dalbasal

That and many other dynamics. Bullying is one. A lot is just dumbing down. Reduction to meme. Thinking by affiliation. Picking sides. Factionalism. Populism. Statements have scores. Followers. Upvotes. Retweets. Everyone is gaming some sort of algorithm.

All the problems of politics, now permeating all of society.

We think, often, how and as we speak.. as we debate. Now that the conversation, the debate has become.. what it is, I think it really does affect how and what we think. That (garbage) mode of debating is now a major mode of thinking.

It's a mess.

Is it spirited? What's it in the spirit of?

It's the duck-witch skit from Monty python.

Well said.

Our 21st century version, at least to me, is even harder to phrase... at least currently.

I thought connecting everyone, all opinions, minds, ideas... I thought it would be good. It was, at first. There were ways for the better ideas to float. Ways for ideas to cross-pollinate.

The "society" seemed like a greater intelligence, one that I got a lot from.

Now... It's worse than I could have ever imagined. It's like every person makes the whole a little meaner, dumber, weaker of heart... The whole makes the individual a little worse.

It's a "naive" statement maybe.

But idk. Were Charles Manson or the unibomber "naive" to think they could achieve their goals, their way?

It's not a naive mindset, whether or not the conclusion is. I don't think it's lack of experience or depth that leads here.

>Are we just going to ignore all the productivity gains that china got from moving away from an agrarian economy to

Yes. I am, at least.

You can write your own comment emphasizing ut instead, if you like. Then I can write a snarky, "are we just gonna.." comment in reply.

Or.. we could just discuss it without the snark. In fact, let's please do that.

What is the meaning of the claim that assembly is "low value?" To whom? The consumer? The worker? Financier? Company?

I called it "low margin" and capital intensive... because these are the economic/financial characteristics.

I don't think naivety is a good description.

It's something else. Mental habits that are entirely rhetorically based. Basically, George Orwell's nightmare

case in point, I suppose.

Ok. Fine. I'm in. Let's discuss it.

Do you think we're better off using ai to decide the arms treaties, or should we hold off for quantum computing?

I didn't mean to suggest it was. The article/union didn't either, and I was just commenting on their position.

That said... Unions are prevalent in sectors. My point is that Tesla knew this was coming. They are not a social media startup.

Premising an investment on "bugger that" is childish. Plan for it however you want, but leaving it out of the plan is silly.

Does Tesla have a chance/way of operating in Sweden without collective bargaining?

>It seems very odd that the government would dictate four consecutive weeks

Because summer vacations are part of the culture, and considered important. That rule allows families to take long holidays together, with other families, etc.

I realize that it's a foreign idea... but this is a foreign place.

yeah...

Honestly, I think governments in some places (Sweden certainly) should just formalize these practices and make them easier and more transparent.

Work is getting international. There is value for Swedish workers and the economy here. Companies (even with good faith) can't deal with unlimited jurisdictions directly.

If it's formalized, it can be managed.

For some countries (Eg France) it would probably too hard or conflicting. For sweden... why not?

Just treat the system as the system. Locate there if your business model works in that system.

If you plan on a "normal" employment model where workers get fired sometimes, redundancy is part of your MO, etc... don't locate to France.

If you plan on being union free, don't go to Sweden.

Walking in with declaration that "you can either have McDonald's or you can have your union model," that is so immature. I can't think of another aspect of business where this kind of thinking is acceptable.

Imagine doing this with building permits or whatnot.

Either Sweden adopts US labour laws or sanctions?

This stuff really gets people worked up.

If Tesla doesn't want a Swedish location, they don't have to have one. There's nothing extreme or dysfunctional about Swedish labour norms. It's not France. Even if there were, that's Sweden. Tesla don't have to locate there.

Why are Tesla not prepare for this? It's not like they completely ignore permitting or environmental regs just because they're different from the US.

Tesla live by Chinese rules in Chin. That even includes the major task of making Elon shut the gob.

You want to operate internationally... everywhere is different. Not everywhere is suitable. Choose wisely.

If Tesla eats a major delay because they hadn't anticipated the inevitable... That's on them and it is bad management.

... Waiters will spit in your burger.

... dentists will split your procedure into three sessions

... the pothole on your street. .. it will be enlarged!

You are reading one side of the dispute's statement.

That said, yes, it doesn't sound like their on specific demands, at least currently. They want Tesla to "accept the swedish labour model."

"Decent and safe working conditions" is the union's general raisin d'etre. Their role, general goal, etc. It would be like Tesla saying they want to "profitably manufacture vehicles." Just a general description of what they do... and it's fine if they were to state it while describing their position.

So it sounds like the action isn't about particulars, at least not at this point.

They are describing the dispute as being about general principles afaict. That Tesla should accept the "swedish labour model" in general. They emphasize that it's an non-disruptive model and good for business.

This stuff is all context(that I don't have. Otherwise it's just a generic "unions or not" debate unrelated to Tesla, Sweden or 2023.

That said... US companies seem at aeas with these sorts of issues in Europe. In china, companies either stay out or bite the bullet and play by Chinese rules.

In Europe, especially around labour issues... American companies seem to always "rebel." It's as if local labour laws just aren't taken into prior account... and companies are caught surprised by the inevitable.

This doesn't really happen outside of Europe, nor for non-labour issues like environmental regs.

What is this? How/why?

Our understanding of economic "classics" like manufacturing often seems to be one generations' propoganda layered onto previous ones.

Labour productivity, today, is a very hard metric to understand. I'm not sure it means anything as an aggregate.

The ideal/goal of industrial policy (mostly determined in trade agreements) forthe last 40+ years has been... I think Apple is the cleanest, best understood example.

Apple US (or Ireland) houses the engineering. The marketing. It's where the "creativity" lives. It's where the intellectual property is. Where the "platform strategy" takes place. Where "network effects live."

Foxconn (taiwan+china) is where the hard capital investments live. It's where the factories are. Where the workers are.

United States (apple) gets most of the profit. They get most of the market returns (see apple share price, Vs foxcon/etc.). Most of the taxable corporate income. The lion's share of high paying jobs.

China (via foxconn/etc.) gets jobs. Industrial development. Labour productivity... all the benefits of manufacturing.

That was the deal. It was (and still is) what the US and China wanted. They both liked the deal. It worked well. Both governments got what they expected and more.

Apple (and others) did very well. Insane profit margins, market caps... financial returns beyond all expectation. What they wanted.

China did get lots of jobs, industrialised their economy, developed whole regions. They also got what they wanted... in spades.

This had had consequences though.

Instead of modernising manufacturing and continuing to get real productivity gains... Manufacturing got to go backwards. More labour intensive options work again. Fewer capital intensive, high productivity options, were necessary.

That game is kind of played out, but we did not go down the path of manufacturing efficiency. Trying to design the factories of the 2030s now... inevitably speculative work. Risky. Hard.

Meanwhile, the market is used to factories/manufacturing representing the low risk, low margin part of the economy. The proverbial "commodity" business.

Adding innovation, risk to big chunky investments for tight margins... you can see why US (especially the financiers) wanted out of this game originally.

Meanwhile, 1950s manufacturing-based suburban lifestyles... that mind's eye ideal is... Hard to know where reality relates to this now or in the future.

>Depends on what diet you compare them to. If you could demonstrate people could live healthy lives on just potatoes compared to a normal Western diet.

People (academic even) "demonstrate" this all the time. All meat diet. Vegan diet. Raw diet. One meal per day. The potatoes and lemons diet. Etc.

Feed most overweight western adults a restrictive diet, their health is likely to improve dramatically. That's because it's restrictive. Not because of what it is restricted to.

If you have >15kg of excess fat, you are probably reslient to undernourishment. The fat loss, lower blood sugar and such will improve your health.

Btw, in 19th century ireland, poorhouses published guidelines for the all potato diet. Their clients were undernourished. Their guidelines based on observing individuals who would deteriorate quickly if the diet was insufficient.

Their dietary minimum was 3-4kg of potatoes + 1 pint of milk or one portion of sardines or mackerel. You need to eat a lot of potatoes to make this diet sustainable.

A modern Irish man is much heavier, and much, much fatter than our great grandfathers. We also do less physical work. In that context, we can survive just fine on a lot of insufficient diets for a very long time.

Certainly agree on the "think more, talk less" front.

I think we often forget or don't realize quite how central talking, and thinking about talking is thinking, is our thought process... or a substantial part of our thought process. How we figure out our values test them and learn to apply them.

We get extremely attached to the stuff that flies out of our mouth, consider it "me."

"You’ll seek only true friends who align with your values, and experiences that bring you purpose and fulfillment and you’ll find a calm quiet center within :)"

Here is where I diverge. I think better conversational habits kind of lead to the opposite. True friends with very different values. A better, calmer separation of self from others, and hence a better ability to appreciate and love those that aren't like us, don't align with our values.

Even ice cream or French fries have a decent shot at working.

Diets seriously need to be considered through the lens of Occam's razor.

First, radical dietary changes cause rapid fluctuations in weight regularly. Not fat, weight.

Second, if you eat only one thing or are generally restrictive... You will probably lose a lot of appetite.

It's no good going off on some theory about pottasium. Occam's razor suggests that this also works for the been soup diet, fruit diet, etc.

It is, potentially, useful to do these kinds of things as an isolation diet (gradually add back foods and pay attention to effects). It's also useful to just break bad habits by doing weird stuff sometimes.

I'm Irish. I love potatoes. They do not have magic dietary powers. The potato doesn't explain anything. You can get similar results with toast, bacon or bananas. The results do not mean anything specific for longer term fat loss, health, etc.

It just proves that bodyweight fluctuates in response to radical diet change. That is known.

Same for a lot of the "water tricks" that thankfully have started to die down. They use bodybuilder tricks to eventually dehydrate themselves for a perfect look on stage day. It's sold as a weight loss trick.

This is also how auto manufacturing works, and is built in to a lot of the defining trade agreements.

Final assembly happens locally. This make up "value add" minimums to avoid tarrifs. It's also good PR. No one care where the aircon is made. They care where the panels are stamped out.

That's what makes GM a Holden, and part of Australian culture... for example.

There also is a practicality to it. Coke's local bottling make their whole supply chain more resilient. Coke are very good at supply chains, generally.

That is globalization precisely.

I think you probably put your finger on the rational driving force here.

If you can't/don't control the borders anyway... It might be more rational to just go with that and enable official channels and/or rules to work.

Insisting on the impossible, or the not-going-to-happen... It's a mistake politics makes regularly. Policies are only as effective as you can make them.

Anyway, if Kenya is in then this is a serious thing.

Software is too valuable, too high potential. It's production methods too creative, too subjective, and insufficiently legible.

So... We can't afford not to do it. Sometimes we can't do it, and we can't afford not to just pretend we're doing it.

Do we really need to quantify the number of firms who's main declared priorities involve producing technology (eg "AI") that they have no idea how to make and no chance producing? I mean those who communicate this clearly to the board, the employees and such. Many/most aren't even tech companies. Their little teams that coordinate salesforce integration & automate google sheets are tasked with tasks somewhere between "winning ycombinator" and developing AGI in 5 months.

The reason might be a penchant for "growth stories." It might be something else, but we know it is. Maybe someone said "why aren't we just using AI to cut our CS costs in half?" Maybe no one had a convincing retort.

"I am near absolutely convinced that the vast majority of our species' ability to produce things of value for the human race is just utterly squandered at large companies."

So... I studied economics circa 2004. A conservative school, during the peak of certainty in particular economic ideas. A very rational view of microeconomics... firms, prices, etc.

Anything outside that paradigm was weird "alternative theory" and we learned the famous polemics to address the obvious rhetorical questions.

I've gone back to most of those polemics over the years. I think they have some answers for us... Especially thought from the 1920s

Anyway... I no longer think the model predicting that our species (or industry/company/etc) ability to produce things should be a limiting factor is totally wrong.

Sometimes our actual ability is the limiting factor. Those problems get solved though. The rest of the time, other factors are limiting us and utilizing our productive potential is irrelevant.

Eg smartphones. They were a hit. In about a decade they went from yuppie toy to prevalence among subsistence farmers. They got good, and cheap, fast. That's technology being efficient.

Once everyone has a decent smartphone, that market has peaked. The "classical model" predicts that prices should now freefall. The market can't get bigger, but that shouldn't make price performance halt. Prices should take over as the driver of price performance now.

^FYI The classical model's definition of "technology" is pretty much "price performance" and it is treated as a black box.

Irl, hat's not how this works. A commodity business model is not the next step. There's no incentive to go this route at all.

The model T had a similar life journey. Rapidly reducing prices until market peak, then a different business model... one that wasn't really about efficiency anymore. Henry Ford hated it, but he did succumb eventually.

That means we are no longer pursuing efficiency. Wasting productive potential is default, when in this mode.

At least from the perspective of the individual firm... Efficiency is only the paradigm sometimes... Times when supply (the companies' output) is factor limiting profit, share price, reward...

The rest of the time, it's demand.

Take retail banking. I am sure, if the population of earth was growing 20% YoY... retail banking would keep pace. Accounts & credit cards for everyone would be no issue.

They wouldn't need to scale their workforce by 20% pa. Banks/banking would get more efficient instead... especially if competition is weak.

That doesn't mean that in a "normal" state, where banks have limited growth potential... Those efficiency gains are not going to happen. It doesn't matter what technology exists. Retail banks are not going to slowly shrink, as efficiency gains make it possible to operate with half the revenue/employees/buildings.

That flavour of "pursuit of efficiency" does not exist, at scale, irl. Only in the model.

The model, assuming that flavour should exist, concludes that efficiency gains cannot be made because technology doesn't allow it.

Longshortlong... The phenomenon beneath, tech operations being a shishow... that's what it looks like when firms try to do less with more... the alternative to efficiency.

>> They are writing law in MS Word and negotiating any changes in law by sending paragraphs over email, which they check once a day at most.

Fair point. But, I don't think it's good enough, at this point.

Software is not new or marginal anymore, and the business of software certainly isn't.

Practices like terms and conditions... Its not something lawyers can't see. I've heard the same thing about patents and I don't really believe that either. Patent lawyers, specialists and reviewers are nerds... They're not "boomers."

There are no more excuses. It's just makes suck now.

Most of the pseudo-contract BS that defines consumer-company relations is trash legal theory. It should have never held water in the first place.

The fact that our legal systems have tolerated and supported it, mostly demonstrates how intellectually weak the legal profession's philosophy and ethic is.

Companies, especially interacting digitally, use TCs, EULAs and other such nonsense like an incantation. Those are not agreements. They are stupid little rituals that strip users/consumers/whoever of all rights.

Any right that can be stripped by TCs... doesn't exist.

The whole concept of "by agreement" in these circumstances is bogus but... If it must be this way... Stack the deck in the other direction.

"By serving this browser a webpage, you agree to the following..."

By dripping a cookie, by recording this person's data. Pro user, pseudo-legal defaults.

Make "you must agree to X, before you use the product you bought" invalid. Give consumers the full right to unlimited time refunds, if divulging data or agreeing to terms (old or new) is a condition for using the product

This ridiculous deck can be stacked either way.

If I have to agree to a coercive contract intended not to be read, in order to use a device... Give me the right to say no and get a full refund at any time. At least invalidate the agreement.

Where TF are our judges, judicial philosophies, law professors? I want to ask "How could they let this happen' but the correct question might be "Why did they do this to us."

Idk... That's a little abstract for me.

Anyone can write and distribute the good version of this article. Major publication, a nobody-reads-it blog whatever....

If they're practiced at this type of work... It's probably a few days worth of work... Probably spread out over a longer period.

It's possible to do this in a way worth reading and writing. The better version would do well on HN. Where is it? Why do we get this version? Why did economist publish this very?

I don't think HN is being manipulated as an "effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion.""

There's a reading of Chomsky whereby this is at least partially emergent. There's a reading of Chomsky (maybe closer to his intent) where it's all a big conspiracy, with market forces filling the space where a belief in wide-scale collusion is untenable. That is, imo, crossing the line into superstition.

The alternative is thateconomist science writing is an abstract product, like code, like education, like a lot of things. It can suck, or it can be better without conspiracy, or secular prophecy.

Thank you!

I guess I deserve the downvotes for coming in hot and opinionated.

In my (admittedly lame) defense, mine literally is an off the cuff comment in a place intended for such.

Your comment demonstrates well what I was (failing) to get at.the project is what it as and where it is. Whether or not that's really interesting is for a science journalist to decision.

It can't be interesting enough to write an article about and not interesting enough to investigate curiously.

It's not that hard to investigate. The people are not hard to reach. The good questions are not that hard to establish.

Why can't we have better? I'm genuinely perplexed.

It's puff, talking about what would be a breakthrough discovery without taking an interest in any more than it takes to generate buzz/content.

How are be supposed to know anything about the space, where it is, how much promise it has, what that promise actually is. There's no meat in this burger.

I really wish journalists could cut the crap. If science reporting is this, that's grim

There is plenty of interest in covering ideas, papers and efforts that are speculative, hopeful or early as what they are. Early, occasionally pioneering efforts to achieve something which may lead to success in the future, or enable new efforts to sprout at a tangent.

Interview researchers. Ask them questions. Interview reviewers and peers. They're accessible. Communicate science. As it is. What science is, is worth covering. Do your job.