Almost everything electronic is overpriced in the EU because of high taxes.
18,047 karma · joined June 25, 2013
Plus Tesla serves customers who don't want a silly crossover -- most other brands are only making EV crossovers. If you want a smaller car you don't have very many choices, and most of them cost more (e.g. Porsche Taycan, the Audi version of the Taycan).
> The next presidential election is scheduled for 2021.
Isn't that likely to lead to nuclear war, which is still the greatest threat to humanity and has been for all of our lives? What if the US bombs a datacenter in China or Israel bombs one in Iran?
Pretty much every TV is a "smart TV" now with built-in streaming apps. Why would anyone buy a Roku?
These additional devices only make sense if they are really cheap (and therefore subsidized by ads, just like the smart TVs are) or offer a premium experience (which would make them cost a lot up front.)
It's increasingly easy and cheap to train GPTs and similar models. Pretty soon anyone who can pay for GPU compute will be able to do it, if that's not the case already. Even if every country in the world agreed to ban it, it still couldn't be stopped.
The GPTs are at the point where anyone with money can buy cloud compute and train one. The methods for doing so are fairly well known. It won't be long before a teenager can train a GPT on commodity cloud VMs.
My point is that if we could simply invent any economic system we wanted, communism would have worked.
Communism failed because it's not possible to do that, because there really are some things about human nature and the way economies and societies work that we can't ignore or change, and those factors prevent utopian schemes from working.
But even if you can keep your holdings forever, they won't be worth anything if there isn't a market for them. All it takes is enough people freaking out and dumping their investments to make yours worthless too. You'll still own everything you bought but it could be worth zero.
If people could just change their minds about this, they would have done it by now.
If a lot of customers take out their money and Binance goes out of business, that's fine. I mean, it sucks for Binance, but they are kinda shady and the world might be better off without them. If customers find out their deposits don't exist anymore, that's definitely not fine.
After a century of failed communist experiments all over the world, it's disappointing that people still believe that utopian economic systems are possible.
AI replacing human workers isn't going to make UBI possible. It's just going to put people out of work. The core problem with UBI remains: it's not affordable without a magical infinite wealth generator.
What you need is enough headroom in your panel to pass inspection. That's generally more than you really "need" at any given time, but good luck convincing the inspector that you will be fine because you won't charge your EV and use your dryer at the same time.
Most homes were built with enough headroom to power all the appliances that were present when the home was built, and that may not be enough if you add a 50-amp car charger. This is often the case for older homes that had air conditioning installed at a later date -- there goes your headroom!
As a homeowner trying to own an EV this sucks, but as a home buyer this is good -- people should be able to have confidence that electrical systems can handle the load the appliances in the home are capable of drawing, and it's not unusual for people with families to do laundry, cook, and charge their cars at the same time.
I had to get a panel upgrade on my house that was built in the 1960s, in order to get a charger installed, despite the house being built with 220v circuits originally for the dryer and the kitchen appliances. Lucky for me I didn't need the power company to upgrade anything like a transformer. It was still pretty expensive though -- around $8k for everything. I get a small rebate for installing it but it doesn't come anywhere near close to covering the full cost.
And this was for a house, so it's easy. Nobody can tell me I can't do it, unlike the situation for people who live in condos and need their HOA to approve things. A lot of condos were not built with this kind of power in mind and will need upgrades, potentially trenching across the community parking lot, etc. The members of the HOA who don't own electric cars are not going to be happy about paying for other people's chargers so they aren't going to be helpful.
If we want people with average incomes to be able to afford EVs we will need to make it much cheaper to install chargers -- and we will need significantly better public charging infrastructure for people who live in apartments and need to park on the street.
Plus we are doubling down on electric power for everything, and our power grids are generally not great. In California we can barely satisfy existing demand, and rolling blackouts need to be implemented in the summer so PG&E doesn't burn down another forest. If we all had EVs on top of the current demand, the grid would not hold up. Given how incompetent our utility companies are at everything else they do, I'm not confident they will handle EV demand well.
A lot of people in the lower income brackets do the kind of work that an AI can't do. The people who should be worried most are actually college graduates doing clerical work, whose main work output is writing or evaluating texts. Even those people will likely use AI as a tool to enhance their productivity, because the AIs still are not good enough to replace people for tricky edge cases. The first companies that try to replace their customer support workers with an AI are going to have a bad time (and so are their customers!).
When almost everything can be automated, the problems that remain are the really hard ones that can only be solved by human experts.
A construction worker with a circular saw can cut boards way faster than someone with a handsaw -- but the introduction of circular saws didn't result in a bunch of carpenters getting laid off. Instead it made them more productive, and for people who get paid by the task rather than by the hour that is a huge benefit. They could build more and make more money, and a bunch of other people benefitted from their increased output, like homebuyers and property developers.
Similarly, as a software engineer I benefit from code generation tooling already. If that gets smarter and faster, I will be more productive, my team will be able to build software faster, and instead of laying people off I will expect to be given more work. Maybe our 4-year roadmap will be achievable in 1 or 2 years with the same size team.
This is especially salient if you think US domination of tech is better for the world than Chinese domination -- if the US pauses, China certainly won't. (And yes, US domination or Chinese domination of tech really are the only realistic outcomes.)
If you are not running in prod in Kubernetes, but you still run in prod with Docker, what the heck are you doing? ECS? You still need a control plane to deploy the images and Compose isn't really up to that task for production workloads.
> Most IT and tech jobs are lower level coding positions.
I don't really buy that. It's true that most positions are IC positions, i.e. not managers, but quite a lot of them require domain knowledge and human intervention in edge cases which can't be handled by automation. If automation could solve all the problems, why are so many people oncall?
AI being able to code is going to be like what happened when construction workers started using power tools: now that one man can saw boards as fast as 5 others with handsaws, wouldn't we see a lot less demand for carpenters? What happened is that per-worker productivity went up because of the new tools and the construction materials and techniques they use were adapted to take advantage of that, there was still plenty of work, and we can build better things faster than before.
In software, imagine how much more effective engineers can be if the grunt work could be more automated. People loved autocomplete and smart IDE features and graphical debuggers because they made coding more productive. A lot of those things already do write some code. AI provides a much better version of that.
People whose only contribution to software is the grunt work of writing simple code might need to worry, but there is a lot more to working as a software engineer than grinding code. These AIs are also repeaters of existing solutions -- maybe they can solve simple problems that have pre-existing solutions in their training corpus, but an AI is not going to be able to create the next Redis or Kubernetes or AWS simply by recombining existing text.
Regarding layoffs:
Even after all the layoffs most companies still have more employees than they did in 2020. Many of the people being laid off today joined since then. They will get other jobs, maybe not in a few weeks like what used to be possible, but still. This is not like 2001 when entire companies were going out of business and laying off 100% of their employees.
A lot of the the American tech industry developed when interest rates were higher than they are now. What we had in the past decade was not normal, and in some ways it was pretty crazy -- investors didn't care if companies were sustainably operated, and now they do, and that's good for the long-term health of the industry.
Tech is not immune from the business cycle, because nothing really is, but this really is not as bad as previous downturns. Even if it gets worse before it gets better, the tech industry is fundamentally strong and will handle it.
One of the first things a union would do is decouple compensation from performance and introduce a standard compensation structure for all workers, segmented by job level. (And somehow the people who are personal friends of the union leaders seem to rise in job level faster than the others…)
The kind of people who are attracted to that kind of structure are not the ones who build successful industries, and they are demoralizing to have as coworkers.
I don’t want a levelling effect in our industry. I don’t want gatekeeping either. We aren’t interchangeable cogs, and people who do better than average should not be held down. Promising people with nontraditional backgrounds should not be prevented from entering the field. Despite what people claim, unions would definitely hold people down and lock out new people.
Things are going really well for us actually, compared to people in other professions. That’s partly the case because our industry has been able to remain dynamic and innovative. Much of the success we’ve seen was built by people with nontraditional professional backgrounds and would not have happened if we got bogged down by gatekeeping and credentialism.
When the pie stops growing and we need to fight management over how to divide it, maybe a union will be attractive. But right now the pie is growing rapidly and workers are getting a huge amount of it in the form of both cash and stock. I’m all for continuing with this free, dynamic, and incredibly successful model.
By the way, unions don’t make layoffs a thing of the past. Look at what happens in the auto industry. The beat thing we can do for laid-off tech workers is ensure that we keep our industry dynamic, so there will continue to be new employers to work for.
Over a shorter time scale that would be called "bait and switch" and it would be illegal.
Over a longer time scale it's still a massive dick move and destroys customer trust.