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We don't need more art historians and event coordinators and other roles for which internships are unpaid. For every degree that actually results in positive return on investment (so, not most liberal arts degrees), internships are paid. Economics, biology, chemistry, business, statistics, law, these are all degrees that mostly have paid internships.

About the only place where you can reasonably say "we need more of these people" but is unpaid is legislative offices. And I agree, government should hire fewer but more highly paid and higher performing staff.

If what you're saying is true we'd see the number of rich decrease exponentially. That is objectively not the case.

> Where is that money coming from?

Not sure what you mean by this?

How does the fact that 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth within 3 generations gel with wealth being lost to other rich people? That doesn't logically make sense. If that was the case then there would slowly be ever fewer rich people who become ever richer. But if you look at the richest people in the world that isn't the case.

The idea that education (in terms of knowledge and skill acquisition) is zero sum is wrong. Educational equality starts with parents giving a shit about their kids' education. Why do you think Asians overachieve on every benchmark we have? Could it possibly be because there are cultural factors that motivate parents to care very strongly about their childrens' education?

America spends the most in the world per capita on our schools and has terrible results. It's clear that tossing more money into a black hole won't fix the problem.

Anecdotally, in high school I never heard any white/Latino/black friend joke about getting yelled at if they got a B.

> unpaid internships

You might want to take a look at levels.fyi. Internship salaries are higher than a lot of full time jobs nowadays.

> In fact most Americans over-estimate the amount of economic mobility that we have

Your link seems to say otherwise. If economic mobility were low then most rich families would not see their wealth meaningfully eroded for generations. This was the case in feudal Europe and many ancient empires like Rome. The fact that most families lose wealth in 3 generations due to mismanagement implies someone else is gaining that lost wealth - ergo economic mobility should be high.

Personally I feel the economic mobility afforded by high paying jobs and widespread capital in the US is unmatched. I started making more money than my parents by my junior year in college and genuinely feel like I have a non-zero chance at hitting 25 million USD net worth during my life. I have friends who have gotten millions of dollars in startup funding and have 10+ paid employees. You can't say the same if you live in Europe.

> Inflation is IMHO less harmful than real wage decrease or unemployment

For minimum wage workers and in general unskilled labor, this is just not true. Minimum wage workers can't afford to hedge against inflation by buying assets, and their income is artificially kept high by a price floor (minimum wage + legally mandatory benefits). When you inflate the USD their real income will drop to its true market value since the price floor doesn't move with inflation. Low paid workers also don't benefit from their debt reducing in real value because their nominal wage won't increase as fast as inflation due to the price floor I just talked about.

Government checks made sense in the beginning of the pandemic but the 2nd round of stimulus passed later on by reconciliation did not. At that point there was a vaccine and a strong economic rebound. You need only look at the popularity of Dogecoin, WSB, etc. to see that people did not actually need that extra round of stimulus.

Interestingly I feel California has gotten colder, especially southern California. It used to stay around 50-60 in winter, now we regularly go down to 30-35 lows and 35-45 highs.

I think this narrative is biased by your perspective as an enthusiast PC gamer (the PCMasterRace type of person). Oculus selling a console-like, works out of the box offering makes a lot of sense in pushing VR towards the mainstream. The existence of stuff like AirLink also points to strong demand from PC gamers as well. The only people complaining are the PCMR crowd who either dislike the focus on mainstream users (filthy casuals amirite?) or the fact that it's made by Facebook (somewhat valid, I suppose).

The market success of Quest 2 in comparison to Oculus PC-only headsets and the Index+WMR ecosystem makes it pretty clear which is the more appealing option to most people.

There was also an FTC filing associated with the Quest 2 face interface recall that disclosed US sales numbers in the millions as well. 10M devices is a reasonable number.

> Balance of payments data show that U.S. firms repatriated $777 billion in 2018, roughly 78 percent of the estimated stock as of end-2017 of offshore cash holdings

This is good for the U.S. economy compared to leaving it overseas. Even if it goes into share buybacks, higher asset prices mean businesses can afford to raise capital more cheaply and asset holders (retirees) gain an influx of cash.

There's no real reason offshore cash holders would invest their excess cash. If they could do so profitably and sustainably then they would've sold bonds at insanely low rates already to fund those projects. Creating more jobs is not as simple as tossing more money at the problem.

Induction is great but most budget apartments/homes are going to have resistive electric, either coil or glass top. These are objectively worse than gas for cooking, not least of which because you can't even lift up the pan 1 inch without losing heating completely. Glass top also has the problem of having to heat up a massive block of glass whereas gas heats up instantly.

If you've ever tried to make something that requires a hot pan (like a lot of Asian foods, or certain meats that you want to sear but not overcook on the inside) you know the difference is easily visible in the final result.

Most NIMBY cities (like NYC and SF) today no longer allow industrial buildings (like for example power plants or refineries) in their city limits. So yes, "how large America is" does end up mattering because electricity and gas and everything else ends up shipped 1-2 hours' drive away.

Certainly you can ask these questions but these are business process issues, not technical ones. They're unrelated to AI.

My personal take is you won't see any tangible movement on this until black women (or whatever group you choose) comprise a tangible proportion of revenue generating users. Corporations operate for money and nothing else.

The answer would probably be yes if that subgroup wasn't a large percentage of the dataset used for training and testing. Or if that subgroup wasn't a large percentage of the user base.

Come on, if you've worked at any large company using ML you know model performance is literally just taking the average accuracy/ROC/precision/etc over your training dataset plus some hold out sets. Then you track proxy metrics like engagement to see if your model actually works in production. At no point does race come into the equation. Naturally, if your choice of subgroup happens to not be a large proportion of either the dataset or the userbase then you don't see the poor performance on that subgroup show up in your metrics so you don't care to fix it.

No, remediating such issues (only predicting the maximum likelihood class in the dataset) is a problem of _machine learning and optimization_ research, not ethics research. There is nothing an ethicist can do to solve this problem. It is easy to point out problems with existing AI and write a bunch of papers to get yourself tenure. It is very hard to fundamentally advance our understanding of deep learning models past a fancy maximum likelihood estimation problem.

The meaning in woke terminology is more subtle than just "not white". For example Asians would likely be excluded in this case, and Middle Easterners and other minorities. "People of color" in this case means blacks and dark skinned Latinos.

The idea that AI itself can be biased (as opposed to the dataset) also has some significant problems. The lead of Facebook AI Research got canceled on Twitter because he pointed out that it's the bias in the dataset used to train the AI that results in bias in the AI and not the AI itself that's biased. I'd also question whether Gebru is a "widely respected leader in AI ethics research". Model interpretability is not even close to a solved problem so just because you can demonstrate some correlation between images of black people and worse performance does not imply that "black person" is a causative factor. It could literally be dataset distribution or image contrast or any number of other plausible explanations that are easily fixable by an ML engineer.

There is an abundance of capital chasing ever diminishing returns. I think it's at least somewhat likely there is little price elasticity on the sponsor cut and almost certainly a lot of retail investors who are irrational investing in these SPACs.

Too many people glorify staying at one employer for a substantial length of time. What people are doing now is what they should have done long ago: switch jobs if you're not comfortable with your work environment or pay. This also happens to re-calibrate your position in the job market so if you were being underpaid relative to the market you'll get a fair wage by forcing competition among employers.

It's being propped up by the Fed, which just announced their QE decision for the next 3 months or so today. That gives plenty time for an IPO.

Nobody wants to pay Bay Area rent to live next to drug addicts and piss smelling sidewalks.

Everyone I know in tech that was in SF has moved out of SF.

The article is about how an amalgamation of feel-good laws combined to destroy restaurants' ability to offer patio dining. Passing feel-good laws that have poorly thought out consequences is what California "progressives" do. That's why it's about how "progressivism" is destroying patio dining.

If this was about actual progressivism then you'd see any number of East Coast blue states mentioned, which they aren't.

It's honestly not surprising in my view. Wealthy "progressives" have always had a "rules for thee but not for me" attitude, whether it comes to homeless shelters, new housing starts, police funding, or affirmative action.

Hah, good luck paying for living expenses in the Bay Area with that kind of money. $1100 will get you a shack built in the 1920's with 3 roommates and drug addicts at your front door.

In the long run, having lower taxes from not paying for other peoples' educations is cheaper for you and for anyone with a useful degree.

I will take the example of my friend. He's at a no name company as a new grad software engineer making $96k. That is, he's working at a position attainable to everyone. That's $8000/mo pre-tax and he lives in a fairly LCoL area. $1000/mo for 5-8 years is peanuts compared to the extra taxes he'd pay for a lifetime under your idea.

If you consider it from the perspective of someone working at FAANG ($200k new grad salary) $1k/mo is even more trivial.

If you make universities responsible for student income outcomes (by for example making them take loan liability in case of default) that makes them steer students towards the CS degree, not the art history one.

You're talking from anecdotes, I'm showing you the objective statistics supplied by the state of California. One is going to give a more complete picture than the other.

> constant talk of student debt forgiveness

This is mostly because a lot of people got useless degrees that don't result in high paying jobs, not because of some intrinsic cost of education. The number of STEM degrees awarded [1] is far outstripped by non-STEM degrees in both number of degrees awarded and growth rate [2].

I am merely saying the current private student loan rate is 3-5%. It is not possible for substantial interest to accumulate at that rate, particularly if you factor in inflation (6.8% YoY this month...)

[1]: https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/sei/edTool/data/college-14.html [2]: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_310.asp

Objectively, from the statistics, that's just not the case. Average undergraduate student loan debt in public California schools was $23,600 in 2019 [1]. That is less than the price of most new cars.

[1]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...

Because for some students the debt is paid off quickly, so in the long run the lower taxes from the state not paying for everyone's education make that student better off. For other students with useless degrees, the consequences of their actions come home to roost with their debt.

That being said I do think student debt should be dischargeable in bankruptcy. As is the market for education is dysfunctional.

It aligns incentives between society and the student. If the student fucks around or majors in something useless, they're on the hook for it.

I'd gladly subsidize more STEM degrees with my taxpayer dollars but I won't give a single dollar towards underwater basket weaving type degrees. Every single humanities class I took in college was utterly useless. Advocates claim you're learning how to read and write competently but I learned that from business school, not sociology and history.