allworknoplay

There is no "point" of automation here beyond deploying capital to produce returns.

That this is the sticking point for the companies is inherently validating of the workers' concerns -- if the companies intended to solely increase throughput, they could guarantee the jobs.

It's total nonsense to say there's a "point" of using a tool except that for which it's actually used.

And no, the timing isn't interesting -- it's during negotiations where an agreement hasn't been reached.

Surprise, organizing takes an enormous amount of work, which anyone who's involved in any participatory, decentralized, leftist, or anarchist space will tell you.

You may know this! Not clear from your response. Do you have a point about something he's factually incorrect about in his writings, or just that you (unlike many other Occupy participants) didn't like processes he created as much as others?

* 6 years old

* hundreds of millions of videos

* many make fairly strong pedagogical claims

* mixed in advertising and product placement

The third one there is the most important here. This isn't comic books, because comic books largely didn't claim to be educational. Seems like a new phenomenon to me. We have truth in advertising laws for good reasons -- companies making obviously false claims about their products' educational value is one of them.

Let me get this straight -- a commercial ad-driven marketplace supplies a very substantial amount of content consumed by children and markets it as educational (and/or allows such marketing), parents are not educational experts, and you think it's problematic that the government might see a need to step in, starting with some basic fact-finding?

Nobody is shutting the service down, dude. Maybe we find that nothing is really wrong. Maybe we challenge the company to more appropriately rate content that's marketed as educational, or do better ad filtering, so that parents can make informed decisions. Right now there are pretty clearly no requirements and lots of obviously false pedagogical claims, and parents can't afford to pre-vet all the content their kids might watch (and the marketing tells them they shouldn't have to).

I don't see what your problem is. This is a major new phenomenon facing parents, it's super weird that you think some fact-finding is nanny pearl clutching.

This is insane. Phone companies published numbers because it was generally considered helpful and the costs of unsolicited calling were relatively high. By the 70s delisting was an option, and by the late 90s it was very common (in the US). The internet made this a no-brainer, and to suggest that it’s somehow ok just because it used to be (in a totally different world) is beyond ridiculous.

We don’t have the option here — people provide their number to a service to be able to use it, and the numbers are then compromised, in breach of that contract and because of the service’s failures.

The two are not remotely alike, what the fuck are you even talking about.

Why on earth did you pick this username

The value derived from public goods is mostly not factored into GDP growth and (when executed well) serves people both more efficiently and more equitably than the purchases GDP does account for (obvious examples, public or publicly funded healthcare, parks, libraries). The degrowth argument is that overall this increase in efficiency would reduce production/consumption while improving lives, but it does also not ignore that particularly wasteful nations/lifestyles may need to live differently.

Hickel and others who write on degrowth are mostly very clear about these definitions (and Less is More is exceedingly thorough on the matter), but obviously you have to read past the surface level to pick up some of the detail. That's not meant as a dig at you or to imply that you're not willing to do more reading, just to clarify that because oftentimes these analyses are miles apart from typical US/western thinking, a lot of digging can be necessary.

As I noted above, Hickel applies a historical materialist analysis in a lot of his work, which can take some time getting used to (and, indeed, did for me).

Emissions are not down -- they've just been exported. The analysis you're looking at is a common one, but it's a shell game. Plenty has been written on this topic and on actual, hard, ecological limits we face; the book I recommended above also covers this.

Capitalism is obviously not "fine" with recessions -- we dump enormous amounts of money into the economy when they occur in an attempt to stimulate it, and inequality tends to widen permanently in the absence of policies to counteract this.

Most people live there, and most food for those people is grown there. These are people, who are not responsible for the catastrophes destroying their ability to live.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm vaguely moralizing -- elsewhere in this thread I recommend a 2020 book called Less is More (https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more) that contains analysis of these problems and very specific strategies for addressing them.

It's well understood that wealthy countries, and especially the US, generate far more junk than poorer ones. We don't need to, and there's a big difference between sustainable strategies for getting people what they need and hoping (because, without planning, that's all we're doing) that capitalism will solve this problem through even greater amounts of consumption.

Great argument.

"We can literally consume our way out of this mess" is my new all-time favorite HN quote. Sorry if you were being tongue-in-cheek, it's just too good.

Yeah this thread is filled with reactionaries downvoting everything that offends them :/

I said GDP and GDP growth, and if two countries are competing on GDP, the mechanism by which they compete is growth.

I know you've seen my book recommendation in the thread here; it's about the incentives behind growth, and how de-growth can work and still encourage human flourishing. Rather than just reacting negatively, why not look it up?

Yes exactly -- so to measure just by what happens to us in the north -- particularly when we're causing the problems -- is basically genocidal.

Totally separately and having literally nothing to do with anything else here, but since you brought it up, the USSR lost an economic war to capitalism, it didn't collapse because communism doesn't work. They spent their money lifting people out of poverty while american empire was busy extracting resources from other countries and keeping them in poverty.

Note also that I'm not defending individual policies of the soviet union.

EDIT: wanted to tack on: if in 1989 the US and western europe had collapsed and become communist, I wouldn't take that as proof -- or a particular reason at all -- that capitalism didn't work. That would be idiotic -- we were engaged in a decades-long cold war with another giant power, and lost. I may have separate arguments about capitalism, as I do now, but the collapse has nothing to do with it.

Similarly, the collapse of the soviet union has everything to do with trying to eliminate poverty WHILE staring down the barrel of the largest and most powerful empire that's ever existed.

You're somehow conflating a method of analysis with communism, which doesn't make any sense. Why are you bringing communism into this?

"For northern countries"

It's absolutely monstrous to think in terms of what's ok just for the global north, here. We've done the vast majority of this polluting, and the global south is, in fact, currently, undergoing catastrophic change because of it.

Glad you asked!

He's a marxist, so statements like that are grounded in a historical materialist analysis -- very basically, that the material result of policies is their reality, not whatever ideals they might aspire to. He makes a very solid case that capitalism can't really do anything else -- he doesn't just ask the reader to take this on faith (I would have hated it if that were the case).

The book does use a lot of such analysis, which can be pretty offputting if you're not used to it, but each such example is really cogent and well supported, so overall I found it a pretty phenomenal aggregation of history and very solid analysis/math for how we think about what's sustainable and what isn't.

His pattern in the book tends to be 1. strong assertion => 2. actual argument => 3. repeat assertion; I did find myself reacting to the first assertion there negatively because they often sound like overgeneralizations at first, but in each case he really did support them.

This just results in more junk. Where do you think it all goes? It's a shell game.

GDP and GDP growth are the universal metrics by which every major international organization judges and ranks economies. IMF voting is literally determined by your GDP.

There are no other metrics that are remotely commonly used to determine real international policies. Every nation on earth is in explicit competition with every other to grow faster because of this. These policies are prescriptions by capitalist countries that weren't like this before and likely wouldn't be after.

It's beyond silly to claim that capitalism doesn't require endless growth.

| renewables become more affordable than coal and nuclear

And yet emissions keep climbing, because capitalism requires growth and demands deregulation.

| Excess energy can be dumped in to carbon sequestration

There is literally no scalable strategy for this, and no serious combination of strategies. Really. Nobody who actually studies this (who's not also trying to profit) thinks there is. Do the math on the world economy continuing to double every <20 years. Or maybe check out the book I shared above, it's really very good.

Our ability to organize the resources equitably and sustainably is the first barrier here, only then can we look at the resources as the hard limit.

Capitalism's relentless drive for growth and deregulation would like a word with you.

My favorite book of 2020 if you'd like to read more: https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more

Of course they did. The DoD puts enormous resources into publicity stunts. They sponsor movies left and right, do tons of advertising and propaganda, and provide early-stage commercialization funding for consumer products to their contractors. They know BD robots look like murderous war machines, so of course they want to spend some money to make the public like them.

And yet truly awful organizations have no trouble hiring programmers! Far too many of us are obsessed with puzzles and paychecks and couldn't give a fuck about the ethics of something like this.

I'm not writing it right now, but have never had trouble find really high quality work (in NYC and elsewhere). The community is active and generally very friendly/positive.

The ecosystem is obviously rails-heavy, and you have to like that, but the skills translate to python jobs well too, and rails has done a good job both keeping up with modern trends and staying modular.

And, the language is faster than ever with 3.0.

My understanding is that he burned out and had to take himself offline. He used to be involved in quite a bit (also see Hackety Hack), and it can be really exhausting for some people. I'm hopeful that he found the balance that he needed, and glad for all the contributions he made along the way.

"... the main cause was this book."

Sorry, but blaming a single book for not learning something when there are an enormous number of other resources (and have been all along -- _why's was a long time ago, but so were, say Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails and the others mentioned here, and there has long been tons free on the web) probably means _you_ were actually the main cause.

If you read further down, it makes this clear:

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