But for decades, government programs ran surpluses.
It’s not hard to explain it away in memorized economics terms. The thing is those terms are merely one set of reasonable, generic language. Not immutable laws of reality.
Technology is moving faster than that because of government investment; IBM refused to invest in solid state fearing it would undermine sales of old tube computers. Government invested in and gifted them solid state patents.
What do you think the cheap money flowing to tech corps was about the last decade? Government subsidy of technology, which is verifiable in that now that rates are down tech genius CEOs are not innovating but pushing traditions of austerity. These companies are middlemen dependent on government subsidies.
The Fed prints fiat which goes into the banking system to VCs & other investment vehicles. Fiat is based on the credibility & debt of the issuer. When the issuer looses credibility & when the issuer issues more fiat in relation to assets & production, then the fiat loses value. Large tech companies have received much of this credit & debt based fiat. When the value of the fiat falls, then the large tech companies' value is increasingly based on fundamentals which is based on underlying assets & production.
I think the macro trends support your comment. Economic credibility & social credibility are related. Let's say a regime that controls the monetary system consists of pathological liars that uses the monetary system to their advantage & a certain critical mass knows it...they will want as little participation with that system as possible...explicitly or tacitly.
If the large tech companies are the vehicle of the monetary regime, then aware people will want to maximize their interests...One way to improve their interests is to use alternatives or to somehow influence the large platforms. If the large platforms do not change in peoples' favor, then it becomes clear that the more effective use of time/energy to use alternative solutions
Even if the large platform does change one's favor, the awareness that those who control it are not creditable leads to distrust & an understanding that participating with the creditable is a better mid & long term strategy.
Don’t be silly. The government doesn’t regulate how these services operate.
If you are going to argue that macroeconomic policy means ‘control’, then the government ‘controls’ everything in everyone’s lives at all times. You are welcome to believe this if you like.
The government regulates their existence, their ability to grow, hire, develop services.
Section 230 regulates what is allowed. DMCA, etc etc
You say I should not be silly but I can believe what I like. Which is it? You are not really selling a strong argument here, just wishy washy opinions decoupled from the negotiated terms of society documented openly.
Society, the rest of us, do not have an obligation to your head canon.
People say the same after a long, solo walk in nature. A more apt headline would be “doing a variety of things instigated valuable state change in our biology.”
Qualified answers are customization of well known generalizations.
I’ve been in meetings where rich elders openly admit to ageism; who cares about the problems this will create, they said, they’ll be dead by then!
This was back in the 00s before the last decade plus of expanded info awareness.
Scientific measure of fossil fuels impact on environment was achieved in 1860s. How long the runway is before catastrophe has been modeled and then hidden away over and over.
There is absolutely no reason to bequeath immense influence on human agency to the aristocrats. One small time polluter in the middle of BFE has nothing on Intel and Apple.
Human languages are ~5,000 years old while human intuition for quantity (enough heat, food, water), spatial geometry has evolved along with us from the start. GabeN has discussed how relatively easy it is to make tech that can engage with the cortex, but seemingly impossible to read when a person “is cold” because more than the cortex is involved; spatial awareness and consciousness rely on full body sensory data not just the brain.
There’s no substance to the idea English is responsible for humans engaging in human things; we built tribal life and tools before they existed. Anglo history has largely relied on the ambiguity of the language to manipulate the masses, externalize the work to prop up a minority “educated in language.”
I’d go a step further than this article and call human language a historical barnacle that spreads mind viruses and empowers inept ideas, leading to fascist police state behavior; language comes along, humanity develops religion and violent nation states, vain figurative identity to defend through violence.
Our “natural language” is math as it’s a necessary intuition to survive the real world.
This seems bananas too me. Are you arguing that language is bad for us? Do you realize language is much older than the age of modern languages?
Linguists debate how long we’ve used complex language, but the most conservative estimates are 50,000 years, and evidence increasingly pushes this date much further back.
Humanoids have been around for millions of years. In universal timescales language has existed as long a TV.
I’m arguing figurative identity built through linguistic structures is bad for us. That it binds inner monologue to circling fantasy. That’s it’s entirely built on emotional policing; reinforced preservation of spoken story and tradition, which binds agency to pledges of allegiance, other words of power.
Whether it’s good or bad, I don’t know. That’s too simple a set of choices. I don’t think it has much to do with engineering tolerances to build a bridge or machine. I see how it’s correct use is babysat by the educated, as is spoken tradition. But I have yet to see how those educated are more than one of billions.
I don’t buy into figurative identity. It’s all a bit repetitive. If I can just dismiss the truth in language I have a hard time seeing how it matters in concrete terms?
To be real this is a perspective I’ve adopted over time. I’m in my 40s. I used to love creative writing and fiction. Now it all seems prosaic and repetitive relative to experimental discovery. I don’t use English to guide my next experiment but the measurements of the previous one.
If, as a normal human, one of billions, can function like this successfully it’s hard to see language as a fundamental requirement of doing and more of a historical barnacle like religious texts.
Edit: I really don’t care about comment scores and online reps either. Chemical addiction to doing what’s acceptable in the aggregate is exactly the argument against language I’m making. Infinite potential sentences of meaning, constrained by politically correct memory.
I would hope it’s obvious words are not stored as real things in us. Speaking and writing are trained mechanical behavior. If you merely train the smallest amount of language possible, behavior is tailored to defend that language. This isn’t really a novel idea.
Claiming math as our natural language feels like a heck of a stretch. Unless you mean math as something other than the human construct we use to communicate it.
I am open to the idea that things can get better. Indeed, I hope they do. I am deeply skeptical of pushes that what got us here is flawed, inherently, though. Not adequate to get us further? Sure. But actively holding back where we could have been if we didn't have it? Seems ludicrous.
I mean intuition for state change in our meat bags. I mean measuring and building things that fit what we’d call in language now a use case, has been a thing humanoids have done forever.
Literally engineering an easier life came before language.
The problem with language is it couples ideas to emotions. It does not couple outcomes to emotions.
Metaphor, learning, intuition, and many other things we often discuss are all communication techniques to convey ideas. Math is no different. Even emotion can be quantified to a large extent for communication and exploration.
The point of this article seemed to be that or language choice is holding this back. But how?
Solo-dadding, hopped up on cold meds, both of which are impacting social media attention which I’m only giving attention anyway because of the cold.
Think a bit literally; reading language is “adding” information to our memory. To explain certain data structures and geometry in English would take an absurd amount of storage; first draw a Cartesian plane; what’s that; first draw a vertical line and a horizontal line extending to the right from the bottom of the horizontal line… is a lot of information to import to explain…
|_
The information density, memorization of form, syntactic rules, of English obfuscates simple ideas.
It’s that obfuscation that’s leveraged by aristocrats to then create confusion around truth when simple mathematical analysis shows they’re one of billions like everyone else, propped up by politically correct adherence to the subset of English that’s socially viable; tax a minority pf the population empowered by run of the mill political corruption being an example of politically incorrect language right now.
About that nautilus article: it shows no evidence. Not only that, 10 years ago or so, there were articles about a newly discovered tribe that showed they didn't have a sense of quantity. Now, that can be due to a genetic difference, but it's more likely that it's language that allows us to teach quantity. If we have a native sense of quantity, it certainly doesn't go beyond 20, which is far too little to be the basis of mathematical thinking on its own.
Such an idea has been discussed for centuries. Adam Smith warned division of labor would lead people to become “…as stupid and ignorant as it is for a human creature to become.” by repeating the same career behaviors for too long.
IMO this explains a great deal about current society stuck on the idea re-training is a waste, the habit of re-electing politicians for decades being one outcome of living life “on the career escalator.”
Such an inner monologue becomes a default state of being.
Accepting simple memes like “will work for money” become the norm and “will work to acquire knowledge” becomes vulgar language.
This puts reasonable restrictions on the usage of the term WireGuard to name your alternative implementation, but neither prevents other people (without any approval) from implementing the protocol nor even from using the term WireGuard to (correctly) describe or label the protocol implemented (and I even could see a solid argument that any command line tooling that might be expected to be compatible with existing third-party tooling that calls out to said tools should be allowed to use the term "wg" or "wireguard", given prior legal precedent that if you use a trademark in a place where it causes a compatibility issue you cannot attempt to claim infringement of that trademark to later stifle interoperability with your project; but, if you go down this path, I'd highly recommend consulting an actual lawyer and getting your response ready to any complaint).
Perhaps Twitter is staffed by middle managers who sell well in interviews but have zero fucking clue.
I’d like to see Twitter fire the cottage industry of professional non-contributors that has seeped into tech for the pay.
Employees like the TikToking “Facebook PM” who showed off 20 mins of emailing for work and the rest of the day brunching/lunching with their crew need to go.
Anxiety and a lot of gossip can make people do dumb things, like make non-technical middle managers issue stupid edicts because they don’t know about git logs.
I’ve worked for orgs where engineer head count alone pushed 250 people. The number of people in power with no technical skills managing technical workers was a huge waste of time.
The article was observed, not the events. I know PR people who plant such articles for profit, all the details are vague enough to seem possible. Even the supposed pictures of eng folk with printed code could be in on the gag. CNBC got trolled by a guy faking being an ex Twitter staffer. Someone from Twitter posted “the algorithm” repo as a troll on Musk.
Why not troll the public and traditional media who are far more obsessed with office life than doing real things for others?
Why bother taking the article seriously? It’s unverifiable. I see no reason to give it a sincere discussion.
Where did I claim there was? You can philosophically believe that free speech (and also know that the 1st Amendment does not apply to private companies, but that the "right" to it is a general philosophy outside of government) should exist while holding the position that you can be held accountable for some things.
The question is how much a public forum should allow or not, especially one that has advertisers but is also an important forum for our democracy. That's very important and just saying everything under the sun is hate speech is not a good debate starter, especially when it's unevenly applied, and the rules are written by one viewpoint.
I think the "downvote" system which does eventually hide comments (until you request them) is a feature that already exists in beta. I think that's better than the "shadow banning" and suspensions in some instances. Obviously, you still can't tolerate some things, such as calls for violence, rioting, etc. Moderation is very difficult, but I err on the side of more openness than locking things down and stifling speech and debate.
One billionaire replaced another billionaire at the helm of a major company, and proceeded to restructure the company. That happens all the time, and no one hears about it or cares. The only reason this is front page news is the anticipated changes in censorship policy.
Not really. It's not just 1 billionaire replacing another billionaire.
Twitter was public and is now private. That's a huge difference.
It's not just any billionaire. It's literally the richest person in the world. That also makes a difference.
The idea that the only reason this is in front page news is changes in censorship policy does not seem to follow considering nearly every other major purchase makes it to the front news. Michael Dell taking Dell private was heavily in the front page news. There were no censorship policy concerns there.
Space man has direct impact on my agency; I need to believe in money and wealth for him to be rich.
I really don’t get the general public deflating the value of their self agency for dedication to Elon and Co todo list. We’ll except the copious amounts of government backed nation state scrip they command. But government bad too mmmk
Public talks a game about freedom and democracy while reciting a curated set of acceptable language regarding business, and bending their agency to the idea using the environment like an open sewer is optimizing for self.
But yeah flippant sarcasm about space man covers if. Yer so smert
It is difficult to take comments like this seriously. Are you serious?
Do you really believe that Elon Musk's role in the U.S. is akin to people like Roman Abramovich or Mikhail Prokhorov who literally robbed Russia of state owned assets during the market reform period? Does he compare to China's princelings, whose insane power over 1 billion+ people is derived almost solely from their being born to the Chinese communist political elite?
Those are examples of real oligarchy. Musk is an example of an outsized success story in a free country. He bought Twitter using the assets he gained in the building of Tesla and SpaceX–two companies of crazy high importance and utility to society.
The people fired are in an at-will employment arrangement in the most lavishly compensated industry in the world, at a company that has dramatically underperformed against its potential and (former) peers for years.
Twitter has long been seen as the worst example of unproductive, entitled employees that has become emblematic of the rot-from-riches that is rife within tech.
These people will be just fine, and they will (freely) find other jobs.
Twitter users contribute to Twitter's capital by virtue of reified social relations(capital) and the content they create. Yet, the users who create this capital have no say in the handling of the value they create. Instead it's a single person. Any analysis that doesn't take this into account is fundamentally flawed and willfully neglectful to the point of absurdity.
I guess you're right. But only if we redefine the term "capital" in defiance of hundreds of years of usage and practice.
Do you expect this kind of "capital" from all businesses you patronize? Do you think you should help decide strategy at McDonald's if you buy an Egg McMuffin?
You can come up with a novel idea like radically defining capital, but that doesn't mean you're correct or that anyone will agree with you.
I don't think it's terribly controversial. Consider two Twitters: the present one, and another devoid of all users and their content. Does one have less value than the other?
We're already engaged in dialog which respects content as capital. Consider Ben Lee (legal counsel to Twitter) who said, "Twitter users own their Tweets." How is it that a tweet is ontologically capable of being owned? Well, it's intellectual property and as such an object capable being owned. Moreoever, it's owned by author, not Twitter. If you answered in the affirmative above, then it's even participating in the circuit of value creation. Yet, the production of tweets contributing to Twitter's value happens largely for free. It's quite simply benefiting on the backs of free labor.
Anticipating your next point, yes, Twitter users willfully choose to participate, but this doesn't negate the process that's taking place. Free labor creates capital.
This process is markedly different from your McDonald's example. It would be akin to people voluntarily supplying McD with beef patties for free. Happy to discuss that though. I'm fairly certain it would be a fruitful discussion.
But, for the sake of argument, let's take your notion of "Free labor creates capital". This implies a one-way exchange/robbery. That is not factual. People use Twitter and are not required to pay for it. This is an app requiring huge costs to build and maintain at scale. Again, they are using it for free. Users are getting the tools for creation and the (mass) distribution of the created objects for free. Moreover, users agree to TOS as part of that. Nowhere in the TOS will you find the notion of "owning your tweet" or being a capital creator/owner.
Again, you're radically redefining terms in a hand wavy, because-this-is-what-I-believe manner while also overlooking the basic facts of the situation and 100s of years of convention. Which is fine. Just don't expect the rest of us to get on board.
I don't think it necessarily implies a one-way trade. Users supply twitter with content-capital(and their time in attention) and in exchange they get the benefit of access to other users and socio-digital engagement. Yes, it's for free - there's no money being exchanged, but it isn't a one-way process by any means.
As far as re-definining terms, you can guess I'm not in agreement. But also know that my analysis isn't some idiosyncratic redefinition. In fact, my analysis sits staunchly after the historical development of Ricardianism, but prior to the marginal revolution. To claim that it isn't based in fact is a nod to the implicit assumption of the orthodoxy of marginal-realism. It's funny. HN will claim that the world could use more heterodox thinkers, but when it's presented with them fiercely holds to orthodoxy.
He’s riding on the coattails of his family’s mining business with a suspect ethical history.
I love these “don’t punch down the people who started at the top.” Why do you hate yourself so much you would deflate your own worth by idly idolizing the idea Musk is “with billions.”
We live in a carefully managed memory that deifies the figurative identity of a minority and aims our agency at protecting it.
It isn’t just Twitter; what of real human value has IBM offered to the masses except hype? Oracle?
The entire tech industry is an agency capturing religion, spouting the equivalent of catechisms. It’s not lost on me their leaders were raised in a far more religious era. They probably are true believes in the “greater good” gibberish despite being normal humans by all scientific measures.
These normal human engineers will freely go work for another “outsized” winner in order to maintain their grift.
> He’s riding on the coattails of his family’s mining business with a suspect ethical history.
There is no good source for how much money Elon got from his family, but it's fair to assume it was probably 7 digits. Turning a few million dollars into being the most wealthy man on the planet is riding his family's coattails? He founded Zip2 in 1995 with $200k in funding and sold it for $300 million in 1999. Even if he had millions of dollars to start with, he made more for himself than his family ever did by the age of 28.
But making a lot of money in a market that’s organically interested in tech the last few decades still does not make Musk literally the most valuable person alive except when measuring in politically correct fiat currency terms.
He’s literally one man in a society with a history of teaching idle idolatry.
Society follows the demands of a minority of wealth holders. Science minded engineers who prattle on about doing for science not “story mode”.
There is no science that suggests the leaders we have are infallible. It’s all politically correct story-mode based drivel to follow these “leaders”.
The technology changes but human agency has not moved on from being captured by high minded empty promises of forced expansion and growth for humanity; we’ll be long dead and never able to verify.
Their past success is leveraged to prop up caricature of who we should aspire to. Meanwhile their success is traditional political corruption.
But for decades, government programs ran surpluses.
It’s not hard to explain it away in memorized economics terms. The thing is those terms are merely one set of reasonable, generic language. Not immutable laws of reality.
Technology is moving faster than that because of government investment; IBM refused to invest in solid state fearing it would undermine sales of old tube computers. Government invested in and gifted them solid state patents.
What do you think the cheap money flowing to tech corps was about the last decade? Government subsidy of technology, which is verifiable in that now that rates are down tech genius CEOs are not innovating but pushing traditions of austerity. These companies are middlemen dependent on government subsidies.