Ioper
13hr ago
Unlikely given that preschool has been practically universal in the Nordic countries for like three generations and this only showed up in the past 10 years or so, coincidentally at the same time smartphones really proliferated.
Ioper
23hr ago
Detroit, which used to have a higher proportion of functional, employed black men with families (they say, I'd be open to an argument that this is a myth I suppose).
Crime actually started rapidly increasing during the era of high manufacturing employment in Detroit (even if it peaked shortly after the oil crisis) and is correlated much more with the great migration than the subsequent decline in manufacturing employment.
Ioper
1d ago
I believe a lot of the lack of institutional pushback was down to the election of Trump, which made plenty of liberals go insane and abandon their principles. There was both this radicalising force and a desire to close ranks.
Wokism wouldn't have disappeared without Trump but I believe his election supercharged an existing movement that wouldn't have had the same legs without such a convenient and radicalising enemy. For any narrative to really catch on you need the right villain and Trump was just that.
Ioper
15d ago
I don't remember anyone even suggesting publicly owned grocery stores.
I believe KF - Konsum filled that role in Sweden. It wasn't technically publically owned but was so intimately tied with the workers movement that it filled much of the same role that a state owned enterprise would. Nowadays noone talks about it, especially due to the commercial failure and consistently higher prices of COOP. Dissatisfaction is mostly channeled toward some kind of market interventions like anti-monopolistic actions agains the largest commercial actors and in the more radical sphere, price controls.
Ioper
30d ago
This also 100% applies to this forum's rule effectively banning AI. It's a bad rule overall.
While I agree in general, this forum relies on people engaging with long posts in a thread sorted by new. If long posts are easy to generate but costly in time to evaluate then this forum can't really function.
Ioper
1mo ago
And yet Korea, the place with possibly the worst gender relations on earth, accompanied by the lowest TFR by a mile somehow manages to be the world leading producer of romance dramas.
I don't think your theory holds up and this has more to do with what people producing movies and TV shows think people want and whats "in" in their social circles.
There is a massive market for romance out there and a shitton is being produced in America, just not necessarily in film. Romance is the biggest written fiction category by far and accounts for some 25-30% of books sold.
Ioper
15d ago
Wait, Wikipedia says that KF and Konsum were specifically the predecessors of Coop?
Yes?
The Finnish grocery market is similarly dominated by the co-operative S Group, which has also attracted the attention of American progressives, but co-operatives have also always been specifically an alternative to not only standard private enterprise but also public ownership, and have been pushed by non-socialists, too, as such an alternative.
Absolutely and there was some criticism to that effect in the 19th century and early 20th century but the cooperatives and the workers movement got so intertwined that the criticism died down.
Fun fact: Japan has almost 2x the tfr of korea. Japan has managed to stabilise and even reverse the trend somewhat while Korea breaks new records of low tfr every year.
Ioper
1mo ago
You're not boned but it sounds to me like something has to change. Being 'badly burned out" and collapsing after every work day isn't sustainable. You shouldn't worry about being fired, you can always find a new job, you should be worried about actually severe burn out. Burnout where you can't work at all for a long time and possibly never being able to work full time in your current position again.
I don't know what you need to change but something clearly has to. You only have one body. Don't break it.
Ioper
3mo ago
It is not the military that makes the USG "insolvent", it's generous unfunded (mostly elderly) entitlements. Neither America nor much of western Europe ran up these massive deficits during the cold war when military spending was much higher than today. The issue clearly isn't military spending.
And even if one wanted to make cuts to the military it could easily be done without endangering freedom of navigation, by for example making cuts to the army rather than the navy.
Ioper
1mo ago
all major spending was Medicare, Medicaid and defense
There is also the biggest budget post by far: social security.
Ioper
1mo ago
You don't want the type of people who are unemployed to take care of your kids though.
The people you want taking care of your kids are unaffordable since they've better options. The market can't really solve this for the middle class. The best you can do is usually hiring teenage girls from middle class+ families, but they can't do that full time for obvious reasons.
The issue with this analysis is that a lot of it is factually incorrect. College grads make more than ever, easily pay back student loans and unemployment is at historic lows.
AI might take jobs in the future that aren't replaced by other jobs, but that is hardly certain and similar worries have existed in the past.
The only thing real here is the housing crisis and fertility decline. I would add mass immigration to that, which doesn't really seem to create much problems in the US in the sense of unemployment, crime, integration and burdening the welfare systems; but regardless causes much contention, while in Europe it seems more of broader and bigger issue.
Finally, solutions have been proposed to all of these issues and they aren't even hard to implement, it's just that the majority doesn't want to. Its like balancing the American budget, it's super easy but people don't want to (raise taxes, cut (mostly elderly) entitlements). Not even populists who say they want to do it want to do it.
The only thing neo-liberalism is actively opposed to fixing and what seems to be it's downfall is immigration.
Ioper
1mo ago
So it isn't a problem because you plan to cut entitlements and raise taxes? How does that make it different from any other unfunded entitlement?
Ioper
1mo ago
Korean romance dramas aren't exactly realistic romances. If you watch just a few of them you can start to see the formula: Episode 1 introduces high-status guy and average girl who hates everything he stands for, Episode 2 we meet their friends, Episode 3 she befriends his best friend who has a crush on her, Episode 4 high-status guy has physical contact with main character in a plausibly deniable way, ... Episode 10 they kiss, Episode 11 something happens to estrange them, ... Episode 16 they marry and live happily ever after. I'm sure the writers and producers spend enough time watching dramas that they know the tropes, know the formula, and have an instinct for the progression of a good drama.
So? People like formulaic fiction. My point is that lack of romance in western writers personal lives (if that is true in the first place) most likely matters little, given the abundance of evidence the places even worse than the west are producing popular stuff and the west still produces a shitton of written romance that is as popular as it's ever been.
Also, I'm sure that there is a selection bias. We hear about every Marvel and Disney production even when it sucks because there is a large marketing budget targeted at English speakers; we only hear about the Korean dramas when they are actually good. (Counterexample which demonstrates the rule: Squid Game 2 sucked and had a large marketing budget, and I heard about it "organically" before it came out).
Romance dramas are more often than not not prestige dramas. They are relatively low budget affairs promoted to their intended demographic. Nowadays that is done by streaming companies by recommendation, not by billboards. Whether we hear about them or not doesn't really matter, they're watched in massive amounts just like romance fiction is quietly the most read literature genre and we almost never hear about that either. The Koreans were able to enter the market for live action romance because it was grossly underserved in the west.
Only some 15% of the American population currently receives retirement benefits from SS and some 20% are on Medicare. It doesn't seem unreasonable for the rest to be in favor of large cuts here due to their unsustainable nature and limited likelihood to benefit much more people due to the looming insolvency.
Ioper
1mo ago
1/100? Maybe on tinder. They look like 7-8s not >9.9s.
You're doing more to convince me of the poor quality of the median man on tinder than of some great social injustice.
I'm 80% convinced you're just a troll.
Ioper
1mo ago
Discourse on the latch key phenomenon only briefly occured in the 50s-60s in Sweden and didn't amount to much. It completely died down once the municipalities were required to offer after school activities.
As far as I'm aware the majority of kids just went home anyway and that was completely normalised. Practically everyone had a key and went home before their parents from like age 10.
This has been going on for some 60 years now without any drama.
Ioper
1mo ago
People are saying a lot of things and doing little. I've heard similar claims, but haven't seen any meaningful increase in SWE productivity and I've talked with friends and managers at other companies and they say largely the same thing.
The one thing I've seen is a slight cut back in use of consultants, particularly third world ones, but that might as well be a result of cutbacks due to economic uncertainty.
This seems like just partisan politics, nothing religious about it.
Their team bad.
Our team good.
There is an issue? Obviously their team did something bad and we need more funding for our team.
Ioper
30d ago
Of course, text chatting and correspondence is no longer very popular except in niche circumstance,
Have you missed the popularity of discord servers?
While I'd say the only thing easy to answer is "does it compile", reading your other list I'd say I largely agree with your assesment.
LLMs can be a force multiplier for SWEs, but that doesn't mean they're good programmers. They're not programmers at all.
Looking at the points you made in your other post I'd argue that the biggest force multiplier is your first point and that this is a pretty big deal and bigger than people might first realise, especially non-engineers.
The second one is the issue I'm having with claims about LLM usability. Its kind of like dealing with mediocre Indian resources. You have break down and define the problem to such a degree that you've "almost" written the code yourself. This can still be useful and depending on your role very useful, but it isn't effectively replacing local resources either. Its not a method for solving problems but more of an advanced auto complete.
How useful is this? It depends on the situation and indivual and I'd rate it as moderately useful. Having managed developers, it also seems like something that (for some people) can feel like more of a productivity boost than it is due to time being spent differently (I'm not saying you're doing this).
Notice how he didn't say that they're good at coding? He said that they're useful for his job.
LLMs are useful for SWEs, at least for some types some of the time. There is value here but they're poor programmers and to use them effectively you have to be relatively competent.
Its also very easy to fool yourself into thinking that they're much more valuable than they really are, likely due to how eloquently and verbosely they answer queries and requests.
I have friends and family working in law enforcement and the general legal system so they talk about this stuff somewhat regularly.
Pretty unsettling, but on the other hand I don't know of anyone, at all, for whom this has happened IRL. It's like some sort of parallel horror world where people act like monsters as soon as there is a disagreement.
Perhaps it's a class thing or it's just that me and everyone around me has somehow filtered out the crazy.
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