The internet created vast new opportunities for software engineers to create value.
Generative AI is about replacing software engineers in creating that value.
These are very different things.
Opportunity: you can buy $1500 in shingles, put them on someone's roof yourself in 4 days, and clear $5000 profit -- somewhere where rents/mortgage are under $1500 a month and a nice restaurant meal for two is under $50.
It's rapidly looking like nerding out while pining for the old days where engineering knowledge and education was valuable is maladaptive. The sunk cost fallacy can be real.
You can replace software engineers with anything else here. Most VPs and higher leadership I see at FAANGs (who're arguably the ones recognizing opportunity) come from a PM or other non-software background. As much as I'd like to believe we're special, it doesn't seem like we are any special. We have no protection.
It's best to start hedging and learning other skills. Or focus on making as much money as possible ASAP so you have some financial safety net to fall back to as AI and Trump/Musk and offshoring has increased in recent years. All of us need an escape plan ready.
I don't mean to spread FUD. Just hedge please. I assume I have at most a decade of tech career left in the best case. A couple years in the worst case.
You'd rather Israel doesn't have the technology to target terrorists with precision, and instead will be forced to use crude methods to carpet-bomb large areas where they hide?
Hamas did not kill 1200 civilians on October 7. There were ~1200 victims total in the attack. There were 274 soldiers, and 95 police or other security officers, and 764 civilians [0]. At least a few of the civilians were not killed by Hamas directly, but by IDF firing on Hamas terrorists holding them hostage [1].
Of course, each and every one of these victims is a tragedy. There are also an additional few hundred people taken hostage, another war crime by Hamas. I don't intend to minimize the hurt or excuse the terrorists. But just as much, every civilian being killed in Gaza is a tragedy and inexcusable. And there are many times more civilians killed in Gaza, even by the most conservative estimates, than the victims in Israel.
Also, while the 30+k victims in Gaza (which also include Hamas soldiers) are indeed coming from Hamas itself, there are no better numbers. The Israeli media and even official sources sometimes quote these numbers, and all external organizations that have looked into them consider them credible. Not to mention, these are only those confirmed dead, each of them identified specifically (the Hamas Palestinian Health
Ministry is publishing a list of the exact names of every victim, and not including unidentified dead or those who are missing in the numbers).
Israel has not published any list or even estimate of the casualties, except their claims for Hamas soldiers killed.
Hamas Ministry of Health officials changed their numbers and brought it down to 22k. so if 13K of these are Hamas terrorists(according to IDF), it means 9K civilians dead. Probably half from failed Hamas rocket launches that were raining down on Gaza civilians at the beginning of the war. These are very low numbers for urban combat as we see in Gaza.
Don't you think it's strange that every civilian that dies is either a woman or a child? According to Israels numbers they have never killed an innocent man, only women and children get in the way while killing the resistance fighters.
There are lots of ways to protest, and plenty of them don’t involve impeding others or trespassing on private property to make their point. We have parks and government centers and sidewalks they can do it in. Your right to protest does not supersede the rights of others.
And these are (were) employees and it’s quite likely Google already has established mechanisms for hearing employee grievances. Google’s not going to allow a small but vocal and disruptive group to override those existing mechanisms, nor would any serious business.
It doesn’t matter. The law is what it is. Breaking the law to get your way isn’t the right way to get things done. Otherwise we’d all be justified in doing it whenever we don’t like something and there would be no point in laws anymore.
In a democracy, you can participate in our system and vote to have it changed, though. And that’s the effective way to address these issues.
Breaking the law isn't a moral question, it's a legal one. You break the law, you go to jail, okay. But what is this "it isn't right" business? Some innocent bystanders are inconvenienced, so what? These people are protesting their employer's complicity in mass murder! And a corporation isn't a democracy, so they can't "vote to have it changed". Should they be bringing their concerns to HR, is that the right way to get things done?
The point is that the "right way"--the way that is sanctioned by the system--is deliberately hobbled by many people in positions of power, to be completely ineffective. So you may well have to push the bounds of the system to actually address these issues.
First of all, these are (probably now former) Google employees. I don’t work for Google, but I do know that most big companies have established channels for addressing employee grievances.
Second, Google isn’t a democracy, but we have a democratic system that allows us to influence our representatives to make reprehensible conduct illegal. If you want to change how a business operates, you can arrange a boycott as well. Companies take the threat of losing significant amounts of money very seriously.
If you honestly think that this type of action should be legal, then by all means, go convince our government to make it so. But I don’t think you are considering the long-term consequences such a change would have.
No, I don't think this type of action should be legal. I think they should do it anyway. Protest is more meaningful (and raises more awareness) when there are consequences.
(You're Lawful Good, which is an admirable quality in a fellow citizen, but Chaotic Good can be more effective when the system has been captured by a strong Lawful Evil element.)
"I don’t work for Google, but I do know that most big companies have established channels for addressing employee grievances"
If you read any of the articles coming out of this event you'll see that the protestors tried for months to get a dialog going with management in half a dozen different capacities, all of which were denied or swept under the rug immediately. Due to this behavior from management, many of the employees engaged in this cause had decided to quit, but if you were one of them why not try to protest one last time? This was basically the last option they had prior to leaving
No.. that's what a stupid and illegal protest looks like. You can peacefully protest in public as much as you want, it's your right under the first amendment. This does not extend into private property. If you don't have permission from the property owner, that's no longer a protest, that's trespassing. One could argue that the whole thing is a meta-protest (along with the arrest and the media coverage) which would be more or less correct, but that's not what you're arguing.
You certainly can occupy private property as a protest, if you get arrested afterwards is immaterial to the fact that you can indeed do the as a protest.
People throw pies at politicians faces as a protest and they're often arrested afterwards for assault, but it doesn't mean they can't do it.
Sit-ins are an old protest tactic. They were used during the civil rights movement, in private property. They were used during labour protest, in private property. They have repeatedly been successful at achieving the protestors ends. They have repeatedly, in hindsight, been viewed in a favorable light and broadly seen as permissible. They were frequently, at the time, viewed as illegitimate and impermissible. Of course, there were other sit-ins which failed and were very much unpopular and were unjustified.
Rosa Parks wasn’t trespassing or interfering with anyone else. And she wasn’t on private property; she was on a public conveyance. She had every right as a paying passenger to be on that bus.
Rosa Parks was both trespassing (she was subsequently arrested, the exchange shockingly resembles the one here) and interfering with folks that her race was legally proscribed from interfering with.
We should all be glad that the view of "she should have just founded her own capitalist, nonwhites-only bus company" did not prevail.
(Google's anti-Gazan defense-dealing is the bus company, in this example)
That's a pretty interesting use of the word "interesting". As I said, the exchange shockingly resembles the one here ('sorry, but if you dont leave, Im gonna have to have you arrested' or some equivalent), and she was interfering with folks that her race was legally proscribed from interfering with, as Palestinians are often legally proscribed from interfering with Israelis.
>“It took the police a couple of tries to settle on legal language describing her alleged offense.”
You say that as if we don't all already know that the actual offense was upsetting the order of the apartheid. What took a bunch of racists a couple of tries to eventually settle upon is irrelevant. Similarly, the police in this case may take a couple of tries to eventually settle upon legal language, but we nonetheless all know that the actual offense was upsetting the order of the apartheid. Just like Rosa Parks.
My point was that her offense was neither trespass nor interference with others, contrary to your claim. So actually trespassing and interfering with others at work doesn’t make you a Rosa Parks—even if you or others think you’re doing the right thing.
Besides, Ms. Parks herself was impacted by the unjust laws that required her to sit at the back of the bus. It’s unclear how Google’s activities directly and substantially impacted the lives of the protestors here.
My point was that Rosa Parks' offense, whatever the racist police's explanation for it, was indeed interfering with apartheid. There is no "contrary to the claim" there. Rosa Parks was indeed arrested according to some legal framework around preserving an apartheid, just like here. Maybe they took some time to "settle upon legal language". Maybe the police here will, too. Either way, both cases are around protestors protesting apartheid and being arrested under some charges that the apartheid-preserving powers conjured up.
To address your edit:
Rosa Parks was protesting the treatment African Americans were receiving, these workers were protesting the treatment Gazans are receiving.
Laws against trespass to property exist in every nation that has private property rights. (They protect you, too.) There’s no “conjuring up” of trumped-up charges going on here.
It's important to remember, whenever a news headline reads "Y after X", that the headline does not actually claim "Y because of X". I find it a frustrating misdirection by the newspaper to employ such headlines, since they are so easy to misread in that way.
That the rich digerati have taken up the cause of the ongoing Palestinian man-made famine and genocide diverges from actions of similar demographics in the past. The genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia received little notice in the global press and received little global action. This is positive progress. Even if the effect of an individual protest causes no direct change, it is important voices are heard and directed toward the political class and the owners of capital who buy influence over the political class. Unfortunately though, far-right Christian fundamentalists hold too much clout in America for mystical theological reasons and will never chide Israel for any behavior, no matter how abhorrent.
Not to agree or disagree with what you are saying here, unlike Rwanda and Bosnia, which were horrible enough, every single day of the apartheid and genocide operations are funded and aided by US. And in this instance the Nimbus program is actively complicit in it. If I were to use the trolley thing here, Rwanda and Bosnia were inaction, but this is fueling and arming the trolley to be a killing machine.
Animats did not claim otherwise AFAICT. The forming of a union in Poland in 1980 is something I’ve been taught was one of the earliest public signs that Kremlin was losing its grasp over the east bloc. That’s not at all incompatible with Soviet falling apart due to internal problems.
These are called sit-ins or "sitdown strike", and are not particularly uncommon. They happen in many democracies around the world (not at google though).
This comment is confusing. It makes me think that you believe their endgame is actually become the owners of the office they occupied or otherwise gain something. Their goal was to make themselves be heard. Us talking about it right now means it’s working.
The actual acts performed in the protest may very well be the goal for some of the protesters. The stated goals are in that case only rationalizations.
Communist countries absolutely used “vocal minorities” as a way to control people. The vocal minority might be organized crime, the Red Guard, or anonymous denunciation.
It wasn’t a coincidence that communist countries had massive police forces and widespread crime. They are both parts of the same function.
So the average working person is in fact worse now economically than they were 2-3 years ago. It's not just a subjective feeling, and the other positive metrics don't change that.
Though, I was responding to specifically: "by any metric", and the presence of one poor metric does not justify that statement.
> So the average working person is in fact worse now economically than they were 2-3 years ago.
I don't think that logic holds. Real wages is not _the_ one measure of economic health. I would agree that it is likely a significant portion. I would posit that whether you are employed or not is another significant measure, as would be things like net household wealth (which are back to early 2022 levels) [1]
> It's not just a subjective feeling
To some extent, the metrics do not show that to be an objective feeling. For example, real wages are back to 2020 levels, would we expect consumer confidence to be at the same level? If real wages and economic health strongly correlate, I would suspect consumer confidence would as well.
The data shows we're a good bit under 2020 and are at confidence levels of 2017 [2]
On the other hand, economic sentiment _is_ subjective. For example, if you and everyone in your town is in the 30th percentile of the economy, it's not going to feel like things are going well. Which is to say, no one person can easily get enough anecdotal experience for it to be statistically significant.
What's more, economic health is hard to measure. $30/hour might be great if you live with parents & have no debt, but it could be crushing if you have children and rent. Which is to say, I'm quite sure you can't therefore accurately say 'in fact worse now economically' based on one measure.
Now the Houthis are facing a competent military, that is so infused with progressive moralism that it can't use any of its competencies, and is very careful not to kill any Houthis.
Unless this paradigm breaks very soon, Houthis seem favored to win. Pretty easy to win against a military which bogus morality won't let it harm you, its enemy.
They can win just as so many others have in the past - outlasting the resolve of the U.S. I think that the best that can be hoped for here (from the U.S. perspective) is to diminish the Houthi's capacity to launch missiles and drones until Israel has finished whatever it is they are trying to accomplish in Gaza.
It can, it just hasn't done so yet. But it definitely can. A threat to international shipping is one of those things that just might bring it into play.
We all know the US military can defeat the Houthis. But so far it hasn't used its capabilities. It warned and threatened endlessly, while the Houthis continued their campaign of naval terror.
Yes, it has, but not to a degree that the sleeping giants have decided it's time to wake up and act. The thing the US hopes for is that the Houtis will see reason, if they don't they can expect to be wiped out. Give it some time, these operations aren't planned on the spur of the moment. You can bet your ass that right now somewhere in the pentagon a set of rooms is dedicated to dealing with this. And until it happens it will seem as though nothing is going to happen.
Iran is using the Houthis to apply pressure on a regional rival, Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis used to be a close American ally against Iran, but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away, and Iran was able to bring them to terms by wielding the Houthis in their backyard against them.
Iran is also using the Houthis to flare up a conflict that will prevent the Saudis from normalizing relations with Israel; Iran used Hamas to execute the 10/7 attack toward the same goal.
Finally, Iran is using one of its proxy (the Houthis) to preserve another proxy (Hamas). The Houthis are disrupting one of the world's most important shipping routes, which will eventually drive up prices (read: inflation) in an election year. Biden doesn't really want to get into an intense military operation in an election year, and his main alternative is to pressure Israel to let Hamas survive - as the Houthis demand.
> but purist progressives in the Obama and now Biden admin pushed them away
Autocratic rulers like MBS deciding to cut up journalists/opposition political figures into tiny pieces with bone saws inside Saudi consulates didn't help matters. The whole Khashogghi incident really illustrated exactly what the Saudi regime thinks of rule of law and human rights of their own citizens when it's boiled down to the the barest essentials. US senators, congressmen, foreign service career people have taken note.
It's still worth noting that the Saudi military/air force/other armed forces are extremely large customers of US/NATO spec equipment and UK origin equipment.
It would be worth remembering that something like 85% of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and there were very clear financial/funding connections from wealthy persons within the Kingdom to the pre-9/11 training program. Highly reputable journalists and intelligence sources have also extensively documented the Saudi funding sources that supported (and still support to this day) wahabbist madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the "V1.0" of the Taliban in the 1990s, and other fundamentalist salafist jihadi groups.
Invading saudi arabia for regime change instead of iraq in 2003 would have been much more logical if anyone in the US and UK had the fortitude to do it. It would have also been vastly more messy.
It's well known in people who study foreign affairs that Iran funds and arms Shia and shia-adjacent armed groups (Houthis, Hezbollah, etc). But this doesn't happen in a vacuum - to some extent this is the IRGC and Iran's reaction to the well documented and widely known Saudi support for salafist jihadism.
It's also well known and documented that the saudis have been investing vast amounts of their oil wealth in the US stock market, real estate and other equities since the mid 1960s, so the financial and interconnected realtionship between the US and Kingdom would be extremely difficult if not impossible to dis-entangle at this point in 2024.
Despite the Khagoggi affair and other problems descrived above, I think it's pretty clear that US decision makers still consider saudi arabia a much more trustworthy regional "partner" compared to Iran. Ongoing US/UK contractor support of all of their armed forces (and US/UK relationship with Saudi Aramco) and ongoing exports of munitions to saudi arabia back up this theory.
Yes, MBS is terrible, and his regime is autocratic.
Also, intelligent mature people make policy based on real-politik and the aggregate sum of its consequences. They don't just respond to whatever moral sentiments they experience in the moment.
The decision to push the Saudis away is destabilizing the whole region and will allow a violent, aggressive, revolutionary Iran to start and escalate extremely bloody conflicts throughout the region.
While it's a shame that one journalist was killed, was alienating the Saudis really worth the many thousands of lives lost as a result?
Without presenting a full argument, just based on your own post, if everyone is starting to do this almost in unison, in cartel-like fashion, then each individual company has no consequences to worry about.
Seems like the good old false Marxist argument, in a sexy new "mathematical" package to appeal to a geeky crowd. I predict it will do extremely well here.
You mean the utterly wrong marxist "accumulation of capital" claim? So ridiculous! There is no $problem in our civilization and it certainly isnt made by our economy or ignorance.
Aren’t there always three pieces though? There is 1. Coming up with an idea, 2. Organizing the capital and labor to realize the idea, and 3. The labor to build the thing. Sometimes, that is all one person, but all three pieces are necessary.
This question seems to misunderstand the topic. The assumption here is not that there is no labor involves, but rather that it its amount is not what determines the value of something it's been put towards.
You misunderstood my answer. I wanted to show that labour is the foundation of all value.
Weather this labour gets payed equally to the trade value is a follow up question, not tackled by your wikipedia link either but very important to discuss accumulation of capital.
And i was really interested in finding some value independent from labour.
