The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama. It is impossible to make meaningful change anymore.
Add in the propaganda convincing 2/5th of the country to consistently vote against their own interests and fundamentally misunderstand core issues, and it is difficult to see what can be done in the next 10 years.
The USA has had a hostile takeover by oligarchs. We are a country who serves only corporations and those who own them. Regular people have been almost completely removed from the process
It's interesting how you elect to name two presidents in an era that were democrats while conveniently omitting the republican president in between. With all his baggages, I find this quite convenient.
It's an interesting point. With Clinton, l'affaire de bj was a willful attempt to take the president's private life public as a means of congressional focus. It should be noted that until then, this was effectively off limits. It was an open secret in DC that his predecessor, Bush the 1st, kept a mistress for years and that was never discussed publicly.
In the case of Obama, the GOP noted that their top priority was to make him a 1-term president and that meant attempted sabotage of any legislation that might make him look good.
Neither man were perfect presidents, but compared to the current regime it is night and day.
The Lewinsky Affair got traction because Clinton used his position of power (literally in the Oval Office) to take advantage of a young subordinate, in a time when ‘sexual harassment’ was becoming a hot topic. Then lying about the affair made it much worse (as cover-ups often do). It was definitely used against Clinton by his opponents, but the way he abused his position, then perjured himself was truly shameful.
Clinton as a sex pest is a more recent narrative. At the time the media coverage was not about how he was abusing an intern. It was about how he was debasing the office and how Lewinsky wasn't even that hot. It was certainly not the narrative from the right that Clinton was an abuser.
I purposely avoided any comparison between Clinton and other presidents, as many have done bad things, and it is difficult to rank them all. I just wanted to address the parent comment's minimization of Clinton's wrong-doing, as evidenced by this quote: "l'affaire de bj was a willful attempt to take the president's private life public"
What Clinton did was absolutely wrong, but that was a personal affair.
In life and the law, intentions are foundational for evaluating people's actions.
The scandalizing of Clinton's behavior was only about political slander, mud slinging. Your pearl clutching is performative and partisan.
There's so much to not like about the Dems, and it's primarily in the fact that DNC leadership is corrupt and they are only interested in serving themselves and their patrons. But the party members as a whole do work on trying to do good governance. They often fail, but on the intentions front, it's not disagreable.
Counter this to the modern day GOP -- they've been coopted by the evangelicals and white nationalists, and the only thing they want to govern is demanding that their theology is the law of the land. No thank you.
I have respect for old-school conservatives who cared about limited government -- I totally agree with that concept but differ on how those limits are set.
I have no party affiliation and loath partisan politics, but with the two-party system one has to choose the least worst.
Dating in the workplace is usually a bad idea, especially if it's a manager and an underling because the power dynamics get fucked up.
But in the case of the Clinton affair, it was effectively personal (Bill, Monica, Hillary) -- their business.
Please explain how this impacted Clinton's ability to execute his job, or how that dynamic hurt Lewinsky in such a way that it needed to be a national affair?
This is the same kind of feigned moral panic over Hunter Biden's business dealings -- designed solely to smear the president for their opponents political gain.
Edit: as a counter point, Trump fucking a porn star months after his son was born was technically between him, Stormy, and Melania. The reason that it was worthy of public scrutiny was that he committed campaign finance fraud with the hush money. Ironically, no pearls were clutched by his supporters over that.
Clinton damaged the White House intern program by making it look like they were either his harem or victims; having an affair in his office also made it look like he was more interested in using his position to cheat on his wife than do his job. It was at least a distraction, and probably more of a handicap. If he wanted to have sex with Lewinsky, he should have waited until she left the internship, and done it in the Residence.
I purposely avoided comparing Clinton to anyone else, so whatever horrible things Trump has done is just changing the subject. I personally believe that neither of them has committed (anything approximating) the most abhorrent acts by a POTUS, but that's a different conversation.
This didn't start with Clinton or Obama (interesting you skipped over a much larger contributor). As usual, "Reagan made everything worse".
When he was governor of California, he ended free college tuition for the UC state schools, because some hippies at Berkley were protesting the Vietnam war.
When he was campaigning for president, he popularized the idea of the "welfare queen", and got poor white people to vote against their own interests because there were some hypothetical single black mothers abusing the system.
When he got into office, he cut taxes, mostly for the wealthy, but also a bit for the middle class. He expected that he could use that as an excuse to then cut social programs to keep the budget reasonably balanced, but once people have benefits they don't want to give them up. He was forced to not go through with the cuts, doubling the federal budget deficit, and kicking off the trend of deficit spending (except for a brief period under Clinton in the late 90s that W then squandered in Iraq and Afghanistan).
Reagan also perfected the process of:
1. Complain that government programs are bad or inefficient.
2. Use it as an excuse to cut their funding.
3. Government programs get worse as a result.
4. Goto 1.
He didn't start any of these trends, but he did ramp them way up, and we've been on that trajectory ever since.
> though the forever pursuit of more material wealth is exactly what brought the USA to this point
I disagree. It’s the corruption of democratic politics with money. And rage-based content providers (on cable TV and social media) who take any consumer/worker surplus and ram it into invented culture wars.
I don't think we are disagreeing, expanding my point: the forever pursuit of more material wealth narrowed whatever was the USA's vision as a nation.
More material wealth showed other good indicators for society being correlated to it, culminating in the misguided ideology with Reagan that only caring about advancing material wealth is enough to advance society.
Since then the whole point of the USA is to further material wealth, and the belief that societal benefits will inevitably trickle down from this advancement. My firm belief after 40-50 years of empirical data about this experiment is that it was completely misguided and missed the forest for the trees.
Within this ideology all the issues you brought up branched from: corporations and moneyed interests got even more power; to keep power those moneyed interests need to corrupt democratic processes.
Rage-based content providers is just another facet of power maintenance mechanisms, if you have capital and want to push your agenda you need the media for it, and since your main purpose is to have an audience to push this agenda you will, inevitably, rely on content that is easy to churn out while keeping this audience, hence the rage-based content landscape that is very prevalent in the USA.
I think people have different connotations for the word wealth. For some that means people being able to afford housing, Healthcare, or taking a day off to spend with their children.
I think it is simply wrong on the facts that the national government has been primarily focused on raising national GDP and material well-being, or that it has done a good job.
The topic of growth is almost absent from campaign messaging, and investment in infrastructure for the future is a minuscule part of budgets.
If economic growth was the priority, we would see streamlined code and legislation throughout the country and focus on improving them. Politicians would be spending their time trying to figure out how to lower the costs of High-Speed Rail or Bridges or houses.
In the attention economy I think there is still plenty of blame to assign to the voters.. they are the ones that care more about culture war topics then the peace and prosperity of their children.
I mean, I also have times where I find myself blaming people for being so stupid.
That said, you have to realize that this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades. Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort and the outcomes are predictable.
> this has been a very intentional propaganda effort by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades
There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.
> Disorganized masses are largely powerless against that sort of effort
Historically untrue. Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.
> There is no evidence it was highly coordinated and many reasons to believe it’s emergent. Cable TV and then social media created systems competing for attention. The content originators became increasingly decentralized, increasing both diversity and ruthlessness.
Hmm, not sure how you could conclude this given the abundance of evidence regarding the activities and influence of people like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, the fossil fuel industry in terms of the global warming discourse, the general corporate and wealthy forces shaping Republican/Democrat policy over the last ~50 years.
The media influences alone that fuel the sensationalization of these issues are transparent, as are the threads that bind these media groups and those in power over them.
Look at what's happening to CBS and will soon happen to CNN due to the Paramount merger and the Ellisons/Bari Weiss for example.
> Historically untrue.
What? In what part of history have disorganized masses shown themselves to be powerful against "the intentional propaganda efforts made by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades" that I'm referring to?
Almost by definition the successful grassroots movements of the past that have created change were organized, no? I also don't believe there's ever been as effective a media (social and conventional) apparatus in human history as we've had the last half century.
> Starving, uneducated masses are easy to repress. Distracted masses only so long as they look away. And I think we’re seeing signs the American voter isn’t looking away.
I mean, this conversation started over the culture war bullshit that seems to have about as good a grip on Americans' attention as ever, although I agree that the material economic conditions are degrading so badly that they are more and more becoming the priority consideration.
That said, channeling that anger towards scapegoats like immigrants or jews etc is an old and effective playbook and I don't see why we wouldn't call that distraction.
> not sure how you could conclude this given the abundance of evidence regarding the activities and influence of people like the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, the fossil fuel industry in terms of the global warming discourse, the general corporate and wealthy forces shaping Republican/Democrat policy over the last ~50 years
Because for each of these there are a hundred other monied interests, and they're all in covert or open conflict with each other.
> Look at what's happening to CBS and will soon happen to CNN due to the Paramount merger and the Ellisons/Bari Weiss for example
Yes, that's one group overtly taking over a platform. The fact that they're behaving differently after Weiss should give pause to the hypothesis that this is all already co-ordinated from the shadows.
> what part of history have disorganized masses shown themselves to be powerful against "the intentional propaganda efforts made by the most powerful actors in society spanning decades" that I'm referring to?
Every regime fighting survivial deploys all means available to it in its fight. That includes the media. Disorganised groups have overturned concentratios of power far more pronounced than what we have in the U.S. (We have high inequality. But our elite is still usefully fractured.)
> channeling that anger towards scapegoats like immigrants or jews etc is an old and effective playbook and I don't see why we wouldn't call that distraction
Here I agree. But there are also powerful immigrant-born Americans and Jewish Americans who obviously don't want to be part of that, and who have influence over money, power and media.
Everyone is trying to consolidate power. But that's an exclusionary imperative. Hence, political competition.
> The politics in this country have been intentionally broken going back to Clinton and Obama.
Ahh yes, the presidents from the other party, including the one currently in office, who runs arguably the most brazenly corrupt administrations in US history, having tripled his family's net worth in a single year is of course entirely blame free /s.
It has been tried many times. Good luck to pgdog, but there’s a reason these projects don’t stick.
Multi master, from even a conceptual perspective, is incredibly complicated. Databases, transactions, consistency, parallelism are all very complicated.
It’s something that always seems promising at the start but as soon as maintenance and long term improvements enter the picture(ie integrating new Postgres versions), the complexity becomes too much.
No one is taking away the existing automatic planning that works well 95% of the time. You're welcome to continue using that.
The worst thing that could possibly happen is that you give it bad advice leading to slow queries, and then the obvious first step to fixing that is to drop the manual advice and see whether the automatic planner handles it better.
It baffles me that PostgreSQL, which is so deeply customisable in almost every other way, resisted this form of customisability for so long. This is great news.
We are basically dealing with the fallout of the 2008 GFC bailout to this day.
The fiat economic system is irreparably broken, and we are circling the drain. Another bailout is _probably_ inevitable. But the cycle sure as hell isnt resetting and we are speeding towards something... what it is is unclear though, and when is also unclear.
The part people cant wrap around is the scale of it and the time it takes to go through the super cycle. Theoretically, it all started with the Dot com bubble, which indirectly cause the housing bubble, which caused the GFC. Which caused whatever happened in 2019, which caused QE in 2022 under the guise of COVID, which is causing whatever the hell is happening now.
Capitalism has become uncorked, and money is irreversibly flowing to the top at an increasing rate. The logical next stage is that like 75% of the world's population is literally not even part of any economy. And that doesnt really make any sense
yeah I intuitively have felt something like this has been happening, too. And finding the evidence is such an immense task, and feels way out of my current energy level.
When COVID was ongoing there was a term floating around I liked, "Psychosis" was it. The spell is like that of, denial? Terror & shock?
Trauma might be better?
Looking at trauma responses and how to detect it in humans is an interesting perspective to look at all this with. Personally, if I look at it from "people are afraid, traumatized, defending themselves" and use that to extrapolate how most people (the masses, the non-rich) would act and also the rich - that points me to why theres such a sudden hastening of action and pace of wealth up towards the top in the name of AI & war.
Sigh, no. Money is not flowing; company valuation might be, but that's temporary and only works if the company keeps delivering insane amounts of value.
So the founders sell plenty of stock while the price is high and then when their valuation crashes sure they "lost" half their net worth but the other half is still there.
I'm not saying that's what's happening, just making it clear that company valuation not being permanent is not a valid argument against money flowing to the top.
I don’t think that’s it. I think the only thing that motivates billionaire is just to have more than the next guy.
The only thing that motivates Bezos is that Elon Musk’s has more and conversely Elon Musk would have a existential crisis if he was no longer number one
Companies whose main core competency is writing code were already making up a big chunk of the economy before AI. Also, less wealthy companies were constrained in their use of software by the inability to afford the salaries of talented programmers (and ripoff practices from software consulting companies who in theory could help). Lowering the cost of building software systems ought to unblock a good amount of economic activity as the technology diffuses.
Those companies are certainly writing more code. But It isn’t clear that they are increasing their economic productivity. It could even conceivably have the opposite effect by fueling a race to the bottom.
e.g. an interesting possible canary in this coal mine is that there’s been a 200% increase in the rate of new apps appearing on Apple’s App Store, but it has not been accompanied by a 200% increase in the rate at which people are buying apps.
The AI pundits often seem to apply the logic that code output is directly proportional to revenue and/or profit, and as such it follows that an AI usage increase leads to more code which leads to more revenue.
I don't believe this aligns with the reality of any major company, unless your business is in the literal sense "selling code" your revenue and profit is tangential to the quantity of code you produce. Google is a good example of this: most of their revenue and profit comes from their ad network, which is disconnected from their development productivity and instead heavily reliant on network effects and time in market. If I was a new competitor with infinite AI funds to throw at whatever problem I choose, I can't simply capture their market by developing an exact copy of Google's ad platform. In the same way, Google can't substantially grow their ad network by coding "more" or "better", they still need more customers and consumers to interact with their network to see any increase in revenue.
So it doesn't directly follow that a productivity increase will inherently follow an AI usage increase.
Agreed. I think it’s more likely to expect that most of it is pure waste.
My impression is that most software development work is not profitable. Either the project is abandoned, or it fails, or it gets shipped but doesn’t generate positive ROI. But, like how venture capital works, the minority of projects that are successful make enough money to cover the rest.
Some portion of this is because demand for software projects in general is less than perfectly elastic. So more software does not automatically mean more software sales.
It also seems plausible that, in general, companies tend to fund the projects that are most likely to be profitable. They aren’t perfect at it, but I doubt they’re just rolling dice.
Which would imply that the new work companies can take on thanks to developer productivity gains will tend to be ones that are less likely to generate positive ROI.
meaning AI may only produce a net increase in waste, which only serves to erode profits.
Add to that that it’s been years now and we still don’t have an example of someone army-of-oneing a killer app or anything like that. It’s beginning to feel like another iteration of the amazing blockchain revolution that was always & forever just around the corner.
The unlocked economic activity won’t come from a Google competitor writing code faster. A lot of it will come from “boring” businesses who could benefit from custom software but haven’t had the means to create it themselves. In some cases they may not even know their problem can be solved by software, but some AI they are using for repetitive tasks will notice and offer to build an app for them.
I would go as far as to say writing more Code has almost no impact on their economic productivity. What drives those companies is infrastructure and networks
So far the place where I've seen "more code being written" having a postive effect, has been in paying down tech debt and reduction of overhead. We've rewritten services (bringing multiple microservices back under moduliths) and cut costs. But I'm talking about net-negative code. That's not the point you're making. I agree that puking out 20 new features likely wouldn't gain us more revenue.
If the quality of all apps remains high, but if there is an increase of low quality apps it may not necessarily be great for consumers as it becomes difficult to distinguish which are the good and bad quality apps, making it risky to purchase apps.
I am yet to see that ‘companies with great ideas which simply cannot afford those very expensive developers’. For the most, issue is not programmer costs. Mostly it’s inability to formulate the MVP which makes sense.
‘uber for my industry’ is not a sensible business strategy
Honestly, if you know guys whose bottleneck is pure software dev — please let me know, I have a good, experienced team in Eastern Europe, we can do wonders in product development. But coming up with sensible business ideas and executing on them in the real world is crazy hard and extremely rare.
Can you believe that the barrier to entry on a $20 Claude subscription is lower than emailing a guy to hire a team for a project you haven’t even thought of yet? Regular people who are using AI to assist with their daily work will find the chatbot offering to build software tools to automate the work for them.
You are wrong, sir. Their core competency is building out infrastructure and networks to support their software and user base. software is by far the least complicated thing they do.
what makes YouTube YouTube is not the video player it’s the servers that can handle petabytes of uploads a day and billions of views. YouTube software wise, is no different from the 100s of porn websites that are coded by small European teams
But what if it kills current ad-tech as we know it (paying to show ads on random sites without any way to verify that the site is legit), and the flow of ad money for legitimate goods turns back to journalism, magazines and other publications?
That would be half a trillion[1] redirected to regular people just from Google Ads.
The other day I watched a YouTube video on a work machine with no history and got 2 AI generated video ads for scam products before the video played.
An AI generated man talking about his product building journey to make a pressure washer hose that didn't need power (in the AI video it didn't even have a water supply connected!) that was going to be banned in a week because it was too powerful so buy now.
I've seen AI slop before and scam ads before but the combination of the two gave me some real tingly spider-sense that things are going to get worse and that some unethical people will make a lot of money from it so be in no hurry to stop it.
I mean, that says a lot about the kind of crisis out current economy is in. How much longer can the United States Be a world leader when it’s primary function is social media and advertising
Advertising is huge because it's backed by a ton of very real products that people go and buy. It matters because people don't automatically have awareness of things they could find useful.
And writing code is one of the most economically productive activities you can do. Why is it controversial that a technology is good at this?
That value for advertising goes negative on a marginal basis.
The first time (or few times) you saw an advert, you were informed of the product's existence. I now know the Hyundai Elantra exists and could potentially be suitable for my vehicle needs. Mission accomplished.
The next 10,000 times it's just fighting over share of a finite market. I am not expecting to buy another car for another few years, so reminding me that I can choose an Elantra instead of a Corolla at all times is just vapourising cash. In fact, there's a chance that you do something obnoxious in your ad and actively burn brand reputation.
You could argue it's a take on the "everyone uses a different 5% of the features" problem-- that advertisement is going to be within the first "informational" window for someone, but maybe there are more efficient ways to not blast it at uninterested audiences.
One other angle might be asking if we still need some markets to be competitive in the first place. You don't need ads if it's a "when you need X, you'll know where to find it" sort of product. If we nationalized the insurance industry alone, we'd probably eliminate a detectable percentage of ad volume.
People really think we have found a way to negate the laws of physics. As of there can exist a system without entropy.
Humans are prisoners of the present moment, but just think what a market is. What does it really mean as it accumulates disorder for decade plus.
Can the market just continue to deviate from a markets actual purpose forever? Hell, can anything in this universe exist in a particular state forever.
If it can’t, then it means at some point things have to go in the other direction. Use your imagination what that means for the largest most complex (man made) system in the history of this planet.
Money and economics are not “physics”. They are social constructs and not immutable natural laws. Prices can go up as long as people are willing to inflate PE ratios; this isn’t the same as saying my weight will increase indefinitely because acceleration due to gravity increases.
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