Important meetings and decisions should be made with remote workers present and with their full participation. If your team frequently cuts people out and is prone to forming cliques of in-groups and out-groups, return to office won’t help you. Those same middle school politics happen in entirely in-person offices. People get cut out and isolated whether remote or in person when management decides their input isn’t valuable.
I like the way my office does it. All the engineers and drafters are on the ground floor. The sales guys work in a loft at the back of the building. We keep them in the attic like they would keep dementia patients in the attic back in the olden days.
You’re talking different neurotypes here. Why should we prioritize the neurotype that prefers in-office vs the neurotype that prefers out-of-office? If anything, shouldn’t we prefer the working style that saves the company money and is more productive on average?
It also has to with the tyranny of distance. People end up trapped in shitty jobs that aren’t right for them. They end up in roles where they aren’t doing the things they want to do or where their talents truly lie. Economically, this causes them to be much less productive than they could be in a position that’s a better fit for them.
And the main reason people end up trapped in jobs is the tyranny of distance. Maybe there’s only two employers in your town that can really use your specific skills. For someone who owns a home, moving costs tens of thousands of dollars. And often you can’t find out a position won’t be a good fit until you actually work there for awhile.
Work from home overcomes much of this tyranny of distance. It allows employers and employees to find much better matches for each other, unconstrained by physical distance. And for this reason, shitty employers hate it. Shitty employers thrive on transaction/switching costs and employee lock-in.
Congress can already directly overturn Supreme Court rulings via either jurisdiction stripping or by expanding the size of the court.
It’s about power. It’s just about power. Extreme wealth is a way for someone in democratic society to exercise the power of high office without actually having to convince the people to vote for you.
You hand me a few million? I’m never going to work again. I’ll spend the rest of my days happily hanging with friends and family, pursuing my hobbies, and volunteering for causes I support. But then again, I’m not a psychopath bent on amassing as much power as possible.
Yeah, it does make sense if you think about it. Imagine if Bezos or Musk decided to use their fortune to do as much damage to a city as possible. Musk could go to a city of hundreds of thousands and absolutely decimate if he wanted. Buy up all the big employers in town and shut them down. Fund local politicians who will screw things up as much as possible. Buy up residences by the thousand and pay to have them demolished. A billionaire like Musk or Bezos could, if they chose to, absolutely do as much damage to a city as a nuclear bomb. And countless people would die deaths of despair as a result.
Bezos could literally destroy a city if he wanted to. Let’s say a city of 100k people has 33,000 residences. Let’s say the average cost of buying and demolishing one is $500k. For about $16 billion, Bezos could literally buy up every residence in a city and tear them all down. Hell, they could afford to literally level a city that is home to millions of people, forcing the city to be abandoned.
One person should simply not have that much power. We don’t let people own nuclear bomb, period. We don’t say “only really ethical people get to own nukes.” We don’t say “only people with an expensive permit and license can own a nuke.” No. There we recognize that no person, no matter how sane or moral, gets to own a nuke. Mr. Rogers wasn’t allowed to own a nuke, even if he wanted one. Because even Mr. Rogers with a nuke isn’t safe. There’s always a chance of one individual going nuts and killing millions. There are simply levels of power that only large groups of people should have. Some things just should never be trusted to individuals.
No. I don’t agree. I don’t want a wealth tax. I want a wealth CAP. 1000x the median household income should be the maximum allowable fortune. That would be something like $80 million today.
I like that number because 1000x the median income is a good approximation for the largest honest fortune a person can earn by their own work. Imagine you had a married couple:
Even in such an extreme scenario, two people in a couple working highly paid jobs and saving and investing nearly everything they could. Even then, they would struggle to die with a fortune 1000x the median income. The only way you can earn more money than this is if you inherit it or if you arbitrage the labor of others. You need to start a business, be an executive, or have other means of scalping the surplus off of other people’s labor.
1000x the median income is the largest honest fortune. It’s the largest fortune you can earn through an ordinary salary and prudent individual investing. And it’s well below the level where you have so much money you’re becoming a threat to society. No one should have an individual fortune so large that they can sway nations through their own wealth. That is just too much power for one individual to have. We don’t let people own nuclear bombs. We shouldn’t let people be billionaires.
I don’t want to tax billionaires. I want to eliminate them entirely. I would make all fortunes over 1000x the median income taxed at 100%. And if you secretly amass a larger fortune? There would be escalating criminal penalties. To the point where having a fortune 10x the legal limit would get you in as much legal trouble as if you tried to acquire your own nuclear bomb.
Thanks! The garage is nice. It has some real advantages. When it’s all set up, I’ll be able to back the pickup truck to the garage door and take a full sheet of plywood directly from the truck bed to the workbench. When the weather is nice, I like to open the doors and just work in the fresh air. Finally, while I do sweep and vacuum up, there’s always a little bit of dust left over. For that little bit of dust, I can grab the leaf blower and just blow the last bit of really fine dust out the garage door.
I’m working to set up my new workshop. We moved into a new house a few months ago, and I’m finally getting to setting up the shop in earnest.
I’m setting up the shop in a 3 car garage. The garage has a one car bay and a two car bay. I want to be able to actually park a car in the one car bay. So I built a large wall separating the two bays. The wall covers probably 2/3 of the width. The rest will be covered by a curtain. The two car bay will be the actual woodshop area. The one car bay will be a place to park a car and will serve as a finishing space. The wall and curtain will keep sawdust contained within the two car bay. The wall also serves as a tool wall. Here’s what the wall currently looks like:
From the other side:
The wall is about 10’ wide and 12’ high.
In my old shop I had even more on the wall. But I’m trying out moving most of my bladed tools into a tool chest. I was going to build one, but I found this old steamer trunk by the side of the road. From the manifest glued to the back it looks like it was used by an air force airman in the 1980s to ship things home from Japan. I’ll be using it as a tool chest. I wanted to put wheels on it. But as it’s a bit of an artifact I didn’t want to actually modify the trunk itself or drill into. Instead I built a little cart for it to roll around on.
After I finish here, the last big step in setting up the shop will be installing the dust collection system. And I went overboard on this. This is very much a dream shop setup I’m building out. Currently in a bunch of boxes strewn about the shop is an entire Oneida Dust Gorilla and a network of piping to service the various machines.
Pass a new law. Make “it was an AI datacenter” an affirmative criminal defense against charges of arson. An affirmative defense is when you go to court and say, “yes, I did the act, but it was necessary because reason X.” “Yes, I shot and killed the guy, but I did so because he broke into my house and was trying to kill me.” That’s an affirmative defense.
Fuck it. Ultimately the law is subordinate to the will of the people. If they’re going to just ignore the voters, the voters should make it so people can’t be prosecuted for burning down AI data centers. It just won’t be illegal.
The real issue is that since any fingerprint that can be mandated for AI content must be algorithmically implemented, then that fingerprint can be algorithmically removed.
For example, let’s say companies voluntarily choose or are forced to integrate text fingerprinting into LLM output. Automated AI writing detection tools already exist, but they’re not reliable. But in principle we could make the output of LLMs easy to identify. Maybe we force them to adopt subtle but highly unique patterns of word choice, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. Then if any student attempted to upload an LLM-generated essay to their course website, the system could with high accuracy flag it as AI generated.
But…if those patterns are so clear and unambiguous, it also means they can be easily detected by third party tools. If one person can code ChatGPT to add special fingerprinting to the text ChatGPT creates, another person can create a program that you can paste ChatGPT text into that will remove that fingerprinting.
Yeah that’s what I figured. I was just really baked last night. This thought came into my head based on a conversation I was having with someone, and I just thought the idea hilarious. Just imagining some guard getting sentenced and going, “wait…I still get to keep my job, right?”
I always remember the classic Microsoft Flight Simulator. In the pre-9/11 days, the game had a helicopter that you could take off from the roof of the World Trade Center. You could only access that takeoff location via a helicopter. However, once the map was loaded, you could switch your aircraft. Our favorite thing to do was to start with a helicopter on top of the WTC, then swap it out for a jumbo jet. All of a sudden you’re piloting a 747 trying to take off from a dead stop off the roof of the WTC.
Google:
“No need to sue us. Mr Maclsaac was listed in Google search as a sex offender, but wasn’t actually on the sex offender registry. But no worry, we’ve fixed the problem! We have several government records contracts. Our LLM simply corrected the record and added Ashley to the sex offender registry. The error has been resolved.”
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Adobe Acrobat will grind it to a halt. Fucking how.
“Today Microsoft and Adobe are announcing further AI integration of their products. This AI will tune software performance in an attempt to counteract the slowing effects of previous rounds of AI integration.”
Well that’s still possible. No real conclusions can be drawn here. It’s quite possible blahaj is the most ban-happy instance. These numbers need to be weighted by number of users, aka measured per capita, to provide any real conclusions.
There’s ultimately really no reason for them to completely dismantle democracy. Republicans know they can lose big in 2026 and 2028 and still regain power in just a few years. It’s already guaranteed that whatever Democrats get elected won’t really do anything to change the circumstances that resulted in Republicans winning. And they will not prosecute Trump and his co-conspirators for their crimes. And Democrats don’t offer the working class anything, so the Republican message of “we’ll make other people’s lives worse to make your life better” resonates with people. They’re the only party actually offering to help people.
There’s just no reason for Republicans to abandon democracy all together. They’ll happily tilt the scales heavily in their favor, but completely abandoning democracy would mean civil war. And they’re already doing quite well in our existing flawed democracy. Why risk it all when you’re already winning?
Ultimately living standards are declining because of increased wealth inequality. And Democrats aren’t going to do anything to fight that. So Republicans at most will be out of power for another cycle.
Republicans don’t need to destroy democracy. They’re already in complete control in our current system. And Democrats, if elected in 2026 and 2028, are already promising to do everything in their power to make sure MAGA returns to power in 2032.