Some people's jobs might be 'meaningless', but we're on the verge of lots of people's jobs being outright 'useless'. Anyone who's worked in a large corporation knows how small some people's useful output is already.
I've been wondering whether increased automation is going to cause some kind of employment crisis in western countries. It's possible we're on the verge of a "second industrial revolution" because of AI. I'll confess that I totally underestimated AI, and figured that by the time AI was writing decent code society would have formulated a plan for what to do when white-collar workers start becoming redundant. This obviously isn't what happened. What is going to happen to the swarms of Uber Eats riders on ebikes? Or all of the new immigrant truckers? Western governments have been keeping immigration relatively high to keep the service sector packed with unskilled, lowly paid service workers. What are we going to do with them all if drones replace Uber Eats riders, or self-driving trucks take over logistics? What I'm seeing now makes me doubt that we're going to look after all these people.
If AI can replace white collar workers than it will also cheap enough for everyone to start running their own business and join the capitalist class.
The problem is alot of people can only conceive of a life where they are handed work and a salary by someone else, when that was only ever a particular circumstance for the last few decades. Whether they can grow out of that is another question, but those who can't won't find much agency.
No? But I'd be creating products, not services that are already automated. Build that video game you always wanted to make, or setup a robot food truck offering your family recipes. Work with a consortium to build a luxury mall or theme park in your neighborhood. Or just invest/arbitrage in the market if you are too lazy to do it yourself. There is a vast amount of economic opportunities to take that aren't just pure labor offering.
This is why some form of UBI seems inevitable. Thinking all these people will retrain as data scientists or whatever is deluded and if you don’t do something the fabric of society will tear itself apart so it’s in the interests of the well off to come up with a solution here
I think it's more practical to work at lowering the retirement age. UBI has a lot of complications, but instead figuring out how to have people retire at 55, then 45, then 35, then 25, can get you close to that direction while ignoring the complications with outright UBI.
While I like this idea, in theory, I think inevitably we need a new bracket that isn't "retirement" per se. So many people hit retirement age and they simply cannot stop working. And still do things and still continue working (if off the books they must).
I wonder if, with your proposed system, we should start working towards something between full employment and retirement and let it be a significant epoch of life.
I've always felt like 45-55 should be a time where you should be heavily incentivized (if not outright subsidized) to give back while you've still got the juice in you.
Not sure where I'm going with this... Just a thought
Older people aren't being forced to work off the books. Very few occupations have mandatory retirement ages. I mean commercial pilots are forced to retire at 65 but pretty much everyone else can continue working a regular W-2 job at any age if they want to, even if they are simultaneously collecting Social Security benefits or other retirement fund income.
That is not a sensible goal to work towards. We already have demographic problems with a lower and lower ratio of workers to retirees. I am absolutely unwilling to pay higher taxes just so that someone else can retire early at 55, and I vote accordingly.
A critical part of figuring out how to have people retire younger is making sure that taxes don't perpetuate a welfare state. Keep in mind that, if you live in the US, right now our increasing national debt funds social security, with the money going to retirees who already have large 401ks and will will huge sums to their children who themselves are building their 401ks.
That being said, the "I get to keep everything, screw everyone else" mentality is a major problem, because it's hard to quantify how much of our earnings are a result of social investment. (IE, how much of your earnings result from taxpayer/debt supported education, roads, research, and other investments is difficult to quantify.)
Take the now useless people and get rid of them. AI will effectively usher in a new era of eugenics in which your right to live is determined by your economic value.
Or just kill the fiscal hoarders who can't conceive of a sustainable closed loop economy where the working class gets a fair shake at living a life. There doesn't have to be billionaires/trillionaires.
AI might not have much actual impact on software engineering, but AI (Actually Indians) has. Companies are using AI as a justification for layoffs, and then just replacing those roles with cheaper engineers employed by bodyshop companies.
the funny thing is all Indian IT service cos are 30% down from their highs and based on unofficial and official data have laid off a lot of people , again on fears from AI based automation
When nobody wants to return to office, why not? The work from home shift was always going to accelerate the global pay equilibrium, it will continue to do so.
You hire discount engineers when you want to move to a maintenance and value extraction stage, something widespread in the industry at the moment due to changes is startup incentives and interest rates making entrenched players feel more safe.
It's not about "global equilibrium", because that misses completely that hiring a very expensive westener still has positive roi, but only if you are attempting to innovate.
Is the shift because there's nothing to innovate, or because of economic headwinds? That's the real question to ask.
Projects are being cancelled left and right and teams dissolved, so this tells me that the former point is shakey. Something tells me that we'll have a tiny boom sometime after the AI bubble pops and suddenly innovation is "free" again. Or because smaller startups can actually get funded without needed to throw AI somewhere in their pitch deck.
There’s not a lot of actual innovation in software. Hasn’t been in quite some time. Any project a lot of these companies invest in has to be tied to a revenue stream or it doesn’t get funded. I think it’s a wholesale realization that they’ve been throwing money away at projects with no revenue and they’re shaping up/maturing as a company being smarter about what projects they invest in. I’m sure it has to do with tax code changes and such that initiated the bigger rethink. But it’s also just not a lot of big new foundational innovation taking place.
The laundering of data on US citizens into the private sector, and overseas, through this company is truly horrifying. Especially how fast it happened, and how little say we had.
Assuming this claim were true, which it isn't, the modern Israelis have genetically nothing in common with the Jews of the old testament. They don't have the same culture, religion, language or genetics.
Revived Hebrew seems to be a child of Ancient Hebrew? Judaism seems to have a continuation? I can't say I know the genetic situation of a while country, but it seems unlikely.
Maybe you've more to add, some sources to convince me?
When someone says he'd like to destroy you, spends half a trillion dollars pursuing that ambition instead of feeding his people, and is in the midst of attempting to wipe one of your closest allies off the face of the earth, I think you should believe him. What would it take for you to think it's more than just talk?
If my government was responsible for funding, training and defending foreign torture camps from international scrutiny, their citizens probably are justified in demanding the destruction of my states as a form of justice for unaccounted human rights abuses: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/legal-and-political-mag...
> SAVAK was established in 1967 with help from both the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.
> All observers to trials since 1965 have reported allegations of torture which have been made by defendants and have expressed their own conviction that prisoners are tortured for the purpose of obtaining confessions. Alleged methods of torture include whipping and beating, electric shocks, the extraction of nails and teeth, boiling water pumped into the rectum, heavy weights hung on the testicles, tying the prisoner to a metal table heated to white heat, inserting a broken bottle into the anus, and rape.
Good luck convincing Iranians that they should welcome your kind into their country for any reason ever again.
I am skeptical that your description is an accurate depiction of Iranians' views regarding the US and their own government. It seems more likely that you're ascribing your opinion to a much larger group than is justified.
No one wants my kind (Americans?) in Iran until they can go there as tourists. Apparently around 80% of Iranians would like that to be possible though.
I find something really gross and dystopian about the idea of Ozempic. Developing the willpower to resist short-term gratification, and the ability to make long-term decisions about your diet and health are some of the most important ingredients to living a good life. The idea of letting a drug do the thinking for you because you just can't trust yourself really horrifies me.
You just don't understand how food addiction works. Going from 34 BMI to 28 (I'm at 26 now) was the hardest thing I ever done, and I had money, great friends, a great family and a doctor that followed me twice a month.
Willpower is not a muscle, it's a well that fill doing what you enjoy, and clear when used. During my diet, my work ethic was at the bottom, and I couldn't force myself to go out meet new people.
Now that I have a healthier weight and stopped dieting hard (I'm still constantly hungry, but now it's my life), I'm a great coworker, I met a lot of people, made life-changing decisions and I have a lot of willpower left to do all the little things right. If I had a drug that helped me control my appetite at the time, i would have taken it.
> Willpower is not a muscle, it's a well that fill doing what you enjoy, and clear when used.
I won't negate your experience, since this is such a personal thing, and it's not like we have a rigorous scientific understanding of these things. But to me, willpower does feel like a trainable thing. Doing hard things seems to make me better at doing other hard things. Limiting my TV makes me less likely to compulsively eat later. Working out hard makes me less likely to lie in bed scrolling on my phone. Doing hard coursework makes me more focused at work.
The caveat is that these changes seem to happen pretty gradually, and the gains can be lost pretty easily, just like with muscle.
But being in a perpetual caloric deficit can be pretty rough and can definitely sap your energy. Glad you found your way to a healthier weight.
It's different per thing. Yes, working out gives me energy (even though I hate it and am bored out of my mind doing it), but going hungry or resisting food isn't the same kind of thing. If I had a bad day at work, I'll usually go "fuck it" and eat a pizza. If I've gone hungry all day because I'm eating what I should, I'll be cranky and not as much fun.
I can definitely relate with the GP, even though your comment is relatable too. They're just different mechanisms, or they apply differently to different people.
Tangential to the discussion, but I'd encourage you to not give up trying to find a form of exercise that you don't find boring. It makes it much easier to get adequate exercise. Also, not having to spend time doing things you hate is nice.
For example, personally I find lifting in the gym or running on the treadmill to be quite boring. I like biking and running outside, especially on trails. A lot of people enjoy group classes like crossfit or yoga, since the social reinforcement can make it psychologically a lot easier.
Yeah, I (try to) cycle and play tennis, but due to some circumstances both are less frequent than I'd like. You need to lift weights too, though, to build and maintain muscle, so there's no getting out of that. I'll definitely need to do more cardio, though.
How have fat people gotten thinner without those meds up until now, then? Was their addiction not as strong as yours, as you seem to imply? They just didn't "understand"? Look, I went from being an absolute fucking fatass to 8% body fat out of willpower alone when I was 17. It took a lot, namely destroying every bad habit I upheld for years regarding food and exercise, but I wanted to do it bad enough, so I did. It was a really extreme and sudden change of mindset, like a flip of a switch, actually, because I had enough of the bullying and lack of self confidence. One day I just got mad enough and changed my whole life.
> How have fat people gotten thinner without those meds up until now, then?
Mostly, they haven't. You and I are outliers.
The population-level data tells us that overweight people are mostly unable to control their weight in the face of modern food. That being the case, it doesn't seem unreasonable to look for alternative solutions to the failed option of just telling people to eat less.
edit: regarding strength of addiction - I mean, of course, isn't it profoundly obvious that different people will have different strengths of addiction? I can drink without the slightest inclination to excess, while others are broken alcoholics. My grandfather didn't have the slightest interest in food beyond the calories needed to survive, while I have to fight every day to eat well.
Exactly, regarding strengths of addiction. I don't feel morally superior about not being an alcoholic... it's pretty clear that my experience of alcohol is just wildly different from some of my friends. I enjoy alcohol fine, but I never feel like I'm exercising willpower when I choose to stop after 1-2 drinks.
It's profoundly obvious you're missing the point, and conflating somehow having a low degree of addiction to something with not being addicted at all to it. Your example about alcohol clumsily compares people addicted to it with people who obviously don't have a problem with it. We were talking, instead, about people, like myself, who had some degree of addiction to food, and still found it in themselves to overcome that shit. So it's two groups of people: addicts who beat their addiction, and addicts that didn't; not addicts and non-addicts, like you explained. Your examples, as you can see, are totally irrelevant and miss the point completely.
You also seem to imply that the degree to which you're addicted to something is the sole factor determining whether you will overcome your addiction or not, leaving your own will out of the equation. It should be logically self-evident that the fact that somebody beat their addiction says close to nothing about its "strength". One could have many physiological and psychological predispositions to food adiction and still beat it, while somebody with just a fraction of such problems could live a miserable life and never do away with it.
Me> different people will have different strengths of addiction
You> It's profoundly obvious you're missing the point, and conflating somehow having a low degree of addiction to something with not being addicted at all to it
Suggest applying some of that willpower towards paying attention to what you're reading.
> You also seem to imply that the degree to which you're addicted to something is the sole factor determining whether you will overcome your addiction or not
I don't imply anything of the sort. Willpower is one variable, level of addiction is another. What I do imply is that without deeper observation of a person's life, and the other areas in which they might demonstrate willpower, you can't make strong conclusions about their lacking willpower based simply on their weight.
Based on all I know about you (or you about me), we could each be people of tremendous willpower who overcame titanic odds to beat our food addiction, or we could simply be people who really quite like food who tried hard and overcame our mild predisposition.
> You just don't understand how food addiction works.
Would you concede that some foods are more addictive than others? Doesn't this suggest other remedies like food regulations, at the very least, should be deployed in concert with seeming "miracle drugs" like GLP-1 agonists?
You have multiple type of food addiction. Most are hormones dependent. For some people, it's linked with insulin, and they will crave carbs, and probably modern diet doesn't help.
Mine is linked to grahlin, I'm just always hungry. Painfully so too (at least it used to be). Do you have a friend who doesn't like to eat, sometimes forget to, and only do so to avoid hypoglycemia? I'm the opposite, I produce too much grahlin, too fast. The weird part is that the more you eat/fatten, the more your hormone production increase.
My solution was regular, multiple days fast. Not calorie reduction (which was slightly painful, and very hard to follow), but full on fast, where the first two days are impossibly painful, but then your body start to ignore grahlin, and the last 3-5 are pretty much OK (hypoglycemia is an issue though, I did it with a doctor). And of course, more fibers in the diet (reducing milk-based products and meat helped).
Can't speak for the original commenter, but I would not concede that, because experiencing semaglutide has convinced me it's not true. The feeling I can now clearly recognize as something like "food addiction" disappeared uniformly for everything from Brussels sprouts to donuts.
Yeah, my fridge has been virtually empty of ultra-processed foods for years. Mounjaro silenced the little voice saying "hey, why not go dig into the leftovers?", and when I do find myself grabbing a late-night snack (because my glucose monitor says I need one), I find it much easier to eat a little scoop of yogurt rather than wiping out most of the chicken I cooked for my lunches that week. I have to remind myself to finish things off before they go bad, now.
Respectfully, have you ever had anything in your life that you have struggled desperately with, and needed help? Anything at all that might give you a little empathy on the topic?
I was obese twenty years ago, and lost the weight via diet and exercise. Keeping that weight off is the single hardest thing I have ever done, and a battle I still have to consciously fight every single day. Doing so causes me a great deal of pain and frustration, and I know that I'm someone who is right on the edge of not being able to control my weight. Why should it be that difficult? So that I can pass some kind of purity test?
The fact is that the food we eat has evolved over time, and is too hard to resist overconsuming for a large fraction of our population. If we can create more addictive food, why not create antidotes? If we could easily treat alcohol addiction with a pill, would we tell alcoholics to just apply willpower instead? Why would we want people to suffer like that?
I took compounded Mounjaro for two months. It was like a jolt to the system and got me back on track. I learned how to eat better and alter what I eat plus tracking it. Started walking and going to the gym. Started with 7k steps and now easily over 12k a day on average. I don’t drink soda and if I do it js Coke Zero, Pepsi Zero or Diet Coke. We just don’t buy it. I didn’t know about maximizing my protein and fiber.
It wasn’t short term at all like you say. Something was seriously wrong.
It’s everything though - if it was that easy to just start doing it then people would.
I needed a jolt and impetus to get better. I was depressed, worryful, everything.
I have lost 40 lb. I went from 255 to 229 with the assistance of Mounjaro. I stopped taking it but kept up with the regimen. I am now down to 214.
Some people who take it don’t do it right, they still eat crap and so those are the people who rebound or think they need to go up to 15. I was taking 2.5 then 5 when I stopped.
Yea it is willpower and discipline. Being on the medicine as an assistant along with a lot of research spurred by the community such as maximizing protein, fiber and water intake to become satiated was all that did it with exercise.
Consider the fact that, if a drug can make you skinny, perhaps a drug can also make you fat. Or, even your own body can make you fat. Sometimes, what we think are our choices, have more to do with our biology and environment.
Just like you can't will yourself to be healthy if you are sick with the Flu. Some people can't just will themselves to be skinny. This is why we have drugs and treatments, because our bodies are not perfect machines that work the way we want them to.
> Consider the fact that, if a drug can make you skinny, perhaps a drug can also make you fat.
Yes that would be Prednisone. People call it the devils tic-tac. Its a wonder drug with terrible long term costs to your body especially at higher doses.
Our biology hasn't changed much in recent years. Our environment has. So has our obesity levels. I mean, it's an "environment" that has "super size," as a default option.
There is multiple effects fighting against people who want to lose weight:
* habits. often times, obese people use food as a stress response, as a reward, etc. this then makes them relapse.
* "target weight" of the body. there is a memory effect where once you have built up fat tissue, your body wants you to return to that weight. In other words, it's not just the first step that's hard, but all the steps thereafter. Relapse is easy.
* fat tissue makes you more hungry.
* environmental issues, like unwalkable cities, an entire industry putting chemicals into foods that make you addicted to them, its excessive marketing, missing availability of non-processed foods (large percentage of US population lives in food deserts), etc.
It's not just discipline of the individual holding them back.
It's also unlike most addictions, you have to eat few times a day if you don't want to die... alcohol, drugs, gambling are not required to survive, eating is.
Telling everyone "just get better willpower" is about as useful on a societal level as looking at a disabled person at the bottom of a set of steep stairs and telling them that the struggle is good for them.
I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I agree, at least partially. I think you're underestimating the "developing willpower" part, but I do think that helping people lose weight the themselves should be the solution, not chemicals.
These weight loss drugs are conditioning people to feel satisfied with less food in their stomachs, but only while they take the medication. If you don't put the same serious effort into improving your lifestyle, you're going to end up overeating again, gaining all that weight back, and probably going back on weight loss pills. Instead of solving the unhealthy dependency on food that most seriously overweight people struggle with, you're adding a dependency on medication.
Where I live, these drugs haven't even passed medical review for weight loss yet, they're purely prescribed for diabetics. That doesn't stop the illegal second hand market (taking drugs out of the hands of diabetics that are much better served with them) unfortunately.
In general, I do think weight loss drugs are better for society as a whole, as they save people from the ticking time bomb that is obesity, but I wish we could come up with a better solution.
The best way to change your lifestyle is to change it, and GLP-1 agonists make it easier to change your lifestyle. In fact, they don't work at all if you don't. Someone who's unable to change their diet and exercise routines while taking a GLP-1 agonist wasn't going to be able to do it without the medication, either.
And this talk of "dependency on medication" is ridiculous. Lots of people take medication every day to live a better life, or they use medical devices like eyeglasses and hearing aids, etc. That's one of the blessings of modern society.
I do make good decisions and put in 10k steps everyday, which according to my stepcounter puts me in the top 5% for people my age. I've managed to slow my progression into the abyss; but I'm still going there.
Truth be told, my body can't effectively lose and maintain weight unless I'm eating a strict 1500 calories and replacing the walking with an hour long run each day. I know this because I've tried it and managed to maintain it for 6-months. It was a herculean effort and despite the results I paid a toll both physically and mentally. This isn't to say that the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to me; but my body will fight against them harder than most.
(I believe I would be a good candidate for these drugs. The only thing stopping me is the thought of having to be on them indefinitely.)
Ozempic helps many people make better long-term decisions about their diet than they would otherwise. Do you think no one without extraordinary willpower should be able to "live a good life?" The drug doesn't "do the thinking for you."
Just flip it around: what if there were a drug that made people fat? Is it an insufficient willpower issue then? Willpower works for some, but the drugs make it easier.
Because there's no coherent regulatory framework to "ban processed foods", no country has ever done such a thing, and it would be political suicide to be the party that banned cheeseburgers, french fries, and Coca-Cola.
Obesity is not an adaptation. It's a total aberration. Storing energy in the form of fat is an adaptation. Becoming obese is overloading your entire system.
If the role was advertised on LinkedIn, out of those hundreds of applicants there's probably only a small minority that have appropriate experience and right to work.
It's really tragic that lots of Americans think this kind of garbage is a healthier alternative to other kinds of breakfast. It may actually have less sugar than pancakes drenched in some disgusting syrup, but it's still garbage. There's a real problem with nutritional literacy in this country. The manufacturers of these products really aren't helping here either. Cheerios have a big 'CAN LOWER CHOLERSTEROL' plastered on the front of the pack, but the contents are still literally 24% added sugar.
That is still a good amount of sugar given it’s every day and setting your morning baseline. If taken with e.g. a refined juice or sweetened coffee, that’s probably setting one up for sugar cravings in a few hours.
A slice of bread (in the U.S.) has more than 1g of added sugar (and less than 140 calories). (If you know of any besides Ezekiel that have less sugar, I would like to hear about it.) I don't think it is fair to villainize Cheerios when it is one of the least offensive options among ultraprocessed breakfast cereals. Especially based on... other things that aren't Cheerios? Juice (20+ g sugar) and coffee sweetener (4+ g sugar) would be the villains in this scenario.
There's nothing wrong with the "can lower cholesterol" banner on it because it's a source of whole grains and it has no saturated fat. That combo generally does lower cholesterol when put to the test, and it probably is one of the best cereals in the aisle.
Directing people towards better alternatives is a good thing.
The Honey Nut Cheerios are glazed in sugar, but the plain Cheerios (to my taste) don't have much if any. Don't have any here to check the ingredients though. If I want cereal for breakfast I generally make plain oatmeal.
I've been wondering whether increased automation is going to cause some kind of employment crisis in western countries. It's possible we're on the verge of a "second industrial revolution" because of AI. I'll confess that I totally underestimated AI, and figured that by the time AI was writing decent code society would have formulated a plan for what to do when white-collar workers start becoming redundant. This obviously isn't what happened. What is going to happen to the swarms of Uber Eats riders on ebikes? Or all of the new immigrant truckers? Western governments have been keeping immigration relatively high to keep the service sector packed with unskilled, lowly paid service workers. What are we going to do with them all if drones replace Uber Eats riders, or self-driving trucks take over logistics? What I'm seeing now makes me doubt that we're going to look after all these people.