Here, bonus hot take @ranma-official might agree with:
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
reading up on the Ethereum / DAO hack and good lord is there some bad code out there in the world
“But what if there’s a bug and my code doesn’t do what I intended, letting someone take my money via means I didn’t expect?”
“Well, then you deserve to lose your money for your poor decision-making. Plus all the benefits of a process beyond human influence are worth making it so human judges and laws and fuzzy ideas of fairness can’t fix things. Besides, those fuzzy ideas do more harm than good.”
“There’s a bug in your code.”
”Okay, so let’s do a soft fork of the network in the short term to prevent the money from being spent, get the exchanges to freeze withdrawals, and then review what code changes we can make to give the money back to its proper owners.”
(This is a Plato’s chicken thing; if they truly deferred to the concept of ownership they’ve encoded into the software, the reaction would be “Yes, it’s the hacker’s money now, what of it?”)
Good ol’ fiat currency with fiat decision making remains the most reliable way for anyone with any grasp of the bounds of their own rationality, anyone who thinks the concept of an “unconscionable” contract has some value to them, to keep a balance.
Geeks love technology problems and hate people problems, so they try and convert every people problem into a technology problem.
Money is inherently social, because it’s merely a system for keeping track of how much you owe each other. Taking people out of the equation renders it absolutely useless, as the whole system only works by mutual agreement.
tl;dr bitcoin sux lmao
I was running out of time to create my Anime Expo cosplays (one week before con!) And I knew I wanted to do something challenging but manageable. I remembered that Monster Musume has a bunch of characters with unique features, so I latched on to Miia as my one week challenge!
Bringing it to life was comprised of running around in a panicked frenzy, hoping it would all turn out. I trekked to a faraway discount fabric outlet because I knew I would need a LOT of fabric. The tail from waist to tip is 17 feet long! Constructing it involved tediously repetitive sewing and hot glueing to make the whole tail look uniform and reptillian. I was relieved to finish it on time with a day to spare!
Wearing it to the convention was a whole new nightmare. Not only was it the busiest day Anime Expo had ever seen, but my mobility was extremely limited. Shuffling at a snail’s pace through packed hallways had me sweating and exhausted before I even made it to my destination (the most popular photo of this cosplay was taken just after bunny-hopping up a long staircase!)
When I finally arrived, I was completely overwhelmed with the response I got. I have cosplayed a lot over the last decade, but nothing I’ve done has been as popular as Miia! I’m so thankful for all the encouraging comments both in person and online that made this project worth it.
— @NikkiMoxxi
Snake girls are p. great
@collapsedsquid @xhxhxhx I went to reply to this thread, but when I opened up my draft it was already filled with this discourse from the future.Contra @fakecollapsedsquid2066’s post regarding the high-end prosthetics industry, @mecha-cyborg-xhxhxhx2066’s quick assessment is largely correct.
The development of the high-end monstergirl, monsterboy, and sex-variant full prosthetic bodies does ultimately result in lower costs for the standard bodies purchased by the middle class and for accessories and general implants available under the North American Cybernetics Subsidy Program. The key here is that these benefits are from the mass production models, and not the custom individual models, such as the gold-plated mecha scorpion body built for Ivanka Trump III.
For the custom models, they just use more material, but for the mass production models, the increase in power requirements and weight requires research into battery and materials technology which eventually filters down into the mainline models.
For example, the DSI6 Fault-Tolerant Power Control System in my body (even though I know neither of you guys have it because I’m way more paranoid than either of you) is actually a derivative of the DSI5X originally developed for the high margin DS-56 Rachnera Special, which was high margin, certainly, but sold 10,000 units, in order to increase its operational time from 76 hours to one week without violating the nuclear materials refined arms control act.
Likewise, the Modular Limb System now so commonly used by firefighters and other emergency personnel on more-or-less standard humanoid bodies was originally developed for the Broseidon Systems T-209, which as anyone on this website will remind you, is widely considered incredibly fetishistic and “deeply unnatural”!
Now of course, a lot of this could maybe come from military research, and there’s some argument whether the wealthy rebuilding themselves as fetishized versions of mythological creatures is really a good use of resources, but honestly I doubt that without it we get the same rate of progress.
He pays the city’s parks department $289,500 a year just for the right to operate his single cart there.
Without gov’t regulation who is going to charge someone over quarter million dollars to sell hot dogs?
When people talk about government hurting small businesses, this is exactly what they mean.
Small businesses are only hurt by their cruel owners/bosses the government has never and can never do anything wrong.
How much space in the parks and streets in the cities should be devoted to hot dog stands?
This is not a trick or rhetorical question. It says right there in the summary that they bid money to be allowed in Central Park. You have to limit the number of vendors or it won’t be a park anymore, but a market. Tragedy of the Commons and all that.
Honestly, most of the people on the other side of the net neutrality debate are probably living in a completely different world from me. They have over a half dozen different options for ISPs, all of whom actually have to compete with one another to keep the customer happy.
Meanwhile I’m over here my little corner of Iowa, which in a duopoly in part because it’s LITERALLY ILLEGAL TO HAVE SATELLITE INTERNET.
@oliwhail said “Wait why in the world is it illegal” I mean I’m pretty sure it’s because Mediacom and Centurylink want it to be. I have no idea what the justification is though.
Probably building out the lines (and then not spending money on upgrading them).
In some countries, the government builds the lines and then rents them out. Those countries have cheaper internet access.
What really gets me is that they won’t even let local power cooperatives compete on this, when they’re demonstrably better. (In fact, local utility cooperatives seem pretty good generally.)
Never forget that the Market actively pays people to sabotage itself.
mitigatedchaos replied to your post: mitigatedchaos replied to your post: …
(also admittedly I am really tired right now)
thinking in equilibrium is hard and I’m not that great at it, either, but the additional insight I want to deliver is that technological innovation and capital accumulation responds to prices
Google invested in the driverless cars because it can create profits in the captured markets. That’s a Schumpeterian process: capital and labor for technological innovation is scarce, so rational firms allocate capital and labor where the captured market can deliver the greatest profits.
By necessity, that doesn’t happen “all at once”, as you suggested earlier. There are only so many software and intelligence engineers to go around. Google had to pay them dearly:
For the past year, Google’s car project has been a talent sieve, thanks to leadership changes, strategy doubts, new startup dreams and rivals luring self-driving technology experts. Another force pushing people out? Money. A lot of it.
[….]
A large multiplier was applied to the compensation packages in late 2015, resulting in multi-million dollar payments in some cases, according to the people familiar with the situation. One member of the team had a multiplier of 16 applied to bonuses and equity amassed over four years, one of the people said. They asked not to be identified talking about private matters.
[…]
It’s unclear how much the payouts cost Alphabet, however, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat talked about it during an earnings conference call with analysts in early 2016.
Operating expenses in the fourth quarter of 2015 rose 14 percent to $6.6 billion, “primarily driven by R&D expense, particularly affected by expenses resulting from project milestones in Other Bets established several years ago,” Porat said, according to a transcript. The CFO wasn’t specific, but one of the people familiar with the situation said the comments referred to the car project compensation.
Google is the most powerful firm in the world, but Google does not have limitless resources, and those resources are prudent enough to command their marginal product. Google already had an endowment here: detailed, comprehensive, machine-readable routes for every navigable roadway in the world; alongside efficient photograph recognition software.
Google, and competing firms, can make a coordinated push where the technology is right, but there are real resource constraints that limit the ‘revolutionary’ impacts of their technology. Technology doesn’t just develop itself, especially capital- and labor-intensive technologies like this one. Not yet, anyways. And not anytime soon.
Google isn’t making surgeonless-surgeries or builderless-buildings or teacherless-teaching, because there aren’t the profits in those markets to justify the costs of the technology and capital investments needed to undercut market incumbents – Google doesn’t have detailed, comprehensive, machine-readable databases of surgeries, building plans, or problem sets which it can process at nominal cost – which suggests that dramatic innovations in those markets aren’t just around the corner, either.
It takes work to do these things. It’s not going to happen all at once unless these are perfect general purpose technologies, with trivial adaptation and marketization costs. I don’t think that’s what they are.
The other constraint is that Schumpeterian innovation profits depend on market prices and incomes. Acemoglu makes them straightforwardly reflect factor prices: falling relative wages induce labor-augmenting demand, falling relative rents induce capital-augmenting demand.
But if you’re working from a model where capital elastically substitutes for labor, I think the equilibrium conditions look different. If your technology is so impressive that it materially reduces labor incomes by substituting for labor, then it will reduce the profits from the goods and services your technology produces.
Less demand for driverless cars means less people can effectively demand drives, right? That really cuts into your bottom line, doesn’t it? Why would you invest in capital-augmenting technology if the relative returns to that capital-augmenting technology are so low? Why would you develop a driverless car if no one could afford to drive it?
Even if you have dramatically different understandings of what the constraints are, I think you have to work out the equilibrium conditions, the individual, marginal choices they emerge from. Why would individuals and firms keep doing the things that get you to that outcome?
I’m not actually entirely averse to thinking of all production as a product of labor. It’s in search of the equilibrium in a closed system with labor that I devised a heuristical model I am adapting for the OTV game concept, because I wanted to figure out prices for a setting in the transhuman space future.
Of course, not all goods respond nice and linearly to labor (especially WRT time), e.g. land vs waitressing, so it doesn’t necessarily hold that, if differences in productivity between workers are sufficient, the price for someone’s labor cannot fall below the minimum in terms of absolute resources that they need to survive. Indeed, this already happens for sufficiently low-productivity workers, workers during famines, etc.
Anyhow,
But maybe I’m missing something here, since my own econ education didn’t go all that far.
collapsedsquid reblogged your post: collapsedsquid reblogged your…
You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel (including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable - 892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790 in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.
Look at that malnutrition table again:
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’t socialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
Which was what that graph was about.
I view welfare spending not so much as a matter of rights, but as something you get away with.
If you have enough money, and you’re clever enough about it, you can get away with spending money on people who are not net economically productive members of society. This is good if you can manage it, since people don’t really deserve to suffer for not being very economically productive, but you have to keep in mind the underlying economic reality - only what is produced can be consumed.
And if you’re smart about it, then you can set the situation up so you have more production relative to the people that need welfare over the long term, and you can then either increase the welfare (or send it to more people) or reduce its (per capita) effective burden.
I would appreciate it if some AI enthusiast would get mad at me
right now I’m objecting to a diffuse and incoherent set of fears about the future, but someone out there’s gotta have a theory of what mass technological unemployment actually looks like and a modestly granular account of the mechanisms by which artificial intelligence takes us there
I don’t have that model or that account, but y’all really seem to believe that the machines are right around the corner, so it’d be nice if someone laid it out somewhere
I wrote a lengthy harangue to @peopleneedaplacetogo about a week back, which appears here lightly edited:
If I were a smarter or better-informed person, would I feel differently about the intelligence explosion thesis? What do its better-informed advocates know that I don’t? What intuitions do they have that I lack?
I guess you’d have to know what I believe before you could tell me why I’m wrong, but as a person who’s much closer to the technology than I am, what are the sources of the rationalist belief in artificial intelligence more generally?
Because, from the outside, with the little understanding of the technology that I have, it seems like intelligence is harder and progress more limited than the boosters are telling me.
From the outside, throwing more processing power at the problem doesn’t seem to address the lack of sound concepts underpinning general machine intelligence, rather than specific intelligence.
The ‘machine learning’ we have, where we train algorithms on large data sets to sort the data and identify the patterns is impressive, sure, but the strength and limitations of ML suggest that we need more and more innovative conceptualizations and operationalizations of the problems we want the machines to address before we can apply machine power to any effect.
I apologize for my technological illiteracy; I’m sure I’m missing something crucial. I guess I just don’t have a good sense of what the conceptual paradigm for general intelligence would look like – “ML applied to the conceptualization of problems in the world”?
To which he replied:
I don’t have any specific knowledge of the topic either. I think a big intuition is just “don’t make strong predictions about what AI can or can’t do”.
What am I missing?
Neural networks and dedicated hardware for them. Have you seen their image generation capabilities lately? It’s like we’re creating slices of animal brains.
Now, it’s easy to object that this does not create an intelligence explosion, and fortunately it probably won’t.
The issue is that if you can create a neural net for walking, a neural net for object recognition, and a neural net for an industrial task, well… you put them together and you get something like an industrial task animal.
Most jobs don’t use anywhere near the whole human capability. What’s necessary for us as creatures (and what shaped us) isn’t necessarily what’s most effective economically. That is, we have more capabilities than artificial task animals, but are they profitable enough in such an economy to feed us? Is a model where former truck drivers all become Patreon-sponsored bloggers at all viable? And this will hit every sector basically at once.
There are limits to consumption based on available time/attention during a day. But food requirements aren’t really negotiable.
But I’m not an economist.
