nartsbtaa

Sorry, I removed it because I realized I misinterpreted your comment.

> But jobs moving to China and India isn't solving the underlying issue

I thought we were talking about automation and technology? What do China and India have to do with this? I never said it's good for a society when their jobs are displaced to another region.

> I would really urge anyone who think that technology creates more jobs than it removes to show where those new jobs are

I would really urge people to think of "jobs" and "productivity" as separate metrics, since productivity will likely continue to climb as the number of jobs continues to fall. The challenge will be reacting to that effectively; trying to reverse the hands of time to bring back jobs is futile.

If jobs are moving from one region to another, that's mostly unrelated to technological progress. Instead, it's because low skill labor has moved to low cost markets with low standards of living. We'll get these jobs back when we have a lower standard of living then rural China and India.

In the meantime, our scientific and technological edge has been one of the few things keeping our economy semi-competitive. Can you imagine if we lost the low wage jobs and the highly skilled jobs? We probably won't have to wait much longer.

> That doesen't change that for some people their job is all they have. If you take that away they have no realistic future unless it's some post scarcity society.

This has always been the case throughout history: new technology makes some jobs irrelevant, and humans adapt by doing new jobs. It's unfortunate for people who cannot or will not adapt, but historically people have been resilient to such changes.

It's a legitimate issue when there aren't enough jobs to employ a significant portion of the population, and perhaps we're starting to reach that point now. We're seeing a decoupling in our economy: job growth is slowing while corporate growth and profits continue to rise. On one hand, this indicates that we are heading towards post-scarcity conditions. On the other hand, the current arrangement is that an increasing amount of wealth is being distributed to a decreasing number of people, leading to greater wealth inequality.

What can be done? We might increase wage/salary while cutting the number of hours worked per week, allowing more people to work while still providing a livable income. A basic income is another option, but that seems extreme; things would have to get much worse (or better, depending on your long-term view of automation) before that's taken seriously on a large scale.

You can win an election without spending big money. But you do need to charisma, and no amount of money can buy Hillary/Romney/Kerry/Gore charisma.

Techies definitely didn't make it cool across the general population. It became cool through brand association with cool phones and MP3 players and its aesthetics.

We should just throw out any regulations that don't spark joy.

Why even compare PNG and H.264 to begin with? PNG is a lossless compression format. A better comparison would be something lossy like JPG, which could easily shrink the size to ~100 kB. The point still stands, but at least it's a more relevant comparison.

Long Beach and Costa Mesa are in Southern California.

Working backwards or forwards, the result is the same. If one in four American billionaires are sociopaths, the likelihood of a sociopath being a billionaire jumps from 1.7e-6 for the general public to 4.25e-5 (all other things being equal). The random sociopath is still unlikely to be a billionaire, but is 25 times more likely to be a billionaire than the random person.

That doesn't make it a recipe for success or a magic ingredient, but it's still interesting.

> "It's time to face the fact that Apple doesn't care about professionals and never has."

I'm a professional, and the MacBook Pro continues to suit my needs extremely well. Perhaps the problem is that "professional" is too vague a term to have any useful meaning in this context. If you mean developers, fine, but I'm also a developer and the MacBook Pro continues to suit my needs extremely well. What exactly is the use case that the new MacBooks fails at, and is this a widespread problem among all professionals, all developers, or a particular segment of developers?

Criticisms of the iPhone are entirely valid. I upgraded from the 6s to the 7 yesterday through the iPhone Upgrade Program. I've only noticed three differences so far:

1. No headphone jack. I only brought my new iPhone 7 headphones to work today, and I can't plug them into my laptop to watch a video. >_<

2. The Capacitive touch home button. Unlike the capacitive touch trackpads, the tactile feedback for this button is not convincing or satisfying at all. It sucks.

3. They moved the camera slightly, so my existing case doesn't work.

That's it. I don't notice any improvements. It's a strict downgrade so far.

There's room for debate about the new Macbook Pro, but this post is bad.

#1 - The touch bar is dynamic and contextual. It's likely that you can enable the traditional ESC/Fx row when you're using Terminal, your editor, etc. It's extremely unlikely that the ESC key is gone forever, given that existing software relies on it.

#2 - RAM is a valid point, but this part is wrong/dishonest: "The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz dual-core processors back in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not really, well... nope." The 13" MBP now has a 2.9 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, upgradable to 3.3 GHz. The 15" MBP now has a 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7.

#3 - So there are four negative snarky people on Twitter. Not a surprise. And they're just repeating issues #1 and #2.

This is a garbage post. A much better critical article is linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12817332

Thanks, I'll probably try again with your recommendations. I may have just approached his writing with the wrong expectations.

But who would drive a Chevy Bolt if they could drive a Tesla? Even if the Bolt is a better car, Tesla has the better brand name for now.

There's a difference between wanting something to be true, and acknowledging whether a business is succeeding or not on its own terms.

> Nope, it's not autonomous, it's Autopilot!

Yeah, well... it's not really autonomous. It's a slightly better cruise control + assisted lane change. In fact the "Autopilot" marketing term makes it sound much more like fully autonomous driving than it actually is.

I've considered that "Big Red Son," to use that example again, is intentionally tedious and humorless. Readers expect something titillating, or at least mildly interesting, and instead DFW reflects the mundaneness of the awards show through brutally dull prose. Perhaps, and the original title, "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment," would support this. But at the end of the day, you're just left with an exceptionally boring essay.

DFW's writing comes up from time to time, and I always react by venting the frustration I feel with his work, which I promptly destroy because it seems wrong to criticize a (relatively recently) dead man.

But I'll say it: his writing style is incredibly self-indulgent and dreadfully dull. I guess it's a matter of taste, but it takes a unique talent to attend a pornography award show and afterparty, and churn out something as soulless, humorless, and completely devoid of a point-of-view as "Big Red Son."

I'll probably delete this soon -- I feel like an awful person for writing it, although I'm not entirely sure why.

David Foster Wallace also had an annoying habit of sprinkling non-standard (or at least obscure) acronyms throughout his writing.

I don't understand how they think this can be in their long term best interests.

We're probably among the more technically savvy Amazon users, but navigating through all the crap is still a nightmare. They can't expect everyone to sift through fake reviews, sponsored reviews, fly-by-night companies pedaling cheap knockoffs, "fulfilled by Amazon," etc.

People order "five star" products on Amazon, and pieces of junk show up on their doorstep two days later. It's Amazon's reputation that will take the hit.

Bread freezes very well. It also thaws out really quickly. Or you can just stick the frozen slice in the toaster.

> On the other hand, some of the people who now are claiming Bill is a rapist once testified under oath that he did _not_ rape them.

Yet other women have consistently claimed over decades that Clinton sexually assaulted them. And today women are coming forward accusing Trump of sexual assault.

There seems to be very little difference; both men have probably assaulted women in the past and abused their power to get away with it. I don't think arbitrarily slanting the narrative to defend one and condemn the other serves anybody. In fact, sweeping sexual assault under the rug when it doesn't serve your political agenda is a pretty horrible thing to do.