371–380 of 394 posts
This whole notion seems to be based on a bunch of seemingly logical conclusions, but it’s also a very narrow view of the reality. Let’s just think for a minute about a single potentially confounding factor - every company has competitors. Those competitors are looking for every opportunity to climb past you, and they’ll be willing to hire humans to do anything a machine can’t. For example… a lot of people still prefe…
Graham will always defend founders "deserving" their wealth, as if it is some technical argument rather than a political one. It's an entirely subjective point. If a solo founder with some very powerful machinery (cloud, AI) produces a lot of economical value, it's quite questionable to attribute that value solely to the human being pushing the button. Even more so when that human has exclusive access to the key inpu…
http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2019.09.01/2253.htm...
This whole notion seems to be based on a bunch of seemingly logical conclusions, but it’s also a very narrow view of the reality. Let’s just think for a minute about a single potentially confounding factor - every company has competitors. Those competitors are looking for every opportunity to climb past you, and they’ll be willing to hire humans to do anything a machine can’t. For example… a lot of people still prefe…
Phone menus are not generally viewed as competitive advantages, I suppose, but we have them in plenty.
Would it be the standard chatbox case that competition for now is against hated menu trees, not against human beings?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>keeps declining Where? It's highest in the history in Poland, Germany, Italy and very close to the top in UK. US is the outlier, even there, it kept increasing after 2015 and just the pandemic dropped it. Even then it's higher than before 70s. Even in aging Japan it's very close to top.
US labor force participation rate has been dropping for at least 20 years. Lower birth rates means this is inevitable basically everywhere. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Not really, it generally means older people will work.
Paul Graham founded this site. How did it end up being so hostile to founders?
It's become a more general site for tech employees rather than founders. Notice how most of the comments are employees talking about how this kind of opinion affects them. To be honest, I don't know where founders reside these days, Indie Hackers was a good site but it has a lot of spam and people posting links with little discussion nowadays.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>keeps declining Where? It's highest in the history in Poland, Germany, Italy and very close to the top in UK. US is the outlier, even there, it kept increasing after 2015 and just the pandemic dropped it. Even then it's higher than before 70s. Even in aging Japan it's very close to top.
https://data.oecd.org/chart/6UQi It doesn't look as bad as I thought, but I suspect some national statistics are using evermore generous definitions of "participation". For example, people in higher education being included. That group is increasing as proportion of the population, especially in some European countries with laughably high official statistics.
The point about education does not make sense to me - the percent of higher education students in Poland is dropping in the last years, and the participation rate keeps climbing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to agree here. Automation increased the productivity of employees, and drove down the price of goods. It never truly 'reduced' the size of the workforce. The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world.
> The industrial revolution actually led to an increase in the size of the workforce. New qualifications were required to handle technically-complex industrial equipment instead of the simple production methods of the pre-industrial world. This is generally true, but also ignores a key difference. When processes first became mechanized and then industrialized, they we're fairly similar in their nature. Sure, they wer…
Using your example of a blacksmith upgraded to machine shop worker, then later upgraded to robotic machine shop worker. In the first upgrade, the blacksmith no longer needs to hammer iron as this is done by a drop press. The skill lost (big arms for hammering) is replaced by a many fold increase in productivity and a removal of many people alternating hammering.
In the second upgrade, using robots for production, you do need to learn some programming, but the programming is centered on such industrial applications. In modern cobots you don't need 3D math or almost any programming knowledge. You just need to give it a set of steps to follow and you can lead it by hand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iCLK__7ymY
As with most automation, the initial prototype is more cumbersome to use, but eventually it becomes a tool like any other.
This whole notion seems to be based on a bunch of seemingly logical conclusions, but it’s also a very narrow view of the reality. Let’s just think for a minute about a single potentially confounding factor - every company has competitors. Those competitors are looking for every opportunity to climb past you, and they’ll be willing to hire humans to do anything a machine can’t. For example… a lot of people still prefe…
> But the pressure to find a competitive advantage is often going to lead to hiring large numbers of people. Phone menus are not generally viewed as competitive advantages, I suppose, but we have them in plenty. Would it be the standard chatbox case that competition for now is against hated menu trees, not against human beings?
EDIT: Just astonishing that uses Instagram as an example. Quick question: After Facebook paid a billion dollars for it, did they a) continue to employ only 13 people or did they b) hire more fucking people in order to actually realize the potential of their investment?
EDIT2: Just saw that he also claims 'automation accumulating wealth in the hands of the ownership class at the expense of workers' contradicts Marx. Amazing. Paul, if you're reading this, please take an introductory class on Marxist thought at your local state college, or have your personal assistant take it and send you the notes.