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"The results overwhelmingly favored entrepreneurs, who evidenced significantly lower blood pressure and hypertension rates, fewer hospital visits, and reduced incidence of physical and mental illnesses."

How many times do we need to repeat the basic statistical fact that correlation does not equal causation? We need to teach this in grade school because it is lost on so many people.

You can think up many attributes of entrepreneurs that might explain lower stress in general: more entrepreneurs likely come from wealth, have resources to start a business, have a sense of confidence in themselves etc.


> Legacy ad-based search has devolved into a wasteland of misaligned incentives, conflict of interest and content farms optimized for ads and algos instead of humans.

> Path forward requires solving the core challenge: actually surfacing the content people want to see, not what intermediaries want them to see

These traps and patterns are not inevitable. They happen by choice. If you're actively polluting the world with AI generated drivel or SEO garbage, you're working against humanity, and you're sacrificing the gift of knowing right from wrong, abandoning life as a human to live as some insectoid automaton that's mind controlled by "business" pheromones. We are all working together every day to produce the greatest art project in the universe, the most complex society of life known to exist. Our selfish choices will tarnish the painting or create dissonance in the music accordingly.

The problem will be fixed only with culture at an individual level, especially as technology enables individuals to make more of an impact. It starts with voting against Trump next week, rejecting the biggest undue handout to a failed grifter who has no respect for law, order, or anyone other than himself.


On the one hand, you're not wrong. On the other, asking for individuals to change culture never reliably works.


Do you equate AI generated with drivel?


No, but there are many who use AI to mass produce drivel


Does their drivel actually stand out or gain market share?


It doesn’t really have to. A lot of it is spam sites that are just farming ad revenue, for example.


Does that mean all of their traffic is fake? If that's the case, we had this issue before AI.


No, it's real traffic. People get there via search engines typically. The sites are set up to rank highly for common search terms. The problem is that many people aren't savvy enough to recognize when they've hit such a site.

This scam did exist before AI, but AI has made it much easier to flood the internet with sites like this, and make them seem much more useful.


While folks such as the Reply All podcast believed and shared the story that big tech uses clever ways to infer what you’re talking about based on indirect information such as search history of other users close to you, Cox Media Group has in the past admitted its software is used to create ad cohorts based on “Active Listening” that’s legal because it’s buried in Terms of Service agreements that customers agree to when they download apps their software is bundled into.


Any kindergartner with a good heart would tell you immediately that the companies targeted by this rule are doing it wrong. That there are so-called professional adults who enjoy any level of respect or status in society running said businesses is a joke.


I would rather die than deliberately cause a humongous speed bump in the history of human understanding of the universe like this guy did. And the choice is never that stark. It's usually "id rather work in a less highly paid role".

To selfishly discard the collective attention of scientific experts for undue gain is despicable and should disqualify a person from all professional status indefinitely in addition to any legal charges.

I deeply respect anyone whose desires align with winning the collective game of understanding that science should be. I respect even more those folks who speak up when their colleagues or even friends seek to hack academia like this guy did.


Another example of why outsourcing manufacturing is a national security concern, and how the absolute free market can lead "winners" to harm themselves by chasing "success" at all costs.


Arguably, it's off-topic, though I agree with the point. Lebanon has been struck by poverty, and as a result, they might have far fewer choices when it comes to providers in general. Manufacturing within Lebanon or trading with neighboring countries might not be affordable for them.

It’s important to take a step back before generalizing an economic or political statement that may not be applicable in other contexts. There are little chances that the supply chain in Lebanon is in the same state as Europe countries' ones, for instance. Thus, this is not another example.


Just because something is not affordable doesn't mean its affordable alternative is a viable option, especially when information asymmetries caused by foreign manufacture obscure plastic explosives in the devices or whatever triggered these.

It is the same attitude. "Outsourcing is the only way we can be competitive" / "Buying these cheap pagers is the only way we can afford it"


Do you think manufacturing pagers in Lebanon is a viable alternative?


The idea of the majority of manufacturing being external to a country is a little under 100 years old, yet people talk as if it is unthinkable.


Unthinkable, or at least not feasible, in the sense of supporting the current level of technological advancement and average quality of life in many countries.


lebanon has an economy that's currently in shambles, and its never been known for its productive capacity. even if they wanted to start making simple comms devices it might rely on infrastructure that they can't invest in, and take tech/capital they have not accumulated

it would be more realistic for them to receive it from the iran but there might be political hurdles to this and it would end up costing the iranians as hezbollah can't be expected to pay much for it


100 years ago there were no pagers or mobile phones I guess, or any other kind of modern advanced tech.


No, there were engines that were capable of flight, guns capable of rapid fire, television technology and radios.

That was "advanced modern technology" then, and as the passage of time has marched forward, what we consider modern changes - so what's your point?


How many of TVs were there back then? I can tell you that very few in my country, now everybody has a smartphone.

Also I can tell you, no airplanes or TVs were built in my country either. They never were, 100 years ago, 50, 20 or nowadays.

So when you said “The idea of the majority of manufacturing being external to a country” you must have meant the US.


I meant the UK.

Domestic production of goods such as televisions, radios and even extremely high technology such as tractors has been declining since the 70's.

If you go far enough back (100y or so) then "imported" usually referred to raw materials, spices or very exotic equipment such as furniture - the supply chain and tooling was mostly domestic.


100 years ago Lebanon didn’t have running water and still had slavery. The Middle East hasn’t been a producer of goods, even domestically, since antiquity.


Except for oil, the Middle East produces allot of oil and has for quite some time.


I wouldn’t count it as a good produced though. It’s just a commodity pulled out of the ground and processed elsewhere (largely in the US). It requires no ingenuity or hard work, just the luck of being on top of oil fields due to geographic peculiarity.


Australia: <puppet looking sideways meme>


Undoubtedly, this attack has proven that it certainly is, at whatever cost.


[flagged]


You assume the muslim-aligned countries wouldn't be compromised. There's the potential for supply chain attacks from a domestic manufacturing partner.


The initial objection was the lack of sufficient size or institutional robustness for indigenous manufacturing capacity. I addressed that.

The question of the integrity and trustworthiness of a collective bloc structure had occurred. It's another factor, and of course poses its own challenges. Then again, the Western bloc, most capable of the set, seems to have persistent issues along those lines already. Several of Israeli origin, as it happens. (Though of course not solely.)


Doesn't matter, they could have intercepted a shipment and done the same thing


It does matter if it would have been much more difficult to intercept the shipment that never left Lebanon.


100% this.


Hating on "nitpicking" is the funniest thing to me. It's a bold admission that one has abandoned attention to detail. Huge red flag.


Yes, correction of a detail is good and not a problem. But using that to mock the central point is a popular strategy in discourse.

In the disagreement hierarchy(https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) this is level 4 or 5, but pretending to be level 6. Like using a bug to say that the software lacks basic value.


I wonder if this is meant to be ironic because this behavior is exactly what was being criticized. You just picked one specific detail to focus on and ignored everything else.


The anti nitpicking attitude is the core point of the parent commenter's post. I agree with sensible prioritization as exemplified in the linked article, as should everyone. But the author of the comment I'm responding to is expressing discomfort with a culture that identifies holes in their reasoning. They're so uncomfortable with having details of their arguments challenged that they aren't saying what they really want to say.

I know an "anti nitpicker" who is entirely opposite to that attitude when it comes to their social appearance and perception. One hair on their tie is catastrophic. One publicly searchable webpage that shows a decades old picture of them is an extreme problem that warrants hiring a company to clean up. It's interesting how, in matters that are important to some of these people, seemingly inconsequential and irrelevant details suddenly matter to an extraordinary degree.

The anti nitpicking stance is a byproduct of the extreme overvaluation of social perception. Often these people do not like to look like they have made a mistake. And thus they avoid conflict or paint it as irrelevant in belief that it will save their appearance.


No, a lot of people on this website value very highly their completely irrelevant nitpicks. I’m starting to think it’s just the kind of mind the tech industry attracts, because I’ve noticed it in some coworkers as well.


Really? I see that problem all the time at work.

There is a limited amount of resources (time, people and money). If you have a list of 100 things to fix, you better figure out which of those 100 are going to drive the biggest improvement.

I see teams all the time focused on fixing a problem without stopping for a minute to ask "will fixing this actually make a difference?".


"They just trust me...Dumb f**s" - Mark Zuckerberg


So, downvoters here are OK with academic results and early resume building disproportionately affecting life trajectory, yet early displays of poor character aren't relevant in holding someone to account in the same way?

This is not a made up quote though I didn't transcribe it exactly, it was an actual message he sent during the early days of building Facebook when asked how he obtained so much personal contact information from Harvard students, so entirely relevant to this context.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/faceboo...


The customer often does not have the luxury of making perfectly rational choices.

IBM for example waits to fly you out to orientation in Armonk before they show you the binding employment contract with dubious clauses.

These businesspeople know this. Introducing pressure and a sense of inevitability of poor conditions is part of the game. And they know that it's scummy. But Ayn Randians will defend them to the grave as they eschew the responsibility to build a stable enduring economy for one that disproportionately rewards them.

Framing it as the customer wants this level of strongarming is the same as saying they want bloody revolution when it inevitably follows. What customers actually want is for scumbags to be banned from leadership roles in the economy, and for toxic business strategies to be regulated out of relevance.


Markets are efficient. At measuring who cares enough to calculate the price of something, who is exploiting it via fraud, how much society cares enough to investigate that fraud, how good the business actually is, how many people are pumping the stock without knowing anything about it, how many people are dumping the stock without anyone knowing about it, how many people have a grudge against the CEO, how many people want to have the CEO's babies, etc.

That they are efficient in communicating what a company is worth on fundamental financial level is laughably incorrect and not even worthy of "in best case scenario" theorizing.

What they are efficient at is capturing literally EVERY possible human motivation to buy, sell, or ignore, and distilling it into a single number.


Sure but that’s not the hypothesis, that’s your definition. Of course a definition is true.


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