roenxi

The modern equivalent to what the man had is what the man had. You'd need to be paid maybe a bit less to support a family like he had because everything has gotten slightly more efficient over the years. If you want to define things by means and medians, the median worker had a median lifestyle then and a median lifestyle today.

If you want much more than he had, you're going to need to pay much more for it. Bit of an obvious one.

If you're happy to live life to a 1960s standard, it'd be quite cheap. If I'm interpreting the stats properly [0], he expected to put two children through high school and the other 3 would have been contributing a lot to the family quite early on. It'd also be interesting to check whether it's legal to build the same apartment in Daly City's current regulatory environment because that isn't a given.

Plus, the US government at the time was less than half the size of the private sector [1] so we'd expect he was contributing less to dead-weight government projects and corruption.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_104.10.a...

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Governme...

> but clearly there must be systemic issues in the people getting elected to this board for there to be so many persistent problems.

First time dealing with a committee? It is routine for every community to be shrouded in an ongoing cloud of drama and that doesn't indicate anything at all. There certainly could be problems and if there are it'll generate chatter, but the problems have to be dealt with individually. People resigning and complaining about a steering committee is normal.

> ...but the obvious counter-argument is that humans can make creative leaps in abstract fields without such sensory grounding...

But we have no idea at how good humans are at that. Given the appalling failures of humans to handle even basic statistical situations like identifying that the same thing happens over and over, it might be that they are hilariously bad at creative leaps in abstract fields, it is just we have had nothing better available to measure against. We've spent about as long as decision theory existed trying to convince people to use it instead of flailing. Limited success, usually in exceptional cases.

And the paper seems a bit dodgy, we have models created with sensory data available. No reason a LLM can't be trained on more sensory data than a human can accumulate in one lifetime. There is a lot of visual data on YouTube.

The key thing is whether it is legal though. If we allow that people abandon the rules and do what is possible then any system can be anything. But in an undemocratic system the people forcing a change requires arm twisting beyond the formal channels.

In the US the people can, formally and legally, do pretty much whatever they like if they vote for it consistently over the course of about a decade.

> To this day Iran's Oil Infrastructure remains intact. Just let that sink in.

The US was going as far as issuing sanctions waivers to Russia to try and get oil to the market it was so worried about what the war in the middle east would do to prices. All the indications are they're desperate to preserve as much middle eastern oil infrastructure as possible, even to the point where they look like losers vis a vis Iran. No surprise if they aren't inviting tit for tat exchanges on oil infrastructure. And the Russia-Ukraine war had vaguely similar parallels, with Ukraine allowing transit of Russian gas through the country to Europe for ... I want to say at least 12 months. So clearly neither side was so lost in the battle that they thought disrupting the pipelines was a good idea.

That type of targeting discrimination seems to be fairly normal. Armies are only indiscriminate when they think that helps their war aims. Although what exactly the US war aims are in Iran is very much a guess, Trump was struggling to even lie consistently when he was trying to come up with one.

An organised army is the most effective coercive tool that money can buy, so every nation has to have one otherwise it'd be crushed by foreign militarys. And an organised army requires a large group of people who obey orders rather than stopping to debate the wisdom or morality of them charging out to get shot or shoot some other people. An army has to obey orders in a hierarchical fashion to be effective.

That basically sets up an equilibrium where you have a small number of people who can cause the deaths and suffering of millions. To escape it there'd need to be an economic sweet spot where armies couldn't cost effectively coerce small groups of people. But that seems unlikely because the economies of scale to outfit an army favour large groups. We've been lucky enough so far in the modern era that a strong army requires supporting a thriving economy.

I don't think it is obvious that measure is meaningful though. The US has always been explicit that it doesn't trust the majority of the population to make decisions and has built intentional systems to keep them out. That is still democratic, the people could change those systems if they really put their mind to it, because the power does technically flow from the people if they really put their foot down.

It is pretty safe to say that the US could be more democratic. It is probably reasonable to compare it to other countries in terms of how democratic it is. But saying it is "not a democracy" is a fairly trivial observation. Republics aren't technically democracies if democracy means that the people make the decisions and win on all the disagreements. Republics are modelled on places like Rome that had a very visible and powerful oligarchy.

If that were true, wouldn't that mean that politicians are in fact acting in a WYSIWYG manner? They roll in, implement policies that people like, say "I implemented this policy because it has quiet support" and the political defence of the policy is average people like it and can't be talked out of supporting it?

If your position is that the average person on the street thinks a policy is a good idea then the politicians involved aren't going to need complex signalling. They're going to say "You all like this policy! The current mob aren't going to do it >:( Vote for me, I will implement it". The sticking point is all the policies politicians implement that are unpopular with the average person on the street and that polie couldn't win an election if they were visibly standing for their actual position.

> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.

Have you checked the premise? Usually the waves of fake protect-the-children policies are widely decried, support is fairly thin and the politicians pass it anyway then refuse to revisit the issue ever.

It is like the constant aggressive warfare the US is in - the US public clearly loathes it. Every single election they seem to vote for the candidate most vocally promising peace. I don't think it would be fair to say that the people keep accepting it, the dynamic is clearly that the political class refuses to acknowledge the hint.

> There are millions of local activists that are improving the immediate lives of their communities in real impactful ways...

Most people manage this. It is hard to earn a paycheck if someone isn't improving the immediate lives of their communities in real impactful ways. Great work has to be something a bit more. There are a lot of thresholds for that which could be reasonable, but if we aren't going to go with solid investor returns someone is going to have to come up with a rough standard that can be talked about.

> Starting after school programs or setting up mutual aid stations or community gardens or creating tenant unions, are all things any one of us can do to improve the lives of those around us.

I mean, sure. But my mind automatically drifts to China and the millions of people being dragged out of poverty by sweatshops and investors making out like bandits. Industrial improvements to living standards, driven by profits, are a lot faster and larger than people setting up mutual aid stations. The scales are just different once people figure out a way to improve the world profitably.

There are examples of people who managed to scale up their work to do amazing things without making a profit along the way (major religious figures spring to mind), but generally it is just easier to have a sustainable impact if the returns are good too.

What do you want it to be synonymous to? The people who've managed to do great work without generating large investment returns not that large. Compared to the number of ambitious people presently looking for advice it is small.

FWIW a good trick is to be aware of your thoughts, watch the tension/stress/realisation/anger/effort arising, the sort-of ignore them because they're thoughts and look for the way your mind tenses moving between them, then do the opposite of that tensing or let the tensing move you to a feeling of (say) extreme love or connection because if you're going to feel something that is more pleasant than stress. These things come and go, as you illustrate. Once you don't lean into them they tend to just go away.

None of those things are doing meditation wrong, they're just things minds do. The mistake is in focusing on them instead of focusing on the process generating the changes.

Because HN was a forum for oil executives to gather and discuss prices? Big fossil isn't in the room here. It would surprise nobody if there were 0 people in the comments who even work in a fossil fuel company.

> One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.

I almost hesitate to ask, do you think that is the centralised or decentralised option?

And, more directly, that is a bad theory. The billionaires will make money either way. It doesn't make a lot of difference to them as a class. They'll have an inclination to the cheaper form of energy because more energy -> more economy -> more money for them.

You're probably going to struggle to come up with a motive for that behaviour. It is much more likely that they simply aren't very thoughtful. Complex webs of deception in a public argument are certainly possible, but it generally relies on some group having a clear financial incentive to misdirect. That doesn't exist in the nuclear debate.

> It's that it is possible to resuscitate dormant or shrinking sectors. It is possible to re-industrialise quickly.

China managed to go from peasantry in the grip of communism to arguably the biggest economy in history over a remarkably short period. And it is hard to get a read on exactly what is going on in that country but that seems to be despite heavy state intervention in the economy and without the benefits of political free speech. I'd also rate their rule of law as a bit rubbery. It is clear that industrialisation can happen like lightening if best-of-breed policies are adopted.

Which is to say, policies in the West since the end of the cold war have been an absolute disaster and we are well due some political remove-the-spec-from-your-own-eye reflection on our industrial strategy. And, frankly, the endless reign of military terror that the middle east is subjected to doesn't seem to help. Keeping the military at home has been a massive win for China, all of that money went into investments instead of pointless murder.

It is enough to make you wonder if it is the politicians or the voters who are more evil and incompetent.

I don't think the author took a position on synchronisation at all. He said you have to pick one to abandon of mutability/concurrency/interactivity and that abandoning mutability is horribly slow (because of the need to copy things). And that isn't technically accurate because you can abandon mutability and not copy things. If you have a 1MB int->int associative data structure and need to change one entry, then you can reuse most of the MB (it isn't going to change) and get away with writing a couple of integers.

And that could be substantially faster than a mutable approach when you need to make a genuine copy of the 1MB structure with a small change and keep both, because you can't structure share and you will need to copy the whole MB. Obviously situation specific, and I'm sure there are edge cases where immutable lookup tables fall apart. I haven't met one myself.

I don't disagree with the article exactly, I do think abandoning mutability is necessary. I just don't think his argument that it needs to be slow is good. If you abandon mutability, "copying" data logically is extremely fast because you can skip almost all the IO for large objects. And copying a large object with a small change should be much faster in an immutable language because of structure sharing. Depending on the workload, that might be faster.

> But again, there is no free lunch: copying data is slow. Very slow. Of course you can optimize data representations, avoid copying binary blobs (they are ref-counted in Erlang) because it would be untenable. But it will still be horribly slow.

You don't have to copy the data; it is immutable. Why copy something that isn't going to change? Are we being charged for empty RAM? Different objects can share the same structure. Famously, this is what Clojure does. Theoretically it can be faster than mutating objects because you only have to write the parts that are changing (which is the same as a mutable object), you lose something to overheads (might be nearly negligible) and have enormous gains in situations where you might need a copy of an object for some reason because that is free; there isn't any reason to actually do a copy unless the data itself is going to be mutated.

It remains confusing that, after centuries of profiting off capital generally being a much better strategic choice than profiting off labour, workers insist and persist in trying to make labour work.

If the unions had dumped their efforts into co-ops instead of trying to fight their own companies then they might have managed to have a positive impact. They've been at it for long enough for capital accumulation to have kicked in even at pathetic rates of saving.

"Your worth" is a bit of a vague and meaningless term (everyone is worth infinite in some sense). But if we want to talk about your general ability to secure more comfortable living conditions then your worth is very much linked to your productivity. The average living conditions are largely determined by how productive the average person is. There are some hard-to-escape balance equations at play there.

Good vibes are nice and all, but affirming each other isn't going to actually make the world more comfortable. Looking after disabled people requires an enormous productive surplus from the rest of us and a recognition that the people creating the enormous surplus are in practice worth quite a bit more than the people who are on the receiving end of charity. Playing pretend on this topic is just going to lead to people being worse off.

Time for a thought experiment! Imagine there are 2 monkeys. One monkey genuinely believes it is a unique and special being. The other monkey is genuinely egoless, believes all monkeys are just a coincidental blob of matter with no fundamental claim to being special and that in some sense are all part of the same being. There is enough food for 1 monkey. If that is all the information we're getting, I would contend that the egotistical monkey is far more likely to be the one to eat the food.

You might easily be you because if you weren't it'd be an evolutionary dead end. Everything with the ability to make choices ahs to believe at some level that it has more of a right to exist than the systems they consume energy more.

> Around 12% of the (US) population actually pursues this, in their view, comfortable lifestyle. The rest consistently indicates either same or a larger number of desired children than they have:

This is basic economic revealed preferences. These people have all achieved the best living standard (and for the least effort) of anyone in the history of their genetic lineage measuring from before humans were a species.

They may say they want more children, but they are not willing to compromise away any of their comforts to actually have more children. Nothing is stopping them except their own preferences. Literally all their ancestors managed to have children in much worse conditions.

As theories go, that one makes little sense. At no point in human history has living in miserable conditions caused people to stop having children. And the evidence seems quite suggestive that people stop having children as their material conditions improve.

There isn't really a final word on the topic I'm aware of, but it looks like all the options available are out-competing having children rather than that people are avoiding families as some sort of revolt. People aren't generally willing to have kids if it means abandoning their efforts to achieve the most comfortable modern lifestyle that they can.

Lowe mentions costs 0 times though, he isn't making an economic argument. If you want to make an economic argument then 90% is probably the consensus on what is optimal given that is what people are doing.

> If this try or die mentality does work, why don't we try every possible amino acid chain in every configuration possible?

You tell me. If someone wants to start working through the amino acids one by one I'm not going to say they should be stopped; sincerest good luck to them. I'm just not going to be the one funding it.

> You could solve all forms of cancer tomorrow, which would be a great thing, but you aren't "saving humanity".

This is a straw man. "Saving humanity", whatever that means, is outside the scope of medicine and I never argued for it. Nobody did. It isn't relevant.

> I’m fond of saying that the most important single statistic about the drug industry is the clinical failure rate, which is (by any reasonable standard) appallingly high.

He starts off on the wrong note, there is nothing at all wrong with a high rate of clinical failures. If anything, the reasonable argument standard might be that this rate is too low. It implies researchers are trying things that they expect to have a 10% chance of working out. That means we're missing out on all the cures and techniques that have a 1% chance of working out but but nonetheless do work.

Failed attempts cost society nearly nothing and successes will have compounding benifits for, y'know, lets optimistically say the human race survives for centuries. 1% or 0.1% success rates sound completely reasonable with that sort of lopsided risk profile. There isn't much of a reason not to try anything and everything that has the faintest chance of helping and see what happens.

Yeah, but even in that characterisation it started with 1 ethnicity and the US replaced it with 2. So the result is less ethnostatic.

That is generally how it works when people don't accept obvious resolutions. If you want to challenge its obviousness be my guest. It is pretty normal for a DnD/board game group to be meeting at someone's house where there is literally only one bathroom. It is hard to miss the fact that both genders can use it without complaint.

In a sporting context or similar where people are needing to change clothes then it isn't an easy one, but in this context it isn't much of a challenge.

It isn't quite a lobotomy, I'm going to butcher the research a bit, but basically what they're finding is that these models create a sort of "bad stuff that I should refuse to engage with" axis in the statistical vector space they operate in. So usually there to be some sort of vector that ranges from 0 for a puppy snoozing peacefully and 1 for writing a virus that exterminates humanity pornographically while broadcasting racist and homophobic slurs (which would be quite something to see I have to say). If the vector is closer to 1 the model generates a refusal.

So what you can do is feed the model a small number of reasonable and likely refused prompts to map out that vector in the model's vector space, then do a fairly surgical weight modification that just hits that vector. The end result is the model is more or less the same as it was before, just with no guardrail refusals. It is quite a clever technique that doesn't even require many assumptions about the specific model being used.

"Propaganda campaign" is the wrong term, but there is still an interesting effect - in the 20th century we tried a bunch of things and liberal capitalism underpinned by democracy won the battle of ideas so badly that the alternatives were basically discredited.

But that didn't convince many people to actually change their ideologies. Instead, the authoritarians rebranded themselves as a type of liberalism and the communists rebranded themselves as a type of capitalism. The net result is there is a lot of intent that tarnishes liberal capitalism, but it is mainly people who aren't remotely liberal capitalists trying to rebrand their bad ideas as compatible with liberal capitalism.

In effect it looks a bit like a coordinated effort because there are a bunch of people working hard to associated prosperous ideologies with bad outcomes.