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You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

geohot.github.io

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Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#71

Post by sothatsit »

imiric wrote: post #36

I partly agree, but where this analogy breaks down, and what the neofeudal rulers are too shortsighted to realize, is that if lower classes don't have income to spend, there will be nobody to buy their products, and the entire economy collapses. Proposals to address this like UBI are a pipe dream.

The idea is that neofeudal lords would own fully automated systems to produce everything they need. They wouldn't need to make stuff to sell to us at all, they could just pursue their own goals. We would be irrelevant to them, other than a nuisance if we tried to get some of their resources for ourselves.

Imagine if you owned a million humanoid robots and a data center with your own super-intelligence. Would you produce doodads to sell to people? Or would you build your own rockets to mine asteroids, fortresses and weapons systems to protect yourself, and palaces for you to live in?

I don't agree that this is where we are headed, but that is the idea. Thinking about this in relation to our current economy is missing the point.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#72

Post by IshKebab »

HotGarbage wrote: post #21
vaughands wrote: post #8

This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this. It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email. It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#73

Post by rglullis »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #34

Honest question, if large portions of labor are automated or marginalized who ultimately buys the goods and services that companies produce? Markets depend on consumers having purchasing power. It seems economically rational to keep the average worker making just enough to afford goods and services over the long term. We can see this logic reflected at times in business history. Ford paid workers double the daily wag…

If you ask the authors of sci-fi dystopias: the corporations owning the means of production will get taxed just enough to keep their masses from starving, the aspirational 14% will ake whatever resources they have to buy shares of this coporation and get a slightly bigfer share of the pie, and subgroups on the elites will be giving perpetual checks on each other, attempting to take full control of the mountain top but never quite successfully doing it.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#74

Post by weinzierl »

fnoef wrote: post #7
d1sxeyes wrote: post #3

Hard to take seriously from a guy who has Facebook, Google, and Twitter on his CV.

I noticed an interesting pattern. People who “made it” usually by working high paying jobs for the neofeudal lords, suddenly gain moral compass and tell the rest of us to not work for said neofeudal lords, because “money is not important”, and apparently you can buy a place to live or food to feed your family simply by having principles.

I agree with your point, and superficially OP is a prime example.

Not to excuse the guy, but I think that, looking deeper, the situation with geohot is more involved. He grew up in a lower-middle-class household and was lucky to be a smart kid in a time when being a nerd could be a ticket out.

I guess not unlike many of us here on HN.

Unlike many of us, his explorations in the corporate world were all short stints. If I’ve kept tabs correctly, he never stayed longer than a year. Sometimes only for weeks.

Apart from that, I often take the pattern you noticed more as confession, penance, and a "tell your children not to walk my way" kind of message. Maybe I read this stuff too generously.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#76

Post by exceptione »

Markets needs regulation to keep them open. Monopolists understand that and thus they buy policy and sponsor narratives in order to abolish market regulation, or reach a "rules for thee, but not for me", or prevent incumbents from entering the market by means of Regulatory Capture. But capitalism needs competition. So they slowly kill their own lands, and thus they need to cross borders to keep eating.

If one feels morally compelled to pay with their own income to stop these parasites, hats of to them. It is nasty that people are being put in this position. They need support from a society. Society needs information and debate about real issues, which requires them to be free from the barrage of falsehoods and yellow journalism. And possible it would help to have a Roosevelt, but culture is the biggest hindrance to change.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#77

Post by teiferer »

HotGarbage wrote: post #21
vaughands wrote: post #8

This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this. It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email. It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable:

I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided.

I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily work from home.

None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.

Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#78

Post by camgunz »

IshKebab wrote: post #72
HotGarbage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: social media, advertising, surveillance. By working for them you are enabling this.

They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.

You don't think the political situation is a teensy bit worse now?

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#79

Post by rmunn »

I don't have enough time to explain the many reasons why that post is wrong, but some of them are:

- "In the future, when labor is fully marginalized..." Hasn't happened in the history of the world, not going to happen in the future either. Some forms of labor were replaced by machines, which then gave rise to new types of jobs, such as building and maintaining the machines. The human cost cannot be neglected, because many people do find it difficult to retrain to other jobs. But on the whole, there are more jobs and higher-paying jobs now than there were a hundred years ago. Higher-paying not just in absolute financial terms, but also in terms of what can be purchased with that money. The richest man of the 19th century couldn't buy an air-conditioned house, not with all his millions.

- "GPT$$$ is surely smart enough to separate you from whatever you have..." Assumes an unbounded growth curve in the "smarts" of AI, and worse than that, assumes that that AI will take the form of an LLM. This is laughable. LLMs will not ever achieve AGI; they are simply not capable of it. If AGI is achievable at all (which I doubt), it will come from one of the currently-neglected avenues of research whose funding is currently being neglected because LLMs are sucking all the metaphorical oxygen out of the room.

- "the neofeudal world": assumes that all companies are like that. Yes, there are many companies that suck to work for because they treat their workers as mere cogs in a machine, instead of as human beings. But not all companies operate that way. If you are being treated as a cog in a machine, start looking for opportunities to jump ship to a better working environment. I've worked in both types of places, and I would be willing to take a big pay cut to work for company that didn't treat me as a cog. They're out there, but it might take some looking. Tip: ask employees what it's like working for the comapny, don't just take the interviewers' word at face value.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#80

Post by rglullis »

pizlonator wrote: post #56

Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Such situations usually correct themselves violently.

Brazil would like to have a word with you.
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