HEmanZ

This works with some people and not with others. I’ve found once you have no epistemological common ground or rigor it becomes pointless and not worth having.

Like what do you do if every source that contradicts them about any aspect of the world is considered a lie controlled by <insert boogeyman> (billionaires, liberals, the Jews, whatever)?

I’ve found the majority of people who are really in to regurgitating politics have no interest in actually understanding reality or making political decisions or even political arguments. They are playing a tribal sport and showing the allegiance and righteousness with words. It’s closer to “my sports team is better than your sports team”. In this situation, there is no string of conversation that can convince them otherwise or land real information. The best thing to do is maintain the relationship, let them know your basic positions, and model “people who disagree with you are very normal and won’t mock you if you change your mind.”

Motte and Bailey.

That again presupposes no one is or has done that.

It’s like “I declare we need to check the batteries and maintenance!” because the previous maintenance reports didn’t show as many busted alarms as you want, because your ego is tied to the idea that the smoke alarms don’t work.

Did you not read the point?

We. Have. Checked. Over. And . Over. We have multiple layers of checks. We have cross checks. We already invest a ton into this.

You are proving my example by presupposing there are no checks and that investigations never happen. You are the person saying “please think of the children and install smoke detectors” when they are already installed.

So much of this noise tho bakes in the assumption that we weren’t already doing voter fraud detection. If my parents are a decent gauge, this is the entire lie the right wing is trying to push: that there has never been rails against voter fraud. That there isn’t a massive amount of machinery already preventing it. And, by acting like “oh now we’re doing something” and ignoring prior work it allows them to put on a captivating dog and pony show for the base that desperately wants to believe the elections are rigged.

It would be like declaring “we are taking the big step of installing smoke alarms in every school in America!” when there are already smoke alarms in every school. You just want the political noise for a base that is too dumb to realize you’re not doing anything new.

$9 Billion was not created, just exchanged, with some intermediary institutions and people making money for facilitating the transactions.

It's actually more like 1 trillion of value was "lost" when the stock dropped, and $9 billion was gained by some (and equivalently lost from others) for being right about the stock dropping.

Stock dropping is not literally a loss of any underlying good. It is a "assessment of how valuable something is". So when we say "omg we lost $1t in value" is not quite right. It's "we (everyone betting in the stock market) now collectively understand the value of this thing (company in this case) to be $1t less than assumed previously"

In this case, massive swings in value mean that the assessed value of a thing is very uncertain. I'd say this is extremely true for spacex, where in theory many people think it could be worth a fortune, or nothing, and no one can ever know the "true" value.

This is because there is not such thing as "absolute value" in the real world. And when it comes to things like stocks, "value" is just "hypothesized current value", which is a whole bunch of things combined: long term value of company, plus short term expected movement, even things like "who wants to own more of this this in the next few milliseconds", make up what a thing is estimated to be worth right now.

Assuming the stock market is some oracle of absolute value will make the world look insane. Seeing it as estimated value at one point in time in a very uncertain world where nothing has "true" value and all value is just relations between people and the things they want and the things they own and can exchange, is much closer to reality.

Absolutely. It’s just the very anti city people never ever seem to use excuses that are actually valid.

Like if “the things that brings me most joy in life require owning lots of land” or “I don’t like people and every day I have to be near them drains me”, those are really valid reasons and there are many more.

What that tells me is either they have a caricature of cities in their head, or (more likely) being anti city is an identity and not based on anything actually about cities per-say.

Most people who live in dense cities don’t live in high rises…

It is very clear you have never lived in a well functioning city before, and just have no idea what you are talking about. Take the L and admit you just don’t have experience with it. North Americans often don’t because North American cities are extremely bad in this regard.

Houston is not a free market for housing at all. They don’t have “zoning” because they call it “land use covenants” and “parking requirements” instead, and it ends up amounting to the same thing as “zoning” in other cities.

And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.

I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.

I am liking the term “car brained” more and more for this type of attitude.

Have you ever heard of trains, busses, bikes? The options for transportation are not binary car or no car. Maybe in North America where they refuse to provide even crappy public transport in most cities it feels this way, but in the rest of the world they are smart enough to build trains and don’t have this problem.

Literally not a single one of those numbers is above the 25th percentile. 18 < 20.

Median income in the US is much higher than $12-18/hr, it is about $30/hr. 25th percentile make $20/hr. 10th percentile make $15.58. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.htm

So, the people you are mentioning making 12-18/hr, are literally below 1 in 4, to less than 1 in 10. These are not “average middle class Americans” except maybe in that higher end. These are low wage earners and are far below “average”.

I mean absolutely nothing normative by this statement, nothing about whether this is good or bad or what we should do policy, socially, whatever. But saying someone making below the 10th percentile is average is like saying someone making $75/hr is average.

Statistically parents spend more time with their kids now than in the 1900s, and the trend seems towards more and more time, especially among fathers.

There’s some “well we have no idea how much is quality time” argument, but just looking across my own families over time the reality is more like modern parents being way more present than their parents.

The issue lies elsewhere. It’s almost a zeitgeist, the direction and evolution of ideas, and less any actual cause. At least that’s how it seems to me.

Robots?

I agree in some sense, I think the runway on human physical labor is measured in decades. But it’s likely not infinite, and likely not 100 years. I expect my children will at least see “the end” in their lifetimes.

Human physical labor also has a ticking clock, albeit longer than software engineering.

Of course again, this is if we don’t put up or find unknown-unknown walls on machine intelligence. I think there is a pretty high chance we just make sufficient machine intelligence illegal for a very long time, at least until labs can fine-tune models enough to be smart enough to replace humans but dumb/lobotomized enough to not make a bio-weapon.

This requires an assumption that humans have some capacity that LLMs/machines can not fundamentally match (or match cheaply, or we’ll make matching it illegal).

That’s fine, but one of those assumptions has to be the case for your statement to be true. If they meet or exceed all productive human capacities at lower cost, are not stopped by regulations or some kind of near insurmountable “exponential cost of intelligence”, then this is completely utterly different than the agriculture shift.

My generals observation about people like you is that you assume “the future form of ai is just a chat bot, like today” and that is just not the case, and it’s not what anyone is worried about. Many of us are “playing” with real agents, grafting together agentic memory systems, kicking around early experimental harnesses, seeing what kind of self learning loops we can hack, perfecting evals, wiring in eyes and ears and a heart-beat to these things. And those of us who are often take a look at the Frankenstein result and go “ya, this could completely replace us with enough iterations”.

We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.

The window of uncertainty is absolutely massive. I could also equally see a world that looks mostly like ours today because it becomes illegal to use sufficiently intelligent AI (Mythos is already generating guardedness, and it’s not smart enough to replace capable humans). Eg if ai that is sufficiently intelligent to truly replace humans is as dangerous as an atom bomb (or chemical weapon, or even a machine gun) then it could just be illegal to use except for use by the governments of the world.

Or high intelligence, enough to replace all humans, becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of energy and data compared to humans that we maintain a kind of biological advantage on a large category of economically valuable tasks.

Or training sufficiently advanced ai to replace us requires judgements and training data that is essentially beyond us (eg if we can’t figure out what the right answer is, how can we train or judge an AI)

No one has any real idea what is going to happen. What we need tho is a collective promise, through our democracies and communities and governments, that we will make it right. Institutions and laws that make sure the benefits are distributed broadly, that we stay safe, that we have a better world because of it. If people get that I think everyone will be mostly excited by ai, not opposed.

I think you have no idea what Jevons Paradox is if you think it is a retort to what I just said.

I don’t think the claim is that people will be less productive, the world will be far more productive.

The claim is that the value of most human labor will be at or near enough to 0 compared to deploying capital (robots, ai) to product the same goods. So humanity becomes owners living ludicrously well on highly productive capital and everyone else getting whatever “humanitarian” portion is assigned to them. And no way to move from “permanent underclass” to capital owning class, besides maybe winning the Beast Games.

Have you not met Americans? The very first thing 95% of Americans will say if you propose public transport closer to their house is that you are bringing crime. Also if the transit comes close then someone might build condos or apartments near it! Oh the horror!

I had a lady parade around my neighborhood handing out fliers saying that extending the bus stop to our neighborhood was going to bring rapists and pedophiles into the neighborhood. I thought she was an odd one out and insane so I made a joke about it at a neighborhood event a few weeks later.

Turns out, I was the odd one out…

Really? The modern ones I’ve run into lately are like 100x better than the old flows. “Press 1 for sales. Press 2 to know our hours. Press 3 if you have a ticket. Press 4 to hear our website address…”.

Of course nothing beats a human with real agency at the company but like, these modern agents could be 100x better than what airlines and internet service providers currently have.

So 164,339,764 made it happen?

I don’t like any direction this administration has taken, but acting like it’s not the completely legitimate will of the people is BS.

And no one is saying eat the homeless.

My city is deadlocked on doing anything about the literal crimes I’ve described because acting against violent offenders is seen as oppressing the downtrodden. Building new shelter capacity is insanely difficult because no one wants concentrations of this near them, and concentrated homeless services turn the area into a waste land (like pioneer square) due to the amount of criminal and antisocial behavior. Raising enough money in taxes seems out of the question because everyone thinks someone else should pay.

So you get common crime and antisocial behavior in much of the city and no one can do anything about it.

What cities? You’re right that I never saw anything like this when I lived in Oslo, nor did I see anything like it living in Sydney.

I’m reacting to a specific environment in two major west coast cities, Seattle which I now live, and San Francisco where I regularly travel for work. What I’m describing is not unlucky in these cities, it’s “I take the light rail to pioneer square for work every day.”

Yes the guy who screamed “I’m going to f*ing kill you!” Out of nowhere at my daughter and then chased us, or set fire to random trees in my neighborhood for fun, or cut the copper wiring off the side of my house, or took sledge hammers to local park statues, these people are definitely not a problem. No the problem is really the people who think it should stop. Those horrible, insensitive people.

They’r being so selfish. Drug addicted should have every right to pull you down screaming by your hair because they’re tweaked out of their mind. And after seeing that, you should be welcoming every one you see to your home.

You’re really the problem for feeling uncomfortable walking by the man jerking off to passerby’s, so intolerant of you.

(Every one of these is a true example I have witnessed, along with too much other insanity to write down, from just the last year in Seattle. so don’t tell me im exaggerating)

The everything crisis is somewhat apt, but if I look at my cohort (older gen z/very young millennial) it’s really mostly a cost of housing crisis.

And if I look at the squeeze I feel as a very high income young person, it’s still just cost of housing. The amount of house a salary of x buys was utterly decimated in the last 4 years, especially in the metros that have good job growth.

Solve the housing crisis and you’ll have happy young people and future generations. Maybe not so much boomers.

This is disinformation. Blackrock and Vanguard manage the accounts of people who own these. They themselves do not own the shares. It would be like you saying you don’t own your 401k, Fidelity does.

There are still control concerns, if blackrock and vanguard started throwing around weight more they’d have a lot of power as investor aggregators. They do “control the vote”, in theory, on a lot of the economy through their aggregation. AFAIK they don’t use this much because it’s not practical for their funds. But framing them as real owners is the kind of boogeyman crap.

Yes. Kind of. Anything involving home invasion I’ve usually seen them go in like an occupying force. Including the time i called them because a small group was going around the neighborhood trying to break into houses. They show up with bullet proof vests and assault rifles at the ready and pull everyone out of their houses.

There is huge variation in what the US trend looks like from the ground that varies by region, age, income level, industry, and demographic.

EI think if you’re a professional class baby boomer the trajectory has looked fantastic through your life.

If you’re a 35 middle income living on the coasts (where at least 100 million Americans live) you may have watched affordability collapse and QOL decease significantly over the last decade.

I agree, difference between explosive growth and “consistent draw” is large employers setting up in the region.

Another interesting anecdote is that I know many people who work remote for companies all over the world who moved to the Seattle area once they had a remote job. I am one of these people who moved once I got a remote job. Im not sure what kind of impact this has long run. I think the flywheel drawing high skill people to Seattle is still very strong.

“ Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.”

How old are you? What propaganda told you this? In my generation (young millennial/genz) the attraction of living in Seattle, which pulled me and almost a dozen professional friends at this point has been:

- high quality urban living in a temperate environment. Including access to great parks, waterfront, bikeability in the city

- access to great outdoors and regional amenities like skiing, ocean fishing, hiking, wine country

- liberal policies and general friendly society (it’s friendlier here than the east coast)

- no state income tax (we’re all very high tax bracket)

- a high enough income population that you can find a plethora of high-end products and services that cluster around high income earners (only a few us cities have this stronger than Seattle I feel)

Ok so if that labor was someone’s job, that implies they couldn’t get something better for them. If you’re straight eliminating those jobs and now they have to take something even worse for them (lower pay, worse hours, worse personal satisfaction, etc)