haroldp

In one of TR's books (perhaps Rough Riders?), he mentions watching Lincoln's funeral precession as a child, from his family home in New York.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo

And, “They have been carried away by monkeys!”

I was more thinking I could add it to my Asterisk server to honey-pot the spam callers into an infinite time waster cycle.

If AI evolves at the same pace, and replacing labor (robots) and services (AI), I am not sure that human would turn around? How do you think we can turn things around ?

I see no indication that we are close to building a GAI, or that we are close to solving the hallucination problems that severely limit the utility LLMs without human managers. We don't understand how our own intelligence works, or even an ant's. The notion the we are close to replicating or exceeding it seems far fetched to me.

What activity would require human involvement ?

Nurses, bar tenders, barbers... Hasn't anyone read Player Piano? :)

How do you think we can turn things around ?

I dunno. Did anyone know how dangerous fire or deadly spear points world work out?

I get what you are saying, and I don't think you are wrong, but it has been like 100 monumental changes in 200 years. The demographic shift of the industrial revolution was particularly painful, to be sure. But we seem to be pretty good at coping with them, overall.

And again, I remain skeptical that general artificial intelligence is actually that close at hand.

I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom

Ok, appreciate the clarification. But in that time frame there have been a number of really tectonic inventions that changed pretty much everything: steam power, ICE power, electrification, refrigeration, computing and the internet, just to name a few off the top of my head.

There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions)

Same. I am both optimistic about human ability to find new jobs, and skeptical that "AI" is going to make that necessary in the new future.

There is likewise no indication that it won't. And if I am looking at a pattern where a thousand careers were destroyed by the advance of technology and were swiftly replaced by tens of thousands of new ones, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the pattern is likely repeat.

My job title did not even exist when I was born.

Also that's a singular industry

200 years ago, 95% of the workers in my country worked in subsistence farming. Today, only 2% are farmers. The whole spectrum of labor has turned upside down and upside down again, in that time. It has certainly not been a singular industry.

Now that jacquard loom has left so many textile workers unemployed?

I grew up in a small town in rural Alaska that would have been completely under glacier ice when Columbus landed in North America. In the time between Captain Cook exploring the area in the 18th century and the next western survey a hundred years later, the coastline had been transformed by glaciers receding and revealing inlets hadn't been there for Cook to map. The glacier that was directly in between my town and the highway to Anchorage when I was a child is all but gone now, and there is a road.

Now ask the same questions about homeless people living in tents down by the river.

This was my thought too, but I figured I just didn't understand the problem. Why use git commands to backup when a file system copy seems like it would do? zfs snapshot takes less than a second on any size repo. zfs send transfers just the changes since the last backup, as fast as your network, more or less.

English was Joseph Conrad's third language.

It's hard. Dense, convoluted, absurd.

These are a few of my favorite things!

Same could be said for the SPLC.

I just got the new M4 iPad like two months ago, and my YubiKeys absolutely did not work, no matter what I tried. There are articles on apple.com and yubikey.com that explain that USB-C YubiKeys will not work with USB-C iPads because Apple's USB-C implementation isn't sending the timing info (or something like that) that the YubiKey needs to function. People were buying Lightening YubiKey and connecting them to Apple's Lightening to USB-C "camera adapter" to work around this.

I decided to double-check my YubiKeys before I responded to your post and (!!!) they work now! This is huge!

Woah, you are correct. My YubiKey 5C now works with my iPad M4! When did they fix that??

Edit: Looks like it was iPadOS 18.2 released on December 11th.

> This is just a big network affect failure.

What do you mean "just" ?

You've made the, "If you don't like the oppression here, move to Somalia" argument. If you don't like the way that cities are mismanaged, abandon them. We could also stop mismanaging them, as an alternative.

From the little I understand the Japanese model is close to what I proposed about buying up land and creating a new urban area from scratch.

Japan had a king-hell housing crisis in the 1980s and solved it by liberalizing zoning and permitting, quashing NIMBY vetos, easing parking, setback and height requirements. Today in Tokyo, families earning median incomes can actually afford to own a home in Tokyo. That is something that can't be said of New York, LA, Boston, San Francisco, Paris, London, and to a growing degree, the middle sized cities across the US. Restrictions on land use drive up the price of housing. This should not be shocking. They also create a list of negative unintended consequences I already mentioned.

America creates new housing on the model of turning pasture and desert into tract-houses and strip malls, that has been known for decades to make things worse.

So as I said, that is actually legally still on the table in the US.

"If you don't like the violent coercion that keeps poor people poor, you are free to move to the desert." But we already own houses in a city where no one can afford the rent. Why can't we replace the building on our land with one that is actually appropriate to people's needs? [0]

not somehow having high population density without any conflict-resolving regulations.

...was never suggested. Merely liberalization.

[0] Actually I don't want to tear down my house, I just don't feel it is my business what my neighbors do with theirs. And the effects of imposing my will on their property seem very bad, indeed.

There is plenty of vacant unincorporated land that a group of people could get together and build whatever city they might want.

This is just a big network affect failure. A bunch of zealots starting a cult in the desert isn't a city, and fails quickly every time.

there is no blanket "striking the root" answer here

I didn't invent this. This is how the whole world worked, in general, 100 years ago. Japan already went back to this 30 years ago, and it absolutely worked.

denser buildings now mean more traffic

But less need for cars when you can walk to where you are going. Also, public transit becomes a viable option at higher densities.

existing properties lose access to sunlight

Exactly the NIMBY attitude that supposes you get to say what other people do with their property. This is what makes homes unaffordable, neighborhoods unwalkable, our working days full of commute time, the atmosphere full of CO2 and soot, and consolidates all sorts of commerce from the small and local into the national and international mega-corps. Great tradeoff!

I think that is also what I am talking about.

A big central store is more economically efficient, and as a result the consumer preference, in an economic landscape where Men With Guns have removed every option except diffuse suburban housing, where they already need to have cars to get along.

Some suggest as a fix, getting the gunmen back out to force a more expensive, less efficient system for distributing food. I'm saying, can we strike at the root instead of forever hacking at the branches? Allow people to build the cities they actually want, so long as they don't hurt or endanger anyone else.

I don't doubt that the change in regulation enforcement mentioned in the article precipitated the shift away from small grocery stores. But the effects of bad zoning have been building for 100 years since Euclid v. Ambler. And it obvious that living in large tracts of single-use residential zones all but requires car ownership. If you already have a car, and all homes and all businesses are surrounded by seas of parking, then going to a large consolidated store is a financial win for a consumer rather than a burden.

Walmart has been making around 2% profits for a decade. Do you think that Walmart is less than 2% cheaper than small neighborhood grocery stores?

In reality, the inefficiencies matter a lot.

Which is how big stores attract customers with lower prices, provided they already have cars to get to them.

Disagree. If most people lived in dense mixed-use neighborhoods where they could walk from home to 90% of the destinations they needed (work, school, groceries, restaurants, entertainment, dentist, etc) they wouldn't need to own a car, and the nominal difference in price between a small corner grocery and a distant chain mega-chain store wouldn't be enough to compel they to buy, park, fuel and maintain one.

Restrictive single-use zoning makes this type of community effectively illegal, despite it being a big consumer choice winner in places where it is allowed.

Perhaps instead of a coercive fix for a problem caused by a coercive fix, we should strike at the root and allow people to buy what they want in the first place?

Prices went up in 2023 following a massive spurt of deficit spending by the government devaluing the currency, and major supply line disruptions and realignments. If sidelining Robinson-Patman is the reason prices went up, then why did it take 40 years?

This is very silly, and the evidence for it is in the world all around you. Walmart is cheaper for most things. If they did not in fact pass the cost on, then there is the idea for your startup business: a grocery supplier to small neighborhood retailers.

if people have the option, they prefer the locally grown, locally owned and operated smaller stores that might cost more

If the close store is the same price, then for sure, everyone will prefer what's nearby. If it is one hundred times the price (hyperbole) then everyone will take the drive. At some point of price differential is the current situation where people who are already forced to have cars will frequently take the drive for less expensive groceries. It's prima fascia the case.

grocery corporations will actively work to grow larger and close stores in Black neighborhoods

If black neighborhoods are underserved, go make a fortune in black neighborhood grocery stores or their suppliers.

When Robinson-Patman was enforced, suppliers had to offer the same deal to all grocers

The law made it so no one had the position to squeeze suppliers for lower prices and as a result, consumers paid more for groceries. If the suppliers were shifting their costs unduly to small retailers, then there was a market for new suppliers. If retailers were a monopoly they would have raised prices, and that hasn't happened. The grocery market remains VERY competitive, with stores popping up and closing down all the time.