It's the old model where distributing information in dead-tree form created an opportunity for middlemen with the capital to make that happen. About 10% of a book's sale price goes to the author, and if we assume the people who review and edit maybe deserve half that, textbooks should be distributed electronically for roughly 1/6 their hard copy price.

The deportations as well will create supply chain disruptions, and that will also be inflationary. We'll especially see upward pressure on food prices.

I'm in that retiring boomer range, and one thing that has changed drastically about work since I entered the work force is the degree to which jobs with a company are *transitory*. In the 1960s, the average amount of time someone worked for a company was ten years. When I entered the workforce in the 80s it was six years. Today it is four years.

Employment also *feels* a lot more transient than it used to. I know a lot of young workers who work in constant fear of layoffs, even when the company is doing well. Layoffs of course always happened, but only when things were quite bad. Now company decisions are more informatics driven and agile and if the spreadsheet says, we're profitable now but we'll be a lot more profitable next quarter if we lay off a bunch of people, then suddenly people get a text telling them they're not employed anymore.

Companies complain about declining loyalty among employees, but a loyal employee now is just a sucker.

The path up was often a kind of balance between internal promotion and changing companies, but now both paths feel broken. Companies don't invest in developing employees like they used to because employees are hired and let go casually. But now if you try to change jobs the application process is an opaque black box. HR departments get spammed with applications and run them through filters that work god knows how.

Believe it or not, it used to be customary to respond to correspondence applying for a job with a brief but polite decline. And if you actually interviewed, it was customary to tell you in a timely manner if you didn't get the job. Now I've known young people to go through several *days* of interviews, only to be ghosted.

They're pretty valuable. But what drives decisions in capitalism isn't value, it's *marginal* value. You can always afford to fire someone, you can't afford to fire everyone.

Technically a *senryu*

If you went back to Marx's time and you were a worker, you might well look at the mess and think the only way to fix it is to sweep it all away. Early capitalism was brutally exploitative, and workers had little legal protection for anything short of outright murder. Living conditions were harsh and working conditions were worse, and there was nothing you could do about it because you had no political clout, even if you had the franchise, which you probably didn't.

But there's been almost two centuries of struggle and experimentation since then. If you look at the countries with the highest human development index [note], you're looking across the board at countries with a market economies, but also with robust legal protections for worker safety and rights, environmental and consumer protection, and typically fairly generous social welfare programs. Average people in places like Switzerland, Norway, Australia and the Netherlands enjoy a degree prosperity, liberty and security that disprove the axiom that market economics has to be swept away for common people to be able to live a decent life.

Nobody living in such a place would come up with Marxism, although people may come to it for historical, cultural or romantic reasons. If human wants weren't infinitely expandable, they'd be living in what would look to a 19th century worker as a post-scarcity society. And as long as they don't infringe on other peoples' rights, the masses can live in a degree of personal freedom unheard of in prior ages of history. Sure, you'd be more personally free under absolute anarchy, but the marginal benefits and costs aren't that attractive.

note: Hong Kong is a historical odd man out on the HDI list, for obvious reasons.

Perhaps. But I don't think the youth migration issue is unique to them. Other culturally and economically similar countries like Nepal also have issues with youth migrating to the cities for opportunities. As for international emigration, Bhutan may feel that rate is historically high for *them*, but they're not anywhere near the top countries for this in the world -- it doesn't even break the top thirty. The top countries are India, Russia, Mexico, China and Bangladesh.

"Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is."

You can say anything about deities in Buddhism and it's bound to be true in some versions of Buddhism. Buddhism has no deities. Buddhism has many deities, but godhood is no big deal. Buddhism has some deities whose worship is very important to followers. All of those things are true.

Well, I think you put your finger on the problem in an ironic way. Coca-cola's tagline used to be "It's the real thing". But that raises the question: the real *what*? Coke isn't actually food, it's an industrial produced ultra-processed consumable product.

It's interesting to compare ad to Coke's landmark 1971 ad, "Hilltop". Which do you think is more effective *as advertising*, "Hilltop" or the AI ad? Which is more *representative of the product* it's trying to sell? Those aren't the same questions. Corny as it is, I think Hilltop is more effective advertising because it's less a truthful representation of the experience you're buying.

As someone who's training is in engineering, it took me a while to realize that when the marketing guys talk about "communication" they're not talking about conveying facts or knowledge. They're talking about evoking emotional responses and transmitting *attitudes*. In other words, they're talking about bullshitting Of course nobody thinks if you buy a coke you'll be transported to a hilltop to sing a catchy song with a bunch of attractive young people. What they're trying to do is to is make you associate coke with making connections with other human beings. And that's not necessarily completely counter-factual. "Food" (I used that word broadly when applying it to coke) really is a way of connecting to other people. But the advertiser has apparently made the decision not to market that their product with that particular association; if you look at the ad there are no humans in it, except one brief image on a TV. They're representing coke as something to shove in your pie hole while you're mindlessly consuming media. That's not strictly false, either.

Yes, China is a "socialist" country without social security or public medical insurance, and incomes are sufficiently low that most people have no savings when they age out of working. It's called the "4-2-1 problem": 1 child supporting two parents and four grandparents. Under the circumstances starting a family means adding mouths to feed.

Right. If you created the deepfakes for your own exclusive use, and took reasonable precautions to avoid them falling into other peoples' hands, it'd be icky, but it wouldn't be a privacy intrusion.

But we're talking about a situation where distribution was the whole point. That distribution is so damaging that it literally can't be repaired.

I think it's a case of sloppy headline writing. AI isn't better than doctors at diagnosing, it's better at guessing *from text descriptions* than doctors are. Doctors normally examine the patient, generate multiple hypotheses and then test those hypotheses with further diagnostic procedures.

It's conceivable to organize society to deal with balancing freedom of expression and privacy in many different ways, but the way *our* society is organized, in general there are prohibitions against prior restraint by the government, but the government absolutely can punish speech which harms other people. This gets complicated with lots of corner cases and things that don't work out quite the way we want as opposed to "absolutist" free speech where nothing you say ever has consequences, but that has its drawback too.

Right vs wrong is easy. When rights conflict, things get complicated.

It's more like a bug in capitalism that has become the point for some people.

"Free markets" are about producers making production and pricing decision and consumers making purchase decisions. The point of capitalism, for Smith, was getting governments out of these particular decisions. But now we have "free market capitalist" politicians who want to use tariffs to favor domestic businesses and who are all for anticompetitive business practices Smith would have opposed.