He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
> Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
In particular, nothing that comes out of his mouth regarding AI makes any sense.
And still, people listen to him as if he was an expert. Go figure.
I just don’t get it? Do people hang off his every word just because he’s rich? What are they expecting for this worship… it’s not like he’s going to start throwing $100 bills to people because they agree with him on Twitter
His latest bullshit was about Tesla cameras and fog/rain/snow - on an investor call, no less - "Oh, we do photon counting directly from the sensor, so it's a non-issue".
No. 1, Tesla cameras are not capable of that - you need a special sensor, that's not useful for any real visual representation. And 2, even if you did, photon counting requires a closed "box" so to speak - you can't count photons in "open air".
> Both SpaceX and Tesla are accomplishments if you consider where their competitors are.
CATL, BYD, and other Chinese manufacturers are absolutely killing it at Tesla's expense, Because their markets have actual, sharp-elbowed competition requiring actual innovation.
Perhaps money alone is not a reliable factor, and there are certainly confounding variables, such as poor people having low access to healthcare including contraception and education about options and how to use it.
More important than money is economic security, the ability to expect a reasonable long-term access to a sound source of income.
Having to worry whether you'll be laid off next week and not be able to get new work, and have that worry be constant over a decade is a real discouragement to having children.
Having a stable situation in life is vastly underrated, and not easily measured by current net worth or income.
Maybe think for a second from the perspective of a couple or woman who WANT to have children. The problems they face in today's economy where both people need to work full-time just to survive are huge, and it seems even crazier to add the time and money costs of a child, let alone several.
The way to change all of that has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with economic and labor policy
Society decided it was OK to have the top 1% control 27% or all wealth and the top 10% control 60%, and allow companies to pay wages so low that a person working full-time cannot even get out of poverty, so 25%+ of the workers at the largest employer qualify for food benefits (and the employer even gives employees seminars how to get benefits), while the leaders/owners of those companies rake in more billions every year.
Society decided it was OK to make sure health care is expensive, incomplete, and bankrupting for any unexpected event.
Society decided it was the mothers who are responsible for all childcare and provide only minimum assistance for critical needs like prenatal care, and day-care.
You want more babies? Make just a few changes
Change requirements so corporations are required to compensate their employees merely the way the original US minimum wage was specified (including in the 1956 Republican Party Platform): So a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education. Recognize that the companies trying to exploit their workers by paying less so their full-time employees need govt benefits to feed themselves are the ones exploiting welfare, and do not have a viable business model, they have an exploitation model.
Add making healthcare sufficient and affordable for all, including children and support for daycare and the time and effort to raise children.
Change those things, and instead of a couple looking at making an already hugely insecure future even more insecure by having children, they would see an opportunity to confidently embark on building a family without feeling like one misfortune or layoff could put them all in the street.
Do you have a citation that the US federal minimium wage ever had the objective that "a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four" because I can't find it in the Wikipedia entry[1] or other top level search results. I also don't see this idea in the 1956 Republican Party platform[2]. At best from reading a few other sources it looks like at its peak in the late 1960s it would have been enough to keep a family of three above the poverty line (though that hardly implies they could afford a mortgage and higher education).
> a single person working full-time will earn enough to support a household of four including housing (mortgage/rent), food, healthcare, and education.
Here’s the problem - some people will still make the choice to have ‘get ahead’ by having both partners work. They will then use their relatively greater economic power to get better housing and more stuff. So others will join them, and they will bid up housing (because it’s the most important thing) until we’re back to where we started and even those who don’t want to do that now have to.
It’s a sorta tragedy of the commons situation.
The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Because until we have one or the other (or both) people will just keep bidding up accomodation to the edge of what’s affordable on two incomes.
Simpler "fixes": Prevent corporations from owning single family homes and don't allow anyone to own more than one single family home.
It'd crash the housing market, making homes MUCH more affordable, immediately. As corporations—who currently own 25% of all single family homes in some markets—are forced to sell off their inventory.
They could still own multi-family dwellings, just not single family homes.
The wealthy would just build multi-family dwellings for themselves, owned by corporations (that they own), and rent them to themselves. So it wouldn't really interfere with their rich lives much.
Yes, there will likely be that phenomenon, but will it occur faster than the approx 2% level of optimum inflation?
>>The only real solution there is for governments to look at social housing, and also to try to produce A glut of house building.
Creating a universally-available baseline lodging situation for everyone is certainly a public good that would yield a LOT of benefits from eliminating homelessness (benefiting not only the homeless but also everyone who their problems affect) to promoting family stability.
Whether the best way is to incentivize a glut, subsidize social housing, or just provide a housing stipend for anyone in need, another system, or some combination of all-of-the-above should be subject to study and experimentation.
Evidently, the requirement for democracy in the US to survive is for the people who failed to vote for the only viable alternative to Trumpism must feel the suffering they are happy to visit on others, and so recognize that voting for "my team" incompetence is a bad idea.
The suffering is only beginning. It takes an insanely long time for large systems to show effects of bad decisions. Usually the party that has wrecked the economy in every presidency for the last 50 years benefits from the lag and the party of recovery gets blamed, putting the wrecking party back in power. Perhaps this round of the wrecking party will be too effective, and blame will go where it belongs.
>>"...She asked for an extension to complete her treatment, or at the least a short period to consult with her medical providers about whether and how she might be able to return to work before the treatment was completed. .."
>>"An extension of Annie’s leave would have cost MongoDB nothing. We made it clear that they did not need to pay her or hold her job open for her. We just asked them not to fire her while she was in such a vulnerable state, as we feared that would result in tragedy. We just wanted a little more time to get her stabilized."
There is no plausible need of management that would outweigh simply letting someone stay on the books as "employed-on-unpaid-leave" for some extra weeks or months.
Whoever did this should be held personally responsible for negligent harm.
And yeah, never touching their software, IDGAF how useful it is.
But only to the extent that the regime fails to get its way.
If the regime continues, they will definitely push us back to a dark age, partially intentionally, partially through not caring about the future or being too stupid to figure out the consequences. And Theil, Musk, Vance and that whole lot are part of the crew pushing for that — technology for me but not for thee.
Just because the main purpose of the forum is technical things of interest and intellectual curiosity, doesn't mean we can't be human and show empathy and caring.
Makes sense. The more aggressive bears would be more likely to get in fights with humans, which generally turns out badly for the bear, either immediately or from being subsequently hunted down. OTOH, more cooperative bears will more likely be tolerated and even fed, like this bear (different population) who started out as a nuisance to the beekeeper[0] and now is an 'official' taste tester.
NO, it does more than that. 1) It removes pressure to find a job on the schedule and expectations of the overseers. 2) It allows the recipient to start work even at a lower-level job without losing out. 3) It allows time for the recipient to find a job that actually suits them and their employer rather than taking the first thing that comes along out of desperation and pressure.
>>expected to earn a living by themselves and unemployment benefits
This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI
>> not meant to enable a life-style
An income of €560 per month, about $20/day, is hardly a lifestyle; it is enough to stay out of the gutter. This is only giving to people who do not have savings a sliver of the resources available to people sufficiently fortunate enough to have education and savings to fall back on.
It shows many of the differences in poverty are not due to any kind of merit/demerit, but simply lack of funds.
>>An useful measurement would be
Yes, that would be a DIFFERENT useful measurement. But to ignore the mental health aspects is to ignore real harms to both the people themselves and to the larger society, such as reduced isolation and crime, healthier communities, etc. Much of this was addressed by other experiments later in the article, which you either failed to read or intentionally ignored.
The entire point of the studies and article wasn't your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)", but the effects of payments vs bureaucracy.
The actual evidence is massively piling up that eliminating a patriarchal bureaucracy, means testing, and all this other govt overhead and simply giving everyone just-above-poverty-level income, will dramatically improve society, and it will be far more effective than all the layers of bureaucracy which not only add overhead, cost to the taxpayer, but also actual harm.
Unemployment benefit is to help you while you are out of job _involuntarily_ and while you look for a job, not to subsidise your lifestyle or aspiration to find your dream job. It's not about "patriarchal bureaucracy", whatever that might mean.
There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.
> This is not testing "unemployment benefits", it is testing UBI
No, this was testing a sort of UBI vs traditional unemployment benefits based on the two groups:
"The other group got it conditionally, with requirements to look for work, report to unemployment offices, and satisfy bureaucrats. And the money went away with employment."
That's unemployment benefits.
Again, it is obvious that the group who got money with no strings attached felt better, this does not tell us anything. It sounds like a contrived study that aims to prove that "UBI is better".
> your trivial "who gets a job fastest (any job, no matter how ill-suited or temporary)",
It's not trivial, it is the key metric. Granted, you could combine it with the "quality" of the new job that would also be useful, but since this is all to help people while they are looking for a job any studies and experiments must measure the impact on that otherwise there are missing the point.
Frankly I don't understand this cultish attachment to UBI its proponents tend to have.
I think there's a big cultural split on morality here.
A lot of people think that a supermarket with self-check out would probably be empty within the day, with people trucking off their goods in every which direction. Maybe in some places that's actually still how it works. This supposes that morality is mostly extrinsic (low trust society).
Throughout quite a bit of the West, Europe , Finland we're dealing with high trust societies these days. In these countries, all said and done self checkout is actually netto cheaper to run than manned checkout, and that includes shrinkage. (Above some point) every penny spent on checkout counter operators is wasted. So -at least in Finland-, morality is mostly intrinsic (high trust society).
If you tell this story to a person from a low trust society, they'll think you're pulling their leg. Every man, woman, and child to themselves, right?
Meanwhile, in high trust societies like Finland, it's just Tuesday: 'Bleep... bleep'.
Now when it comes to people with intrinsic morality: Making them go through extra procedures might actually slow them down; Hiring extra people to keep an eye on them can go negative yield.
There's more to be said on this, but the key intuition is that much of western thinking on morality is still calibrated on extrinsic morality, while many westerners are now actually being raised with intrinsic morality. It's a slow cultural change.
,> There is actually a moral aspect here. Morals in society is that you work to earn your own living and that you don't abuse kindness.
That is true, but it leaves out the question of who's morals we are discussing. If the recipient is not under any obligation, and yet gets a job, that morality is played out in them.
If the person is under obligation and gets a job as a result, their moral position is unknown but likely unchanged
Or perhaps we are talking about wanting other people to live out our morality?
Sure, in a world where you can effortlessly make that work without waste or moral lossage through faceless bureaucracy on the enforcing side, that seems like a great model. E.g. a parent setting some rules around a large monthly stipend for a child: the humanity remains, it’s efficient, the morality of “if you want money you have to do something for it” can be preserved without incurring larger moral costs like “you don’t understand the circumstances”, and maybe/probably efficiency can actually be improved.
as far as I understand this entire conversation around ubi, that ideal isn’t the issue. Proponents rather hold that you cannot scale this to a society without the cost exceeding the benefit. The bureaucratic machine to sustain these rules inevitably becomes soulless, expensive, inefficient, and counter productive. Is the argument.
It’s not that we shouldn’t, it’s that, at scale, we can’t. Is the argument :)
I don’t think your statement on morals is necessarily incompatible with the practical considerations offered by others. It’s a different conversation.
You keep claiming there is a moral problem with giving people enough of a basic stipend to actually live out of the gutter.
In the richest most affluent society in the history of the planet.
In a society where it is organized so a handful of people control more than 50% of the society's wealth, and it is also organized so the minimum wage has stripped is no longer even sufficient to work FULL TIME and get above the poverty line. In a society where a family owns the largest employer in the country and sits on $Billions of wealth while they pay so little that a substantial number of their employees qualify for food assistance.
Who is freeloading, the billionaire owners taking massive tax breaks and paying less than their office workers, or the minimum-wage laborer who must "take" government assistance in addition to his pay merely in order to not starve?
A society can rightly be judged by how it treats it's lowest members.
A moral affluent society would organize itself so every single person has a minimum of food, housing, healthcare, and education, even if a few were freeloading.
Instead, you attempt to justify refusing to feed and house people because a few might freeload. Or, if not refusing, to implement massive government bureaucracies, which 1) are both costly and 2) are proven to make worse outcomes and 3) are even more easily defrauded, merely to make sure all the lowly workers who cannot get a leg up are suitably shamed and monitored, lest they receive just a little too much.
And do not start on how some will waste UBI it on alcohol or drugs. The rich also waste their lives in the same way.
While you stand on your moral high-horse, you argue for the most immoral actions.
They’re absolutely right, and you’re wrong. In the moral sense.
You’re treating it as a moral imperative that (to be charitable) all able-bodied adults in a society must be somehow self-supporting, and using that as justification to either browbeat the recipients of minimum-quality-of-life benefits in order to continue receiving them, or to deny such benefits entirely after some point.
Given the relative wealth of our society, it’s immoral to cut off minimum-quality-or-life benefits when doing so would result in people becoming homeless, hungry, or sick. Even from a strictly utilitarian perspective, that will in the end impose higher costs on society than just distributing benefits.
Similarly, if what you actually care about is the cost to society in a utilitarian sense, the cost of the administrative overhead of browbeating benefits recipients and doing the necessary tracking to ensure benefits are cut off when they reach their endpoint and stay that way will be higher than just distributing them.
So what is your actual moral argument? It comes down to “everyone should have to work.” And, well, why? Some people can’t work and I hope you don’t begrudge them being cared for by society. Similarly there are the young and elderly who society should care for, rather than rely just on family to care for. So why is an able-bodied adult different to you?
If the argument is that you have to work so others should too, well, under the proposed scheme you actually don’t! If you want to just hang out all day every day on minimum benefits, I wouldn’t begrudge you that. Sooner or later you’ll probably work anyway just to get more than is possible at the very bottom. Or maybe you’ll create art and contribute to society that way. Or maybe you’d avoid being a drag on a workplace that’d be a bad fit for you, and contribute in that way. Or maybe you’d be able to devote your time to raising a child so they can contribute much better than if you weren’t there because you were working.
A morality that treats work as virtuous for its own sake is too simplistic to survive contact with the real world.
Oh, can you reframe? Maybe I'm reading wrong too (sorry if I did).
Meanwhile, I noticed a slight detail which both sides may have missed? : Job-finding rates were equal with the treatment and control group. Which makes sense in a high-trust society actually.
No, they are accurately observing that the "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements are FAR weaker than they can be and should be.
Such weak statements are either a real mistake or show movement away from those principles which should be bedrock for Mozilla and towards some justification to abandon those principles.
It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
Unwise to try to dismiss and laugh off legitimate alarms.
Instead of criticizing an actual contract to engage with a third party or a code push or an affirmative statement, you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails to indict Mozilla for a hypothetical thing that they explicitly said they're not doing. If that's not scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's only because you're able to imagine an even lower bottom than that that you're willing to reach for.
>>you're attempting to parse a random combination of tea leaves and chicken entrails
It is exactly the opposite — it is reading the actual language used for its intended meaning.
Every CEO is expected to not only understand the issues he faces and is managing, but to ALSO carefully choose the words to describe the situation and the intentions of the organization he leads.
When a CEO makes a statement about what should be a core fundamental principle of an organization, we can certainly expect that CEO to choose their words carefully.
Those words are, or at least should be, the exact opposite of "tea leaves and chicken entrails".
If the CEO is sloppy and the chosen words should actually be considered "tea leaves and chicken entrails", that is a different problem of a less-than-competent CEO.
If those words were actually chosen carefully, consider these two statements:
The actual statement: "[I don't] want to do that. It feels off-mission"
A different statement: "This is a core fundamental principle of Mozilla and I will not lead the company in that direction — not on my watch".
One could technically say "they both say 'Not today'".
But that would be absurd, and stupidly throwing out significant meaning in what the CEO chose to say and how he chose to say it.
He made the first vague statement with weasel words instead of something resembling the bold and unambiguous statement resembling the second statement.
The statement he did make is "I don't want to", which type of statement has often preceded an eventual "sorry, we had to".
There is a lot to make Firefox users nervous, and his choice of statement here did not help matters.
> It's not like the industry has no precedents on this. "Don't Be Evil" was the motto of a company that is now one of the apex predators in the surveillance capitalism ecosystem.
How is this precedent? "Don't Be Evil" strikes me as extremely explicit. This seems like a counter-example to me.
Yes. The point is that it started out as a wonderfully explicit and expansive statement.
And even THAT explicit and expansive statement was abandoned to the point where the very same company is now a global leader in surveillance capitalism, which is widely considered a massive net-negative for society if not flat-out evil.
So, when a CEO won't even make anything more than wish-washy "I don't want to do it" and "feels off mission" statements, people should be concerned that those weak good intentions will hold up even less well.
"we won't do this" But you didn't say you'd never do this.
"okay we'll never do this" But you didn't say you'd never ever do this.
"fine we'll never ever do this" But you didn't say that it's never entered your mind once.
They said they won't do it and your interpretation is to demand they said it with more words? Come on, let's stop this nonsense. Can Firefox users ever be happy?
He engineers perceptions, finance, and govt funds, not technology. Every report and available evidence shows he is barely technologically astute, nevermind genius; the accomplishments of his teams are despite him not because of him.
Which is why a better description would be: The Greediest Man On Earth.
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