baron816

Just wear a light colored linen suit without a tie. You’ll look great

Those places aren’t isolated though. Many of their residents (and especially their children) have left and found opportunities in other parts of the country.

Economists tend to prefer policies that help people, not places. Gary, Indiana just doesn’t have any geographical advantages that make it competitive.

I think, if anything, the mistake was to allow people in those places to believe there would be an eventual turnaround by trying to prop up uncompetitive manufacturing industries.

They don’t because they hire people to pick it up

Anyone reading this who works/runs a robotics company, I really want to encourage you to build a robot to pick up trash on city sidewalks as an early product.

Picking up trash requires a lot of dexterity and will come with many challenges, but I think it’s a simpler problem than many household tasks and it’s probably on par for what these tests show is doable.

I think you’re going to have to PR challenges getting people to welcome robots into their homes. If you have robots out in cities providing a public good, not only do they serve as walking advertisements for your company, you’re going to earn some trust before you’re ready deploy them into private spaces.

Plus, governments (or perhaps HOAs for wealthy communities) can be good early customers since you can have a focused sales strategy. Politicians love these types of visible quality of life improvement projects. If you can show that your robots, working round the clock, can decrease litter at a low cost, many cities are going to want to buy them.

Alphabet hasn’t had any layoffs, tightening of salaries and perks, or impacts to work life balance. Morale is quite good, imo as an employee

People have this right to take better jobs at other companies. This is how we get better working conditions: competition between employers. Tech has figured this out. I’ve never felt the need to go on strike.

Unions can be a deterrent to this. If you have sectoral bargaining, you can’t get a better deal anywhere because everyone pays the same. Or even if it’s within a single company, you’re just stuck with whatever scheme the union bosses agreed to.

But also, unions are a deterrent to new employers since fewer people want to start companies in industries where unions have taken over. They’re a nightmare to deal with. Fewer employers means less competition means worse services.

We have a dynamic economy with lots of competition. It’s easy to switch jobs and find a better place to work. We should not want to give this up.

Why do you assume unions are always reasonable? Unions in the US have a long history of over reaching and crippling industries and governments.

Where do I say that nurses shouldn’t have good working conditions or good pay? Most of us have figured this out already: you can take a job at another company that’s better to work for. Most nurses do have pretty good working conditions and get paid well. Competition among employers is the solution here. Walking out and putting customers (or patients in this case) in a precarious position is not.

Have you ever not been able to send your kids to school for weeks (or years in the case of COVID) because the teachers refused to work? Have you ever been unable to get timely medical treatment because nurses refused to work? Have you ever been unable to work yourself because the transit workers refused to work?

The labor market is just kind of complicated. Having a four year span where your real income goes down because you didn’t job hop isn’t ideal, but it’s totally possible that it pays off in the long run quite handsomely.

Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.

Rupert Murdoch absolutely is capable of doing all that. He’s absolutely done far more harm globally than Zuckerberg.

This take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches.

Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.

Sneaker manufacturing is a very manual process. Nike famously tried to automate it and failed (https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/why-its-so-difficult-for-r...). Designing and constantly changing all the processes is more expensive than just having people do it by hand. If you can have AI design the process, then the equation switches.

IMO, the area where AI is going to be most useful over the next couple years is in developing manufacturing processes top to bottom. Maybe a million token budget is too small, but something like "design me a sneaker and all the equipment to manufacture it autonomously".

He knows he brought these attacks with his war, but he doesn’t take the blame for anything.

I hope humanoids will be ever present, it’s just that the scale of impact from specialized robots will be far greater. Humanoids will be our butlers, but the other robots will be creating a world of unimaginable abundance.

I don’t think this is where the robotics revolution is going to happen. The big one will be using AI to design and build highly specialized robots to automate mining and manufacturing.

Yes of course life insurance and pension funds are going to buy this debt. This is the highest quality debt that's out there. If you don't want life insurance and pension funds to buy debt from big tech companies because you believe it's too risky, then you believe that bonds are just too risky in general.

Interstellar travel is probably not ever going to happen. Even if we have antimatter propulsion (which is still probably not practical even under ideal circumstances), we’re still talking hundreds of years of travel time to get to somewhere like this star.

This also goes for aliens visiting Earth. Interstellar travel is just so impractical that I don’t think anyone has come on safari to Earth.

I don’t think you finished reading my comment. If you want the government to build lots of housing, fine. But you just have to really commit to doing so and expect it to be a perpetual project. Building out the highway system worked because we never stopped building it. China was able to build out its high speed rail system because it planned on connecting the whole country (and it’s still building, to its own detriment).

If you’re going to build three new subway stops, or a single housing complex, you’re not going to keep any of that expertise. You hire some consultants and contractors and then they move on to something completely different at the end of the project.

Progressives and Democratic Socialists like to pretend that the government can pass a law which would allow it to build lots of social housing/provide health care for everyone/build a lot of green energy/etc and it would just go and do that easy peasy. But building housing and infrastructure is not something you can just snap your fingers and it happens. It’s not something you can just throw tons of money at and pops up over night. Governments have to spend years and decades building systems and institutional knowledge around these things. The reason people can make a lot of money building houses is that it’s really hard and requires a lot of specialized and localized knowledge to figure it out.

This is a lot of what Abundance is actually about. Part of it is saying “yeah, let’s take the time and build state capacity to be able to do some of these things”. Vienna is able to build social housing because it’s been doing it consistently for decades and has all the right systems in place to do it. It’s not a libertarian book that just says “get rid of the rules and let capitalism sort everything out”. It’s about figuring out the right set of rules and incentives that allow governments to sustainably build things, or else facilitate the market to build them.

I’ve been worried about the same thing, but I’m more worried about it being used as a mechanism for deploying chemical weapons.

My view is that AI's productive power will allow more individuals to be independent from powerful corporations, and that will significantly weaken those corporations.

It's been really challenging to start companies because you need to go hire and manage a lot of people to handle lots of very different tasks. But it's becoming easier and easier everyday because AI is able to do a lot of that work.

As more people start companies, more competition will drive down prices for everything, making the things people want more accessible.

This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output.

People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.

Are they built in people’s backyards? There’s a famous case in Northern Virginia that has admitted they messed up zoning which gets cited in every story to make it look like they’re all built in people’s backyards, but the vast majority of them are in industrial zones.

The tradeoff isn’t dev job easy vs better performance. The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about instead of unobservably better performance.

Why are you assuming this? Because Bloomberg didn’t report the execs’ performance reviews? Maybe they did face consequences and we just don’t know.

I really like what https://www.deepfission.com/ is trying to do. They have the absolute simplest model for nuclear fission that I can imagine. They’re digging one mile (1.6 km) holes dropping low enriched nuclear fuel to the bottom, and filling them with water. The pressure from the one mile column of water is perfect for the reactor. From there, it’s basically a geothermal well.

No need for an expensive containment dome, or expensive plumbing. If anything goes wrong, the nuclear fuel is already a mile underground. When the fuel is used up, they can leave it where it is since it’s below the water table. No need for expensive and hard to source highly enriched uranium.

The hard part is digging the wells, but that seems trivial compared to Quaise, who’s trying to dig 3-20km wells. The Deep Fission wells can just go anywhere (perhaps next to a disused former coal turbine?).

Well, probably the right thing to do for large trucks and suvs is to reclassify them so that you need a commercial license to drive them.

Well, my conspiracy theory is that it’s the other way around: AI leaders know they’re never going to recoup money for their investors. Money will be become useless and no one will be any richer than anyone else (though everyone will be far richer than the riches person is today). But they have to promise a mountain of riches in the future because they need those resources today to build that future.