dalbasal

I agree...

Any alternative has two core issues... Adoption curve issues and scalability/potential. What do you do when adoption is 2%, 20%, etc. If issues exist at 5% adoption rates can't be solved, those at 50% will never be relevant.

Toyota's much talked about new line on EVs is all about this. Elons intital (underpants) plan for Tesla was all about this. Not just destinations, destinations with passable pathways.

There are easy places to get started. Buses, trucks, specific locales that can be served by dedicated fueling facilities. To make that a useful plan though, you need to be able to reach level L+1 from L, and a realistic vision of pathways to L+n.

I'd also note that it was mostly Tesla's financiers that made an "investment case" where Tesla's potential is proportional to the EV market broadly.

Tesla's Elon strategy never (openly) looked beyond model 3. Cubertruck is strategic, but not in a sense that has much to do with EV adoption rates in general.

Idk... Maybe... But Reddit seems to hold info pretty poorly. A lot of the subs/posts and incredibly dumb.

The good information is there, often, but finding it is hit and miss. Until relatively recently, unofficially archived gives web forums were still available. Reddit search is a downgrade, imo.

In any case gpt can do reddit pretty well.

The types of queries where gpt is useful (or I hope will soon be useful) to me are those where google themselves have "destroyed the internet.^"

If you want to basic information about a physical exercise, a recipe, a travel destination or such... All the content in Google seems to be content farmed. Written by people who don't know, quickly, by copying similar articles. It's just a buggy, manual version of the proverbial gpt anyway. At this point, I may as well just go direct.

If I want to know about doing weighted crunches instead of sit ups, Google results already represent all the downsides of using gpt. The got UI is nicer. You can also narrow in on your questions, push back and generally get the same level of content in a better package.

Maybe the old chestnut of "computerized recipe book" will finally be solved.

^Ra Ra!

I feel like economics has gone backwards, for generations now, in its understanding of monetary/debt/macroeconomic inflation.

I don't think we ha "The Answer" before. But now we don't even have the questions anymore.

A country/economy can't "borrow from the future," or save for the future. We can invest in the future. We can eat the seedcorn, but those are very limited.

China used debt creation, like other economies did/do to catalyze increased economic activity. That economic activity is from the present, not the future. Present construction workers doing work, getting paid..

It demonstrably represents economic potential being realised. The "unsustainable" part is the debt. Meanwhile, paying back the debt (the economy as a whole) creates the reverse process. Economic activity recedes.

I think the prevalence of "jubilee" in ancient culture is a clue. Economies really do need a debt cancellation mechanism to be stable. Bankruptcy is insufficiently scalable.

The west's "solution" has been nationalisation of debt. But, instead of a preprepared plan, it's a chaotic, emergency event that only a handful of bankers understand before it's too late.

We need some new ideas here. China too.

Agreed.

Pop culture "obsession" may have been useful for overcoming blanket bans on research, funding, etc. It was obsession that created these bans in the first place, and obsession that triggered them.

Now obsession it's interfering with science and (especially) science communication.

Meanwhile, parent comment (the "trip" is the active substance) is a hypothesis... on the face of it. A reasonable hypothesis that needs to be considered, and if possible tested.

There's probably no getting around obsession here. This is literally the namesake "culture war," dating to 60s counterculture.

What you are saying is true, but that doesn't mean a lot of underhanded "games" aren't played.

"Nobody is getting rich off failure; if everyone were to walk away there'd be nothing left and therefore nothing to recover and distribute. It's bad for everyone, but the alternative is worse."

Here's one such game. Executives, who enjoy information asymetry, and leverage can parlay this into one final earning event. Threaten to leave the company in disarray, unless they're paid. Coordinated, it's hard to say no to.

Imagine if the top 5-10 execs at an otherwise ok startup coordinated a demand to double their pay/stock or everyone walks tomorrow. They time the move using inside knowledge of cash flow, making the demand irresistible.

I'm not suggesting an alternative, but that doesn't mean a corpse isnt a feast for some.

So... certainly with social media, the rules the rules and only we know the rulebook.

The incentives are just stacked towards not having policies.

First once you have a policy, that policy can be criticised. Nothing withstands criticism these days. Politics also lost its explicit policy statements for the same reason.

If one politician has a policy plan, his opponent's "policy" will be a critique of his plan and that gives the opponent an edge.

Second, once e have a policy, you need to implement it. FB is better resourced than all the others, but none of these "policies" are even designed to be implemented broadly.

Vagueness just serves, and if you aren't vague you will regret it.

If you are clear, there will be a ton of criticism of your clear policy. Then there will be criticism of your imperfect implementation.

If you're vague and concommital, you can half implement a half baked plan plan and change or drop it when you want.

Apologies. I did know that at some point.

Yes... Books, & TV shows are often brandless. We're used to that. It's how story land looks, but our world is full of brands.

How many brand names do we say per day?

Maybe at the margin. Broadly though, the way to do YouTube professionally is high frequency.

Most channels these days attract pretty consistent views per vid. The most straightforward way to increase revenue is frequency.

You know, I don't think they can anymore.

The web is not what itwas, so they can't just "revert." They need talent, execution, ideas. IDK if websearch still has that at google. A possibility of big(ish) ideas about how websearch should be.

Innovators' Dilemma, and just general difficulty of changing core things that don't change often. Google are optimizers. Local plateaus are hard to beat.

That shift (pc to smartphone) represents a lot more "who and how many" users than how they use it.

As late as late 2000, web was still pretty exclusive club. I went to college mid-2000s. Even among students, it was a geeky minority that really "consumed" internet massively.

If the web was real life, we'd have recognised this very easily.

"Search results plagued with ‘clickbait’ would have been an understatement 20 years ago.

The parts of the open web you access from Google/search (most of it) is almost entirely made-for-google' ranking algorithims.

The situation is worse than it is on closed social media, including Google's YouTube.

Professional YouTubers are also making content for rankings above all, but the fact that it's their own face/voice keeps some of the rot at bay.

Google is literally content made by uninterested copywriters exclusively for Google rankings.

I was recently looking for general travel advice on Google. I found it completely impossible. The content is all written by people (or ais) that had never visited. Everything reads like a middle school essay.

I often resort to searches in a smaller language, where economic incentives are 100X smaller than English.

Google created incentives for littering the web with garbage. Then they took away incentives for anyone else to even bother.

Google killed the thing that gave them life. They gave Vince Serf a sinecure and a hows-your-mother for the rest.

Thieves.

Yes it is.

The pertinent question (to me) is the relative corruption and/or other dysfunction to national and/or subnational governments. That's the competition.

They seem to have the right idea. Do you know much about them? Are they good/effective?

Or the European Pirate Party or similar. They have a handful of elected MEPs at any given time.

That is the problem though. That's not very serious politics. If it's a coalition of tech companies, law enforcement and whatnot vs pirates and anarchists... guess who wins?

A normative, liberal movement/coalition that is for digital freedom is not far fetched. It just doesn't exist. That's why we're losing.

This post demonstrates the problem quite well.

yes..

Also, MEPs are often elected differently allowing otherwise unlikely or fringe candidates to succeed.

And, parties/people just don't treap. EP seriously. Everyone knows it's a clownshow. Treat it that way. EP can't have more power because clownshow. Cycle.

It's a perfect 19th century steryotype of upper house (Council) and lower house (EP). One is a club. The other is a square. Public square, atm, are a hard place to do anything but show off and fight.

Yes, corruption at national (and subnational) levels is much greater.

EC institutions don't control enough programs, funds or building permits to rival states on this front.

I do think there is "soft" corruption (as OP alludes) in the "EU as a regulatory powerhouse" complex. Lobby-adjacent corruption, like in the US. A lot of that is very dirty money, with foreigns states or industries literally buying a seat at the table. The cleaner end is Google & Apple getting a seat at the table via ireland (and others) who simply have a national interest in giving it to them. The dirtier is Qatar, China or whatnot getting proxied in for political donations, payola, funding of specific nonprofits/etc.

Anyway... that exists. It is (IMO) almost entirely contained at the top level, and it mostly bleeds in from national politics.OTOH, competence and professionalism also exists in the EC. That means the can actually deliver on the job, if they're tasked with a good job.

The EU has very little advocacy or awareness of digital freedom. Foreign ministry staff don't understand it at all. We're just a stream of weirdo complaints that appears whenever they try to do anything digital related. I know it's hard to grok, but they do not have any idea what we are talking about... and that's kind of our fault. Democracy has some essential bottom up components.

On the positive side... a sound, rational and tactical movement can (IMO) really succeed and get stuff. The good thing about eurocrats, is that once they're mission is the right mission... they get it done better than most. EU consumer protection, for example, is quite excellent relative to any examples I know. EU infrastructure and transport projects were executed way better than national equivalents (see Ireland again for examples).

There is no serious political/factional/ideological barrier to EC adopting digital freedom goals. Just ignorance. There's hope.

Idk...

The EC pushes through controversial decisions, that are not controversial between states... the bar is generally something high in this regard.

National Governments get a buffer between them and discontented citizens, because "it's the EU." There is also a lot of pressure to conform to EC "consensus," parties/individuals that want to be seen as government material.

EC totally discounts digital privacy especially privacy from state actors and there is corruption, carve out a and such. I disagree with a lot of their agreements. I agree that they make far too many laws and are way too bureaucratic but....

EP is a shitshow on another level. It's literally the star wars senate. Endless factions, recreational politics. No about to act in a way that might result in anything but show. It's trump, but boring.

National governments also don't lack in corruption. Politics sucks.

IMO, what is badly missing is an active electorate. Civil society. There needs to be an organized, pro-freedom movement. ATM, EC is taking advice from tech industry,dirty insiders and spooks. No one speaks for "The Cause" because, to paraphrase americans... "When I need to speak to Europe's digital freedom people, who do I call?"

Well said, and it rhymes with many of the mistakes we have made in the past. We discount the social, the emotional, the storytelling... Often they're what matters.

It also rhymes with common parenting folk wisdom that having "the wrong friends" is detrimental to grades.

>the challenge isn't explaining, it's to get the students to care.

This.

The reason not one student learned French in my four years of mandatory French classes is that we didn't want to know french. We didn't know any french people. We didn't care about french songs or movies.

OTOH, when telenovelas became a local fad, every girl had a clique of Spanish speaking 13 year olds.

The actual problem in that case is: How do you teach french/philosophy/whatever to a class full of kids who don't want to learn that stuff? Maybe they want to pass exams and get grades. Maybe you can rejigger discipline mechanisms to motivate them... but that is never going to get you to good.

I think good tutoring should/does demonstrate the standard. It shows us what education can do, when the limiting factor is (ideally) the students' ability to learn instead of resources available to teach.

Idk if any technology, institutional framework or other fix can ever achieve that standard. They don't necessarily have to. Its still useful to have a comparative standard.

There will always be a difference between learning to (say) pole jump & hammer throw by self coaching, vs training under an olympic coach. You can, however, use that coaches' methods and standards to teach a cheap, recreational class.

The mechanism is complex, but recreational field athletics is better (farther/higher) by existing in a world where olympic training exists. They'd be even better in a world where those trainers coach middle aged normies, to remove the "youth and talent" factors.

I suspect, for example, that small groups or 1-v1 can comfortably pace a primary school curriculum with a small fraction of the desk hours. That in itself is a "performance gap" with potentially actionable crossover.

I encourage everyone to watch/listen to Peter Thiel's "Why Monopolies Are a Good Thing."

Thiel is a objectivist (Ayn Rand acolyte). This puts him in a position to argue a libertarian/conservative-like position, but with a very different moral framework.

The idea that economics is a morally-neutral science is hard to find evidence for irl.

Divide economists into "Austrians," "Monetarists," "Keynesians" "Marxists," etc. They will divide politically, epistemologically and ethical philosophy into their respective schools. That is just how it is.

Anyway... Peter. His talk on monopolies reaches convergence on various points that don't normally.

Everything makes more sense when you believe it to be intentionally orchestrated by someone or something. That's why this way of thinking is so popular.

Edit:them/it

Livestock feed is part of food's supply chain (and ou literal food chain).

Yes, we can eat eat a lot of this feed... but that doesn't mean that the world will neatly respond to a shortage of quantity with a slight tweak to quality. A shortage is still a shortage, with all the dynamics of any other shortage.

No. It's rhetorical.

This is true, but does not stop a foodie from going on a mission to replicate the spicy sausage flavour of petrol station food they loved on childhood road trips.

Is android viable outside of its role ass asset to search/ads.

Google's money comes from adwords. Adwords has two key assets. One is Google search. The other is Google's systemic ability to gather ad-useful data using android, maps, etc.

Everything else is stuff that exists to support the search/ads/data money maker or it is ways of spending the enormous profits generated by this monopoly. EG Waymo.

The first group can't be separated and retain value, unless the post break up shards contract to operate like they did before. That is basically a trust. The second group just aren't viable businesses, or aren't big.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just saying it gets real squishy and there aren't many guiding principles.

Sure... maybe. Do you really think a court process could make those decisions well?

I'm not even sure if that would work. Does Google search now have to use adwords? Will the court mandate the revenue split? Most of both entities' revenue will come from this revenue split. It's almost like spinning off the cash register in a convenience store.

It's just a lot for a court to actually do.

Meanwhile, there's a tension between eliminating monopolism and eliminating market value. A judge's decision could blast $1trn off of Google's value, and cause a general market shock.

Meanwhile, what are consumers getting out of this? Advertisers are not going to have more choice. There will be no competition induced price reductions. What's the goal here? Justice?

This stuff is basically industrial policy. To have industrial policy, we need to do industrial policy. Can't just let courts handle the whole thing.

IDK if those are, in themselves, indicators. The idea is not purity. The idea is for technical common sense to win over sales/consultant-led architecture.

You can't scare google with antitrust.

The game is structured. If Google lose, they face an affordable fine or mandated adjustment to a single business practice. In this case, the business practice is "OEM Search Deals" which has been litigated before. The practices is profitable and strategic enough to take the heat.

IMO, antitrust was entirely declawed by the "US vs MSFT" settlement in 2001. It's a similar case. An operating system with 90% market share using their position to dominate key parts of the application market. We now know this as the "platform strategy." Something that investors demand from CEOs, as opposed to a legal risk to avoid.

For the young.... "US vs MSFT" was the high profile case(s) of the 90s. Software was known to be monopoly prone and the case was expected to reveal what was and wasn't allowed.

MSFT litigated similar antitrust cases in the early 90s, and settled. The key term of this era was "bundling." MSFT concluded that antitrust was a cost of doing business. MSFT continued bundling to reserve key application markets for itself. Gates rubbed it in. DOJ took offence and went on a warpath.

DOJ pursued real antitrust. MSFT was found guilty of monopolism and the court actually ordered a "breakup." Seems far fetched today. The model for monopoly "breakups" was the 80s breakup of Bell (telcom). Shock! Insanely aggressive by today's standards. We can't even conceptualise how a breakup of a big tech today would work.

Anyway... doj flinched. They settled the appeal. OEMs were freed from MSFT exclusivity. Real antimonopolism was off the table, and never returned.

I don't really blame them. Breaking the monopoly of a tech giant could, and likely would, decimate their value. Bell was a telcom. Physical and concrete. WTF does "breaking up Google" actually mean? How can a judge do this task.