delazeur

Thanks for confirming that you don't have experience in law firms.

You clearly don't have experience in law firms. White shoe Wall Street lawyers, for example, generally can't just hang their own shingle and do corporate M&A as a solo practitioner.

First of all, the "no layoffs" claim can easily be achieved through attrition, as covered elsewhere in this thread. That means that someone would have been hired to replace a departing worker but now isn't getting that job.

Second, even aside from attrition, there are absolutely people who would have wanted the jobs that the robots are doing. Some of those people would have wanted those jobs because it would have been their only option. I would rather they had other options (via a social safety net, presumably), but that's not the world we live in right now.

At this point, I suspect you are intentionally reading me in the worst sense you can manage. I think I have adequately explained my position, and if you really want to continue this discussion, I encourage you to go back and re-read my comments. Engage the statements I made or ask questions about the points you don't understand. Otherwise, have a good one.

If two to three seconds of waiting (that's on the high end, and only for certain apps) is breaking your flow, you need to work on your attention span. That's ADHD territory.

Edit: For that matter, interacting with your phone for a few seconds at a time is probably an attention deficit issue in and of itself. I admit that it's common, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

> Isn't it equally cruel to talk like people want to be drones?

Well, I didn't append all the qualifiers I could have because I assumed that my comment would be read in a reasonable way.

Right now, those drone jobs are the difference between eating and not eating for a lot of people. I obviously want to see the eating problem solved before the drone job problem is solved. Until then, saying that these people should be happy to lose their drone jobs is cruel. I encourage you to go present your theory to some of those drones. Tell them about how they can cast off the chains of their slavery and be free to starve.

Talk about failures of the social safety net is nice (and I agree, as far as that goes), but it's just talk. Talk is not going to fix the social safety net. These are real lives that depend on this issue.

> I suggest you discuss this directly with archaeological faculty at a university, rather than making claims about dynamite - e.g. those who used dynamite were treasure hunters, for example, not archaeologists. Modern archaeologists do share your distress over most of what you've claimed.

My experience with academic archaeologists has been that they are pretty myopic on this. They like to dismiss past archaeologists as treasure hunters, but they are also eager to get their hands on all the data they can without much regard for the locals or for preservation. They usually justify this by pointing out that they aren't looking for treasure, in the traditional sense.

> Also, iPhones are extremely economical. My iPhone 6, which cost $749 at the time, is coming up to 3 years old.

Uh, what? I'm on my second ~$70 Android smart phone in eight years. It's a tad slow, but we're talking about literally a few seconds of waiting, nothing truly inconvenient. I have honestly never been impressed by anything a $600+ iPhone can do beyond what my phone can. The only drawback is that it isn't compatible with Apple group texts, but that is more than made up for by the fact that I truly don't care if my phone gets lost or breaks (I back up my files, so I'm only out 70 bucks). I have no idea why people spend so much money on phones.

> If something looks like it's an impossibly good investment, it may actually be.

Probably not a fair criticism of the investor in this case. 20 years ago, it would have been a totally accurate assessment.

Lots of people want to be drones so that they can feed their families. Ideally, they could feed their families without being drones, but your saying that they should be glad to lose their drone jobs without gaining a different means of support is simply cruel.

Only a very tiny portion of the global population is in a position to own productive capital (or, at least, enough to support themselves). Even if the portion were higher, though, you are basically just advocating rent-seeking as the solution to job losses caused by automation, and that strikes me as dubious at best.

There's a lot more to sexism (and other bigotry) than simple economics.

Presumably, we have all had coworkers who weren't great workers, weren't very bright, etc., but managed to get ahead by schmoozing and playing politics. Their brighter and harder-working colleagues who didn't play that game didn't progress up the ladder as quickly. Bigotry presents a similar issue, but on an even larger scale.

Islamic banks are issuing loans without interest to this day. They have a clever fee schedule though, and I'm not sure it works out any differently for the borrower at the end of the day.

Yeah, residential real estate isn't the best example, but it's not as though there isn't any pure rent-seeking out there.

Carve it onto stone tablets.

For certain millennials, crypto-currency already seems to hold the role that gold does for certain baby boomers. I would expect that phenomenon to grow during a bear market.

The problem is that, in most cases, managers are people who were good workers (and good at office politics) and who then got promoted into supervisory roles with little, if any, additional training.

Y'all should check out https://b612foundation.org

Yes, they still need coke, but much if not all of that demand can be met by oil refineries. Even if the steel industry got all its coke from coal that would be a pretty small percentage of the coal market.

I really struck a chord, didn't I?

> Maybe, but this is not why we have patents.

Yeah, and? I wasn't saying so.

Lots of things become easy to replicate after they've been done once, despite being non-obvious before. The "no obvious inventions" part of patent law is supposed to prevent people from patenting things that are already broadly used (or small variations on things that are already broadly used). The cliched example being that you can't patent the wheel.

Edit: I see that Animats has covered this much better elsewhere in the thread.

This is also why U.S. companies like to incorporate in Delaware – it's not that the laws and regulations are favorable, it's that the laws and regulations are well known and predictable.

Actually, they suggested that the executor's "wishes" should be followed, suggesting a fundamental misunderstanding of what a will is.

One sarcastic tweet from a random nobody is not a bellweather of leftist discourse. That's a weak joke, not social commentary.

> The laws don't affect the rich and the poor in the same way.

To paraphrase an excellent line: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges and steal bread.

It's a reasonable reading of your comments. Perhaps you communicated poorly? Browsing the thread, I am far from the only person who read you this way.

Shit, do you really think that people who get speeding tickets deserve jail time? You understand that the punishment should be proportional to the crime, right?

I am also white, and I also grew up poor. I agree that many (though far from all) of the college students who talk about socioeconomic inequality are spoiled brats.

However, you have misunderstood what "white privilege" means: it's not that your life has been easy, it's that the same situations would have been even harder if you had not been white.

> You're suggesting he's using "Marxist intellectuals" as a codeword for Jews, and that he's actually a Nazi (or at the very least a conspiracy theorist anti-semite)

Do you genuinely believe that the only anti-Semites in the world are Nazis or conspiracy theorists?

Verifying and discrediting are notably different activities.