That was a design feature of democracy all along, not a bug.

Democracy stops working when no one can agree on what the problem even is. Your comment is one that implicitly condones these kinds of attacks because it’s part of some kind of “cycle” repeating itself, and ah of course we’ll see more violence before the issue is “corrected”. We may even need it!

A little disturbing to be quite honest, though I suppose this is what happens when a generation takes “eat the rich” not as a LARPy political slogan but as a real call to action.

Not just strikes: go-slows, work-to-rules, using whatever power you have at whatever level to act more ethically.

Also: disinvestment, boycotts, public shunning, adverse publicity, picketing, blockades.

Start small, increase the pressure over time, be clear about what you're doing and why.

Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.

The masses seem kind of right to be in that mindset, if you consider it from thier point of view for even one second?

So, yes RLHF is available right now, for people with specific backgrounds. That RLHF work is temporary and it's going to make hundreds of thousands of people redundant. The RLHF work is actually job-negative, it is work which will later deprive others of a way to make a living.

Once that training work dries up, what happens to the people who were doing the job which AI now does? How do they pay rent? How do they feed and clothe themselves? What answers do any AI proponant actually have for this, or is the intention that every person shuts the critical thinking part of their brain off and trusts the computer will come up with something?

> and everyone’s jobs getting taken away—as if RLHF contract work is not available to basically anyone with a college degree.

Huh? The jobs aren't going away because a few people can get temp work as traitors to automate away the jobs of their fellows? I suppose that's technically correct (e.g. the there-exists counterexample to a for-all statement), but it totally misses the point.

> The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.

BTW, totally fine. If you like nice things and have political or economic power, it's totally on you to prevent things from getting bad enough that people want to do that. That's something libertarians would do well to remember. Propaganda only gets you so far.

This isn’t my experience at all when talking to non-techies all over the country.

> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09797-z

That title reeks of the paper equivalent of clickbait. The paper is about subjective well-being and mental health in the psychological sense. Broader well-being includes material conditions like income, housing, health care, safety, and social connections. So a null result on subjective well-being is not necessarily a null result on material welfare, and the problems that leads to. The paper’s own abstract also talks about context effects rather than a simple universal null.

> https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/ar...

Unions are not perfect, but they have been an important check on exploitation. Organized labor helped win the 40-hour workweek. If you demand perfect solutions, you end up doing nothing. And given that you're up against people with nearly unlimited resources, you can't afford to be picky.

No no i do get that of course, and i agree. Its just that the thing that struck me about the phrasing was that its a bit revealing. We are reviled by violance but we do allow its use in society everyday. But what violance and for what utility is acceptable seems to be a matter of debate. The line doesnt seem to be universally agreed on given the passion seen in this thread

Violence is never but sometimes the answer.

> If it did solve a problem, it's possible it would be legal.

FL crafted a law to help safeguard someone who gets sued for running over a protestor. I think this illustrates how a law can protect problems rather than solving them.

I have worked on electoral and initiative campaigns, and traveled thousands of miles to knock on doors. I’ve donated money. I’ve called my congresspeople. I’ve gone to and spoken at public meetings. I’ve protested, been tear gassed, beaten, and thrown in jail. I’ve been doing all of this continuously for about 20 years. I can tell you, from extensive experience going through the official channels, that the formal mechanisms of our democracy are fundamentally broken. We need to seriously face this problem and fix it, or things are just going to keep getting worse.

Because so many people are being ground down. You have time to organize something, instead of making rent? Well now you have to fight to even get your voting rights back, that you were silently stripped off because of your skin color and demographic, or social status. Then you need to see if you can ever get the gerrymandered border back to where it should be so the other party will ever have a chance at winning in your area, instead of losing by default. Pretty sure the next election is only about two swing-states again.

This system totally works so long as you can take time off work to form a lobbying group -- this does not pass the sniff test to me.

Reminder that even in the scenario that constituents 100% support or 100% reject a policy, their opinions hold almost no statistical sway to their elected representative. It's actually worse than a coin flip.

It's only when you restrict your constituent demographic to just those in the top 10% of wealth (...like a professor in college for example...) that suddenly their voting decisions align to constituent opinions.

Look up "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens", this has been known for some time.

> I had a professor in college who was big on entrepreneurship. So he formed an organization, got others involved, went to Washington to lobby his rep. His rep said “let’s do it”, and sat him down with her staff to write a bill. That bill was brought to the floor for a vote and passed. Until you’ve done that, dont complain the system doesn’t work

This is a sign of the system not working. A well connected professor, with plenty of free time to form an organization and go to Washington to talk to his rep

Might as well be an industry lobbyist.

Could a worker from Walmart do the same thing? In theory sure. In practice unlikely, for any number of reasons. Not least because people are unlikely to take a Wal Mart worker seriously enough to join their organization.

The billionaires will blanket the airwaves with bad-faith argument ads and you will lose.

Except they only won because UK was too busy spending money on a way to stop the French.

Like 1812 when the Brits weren't busy with the French they easily came in and burnt the US capital as punishment for burning the Canadian one. It's not that the British army suddenly got a lot stronger; they just weren't busy fighting on two continents.

That said, civil disobedience is largely pointless. We're in a capitalistic society so money is the name of the game. Rosa Parks did shit-all; it was the boycott of the bus system for 9 months that made the buses cave.

Everybody who believes civil violence is a productive solution to any problems we have in 2026 is wrong. I don't see myself as having called anyone names; rather, I said that the point was so banal that the only conversation you're likely to see is from people who get dopamine hits from taking the edgy other side of the argument.

> Perhaps something to think about in a scenario like this. Personally I think it's interesting that some people are so quick to condone aggressive attacks on powerful people, yet have no comment on those powerful people committing lower levels of violence against the masses. It's all social context.

Can I just say that out of all of this discourse happening, this might be the most insightful yet succint position to explain my stance on all of this especially the "its all social context." line.

I feel like many of us here might share an answer publicly but I have always believed that if I am in the shoes of someone else, I might act the way they do so in a sense I understand the human part of it. A human did the violence and why. I understand that. Now we can call this violence inhuman, sure, but this action is still done by human and for many reasons. And I also understand why people condemn these actions, we wish to live in a clean and structural world and then we see the messiness of the world.

I just feel like just condemning an action would do nothing unless we change the ground conditions but that isn't in the hands of even many of us Hackernews users and this is basically a class aspect to it.

I personally feel like there are some similarities to this incident to the Trolley problem actually. Vsauce did a video about it worth watching[0]

Thank you for writing this comment.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA

only on this site would people need a neuroscience lecture to understand elements of human nature that are apparent to most elementary schoolers

I think you meant condemn, but otherwise, well said.

There's also the international angle here.

How is a person from a nation that the US President has threatened to annex or invade supposed to feel about seeing domestic violence in the United States? From their perspective a divided United States is less of a personal threat to them.

All this talk about how 'we can't have this in a democracy!' forgets that many of us don't live in that particular democracy, and that particular democracy is threatening other democracies.

What should my response be if a North Korean General is executed? Or if a Russian oligarch 'falls out a window'? Or a corrupt Mexican politician is beheaded by a rival cartel?

These American oligarchs aren't my countrymen, They don't have my best interests in mind, they fund the people who threaten my country, and now they provide the American military with technology that it can use to attack my country.

Their lobbying and campaign contributes have resulted in a Mad King waging an unwinnable war that has severely damaged the global economy and has made my life demonstrably worse. I have never done anything to these people and yet they callously did this to all of us for personal profit well beyond what any human being could never need in a thousand life times.

At the end of the day the less cohesive the American tribe is the better off my tribe is. I wish our incentives were aligned but they just aren't and I am not in any way responsible for that.

Before passing judgment consider that while you may have the privilege of posting from a country that's never had to fight for relief from tyranny, that's not necessarily the case for others.

You can't keep marginalizing people and expecting stability.

Here's your canary.

[flagged]

This is about propaganda regimes, as much as about whataboutisms. Both sides paint the other as violent. Which is more believable. Sad as though the answer may be.

Nope. Both sides are not equivalent. The political right, in the U.S., has been significantly more violent than the political left for quite some time. And it’s not even close. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/

Yet the difference remains, as does its decisiveness.

“I’m not right wing” “Antifa attacked a guy!”

I’ve got news for you, friend!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vig...