In a sense, Harry Potter is the worst when it comes to class divide.
What let the kids go to that boarding school is the innate ability to do magic. A privilege you are born with, and that is dependent on your ancestry. Even if "blood purity" is a recurring theme for the bad guys in the books, it is made clear that the ability to do magic is like a gene, and if you are born a muggle, you will stay a muggle.
The reason it is worse than selection based on wealth or even nobility is that while it may be something you are born with, this is also something you can acquire, not so much with magic.
Not only that but there is essentially no drawback to being a wizard. Wizards tend to dislike muggle tech, but there is effectively nothing preventing their use, it is just that they can do better with magic. In the same way that being born rich comes with a lot of advantages and very few disadvantages.
The idea of innate magic ability that make those who have it strictly superior is extremely common, and honestly, it works, but if you want a story where the idea is that anyone have their chance, which is how I interpret the idea of "not just wealthy kids", then Harry Potter is not that.
That being said, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't take anything away from the story, not everything has to be a political statement, and in fact, making a political statement often makes the story worse.
Lots of fantasy settings end up supporting some really bad worldviews if you look too far into them. I highly doubt the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender realized they were creating a society of ethnostates enforced by an all powerful pseudo-immortal autocrat supported by a secret society. They just wanted a reason for the main character to go on an interesting journey to save the world.
It became a problem for me when they tried to make a sequel that took the setting more seriously. Maybe one person chosen by lottery at birth shouldn't be allowed to kill heads of state without any oversight? The villains who were opposed to the chosen one's uncontested rule ended up making more sense than the enforcers of the status-quo.
There's a funny video explaining why the Disney direct-to-tv movie Sky High is actually propaganda for fascist eugenics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIdbLUm-ez8 The "some people are just born superior" out is an easy excuse when you're trying to come up with a reason why the main character and their cohort of whacky friends have the ability to save the world while everyone else is helpless, but taken to the logical extreme is blatantly fascist.
In my experience it is true, but only for relatively small pieces of a system at the time. LLMs have to be orchestrated by a knowledgeable human operator to build a complete system any larger than a small library.
Basically the US wasn’t great at shipbuilding post civil war due to high costs. WWII was an existential threat so cost was no object, and we coasted on that capacity for a long time.
How else do you propose to get a company to build a factory at your preferred location rather than theirs? Paying companies is the usual way to get them to do things.
The economic effects are important but secondary to the national security effects of having TSMC chip manufacturing on US soil.
I agree with you, and am excited for TSMC fabs in the US. At the same time, I also wonder if this would lead to _less_ defense of Taiwan if we neuter its strategic importance by building those crucial fabs somewhere else. Mind you, this is not an argument against building them. It just makes me wonder what the other effects will be.
US will still have plenty of reason to defend Taiwan, if only because it is a crucial part of America's containment strategy - China would have a much easier time operating in the Pacific if it controls Taiwan, and the US won't allow that. Further, if Taiwan falls a lot of countries will lose faith in America's ability to protect them from China which would thrust the entirety of South-East Asia into China's hands, also something the US can't afford. Though, with recent claims that China can build 1000 cruise missiles a day[0] it might not matter whether US defends them or not.
Yes, Vivek famously already said during his campaign that he'd tell the CCP that we need a few years to catch up on chips and then they can have Taiwan. I'm sure other share this (IMO inhuman, deprived of any morality and allegiance to our liberal western alliance and any foresight) sentiment
They have said they will not build the best and latest here in the US. Many of the fabless companies here in the US want access to that latest stuff and the US is vested in keeping that channel open for market/defense/security reasons.
The Chip Wars book is an excellent read and tells you us the supply chain is globally integrated. If we were to draw a country graph of technology dependence to create semiconductor technology T (tools, chips, etc) - well, there is no DAG. The defense department is not so happy to see all this free market sharing of essential technology going on as it benefits non-friendly nation(s).
The book also illustrated how behind Russia was/is with weapons technology and semiconductors in general (compared to the US).
Being 2-3 years ahead in chip making(with other closing the gap over time) is not a defence against a potentially WW3 level event. Anyone who thinks millions of life is less important than few percentage increase in performance is delusional. I don't know how this discussion surfaces in HN so many times.
At the end of the day it’s a trade-off decision. It’s probably cheaper to build highly subsidized factories in the States than to go to war over Taiwan.
I disagree. You don't want the government to own things because they would be slow and ineffective at corporate governance. It's better to simply subsidize and let the business owners make the important decisions.
The biggest owner of TSMC is National Development Fund, which is a fund owned by Saudi Arabia. I'm not sure if a US owned fund would be slower and more ineffective in corporate governance than a Saudi owned one.
Feels like a self fulfilling prophecy. There’s no reason government can’t be effective at decision making if things are set up the right way (their involvement could be distant). There’s also no reason to assume a giant company (like, say, Intel) is going to be particularly fast at it.
The people in government aren't incentivized to be effective largely because they have no personal financial reason to be. There's no stock options or things like that, no good bonus programs, etc.
Here in Norway the government fully owns several "private" companies[1], like Statkraft[2]. They can have bonus programs and similar. Some are too good[3][4], others[5] not quite as wild.
What about a competitive salary they lose (i.e. get fired) if they underperform? We’re used to underpaying and overprotecting government employees but if you were setting up a new publicly owned company there’s no reason you’d have to do it that way.
It's already difficult to fire people in large businesses, but firing people from government is in a whole different level. Especially for performance unless we're talking about extreme underperformance or job abandonment.
What I’m saying is that a publicly owned company has a lot of flexibility in this regard. Employees are not government employees. It’s like a regular private company except the government is the sole shareholder.
My broader point here about self fulfilling prophecy is reflected in your comment: it has been this way, therefore must always be this way. That’s not true.
For example, the Federal civil service ("general service") pay scale tops out around $160k. This really doesn't make sense and costs the government multiples of market wages for hiring for roles where market pay is higher than this. One route is to hire that person via a contracting firm with a huge (double or triple) markup.
And of course the reason we don't just revamp the pay scales and pay market wages is because it's political suicide to pay people half a million or more at market rates.
The American people, on average, don't like the level of wage inequality in society. For any particular issue where you shove it in their faces (like proposing to pay the project lead "competitive salary"), you will get shouted down.
That's also why we get strange arrangements like Congress members making around $170k a year with legal insider trading. The insider trading money they make looks like "free" and isn't easily quantified.
Great connection you make on the insider trading! That never occurred to me despite recently being fed up with local mayoral candidates; looking at mayor comp and immediately noping out because a substantial paycut for the pleasure of dealing with the biggest BS imaginable seems rather unattractive.
From working in government, “no, they don’t care about doing it the right way.” The people who get hired are, largely, the ones who will work for the lower salary paid, and plenty lack enough experience and/or capability to even do what they need to. At least in IT.
> The people in government aren't incentivized to be effective largely because they have no personal financial reason to be. There's no stock options or things like that, no good bonus programs, etc.
I would hazard to guess that most employed people do not have stock options or get bonuses (only salary), but are still "effective" because they consider that doing a job well is its own reward: i.e., they have intrinsic motivation (rather than extrinsic).
I have worked in private sector, and in government (including academia/research), and most folks want to do a job well because they like the satisfaction of being able to know they did the job well.
I'd say it's not that clear cut. Do we have any facts (research) here or are these just beliefs? I can point to several but companies doing very well owned by governments, as well as many doing very badly.
Could be slow and ineffective. It's as likely a company would run it into the ground because of short-sightedness. There are so many examples of government services becoming private company enterprises and in short order everything got worse. But I guess there are equally many examples of the other way around as well.
Isn’t that effectively what they’re doing? They’re using their riches to pay the people with the necessary institutional knowledge to build it in the USA.
The US really doesn't do things directly like that, at least not in the last 50 years. Maybe you could point to this and say its wrong, but going through a contractor or company is the way the government typically operates.
Another approach would be to apply tariffs to chips coming from adversary countries, until it becomes more economical to produce them in North America.
> Here [2] is a table of best selling movies, inflation adjusted. No movie made in the past 25 years, including the endless men in spandex movies, is among them.
The Force Awakens (2015) is #11. Avatar (2009) is #15. Avengers Endgame (2019) is #16. And that’s just in the top 20. Not too bad for a list that covers a century of films, especially when you consider the limited entertainment options available in the first half of that century.
Tags are functions that receive an array of strings and then a series of arguments corresponding to values passed in the interpolation slots, allowing you to use template literal syntax while the tag function does something much more complex under the hood, potentially including returning non-string values.
I haven't used Tailwind in a larger codebase, but it looks to me like the problem here isn't with Tailwind, it's with the lack of abstraction in the HTML.
The tone of the article rubbed me the wrong way as well. Pointing to a couple of examples of bad Tailwind usage and then making the sweeping generalization that using Tailwind is equivalent to "the death of web craftsmanship" is completely over the top.
Sure, using Tailwind means that you won't have lots of one-off "craftsmanship" in writing CSS. But that doesn't mean there's no craftsmanship. It just means that the focus of the craftsmanship moves from writing nice CSS to designing nice boundaries between your HTML components.
But what do I know? I've only been writing semantic HTML and CSS professionally for 18 years.
You're not crazy. I've used Tailwind to accomplish 75% of the work required to rebrand an enterprise website with over 6k pages of unique content by updating only the Tailwind config. It's not perfect, but it's a reliably productive enough system as far as I'm concerned.
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