> Of course there are macro-economic arguments against it
If there were, wouldn't the market eventually take care of it?
74 karma · joined August 18, 2014
If there were, wouldn't the market eventually take care of it?
I bet no one does .. the real issue is how to decide on what is "asinine". After all, why are your views and beliefs any more valid than any one else's?
My first intuition was that this is impossible (at least not with math alone). I have no (proper) proof however.
Ultimately anything could be infinitely parallelized, by brute-forcing the answer itself. If we put the answer safely out of reach for brue forcing, then all that remains is a number of methods of actually calculating it. Those methods can either be arduous but applicable by everyone or fast but requiring some pre-known secret.
For a puzzle that could be solvable by more than one ardous method, it is to be expected that ultimately everyone would be using the fastest one of those - i.e. the author and the public alike, since the methods would be applicable by everyone.
For a puzzle that would be solvable by a fast method requiring some secret, the solution would always be brute-forcable on that secret, and thus have a wide timesrange in which it could be solved, depending on the level of parallelism.
The only way out I see here is to construct a puzzle with more than one arduous method - one of them obviously faster than the other, but only publish one of the methods and use the other one yourself to calculate the time-locked data. This may or may not be possible - but I don't think it's something that can be automated, since it requires creative input, considering how a new kind of puzzle would need to be created for every new piece (or at least every new author) of time-locked data, since otherwise the less-arduous methods would become public knowledge too. (And of course there's always the risk of there being other smart people searching for and eventually discorvering that other less-arduous method, before the desired timespan has elapsed.)
This is a bit disingenuous. I understand what he's aiming at, and he also mentions StringBuilder later on, but saying that a GC necessatites immutable strings is simply not true.
As a counterexample: PHP has mutable strings and uses copy-on-write in situations where it "feels" that conflicts could occur. (Granted PHPs rules on how it handles its variables is a bit arbitrary and magical, and PHP didn't have a GC till version 5.3 .. but the argument still stands.)
Software development to some extent is a creative process, thus eluding automation in many ways, though not for lack of trying.
Much like book authors, in the general case, can't really "re-use" subplots of one another's stories, software devs can't really, in the general case, re-use one anoher's implementations. Of course there are many more specific situations in which software may be re-usable than there are for subplots in books .. but that doesn't impact the overall argument.
Much like a detective story will have some crime being commited by some perpertrator, harming some victim and being investigated by some detective, an e-mail client will run on some OS have some GUI and exchange some IMAP and SMTP messages. But the creation of the specific detective story and the specific e-mail client still require creative input by some human before they can come into existence.
Or is your argument that there is less need for e-mail clients and detective stories because there already are enough of them in existence? If so, then this is an issue orthogonal to automation itself.
Are you serious?
The printing press alone has benefitted humanity as a whole immensly over the last centuries.
And there were piles and piles more of automation necessary for us to be able have this discussion right now - on a global scale and at virtually no cost to either of us.
And yet, when something manages to hit us on an emotional level we falter.
What Afforess said is a statement of fact and relevant to the discusssion. Thus it's a valid counterpoint.
You may not like it and you may not agree with it .. you may even discard sprituality as a whole .. but none of it makes the satement any less true.
A lot of regular people "burn through money" and fail to deliver any sort of value in the process of their daily job. We consider them successful to some extent, right?
How is raising funds but failing to deliver any different compared to one of those more conventional members of society? And having raised $13m allows you to be one of those "less productive" workers for the rest of your live.
> unless the inventor runs away with the money
Well, he doesn't need to literally run away. There are more nuanced ways of failing to deliver, without being a criminal. After all, there's no guarantee on this sort of investement right?
At the same time, this is money that'll be flowing into the economy one way or the other. So it's not all bad.
What do you do when something with 51% mortality in 15 days comes up? And then something with 49% in 13 days .. where do you draw the line? And what do you do when people continue to cry out?
At the same time though, we need to realize that this is primarily about protecting the health professionals and care givers, and only indirectly the sick. (The sick will of course indirectly profit from professionals being just that - professional, but only in the "long term".)
We should have no delusions about willingly letting people die, in the name of professionalism, just to have a clean concience and the ability to claim to have done nothing wrong.
On the other hand, society as a whole profits immensly. Would you really want to give up on that? Wasn't this the major argument against communism and bureaucracy?
Well, I don't know. Is there really nothing you'd rather do with that much time and money?
And if the relationship only lasts some 5 years... :x
I guess that's the equivalent of Stroustrup's "If you understand int and vector you understand C++", for nutritionists.
Talking to them usually results in "more of this and less of that and exercise and being thorough and blah blah blah". That sounds a lot like "I have no real idea of what's going on, but something in this broad spectrum of measures is bound to eventually pay off". That's very different from an answer that one would expect from a true professional, which would be more along the lines of "In this long and complex chain of events, this point here is the one that you need to affect in order to experience the effect you're looking for".
I don't think smoother text (and pictures) is anything to be trivialized. I mean it actually looks much much nicer and (imho) comforting - I experience joy anytime I look at anything that's above the 100 or so ppi of average 1080p monitors.
People spend huge swaths of money on the looks of things that they'll hardly ever be looking at. Considering this, spending the money on a screen (i.e. something they'll litteraly be staring at for large periods of time) is actually a borderline-rational choice in comparision..
That's an odd way of phrasing it. Are you a Ferrengi? Usually we call them women, not females.
What's the "turnover" with those clothes - i.e. how often do you buy new ones and throw out the old ones? Ever gotten any weird looks for running around in mostly the same outfits? What do you do when you need a suit?
What do you do about your data? Do you carry any additional HDDs in those backpacks? Don't you keep any spare hardware around for when things break to be able to replace them quickly?
What about legal documents (birth certificate, graduation certificates, tax declarations, etc.)? Do you store them somewhere safely, or keep them on you?
Also, do you have any allergies? One thing I allways seem to have too little of when travelling is napkins/tissues.
What do you do for more mundane things like scissors and paper and priting stuff?
Then again, I'm "deep inside" Europe, so I have no idea how bad the weather over there really is.
A "little confusing" is way off the mark here. If it weren't for Google Search working its magic, it would be practically insurmountable.
> it still necessary to keep old add-on systems in place,
I don't think anyone is asking to scrape the old APIs. Just clearly mark the APIs as depracated and link to the new corresponding bits of documentation .. that is after writing them first.
As it stands, writing a Firefox extension is somewhat of an arcane art currently.
If what Azul has worked on conventional Client/Server-JVMs, Sun/Oracle/IBM would've adopted it long ago.
The sad reality is that spending 99% of your time in GC, but never in a pause longer than "x units of time" qualifies as "pauseless" and if you want more throughput, you have to scale up the system so that the remaining 1% of througput is sufficiently large for your workload.
I guess this works in the markets where Azul is active (things like finance) but is useless in more conventional use cases.
Well, downloading youtube videos is a breach of contract too.
You can try to attach all sorts of alternate labels to this, it doesn't change the fundamental issue underneath. I'm not questioning how adequate the semantics of the label are, but rather how adequately our legal framework captures reality here.
Sometimes reality evolves in ways such that the legal framework around it needs to be updated/re-evaluated. There's nothing wrong with that, and it's part of the democratic process.
That's all I'm saying, and I fail to see any formal, moral or legal issue with this.
> It goes straight back into circulation as investments or bank deposits.
Some of the money in bank deposits effectively is in a "money bin". Meanwhile investments on the other hand will (at least most of the time) flow through certain desirable channels that "disposable income" for the most part doesn't.
> Profoundly elitist
Is it? Isn't this the standard economic theory that's being tought to everyone currently?
> We're taking the money off the poor because they might otherwise use it to enjoy themselves
You fail to realize that it's not money that people need/crave but rather goods and services. Taking away money, in order to ensure a steady supply of goods and services, improves the situation for everyone.
> or even something really unproductive like feeding their children or receiving medical treatment!
Having a growing and healthy workforce is in any society's best interest, and a large part of its competitive advantage. Which is in part why children are subsidized by the governement in so many ways. After all, what's point of money if there's no one to exchange it with?
At the same time though we must figure out how to maintain this growth in a sustainable fashion - and I doubt that the optimal solution here is to simply hand people more purchasing power.
--
You, much like the author of the article, seem to fail to understand that there's no perfect answer here. This is an issue that needs fixing, and there seem to generally exist 2 solutions, both of which present a compromise.
While we currently don't have all the data necessary to make that decision, the article clearly seems to prefer one of those 2 alternatives while carelessly neglecting the negative impacts of it.
I on the other hand think that it's worthwile, for everyone, to consider the negative aspects too, before rushing to a conclusion. Do you see anything wrong with this line of reasoning?
That's hardly a benefit for most, seeing as how they (most likely)
(1) actually need their home for living in it, so it doesn't make much difference how highly its priced
(2) have the interest rates for their debt bound to the inflation in one way or the other
> Ask a Japanese person about how deflation is bad for the economy
I was talking about damping inflation. I doubt deflation is a serious issue "in the West", given our culture of spending.
Also, as devastating as the real-world effects may have been in the past, all deflation means is that
(1) we need to find more worthwile activities to invest our efforts in. Imho this would be a much needed reality check in some sectors .. but like I said, I doubt it'll be happening any time soon.
(2) we're on our way towards post-scarcity and can start taking things easier from now on. (If only..)
Yes, agreed.
My point was that if it's a wide-spread issue, as the article claims, then employees engaging in those activities probably knew what was expected of them beforehand, and still went ahead with it.
If on the other hand it indeed is "trickery", then it's not a wide-spread issue (since tricking people relies on the practice being uncommon enough to not be anticipated), and is thus something that can be sensibly dealt with in courts on a case-by-case basis.
I'm not sure what the laws in the US are like, but in Germany that would already be covered by the mandatory insurance every car needs to have, before being allowed onto the streets.