Note that comment is toward "then going into rhapsodies about how free-spirited and unencumbered and holy and mad and visionary it all is". It is entirely valid comment. It is entirely 100% valid to make such comment even if you actually like the book.
What is bad is insisting that no one can point it out. That we all must pretend that acting like that is being cool free-spirit and visionary. That we cant analyze a book and make conclusions about what it celebrates, what it criticizes and what it just describes without any value judgement attached.
Somewhere along the lines people developed extremely thin skin toward what you can say about famous pieces of art. You cant really analyze them nor their characters. You must show only unfailing admiration of the characters and the book itself.
You definitely should have the right- and there should also be a firewall to socializing such experiments damage and fallouts. I just had also very negative experiences, where the mere thought experiment was considered "heresy" and as an attempt to recruit people for such a lifestyle. I can defend the freedom while defending the freedom, while not pushing the freedom from consequences.
> Lawyers bill by the hour. It is not in their interest to speed up what they do, because they only have so many clients.
This isn't how markets work.
If one lawyer starts doing 10x as much work in the same number of hours, then all the customers will move to that lawyer as soon as they find out, and the other lawyers will have to adapt to remain competitive.
The legal market is competitive, but it is not a normal open market. Model Rule 5.4 is a good example. In a lot of jurisdictions, law firms generally can’t have nonlawyer owners, share legal fees with non-lawyers, or let outside businesses control lawyer judgment, “the fastest lawyer just gets all the customers” is too simple. So if even law, one of the most protected professional labor markets through its own institutional self-protection, voluntarily hollows itself out through AI, that should worry everyone because we would all be screwed. Everyday workers would have no defense against AI aggressive corporations.
Lawyers are extremely well-organized, and not surprisingly, know the law. They always have found ways to limit competition. (Why else would it be such a well-paid job?)
I'd expect the market to only work like that for business clients. If I grabbed a person off the street and asked them how they'd evaluate a lawyer's productivity, I suspect they'd generally have no idea.
People are clearly hiring lawyers based on silly billboard ads, after all.
And for a thought experiment - if a lawyer controls the pace of their work, why work at any reasonable speed? They could take the client's money and go picnic or something then put in 20 minutes at the end of the day.
Something is forcing them to put in long hours. It's the market.
Huh? Obviously. The example was that they do 20 minutes of work. Of course they bill for 20 minutes.
It'd be a line item: "I worked for 20 minutes. Pay me lots of money". Similar principle to locksmiths when they walk over, do a few seconds of work and charge a hundred bucks. If a lawyer uses the same principle and works for 20 minutes they could target $10k/day.
That isn't a plan that'd work, but if "their interests" were the thing controlling how many hours they worked then that'd be what they would do. They're going to be forced to use AI by the same influences that make them work for full days.
That’s a supply and demand issue. If there were more clients than lawyers, I can totally see a reality where they speed things up because now in one week they can work on 20 cases instead of 2, thus 10x more money, but as you said, it doesn't seem to be the reality of the market.
edit: tldr; it does not seem in their best interests to be more efficient at this point
You're missing that most people are able to buy houses on borrowed money, so their housing investment is effectively levered up 10x or more, at least at the beginning.
It's not a choice between $1m in housing appreciating at 3% and $1m in stocks appreciating at 9%. It's a choice between $1m in housing appreciating at 3% or $100k in stocks appreciating at 9%.
The borrowed money isn't free from interest. There's no numerical sense in borrowing money at 5%+ interest to fund an investment appreciating at 3%. Some schemes might advantage it further (such as leveraging your mortgage with your retirement funds) but then we might as well also discuss further disadvantages compared to renting, such as upkeep and property taxes.
Back around 2020 when mortgage rates very briefly dipped below 3%, there could have been an argument. But such is no longer the case and not likely to return soon.
> It's a choice between $1m in housing appreciating at 3% or $100k in stocks appreciating at 9%.
Just to drive the point home: It would be $100k in stocks appreciating at 9% and monthly rent subtracted, or $1m in housing appreciating at 3% and a $900k debt growing at 5%+ interest.
I agree with your points. You have to take risks in either case, but some risks are easier to do the math on. And yes, fewer home investment opportunities exist as the interest rates go higher. There may be opportunities for higher gain with stocks, but there are also greater risks for loss. At least if you lose some value in a home, it's practical -- you still have a roof over your head or make money by renting it.
The problem with leveraged investments is that they can put you deep underwater.
Many people in Seattle that bought $1M leveraged with $100k now own a $800k asset. They've lost twice as much as they invested. They would have been much better off investing that in stocks without leverage.
Multiple people in this thread have mentioned the Seattle real estate market going to shit (for sellers) - is that related to tech layoffs or is something else going on? San Francisco's market is just as crazy as ever.
Seattle real estate has been trending downward for a couple years now. It isn't a single factor but the confluence of several. Initially it was only in some market segments but seems to have spread to most of them now.
The inventory of housing currently on the market is anomalously high and there are relatively few buyers. I know a few people that will be lucky to sell for as much as they paid a decade ago. People who bought during the COVID bubble are underwater.
This feels more like the beginning of a macro trend than a temporary blip.
Yeah, but rent doesn’t seem to go down that much though. Opportunity cost of moving is real, security deposits are sizable. I wanted to rent for as long as possible but there’s no rent cap and the apartments keep jacking up the rent.
At least now they have some sense to cap the rental raise percent but I’ve had to deal with 15-20% increases before, and not to mention the cost of parking in an apartment.
I probably made a mistake buying but I couldn’t take the bullshit from landlords and all the headaches that come with people wanting more money.
I think some of it is due to the lay off, some of it due to the supply situation not being as bad as SF (though construction has slowed recently), and a lot of it due to interest rates making "effective prices" much higher.
The landlord isn't losing money. Totally different cost basis. The landlord rarely has a carrying cost that is equivalent to the renter buying the same property with a mortgage. It is frequently half that or less.
I've sold a home I lived in to rent something equivalent because the rental rate was a fraction of my carrying costs. Saving the difference in costs added more to my net worth than the appreciation on the property.
I would say that in a source code tree that represents old commits I'd like none of the files to be executable. (It would miss some commits that only change the executable bit though.)
Also if I were to guess the damages because of sci hub is higher than Anthropic training the models. I don't think I know anyone who didn't bought a book because the summary is available or they can ask about it to AI.
We've done this dozens of times before. In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them. In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity.
No, we really haven't. Every previous wave of automation has targeted human labor.
The thing that makes human's unique in the animal kingdom is our intelligence. From an economic stand point, that's the thing that makes people valuable.
When that's automated, what is there left? Onlyfans?
I'd love for everyone justifying and hand waving the suffering of others to quit their jobs, give up their assets, and join in on the suffering. If it's really worth it for the "increased productivity", they should have no problem doing so. After all, they'll be much better off in the end, right?
What’s really baffling is the people in charge seem to just expect the suffering people to sit down and take it. That’s probably why they are pushing so hard for the surveillance state.
> In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity.
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Do people still believe in these fairy tales lmao? Most of the productivity gains don't go to the workers, pretty much everywhere in the developed world working hours and retirement age are going up, housing affordability is going down. You're not "much better off"
Politicians were selling us the 3 days workweek like 40+ years ago, while shilling for more automated factories, it never happened, it didn't happen with computers, it won't happen with AI
Only if you view productivity as likely to distribute results to society. This has been proven false again and again over the last fifty years, and the k-shaped economic trend seems to be accelerating.
> Beginning in Great Britain around 1760, the Industrial Revolution had spread to continental Europe and the United States by about 1840
You know what else happened during that 100-200 years time frame? 2 Wars + Governments decided to step in and rebuild post-war. Governments tax the rich/elite by 90%.
You know what else happened? workers being punished physically and mentally until the formation of Unions.
You skipped a big chunk of The Ruling Class always exploit everybody else like what we're seeing right now: Tech CEOs laying off and not hiring.
History repeats again.
Are our productivity increase for the better? People are still working overtime because of reduced worker's protection today.
And if productivity does increase, how are we supposed to force the recipients of this productivity to care about the rest of us? It's not like investment has panned out with its promises of general return in any of our lifetimes
The last time something like this happened, we got the great depression. Do you want another great depression? The next one will likely be far worse than the last one.
Historically, this is not always true. It's a gamble. Right now, a small group of ultra-wealthy tech guys who have a clear disdain for everyone else is trying to gamble the future of us all.
That's infuriating right there.
Also,
> In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them.
The casual way that the well-being and survival of people in the here-and-now is disregarded doubles how infuriating this all is.
Related: productivity has greatly increased over the last ~75 years, but wages have not increased anywhere near the same amount[0]. There is no reason for anyone besides CEOs (or similar positions) to care about productivity.
Every time, the people suffering are correct to revolt, and the people trying to repress them are incorrect to repress them, from the perspective of human beings.
Every time, the "increased productivity" is inevitable, but that is not the same as better off. None of these changes has been 100% positive, even in the long run, and this one is shaping up to be the most disappointing of them all in that dimension.
Inevitable != purely good.
You can be pragmatic and give a shit about humans at the same time. It's not a puzzle.
Anything can be used to endorse anything if you twist the underlying implications enough. Good news: I promise I don't endorse those things.
I don't think you're coming at this from a place of thoughtfulness (it's a tough, broad topic).
Saying that people are correct to resist does not imply the endorsement of any actions, it just means that people are correct to resist against things that harm their lives and their children's lives, even if it theoretically makes life easier for their grandchildren (which isn't even clearly true in this case, making my point even more valid).
I.e. it's OK for humans to behave in the interest of their own. This can be a really tough point with complicated implications, but it's fundamentally unassailable.
> Anything can be used to endorse anything if you twist the underlying implications enough.
I don't think i'm twisting here in the slightest. Every moral choice involves weighing the harms vs the benefits at some level. Things that are 100% good or 100% bad don't exist in real life.
> I.e. it's OK for humans to behave in the interest of their own
Ok, as in morally ok? Always?
I do not subscribe to the view that it is morally ok for humans to act in their own interests in all cases.
Whether something is morally ok to do depends on a lot of factors. There is no blanket, X is always ok.
> Saying that people are correct to resist does not imply the endorsement of any actions
Typically the term "correct" is an endorsement. It is a value judgement saying someone is behaving in the way you think they should behave. Are you using the term to mean something else?
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Edit: i read a little too fast. I guess you are more claiming a moral relativism argument that everyone always thinks their own cause is just, not a moral nilihism argument. Personally i've never found moral relativism all that useful because at the end of the day decisions still have to be made, people are still going to be hurt as a result of those decisions. Somehow someone still has to make the choice and they still need some framework to ground their decision in.
People have been calling the top on Moore's Law for at least as long as I've been buying computers. (~20 years). I'll believe it when I see it.
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