131–140 of 219 posts
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Cocaine triggers a dopamine response (simplified, I dated someone with an addiction). Is that a positive impact? Moderation is important, as in reflection as to why you’re enjoying something and if it's healthy.
If cocaine was free I think it'd have a tremendously positive impact.
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Those are PPP numbers, which means they are a total joke. The graph you post does not show the post war boom, nor does it show the productivity stagnation after 1973. The USA went from 3% per year productivity growth, before 1973, to 1.5% productivity growth after 1973. None of that is visible in the chart because the chart is using PPP numbers. But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on computers, and s…
> But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on computers, and so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to productivity? Just going by eye, there is a pretty sharp trend upward from about 1990-2005, which I think roughly corresponds to the period when the bulk of computerization happened in homes, offices, schools, as well as being put to use in many o…
The uptick in productivity between 1995 and 2005 is mostly attributable to 2 sectors:
retail
finance
In retail, it was the era of big boxes, lead by WalMart. Basically, it was the era when big retail learned how to take advantage of big databases to better manage inventory. Sadly, this did not seem to be the beginning of a sustained period of higher productivity trends. Rather, it was a one-off innovation.
In finance, much of the uptick involved HFT. Some economists feel this contributed to the crash of 2008, so how much we should celebrate this particular uptick is open to question.
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Itt: people being willfully ignorant about climate change. If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.
I make about 20% of what people claim the SV crowd earns. I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3. I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough. But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y…
Interesting. Have you described it in detail somewhere?
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> Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. So, not much then. For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades. Likewise, cheap clothe…
> For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades. How nicely should a consumer device be made? I feel like technological improvements make the device obsolete and disposable, so making the build quality higher just artificially slows down iteration time. (Why will 5G be widely adopted? Because eventually everyone will drop their 4G phone down the stai…
I think we should reject 5G as a community.
Not because any danger of radiation. But I think people should be able to say "This is enough", and stop ourselves to be forced to think "We need moar!", thus put some block to this progress for the sake of progress..
'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (…
Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…
You cannot really pay a man to "focus" (I mean, work passionately) on something, which is what exactly is required in these kind of things.
And I think this might be blocking our progress right now. Because people cannot work on things they are passionate about, because they are told to focus on this other thing, some other idiot thought they better work on..
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Science discoveries don't just happen because there are more people "competing" to solve a problem. The more likely outcome of what you're saying is that you'd only have more teams competing, sure, but to redo each other's work.
The replication crisis suggests to me that we'd probably benefit from lots of repeated work.
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I make about 20% of what people claim the SV crowd earns. I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3. I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough. But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y…
>My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to. Interesting. Have you described it in detail somewhere?
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Itt: people being willfully ignorant about climate change. If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.
I make about 20% of what people claim the SV crowd earns. I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3. I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough. But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y…
[1] One way to think about that is you force people buying new cars to be carbon neutral by paying to retire existing cars.
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I make about 20% of what people claim the SV crowd earns. I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3. I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough. But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y…
>My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to. Interesting. Have you described it in detail somewhere?
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This reminds me of Simpson's Paradox in the sense that it may be true that life is better for a single mother because modern appliances make life easier but it is also true that society has greatly increased the number of single mothers. In 1980 18% of births were to single mothers compared to 40% in 2020[1]. It's possible that the amount of single mother suffering has increased even though the suffering per single m…
Again, we can go deeper. How many single mothers would be forced to remain in otherwise abusive situations but for the fact that she is able to both work and care for her family due to “progress”?
https://ifstudies.org/blog/children-in-single-parent-familie...