In this case the systemic problem is precisely the belief that it’s somehow not your, nor your friends, fault. Being Americans you are directly profiting from it; destroying other regions of the world is a fundamental branch of American economy.
You're truly in Cambridge and you make such arguments about Americans? There's this collection of stories and myths I've heard about that talks about casting stones, planks in eyes, etc that comes to mind. We might as well just play the Anglo-Saxon bad and Anglo-Saxon fault cards together.
This _is_ the meaningful stuff. Engineers might have the urge, but most don’t have the opportunity, because they need to focus on the currently fashionable framework.
A good rule of thumb regarding meaningful battles is to ignore everything promoted by companies like Google or Facebook - everything they do is either going to be abandoned in five years, or makes sense only in the context of solving problems nobody else have.
seems like something an engineer might fix on their own time if they were feeling feisty about the matter. Something tells me if it went on for 20 years it was an edge case that only very rarely came up and was mostly a non-issue.
I suspect it was definitely an issue, it’s just that most companies like Google don’t care about reliability, only availability, and it might just not show up in their stats.
This whole problem sounds similar to what was happening with MP3 support some 20 years ago, and as we now know it was all bullshit. And perpetrated by the same parties.
For a singular job, yes this is true. Raising wages will convince workers to migrate from one job to another. The company that lost the employee can then also raise wages to lure employees back, taking them from other companies. And those companies can try to raise wages, and so on. This cycle still leaves vacancies.
At the level of the entire economy, raising wages cannot materialize more workers for every job opening.
A couple centuries back, the majority of the labor force was working agriculture jobs. Now that number is a tiny fraction of the workforce due to automation by machines. If we didn’t have automation, we would absolutely have a shortage of agriculture workers relative to all of the modern job openings. The same thing is happening today with the jobs being automated away as workers move to higher paid jobs.
This isn’t new or surprising. It’s been going on for centuries.
> There is no such thing as “scarce workers”. The problem is scarce salaries.
Well, yes, and the point is that workers are more scarce at any given salary than they used to be last year, or in the last decade, etc. At the same time, robots get more affordable. Isn't that the reason why employers want to automate as much as possible?
It's a question of how quickly the robot can pay for itself and provide a return on investment. Whichever tasks can be performed by robots will likely be automated.
Yes; and deeper still, unsound money causing business uncertainty (can I afford to hire?), inflation (can I afford to change jobs?), and fake wealth (why work if the government is creating cash to pay me not to?).
It’s going to be difficult to reach a healthy equilibrium between labor and capital until money is fixed.
Fertility is below replacement level outside Africa. Due to demographics workers will be scarce. Covid and associated lockdowns also shrank the workforce.
There are two ways to read that comment. One is like you say. The other - as “someone who doesn’t go out much”, this actually resonates, in a weird way: “the Unix way” resulted in user having a proper control and their environment being predictable and thus trustworthy. Compared to that, the web is not only technologically inferior (Chromium LoC alone is enough to tell), but also as unreliable and unpredictable as many other things IRL.
