everdrive

It's always surprising when companies don't understand that people what inexpensive, quality goods. The original Ford Maverick retailed for $19,995, Ford absolutely could not keep up with production. Ultimately, they raised prices both because they could and in order to reduce demand because they could not actually product enough units.

>but in return you are getting fewer jobs,

Certainly not in any meaningful way.

Interesting that they never seem to think the executive suite is overpaid -- for some reasons it's always everyone _else_ who is overpaid.

network effects from how the rest of the industry has reorganized itself.

I don't work for Meta, but how many more years do I need to work in tech? I'm in my 40s and my kids are young. I've already set up 529s for them, and am paying for some expensive home upgrades. Maybe when that is finished and I've built up a buffer I can switch industries for the last 5-10 years of my working life. Curious if anyone here has any similar plans.

No, we've got to ruin everything. We might make another $0.05 in the next 6 months if we make our product worse for years. There is NO WAY to avoid this problem, and so we must make things worse no matter what all the itme.

People's workflows will vary but I never find myself using tabs in Dolphin. (ie, the KDE file manager) If I'm dragging and dropping, I want to see both the source and the destination, so I usually just open two windows and tile one on the left an one on the right. This always works great and is a lot like Norton Commander, which seems relevant.

>The reason most people still believe that Chinese-made stuff is poor quality is

I think most people just buy trash at WalMart and Amazon and it's 99% Chinese disposable junk. That doesn't mean that China is incapable of producing high quality goods, but just that the average interaction that people have with Chinese goods are low quality.

It's the manufacturing equivalent of "How could the government be efficient? Haven't you ever been to the DMV?" (set aside that fact that many DMVs seem to be quite efficient these days)

I don't disagree with you, and I think you might have misunderstood me. I think Congress could start clawing these back, but I agree, right now they have no effective power, which is why I called them a "eunuch congress."

Oh, I'm not sure the government can fix this sort of problem. I'd still like to prevent any data centers in my state, which is a bit more tangible.

A major challenge of the past ~30 years is that new technologies can totally transform society, and really no company cares whatsoever if that transformation is for the worse. If a company poisons my products with PFAS and I'm not even aware of it, there is little I can do but find out eventually and just avoid those products when possible. If social media and smart phones destroy societal cohesion, we seem to be powerless to stop it and most people don't even want to stop it.

If the worst / greatest predictions of LLMs come to pass, then I imagine we'll be in a similar state.

I'm no expert, but I'd have a few prerogatives:

- Look into ways to restricting executive power, or more rightly revert it to its previous state as described by the constitution.

- Repeal the pardon power (or at least seriously amend it)

- Find a way to limit the use or impact of executive orders. I'm honestly not sure of the best way to do this, but executive orders have exploded basically at the same rate that congress has receded. At the moment they are really just "very weak laws" due to the fact that no one can pass a real law anymore.

- A friend of mind suggested that you prohibit naming the political party of a candidate on a ballot. This has a few legal problems (eg: the states individually control their election process) but the spirit of his comment is that the two party system is broken. The founding fathers imaged that the speaker of the house would jealously guard his power against the presidency. ie, they did not imagine that being the same party the speaker of the house would just do whatever the president wanted. So like the other suggestions, I'm not sure of the best solution here, but the party system is at odds with our current system of government, and seems to be doing an even worse job in these polarized times

Some things you cannot fix with laws or reforms. Congress has power right now. The president never enforced the TikTok law, never sought war powers for Iran, etc. A healthy Congress would do something about this. A new law or regulation here might not necessarily fix this problem. This is something of a cultural rot.

I realize these answers might not have been super satisfying. I'm not a political expert, and I'm sure smarter people than me have been working on these problems for a while.

That's not true at all, they could:

- impeach

- pass new laws / revise old laws

- hold real hearings

- amend the constitution

Now practically will this congress do so? No, but in principle they wield more power than the executive.

Thanks, that's really useful. I guess in my head I had the impression that costs could potentially be static. eg: if you had 10 customers total, each needed to pay $1 to generate electricity to serve their needs. So when you scale up to 100 customers, you can still have everyone pay $1 and come out to the same place.

I totally get the general principle that not everything scales linearly like that. But, I also know very little about electricity generation, so I have no idea where the breakpoints are. (I would also guess that if the demand dips low enough, there could be a case where after decreasing costs for a while, costs actually start to rise again as there is some minimum infrastructure needed but fewer customers to bear the cost.)

On this note, I'm actually confused about why datacenters raise electric costs. Why doesn't the data center bear an extra cost for the added infrastructure?

If I build a house on undeveloped land and the electric company needs to run lines, do I also (in a much smaller way than a data center) increase the costs for all other customers? Is everything always just spread evenly?

Well realistically both are bad. Right now our government is purely dysfunctional, so I'm not sure anyone knows how to fight anything. We have a eunuch Congress, and in response each party just tries to push executive power as far as possible, never once considering that someone they dislike could get elected in the future and use that expanded power in a negative way.

I'm sure that right at this moment at least some people are thinking "if only we had a different executive, then we could rein in this AI problem." That is wrong at best. You could rein it in for ~4 years until you lost the next election. With a completely feckless Congress, very little can get done.

Lawmakers love these stupid, symbolic doomed-to-fail lawsuits. There are real problems, but it would be nice if someone did something other than posture and virtue-signal.

I wish I could uninstall Safari from my iPhone. I'd love to just have no internet app.

Interestingly, I've heard that job hopping no longer pays better than staying in place. I can't say if this is true (and no matter what's true, I'm sure that people have anecdotal exceptions!) but it would be quite discouraging if so.

I think given that meta has already sort of destroyed so many things, it's difficult to see this measure causing any _harm_. I'm not sure it's a panacea, as since you said meta will just take your money and track you. But the "tracking you ship" has already sailed. Maybe in a perfect world the "taking your money" bit is successful enough that they try to make that experience better? Ideally, meta would just take 100% of its intellectual assets and pay to have them subducted by the Mariana Trench, but I don't think that'll be happening for me.

Been doing that for years and do not regret it.

A terrifying home invasion murder is such a world of difference from dying in a car accident. Comparing the two just ignores basic human psychology.

>but at least you don’t have to share a wall with another human!

If you ban loud bass I don't think I'd mind. Until then, no thank you.

  See how pots strike and dint the sturdy pavement.

  There’s death from every window where you move.

  You’d be a fool to venture out to dine,

  oblivious of what goes on above,

  without your having penned that dotted line,

  of your last testament.

This feels very modern. "Sure, you might get randomly killed by a pot flying out a window, but there are _walkable_ restaurants!"

>1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case.

I think this is more of "another brick in the wall." There was already a LOT of pressure to do the bare minimum to fulfill requirements and then declare success. Now, those pressures seem insurmountable.

There was already a word for an "ask" -- it was called a request. "Ask" is a useless neologism.

>?? >The point is to raise revenue.

Yep, I'm sorry -- I was very confused here, sorry for the not-very-useful initial post.

Thanks, I feel sort of stupid for failing to notice that it would if nothing else just increase tax revenue. I was stuck in a perspective that this was about increasing housing stock.

I'm really curious about this. Wont, as a rule, any super-rich 2nd, 3rd, and 4th homes in New York be completely unaffordable for almost everyone? It feels a bit like you're potentially spreading around the super-luxury homes across a wider breadth of the super-rich, but not much else.

Is there a better way to think about this?

In part this is a consequence of blank slate ideology, which presupposes that all students are equally capable of identical outcomes and that individual student failures are always / usually systemic failures in disguise.

This is a silly perspective, but the blank slate folks really got their tendrils in just about anywhere. In reality, some people are simply bad at math. More education will help, but they will always be disadvantaged compared to people who are more naturally predisposed. (note, I'm quite bad at math myself)

It may seem altruistic to err on the side of caution here and try to catch the kids that fall through the gaps, (again, assuming that they are falling through the gaps due to systemic failures) but as the article points out, there is a limit to this approach; eventually it brings the talented students down and degrades the program.

I've always really hated this phrase. It presumes a specific starting place (ie, that I've fallen into a lazy, repetitive niche and I'd be so much better off if I could dig myself out of it) and, that anything which is "uncomfortable" would also be good. Neither of those things are a guarantee.