Not to mention that even the utility function of the "millenials dilemma" makes no sense here, it's not even consistent like it has to be. What it represents here?
- More wealth is better? Then 0/10 for chill/work maybe is ok, but it make no sense to have 8/8 for chill/chill.
- More fun is better? Then 8/8 is ok, but it makes no sense to have 0/10 for chill/work.
- More fun in the near future is better? But it is clearly stated that fun will be unachievable in the game since work will prevail as the dominant position.
It is true. It is crucial to understand any kind of growth situation which are predominent in life. For instance, one of my friends who is a teacher wanted to explain sustainable development to his highschool students by showing the effect of cutting too much trees if this doesn't match the trees growing rate. He asked me to solve the not so trivial equations with a series and found myself returning to the same maths used for the interest computation.
Not also to mention something often oversight. An autonomous car can park far away from it's user, meaning we could drastically reduce de number of space taken by parking in the city. First, giving back this spaces to the people as green parks and services places. Second, lower one of the biggest problem in our current city: urban heat island.
But then you’ll likely have a bunch of extra traffic created from the cars going to and from their owner to parking, rather than just to and from their destination. Or from the car just circling the block because the owner would rather not have to wait long for its return.
Right. You go to the opera, you order the car to drive around the block for two hours and then pick you up. Cost of gas is cheaper than parking and by definition, you're not affected by any traffic congestion caused as you're sitting watching your show. Sure, 1000 other people in the theater are also doing it, but that's not your problem.
30 minutes before the show is over, you order the car to wait in the "no stopping" zone in front of the theater for easy access. You exit the theater and find your car is tangled in a mess of traffic that takes 45 minutes to clear as most of the cars are double-parked and blocking traffic, waiting for their owners. For the duration of the show, no useful traffic has been able to move for a mile in any direction, as empty cars are just idling around and are content to wait, fully stopped.
There's a big limit on how bad it can be with Uber though because each Uber is currently driven by an actual person. That person costs money and places a natural limit on how many unutilized Ubers there will be.
With AVs, this limit no longer exists, and people will start using AVs for runs that currently are prohibitively expensive with care that require drivers.
I think the reasoning of the Fermi paradox is that "at some point in time" a distant civilization must have been using EM wave to communicate. Now, considering the number of planets, it must exists a civilization in the universe that sits at a distance that let us sense this EM dominated past. And this even if in their own local time, they use fancy new tech. Even if they were not trying to communicate with us per se. Their own radiation should be measured.
We would only be able to detect our own everyday transmissions at a distance of a few dozen light years. So the galaxy might be full of EM emitting civilizations, and we wouldn't have detected them.
On Monopoly: It has been a though I have for some time. I wonder how could they not form monopolies. Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another? A minority. Their product are almost natural monopolies.
They are very difficult to fight against monopolies because when they have user commitment, the need for the product is filled entirely by one company. In addition, it is very difficult to make the user change, it's part of a habbit.
I might be wrong there. Just a though I had, but interesting to discuss. Is it really possible to avoid monopoly with these products?
There are a number of options, and not all of them are splitting the company into a bunch of fully co-equal units, which is a process that works better when things cover an area.
In telecom, it was typical, due to regulation, that you'd have different parts of the business that couldn't interact at all. I wasn't permitted to talk to people with certain badges because of their business unit. You could easily do this with the advertising business for each of these large companies, or split it off entirely, and force that ad exchange to work with their competitors, for instance. You could regulate the news feed so that the pipe was a lot dumber and configurable, so that the company would no longer be allowed to experiment on human psyches.
There are tons of options that don't result in breaking facebook into 12 facebooks. Pulling the advertising out, and regulating advertising in general, is the best solution I've been able to spitball though.
Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another?
Uber, Lyft, and some smaller competitors already exist yet people don't need all the apps; they just choose one and it works fine. Likewise with search engines: some people use Google, some use Bing, some use DDG. It's suboptimal but monopolies are suboptimal in different ways.
The problem with network effects was solved in the 1980s breakup of AT&T where the telcos all federated with each other. Federated protocols like SMTP and XMPP existed before Facebook and Twitter; rather than a historical accident they made a decision to pursue lock-in.
Yes, that was my point: they choose one and it works fine. It is easier in that case to ensure and keep a certain mass of users and so, for a long time. That leads to the possibility of blitzscaling and monopoly I think.
To me, the problem comes when you provide a service. The service market seems much more difficult to diversify than the product market. When the need is well filled by one company, it is difficult to keep competition alive. It is obviously not binary. It depends on the service.
For instance, for the product side; Nike, Adidas, etc. are constantly trying to improve and change their products to keep up with the complex shoe market even if they are pretty colossal companies. Because the user need for a new shoe pair is coming on a really short scale and the competition is fierce.
I'm not seeing the same kind of competition with services. When you use a service that fills the need, you don't change in general. Or at least, people change on a very long scale. Some times, it even takes a cultural shift to change habits.
On the google vs bing example: Well, ok some uses bing, but in majority because microsoft makes it easy to do so on their systems ;-). There exists some very good alternatives, like duckduckgo, but it represents a minority.
On monopoly: I don't really understand the surprise the article seems to show on this topic.
> Most monopolies or duopolies develop over time, and have been considered dangerous to competitive markets; now they are sought after from the start and are the holy grail for investors.
It's not now that they're sought, it's always been that way. Because that's literally the way a business wins this game. That's the holy grail, literally the driver behind competitiveness - the desire to monopolize a market, so that you can comfortably do whatever you want, and earn whatever money you need. That's the very carrot society uses to create entrepreneurs - the name of the game, from society's POV, is to get people working towards monopoly, creating value at low prices in the process, and once the winner is about to emerge, to pull the rug out from under them. The game is a lie, winners can not be allowed. That's the market way to prosperity.
The only thing that's changed is that some people are now not afraid to publicly say they're seeking monopoly. But they've always been seeking that.
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RE your comment, I sort-of agree. I strongly agree with the observation that I explicitly do not want to have 4-5 taxi apps on my phone, and my life would be much happier if I could just use one. Similarly, I'd prefer to have just one app for public transit, just one app for maps/navigation, and preferably integrate all three categories into single super-app, whose sole purpose is to help me get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. But that's more of an UX issue.
And it wouldn't have to be one app. Just one per user. In a perfect world, all those services - mapping, taxis, public transport - would be available through open APIs, and you could use free or commercial super-apps interchangeably. Services would be serving you, proxied by your super-app, instead of serving you on a plate to their investors. Alas, most companies seem hell-bent on capturing all the value they produce - they have this kind of greed that ruins things. I know that market pressure sort-of forces this to happen, but I wish there was a way to correct this.
That's only because/if one shop/airline/brand doesn't cover all of their needs cheaply enough.
It's not like most people choose multiple providers because they care about health of the competition. From customer's point of view, competition is noise.
Uber is actually not the best example of a natural global monopoly - because it needs to compete locally - most taxi rides are for local population. So there might be a natural monopoly (or duopoly) for a taxi app - but one per a metro area. This is different from AirBnB - where the app works truly globally. https://thinkgrowth.org/uber-is-going-to-0-and-benchmark-kno...
But maybe change contexts—would you call Coca Cola a monopoly? Certainly Pepsi gives them a good run for their money, even if they aren't as large technically speaking (I have no idea).
I mean, people will always have their preferences. I'm not sure if that makes for a monopoly on its own.
How much that preference is formed by the company's inherent pursuit of a monopoly, well...
I'm not sure if it's that different from other contexts, or if it is.
Uber is not a very good example because you can easily switch to another taxi app if there are better benefits/the costs are lower etc. Even the VP of Engineering of Uber acknowledged it in a talk a few years ago. Something that accumulates over time and has a social networking effect would be much harder to replace.
What a beautiful text. It just made my day. I think, for most of scientists, these previously thought impossible outcomes is as, if not more, rewarding as aligned with theory outcomes. Certainly this is one of the reasons that encourage me to continue in science. Curiosity of course, but also the feeling that impossibility is only temporary.
I love PyTorch, but my experience with jits embedded in Python (eg. Numba) has been everything but simple, nevermind trivial. I'll really have to try it to believe it.
I’ve had the opposite experience with numba in production. It works almost flawlessly, very easy to reason about the generated code and inspect annotations, easy to debug.
Do you interact with numpy or other compiled numerical packages? this is where it usually breaks for me. The thing is that I use numpy, scipy, keras, tensorflow, etc. in literally every project, making numba not too useful
That’s very cool. Numba and Cython work extremely well with virtually no overhead or extra effort on my part, so jax doesn’t seem like it would buy me much for most of my work. But I can imagine a lot of projects where jax woukd be useful, and I plan to keep current on best practices for it.
Disclaimer: I am not an historian nor a sociologist nor a political scientist. It is pure intuition, so please correct me if you find me wrong.
This kind of article recalling the war declared between Apple and Google by strong characters (reaching almost royal admiration) like Steve Jobs and showing their alliance now forced by economical benefits, brings to my head an observation I make for some years now.
It feels like the world is more and more returning to a, though different, late Middle Age state where kingdoms, merchants/bankers and religion were in control. It feels like we are close to the end of the powerful democratic state.
Yes, these forces has always existed and played a major role in political affairs, but during thr XXth century, we managed to keep it marginal, at least in the West.
Now there is an inversion, Kingdoms are coming back.
There is a lot of example: formation of alliances over sole benefits of oligarchs, growth of organisations never seen from a long time, customer attachment to a company like it was a dogma, tax and regulation ducking by companies, companies wars often more important than wars between states, states bending to organisations wishes, etc.
Maybe to return to this state is a human reflex. Like were unable to create a stable democratic state.
I don't know what to think about it atm, but I'm pretty sure we are on the edge of a great schism with the modern era.
> Like were unable to create a stable democratic state.
I believe equality is an unstable equilibrium.
Throw a bunch of people on an island where everyone starts out equal. Soon, some will have marginally more power than others. Maybe they happen to be stronger, or washed ashore at a point with a few more coconuts and fish, maybe they just get lucky.
What do you use that extra power for? The obvious answer is to use it to force others to give you more power. Let that cycle run for a long time and you get the wildly unequal despotic power structures witnessed through almost all of human history.
The reason democracy "wins" is because bringing the least-powerful people up is a net benefit to everyone, including the most powerful, even if it requires bringing some of the most powerful down. It's a more efficient system -- extracts the most value from the most people -- so the total volume under the equality curve goes up at the expense of the top end going down a little.
For that to work, though, everyone has to buy into the system, even the most powerful. You need a populace that will willingly sacrifice personal power for the betterment of the whole. That requires intense, constant cultural education and community building.
When that breaks down, it's incredibly easy for a society to fall back to the default state of "everyone in it for themselves".
The horrors of WWII were enough to scare people shitless about unchecked power concentrated in the hands of a few. But those horrors are passing out of living memory right now, so it's little surprise that we're going back to authoritarianism and rapacious power hunger.
I'm generally an optimist about the human condition, but the news scares the shit out of me right now. It feels like we're forgetting everything about democracy and won't relearn it until we plunge headlong into WWIII.
I can almost hear a Scottish accent in that argument.
IDk if a thought experiment about a desert island conducted inside a mind that is already thinking in terms of economic dynamics is... There are plenty of examples in the real world. It's pretty rare that little societies have dynamics like that.
Small groups of people usually share instead of trading. Power structures usually emerge from violence, religion or someone becoming chief. Power built by the sweat of one's (scottish) brow is something more characteristic of modern, monetary, large scale industrial and post-industrial societies.
Pharaoh wasn't pharaoh because his ancestors were marginally better farmers.
And seems to center around the same ideologies that were most prevalent in the early 1900's too. Industrial/corporate capitalism and communism respectively (new names, same ideas). In the end many didn't learn and the same mistakes will repeat. Pragmatism places things somewhere in the middle, but this time around people are far less willing to make concessions or even have conversations for the sake of progress.
At least in the West, I'd say democracy has generally been fairly stable... but the forces opposed to it have strengthened or weakened over time.
Anything which deconcentrates or destroys capital (rapid innovation, war) relatively strengthens democracy.
An age of peace, and lack of political will to prevent innovation-capture by current monopolies, results in democracy weakening relative to commercial interests.
>At least in the West, I'd say democracy has generally been fairly stable
Preface: I'm happy to be corrected, since i'm not very well-versed in this topic.
In the US, is it even a democracy when a new party can't come up and win an election? You can legally lobby for a party which in reality is just a fancy word for a bribe, so how do you expect either of these parties to have a common's person best interest in mind when it comes to making policies?
Compare this to India, where a person went on a strike, and then a group of people formed a party with the said person and he ended up becoming the Chief Minister of Delhi. Now, did he turn out to be good or not is another debate, but my point is, people were fed up with established parties, and it was actually possible for a new person to form a party and make a government out of it. Majority of the population wanted a change, and it was possible for them to get it.
It's due to the first past the post system strongly favouring two or few parties per constituency (otherwise if you have two parties that are closer to each other politically, then they're at a disadvantage against the third one.
> The question is: Why can't a new party come up? Is it due to the system itself or the "will of the people"?
I honestly and genuinely don't think that's much of a question.
I encourage you to read Lawrence Lessig's "Republic, Lost"[1] - which talks about how the big money behind campaign financing makes average Joe's feel as if they're choosing a politician based on their will, which turns out to not really be the case. Rather, they're choosing from a select group of politicians already rubber stamped "OK" by deep pocketed donors.
A good quote (not verbatim) from the book is basically how deep pocket donors have a sense of: "Let me choose the potential candidate options, and I don't really care who wins".
So it's the "will of the people" only so far as the people's will aligns with something they have 0 control over - the intentions/ambitions of those with money - which doesn't sound much like free will.
Money has always been integral to political campaigning.
But I'd say the 2016 election clearly refutes your assertion.
Republican fundraising as of 6/22/2016 in USD$millions, {total}, {candidate}, {affiliated PAC} [1]: Donald Trump (67.1, 64.6, 2.5), Jeb Bush (162.1, 35.2, 126.9), Ted Cruz (158.0, 92.6, 65.4), Marco Rubio (125.0, 47.3, 61.8)
If one wants to blame the Illuminati for secretly supporting candidates... this is a harder point in history to find support.
It's due to the voting system. Plurality voting systems tend towards two-party rule. This observation is known as Duverger's law [1].
Now, if the US switched to a radically different voting system today, we probably wouldn't see a flourishing of outside parties tomorrow; it could take a little while. But people sympathetic to outside parties such as the Greens or the Libertarians would be far less reluctant to vote for them if it didn't mean splitting their vote and causing the "lesser of two evils" to lose their local district.
Not in the United States it's not at least. Even just the recent net neutrality pubic votes don't match what was done in the slightest. The USA is an oligarchy through and through.
There are many who don't want the government involved in 'net neutrality.' The FCC under Obama was acting in an antidemocratic manner when they claimed authority to enforce net neutrality. The executive expanding its power without the interaction of congress is far more anti-democratic than a vote that turned out a way that you didn't like.
There are many who think the net is evolving in a great way and want to limit government interference until their is a real problem. If there's a real problem then pass a law and deal with the problem. Often times these harmless laws have terrible consequences and are difficult to undo.
Are many people != Large majority. The large majority publicly backed net neutrality and then the government choice the opposite choice, which only helped a set of large, rich companies.
Yes in a democracy you will frequently deal with votes not going the way you want. Having powerful groups who can get the law changed to benefit them is a different issue and is indicative of a de facto oligarchy
I would say the large majority doesn't care about net neutrality in any meaningful way. Personally, I researched it and couldn't find any reason to a have a stance on the issue.
I don't know what to think either. Thinking about it at a higher level than this:
Some days I really think people don't know how to live under a democracy. There just always seems to be this segment of the population that want to be told what to think (and preferably told things are going well)
Some days I think liberty is the only way to live life, but that people mistake that liberty doesn't come at a cost. Most people don't have enough skin in the game to be willing to accept that cost. The original pilgrims, the founding fathers, and the lot did. There are attacks on our liberities that would have started revolutions (Patriot act being the most egregious example).
Don't know what to think anymore. Politics disgust me. I'm told I'm not even old enough to be this cynical.
Politics in a democracy has always disgusted everyone.
Per Churchill, "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time..."
US is not a democracy, it's a republic AFAIK. The design philosophy behind the architechture of US Government is explicitly that it is not a democracy.
The US is both a democracy and a republic. The terms are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, it is much more common to be both than to be just one or the other.
>Most people don't have enough skin in the game to be willing to accept that cost.
This reminds me somewhat of the argument over voting rights during the founding of the Constitution, ultimately being left up to the States. The argument for restriction was that those dependent on the wills of others are not independent or privileged enough to act in a way other than securing their own interests; the argument against this idea is fairly obvious.
From William Blackstone's Commentaries of the law of England is the most concise summary of the pro I'm aware of.
"I'm told I'm not even old enough to be this cynical."
Don't worry my young friend: if you think, as it seems by your comment, that there was a golden age in the past where people was better, you have a lot of way to go in your cynicism.
As an EU citizen, I've thought about this for a bit and I think that maybe it is more because the large companies being targets for regulation atm (FAANG) are not EU companies.
See for example how protective the US has been of Monsanto in the past and now that Bayer has swallowed it, lots of lawsuits are suddenly underway and scandals pop up.
- More wealth is better? Then 0/10 for chill/work maybe is ok, but it make no sense to have 8/8 for chill/chill. - More fun is better? Then 8/8 is ok, but it makes no sense to have 0/10 for chill/work. - More fun in the near future is better? But it is clearly stated that fun will be unachievable in the game since work will prevail as the dominant position.