Why turn this into a morality play?
I don't believe you would actually do this or you wouldn't make that comment, but either way don't do it to satisfy me.
> Why turn this into a morality play?
As I said, a lot of people are struggling and hungry. The point of the comment is to inject a little reality in to the idea that a $4,000 monitor is "worth it" because someone is at the computer a lot. But the marginal happiness of an HN user buying a $4,000 monitor instead of a $2,000 is very low, and there are other ways to spend extra cash. If you have extra money right now, consider donating it. It's cold outside and people need help.
Why get upset anyway? I think I made a fine suggestion. Someone could do what I suggested. Or not. You don't have to do it if you don't want to.
at least not when you wrote this:
> Don't do it because I am satisfied or not.
but for some reason you felt the need to edit it to:
> I don't believe you would actually do this or you wouldn't make that comment, but either way don't do it to satisfy me.
You should probably rollback the edit.
I'm from Ghana, I probably donate what you've donated in a decade every month to people who need it more than any American ever will.
And not just money, time. I don't go back home just to see my family after all, I've spent months of my time working with my father on his USAID project in the country. Is taking a 6 month unpaid sabbatical and giving up 200k in pay enough for our resident patron saint of the poor?
I grow reallll tired of people like this. People in the "1st world" who based on their virtue signaling you'd assume live like monks but in reality live in relatively cozy excess completely unaware of half the reality the actual downtrodden face.
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Semi-off topic but based on this comment I feel like you're exactly who needs to hear this. The degree to which virtue signaling has become an integral part of some people's sense of identity in this country is infuriating: It's not cold where I'm from, people still need help.
Getting giddy off slogans and token shows of kindness in one of the most privileged countries on earth...
Where I'm from "needing help" isn't a seasonal issue, and it's not even close to being as bad as it gets globally.
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> But the marginal happiness of an HN user buying a $4,000 monitor instead of a $2,000 is very low, and there are other ways to spend extra cash.
What a joke. Did it ever occur to you spending fractions of a percent more compared to what you get paid to sit in front of the damn thing is a marginal expense?
> Why get upset anyway? I think I made a fine suggestion. Someone could do what I suggested. Or not. You don't have to do it if you don't want to.
Because you have the audacity to talk so condescendingly based on someone's monitor choice. I couldn't resist replying in kind.
But other than that you’ve read too much in to me. My entire philosophy is that we must change the way our economy operates to eliminate poverty. I’m setting my own life up so that all of my engineering work goes to support this goal. Everything I do is open source so people all over the world can benefit, and I am learning how to operate an engineering project sustainably that can stay open source without needing to cave to commercial interests. The project I am learning this on is an open source farming robot of my own design, and I have sunk a fair bit of my time for free in to the project and earn less than half of what I did working at google. It was my idea to operate the project as open source, and to intentionally collaborate with people all over the world to make a design that can be fabricated cheaply anywhere.
Once I learn how to manage this community oriented engineering project, the next project will be large scale free hot meal producing machines. I want to make free meals the way the Sikhs do in India, where an army of volunteers cooks 50,000 free meals a day at a single location, and collectively across India their non profit NGO produces over 1.7 million free meals a day. I want to use my skills in automation and engineering management to make open source machines to do the work of those volunteers, and if I succeed we will open a demonstration facility in Oakland that can serve hundreds of meals a day, scaling hopefully to thousands.
You mention virtue signaling. But I am not here for signaling. I really do find it weird when people on here talk about how they’re going to spend all their money on themselves. And I make this mild suggestion that they consider donating their money because I want to see how people respond. I wasn’t condescending, I just said someone could buy cheaper and use their excess money to help the needy. We have a real problem with consumerism in the USA and it is destroying the planet. I think it’s worth making a gentle suggestion to donate. And invariably someone gets upset and makes a big deal out of it. So today that person was you.
But I’m working very hard to do my part. Sharing my work with all and trying to make it sustainable. I taught a robotics class in Mauritius to some students from Ghana, and Kenya and South Africa and Ethiopia and Morocco. When I design my farming robot I have them in mind. Once our design is operational I want to find people in Nairobi who can build them, and I will help them every way I can. Hopefully some day one of my students will be able to use it. A few of them really wanted to bring farming robots back home.
EDIT: This linked comment below really nicely sums up what I am getting at. I’m not saying a developer shouldn’t have a nice monitor but there is a point at which it becomes extravagant, and I really don’t understand why you’ve fixated on me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29708573
