njepa

Not 10 years ago. Maybe 30 years ago. There were a number of 40-50 floor skyscrapers being completed in the '90s.

I think it is mostly a funding issue. In Sweden there is municipal adult education. About 4% of the population ages 20 to 64 attended last year, with the median age (at least previously) being around 30. It is however tuition free and grants you a government student loan for living costs. Of course soon enough that loan might not actually cover rent.

I don't think it is the "Business Stuff", though that can be troublesome. It is the hidden costs. You often have to be significantly more successful running your own business for the same "deal" to make sense, which is hard. Some people manage to find their own path, but that requires a lot of effort.

> Western democracies have now overly partisan political system where most of the effort is spent in just cancelling out each other.

I would suggest almost the opposite. I think the West suffers from having too much similar politics. Overall the developments have been largely the same, roughly following the UK and the US. Very few countries stand out, especially not as a result of recent policies. And if they do it isn't a positive thing.

I think you are right to some extent.

Democracy as a shallow concept is mainly good at handling despots. The 0.1% can't get much power even if their influence is relatively large because the other 99.9% is against their one sided interests. But if you manage to convince 10% of something they could potentially get 51% of the influence, especially locally, at which point you have a big problem. Now 10% of the people can decide what to do against the interests of 90% of the people. A two party system makes this even worse in the US.

That said, it can be solved within democracy. It isn't the first nor the last challenge facing society, especially a changing one. I think we need to realize that we are in a second industrial revolution, with information this time.

From a democratic perspective the doctor can in theory earn much more as long as that doesn't grant them more influence or rights. Someone having a sports car isn't in isolation a democratic problem. Access to education, communities and security is.

I guess there in theory there could be libertarians that have very high criteria for what an informed choice would be. To a point where it would be democratic. But that is probably closer to social liberalism.

One can of course question whether most authoritarians care much about their own ideology. But as an ideology they do care that the system is fair, just not society overall. People do believe that it is fair to have a "strong leader". They might not care much if the leader is enriching themselves as they aren't equals. They would care if the leader loses face and don't seem as "strong" as thought. Because then their position would be unwarranted.

I have ever only heard the quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson. I guess that is his sense of humor. I do think it makes sense. Things rarely are as you want them to be.

I am not saying that things shouldn't be fair. I am saying the opposite. Things should be fair and you should make it so. That is sort of my argument here, that you can't expect things to be fair. If you design your system around hierarchies it doesn't necessarily matter if it is capitalist or socialist. Democracy isn't going to win that. China is amazing at being unfair.

Things don't stop at the border. If all your clothes are all made under undemocratic conditions or your real estate is bought by oligarchs, how democratic are you? In a non-scares world what defines you is what you don't do. China also produces things under even worse condition other Asian countries.

My thesis is that democracy doesn't fall with China, it falls with the West. Because we are the ones not finding our way. I mean, to take a capitalist approach we want China to not be able to handle technology. That is the somewhat point, that in democracy you can do more sophisticate things and still live to see it. Now instead we find ourselves at disadvantage because we don't now how to handle things.

> In general, I agree with you. I would not use the current US as a stirling example, historically, though the US system has been largely successful. We probably disagree on the level of success though.

That is sort of the point. People see the US as an example of democracy because of its prosperity, not because of its democracy. If you want democracy you probably go to Finland instead.

Everything is worse in these authoritarian countries not just the freedom. That is another thing people generally don't understand. There is nothing to catch up to. We just have to make sure to not get worse ourselves. And to actually use the advantages we had. That is why I am saying that it is the West that is defeatist. It is we that are changing our ways, to a large extent from our post war ideals.

If you want the feature of democracy you have actually be democratic. Which many areas of our societies increasingly aren't. It is nice to be able to say whatever you want, but if no one is listening there is no effect. The point is that something should happen, otherwise we are just cargo culting ourselves and being jesters for those in power.

I don't think the would, or at least hopefully could. De facto egalitarianism is to a large extent a democratic ideal. An authoritarian or a libertarian don't in general care about equality, but that the inequality is fair. They would say as long as the system or the conditions are fair the outcomes are also fair.

I do think things are better in general.

But as I said, if the lesser corruption doesn't deliver then it doesn't matter. The West can keep pretending that increasingly not delivering cost effective housing, education, health care and other things of importance in a knowledge economy is just repeated "flaws" and not a result of the current system.

Maybe is better to pay consultant instead of corrupt politicians, even if the consultants then tend to award the politicians after the fact. The problem is that the corrupt politicians in some of these other countries are now delivering results.

Shenzhen has opened a new subway station every month on average for the last 15 years. And there are certainly cities in the West that need more subway stations. Maybe cities in the West could even produce subways better than the Chinese. With less corruption and at lower cost relative to income. But as long as that isn't happening, the ability to do so doesn't matter much. So at least to the extent that the West can't produce these things it is still a problem.

I don't know. Seems like we are the ones in the trap. We make more money, but we generally don't get more for it. 20 years China couldn't produce cars, at least not as far I know. Now they bought Volvo. They bought KUKA robots. High speed trains. And can import almost anything if they want to.

Chances are if you look back at those societies it wasn't the liberalism. They were probably horrible by modern standards. It might just have been the trade of information and resources. Today you can do probably do that without the values. Or at least if the West doesn't do it that way, who is the competition?

If everyone in the US is worried about their mortgage, who is going to be more creative than Google to the point where Google can't just buy them? The same probably goes for society. If the West doesn't do democracy very well, who are the Chinese losing to?

Maybe you are right, but I still would trust the future to some idea. That is when you lose. When you think "well this can't happen" and then it does. Because the quote about astrophysics also goes for society, that "the universe has no obligation to make sense to you". Chances are it doesn't have to be certain way at all. Most of history certainly isn't fair.

I don't disagree with democracy. It is just that the system isn't its idea, but what it delivers. Most people never looked up to the US because it was the most democratic, because it wasn't. But because it delivered relative to other systems. The US system gave some of its people prosperity as in a decent sized house, the independence of a car to use the extensive highway network, an education and a career. Essentially a future.

Today it doesn't deliver. People go to the US because the status and the money, despite the visa process, the education system, the housing market and the infrastructure. Soon enough they will catch up to the status and the money, and the West will have little to offer.

It is easy the point the finger to everyone else, but it is the West that aren't fighting for it. We want the global markets, the large companies and the Chinese investments. You can't have both. You can't on the one hand have an idea of how things should be, and on the other sell it to highest bidder.

There are probably hundreds of articles about China "stealing" industries from the West. But overall they are just buying them to the delight of the owners, either with money or effort. And then the West somehow thinks that the Chinese should be the ones considering them successful.

While I agree with your overall point, I am not sure I would attribute defeatism to the rest of the world so much as the West. It is the West that is set to remove any form of commonality and turn to a state of legalized corruption and nepotism. The Chinese, Russians and Arabs are just copying the West. They are the ones getting the high-rises, roads and subways. And people are actually seeing progress.

If the West ever returns to the idea of democratic society where everyone should have access to education, housing and good working conditions. Where we run our countries, our infrastructure and invest in scientific progress together. And where we believe that running businesses in line with the values of society is better. Then they would want democracy as well.

> That's a strong opinion. I'm not going to argue for lack of time, but suffice to say that 99% of my interactions with my computer and sometimes with my phone is with a shell scripting language. Shell scripting is awesome.

It really isn't though. (It certainly can be fun however). Switching from shell scripts, and avoiding to do things manually (like ssh), likely increases your success rate at managing *nix by orders of magnitude. All these "configuration management" tools like Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, Ansible etc. are pretty much just to avoid shell scripts and interactive ssh.

I think the challenge is a bit misunderstood online. The challenging part by far with forming something like a trade union is to gain the influence, not how to wield it. It is having a high participation rate, a strong organisation, institutions and a war chest is the hard part. Actual influence will then be largely automatic just by existing. In general only weak organizations need "activist activities". A strong union's activities would be ongoing negotiations, legal cases, education, conferences, media production etc. That would form the culture more than any sort of code.

That does seem interesting. I could definitely see that as something I would want to use for the functionality rather than the "underlying feature". The story around this is pretty weak in most language ecosystems from what I have seen.

I don't disagree. I am just saying that thousands of dollars to bring a farmers business online to consumers shouldn't necessarily just be seen as a success thirty years after AOL.

There are many things that can be done, especially online. The question is if you can do it in a way that make sense. I am sure there are many people from New York on tindie. It is just hard to make it into a full time small business if you have a high cost of living and a limited supply chain.

No, because the money would be going into the business of serving an entire nation of farmers with these services. The cost for each instance of doing the fundamental thing, having a farmer sell to consumers, would hopefully be low.

It is an apples and oranges comparison because they are. Python exposes it's feature fairly readily in a relatively similar context. If I can open "Erlang Studio", plot my nodes, write my recursive functions and run them to some effect on some "Erlang Application Server" then Erlang would be as well. But as far as I know I can't. And I think that makes the application of Erlang somewhat inaccessible.

One could of course "just" use Erlang the language, but that use case has a lot more competition.

You probably need to look somewhere were that amount of money would actually makes a big difference. It just doesn't go very far in many places today. Or you need to provide some other value.

Edit: Don't know why this is objectionable. $5k is like one months living costs in many places, and sometimes one months savings. You aren't going to get much in return for that. You need to go somewhere cheaper where that kind of money can buy someone some time. Unless you can provide something else.

I mean that if you want to do something with e.g. python it is pretty easy to access what is good about python. You can make a script, make it "pythonic", use some modules and package it. And that sort represents a good, useful, python program.

With Erlang it is generally a lot harder to access what it is good at. Not only do you have to learn the language, which is a bit different, but things like how to configure and distribute the virtual machine, how the concepts of otp works and maybe even things like dialyzer.

I realize that I don't have to learn all that, but still the distance from writing a simple program to what is the unique features is still a lot longer. At least that is my impressions.

It is sad because it doesn't really go into the core business. He spends thousands of dollar on marketing, domains and suppliers just to have a farmer sell to consumers. It should almost be two clicks on "etsy for farmers".

Right, but that is a factor of your supply chain.

In Shenzhen you might make hundred boards, go down to the market and buy a hundred boxes and leave them with the shipper. Boards don't work? Re-work them or make another hundred. Box doesn't work? Buy another box. You don't like your box supplier? There is a hundred others on Taobao.

In NYC it might take you weeks to do the same thing while you are bleeding rent (and everything else) so you need the thousand boards and boxes to make it work (or you are selling very few in your spare time). And if something goes wrong you are probably fucked.

I am exaggerating, but you get the idea.

True. You could to some extent. I think part of the story is the opportunity though. The domain name, the boxes and the time are all things that grant him the opportunity to do it. He probably could have sold them in plastic bags on eBay (someone probably already does), but it wouldn't be same thing.

We all seem to agree like things like this is a good thing, but then we undermine people's ability to do it by favoring things like real estate, domains and "middle man businesses" instead.

I guess bunnie said it best: "supply chains are made out of people" https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266

I think the application of the language is quirkier than the language. There is a fairly high barrier to doing something ideal. In languages like python or c you can pretty much just write a few lines and you got something representative of what you can do. In this thread for example people are arguing whether you should make command line programs even in elixir: https://elixirforum.com/t/elixir-static-app-binaries/15335/4...

It was a fun read. But also a bit sad that it takes thousands of dollars and a lot of available time (which many people don't have) to do something as fundamental as this.

I don't disagree. I think the point "deogeo" was trying to make was that YIMBY often say that zoning should be removed so the market can take care of housing. But in effect the market already says that it doesn't value affordable housing. We might not like that, and want to change zoning, but that is still intervening in the market and should be recognized as such. But then you would also have to recognize other ways of intervening in the market as legitimate, like rent control. Which is something people usually don't want to do.

No, I don't think that is the same thing. In this case they are specifically lowering the standard of living. If the standard of living returns to a more normal state, where more traditional accommodation becomes more affordable, their investment becomes unprofitable. That is more like if a farmer would permanently change their fields to something that is high priced at the moment. Which would be speculation.

Because of volatility. You don't need a "shot at getting rich" when you already are. You much rather avoid getting poor(er).