tharne

It's not a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's the fundamental fact that trust takes a lifetime to build and a moment to lose.

> "47% of Republicans would still vote for Trump even if implicated in Epstein's crimes"

Two things here.

One, I bet it's WAY higher than 47% who would vote for Trump again; it's 47% of Republicans admitting in a survey that they would vote for him again, the rest probably just don't want to admit it out loud.

Two, would you expect something different from Democrats? I wouldn't. I would bet anyone running against Donald Trump would start off with roughly 45% of the vote no matter who they were or what they did. That's just where we're at as a country culturally and politically at the moment.

> Why is everyone trying so hard to find purpose in broken administrative processes?

Broken processes persist when they're benefiting someone somehow. If you can't figure out who's benefiting from a crap process, good luck trying to fix it or change it.

I don't know why people keep referring to AI as a hype bubble. A bubble usually implies that the majority of the population doesn't see the hype and bubble for what it is (see the run up to the 2008 housing crisis, where everyone and their brother was flipping houses). In the case of AI, pretty much everyone outside of the tech and AI spaces has smelled the BS from get go.

Bubbles do damage when they pop and surprise everyone, but I don't think too many people outside of SV will be surprised when this train eventually goes off the tracks.

The problem here is not that there's an AI bubble, it's that the AI and tech folks are so disconnected from regular people.

I was starting to get worried about the potential for stagflation until I saw this post. Paul Krugman is the Jim Kramer of economic forecasting; take what he says and wait for the opposite to occur. There's a perverse skill to being consistently wrong more often than would occur simply by guessing.

Yup, the military is one of the few remaining institutions interested in funding long-term research without an obvious immediate payout.

Maybe, but another way to look at this is that if someone is going to hold back requesting a new machine because they don't feel like writing a few paragraphs, then they probably don't really need a new computer. On the other hand, if their current machine really is so bad that it's getting in the way of their work they won't hesitate to quickly bang out 4 paragraphs to get a new one. Obviously, this trick does not work with LLMs in the mix.

> humans are needlessly verbose

What a depressing belief. Human communication is about a whole lot more than just getting your point across as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The other big reason is their glorious refusal to honor non-compete clauses. As I understand it, this was a big reason a lot of tech companies moved from Boston to CA back in the day.

That is insanely clever. Love it.

The fact that you think that's a big number just underscores how dire Europe's security situation is at the moment. One hundred billion Euros sounds like a lot, but China spends two and a half times that much on defense every single year, the U.S. spends 10X that much every single year, and even the Russians spend more than that every single year. Nevermind the fact Europe needs to play catch up here, not just keep pace.

It really did cost you bigly. Compared with 25 years ago, Europe is less safe, less powerful, and more dependent on other countries for very important things.

Lol, I'll believe it when I see it. Is this the same Europe that despite everything going on in the world is:

- Still buying Russian gas

- Dependent on U.S. Military bases for their own security

- Dependent on Chinese manufacturing for consumer goods

- Dependent on the U.S. for software and cloud infrastructure

- Dependent on the Chinese for computer hardware

Best of luck Europe, you've had a good run, but you've gotten yourself into a fine mess here.

> Eh. I'd argue while some of the objects have improved - I'm not sure my life has improved because of them.

This is exactly right. So many "improvements" are cool or interesting, but either provide no meaningful improvement to one's life (e.g. streaming vs. VHS) or actually detract from our lives on balance, e.g. smartphones.

> Do people learn to be this way at business school?

Yup. I've found the the core material in the curricula for most business schools and MBA programs is a excellent resource on what not to do while working in business, or really anywhere for that matter. It's almost as if they've decided to round up all the worst ideas and put them in one place, so you know to avoid them.

> I don't know that the prior situation was sustainable and would have lasted much longer anyway. Using China for manufacturing is like using Amazon for sales. You are required to give them everything they need to take your business away.

If if comes to pass that the 21st century is a Chinese one, it will be this long con that launched the whole thing: "We'll manufacture anything you want real cheap, just show us how to do it."

The U.S. outsourcing it's manufacturing to China is likely to go down as one of the biggest economic and political self-owns of the modern era.

> “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks?

I don't why the mainstream media isn't focusing more on this angle. Five years ago the richest, most powerful, country in the world couldn't get basic medical supplies to its citizens during a public health crisis. That should have terrified us into making major policy changes, but instead everyone just seems to have shrugged it off and gone back to business as usual.

> Eh, China has 20x-ed its GDP per capita in a generation. They're not slaves.

Maybe not according-to-hoyle slaves, but they're not in a great spot either:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...

Wow, you're right. I read the article quickly and did not catch the fact that those were two related, but not totally causally linked statements. My bad. I still find it odd that Europe and others are reacting to bad behavior on the part of the U.S. by drawing closer to even less trustworthy business partners.

I would argue that the CCP and the Maga crew employ a handful of similar tactics against the ultra wealthy in their respective countries. If you play ball and kiss the ring, things generally go ok for you. If you criticize them publicly or loudly, they do their best to make you wish you hadn't.

> BYD cars are much more affordable than Teslas. It's not all about politics.

Yes, things can have more than one cause, but the article mentions political motivations several times.

> I thought this would go without saying, but once SWE jobs are automated by AI (if it were to happen), then every job can be automated.

I think this is exactly right, and possibly a good thing relative to the alternative. If AI were able to automate 20% of office-type jobs, you'd have a lot of people out of work, but likely not enough for anyone to do anything about it at a societal level. Those people would just be given some platitude in the same way out of work coal miners or assembly line workers were snidely told to "learn to code".

If every or nearly every office-type job gets automated, it would force us to address the issue in a meaningful way.

I don't think AI will have much of an impact on management consulting, since it's really just executive insurance. If anything, management consulting might be the perfect use for generative AI in its current state.

If you're a CEO running a company, you can go out and hire McKinsey and tell the board, "I'm a great CEO, that's why I brought in McKinsey. They're the BEST". McKinsey then proceeds to charge you a bunch of money and leaves you with some very slick powerpoints containing a bunch of advice, roadmaps, org charts, and action items.

If your company has a few good quarters after that you can say, "Look at what a great CEO I am, I brought in some best in class consultants and now our stock price is through the roof!". If on the other hand your company struggles, misses earnings targets, etc., you can say, "It's not my fault we're doing badly, I brought in a team of best in class consultants and even THEY couldn't help us turn things around yet - it must be the macro economy, industry headwinds, etc. Imagine how much worse we'd be doing if I didn't bring McKinsey in!"

Ahhh...that makes a lot more sense. I hope they fix that.

Is this article more LLM-generated junk?

The very prominent statistic they use close to the beginning of the article is both confidently and spectacularly incorrect in a way that should have been obvious even to someone doing a cursory skim of the text:

"For instance, there was the National Public Data (NPD) breach in 2024. This catastrophic incident exposed the sensitive personal information of nearly 2.9 billion US, Canadian, and British citizens. "

If you sum up the populations of those three countries, you don't even get to 500 million people, never mind 2.9 billion.

> in the abstract, governments are indistinguishable from any other collective of people.

Sure, but in reality they have a legal monopoly on the use of violence, which is a very big deal and makes them qualitatively different from any other collective of people.

> Stallman was right again.

He usually is, no matter how many times people write him off.

> You can't expect the police to do their jobs?

Imagine you're a programmer, or a chef, or a carpenter, really anything. Now imagine you go to work every day, put in 8-10 hours a day working hard, and at the end of each day someone in a more powerful position than yourself throws out, ignores, or otherwise destroys all of your work for that day.

And this happens every day, day after day. No matter your work ethic or how much you care about your job, sooner or later after enough of your work is sabotaged, you're going to give up.

So no, I do not expect the police to "do their job" as you put it, when a chief prosecutor publicly and vocally undermines that work each and every day. If you can't understand that very fundamental human reaction, then I don't know what to tell you.

> the DA didn't "stop prosecuting criminals"

The voters of California certainly think he did: https://calmatters.org/justice/2024/11/george-gascon-pamela-...

> They're more concerned with being a paramilitary police force versus stopping or preventing neighborhood crime.

Didn't they pull back on enforcement of quality of life crimes when the previous DA stopped prosecuting criminals? You can't expect the police to arrest criminals knowing full well the DA is immediately going to drop or reduce charges and let them loose.