> Beijing more resembles Greater New York—a conglomeration of over 70 cities—than it does New York City. A similar pattern holds for most Chinese cities.
TIL with this one, I’ve been wondering until now how so many cities in China have a crazy high population and if it really is that urbanized
It's also interesting to note PRC cities, are not particularly dense. Population densities in cities within a country tend to follow zipfs law, which would predict BJ and SH to be 3-4x larger than it currently is. But hukou anbd industrial policy seems to be designed to limit megacity sizes to redirect popuation towards growing 3rd, 4th+ tier cities into their own economic hubs.
I agree with the premise of the article, but something caught my eye in it:
> Some experts worry that this kind of information may shift policing more toward quality-of-life issues and property theft rather than life-threatening crimes such as assault.
Property theft isn’t merely a “quality of life issue”. This seems to imply that policing shouldn’t be concerned with it, which is utter bullshit, they absolutely should be
Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it?
Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off
Seems to me like you’re assuming that the economy incentivizes efficiency. Imo it doesn’t, it’s just a bunch of stupid rich people sloshing money around (for the most part). None of it makes any sense
I was a temporary worker at a field dispatch office. We had to telephone all of our technicians and enter their time into a time sheet. This was approximately 1990, and it turns out all the technicians had email. Since the time recording format was very simple, I worked out a shell script to Let them enter their time in an email message, mail it to me, then my forward rules would pipe it through a shell script, a couple of ANSI codes later, and the time was entered automatically into the system. I would check it for accuracy, but it saved me having to Tab/enter about 25 times per employee just to get to the part where I entered their time. Literally it was five minutes per person including voice comms time reduced to 30 seconds.
A senior dispatcher got wind of it. She went to the boss’ boss’ boss, and complained that “this boy is going to computerize us out of a job.”
It wasn’t long before I was summoned to appear. Three things happened at that meeting. The Uber boss told me to keep it on the down low. He also gave me a copy of his shell script programming book. And finally, he told me to get the heck out of there, go back to school and stop putzing around at a job like this before you end up becoming a middle manager like himself in a career with low reward.
> if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any
kind of reward for it?
More likely she would be hauled up in front of a gang of rabid,
frightened, myopic and punitive ICT managers where she'd be
reprimanded for breaking a litany of "policies".
In these kinds of places you are not supposed to think, there,
computers are not intelligence amplifiers or "bicycles for the mind";
they are more akin to the presses and looms in dark satanic mills.
I synthesize proteins to sell on an industrial scale. When I started working here a few years ago I noticed much of the programming/prep work could be easily automated, so I did. In many cases I could at least double productivity.
None of these improvements ever resulted in getting a raise, or a faster promotion, or getting to go home earlier. All it earned me was extra time to do other people's work, or to stare at the floor and look like a lazy unproductive employee.
I never had any real expectations otherwise; I did it out of boredom. But still I feel stupid for having done it at all.
I believe dingi is perfectly aware of the realistic outcomes, and is instead describing the normative ones, i.e. what you need if you want an enterprise that actually self-improves, where the best employees aren't actively looking for the door whilst concealing things from management.
It is, however, wholly a management problem to find those actually-rewarding rewards.
Crazy idea: what if employees retained IP of any spontaneous, self-directed R&D? You could then license their tech and make the role redundant, something any ruthless capitalist would consider a win. The employee can go job-hunting with a small passive income and glittering CV, which means they're much more likely to actually tell you so you can get that outsourcing win.
In reality, it seems far too many businesses have moats as a result of excellent decisions made by founders in the past, and as a result can't be outcompeted by companies that do manage talent better.
Exactly my point. But if you are a manager, you might wanna consider if that is the incentive structure you wanna have at your organization: People who do good work get "punished" with more work, people who keep it low don't.
I think about incentive structures from an opportunity cost standpoint too.
Everyone has finite amounts of time they can spend on work.
Ceteris paribus, if you spend 90% of your time working and 10% politicking, at most companies you will be out promoted by someone who spends 60% of their time working and 40% politicking.
The parallel IC track that tech popularized solves this to some degree... but most non-tech companies don't have that track.
She doesn't because there is an app on her work machine that gathers all kinds of useful data on usage of such computer. Sooner or later someone will notice and there will be consequences for doing so. There are no trophies for running some unauthorized software on companies data and documents.
> Hypothetically, if she figured out how to automate it on her own, would she get any kind of reward for it? If not, why should she automate it?
One would hope she would be able to move on to more meaningful work, rather than doing drudgery while waiting for someone to eliminate her when someone figures out it can be automated.
That said, a lot of people don't know how to automate processes and it would likely face some push back since the process would be non-standard and tied to an individual. That can have long term costs should the knowledge be lost or a software upgrade breaks something.
spoiler alert: you can put anything in your CV without actually doing it.
I've had the experience of dealing with people who I have high doubts did this.
From the looks of it have been reward for it for more than a decade.
> the reward is the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well done,
just because it applies to you do not mean it a universal shared experience.
for some it's not even satisfaction that they get from that it a frustration and a feeling of being cu*ed where they put in the effort and someone else get the reward.
She would of course get a raise or would succeed otherwise in our economy.
The only reason why I'm as successful as I am is that people understand that I'm so good in optimizing shit that they give me raises.
And alone the time I have to myself to skill up instead of waisting it on repetitive things is ridiculous if you think about return of investment and reinvestment.
> She would of course get a raise or would succeed otherwise in our economy.
Are you kidding? I'm happy your optimisations have been recognised and rewarded, because that's how it should be, but this lady would almost certainly just get more work to fill that newly freed time, for no additional compensation.
Your situation is unusual and you should be grateful. The person described by op is a quasi government employee likely working for a TBTF institution that does not do this
Quite likely she will be punished for it, directly or indirectly. This is why it’s bad to be an employee. If you earn a living by knitting scarves in your house and work out a way to make them faster or better, or both, you’ll make more money or have more free time. If you knit scarves for a salary you’ll probably suffer for doing it faster or better.
> Quite likely she will be punished for it, directly or indirectly.
Not at most modern companies in the real world.
Jobs have already been so hyper-specialized that you have minimal staff "managing" large portions of the company, amortized over a large number of locations / amount of business.
Consequently, if a job task is taken off their plate, there are innumerable additional tasks to backfill the free time.
And critically, tasks that are probably more intellectually fulfilling than the lowest-hanging-fruit rote tasks that are automated.
In the long run it does. Today's stupid rich people are tomorrow's "my grandfather was x and now I'm middle class"
Happens more and faster than you think.
Economic disparity metrics suffer from selection bias.
But beyond that I think that attitude come from misunderstanding and confusing an ideal of "fairness" with efficiency.
Efficiency and fairness are far and away not the same thing.
Autocracies, for example, can be very efficient.
The same applies to economic competition. Scams and cons are efficient. Crime is efficient. Corruption... All are very efficient at redistributing wealth. So government is needed to enforce fairness.
But when it comes to the example problem here of adding excess value to a low-value job, the efficiency of the market is usually acting at the level of the firm, rather than within it.
People are naturally lazy, and for most people, the imagined ungratefulness of a company paired with an inflated view of their own value causes them to not even try and certainly not persist at innovating.
> Another example, if there’s some repetitive task that you automate at a software dev job, would you get rewarded for figuring out how to automate it? The answer is obviously dependent on culture, at my current gig you just get brushed off
The only reward I need for automating a tedious task is my own sanity.
Our society is geared -- at all levels -- towards minimizing expense regardless of the impact on quality or even on society in general. We're all racing to the bottom.
Giving people raises for automating things is minimizing expense.
Suppose Alice is making $40,000/year and comes up with a way to automate a third of her job. So you start paying her $50,000/year and give her some other work to do. Then Bob and Carol each find a way to automate a third of their own jobs, so now they all make $50,000 and have made Don redundant.
The company is now paying $150,000 in total salary instead of $160,000 and only has to pay insurance and provide office space for three employees instead of four. Meanwhile the workers who found ways to improve efficiency are making more money and have the incentive to do it again and get another raise.
Companies may not actually do this, but those companies are mismanaged and putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
> they realize they’re all potential future Dons if these automations continue.
That isn't how the economy works. Bob, Carol, Alice and the boss are now collectively making $40,000+/year more than they did before. Where does this money go? To buy something they couldn't previously afford, made by Don at his new job somewhere else, which was created to meet the increase in demand caused by the increase in productivity.
The only way automation reduces employment is if it makes goods cost less and then people choose to work less because working less still allows them to buy everything they want. But in general people don't do that. Given the choice between having the same stuff they have now and working fewer hours or having more stuff than they do now and working the same number of hours, they pick the second one.
It is not entirely correct to describe the social contract within a corporation as capitalist if you are salaried and compensation is indirectly tied to performance.
> only to end up, a decade or two later, in either a regular struggling life like so many others, or a downright bad place
It isn’t like they transform into the ubermensch and transcend the bodily functions of eating and shitting. At the end of the day we all have insecurities
You can be struggling, you can be in a bad place, but that’s orthogonal to feeling connected and spiritually awake
And I’m not saying drugs are how you can (or should) get there, just that the material conditions that someone is living in have nothing to do with being “there”
And by “there”, I mean a sense of abandonment of self to the fabric that you arose out of. Which is not the same thing as conformity, more like a sense of understanding and acceptance of where you belong in the grand scheme of things
> Beloved websites are destroyed by money hungry ghouls everyday.
Seems like a common theme: people build a community around something, it becomes something really cool, and then a bunch of businesspeople insert themselves and liquidate the trust that’s been built
The problem is money, it pits people against each other. It draws in all of these sociopathic businesspeople. It turns people into ass kissers. It liquidates trust. It destroys community
Build a culture where people think money = God and this is what happens. It consistently brings out the absolute worst in people
>Seems like a common theme: people build a community around something, it becomes something really cool, and then a bunch of businesspeople insert themselves and liquidate the trust that’s been built
So do the people who let the business people in just get to dodge the blame? "Oh well, we can't expect anyone to have principles in the face of so much money, so we shouldn't hold anyone to a standard?"
Most of the time it’s like I spend 90% of the time trying to understand context of preexisting application and requirements, that’s purely reading and not writing
Once I start writing, it’s normally straightforward what’s needed. What difference does it make if it takes 10 minutes to write something or 2 minutes to write it? Especially when most nontrivial problems can take several hours to grok
And no, I don’t trust a model to “grok” the code for me, I’d much rather suffer through it. And introducing another tool isn’t worth 8 minutes of time savings to me if those 8 minutes are relatively enjoyable
LLMs are not suitable for some types of work but they seem suitable for others. ChatGPT hasn't changed my workflow drastically but I do use it at least once a day for one task or another. For example I just created this PowerShell script I would normally wouldn't bother to do to change some settings, send some automated emails etc.
The reading part is what I find really valuable about these tools. As I'm trying to understand a new code base I can ask questions and get excellent feedback. It is a true accelerator for understanding code, especially when unfamiliar frameworks are being used.
Just go into software dev. Don’t go into “Devops”, it’s just some shitty buzzword for having a bunch of oncall. “Data science” is really oversaturated atm. Cybersec in industry isn’t as glamorous as what you might think
> a) Years at job = pay. Absolutely no pay increase or decrease for working harder or being better than average.
It’s already like this
> b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.
Good, the bullshit takes less time and leaves more time for foss or family life or whatever else
> It's good for society, the individual, and the employer when people have room to grow/work harder/contribute more and be rewarded for it.
Rewards are distributed based off of seniority. If you do more than what’s “expected”, there’s no guarantee it will lead to promotion. It’s more likely that you’ll just be given more work
I agree with you when you say that hard work is good for people, but doing this for your employer (as opposed to for FOSS or personal learning) will just screw you over in the long run
There's no "guarantee" but there's an increased probability, coupled with a good employee's ability to move to an employer that values someone like them.
In the union mindset, there's no chance to do better - it's all been traded away for the chance to do "no worse than" which by definition benefits the less good/productive and hurts the best people.
> There's no "guarantee" but there's an increased probability
This is part of the problem. If you work hard but don’t benefit, you’ve essentially fucked yourself because then you’ll get assigned more, you’ll be stuck carrying a bunch of people. Even if you factor in comp increases, how do you know there’s a net benefit to working hard? (specifically for your employer, on your own time is a different story)
It isn’t blind “probability”, it essentially turns into this little psychological game where management dangles promotions in front of people to manipulate them into doing more than is needed
> coupled with a good employee's ability to move to an employer that values someone like them.
// then you’ll get assigned more, you’ll be stuck carrying a bunch of people.
Ok so on a personal level, if this happened to me, my sequence of response would be (1) talk to my management to fix the situation (2) failing that, look for another place to work (3) failing that, dial down my level of engagement.
Right now, #3 is the worst case. With a union, #3 is the default case since the system is designed to prevent you from being rewarded.
I really don’t get why all of the fanfare and hand wavey attempts at outreach are necessary here. You have a well defined problem: high rates of property crime and drug use. How to solve it? Maybe try what they did in El Salvador, since that’ll actually accomplish something
The impression that I get from this article is that the city has too many bullshitters in it to actually solve concrete problems: the same problem of a company with way too much management
> You have a well defined problem: high rates of property crime and drug use
Did we read the same article?
Here I thought TFA said the rates of property crime and drug use aren't exceptionally high, and relative to the distant past, actually quite low. But that against a backdrop of an empty downtown thanks to being all tech workers who are now remote, all you see is the ~normal urban blight, so it stands out in terms of visibility.
SF has one of the highest measures of property crime in the country. Article was mainly referring to violent crime. Don’t have any drug stats off the top of my head
That’s the dilemma. Being progressive means being empathetic and a pacifist. Hauling people off the street into jail or other institutions against their will doesn’t play well with the voters. Until there is a tipping point and it does hopefully.
Well I’m a centrist so I hope people get there eventually. You need a good balance of empathy and decisive action. I think one of the flaws in the progressive mindset is that care and love can solve most issues which it most certainly can’t. That and pushing evidenceless delusions like the trans issue are the only flaws with the left right now. The right on the other hand is a hateful, regressive, conspiratorial pit of snakes with no real plan other than being against any sort of egalitarianism.
> That and pushing evidenceless delusions like the trans issue are the only flaws with the left right now.
The reason they push this is because there's a particularly nasty streak of misogyny on the left, where they'll completely disregard any negative impact on women in favor of whatever benefits men.
So like the trans issue is mostly about men (who want to be women, or claim that at least) demanding and gaining access to women's spaces. Then there's the policy of trying to legitimize sex work, which basically just harms women for the sexual benefit of men. Also there's the whole issue of uncritical support for Islam, despite it being the most horribly misogynistic religion out there.
For those of us leftists who aren't misogynists, it's a real uphill battle having to deal with these assholes, especially when they try to claim that their beliefs are 'progressive' despite being anything but that, and that anyone who disagrees is doing so because of 'hate'. It's very frustrating.
Sort of like Feminists looking at how women are treated in Muslim majority countries in the Middle East, how they are treated in Israel, and then square the circle of who deserves sympathy and who doesn't.
Sort of like people who claim to be women's advocates and enact policies that make women afraid to go out after dark.
How does this relate? There they actually enforced the laws and threw violators in prison. A similar strategy could be employed with drug dealers, property crime, etc in SF
From what I understand El Salvador went beyond "enforcing the laws" as we'd understand in a peacetime liberal democracy and instead jumped straight to borderline martial law and arbitrary arrests.
So I read the article. I have no doubt that some people would love to suspend constitutional rights and use the military to start rounding up anybody they don’t like, but that doesn’t feel like the kind of thing we do in the US.
TIL with this one, I’ve been wondering until now how so many cities in China have a crazy high population and if it really is that urbanized