DubiousPusher

Yeah. I think that a lot of these changes after 1940 are much more to do with socio/political factors than growth. By 1940 you have the GDP to support a middle class. It's the collective experience of the Great Depression, WWII and the rheotric of the New Deal that produce a populace that just wouldn't put up with significant imbalance in the riches of society.

People who fought in and justified WWII contrasted it with WWI. The claim being that WWI was a war fought on behalf of the old world system. And WWII was a true war for Democracy. I think it would've been very hard after that kind of mobilization, sacrifice and rhetoric to re-instute the Gilded Age ethos of a system which the rules of the game were sacred about the outcomes.

In this way American Democracy is born of the FDR era. I don't mean this in the narrow sense of the size of the electorate though that is important. At every level, America's systems Democratized. From the way the Supreme Court interpreted the law, to the choices of industry in what to produce, to how the rewards of production were distributed. There was a broad transition from the notion that institutions existed to maintain rules towards a notion that these institutions in their largest sense needed to serve the people.

I think a lot of what has happened since 1970 is a transition back to a way of looking at the world through the pre-democratic lense. The biggest difference being that now there is a plurality which is the upper half of the middle class who have some similar interests to the wealthy in protecting their wealth.

I recommend checking out the fantastic, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth". The book provides very strong evidence that the era of American growth which produced our modern standard of living starts in 1870 and actually ends in 1940, though there was also an era of less important but still strong growth from 1940-1970.

Furthermore, this is a bit of a counterfactual as we don't actually know the trajectory of technology without the war. Some thing we know for certain though, mass electrification and public health were well underway before the war and continued through it. These being probably the two most important developments that improved productivity and the quality of life for most people.

I think it's complicated. I don't think Butler believed that every single war was unjustified. When reading 'War is a Racket', you have to look at the context of war in which we lived. He was too young to fight in the American Civil War. So his consistent experiences of war were those fought in America's most blatantly Imperial phase. Even compared to Vietnam, Iraq, etc, the wars of the turn of the century were cravenly driven by capital and imperial ambitions.

And to that matter, some of what brought the U.S. into the orbit of WWII was a lower key version of the kind of foreign policies of that earlier era. Disrupting Japanese interests in Asia was very much about economic benefit and power balance in the mode of realpolitik.

And in the end, the Roosevelt administration remains unique in American history for how hard it pushed against colonialism. Truman was much more aligned with British interests in this way than FDR. So while the war is justified in the name of stopping two monstrous regimes, its precursors and its aftermath do carry a fair amount of the same taint that Butler thoroughly observed in his time.

> standing armies

Armies yes. Standing, not so much no. Human history is 100,000-200,000 years. That would be < 3% of human history. To do this, humans had to invent pre-feudal client/vassal networks of specialized food producer and warrior classes. This for the very reason that most humans had to spend most of their time in the act of producing food.

> We can fill our stomachs in 5 minutes

That is not at all now it has gone for most of human history. Feudalism and its ancient world precursors, an entire religious-social-economic system of vassalage, was necessary concentrate the tiny bits of surplus food into long standing specialized military forces.

I imagine that they will go after the source. Basically Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft will have to hide the app in their respective stores for Montana users. That is, if there isn't an injunction before it even goes anywhere.

This is why the "legislating from the bench" criticism always fell flat for me. America's legislative branch has been deadlocked for 40 years. History abhors a power vacuum. When one exists, the neighboring institutions will bend and stretch to fill it, distorting themselves and the whole power structure in the process.

US needs an open software and open hardware mandate.

How recently have you used a government website? Most of them are pretty good. They often don't look great but they're usually highly functional. And the ones that do get modernized are actually usually quite good.

We are once again at the limits of the illusion of ownership. We take for granted that ownership is real. But it is not real. It is an illusion. A profoundly helpful illusion if we believe the mainstream narrative about Western culture. But an illusion nonetheless. And it is only natural that we will encounter the intrusion of reality into that illusion. The question is whether we will extend the metaphor to encompass this new deviation or whether we will not. The American system can usually be counted upon to do what is in the interests of business. But this conflict puts business against itself so it is not clear how things will turn out.

I don't think that was the case when ITER was conceived or started. The flood of fusion news we see is relatively recent.

And to be perfectly frank, a lot of it bursts onto the scene with sensational claims, never to be heard from again. At the end of ITER, there will be a thing. And probably, it will do most of what it was projected to do. We can't say the same for almost any of these other advances, compelling as they may sound.

Lastly, I'll point out this. "Breakthroughs" are rarely made in isolation. Are you so sure that without the billions that have gone into Lawrence Livermore, ITER and such that these other "breakthroughs" would even be happening? If there is no market for nuclear engineers, there will be fewer nuclear engineers. There's fewer people to bounce ideas off of and peer review your work. There's fewer people to come up with the small innovations that add up to a big result. There's fewer colleagues to get you that next gig where your team might beat a hard problem.

Erase it and do it iteratively like any sane person!

Kidding aside, I'm more talking about the kinds of large procedures common to C++ codebases. These involve many sequential state changes which leave lots of opportunities for not initializing things and the like when the right set of conditions are met. The more paths available through this kind of code the more likely it becomes we'll create a bad one and fail to anticipate the conditions which trigger it.

Is it though? Like, if I see a lot of nested "ifs" with "returns" sprinkled around, I'm getting "icky" vibes way before I intellectually know what is wrong.

Like, I don't think you can get away with just typing "code smell" in a CR. That's lazy but the gut reaction to some code can be a useful starting point.

> The best programmers I know

But are the "best programmers" the best judges of such things. I often find they are not because they often understand their tools in a way that is incomprehensible to others. I've seen many junion engineers fizzle into disfunction because they are paired with "one of the best programmers". I've seen "the best programmers" adopt tools and patterns that cannot survive their departure because they are too complicated and too specialized for anyone else to own.

> rarely see things as 100% good or bad.

For me, I held this view most strongly when I was an intermediate programmer. I quickly moved into the "every tool for its job" phase after the "the things I learned with are best" phase.

But as I've become an advanced programmer, some of my opinions have become much stronger. For example (and this is just an example I don't want to argue about this) I currently see "the self initializing singleton" as pretty much a 100% bad pattern. This because my experience has taught me that not knowing when something is going to get setup is a weakness, not a virtue. This is an opinion I was actually incapable of developing as an intermediate programmer because I had not yet encountered the myriad of annoying bugs that come from ambiguities of initialization. I just respected the "ease" and "cleverness" of the pattern.

If you like this, I recommend Hacker's Delight. The first chapter goes into bit twiddling in depth. It ends with some explanation of what all can be expressed in bit-wise operations, a sort of Fundamental Theorem of Bit Twiddling.

This is one of those all too common misunderstandings of how engineering works. There's some idea that once designs and theory are done, that engineering is some kind of straight forward act of stamp collecting and that the best thing is always to wait until the problems are worked out on paper before we start to build.

But in fact the engineering itself is exploratory. And often times, to understand something, you just have to start building.

That's what ITER is about. When the project started, we had gone about as far as theory and design could take us. You can see the same thing with other unproven fusion designs getting underway as well including the one at Lawrence Livermore.

Watching MOON like it's a documentary.

Just maybe the trajectory of some of tech's most hyped companies has had some impact on this: WeWork, Palantir, Theranos, Uber, etc?

Nor does unbounded positivity and optimism.

> isn't this something that can be more or less corrected by a lot of engineers finding work elsewhere?

In the long run sure. But in the short run, employment is sticky. Especially in the professional world.

> Microsoft has been bleeding talent for the last 5-6 years due to low compensation.

I have been hearing this for awhile now. When I compare MS pay and benefits to what is on offer at other companies, almost the only jobs I see with better TC are at Meta and Google. And that will likely not be a thing of Meta's future.

I think the bigger costs are/will be associated with AI plays. I would guess MS is protecting the war chest for some bidding wars.

> this is an EXCELLENT decision. It really is a _lazy_ method to handle layoffs

That's one way to see it. You could also see it as a tremendous blunder. The people who will "self-layoff" are not the low producing team memebers. These are the people who know their value and have competitive even better offers elsewhere. You just took anyone with a modicum of ambition, skill or talent who was already contemplating a move and gave them a big ol' nudge to do it. People who are low producing will put up with what they have to. They may complain but they won't self select out.

Patrick Wyman's, Tides of History podcast has done a lot of episodes on this and is a great introduction.

Yale's introductory Greek history class with lectures from Donald Kagan is available online and part of it covers the Mycenaean empire and its fall.

Stories like this make me really miss, the "Reply All" podcast and its "Super Tech Support" segment.

Sam Altman is the worst mistake of the tech industry.

edit: Like, I'm only half snarky. He ran like one ok company and then got pretty much coronated into OpenAI.

edit: edit: Like really. It was a company that let you share your phone location. Revolutionary unicorn to the moon on steroids for sure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt

Why didn't I think of this? I should be making up things which I pay him unrealistic amounts of money for in order to teach him that work is about being an extractionist sponge rather than trying to find a way to make a meaningful contribution in exchange for a social/economic reward.

He both wants to work and wants money, like most humans.

That aspect does. Yes.

I can't speak for Iowans but it looks very close to what has happened in my home state of Montana. That is, the Republican party has very successfully bonded a functional plurality to itself mostly via the culture war. In Montana this isn't just about your wedge issues like abortion. Particularly there's a long standing animice towards people who move there from California. This goes back to the 90s, long before it became an internet meme. Californians serve as an abstract outgroup that a pundits can pin any absurd or unpopular cultural issue on whilst creating a contrast to "real Montanans" whose character and interests conveniently align with all the pundit's favorite policies. For many of the voters in this plurality, what goes on on the business side is secondary to these culture war and identitarian issues.

This is compounded over time because as the empowered business interest of the party break down the social programs which were the product of a historic culture of community and combination, voters endure real deprivation and feel the pressure and anxiety from that deprivation. But instead of turning against the party and the business interests, they again find their antagonist in the culture. That is, everything has become so expensive and hostile and competitive not because of the growth of financialization and creeping capital but because of a decline in character.

These people are so saturated with culture issues that they cannot see how the very thing they are in bond with, business, is destroying the things they claim to care most about: families, communities and generosity. I am not being condescending when I say that they find themselves able to blaim skyrocketing medical costs on the fact that you cannot pay a doctor in eggs and butter anymore. (Something almost none of them ever did btw. Even in Montana that was a thing of the past by their time. But I have literally heard this argument and many of a similar for. on trips to my home state.)

Here's a rational argument. Roofing in particular is one of the most dangerous, demanding and environmentally harsh trades in the construction industry. Just as there is an age below which most children's bodies are not ready to begin heavy weight lifting, there is an age below which most children's bodies are not prepared to handle roofing.