You have to judge it client by client though. Some are amenable to and grateful for a flatly stated analysis and recommendation, even if it goes against their ideas. Some will feel belittled and undermined. You need both sorts to pay their invoices and refer their peers, so you pick your battles.
This has always frustrated me. You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!
The 'problem' (it's a problem from my pov) is that clients simply think they know better when it comes to digital/computer/online stuff. They're used to browsing the web, so they think they know what a good website is. They know how to write a letter in MS Word, so they think they can write good web copy. Etc.
> You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!
It happens more than you'd think, even in the HN comment section! Go to any thread where the topic is medical or diseases. Plenty of people distrust their doctor and advocate going to the doctor with your own crackpot theory you "researched" on WebMD. There's a huge anti-credential streak, even here. A lot of people see professional service providers of all kinds as "mere gatekeeping implementors of my own ideas" rather than experts in the field.
A lot of it is internal politics. As a consultant, you see the tip of the iceberg. There may be rational reasons for seemingly irrational decisions that you're not privy to. Your contact's boss wants it done some particular way, so your contact insists on doing it that way. Or your contact has recommended doing it some way internally, and they don't want to be made to look a fool by an outside consultant. Etc.
There’s a site that collects stories about experiences like this. It used to be called Clients From Hell, but got absorbed into a bigger site, called Not Always Right[0]. I suspect some of the stories are apocryphal, but it can be entertaining.
> This has always frustrated me. You wouldn't go to a doctor, hear that you need an appendix removed, and feel "belittled and undermined"!
Many people absolutely do. Hell, look at the number of people who refused to take a safe and effective vaccine during a pandemic!
> The 'problem' (it's a problem from my pov) is that clients simply think they know better when it comes to digital/computer/online stuff.
I must also say there is definitely a reasonable point to challenge your doctor. While they're an expert, they're still human. As a software engineer, I expect my non-expert colleagues to challenge me, and I've come up with better ideas as a result.
As a real-life example, I'm currently trying to get treatment for my Morton's neuroma (foot-nerve issue). The orthopaedic consultant wants to do a neurectomy but I want to investigate alternatives before taking the leap. Why? The alternatives, while they may not work, won't make things appreciable worse, whereas a neurectomy has a 3-6 month recovery if it goes well and can't really be undone if it goes wrong.
In content intended for an audience of developers, it's reasonable to assume "special developer access" means access for special developers. If the audience is the general public, it would be sensible to interpret it as "special access for developers," in contrast to the normal sort of access most other people use.
Growth is much easier with mass immigration than mass emigration, regardless of if those crossing either direction are skilled or unskilled.
And the UK welfare system isn't all that good. I'm a landlord, and at one point a letting agency told me they refuse to deal with anyone on the welfare system because it's simply too difficult to actually get the council, who are supposed to pay, to actually pay. The necessity for food banks is another big hint that the government system isn't covering basics.
(As in: migrants will be asked to prove entitlement, it won't be assumed).
If you moved to the UK for work, you're paying twice for the NHS, because not only is it supposed to be covered by national insurance contributions, but there's also an NHS immigrant surcharge: https://www.gov.uk/healthcare-immigration-application/how-mu...
States such as California were allowing them access to Medi-cal, their version of medicaid. Many get free housing- NYC entered into a $980 million dollar contract to house people in hotels.
Federally, no, they aren't getting assistance, but it's all a slush fund as money flows back and forth between local and the federal governments anyway.
California also has, like, the 4th highest GDP in the world. Take complaints about their money mis-management with a grain of salt - of course people from economically failed states like Louisiana and Tennessee are going to tell you California has all these problems. PS - I live in the South.
The US guarantees ER health services regardless of citizenship or ability to pay. They also get free public education (with all the burdens of being non-english speaking).
They pay taxes (in Texas) through gas, property and sales taxes which fund much of the state.
Yes, immigrants are a critical component of several industries like healthcare.
Legal permanent residency/work visas should be easier for skilled workers who want to work in high demand jobs. And all wealthy nations should be more wary of unlimited, unchecked economic migration by poorer populations.
(IOW it's complicated)
I think social media is at least as big a cultural weapon against us, and if I had to choose between deport/imprison a small number of business and political leaders who abuse that weapon or four million undocumented US residents, I would choose the former.
What tangent? pjc50 was responding fairly directly to points in the comment he replied to. Who was in turn replying directly to his comment. Which was a direct reply to the next parent up. Which was expressing surprise to immigration being present at all in a root level response to a story about UK use of VPNs.
Veen made a comment about US ICE suggesting that political positions limiting immigration are a backdoor to human rights violations as a matter of fact, and suggesting that immigration has nothing to do with the push for more surveillance.
My comment was responding to that and to pjc50's reply.
Veen was in reply to pjc50, who also did not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44712105 — "they've seen US ICE snatch squads and internment camps and decide that they want some of that here."
("here" can be read as either being "the UK" or "all places outside the USA", but the one place it can't be read as is "the US" because the US already has that).
• Los Angeles County General Relief (“GR”, undocumented adult) $2,348/yr
221 × 12 ≈ $2 650; actual monthly household max 2 adults = $442 (LAC DPSS 2023 schedule). Family with kids rarely gets full GR cash, so book 50 % = $2 348.
-------- Food
• CalFresh for 3 citizen kids $8,940
Max allotment for 3 children household = $780 / mo × 12.
Housing-subsidy value (Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher)
• Local Payment Standard (3-br in Central LA, 2024) 28,640
FMR $2 655 / mo × 12. Actual voucher covers 26 600 after utility allowance; market-value differential is tax-free.
-------- Medical care (only the kids qualify under “Restricted Medi-Cal”):
Is this actually what a typical immigrant is getting, or did you just pull this straight out of your ass? Who is actually getting these benefits to this degree? Do we not understand that it's very difficult to apply for a lot of these and most people don't know how to do it?
Also, elephant in the room: California has the 4th highest GDP in the world. Clearly, what they're doing is working. So well that they provide what, 1.5x more federal dollars than they take?
I mean, Louisiana doesn't provide jack shit to nobody. And how's their economy holding up? Anybody check on them recently? Last I checked, despite providing fuck-all, Louisiana isn't even breaking even with federal dollars, let alone touching California's 1.5x ratio.
Yes, and the impact of poor governance tends to fall disproportionately on the less wealthy, which may be why poor people more often support the authoritarian who promises to give them a better life (regardless of whether those are empty promises).
I just use commas or semi-colons where I would have previously used em dashes. It's annoying to have to adapt to avoid triggering people's faulty AI slop pattern matching, but the alternatives are perfectly fine.
It's more that a human author has had an experience and writes to communicate it to other people. They have objectives that make sense in human contexts. They have learned things, run into issues, solved problems, developed arguments, evolved their understanding, felt emotions, considered and rejected actions, and integrated those recent experiences into a lifetime of experience. Then they order and condense all of that into a form that communicates it effectively to other experiencing beings.
LLMs, in contrast, experience nothing. When they "write", they are not even vaguely approximating what a human writer does.
Really? To me being conservative means more or less agreeing with the thinking of people like Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and so on. None of those would have supported the Democrats in their current state, but nor would they have supported Trumpian populism.
Please reference the specific values you're invoking to make a coherent argument. Referencing people is a setup for a Motte and Bailey and talking past one another. This especially applies when the first two people on that list lived over a century ago, making it so that views that could appropriately be called conservative during their lifetimes are likely reactionary/revanchist in the modern day.
I invite you to read them yourself — or their equivalents from your own country. Conservatives are by nature culturally specific. I'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything. Just giving a counter example to the claim that conservative is synonymous with radical reactionary populism. It is not. Donald Trump is no conservative.
It seems like we're mostly agreeing in a roundabout way. The original context was using the label "hard right" in 2025 and the comment I was responding to equated that with conservative. But if you're "hard right" in 2025 America but still continuing to call yourself a conservative, you're basically abusing the label as a dishonest cover for a radical agenda.
I most certainly understand and respect there are political views that don't map well to the two party system. So with that context the last bit of my original comment is more like if you are actually conservative and trying to express yourself within our current two party system, you're voting Democrat. The whole party most certainly isn't conservative, but there is a large moderating establishment that makes its overall results align much more closely with conservatism than what's currently being offered by the Republicans.
That's what happens when lots of very smart people dedicate their working lives to devising schemes and systems that push people towards making bad decisions. There's a lot of money to be made influencing people to act against their own best interests.
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