daevout

That might be true for the subset of suicides the author has studied, but there are about as many reasons humans commit suicide as there are reasons they commit homicide, which is to say, infinite varieties.

There's religious (Heavean's Gate, that recent kenyan cult), protest (self-immolating monks), media spectacle (Yukio Mishima), honor (seppuku, the samurai ritual mishima was immitating), shame (pompei), escape (L pills) fiancial ruin (1929 brokers), and fads (90s school shooters). Then there's suicide as a way of life (downtown SF, opioid epidemic).

The idea that this is all caused by "suffering" that could be prevented through increasingly sophiaticated treatmant plans or perhaps extended social welfare programs is a peculiar modern secular idea. I wonder if people who believe this sincerely are staving off their own suicide this way.

That is a good way of looking at it. What's missing is a catchy name to debase store-based installation similar to what was done through "sideloading". Perhaps "lord-loading", "begstalling", "babybiting", etc.

China has done what's only being talked about in the west: successfully broken up a powerful tech conglomerate.

One needn't resort to the kind of marxist leninist tactics that were at play here to achieve the same outcome, but all we'll get is more talk, or if things go really well, 5 mini googles just in time for openai, bing or someone else to become the next search monopoly.

The problem is that children, rather than free farm labor, are now too expensive, while the wages on which the majority of people depend, are too unpredictable and intermittent for the kind of long term involvement 2.1+ children represent.

If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.

Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.

If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.

Google's is the best business the world and chatgpt opens up round 2 over who gets the hold the rains of that beast.

The hype originates in the business comminity, and it's about all the money that will be made, not technology.

The technology part is over as far as business is concerned. It's good enough to get everyone in the world to type their every need into this textbox rather than another. Everything else is downstream from there.

Transformers, rotators, discombulators, those things get nerds excited, but what's whipping people into a frenzy is the race to GOOG 2.0

Of course, the problem is that the trade is on offer at all.

In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.

> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess"

Also, remote work opens the door to replace expensive domestic workers with cheap foreign ones. If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.

For what it's worth, this might finally open the eyes of many SWEs that they're plain workers with little bargaining power and that their inflated salaries are a historical accident owning to many of the current tech barons having been engineers themselves at one point, throwing a larger bone than they otherwise would have to. Other than that, there's few reasons, and certainly no market-based ones, why those salaries should be as high as they are, when they're cheap just across the border.

If remote work being granted and taken arbitrarily -- with not even an attempt at justifying it in terms of business demands -- hasn't alerted you to the feudal reality of the modern tech corporation, perhaps being laid off will do the trick.

Broad pro labour legislation would be the answer here, but while the libertarian crackpot religion remains strong in overclass circles, there's not going to be anything of the sort.

Yes it absolutely is, but imo less so than what GitHub Copilot and various image generation companies are doing. My theory is that if AI turns out to be as disruptive as the current hype suggests, the conflict between those who feed the AI vs. those who profit from it might be the next big social rift.

Artists are already in full rebellion against this, as they should be, being nearly eclipsed by AI, except when it comes to inventing new styles and hand-crafting samples for the models to train on. These, I assume, are either scraped off the web, or signed away in unfair ToS of various online publishing platforms.

Since the damage individually is small (they took some code from me without attribution, ok) but collectively enormous, in my opinion it the role of government to step in and soften the blow if necessary.

Amazon, Meta, Google are most certainly cut from the same cloth, only slightly smaller. For Wal-Mart I can't think of anything strictly anit-competitive, but its practice of paying sub-subsistance wages and counting on government relief programs to make up the difference is so disgusting I don't know how to describe. Time-Warner, Comcast I'm not too familiar with, but as I understand they are under regulations that prohibit them from dropping your connection when e.g. they find you visiting ycombinatior.com, a site where their business is frequently ridiculed, which is certainly a step in the right direction and the model that should be applied broadly and forcefully to all of the above.

I can't think of a company more blatantly engaged in anti-competitive practices than Apple, but I'm glad to see all that unfairly amassed wealth benefitting even the lowest rungs of its corporate hierarchy through the unusual benefit of not being terminated at the drop of a hat. Bravo!

Indeed if we did apply that level of analysis to other companies, we might not have emded up depending on a one man dictatoship flush with concentration camps, ongoing genocide and war preparations for essentials like PPE and antibiotics.. imagine that.