100% agree! But how many organizations actually need an expert vs someone productive? Goes back to the "only the most hardcore performance-based orgs" point as an example
I am sure engineers collectively understand how the entire stack works.
With LLM generated output, nobody understands how anything works, including the very model you just interacted with -- evident in "you are absolutely correct"
Even as a collective whole, engineers will likely only understand the parts of system that are engineering problems and solutions. Even if they could understand it all, there is still no _one_ person who understands how everything works.
I don't think they're saying _you_ can't do those things, just that most people can't which I have to agree with.
They're not saying people can't learn those things either, but that's the practice you're talking about here. The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.
Can you list a situation where this matters that you know this personally?
Maybe if you end up alone and lost in a huge forest or the Outback, but this is a highly unlikely scenario.
If society falls apart cooking isn’t something you need to be that worried about unless you survive the first few weeks. Getting people to work together with different skills is going to be far more beneficial.
The existential crisis part for me is that no-one (or not enough people) have the skills or knowledge required to do these things. Getting people to work together only works if some people have those skills to begin with.
I also wasn't putting the focus is on cooking, the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important.
And you are far more optimistic about people than me if you think people working together is the likely scenario here.
>the ability to hunt/gather/grow enough food and keep yourself warm are far more important
These are very important when you're alone. Like deep in the woods with a tiny group maybe.
The kinds of problems you'll actually see are something going bad and there being a lot of people around trying to survive on ever decreasing resources. A single person out of 100 can teach people how to cook, or hunt, or grow crops.
If things are that bad then there is nearly a zero percent change that any of those, other than maybe clean water, are going to be your biggest issue. People that do form groups and don't care about committing acts of violence are going to take everything you have and leave you for dead if not just outright kill you. You will have to have a big enough group to defend your holdings 24/7 with the ability to take some losses.
Simply put there is not enough room on the planet for hunter gathers and 8 billion people. That number has to fall down to the 1 billion or so range pretty quickly, like we saw around the 1900s.
> The real question is, can you learn to do it before you starve or freeze to death? Or perhaps poison yourself because you ate something you shouldn't or cooked it badly.
You can eat some real terrible stuff and like 99.999% of the time only get the shits, which isn't really a concern if you have good access to clean drinking water and can stay hydrated.
The overwhelming majority of people probably would figure it out even if they wind up eating a lot of questionable stuff in the first month and productivity in other areas would dedicate more resources to it.
> … the main household survey used to estimate consumption in the UK has a low sample size, and there appears to be a growing problem of undercoverage of expenditure … the fact that undercoverage has grown over time means that it is not clear whether the relatively modest recorded changes in consumption inequality since 1991 are genuine, or just due to an increased inability to pick up the expenditure of high-spending households.
You cherry picked a line and didn't include the rest:
> But the gains for middle‑ and lower‑income households were less than the gains for upper‑income households
And you're making claims that are only talking about income (where the evidence suggests that inequality is increasing) to suggest that people are better off.
Where is the evidence that "all income levels are doing better"?
You are not able to talk about these separately. Inequality is increasing, but everyone's incomes have also increased. That means everyone has more money to spend, but also some people have more money than others. Why is it so hard for your to understand this?
The original article is literally focusing on a single metric to make a wider point about inequality — does that mean you agree that it's not a valid way to analyse the data. Particularly if the conclusion doesn't seem to be borne out by actual studies in the area.
∴ If a certain quintile of population is gathering more resources, necessarily other sections of the population are losing compensatory access to these same resources.
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We can argue zero-sum (or not) all day long, but wealth inequality is increasing (globally, as well as US) and it shows most (anecdotally; statistically) along borders of haves & have nots.
I happen to live along such a border, as do both of my wealthier brothers (I'm the one on the other side of the tracks, but I live respectfully, with simple grace). The majority of americans are broker than broke, whether they live in a big financed house or a cardboard box — the latter's net-worth may actually be higher (if @ $0.00).
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However you want to define metrics / sources, when the majority of your citizens are living paycheck-to-paycheck, or not able to come up with $1000 for an emergency expense without going into debt — you live in a fiscally unhealthy society.
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When the majority of US stocks transacted in 2025 were done in darkpool (i.e. not public) marketplaces your financial markets are no longer participating in daily public price discovery.
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I am the black sheep [blue collar electrician] of my family (they're all "professionals" [lawyers, politicians, engineers]); we still maintain respectful conversational tones (mostly) but none of my many family members lives outside of Top 5% income brackets, so they absolutely do not live in the same world as a median income earner experiences (like me; perhaps not you?).
Perhaps there is a Top20%/80% line that it takes living beyond to actually experience the reality of wealth inequality. I've seen both sides — that's about where I'd place it.
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Let's continue this discussion, but I only log on a few times a week. I appreciate attempting to understand different perspectives (share yours?).
Certainly the higher your fiscal positioning, the better each recent decade has felt. Sure, we all have color TVs in our pockets [/s == "rich"], but can young people even afford to educate themselves in this economy?!
I know some very poor (and rich!) doctors and lawyers. Student loans and privatized healthcare are both evil within the USA — they can capture/demoralize just about any professional.
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