The indian coder in SF sends back remittances to his family to live like kings and has the full possibility of returning with whatever savings they have which will go far further in India than the US. It's not a different situation at all. Yes, I too would be willing to work for less if I knew it was purchasing my family a mansion back in my hometown that I can return to as a conquering hero.
Also, yeah, before you even bring it up - people are also willing to work for less in worse conditions when they have a deportation hanging over their head. For that matter, they'd probably be willing to work for even less if we pointed a gun at their head and told em to get cracking or else. I don't want to compete with slaves for wages either - guess I need to adjust my salary expectations.
When you allow people with massively different and negative externalities driving their wage acceptance criteria down to compete with people who don't have the same externalities hanging over their head, you are transferring the consequences of those horsehair swords onto others. Surely the people who didn't previously have to compete with the sword of damocles can at least ask you to stop doing that?
Stop, please.
Drinniol
5d ago
Bro if I paid indian prices for housing and every other good and indian tax rates I could afford to work for indian wages too.
You seem to fail to understand that american companies make america-sized profits by selling in america at american prices - prices that are only affordable to americans because of america-sized wages. If no company pays american wages anymore the whole edifice collapses. It's literally textbook tragedy of the commons here. An individual company thinks they're super smart offshoring, but if every company does it congrats we've achieved total parity with the indian standard of living.
Well first off the best way to make people want to talk about something is to tell them they can't talk about it. And that happened a lot with hbd, the ssc mods literally banned discussion of it for a while.
To be fair, you do have to keep in mind that on reddit having your entire community summarily banned because people are making cogent, well-reasoned, and factually grounded arguments that reddit admins don't like, as opposed to merely posting acceptable content like rape fantasies, is an everpresent threat. So it was understandable.
Hbd is an annoying topic too because it was just constant ping ponging between, "No populations can't possibly differ on genetically derived mental traits even though they are no different genetically than height or skin color or hirsuteness which clearly and measurably differ the average brain is identical between every single human population no matter how you divide them because it just is ok you nazi?" and, "Ok now that we've agreed races differ in intelligence let me explain why every other race but mine are all untermensch and need to be confined to ghettos and we shouldn't waste time educating them."
Drinniol
18d ago
Are you familiar with the concept of sarcasm? Personally, I've never believed in it.
I love Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot btw.
Ah but it wouldn't advance your argument soldier to obtusely pretend to not understand jokes like an inhuman robot in this circumstance, so I'm sure you understand the non-literal subtext perfectly.
Drinniol
23d ago
Companies producing weapons and military vehicles already have tons of laws on them that would prevent them from being purchased or suborned by a foreign power.
Literally all that needed to happen was for the government to identify that REE was critical to defense and apply the same rules to them that they do to other defense critical industries.
Unfortunately, the time to do that was around 30 years ago. But in 1995, with the Soviet Union having fallen, and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in recent memory, and HK still under British control, the government just wasn't thinking about China as a strategic level threat. Thinking ahead 30 years? Eh, they'd probably collapse like the Soviet Union by then anyway, right? Mid/late 90s US was on top of the world, why worry about some rinky dink mining company or two getting bought out by the Chinese?
Drinniol
26d ago
If there is one single issue I think you will have trouble rallying cops to kill feds for I really think, "Actually we don't need to allow law enforcement to use greater force on criminals and we should decriminalize even more vagrancy and brazen public lawlessness" is it.
It is nearly infinitely more likely the cops grab their own balaclavas and join the NG and ICE than line up against them. Fuck, this is the purge most city cops have been itching for. They're gonna instead form a human wall against it because the dem apparatchik who 6 months ago was calling for their total defunding and disbandment tells em to? One might even think that constantly claiming the cops are racist murderers might not endear them to your cause.
France has also been rather running into this issue. It turns out that when you constantly side with criminals over cops that cops are less inclined to take massive personal risks just because you tell them to. And, of course, the politicians dearly want to gut the police for this but they also need them more than ever.
Drinniol
26d ago
Police, despite being dressed in blue, are overwhelmingly red. I find it hard to believe that a significant amount of local or staties would be willing to shoot feds even if given orders to that effect.
Drinniol
26d ago
Well, one thing the democrats could do to better earn my vote is stop publicizing how they hate me and hold me in utter contempt but will pretend otherwise just long enough to get my vote.
In all these inside baseball articles it's never that dems hate white men that's the issue. The issue is merely that white men (ew) have picked up on it and (ugh) are still allowed to vote (gross). "And anyway, we need to figure out how to lie most effectively to convince those 'people' that we don't hate them."
I mean, even if they went full court press tomorrow, White Boy Fall, do they really think anyone would believe it? No amount of cauc worship will help if I know from your own fucking articles that you're completely disingenuous.
Drinniol
1mo ago
Can you?
Can the 55 year old accountant with a bum leg and asthma really be James Bond if he just REALLY tries?
Can he really be Genghis Khan? Would it be wise or even good if he could?
A high-speed car chase in VR is fun and thrilling. In real life, it's tragic and destructive.
But no, people can't have everything they want in life. A big part of growing up for most people, who are ordinary, is coming to terms with and accepting that you are, in fact, not special - and that's ok. You'll never be famous, you'll never make a great scientific discovery, you'll never make a speech that shakes the world, you'll never have 1 second let alone 15 minutes of fame. Hell, for most, you'll never even be an ordinary rich guy. Sure, people shouldn't be complacent and should work to get what they can, but don't pretend that there aren't limits especially for the 50% of the population below the median. Because that's the brutal truth: there is always a bottom half.
Why shouldn't they be allowed some escapism?
Drinniol
1mo ago
I mean, it's family - children, specifically - that has historically been the fundamental anchor of the social unit. Relationships that can't or won't bear children are fundamentally different than those that will.
Drinniol
1mo ago
For the race conscious crowd, immigration can not ever be a solution to a fertility problem.
Suppose you were an ethnic nationalist Japanese man concerned about replacement rates. Would it really save Japan, in your view, if Japanese birth rates never recovered, but you replaced every single Japanese person with an Indian over 75 years, so that in three generations there are no Japanese people on this Earth, but there are 200 million "Japanese" Indians, and the GDP line never stopped going up?
I mean, we're constantly told that H1B's are for absolutely essential roles and skills that can't be found in the US at all for any price.
Ok. Then companies will gladly pay another 100k for that, no H1bs should even be affected - being so essential and irreplaceable, right?
I mean, the only way this move could actually wreck the H1b system is if... somehow... in defiance of everything we're constantly told... those skills DO exist in the US, and for less than 100k extra. But... that would mean the entire H1b system is just state-sponsored undercutting of American labor, and always has been. Strange.
Watching people argue themselves in knots about this issue has been quite amusing. I mean, we're told that cost is not even a factor - not even a factor! - in hiring H1bs. No no, the skills simply don't exist among American workers! It's not that we're dramatically undercutting the labor market and that the skills ABSOLUTELY exist, and in quantity, but for 50k more a year. It's not that we're importing foreigners as scabs against American labor, the skills just DON'T EXIST.
But if that's true... why does raising the cost of H1bs by less than the median tech salary suddenly destroy the entire edifice? I mean, if these skills really don't exist in the US, I guess American companies just need to pony up. But it's not companies panicking about the extra cost that they just HAVE to eat, is it? It's H1bs and the entire grift industry around it that are panicking. Wait, but... that means... cost is a factor. In fact, if H1bs are panicking that costing 100k more to be employed is going to make them unemployable... that necessarily implies that cost was the ONLY factor that led to them being employed... So, the entire system is, was, and always has been a lie. It was always and only and forever about hiring foreign workers for cheaper than Americans. Oops, the Emperor has no clothes.
Drinniol
1mo ago
This is that - but note it was necessary for the right to respond in kind to create the consequences that would deter it in the first place.
As Arjin noted, when someone bombs you, and you don't like that - and you maybe even think nobody should bomb anyone - that doesn't mean it's hypocrisy to bomb them back.
Si vis pacem para bellum. To create a world without war you must be able to wage war.
Drinniol
2mo ago
It doesn't take much effort for a civilization higher on the scale from us to send a kinetic kill vehicle.
Indeed, the idea of an interstellar invasion is ridiculous. Preemptive extermination of all other intelligences, however, makes a disturbing amount of sense from a game theoretic perspective.
Drinniol
2mo ago
Wouldn't is correct.
"Only enter information you wouldn't mind being leaked"
Drinniol
4mo ago
Let me argue for the other side: Disability assistance is providing money to those with the inability to financially support themselves. Stephen Hawking did not require disability assistance, despite being significantly disabled, because his intellect provided him the ability to provide for himself. It makes perfect sense to account for intellectual ability if making the holistic judgment on whether someone's net ability makes them employable. Just consider them to be suffering from a mild intellectual disability on top of their physical one.
But, I largely agree that it reaches a degree of ridiculousness. Where does it end? If someone can't hold down a job due being totally lazy and refusing to arrive on time, I guess they're temporally disabled and we owe them our money.
But wait, let me change the above scenario: the person in question has severe fetal alcohol syndrome. Do they deserve disability now? How about a severe head injury yielding the same result? How about they have absolutely no diagnosable issue but just have 1/10,000,000 shit genes for intellect and conscientiousness?
Drinniol
4mo ago
You misunderstand significantly what they spent $1,000 on. It's per task, not per query. I remember the results this article is summing up. If you look at the originak source, you'd see that it's 1k dollars per task... using a super chain of thought reasoning workflow, spinning up a ton of separate agents, running and restarting up to budget, and taking the best result. Very, very far from a thousand dollars per query. Each task was probably thousands of queries.
When they weren't trying to brute force the benchmark by trying the same model thousanda of times, it was around 17-20 dollars per task. Again, the arc agi tasks are not single queries. https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough
Drinniol
4mo ago
And not a word about open weight models?
I can run Qwen2.5VL on my desktop and it can read tables and documents visually. That alone is a multi-billion dollar value proposition for office work. And it's not monetized, it's free. But you can build things with it and monetize that.
I agree with you that when it all shakes out proprietary ultra-massive b2b saas AI will not be the thing that really shakes up society or industry. But AI is here to stay - I can already run shit that would have been nigh miraculous 2 years ago on my damn phone, locally.
Drinniol
5mo ago
I mean if it's out there it's out there, it will be seen. At least if you rt yourself people who see it will also see your response.
Drinniol
6mo ago
Well, of course, those that have died in the war don't drag down the average standard of living, being dead.
But if you did still count them, how much would being dead when they otherwise would have been alive move the average?
If I take 100 people, kill 99, and give all their money to the last 1 alive, I suppose I've dramatically increased the average income and the average standard of living, haven't I?
Drinniol
7mo ago
The cynical take was that "learn to code" was a deliberate push to oversaturate the technology worker market in order to break the power and unity of a dissident and growing political-economic block. Tech workers were getting too big for their britches, too expensive, and too socially/politically powerful. But now that there's 100 people applying instantly on linked in for every single tech job, and laid-off mid-level devs are taking 5 (even 6!) digit pay cuts just to get back to work (which also completely shuts out fresh grads even more since they are now competing with people who actually have experience)? Not so much.
The rise of a competitor to the PMC successfully quashed. But we see as well the power of all those gatekeeping institutions in other professions. Why was tech so easy to flood with workers as opposed to something like medicine? Because there's no big regulatory credential bottleneck.
Even if AI rapidly reaches the point where it could begin replacing doctors - it won't, because of the massive regulatory, legal, and credentialing edifice. That is, even if it becomes true that any guy of moderate intellect with just a bit of training and a fine-tuned LLM could statistically match the average primary care physician, that still can't happen. He can't be your PCP, because he doesn't have an MD. And as we all know, you need an MD to be a doctor and do doctor things. That's just the way things work. Which is great for doctors, not so good for everyone else.
Rideshare apps completely slaughtered traditional cabs and cabbies, especially the racket of medallions. Sucks to be some poor cabbie who saved up for years to get his own medallion only to have his entire investment torpedoed. But, it was ultimately a good thing and made car service infinitely more accessible and cheaper for everyone else.
What I'm saying is we need to break the hold of the MD over medicine. This will absolutely suck for doctors who already have their MD, who will see their wages drop tremendously as they are forced to compete with people who didn't take on six-figure debt and invest the better part of a decade getting an MD. It will, however, dramatically reduce healthcare costs and increase healthcare accessibility. I'm not saying you get rid of credentialing entirely - but there's no reason that every single doctor needs to do a whole ass MD where they take tons of classes and rotations on specialties they will never use. There's certainly a use for such well-rounded physicians, but it's frankly absurdly wasteful to have someone with 10+ years of higher education spending all of their time doing rote carpal tunnel releases that someone could learn to do in a few weeks. We're already seeing this emerge inefficiently and chaotically with the rise of the nurse practitioner solely because of the dire need, but what really needs to happen is a massive, widespread and deliberate reduction in the legal privileges of the MD in terms of "only an MD can legally do this."
Drinniol
7mo ago
Not off the top of my head, in regards to painting. I was just giving an example of conservative subject matter that would not fly far in contemporary art circles. You raise a good point that one of the issues is the constant drive for novelty, which I think comes at the cost of alienation from more universal experiences and values that could reach a larger audience.
I'm more familiar with Christian music. POD is an example of a Christian group that was very contemporary and found wider market success when I was younger. I like Alive and Youth of the Nation by them. Looking them up, I hadn't realized they were still going, I need to check out their recent stuff.
Is it sad that I don't recognize that a set can both have members and be empty? That two could be the same as one? That yes could be the same as no?
It is in this sense that I do not recognize that "good" and "bad" are things that exist outside of moral agents.
Those things would indeed be sad to believe if they were false, and furthermore that believing the false thing stunted your capacity to properly engage with the most important aspects of existence.
Do you ever meditate?
But you are imagining it. It would be literally impossible to "morally sense" something you do not imagine.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Yes, it's impossible to consider a thing without... considering it. I can't consider the truth of falsity or a proposition without thinking about it. This is just tautologically true, Cogito ergo sum level stuff. I don't understand why you're bringing it up.
I'm aware. Curiously, in all societies I've seen including the most robust ones, children are deliberately taught to discern right and wrong in the correct way as described by the society, often significantly differing per society.
The ways in which they differ are less than the ways they are the same, but I already know your explanation for that. Cultures that practice horrendous human sacrifice are rare, (and unstable - though I suppose that explains their rarity).
You seem to either be bluntly reasserting your belief or pointing out a contradiction. I see no contradiction. Wicked men feeling shame is good for others, not them. Of course the shamed person is not supposed to feel good.
But this is the fundamental disagreement. Wicked men feeling shame is good for them. It is, among other things, a necessary step towards contrition and redemption.
But, nihilist that you are, I suppose you think that it is equally well and good that a man be a monstrous tormentor of others as a benevolent saint, provided their internally coherent self-satisfaction is the same. Being a moral relativist, it isn't as if you believe the man could actually BE good, so BELIEVING he's good is the closest thing.
I'm still awaiting your method for discerning the shame you feel at having done bad things from the shame you feel because a part of your correct (obviously) moral sense has been deliberately taught out of you.
Careful meditation, introspection, reflection, thought, and mindfulness. It is a lifetime a hard work and it never stops. Nobody said being good comes easy. I fall short in many ways (as do we all), but I don't then declare that my moral failings are fine, because it's all just relative.
My method, if you were curious, is that there is no difference and that exaniming and understanding the source and mechanism of shame is important if you want to reach anything that could be described as "good".
That certainly seems easier, a shame it is wrong.
Drinniol
7mo ago
Well there's not much to argue about. As far as utility goes, I think your nihilistic worldview is not only wrong, but cleaves you off from the most important and fulfilling parts of life. I think you don't even know what you're missing.
If I were to talk to someone who was, for whatever reason, seemingly congenitally incapable of love - and they argued about how, really, they preferred it this way... how could I possibly disabuse them of that notion when they don't even have a concept for what they're missing out on?
Arguing about trees when the forest is burning down, or are you seriously contending that immigration - legal and otherwise - as well as offshoring, has not seriously depressed US labor wages in nearly every sector?
And yes, the fact is that US companies using offshored sweatshop slavery destroyed much of the US factory labor class. This is terrible in its own right -I shouldn't need to connect it to coders for you to care - but yes, this depresses coding wages too. The economy is interconnected and the general state of labor prices affects wages everywhere.
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