jgeada

Because that was when the factories & their support infrastructure moved, not when a handful of entitled wealthy moved.

Note also that while the factories moved to China, the wealthy stayed right here in the US, & didn't go where their money was spent.

Different scale, different consequences.

You sir are part of the problem.

How on earth do you have any standing to make any pronouncement? "You've done your research"? You know better with your 5 minutes of googling than scientists that spent their careers studying these things?

Sigh ...

I despair for how stupid our discourse has become, and how loud and and proud are people's public displays of stupidity and ignorance.

In reality, it is not the DoD that contracts out the big stuff, but Congress. And when the purchaser isn't the actual user, then a whole bunch of nefarious negative feedback loops come into being. The Congresscritter mostly only cares about sounding good and their lobbying (bribery) dollars, everything else is a problem for someone else, or sometime later.

It is the worms in the brain, isn't it?

The tradeoff was that pedestrians were not considered and any pedestrian death was therefore considered an acceptable tradeoff to allow cars the least encumbrance.

The modern US is notoriously run for lawyers, by lawyers, and every facet of everything is contoured by what lawyers want. But does this lead to a viable country or is it a path to paralysis?

Right, just "nerd harder".

The mathematics of encryption just doesn't play that way.

That is a bad faith argument.

As soon as there is another untrusted party in the encryption, an in particular a party with a "skeleton key" that can decrypt anybody's message, then your encrypted communications are merely one leak away from being decoded by everybody else.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- John Maynard Keynes

The other hard lesson learned during the Covid shutdowns (actually, it is learned and promptly forgotten at every major crisis):

maximizing efficiency also maximizes the number of single points of failure in your system. Anything that goes wrong breaks an optimized for efficiency system.

You need to have resilience and redundancy to deal with variability, but those cost money.

Much better from the management perspective to ignore those risks, cash in on the cheap profits and blame "unexpected events" and get a bailout when things go wrong. They cash in on the easy money and have no downside consequences.

Economics can't predict what should be one of the most important and fundamental property of markets: inflation (aka how prices move)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/12/opinion/inflation-economi...

Any "science" whose theories aren't falsifiable and cannot make useful predictions of future behavior isn't a science.

Economics - the business of creating a cover story for whatever the rich want to do. All dressed up in mathematically rigorous fictions claiming to model reality so it cannot be questioned by the hoi polloi. Never matters whether the forecast predictions ever match reality.

They serve the same role that soothsayers and captive religions used to play.

Only the the context of weak labor laws and no unions.

There are more workers than CEOs and CEOs don't create the value, the workers do. What CEOs largely do is monetize and take credit for all the value creation.

I don't think things can continue along the current unsustainable path in the US. Something will break; hopefully in a sensible way and not the historical pitchforks and arson.

That used to be true, not so sure my trust in our institutions is high these days. Seems a few million $ donation to the right people can make all regulations just vanish.

Those useless devices cracked the Enigma machine and several other cyphers in the span of WWII.

No, electronic based computers were not useless from the start and very very rapidly started making significant progress.

There is a reason QC factorization records haven't shifted much over the past years. Number of qubits by themselves isn't enough. You to be able to do computation on them and for long enough to run Shor's algorithm till it produces a solution. How the qubits are connected, how reliable the logic gates are and how long you can maintain the quantum coherence with enough fidelity to get results is equally important.

That no significant factorization milestones have moved is a huge critical black eye to this field. Even worse, that no one has ever even been able to truly run Schors algorithm on even trivial numbers is a shocking indictment of the whole field.

Except that factorization is exactly what is needed to break encryption, and so knowing what QC can do in that realm of mathematics and computing is exactly the critical question that needs to be asked.

And a reminder that in the world of non-QC computing, right from its very roots, the ability of computers improved in mind boggling large steps every year.

QC records, other than the odd statistic about how many bits they can make, have largely not made any strides in being able to solve real world sized problems (with exception of those that use QCs purely as an analog computer to model QC behavior)

Because scams destroy trust in institutions, and trust in US institutions is already worryingly low. Without trust in institutions the system collapses.

In New York court on May 20th, lawyers representing victims of a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York argued that Meta, Amazon, Discord, Snap, 4chan, and other social media companies all bear responsibility for radicalizing the shooter. The companies defended themselves against claims that their respective design features — including recommendation algorithms — promoted racist content to a man who killed 10 people in 2022, then facilitated his deadly plan. It’s a particularly grim test of a popular legal theory: that social networks are products that can be found legally defective when something goes wrong. Whether this works may rely on how courts interpret Section 230, a foundational piece of internet law.

And the perverse incentive of this direction of thinking is that when you elect people with this thought pattern they prove the point by sabotaging the service. Then they say "see, government is ineffective ", and either directly pocket the resulting money (corruption) or give it to their rich friends (oligarchy).

Everything is simple at the highest levels of abstraction.

It is the details of actually making it work that raise the complexity levels and/or kill you if you don't get them right.

Remember: a decision that in the abstract with infinite thinking time is easy can be extremely stressful when it has to be made in seconds in real time and getting it slightly wrong will potentially cause a catastrophe. And ATC has to keep doing this throughout their entire work shift.

Any assumption that there is targeting or any sort of planning by the chaos goblins we currently have running this administration is long on hope and short on reality.

It is the incentives.

Maybe you're moral and keep to the straight and narrow. However, the system hires all types and the ones that just follow the incentives will do better. They get promoted, have more power, hire more people like them. Eventually the moral types will just be the exception and no longer affect the average.

Incentives exist because they change the behavior of the whole; they work as intended. Just that what is intended isn't always desirable or even a good idea.

Like I said "Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient."

Heck, downvotes here in HN are basically the same thing. If a statement doesn't comply with both the explicit rules and implicit assumptions and culture here, it will be downvoted to oblivion. And it is one of the major mechanisms that HN uses to ensure this site remains useful and relevant even with the large number of participants.

Oh, give me a break with all the whining about cancel culture!

Cancel culture used to be called social exclusion/ostracism, and it has been how people police themselves against undesirable people in pre-internet communities where most everybody knew everybody. If you were considered an ass, eventually the only person listening to you was you.

Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient.

While you have a right of free speech, the rest of us have the right not to listen to you, nor to be forced to listen to you, nor to interact with you.

OK, now explain where management's salary comes from.

They don't produce anything, at best they're taste arbiters and at worst parasitic middle men that happen to control the budget; funny how that always means they get more of it.

The best long term performing companies are run by technical people that happen to be competent managers. As soon as the professional managerial class takes over they quickly figure out their most profitable move is to cheapen out on engineering and trade in the future for bonuses right now; they'll be long gone when the company craters.

SpaceX and, for a time, Tesla. PayPal was already a success when he conned his way in. What other successes has he had? Twitter imploded when he took over, Boring company was never real, FSD at Tesla will never be real. And SpaceX is succeeding because they have a team dedicated to keeping him away from decision making.

What he's had is an army of internet bots pumping up his supposed credentials (visible even in the voting patterns here on YN)

we're pretty much training these models on the entirety of human recorded information (good & bad); sure, we can run larger and larger models, but it seems that fundamentally we've hit a wall in that none of these models are immune from hallucinations and the constant generation of "sounds likely but is false" sentences.

The approach is fundamentally flawed, you don't get AGI by building a sentence predictor.

I mean, this is literally the definition of insanity: doing the same thing you imbeciles did 8 years ago and expecting different results.

Electing a felon that notoriously managed to bankrupt several casinos and pretty much every business they've ever run is definitely not electing a smart man or even a vaguely competent businessman.

This has always been about racism and wanting to punish "other" people because you failed at life and want a handout.

Maybe because magical thinking, based entirely on early childhood brainwashing and cultural conditioning and peer-pressure, has no place here.