In societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they don't respect you and they would make better rich assholes, they will kill you and take your property. Historically, societies like that were often ruled by the biggest and the most charismatic thugs, who could command the respect of lesser thugs. Or warrior nobility, if you want a fancier term. Today's billionaire nerds would not be among those.
Russian state is a final form of the thug-centric governance. The economic oligarchs maintain their riches at the behest of thugs, but they don’t have the power nor freedom.
> Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
Russia is 15 slots lower than Nigeria on government corruption. Putin can easily have someone killed but the idea that if he needed money for the war he could get it by e.g. enforcing the law against taking kickbacks for misallocating public funds is so ridiculous that even attempting to do it might be one of the few things that could cause him to be removed from power.
And for a similar reason he can't enforce laws that require any form of localized information, because everybody is just fabricating the numbers.
The trouble with running a kleptocracy is that there's no honor among thieves.
It’s no accident that the schmoozer media/real estate/car dealer/mining/energy guys in US wield more power than their wealth relative to SV VC bros would seem to merit.
Too bad these researcher's organizations spent their efforts supporting the dumbest, ficklest possible version of the U.S. government to guide us through the gravity of this moment.
With SPCX shares never going down in price, SpaceX can acquire all companies in the US in exchange for its stock, so SpaceX itself is worth at least as much as the US GDP! (/s)
> the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the “soyboy” type of person
If you were to actually know parents at your local area daycare centers/schools, it'd quickly become evident that the "masculine"/"feminine" types are a definite minority.
Possibly yes when it comes to air pressure, but the learning curve will be steeper. But not when it comes to the generated vibrations, and my bet is the latter are more important.
TLDR is that it’s a job that can pay enough to keep one housed, and sometimes there are no alternatives.
I’d redirect the outrage away from the grunts denying care, and towards the leadership that set up those incentives. And even further, when the shareholders demand more profit because the line must go up, what to do?
Got me thinking, if 99% of code pushed to GH is generated by Claude, GH just becomes a free Claude distillation service. Gotta ban it on natsec grounds obviously.
The problem is it’s so rarely A/B tested, definitely not at scale. An engineer, who writes all these my-workflow-but-for-agents skills, proceeds to get the good outcome, while also seeing affirmations that the agent did follow the prescribed processes - that is considered a victory. In reality the outcome could’ve been just as good if they fed Claude a spec + acceptance criteria, or even a basic prompt for the simpler tasks.
But I don't expect anyone to every use my stuff. It's complicated as hell. But it's for me, and it works without me having to remotely think about the complexity.
I know this narrative is very popular these days cause it allows to frame voting against one’s interests as some sort of justified rebellious act, but let’s not forget that the opposition to renewables is a decades in the making, paid for, “opinion-shaping” operation (uncharitably, brainwashing)
Eh, I think the "political agenda" brainwashing is overrated and the real issue is more "anything to get me elected / to get people to watch advertisements".
Abortion/environmentalism/crime/drugs/whatever are the selected political issues because it's what successfully gets people emotional to watch tv and vote. Sure there are people with agendas pushing these things but the real reason they're the issues is evolutionary -- the ideas at the center are there because they upset people not because they are the subject of dark motives of people pulling strings. They throw everything they think of at the wall and whatever sticks becomes the agenda.
