That’s the same thing as being pro-business. Big business out-competes small businesses again and again. The idea of smol business being viable (see: this whole thread) is just the marketing front.
Well, it's also a US- vs the rest of the world thing. Big businesses destroying local economies, local health, local taxes, etc, is a very American problem. See [0] for a study on the topic.
Small business is viable. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses successfully running throughout the country. Maybe I'm missing your point but this seems like a dumb thing to say.
Without proper anti-trust and monopoly enforcement, no, small businesses cannot compete with megacorps who have giant war chests to fund the literal destruction of whatever niche you call your market.
Megacorps are destructive to market forces in general.
Small businesses died because we fed all the IGAs to Walmart, through Reagan's absolutely braindead "what if we just don't prevent monopolies?" policy.
It turns out, destroying the economy of local communities so that Walmart shareholders can be even wealthier while average Americans only get a few cents cheaper on some products.... at least until the monopoly has consolidated control and can just keep raising prices for the rest of history while selectively dropping prices anywhere someone tries to compete only serves the goddamned shareholders, not Americans.
Most rural places had small grocers. Now people who live in those places have to drive an hour to Walmart, and the local economy no longer has anyone working at the local grocer. The building that used to house the local grocer now has a fourth generation of whatever sketch dollar store company bought it this year, which employs exactly one human being from the local community, and the products are terribly priced, meaning not only did we lose the money staying local with whatever kind of more expensive IGA we replaced, we didn't even get better prices for it!
Monopolies are a huge percentage of the problem. America's rural communities are dying partially because all the local businesses have been replaced by national behemoths so literally every single day to day purchase you make ships more money out of the local economy. Nobody can have a job in a rural community because every dollar that finds its way to that community gets shipped out to Walmart HQ instead of flowing around and paying tradespeople and buying local products and services.
Sorry, it would have been more correct to say that while smol businesses are viable, Republicans and other corrupt politicians siding with big business is just them siding with the winning side.
> New challenges would come up. If calculators made the arithmetic easy, math challenges move to next higher level. If AI does all the thinking and creativity, human would move to next level. That level could be some menial work which AI can't touch. For example, navigating the complexities of legacy systems and workflows and human interactions needed to keep things working.
You’re gonna work on captcha puzzles and you’re gonna like it.
I’m gonna assume that Brain Drain means that people who you spent resources as a country to train leave to spend their productive years elsewhere.
> Our proxy for talent is respondents who said they had completed an undergraduate degree.
Higher education in the US is mostly privatized. Society hasn’t born the cost of those undergraduate degrees. What does the US lose if they leave?
There’s also the question of whether other countries need people with undergraduate degrees. Do they need to save money on training their own citizens in liberal arts, nursing, engineering? That’s a bit unclear.
> Well, there you have to look at the history: you have to ask, how has the history of Canada been different from the history of the United States? And there have been a lot of differences. For instance, one difference had to do with the American Revolution—in the American Revolution, a large number of people fled to Canada, lots in fact. And a lot of them fled because they didn’t like the doctrinaire, kind of fanatic environment that took hold in the colonies. The percentage of colonists who fled in the American Revolution was actually about 4 percent, it was probably higher than the percentage of Vietnamese who fled Vietnam after the Vietnam War. And remember, they were fleeing from one of the richest places in the world—these were boat-people who fled in terror from Boston Harbor in the middle of winter to Nova Scotia, where they died in the snow trying to get away from all of these crazies here. The numbers are supposed to have been in the neighborhood of maybe a hundred thousand out of a total population of about two and a half million—so it was a substantial part of the population. And among them were people from groups who knew they were going to get it in the neck if the colonists won—blacks and Native Americans, for example.[70] And they were right: in the case of the Native Americans, it was genocide; in the case of blacks, it was slavery.
> [70]: On the number of colonists who fled the American Revolution, see for example, Carl Van Doren, Secret History of the American Revolution, New York: Viking, 1941. [... ...]
I have no other gear than polemic on the topic of AI-for-code-generation so ignore this comment if you don’t like that.
I think people in software envy real-engineering too much. Software development is what it is. If it does not live up to that bar then so be it. But AI-for-code-generation (“AI” for short now) really drops any kind of pretense. I got into software because it was supposed to be analytic, even kind of a priori. And deterministic. What even is AI right now? It melds the very high tech and probabilistic (AI tech) with the low tech of code generation (which is deterministic by itself but not with AI). That’s a regression both in terms of craftmanship (code generation) and so-called engineering (deterministic). I was looking forward to higher-level software development: more declarative (better programming languages and other things), more tool-assisted (tests, verification), more deterministic and controlled (Nix?), and less process redundancies (e.g. less redundancies in manual/automated testing, verification, review, auditing). Instead we are mining the hard work of the past three decades and spitting out things that have the mandatory label “this might be anything, verify it yourself”. We aren’t making higher-level tools—we[1] are making a taller tower with less support beams, until the tower reaches so high that the wind can topple it at any moment.
The above was just for AI-for-code-generation. AI could perhaps be used to create genuinely higher level processes. A solid structure with better support. But that’s not the current trajectory/hype.
This resonates with me. There are so many tools and techniques that many developers refuse to adopt because they're not hyped and take maybe a week to learn (e.g. take something like TLA+ which could be used to reason about distributed systems), but instead of improving the craft of programming we're just using LLMs to spam bad quality software at a faster rate.
Amusing that a newly minted federal department of tech-bro adjacent yahoos declares that there is waste but clearly does not have any of the expertise—which would probably need to be wide-ranging—to be able to actually get rid of the waste itself and not just cut indescriminately.
You could get an oncologist to admit that the patient had some cells that needed to be removed, due to the advanced cancer. But the layman chose to get rid of a couple of perfectly healthy, cancer-free limbs.
Same person: Why is the world organized in such a dumb way?
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