It’s absolutely insane to me how intro economics classes spout that capital takes on risks to implement new ideas while completely glossing over the political process of ensuring profit floors and guarantees under the “rent seeking” definition. Like, rent seeking seems to be the only goal of capital now.
Public prisons have all of the same incentives to reduce costs and anything you should do to ensure public prisons are following minimum standards (regular inspections and regulations) can just as easily be applied to private prisons.
The problem isn't the profit. The problem is the lack of accountability.
The technology is fine, great even. It’s the rabid greed of venture capital and sociopathic CEOs that try to integrate themselves into every aspect of our lives for profit, that’s the problem.
“For 19.99 a month you too can be a world class mathematician!” Meanwhile they are extinct.
Comparing US safety nets to those of “any other country on Earth” is just patently absurd and disingenuous. EU has mandated - mandated - 4 week paid leave. In the US you are obligated to exactly 0 days of paid leave.
I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs that this applies to, but there is very little difference in take home pay for this income regime after accounting for necessary expenses such as housing, transportation, and food; in some cases EU take home is even higher. https://boundlesshq.com/blog/us-vs-europe-employment-costs-s...
Like, sure, if you want to larp as a low income oligarch the US is the best place to do that. Otherwise, you’re going to be regularly crying after 10 hour shifts because you’re in the red each month after necessary expenses. Most people would like tech talent fall into the latter category out of schadenfreude or profit motive.
What's disingenuous is comparing government mandated minimums and acting like that has any reflection on what the situation is for the vast majority of people. In addition, plenty of states and localities have their own requirements for PTO, sick pay, etc. You act as if the US is some homogenous place.
> I get that this is HN and most people here haven’t worked the bottom-of-the-barrel retail jobs
I worked 50+ hours a week while pursuing my CompSci degree. The place I worked was officially commission based (Circuit City) so it didn't matter how many hours they put me on the schedule. I was frequently working 9am - 9pm retail shifts. My easy shifts were 10am-9pm or 12-9:30. Life is hard, but somehow I managed to get my degree while working that schedule for years. My favorite thing was when we did entire store inventories. It was required to be there, but we didn't get paid. Was it legal? Who knows!
I wish I had the pay and benefits that every single major big box store provides now. It would have been glorious. $15-$20 an hour to start, plus full benefits, PTO, sick days, paid breaks(!), etc etc? Heck, quite a few would have helped pay for my tuition too!
> Tech needs to unionize.
There is no job sector in the US that needs unions less than tech. I'm not sure how you can go from talking about "hard" retail jobs to the absolute cushy profession we enjoy. Sitting around in a comfortable office or working from home, poking at a keyboard, attending meetings, stock awards, ridiculously high pay for the amount of effort it requires - the list goes on and on.
This is the mindset of an abuser. “I don’t like how you’re acting so I’m going to pursue unrelated avenues to disenfranchise you.” People who voted for Trump put him into office. Nobody else.
Those voters were simply exercising their option and desire to change from the status quo. That’s what Trump represents. No different than why Obama was voted for. Those people vote how they vote for a reason and feel how they feel for a reason. Racism is/was part of it in both cases. But without a wide chasm of policy direction they dislike, they aren’t motivated enough to change the status quo or pick a wildcard candidate. You have to look deeper and ask, why did people vote for Trump?
I refuse to believe there’s enough racism in America to run a winning campaign on. I’m in Texas, know a lot of Trump supporters, and the number one thing is how they support his ideas but not his process and how they still view that as a better option on the ballet.
People voted for Trump because they are racist and bigoted on such an abstract and distanced level that it doesn’t seem that way, even to themselves. Lee Atwater, who himself pioneered the strategy, framed it best:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nr, nr, nr.' By 1968 you can't say 'nr'—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is—blacks get hurt worse than whites…”
The system has evolved to the point where if people do not verify their political assumptions in relation to a history of racism, they are voting out of ignorance and bigotry that is essentially synonymous to racism. And this isn’t for a lack of trying on everyone else’s part - you can’t say it’s anyone else’s fault but your own when you were warned multiple times, alarms bells ringing like fucking crazy - that this is the history, these are the dog whistles, this is what you’re signing up for.
I get there was, and still is, a status quo that needs upending. But when you look at people’s actual policy beliefs, they align broadly with the aims of the current DSA movement, and yet they vote in droves for the diametric opposite in the form of the GOP. And even in the modern age, it turns out “ban transgender” and “protect free speech” is not valid economic policy. There’s no explanation for it, other than suicidal stupidity and stubbornness manufactured by years of systemic racism.
The only real bottleneck for self-organized discord work groups becoming more mainstream is the need for a central point of contact for legal things, money things, and inter/intra communication things. I see 0 reason why there couldn’t be a system for distributing all of this work at some point.
If you want to add a feature compliant with X Y Z, you need forms A B C and to implement I J K. Put it on the board for whoever’s interested and when it’s finished, add it to the set of things you’re compliant with. If there’s disagreement about how it should be implemented, elect a tiebreaker. Have automatic actions and alerts based on what you’re compliant with and what you intend to do. etc
All this needs to work is the ability to reliably look stuff up by how you want to change the organization, and pattern match on previous approaches and your evolving situations. If you aren’t inventing anything new this is exactly what LLMs are for.
Julia is basically this, i.e. compiled typed python. The nesting for type declarations gets gnarly though, which answers your general question - the really nice language ergonomics cost compute at runtime because that’s the only way you avoid laying everything out beforehand.
I mean just from the above quote it’s clear he doesn’t trust them for “mission-critical” tasks. And I doubt LLms have evolved significantly from their stochastic parrot nature over the last few years
You’re conflating being ghosted with ghost jobs, which are positions that are posted but are never intended to be filled (usually cited as for data collection purposes). These waste people’s precious time while they apply for jobs.
Egregious example:
https://www.loevy.com/for-profit-prison/
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