lordlic

I understand why people take up smoking but I don't understand why people expect credit for breaking out of it. Addiction is an ugly thing and seeing a public personality parlay their experience into an excuse to write a blog post is pretty distasteful to me. Just quietly stop; not everything has to be an event in the history of internet culture.

Yeah I mean that seems like a weird narrative. Some people get wealthy because they bought land and then did nothing and held on tenaciously to it even as the rest of society increasingly needed it for something else? How is that a victory for the good guys? That's just rentier capitalism.

In other words, you're saying that it hurts them...

Their goods will cost more, but they'll also have more income, both from employers paying more for labor and from the direct payments from UBI.

And even if the benefits are entirely "inflated away" in aggregate (which is extremely dubious given that UBI produces real economic value in terms of stability), that's just the aggregate effect. To take an extreme example, if the Fed prints 1,000,000 exadollars and distributes them equally, then yeah it's pure inflation, but it also massively redistributes wealth to the point where everyone is practically identical. Hopefully that example demonstrates that the effect isn't zero even if it's just "inflating itself away."

Finally, I object to treating this question in pure economic terms. We shouldn't be overly concerned with optimizing aggregate economic outcomes for society. Those at the top end can more than afford to give up some wealth, and those at the bottom are struggling to a heartbreaking degree. The utility function of holding wealth is not linear and if you're interested in increasing everyone's well-being then that's a fact you have to address.

That just doesn't add up. Even without progressive taxation, if you give everyone a flat increase in income then lower-income people come out ahead relative to where they were before wrt the average. It's directly a wealth transfer from classes paying more taxes per capita to those paying less taxes per capita. There's no hand-wavy economic argument about how, actually, lower-income people would be worse off if we gave them money.

If the jobs really need to get done, then the working conditions and wages offered will improve until someone's incentivized to do them. Usually people's objection to this is "but this will raise the prices of consumer goods!" And the answer is yes, yes it will. Better-off people used to cheap goods/services will no longer be able to fuel their consumption on the backs of people getting paid very little for work under dehumanizing conditions, and will end up with a net loss. Lower-class workers will see their incomes increase much more on a proportional basis and end up with a net benefit.

On a more meta note, this is an incredibly common and obvious answer to your question, and I wonder if it's even asked in good faith. If you've "yet to hear an UBI proponent explain" this to you then you really don't understand it at all.

I've held one myself, and what I think is "absolutely horrifying" is your moralistic justifications for worker exploitation as being simply bestowing "the pleasures of hard work" and "the foundation for what it took to build a business of your own."

Your hustle-culture narrative is appallingly toxic and your entire argument amounts to learning to love being treated like garbage so that you don't feel bad when you do it to others once you're the one on top.

I think you're overstating the importance of small companies to the vast majority of people. If Amazon comes along and annihilates all the small bookstores by undercutting their prices, people will just get their books from Amazon. That happened; that's a fact. It doesn't really matter to anyone except the bookstore owners who are now annoyed that they can't make profits anymore. It has nothing to do with "stability."

Why would "society" care whether company A makes money instead of company B? This kind of thing is only remotely concerning to, like, VCs and tech workers hoping to strike it rich in the startup game.

I like the overall framework of trying to identify asymmetries that web was able to exploit in each epoch. Unfortunately, the details are a real mixed bag:

* Why did the web disrupt desktop?

It's not even really worth addressing these, because they're all so weak. None of the actual reasons that web was successful are here. And the ones that are there are nonsense. For example, to suggest that security in the browser was a significant factor in the success of the web on the desktop is utterly detached from reality. Even if average people cared (which they didn't) then they'd be better off trusting software bought at the store than going into the wild west of the internet with the shambles that we called browser security back then.

* Why didn’t the web disrupt mobile?

- the web’s network advantage had evaporated

If anything this argues against the thesis that "make anaerobes do photosynthesis" is insufficient. How would apps become successful by merely matching the existing networked nature of the web? At best this item is filler that adds nothing.

- The iPhone was a completely new thing

Yes, this is actually a good point. New paradigms and new APIs for a new type of device. Makes sense.

- The basis of performance shifted from small binaries to smooth interaction

What? No. This is silly. There's no way that the web prioritizing download size had a significant impact here. And "smooth interaction" has absolutely nothing to do with binary size, so I have no idea why the author is associating them.

- Navigation shifted from keyboard to springboard

Kind of a repeat of the smartphone being a new device, but okay, good additional flavor.

- Log-in disappeared completely

I mean I guess. But if there's any difference, it's more a matter of shared devices not being so much of a thing with phones. Web is perfectly capable of "one-and-done" logins, and many sites do that. And you could easily have a longer session cookie on your mobile site based on the single-user-per-device assumption.

- Discovery shifted from search to app store

Decent point, but only by accident. "Lowering the friction of software install" is nothing, since web has zero friction in that regard. I don't think that typing-free discovery was really that huge of a deal either. But having a large ecosystem of app developers, with ratings and featured content, was enormously influential. This might have been possible with web technologies but obviously nobody did it well enough to gain critical mass.

- Engagement shifted from links to icons

You could have single-page applications on web, with shortcuts on your home screen, send notifications through the browser, etc. You can use icons instead of links on web. Behind the pile of buzzwords, this item is nothing. "Deep, branded experiences" really?

- Business models expanded to IAP, subscriptions, and app purchase.

Yeah I think this is a good point. Having a single payment processor in the play store / app store that knows your payment details did reduce friction.

- Security shifted from sandbox to app review

No, no, no. Not this again. People don't really care about security, and anyway again, app security was still dogshit by the time it had won on mobile, just like browser security was by the time it had won on the desktop. Apps requesting tons of permissions to spy on users were rampant for years and years, even with apps being reviewed by apple/google. And how does this item even constitute a competitive advantage? You can have a browser remember permission to access your location or camera or whatever. There's nothing here.

I feel like this article really dazzled with its introduction tying in business and evolution and setting up the framework for the problem, but then fell to absolute pieces when it came time for the author to actually know anything about technology. Even if there are some good points here, the missteps really undermine their credibility. The analysis of the success of web on desktop is especially lacking, but I don't feel like it's a great analysis on the web vs app section either...

How about a "Find everything you needed?" popover that appears near the top when you move your cursor up to the tab bar to close the tab?

But it's not e2e encrypted so I don't know what point you think you're making here.

A better way of saying it would be that they just don't care that much. Most people care in theory about taking care of the environment, but that doesn't mean that they're willing to tolerate even 1c/gal higher fuel taxes. Most people care in theory about taking care of the poor but balk at the personal economic consequences of doing so. People have different priorities and when one consistently loses out to the others that means that they largely DON'T care about it.

No, architecturally there's no reason to do it on the client side. You're uploading a photo to iCloud, encrypted with a key that Apple controls. The only reason to use even a little bit of battery power to do the check on the client, and to do this elaborate song-and-dance around only notifying Apple if there are a certain number of positive matches, is that it creates the (false) impression that Apple couldn't just check your photos on the server side if they wanted to.

It's basically engineering with the goal of creating a perception of privacy rather than actual privacy. I don't really care that much about Apple policing what you upload to iCloud, but this disingenuous architecture does annoy me a bit, and there's also the added insult of having a device in your pocket that by design works against its owner (reminiscent of "treacherous computing"). These problems would go away if they just did the check on the server side.

This is an absolutely bizarre proposal. You want moderators to willingly pollute their subreddit with ads in exchange for personally getting a kickback from reddit? Users would either migrate en masse to competing subreddits with decent mods, or they'd stay due the same old problems with moderator inertia...

It's not too expensive for governments to do it, and it doesn't have to be private enterprise. Neither of those things are true. Nor is it even clear that it would be cheaper to contract with some private provider to boost the ISS than for the space agencies to figure it out themselves with the launch vehicles they have. How do you think NASA, ESA, etc build rockets anyway? They contract with Lockheed, Boeing, Airbus, Northrop, and others to build them. Having the whole operation be under the auspices of SpaceX doesn't do much other than make other governments more reluctant to help fund it.

No, the argument is that there's plenty to learn, and it's all very interesting, but it doesn't stand up against people's very real needs here on Earth. I'm about the biggest fan of space you'll find, but even I, sadly, find the ethical calculus unassailable. Manned spaceflight won't accrue material benefits for ten generations or much more, and meanwhile human beings are dying of treatable or curable diseases, suffering under poverty, and living without access to clean water.

This spoken-word work from 1970 conveys the sentiment well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

Gigadollar-scale space projects seem like a particularly poor fit for the private industry model, though. Conventionally the idea of free-market competition is that companies stand to gain if they succeed but have to eat the losses if they fail, and so competition eventually selects the best. But we're not talking about making widgets or sandwiches or launch vehicles. Things like the ISS, JWST, etc are all one-off projects, and they cannot be allowed to fail, so competition doesn't really help and the public is left holding the bag, just like we see in the endless cost overruns of politically unkillable DoD contracts.

"Public bad private good" isn't a coherent strategy. If NASA isn't good enough then the preference should be to improve NASA rather than to insert an unnecessary layer of profit-taking for SpaceX or Boeing to do the same thing anyway.

You think NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, etc can build the ISS but they can't raise it to a higher orbit? Honestly, this cheering for privatization of space research is getting out of hand.

If you want to geek out over the pharmacology, ketamine is mainly an NMDA antagonist, same as the other dissociative hallucinogens, and apparently that's one of the mechanisms of ethanol too, though anecdotally I've only heard complaints about alcohol cross-tolerance issues with GABA agonists.

This whole subject is really interesting and you should at least check out some Wikipedia articles:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_(drug)#Pharmacology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptor_(biochemistry)

Ah, I see. I was conflating the IM and IV dosages; 0.5mg/kg seemed much too low to induce general anesthesia from what I vaguely remembered of IM dosages. Thank you for elaborating.

If you're dropped into a totally foreign culture and one remark to your guide results in a slightly-discomfited "that's not really how we do things" then you might not think too much of it, but if you venture a comment that's met with an expression of abject revulsion, you know you've said something unacceptable. We're all constantly calibrating our sense of such things in everyday social interactions and those normative pressures ultimately define acceptable discourse. At the moment the Overton window unfortunately admits some very ugly things and I'm not sure it makes sense anymore to persist with gentle nudges in the right direction given the manifest urgency of the problem.

Those unwritten rules that govern social behavior can induce real internal change too. People's attitudes and beliefs are shaped by what they perceive to be customary and deviant in their culture.

I'm bewildered by what line the Seattle Times thinks they're trying to draw here. Looking at the "CRAZY TOWN" headlines in the image in the article is like looking at the covers of tabloids in the checkout aisle. I don't know how anyone could consider what they're seeing there a trustworthy source of factual reporting.

Well, there are lots of people with unhealthy tolerances for risk who write about brain hacking with nootropics.

I was confused by how low that was until I realized you meant per minute. I assume you use a higher dose at first to actually induce unconsciousness?

I feel like you're blowing past some pretty significant psychological factors. People find it interesting and valuable to own a one-of-a-kind item that nobody else can ever have. An artist might paint pretty much the same thing a hundred times, but those small differences make each one slightly more valuable than a mere print. And the fewer instances there are in the world, the more valuable it is, at least in theory. Also, people like it when, for example, a favorite table was made over tens of hours of work by an expert carpenter, and they imagine that it was a labor of love by someone happy to have their work be a part of someone's life. It's personal somehow. There's also a lot of signaling involved in these "artisanal" or "handmade" marketing labels, because they are legitimately associated with higher-quality goods. Manufacturers mechanize processes to cut costs, and if they're so concerned with cutting manufacturing costs maybe they cut corners on quality too - this is how "Made in China" got a bad reputation even though of course China is perfectly capable of making high-quality goods. Finally, if an object is individually made by hand then there's a kind of automatic quality control that doesn't necessarily exist in an automated process.

And I seriously doubt that anyone will claim that a knife sharpened by a robot arm reproducing the exact movements of a human will produce an inferior product. The problem is that most automated sharpeners are some variant of a rotary grinding wheel run linearly along the blade and, unless you're sharpening a machete, there are all sorts of aspects of the blade geometry that are ignored by this process but can be accounted for by a skilled worker at a whetstone.

> High tourism locations will often have lots of junk food places. If you can move larger distances (i.e. rent a car and the like) you'll find wonderful and cheap restaurants pretty much anywhere.

I'm pretty sure this is the opposite of the actual situation. Cities attract both tourists and high-income residents, and the latter combined with high population density drive the development of much more diverse eating options within a reasonable range than a person in a more rural area has available to them.

Anecdotally, the organic grocery stores and vegan eateries I see in SF just don't exist where my parents live.

This whole argument strikes me as very silly. If I want to eat healthy foods badly enough to change my diet and check the ingredients every time I buy something, I'm not going to want to oversimplify it to the point of near meaninglessness by adopting a rule like "3 ingredients or fewer." I'm perfectly capable of learning what ingredients to avoid.

And if I'm sick, and there are clinical details that are important to my treatment, then I'm absolutely not going to be satisfied with a low-accuracy simplification.

If you IV a single 24mg/kg dose like the sheep in the study, I suspect you won't be experiencing anything at all before you lose consciousness.

From TFA:

> Throughput is the amount of work that comes out of your project by unit of time. It’s up to you to decide what units make sense for your context. Days, weeks, sprints, stories, bugs, epics – anything goes as long as you’re consistent.

Using days/weeks/sprints as your unit of work for determining throughput seems circular. If you want to know how many weeks of work your team can produce per week then you don't need a monte carlo simulation to tell you that.

Using stories/bugs/epics is flawed too, I think. You can have a fantastic model for your team's throughput in stories per week, but that doesn't tell you anything about when the project is going to be done unless you know how many stories there will be. There are two variables here (throughput and quantity) and you can't get useful information out of the product of them for free.

To see why, imagine that you take only the minimum amount of effort to very roughly divide the project into sensible-seeming chunks. In that case, your throughput in chunks per week will be meaningless (i.e. your model will have a confidence window which is uselessly wide) because the chunk division will have barely any relationship at all to the amount of actual work in each chunk. Now imagine that you're a bit more diligent in your project planning and look in a bit more detail at the work that will be involved. You've done some work to clarify what code will need to be written, and your confidence window will narrow accordingly. Now imagine that you're even more diligent. And so on, and so on. You eventually end up with zero error in your model, but in the process you've completely determined what code will need to be written, and the project is finished! Congratulations, you've invented waterfall. There's no free lunch here as the intro paragraphs of the blog post promise.

I assume that in practice you're stopping at some point in the middle of the extremes of doing nothing and planning out every line of code, and then applying your statistical model at that point, but I think you'll still be thwarted by the (at that point) partial disconnect between the chunk divisions and the actual amount of work in each chunk. We've all experienced innocent-seeming tasks that end up consuming vast amounts of time unexpectedly, and various degrees of this phenomenon is what fundamentally ties the amount of error in any pure "stories per week" model to the amount of effort you spend planning and estimating the stories. No free lunch.