throwawayjava

Can you give concrete examples of legislation that "encouraged disintegration of the family units"?

> If anything, capitalism's endorsement of these holidays brings families CLOSER together, than they normally exist during the rest of the year

How so? Would Christmas have faded in significance if it weren't "endorsed" by capitalism"?

> Left policies and statements about 'patriarchal structures' and why they need to be disassembled have contributed far more to family unit disintegration than capitalism.

The canonical American nuclear family unit doesn't even include multi-generational housing.

Yes. I am feeding apples to you. You are feeding apples to me. that's why a feedback loop is called a loop.

> No, I am feeding apples back to you. I am the feedback loop. You are the source.

You are not a loop. You are a person.

I realize that sounds silly, but I think this actually is the miscomprehension at play. We are both sources. And sinks. That's literally the whole point of a feedback loop.

Because I'm writing this on a site with a combinator in the upper left-hand corner, consider the following programming/logic analogy:

     let A = λx.xx

     let A = λx.xx;
     AA

A is a function definition, not a diverging program. You are a person, not a loop.

The observation by llamataboot that "maybe we shouldn't execute AA given what we know about the definition of A" demonstrates a competent and accurate understanding of feedback loops.

This has everything to do with your characterization of those quotes. "We don't know for certain, but shit could get bad" is a perfectly reasonable basis for precaution. The precautionary principle is not "anti-scientific".

> It would benefit you to suppress your religious fervor for a few minutes and examine the facts for yourself.

What are you trying to accomplish with this sentence?

It's true that you probably won't die immediately. But for most people, driving a long distance without a cluster display would be extremely dangerous. Especially at night on an empty road. For me, I start relying on the readouts for speed and rpm around the four hour mark. Tired brains don't work well.

Which means you probably have to get it fixed ASAP. If that happened more than a couple of times with a car, I'd sell the car / not buy it in the fist place.

But still, there's good reason to believe it would, so it'd be irresponsible to push the button given other reasonable alternatives.

"You can't ever know FOR SURE that this destroy life as we know it!" has to be the least logical form and most confusing of climate change skepticism out there. The fact that anyone would consider this argument, on its own, even remotely compelling, is... oy.

If you mean for cash/gold/diamonds/..., then yes, absolutely, all the time.

So although it's a nice sentiment, I'm not so sure it's realistic.

> Marx saw a world where capital subjugated labour for its own return; technologies like Amazon Go have increasingly no need for labor at all.

First, because even the author's idealized view of Amazon Go does require labor (the author even discussed this at length; that labor takes the form of R&D). Second, because Marx did see this possible world, and even wrote about it extensively in chapter 15 of Capital.

I find that happens a lot in articles like this one -- ideas that originated with Marx are parroted by an author who doesn't realize that Marx wrote extensively on the role of technology in capitalism.

General advice on articles like this one: If you're going to write about labor and technology in capitalist economies, and don't want to unknowingly parrot lots of Marxist ideas, you should read capital. Capital certainly contains some prescriptions you may disagree with, but it also contains a lot of descriptions. If you're thinking about labor and technology, there are better than even odds that you're re-inventing one of Marx's descriptions. He was the first one to say a lot of the obvious stuff.

Even more general advice: western stigmas aside, familiarity with Marx's writing is as indispensable to understanding modern economic thought as familiarity with Smith, Hayek, Keynes, et al.

A nice reminder about the difference in meanings when the owner says "value" and when the employee says "value"

1. This assumes that the way we build solar panels (or whatever) never changes. We lost a lot of steel-making knowledge in the early 20th century. Of course, all that "expertise" was replaced by machines, so it was mostly a loss of obsolete knowledge.

2. The solution is to pocket a fraction of the savings and keep that in your back pocket to maintain a teaching/research corps and to ramp up internal expertise when/if the subsidies stop flowing. Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.

Oh, I might now see why you're being so pedantic about the definition of profit.

When I asked "If I'm the one figuring out how to create value, why the hell are the C suite, middle managers, and investors getting 99% of the profits?", I wasn't trying to make a moral point. It's not intended to be read with an indignant tone, but with a curious tone.

In fact, at the end of the post, I answer this question: because the engineer in a large firm has (perhaps) traded a bit of the value they create in order to be insulated from business decisions, allowing them to focus on engineering instead of on running the business.

Maybe you're confused by the second paragraph of my post. That wasn't intended to be read with any sort of moral indignation or as a suggestion that engineers ought to capture more of that value. Rather, it was a sincere question and the answer was "you've traded your ability to capture that value for the ability to work in an environment where you don't have to think strategically about the business and can focus on your engineering work".

Please... I understand your pedantry, and I don't care. This is a silly conversation.

Do you have any thoughts about the role of engineers in a firm and how the existence of firms relates to the article's thesis? That's a much more interesting and relevant topic for discussion than the fact that words sometimes have more than one definition.

So if not, let's kill this thread. I used the word "profit" in a way different from how it's used in Accounting 101. For that I am profoundly and eternally sorry, but not sorry enough to continue an off-topic and unenlightening conversation :-)

Being so fickle about definitions that you miss the broader message, however, does make sensible discussion impossible.

Okay, so I'm getting a tiny fraction compared to everyone else. Again, this is a fairly pedantic tangent and no matter how we define these things, my observation seems to be accurate.

Again, this sub-thread about the definition of profit is both tangential and unrelated to my original point. I think the standard accounting definition is pretty useless and silly in the context of modern large firms, but that seems like a discussion for another day.

> This isn't MBA level stuff

By MBA stuff I don't mean "useless econ 101 terms". What I mean is "aligning engineering talent with value creation", which AFAIK isn't taught is basic accounting courses...?

The author of the post suggested this alignment is an engineer's job. But the whole point of a firm is that the MBAs do that and the engineers focus on building things. That's my point -- that in the context of a large firm, the author is wrong.

Of course, joining a large firm means that your own compensation is disconnected from the value the firm creates. And that can mean less share of compensation, especially when the firm is doing well. But it also means you can make a good living without becoming a Monday morning economist.

I don't really care about defining profit "correctly" according to accounting terminologists because I think a well-meaning reader can completely understand the point that I'm making in my original comment without this aside.

Highly compensated managers are taking a share of profit, often quite literally (look at how VP and above positions are compensated). But always indirectly -- you can't tell me a 7-8 figure salary "isn't a share of profit". That's obvious BS. And if my own compensation is a share of profit in the same sense (which, a port of it literally is), then my observation that non-engineers get 99% of that share is still accurate.

Anyways, and much more importantly, this is pretty tangential to my original point. The point is that if I'm an engineer at a large firm, it is NOT my job to do the MBA thing. The entire premise of a firm is that the author of this post is wrong.

The author of that post does understand these trade-offs and is asking the best way to maximize wrt his constraints. So this article just misses the mark.

Counter-point: firms exist.

If I'm the one figuring out how to create value, why the hell are the C suite, middle managers, and investors getting 99% of the profits?

So no, in the context of a large firm, it's definitely NOT an engineer's job to figure out how their skills align with market demand. And that's the whole damn point of a firm.

Now, this may be reasonable advice if I want to maximize by income. But maybe my goal is to maximize income under the constraint that "my excellent engineering" is the primary consideration in my performance evaluations. And there's nothing wrong with that; people trade income for all sorts of things. Telling someone not to make that trade-off is like chiding them for buying an expensive latte or sending their kids to an expensive private school. It's not your money, so it's none of your business.

edit: And, furthermore, the success of large firms and the high compensation available at those firms suggest that the author's advice might actually be actively harmful. As an engineer, you might actually be better off ignoring engineering-value alignment because you might be better off simply executing well within a well-oiled machine.

1. There's a reason that foxconn wants to manufacture in the USA, and there's a reason they're courting states in the great lakes region. Resolving the Prisoner's dilemma becomes much easier when there are ~3 states with viable sites as opposed to 50.

2. See guelo's comment.

Your point is well-taken in general, but in this particular case, IMO, it really is a stupid giveaway.

I'm sort of making two only vaguely related claims here.

Claim 1: In this particular case, I don't think bias is even a problem, because we shouldn't even be doing this leg work on behalf of ISPs in the first place.

My point is that ISPs choose not to contribute to the quality of publicly available information. When entire industries (or governments) willfully hide data that's necessary for a populace to make an informed decision, I default to a worst-case assumption on that data. Not because I think that's most likely, but out of contempt for the lack of transparency and as a forcing function for greater transparency.

In other words, these "biased" researchers are already a hell of a lot more charitable toward the ISPs' position than I think we ought to be. If ISPs aren't willing to share granular data on network accessibility, then assume it's a major problem until they muster up the will to share that data.

>... the humanities and social sciences...

Claim 2: On this issue, I think it's helpful to discuss "critical studies" and related departments separately from the rest of "academia" and separately from the natural and mathematical sciences in particular. I don't think that the liberal bias in natural/math sciences has the same underlying causes OR the same long-term effects.

I.e., I don't think that chemistry departments are hiring based upon political beliefs, and I also don't think that political homogeneity effects the quality of chemistry research.

You also have to explain why political diversity is even important in the face of other forms of homogeneity. E.g., I'd rather a very liberal, very theoretical physics department hire a flaming liberal experimentalist than yet another theorist who happens to be conservative. The importance of political diversity in humanities and social sciences is obvious, but I don't see why science would suffer if all algebraists were libertarians...

My assertion is that if you want a politically diverse chemistry department, you have to 1) justify why that diversity is even necessary / more significant than other major problems; and then 2) probably also solve different underlying causes.

> Of course, I'm picking on the academy, but the same probably holds true for journalism.

And also literally every other profession, from clergy to CEOs to career criminals. There's even a trite quote about it.

People will still invest, but risk tolerance goes way down and ROI expectations go way up.

Concretely, your business plan has to compete with "I can get an x% return by putting my money under my pillow", and x becomes very large in a highly deflationary economy. Place yourself in the shoes of a person seeking investment in a productive business, and the problems with a deflationary economy become obvious. Being good isn't enough. You have to be better than "sit on my ass and get rich doing nothing".

In other words, the primary concern in a deflationary economy is discouraging value-producing economic activity.

Also, all of this is wrt deflation in general. Notice that a fiat currency can easily be deflationary. The deflationary nature of gold standards is a major component of the criticism of gold standards, but there are also other reasons that people oppose gold standards.

> Same can also be said about spending. As a contemporary example why would anyone buy a computer today when they know that in the near future they can get a better model for less? The whole computer industry thrives in a price deflationary sector of the economy.

People still buy computers because having a computer today helps capture value that you can't capture by having a better computer tomorrow. For consumers, entertainment tonight. For businesses, automating processes today.

> Whenever someone is trying to push one economic theory over another the key question you need to ask is cui bono.

That's not quite fair. There are people motivated by truth and there are also people motivated by ideology.

It's always surprising to me when (not-already-on-the-top-f-the-world) software types see virtue in gold standards. The fact that our work -- moving bits around -- produces so much economic value is an epitome of everything that's wrong with a gold standard.

Also, the selection of left-leaning people doing publicly accessible research is, AFAICT, a self-selection. The problem isn't that our institutions are biased, but that conservatives (in general) choose not to pursue scientific careers in the same numbers as liberals. This suggests a fundamental limit to your proposed solution because there aren't enough "heterodox" collaborators to ensure viewpoint diversity. One of the studies published on the website you mentioned even suggests this underlying cause.

Also, I'll note that in the vast majority of academia, internal politics (what research methodologies, maths, etc. someone likes to use) are far more of a problem than external politics (of the sort you'd typically call "politics" in general conversation). E.g. I'm not at all worried about "liberal bias" in physics or chemistry or CS; if it's a problem at all, then it's a minor one compared to other problems.

It's fairly obvious that (b) is concerning, and also fairly obvious that it takes an actual suit to put a price tag on this problem. That's why the MJ case was presented.

But all of this is obvious and explained in the comments above, so this is getting very pedantic, and I don't see a) what point you're trying to make, or b) how that point is at all relevant to the overall thesis of the root comment.

Anyways, my only point was that Citizens United was not exactly a clear or obvious application of the First Amendment, and offering up the integral role of cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment as examples.

I guess merely mentioning that the decision was 5-4 would've been enough and prevented this now rather long thread.

>>>>>> Personally, I'm concerned that the individual factors of this case (i.e. Gawker being Gawker) will overshadow the principle at stake, which feels a lot more important than a gossip site.

We are discussing principles and problems that are larger than just these two cases. That's the entire thesis of the comment that started this thread.

The Citizens United decision rests on Corporate Personhood. Corporate Personhood was established in a case testing the limits of the 14th amendment.