Ah, success through lowered expectations! This has been my mantra for the last 40 years, and it has worked surprisingly well. I started out with a New Year’s resolution to not intentionally consume significant quantities of human flesh, and have worked my way up from there.
It may seem ridiculous, but it’s a form of stoicism adjacent philosophy that presumes nominally more control over one’s circumstances, and it has had excellent outcomes for me. Ratchet forward but expect modest clicks and be delighted when something goes right or someone comes through.
Well you know, probably everyone is constantly swallowing some of their own dead skin cells. Nobody's perfect. So I'm not going to feel too guilty when I cheat and buy a human-balogna sandwich every now and then, especially if they're free range.
I'm assuming this is referencing "taking a pound of flesh" generally meaning to being cruel in demanding what you're owed (from Shakespeare Merchant of Venice). Presumably they're tired of unloading on people for not following thru or contributing. Doesn't seem like the best use here, particularly so indirectly.
Nope, I meant literally not consuming human flesh as food. After years of unsuccessful New Year’s resolutions, I decided to pick one I was sure I could stick to. Success through lowered expectations.
Yeah, the phrase "significant quantities of" is really throwing the whole comment for an unfortunate loop. Maybe "I choose not to steal any vehicles" or "I choose not to commit fraud" and work up from _there_ instead of somehow trying to faux-normalize cannibalism. Very strange indeed.
Well, I added that after realizing that it wasn’t uncommon to accidentally eat small parts of your mouth, fingertips, things like that in the course of a year, and I was not about to fail in my quest to reject cannibalism for the year. I mean, for me, that would have been a new low.
Mmmm…. Not saying us pilots are universally great, but I have definitely seen a significant regression from the mean in many foreign cohorts. I imagine it’s due to fundamental differences in the concept of training. It’s one of the things besides war that fear based societies seem to do better than shame based societies.
There exists a concept called "regression to the mean". I don't think "regression from the mean" means anything.
There is no way pilots form all over the world could "regress to the mean". They could not have been all, or most, "above the mean". The mean would be higher then.
Civilian pilots have to consider that they are flying in heavily congested airspace with 200 passengers in the back. They are not LARPING Chuck Yaeger in the right stuff.
Ah, whistleblowers. Always and forever committing suicide. Turns out thinking you can stab the gorgon with no consequences is a form of mental illness.
What is odd to me is hearing people talk as if somehow a job is supposed to be intrinsically enjoyable or enriching. Paid labor is and always has been a subservient role that pays exactly the minimum that the market allows for the circumstances.
Labor is the next option above slavery and indenture, and now that slavery and indenture are frowned upon, labor has absorbed that space as well.
If you want to have some control of your environment and destiny, you must be an independent agent, a contractor, entrepreneur, or consultant. A tradesman. You have special skills and expertise, your own tools, and a portfolio of masterpieces at the least.
There is nothing new in this space of human endeavour, it is as it has been, and I suspect will continue to be, for better or for worse. Sacrificing your agency for subservience is going to make you feel at the mercy of your “betters”. If you don’t want that, don’t do that. Labor law and other conventions have made it a little better, but the fundamental relationship is still master and servant.
> Labor is the next option above slavery and indenture, and now that slavery and indenture are frowned upon, labor has absorbed that space as well.
If we go down this path, what can I say that doesn’t get my account banned and my speech suppressed for what what I would suggest doing to people with your opinion?
We don’t have to go down that path, it’s the path we’re already on.
It’s not the way I think it -should be- but it is the way that it is. The incentive alignment keeps it at that local minima, and every attempt to move it to a new one so far has introduced so many perverse incentives that it ultimately causes the regression or even complete failure of the economies it is implemented in.
I don’t know what the answer is that maximises human happiness and minimises human misery, but I suspect it lies well outside of the paradigm of conventional market economics.
Within the dominant paradigm, It’s all a matter of risk management. With employment, you are paying your employer with your surplus value to handle the risks that you feel powerless to manage. Market risks, capital risks.
In exchange, you accept risks that your opinions and comfort won’t be prioritised, and in some cases even your physical well being.
In effect, you are betting against yourself being able to balance those risks against the risks posed by pursuing profitability.
The ability to manage risks is intersectional with your ability to manage discomfort and privation. When you run out of money, the house wins by default.
That’s why the foundational step for anyone should be to do whatever they must to obtain a safe fallback position. A place to be. A safety net. This is what enables risk accommodation. Without taking risk, there will be no advancement. If you don’t have a fallback plan, a safe spawn point, do everything in your power to create one, at least for your children.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised how useful it is for writing low level stuff like peripheral drivers on imbedded platforms. It’s actually-simple- stuff, but exactingly technical and detail oriented. It’s interesting that it can work so well, then go wildly off the rails and be impossible to wrestle back on unless you go way back in the context or even start a completely new context and feed in only what is currently relevant (this has become my main strategy)
Still, it’s amazingly good at wrestling the harmony of a bunch of technical details and applying them to a tried and true design paradigm to create an API for new devices or to handle tricky timing, things like that. Until it isn’t and you have to abort the session and build a new one because it has worked itself into some kind of context corner where it obsesses about something that is just wrong or irrelevant.
Still, it’s a solid 2x on production, and my code is arguably more maintainable because I don’t get tempted to be clever or skip clarifying patterns.
There is a level of wholistic complexity that kills it though. The trick is dividing the structure and tasks into self contained components that contain any relevant state within their confines to the maximum practical extent, even if there is a lot of interdependent state going on inside. It’s sort a mod a meta-functional paradigm working with inherently state-centric modules.
Surprisingly, at least in theory, and probably in practice with better technology, supersonic travel can be as efficient or even more efficient than subsonic flight. Supersonic travel opens up higher altitudes, higher altitudes means less air resistance.
The ultra high altitudes of LEO satellites showcase the steelman example, traveling effortlessly through the vanishingly thin atmosphere at hypersonic speeds with extreme efficiency even though the fuel expenditure to get them there was high.
For more reasonable hypersonic travel, at 100k feet, the “wind” force at 3375mph is only as much as you would feel at 400 mph at sea level… so you can exert the force needed to fly at 400mph, but for that same energy you are going 3375mph.
Of course there is a lot of tech needed to take advantage of these efficiencies, but it’s not a matter of faster = less efficient. As for economies, a jet that can fly LA to NY in 70 minutes, with an hour of turn at each end, could make 10 trips a day, potentially cutting the number of aircraft needed to cover a given route or route rotation by a factor of 4.
Obviously this is not currently practical on so many levels, but there is nothing fundamentally stopping us from achieving that level of service, given enough knowledge and technical capability.
If we ever want to achieve that level of understanding and competence, we will have to work on it when it seems impractical. Remember, it was in a single persons lifetime between flying precariously in glorified kites and supersonic flight.
Interesting, maybe new for pocket compasses. I had a marine plotting compass that used a massive copper cylindrical housing, with a sapphire glass bottom and window. It was very well damped. It was made in the 1940s, presumably when yachts were mostly wooden. (More modern boats would usually need significant compensation) or maybe it wasn’t for marine use? But anyway, it was a great plotting compass that I used extensively on my little fiberglass weekender sloop. Better than the westmarine garbage mounted on the cabin bulkhead by a long shot.
Manufacturing means, realistically, bootstrapping the general purpose robots that will foment the “third Industrial Revolution”, which will revolutionize capital and make money largely irrelevant. Energy, materials, and automation are the only relevant factors for capital in the post-employment era.
Oh yeah, I also like post-scarcity SF like Iain M. Banks. Funny names for those ships, right? So we're betting everything on infusing humanoid robots with "AI" and abundance will automatically follow? I'm missing a lot of steps here inbetween. Will we live in harmony or will it be a massive scramble by the various nations to extract every single piece of natural resource by way of PvP? Oh right, the robots will fight. It'll be like that ancient robot-fighting show. We'll have that show too, but it'll be AI slop now, and it'll be entertainment for the robot warfighters while they charge their batteries.
Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot from China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in a post-scarcity society and they will just be like any regular Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive conflict of interest. Hmmm.
I think you misread my post as optimism. If we are not very, very careful, it will be more like macroscopic grey goo than some kind of techno-utopia… and that’s with humans still in charge.
> Can't we just make the billionaires buy everyone a robot from China instead? Oh wait, their money will be useless in a post-scarcity society and they will just be like any regular Joe. Wait a minute. That seems like a massive conflict of interest. Hmmm.
Dude it’s all good. Just snort another line and fall in the techno-delusion.
Unfortunately, that’s not the result of money being useless. Money being useless means the end of scarcity for a very few, and life outside the gilded walls for everyone else, trying to maintain an agrarian society so they can eat , and trying to stay out of the way of the ecophagic juggernaut.
The only reason offshoring is ever done is because leadership does have a vision beyond the next quarter. Offshoring takes years to pay off because of the upfront costs and time it takes to work out how to run the new operation efficiently.
I guess, but the real issue here is that capital will mount a concerted, decades long effort, to prevent global organization of labor. Its not like its per se impossible to get enough global labor organization: its just profoundly, aggressively, even murderously, opposed by people who have power.
I guess we could think of that as just "part of the reality," but I think its a little silly not to at least mention it.
It is not realistic but even worse it isnt even desirable.
There is huge swaths of opposition to "global organization of labor". The last thing you want is to oppress a bunch of people under your vision of perfect government.
Labour is still going to be cheaper in offshore countries simply because of purchasing power parity.
Even good conditions and everything in country like India paying them around 10-30k$ is seriously really really good (source: I live there) and its english speaking and well integrated etc.
I saw another comment which mentioned that just merely healthcare in america can cost around 10k$/year
So Labour should be empowered in a good way but this idea still won't help america simply because of power purchasing parity.
Not to forget that America is going through some really tough economic crisis right now which it needs to figure out on. The deficit is still high and everything and companies are favoured completely capitalistic and so combined with all of these factors, we really come to the situation where it is.
I appreciate your optimism but I have my doubts. Especially when one reads the tense atmosphere of America right now
I think it's hard to overstate how big of a deal "Labour needs to be empowered globally" is.
Think of it as two huge reservoirs of water, one of which is at a higher altitude. If you connect them with a pipe, they will inevitably tend to equalize - this is what is happening with globalization. It's good for the developing world but bad for the developed. The labor class not only needs to demand better working conditions, but also standards of living, environment regulations, housing, etc. etc. until equilibrium is reached. The owner class will be exploiting the difference until that happens.
I doubt that an equilibrium can ever be reached tho.
The biggest issue is that even if one provides better working conditions, but also standards of living, environment regulations, housing, etc. etc
Even then, there would still be an imbalance and equilibrium would still not be reached simply because of power purchasing parity and other factors.
Plus another issue is corruption. There are rules and laws already in place but corruption takes their way
Also another thing but corruption can actually also take regulations and hijack them and actually penalize things simply for reducing competition etc.
Corruptions also the reason why we have enough food to feed the world but corruptions in the way and I am not sure if there is a way to solve it
y'know I have this pet theory that corruption is everywhere but the incentives of corruption/ways changes.
In the UK, the prices of rent are so damn high, this is a developed country.
In America, corruption takes place in the form of lobbying and the coupling of politics and finance and also the immense parity of money between the average person and the CEO salary's ratio being one of the highest and the shrewd incentives being one causing these issues in the first places being written almost in law, CEO's of major companies will fire 10_000's of people or more in a blink of an eye.
China, although secret, In my opinion has corruption inside the country as well from a more political standpoint as well
In India, there are some regulations and systems meant for good but people skirt through them via corruption.
So I don't know but to me corruption feels natural in the sense that altruism can't be the only gene and biology would dictate maliciousness to be present
This does make me sad thinking about it but I think that the nash equilibrium is unfair. This is how the system works, this is a cycle and Countries Like India/China once were super rich then became poor then are getting on their path again
At the end of the day, the person speaking about this Jensuan huang is corrupt as well selling AI hype in the first place, spiking actual prices of actual goods people buy thus contributing in inflation but also that some people accuse them of even writing this statement as a way to people please
When I had thought about it previously, I think um the best things we can do is probably reduce the incentives of corruption and then the nature of good ideas would take prevalance.
It's also just not a developing vs developed countries thing anymore as I said. We see in the news cycle how much blatantly corrupt America's current administration is becoming.
At the end of the day, facing reality is hard but that's the only way we can really put real change in the world.
if you have some thoughts about how to counter corruption in your idea/ actually creating incentives to be good and not corrupt or even malicious compliance in your idea and I am listening and I'd love to discuss more about it.
I wish there was less corruption but I am starting to think that incentives are set this way to help corruption and those themselves might've been/were brought by corruption themselves as one wrote on HN once that corruption brings more corruption , so how can one stop this vicious cycle? Because if that happens, I am telling you that America has enough money but the corrupt forces distribute them in a concentrated manner, even solving that problem to me feels like something which can help empower the labour globally
perhaps the rich can be taxed for what they deserve and that money can then be spent in developing countries labour class in your idea? This to me feels the most okay way to help but the problem is, nobody's taxing the rich/its hard because of all the loopholes/malicious legal compliance in many places.
It is, along with NATO. The invasion of Ukraine is being managed in a way that bleeds Russias economic and war fighting power without escalation of the conflict to other states.
Ukraine is being spoon-fed arms and support just enough to keep them able to attrit Russia without ending the conflict until Russia is exhausted. Once Putin stuck his foot in the bear trap, there is no way he can turn back and retain power/life. I’m sure he’d love to have backed out in the first few weeks while it was still possible at this point.
It’s great for the region and for NATO, but it trades Ukrainian blood for NATO interests. Obviously Zelenskyy knows the play by now, but he and the Ukrainian people are between a rock and a hard place. It’s tragic for them, but there is a little hope at least of having earned a seat at the table if they survive. My heart (and donations) goes out to the Ukrainian people.
> My heart (and donations) goes out to the Ukrainian people
your donations go straight into the pockets of the elites. You need to be an idiot to think you are helping by sending money, unless you are sending it to your relatives.
Idk, I’ve bought some gear for a couple of the units, stuff like that. I don’t see it going to the pockets of the elites, though I suppose it might be an elaborate scam to resell the gear they are asking for. Doesn’t seem like it though.
It may seem ridiculous, but it’s a form of stoicism adjacent philosophy that presumes nominally more control over one’s circumstances, and it has had excellent outcomes for me. Ratchet forward but expect modest clicks and be delighted when something goes right or someone comes through.
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