Completely broken on multiple levels. In a lot of industries now, as an employer you can't win even if you buck the trend and lead out your competitors on wages and benefits. The highest paid warehouse worker, waitress, etc. will still barely make ends meet, never be able to afford a house, so on. Decades of devaluation of labor (automation, venture capital, bad laws & regulations, etc.) has really done a number, and I don't see a way to easily reverse the damage. IMO, the top end of the economy needs to be brought back closer to the bottom end, but I just don't see it happening.
It's just absolute lunacy.
If that's the stated goal (and it sure looks like it), the 'academic left' is at least partially responsible for a large majority of the prosperity of this country over the last few decades. How can you have a successful, rich country when you're antagonizing your allies and roughly half of your citizens?
These people will burn down their own house and wealth to make sure others don't feel welcome. How hard is it to just learn to live with people that don't agree with you?
A small percentage will, yes. The vast majority won't. Plus there's the issue of the stranglehold Trump seems to have over GOP members (ie. they're pushed, even threatened into compliance, especially GOP congress members). An easy way of vilifying any group is to point out how bad their most extreme members are.
It also doesn't even matter. The Trump situation will end. At that point MAGA people won't be gone, and it'd be a pretty sad outcome if they were or felt repressed, or we'll simply end up right here again. The point is not to win, the point is to make things better.
Also they're demanding universities such as Harvard install a contingent of their hand picked ideologues, party official vetted academics basically, to insure viewpoint diversity & to be able to snitch & propogandize within universities.
The right has plenty of very strong hard right institutions of its own. Very very strong. But they're very rarely academically or scientifically notable, across the whole world (with notable exceptions of the Koch brothers & Federalist Society funded George Mason School of Economics). The right has enormous influence, their own schools & control within schools that they pay for! https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mas...
I think we find very few examples going the other way, having such large scale divisional control & top down left control.
Its because of who the right is, what their priorities really are, and how they bias themselves against science, how they let their efforts be steered explicitly by money & funding that they are largely irrelevant: they are not, imo, unfairly denied opportunity or the chance to do their work. There's opportunity abundant, if they want to do genuine & reasonable research, they could do it in real universities. But as comedian & faux-conservative Stephen Colbert polemicizes, the right is sworn to forever fight 'reality's well known liberal bias', in the name of defending winner takes all amassed capitalism & pro monarchy pro feudal ideology, that alas is well represented by loud voices in Silicon Valley.
I hope you're right, because his dopey supporters have destroyed any balances or opposition to him other than the courts (which he is also busy attacking and undermining).
Non-hysterical people aren't concerned that there's a night of the long knives imminent, but are concerned that there now could be. It's the breakdown of the rule of law - if he won't punish legitimate law breaking, provides pardons to people that support him, uses the government and justice department to go after people who don't agree with him...what will stop him if he decides to, short of popular uprising? And let's be clear, that's civil war/domestic terrorism territory.
Will they?
Trump has said he's in favor of the H1-B program and has given no indications that he plans to lessen or stop it.
Tariffs will likely be used as bargaining tools - you won't see tariffs directed at a country because a US corporation has outsourced labor there.
There's a lot of noise about changes to immigration right now, but I'd be very unsurprised if little or nothing changed.
Far too extreme a view. I'm very unhappy with the H1-B program and how it has been used to depress wages for engineers, but I understand (and agree with) the need for us to compete globally and not stagnate. I have nothing but respect for a lot of overseas engineers and have worked with some very intelligent, kind, generous individuals in my time.
What I strongly oppose is - and I've seen this up close and personal three times in the last five years - large companies or investment companies buying/merging smaller companies, then gradually offshoring/firing (about 10-20% per year) US jobs in favor of overseas jobs while keeping their customer base. These companies, their revenue streams, their customers exist because of US employees and engineers, and yet they're thrown out at the first chance because someone overseas will do the work for less (often one third of a US salary). This is a complete betrayal of the people who worked to build these companies in the first place. These revenue streams would not exist without them.
H1-B is used in a very similar way: they get anyone they can over here, and pay them 10-20% less than a US counterpart, then use that to justify lower wages/raises to existing employees.
I agree that some people unfairly blame the overseas engineer, but don't simply write them off as racist or hateful - they're having their livelihoods taken from them, and leadership is very good at hiding or shifting blame.
Reasonable criticisms of specific policy or programs (like you mention) is not what I or the poster above was referring to- there is a widespread cultural zeitgeist going on right now that is fundamentally emotionally based on hatred, and will broadly advocate for any policy that will harm groups they hate. Comments in this HN post show how widespread and normalized these feelings are, which wouldn't have been normal to express publicly until now.
This is a terrifying time to be in the USA for anyone with the "wrong" skin color, accent, culture, religion, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.- and many of the people I know in those groups are actively preparing and planning for the worst imaginable outcomes. People in those "wrong groups" are terrified right now, and people not in them - which includes much of HN - are in a bubble and not aware of what is happening.
I understand, and broadly agree for what it's worth - as someone with friends and peers in those groups, I'm very worried about the tone of the discourse.
That said, I think it's good to recognize it's not a 0 or 1, open minded vs racists, or however it could be framed. There are a whole host of people in the middle, and actions like the one I mentioned push people towards the crazier views we see. It makes good people stand to the side and say nothing, maybe, instead of pushing back against it.
Absolutely, you make an important point. The reason this hate movement is gaining so much momentum is that they are the only group validating peoples concerns, but then pointing the finger and telling them who to blame, and claiming to have a solution. Effectively countering it will require a non hate based movement that still validates those concerns.
And then they don't respond to email or slack. Are they missing it? Ignoring it? No one knows. Meanwhile, time sensitive deadlines come and go.
There's no clear, easy protocol that works for everyone, unfortunately. Some people are always going to operate on the 'better to ask forgiveness than permission' model. And I say this as someone who is often in the 'always busy' camp.
If it’s on the record then it would be simple to assign blame on them for the consequences… and then punish accordingly, so it seems like a self correcting issue?
Most employees probably have enough credibility to explain away one or two missed deadlines, but not 5 or 6 in a row without providing actual proof.
If you don't have any proof of that, you're no different than those that believe he exists. (Respectfully) Agnosticism really is the only correct scientific approach.
I have to disagree with that. Yes, ideally we should only believe things for which there is proof, but that is simply not an option for a great many things in our lives and the universe.
A lot of the time we have to fall back to estimating how plausible something is based on the knowledge we do have. Even in science it’s common for outcomes to be probabilistic rather than absolute.
So I say there is no god because, to my mind, the claim makes no sense. There is nothing I have ever seen, or that science has ever collected data on, to indicate that such a thing is plausible. It’s a myth, a fairy tale. I don’t need to prove otherwise because the onus of proof is on the one making the incredible claim.
> There is nothing I have ever seen, or that science has ever collected data on, to indicate that such a thing is plausible.
Given that this is an estimate could you estimate what kind of thing you would have to see or what shape of data collected by science that would make you reconsider the plausibility of the existence of a supreme being?
I don't think that's really possible. The issue isn't so much that there isn't proof, it's that proof existing would be counter to everything we know about how the universe works. It wouldn't just mean "oops I'm wrong" it would mean that humanity's perception of reality would have to be fundamentally flawed.
I'm not even opposed to believing that our perception is flawed - clearly we don't know everything and there is much about reality we can't perceive let alone understand. But this would be so far outside of what we do understand that I cannot simply assume that it's true - I would need to see it to believe it.
There are virtually limitless ways such a being could make itself evident to humanity yet the only "evidence" anyone can come up with is either ancient stories or phenomena more plausibly explained by other causes. To me this completely tracks with the implausibility of the existence of god.
> The issue isn't so much that there isn't proof, it's that proof existing would be counter to everything we know about how the universe works.
I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. It doesn't sound like you're saying that "supreme being" is "black white" (that is, mutually contradictory, meaningless). More like "proof of the existence of the supreme being is impossible". But you also say "I would need to see it to believe it", which suggests that you do think there is a category of proofs that would demonstrate the existence of the supreme being.
Way back in 2012, this affected a lot of my thinking around software piracy/selling software, and I think a lot of it has proven pretty insightful in the intervening decade:
The images are shot, but that may be all the attention his site is getting today.
Edit: Many others are already saying it, but thank you for sharing, Lars. No one should have go through this, and your thoughts were beautifully written. Makes me feel very grateful/humbled for so much that I take for granted.
So the researchers, shareholders, and leadership of OpenAI will be happy to give up being ridiculously wealthy so they can be only moderately wealthy, and everyone else gets a basic income?
I'm also just skeptical of UBI in general, I suppose - 'free' money tends to just inflate everything to account for it, and it still won't address scarcity issues for limited physical assets like land/property.
