> Honestly though, the biggest impact I've seen across my friends has been what's happened to art commissions
Given the author's eccentricities, when I read "art commissions," I immediately suspected they really meant "furry porn art commissions." Then a few paragraphs later:
> A friend of mine runs an image board for furry art. He thought that people would use generative AI tools as a part of their workflows to make better works of art faster. He was wrong, it just led to people flooding the site with the results of "wolf girl with absolutely massive milkers showing her feet paws" from their favourite image generation tool in every fur color imaginable, then with different characters, then with different anatomical features. There was no artistic direction or study there. Just an endless flood of slop that was passable at best.
> That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, or growing - is no longer a "profitable enterprise"? I don't understand this statement. These things aren't unprofitable. Doing these things a specific way is unprofitable. Growing food is most certainly profitable; but only at scale. Is it sad that a small, family farm isn't really a great way to make a living nowadays? Sure. But that…
The replicator in Star Trek doesn't seem plausible to me any more. Flawlessly outputting a cup of Earl Grey? The computer-based drinks machine onboard the Heart of Gold on the other hand… Trying to order tea there now sounds suspiciously like a bout of futile prompt-engineering; trying to goad an LLM into giving you tea, but ending up with something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
And if you phrase your question wrong, you have a chance of triggering a Chain of Thought process that gets stuck in a loop "analysing" some utterly irrelevant part of the problem (here, "why would anyone want to order tea?"), locking up important subsystems of other systems on the network in the process.
There are a lot of issues brought up in this post, but I want to discuss one in particular: technological progress and its economic and societal ramifications. We can say that technological progress occurs when a new method is employed to deliver a product or service with some "more desirable" blend of qualities: it's created/delivered faster, cheaper, with a more desirable mix of resource inputs, and/or results in a…
> a bunch of consumers have decided that they'd rather pay less for a shirt or shoe that will fall apart faster than more for one that lasts longer
They don't know it'll fall apart faster, to begin with… and then by the time they do, they've already spent enough of their clothes budget that they can't afford to buy proper cloth, and it's hard to find that nowadays anyway, so they'll just have to buy more of the low-quality stuff.
With all due respect, and I mean that sincerely as you've accomplished far more than I have, you aren't here for debate. Your viewpoint is stuck in the cold war mentality where Soviet communism was a failure (it did, but that doesn't mean that everything they touched was bad) and America and its brand of Free Market capitalism is perfect (it isn't) and responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall for a…
All attempts at communism failed. Did you know that there have historically been 20,000 communes founded in the US? I wonder what happened to them! I never said American free markets were perfect. They certainly aren't. But they are very successful. > responding to your comments is like talking to a brick wall I could say the same of the people I respond to! I don't expect to change anyone's mind here. The average st…
I would consider co-op businesses a form of small scale communism, and they have steadily been growing in number for many decades with both workers/owners and customers praising them.
I also would consider many nation level communist movements that are held up as examples of failed communism to not really represent basic communist values very well at all, and to be mostly a thin PR cover for changes and turnover within the ruling class. Its not like the USSR was actually paying fair or equal dividends to the working class citizens who they claimed owned and controlled the country, the vast majority of the wealth, power, and control was still mostly diverted to a small class of elite.
Profit motives are a relatively recent phenomenon, though, and are often erroneously cited as analogous to efficiency gains (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary). > Even food is not able to escape this hole: it's not profitable to manually cultivate food anymore if you wanted to do that as a career. Does this not horrify you? That the foundational discipline of humanity - nutrition via hunting, gathering, o…
What are you talking about? Inexpensive food is a boon to society. Cultivating food the 'old fashioned way' is incredibly labor intensive. We now have machines that allow us to cultivate far more food with far less labor. For example, in 1900 corn took 38 hours/acre to plant/cultivate/harvest. In 2000 it took about an hour. The yeild per acre has also improved 3x-5x in that span, so the time per bushel has decreased…
I find that 38 hours per acre for corn figure a bit inflated as someone who use to plant 2 acres of corn each year using a 1901 corn planter and harvesting it by hand with my father. It never took the two of us more than a day to harvest the entirety of the corn, store it in our corn crib, and bundle all the corn stalks, while working at a fairly leisured pace. Tilling, fertilizing, and planting only took a day and only required one person for the first two, granted we did use a 1940 farmall tractor, but like I said its not like we were working at any real speed trying to get it done as if we needed it to survive. It was just a cheap and easy way to get corn to fatten up a cow or two before slaughter. It is also an absolutely miniscule amount of work compared to the amount of food it produced. Using 1900 corn yields (we didnt actualy weigh our own yields), it was over 3,000 pounds of corn, and it was likely much higher growing a more modern variety. Going by bulk grain corn prices at the local Tractor Supply the value rivals or exceeds the average local wage, and if it was sweet corn would surpass local wages multiple times over, so doesn't seem like a bad deal at all.
Doesn't every nationwide firm engage in central economic planning?
Yes and no. A large national firm like Starbucks has a national annual plan. However, this national plan is made up of a lot of little regional plans which are then combined together. This national plan is then executed. Execution relative to plan is assessed every quarter; and every quarter the plans (both national and regional) are adjusted. This assessment and these adjustments are done at both national level and…
Were the Soviet Union plans not also made of the plans of individual regions? (did you ever wonder what the Soviet Union was a Union of?)
That’s not what the Luddites wanted. They praised the technology itself and recognised it would save a lot of time. But they also recognised that they the workers wouldn’t reap any of those benefits, they’d just lose their jobs. Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? If so, you are incredibly naive.
The workers did reap the benefits. The Law of Supply and Demand ensures it. 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs. When wages are raised by the government, job losses happen. 16,000 to 36,000 people lost their jobs when California raised the minimum wage for fast food workers. > Do you really think capitalists would choose to shorten the working day with no loss of pay as productivity increases? Durin…
> 1.1% of the US labor force works at minimum wage jobs.
Far too high. Abject failure. The US's minimum wage is approximately the wage where you could work 24/7 and break even. Anyone working at that wage is in a very bad situation or someone else is paying all their bills.
> if you track employee total compensation (not just wages) against productivity increases, the two lines form the same curve If you count inflation in medical and housing costs as an increase in wages, the "wedge" disappears, yes -- but why would you do that for any other purpose than making the wedge disappear? No, it's very telling that labor saving devices, which have squished the largest industry into economic i…
employers pay for the massively increased medical costs directly though? Its not hard to see that when medical costs increase by 6-10% they would hesitate to increase wages
Put it this way: If the government increases my tax by $10k per year and my employer increases my gross salary $10k per year in response, did I get a pay raise?
Also, it's known that as medical prices rise, the percentage of the prices that insurance actually pays goes down. Are you sure they're paying more?
Also, why do countries with universal healthcare have such cheaper healthcare of a similar quality?
> I don't believe it is and writing off the rebuttal is akin to "well it's boiling, just trust me". Which would be a fair counter-argument to have if so many of you (and people like you) weren't also trying to drag those of us looking to escape back into the fucking pot . If you want to sit and boil, fine, but for chrissakes let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that. Your staunch re…
> let those of us who wish to try anything other than boiling alive go do that Ok? Who is stopping you? Nobody here is prohibiting you from continuing to write code by hand and doing whatever you wish. Certainly if you're going to assert that that's criminal, of course I'm not interested in your vinegar.
Life would certainly be easier if we could all choose which things done by other people affect us and vice versa. Then we could have these simple "if you don't like it, leave" arguments hold water and air pollution wouldn't exist and herd immunity wouldn't be a thing and we wouldn't even need police.
> The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury. Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA . > and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to t…
> Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part The article says clothing was passed down generations. > Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear What if the father's clothes don't fit the son? Now you have to choose between feeding your cows and buying a shirt.
Cloth of any decent quality is not hard to alter to fit, often clothes were made with extra material with the expectation of being altered likely multiple times to fit different people.
Also people did't really buy cow feed at the time, they were grazed on nearby fieldgrass in the summer and fed harvested hay grasses from their own fields in the winter. And it doesn't take all that much work to use a scythe to cut literal tons of grasses. With just a minimum of practice you can cut 2-3 acres of grass a day without straining yourself, provided you are fit, which any pre-modern farmer would be.