I'm not sure how this article would be any different if Culdesac had written their own "journalistic" article about itself and paid The Guardian to publish it.
146 karma · joined June 8, 2013
If it doesn't fill you with gratitude that we have even the slightest ability to exist, and to experience and understand any of this, I don't know what will.
It's complex, but overall the US system is better than Canada's. It's not as clear cut comparing the US to some European countries, but with Canada it's mostly clear cut. And it's especially clear cut for tech workers. If you work in tech, you're highly likely to have very good coverage through your employer, you will almost surely experience much better availability and speed of care, probably better quality, and the extra out-of-pocket costs are absolutely dwarfed by the superior pay in the US.
It looks at some recent time period (roughly, during COVID) and breaks down the growth in money spent by where it goes (e.g. company profits, labor, etc.) and how much of it is due to real growth in output vs. being due to purely inflationary price hikes. It aims to show that a disproportionate amount of the excess money spent, beyond that accounted for by real growth, went to company profits.
There are two problems with the approach in this article.
First, its choice of time period is somewhat arbitrary. Over the course of this particular 11 quarter time period (Dec 2019 - Sep 2022), corporate (+38%) and small business (+30%) profits grew much more than labor expenditures (+17%). But just from the data presented, over the final 8 of those 11 quarters, growth in corporate profits (+22%) and labor expenditures (+18%) were comparable, and growth in small business profit (+7%) was much less. This article doesn't present the data, but what would happen if choosing a longer time scale? Quarter over quarter we see business profit growths are very volatile, sometimes growing, sometimes shrinking (negative growth). So unless you're looking at longer time horizons like decades, you can probably find runs of 8-12 quarters showing any narrative you want.
The other problem is how this article tries to determine how much growth in each component was real vs. purely inflationary. The problem is it assumes the real growth of each component was the exact same (about 6.5%). After observing 38% nominal growth in corporate profits and 17% nominal growth in labor expenditures, it simply assumes the real growth in each (due to real growth in output) was the same 6.5% for each of those categories. One implication of this presumption would be that over any time period, the real output growth of corporations and the real output growth of small business would always be the exact same, percentage-wise. This is definitely a completely flawed presumption. And it's doing most of the heavy lifting in the paper's overall argument.
First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem.
Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." However the conclusion of the very paper he references says, "[t]he findings of this field study indicate that downsizing can improve an organization's financial performance but not in the near-term.... [R]esearch strongly suggests that it likely will take three or more years for organizations to be able to truly see the financial benefits of downsizing." If you look at all the graphs in the Results section of the paper, it shows that companies who downsize started out being weaker performers than those who weren't downsizing, but a few years after downsizing they were largely able to close that underperformance gap.
I forgot about the degree to which Rogers is vertically integrated (ISP, cable provider, landline and cell provider, TV stations, radio, partial ownership in all major sports teams, etc.) and the degree to which this is a duopoly with Bell in Canada. But it's no wonder they can get the courts to issues these orders against themselves (and their smaller competitors) to legitimize actions that protect their broader interests.
Weirder still is that Rogers has apparently sub-licensed the English-language broadcast of NHL in Canada to the state-owned broadcaster, CBC: https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/deal-gives-rogers-rights...
One hand washes the other.
Doesn’t seem like this should be the role of government, but not surprising for Canada. On the spectrum of irrational distrust of government to irrational trust of government, any population is going to have a distribution. Canada skews towards greater trust of government, with more broad and intense irrational trust in government in the last few years than I’d ever noticed in the decades prior.
App: https://akgupta.ca/smart-health-cards Source: https://github.com/amitkgupta/go-smarthealthcards
I’d be interested in seeing the program that OP’s colleague has to see energy consumption per device. I want this for electricity, gas, and water. The utilities are starting to get into smart metering, but they’re not up to what I’m looking for yet, at least not my providers.
I don't think DeFi helps with most of the problems you're talking about. Supply chain issues, COVID-related business restrictions, health care prices and the role of insurance providers, none of these are caused by centralized financial systems.
But how do you know which third party auditors to trust?
What DeFi projects are laying bare is that it’s an absolute marvel that we have functional societies at the scale we do today (USA, EU). Most people can live their lives intuitively knowing which instructions to trust (financial, groceries, restaurants, medical, you name it). All of it is ultimately backed by laws, systems, real people who can be held accountable, and government monopoly of force. Furthermore we rarely have to see that stuff for the system to work and that monopoly on force is rarely abused.
It could be a meaningful technological shift if a lot of the financial infrastructure goes decentralized, digitized/programmatic, and open source. But I’m dubious the mainstream person’s day to day experience will change much, the stability and peace of mind afforded by the structures of our current society are pretty amazing and I don’t see them being replicated in a purely digital and decentralized form.
Can we agree on any possible intersubjective standard for too extreme? If not, fine, we revert to solipsism.
If either of the data mentioned in the first paragraph is a possible metric, how many standard deviations is too many?
If not this standard/metric, will you propose another? I challenge anyone to propose a metric or set of metrics that reasonable people will entertain as a standard of measuring a cities extremes, plus a set of thresholds that reasonable people will entertain as determining too extreme/not too extreme, and then coming to the conclusion under these metrics that SF is not too extreme. In other words, any way you want to slice it, SF is too extreme, unless you refuse to “slice it”.
2. National political duopoly is problematic, but we live in a democracy. Every citizen is free to have their own positions, vote for whoever they want, and run for office if they don’t like who’s running. Your perspective is not your skin color, you can change it and update it as you participate in the real world. Citizens of SF simply cannot blame the national duopoly for their choices. It’s completely possible to foster, appreciate, and embody diversity and non-partisanship of thought. It’s possible to foster a culture of balance and diversity, which in turn could encourage the partisan competition you mention.
SF even has ranked choice voting which should weaken the duopoly’s death grip, in theory.
The national structural problems you mention are true for every city. There’s nothing in the water or Karl the Fog that uniquely prevents people in SF from doing what I mentioned above. But they don’t, that’s their choice, that’s SF culture, and that’s the problem.
Sure, we can regress to a form of solipsism and just say there’s no possible discussion to be had about whether SF is too extreme. Yes, God has not written down a cosmological constant of what threshold determines too extreme vs not too extreme. I think it’s pointless for us to gaslight ourselves into this belief. If we can’t say SF is too extreme, how can we say crime is too high, or persecution of LGBTQ is too high, or anything else?
In the link I shared above, SF deviates as far left as the scale can go. If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme, but think SF isn’t, what would need to be true for you to declare SF past the threshold?
> But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly.
SF is extremely unbalanced. See: https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/san_franci.... Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?
My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don't think he got many votes. Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates, with strong and worthwhile candidates from each party, each getting a decent share of votes. I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don't remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone (giving the homeless productive, gainful occupation and dealing with all the litter, needles, human waste, etc. on the streets). I can't think of a more out-of-touch idea than that, but this was the #2 choice for San Franciscans.
I think anyone sensible would have simply asked for what Breed is now proposing to do. Voicing that opinion in SF years ago would've made you a pariah. It's a common sense opinion if you're living in and observing reality, but that's simply not what SF culture has been about.
To diagnose the problem with the proof, it’s worth knowing why proof by induction works, to thereby know how it actually works, and then diagnose which part of how it’s meant to be executed isn’t actually being executed in this blog post.
We need a starting point. For natural numbers, that’s Peano arithmetic. For simplicity, Peano arithmetic says that for any unary predicate P, the following is axiomatic:
If
P(1)
And
For all n > 0, P(n) => P(n+1)
Then
For all n > 0, P(n)
Proof by induction involves formulating your hypothesis in the form “For all n > 0, P(n)”, then proving the two conjuncts “P(1)” and “For all n > 0, P(n) => P(n+1)”, and finally concluding your hypothesis by modus applied to the inductive Peano axiom for P.
In this case:
P(n) is “in all sets of horses of size n, all the horses in the set are the same color”
The first conjunct, P(1), generally referred to as the base case, is true, and correctly recognized as such in the blog post.
The second conjunct, “For all n > 0, P(n) => P(n+1)”, generally referred to as eg inductive case, is false for this P.
It’s not about “would the inductive case be true if the base case were different”. There is a single proof presented in the article. It has a base case which is a true statement, and an inductive case which is a false statement. So the problem is the inductive case.
You could have a different proof which, reformulating the Peano axioms a little, could look like:
Base: P(1) and P(2)
Inductive: For all n > 1, P(n) => P(n+1)
In this different proof, let’s call this Proof 2, the base case would be false and the inductive case would be true.
Maybe the author is not intending to say the base case is “wrong” in that is false, but that is “wrong” in that it should have been formulated as in Proof 2, and that the inductive case is valid when interpreted in the sense of Proof 2. But this is completely confused. Why would it have been better for the proof presented in the article be interpreted as a proof (Proof 2) that’s not presented in the article? Both proofs fail, neither is a “better” formulation.
Rather than saying: the proof presented in the article should instead have be formulated in a superficially different but fundamentally equally invalid way, under which formulation the base case would be wrong.
Let’s just say: the inductive case of the proof presented in the article is false.
This has nothing to do with the idea that it can be common practice to prove claims of the form for all n > N, P(n) by induction when N is a number like 4. Yes there is a perfectly valid way to use proof by induction to do such proofs. Has nothing to do with this blog post.
The inductive step works fine if you introduce the premise n>=2. It is not valid to introduce that premise. The inductive step is therefore wrong.
The proof in the post is saying the base case is P(1) and the inductive case is that for all n, P(n) => P(n+1)
“P(1)” is true. “For all n, P(n) => P(n+1)” is false. The inductive step is wrong
A completely different proof not present in this post could be:
Base case: P(1) and P(2) Inductive case: for all n > 1, P(n) => P(n+1)
In that completely different proof, the inductive step would be correct and the base case would be wrong. That proof is not in the original post.
One could write a completely different proof where the base case(s) cover n=1,2 and the inductive step is as in the post. In such a proof, the base case would be wrong and the inductive step would be correct. But that’s a different proof, not the one in the post.
When that fails, math.stackexchange.com is a very active and helpful resource. You can ask what certain notation means, and upload a screenshot since it’s not always easy to describe math notation in words.
If you don’t want to wait for a human response, Detexify (https://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html) is an awesome site where you can hand draw math notation and it’ll tell you the LaTeX code for it. That often gives a better clue for what to search for.
For example you could draw an upside down triangle, and see that one of the ways to express this in LaTeX is \nabla. Then you can look up the Wikipedia article on the Nabla symbol. (Of course in this case you could easily have just searched “math upside down triangle symbol” and the first result is a Math Stackechange thread answering this).