Hasnain says:

“Mr. Buffett is almost the perfectly made billionaire for this moment in which, at last, many Americans are beginning to question not only corruptions of the system but the matter of whether billionaires should exist at all. He doesn’t do the things the worst of them do. He isn’t in it for what they’re in it for. He clearly must care about money, but he also kind of doesn’t care about money. Even in his generosity, he has avoided the imperial lording over that others cannot resist.

And this is what makes him so troubling, because through him we are tempted into believing that a system can be defended that allows a man to accumulate more than $100 billion while people are sleeping, in hock to him, in his mobile homes, shortening their lives with the beverages he’s invested in, scampering around the warehouses whose nonunion status has redounded to his money pile.”

Hasnain says:

In what world did their social media person think this was a good idea?

I think I lost it at the ridiculousness of this when someone pointed out that the standard Pfizer box has 195 vials, so they literally had to open a box, take out 115 vials and put them somewhere else. Like why not donate at least one full box?

“The tweet has been widely shared, with many comments expressing surprise at the size of the gift compared to Trinidad and Tobago's population of 1.4 million. Many mocked the gift, with some users sharing memes about the donation.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s worth noting, as I wrote when India’s second (and still-in-effect) TikTok ban came into play, that the app had become an easy-to-use arena for conscientious citizens to counter mainstream media censorship, spread the word about protests, and give voice to Indians of different castes, gender and sexual identifications, and ethnicities, many of whom found themselves under attack from the BJP’s Hindu nationalist government. Speaking of that very administration: In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that India’s then–Facebook head opposed applying the company’s hate speech rules to BJP politicians who’d spouted Islamophobic rhetoric online. And the New York Times reported that wealthy Indian workers who emigrated to the U.S. to work for Silicon Valley firms often perpetrated the same caste-discrimination systems that are so rampant in Hindu-fundamentalist regions of India.”

Hasnain says:

“This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t care much for baseball or sports these days but this was engaging!

“Those punishments are supposed to send a message, but players hear a louder one.

“The calculus is whoever gets outs better gets to play major league baseball,” says the NL reliever who says he uses Pelican. “There’s some guys that might have a moral dilemma about it, but I’m not one of those guys. It's not bad for your health. Steroids ... could kill you. That’s different than washing your hands of stick at the end of the game.””

Hasnain says:

“Taxing the rich is an incredibly rare sweet spot: a policy change that meets the approval of the party’s centrist technocrats and the voters and enables other popular and morally compelling reforms. The cause has been losing ground to an inside game dominated by the prejudices and self-interest of the rich and powerful. Every cent of Biden’s tax hike on the wealthy that Democrats leave on the table, because of a handful of gutless members of Congress, will be a sickening waste.”

Hasnain says:

“Note that nothing here implies abdicating responsibility. You still have to be responsible for all the projects and teams you own, and you have to be for as long as you are in your role. This is important because this responsibility is what will open up new gates.”

Hasnain says:

Trigger warning, since the violence described here… ugh

“The link between extremism and violent misogyny has become very evident in recent years as more mass shooters have been found to have a history of violent behavior toward women. Though most abusive men do not go on to perpetrate larger acts of violence, the ties between violence against women and extremism are too clear to ignore, experts said.

“We still, in this day and age, treat violence against women as a personal or family issue, as opposed to a troubling indicator of someone who could become more violent,” Bridget Todd, communications director at the feminist organization UltraViolet, told HuffPost in February. “

Hasnain says:

“If this is what it takes to transfer a file nowadays, no wonder every service that does it needs to charge money, or put arbitrary limits on file sizes, or show you ads, or worse.

You know what, on second thought, all this was a terrible idea, maybe we should have tried the p2p method after all. Okay, no, not that.

And this is why Tailscale is different.”

Hasnain says:

“You can’t monopolize someone’s time when you can’t trap them and act as a hall monitor over their every action, and so they want you back in the office. They deep down know you’re not working all 8 hours of the day at your work station, but they know that you know that they could walk behind you at any time and see that you’re doing something else. They don’t want to make the office a place where things actually get done, because that’s not the point to them - the point is that they own you.

And it’s hard to keep control of something that’s out of arm’s reach.”