeless sleeping in the subway and on the main streets, the smells, crime so rampant it's basically ignored (my car was broken into > 5 times), working relationships are brief and cold and high-pressure
- woah 8y ago
  As a contractor for startups in SF for 6 years and now a founder for 1, I have found the opposite of what you have about business relationships. The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry, it is caused by the homeowners who have been blocking apartment building construction in 90% of the city for 50 years.
  - oblio 8y ago
    Aren't people in the tech industry numerous and powerful enough to lobby for humane conditions for their fellow citizens?
    - woah 8y ago
      The tech industry does overwhelmingly vote for more housing, but many people in tech are young, newly arrived, and very busy. In California’s Byzantine political system, whoever can sit in the right meetings for longest and file the right paperwork at the right time has political power. This ends up being elderly homeowners, and the nonprofits that earn their money servicing the homeless (SF spends more money on this than they do on streets and parks).
      - mirkules 8y ago
        Frankly, I find the notion that people are too busy to fight for causes they believe in laughable. Either make the effort to effect change or accept that you are part of the problem. Face the truth. I don't understand how someone can believe in something, but only when it's convenient.
robertAngst 8y ago
>bought a tesla >thinks bitcoin is worthless So this guy is the person that serves the programmers... right? People arent trusting him with user data at facebook... right?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
s3r3nity 8y ago
"[T]he economy is centrally planned, using opaque algorithms not fully understood by their users" Loved this thread, but I think this one lost me. Does anyone know to what this is referring and mind explaining? Is this a comment on news feeds in apps, or is it a comment on the odd housing supply / zoning decisions? Or neither?
- arethuza 8y ago
  Possibly because large corporation do internally have a form of central planning - usually using Oracle Hyperion (which Google appears to use).... :-) Edit: I based my guess about Google using Hyperion for their financial planning based on the job adverts....
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    I’ve always found it ironic that the purest examples of communist style central economic planning are found within capitalist corporations. Raise your hand if your company’s budget, hiring, and other resource deployment is done democratically, through a vote.
    - zzzcpan 8y ago
      I don't think it's a secret that Soviet Union "borrowed" a lot of ideas from large capitalist corporations. Of course they are similar.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Big corporations are basically communist empires in this regard. I think the reason why capitalism won over communism is that capitalism has a large number of centrally-planned enterprises where natural selection can take place internally and the failure of any single enterprise does not hurt (and even benefits) the others. In communism, however, there's only one big plan that's "too big to fail".
      - digi_owl 8y ago
oblio 8y ago
Hilarious: > So, soon they'll invade Afghanistan and get monthly limits for buying sugar and socks? > I don't want to alarm u but they've been in afghan for 17 years
Nokinside 8y ago
- all important decisions are made in Kremlin.
petermcneeley 8y ago
HyperNormalization looms large. "everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretense of a functioning society... Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the "fakeness" was accepted by everyone as real" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
- mrnobody_67 8y ago
  Most of society is built on shared fictions. Corporations, The UN, Governments, borders, the value of the $20 bill in your wallet, only exist because everybody accepts it's real.
  - atulatul 8y ago
    That's from Sapiens, right?
atroyn 8y ago
OP here. It's tongue-in cheek, in the same way that Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley" is tongue-in-cheek. Please don't hurt me.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- projectramo 8y ago
  Silicon Valley is tongue-in-cheek? I thought it was a documentary!
- myth_buster 8y ago
  > The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention.
- anghor 8y ago
  I don't think it is all tongue-in-cheek, but it is brilliant.
closeparen 8y ago
> living five adults to a two room apartment This one has become terrifyingly normalized - even within the industry, people who don’t live this way are decadent irresponsible pigs. People who resent living this way are entitled redneck whiners. And despite all that, don’t you dare suggest you’re not really a member of the evil elite 1%.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  See also the “dense urban apartments are the only morally acceptable housing solution” trope that emerges from every Bay Area Housing thread.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - closeparen 8y ago
    They’re all interrelated. Irrigating your lawn isn’t necessarily wrong, either, until there’s a drought. And we could probably have all maintained our moderate water consumption through the drought if it weren’t for a few truly excessive users. The same applies to land and the housing shortage. If a few areas didn’t insist on being rural, maybe we could all have the suburban dream. But they did, so now even suburbia is egregiously wasteful.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  Where is that? I work for a startup in the peninsula, and most of our employees over the age of 25 live by themselves (or with a romantic partner). And I don't know of any that live more than one to a bedroom. Many of the younger employees do live in shared housing, but then, so did I when I moved to SF and that was nearly 3 decades ago.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    I don’t know of anyone else living alone at my household-name employer in SF. (I do, which means I save and travel less than most of them, but I get weird looks whenever it comes up).
handbanana 8y ago
> - the United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default That's my pick of the bunch
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dictum 8y ago
- Anyone who sounds like a wrecker must be reeducated. (q.e.d. https://twitter.com/DanielDoWrite/status/1015263695558135808 https://twitter.com/DanielDoWrite/status/1015263695558135808)
- digi_owl 8y ago
  The fuck???
  - lainga 8y ago
    "He writes code for @google and puns for fun." The layers of comparison are increasing!
myth_buster 8y ago
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014974099930714115.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014974099930714115.html
lainga 8y ago
I might add "- the government tries very hard to depict other places as deprived, backward wastelands so nobody wants to leave" and thus nobody wants to work in somewhere more affordable than SF, e.g. Charlotte, where a roving pack of bloodthirsty rednecks will surely swarm out of the woods and tear them to pieces.
JdeBP 8y ago
One interesting thing is that this seems to be on the cusp of spawning an "In Silicon Valley ..." joke cycle. * https://twitter.com/MarcLucke/status/1015211522111496193 https://twitter.com/MarcLucke/status/1015211522111496193 * https://twitter.com/Vietpdx/status/1015253367285673984 https://twitter.com/Vietpdx/status/1015253367285673984
coolspot 8y ago
> - living five adults to a two room apartment > - 'totally not illegal taxi' taxis by private citizens moonlighting to make ends meet > - the plight of the working class is discussed mainly by people who do no work > - the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless So true it hurts. > - mandatory workplace political education Is it really a thing?
- digi_owl 8y ago
  > - the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless Not quite sure what that is a dig at. Unless you are dealing in fresh produce or something, everything can be considered fake and worthless... As for the political education thing: I don't think they would be overt (or perhaps even conscious) but they do have various team building exercises, no?
  - coolspot 8y ago
    I guess fake currency most people are talking about in the Silicon Valley could be the Bitcoin et al.
    - digi_owl 8y ago
      Yeah i guess. Just too used to seeing people riff on the dollar being fake and so on...
  - pm90 8y ago
    It’s a dig at startup equity.
- luminaobscura 8y ago
  i think it's referring to things like "diversity and inclusion" trainings.
- lobotryas 8y ago
  Yup. Read about James Damore. Don't take people's words for his essay though. You can find copies online to read yourself to see if it's as bad as others would want you to believe.
coryfklein 8y ago
Despite all the other meta comments in this thread it is an interesting commentary on public discourse in the U.S. that the messages like the OP are simultaneously interpreted as a satirical joke by some and as a straight literal comparison by others. A U.S. hating defeatist will point to this list as proof that the U.S. is just as bad as Russia while giving no room for evidence to the contrary. A loyalist can laugh all this off as hilarious while ignoring the reality of Trump's autocratic leanings. In polls most voters are crying for moderate representatives and they just want people to reach across the aisle and get things done. But then come election day the polarizing extremist candidates end up getting the votes. As a population, the U.S. is in this self-torturous cycle where they cry for movement and change but in action they only perpetuate the gridlock and partisanship. This climate really gives me respect for Sam Harris's approach: he really tries to interview others that have just enough of a different opinion so as to give rise to alternative viewpoints and interesting conversation while simultaneously striving to maintain an open, honest, and dispassionate discourse on emotional topics.

315 points by lavrov 8y ago

Most of these are on one company. Overall the silicon valley is way better. And remember it's not a country. Edit: I accept that I didn't get the joke.

smt88 8y ago
You make good points, but it seems to be meant as a joke rather than a serious attempt to suggest that SV is meaningfully similar to the USSR. For what it's worth, I agree with you and still found the thread to be very funny.
- talmand 8y ago
  The reason it's funny is because there's an element of truth to it. Just like with most of the politically-based comedian routines over the years.
- mikeash 8y ago
  If you go down into the replies, you’ll find the author saying “I am unprepared for people who don't understand jokes.”
tclancy 8y ago
Other than the joke about the car clearly being Tesla, they seem pretty widespread to me.

kimdotcom 8y ago

Blatmeisters?

21 8y ago

> the United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default So true. The USA is viewed worse than China, Russia or Saudi Arabia. I also see a lot of it on HN.

MajorSauce 8y ago
I hear a lot of that, but when comparing the US to the rest of the West. To say that they are considered worse than those 3 countries might be pushing it..
- Aunche 8y ago
  It's a "with great power comes great responsibility" kind of thing, and it's not necessarily their fault. The US does a lot of things in general, so a lot of them are inevitably going to be bad.
commandlinefan 8y ago
> mandatory workplace political education Also popular in these parts.
- ibejoeb 8y ago
  This is #1 why I prefer remote. #2 is I don't want the flu from compulsives who insist on hanging around the low-budget "open concept" office while sick af. edit: Every one of these is hysterical. Can we write a pilot?
jpzisme 8y ago
I'll go ahead and say the United States is the greatest country the world has ever seen. It's not perfect, but once you live in other countries for a bit, even if you enjoy the experience, you appreciate the U.S. a lot more.
- tdb7893 8y ago
  It might be the greatest if you have a decent amount of money. My experiences with poorer rural communities really changed my perspective on the US (and I assume inner cities communities would also have the same effect).
- ben_w 8y ago
  My system one thinking has the impression the USA is better than Russia or Saudi Arabia but kinda swings and roundabouts with China. My system two thinking, given what people say about things rather than personal experience, puts a lot of caveats on top of the China comparison. However, basing my judgement purely on direct personal experience: regarding “greatest the world has ever seen”… I’d rather have been born a random citizen of France, Netherlands, (west) Germany, Switzerland, or the UK, than a random citizen of the USA — and again, that’s just out of the places I’ve actually visited or lived in. Going back to second hand impressions: Canada, Ireland, and most of Scandinavia seems better than the impression I have of the USA from three visits of one month each.

projectramo 8y ago

"I am unprepared for people who don't understand jokes" -- Anton Troynikov I don't know who he is but I really like this quote. That's consistently my biggest surprise on the internet. The #1 question I get for my posts is "Is that sarcasm?" I never answer.

21 8y ago
> I never answer. That might cause you to be declared a "class enemy". The downfall will be swift.
deadmetheny 8y ago
That sentence pretty well summarizes why I don't really like using Twitter.
MaxBarraclough 8y ago
Sarcasm doesn't always carry clearly through text-based media. I wouldn't be so sure that the reader is always at fault.
- projectramo 8y ago
  Are you kidding?
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    it doesn't have to be even on sarcasm level, sometimes i get misunderstanding on elementary level, ie when texting my fiancee, meaning somebody who is the closest person to me for years. once you don't see face of the other person clearly, misunderstandings will happen, better learn how minimize them or you and people around you will suffer from unnecessary conflicts
  - lostconfused 8y ago
    I can't imagine why that would be intended to be humuoruos. The content of the post seems like a genuine attempt at trying to point out the potential flaws in purely text based communication via internet. To expand on such, text doesn't carry any of the social cues that human beings learn during their development. There's no facial expressions, tone of voice, any form of body language such as posture or hand gestures. Communicating and being understood via text is very difficult, especially when one is attempting to be succinct. "Brevity is the soul of wit" does not only mean that one should strive to be brief but also that it takes great ability to accomplish such a feat aswell.

zug_zug 8y ago

"- being told you are constructing utopia while the system crumbles around you" This is the one that resonated with me. Obviously "the system" as a whole isn't objectively crumbling by traditional measures like GDP, but there were things that could give that feeling: Homeless sleeping in the subway and on the main streets, the smells, crime so rampant it's basically ignored (my car was broken into > 5 times), working relationships are brief and cold and high-pressure

woah 8y ago
As a contractor for startups in SF for 6 years and now a founder for 1, I have found the opposite of what you have about business relationships. The homeless problem is not caused by the tech industry, it is caused by the homeowners who have been blocking apartment building construction in 90% of the city for 50 years.
- oblio 8y ago
  Aren't people in the tech industry numerous and powerful enough to lobby for humane conditions for their fellow citizens?
  - woah 8y ago
    The tech industry does overwhelmingly vote for more housing, but many people in tech are young, newly arrived, and very busy. In California’s Byzantine political system, whoever can sit in the right meetings for longest and file the right paperwork at the right time has political power. This ends up being elderly homeowners, and the nonprofits that earn their money servicing the homeless (SF spends more money on this than they do on streets and parks).
    - mirkules 8y ago
      Frankly, I find the notion that people are too busy to fight for causes they believe in laughable. Either make the effort to effect change or accept that you are part of the problem. Face the truth. I don't understand how someone can believe in something, but only when it's convenient.

robertAngst 8y ago

>bought a tesla >thinks bitcoin is worthless So this guy is the person that serves the programmers... right? People arent trusting him with user data at facebook... right?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

s3r3nity 8y ago

"[T]he economy is centrally planned, using opaque algorithms not fully understood by their users" Loved this thread, but I think this one lost me. Does anyone know to what this is referring and mind explaining? Is this a comment on news feeds in apps, or is it a comment on the odd housing supply / zoning decisions? Or neither?

arethuza 8y ago
Possibly because large corporation do internally have a form of central planning - usually using Oracle Hyperion (which Google appears to use).... :-) Edit: I based my guess about Google using Hyperion for their financial planning based on the job adverts....
- ryandrake 8y ago
  I’ve always found it ironic that the purest examples of communist style central economic planning are found within capitalist corporations. Raise your hand if your company’s budget, hiring, and other resource deployment is done democratically, through a vote.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    I don't think it's a secret that Soviet Union "borrowed" a lot of ideas from large capitalist corporations. Of course they are similar.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Big corporations are basically communist empires in this regard. I think the reason why capitalism won over communism is that capitalism has a large number of centrally-planned enterprises where natural selection can take place internally and the failure of any single enterprise does not hurt (and even benefits) the others. In communism, however, there's only one big plan that's "too big to fail".
    - digi_owl 8y ago

oblio 8y ago

Hilarious: > So, soon they'll invade Afghanistan and get monthly limits for buying sugar and socks? > I don't want to alarm u but they've been in afghan for 17 years

Nokinside 8y ago

- all important decisions are made in Kremlin.

petermcneeley 8y ago

HyperNormalization looms large. "everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretense of a functioning society... Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the "fakeness" was accepted by everyone as real" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

mrnobody_67 8y ago
Most of society is built on shared fictions. Corporations, The UN, Governments, borders, the value of the $20 bill in your wallet, only exist because everybody accepts it's real.
- atulatul 8y ago
  That's from Sapiens, right?

atroyn 8y ago

OP here. It's tongue-in cheek, in the same way that Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley" is tongue-in-cheek. Please don't hurt me.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
projectramo 8y ago
Silicon Valley is tongue-in-cheek? I thought it was a documentary!
myth_buster 8y ago
> The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention.
anghor 8y ago
I don't think it is all tongue-in-cheek, but it is brilliant.

closeparen 8y ago

> living five adults to a two room apartment This one has become terrifyingly normalized - even within the industry, people who don’t live this way are decadent irresponsible pigs. People who resent living this way are entitled redneck whiners. And despite all that, don’t you dare suggest you’re not really a member of the evil elite 1%.

ryandrake 8y ago
See also the “dense urban apartments are the only morally acceptable housing solution” trope that emerges from every Bay Area Housing thread.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 8y ago
  They’re all interrelated. Irrigating your lawn isn’t necessarily wrong, either, until there’s a drought. And we could probably have all maintained our moderate water consumption through the drought if it weren’t for a few truly excessive users. The same applies to land and the housing shortage. If a few areas didn’t insist on being rural, maybe we could all have the suburban dream. But they did, so now even suburbia is egregiously wasteful.
Johnny555 8y ago
Where is that? I work for a startup in the peninsula, and most of our employees over the age of 25 live by themselves (or with a romantic partner). And I don't know of any that live more than one to a bedroom. Many of the younger employees do live in shared housing, but then, so did I when I moved to SF and that was nearly 3 decades ago.
- closeparen 8y ago
  I don’t know of anyone else living alone at my household-name employer in SF. (I do, which means I save and travel less than most of them, but I get weird looks whenever it comes up).

handbanana 8y ago

> - the United States as a whole is depicted as evil by default That's my pick of the bunch

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dictum 8y ago

- Anyone who sounds like a wrecker must be reeducated. (q.e.d. https://twitter.com/DanielDoWrite/status/1015263695558135808 https://twitter.com/DanielDoWrite/status/1015263695558135808)

digi_owl 8y ago
The fuck???
- lainga 8y ago
  "He writes code for @google and puns for fun." The layers of comparison are increasing!

myth_buster 8y ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014974099930714115.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014974099930714115.html

lainga 8y ago

I might add "- the government tries very hard to depict other places as deprived, backward wastelands so nobody wants to leave" and thus nobody wants to work in somewhere more affordable than SF, e.g. Charlotte, where a roving pack of bloodthirsty rednecks will surely swarm out of the woods and tear them to pieces.

JdeBP 8y ago

One interesting thing is that this seems to be on the cusp of spawning an "In Silicon Valley ..." joke cycle. * https://twitter.com/MarcLucke/status/1015211522111496193 https://twitter.com/MarcLucke/status/1015211522111496193 * https://twitter.com/Vietpdx/status/1015253367285673984 https://twitter.com/Vietpdx/status/1015253367285673984

coolspot 8y ago

> - living five adults to a two room apartment > - 'totally not illegal taxi' taxis by private citizens moonlighting to make ends meet > - the plight of the working class is discussed mainly by people who do no work > - the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless So true it hurts. > - mandatory workplace political education Is it really a thing?

digi_owl 8y ago
> - the currency most people are talking about is fake and worthless Not quite sure what that is a dig at. Unless you are dealing in fresh produce or something, everything can be considered fake and worthless... As for the political education thing: I don't think they would be overt (or perhaps even conscious) but they do have various team building exercises, no?
- coolspot 8y ago
  I guess fake currency most people are talking about in the Silicon Valley could be the Bitcoin et al.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    Yeah i guess. Just too used to seeing people riff on the dollar being fake and so on...
- pm90 8y ago
  It’s a dig at startup equity.
luminaobscura 8y ago
i think it's referring to things like "diversity and inclusion" trainings.
lobotryas 8y ago
Yup. Read about James Damore. Don't take people's words for his essay though. You can find copies online to read yourself to see if it's as bad as others would want you to believe.

coryfklein 8y ago

Despite all the other meta comments in this thread it is an interesting commentary on public discourse in the U.S. that the messages like the OP are simultaneously interpreted as a satirical joke by some and as a straight literal comparison by others. A U.S. hating defeatist will point to this list as proof that the U.S. is just as bad as Russia while giving no room for evidence to the contrary. A loyalist can laugh all this off as hilarious while ignoring the reality of Trump's autocratic leanings. In polls most voters are crying for moderate representatives and they just want people to reach across the aisle and get things done. But then come election day the polarizing extremist candidates end up getting the votes. As a population, the U.S. is in this self-torturous cycle where they cry for movement and change but in action they only perpetuate the gridlock and partisanship. This climate really gives me respect for Sam Harris's approach: he really tries to interview others that have just enough of a different opinion so as to give rise to alternative viewpoints and interesting conversation while simultaneously striving to maintain an open, honest, and dispassionate discourse on emotional topics.