Any analysis that frames this as a productivity or talent-attraction issue is flawed from the start because that was never the point and still isn't.
The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance.
Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors.
None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do.
Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.
I'm wondering how long it's going to take people to see the bigger picture and start connecting the dots.
"Prediction markets" (which is just gambling) are not an isolated phenomenon. It's simply a natural step is the financialization of every aspect of our lives and everything that's touched by this gets worse.
Can't afford your rent? That's decades of financialization of the housing market, which is just a wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. tIt's stealing from the next generation.
Hate your health insurance? That's the profit motive in healthcare, a business model designed explicitly to make money by denying people life-saving care.
Hate your ISP? They've lobbied for exclusive access so they can gouge you. It's absolutely no coincidence that every good ISP in the US is a municipal ISP.
Awhile ago I read "hobbies are a luxury" and it's stuck with me. Because it's true. Now "side hustles" and the "gig economy" are part of the lexicon because one job is no longer sufficient. If you had a hobby instead, well you're not creating shareholder value for some already-billionaire. We can't have that. That's like stealing from Jeff Bezos.
A big problem with Covid is that it broke the dam on retailers, particularly supermarkets, raising prices. This is something they were afraid to do. Now, just like airlines, we have dynamic pricing on everything. Instacart got caught doing it. Pricing AIs are just the latest version of anticompetitive behavior eg RealPage. Make no mistake: all of this pricing is designed to do nothing more than make things more expensive.
And who is meant to protect us from all this? The government of course. But they don't. Because they don't care. Neither party does. This isn't a partisan issue. All of the politicans are just looking out for jobs after they quit politics, jobs for their children and so on. All of the systems to select politicians are designed to filter out anyone who bucks the system. If there are such people, it's because that system has failed, which it occasionally does.
Another quote I read while ago that's stuck with me is that companies increasingly resent having to go through you to get to your money. I think tha's true.
So back to gambling: many people don't realize if you consistently win you get kicked off the platform, particularly sprots betting. Consistent winners are bad for business because the losers need to occasionally win to keep losing. So if you ever encounter someone in the wild who boasts about how much money they make on FanDuel you know they're lying, either to you or themselves.
But do you get it yet? Polymarket is just more financialization.
I'm reminded of the quote "all models are wrong but some models are useful". I tend to think of generational analysis as overly reductive but, looking at the world, it's hard not to look at the world and blame everything on the baby boomers.
Consider the birth year of the last 5 presidents: Trump (1946), Biden (1942), Obama (1961), W Bush (1946), Clinton (1946). Isn't it a fairly wild coincidence that 3 of the last 5 were born in 1946 (and one more in 1942)? That's the first year of the baby boomer generation.
The term "woke" has been completely distorted but the original meaning is simply to recognize societal (ie systemic) injustice and to recognize that there is such a thing as intergenerational trauma (slavery, specifically). You could also say that the Holocaust caused generational trauma.
But the parents of the baby boomers went through a lot too. First there was the Great Depression and what followed (eg the Dust Bowl for many). It was a decade of social insability and a lack of security. Then came WW2 and then they were the first generation to live under the threat of nuclear annihilation. That's what the baby boomers were born into. So you had baby boomers being raised by people with unresolved trauma (eg "housewife syndrome" [1]). This generation grew up to vote for Ronald Reagan and almost everything bad in today's society can be traced back to Reagan somehow.
This is of course a generalization but baby boomers are the most emotionally immature, traumatized, entitled generation who are terrified to die, easily manipulated and like the pharoahs of old seemingly want to take everythign with them when they die. They were born into one of the greatest eras of wealth creation and did nothing but hoard and squander that opportunity while dismantling the systems that made it possible.
I envy the next generation because they will eventually get to live in a world where all the baby boomers are dead. The problem is that everything may be so screwed by then it might not matter.
"eventually get to live in a world where all the baby boomers are dead"
man, that stings. as a member of the birth class of 1963.
each of us is a product of our times. i wish no ill will on those younger or older than myself. personally, i have lived my life in a way to be a good steward of the world. was it always successful; no.
not malice, perhaps ignorance. please enjoy what is left of the world. i did my best to leave it better than it was when I received it.
if you don't like the world, try to change it. you have agency.
I think "simplify" is pretty clear here. For trigonometric functions you would expect a trig function and an inverse trig function to be simplified. We all know what we'd expect if we saw sin(arcsin(x)) (ie x). If we saw cos(arcsin(x)) I'll spoil it for you: it simplifies to sqrt(1-x^2).
Hyperbolic functions aren't used as much but the same principle applies. Here the core identity is cosh^2(x) = sinh^2(x) = 1 so:
The first time I looked at the comment above, there was a reply, a reply to that reply, and a reply to the reply to the reply.
Later I came back and this time there were no replies. Since HN won't let you delete a comment that has a reply the only ways a comment chain should be able to go away are (1) the participants delete them in reverse order, or (2) a moderator intervenes.
I came back again and the comments are back!
I wonder if this is related to another comment problem I've seen many times in the past few weeks? I'll be using the "next" or "prev" links on top level comments to move through the comment and will come to a point where that breaks. Next reaches a comment that it will not go past. Coming from below prev will also not go past that point. Examining the links, next and prev are pointing to a nonexistent comment.
If you can't recognize how much simpler the simplified version is, I'm not sure exactly what to tell you. But let's think about it in terms of assembly steps:
1. Multiply the input by itself
2. Add 1
3. Take the square root. There is often a fast square root function available.
The above is a fairly simply sequence of SIMD instructions. You can even do it without SIMD if you want.
Compare this to sinh being (e^x - e^-x) / 2 (you can reduce this to one exponentiation in terms of e^2x but I digress) and arccosh being ln(x + sqrt(s^2 - 1)) and you have an exponentiation, subtraction, division, logarithm, addition, square root and a subtraction. Computers generally implement e^2 and logarithm using numerical method approximations (eg of a Taylor's series expansion).
1. The right-wing UBI is a tool to dismantle the social safety net. The idea of the likes of Milton Friedman is to replace all social safety programs with UBI. This doesn't make sense because, for example, being disabled in today's society makes everything more expensive; and
2. Left-wing UBI would seek to have everyone share in the wealth they create by supplementing social safety programs with UBI. UBI becomes a form of super-progressive taxation because it can be viewed as negative taxation.
As for your inflation comment, you have a point, to which I'll say: UBI alone isn't sufficient. You need economic reform and planning on top of that.
A good example is the US military. If you live off-base you get a housing allowance (ie BAH). Now around military bases, in the US and overseas, all the landlords know this so you'll find that weirdly all the houses to rent cost pretty much what BAH is.
So a more equitable economic system, including UBI, needs social housing. That is, the government needs to be a significant supplier of quality, affordable housing so landlords (private and insitutional) can't artificially drive up prices, as is the case now. A prime example is Vienna [1]. Housing simply can't be a speculative asset in a healthy economy.
If you wnat to see what an equitable planned economy looks like, look at China.
It's worth noting that Left-wing UBI can still be seen as a mechanism to replace social safety programs. It just requires that disability payments, etc be merged with the UBI system such that added disability needs can be treated like additional tax credits that get applied to the fixed-interval interest-free loan disbursement from the government based on your taxes that UBI effectively is.
In such a system you get your base UBI tax credit which pushes your tax burden into the negative. Additional UBI-elligible tax credits can push that tax burden even further negative. You can file the paperwork to adjust this at any point in the year and if it's for the current year the tax credit is prorated relative to the date of the next disbursement date (and the full amount for the next year).
Then your UBI disbursement updates and you get it. It works the same way as updating your W-4 tax withholding for a standard W-2 position.
At the end of the year of course your taxes all need to zero out still and if not you either get a bill or a refund.
And this also moves all of the social safety program fraud prevention together into the same system within your tax agency (IRS for the US, or state/local agency, or whatever else).
So instead of a bunch of different agencies and systems for avoiding and finding fraud it all rolls together into the responsibility of the IRS tax assessors, auditors, and the IRS Criminal Investigation unit. And while the rich hate the IRS and common media frames them as incompetent, the people at the IRS are in general extremely competent and more than willing to help and accommodate your average person (less so for the rich who get caught systematically trying to defraud the IRS).
I bought a PC in early 2021 IIRC. It was good for the time and a good deal for a high end PC. IIRC it was $2800 and had a 6900 XTX. Last year I accidentally killed it. The CPU temps were higher than I'd like (~85C). the thermal grease can become hard and ineffective over time so I figured I'd replace it. Instead, it had become like cement and by twisting the AIO off, I snapped the socket on the motherboard.
This was an expensive mistake as I both looked into buying a replacement motherboard and CPU but that quickly gets to the price of a new PC. Paying someone to rebuild my PC is expensive and I'm beyond the age of wanting to fully remove a motherboard and effectively rebuild my entire PC myself. So I didn't know what to do with it.
Anyway, I ended up buying various alternatives like a NUC with 32GB of RAM, a laptop (with a 4080) and a Mac Mini. But I also ended up buying a new 9800X3D PC with a 5070Ti. Like I said, it was an expensive mistake.
But I decided for no particular reason to upgrade the (already good) 32GB of DDR5-6000 to 64GB with a $200 kit of DDR5-6000. This was in July I think. I also upgraded my laptop to 64GB for no readily apparent reason.
I recently checked and that $200 64GB kit now costs $950. SSDs are through the roof too but through complete accident I'm surrounded by about 5 PCs and a bunch of spare RAM. I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.
I will say that there are some good deals (relative to current pricing) for combos including CPU, motherboard and memory or even some pretty good prebuilts.
This situation would be laughable if the consequences weren't so dire.
I have problems adequately stating just how incompetent and ill-thought out this entire misadventure was. I say this because everything that's happened has been completely foreseeable and foreseen, including the ability of Iran to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
This has been something many militaries around the world have planned scenarios for. Word has it any warnings from allies, the NSC and the Joint Chiefs were just completely ignored. And those estimates probably underestimated how numerous and effective Iranian SRBMs and Shahed drones are.
Beyond direct impacts on crude oil, refined oil products and natural gas, there are secondary effects such as ~30 of the world's fertilizer goes through the Strait. Helium from Qatar is an issue but at least there are other sources for Helium, being pretty much any natural gas well so equipped to capture helium.
> I say this because everything that's happened has been completely foreseeable and foreseen, including the ability of Iran to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Yup. Even illiterate could tell just looking at the damn map. Gotta wonder if somebody on top is trying to undermine own country...
Not just many foreign militaries. Our military. General Dan Caine by report advised Trump about the negative consequences of this action. MAGA elected a fantasist and narcissist and we will all bear the consequences. I was no fan of Kamala but the appalling limitations of Trump are of a different order and it is a disgrace that our voters by majority elected him.
There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US.
An obvious place for this is that I think the EU will follow China's stance on not wanting to be beholden to US tech companies. The EU will bootstrap this by requiring EU government services to be hosted on platforms run by EU companies subject to EU jurisdiction. Think EU AWS. This is easier said than done.
But this is really a consequence of the current administration having absolutely no idea what they're doing and they're intentionally and unintentionally destroying American soft power.
Another way this can come to pass is that the EU decides that the US is an unreliable partner for their security needs so you will find that various weapons, vehicles, platforms, etc for EU militaries will be supplied by local companies, particularly if the US effectively abandons Ukraine.
Starlink is just another piece of that.
The current administration paints NATO as Europe taking advantage of the US. It could not be more wrong. NATO is a protection racket for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy.
We kind of saw a precursor to all this with GPS. For anyone who has been around long enough, GPS used to be less accurate, deliberately. Why? Because defence (apparently). There was a special signal, Selective Ability ("SA") [1], that military gear could decode to be more accurate.
Fun fact: one of the clues to the first Gulf War was that the military turned off SA on the commercial GPS system because they couldn't procure enough military equipment so had to use civilian gear [2].
I think Europe was slow to learn the lesson of being completely reliant on the US but we did end up with Glonass and Galileo as a result.
To exert the kind of control the US does through tech platfoorms, the US needs to be predictable and reliable can't be too overt with exerting political influence such that American imperial subjects can pretend they're still independent. This administration has shattered that illusion.
You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation. Either NATO is a scam that exploits Europe, or it's a security umbrella that Europe needs.
The "protection racket", in particular, is very dishonest. The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades, outspending the rest of NATO combined, while the majority of NATO members continuously fail to meet their monetary contributions. Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs if the majority of their military capabilities weren't directly tied to the implied threat of the US military interceding.
America's allies haven't necessarily been that reliable for us either.
During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes, and the US could barely get token naval contributions from allies. The US deployed an entire carrier strike group while Norway sent ten staff officers, the Netherlands sent two, and Finland sent two soldiers. France, Italy, and Spain refused to participate; Denmark contributed a single staff officer while being one of the primary beneficiaries of the US naval protection.
With Operation Epic Fury, the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging, and Spain banned the US and then demanded that the American tanker aircraft leave. The UK refused to provide any support until drones hit a UK base in Cyprus, and even then, their mobilization was extremely slow. They weren't even able to deploy their carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, without getting an escort from France. Canada praised the removal of Iran's nuclear capabilities, while providing no support and heavily criticizing the operation itself.
Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them. The unreliability comes from trade policy (which I think is mostly dumb, but is also very much not a one-way action), hesitancy to fund Ukraine at levels that aren't being matched by NATO allies, and Trump's blustering about "adding a 51st state" (no one seriously believes the US is going to annex Canada).
America will continue to act as a deterrent against military action for her allies, and said allies will still not have to commit to the spending that would be required to field a military that is actually a near-peer to China or Russia.
Having said all of that, I 100% support America's allies building out their own cloud infrastructure and bringing defense R&D and manufacturing back locally. Israel has been moving to cut direct dependency on the US and instead acts as a partner in new joint defense capabilities. I think a similar strategy for Canada and Europe would be best for all.
I'm honestly not sure how practical an EU counterpart to Starshield is, but maybe a partnership with SpaceX would allow them to more realistically diversify while the EU builds up its space capabilities.
> Many people believe that the US annexing Canada is a higher probability than either China or Russia doing so. All three are very low probabilities.
I believe those people are being a bit silly, and their position probably comes from a strong dislike of Trump as a person, and not a genuine belief.
Russia annexed a warm-water port and then shortly after attempted to incorporate Ukraine as part of a plan to remake the USSR. The only thing keeping China from taking Taiwan is the United States.
The US has no desire to annex Canada, and it also has no need to. If Canada proposed statehood or even a territory agreement with the US, I genuinely don't think it would even pass a vote.
The US doesn't have a desire to annex Canada; that's very silly. And the reason Russia doesn't have the capability is because of Canada's alliance with the US.
You list "operations" that occurred after Trump burned bridges with us. Why would we help you after the insults, political meddling, and tariffs? Now go look at the Iraq War and Afghanistan War, when the US invoked article 5 (the only time it's ever been invoked). In those wars, our men and women died fighting for your country.
> You can't simultaneously argue that NATO is a "protection racket" for the US to sell weapons and control European foreign policy, and also argue that the EU would be in trouble without the current levels of US participation.
Sure I can. I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.
> The US has spent 3-4% of GDP on defense for decades ...
Ah, now I get it. This is Trump administration talking points eg [1]. Those talking points are just a shakedown for American defense contractors. Again, just like a protection racket. Because it is a protection racket.
> Most of America's allies would not be able to fund their generous social programs
This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs. Even something like the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund was only tolerated because of Norway's strategic position in the North Atlantic as a foil against the USSR.
> During Operation Prosperity Guardian, Houthis started attacking commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea, directly threatening European trade routes,
America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
But again we come back to the protection racket. You can't both have a protection racket (and, by extension, defang the militaries of the protectorates) AND expect military help, particularly when the entire thing only happened because of the US material support to Israel's genocide.
> With Operation Epic Fury ...
Operation Epstein Fury FTFY
> ... the US asked to use jointly operated bases for staging,
Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran other than the US and Israel. Everybody else, including Europe and other Middle East neighbours, all of whom are American client states, basically, begged the US not to do it. And they did anyway.
So yeah, you're on your own.
> Can we actually be clear on "reliability"? There is not a single defense analyst in the world who seriously believes the US wouldn't IMMEDIATELY defend Canada if Russia launched an offense against them.
Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect any more than Fiji invading the Central African Republic. What are you talking about?
Ignoring the ... less substantive portions of your response
> I can both deny you the means to defend yourself, forcing you to rely on me for protection. That's the definition of a protection racket.
The US didn't deny Europe the means to defend itself. Europe chose not to build those means because it was cheaper to rely on the US. These were domestic political choices made by governments whose voters preferred social programs over defense budgets. A protection racket requires coercion; what the EU received is much closer to a subsidy.
> This is revisionist history at best. The US has done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs.
Can you cite a specific example? The US has broadly pushed for capitalist markets or free trade via policy, but "done their best to undermine and dismantle European social programs" is a very strong claim without evidence. Norway's sovereign wealth fund being "tolerated" because of strategic positioning is, at best, a conspiracy theory. There has been some tension over Norway divesting in American companies for political reasons, but that's hardly the claim you've made.
> America was protecting Israel's trade routes. Let's be clear. European trade routes largely just rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
Rerouting around the Cape added weeks of delay and a high monetary cost to European shipping. Just because European ships could reroute doesn't mean the European economy wasn't significantly impacted. Why did the European trade association publicly beg for more governments to join the operation if the Red Sea shipping was only about Israel?
> You can't both have a protection racket and expect military help
You expect America to adopt a one-way obligation where it provides for the defense of its allies, and receives no help in return? Why wouldn't that deal fall apart?
> Yes, literally nobody wanted the US and Israel to launch an unnecessary, unprovoked and ill-planned war on Iran
You can disagree with the decision to strike Iran. But when Iran retaliates by launching missiles and drones into 12 different countries (11 of which had not participated in the initial strikes against Iran in any way), the question of whether allies will support defensive operations is separate from whether they endorsed the initial strikes.
> Not a single defense analyst would even seriously consider such a prospect
No country would seriously consider it a prospect because the entire might of the US Armed Forces would immediately engage anyone who tried. This despite the fact that Canada has anemic defense spending, a large arctic border with Russia, and strategic assets I'm sure Russia would love to have.
> You expect America to adopt a one-way obligation where it provides for the defense of its allies, and receives no help in return? Why wouldn't that deal fall apart?
If I drop you into a war zone and don't give you a gun, don't you have to kinda do what I say?
> You can disagree with the decision to strike Iran.
There's only one country on Earth that supports attacking Iran and that's Israel [1]. Americans don't support this war [2].
> But when Iran retaliates by launching missiles and drones into 12 different countries (11 of which had not participated in the initial strikes against Iran in any way), the question of whether allies will support defensive operations is separate from whether they endorsed the initial strikes.
What targets did Iran strike in those 11 countries? Was it US military bases? Radar installations? There were also hotels housing US military personnel who had abandoned US bases because the US either chose not to defend them or was unable to.
Everybody, except you it seems, understands America is doing this for Israel and the Gulf states are caught up in this because they house American military bases and provide indirect or direct support an unprovoked war. These arne't innocent bystanders.
> There's a deeper message here. I believe that countries around the world are moving towards a stance that the US is an unreliable partner and that their national security depends on not being reliant upon the US.
That's not a bad thing, because the EU has been a mooch since the end of the Cold War, at least. It's unfortunate it took two terms of Trump for them to finally chance their attitude.
I don't believe they are a mooch at all. But when your biggest ally, and potentially most powerful adversary, becomes unreliable, a change in military policy and funding should be expected. If the EU started talking about invading, would you not reevaluate your military position to ensure you will be safe?
It's common knowledge that most European countries weren't meeting their NATO defense spending commitments for a long time. I'm still not sure if they do even after the post-Ukraine increase in defense spending.
The story I like to tell is about the Manhattan Project. This caused a debate in US strategic circles that set policy for the entire post-1945 world. Debate included whether a preemptive nuclear strike on the USSR was necessary or even just a good idea.
Anyway, many in these circles thought the USSR would take 20 years to develop the bomb if they ever did. It took 4 years. The hydrogen bomb? The USA tested theirs in 1952. The USSR? 1953.
China now has decades of commitment to long-term projects, an interest in national security and creating an virtuous circle for various industries.
The US banned the export of EUV lithography machiens to China but (IMHO) they made a huge mistake by also banning the best chips. Why was this a mistake? Because it created a captive market for Chinese-made chips.
The Soviet atomic project was helped by espionage and ideology (ie some people believed in the communist project or simply thought it a bad idea that only the US had nuclear weapons). That's just not necessary today. You simply throw some money at a few key researchers and engineers who worked at ASML and you catch up to EUV real fast. I said a couple of years ago China would develop their own EUV processes because they don't want the US to have that control over them. It's a matter of national security. China seems to be 3-5 years away on conservative estimates.
More evidence of this is China not wanting to import NVidia chips despite the ban being lifted [1].
China has the same attitude to having its own launch capability. They've already started testing their own reusable rockets [2]. China has the industrial ecosystem to make everything that goes into a rocket, a captive market for Chinese launches (particularly the Chinese government and military) and the track record to pull this off.
And guess what? China can hire former SpaceX engineers too.
I predict in 5 years these comments doubting China's space ambitions will be instead "well of course that was going to happen".
Because of the traitors, the Soviet Union has gained a few years, but the end result would have been the same.
At that time, there were a few good Russian nuclear physicists, and they have also captured many German physicists and engineers.
Actually I think that the effect of the information provided by the traitors was much less in reducing the time until the Soviet Union got the bomb than in reducing their expenses for achieving that.
In the stories that appear in the press or in the lawsuits about industrial espionage the victims claim that their precious IP has been stolen. However that is seldom true, because the so-called IP isn't usually what is really precious.
The most precious part of the know-how related to an industrial product is typically about the solutions that had been tried but had failed, before choosing the working solution. Normally any competent engineer when faced with the problem of how to make some product equivalent with that of a competitor, be it a nuclear bomb or anything else, can think about a dozen solutions that could be used to make such a thing.
In most cases, the set of solutions imagined independently will include the actual solution used by the competitor. The problem is that it is not known which of the imagined solutions will work in reality and which will not work. Experimenting with all of them can cost a lot o f time and money. If industrial espionage determines which is the solution used by the competitor, the useful part is not knowing that solution, but knowing that there is no need to test the other solutions, saving thus a lot of time and money.
also, the knowledge about how a nuclear bomb works wasn't a secret. The way to produce one was the hard part to figure out.
Without the espionage, a industrialised country like the USSR would have figured out how to produce an atomic bomb eventually.
> Because some people committed treason and gave the technology to the Soviets.
American big business is pretty much doing that every day, handing over technology to increase China's manufacturing tech level.
Pretty soon China won't need it anymore. If the massive incompetence of the US government and business establishment is defeated, the the industrial espionage will start to go in the other direction. More likely is the US just declines, becoming little more than a source of raw materials and agricultural products to fuel advanced Chinese industry.
Not sure what the Gruber thing is about. I guess I lack context. But on ZKP, I will agree but add this:
The only authority that can be trusted to do age verification is the government.
You know, those people who give you birth certificates, passports, SSNs, driver's licenses, etc.
The idea that parental supervision here is sufficient has been shown to be wholly inadequate. I'm sorry but that train has sailed. Age verification is coming. It's just a question of who does it and what form it takes.
Take Youtube, for example. I think it should work like this:
1. If you're not of sufficient age, you simply don't see comments. At all;
2. Minors shouldn't see ads. At all;
3. Videos deemed to have age-restricted content should be visible;
4. If you're not logged in, you're treated as an age-restricted user; and
5. Viewing via a VPN means you need age verification regardless of your country of origin.
The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance.
Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors.
None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do.
Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.
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