annabellish

"What we have now is the bad kind of capitalism! There's a different, good kind of capitalism which in theory does all these great things!" is essentially the "communism works great in theory" argument.

100%, both systems are great theories. However, the last few hundred years of actually trying to implement capitalism has "most people have access to abundant food, cellphone in every pocket, access to a wealth of information, access to transportation, incredible medical advances.", if by "most people" you mean "possible a majority of people in the richest countries in the world". Unfortunately, the cost of that is that we've done irreparable damage to our environment, are causing the worst Great Extinction ever, and have caused a climate crisis that may cause us to go extinct.

>It's OK to just solve the tractable problems in front of us and to get a good couple of decades out of a system.

Is it? Is it really? The point the article is making is that by designing a system which solves the problems in front of them to get a good many decades out of a system, those engineers have actually made other problems worse. I think you're being overly simplistic when you suggest that the problem the article is proposing is that the system requires some rework.

The problem the article is proposing is that fundamental, irreperable damage has been done. We can't un-do that damage. Short term thinking like what you're proposing is, by the vast majority of evidence and evidenced theories, destroying our world and risking the survival of our species. It is not okay to just solve the problems in front of us now if the cost is that all our children die in chaos and poverty--and it looks like the cost is just that.

The individual companies likely not, but it's not like those are the only companies doing these things. Human achievements come from standing on the shoulders of giants, not from individual supermen - we see this through history time and time again, with so many groundbreaking discoveries being independantly made at about the same time simply because previous discoveries had made them possible.

This is not to diminish the minds of those who discovered them, of course, but it is to _temper_ the hero worship. What SpaceX is doing is not enabled by an individual superman, as the comparison with Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark would suggest, but by allocating resources to something made possible by the work of hundreds of thousands of people.

Remove one man from the picture there and that work still exists. Just as other companies are doing the same things _now_, because they are possible _now_, they would be with any individual person removed, regardless of who that person was. The details would be different - without Musk, it would be some other company doing this, without the lead designer, the things themselves would look different, without the lead engineer some components would make different tradeoffs, et cetera - but without Elon Musk, everyone working at SpaceX would still exist, everyone working at Tesla would still exist, and everyone working at other companies doing the exact same things would still exist. We could be a little behind, for sure, the hero worship could well have translated into inspiration for some, or even a lot of, people, but that doesn't make the man himself necessary for any of those things.

I worry that saying things like this comes across as attacking the man, which it absolutely isn't. Without Einstein, we would still have made the same realisations, collectively, eventually. Other people were working on the same things at the same time. Without Edison, we would still have the electric lightbulb, entirely likely invented by, hm, who...

Oh right, Tesla. The company itself is named after one of the most blatant examples of this phenomenon. Musk may even understand - he certainly does, he's clearly not dumb - that he isn't a unique superman. That doesn't make him "bad", but it does mean that we really don't need to waste thousands of words on defending his obviously harmful actions under the theory of "we have to let him do and say bad things or he might stop doing good things too."

>He is under attack. For tweeting the wrong thing, for not making enough cars, for appearing unstable. Some of the criticisms have merit. Much of it is myopic and small-brained, from sideline observers gleefully salivating at the opportunity to take him down a peg. But what have these stock analysts and pontificators done for humanity?

Yeesh, what an opening paragraph. This, and the rest of the articles, seem to focus on the idea that Elon Musk isn't just a slightly more philantropic than average billionaire with a very good PR department, albeit one he's doing his best to undo the work of.

As one of the articles rightly states, Musk provided some funding for these projects, but is at best one person among tens of thousands actually responsible for _any_ of the achievements of "his" companies - scare quotes intentional, for between the loans and government grants it starts to become unclear what, other than the cult of personality which evidently no longer serves the needs of relatively mature and legitimate enterprises, he actually brings to the table here, beyond being an ideas guy who can afford to throw money behind getting external funding to try things.

Whether he deserves the shit he gets talked about him is a matter for debate, but it's very much a reaction against nonsense like one of the articles here comparing him to Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark, two comic-book superheroes defined by superhuman brilliance and superhuman finances, while Musk clearly can have only one of those things.

At the end of the day, though - do we need articles defending a man with a net worth of twenty billion dollars from the average citizen--who's net worth is closer to twenty _thousand_ dollars--'s criticisms? No, we don't. Whatever criticisms might be had, they're clearly not stopping him from doing whatever he likes.

It's a... difficult area, for sure. The scenario where some guy and some girl have a one night stand and then nine months later he's on the hook for a whole tonne of money is a Very Bad scenario, because obviously there's no promise of support inherent in that, and I'm not gonna pretend that scenario has never happened, and in cases where it has it's difficult to suggest that more nuance shouldn't have been taken.

I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that "paper abortion" is a workable concept in the general case, though. If a couple is a couple and they break up eight months into the pregnancy, then suddenly you have one person who is about to lose their financial support _and_ their ability to financially provide for themselves, but "Child Support" as a concept isn't there for the parent, but the child.

The main difference between actual abortion in this case and paper abortion is that paper abortion still involves a child, and you can't get away from that. That child needs supporting, and permitting the "provider" member of a traditional "provider/childbearer" childbearing couple to vanish late in the process totally screws over the child, and that's what child support laws are there to avoid. There's definitely cases where this goes wrong, but I don't think I've seen much evidence that those are anything but a tiny minority.

>Just a side note, but I don't think there is a legal system that I know which would force the other woman to pay child-support against her will.

I think that's probably true, unfortunately, and I think that's very silly and needs fixing. A two-woman pair is effectively identical to a man-woman pair (save obviously for usually requiring artificial insemination).

>The only promise of support should come from society at large to give every child the same possibility in life regardless of how much money their parent or parents has.

This, though, I can agree with wholeheartedly. I would be 100% behind abolishing child support as the current concept in order to replace it with a general child support system not dependant on the financial situation of either parent - kind of like UBI but for the child. We don't have that yet, though, so we're just kind of working with what we have, and what we have is a very imperfect system that prioritises the child above the parents, because the child has no choices in anything and is in need of far more protection.

Making that about women vs men is missing the point entirely, which is part of why i was explicit about alternate childbearing groups. If you have two woman in a childbearing group, then the one who is pregnant has the option to terminate or continue the pregnancy, while the one who is not pregnant does not have these options. It is entirely about bodily autonomy - you cannot force anybody to either undergo an abortion or not undergo an abortion. It is a medical process with side effects, effects on one's mood and mind, deeply personal implications depending on how "human" exactly you feel a fetus is, et cetera.

Drawing that as "men have no rights" is deeply reductive, because it isn't about men vs women, it's about the childbearing person vs the non childbearing person(s), and fundamentally does come down to that the same rights have very different implications depending on a person's position.

You have the old joke, "this law isn't discriminatory, both rich and poor are banned from sleeping on the streets!", and in this case it essentially holds true. What you're seeing isn't discrimination, both the childbearing person and the non-childbearing person(s) have the same right to not be compelled into or out of an abortion, it just isn't a right which helps very much if you aren't pregnant.

It does work out that the average man in a childbearing couple doesn't have an "out", but there's no way to implement that "out" without imposing on the rights of somebody else, whether it be by compelling action, or by suddenly threatening to revoke a promise of support that a new childbearing parent desperately needs for them and their child.

I don't think this is a fair analysis of either current feminist thought or the current state of affairs. The reproductive rights of men are important and there's no suggestion any should be removed, but that doesn't mean that in a sexually dimorphic society both members of a childbearing couple (or more generally, all members of a childbearing group) have the same _options_.

Men and women both have the right of bodily autonomy. In a "traditional" childbearing couple of one straight, cisgender man and one straight, cisgender woman, this identical right expresses itself in very different ways between them, but that doesn't mean that "reproductive rights for men are ended at the point of conception" unless you really, _really_ try.

>It could very usefully try harder to avoid getting into that state in the first place.

Am I missing something here? How do you get into a detached HEAD state without explicitly taking an obviously weird action, like finding and checkout out a commit hash instead of a branch, and why would it make sense for git to not be in a detached HEAD state should you do that?

Sure, and there's places other than amazon to sell.

That doesn't matter when the Play store, or Amazon, controls the majority of all sales. How much money are people making on APKpure? Is it enough to support a dozen software engineer salaries?

Didn't think so, no. Getting booted off of the Play store does not mean your app is impossible to share, but it decimates the size of your audience - worse, even. Will even one in one hundred be left?

>The fundamental problem here is that laws and regulations written to deter some megacorp from systemically being sleazy to make a buck apply equally to small businesses.

I don't think that's the _fundamental_ problem, because there are problems leading to that. Capitalism strongly incentivizes against respecting externalities, and regulations are the only effective tool we've found to stop us from (more aggressively) killing ourselves for profit.

That regulations have a cost and this strangles smaller businesses is a serious problem, but the regulations are usually solving an even more serious problem. A more fundamental issue is simply that capitalism left unchecked incentivizes behaviours which are crippling, while checking capitalism to prevent this causes powerful inefficiencies to form.

I don't know if there's a good answer here. Having regulations not apply to small businesses doesn't work, because small businesses are not intrinsically more likely to act against their own financial interests in order to respect externalities than large businesses are.

It's possible that if you did that you might be okay _today_, if your kids are also gonna go to a "decent" school instead of a better school, if you're also gonna get a "decent" house, et cetera, and you happen to live in the right place to enable all of this. The trend lines are strongly suggesting that everywhere is going down similar paths, though. There's no indication there's anywhere specific they're going to -stop-.

The problem here is the trends, not today, because those big expenses are in the future and we need to worry about what they'll be then, not what they are today. The trends are happening just about everywhere, just to different degrees.

What the linked article is trying to explain is that the opposite is true. It isn't that everyone wants to live in the trendiest areas, it's that they _have_ to in order to find a job that has any hope of paying off their debts fast enough for them to save up enough so that when the next huge expense comes through they can afford it... likely taking on more debt even so.

It isn't that everyone wants a degree - certainly not, given the price - but if you don't have one then you don't even have a chance of making enough savings to afford housing, healthcare, education for your children, et cetera.

People _can't_ "set their expectations a bit lower". Your options are to have no expectations, and accept that you're not going to be able to provide for your children, or to join the same rat race as everybody else and get locked into this cycle of wildly increasing prices. There isn't a middle ground for people to aim at any more.

I don't know if it's fair to call that "the Haskell approach", per-se. That destructors are not guaranteed to run, or run predictably, is generally a property of all fast garbage collectors. If you want a GC that can run quickly, which in a language like haskell where you're going to get lots of small allocations in contexts it would be difficult-to-impossible to efficiently determine the exact moment scopes die, or get the programmer to, you absolutely do, then one of the costs of that is you can't afford to run code for every destroyed object.

The linked post is interesting, because I didn't realise "RAII is a much better way of managing resources than destructors" was controversial. It absolutely is, RAII is fast, predictable, and flexible. It's also one of the tradeoffs some languages make to achieve more flexibility in their design by enabling performant automatic garbage collection that doesn't require perfect escape analysis.

I have yet to see even a concept, never mind a product, that actually uses a blockchain in a net-positive way, especially for "the unbanked". Universally high transaction fees and slow confirmation times on anything that sees leitimate amounts of use with no clear path towards mitigating this situation, if it's even possible to mitigate at all, combined with several choices of security system each with devastating concequences - from the morally black proof-of-work burning precious resources at a time climate change is already threatening to destroy us, to the morally grey proof-of-stake that simply reinforces the idea that those with the most resources deserve even more resources - makes for something that doesn't seem to have much potential for _good_. The "Unbanked" aren't going to be served by these systems, they need efficient, reliable, and safe systems.

Nnnh, only in the really straightforward case. It's often not the case that you can just `new` what you want with no parameters, and _that_'s what the factory pattern covers.

To take the archetypical example, let's consider our database. We just want something that implements the `Database` interface, but we can't just `new MySqlDb()` because it needs a whole bunch of data to connect - so we end up needing something more complicated which can build and configure something implementing the interface we want without requiring us to know anything about the implementation.

What people mean when they say better languages have this behaviour as just something obvious within the language semantics is like, when you simplify it down you don't get `new $className()`, you get a function of `() => Database`. Any language with higher order functions that can properly represent function types can, instead of building all this cruft to construct factories, just accept that the concept of "something you don't need to give any data to but which returns you a configured X` _is_ a function from nothing to X- and so all the behaviour is "built in".

The code which deals with databases just needs `() => Database` as a parameter, and then your composition root simply provides the right function. Exactly the same expressive power as an abstract factory, but it's so straightforward it doesn't need a fancy name.

In the sense that more competition sometimes produces better outcomes, absolutely. However, going by Amazon's historic behaviour, it's an aggressive move which seems to continue their strategy of just using their massive scale to crush the competition, at which point there's no longer a need for them to act in pro-consumer ways any more.

IQ is highly predictive of the outcomes of future IQ tests, and to a degree academic performance (though much of academic measurement is based on similar theories, so this is unsurprising)

There's much less corellation when you consider "future success" in terms of things like job performance, financial success, happiness, et cetera. IQ is obviously measuring something, because IQ tests are quite reliable, but the thing it's measuring does not seem to show a strong corellation with a lot of real-world goals.

It's one of those measurements that people _want_ to use a lot, and so it sees a lot of use, but the idea that you can boil general intelligence down to one number is fallacious to begin with, so many of the things it's used for are not useful.

This is literally one of the things the post we're commenting on is saying. High IQ people are not automatically successful and whatever effect high IQ may or may not have on future success is easily lost in other, more significant, factors.

IQ is a garbage measurement that isn't predictive of future results, yes. It's more the hard work and sacrifice part I'm disagreeing with.

I can tell that that isn't your story, because there's a lot of conjecture in there that isn't supported by the data. Even just starting with #1, the ability to pick a degree at _all_ is a privilege not automatically afforded to everybody. Should you be able to do so, then working during college is strongly linked to worse outcomes, as you have less time to dedicate to learning - thus making #3 harder as you're competing against people who have had better chances than you. If you can't do 3, you can't do 4, 5, 6, or 7, and 8 is predicated on that.

It might be "common sense" to you, but it's directly contradicted by all the data.

Do you have any research backing up this position? It seems to fly in the face of every reputable study I've seen, which suggests the opposite is true - average genes, hard work, and sacrifice is not enough to "guarantee" anything.

>More likely to be implemented

In the big guys, sure. "My first drone" bought from some low-end chinese reseller over ebay probably isn't going to do anything which raises costs unless it has to, which is why regulation exists.

Not suggesting regulation at this point is fair - but I suspect this will take the path these things always take. A problem is identified and the industry creating it is given a chance to solve the problem itself. It doesn't, and so a harder tool is needed to enforce it for the safety of everyone. Sometimes it does get solved itself, and that's wonderful, but this particular area isn't good at that.

Do you have a pension? A lot of us do, and a lot of them are just specifically structured investment schemes with some tax incentives, which means they're a seventy year bet that the stock market will "always go up". Historically, that's been broadly true, given decent time scales - just as it was with house prices.

I suppose it would be logically consistent to then say that people with pensions are "asking for it", too, but you get to a certain point where we cannot blame the layman for not looking at a field where all the experts are saying the same thing and not believing them.

In financial markets, the idea that "prices will always go up" is not just reasonable, but one of the founding principles of our economy. Everything must grow, all of the time. If prices _aren't_ going up, then something is wrong, and if prices are going _down_ we call it a recession, give it a grand name with capital letters, and try to make it not happen again.

I really feel like this is just victim blaming. When financial advisors are telling people they can afford something because prices will always go up and will give them those loans, working out a payment plan they say that is affordable, how on _earth_ is it the fault of the people who believed financial experts on financial matters?

>Ignorance - developed countries have never sent so many people to university.

And yet, ignorance is still a significant problem in society, whether it be today's flavour of bigotry, a continued denial of the dangers of climate change, anti-vaxers, et cetera so on and so forth.

>War Less war is certainly not none, and the consequences of our current wars are hitting as close to home as they have in living memory. Terrorism, both domestic and foreign, are problems for real people.

>Poverty "Absolute" poverty maybe, but that doesn't mean that huge chunks of the western world aren't worrying about money constantly. Effective poverty is a tremendous issue.

Well, I could keep going, but I won't - suffice to say, all of those things are still issues. They may not all be the same, or even as bad in some "absolute" sense, but they're still relevant.

The YouTube far-right community is much bigger than one might expect. There's a lot of actual fascists on youtube who get a lot of algorithmic promotion, but leftist youtube tends to be smaller and much less extreme - no "far left" by most definitions.

The same tends to be true in most spaces in my experience. Whatever the "far left" is tends to be a poorly defined boogieman, not a cohesive group--almost as if it were the eternal enemy of standard far-right ur-fascist theory!

>I imagine today people are more familiar with that concept.

You... would be surprised. I've been asked to implement "pixel perfect" designs on mid-six figure projects, and explaining that that isn't how the web works can be fruitless when their background is in traditional media.

_Managers_ can be extremely helpful, and I'd argue a good manager is just as much a creator of value. Managers != Capitalists. You cannot be a good manager if you don't trust the people you're managing, whether because you're untrusting or because they're untrustworthy. It's an untenable situation that must be resolved one way or another, and removing employee privacy and respect is not the answer.

This attitude that the workplace is a minor, independent kingdom for the capitalists above you, where you shouldn't expect to be treated well or with respect is a scary one indeed.

Workers are not untrustworthy beasts that need to be corralled, or at least shouldn't be, and we shouldn't accept being told that we are. _We_ are the ones who create the value, _we_ are the ones who the world could not run without.

"just"

The complete agreement of every EU nation is required to un-invoke article 50, because there are no provisions for it. Now, they'd likely do it, but that isn't a certainty, especially as the UK arguably gets a lot more out of the EU than most other member states relative to investment.

The Surface Go is, on that note, a wonderful machine, though I feel one with too many compromises to hit mainstream right now. At 10" it hits the portability of a tablet, while the keyboard is good enough for real usage, not just in a pinch.

The Surface Go 2 will be a thing to watch. If they can get it running on ARM with flawless x86-64 translation, roll the price point down a hundred dollars (or just bundle the keyboard - come on, Microsoft, selling that separately makes _no_ sense here) and ship it with a dongle that turns one USB-c port into 2 usb ports, charging, and a displayport, and what you'll have is a 10" laptop that's fully functional, runs _everything_, trivially integrates into a desktop-like environment for home use, is a passable tablet, and gets all day battery life.

Right now it's _close_ to being able to achieve that, but the battery life is a bit too short and the price a bunch too high, and a switch to ARM could alleviate both of those issues.