We are currently around 20% functional unemployment. That is the number of people who have a job that does not pay enough to support them as a basic human being. Those people are relying on relatives or friends to make up shortfalls or they are working homeless. Last I checked we had about half a million full-time employees who are homeless.

The two and five, which is 40% cuz well math is hard, is the number of people who have good jobs. A good job is one that gives you enough money to afford a one bedroom apartment by yourself and a reliable car and health care. Basically what the baby boomers took for granted before pulling the ladder up behind them.

You don't have to like reality but you do have to live in it. You've got Google you can look all these things up little man. As the saying goes, reality has a liberal bias.

Indeed. And, yes, Claude massively over-comments. I have more Claude coding rules about commenting than any other single topic. Though I do wonder if my rules make as much sense in the AI era as when code was all maintained by humans. Most of my rules are about minimizing comments because comments are fragile and tend to get out of date... but Claude actually does do a pretty good job of maintaining the comments. I still try to minimize them, though.

Heh. That's definitely true for me as well, now, not so much in the past. When I was at Google I had a higher caliber of colleagues. My colleagues at the new company are bright, but they're young and inexperienced. But, yeah, if I didn't have Claude to kick ideas around with me in my current position, my code would be much worse than it is.

Nope. Wars used to regularly cause widespread famines, as well as being far more directly bloody. Murdering all the children was for millennia an accepted practice. You should read the book.

Yes, it is

When the norms and the expectations move from considering something cruelty to be funny or enjoyable to merely accepted and then to shameful or hidden -- and even illegal -- those steps are progress.

Related: "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." While the individual hypocrite may not be better than the person who engages in open vice, and might be worse, the fact that people feel the need to keep their vices secret is a positive indication about society as a whole. Assuming, of course, that the "vice" is actually bad.

That's another area where our society has been improved... we're more tolerant, having realized that many things we considered bad are merely different. We still have progress to make on that front, too, but don't let perfect be the enemy of progress.

Want to take a gander at this? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...

Full employment is a lie. You have to count gig workers to get to it. And a shitload of other massively underemployed workers. There are only two good jobs for every five Americans.

Consumer spending is only up because the baby boomers are sitting on a shitload of cash from when we used to do stuff like the New deal and the great society. AKA socialism. They are burning through it fast because of our healthcare system and because RVs are fun and they're going to leave basically nothing in their wake. We have a massive crisis brewing because when they die and leave no inheritance the next generation does not make enough money to sustain the consumer spending our economy needs to be functional. Just throw this on the pile of crises that we are not talking about.

As for the solid market growth that's because a bunch of finance Bros are in the process of looting everyone's 401ks. The actual market is incredibly overvalued and when they are done stealing all that money, about 10 trillion in total, the market is going to collapse when all those fake stocks have to eventually come back down to earth inside of our retirement plans. It's going to make Black Friday look like the . com bubble...

This is before we talk about the last 40 years of non-stop automation devouring middle class jobs and the huge automation boom going on right now.

Absolutely nothing about our economy or society or civilization is at all stable and I just wish I had died before the shit hit the fan. I did used to think that the baby boomers were going to get off scot-free but the younger ones look like they're going to get caught up in it because the pace has accelerated so much.

For example the shit Donald Trump has done is going to cause social security to collapse in 4 years instead of 10. They are going to use that as an excuse to privatize everything which will over juice the already overvalued market making the inevitable crash even worse.

I want to say historians are going to write about all this but honestly I don't think our species is going to survive this much concentrated insanity and stupidity. I think we're going to hand the nuclear launch codes over the religious lunatics and then it's game over. Maybe some of the trillionaires will survive in their bunkers but I think even that is unlikely.

That's probably true of many, and it couples well with motivated-disbelief. Confidence that if it happens it won't really be a problem for you makes it easier to just shrug the whole thing off and refuse to think too much about whether your disbelief makes sense.

It's worth mentioning that there's one more position that actually does make sense, even if it's a bit Pollyanna-ish: The belief that science will find a less impactful way to address the problem in the future. The argument is that we shouldn't trouble ourselves now, we should just wait for the new tech that will fix it.

I actually subscribe to a weak form of this view. I think we should be acting now to address climate change, but that we shouldn't do anything too drastic, because technology is going to improve and find better solutions. The world is actually making significant strides toward emissions reduction, mostly in the form of low-emissions electricity production, and not because of a moral obligation but because renewables are cheap! That's the sort of thing that generates real progress, without much pain.

I suspect that atmospheric carbon recapture will always be extremely energy-intensive, but we are on a path to extreme but intermittent energy abundance, and carbon recapture sounds like a great way to spend the extra terawatts when they're available. I think one of the things we're not doing enough of now is research into carbon recapture and sequestration. Reducing emissions can never get us to net-negative CO2, and we need that if we want to actually fix this problem in anything less than a millennium, so cutting emissions is insufficient. The corollary to that is that cutting emissions will likely become unnecessary before we get very close to zero.

So, the conclusion of the weak-form of this techno-optimisim is that we should be working to curb emissions, and we should be directing tax dollars to recapture and sequestration research (and geoengineering, too), but we shouldn't go so far that we reduce economic output.

What I'd really like to see us do is to take a very market-driven approach, facilitated by carbon taxes. Pick a reasonable per-ton price and apply it at the point of extraction, where it's easy to identify and track, so that every downstream use has the carbon tax built in. Fossil fuel consumption that doesn't burn it and release the CO2 can apply for a rebate to recover the carbon taxes on the carbon they didn't emit. Couple that with carbon tariffs which attempt to impute to foreign-made goods the CO2 emitted in their production. Anyone who can prove they're capturing and permanently sequestering tons of carbon should be able to capture that as a refundable tax credit. Planting trees should count, as long as there's a plan to keep that carbon sequestered for several hundred years -- and if the trees burn, the tax liability comes back. Oh, and a small percentage of the tax revenue should be earmarked for climate mitigation research. The rest can just go into the general fund, ideally displacing other taxes, and maybe funding progressive offsets since a carbon tax would be mildly regressive.

There'd be a fair amount of bureaucracy in defining and administering such a tax, especially the tariff part. But it's manageable, I think, in particular because it doesn't have to be perfect, it only has to be good enough that everyone is incentivized to avoid 1-2% of their emissions this year, another 1-2% next year, and so on, and good enough that there's actual money to be made in recapture and sequestration for anyone who can figure it out. With that, we can sit back and let the market solve the sort of problem it's good at solving. We might need to tune the carbon tax rates a bit from time to time, and we'll want to scrutinize the system regularly to identify loopholes to close, but mostly we could just consider it a solution in progress.

Whatever they come up with won't involve AI replacing politicians and upper management types.

Interestingly enough if you count out loud your lips won't touch in the middle until you get to a million.

Billion continues that deviation from the lower numbers.

These are people who cashed out. They're gonna shiv you for cash.

I don't agree. In fact you could fix a lot of what's wrong without even spending more money to do it than it would have cost to do right in the first place. Modifications to slaughterhouses like having the cows go through a curved passage so they can't see what's happening to others in front of them for example. Obviously you can't fix feedlots without eliminating them, so some things are basically unsolvable, except that we don't actually need feedlots and could eliminate them.

Therefore I'd say the sad fact is that we don't even give a fuck about reducing the cruelty.

You're frequently insulting, apparently without realizing it, which implies that you're a lot dumber than you think you are. Learn not to be insulting all the time if that's not your goal, or continue to be looked down on for people you sound like you're looking down on when you talk to them.

Nobody is less familiar with history than Slashdotters, who think they're smarter than everybody.

This is why average people hate techbros.