domain:worksinprogress.co
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5hr ago
I tend to agree. Curves tend to have the purpose of hiding failure. You can objectively fail the material and still pass. I find a lot of monkeying about with the grading end of college and almost all of it does the same. Grading scales in the 1989s had A= 100 to 92, Cs were 85 to 72. Anything under 72 was pretty much failure. Now it’s 70 to pass, and 90 it an A. Curves are much more common. And I’m finding a lot of schools now allow extra credit, class participation and other “free points” to goose grades. Until upper division courses, Theres a good bit of handholding as well, as major tests and papers are mentioned in class and in some cases the students must produce drafts of papers and outlines at intervals to make sure they’re working on them.
I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.
You can think about them as wakalixes if you want - it doesn't change the tradeoff that if you eject the people doing work either someone else has to do the work (in place of what they are currently doing) or the work doesn't get done.
Labour-driven immigration is, regardless of the motives of the immigrant, fundamentally a commercial transaction with terms set by the host-country government on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Empirically, Singapore and the Gulf Arabs have demonstrated that you can offer low-skill immigrants much less favourable terms than the West does and still get takers.
After an attempt to fact-check your comment about Zimbabwe, the specific context of the UK care worker visa appears to be a furphy here. It looks like there was an order-of-magnitude drop in the number of care worker visas issued before the change to dependent visas, driven by a crackdown on outright fraudulent applications in late 2023. So this particular case wasn't choosing the wrong-side of a trade-off, it was failed implementation due to administrative incompetence. For anyone familiar with the UK Home Office, this is unsurprising. For anyone familiar with the Johnson-Sunak Conservative regime, this is also unsurprising.
gattsuru
6hr ago
Why consider?
It's a hard question. You're definitely looking at a lot more complexity and, unless you get into PCB manufacturing, a really trustworthy charger can get expensive. In turn, running low voltage inputs into a high multiplier boost converter is generally going to be low efficiency and high-noise. Depends very heavily on your comfort level.
I was a bit freaked out by LiPo watching videos of them burst into flames if they get ruptured. Maybe not something I want to attach to my helmet. But perhaps the issue is just as prevalent with 18650s?
18650s are just a form factor, but expect LiPo unless advertised otherwise. They're a little more resistant to puncture than pouch-style designs, but you're probably going to want a rigid cover regardless, both to protect against impacts, but also to avoid contamination.
Lithium-iron-phosphates are a lot safer and are available in 16850 format -- though they'll still discharge some heat and not-great fumes, even a direct puncture or complete short on a big battery pack won't cause a fire on its own -- but they're more expensive and finding a compatible charger is even more difficult. NiMH are cheaper and more widely available, but they have a much lower cell voltage and are pretty heavy for something to wear when biking.
The irony is my local library and (non-profit, communist) maker space all have 3d printers (multiple, even), but they're always broken.
Yeah, that's definitely a Thing. Especially the lower-end machines are always a battle to keep running.
As such I'm now currently trying to get pieces of acrylic, cutting them to size and seeing how sandwiching the ESP32 etc and wrapping the whole thing in a rubber gasket for light waterproofing works out.
That's definitely an option. I would consider switching to polycarbonate for the final version -- it's a little more obnoxious to cut with a saw (and can't be safely cut in any way involving heat/laser) and scratches easily, but you can bend it cold and it's extremely impact-resistant where even acrylic can shatter with jagged edges. But acrylic's fine for testing.
If you need a really weird shape or very thin gaskets, I'd also point to various automotive gasket makers. They're generally only useful where you have two surfaces being tightly screwed together and won't last for too long if you're repeatedly removing and reattaching things, but especially for rapid prototyping they're a lot faster and easier to work with, and surprisingly cheap (and actually can be purchased in Ace/Menards/Autoshops, even some WalMarts).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6hr ago
The question now is whether migrants are like benzos or, say, antihistamines.
But antihistamines don't work...oh! I see what you did there.
drmanhattan16
6hr ago
I dispute Trump being 2, I think he's more of a 4, and that does impact your argument. Trump is constrained by the rules around him, but he's actively trying to break them and test the limits of the law. Not to mention that even if you agree with his goals with DOGE, cutting down on wokeness, etc., he's squandering the political capital he was loaned for doing those by going about it in the way he does. Wanting less government waste isn't the same thing as having no government capacity. In fact, there's a good case to be made that the issue with the government is that it doesn't build capacity to do things more effectively on its own. Jennifer Palkha goes over examples of this in her book, Recoding America. I described one example here. Nor does it make sense to try and limit money spent on science, the NIH, etc. Or appointing RFK to the cabinet. Moreover, uncertainty has big impacts on the modern economy. We're not playing a 4x game where you just turn trade routes on or off. The US, for instance, spent years getting companies to move manufacturing to Vietnam, and now there's a tariff on...Vietnam. It's years of diplomatic and government effort being wasted.
It's true that outcomes matter. I certainly wouldn't want to live in a US where a hypothetical socialist president, with great stability and order, transitions us into degrowth socialism. But it's certainly not obvious to me where the line is to say that the outcome is more pressing than the process of obtaining it, and so I can't wholly accept the ordering of 2 vs. 3.
gattsuru
6hr ago
FDM's a great learning experience for software-side people that aren't great at self-driven efforts to learn about physical-side work -- everything from chemistry to mechanical tuning to maintenance scheduling to belt or stepper drive behaviors matter.
For actual usability, it's a mix. A lot of what's available out there are aesthetic toys at best and, frankly, more often cheap useless crap. If you've got a good use case, there are things that they excel at, but many times even they can turn into a temptation rather than an actual benefit (oh boy, a 3d-printed corner bracket!... why didn't I just get a metal one from Home Depot?). Still, for rapid(ish) prototyping, for specialty shapes, and for weird art projects.
Resin printers are more set-and-forget, since outside of support placement and cleaning there's not much to tweak with them. Better for figurines, though there are some chemistry-adjacent stuff where they have unique advantages.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
6hr ago
Skill tests exists. CLEP (https://clep.collegeboard.org/register-for-an-exam) runs all kinds of exams to give college credits. There’s stuff like GRE and GRE subject tests. We have versions of this stuff already and putting them under one roof with national testing would not be that difficult. An advantage is that if this takes off nationally, it’s plausible that you could replace college with such testing.
Rov_Scam
6hr ago
Yeah, I think most people here are missing the point. This isn't a question about rights; it's a question about moral tradeoffs. Is it worth saving a child's life if the consequence is that it makes a murderer harder to convict? I don't think most people would have to think too hard about that one. The 4th Amendment angle is just a red herring. If this is indeed a real interview question (and I have reason to doubt that it is), the point is that you're not supposed to think about whether the search can be justified.
Lazuli
6hr ago
3D printing works well if you find yourself wishing you could print specific pieces to fix things around your house. You'd benefit buying a machine and learning how the process works, so, when you need to print a specific thing to fix an issue--more hooks to keep wet towels off the bathroom floor, for example--you can spring into action.
dr_analog
razorboy
7hr ago
I think that sourcing the basics, e.g. a breadboard, wired resistors, capacitors, LEDs, jumper wires, some opamps, is not that hard.
Yeah this part is easy if you know to get the $10 starter kit.
If you increase your budget to 200$, then different people will want very different things. Matrix LCDs, TTL logic chips, myriads of sensors, servos. Some will want passive SMD components (with different preferences to size).
Alas, these electronics vendors do not typically sell to hobbyists. Presumably, cutting five chips from a reel and packing them for sale is not in itself very profitable, but simply a prerequisite to sell a reel of your chips to companies, eventually. Unlike corporations, private persons rarely scale up their projects to a scale where serious money gets spent, and complying with the consumer protection regulations is just not worth it.
Agreed, market failures abounds. Except in China?
So you sometimes find yourself in the situation where you know that four different companies carry the chip you want, but none of them want to sell to you. (These days, it might be possible that you can get it from China, if you don't mind the wait, though.)
I have 3 different shipments on the way from Ali Express, with 3 different orders in each one, each order for $2-3 containing just 3-5 chips cut from a reel or whatever. And the average price of each shipment is about $11 (>$10 is the free shipping level). The combination of cheap labor and postal arbitrage (China gets some preferential extremely ludicrously cheap shipping to the US, cheaper than US-US domestic) is unreal. It's almost outrageous enough that I sympathize with Trump. It does take 10-12 days to arrive though.
Hey thanks for the wealth of excellent info, as usual!
On the power side, I'd at least consider 3S LiPo battery pack, running the LEDs from that voltage, and just using one buck converter for ESP32 (which can be a tiny 5 watt one). That's only a nominal "12v", and really a 10ish-12.6 range, so you'll want to double-check the datasheet for your specific LEDs, but it's well within spec for the WS2815s.
Why consider? I was a bit freaked out by LiPo watching videos of them burst into flames if they get ruptured. Maybe not something I want to attach to my helmet. But perhaps the issue is just as prevalent with 18650s?
You can get 3S 18650 chargers cheap (eg here, not endorsed), though premade packs are so widely available (and tend to have much better low-current protection) that it's hard to justify building your own packs unless you need 5+ amp.
A friend has been going crazy trying to find a charger that takes USB-C and can charge 2S safely. Some reviews on that link say it doesn't do proper balance charging :/
And even once you have your 'jellybean' parts together, you'll always need something specific to a given project, or find that your old parts aren't available anymore, yada yada. Breaking projects into modules can help, but then you're juggling them, too.
It's really something else. A box of parts will arrive and then I'll make a bit of progress but realize I need, e.g. clear heat shrink tubing to make this thing happen the way I want and then it's another 2 days if I pay way too much on Amazon for it or 11 days to get it from Aliexpress. There's just no powering through some online tutorials and banging this stuff out in a weekend if you're coming from it so cold.
If you're only needing a handful and had little or no interest in 3d printing, seriously consider various fabrication services, or local marker spaces (or some libraries), rather than buying a full 3d printer.
The irony is my local library and (non-profit, communist) maker space all have 3d printers (multiple, even), but they're always broken. But maybe hiring people is not a bad move.
For flexible, light-weight, shaped transparent pieces with little 3d complexity, my go-to has been vacuum-forming. Big ones get surprisingly complicated fast, but for anything under a couple feet square you can get away with stuff you probably have in your house, and the big trouble becomes sourcing the right types of plastic.
TIL!
I'd also recommend considering Traditional Manufacturing -- just as there's a lot of people 3d printing what could be made with a handsaw in ten seconds, you may well be engineering something that could be sewn together in a good half-hour. If you want something flexible and comfortable for long-term wear, sewing is kinda the way to go. You'll still want some boxes for the batteries and protoboards to provide impact resistance, but it'll give a lot more space to consider multiple small project boxes or such, and those are a lot easier to source.
This opened my eyes a bit. As such I'm now currently trying to get pieces of acrylic, cutting them to size and seeing how sandwiching the ESP32 etc and wrapping the whole thing in a rubber gasket for light waterproofing works out. This has the bonus of looking really cool since the internal LEDs and circuitry are visible, if it works.
Though for prototyping I might just wrap it all in an ESD packet and tape it to my helmet, like some kind of silicon organ pouch.
faceh
7hr ago
What does this have to do with anything? They'll keep importing soybeans from Brazil and iron from Australia.
Will they?
Population decline isn't limited to China.
https://www.abs.gov.au/media-centre/media-releases/birth-rate-continues-decline
Lot of countries in the same boat. Every country wrangling with population decline at around the same time means they all have to handle internal economic strife, and may not be able to maintain productivity needed to export as much.
Do you just operate on the assumption that China is a land of mobilized peasants gluing sneakers by hand, and when peasants get old, the gig is over?
I operate on the assumption that China relies on international trade, and the PRIMARY value they provide to trade for is cheap skilled labor and, concurrently, massively industrialized manufacturing.
Both of which rely heavily on their population remaining steady.
I operate on the assumption that China has no fallbacks if they lose the ability to provide cheap labor and manufacturing to the world.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
7hr ago
extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases
That's only a white paper and will take at least until next year to pass into law. Currently rules are the same. Also there's a concept in UK common law called "legitimate expectation" where the migrants can argue that they had a legitimate expectation that they'd be granted ILR after 5 years on a visa and that influenced their decision to accept it so now that can't be changed unilaterally (much like how if I have a job contract with you you can't cut my salary unilaterally). They can apply for judicial review on the basis of legitimate expectation and will very likely win and there's even precedent for it: last time the government increased ILR length from 4 years to 5 years the people on the skilled worker visa at the time were able to win in high court.
kky
7hr ago
Downthread, in the discussion on cheating in college and the decay of institution, @hydroacetylene brought up a frequent topic: is the college-to-work pipeline good for society and for women? Rather than the high-level moral or strategic view, I wanted to look more at the countervailing forces here. Even assuming that early family formation is good, desirable, and pleasant for women compared to schooling, why would they choose college? Not to bury the lede: I think it’s risk mitigation.
A woman’s life is, not to an infinite extent but nevertheless to a great extent based around vulnerability. She is especially vulnerable to men, who are stronger than her and yet want something from her. A man who wants something from her more than he cares about her is not a curiosity but an active threat. Even if no such threat manifests, her very nature makes her vulnerable. A pregnant woman, or a new mother, is incredibly dependent on those around her. If any part of that support should go away, she could be in serious trouble. Women’s life strategies, unsurprisingly, center around mitigating these risks.
These strategies fall into two major camps: finding a center for her protection and support, and making damn certain that she has excellent control over that center. (For men this is simple: he is his own center of protection and support, always. Everything else is just a fallback for extenuating circumstances, or part of his larger ambitions.)
For her center, a woman can choose, in essence, a man, an institution, or herself. For herself, she will obviously be unable to reproduce. This is a fallback, the spinster’s last resort. No more needs be said. An institution is impersonal and uncharitable, but (say) a widow will find it tolerable, and she has some modicum of control. If she follows the rules, support will not be retracted. So what is preventing her choosing a man? Her lack of control over him.
Men are famously fickle. A man will sing a woman’s praises to the moon, and maybe even believe himself, and vanish as soon as he gets some. He will spend the family’s money on dice or drinks. He will say that whatever he earns is his by right, and ignore the duty he has towards the flower he plucked in the prime of her life in an explicit contract to care for her forever (till death do we part). Even if he is one of the rare, dutiful ones, his simple preferences become domineering imperatives, and you have to think on every one: is this worth fighting over, if he might just leave? To say all men are cads is to go too far. But there are cads out there, and their attentions are disastrous.
(I know women who have had their men: get fired and refuse to work, get addicted to painkillers and refuse to work, allow their mother to browbeat their wife, and support an entire separate family in another country, off the top of my head. I also know women who have had loving husbands with no problems who are in old age. But would you want to simply gamble on the outcome here?)
So what women need is leverage. Historically this was twofold: the highly salient and important labor they performed, and their tight bonds with their (and their man’s) immediate community. For reference, before modern textile production, a woman would quite literally make the clothes on her husband’s back and the food he ate. Were he to get them elsewhere, they would be much more expensive and less tailored to him. This makes any argument inherently easier for the wife to win. He depends on her, too. Meanwhile, if he were to stray, her connections to the local wives, perhaps including her own parents and his, or moral leaders like a priest, would allow her to bring wide-ranging pressures down upon him. Or, say, if he were to romance her but fall short of his duty to propose to her, a brief word between their fathers would end in a joyous wedding officiated by shotgun. I’m not trying to imply the distant past was a glorious feminist utopia, but these were to the best of my knowledge the mechanisms of women’s power back then.
Woman’s work was eviscerated by the Industrial Revolution, and her community was shattered by the car. Bluntly, there is nothing coarse and material that a housewife can offer a man in this day and age which he cannot get for an acceptable amount of his own money. Food and cleaning are trivial, and the only real limitation on sex is whether porn is sufficient (it generally is). The only things she can offer are on a more sophisticated or higher plane, like the abstract of a continued legacy through childcare or loving intimacy and affection. These are important, but have a lower valence than the material, meaning that the man’s opinion is dramatically privileged. And in a postwar suburb of friendly acquaintances, in and out of the house on errands and excursions, there’s nobody to drop in on and talk to and organize with - and even if there were, why would the man not simply get in his own car and leave to find those who “understand“ him better? As the last nail in the coffin, the pill and the Sexual Revolution deny women even their power over sex. If it’s pleasurable and has no risk, what right does she have to demand that her man do something in exchange - except pay as her john? With pregnancy on the table, it’s obvious: he risks what she does, together with her. But without, it’s harder to argue the obvious truth that she is risking time, because he does not have the same pressure to make the most of the flower of youth.
This is the foundation of our current moment, and given the premises women choose independence. They do not perceive a reasonable alternative by which they can have a marriage where they are respected and equal. The life plan changes accordingly, and becomes: go to college (to protect you in your most vulnerable and desirable period and increase your status and the treatment you can demand), take a job with a good healthcare plan (including maternity leave), find a man who sticks with you for several years (while you are on the pill, and proving he is not a cad), and finally, around 30, get married to a man you TRUST to support you and your children. Of course, this costs a huge amount of time and money, but it’s more palatable than taking a dive for the first schmuck on the street with no good way out. (And even if he is a good man, get stuck in a suburban home near HIS job with an infant or two and an absolute dearth of friends to see during working hours and little sense of what you’re really bringing to the table. At that point, why not just get a job working alongside other ladies and stick the kids in daycare?)
So that’s my analysis. College is just a means here; if it were not available, women would go for anything else that could protect them, probably an employer. The problem for women is that they feel like the whole deal is raw, that they’re going to struggle to get a man who works for them and supports them and who they can influence. Unless they feel their own power in their own relationships, they will scrabble for every edge they can get. If you want to fix this on a personal level, as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily. As a woman - can’t comment with quite so much authority, but valuing men for their private (i.e. directed at you) virtue over their public (i.e. abstract and status-seeking) virtue might help. On the societal level, focus less on pushing women into childrearing and more on pulling. What are the advantages? How do they mitigate risk? And what’s in it for them, on a practical and day to day sense?
Long-term I feel this will shake out. Men and women who figure out how to bond and partner quickly and effectively will be aspirational and fruitful, and they will be the new model. But for those of us alive now, I think it helps to be intentional about our own lives.
Interested in the opinions of married mothers on this (I think we have a few). I’m a happily married father, so I have some insight, but it’s all third person to me.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7hr ago
One other obvious technology solution would be to automate butt-wiping. I suspect there are fewer qualms about automating geriatric care versus infant care, too.
HaroldWilson
7hr ago
I don't think this line of argument necessarily proves anything about the optimal number of semi-skilled or unskilled workers to have in a country. Clearly that number is above 0 (or you get reverse complementary task specialisation where skilled workers get moved into care work because the wages are get so high that productivity suffers in the long-run) and might depend a lot on how the generous the state is to recent migrant workers. The Qatari economy would probably not be better off if they deported all the South Asian construction workers (even if we were to assume they were entirely free economic agents rather than borderline indentured servants). What the balance is in any given country is just an object-level question you can't reason your way to an answer to.
One, a short argument is not a filibuster.... recommendations with short supporting arguments and no time commitment are about as far from a filibuster argument as one can get.
Your argument is "to find out why it's useful, go do it yourself". That is neither short, nor has no time commitment. The sentence may be short, but reading the sentence is not enough to see the whole argument; the rest of your argument is hidden behind the time commitment.
Two, 'I want you to do it on your own' is an honest argument if it I honestly think he would enjoy and benefit more from doing it on his own and I want him to have that benefit.
Again, that's the difference between "do it to gain a benefit" and "do it to see the explanation". You are proposing that he go through an entire field of study in order to see the justification for your claim. This is unreasonable. If you make a claim, justify it. It doesn't matter how much he'd benefit from it, you should be willing to back up what you are saying.
It's also bizarre to suddenly give life advice in the middle of an argument with someone over the Internet. Clearly you told him to do that as part of the argument, not because you have a habit of giving random advice to strangers.
Precisely. At a certain ratio of machine:human ability, NOT committing genocide starts being harder than doing it.
ControlsFreak
7hr ago
I don't think it's a pure commons problem. In fact, I think it's probably just a problem that is inherent in their product, the means of monetization, and game theory of a two-sided market.
Their biggest product is the final credential. The awarded degree after a complete course of study1. But universities get paid on an annual basis. If universities could hold everything else constant, they would prefer that any given degree would take more years to complete, wringing out additional revenue from each successfully acquired customer2. Once a customer is acquired, they obviously want to retain them for as long as possible. If they could magically make the first three years of a program trivially easy, but make the fourth year so difficult that only high-quality students actually get the credential (maintaining their brand for employers), they would obviously love to do this.
...but it's a two-sided market and prospective students get to make choices, too. If they see a program with statistics such that they wring four years of tuition out of 99% of students, but only 20% survive year four and get the credential, they're gonna nope out of that. And since they can't actually just pass everyone (because that's likely to torch their credibility with employers), they have to get more sophisticated in their scheme.
The gov't requires that universities publish graduation rates, but they can hide a lot in unpublished data. This is probably what motivates the creation of "weed-out" courses. My guess is that the rest of the university's portfolio of degree offerings significantly affects when these courses happen. I took what was perhaps the most difficult STEM discipline in my undergrad uni, but they had shaped their first couple years such that they really could manage to put weed out courses in the junior year. I think this was only possible because they were confident that they could steer the vast majority of the failers into their other programs. First, they had these other programs, and they knew they were easier. Second, they already had you for three years of tuition, so they were riding high either way. They shaped their programs so that you could easily slide into one of the others while maybe only burning a semester or at most a year3. Thus, they set up the incentives so that a failer could either drop out entirely, wasting three years and a bunch of money, or agree to their suggestion to just slide into another program. If they can play this game right, they can hide this movement, preserve their stats, and get as much money as possible.
My guess is that programs that have a reasonable "fail down" pathway to other programs, but would require too much additional time (risking the stats) after conversion are likely to move their "weed-out" courses to earlier in the process (when it's less likely to burn as much time). My further guess would be that programs that have no reasonable "fail down" pathway probably just pass basically everyone (counting on employers to realize that those degrees are pretty worthless, but still trusting the signal of their other degrees).
That said, I did know at least one student who didn't get the hint, with barely passing grades. Once they persist past a certain point, then the incentives for the uni are absolutely to graduate them, and the best they can do is give them an atrocious GPA and hope that employers see that and don't hire them.
I imagine that smaller schools with a less expansive set of "fail down" options have to make somewhat different choices.
If you significantly buy a stronger version of signalling theory, there is a lens here in which large unis are primarily filtering/tracking products. On this theory, the actual course material is mostly window dressing; it's mostly a matter of just that some are more difficult and some are less difficult. Students come in, they get filtered down through the programs to their level of competence, and then the "major" on their credential basically tells employers how capable they are. It would be my dream if some economist got their hands on all this internal university data and made a model to test how much of this is real. Moreover, it would be really nifty if they could compare the quality of this filtering against things like just intake SAT or whatever.
This sort of model keeps employers happy, because they can ignore the bad degrees and hire from the good degrees; it keeps the uni's published stats up, because bad students still complete their trash-tier degrees; the only people who get screwed are the students who think they're going to get a valuable, high-tier degree, get thwacked by a weed-out course, then don't realize how the game works, succumb to the sunk cost fallacy thinking that they can still at least get a different degree, not really looking at how much more poor the employment prospects are. The cynical view would be that unis know that SAT is basically going to correlate with what programs the students get filtered down to, but they still 'over-admit' students purely for customer acquisition, trusting that they're likely to to be able to pull this one over on them.
1 - There could be reasons why this might be independent of the signalling v. educating debate. Also, I spent a little time thinking about how 'partial' products could be packaged, and it's kind of bleak at first glance.
2 - There are obviously limits to this, and it is probably a combination of historical, competition, and regulatory reasons for why almost all programs have converged on four years.
3 - Regulation is again important here. Unis generally have to publish statistics along the lines of what percentage of four-year-degree students graduate within six years, so they're happy to string them along for another year or so of tuition, so long as they get into another program and graduate before dinging the stats.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
7hr ago
This seems so very obvious. How can anyone believe that the truly useless will just stick around forever? Those for whose existence there is no longer any justification other than "the other humans are committed to impractical humanitarianism"? This is the status quo right now, when a small minority in each country is completely unrelated to all productive processes and the productive majority is other humans who still care for the useless humans. But in the fully automated future where 99% are unproductive mouths to feed and the 1% have all-powerful and perfectly obedient machinery to do their bidding, can one really expect the same dynamics to hold?
Crowstep
8hr ago
I think it's fundamentally a mistake to think about these foreign care workers as workers. They are not people who migrated in order to work, they are people who are working in order to migrate.
They are simply people who are desperate to move from poor countries to rich countries. The care worker visas were the only way for them to do that, which is why for some countries (Zimbabwe being the best example) there were ten dependent visas issued for every worker. All they needed to do is work for five years and then the whole family can get indefinite leave to remain, access to the British welfare state, the right to import even more relatives. At that point, there's no reason for them to continue working in care homes (or at all, really).
Now these absurdly large holes have finally been plugged, the Conservative government that introduced the visa removed the ability for migrants to bring along dependents, and the current Labour government abolished the visa route to new entrants (although those who previously came in can still work in the sector) and extended the time needed for indefinite leave to 10 years in most cases (we'll see how many exceptions they grant).
I personally am in favour of increasing wages (or at least allowing the market to do so) for care workers. Pensioners are far too wealthy in the UK. The care sector would allow some of that wealth to be transferred to younger, poorer people, allowing them to buy houses and start families. With fewer low-skilled immigrants, the welfare state bill will be less. If that means fewer waiters, so be it.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
8hr ago
I think you're missing Corvos' point (or I'm missing everything and seeing my own instead): They don't need to conspire. They can just eliminate their own subject humans because they're nothing but a liability at this point. In fact, a lack of conspiracy makes it more likely for this to happen, because it should make the faction that ditches its ballast more competitive!
Corvos
8hr ago
I really don’t follow your thought process. To me, there is no risk and no need for conspiracy. All humans not in charge of the robots might as well be air - they have no ability to affect anything at all except to spoil the view.
There would be no need to ‘plot’ under such circumstances. Committing worldwide genocide would be as easy as setting the air conditioner to ‘cool’, or indeed as easy as setting the ‘feed the populace’ machine to ‘off’.
In practice it might be difficult for people to get to this level of dominance, and we should keep it that way of course.
Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market. He sees the market shift from low-end full-service restaurants to high-end fast-casual dining as (a) driven by rising low-end wages and (b) an entirely good thing. So the official rat-adjacent neoliberal shill position here is
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