jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

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20

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537

Joined

2 yr. ago

At this point, I think the only conservative academics might be some economists and theology professors at religious universities. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out - if it's true that lots of academics were not allowed into tenure etc because of bias rather than the alternate view that education corresponds with liberalism, there might be a flood of potential hires, albeit not with existing track records. However, if that isn't true, then you're going to be looking at the dregs of the academic system, people who both can't get jobs elsewhere and don't have an ability to get an associated job who are willing to go to a very annoying (to them) political climate.

Or bad experiences with a union. I've personally seen Unions do good things, I've seen them have bad effects, and I've seen them cause frankly ridiculous delays with their rules and lack of coordination with other unions. I think theoretically Unions are a great idea, but we've all seen things like Police Unions make it impossible to get rid of bad cops, and otherwise protect people who I believe no normal person would say should keep their job.

Sorry, I meant than using Zelle, a credit or debit card, Paypal, etc. Last time I looked, most crypto is completely traceable because of the public ledger (monero does built in illegal in the US money laundering style transaction mixing to try and make it less traceable, not sure how well that works, but the rest apply to it), and the distributed public ledgers are the only way it works. I'd argue the way most people can get crypto requires a bank account tied to something like Coinbase, so that's a link from your bank, to your crypto wallet, then the rest is even more public.

However, for most people, crypto doesn't work like cash, and does work like a stock. You need a special broker, you need to move money with fees into the crypto account, then pay fees to buy the crypto. This is way more analogous to stocks, so that's how people think of it, than cash or bank transfers.

Assuming you can figure out the right crypto to buy, now every time you spend it or try and send it to a different wallet, there's stupid high fees for the common Bitcoin and Etherium networks (I haven't actually tried to use the other ones as they get very obscure). We tried to move $30 dollars in Etherium to a different wallet (granted this was 4 years ago) and it cost $15 in "gas fees". This makes me long for the 3% credit card processing fee.

After the fee, it takes quite a while to transfer, I recall Bitcoin took over an hour, and it was like several minutes or more for Etherium. Paypal, Zelle, Card are all instant, or maybe seconds.

Basically if you're not buying something highly illegal, there's 0 benefit to a normal person and masses of costs, complexity, opportunities to get hacked and all your crypto stolen, and exchanges to either collapse or also steal whatever money you had in there. It doesn't solve a problem, and so normal people are right to not use it. I'd suggest after 13 years it's only been used by speculators and scammers "successfully".

syncthing will work with pretty large amounts of data, unless you mean having the storage space on each device is the "won't work" issue.

I mean, as a normal person, I can't earn Yuan in China and then convert to USD when I leave(at least this was the case for a long time), but the reverse isn't true. If you can't convert into and back out of a currency, I question how much it has to do with the global economy. A government currency swap is like swapping commodities, it isn't doing anything for other countries.

Crypto is entirely an extremely expensive gambling system. It serves no actual explainable purpose for the vast majority of people. It's trivially provable to be worse than existing alternatives in every way that isn't scams and or money laundering.

I'm pretty sure in the US this is already answered as "no". The reason is - non-persons in the legal sense cannot hold copyrights at all. This was tested with photographs I think taken by a monkey and maybe a bear. The AI isn't a legal person, so cannot have copyright.

That's not to say humans can't take an AI image, and manipulate it / clean it up / etc and have copyright in the final result if they do a minor level of touching up or more.

Of course, I find the idea of copyright and IP rights in general as usually expressed pretty insane anyway. The AI "conundrum" is just another point showing how nonsensical IP laws are when you actually think about them and the supposed things they're meant to accomplish.

I'm just not as convinced that China is as essential going forward as they were for the last 40 years or so. There's a bunch of reasons for that. But as to other countries wanting to do business with them there's a lot political going on too.

• China isn't cheap labor comparatively anymore. A lot of low skill has moved to India, Vietnam, etc.
• We saw several movements of manufacturing, I see no reason it can't move out of China just like it did elsewhere chasing either cheaper labor or better supply chains or more amenable political systems.
• China is having all sorts of economic woes in their property and bank crisis.
• China is going to go through a demographic contraction like Japan did starting in the 90s. It's going to be on a larger scale.
• China isn't a better partner than the west for developing nations. It's proven it also just exploits for raw materials and the like.
• The US and Europe after COVID see manufacturing as the strategic issue it always was again, so they want to move stuff closer or back into their countries.

That said, I think a lot of people overestimate how much the US needs China. There are plenty of countries that would step up and be happy to get any set of consumer spending from western countries IMO. I think a lot of multinationals could make it the next "offshoring" cycle to move production from China to Mexico, India, etc etc. The other thing people forget is the west can and does play dirty too.

Like I said - all that would make it seem like just assuming China has a long term plan that is going to obviously beat the US is buying their propaganda IMO. The bigger issues though are the wildcards - will LLM AI actually provide a huge productivity boost again and let China manage their shrinking population in terms of economic output? Will it do it in a way that doesn't also advantage using the enhanced automation within Western countries vs China's previous inherent cheaper labor due to lots and lots of people?

Will Climate Change make it more and more difficult to have a global shipping network, making it even more expensive to have a world manufacturing hub in the future? Will the US Navy keep patrolling the seas to prevent piracy?

But back to being an essential part of the global economy. China doesn't have a lot of settlement networks outside China that third parties are using. China doesn't even let you take Yuan out of the country in most cases, even if someone wanted to take it in payment. So China isn't a big Finance player outside their borders. COVID already showed that we can survive if China stops shipping stuff for a while, and I think that will get more robust and diversified as time goes on.

I mean, I guess work could also just give me a gas credit card and pay that, but I have my doubts that'll become common. And yea, I left out solar because again, first it's impractical for a very large number of people (they don't have property to put up solar panels), and where it is possible it's another tens of thousands. I'm not even sure I'd call that a capital investment as I see lifespans for the solar panels being near the lifespans of cars, or at most 2x if you take the 20ish year estimate and take 10 years as a car lifetime, both of which seem conservative to me. Then there's the road taxes that as EVs become more popular, ICE will no longer subsidize completely via gas taxes, so that illusory savings will switch, and as they're updating the laws and changing mediums, I bet that's where local governments will find a way to increase that tax to make up for the impossibility of increasing the gas road tax due to politics - with the EV switch there's enough smoke and mirrors to get that through.

I still believe EVs can be cheaper than ICE, but it's going to work out to be far less than "advertised" by the early adopters who got all the subsidies, some unintentional.

I kinda think that's the plan. The US beat the Soviets that way, they probably think they can repeat that success. Population trends imply this might well work out for the US, but then again AI and Climate Change are real economic wild cards.

I am honestly not sure how much the US would care if China did less business with them, I think lots of people would actually be happy about that after the supply chain issues seen with COVID19.

I actually use waterproof earbuds because I don't want to blare my podcast or whatever to everyone in the house.

I have no idea why Mastodon does what it does, but I also have no idea why anyone would build a weird auto reposting group thing for Mastodon. I honestly don't understand how I'm supposed to use it, or preview what a group is. The listing I saw doesn't tell me anything. Very odd.

I see this a lot online, but I have to ask - where are people even getting exposure to any lending with a full call at any time option by the lender? Like all my personal debt has defined payment terms, just cause the bank might like the money back sooner, they can't come to me and demand a full repayment in any circumstances.

Why would people expect this for government debt? (this all ignores that the US didn't go to China and ask for a loan, China bought treasuries on the open market - it's like owning bonds, not being a bank).

The problem is just, people picked where they live partly based on the environment. People don't want their neighborhoods changed. That said I don't like zoning that makes it impossible to try and buy people out so you can build a apartment building.

Noise doesn't matter in a data center which is where the switches live. The power use might be more than a 1gbit, but they're in line with any dual power enterprise switch really.

I mean I don't trust Robin Hood, but do they sell the securities for more money? Or is it just they try and get you to make more trades? I'm not even sure how a broker would do that beyond making the fees 0. I mean, maybe if they were managing your investments for you, but they're a discount broker where you do self directed trades right?

I will have to see that. I would be concerned about pushing cat5e that fast. I am not sure about cat6, but again that speed is not fast enough to buy new cards for the computers and if we were buying cards I guess the 10G fiber cards are likely cost competitive now that servers are dumping them as obsolete.

The main thing I see is our cities still often require you to have a car, yet rent is 3x or more what it is out in the burbs. It's hard to make that work. I don't think anyone likes commuting a long way. Though I think we need both more housing in cities to try and drive the prices down and more WFH so less commuting in general.

Wait. You think the industrial revolution fit the ex farmers proclivities and existing abilities? Factory shift work is pretty different from self owned farms.

You think the mass produced furniture factories owners worried about the local craftsmen they were replacing or that those craftsmen loved the idea of going to work in a factory?

You think that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were wringing their hands in the early 90s as they basically replaced secretaries?

I have only ever heard of one famous industrialist care about the money his workers made in relationship to paying them, and that was Henry Ford. I'm pretty sure he was an outlier and hence why he was remembered. Atlas Shrugged was written what? 70 years ago with the idea that rich people could go off and not need anyone else... This isn't a new idea or desire, but yet we do keep coming up with different stuff to do.

I think you're underestimating how large the productivity gains over the last 150 or so years have been, mixed with how much the costs to get access to the tools have fallen. Doing laundry used to cost a person hours of hand work near a river, now you can go rent time in a laundrymat for like $6 a wash and dry load. Having this discussion would have cost days of either travel to meet up, or several letters back and forth and time. It's basically free and instant now. Most people were farmers because paying for food was incredibly expensive when most farming was substinance productivity. Now we have an epidemic of too much food availability.

I think it's as likely that more people having access to cheap AI tools will just let them do more and different things, and "controlling it with pricing" forgets international competition.

I am thinking of things like the laser cutters. For Idk, 7 years or so the main consumer one was the glowforge, for like 3500 dollars. Now you can get one from a bunch of Chinese vendors for 1000. Lesser ones are 250. It's more and more accessible, and I just think this will happen with AI tools too, as long as you're not hung up one one brand.

Honestly the only problems I see with cities is the cost if they're not able to set you up car free. If you're paying 3x in rent, if you can't offset that by not paying the car costs you have to be making a lot more money. And most US cities don't make it easy to go carless.