bruce511

I'm assuming you're talking about people born in SF? Because the rest have already demonstrated a willingness to give up their community once in the pursuit of quality of life.

Equally, if you are in SF you're about to feel the pain you've caused to the locals by moving there. Somewhat harshly, I could suggest that you didn't care about their existing community when you priced them out of their neighborhoods.

So here's the rub. SF is somewhat different. It is a company town. If you don't work for the company you're moving. Sorry. There's certainly nothing else that can pay you the same money.

On the up side, there are lots send lots of cheaper places to live. And chances are you can find a good job there doing something that adds value to that community.

The language students were however better at writing and communications in general. They ended up in sales, marketing, advertising and everywhere else.(all under threat from AI as well.)

But to further the GP question there are lots of examples of people not working in their degree in both directions. The entire computer industry was built by people without a Computer Science degree. Today huge numbers of programmers have no degree at all.

To refer back to the original post about the farrier turned mechanic. Most comments seem to miss the point. Change is coming. You can lean into the change and prosper. Or fight the change and vanish. Those with enough vision, creativity, adaptability will continue to thrive.

There's a lot to unpack in your question.

First you assume that being "interested" in the work is a requirement. I'm guessing 90% of people are doing work that doesn't interest them. But assuming that it's a requirement for you the question becomes, what are you interested in?

Second you want well-paying work. I understand. Programmers got well paid. They lived above the standard of most. It's not surprising you'd want to keep that. But "well paying" is a spectrum. It depends on your life-style, location, eating habits and so on.

And finally, lots and lots of jobs don't require a formal certification. Or one that isn't trivial to get. Ask the people you see everyday (including the software programmers, hardware designers, receptionists, assistants, book keepers, marketing and advertising people, sales, support, your vehicle mechanic and so on.) I suspect if you asked every dingle person you met in a day the ones that actually had this requirement would be a rounding error.

You're right. There are several occupations which have legal entry requirements. You can't be a doctor without getting a medical degree.

However the number of professions that require a formal degree is very small. (And notably, programming is not one of them.) If you take any large group of random people and asked them, you'd find close to all are not required to have a formal certification.

Generally yes, people with (any) degree are more hirable to (any) job. The skills getting a degree are generally useful, and make a candidate more employable. But if you already have one, you already have that.

So obviously each college is different. And your experience is not mine.

But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.

What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.

You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.

Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.

yeah, I get your point - technically Iran closed the strait, not the US. But that's equally disingenuous. The closing of the strait was the result of a chain of events (a short chain at that) which originated with the US bombing Iran.

In your analogy, the crims performed the burglary. That lead to the police arriving. That lead to the police closing the street. You can argue that the crims "didn't close the street", and sure, they didn't. But the street is closed purely as a result of their actions.

I've been reading a 15 year study by a well known (here) sports psychologist. He studied why children played sports, and why they stopped.

The single biggest reason, by far - kids stop playing sports because of parents who come and watch. Turns out parents think winning is important, which robs all the fun out of it.

As a counter anecdote; in high school I played 2 or 3 sports per season. I enjoyed them all immensely, despite the teams being (usually) objectively terrible. No parents ever came to watch (outside the ones offering necessary transport). We'd occasionally go a whole season without winning a single game. No expectations. Just having fun with my mates...

I'm really thankful it was my time, not my parents time.

The point is made in the article; Art is about branding not quality.

He made original art in Vermeer's style. All the experts of the day authenticated them as Vermeer's. Frankly, had he not confessed, they'd likely still be Vermeer's today.

Their value was locked up in the Vermeer name; the brand. Once they weren't Vermeer their value dropped by 3 orders of magnitude.

To all creators, heed the lesson. The brand is the valuable part. Building a brand is the expensive part. AI might replace your product but it can't replace your brand.

Wine has the advantage that it keeps really well, and in some cases improves (becomes more valuable with age.)

So when demand softens it may be advantageous to hold back the excess rather than lower prices. Yes, there are cash flow issues when this approach gets out of hand, but financial interests can cover a lot of that as well.

Referring to countries as "shithole countries" does not help in understanding the current dynamic between rich and poor nations. So perhaps it is helpful to understand what that is, without the pejoratives.

Firstly, each country is different. So the relationship between say the USA and Mexico is different to the relationship between the USA and say Ethiopia.

By "richness" we might also be better off thinking as less "spare cash" and more "standard of living". Which includes food, housing etc but also security, safety etc.

In truth much of the US "richness" depends on other nations. If there was no Latin labor the US would have a fresh produce problem. Indeed the very premise of DJT is that the US has a trade deficit with just about everyone. Much of US "richness" is thus dependent on the "poorness" of others.

Yes automation, cheaper energy, AI can reduce the labor content of goods and make them universally cheaper. Yes I believe in a future where the overall standard of living increases.

But it would be a mistake to believe the US is "leading" US there. The US achieved its current position at the barrel of a gun, and uses the military (and threat of military) to interfere with countries and regions either overtly or covertly. The entire premise of the cold war (outside of western europe) was premised on interventions to resist countries switching their political model to something the locals preferred.

And yes, maybe the locals preferred wrong. But the US didn't promote democracy, they promoted "willingness to keep supplying us". Countries which were leaning away from the US had to be punished. (Shah in Iran, Vietnam etc.)

I could go on, but I'll stop there. Suffice to say that an equitable standard of living is not in the (current) interest of most US citizens.

Every industry goes through a cycle of birth, explosion of creativity, enormous profitability, followed by consolidation and a small corporate class, and a large hobby class.

A time ago, sewing and tailoring was a valuable skill. Cheap clothes made it unnecessary. Today sewing is a hobby and most people who sew do so at a lower quality than a machine. You can say the same about pottery and ceramics.

There was a time when there were hundreds of car companies. Folks who wanted to could build a car, or plane, from scratch. That's not possible anymore.

Today lots of people cook at home at a level far superior to (at least) fast food restaurants. But of course fast food still exists.

I have been lucky to spend my career at the birth of the industry. It is now moving into the next stage, the commoditization of the skill set. I've seen the industry change before though, this is just the next cycle of that.

Lots of people will make a lot of software for themselves. But they won't sell it. Lots of other people will buy software because programming (ai or not) won't interest them. Programming isn't the skill here. Everything else in the business is.

Thanks

I'm going to side-track a bit, but since I'm being courted by PE I thought I'd ask.

>> The employees of the PE also co-invest

Is this voluntary, or mandatory?

I ask because I've seen clauses along the lines of "75% of bonuses are paid in shares, not available for sale for 5 years."

Using bonus money to buy shares props up the share price, but delays the employee actually seeing the bonus for 5 years. Seems pretty win-lose to me, and kinda puts me off.

Is this a standard practice you mean by co-invest?

(As an aside, I'm not a fan of buying shares where I work, that's not a good portfolio-diversification model. If the business goes under it's not good to lose both your job, and investments, on the same day.)

It's worse than that. When the owner retires, all staff lose their jobs. That's a fairly big bummer.

I'm currently part of a "small" business/factory (around 50 employees). The owner is nearing retirement. Are all 50 of us gonna hit the streets tomorrow? Should our customers, many longstanding over 20 years get their contracts terminated? Do they get any warning? Can they easily switch to other suppliers? Is our offering somewhat unique?

Frankly, I think the thought-experiment is very incomplete if you can't see major downsides.

Fiction is not real, but I would add a "yet" into the sentence.

But that's not the point. Science Fiction (speaking generally) takes a specific hypothesis, and then imagines a society that derives from that.

For example "The Space Merchants" (Pohl & Kornbluth, 1952) imagined a world run by advertising. Or "Profession" (Azimov, 1957) explores education. I offer these as the tip of a large iceberg.

Science Fiction is seldom about science. It's mostly about people and society interacting with that science. It doesn't seek to predict science advances, but rather predict how those advances will affect the society we live in.

Sure Terminator isn't real. (And frankly not something I'm terribly worried about.) But the impact of AI on society is real, and that impact will manifest in ways we have predicted (eg the movie Her) and in ways we've not yet explored.

What happens when there are no engineers left? Nobody knows how to use a slide-rule anymore because we have machines to do that work. What happens when building a bridge becomes "Claude please design a bridge", which it does then perfectly well? Why should coders, or accountants, or engineers even exist in a world where AI exists?

That's the kind of question Science Fiction sets out to answer.

Stamp collecting in particular is a very good hobby. Where "good" is defined as "time consuming, pleasurable and cheap".

Well cheap to most of us. You can spend a lot if you want to, but you don't need to. But finding, and importantly organizing, makes for many restful hours.

My father was an avid collector and spent many hours cataloging his collection.

I will say though that as a whole, a collection (and indeed any collection, not just stamps) has almost zero net value. The cost of selling the collection dwarfs the collection value.

My advice to collectors is to have as much fun -selling- the bits in the collection (-especially- the valuable bits) before you pass. Do Not expect your heirs to sell it; they'll basically take pennies for it just to make it go away.

My father sold (or separated out) everything of value so we could dispose of the rest (basically donated to a dealer) with a clear conscience.

"Copyright" covers a lot of areas, from films to books to software etc. So blanket statements about it are not helpful.

From the mention of LLMs I guess he means software copyright. But then refers to takedowns, which I don't see much of in the copyright space.

And possibly he's confusing copyright with patents?

For software, copyright I the only thing that protects Free Software. Without it GPL would not exist, and all GPL software could be used wherever without releasing sources.

Copyright most certainly protects small business against big business. It is the model on which most small software businesses are built.

Patents are bad, and if you replace the term "cooyright" with patent in the original article it makes more sense. But to be fair it's hard to put much credibility into a post that doesn't even understand that difference.

>> Copyright is serving exactly nobody today.

Are you sure about that?

So just to be clear;

You're advocating for the end of software licensing? Ie the removal of GPL or Open Source licenses? A landscape where any source code (or binary) can be snapped up by say Amazon or Microsoft and run via a paid subscription?

You're advocating for a business model which removes your access to local code and only allows access via a terminal or browser?

Because removal of copyright doesn't mean corporations go away. Rather it incentivizes business models that protect their products in other ways.

In the 80's and 90's, pre-internet, binary programs were distributed on media. An arms race of copiers and copy protection ensued. The copiers won, and since copyright enforcement has always been weak, business changed to favoring remote access (with subscription) over running locally via purchase.

At the same time Open Source and Free Software have thrived. Copyright protects that software being used outside the terms of the license. Indeed there's even outrage when it's used within the terms of the license (by AWS etc.)

Of course OSS still thrives under a copyrightless environment. (Free Software less so). But equally it means AI can simply be trained on it (probably no great loss since it's likely most of OSS will be AI generated anyway.)

Business however will adapt. And the easiest way to prevent coping now is simply remote execution. With a suitable Terms Of Use declaration.

Outside of software it would destroy music, movies, books etc. Basically it becomes a race to the bottom in terms of production costs (think user-generated You-Tube as the high-water mark.) But I assume you meant in the context of software.

Yes, I agree, that in much less than 1000 years copyright is dead. Because by then so much is in the public domain it doesn't matter anyway. Also because by then the last human programmer is long dead. AI will write anything you want, only you won't even ask because computer interfaces and abilities will be long past where we are now. You would have no need to create software any more than you need to build a plane or car today.

And those industries have taken less than 150 years to invent, explode, consolidate and commoditize. Indeed most of the complexity disappears when we go EV.

In 1000 years copyright is gone. But today it serves a lot of people.

I understand where you are coming from here. And there are multiple levers in play here.

The cost of a mortgage underpins the rental value. If there are multiple units for rent then there will be a "going rate" and that's certainly a part of the equation. In that sense some landlords get more cream than others, but that's capitalism in action.

There are however other costs that go into rental calculations. Perhaps the building has a supervisor, or rental agent. Perhaps utilities are included. There are typically property rates and taxes. There may be sectional title levies. That's before we talk about insurance, maintainence and so on. For a group of similar dwellings these costs will tend to be similar, and so the floor is set not just by the mortgage, but by including these costs as well.

If a extra cost comes along, which affects all the properties together, then that will just become part of the rental-floor equation. And yes, it's possible for that to be higher than people will pay, but that tends not to be the driving factor. People have to live somewhere and ultimately will pay whatever keeps them off the streets.

Of course people who own their own home will simply have an extra cost burden every year. There's no upside at all, and will result in more people not purchasing, but rather staying on the rental ladder. Indeed making purchase less attractive allows rents to get higher.

This is the problem with all economics. There are butterfly effects all over the place so "simple solutions" tend to have lots of unwelcome consequences. Trying to solve problems with taxes seldom ends well.

>> That costs the government nothing

The costs are actually substantial, but measured in things other than money. Countries have nationalised things in the past, including energy, (think Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc). The real cost tends to be in lost investor confidence at the bottom end, up to massive sanctions at the top end.

>> because their profit margins would be limited by law

yes, and no. I've lived in a place where selling price was below cost price for electrcity (with a Govt run electricity production.) Ultimately the price is paid out of the budget, which in turn is not infinite. Pressure on the budget in turn leads to redicing costs - like proper maintainence. There's some serious long term pain that is at the end of this path.

>> So the solution is really that simple. Do not build power plants that burn fuels. The economics will push the next cheapest solution to the top.

That's not strictly accurate. It'll push the next most profitable solution to the top. If there's no solution that offers the desired rate of return, at acceptable risk levels, then private capital simple doesn't bother to arrive at all.

Govts don't need a reasonable rate of return, so they can fill that gap, assuming that it doesn't cost too much political capital. Yes we need base load, but that message gets lost when the opposition are complaining about high govt spending etc.

Storage is the holy grail here. That allows for more provision of wind and solar.

Look, I prefer nuclear over fossil fuel every day of the week. It's the great hope of the non-carbon electricity sources.

In practice it is expensive to build, expensive to run, and really expensive to clean up. And that's before we add the risk of meltdowns.

Economically it makes no sense, not at the returns level, not at the timescale level, and certainly not at the political level. (If a US president can shutter an offshore wind farm unilaterally, imagine the risk to a nuclear plant that is 50% complete, and not yet fueled.)

There's a reason they're mostly run by govts. Govts are the only providers who don't have a money motive.

Personally I think research into storage, coupled with "wider" grids geographically, make solar and wind far more financially attractive.

Private capital has no appetite for nuclear, and few govts are left with both financial ability, and political will, for 30 year projects.

And if you think fission is expensive, wait till you find out what fusion-on-earth costs...

Unfortunately that doesn't really help. It has the effect of eroding the asset value such that it quickly means the owner can't sell.

In other words, if selling removes much of your capital, you then don't gave capital to spend on the next place.

Conversely investors become even more motivated not to ever sell. They can defer the LVT forever, and just use the property as collateral for loans (ie getting liquidity without selling.)

And LVT just becomes an expense built into the cost of rent. The investor never pays it anyway, the tenant ultimately pays it.

Solar power on the roof of an EV car seems like an obvious play. And yes some energy can be derived this way. But it's important to understand the limitations of physics.

When the sun is directly overhead we get about 1kw per square metre. Very good panel effeciency is about 25%. ) I'm rounding a bit to make math easier.) The average car footprint is maybe 6 square meters. Obviously a lot of that is curved away from the sun, or is glass. 4 square meters here is perhaps a reasonable starting point.

Which means if we plaster the car with solar cells, we might get 1kw of output in pretty optimal conditions. Perhaps 12 hours of generation depending on latitude, time of year, and so on.

Most EV cars have 30 to 80 kw batteries (some more). So 12kw of charge per day is not nothing, but also not enough. Given pesky things like shade (from tall builings or trees), undercover parking, clouds and so on, daily average is much lower.

Solar film in general is great. But current pricing makes it cheaper to just install regular solar panels in most places. Less portable maybe, but more (financially) efficient to generate/store/charge as we currently do.

On the other hand the aesthetic of a solar panel car roof is very cool, and maybe covers the aircon power requirements on a hot day.

This. Plus I'll add that coding is the lowest point on the IT development ladder.

Just like crawling wasn't the end goal, neither is programming. I know learning how to do it felt great (so did crawling) but there's still a long way to go.

The market in the US may be growing less strongly than elsewhere, but there are somewhat unique circumstances involved in that.

One is political - Energy in the US is highly political, and the oil and coal lobbies are both influential and regressive. This leads to EVs becoming a political statement rather than an active choice.

Second is size. Americans tend to drive further so range does matter. More range means more cost. And even Americans who don't ever go further than 20 miles entertain at least the idea of a cross-country road trip.

So I get where you are coming from. But I'd also say that the US is different to the world in general. In Europe I saw charging infrastructure everywhere. (Streetlight poles contained chargers, all the way down the street.) Electric busses were the norm. Electric cars everywhere.

Like I said earlier, a tipping point is coming. Naturally it'll happen sooner in some places than others. The US will likely be towards the back.

The problem for US automakers is that by the time they see a local market, they'll be well behind the curve in development. I don't think a GM will be able to compete in product (never mind price) to a BYD et al.

Would you say that non-profit insurance companies and non-profit hospitals are the norm in the US? Or is your area an outlier?

Hence the concept of trade partnerships. No country makes everything, and yes, there's lots of competition.

Tarifs have existed since forever. Countries use them to protect local industries. But they've always been stable, and industry focused.

Food production for example is worth protecting and Canada has tarifs on imported Dairy. Partnerships exist to protect local industries, promote exports, and give citizens access to cheap goods. It's a complex balance set up over time with lots of nuance and negotiating.

Yes, sometimes tarifs kill a local industry as well. Lack of international competition let's local industry stagnate until it is dead. US ship building is a good example of this, and US Auto makers are trending in this direction. (Banning Chinese EVs is not bolstering the US EV production, it is causing the US manufacturers to ignore that market, and I don't think that ends well.)

Tarifs are a powerful tool when wielded well. Alas right now the US in unstable. Local industries can't rely on tarifs existing next week, never mind 5 years from now. I'm not investing in a local hockey stick factory because the tarif could disappear at any time.

In my country we get cheap solar panels from China. Frankly, let them sell below-cost if they like. (Hint, they're not below cost). We don't make them here, so cheap energy is good for all.

The US negativity to Chinese goods seems to be around dumping (which happens, but not much), around quality (frankly much of it is very good) or around human rights. (Cause, you know, we bombed Iran to promote human rights...)

I don't think Americans will suddenly love China. But the rest of the world is getting very cosy very quickly.

They don't need to be part of the administration.

More than 50% of voters voted for Trump. Even today >30% (of everyone) think he's doing a good job. (Ie about equal to the voters in absolute number terms). Lots of people believe eat he is doing is legal simply because he is doing it.

And trade. The last 18 months the US has shown itself to be a unreliable trade partner. Lots of companies are looking at diversifying both markets and supply chains.

The recent trip of the Canadian PM to China is but the most visible part of this shift. That's at govt level, but I've seen it happen all the way down to individual level.

US products are typically more expensive here than Chinese. But at least you were buying from a friendly supplier. That distinction is eroding quickly. In my experience it's forced people to try Chinese, and generally been surprised (in a good way) over quality and features.

And yes, the price of oil has focused people much more at the EV market. (Not least because people with an EV already aren't shy about gloating). Pretty much everyone I talk to, who would buy a car "new" tells me their next one will be electric. The tipping point is coming much faster than most people think.