Tomato
20d ago
Krugman was right about the Internet at least in terms of aggregate productivity/gdp growth. It’s true that we switched dramatically from using red widgets to blue widgets to do basic communication tasks but sort of so what.
Tomato
19d ago
What exactly are you looking for?
Something to be appreciably different in people’s lives that’s attributable to AI. For an extremely small subset of people I don’t doubt that their workflow has changed a lot but there’s not much else to point to.
Tomato
19d ago
vast difference between 'fax machine' and people doing research being able to access practically everything interesting that's ever been written.
One would think so but it doesn’t show up in aggregate productivity unless you really really squint.
At least with software development internet enabled cooperation increases productivity by a big factor.
Maybe, but see above.
Tomato
19d ago
And even the people who have success there (according to whatever their definition of that is), both men and women, regard it as a necessary evil.
It's no wonder men and women hate each other: they know each other only through the adversarial, hierarchical, soul-destroying apps.
I may be an extreme outlier in this but I’ve met, hooked up with, and dated a lot of women (and eventually married one) from dating apps and both me and the women I met for the most part regarded the experience as fun and rewarding. I’m close friends with a couple of my former partners and we’re all happy about it. It was not appreciably worse than meeting women in person. This was mostly in the Bay Area so maybe it’s an unrepresentative market for how good online dating is/bad in person dating is. I’d be happy to keep hooking up with bumble chicks if I hadn’t met my wife.
Tomato
19d ago
My Korean wife seems 100% unaware of this but in her defense she spends most of her online time-wasting reading about domestic drama on a Korean coupon-clipping forum and a Korean credit card churning forum.
Tomato
17d ago
Kelce is a Super Bowl champion, charismatic, good looking, talented, and interesting to a lot of people because he’s dating the most famous woman in the history of the world. It don’t think it’s anything besides that.
Tomato
17d ago
There’s a saying I’m paraphrasing that I think is basically right,
Black Bear is fine unless you startle a mom with cubs
If a brown bear sees you it’s too late
If you see a polar bear it’s too late
Tomato
16d ago
It's literally a coupon clipping/deal-searching forum but there seem to be a lot of unrelated dramatic threads. I don't speak korean so I have no idea.
I genuinely cannot think of a single "smart" device that has made my life better but it's easy to think of a ton that have made my life a little bit worse. This isn't a privacy or security thing. The devices are genuinely pointless and annoying. We recently unplugged our Alexa because it was pointless and annoying. There was probably a week where I could come up with contrived tasks for it to help with so I could pretend it wasn't completely stupid. I'm tired of tech people telling me I need this or that and making it impossible to find a house in the Bay Area with a normal boring thermostat. It's an immense treat that the used grill I just bought has no electronics built in.
The best argument for IoT devices was that they were a lot cheaper than normal devices because a VC was spending some pension fund's money to "build market share."
Tomato
4d ago
House prices are high because of policies that people like your parents voted for. Hispanics, Asians, and Indians aren’t voting for zoning restrictions and fighting tooth and nail for Prop 13 and similar policies. At least guys like Newsom are wielding power at the state level to force lazy freeloaders (65 year old whites) to make California livable for normal hardworking people (30 year old Hispanics).
Tomato
3d ago
I'm sure that the wealthy home-owning Indians and Asians are voting for policies that keep their home prices high. But most wealthy homeowners in the areas you're thinking about are old white people. Indians and Asians are mostly renters. If you have some data on what they're voting for I'd be very interested.
Idle Hispanics and Blacks are not living in the Bay Area and are certainly not the reason that your parents' old home sold for $3m. That's such a ridiculous thing to say to be honest, I'm sort of shocked that you connect these two things. Hispanic immigrants, particularly those in the Bay Area, tend to work really hard and be model citizens compared to the natives.
Bay Area prices are high because incumbent (mostly) white people don't allow new construction.
Tomato
3d ago
There are plenty of people who want to sell, the problem is that their neighbors have made it illegal to build higher density on their own land.
Tomato
3d ago
No one has an obligation to sell you their home just because it would improve your commute and they're not commuting any more.
They have made it illegal for their neighbors to use their land how they want to use it (e.g., build higher density apartment buildings). Nobody is forcing granny to sell her home; granny is preventing other people from doing things with their own land. That's a real economic harm.
Tomato
3d ago
Most of the US has gotten much richer and has also gained population. Prices are particularly so much higher in the Bay Area because it’s impossible to build new housing in the Bay Area. In other words, demand has increased everywhere but supply has been flat (or even negative given depreciation of the existing stock) particularly in California, due to incumbent local NIMBYs.
Tomato
3d ago
The entire sunset district could look like Manhattan. It’s not like we don’t know how to build buildings that are taller than two stories. It’s a completely self-inflicted space constraint.
Tomato
3d ago
If that’s a priority for you there are tons of places in the country where demand is low enough to allow that. It’s totally crazy for us as a society to empower someone to prevent his neighbor from doing what he wants to do with his own land in the most productive, in demand location on the planet.
Tomato
3d ago
California’s housing problem and people’s political views on it is completely orthogonal to national party differences. It’s caused by local zoning restrictions which is basically older incumbent homeowners versus younger new entrant renters. Through demographics it’s probably accidentally related to national party affiliation but that’s likely weak and completely incidental. Whether the locals like Trump or not has nothing to do with whether they’re in favor of multi family apartment building construction. The state (Democrat) has implemented pro-building policies that short-circuit local power to restrict it but again you should think of this as largely orthogonal to D vs R. Viewing this as a Trump-related culture war issue totally misses the mark IMO. (I’m responding to your comment but this goes for everyone in this thread).
Related, how long do I have to wait before I can start calling LLMs a nothing burger? Everything that has come out of it seems so small and near-pointless. Marginal productivity increases at best. When does the fun stuff start happening?
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