Why doesn't a small village have a supermarket? If it's small enough then it won't have any store at all. Why? Because the business doesn't make enough money to justify it and the consequence of this is that none of the inhabitants of that village can "just go to the store to buy some milk". They either need to plan weeks or months worth of shopping in advance or have access to transport that can take them to a town that has a store.
The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
I know that it's hard for people from rich (and high population) countries to understand, but the high variety of goods and services that exist are a consequence of people investing into businesses. Without them many of these businesses wouldn't exist, because most people are not rich enough to be able to fund a business on their own.
> The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
This is blatantly untrue in the face of even a cursory thought. If the deli didn’t exist, that worker would have done any number of other jobs. Subsistence farming, doing deli stuff out of his house, maybe even community funding a coop grocery store.
That was how things worked at many points in human history. Instead of “private citizen makes $thing and collects rent” it was some variety of “municipality funds $thing for the community”. That just doesn’t extrapolate to a global economy well, for better or worse.
Your argument amounts to billionaire apologism and has nothing to do with my comment.
If a supermarket cannot be profitable in a small village, an investor isn't going to change that. The investor will invest in businesses that can be profitable.
> Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
People have had jobs since before civilization, and certainly before massive accumulation of wealth became the norm.
Ah yes, the famous "trickle down" economy of Reaganomics. If only we had more billionaires, then I'm sure I'd be able to afford to get my car fixed.
Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong. If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor. We didn't.
> Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong.
As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class.
> If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor.
What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor. Musk's wealth, for example, has no effect on my standard of living. Or yours.
> As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class.
Yes you keep on mentioning that, but I don't know why. Correlation is not causation. You haven't even proposed a mechanism of causality.
> What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor.
You keep on repeating that, and you keep on being wrong. You are parroting billionaire propaganda in the hopes of making people ignore injustice. In reality, in the US, living standards are falling for most people, while Elon Musk has no rational reason for possessing so much wealth.
You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer. Capitalism is about producing stuff. To create a large variety of (useful) products for society.
You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get more value back. If it doesn't work out, then investors lose money. Most businesses fail early and do not provide a return for the investment.
The point of capitalism is to keep this system running. As a result of it we have made an ungodly amount of technological and quality of life improvements. Some people have become filthy rich from this, but typically they also provided the world with goods or services that people like and use. Tesla made Elon filthy rich, but it also made electric vehicles popular.
> You don't understand the point of capitalism. It's not about making rich people richer.
Making the rich richer isn't necessarily the point, but it is an unavoidable consequence.
> Capitalism is about producing stuff.
Humans have been producing stuff well before the concept of ownership was invented, and certainly well before the massive wealth accumulation that is the hallmark of capitalism.
And almost for the entirety of that period, humans lived in abject poverty. The rise of capitalism perfectly correlates with the most spectacular increase in human flourishing and prosperity in the history of our species. Even in the last fifty years, liberalizing economies, private ownership, and contract law have lifted tens of millions out of poverty, mostly in SE Asia.
And yet many in capitalist society lived and still live in abject poverty, despite the fact that there are enough resources so that no one should be left wanting. Nevertheless, you've somehow convinced yourself that those people either (a) don't matter, (b) deserve it, or (c) can't be helped.
If the goal is to reduce poverty, I fail to see how the existence of billionaires is a positive outcome, either now, in the form of Musk and his ilk; in the form of the robber barons of the late 18th century; or in the form of the noble lords of the feudal period to owned a lot but contributed nothing.
It's not, but if the existence of billionaires correlates strongly with an increase in the median standard of living, I'm all for it. My politics are not driven by envy -- only what consistently produces the best outcome for the most.
Regarding the idea that we can design a system where "no one should be left wanting," that sounds nice. So does big rock candy mountain. There is no such system.
But, again, the gap between the poor and the wealthy is irrelevant. Income inequality doesn't describe what's best for the most. If more income inequality produces a better outcome for the majority, it becomes very difficult to argue income inequality is, itself, bad. While the GINI index has certainly increased over the last fifty years in the US, real median household income and real personal consumption expenditures have too, all while poverty rates have substantially declined. It is exceedingly difficult to argue by any objective metric that rising income inequality has handicapped median standard of living.
We see similar trends around the world. In fact, the countries that have struggled the most with stagnating standards of living are precisely those that have most aggressively imposed redistributionist policies.
Income inequality with rising standards of living for the median is only bad if your politics are driven by envy.
It's not irrelevant. It wasn't irrelevant when the same arguments were made in favor of feudal lords. People want to fairly compensated: the premise of "a day's pay for a day's work" is based on it. If the idle rich are vacuuming up profits that properly belong to the working class, you're asking for a revolution. There is absolutely nothing to suggest a causal relationship between massive wealth in the upper classes and any benefit for the rest of society. last time that happened in the US, the robber barons and Wall Street class nearly brought down the world economy.
But not all "capitalist" societies have the same percentage in "abject poverty". So that makes me think that capitalism by itself is not the only major determinant of some of the bad things that we see, but rather the lack of interest and of focus to fix actual issues. Many societies can learn from others and improve their situation. Note: and many, if not most actually do, check : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-and-number-of-p...
If the goal is to reduce poverty, the number of billionaire is actually irelevant. How you fund reducing poverty might influence the number of billionaires, but, for me it is more important what each society does for the poor, rather than counting how many are billionaires today.
> If the goal is to reduce poverty, the number of billionaire is actually irelevant. How you fund reducing poverty might influence the number of billionaires, but, for me it is more important what each society does for the poor, rather than counting how many are billionaires today.
You're so close. The only missing connection is the realization that billionaires exercise outsize influence, and will affect government policy to help themselves, not the poor. The only way for the poor to not have their voice silenced by the rich is to reduce the rich.
It shouldn't be a politically unpopular move. Other countries can get pissed off, but those other countries also cannot guarantee that Europe will get chips when times are tough. If you want to build modern drones and missiles you need access to a large amount of computer chips. In a crisis will those still be available to Europe?
I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet.
Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating system used to ~20 years ago. If 128 GB of RAM were the norm then there's a chance we might expect to buy 128 GB of RAM too.
But I suppose it's really a question of how many dollars we expect to spend on memory rather than the specific amounts of memory.
The Chinese memory makers have been sabotaged by USA, otherwise they would have already "flooded the market" and reduced the prices.
Even so, the production of cheaper Chinese DDR5 memory is increasing despite not being able to import all the tools and materials that are needed, so eventually they will benefit from this memory shortage that allows them to gain market share that they would not have gained otherwise.
Google US semiconductor sanctions on China. Basically US (and allies pressed by US) aren't allowed to export their most cutting edge semiconductor tools and materials to China, so China can only make chips using older-gen tools on older process nodes than western-aligned competitors.
The other part of the sabotage is that western companies then have restrictions on what chips they're allowed to buy from China. IDK if RAM chips are also on that list.
Apple cancelled their deal with YMTC (Chinese RAM company) after the US sanctioned the latter. I don't know whether that is directly because of the sanctions, or indirectly (e.g. if Apple thought sanctions would hamper YMTC's ability to supply the goods), but they have had the same effect.
For older hacker news readers who have lived through multiple RAM price spikes - it has held true for decades so far. Making memory is one of the most vicious tech markets to compete in.
The last one I remember was after the 2011 tsunami. I think things are worse these days because memory isn’t just a chip that you toss on a board anymore, it’s now frequently delivered in the same package as the CPU.
There was the 2007 spike following the Windows Vista release when a huge chunk of the corporate market had to buy new machines, there was also the Hynix fire in 2013, to pick a few recent ones. The 2007 spike was pretty rapidly killed by the famous global financial crisis that followed.
I think that Slack's memory usage is "not bad" at ~300MB just because Discord exists, and somehow that seems to get into the gigabytes before even looking at a message.
"I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet."
It's a gambler's ruin problem. Future profits are worth zero if you go out of business first.
We already had that. Memory prices got really low for a while. If there are too many companies with too much capacity they’re forced to race to the bottom until one of them collapses and reduces supply.
Yup, see my previous boom-and-bust comment. In particular vendors will remember the price crash in 2022/23, the industry only recovered once the AI mania set in. There'd been another boom around 2020/21 when supply-chain panics meant hyperscalers bought up huge inventories, and just before that another low around 2019. So the current situation is standard pre-bust behaviour.
They are? Games need pretty much all the performance they can possibly get. Can you sandbox them without having a performance impact?
Consider that people pay a $300 premium to get ~10% better performance (buying an RTX 5080 instead of a 5070 Ti).
Personally I know that sometimes closing the web browser in the background makes my game run better - that web browser doesn't even interact with the game! Would a sandbox have a smaller impact?
Buying a better GPU improves your graphics performance and that's basically unrelated to the area where a sandbox impacts performance.
Killing your web browser is probably just lowering memory pressure?
Sandboxes add overhead to syscalls. It's kind of similar to running under Wine, which also adds significant syscalls overhead. Wine also has a much more impactful DirectX translation layer, so your sandbox performance would be probably be much better than the Wine performance.
I don't hate social media. It's very amusing to me to hear about how much people hate social media... on social media. I really think people need to stop using social media for a couple of months and see what it's like to not use it.
Personally I find the lack of social media use to be a downside. I never used Facebook and I do occasionally think that I missed out on a lot of stuff because of it.
My understanding is that glucose diffuses from the pecten oculi into the vitreous humor (it's the jelly-like thing that makes up most of the eyeball) and from there glucose diffuses into the inner retina.
I'm not sure why this is easier, but I'm guessing it has to do with how much oxygen you need for aerobic glycolysis. In blood, glucose just exists in the plasma by itself, oxygen has to be carried by red blood cells. Without blood vessels it's probably difficult to get enough oxygen through diffusion into the inner retina.
Fun fact: the human cornea also doesn't have blood vessels. Instead oxygen diffuses from the atmosphere into it and from the aqueous humor - a fluid? behind the cornea. The aqueous humor is also where the cornea (and the lens) get nutrients from.
>but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis.
No it isn't. Do you believe what teachers told you in school? Yes? Well, I guess you're suffering from just normal psychosis!
I don't understand how people don't understand that people offer unreliable information too. We learned about the tongue map in school as kids - many kids still learn that in school today. It's still BS regardless whether it was told to you by a teacher or AI.
You don't suffer from psychosis for believing a source of information, you're simply mistaken. You need a more critical eye to assess what you're told in general, not just AI.
There's a huge difference between a teacher giving outdated information representing what was once our (or at least their) best understanding of the world, and a chatbot that just randomly makes up things for no reason while insisting that it's all true.
Also, a good teacher should be encouraging the development of critical thinking skills and correcting your errors, while AI will just tell you how brilliant you are when you wrongly tell it about how you've just invented a new form of math or disproved a scientific theory you barely understand in the first place.
Not all BS is the same, just as not all sources are equally unreliable.
> Do you believe what teachers told you in school? Yes?
Nope. At least, not without proof. That would, IMO, be kinda crazy. We could argue semantics - maybe “stupid” would be a better word? Lacking in critical thinking skills? Whatever “it” is, it isn’t good.
>3.081 European government sites place tracking cookies without consent.
GDPR was adopted more than a decade ago and our governments still can't do it right, yet they expect everyone else to get it right. Amazing regulation.
My quality of life improved by a significant amount when I started supplementing magnesium. Better sleep and a bunch of other things. It's actually scary how much of a difference something so simple (and cheap) made.
Placebo effect may exist for someone who claims to sleep better with it, but there are effects that are definitely not placebo.
In the water that I drink in the morning I dissolve small quantities of powders of magnesium bisglycinate and potassium citrate.
Before starting to do this, after days with more intense physical effort, I frequently had nocturnal leg cramps. Since I began taking this regularly, I never had leg cramps again.
Understandable thing to test for but, in my experience magnesium has been legitimate for me. I've found it improved my ability to think personally and depression. The 'dosing effects' are the thing that convinced me it is a real effect. If I ran out of it and was say, waiting for it coming in the mail I could go for it for some days without noticing a difference. That level of 'some endurance, don't need it daily' seemed to suggest some real pharmacology behidn it.
I also say for me because if you already have good levels of magnesium in your diet, it will have nothing to improve.
gwern once ran a rigorous N=1 self-experiment on magnesium with self-blinding and week-long blocks, and concluded that it was probably helpful to him: https://gwern.net/nootropic/magnesium#conclusion
You are welcome to review his methodology and see if it still seems like the placebo effect.
Based on his ranking of MP (mood/productivity), he concluded that it helped for the first three weeks and then got worse because he was overdosing on the magnesium. So not much there is going to apply to the general case.
The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
I know that it's hard for people from rich (and high population) countries to understand, but the high variety of goods and services that exist are a consequence of people investing into businesses. Without them many of these businesses wouldn't exist, because most people are not rich enough to be able to fund a business on their own.
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