superuser2

1) My friend has one

Having your product out in the world with a brand name on it is a form of advertising, and it works really well because people don't recognize it as such.

Some people do recognize it, which is why they'll do stuff like de-badge their cars, to avoid being an agent of the "my friend has one" or "I saw one" form of advertising. My grandparents found this terrifyingly insidious and tried to be cognizant of and reject it whenever possible. Now we all wear logos without a second thought.

3) I was at the store a while back, browsing around (of my own volition), and learned about them

Manufacturers jockey with retailers for prominent shelf space (or shelf space at all) as part of their advertising efforts.

Similarly, a storefront with signage in a heavily (foot) trafficked area is one of the most expensive (per impression) ad placements that money can buy.

Sure it does. Advertising is the flow of information about what products and services are available, how much they cost, and where to purchase them. Some are crass, some are subtle, some are sprayed, some are targeted, and the very best (personal recommendations and such) aren't even paid for. They are all advertisements.

How will people know where or how to buy what they want without advertising?

If you believe the human experience before modern technology and economics was good enough, why aren't you living it? What in the world are you doing on a computer?

Yes, many people lived and died in an era when there was no time for economic activity beyond extracting dinner from local fauna or the land. The process by which they first learned about and acquired farm implements, giving them the time to do other things, is called advertising.

people won't stop wanting things that make their life better, and in general will continue to buy such things.

This is nonsensical.

You can only buy something if you know that it exists for sale and where.

The process by which you acquire this information is, by definition, advertising.

Most of us are employed producing goods and services for which people are not born with an innate desire.

Approximately the only people who can bash advertising without hypocrisy are subsistence farmers. The rest of us are paid to satisfy artificially inseminated needs. Perhaps our specific industries and employers use classier, higher-quality, and more subtle forms of advertisement, but in a truly ad-free world, we'd not spend money on anything but staying fed, warm, and reproductive.

Original content by Netflix and Amazon is produced by the same companies, people, and tools as the rest of Hollywood's output, just for a different distribution system.

Forget exhaust, this is the real air quality problem.

We have this, it's called SMTP and IMAP.

If you feel (as I do) that they haven't sufficiently adapted to the current era, why do you think any other open protocol would be able to change more easily?

The prevailing winds in the regulatory climate do not seem to point towards a skyscraper construction boom anytime soon.

Over in technology, we're rapidly marching towards cheap household-scale solar panels and batteries, commodity autonomous driving technology, and cheap electric cars. Elon Musk's satellite constellation will deliver decent internet service regardless of the population density/economics needed to support fibre buildout. Telepresence is already good and keeps getting better.

The society coming down the line is one made of energy-independent prefab houses with no particular constraints on location (so they'll go to where land is cheapest), drastically improved freeway throughput (autonomous cars can pack much more densely), and car interiors not much different from small apartments (you'll be able to eat, sleep, and work while the computer drives).

So, as it gets easier to live farther from work, the economic incentives for everyone to cluster into a few square miles will diminish greatly.

How would you compare it to code review at a medium to large tech company? At work there's certainly a lot of back and forth but it never feels hostile, and I usually learn something.

This started well before "social media" was a thing. Newspapers weren't done in by Twitter, but by their own online editions, and by Google unseating them as the best place to advertise.

All it takes is a coup of a nuclear-armed nation, and the barrier to entry on that project keeps dropping as states with a recent history of fanatic-deposes-weaker-fanatic coups join the club.

The scary part is that a DAO could actually do this.

And people wonder why developers flock from "real" businesses to Silicon Valley.

If we figure out how to increase supply to keep up with what looks like unquenchable and long-term demand

The answer, as it always has been, is sprawl. We can't sprawl with cars anymore: land is too valuable to park on. So we're bidding with our time: moving to further-out transit stops, walking farther to the stations, tolerating increasing crowding on the trains (losing the ability to work and read). People who nominally make $50+/hour are spending 2, 3 hours a day commuting from their $2500/mo apartments.

I don't mind being a passthrough for the transfer of wealth between tech investors and real estate investors. I am growing increasingly resentful about the hours of my life that I'll never get back, shuttling back and forth from where housing is affordable.

I could technically live close to work, but not with an emergency fund. Maybe with roommates, but that's even worse.

Where are you seeing these?

Basic 2-bedroom condos in the general vicinity of an East Bay BART stop seem to run $700-900k; SF proper with any hope of a short walk or bike ride to downtown, $1.3 - $2 million. There are $500k houses, but they're in Richmond.

I think to be $500k, a condo would have to be far from transit in the East Bay, but such places are mostly single family homes.

I agree, but I think most critics of Apple would claim that only specs are real, and what we're talking about here is an illusion created by branding.

Looks far nicer, and drastically less eye strain looking at text all day.

They're "overpriced" because you can buy more GHz, cores, GB ram, and GB storage for drastically less money.

What you can't find is screen resolution, quality of the keyboard, trackpad, and hinge, battery life, and general polish ("marketing") along with the other specs, while still costing less.

Every minute of prerequisite to get someone new to the project to the point of "I edit code and see its influence on the program's behavior" is toxic waste. Minutes spent getting or recovering a working desktop shell are radioactive toxic waste.

Smart companies ruthlessly optimize and automate these things. IMO it's usually unconscionable not to. Maybe that means Puppet manifests for the laptop model and linux distro the company has chosen to issue developers. Maybe it means a handcrafted AMI for cloud dev VMs where everything already "just works" + a pointer to a decent code sync tool for local editing. Maybe it means shell scripts for OSX. Or some combination. It also usually means the ability to hand off your current "broken" computer and get a new one with minimal friction and in less than half an hour.

But it any case, throwing away the work that was done for you and lighting your own time on fire (or worse, expecting others to light their time on fire) to satisfy your personal taste in operating systems is almost certainly a bad idea, and something employers should not humor.

And if the automation work hasn't been done yet, the employer should insist that the next person to stumble through setup leave behind a script that will work for everyone else (i.e. in the environment that everyone else is using).

My company lets new hires choose to be issued Thinkpads with Ubuntu. Inevitably within the first few days of training or work something doesn't work as expected, and they are rightly told to go back to IT and exchange it for a Mac, because it isn't anyone else's job to help you make your nonstandard environment choices functional.

Running? I wear loose-fitting athletic shorts; a phone swinging around in my pocket is really annoying. I'd have to get an armband.

The futuristic supermarket I imagined as a kid was a warehouse-scale vending machine. Robotic carts roll down the aisles on tracks, and the shelves push the requested items out onto them. You show up after that's done and collect your cart.

Probably need some human labor for the produce section.

This is interesting but the checkout line is nothing compared to the time in the aisles.

Then those (like rent, as I mentioned) are the much more compelling arguments.

If I'm unable to work for months, I'll have to draw down my emergency fund (probably move somewhere cheap to slow the burn rate). If in Europe I don't have to save for this, and can freely spend all of my paycheck, then that's a huge benefit. Ditto with retirement, which takes ~15% off the top of American salaries (unless you are irresponsible or in crisis so not saving for it).

Preschool is a valid point; moving to a good neighborhood is captured in rent.

I'm just saying healthcare and education aren't the interesting arguments. Housing costs and socialized savings plans are.

Healthcare is absolutely taken care of for American six-figure tech workers. My premium is $2.50/mo and all my care is free or for a nominal fee, like $20. US healthcare is systemically broken, but not for people who command high wages.

Having kids in college is at least 30 years out. Knowing that an expense 30 years away will be taken care of is better than the alternative, but would do nothing for my stress level in the next ~20.

I don't buy that either of these things make any actual difference for an early-career programmer.

Probably the most important thing is rent. I suspect most European cities can offer a 1-bedroom apartment within 30 minutes of work by foot/public transit for a much lower proportion of a developer's salary than SF can, even when developer salaries are much lower. And in places not SF, $50k USD is not particularly low for a developer salary.

and the carriage drivers could become chauffeurs

And the people in Detroit could move somewhere with productive economic activity. Why are they different from carriage drivers?

FWIW I used to be a protectionist. I became disillusioned with it when the choices around which things to protect, what to protect them from (foreign competition vs. automation), which status quo to lock in, and where we draw the boundaries of units that ought to be protected from each other, started to seem arbitrary.

I remember a particularly compelling line of argument from an economics textbook: okay, the US should make its own cars, but why stop at the national border? Why not have every state make its own cars? Think of all the jobs that would create! An auto industry in every state! But why stop at state? Why not make people sell their cars and trade to locally manufactured ones at every county line? Because it'd be a huge waste.

And, of course, many of the things we propose to protect "disrupted" something else not so long ago, sometimes in living memory. If we protect truckers from autonomous vehicles, for example, we will have to explain to the laid off railroad guys why we did not protect them from the truckers. Why we did not protect the longshoremen from the shipping container and crane.

It's the government's responsibility to take care of its citizens, absolutely.

Making people do work that they know is inferior to what could be done by machines (or foreigners) just seems like an extremely degrading way to go about that. I'd much rather see a good chunk of the output of "license to print money" operations taxed and redistributed.

[Spoilers for Arrival, Contact, and Interstellar]

Forget aliens for a moment. Contact is a retelling of one of the oldest stories on record: the plight of the faithful. (Wo)man encounters awe-inspring supernatural force, tells the world but can't prove it, gets dismissed as a fraud/crazy, but goes on knowing in her heart that her experience was real. The rest is implementation details.

Putting a scientist in the role of prophet, and getting buy-in from science-y, atheist audiences by using aliens instead of God (you don't know that they're a God metaphor until you're on Jodie Foster's side), are precisely the kinds of intentional inversions that make adaptations of classic tales great. Present the message differently, using different tools, to appeal to different people in different ways.

In theater, Anais Mitchell's Hadestown takes Orpehus and Eurydice, sets it in 20s Appalachia, and expands a story about a hero into a story about the industrialized world: Orpheus and Eruydice's light, playful hearts are nature and beauty and song, while Hades is heavy industry, the coal mines, the Man, the capitalist machine. Also gives it some awesome music.

Sarah Ruhl's feminist Eurydice, from the same myth, subverts a story of a man's heroics in (trying to) rescue his damsel in distress, and transfers the agency to the damsel. These are both, in my mind, highly successful retellings.

Interstellar certainly has components that you'll find elsewhere - what story doesn't? - but none of them that I can place are a huge part of its identity. I wouldn't classify it as a retelling.

Arrival directly copies the setup of Contact: aliens make contact, we ingeniously decode their communication, the message is a blueprint/schematic for something that might be a weapon. Then it concatenates on the ending of Interstellar: time is non-linear, it can be transcended by the power of (love|language). It is neither faithful to nor a clever inversion of either story. It just takes half a plot from one movie, half a plot from another, and puts a different bridge in between them.

I had a good time in the theater, I'd probably see it again, I just don't have as much respect for the story as I did for either Contact or Interstellar individually. The linguistics were an interesting value add, just not that powerful.

[Warning: Spoiler] The most direct criticism I have is that it's a slightly modified Contact with Interstellar's visual style and time-travel plot twist.

As I understand it, you propose a right to "conservation of prosperity": if something is prosperous now, we should use force to ensure that it remains so in perpetuity, and are morally responsible for the harm that comes from not doing so.

How do you decide what to freeze, and how do you decide which year to freeze it in?

I could argue we had a similar moral imperative to prevent the destruction of the livelihoods of horse-drawn carriage drivers. What if you had made this argument successfully in 1890 and the auto industry was never allowed to exist in the first place? Would you acknowledge the same responsibility for the nonexistence of Detroit that you assign to free trade now?

If you think foreign competition was a major factor, the responsible parties are the executives and engineers of the Detroit automakers, for being worse at their jobs than their Japanese and German counterparts.