> Tech communities like this skew more libertarian
Indeed, this is historically a forum with lots of "temporarily embarrassed billionaires".
My observation is the opposite of the GP - that labor identity and consciousness (not "liberalism") is rising here, pushed in no small part by the transformation in labor value that LLMs have caused.
> The demand is already there. It's the supply that is the issue.
Somehow many societies are able to power a huge amount of transportation via electrified rail and bus systems. That's an existing solution that requires zero new technology.
And of course there are EVs for places that somehow can't figure out how to do electrified mass transit.
Wrong. Storage is the issue. In my town in switzerland we produce a surplus of solar energy, so much that we can't even sell it back to the electricity company.
But the storage is too limited. The surplus during the summer doesn't translate to the winter months so other types of electricity generation is still required.
And what's great about EVs is that they are also storage. In winter you can buy electricity from places that do have solar potential - it's not far from Switzerland.
That is still demand destruction: under supply of a resource triggers substitution activity which means the demand for that specific good never returns after.
> my first thought is "wow, that's a lot. And some of those aren't even in the same family of language?"
The meaning of the historical linguistics term "family" doesn't map directly to our common usage.
A language family is a collection of languages for a which we can identify a significant number of shared core historical grammatical and lexical features.
Just because languages belong to different families doesn't mean they don't have a shared ancestry, just that we can't see it in the modern languages.
If anything, in PNG population genetics identifies the highland populations as closely genetically related, but their languages have diverged to the point that signs their shared ancestry have been lost.
There is an theory that the linguistic diversity PNG represents the state of human societies in Southwestern Asia just before the emergence of agriculture - possibly explaining why many ancient attested languages like Sumerian, Elamite, and Assyrian which were in close proximity appear to be entirely unrelated to each other.
> You can print money, but you can only ""print"" oil for a short time from reserves, which the US and China have been draining.
What's different between the two is that apparently China hasn't made an equivalent dent in its oil reserves, despite no significant reduction in travel, and despite reducing its import demand by 1 OPEC.
It's not entirely clear how - but theories include shifts from flights to train travel and shifts from gasoline cars to EVs.
Apparently the main reason they have started buying crude again is not for internal consumption as much as taking advantage of the massive crack spread in refined petroleum products (like diesel) which they export.
> It's not entirely clear how - but theories include shifts from flights to train travel and shifts from gasoline cars to EVs.
From a distance, those look like pretty sound theories.
It's wild that the pols and talking heads in the US have been screeching about how "dangerous" China is since the 90s (I remember family members making crude jokes about why I should be learning Mandarin instead of Spanish in middle school) and, yet, here we are doing everything we can to hand them the reins of world power.
> China hasn't made an equivalent dent in its oil reserves
I think the easiest explanation is that this probably isn't true. The US SPR is underground, it would be quite easy for China to manage its equivalent in secret, for whatever reasons.
The Chinese EV shift is real and significant, though.
Not really. It is very hard and expensive to get these oil well pumping again. That is why we had negative oil prices during covid. Plus, when we are talking about the Gulf states, they have extremely low production cost. The discount would be against world prices, not production cost.
> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
Unless the child is immunosuppressed, outside of a novel pandemic scenario, a vaccinated child is not likely to contract a very serious infection beyond the common cold or flu by being in childcare. Much of that can be mitigated by giving parents the flexibility (sick leave) to keep their children home while ill.
> I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
Perhaps you are uniquely susceptible? I don't think this generalizes to most people if they practice public hygiene habits like washing your hands when arriving at the office.
I dunno man my wife takes care of our one-year-old not just staying at home but going to the library and stores and the nearby petting zoo and stuff, and he's only been sick once, after a long day of air travel where my wife and I got sick as well—whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and such. Just something I've noticed, is all.
Outside of society being oriented around having my wife work and sending our son to daycare rather than having her raise him at home, everything's going great so far, one year in.
> whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and s
Probably just the common cold most of the time. My nose was runny through most of my childhood too. And kids are snotty - always have been - it's not necessarily a condition that needs to be fixed. If it's bothersome to you, then of course avoid group childcare.
Also, some diseases like chicken pox are preferable to contract as a child and gain immunity to then - since they are far worse symptomatically to contract as an adult.
Chicken pox isn't a concern due to vaccines. Common colds especially for very small children are a bit more of a concern due to ear infections. I'd like to avoid putting tubes in my son's ears if possible.
> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
That's a different problem that would be better addressed by mandatory paid parental leave and universal healthcare - so new parents can afford not to work while their child is an infant.
> or the caste system (unthinkable in Islam or Christianity, a base part of reality in Hinduism), etc.
The historical prominence of the slave trade in both the Christian and Islamic worlds should make it quite clear that it was hardly "unthinkable" but instead very rationalizable.
Rigid systems of social power hierarchy and oppression based on ancestry, perceived race, and occupation (which is a lot of what the worst part of caste is) were very much features of Christian and Islamic societies, even if their religions didn't codify them.
Right, but that proves nothing. The fact that human beings who profess religion R engage in behaviour B does not imply that B results from said profession of R. But I think you'd struggle to argue that the caste system doesn't result from Hinduism.
> But I think you'd struggle to argue that the caste system doesn't result from Hinduism.
The "Hindu" caste system results from the history of social hierarchy in the Indian subcontinent. What you are calling "Hinduism" is a relatively recent construct that has emerged as a response to religions with more centralized/uniform doctrines and institutions. There are belief systems categorized under this "Hinduism" label that overtly reject caste systems (and have done so for centuries), while others overtly uphold it.
Other societies also have caste systems, just differently rationalized than the one present in some belief systems that fall under the "Hindu" banner. I'm not excusing any of these systems whether Hindu or not - they are all a blight on humanity - but they are also a feature of many societies whether or not they use the particular term "caste".
Some clear examples of excluded/oppressed castes outside of the South Asian context are the Burakumin in Japan, the al-Akhdam in Yemen, and the Mestizos with more indigenous ancestry in Latin America.
True, I was speaking loosely, but that doesn't affect the point. If you change my statement to 'the caste system results from some belief systems categorized under the Hindu label' then the original point (which is that you find enormous differences resulting from different belief system) stands.
The existence of caste systems outside Hinduism doesn't change this either.
Some objects are red in and of themselves, while others can be made red by something outside them. Likewise, some beliefs cause people to act in certain ways, while other people may act in the same ways tangentially to, or even despite, their belief.
As long as the first two letters in LLC hold up, lots of people would be willing to enter into a new market that appears to have a lot of potential upside and profit, with the downside limited to whatever they invested, or borrowed, to get it going.
Why would they do that? Their goal is to stay in the good graces of the administration, to avoid financial or legal retribution.
If you think conscientious resistance is anywhere on the agenda of these corporations, I'd refer you to the inauguration photos and donation list, and the various acts of public supplication by their executives.
I don't even think it's wrong for them to do any of that - at least now the mask is off - but people should stop looking to corporations to take moral stances, despite their attempts over decades to convince you to attribute morality to them.
I think looking at a for-profit corporation to take a moral stance is like expecting the police to plant trees, or the local school board to pave the roads, or the DMV to run health policy.
It's the wrong type of organization for that. It's not set up for it, its incentives are wrong, and its structure is wrong. Organizations are set up to do a certain job and structured and staffed to do that job.
It's why a functioning society needs multiple types of social organizations with different functions. Don't expect any organization to do what it wasn't made to do.
In this case, a public company is pretty much helpless against the US executive branch. One tweet from Trump could crash their stock. One investigation could wreck a major venture of theirs. One tariff could kill one of their major lines of business. So they're going to suck up because they have no power to do anything else.
The entire reason we treat corporations as independent entities, rather than as the extensions of the government that they are, is that they are supposed to be institutions executing on their own imperatives, and protected to do so under the rule of law. If owners and management of corporations can't take moral stances, then who else can do so at scale?
If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator (on an issue as simple as data provenance) because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start directly democratically regulating them - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.
> If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government,
Ironically, in this narrow way, the US is becoming more like China: authoritarian control in the functioning of corporations. In the case of the current US administration, it ends up being poorly thought out policies like broad tariffs without industrial policy to support them, and shallow nationalist stunts like this.
> then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start democratically regulating them directly - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.
The only way this happens is if Congress claws back the power it had ceded to the Presidency (which the current administration has even overstepped). That will only happen when US voters start electing representatives who are not controlled by those corporations. We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.
> We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.
I fully agree here! Although I think it's too kind to characterize it as "compliance". Once you get past the sheer incompetent and histrionic theatrics, this seems to be the primary goal behind the backers of Grumpism - keep destroying what's left of the US government so they can keep on expanding the scope of unaccountable corporate government based on unilaterally-set "policies".
Corporations are extensions of the government? I think an argument can be made for the opposite view (lobbying, the military-industrial complex, regulatory capture, DOGE) but I suspect the reality is tentacles of influence going in both directions.
Yes, every US-domestic corporation has been chartered by a state government. Every corporation that operates in the US has gotten a license from each state it operates in. Corporations (/LLCs) aren't just mere groups of people, rather they have a government-created liability shield.
> the reality is tentacles of influence going in both directions.
I completely agree with this as well. Which is why when taking them to task we need to not stop at the line of "independent entities", where they can comfortably retreat to and regroup until the political time is ripe. For example one of the hopeful approaches to reforming Citizens United involves changing state laws to constrain what chartered/licensed corpos can do.
Yes, that would be one way to do it - split up their power so they don't have coercive power to infringe upon our natural rights. A proper approach to anti-trust enforcement is another issue I've thought about for a while. We shouldn't focus on market cap, number of users, or the number of products. What needs to happen is declaring that hardware, software, and services all independent markets and prohibiting tying between them - strike the root of their capturing Metcalfe's law and other sticky market effects. In other words - Google can continue to run GMail-the-service at the scale they do, but all the clients (even those delivered as JS over HTTPS) need to be implemented with only publicly-available APIs - a clean divide between the developers of GMail-the-service and GMail-the-client with no internal documentation or communication - API change notification that goes out publicly to the developers of all clients. And of course with email, anticompetitive actions for sending email to GMail-the-service need to be reigned in as well.
Indeed, this is historically a forum with lots of "temporarily embarrassed billionaires".
My observation is the opposite of the GP - that labor identity and consciousness (not "liberalism") is rising here, pushed in no small part by the transformation in labor value that LLMs have caused.
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