Seems inevitable once multi-modal reasoning 10x's everything. You don't even need robotics, just attach it to a headset Manna-style. All skilled blue collar work instantly deskilled. You see why I feel like I'm in a bind?
Way I figure, or what I worry about anyhow, is most of the well paying jobs involve an awful lot of typing, developing, writing memos or legal opinions.
And say like LLMs get good enough to displace 30% of the people that do those. That's enormous economic devastation for workers. Enough that it might dent the supply side as well by inducing a demand collapse.
If it's 90% of all jobs (that can't be done by a robot or computer) gone, then how are all those folks, myself included, going to find money to feed ourselves? Are we going to start sewing up t-shirts in a sweatshop? I think there are a lot of unknowns, and I think the answers to a lot of them are potentially very ugly
And not, mind, because AI can necessarily do as good a job. I think if the perception is that it can do a good enough job among the c-suite types, that may be enough
I think the root of many problems is housing costs
I'm somewhere around your age, and I also wonder what the future of software development work looks like. I don't know that I'd direct my kids towards the field; maybe this is just a temporary bumpy patch and it'll improve, but it is hard to say.
One thing I think is that being 40-50 or so means that there is plenty of runway for a second career. Could retrain for something, nursing, cpa, lawyer, trades? Just have to have the savings for making that transition
My thoughts are similar, but I think the cost of commercial space is also driving costs up for everyone, so I classify it as "rent." I'd love to see data, but small businesses (at least in certain sectors) seem bare able to survive--opening and closing constantly.
But, to get to a root cause, I think we have to keep asking why. Why are rents high? One reason is that cities seem unwilling to rezone. Okay, why is city council/the mayor unwilling to rezone (sometimes vast swaths of single family homes?) Voters? Corruption? Something else?
There are several root causes we can potentially drill further down to, but making headway will likely require hard work and involvement in our communities. You could always try running for something and becoming a politician.
My point is: when looking for the "root cause" of these problems, people shouldn't stop asking when they get to the rent being high, that's a symptom.
Additionally, if people care about helping younger generations, it's within reach to jump in and help shape the communities they'll be living in. E.g. If an issue is zoning, go to zoning meetings.
Yes, I think we need to reform zoning and build like crazy. With everything costing a million dollars on the west coast, I don't see why there isn't a crane every block putting up a new building
The problem isn't as much that wages are depressed as "The Rich" is the average person in the older generation that bought housing when an appropriate amount was being built, then lessened the amount of housing so that there's not enough for future generations.
Class analysis must account for the strongest political class being real-estate asset holders that don't set wages but do benefit from a shortage of that real-estate asset.
> "The Rich" is the average person in the older generation that bought housing when an appropriate amount was being built
That's one of the fallacies here, thinking that upper middle class is "The Rich". If you think of it as a whole, you will see that the current trajectory means that the overall amount of property that the middle class owns collectively can only go down. Any house that was bought for dime by the older generation but cannot be retained by the following will drop out of the middle class. And it's not going to be spread among the poor but goes up to those who can still afford it: the actual rich.
Thus the middle class slowly but surely bleeds out and all landownership will remain with the super rich. The older middle class is just a temporary place for assets. Once they have gone the situation I layed out will become more and more obvious.
> And it's not going to be spread among the poor but goes up to those who can still afford it: the actual rich
Which will be the children of the older generation of the middle class.
Lack of housing supply is fueling huge economic inequality that wasn't there before.
The situation you layout is not very clear to me, specifically what is meant by "super rich." How do the older middle class lose out and not become "the rich," specifically?
I think the best description of what I'm talking about is the book The Asset Economy by Adkins et al.
The older middle class have assets that they acquired when those assets cost a fraction of the new price. The older middle class die and try to leave it to their heirs. If asset prices are higher than what a middle class income can afford, the middle class can only own property if they have inherited it. No new property is going to be owned by the middle class as a whole.
There are plenty of ways, however, that property leaves the middle class. If your inheritance tax or property tax (both a percentage of the inflated asset "value"), e.g., exceeds what a middle class income can manage, the property will be sold. If you have used it for a loan to, e.g., start a business and you become ill or your plan fails, you might have to sell it.
Who is going to buy these properties? If a middle class income can't afford property prices anymore, who is left? The middle class can only afford those houses by swapping their property for it.
Therefore, the overall amount of properties owned by the middle class can only shrink. It baffles me that this isn't obvious to everyone.
Now, who is "The Rich" in this scenario?
Those of the middle class who own property will do so because they inherited it, not because they were able to afford it through their income. They might be able to swap it for another property and hope not to make a loss. Their income is still middle class, however. They can't use those inflated property values unless they sell which leaves them without said property.
The rich are those who have enough income to increase their portfolio of assets despite of inflated prices, solely to park their money somewhere. Those aren't your middle class mom and pop who bought a house in the 80s and then a flat in the 90s. And the rich are also not the ones who inherit that house or flat but still earn a middle class income.
There will be a sharp divide between the middle class that was lucky enough to inherit land and the middle class that wasn't so lucky. Reading comments like yours makes me believe that there will be a lot of finger pointing towards the lucky ones. Because those are the ones you can see. The ones who are inflating housing prices by their demand to park their vast amounts of money stay invisible. The ones that will be attacked are the upper middle class, just to pull them down. Like crabs in a bucket.
I think we agree, though I find your use of the term "class" very confusing. The ones who bought cheap are already rich in these high-demand low-supply parts of the country.
The fingers must pointed exactly at the ones who are keeping prices high by suppressing housing supply, namely the rich homeowners who still consider themselves "middle class" or even "working class" despite owning assets that none in the working class or middle class could ever afford. These are the rich people who are controlling the local policy that changes their social class. It is not REITs or bankers, it is the very folks with large assets who work to keep their prices sky high by keeping housing optkons limited.
This is absolutely not anything like crabs in a bucket, with people with less pulling down those who succeed. It is in fact the exact opposite, those with housing assets who work to prevent any more housing from being built have put people into the pot by making the game a finite sum with limited housing.
Unaffordable housing comes from inadequate supply, which comes from older generations not permitting enough housing to be built in the high-demand areas.
Where I come from, you do not become a millionaire by working an average job. If you don't happen to be at a C level position, you will never become millionaire level rich by working for other people. If you have a middle class income, it means you have no more than middle class maneuverability. It isn't enough to become a multi millionaire under your own power. You have to start your own company or repeatedly make very good investments to really move up.
Owning something that suddenly has an inflated value does not necessarily make you rich.
Let's say you own a car. You need that car (maybe to take care of a relative). You can afford your car with your middle class income. Over night it gets replaced by a golden car worth 1 million dollars. If it's the only golden car, you are rich. You can sell the golden car and replace it with a reasonably priced one and still have about a million dollars.
But it's different if in the same night all cars become golden cars, including every car leaving the factory. Even 20 year old cars in dire need of repair have become golden one million dollar affairs. Now you're not rich. You can only exchange your golden car for another golden car.
If you sell your car and use the money for anything else, you will never in your entire life own a car again, because your income just can't provide for it.
That's how people stay middle class with a middle class income even though the house they live in suddenly is worth a million. It's about maneuverability.
> Unaffordable housing comes from inadequate supply, which comes from older generations not permitting enough housing to be built in the high-demand areas.
Unaffordable housing has to do with demand and supply, yes. What many people overlook is that not all demand stems from people wanting to live somewhere.
Land ownership has become an attractive way to park money the last 15 years. And there is a lot of money that needs parking. The last burst of a housing bubble caused one of the biggest ways to park money - lending to other people - to shrink dramatically (mixing subprime loans as a marketable bundle turned out to be a bad idea). Interest rates went down, making it even less attractive. The money now gets put into an equally inflated stock market, some of it into Silicon Valley style venture capital bets, and another huge chunk into real estate. So there are a lot of very rich and influential people who would lose a lot of money if those house prices would start to fall.
And even if you would meet the demand of those people who just want a place to live, you will not satisfy the demand for investments.
Large capital is not controlling the housing supply, though. That's entirely done at the local level by the petit bourgeois, which are the NIMBYs. You can read their investment filings which openly state this, even. Or go to any local government meeting.
On the software side - I'm not sure I'd recommend CS as such, but I know plenty of software engineers that have some alternative kind of technical background and enough CS classes or self-taught knowledge that they were able to be successful. Like physics, electrical engineering. Disciplines like Aerospace eng or Biomedical eng have great systems engineering backgrounds and often CS coverage too.
I'd make a recommendation to hedge one's bets even if they wanted to go into software to see if they wanted thought an adjacent field with transferable skills would be a good fit and offer multiple opportunity paths.
> I think the root of many problems is housing costs
for us, family of 4, it's 1) housing, 2) healthcare (unless you're lucky enough to have a really good employer-sponsored plan that covers dependents or allows them to buy in at employee-negotiated rates, which I don't), 3) education (college for the kids, and the high cost of anything besides public school, I don't mean private schools but even just summer camps etc.)
I look to the future and have a lot of anxiety about how my kids are going to make it
Think about it, you're heating the milk up enough to kill the bacteria right? That's what I'm talking about.
It's funny because when people are instructed by their doctors to eat yogurt to get beneficial bacteria back in their gut, the companies are having to cultivate the bacteria the again, then add it back to the pasteurized dairy to replace the stuff that was killed by pasteurization.
It's like people adding minerals back to water that was filtered to remove everything.
To most people, "nutritional content" means the protein and sugar on the label. There is a lot more to what your body needs though that what is on that little label.
Again, I don't think raw milk is for everyone, but there are reasons why people drink it when they could get the cheaper pasteurized stuff.
"It's like people adding minerals back to water that was filtered to remove everything."
This is a great comparison - I'd much rather they filter out the minerals and the shit and then put the minerals back than have me drink the water with shit still in it.
Sure, but you have to admit that it's still impossible to know if the final product is equally the same as the unadulterated version right?
If it was possible to have a perfect food (or drink) that was totally identical to the theoretically perfect natural version then everyone would want that.
Currently, we have to pick between mostly-working set of alternatives: more natural, more risk or less natural, less risks.
Sure, I know for a fact that the final product isn't the same - this is a good thing. I think you're falling for the fallacy that natural is better. At a most basic level, our ancestors proved hundreds of thousands if not millions of years ago that this is false - natural meat is uncooked meat, but both the bio-availability of the protein and the safety of the food increases with cooking.
I would argue your comparison is itself a fallacy of equivalency. There are certain things in nature you cannot (and should not) consume (cooked or uncooked).
Certain foods like milk are the most basic/only source of nutrients for mammals from the time of birth. This isn't anything like raw meat or poisonous berries.
> I would argue your comparison is itself a fallacy of equivalency. There are certain things in nature you cannot (and should not) consume (cooked or uncooked).
This doesn't address my example. You can consume raw meat, and we used to, before we had fire. Now there's some meat that's not great to consume uncooked. Chicken should be cooked. But beef? We can eat that raw, but there are considerations to ensure it's safe, and it's easier, tastier, and better for you to consume it cooked.
> Certain foods like milk are the most basic/only source of nutrients for mammals from the time of birth. This isn't anything like raw meat or poisonous berries.
Again, an appeal to nature. Most mammal's drink milk only at the beginning of their lives and stop once they can consume other food sources. Regardless, raw milk straight from the teet of a mammal's mother is not the same as the raw milk in stores. Modern agricultural practices have ensured that diseases can easily travel between creatures, infesting the milk, which is what pasteurization solves.
> then add it back to the pasteurized dairy to replace the stuff that was killed by pasteurization.
Not quite. They add one or a few strains back that are known to be safe. When you ferment raw milk, you run the risk of other strains being present which can harm you. If they don't create evidence of contamination, you really have no way of knowing.
What reason do we have to believe that the whole package from milk is one worth receiving? I can get heaps of diverse beneficial bacteria from plenty of other sources. What’s milk offering that’s unique or special?
I’m asking sincerely. I’ve never bothered looking into it.
To answer one of your questions directly, it's the only thing that works for young mammals, it's got to have some unique mixture in it by that fact alone.
However, we're not all babies. I think lots of other sources can be just as beneficial, but this thread was about milk.
Yes? Isn't that the whole point? It has a bunch of biological content that needs to be broken down. The nutritional content changes while sitting on the shelf, why wouldn't heat affect that?
> According to a systematic review and meta-analysis, it was found that pasteurization appeared to reduce concentrations of vitamins B12 and E, but it also increased concentrations of vitamin A.
Thankyou for that. I will check it out! Maybe one day the decoding project can ingest all the sound content.
Reading through the rules I like these people already. They prefer high quality .wav files as do I. Not sure if I have the skills to edit to their standard but I will try.
So long as the tap water is correctly treated, it's not going to give you fluorosis, but in the event the plant breaks and no one is testing the water, it can happen
Sure, their can be industrial accidents. But just because some company made a radiation therapy device that accidentally fataly irradiated people, doesn't mean that radiation isn't an effective treatment for cancer
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