I'm just making fun of the certainty with which the poster assumes that just because we had humongous progress in all areas of knowledge for the last 100 years, it's somehow guaranteed that the progress will continue at the same rate. Fundamental limits or not, we've already picked the lowest hanging fruit and further progress is painfully incremental, slow and expensive and Star Trek-like devices seem extremely unlikely.
I think you're reading it backwards. If you look closely at how medicine is done today, you will see that there are many areas where it is wildly divorced from reality. So, the point was not "we'll be vastly better soon", it's more "we're in a bad place now".
The current most wildly successful, heavily prescribed medicines today are statins. They help 1 in 104 people in terms of preventing heart attacks, 1 in 154 people in terms of preventing stroke. (Those are people without known heart disease, but they are the vast majority of people taking statins.) They harm 1 in 10 by causing muscle damage, 1 in 50 by causing diabetes. [1] That's the success story. (Sure, you can debate the details. Do they really cause diabetes? Unclear. Do they help anyone, ever, to not die sooner? Unclear.)
It seems like the main reason they're considered so successful is that they do indeed lower an intermediate metric, namely blood cholesterol level. I am sure that bloodletting was successful at removing blood, and if you have an infection, you could even say at removing bad blood.
And yes, I'm cherrypicking my definition of success. Modern medicine can indeed dramatically improve outcomes for a large set of problems (eg cancer). But doctors were successfully setting bones back in the bloodletting days, too.
There is a serious problem with that site's analysis. The meta cited on statin death prevention covered an average trial length of 3.74 years per person. That means they can give you, at best, your 3-4 year probability of having a fatal heart attack. For most age cohorts, that probability is very near 0 no matter what you do, so no intervention whatsoever can prevent cardiac event death by this metric. But this metric isn't what people care about. They're not trying to reduce the risk of having a heart attack in the next few years. They're trying to reduce the risk of ever having a heart attack.
Note this is exactly why we actually use the studies of people with prior cardiovascular disease that this meta excludes. Those people are sufficiently likely to actually have another heart attack within the time horizon of the study that you can get useful data!
The other option is to only conduct 60 year trials. It should be obvious why that isn't a viable option.
The limited time duration is a big deal, I agree. It's an extrapolation from insufficient data. (Though the studies were evidently powerful enough to come up with a number, so the probability is not that near 0.) But that also means insufficient data to provide evidence for net benefit from an intervention, and an intervention really needs to prove its worth before you go about tempting fate by taking something biologically active. Where is the evidence that statins "reduce the risk of ever having a heart attack"?
I'm going to disagree about the cohort. That only means that if you have prior heart disease, you should not be looking at an NNT derived from a population without prior heart disease. The site's conclusions are mostly irrelevant for you, and should not factor into a rational decision.
If you don't have prior heart disease and are weighing your options, then those data are relevant to you. The vast majority of people who are deciding whether to take statins are in this category.
People deciding whether to try to remove a bullet from their abdomen, and who have no reason to believe that they have ever been shot, should not be weighing the outcomes of test subjects who had been shot before participating in the trial. (It would really suck to be in the control group...)
I'm not saying you shouldn't take statins, with or without prior heart disease. An individual would have more to go on than the existence or absence of a prior heart disease diagnosis. Exact cholesterol readings, for example, might create more or less urgency.
But if I were in the situation of deciding for myself, I'd want better evidence for them than I have seen presented so far. I am suspicious of an industry for which this is a big success story.
The cost to show one person "this is the browser icon and these are the excel/word icons; click them when you need to", multiplied by number of people who need to be trained.
Why is it terrifying? Because it's "artificial"? Would you be more at ease with something "natural" as calcium being part of the plaque?
We've been living with plastics for decades. I don't see people dropping dead around me. Life expectancy around the world has been steadily growing, not the other way around. When exactly are these micro/nano plastics supposed to kill me? When I'm 90?
Hmm, many health markers have been declining. Fertility, hormone levels, many exotic cancers incidence rates and how often they occur in young people. You may need to just look a bit harder.
We need to acknowledge that 'trickle down' is a myth, and that the'rich gets richer' phenomenon is much stronger. And that is a massive democratic problem, which will destabilise our societies.
For our democracies to survive we must put many different taxes in place to counter the rich get richer, and the perverce gathering of power it causes. There won't be a single policy to fix it, and actually finding a good compromise which helps growth instead of hindering it is hard (especially giving the constant lobbying from the rich).
Personally I am quite for a high inheritance tax, but it's definitely not enough. I have no problem with JK Rowling being rich. But I don't think it makes sence that she has a wealth 1000000 times what a teacher makes in their lifetime. And it certainly don't make sence that her child (if she has any) should receive a wealth that size.
> But I don't think it makes sence that she has a wealth 1000000 times what a teacher makes in their lifetime.
Why? What number do you think “makes sense”? Once you pick that number, do you think it’s correct when you compare it to a teacher’s income in the DRC?
If it wasn't totally impossible to implement, you could replace all taxes with low single digit percent per year service fee on your total assets for protecting them from criminals and foreign dictators. (Piketty invented that. It was tried, and didn't work out well for pragmatic reasons like jurisdiction shopping.)
The service fee would be set so that the return on capital was equal to the overall growth rate of the economy. Naturally, it's higher, which makes it mathematically inevitable for a few family offices to end up owning everything. (Also from Piketty.) If the risk-free rate was 3% this year and the GDP grew by 2%, your service fee would be 1%.
Alternatively/in addition, significant inheritance taxes for the ultra-rich.
A lot of wealth is multi-generational and nepotistic (i.e. do we really think Jim Walton would have got the job if he wasn't the son of the founder, and even if he did, would he have earned as much as he has?).
Inheritance taxes don't work in a world where one can jurisdiction shop/utilize multiple different trust and other setups. What inheritance tax does accomplish is keeping the newly rich from becoming multi generational while protecting the old wealth, which is the worst possible outcome. On top of that, to enforce them requires a level of privacy and personal liberty abuse that is counterproductive.
A better solution is much more effective antitrust enforcement through both breaking up monopolies/oligpolies and outlawing contract abuses by oligoplies as we see them (i.e. the myriad of things amazon puts in their seller contracts to ensure the prices elsewhere are always near amazon's price).
You asked the wrong question about Jim Walton. You should ask would Jim be able to pull off the same level of wealth accumulation if walmart had been broken up so that it could not have abused its market power for the last 30-40 years? Probably not, because he's probably not great at creating businesses people want to spend money at. You could say the same thing about guys like Bill gates (he would be worth at least 10X what he is currently worth if he had just kept his microsoft stock instead of diversifying bit by bit each year). When you look at it, it's almost always the market power abuse that is the problem, not the wealth per se (notable exception is Elon Musk, who has knocked it out of the park on multiple companies in starkly different fields, kind of impressive).
This is a false dichotomy - It's not one or the other, it's both and more.
It's the right question about Jim Walton, and there is a question about breaking up Walmart on top of that. Walmart can still be broken up in a world where inheritance tax exists!
> On top of that, to enforce them requires a level of privacy and personal liberty abuse that is counterproductive.
Disagree with this - forcing billionaires (or anybody for that matter) to provide details of their estate for tax purposes is pretty well-trodden territory.
It's not a false dichotomy, it's actually what happens because the newly rich are often earning their new riches in a way that is not easily hidden away in any of the myriad of legal structures that can hide income permanently from the high tax countries. The new guys will get their wealth eaten by your proposed policies but the old wealth will not, calcifying the system.
It is the wrong question about Jim Walton because it only matters if walmart is still the obvious oligopoly abuser it is. There is a huge difference between someone who managed to get big enough to abuse market power in one space and collected monopoly rents to amass a large fortune (The waltons, bill gates, etc.) and the guys who appear to be excellent managers and have grown massively society improving businesses in disparate industries (currently only Elon comes to mind, I am sure there are other but they are rare enough and/or have stuck to a single business that they grew large enough to extract excess profits that I can't think of any other semi proven names). The good managers you want to be as rich as possible because they are deploying that cash well, the other guys not so much. This translates into much more concern about the children of the super rich (which is correct) but to which you are trying to solve with an inheritance tax, which will just make things worse and slow growth. It's far better to break up the monopolies/oligopolies/regulate away the most obvious abusive contracting and let time do it's thing to get the junk offspring back to normal wealth levels.
You don't get it. Reporting requirements are quite invasive now and they aren't working. The level they will have to get to to actually make an inheritance tax work is a place that is far too much power for the government to have and won't end well (because that level of power has never ended well in the hands of the government). You are trying to solve a questionable problem (billionaires) by feeding an obvious, terrible, and literally deadly problem with massive historical precedent (government power).
If Walmart is broken up and Jim Walton is forced to divest, he will invest his money elsewhere and still own the means of production (capital) just in other companies.
It doesn’t solve the underlying issue of wealth distribution.
Of course it will, just not on a very quick (and destructive) timeline. He loses a monopoly abusing company and its excess profits which fed inflated salary and stock compensation for him personally and is instead left with taking the equivalent of the S&P 500 return or trying his hand at actually being a good manager and growing a company from small to large again or investing in early stage private stuff and experiencing the huge risk of that. If he's actually a good manager/ entrepreneur he can still grow his wealth starting something new, if he's not then he, or his kids, or his grand kids will eventually put enough of the wealth into failed company ideas, up their nose, in their veins, down their throats, into bad real estate, etc. that they cease being billionaires and have to get real jobs. This is the classic way wealth was dissipated. It's non violent, slow, but effective. most importantly it doesn't ruin the calculus on whether someone should strive to be a great entrepreneur or just keep their head down because they can be sure the government will steal it if they succeed.
"Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, for instance, find that once corporate and estate taxes are added into the mix, the top 0.1 percent of earners paid 71.4 percent of their income to the IRS in 1960, compared with 34.7 percent in 2004"
Oh, you mean a plumber working from home, just like a programmer? And not having to pay exorbitant real estate prices to live near his clients? What a horror!
We already have drone pilots working from "home", and it appears the alienation is real. Not that bombing military age children from an f-16 is a walk in the park.
And while I personally enjoy working from home I know a lot of people who would claw at the walls if forced to WFH.
Point being - it might seem like a small difference - doesn't mean that it is a small difference.
So, in our current reality rich people in rich countries are immensely worried about the fate of poor people in countries with terrible human rights abuses? But once avatar bodies are invented those fine folks will turn into blood sucking monsters?
Are they that concerned? Some people are, and they will take some action - but only on what is reported in the media they read, and its very sporadic and random.
Because the real world is infinitely more messy than a database. Do a few plumbing fixes and you will immediately understand the vast challenge of automating that type of work.
It's actually a fantastic example of probably one of the last jobs/trades to be automated.
It might work half the time in standardized catalog houses/apartments soon - but might need a few hours per job of human guidance in the majority of jobs for the forseeable future?
Why would they pay the per-job API charge for RoboMario when an actual sweatshop worker is cheaper than the first-world electricity to run the server farm?
Plumbers aren't really a good example as they are skilled and powerful. Therefore a teleoperated plumber robot could actually enhance the life of plumbers as they would be able to do more work more conveniently.
However, for cleaners or domestic servants, well expect a race to the bottom, think North Korean prison colony for a model.
How are plumbers so skilled and powerful that they can avoid being enslaved? If slavery is legal in your country, certainly being a plumber vs housemaid will not be the deciding factor in whether you become a slave. Clearly the key factor here is the legality of slavery, not the existence of remotely operated robots.
Edit: I also don't understand why we suddenly jumped from GP's scary dystopian warning to robots operated by foreign slaves. Casting aside how unrealistic the underlying technology is, applying it en masse is an entirely different discussion. You're essentially allowing the whole world's population to migrate to your country.
It's not literal slavery, rather what's often called 'a modern form of slavery' that is the unfortunate risk. People working for very low payment, they can barely live if it. Because of the tele operation, people will compete with a lot of peers across the world, hence the pressure on the salary. There is also a flip side, the even-poorer people get a chance to compete with the 'normal' poor and generate some income.
I believe there really is no way out of this direction of affairs. It's capatalism, free market at work.
Hopefully soon the machines become smart and cheap enough such that the poor can benefit as well. In the end anything can be automated, building and operating houses and infrastructure, and making food.
You're confusing paid advertising with marketing. Marketing is interweaved in almost any business activity. No marketing means you literally register a company and then wait in your house for someone to randomly walk in and pay you for you services. And if that miraculously happens, you treat them as badly as you can and do the worst possible job, just to make sure you don't inadvertently get some word of mouth referrals.
This is a good point that I'm glad you called out. Having a logo is marketing. Having a website is marketing. Every blog post, tweet, like, reshare, etc. is marketing. This comment could be considered marketing if you look hard enough.
Marketing is the act of bringing a product to the market in such a way that it is received well.
Product, price, place, promotion.
All of those are marketing.
Yes, even the product itself is marketing. When people claim they are not doing marketing, but going by word of mouth, they are using the product itself as marketing.
You’re right that I was implicitly referring to top of funnel marketing - things you do to make people aware of your business and get them to your business. And yes, I was most focused on advertising.
I would argue that customer service and the actual job done are part of the product, since they’re part of the value you’re delivering to the customer. By that logic one could include the warm fuzzy feeling they get from some really slick copy, but to my mind it feels different. I’m having trouble formalizing the line here.
I’ll also concede that there are things that fall under the aegis of “marketing” that are not direct transfers of money for placement - e.g. cold calling, content marketing, SEO, etc. many of them are zero-sum games, a few are not.
One of the dumbest takes I've seen in a while. Good customer service is like juicing in athletics. You can get away just fine without it but once those pesky competitors stop yelling at their customers, you're kinda forced to do the same as well. Not to any benefit but just to maintain the status quo.
