> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.
In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.
In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.
This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.
You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.
Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".
From where do you get your understanding of the terms supply and demand? They are primarily from classical economics - have you read any? e.g Adam Smith?
And 2 days off was not a system dictated by God, which we are obligated to keep in perpetuity (in fact, most religions dictate 1 day off, not 2).
So, we could, as a society, just choose to make a 32 hour workweek “full time”, and mandate overtime pay after that.
There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
In fact, I think if we choose to do that as a society, it will end horrifically.
> There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%.
The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.)
But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
> But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
I'm not sure about that - farming kind of sucks. I think what the transition away from farming generally looked like was people who had some kind of small family farm, where multiple generations had worked hard all their lives to make a living growing crops, having kids who left the farm to work in some other industry, and making more money that way and having better working conditions (at the price of living a more urban lifestyle foreign to their family back on the farm). When their parents' generation got old and was ready to pass the family farm along, the urban worker generation decided they'd rather not quit their jobs and go back to the family farm; so (perhaps with some feeling of guilt), they sold the land to a large farming conglomerate; and then the next generations who grew up in an urban area doing white-collar jobs simply forgot that their ancestors had ever been farmers.
Something like this happened in my own family - about one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather owned a farm on what was then the outskirts of the bay area. He sold the land when he retired, no one else in my family ever did agricultural work, I only know the story, and the land that farm was once on is now incredibly valuable bay area real estate that is not being used for any agricultural purpose. I have no desire to work in agriculture.
> I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs:
"replacing workers with technology “explains 50 to 70%” of the increase in inequality from 1980 to about 2016."
They point out a disappointing aspect of some technologies (self-checkout), which seems to be that not only are workers displaced, but customers also experience degraded service (probably without a new benefit such as a discount for using self-checkout.)
> The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs
As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer.
But when I say (and I assume everyone else here also says) "I don't want to go back to a world where 90% of people had to be farmers" (because farming was so inefficient), that's another way of saying, the world that farming efficiencies gave us is richer / more preferable overall than the previous world. In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
I expect the same will be true for AI. I think our society should do more to help the displaced. But I do not want my grandchildren to live in a world where, 100 years from now, 90% of people are still doing jobs that could be done by a computer, but we choose for the computer not to do them. Just like I wouldn't want to have to be a farmer.
> As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer
What you seem to be saying is that consolidation of the farming industry into fewer producers with higher productivity was good for food buyers and society at large, which might be true but doesn't contradict GP's point that when their company earns $100 more due to improved employee productivity, approximately $0 of that will be paid to the employees, so they find little reason to celebrate.
The link I posted makes somewhat different yet important points: first, the arc of automation seems to tend toward increased inequality (and a hollowing-out of the middle class); second, automation may provide a markedly worse (but cheaper) replacement for the thing it replaces. Even in the case of farming, many fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they were 100 years ago - perhaps effects of selective breeding (such as for size, shelf-life/durability, resistance to pests/pesticides/herbicides/etc.), soil depletion, environmental changes, etc.
> In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
That was in large part due of strong leftist movements and states that forced the capitalists to share the increasing wealth. WW2 and the resulting labor shortage and other special circumstances contributed as well. Currently no such movements and circumstances exist. Globalization and the resulting free movent of capital has put capitalists in a better position to direct the extra wealth for themselves than ever before. A global movement is required to get a meaningful share of the increased surplus to the workers now, and that is very hard to do. The market will not do it on its own, as the demand for human labor eventually decreases due to automation.
> I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
That would be relevant if I stood for that premise, but I don't and I wasn't putting it forward.
I was responding to your earlier claim:
> But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.
I was disagreeing that this was what was being asked in the present moment. What was being asked in the present moment ("can we have a day off") is very similar to what was being demanded in the past.
In the past, workers demanded to share in the wealth and productivity that was being created through technological gains. And so, I agree with you, workers in the modern era have benefited massively from past technological gains. But that wasn't an accident. Those gains were earned through the blood and sweat of workers demanding to be included in those gains.
And so, to ensure that these present gains continue to be distributed more equally, we need to continue applying the pressure that was applied in the past.
But that's not a rejection of the the laws of supply and demand, it's at a social layer before the economics of supply and demand apply. It's at the political and social layer of how much work we expect an individual worker to put forward into society, which is a major factor in determining the amount of supply of work available.
It's a political decision—totally separate from a rejection of capitalism—of how many hours a "full week of work" is. It is not a rejection of capitalism to set the "full work week" to 48 hours, or to 40 hours, or to 32 hours.
> The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy.
Sure, a poor man with two dollars is richer than a poor man with one dollar.
And yet the man handing out the dollars had 100$ in surplus when he was handing out 1s and now that he's handing out 2's he's got 1,000,000,000.
Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.
In fact, I see no reason why the pie should be shared with wealthy non workers at all. Were they necessary for the increased quality of life?
On top of that, it's a global economy. Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
> Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years.
Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.
Putting the poverty line at 1$ a day, or saying people crossed from 2$/day to $3/day is "poverty decreasing," lets people get these self-serving numbers. Poverty declined, relative to what threshold? Do these people have secure housing, medical care, education, political power, in line with their contributions to the global market they've been shoved into?
People being moved from centuries old homes distributed across agrarian geographies into slums, that's improvement?
People living side by side to polluting factories that poison their water, that's improvement?
These people are foisted into a global supply chain, their economies changed into e.g. unsustainable cash crop or similar fragile-to-price-shock products, and themselves thrust into market dependence without any labor security since outside entities show up, exploit while it's profitable, then disappear without leaving any meaningful industrialization to the overall nation. Not to mention there's still a lot of people being straight up enslaved.
> Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.
Sure, but the argument being made is that "productivity gains accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth."
That is simply not true. Across the entire world, from rich countries to poor countries, economic development, driven in large part by technological development, has resulted in a dramatic improvement to everyone's quality of life.
The way some people talk about it, it's as though they wish they were middle class in the 1920s instead of in the 2020s. People are so. much. richer. today. In ways that really matter, like education, retirement, ability to travel the world. MEDICINE.
I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.
Both can be true. Standards can both have improved since the 1920s and income inequality can be equivalent or worse than the gilded age. This would be coherent with improvements mostly being funneled to the top, while some benefits accrue throughout the economy.
However the story is much more dynamic and interesting than that, with income inequality shrinking until the late 70s and early 80s, then expanding drastically until now, half a century later. That period of lower income inequality is mostly why things got better for the working class (but science and technology have marched on regardless).
> I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.
It is, though, if we talk scale. The rich went from having big houses in the 1920s to being sent into space, or building private libertarian colonies, or buying elections, or potentially increasing their lifespan a few decades, in the 2020s. The working class went from working 40hrs a week until age 64 when they retire in a house they own, to working 60hrs a week until they die, but hey, that death might be at an older age!
The improvement disparity between the two makes the improvement for the working class insignificant enough to be dismissible. I don't buy into the idea that the working class should be grateful that the scraps now have better seasoning.
I mean really, just look at the wealth gap. Imagine how much better the lives of everyone could be if that wealth was distributed better! Fuck a 20 hr workweek, what about 5?
I don’t want to go back to the past, I want to go toward a future that looks good and fair for regular people. Technology doesn’t provide some divine mandate to build whatever will make the owners more money with no regard for people or the planet.
> I want to go toward a future that looks good and fair for regular people.
Do we agree that moving towards a future that's somehow "more advanced" as compared to the present (i.e. isn't going back to the past) would likely require giving up some land, water, and energy? That is, that progress is always a trade-off?
We don't have to agree that an AI-powered future specifically is "more advanced". For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is IMO a future that looks "good and fair for regular people". But building solar panels requires energy and water, placing them requires lots of land, building batteries requires mining lithium which is bad for the local environment, building hydro power destroys ecosystems, etc.
I imagine you don't oppose this because it's overall better for humans and the planet. I'm just making the point that there are nontrivial trade-offs, and building anything requires the use of resources such as land, water, and energy.
If we're in agreement so far, then I think the main thing we're in disagreement about is whether AI is actually worth the cost. ("What does this 'future' do for us besides take our jobs?")
And to this I'd ask, how should we handle such disagreements in a free society? I may think that Mr. Beast recreating Squid Game was a profligate waste of human and non-human capital, just to make a buck. Or more seriously, I'm a vegetarian. Worldwide, meat and dairy production accounts for (very roughly) 80% of agricultural land use [1], 30% of agriculture's water use [2], and 15% of total human GHG emissions [3]. I don't think the benefit is worth the extreme cost.
People disagree with me about Mr. Beast and beef, though. They think that these are worth the cost to land, water, energy, and the planet overall.
My question is, how should we resolve disagreements of this kind, where one person thinks another person's actions are spending resources in a way that is not worth the return? It seems much larger than AI.
The real problem is that there is so much money in politics now that the freedom of choice through elections is often an illusion. Money decides what we do with our planet and resources more than we do.
Sure, we agree on that. Everything has a cost. I’m a lifetime vegetarian also.
Just because “progress has a cost” doesn’t mean I have to support whatever the owner class decides is progress. They are explicitly telling us their plan for AI: to take our jobs. This isn’t speculation - the CEOs are literally saying this openly, and we should listen.
Sam Altman can’t just throw around the words “cure cancer” occasionally and expect us to not see what he’s doing. The unemployment issue? He used to say we would solve it with UBI, and recently said he no longer believes that will work, without providing an alternative. I guess we’re just on our own while he destroys our livelihoods now?
The future the hyperscalers want involves insane energy and water use. What do we gain out of this exchange? Right now it’s fun that Claude Code does our job for us, but if they pull off their plan we’re a few years away from massive concentration of power, mass unemployment, AI assisted warfare, unprecedented misinformation campaigns, etc.
I don’t think I’m crazy for questioning whether this is worth it.
All companies (and indeed individuals) rely on and benefit from various public goods, such as roads, law and order, and an educated populace. They pay for these public goods through taxes.
As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think deeply about how different locations have present different challenges, including different weather.
Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.
Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.
> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on.
Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.
When hurricanes come to South Florida, the well off migrate North to wait out the storm while the poor suffer the dangerous conditions. Part of this is due to the price spikes of gasoline in the local market as supplies dwindle due to fewer truck shipments and refineries shutting down for the storm.
Water is similar. Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The “markets work” heuristic is frequently wrong if you don’t glaze over the very many counterexamples.
Yeah but that response is stupid, irrational, makes shortages more likely and discourages people from taking action when they need to do something different right now. In an emergency situation, people who can provide more of something that is in desperately short supply should be paid more. People consistently adopt a strategy of trying to not pay them more and it's one of those really annoying cases where people's instincts are primed to make them band together and do something predictably foolish.
Rationing is an inevitable response. But to say that is like saying witch hunts are inevitable - they are. They're still bad ideas. People who can maintain access to their higher reasoning should resist them.
> Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.
Sure, but OP is advocating that we should "systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds." They're not arguing that this is something to be applied only in emergencies.
Similarly in your post, you use the need to ration gas after a hurricane to argue that we should ration water all the time. This does not follow.
> Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The logical extension of your argument here is that the world would be better if we subsidized gasoline for "poor utilities bill payers" and "rural residents".
But why gasoline and water specifically? Why not also healthcare, food, childcare, and other necessities?
Then consider, if we have a budget of $X per family to subsidize necessities, surely the government is not best suited to decide how to split up those dollars between water, gas, healthcare, food, and childcare? There's no right answer universally, some people need food more than they need gas, and vice versa. Surely an individual family would be better equipped to decide for themselves?
We have now invented "giving money to poor people instead of subsidizing demand", which I wholeheartedly support.
200 miles will easily get you out of the path of a hurricane. 200 back home. 400 miles at 20mpg is 20 gallons of gas. Even if gas doubles from $4 to $8, that’s only an extra $80, likely less than the cost of that one night of motel, and certainly less than the economic costs of actually being hit by a hurricane.
As with many things, markets do work, but people don’t make rational choices for their well-being.
No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year.
> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone.
No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible.
Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.
That's a bad argument. There are gasoline trucks with a GVWR of ~20,000 pounds and diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord. If you actually wanted to do that then you'd instead do something like tax based on axle weight and miles traveled, e.g. by reading the odometer during inspections.
The better argument is that diesel is worse for air quality and then it's a pigouvian tax in proportion to how much you burn.
The realpolitik argument is that fewer people have diesel vehicles and democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But taxing commercial trucks is also a pretty sneaky way of taxing ~everything while pretending to not, so it's also the principal/agent problem. Legislators want to spend money while pretending not to take it from you.
> diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord.
It is taxed less than gas in lots of Europe where that is more common. You also need to factor in mpg vs gas, where it is higher, so more road-wear pCO2 was part of the debate in Europe, even though it is longer carbon chain so worse co2 ratio per calorie, the engines are more efficient. Diesel is worse for local air, better for long term co2.
There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one. Farm fuel with no road wear isn't taxed much at all in lots of places and is more often diesel.
In theory diesel hybrids would be even more efficient but diesel engines and hybrid transmissions both add up-front cost and further efficiency improvements have diminishing returns because reducing a $100 fuel cost by 30% isn't as much money as reducing a $70 fuel cost by 30%.
> There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one.
Road wear is the irrelevant one in terms of fuel. Because of the fourth power law, essentially all road wear is from full-size buses and semi trucks. The contribution from passenger cars and even the likes of diesel pickup trucks rounds to zero. Meanwhile the largest vehicles use a minority of the fuel because there are several times more passenger cars than semi trucks.
"Someone captures the market" is the thing that happens when the government micromanages them. Laws that charge more per unit to high users aren't anti-trust laws. A farm doesn't have higher market share in food than Google has in a tech market just because it uses more water.
I am not saying that there should be no regulations on monopolies. We are discussing a very specific market intervention, namely the proposal to
> systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
This is what I'm arguing is a bad idea, by using gasoline as an example.
If you want to argue that imposing this pricing structure systematically is good because it would help prevent a bad monopoly like Standard Oil, you'd need to explain (a) how this market intervention would prevent monopolies and (b) how it's a "better" way (according to however we decide to measure "better") to prevent monopolies than the alternatives. I don't see how this is true, though.
> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
excuse me? leave the markets alone? to do what? continue screwing people over with the cost of living? at some point the government needs to step in when greed outstrips the ability of the consumer to meet the demand. capitalism on it’s own will demand ever increasing profits and that is simply unsustainable for any civilisation
> having a Waymo dropping off clear of the bike lane sounds good, until the exiting passenger accidentally doors a cyclist who isn’t prepared for that possibility.
Note that Waymos will alert you if a cyclist is approaching so you don't door them. Not saying it's perfect, you can still open the door if you want, but they are very consistent about this.
Yes, that's why, unless it is a parent-child duo, almost every cyclists duo I see everyday keeps riding side by side and now I can't even legally overtake even when I go (as I should) fully to other lane as I am supposed to keep 2M distance from them.
Look, I have a bicycle that I love riding. I have nothing against bicycles. But (primary transport) bicyclists are, in general, AHs.
Given the sheer amount of cyclist who think that cars should be banned with no consideration for anything else, I think that this is a common observation.
Where I live, the pro-cyclist mayor (whose husband owns a bike rental shop, by pure coincidence) closed a road for cars without consultation, now the firemen along with residents are protesting because emergency and delivery vehicles can't access a large part of the city (car parked can't get out!). This is the average behavior you can expect from militant cyclists, from my experience.
Riga. Of course, all of the cyclist absolutely LOVE it, and now want to remove cobblestones, which could lead to a removal of the city from the UNESCO World Heritage list. But they don't care.
Based on the photo, it looks like it’s pretty easily rectified by emergency bollards that can be lifted / lowered by emergency crews, though those may be expensive to procure.
In the tool I wrote, you have a single branch with linear history. PRs in the chain are demarcated via commit messages. You then don't need any special rebase / sync commands -- you can use regular `git rebase -i` to reorder commits or edit a commit in the middle of a stack. Literally the only special command I need is "push this branch to github as multiple PRs".
Anyway I hope that alongside the branch-based you've built tool in `gh` that there will be an API that I can target.
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