LMAO the pure fucking judgement in this article, like this is a problem that needs to be solved. If someone is producing their work effectively and in less time than others that’s not something that should be eliminated. Yes, if someone is doing literally nothing and nothing is being asked of them it might be in the corporations best interest to eliminate a job like that, but the solution isn’t to fucking hover over people, it’s to actually pay attention to employee output.
But I think more importantly, why shouldn’t we be optimizing so that MORE jobs are like this? Why should jobs be 40 hours a week? Jobs shouldn’t feel bad. Jobs should provide income and give you something to do that helps out society or produces something useful. Past that point, why are we optimizing for peak productivity? So that the CEO can make another billion dollars and employees can be denied raises?
Sounds like a pretty well measured guy. I don’t think it’s fair to characterize what he’s saying as that of pessimism vs. optimism, however. I think it’s more that his optimistic outlook has been thwarted by capitalism’s dehumanizing behavior repeatedly. It feels like there’s still support for these technologies present, just caution in terms of application and centering human voices and values.
Literally nothing should benefit land owners pretty much ever, it’s an extremely parasitic part of society to be owning a lot of land. Anyone who can afford to own the space for a skyscraper or other large office building should not be given any extra money. The issue is with foot traffic being down so local businesses which crop up around office buildings and complexes are going to suffer. There probably isn’t much that can be done about this, however, and it’s just going to result in a redistribution of where businesses like this are (closer to homes rather than office centers).
With regards to affordable housing, they just need to be more aggressive with pushing money to be used on affordable housing. The market is going to respond to incentives - if they can make more money in the long term creating less total housing that’s more boutique or upscale, they’re gonna simply do that. You have to provide incentives to create cheaper housing.
It felt like there was a weirdly pro-office tilt in the article, like this shift to less office work and more remote had some kind of moral or ethical judgement associated with it. With that being said, big cities definitely should be worried about being able to keep up with the financial demands, with less revenue streams coming in from taxing office space. But that’s the issue with getting so much revenue from land owners rather than the corporations which operate in your space. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over time and how cities and the country adapts. We certainly have a housing crisis in many places in the US, will this resolve itself by residents spreading themselves more thinly across the US or will there be innovative ways to reclaim this office space in large cities and increased population density? Probably a combination of both.
I’m glad less people are being forced to commute for many environmental as well as practical reasons. In general the workforce is less and less tolerant of shitty corporate behavior. A recent study I read talked about how gen z has the highest rates of not applying for jobs where the salary isn’t posted. I’ve seen many similar narratives and studies - ‘the great quit’, people just leaving without giving notice, people advocating for better work environments, demanding greater equity, the most important factor for workplace engagement being whether diversity is championed, and many other shifts in mindset. As a whole the market will attempt to adapt to the diversity of opinions out there, and it does not surprise me that some companies are pushing a return to office and a response is for other companies to compete by allowing remote work - this gives the employees a choice of company to work for. A response of companies easing their policies or not enforcing a return to work is entirely unsurprising and I expect a more highly remote environment to be the norm now that it’s actually plausible for many positions.
I was not expecting this to be in favor of California law, because it opens the gates to other far reaching regulatory laws. California single handedly has changed pork production across the US with this law. Similar regulatory laws on privacy have gone mostly unnoticed because of EU laws causing large shifts across the globe. I expect other major regulatory laws coming out of California in the coming years to force corporations to act a tiny bit more ethically, pushing on climate change, consumer rights, etc. The fact that this was let stand means they may have precedent to keep pushing for regulation in favor of the people that the US government is unable to enact.
I mean that plane could have caused a lot of damage. He’s lucky it didn’t kill anyone or seriously damage the environment. 20 years is the max and hopefully not what he’ll get, but taking money and banning from social media seems like a really light sentence for grossly negligent and potentially harmful behavior.
or how about an entire database, growing every day!
It’s the interface as a whole, not just the front end skin. To expand upon my thoughts, I think that many tech literate people do not understand how much of a hurdle it is to understand decentralized platforms. I’m not sure what the best route forward is, but I think interviews with non-tech literate people is a key component. I don’t consider myself as someone who works in tech, despite being someone who does ‘tech literate’ things - professionally I’m a data scientist and I grew up in silicon valley, so there’s a lot of tech concepts that I understand, but even I found decentralized platforms a bit daunting to understand.
I think most individuals are not interested in understand the details of how data is decentralized and I’m not sure what needs to be done about that. I have some ideas on where people might get hung up, but it’s coming from the bias of my own background and what I was able to understand and what questions were important for me to answer to adopt a platform. I think we need to understand the questions that regular people have about decentralized platforms before we can even begin to rethink design, because I think there may be creative solutions to solve these questions where the platform itself doesn’t need to change but the user interface can simply move where certain pieces of information reside or how they are surfaced (for example the instance someone is posting from is currently visible in the @<user>@<instance> when they post, but instance might be hidden behind a click into a user’s profile while using colors or another element to differentiate instances or users with the same username from each other).
It’s a complicated enough question that I haven’t really began to unpack or think seriously about it because I realize that it will take significant effort and resources to resolve. For now, however, I think a lot of the problem is an educational one and focusing on spreading simple explanations of how decentralized platforms work with a focus on explaining simple questions a user might have is probably the best allocation of existing resources.
Using the same road with different cars isn’t really analogous to federation. But the comparison to mobile and internet is good, however, it’s not one I’ve ever been presented until now. It’s still a relatively new concept for most, and there needs to be more people explaining how a platform can exist across multiple web pages with rather strikingly different experiences on each although a fundamentally shared experience too.
If decentralized platforms don’t learn that user interface designers are desperately needed, decentralization is not going to succeed. There’s a reason that tech has a certain look and feel that emerged in the early 2000s and parts of it have stayed around. People often need a lot of hand-holding and information at their fingertips to accept a platform.
Literally hire people to figure it out? Even if half of his money ended up at shitty companies actually giving away the 10bn he pledged (of note, a fraction of his net worth) the total amount given away to good causes would be over 2x more than he’s given away to date.
This is always an excuse I can never abide. Literally hire more people to figure it out. When you have billions of dollars to give away, it’s perfectly fine for some of it to go to overhead to ensure it ends up in the right hands. I think we can all agree giving someone a liveable salary to figure out where to donate money to is a pretty good use of money.