Processing power has cheapened exponentially for the last 50 years (Moore's law). I am skeptical that a continuation of this trend will drive a fall in wages.
In my own experience performance optimization is an important but infrequent part of my job. There are other skills an elite programmer brings to the table like the ability to build a mental model of a complex system and reason about it. If downward pressure on wages occurs I think it will be for another reason.
I think in general you are right, however, there will certainly be sectors where it will be a lot easier to just throw it at a wall of computation than pay someone to think about it.
But architecting complex systems so that they are maintainable, scalable, and adaptable... there's not gonna be enough cheap computation to solve that problem and omit top talent for a long time.
Anecdotally, I think its worse in the public sector. I know several public school teachers who have gotten graduate degrees for the sole purpose of getting a raise. Its not like a private company where you can get a bigger raise by impressing your boss.
Most school districts have what’s known as a “step and lane” salary schedule for teachers. These grids specify how much raises are worth. Teachers earn a “step” increase for each additional year of experience, with many teachers peaking with the highest “step” at around age 55.
Teachers can also earn more by having more education (those are the “lane” increases). Some districts pay teachers holding a master’s or doctoral degree a premium, while others move teachers into a higher pay column when they earn a certain number of credit hours of professional development.
There are money runs on funds causing liquidity issues. Funds sell assets to market makers for cash to give rich people their money. This causes a downwards spiral and asset prices plunge.
Now, the fed will continue to buy assets (eg. but not limited to corporate bonds which have tanked and taken out a couple firms and MMs) so that rich people can liquidate their assets.
We will be bag holders as the fed will own corporate bonds that – frankly – the existing financial system players expect to default. We take the hit and own junk so that wealthy people can extract money now.
This is the high level to my knowledge. Please add more colour and correct me if there are things that I'm missing :)
The $1.5 trillion was a fund of one day fully collateralized loans, of which only ~$100 billion was actually used. There was no wealth transfer, just the fed following its mandate to keep interest rates on short-term loans within an acceptable band.
Yesterday Twitter started showing me "someone you don't follow replied to another person you don't follow" types of conversations and it's gotten really absurd at this point.
This happened to me yesterday as well, only it was "liked" instead of "replied". In my confusion I clicked on the account, since I didn't recognize it. Only to mistakenly click the Follow button, as my brain didn't manage to correctly derive the current status of it. Because I actually thought I had accidentally followed them or something similar.
Notice that the cost per mile actually goes down the more miles you drive! You have to drive 20,000 miles to get down the ballpark of the IRS number. This indicates that expenses affected by mileage like gas, maintenance, and depreciation are dominated by up front costs like insurance and taxes. Now consider that most door dash drivers already chose to have a car before working for door dash, so they will have to pay the up front costs regardless. For this reason, I don't think $0.58 per mile is a good estimate of the marginal cost associated with extra driving for door dash. The AAA report estimates gas and maintenance costs per mile at $0.17 to $0.23 depending on the type of car.
Second, I don't believe it is right to include depreciation in a household budget because it does not manifest as an additional cost on top of the price of the car. Unless the car is listed as a line item on your household budget, you don't have to account for any additional loss in value. Imagine that you bought a car in cash for $1000 and never drive it. You lose the $1000 immediately. If some years later the car is worth $0, your total cost of ownership is still just $1000, not $2000.
I believe the fact that people still chose to work for door dash is additional evidence that the estimated costs in this article are too high. We may not be perfect rational actors, but most of us can tell if our bank account is going up or down.
None of this excuses the unethical behavior of door dash, and personally I choose not to use them. I believe tips are intended as a gift to the driver, so it is misleading to call it a tip if the driver isn't getting it. That said, I didn't find this analysis convincing for the reasons above.
I tend to agree that there is a lot of unimportant and largely unimpressive research going on. Just my anecdotal observation, but try picking a random mid tier university and check out the professors' websites to see what they are working on.
Note that in Shakespeare's time an audience would directly have understood "make a shambles" here to mean violent bloodshed in the parliament building because a "shambles" would have been a common term for somewhere you killed animals to produce meat. Which is exactly what is being described here. Henry VI part 3 is not a play about a polite disagreement settled over lunch...
Today "shambles" remains in the common vocabulary, but only in a sense of things being messy or disorganised, most English readers today probably wouldn't think of literal violence and I suppose that the people who named this website, likewise, were thinking of modern usage.
In my own experience performance optimization is an important but infrequent part of my job. There are other skills an elite programmer brings to the table like the ability to build a mental model of a complex system and reason about it. If downward pressure on wages occurs I think it will be for another reason.