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This is the sort of person who got a degree in writing essays and was never any good at it. Her target is NOT casino gambling. It's the 'Big Tech' boogeyman tha

This is the sort of person who got a degree in writing essays and was never any good at it. Her target is NOT casino gambling. It's the 'Big Tech' boogeyman that conservatives hate nowadays. And if you cut out the third and final paragraph, you'd never know it. Given that she's such an absolute luddite, nobody should be shocked that she is enraged that casinos and tech companies use... modern product design techniques... This is old man yelling at the sky level silliness masquerading as rational thought. I'd love to see her essay attacking oil and chemical companies for buying out riverfront land (eminent domain or otherwise) owned by families since before this country was founded to plop down gigantic, polluting refineries that raise cancer rates among people who never work there, but I doubt she likes that sort of parallel narrative.

syrrim 5y ago
I wouldn't think HN would find the thesis as applied to big tech so disagreeable, since people here have frequently say the same thing. For a while it seemed like every week there was a thread about all the people deleting their facebook account. The distinction with oil, or any other sort of industry for that matter, is that the latter at least produces something that is useful to people, whereas gambling largely does not. I found the lack of attention paid to big tech strange as well, but I could hardly complain, seeing as we've seen that discussion many times over, whereas the historical context regarding casinos was quite new to me.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  The problem with the article is that it's written like an 11 year old was given a topic and she wrote an essay about the thing she was interested in at the time, then tried to shoehorn the actual topic in there. People want to complain about Big Tech? Fine. Have some actual substance to your argument instead of saying something like "this guy who was barely Indian managed to coerce steel-factory landowners to sell them their land, and because they use A-B testing, that's why Big Tech is bad." It's a stupid article.

syrrim 5y ago

I wouldn't think HN would find the thesis as applied to big tech so disagreeable, since people here have frequently say the same thing. For a while it seemed like every week there was a thread about all the people deleting their facebook account. The distinction with oil, or any other sort of industry for that matter, is that the latter at least produces something that is useful to people, whereas gambling largely does not. I found the lack of attention paid to big tech strange as well, but I could hardly complain, seeing as we've seen that discussion many times over, whereas the historical context regarding casinos was quite new to me.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
The problem with the article is that it's written like an 11 year old was given a topic and she wrote an essay about the thing she was interested in at the time, then tried to shoehorn the actual topic in there. People want to complain about Big Tech? Fine. Have some actual substance to your argument instead of saying something like "this guy who was barely Indian managed to coerce steel-factory landowners to sell them their land, and because they use A-B testing, that's why Big Tech is bad." It's a stupid article.