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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • You get more stuff, more status, etc. Or alternatively, penalized, threatened, etc. Whatever it takes to motivate people to do the job. Even if paper money isn’t a thing in communist societies (which it still is), money’s just a symbol for debt. You’re going to get something, somehow, for a job people greatly desire to be done without enough doers and they’ll become “indebted” to you disproportionately for doing it.

    In Soviet society for instance, you might be provided a nice apartment in central Moscow if you were doing something “important”. This assignment would be via your government-controlled employer and their agreements with some other government bureau that officially managed the buildings to dole them out to select people.

    So, same deal as anywhere else, just a different mechanism. Higher ration, bigger dacha, jump to the front of the line to get a car, etc.

    Compensation is usually not much about how dangerous a job is, though. It’s more about how many people are willing to do it for any number of reasons. Some people are just not very risk-adverse, and figure they’re going to be fine at a job that is more dangerous. And they’ll be compensated at a normal level as long as there are enough such people to fill the need.


  • The thing that feels hopeless here is that “dynamic pricing” is like…the natural way to sell stuff if that makes sense? Standardized non-negotiated pricetags evolved as part of the growth of industrialization and mass consumerism. It just wasn’t feasible to have individual salespeople trying to milk each customer out of the most possible money for every transaction for small purchases, and big box stores eliminated the shopkeeper role as a quasi-salesperson who might do that from time to time. But that still IS how many, many sales work today. It’s just that “negotiated prices” are reserved for big ticket items where salespeople get a big enough cut. Real estate, B2B deals, new cars, etc are sold by salespeople whose main job is moneymilking based on what they think they can con the particular buyer into handing over.

    Technology, as the great optimizer, is merely making the job of a salesperson automated enough to be applied at the Taco Bell drivethru using your personal data.







  • They can’t read your mind. A professional painter is going to make the exact image they want in far less time and with more accuracy than repeatedly prompting a black box to make small changes.

    But if you’re an amateur and don’t really know what you want, or you’re not very picky or care about quality, then meh good enough. High level software developers know what they want. They are like painters. And at that point, the LLM isn’t really solving problems for you. At best, it’s putting the paint to the canvas. That is, saving you typing time.

    But time spent typing is definitely not the limiting factor for productivity in software.


  • My partner and I quit watching these after I pointed out that they usually cover small town murders, and almost every time the crime is eventually solved, it’s because the local police suck it up and finally ask for help from the state or FBI who actually know what they’re doing. Similarly, the videos of cold cases that aren’t yet solved rarely mention any involvement of more competent higher levels of police in the investigation.


  • If you’re not planning to volunteer to drive political change, and you’re not going to seriously plan to expatriate, then I suggest blocking the news and the other anxiety-inducing content. I have keyword filters in Boost to exclude lots of political stuff. I also pick the “do not recommend this” for google news posts that are political. Has done wonders for me. All my digital content is fun, hobby related, or general interest news from my area.








  • At least with social media, you can choose what content to engage with or scroll past. A lot of TV news is fear mongering non-news entertainment. I don’t care that someone got arrested after a high speed chase. I don’t care about someone’s dog charity. What your local Sinclair is peddling, let alone Fox, is just about getting you to come back over and over for the ads, and it’s a continuous feed of trash someone else is deciding to put in your face and dub important.

    Feeds also often let you mark content as “not interested” to better personalize for what you consider relevant and newsworthy. So, it’s not necessarily a one-way street there either.



  • Defense, foreign relations, cross-jurisdiction crime, the usual things. But civil law and local criminal policy overridden locally, if voters desire?

    I guess I’m thinking about a situation where let’s say one region wants to trade with some other country, and another doesn’t like that, then tough luck. Or same sex marriage, vehicle emissions rules, etc. That sort of thing. Seems like in places such as the US, voters from the other side of the country can override what your local citizens want if they get enough other external voters to side with them.