711–720 of 896 posts
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Jobless people normally can't feed themselves in a modern world. And uh, healthcare. Among other things.
Exactly, so that problem needs to be solved. Labour and income should not be linked.
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I don’t know who his wealth was transferred from, exactly. But I do know what he’s using it for now: as a gravitational force to unilaterally screw with public institutions and systems the rest of us depend on. Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable. I’m honestly sick that my…
Musk's money came from creating a business that was worth a lot of money. I.e. he created his wealth. It was not transferred to him. The same goes for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc.
But if you come from “so much money we couldn't even close our safe” as his father put (quote from Wikipedia
Then you do have a leg up
Yes, and textile factories involved people "forgetting" how to weave. Whitehead: "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" It remains to be seen whether this implies some kind of constraint on human progress. I doubt it.
We're not talking about replacing "writing code", we're talking about replacing your ability to think about the problems critically at all.
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I feel like I have to disagree here. I don't practice e.g. multiplication or doing math in my head everyday or for years really, but I feel like I'm just as fast at it as I ever was. In fact whenever I have tried things like Lumosity or brain benching games, that I used to do when I was younger, I'm actually faster than when I was younger, despite not having practiced it at all. I feel like all the real world side pr…
Multiplication is elementary school math which doesn't require any thinking and the learned approach is simple. You can't really compare the simple stuff that's taught to kids, like basic multiplication or riding a bike with stuff that requires domain-specific knowledge and experience. Think more stuff like "find the angle of lines defined by (x-4y-1=0) and (x-y-2=0)", "write the number 2026 in base 7", "solve an equ…
> I plucked these from our country's high school final exam from this year. Back when I was in high school, I did mine in 60 minutes without an error when the time limit is 150 minutes and I intuitively immediately knew how to approach each task since the moment I saw it. Also all needed formulas are supplied, you don't need to remember any of them.
It seems like with just a little bit of doing it again, you'd be back at the level you were though. Especially if you can do it with formulas right. You would be slower for only a very short amount of time. All those things are in my view if you understood them at some point in your life, you will understand them to the exact same extent with just a little bit of reminding. I would say with most of those concepts, it would take less than 1 hour to be back at similar level. Like for instance number in another base etc.
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I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes ... so far. There is no guarantee it will keep working for the majority of us going forward; as is becoming very clear all around the world, it also has downsides especially without checks and balances (which was predicted and observed in the past, which is why other processes were conceptual…
> I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes... so far. Nobody has found a better process. Not even close. > As a trivial example It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it! Have you ever wondered why communist countries never exported products? Also, if you want better products…
Maybe, but as they say, "Past Performance Is Not Indicative of Future Results." The point was, this process may work up to a point, then it may work more against the interests of the population.
I mean, history is already littered with examples of the downsides of this process, like all the rampant anti-worker things profit maximizers tried to get away with that had to be fought literally with blood. Without that bloodshed it is highly likely the average standards of living of the general population would be much, much lower.
You don't even have to look at history, the process is literally playing out right now in various countries.
> It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it!
I thought enshittification was a pretty specific example? You can find the many articles written about the various ways things are degrading on the Internet with a Google search (the experience of which is probably an even more specific example in itself ;-))
I chose that example because I think it's a microcosm of this process: in the beginning, the profit motive creates great innovation and products. But at some point, like when the market is saturated or monopolized, the profit incentive creates anti-consumer dynamics because companies turn to extractive methods rather than innovative ones.
I don’t know, but the evidence shows that software engineering is not that deep of an art. People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.
Interesting take. We are not going to talk about Office, Windows, Adobe or Autodesk products here. Neither Linux kernel. Just classified ads or e-commerce platforms such as gumroad and shopify are complex enough that a single person cannot master them end to end. The domain is huge to master and takes a lots of time to master.
In manufacturing it so regular, that typically senior technical people retire as soon as possible to form their consulting firms and charge much higher rates, just by selling their multi-decade expertise back to their company.
In oil & gas, there are consulting firms that their role is to just store and provide domain knowledge to companies who lost their experts.
In tech, consulting firms provide cheap labor.
There will be always a room for good developers.
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A writer will never forget what adjectives, verbs, and nouns are. But if they use LLMs to write for them for years they will be worse at writing on their own.
Are we talking about observational ability, creativity, accuracy of communication or grammar here? There's many more ways to evaluate a writer skill in terms of what they are doing vs what is coding. Coding can be creative, but in most cases you are not evaluating coding as writing, unless it's possibly technical writing, which is still different compared to coding.
You are trading one skill set for another.
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You listed joke sources. Merkel, in particular, has been utterly discredited for her naivety toward Russia. Her sucking on Russian gas left Germany lagging in the transition to renewables and EVs, and the German economy is now paying a double price by also having to bear a part of the economic burden of the war. As to Russia, virtually no-one in Russian academic foreign policy circles, nor in the influential semi-for…
Sigh, joke sources. Burns and Kennan also, right? Anybody who actually understood Russians is a joke. Study a bit, and not only neocon think tank sources, but from the people who actually understood Russians (there are practically none left in recent administrations). Russians are paranoid, among other things, about nuclear decapitation strikes. For the same reasons, they have repeatedly explicitly strongly opposed m…
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Counter-examples are France and Japan. Democracies, electoral terms. High-speed rail that the world looks up to, investment in infrastructure everywhere. In France you have Grand Paris, a programme to transform the suburbs into denser housing and commercial space, a calculation and planning that INCLUDES public transport. And the green initiatives in France. These, transit, Grand Paris, and much more are initiatives…
Counter-examples are France and Japan. Democracies, electoral terms. A democracy doesn't prevent long-term planning if only the electorate appreciates long-term projects. Democracies can build stuff across parliaments if differences between parties aren't so overwhelming so as to the majority of them can agree on developing something even if the relative power of elected parties varies over terms. In a lot of countri…
Something like public transit that powers a region that's a sizable fraction of US GPD should not be a state affair in the first place. What Europeans have that Americans lack are perma-technocrats with a long term vision that are entrenched in power.