Funny. I don’t need to work hard for that at all. It comes naturally to me. It obviously has its pros and cons, but to me, a shiny new tech has to prove itself first in order to deserve my attention.
There are, occasionally, the “wow, I got to have that” moments and those are great, but rare.
well if the marginal value of labor goes to zero, only those with capital will be able to survive. we may need to think about what kinds of redistribution are socially acceptable.
Minimum wage is barely (in many cases not even barely) enough to live on. Raising minimum wage is a herculean task that rarely succeeds. Federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in 16 years. But we'll have not only a livable UBI in 20 years, but one that's enough to "retire to a life of leisure"?
Minimum wage isn't directly comparable, because that's the government setting a rule on what two private parties can agree to. It's not the government but the employer who pays it.
UBI is distributed by the government directly, so it's basically a question of what gets taxed, how much inflation results, and whether that inflation and taxation proves more unpopular than the UBI is popular.
This is silly. To a first approximation, zero percent of the opposition to minimum wage increases comes from a principled stance of "I support taxation, even high taxation, but I am opposed to the government interfering in private labor market contracts"; 100% of it is from "they're taking my money!". There is no reason to expect any less opposition from the much, much larger amount of wealth redistribution which would be required by UBI.
What does minimum wage have to do with taxation? It's not the government paying those wages, it's McDonald's, and the opposition to it comes from people who say it will result in McDonalds closing stores or replacing cashiers with touchscreens rather than paying more for employees; ie, low-value labor simply becoming unemployable rather than getting a pay boost.
There are a lot of counterarguments to a high minimum wage, some even from UBI proponents, but none of them are "they're taking my money" because that doesn't make sense in the context of a minimum wage.
You can frame the opposition to a minimum wage that way, e.g. if you raise the minimum wage then the cost of a Big Mac goes up and you're the one paying it. Or, suppose you're a small business owner who employs three people and you pay them each $20,000, and then after paying them you're left with $50,000/year for your own salary. If you were required to pay them each $30,000 then you'd be left with $20,000 yourself, and that might make you pretty unhappy. More to the point, it might make you close the business and go get a job doing something else, and then those three people lose their jobs instead of getting a raise, which is precisely the argument against a minimum wage.
But that still doesn't apply to a UBI, because a UBI is universal. The person buying the Big Mac or running the small business gets it too, and the breakeven point would be around the average income, so you don't have the problem the minimum wage has where the people paying the cost are often the people who weren't making that much money to begin with.
There's plenty of reasons to doubt, but you could reframe it as "lower pension age to zero".
In optimistic scenarios, if AI can do so much that nobody's even getting paid to make robots, then AI are making robots that also makes the cost of living lower.
In practice, I think that the path from here to there is unstable.
We can't even get universal health care or a decent minimum wage through the opposition from our oligarchs, and those are much, much smaller asks than UBI. Why on earth would you expect UBI to be possible, never mind inevitable?
"Universal healthcare" is typically used as a euphemism for government-operated healthcare providers, which would wipe out both the health insurance industry and a lot of private healthcare providers. You get the strongest opposition to a policy when a specific group sees it as an existential threat, because that group will then organize to lobby vigorously against it.
Minimum wage is a price control. Price controls are trash economics and should not be used. They're a political issue in the US because a federal minimum wage is doubly counterproductive, since different states have a different cost of living. But because of that the states with a higher cost of living see a smaller deleterious effect from a higher minimum wage. Then representatives from those states can claim to want to raise the minimum wage so they can paint their opponents from the lower cost of living states as the villains when they fight against it. But nobody really wants to increase it because it's a bad policy, most of the proponents are from states whose constituents wouldn't even be affected because their state already has a minimum wage in excess of the federal one, the proponents just want to make their opponents vote it down again so they can cast aspersions over it.
A UBI is equivalent to a large universal tax credit. A slight majority of the population would receive more than they pay on net because the median income is slightly below the mean income, which creates a large base of support. If everyone voted purely in their own personal financial interest it would have simple majority support. Meanwhile most of the people who would end up paying on net would only be paying slightly (because they make slightly more than the average income), and in general the net payers are a very large diffuse group with no common interests or organizational ties to one another.
A UBI is a thereby easier to bring about than either of those other things.
Your argument pays no attention to how economic behavior changes due to existence of UBI, ie, how many people choose to work less and thus drop out of the pool of people paying in.
It doesn’t really make sense to me to live in a world where people are given money by the government while simultaneously expected to pay taxes. Its a high overhead when the same could be achieved by printing money and handing it out to everyone equally (which acts as a redistribution of wealth same as taxing the rich and paying credits to the poor, since it devalues the dollar as more supply is added)
I’m also unease about the open-source-but-not-really VSCode situation. I don’t know how useful an editor you can build from the available source, which is enough for me to not consider it seriously. I’ve been bitten before.
It’s a know phenomenon. A friend of mine had a reasonably important public office position. Always on the phone, constantly demanded, giving interviews, etc. The first few months after a change in administration were a great relief. A year after being let go and he was devastated. No one called, knew or cared who he was. There’s probably a name for this syndrome.
A kenyan politician once wrote about it. They even thought their phone had an issue because when they were in office they would receive an average of 30 phone calls an hour, once they left it was zero in a day till they though the phone had gotten spoilt
> We all know that custom, hand-made, artisan-crafted, boutique tools are always better than something factory made.
Right. We all know the best chips in the world are made by local artisan silicon-etchers. None of that TSMC pasteurized crap. You simply can't beat a 1nm brush and a steady hand.
We all know this industrial revolution thing was a mistake.
To be fair, for the last few years of my career as a developer and ops worker I had a boss who was convinced that Let's Encrypt certs were inferior for "reasons".
It's pretty trivial to generate a long list of technologies which are deemed "better" only because they are built by a large commercial enterprise.
I don't think this analogy resonates particularly well with the drug manufacturing process.
I would think in general the bulk of the expense of a drug comes from its R&D, not manufacture. The cost of manufacture probably varies wildly (with the most expensive being bespoke treatments), but as the talk shows, there have been many examples where a (relatively) simple-to-manufacture drug is kept from those who need it due to prices that do not reflect the cost of manufacture.
Will most drugs be easy to make at home? Probably not, but enough probably can be that I wouldn't dismiss the idea because of some rhetorical overreach.
> Will most drugs be easy to make at home? Probably not, but enough probably can be that I wouldn't dismiss the idea because of some rhetorical overreach.
Ever watch a non-chef bake a cake? If you have, that experience should give you great concern about people playing with drug recipes.
In addition, most drugs do not have a "nice" synthesis that doesn't leave a whole bunch of glop in the afterproducts. Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time.
People do not synthesize drugs on their own without any prior knowledge. They take university organic chemistry classes and then start synthesizing drugs. The cooking analogy would be studying at a culinary school prior to preparing pufferfish without a license.
> People do not synthesize drugs on their own without any prior knowledge. They take university organic chemistry classes and then start synthesizing drugs.
The girl who needs mifepristone will not be an organic chemist. The trans-person who needs their hormones will not be an organic chemist. etc.
What part of: "Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time." did you miss?
We know what happens when drugs are made illegal--they wind up adulterated with god knows what--sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
The "solution" is making sure that these drugs are legal and available. The solution is social and political--we need people to put in as much effort into the politics as they do into dubious "tech" solutions.
Your comparison of ethanol distillation to drug synthesis assumes that recipes for drug synthesis are public like instructions for distillation. Recipes for drug synthesis are trade secrets, not public knowledge.
If you want to synthesize organic compounds (drugs or otherwise), you need to know organic chemistry in order to make your own recipes. To give an example, this guy made his own recipe for making cinnamaldehyde from styrofoam, using what he learned from his college Organic Chemistry classes and a substantial amount of background research:
He did not follow a recipe from someone else because there was none. Chemists have worked out a number of reactions that can be chained together to make arbitrary organic compounds. Organic chemistry teaches the better known / more widely useful ones. That gives the foundation needed to do these things.
Please do not make me regret sharing my knowledge by bringing politics into a technical discussion. I am under doctor's orders to avoid political discussions.
> I would think in general the bulk of the expense of a drug comes from its R&D
Not just its R&D, but also the R&D of the 10 other drugs which looked promising, had a lot of money invested in them, but didn't end up working out in the end.
You could very easily pass a law invalidating all drug patents, and making generics for any drug easily available. This would make all drug prices go down drastically. It would definitely work, there's no question about it. The anti-capitalists are very much right about this.
What they're missing, though, is that this law would completely remove the incentive to make any new drugs. The progress of medicine would instantly slow down to a halt. All existing drugs would be very close to free, but all currently-uncured illnesses would forever stay uncured.
> All existing drugs would be very close to free, but all currently-uncured illnesses would forever stay uncured.
Unless there's government funding.
Also consider that for both patents and government funding, there are other jurisdictions which won't do what your government does, so there's a Nash equilibrium problem where every country has people who want to defect (delete patents) to get free stuff whose research was paid for by the profit margin in the jurisdiction which keeps the patents.
Sure if you apply enough mental gymnastics you can invalidate any claim.
Good faith reading of his argument would be that a custom, artisan crafted hammer is better than a factory made one. I can’t say if that is true or not but using chips as an example- probably the most complex man made thing- is bad faith argumentation
Given that the application here is molecular chemistry aimed at targeting human biology, one of the few problems equally complex as computer chips, I would say their analogy is far more appropriate than a hammer.
Creating a medicine such as the ones mentioned in the talk is FAR more simple than creating microchips - as a starter you don’t need a billion dollar worth clean room and equipment as they clearly demonstrate.
So yea human biology is as complex if not more complex I agree - creating medicine after a proven recipe is not.
You do not need “a billion dollar worth clean room and equipment” to make chips. You just need a garage and a bunch of old equipment. Even high school students can make microchips:
As your “creating medicine after a proven recipe” remark, that is not how things work. The way it usually works is that you study organic chemistry in college and then you work out a recipe yourself based on the chemical formula. You do not follow a recipe from someone else because recipes are often trade secrets. At least, that is what I took away from studying organic chemistry in college. Well, that and a remark by the professor that those making illicit drugs take that course before getting started.
This is an interesting comment, because before you mentioned it I did not even consider DIY chip fab was a possibility.
In the context of access to cheap mass production, it would of course be silly to use the DIY product of that professionally.
In the context of "having zero access" to the technology, then the hand-produced products can be better than nothing, especially if the "no access" alternative is heinous or deadly in its own right.
It's kind of a micro-scale version of the larger discussion, perhaps?
That specific sentence is making an analogy using handmade tools. A hammer is an ideal example of a tool. You would expect to find a hammer in a toolbox. A computer chip is not an ideal example of a tool. You would not expect to find a computer chip in a toolbox.
Laser level,
boroscope, camera stud-finder, thermal camera, laser tape measure, multimeter, battery management system on a lithum-something battery pack for power tools; those are all gonna have IC chips in them and it wouldn't be unreasonable to find them in a professional's toolbox.
If someone claims that X is "always"(!) the case, then giving just one example where X is not the case counts as a refutation. The statement that the GP quoted is just obviously false and there is nothing "bad faith" about pointing that out.
There’s not even much argument for it being true in most cases.
Artisan made tools compared to high end tools from a factory are more like a mechanical watch compared to an electronic one. It might be a cool mechanism and a more unique statement piece than an Apple Watch, but it sure won’t keep better time.
One some topics this is realized and praised on HN.
On other topics, the cognition flips.
This is the nature of evolved, culturally conditioned consciousness (one of the things most HN'ers like talking about from an abstract perspective, but really don't like talking about at the object level during discussions of certain controversial ideas, when heuristics have taken control of the mind).
For fun: observe the nature of comments in this thread from a meta perspective of a curious alien observer.
Most of the people here aren't biochemists, hence q "biochemistry = scary untouchable magic" POV. But for those that have done the chemistry in a university setting before and gone on to being professionals in the field, know the plant-based history of the field, as well as the history of synthesizing "stuff" and ingesting it, by certain individuals in the field.
it's important to get the chemistry right, but if you know the failure modes, it's far less of a black box and thus less scary.
Sure, but most people here have technical backgrounds and well above average skills in logic. But prompt them with specific topics, and skill in logic vanishes.
I think this phenomenon itself is very interesting and a huge deal (cognitive ability is what makes us the most dominant species, and is required just to maintain living standards), but also the secondary effect is interesting: the mind does not allow focus to be placed on it.
If you ask me, it is about as close to magic as you can get.
My college chemistry professor said never to ingest anything made in a lab. Thus far, I have followed this rule and I have been fine, not that I have been around any chemistry labs since college.
A chemist broke this rule on YouTube by turning styrofoam into cinnamon candy that he ate himself, but he went through an extreme amount of effort to make it safe:
Yeah! I love NileRed (and blue). To be clear, it's not safe for someone without a lot of training to ingest a chemistry project and even then. Hopefully it didn't read like I was endorsing anyone to do so. Just that there's a history of that which we've walked away from (for good reason!) and that we wouldn't be here without some brave chemists to do the insane thing.
The question if there is such a thing as “truth” (an universally true statement) is probably the hardest philosophical problem in humanities history- of course that is not what we were discussing and for that reason your argument here is also in bad faith
I don't see why the nature of truth is relevant here, unless you are claiming that we can't make deductive arguments about anything ever (I never used the word "truth" in my comment anyway). Also, constant accusations of "bad faith", i.e. dishonesty, are poor debate etiquette and just give the impression that you have no point to make on the object level.
There are, occasionally, the “wow, I got to have that” moments and those are great, but rare.