No it’s like someone owning a Ferrari and looking down on someone who drives a Corolla. Or that’s how they see it, anyway. Plus there’s the annoyance with interoperability: it’s not just about status, it’s about all your iMessage group chats that don’t play nice with android
This is a legitimate movement in my eyes. I don’t participate, but I see it as valid. This is reminiscent of the Luddite movement - a badly misunderstood movement of folks who were trying to secure labor rights guarantees in the face of automation and new tools threatening to kill large swaths of the workforce.
The Luddites were employed by textile manufacturers and destroyed machines to get better bargaining power in labor negotiations. They weren't indiscriminately targeting automation, they targeted machines that directly affected their work.
Because life would be so much better if people still had to spin wool and weave cloth by hand, and grow their own food by digging in the earth with no tools.
Use whatever means necessary to stop powerful people from exploiting you and stealing the fruits of your labor. If that struggle involves monkeywrenching their machines, so be it.
But like any tool, the machines themselves can be used for good or evil. Breaking the machines shouldn't be an end in itself.
The 700m people suffering from starvation or malnutrition while we produce excess food would probably rather be digging in the earth with no tools if it meant they got fed.
The Luddites wouldn't have been destroying machines if they had insurance that they would also benefit from the machines, rather than see their livelihoods being destroyed while the boss made more money than ever.
Like the OP, you misunderstand the entire point of the Luddites. Breaking the machines was not an end, it was the tactical means to help illustrate their broader point of how the owning class can arbitrarily ruin their entire lives and livelihoods with absolutely zero recourse or consultation with the impacted people. This is a defining feature of capitalism, and that was their issue.
Your strawman about spinning and digging with no tools is just that, and is irrelevant to the core issue of capitalism.
If the core issue is ending exploitation by capitalists and not about breaking machines, if you don't want to return to a world without automation, if the machine is just a strawman, then why do you describe yourself as "anti-AI" instead of "anti-capitalist" or "anti-exploitation"?
It seems like you identify yourself with the strawman instead of with the core issue.
I am anti-capitalist and exploitation. And I don't think any anti-capitalist person can be pro-AI, not the way it's currently constructed. But people on a startup forum tend to lose their minds if you say you're against either :)
Being anti-AI is not a straw man, it's the logical conclusion of being against exploitation and hierarchical domination. Discussing that nuance here is difficult, to say the least, so it's simpler to say anti-AI.
Unless you're committing serious crimes vandalizing machines to get leverage over a counterparty in a negotiation you're not comparable to the Luddites.
Criminality is an arbitrary benchmark here, cutting people off can be illegal due to the risks involved.
However what’s more interesting is the deeper social contracts involved. Destroying other people’s stuff can be perfectly legal such as fireman breaking car windows when someone parks in front of a fire hydrant. Destroying automation doesn’t qualify for an exception, but it’s not hard to imagine a different culture choosing to favor the workers.
Inflicting damage is usually justified by averting larger damage. Very roughly, breaking a $200 car window is justified in order to save a $100k house from burning down. Stealing someone's car is justified when you need a car to urgently drive someone bleeding to a hospital to save their life (and then you don't claim the car is yours, of course).
I don't think Luddites had an easy justification like this.
I'm pretty sure the Luddites judged the threat the machines posed to their livelihood to be a greater damage than their employer's loss of their machines. So for them, it was an easy justification. The idea that dollar value encapsulates the only correct way to value things in the world is a pretty scary viewpoint (as your reference to the value of saving a life illustrates).
The Luddites were trying to stop themselves & their families from starving to death. The factory owners were only interested in profit. It isn't like the Luddites were given a generous re-training package and they turned it down. They had 0 rights, I mean that literally: 0.
You missed MR2Z's argument: there are more people in the world than luddites and factory owners.
During industrial revolution, the clothes (and other fabrics) were getting dramatically cheaper. A family that could only afford cheapest clothes could now get a higher quality stuff. A family that could not afford any clothes at all, could now get cheap stuff.
This is what the luddites wanted to stop. It's not "luddites starving to death" vs "factory owner get no profit", it was "luddites starving to death" vs "many many more people can not afford clothes"
Except for the fact that the Luddites' labour grievances could easily have been addressed by the factory owners (rise in pay, better conditions) while still offering cheaper fabrics through industrialization. There was simply no desire to do so. No one was saved from freezing to death by cheaper textiles.
People did starve to death and turn to things such as alcohol due to labour displacement during Industrialization. At the time, the prevailing wisdom was that lower-class people were naturally inferior. Robert Owen challenged this theory.
And yes, that was the choice given to the Luddites. Have no work (and therefore no food), because the factory owner can replace you with machines, and you have no labour rights, so he will simply cast you out and make more profit. I did not miss Mr2Z's argument, yours is just incorrect.
> No one was saved from freezing to death by cheaper textiles.
Citation needed for that one.
> Except for the fact that the Luddites' labour grievances could easily have been addressed by the factory owners (rise in pay, better conditions) while still offering cheaper fabrics through industrialization.
So how long would the employers be required to pay them, in your mind? A year? Ten? A lifetime?
It would be the end consumer of the textile that would have to pay for those former textile workers to do nothing.
People can find new jobs when the world changes. It's not pleasant, but it's frankly a lot better than trying to force their old employer to keep them on payroll in a job where they can't do work.
"People can find new jobs when the world changes. It's not pleasant, but it's frankly a lot better than trying to force their old employer to keep them on payroll in a job where they can't do work."
This is what you don't understand. There was no re-tooling or re-training for the Luddites. This wasn't a 20th century downsizing situation. This was one step above slavery. They didn't just go get new jobs. They got extremely precarious work with no labour rights (at all) at lower pay than before and in competition with hordes of desperate unemployed labourers. This has nothing to do with free market economics like you're posting.
"citation needed for that one."
Actually no, you're the one who keeps saying that industrialization / replacing human workers with machines saved people's lives with cheap textiles, but you show no proof of this, so you're the one who needs a citation!
It’s an interesting question because the benefits of automation aren’t necessarily shared early on. If you can profitably sell a shirt for 10$ while everyone else needs to sell for 20$ there’s no reason to actually charge 10$ you might as well charge 19.95$ and sell just as many shirts for way more money.
So if society is actually saving 5c/shirt while “losing” 9$ in labor per shirt. On net society could be worse off excluding the one person who owns the factory and is way better off. Obviously eventually enough automation happens so the price actually falls meaningfully, but that transition isn’t instantaneous where decisions are made in the moment.
Further we currently subsidize farmers to a rather insane degree independent of any overall optimization for social benefit. Thus we can’t even really say optimization is the deciding factor here. Instead something else is going on, the story could have easily been framed as the factory owners doing something wrong by automating but progress is seen as a greater good than stability. And IMO that’s what actually decides the issue for most people.
In regards to both the Luddites and the farmers, you seem to forget the most important factor. Food.
In the case of the Luddites, it was a literal case of their children being threatened with starvation. "Livelihood" at the time was not fungible. The people affected could not just go apply at another industry. And there were no social services to help them eat during the transition period.
As for the farmers, any governing body realises that food security is national security. If too many people eschew farming for more lucrative fields, then the nation is at risk. Farming needs to appear as lucrative as medicine, law, and IT to encourage people to enter the field.
The luddites food requirements didn’t provide them with popular support.
Similarly US agricultural output could be cut in half without serious negative consequences. Far more corn ends up as ethanol than our food and we export vast quantities of highly subsidized food to zero benefit. Hell ethanol production costs as much in fossil fuels as we get ethanol from it, it’s literally pure wasted effort.
Rational policy would create a large scale food shortage and then let market forces take over. We could have 10 years of food on hand for every American at way less expensive than current policy with the added benefit of vastly reducing the negative externalities of farming such as depleting aquifers.
Be careful with the assumptions you're making. A risk management strategy, for example, will often appear to be of zero benefit except in the case where shit hits the fan. We can stop feeding cattle, producing ethanol, and whatever else overnight in the event that something happens.
> Rational policy would create a large scale food shortage and then let market forces take over.
Well I'm just going to state that I'm _really_ happy that you're not the one in charge and leave it at that.
You may be happy with the current status but it’s actually both risky and expensive.
Risk management means managing risks, there’s plenty of things having more farmland doesn’t actually protect you from. On the other hand having a decade of food protects you from basically everything as you get time to adjust as things change.
Just as an example, meteor strike blocks sunlight and farmland is useless for a few years. Under the current system most of us starve to death. Odds are around 1 in 1 million that it happens in a given lifetime, but countries outlive people start thinking longer term and it becomes more likely.
I fully support having huge stockpiles in addition to subsidies. There's a lot of things midway on the scale between "business as usual" and "meteor strike" where minimizing supply chain disruptions would likely prove to be of great benefit.
I completely agree that the current way things are being handled appears to have its share of problems and could stand to be better optimized. But that doesn't mean it's useless either.
Subsidies as a concept includes spending 1% as much on subsidies. Subsidies as they exist now however are a specific system that’s incredibly wasteful.
Producing dramatically less food and ending obesity are linked. If the average American eats 20% less obesity would still be an issue, but that’s a vast amount of farmland we just don’t need.
The current system isn’t designed to accommodate increased agricultural production, lowering food demands, or due to decreasing fertility the slow decline in global population. Instead the goal is almost completely to get votes from farmers.
You want to solve obesity by ... making food cost more? Assuming I've understood you correctly then I think it would be difficult for us to be more opposed to one another. I want basic necessities to be as cheap as possible. Preferably free.
I'm happy to debate what sort of free food the government should or shouldn't be handing out, what measures could be put in place to minimize waste, etc. But from my perspective the ideal is a free all you can eat buffet that's backed by the government.
No, I’m saying solving obesity reduces the need for food. Did you not see the post directly below this one posted 6+ hours before your comment where I said:
“For clarity, Ozempic etc have actually measurably decreased food consumption.”
Technology isn’t going backwards, we can expect increasingly effective medications with fewer side effects at lower costs to drive down food demand over time. Policies designed to prop up production in the face of falling demand are deeply flawed.
If you want to give people money, give them money, don’t give them lots of money so they can keep a little bit while they waste resources producing something without value.
Apologies, I saw it at the time but failed to follow. IIUC you're saying that subsidies will tend to ratchet in only the one direction.
To be clear I don't object at all to the idea of optimizing how subsidies are determined. I just don't think that subsidies and the resultant overproduction are a bad thing in general. I'm all for efficiency in the general case but I think a fair amount of paranoia is called for regarding long tail scenarios that lead to famine.
I am not sure at all how would we stockpile 10 years of food for each American - most of the kinds of food cannot be kept for that long. And what can be kept is unlikely to make a balanced diet.
Moreover, I am not sure how long will it take to re-build the farm industry if most farms will close. I think "10 years" is too optimistic, given how many farms will need to be spun up.
You could revert to a granary system, but the whole point of farming subaidization was to leave the granary system that repeatedly throughout history ended up with massive famine and starvations.
Stored food is not bullet proof, and takes up a lot more bulk space than you may think. It can also take numerous years to ramp up farming production in response to a drop in yields or disaster.
Yeah its better, but it is still far from perfect. You aren't going to increase farm tractor or farm implement production by 50% with a year or twos notice. Some crops like fruits takes years to establish, and unused farmland quickly succumbs to nature and starts growing trees. And if that field wasn't clear 5 years ago you now have to stump grind or bulldoze the fields because tree stumps and tree roots will mess up your farm equipment, doubly worse if its some super massive tractor and implement setup that would normally be the most productive.
And there is also all the political and financial barriers to taking unfarmed land and very quickly turning it into farmland. Who owns it and who owned it before? Who with the right knowledge to manage it properly will run it? What about other problems around them that are part to the famine.
And farming in itself is not very predictable business. Yields regularly vary by 30% just due to local weather without being considered unusual. Return on investments may be a decade down the road even if everything is done perfect. Getting people to invest long term for a potentially very short term problem is not super easy.
We got surviving rations from back in the US civil war that are still edible, but people still regularly starved and had famines despite massive leaps in food preservation technology. Hermetically sealing just a single persons food for a year is not an easy task, not to mention hundred million+.
Economies of scale are huge here. You can store well below -40 when you're talking food for 100 million people, that just doesn’t work well when you’re talking one person.
Of note I didn’t say a year or 2’s notice 10 years of food on hand would be fairly cheap and we currently have the surplus to hit that number quickly. And that’s for 100% replacement, most situations aren’t going to drop food production to zero giving us more time.
It's easy to see the word Waymo and think clanker autonomous car, but there are very often people inside that car - they are a rideshare service after all. Calling endangering other humans "legitimate" because you dislike the taxi company is not a good look.
Thank you for the brief explanation of Luddites. It was enough to send me to wikipedia where I learned that what I thought I knew was extremely wrong. Until today I thought they were a religious sect who took their name from the biblical Lud.
Your general luddite argument - preserve way-of-life of the small group at the expense of a larger group.
In this particular case: for many people, Waymo provides a better service (clean, safer driving, etc..) than Uber or Lyft. This threatens livelihood of human Uber/Lyft drivers. If you sympathize with human Uber/Lyft drivers, and don't care about Waymo users, you want to make Waymo worse, hoping that the people will stop riding Waymo and move to Lyft/Uber instead.
One way to do so is to make riding in Waymo unpleasant, and it's certainly unpleasant when people are cutting your car off all the time!
This is such a bad characterization of the Luddite cause, and it's not even close to what they stood for or why they were spurred to action. Please do a bit of actual educating yourself on the Luddites.
If you think someone is wrong, and want to help them realize what the truth is, I recommend (1) actually explaining where they are wrong and (2) saying what the right thing is. Just saying "This is all wrong you should do a bit of actual educating", without stating any facts will never convince anyone.
That said, I don't really see how is it wrong?
- New technologies provided better service for general public, so people chose those - this seems to be true. In case of luddites, we are talking about dramatic price decreases in fabric (and by extension, clothes) - at least 2x, much more in some cases. A family who could not afford new clothes could suddenly buy them. And sure, they might have been worse quality - but before, they were unaffordable.
- The same technologies threatened way-of-life of old producers - also true. The textile workers got significantly worse deal. Who wants to pay 180d/lb to artisans for hand-made textile, when you could get factory-made for 12d/lb? And factory working conditions were horrible.
- The "solution" was to stop new technologies, so that there rest of the nation do not get the benefits. This also seems true - for a lot of the luddites goals were destruction of machines. As [1] said, "The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery". They wanted to go back to the time time where people were paying 180d/lb for fabric. Sure, it'd mean a kid would freeze to death because their poor family could not afford new coat, but it did not matter as long as artisan croppers keep getting paid.
(Things would have been quite different if luddites instead said: "we are going to destroy machines until we get higher wages / better conditions / etc...", and it seems that a few groups did say that. But majority did not say this, instead lashing out at all the machines in general)
The Luddites destroyed machines because industrialization destroyed the only living wage they could have. There was no recourse for them other than accepting an even worse quality of life.
Neither of your links say anything about cheap textiles stopping people from freezing to death. The Luddites' concerns could easily have been addressed by factory owners while still offering cheaper fabrics.
Neither of your links ALSO say that the majority of Luddite groups did as you say in destroying machinery without a goal in mind. The fact is that the Luddites were reacting against extremely unfair labour conditions, not progress. What you have said here is 100% untrue.
If you are sitting in a waymo vehicle, and somebody cuts you off - do you even notice? They don't have them round here but my idea is that the vehicle itself is doing all the work, you can just continue reading your book, chat or get on something else with little awareness of the actual journey. Does the waymo curse and shake its little fist to alert you it was cut off?
People are free to reject technology as they please.
If you deliberately impede the flow of traffic, vehicularly assault, or otherwise sabotage the health and safety of drivers, passengers, and/or pedestrians, what do you deserve?
If you cause whiplash intentionally, what do you deserve?
What would be use of equal force in self defense in response to the described attack method?
Please tell me that he does realize that when something bad happens, that Waymo car has all the footage that it is his fault?
Something in people's brains often makes them think they are anonymous when they are driving their car. Then that gets disastrously proven otherwise when they need to show up in front of a judge.
You, like most hacker news folks, likely are too rich to imagine the type of person who can’t spend hours every day learning a billion different difficult things. Some folks have to work menial jobs, take care of their kids, and fix their leaky roof themselves.
as a software developer with a life after work, I don't have time to learn to be a mechanic either. So I don't claim to be one without having done the work.
Bad assumption. I taught myself to code in the early 2000s while scrapping by earning just above minimum wage in Vancouver, one of the most expensive cities in the world.
So uh, you would be hard pressed to be more wrong. And I used free resources.
A "revert filesystem state to x time" button doesn't seem that hard to use. I'm imagining this as a potential near-term future product implementation, not a home-brewed DIY solution.
A filesystemt state in time is VERY complicated to use, if you are reverting the whole filesystem. A granular per-file revert should not be that complicated, but it needs to be surfaced easily in the UI and people need to know aout it (in the case of Cowork I would expect the agent to use it as part of its job, so transparent to the user)
Re: media server. Yeah. I wish there was an alternative but the modern media landscape is so broken there is no other way to maintain digital copies of your shows and movies, while maintaining your own ability to curate your ow content on a plane that isn’t just another surface for those companies to drive engagement metrics. If you try to escape, you are forced into drm locked down Blu rays or even just shit out of luck in the case of a lot of direct to streaming tv. In which case you have two options, stay on the enshittification treadmill, taking more and more shit from bigass corporations who are actively poisoning the culture, or sail the seas. Or I guess just don’t watch tv. But I like tv.
Hacker news moment. If you believe this, you are lost, but man. What a terrible take.
Build what? The next big ad serving platform? The next mass surveillance platform? New ways to squeeze money out of people? You’re right we all die so nothing matters, why would what you build matter more than the relationships you make, the good feelings you create? Build, but build art. Build something that will change peoples minds, make them feel good, make them want to change the world.
Do not conflate building something to make some guy richer, as just as or more important than spending time with family or creating true art.
Not the GP but I don’t think they were talking about “building something to make some guy richer” - they was were talking about building a life and relationships that positively impact the people they care about.
Do you believe in his ideas? I think the abundist philosophy is a fake moustache and a coat of paint on third way neoliberalism, which has proven time and again to have utterly failed as a political strategy in our current era. Ezra Klein’s ideas mostly feel tired, recycled, boring, outdated, and rudderless. We need true labor reform in this country, not less regulations and more trust in “altruistic developers”.
The original commenter answered the question of the thread: "here's a book I'm reading". They got in response a screed about "neoliberal" politics. That the response is wrong is besides the point: it was a really rude way to respond to someone recommending a book. The civil and productive way to write that response would have been to recommend in addition another, countervailing book.
Sure, it's just a totally different conversation than what the thread's about, and a super rude one. I'm not the boss of him, but I guess I get to have off-topic conversations too. "Next time, on book recommendation threas, recommend another book, instead of writing a screed about how bad the politics of some other book are."
It's an opportunity to discuss, should he create a new thread to discuss this book and maybe the same person will see this thread? Kinda weird, especially when this doesn't hurt anyone.
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