danans

> They lost. So why did it still cost us $400 million?

Did the article provide a direct answer to this? I see the $20M delay payments to contractors and the rise of labor costs cited, but is that all?

> assuming we're all 10x more productive - we'll still be working 5 days and enjoying 2 days a week, but we'll consume 10x more, or everything we consume will be 10x higher quality

Who is "we all"? To me, it sounds like the relative few who happen to have those jobs that have the 10x productivity boost but also receive the monetary upside (via ownership).

The rest of the hard-to-automate jobs will likely see their wages crater as the workers whose jobs got automated flood those labor markets - i.e. office worker turned skilled physical laborer.

This will further enrich the previous small group relative to the masses, as they will pay lower prices and receive higher quality goods and services due to competition between everyone else. Prices will fall not by miraculous AI robots but by squeezing labor.

This is the scenario - neofeudalism - that may await us absent strong mechanisms to replace the broad productivity redistribution the social technology known as "jobs" provided. Hardly a good thing.

> The middle ground is integrated solar panels, where you have normal sized panels but they are flush with the rest of the roof and there are no tiles underneath them

Flush with the rest of the roof seems like a mistake. What if you need/want to replace them with a different sized panel?

> "California completely drought-free for 1st time in 25 years after winter storms"

California is like 5% of the land mass of the contiguous 48 states.

Just because it is out of a drought doesn't negate the article.

> A123 bankruptcy giving China its EV industry

For those who aren't aware, A123 made the batteries for the GM EV1, which GM famously killed after killing the CA clean air regulation that gave rise to it.

Money is a proxy for other things. In the places where meta has offices, the cost of living (housing, childcare, healthcare, etc etc) is so high that working for a company that pays like Meta can be the only way many can afford it all.

It's hard to expect people to sacrifice a comfortable non-extravagant lifestyle for principles.

Are there some purely money-centric lambo loving single sociopaths at companies like Meta? Sure.

However,there are probably many more employees who are not thrilled about the company's business model but dependent on the pay, while living in a system concentrates wealth and access to both capital and doesn't guarantee or make affordable the aforementioned basics of modern life.

Hopefully many of them wake up to the folly the system that makes u like Meta (or Apple, Google, etc) effectively gatekeepers of a good standard of living, but until then it's hard to question their motivation for working at these companies "for the money".

> This is frustratingly one-sided writing

Tangential, but by being that, it's also refreshingly human writing, vs the both-sidesy bullet listed AI pablum that's all around us these days.

I have zero take on the subject matter, but I like that the article had a detectably human flair.

And if it was AI written, god help us.

> Look at e.g. General Mills, based in a blue state, but a great deal of what they buy are ag inputs from red states.

Are the businesses from who they buy ag inputs in the red states not compensated at market rates for the raw materials they provide?

Do the red states also not receive massive taxpayer funded farm subsidies for the corn and wheat they grow from the federal government?

Minnesota's GDP is higher because it has a larger population and a more diverse and greater value-added economy than it's its ag focused neighbors.

It's GDP per capita is actually lower than its very sparsely populated neighbor, North Dakota, but the economic power of a jurisdiction ultimately comes from its population*productivity.

> There is not overall any sign that poor people, as a whole, have increased criminality; other factors like culture are far stronger.

"Criminality" is too broad a characterization. It covers both assault and petty theft. I never said the poor are more criminal as a group than any other group.

People in poverty are more likely to commit petty theft out of need. Similarly, people who are very wealthy are more likely to commit large scale tax evasion out of greed. Both are financial crimes, but they are not committed equally by both groups.

> Punishing crime and preventing it (like shoplifting) helps poor people, too.

Yes, and so does giving people in poverty a step up out of life circumstances that make them more likely to commit petty crimes (like shoplifting).

Similarly, punishing large scale financial crimes by the wealthy (something that has basically stopped of late) would benefit everyone, from the poor to the wealthy. In fact, punishment may be the only disincentive for financial crimes by the wealthy, since they don't want for anything else.

> t’s a myth that petty shoplifting is something done by poor people. The people doing it are usually part of organised crime (that is not “hyperlocal”) and generally are doing better than actual poor people

There is not such a strong distinction. Organized crime groups often use poor people who have few alternatives as the pawns of their theft and fencing operations. People with other better options don't usually take up petty crime as a vocation.

> Is this an oligarchy or a kakistocracy?

Yes. Also a klepotocracy

I personally find Chevy's recent infotainment control center great (Equinox/Blazer, maybe others too). Physical buttons with lots of travel (almost feel like an old IBM keyboard) for HVAC essentials, knobs for temperature and volume, and a big screen.

They have struck a really good balance between traditional interfaces and the benefits of screens.

> I think HN specifically, and the country more generally, has become disgusted with the magnitude of wealth concentration.

I'd like to believe this, but the proof is in the pudding, the pudding being how they vote. Apart from a few well known politicians, most of them aren't running on a platform of countering oligarchs.

A HNer might ask themselves: do I vote for the future where preserve low taxes in case I become massively wealthy, or do I vote for the future where I work for my income?

> Taxing the wealthy is the most popular way to lower the debt.

Let me clarify: Few in the mainstream of current politics and media want to discuss higher taxes on the uber wealthy (1B and up) - much less the very wealthy (100M and up).

It's only happening in a few places at the state and local level, but that's challenging because of the ability of the wealthy to move residence between states (something the pied a terre tax cleverly works around).

It also seems to have a lot more purchase these days in forums like this. My comment above about raising taxes would likely have received much more opposition 10 years ago. It seems like the consciousness here has shifted, probably because many here have a front row seat to the emergence of the tech oligarchy.

> The right says it’s fine as long as it goes to endless wars, and the left says it’s fine when we spend the money on social programs. Both say it’s bad when the other side spends it, but not when their own spends it.

Spending is only one part. The part that almost nobody wants to touch is raising taxes to support the spending.

As funny as this is, there is a serious side. This is a case of an unintentional hallucination propagating and amplifying through human social and incentive structures. This is also how probably how religious miracle stories work.

> Does it inspire fear to motivate productivity?

> Haha, no, it inspires motivation for finding a new job. Interview prep takes time

Everyone's circumstances are different. Many people - especially those with dependents - would reasonably be afraid. Whether that would inspire lasting productivity is questionable. It could also inspire less productive ways of getting ahead.

I doubt it. Expensive and wasteful side quests are a symptom of too much wealth/power concentrated in too few hands.

Unless your parallel universe has a more (not perfectly) equal distribution of capital and resources, it would have ended up here in some other form.

> You don't get asphalt without bitumen and you don't get bitumen save as a byproduct of a massive amount of fossil fuels being pulled up

There are alternatives to virgin bitumen for binding asphalt, like recycled asphalt [1], asphalt blended with recycled rubber, etc. These could conceivably be used together with a smaller amount of virgin petroleum-derived bitumen.

1. https://www.nyc.gov/site/ddc/resources/features/july-2016-gr...

> solar asphalt is hard to imagine with subsidies

Arguably asphalt is exactly the sort of application we should be using petroleum for - keeping it sequestered in earth instead of burning it.

> American solar installer companies do seem to charge way more than European or British ones

One of the reasons for this is that in many parts of the US, solar has sadly been market segmented as a luxury product, just like other high efficiency products like heat pumps or EVs.

This is enabled by both the prevailing cultural attitudes about efficiency and renewables as indulgences for the better off, and industries that are happy to keep captive high margin markets of those customers, i.e. the continued lack of a US produced low-cost EV.

The American cult of individualism is also at play, wherein collective solutions are shunned vs private ones, which is why renewables and storage are so popular among off grid libertarian types.

> You boss is a living being too, and he is working for the company just like you are, even if his status is different

Your boss is your coworker. The corporate entity is not

> truly wild and untouched by man.

In the US you can find truly wild places, but it is pretty hard to find places untouched by man. Humans have been here for at least 15000 years, and from the very beginning were having huge impacts on the ecology.

> Already in the 5th century BC, Herodotus reports about the ‘Hyperboreans’ (Folks from above the North Wind), and how they regularly visited the island of Delos

Heh, some things never change.

> Can you think of a mass labor displacement that resulted in an overall erosion of living standards? I cannot.

The mass evictions of the Scottish Highlands [1] in which peasants were driven at the point of bayonets to the lowland city slums to make way for the British government to transform Scotland into a mass sheep/wool production monoculture economy.

The use of kidnapped Africans as slaves in the Americas was also an example of a labor displacement - by introducing a source of mass human labor with absolutely no human rights - to scale the agricultural commodity economy (cotton, tobacco, sugar), which resulted in horrendous living standards for the enslaved, and an erosion for the poor paid peasants whose labor they replaced. Slavery was a very "efficient" way to use labor.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

> This is a fabulation, right. What kind of POS parent would instill self-worth on money and career into their kids?

They are not POS, they're trapped in systems and perspectives that push them to do this. Often they are the same kind of parent who had that instilled in them as kids and never had to self-examine those values or the systems that drove them.

If not a majority of parents, I'd guess a huge percentage fit this. It's a characteristic of the anxious middle class, some of whom still have the inter-generational memory of poverty. And yes, some of them are just that shallow but often it's a mix of both.

Ironically, the inclusion of career as a signal of self-worth is a relatively new and "progressive" change in the context of history, where in aristocratic or landlord-ruled societies, inherited or conquered (AKA stolen) wealth was primary signifier of self-worth.

In such societies, not having to work because of your wealth was the marker of honor and even moral superiority, to the point of being tautological.

Within the turbulence of recent technological advancements, we're now struggling to evolve to the next stage where self worth isn't attached to wealth or career, and we're potentially regressing.

> their voters prioritize making people they don't like suffer over their own comfort.

> That probably doesn't seem rational but remember loads of these people think the Bible is a true story.

Those are the (sizeable) subset who are obsessed with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament rather than the turn-the-other-cheek teachings of Christ, who is little more than a totem for these fundamentalists.

Arguably there is less harm in believing that Christ's ministry was historical than believing that Sodom and Gomorrah were historical.

> Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it".

Yeah because it makes perfect sense to them, just like it doesn't confuse us that the pronoun "them" in English can refer to either a singular non-gender-specified individual as a verb object or plural individuals of any genders (or even non persons) as objects.

That's three distinct meanings of "them" in standard English, and there are even more in dialectical speech.

> Doing this to a work computer seem a bit questionable from the ethical standpoint.

"Ethical standpoint" seems like the wrong choice of words. I think you mean "equipment ownership standpoint.". Ethical implies a set of values, vs contractual terms of equipment use.

You can't be unethical to your employer, only to people like your coworkers and customers, or other living beings that your business activity impacts.

> If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please?

> We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion.

German has a relatively simple case inflection system, one that mostly applies to particles. Fully inflected languages often apply case and gender to the nouns and adjectives themselves, in many cases with overlap between cases only distinguishable via context.