The difference is at a university you have to learn ~5 different subjects at once. On the job you only learn one. It's more of a "Breadth first" approach.

And have you seen tuition and housing costs?

When I was in school mostly the poor kids and lower middle class had jobs, but I wonder if that's still the case.

What you learn on the job is largely up to you. You can choose to focus narrowly on your job and learn nothing more. Or you can stick your fingers in more pies to learn much more.

Right... the story is called "Robots and Murder" because people still use robots to commit murder. The point is that broad overarching rules like that can always be subverted.

This is totally wrong - people are much different in 2023 compared to earlier in our lifetimes, even people from 1990 would seem completely different to us now. Cultural evolution is a type of evolution, it's not a "fake" version or something like that.

Unfortunately people often don't go to the doctor because it's too expensive. Why would that change if you added more things to the doctor's toolbox?

The more you have to pay for it, the fewer people have access to "on-demand everything". Meaning it'll become a luxury of the richer side of the arbitrary cut-off line where ordering groceries or getting an Uber is financially feasible. The less these services cost, the better for all of us.

The solution that solves that problem is to remove the infrastructure from the capitalist market - for example, by nationalizing UberEats or Amazon (although nationalization isn't the only option)

Doing so would allow the business to continue as usual but the expenses that are external to each transaction would be offloaded to a third party (the government for example, or just written off) thus allowing the maximum amount of people to access the service at the lowest price.

The transaction is fundamentally between a human client and a corporation. With an AI shopkeeper or with a human, it doesn't matter - you don't steal from the till attendants, you steal from the corporation.

A human cashier makes a mistake and doesn’t ring up an item? They’ll get reprimanded.

An AI cashier does the same and all of a sudden it’s the fault of the human and is liable for prosecution. You should know better than to steal.

Businesses looking to replace people with this can’t have it both ways.

There's a scam where two people go into a store and pretend not to know each other. One gets change from the other, but doesn't have the correct change. They then get the cashier involved to help with the "problem" by making change from the register till. But, via a fast-past set of confusing operations, trick the cashier into giving incorrect change. It's still considered stealing if you intentionally trick the cashier into giving you incorrect change.

There should be forums or something where people can contribute to discussions and create a community. How are they supposed to vote for representatives if there's no way to know who other people are?

The app itself coordinates this. It guarantees only people with company emails can join and these people can only join with a single accocunt.

Blind already does this and is quite popular among tech workers. I'm just extending the concept with Unions.

Unlike many other professions, I don’t think there is much crictical thought from the tech community as to what tech and programming is and isn’t for.

A few people engaged in “hand ringing” but not deep, regular discourse on the evolving nature of what we want “tech” and “programming” to be going forward.

Despite delivering transformative social shifts, even this last decade, where is the collective reflection?

It could also be caused by authors getting better at expressing themselves succinctly.

An ancient affliction / a hopeless optimist wades in / the sound of denial.

I think it's because publishers have loosened up a bit on their requirements and self-publishing is easier than ever. Traditionally, publishers wouldn't really invest in putting out short books aside from some notable exceptions.

There's also the "too big to edit" feature of many bestselling authors - look at the size of the Harry Potter books as an obvious example: (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/harry-potter-paperback-boxe... third image). When an author gets famous enough they apparently get edited less.

There may also be something about people not wanting to pay "full price" for a "thin book" but I doubt that's a major factor.

Good point. I've definitely seen follow ups to books that did well that just felt more sloppy. The sequel to Shantaram is a prime example.

Though I doubt many of the books on the NYT bestsellers list are self-published. In general though I agree with you. For a lot of non-fiction books 100 pages is probably plenty but, if you go through a publisher, you'll have to go longer. It's one reason I likely won't use a publisher again.

What kind of book did you put out? Do you feel like it was bloated as a result of going the traditional route?

The book I put out through a publisher (Apress) was essentially open source software (How Open Source Ate Software) for the business person who understands it's important but really doesn't know where to get started to learn about it and how it works from a community, development, and business perspective.

I did feel I was stretching to fill some pages in the first edition. That said, I was asked to do a second edition and it actually ended up a bit longer. I cut some "filler" that I didn't think was essential, reorganized, and dove more deeply into some topics (like legal matters with the assistance of a lawyer colleague) and I think it is now reasonably in right length territory; it covers a lot of territory.

Another book I self-published on software packaging broadly and its analogs to various things in the real world today and historically ended up around 100 pages.

Robert Evans (the author) has done a lot of important reporting in the middle east. I first heard about him through a friend who recommended his podcast "It Could Happen Here", and I loved his reporting on the BLM protests in Portland. Very interesting stuff.