Yeah between this and Toyota's similar talk about amazing tech just around the corner (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36833836) it feels like this could be a concerted effort by Japanese car manufacturers to create some FUD to keep people out of EVs while they get their act together.
Apple already does the same thing. Apple Search Ads is not limited to the same restrictions that Facebook and Google are with regards to iOS tracking and reporting for advertising attribution.
I mean, pre-agricultural hunter/gatherers never had to change the oil on their cars, if that's what you're going for?
But I do oil changes (and otherwise maintain my car) because I like being able to travel dozens of miles each day. So I gain a responsibility to take care of my car to be able to continue to live like this.
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Do you like hot showers in the morning? Well, you better build, and maintain, a home with pipes, drain, and water heater.
Do you like computers? Electricity? Etc. etc.
Each luxury device we own today is not strictly necessary. But the bulk of work today is maintaining our luxuries.
Automation and technology should be reducing the need for most people to work. Capitalism warps the role of technology: instead of technology freeing you up, it risks destroying your livelihood. Just look at the economic anxiety surrounding AI. AI should be embraced. It should not jeopardize anyone's livelihood.
> Automation and technology should be reducing the need for most people to work.
I think it does. Many people working office jobs are barely doing anything, esp. compared to manual labor in hellish factories just 100 years ago. And, for that puny amount of office work, we live so much better than people 100 years ago.
Also, it's currently possible to work less by just not buying top of the line consumer option. It's perhaps harder in the US, where such options does not exist, but other parts of the world have e.g. specific brands of cheap, crappy cars you could buy and work less in consequence.
> I think it does. Many people working office jobs are barely doing anything, esp. compared to manual labor in hellish factories just 100 years ago. And, for that puny amount of office work, we live so much better than people 100 years ago.
We have those busy work office jobs because capitalism demands us to make capital. Ideally, as our basic needs are met (housing, plumbing, food, etc...) we wouldn't need busy work jobs. Even if we do need busy work jobs, then consider this: when I worked as a programmer I did so 5 days a week as a web developer. Given modern web frameworks and the abundance of open source packages, I could easily accomplish in a day what would have taken a web developer a week or more to accomplish ~20 years ago. So the question is, if I'm 5x more productive, then why am I working 5 days a week? Why not 1 day a week for the same pay? Ideally, we would not classify the work week in terms of hours worked, but rather by productivity.
> Ideally, we would not classify the work week in terms of hours worked, but rather by productivity.
This is exactly what is happening, but on a slower and more noisy timescale that you'd expect. That's why we work less than people 100 years ago, and yet make so much more money.
I know a plumber who keeps his phone ringer on all night so he can wake up and go on calls. He's in his 30's and his knees are as damaged as an 80 year old man's. Try telling him that automation and technology should be reducing his need to work. Those of us in the Silicon Valley bubble should remember that 99% of the world's population has harder jobs than we do .
And note that plumbing is simply automation of water.
Instead of us walking down to the stream to drink like our hunter/gatherer forefathers did before us, we create pipes that send water anywhere we wish to settle.
The creation of automated pipes / automated water movement has created an entire industry (plumbing), as people move further and further away from streams. And into deserts even, requiring more and more plumbing to even live.
That's the story of technology. We continuously are depending on more-and-more of it. Be it a modern technology stack like a computer, or a 2500-year-old technology like plumbing / aqueducts.
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The bulk of all jobs today is in the maintenance of this automation. HVAC to automate our air conditions. Plumbing to automate our water. Cookware to automate food preparation (fast foods, chefs, etc. etc.). We don't grind grain ourselves anymore, we use flour that's been processed ahead of time in mass.
And we all specialize upon our particular niche. And around Hacker News, we focus on the most abstract of automations: automation of communications, computers, mathematics. We write programs that send messages faster, simpler, easier through various social networks.
You know, instead of running those messages by hand, or by horse. We have wires that talk to a computer router that talks to a network that... eventually delivers the message.
The more free time I have, the more I'm convinced that "idle hands are the devil's plaything" is one of our more accurate aphorisms. Considered in total, I'm far less ethical when I have time to myself than when I'm working.
Sure, but you could never escape the work that was needed, no matter what you did. Not saying it’s a worse setup than capitalism, just that the escape part is novel and simply wasn’t an option in other setups.
The point is that "escape" in this case means not having to work to American Capitalism levels, not escaping working entirely. Retirement in the FIRE sense does not imply in all cases spending every day by the pool doing nothing, and even in the AmCap sense, most who retire and tend to live longer and (self-reportedly) happier, have some work that they are doing, but more along the lines of what even a medieval serf would have enjoyed to the tune of like 15 hours a week.
ETA: often this work is volunteerism, which does not have a capital incentive in the individual case here.
I am thinking of escape as “not having to do things you don’t want to do”.
No one wants to work in the style of American capitalism, so this is one thing that people stop doing, for sure. In prior systems, no matter what you did, you always had to keep doing things you didn’t want to do (assuming one isn’t in love with perpetual farm labor).
If we are talking about Garden of Eden levels of natural abundance hunter gathering, then that is surely peak human lifestyle, but I don’t know of any scalable system that remotely compares to that.
My understanding is that it's essentially Looker minus the dashboarding. What you would define via LookML is essentially the "semantic layer" that this is addressing. DBT is attempting to do similar work: https://www.getdbt.com/product/semantic-layer/
The Shopify layoff memo (https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team) has a pretty interesting graph of exactly this effect. Basically a huge leap in e-commerce adoption with a subsequent dip right back to where the pre-pandemic trend line was heading. It’s not hard numbers I suppose, but it was at least the reason shopify gave when explaining their layoffs.
Used it for several years, beat the pants off Redshift and was comparable to BigQuery for our use cases. They have a ways to go on the maturity/reliability front though.
I too am in Victoria. I used to be a hiring manager and had people turn down 6 figure (CAD) offers due to receiving a better one. Although there is admittedly a huge gap between the local companies, and the satellite offices of American companies. Look at KIXEYE, Change.org, Workday, Abe Books (Amazon subsidiary). They typically pay up to 50% more than the local companies, but also typically have higher expectations around skills and availability.
When we've looked at BigQuery it seemed that if you prepay you essentially get a similar effect to what you're describing. You're given a certain number of "units" of compute, and if you exceeded your concurrent units available you end up with the same compute resource contention you would with an improperly scaled Snowflake warehouse or Redshift cluster.
If you're willing to just pay per gigabyte scanned with BigQuery you can scale near linearly I'm sure (although I haven't actually tried it), but you could accomplish the same thing using Snowflake's API to add warehouses as concurrent query load increases. That's what we do (although we just pre-allocate and suspend the warehouses because you only pay when they're on).
Redshift does suffer from this problem because the compute is tied to the data, but Redshift Spectrum is attempting to rectify that as well. I don't know anything about its performance though.
