Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like, pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to provide their own extraordinary evidence for why consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any thought) already knows about.
Downvoted because the commenter asked for evidence, and you just provided a definition. The statement that it's "obviously true" is not evidence, or even an argument. If I said it's "obviously not true", would you consider yourself refuted? Probably not.
You're merely repeating the GP's assertion, and completely ignoring the parent's request for corroborating evidence. What you hold as self-evident is still just your anecdata, and cannot be extrapolated to "the tech set", unless the tech set includes only you.
I'm just pointing out that it's a common belief (and it is, your ignorance notwithstanding) and giving them the search term to read more if they're interested. What's so difficult to understand about this? And it's the philosophy of mind; there's not really "corroborating evidence" to present so much as there are logical arguments that you need to read up on yourself.
I agree that there's not a single instance of double-spaces in the text, and I thought that was a really bizarre claim, but there are some instances of misspellings that help it along.
For example:
1. missles instead of missiles
2. carefull instead of careful
3. futher instead of further
But they're at least all consistent so there's plausible deniability that the author just didn't know English that well. And ofc the tweets are still on-point saying that it's an impressive and unappreciated feat.
That makes it sound like the typo is made in just a few places to make the line fit.
Search missile, there are 0 results. Search missle and there are 217.
The consistent and plentiful usage makes me strongly believe it’s just how the author thought the word is spelt, not a cheap way to get their preferred formatting.
Does it actually help them along if it’s that many items? It’s hard for me to imagine that 217 instances of a 6 letter word instead of a 7 letter word is much easier to format. My view is that trial and error, obsessively rewriting sentences to fit, is much more likely.
EDIT to clarify: what I mean is that I don’t think there was a master plan where words were misspelt to make this work. I think it’s rather brute forces with a lot of obsessive time and effort. Not in a bad way of course, I really enjoy what they did.
EDIT2: especially when rocket is already a 6 letter word, and likely could be used interchangeably in the guide. I feel that turning missile into one as well wouldn’t help the goal in the slightest, would only make it more difficult.
They're not just vowel removal abbreviations or similar though, they seem like things that'd be common errors - 'missles' is how a lot of Americans pronounce 'missiles', if her film and television is any indication, for example. 'Careful' is one of those 'eh what can I say, English spelling is weird' words anyway - 'care', 'full', why shouldn't it be 'carefull'? I'm not a teacher, but I bet that's a common error.
I just scanned this, but some of it seems ludicrously wrong. Like rating chat a neutral face for "find" when honestly one of the biggest advantages to chat in my mind is being able to search for key terms long in the future and be able to turn up the exact transcript of the discussion you're thinking of. Or like this quote:
> Using interactive chat is a good idea for the kind of communication that requires immediate, interactive mutual feedback from two or more participants. If that is not the case, chat is not a good idea.
No. Just... no. This is so wrong it's absurd. The point of text chat instead of in-person chat is that it's asynchronous and it doesn't require immediate, interactive feedback. I'm honestly just baffled at how someone could actually use chat and come to this kind of conclusion.
I think neutral is a good rating for chat searchability. It's better than video or face to face chat. It's good for recalling the conversations you were part of. It's bad for discovering information you don't know about and you weren't part of.
The chat that doesn't require immediate feedback is called "email".
Otherwise you are stuck with "hey, can you help?" with zero details for when you actually get to take a look. Then you have to say "yeah, what's wrong?" and wait another hour. A properly written email would have solved the issue in a tenth of the time.
I'm not sure what you think minority ownership of a public company should entail, but surely you'd agree that it should protect them from the majority shareholder spending unlimited amounts of company cash to save themselves from personal inconvenience/embarrassment?
"Personal inconvenience/embarrassment" will hurt his ability to operate the company efficiently. Protecting CEO is (usually) in the best interest of minor shareholders.
This is why companies pay for personal security of CEOs or for their personal PR (most large companies, not just Facebook).
Perhaps damage to Z would result in damage to FB for more than 5B (company market cap would definitely fall for more than that, and it could result in large mismanagement in the following years), so he is worth it.
I meant "really" worth, for some reasonable definition of "really." But I can't argue that market cap is a more pragmatic definition of worth, so your point is fair enough I guess.
Who exactly is the victim of the crime which such a law creates? If the purpose of age verification is ostensibly to protect children, and if children are the ones lying about their age, then are they both the perpetrator and the victim?
In any case, dragging a 12 year old through the legal system seems like a greater harm than allowing them to play Roblox (although perhaps not by much).
If a child is using a fake ID to buy cigarettes and alcohol, the harm they suffer is not from owning or presenting the ID, but from consuming the product which the ID gives them access to.
A company could in theory ask for ID before selling any product (ignoring age discrimination laws), and you wouldn't say that a child is harmed if they use their fake ID to buy a bottle of water, for example, so the use of the fake ID doesn't necessarily lead to harm.
It's kind of jarring to see Doctorow praise hypnosis in one paragraph and then excoriate tobacco companies for their science obscurationism in literally the next paragraph.
Why? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of woo practitioners around hypnotism, but hypnotherapy does seem to have some scientific support (even if there’s ongoing debate). It’s not like he was having his auras aligned or anything.
He didn't make the claim that hypnosis was scientifically sound and better than other forms of medicine. He just said that he tried it and it worked for him. It seems entirely different from what tabacco companies do to me.
I understand why people take up smoking but I don't understand why people expect credit for breaking out of it. Addiction is an ugly thing and seeing a public personality parlay their experience into an excuse to write a blog post is pretty distasteful to me. Just quietly stop; not everything has to be an event in the history of internet culture.
I find your perception of this blog post bizarre. Who is asking for credit for quitting? Who is making this an event in the history of internet culture?
I've made a habit of putting myself through nicotine withdrawal (I like the on-edge feeling, yes I'm weird), and smokers who quit deserve a lot of credit. It's hard, and I don't think anyone who hasn't been through it would understand how hard it is.
Yeah I mean that seems like a weird narrative. Some people get wealthy because they bought land and then did nothing and held on tenaciously to it even as the rest of society increasingly needed it for something else? How is that a victory for the good guys? That's just rentier capitalism.
If the jobs really need to get done, then the working conditions and wages offered will improve until someone's incentivized to do them. Usually people's objection to this is "but this will raise the prices of consumer goods!" And the answer is yes, yes it will. Better-off people used to cheap goods/services will no longer be able to fuel their consumption on the backs of people getting paid very little for work under dehumanizing conditions, and will end up with a net loss. Lower-class workers will see their incomes increase much more on a proportional basis and end up with a net benefit.
On a more meta note, this is an incredibly common and obvious answer to your question, and I wonder if it's even asked in good faith. If you've "yet to hear an UBI proponent explain" this to you then you really don't understand it at all.
> Better-off people used to cheap goods/services will no longer be able to fuel their consumption on the backs of people getting paid very little for work under dehumanizing conditions, and will end up with a net loss. Lower-class workers will see their incomes increase much more on a proportional basis and end up with a net benefit.
This is totally backwards. Better-off people have more disposable income and are less sensitive to price increases than lower-class workers are. For example, suppose your favorite restaurant raises its prices from $10 to $15 per meal. If you're a tech worker, you probably won't care and will continue eating there as often as ever. If you're an unskilled worker, there's a good chance you'll never go there anymore.
That just doesn't add up. Even without progressive taxation, if you give everyone a flat increase in income then lower-income people come out ahead relative to where they were before wrt the average. It's directly a wealth transfer from classes paying more taxes per capita to those paying less taxes per capita. There's no hand-wavy economic argument about how, actually, lower-income people would be worse off if we gave them money.
I'm not saying giving money to lower-income people hurts them. I'm saying the price increases will hurt them more than the money they get will help them.
> I'm not saying giving money to lower-income people hurts them. I'm saying the price increases will hurt them more than the money they get will help them.
For that to be true, the price increase of goods purchased by the poor induced by the additional income would have to be a greater multiple than the additional income of the poor; this doesn't make any kind of sense.
If you're an unskilled worker, you probably didn't go there to begin with and so long as you're net ahead when going to Food City it seems like a net positive.
I don't know if you've ever worked with people in low socioeconomic strata, but I've been a camp counselor with some kids who's socioeconomics were such that eating off the dollar menu at McDonalds on their birthday was a big deal. I don't think Chipotle being more expansive is a material concern so long as actual purchasing power goes up.
I tend to think the minimum wage should be regarded as a moral concern - if you can't make enough to live decently then the line between effective indentured servitude and freedom is eroded, and this is dangerous in a society premised on the general welfare being such that each citizen has enough leisure time to be educated and vote.
The food supply chain is already mostly automated. Food is not cheap because of the service economy. It's cheap because it only requires work from a very small percent of the population to feed everyone else.
Yup. And some foods are unbelievably automated. There are GPS-guided, self-driving combine harvesters that will harvest an entire field of grain with essentially zero input of labor. Higher labor costs might somewhat increase the cost of some of the more labor-intensive crops, but your basic staples will still be cheap. If anything it's the cost of truck drivers that might have the biggest effect.
I don't think broccoli would matter unless it were already the cheapest vegetable with no substitute good and common to the cuisine of specific person.
But if you're trying to generalize the idea that increasing minimum wage would lead to an inflation death spiral because labor is too high a percentage of cost of staple goods... I'm not sure I buy it, though agriculture is definitely one of the industries most impacted by low cost labor (I don't know what they pay the folks crossing the border at 3 AM to pick lettuce in Yuma in 100+ degree heat, but it's not a lot). But my general sense is that the labor to harvest isn't most of the component cost of lettuce, there's transport, refrigeration, irrigation, pesticides, etc., so you can probably assume doubling minimum wage doesn't do anything like double the price of lettuce. If you believe that the labor to pick lettuce is 50% of the cost of lettuce, your worst case for a 2x wage increase is a 1.5x gain in the price of lettuce, which means the low end of the economy is getting net purchasing power growth, but more realistically, I can't imagine that picking lettuce is 50% of the cost, meaning low-end labor wage increases can't have near that much impact on prices.
My assumption is that the issue with higher labor costs is foreign competition at lower cost with lower standards causing a competitive issue and net less business more than it's an "wages increasing the price and causing an inflation issue." (IE the general "US must have 3rd world wages because otherwise it can't compete with the 3rd world" idea.)
But in my view so long as the increase in minimum wage creates an increase in overall purchasing power greater than any follow-on cost of inflation, it's probably net positive, and should be more efficient because the more normalized wages and living conditions are circa median income, the greater benefit to economies of scale and services and such for that group. Having too many poor and too many distinct socioeconomic bands is bad for the market because it means that the next model-T type product will be more likely to fail. So dealing with the issue caused by competing with lower-wage producers outside our boarders should be addressed separately. (For example, subsidizing US labor's wages by how deficient the living standards of competing labor is, or some other, smarter, plan, someone smarter than me comes up with.)
Their goods will cost more, but they'll also have more income, both from employers paying more for labor and from the direct payments from UBI.
And even if the benefits are entirely "inflated away" in aggregate (which is extremely dubious given that UBI produces real economic value in terms of stability), that's just the aggregate effect. To take an extreme example, if the Fed prints 1,000,000 exadollars and distributes them equally, then yeah it's pure inflation, but it also massively redistributes wealth to the point where everyone is practically identical. Hopefully that example demonstrates that the effect isn't zero even if it's just "inflating itself away."
Finally, I object to treating this question in pure economic terms. We shouldn't be overly concerned with optimizing aggregate economic outcomes for society. Those at the top end can more than afford to give up some wealth, and those at the bottom are struggling to a heartbreaking degree. The utility function of holding wealth is not linear and if you're interested in increasing everyone's well-being then that's a fact you have to address.
How will printing money lead to redistributing wealth? The wealthy will still have their properties, their stocks, their personal connections, their education, ... . When the water level rises, all boats will rise together.
Governments don’t generally do it that way. Usually they just seize assets.
That is because if you print exadollars then either the assets rise in value in proportion or beyond a certain point, implode, making the country as a whole poorer. That is because companies can no longer make money. Suppliers demand more anticipating further inflation. You then need to pass it on but may not be able to pass it on fast enough. Cycle builds upon itself.
Pretty soon, your currency is completely devalued and there is a robust underground economy. You run into shortages for essentials and have to introduce price controls. The poor get poorer. The rich get poorer. Good job.
I remember seeing interview on TV with a McDonalds worker in Switzerland. She said, They are paid about 35 Euro/hour. and they are happy to work at McDonalds ! One of comments from the reporter was that higher salaries increase the price of BigMac by some cents( I remember that it was about 50cents) due to higher salary comparing to cost of BigMac in US. I wonder, Could this be a way to fix the lack of employees? /s
2. The wage of the burger flipper at mcdonalds might not contribute much to the overall price of a big mac, but the wage of the burger flipper plus the wage that was factored into the cost of the ingredients might.
Fwiw, when I was there four years ago the meal prices were in the $13-15 range, so quite a bit more than I was used to. But if that makes for a more equitable society, good.
Then swiss mcdonalds massively lowered their prices since, you ate at a special mcdonalds or you eat huge meals consisting of many burgers. Or you remember wrong. Last time I ate there a big mac didn't cost more than $7. It is expensive, but not that expensive.
If you ever gone to mcdonalds in switzerland you’d know that minimum bill is like $50 (that was still basically at least 50% cheaper than the next inexpensive place I found in Zurich) so I’m not sure that statement about the price is correct.
If the cost of labor goes up, increasing the consumer cost of goods (inflation) is only one way of offsetting that labor cost. That cost can also be offset by A) Reducing shareholder profits B) reducing management profits C) government subsidies D) reducing capacity.
Companies in America are incredibly top-heavy, and a more stable economy could emerge if those resources at the top are distributed down to the worker. If implemented properly, UBI could push companies to share more of those profits with their workers without affecting the buyer.
Additionally capital generates more social value when it circulates (when its being spent) vs when it is stagnant (when it sits in a bank). Even if things are more expensive, more people having access to things allows local economies to grow
I've held one myself, and what I think is "absolutely horrifying" is your moralistic justifications for worker exploitation as being simply bestowing "the pleasures of hard work" and "the foundation for what it took to build a business of your own."
Your hustle-culture narrative is appallingly toxic and your entire argument amounts to learning to love being treated like garbage so that you don't feel bad when you do it to others once you're the one on top.
Definitely was not treated like garbage. Obviously not all entry level jobs treat people well (or even fancy jobs, ever read a comment thread on being a software dev for Amazon?), but just because jobs are low pay does not mean they are exploited.
Seriously, do you expect six weeks of paid vacation and 30 bucks an hour for running a till at an ice cream shop? I can see maybe 18 an hour at an ice cream shop, but even at that price I’d be shocked if you don’t lose business due to a cone costing 5 bucks instead of 4.
Maybe this conversation would be helped by understanding what you define “exploited” and “treated like garbage” to be, and some examples of how that is happening. I feel we must be talking past eachother, because it’s hard to understand how there’s a valid argument for non skilled labor to command a high salary.
Again for reference I believe that wages haven’t kept up with inflation and that a minimum wage of around 18 or so an hour would be appropriate given the cost of living increases we’ve seen in the last 12 months.
It's a very common worldview among the tech set.
Edit: Uh, downvotes, really? I think it's totally reasonable to assume this as a given since it's, like, pretty obviously true. If anything the parent needs to provide their own extraordinary evidence for why consciousness would be non-computable. I'm just trying to provide some context for them to read up more on some stuff that apparently everyone but them (who has given it any thought) already knows about.