VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
Strictly speaking, this is a pseudoscientific attitude.
Do you have a suggestion for how an above-board business that requires one employee per four paying customers (well, per infant the customers are paying for) can cost less than a quarter of a minimum employee salary for that duration? I was suggesting it as a pretty obvious bound from a business perspective, absent subsidies (which have their own bounds).
Nobody seems to be seriously considering AI and robotics to let a single human watch more than four infants at once, and frankly I'm not really sure I would either. But without that, the bounds apply.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21hr ago
Childcare is not that expensive
This particular example feels like it's a function of rising income expectations: you have to pay the help Your daycare costs more than a few bucks a day for very foreseeable reasons. Childcare workers expect to be paid minimum wages (citation needed), and mandated child-to-caretaker ratios make the cost of infant childcare about a quarter of a minimum wage salary before even considering benefits, rent, or other business costs, which are probably nontrivial additions.
People's time is expensive, especially as living standards grow: it's perhaps not obvious, but why wouldn't worker-efficiency-capped services rise in cost at pace with (or more than!) average incomes?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21hr ago
Somewhere in here is an uncomfortable question about whether Von Stauffenberg is an example of a stochastic terrorist.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21hr ago
What sort of "think tank" are you looking for? RAND has jobs posted on their web site. So does the Heritage Foundation even, it seems.
But I can imagine more niche options that look like billionaires' pet policy promotion are probably in practice patronage programs.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23hr ago
Women worked. They did not work a traditional job, but they worked.
From the accounts I'm familiar with before the Industrial Revolution (and even after, if to a more limited extent), there are plenty of women-coded "traditional jobs" that can be done from the house. Sewing, weaving, spinning, and knitting weren't always hobbies, and the results could be sold or done as services for others. Textiles are dirt cheap these days, but accounts from history often have budgets where the cost of clothing isn't that far from rent. Candlemaking comes to mind, too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
When your social pool of people expands from your local neighborhood to the entire country, people aren’t going to think their backyard community of individuals will ever be good enough
I guess I haven't heard so much about it more recently, but when I was a kid, the generational mentality of "Keeping up with the Jones'" was mocked frequently. I think it's funny that social media has really taken that to 11 all the while people still mock older generations for wasting so much effort and money for social status.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Farm land stays fixed while food demand falls. Food becomes cheaper.
IIRC we have quite a bit less farmland than a couple generations ago, but produce quite a bit more total with it because of efficiency scaling. There is a lot of no-longer-under-plow land out there, although much of it wasn't very good for farming anyway.
Food is still cheaper, although I don't think your point is completely wrong.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The average IQ on the internet has dropped a point a year since 2010 I'd say.
We're still stuck in the Eternal September of 1993, when the powers that be decided to allow regular people, not just university students and researchers, onto the Internet.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
For opsec reasons I wasn't actually willing to upload the spreadsheet and have Fable one-shot it
I think "opsec reasons" are ultimately one of the big limiting factors for OpenAI, Anthropic, et al: lots of situations will really prefer something in-house, or at least an ironclad contract about confidentiality.
In the past I've wondered about the long-term market for server-side AI: I'm sure it's non-zero, but I suspect any organization of sufficient size will find themselves rolling out internal hardware and models in the medium term unless the big players keep sufficiently ahead of the commodity models and hardware prices stay high. I've heard of it being done with open weight models already.
Even without seeing the content the AI models see, I've been curious how much intelligence Google (or governments, presumably) could glean from search queries on an aggregate basis. Hypothetically, "Wow, internal Microsoft searches about WINE and Linux are up 100x in the last month, I wonder what they're working on?" gives away potential insider information. Querying the local AI server doesn't give that away.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Relatedly, the UK countries compete separately at the World Cup (it's England specifically, although I think Scotland and Wales have qualified before), but as a combined "Team GB" at the Olympics.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
it’s natural fodder for jokes that the French team be so visibly un-French in background
Doesn't France use a definition of "French" that looks more like the American self-definition? I suppose I can't speak to how widespread the view is within the country, but at least from here it has a reputation, far more than the rest of Europe, of considering France to be a meme, and its adherents to be French.
I guess I'd be interested in hearing a real French perspective on this, if someone is willing to volunteer one.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I think the example of Jews here is complicated because of events last century: "there are fewer Jews than there should be" is a sentiment that I've heard expressed multiple times even as an outsider, and seems broadly believed in the community (willing to hear closer accounts, if anyone wants to offer). That's a hugely pronatalist meme that probably outweighs things like urbanism and education.
It's unclear that there would be such a consensus on the issue without that shared generational trauma.
I wasn't expressing an opinion on Baumol more broadly than the one specific example, which I think has plenty of logic to show exists.
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