> the size of the US economy relative to the global economy is shrinking
This is not true, not at all, it dipped as China grew initially, but looking at the past few years this trend had reversed and the US was again growing as a percentage of the global economy, going from a low of about 21% in 2011 to nearly 27% today. It seems certain now that Trump has put a bullet in this growth, but it was hardly inevitable. In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.
> In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.
The GOP did a fantastic job of blaming all the shockwaves from Covid on Biden. Don’t get me wrong, his admin made some pretty poor choices, but he did inherit the Covid economy and basically got blamed for it. Whereas Obama inherited the recession and wasn’t blamed for it in the same way.
They also did a good job of making it look like all of these problems were only happening here and hiding the fact that other countries were actually in far worse shape. Relatively speaking, as bad as it all was, we did better than most economically speaking.
You can watch the screen and see what it can detect, and it is impressive. On a dark road at night in Santa Monica it was able to identify that there were two pedestrians at the end of the next block on the sidewalk obscured by a row of parked cars and covered by a canopy of overgrown vegetation. There is absolutely no way any human would have been able to spot them at this distance in these conditions. You really can "feel" it paying 100% attention at all times in all directions.
Yep I've often noticed this as well - it has many many times detected humans that I can't even see (and I like to sit in the front), especially at night.
Sometimes it would detect something and I think "huh? Must be a false positive?" but sure enough it turns out that there really was someone standing behind a tree or just barely visible around a corner etc.
Sure none of those have run out in front of us, but the fact it is spotting them and tracking their movement before I am even aware they're there is impressive and reassuring.
Every government in the world right now wants to get their hands on the controls and put their thumb on the scales here. Modern social media has proven to be effectively remote control for their citizens, nothing like this kind of power has never existed before and is absolutely irresistible to politicians. Expect them all to be laser focused on this until they're able to seize complete control, no matter how long it takes or how roundabout the path to this is.
Yes and no - you need to check whether each individual politician, not just party, is taking money from said global corporates, because they have a lot of money and UK politicians are cheap.
Not to mention the opaque mess that's Reform UK financing.
Many of these governments are directly funded and directed by said corporate fascists. The opposition is hardly much better. There’s no good guys at the state level here.
The "coordinated corporate fascists" (your words not mine) are providing a platform where I can challenge the the state and be seen by potentially millions of people.
Some time ago I had my 10 year anniversary forgotten once in a company (where I had written almost the entire codebase for their core product myself) and I did feel slighted. I had felt invested in the company, to me this day was a big deal and my company was completely unaware. It felt like a disorienting mismatch of unreciprocated commitment and made me feel a bit sick in the pit of my stomach. I started looking for a new job the next day.
My company gave out nice plaques for ten year anniversaries. As my anniversary neared I frankly got really excited to receive mine.
My manager started a couple months before myself, and a colleague started a couple months later. We still work together all our anniversaries in a line.
My manager got his plaque and showed it off. I patiently awaited mine.
When my 10 year anniversary came around we were in the middle of being acquired. It seemingly got lost in the fuss. My anniversary came and went. Zero acknowledgement beyond an automated email and some points towards the company store. No plaque.
When my colleague's 10 year anniversary came around a few months later and he got an even nicer plaque than my manager AND a small celebration...
I'm not one to usually express anger or disappointment, but I got salty and maybe said some things I shouldn't have. I'm frankly still salty and it's five years later.
I feel a little childish but I just wanted a plaque. I waited ten years for my plaque. My wife had offered to make me one.
My fifteen year anniversary is coming in a few months. We'll see if anything comes of it.
The little things are more important than they seem.
I was the second person to not get a plaque after they stopped the 10-years at work. Instead I got an email.
I knew one of the last people to get one, so was expecting mine two weeks later.
And I knew Sarah, who started a week before me, and had printed out her 10-year email and a picture of the clock. I found mine at a thrift store. When I left I set it on her desk on the way out. Hope she liked it.
Sounds like you are extremely valuable in the product you built.
In your experience it’s not just the manager direct report relationship that’s adversarial, it’s you against the whole company for the mismatched value they place in you.
You should use that as leverage. This comes with an mindset of looking out for yourself and not any loyalty to the company (I really wish that we could all find companies loyal and nice to their employees, in reality they are few and far between).
Something along the lines of “Hey I built our product. We’re making X in profit. I deserve Y in comp. I’ll give you a week to decide. If you reject I quit and build my own product or join another company.” Obviously add some fluff to reduce harshness.
The basic problem there was that salespeople were viewed as the ones who actually made things happen, engineering and building the actual product was just an inconvenient necessity.
Exactly. A whole lot of people have been sold this idea that "taxing billionaires" is going to solve all their problems and provide endless spending for all the free things they want, but this is simply not the case. First off, the math, even the naive math that assumes that all billionaires' stock can be instantly liquidated at the current prices does not work. As individuals these people do have quite a lot, but there are not enough of them. The politicians constantly mention the same 5-6 individuals with net work measured in the hundreds of of billions, then list the number of billionaires, but the vast majority of these "billionaires" are single digit billionaires, with their net work held in an extremely illiquid investment such as private companies.
If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.
Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.
Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.
This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.
> And I don't think org-mode's babel features really exist in Markdown
I think the neatest part of org-babel is the source code block execution, & the various ways it supports for configuring output. This allows for org files to be "plaintext notebooks" (like jupyter in plaintext"). -- It's really surprising that this part is not more common.
More niche is the "babel" part of that: because the code blocks can take variables as inputs, and output values, this allows a polyglot notebook where values from e.g. Python get passed to R and plotted or so. -- Cute idea, although I've never found it too useful. The supported types are (unsurprisingly) limited, and the language support for code blocks is held together by duct tape.
(Even more niche is the noweb syntax for proper "literate programming". Which is mostly discussed about how awful it is to use in practice?)
Of course, org also has a long tail of neat features (like how each heading can have properties attached to it, as well as tags, and the task management that relates to this).
> It's really surprising that this part is not more common.
I think it is because of low Emacs adoption and other editors not having enough support.
The problem with polyglot notebook workflow is probably, that you can only use it well for small data, or at least not big data, because who wants to have a million lines of output suddenly appear in the buffer, only to then read them as input for the next language ... That would be a tremendous amount of computational overhead. And if we didn't have that, we would need a way to pass a proper value from one language to the other.
What I also like is, that you can define code blocks that are used as formulas for spreadsheets (tables) inside the document. That's quite powerful too.
> (Even more niche is the noweb syntax for proper "literate programming". Which is mostly discussed about how awful it is to use in practice?)
I don't find it very awful to use. I have used that for working through computer programming books and it was fabulous.
I agree about the duct tape, which I also use often around the house, so maybe that's why I like org-babel :)
Just wanted to say that I share data between different blocks in different languages through files and env variables (I add :session shared to the src blocks that need to access this). That is useful also to have src blocks you can execute repeatedly and that depend on something like an aws identity being assumed (you just assume it in the first block that shares the session).
I agree it's messy, it's just a mess that works for me.
I think this is the crux of the issue, use like this is like a real program, just built up incrementally in a notebook rather than a repl or shell-with-pipes, and with manual error handling. The STEPS project was all about this- a way of incrementally building blocks that can be composed.
With org mode in mind, ideally you would have language support for this ie. Comments are scoped metadata that can be formatted, tested, linked etc.
You need a well defined spec like djot as a DSL for this to work, so that parsers can be easily written for it. This level of language support allows many different views onto the source code. We’re not there yet.
Babel features are kind of a moot point if you’re just talking about the syntax, which seems to be the purpose of the post. Most of the reason to use org mode is tied to emacs.
There’s no reason you couldn’t do something similar with markdown code blocks if someone were so inclined. But that’s tool dependent, not syntax.
I sort of agree with Karl’s point about there being too many standards of markdown, but I doubt org mode would have survived the same level of popularity without suffering the same fate.
It doesn’t help that there is no standard for org mode. You can only really use and take advantage of its power in emacs. It isn’t susceptible to lossy transformations because there’s only one real org mode editor.
Well, but I am not aware of anyone having come up with a good syntax to do babel things in Markdown. Markdown and Org Mode also set out to serve different purposes. For a quick and dirty text Markdown might suffice, but the babel stuff and spreadsheet stuff enable a lot of use cases that Markdown simply doesn't cater to. We already have the implementation of all these nice things in Emacs. If we were to replicate them for some markdown dialect, they would probably be done half-right, before someone actually manages to get literate programming right for various languages, including what code to translate to, how to wrap or not wrap the code that is inside blocks, sessions, output formats, etc. We might as well use what we have with Emacs. There is probably a way to call Emacs' functionality from outside of Emacs, to treat it as a library.
But not all is well with Org Mode syntax either. Many git hosters have only a very rudimentary implementation of a parser and writing a parser for it is not actually that easy. Its dynamic nature requires at least a 2 step approach of parsing and then later checking all kinds of definitions at the top of a file and further processing the document according to that. It's power comes at that cost. That's probably why we have so many Markdowns, but only one Org Mode (OK maybe a few, counting Vim and VSCodium plugins, that achieve a feature subset).
I will say though, that org mode syntax is much better suited for writing technical documentation than markdown. The only issue is, that not so many people know it or want to learn it, and I don't know a way to change that. Perhaps that effort to have the org mode syntax separately defined (https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Over...) by the same author will help creating more support for the format in various tools.
I agree you would need to specify the markdown to allow more implementations. https://github.com/jgm/djot Would make a good DSL inside languages, combine that with compile-time execution so that blocks can auto-recalculate and you have a more available mechanism than emacs/org in other languages.
A) I'm aware and B) so what? Markdown is popular enough now that even people who aren't very technical and don't know that they're reading/writing Markdown are familiar with it. This is incredibly valuable and not something you can replicate through purely technical means, there are so many places where having a ubiquitous way to express in plain text is helpful. Markdown has grown into this role at the same time that the environment developed. You will not be able to recreate this situation.
“Adequate” is a very relative term. Adequate for what? The fact that Markdown is widely used quite successfully demonstrates that it is adequate for a wide variety of tasks. Yes, Org mode might cover more of the long tail, but Markdown clearly covers all the important cases to the point that it has achieved wide adoption.
> The fact that Markdown is widely used quite successfully demonstrates that it is adequate for a wide variety of tasks.
Just because $x is used for lots of tasks does not mean that it is adequate for that. People use Excel for lots of tasks that it is clearly not adequate for; (like time tracking). I knew someone who wrote his letters with Excel.
Is it though? Like for example, I often deal with Org-mode documents of several thousand lines of text and I honestly don't know any piece of software that can acceptably handle multi-thousand lines of markdown.
Emacs/Org-mode has tons of different ways to navigate and search through these large bodies - the outline nature of the structure is perfect for that - there's narrowing, collapsing/expanding, sparse-tree search, flexible sorting, indirect buffers, imenu, overlays and text properties that can render the text conditionally, etc.
I read HN and Reddit threads in Org-mode format¹; I browse my Jira board and tickets in Org-mode², I have Wiktionary lookup³ and Thesaurus⁴ - all in Org-mode.
Comparing Org-mode and Markdown and saying "Markdown is widely used [and thus it's better]" is wildly immature - popularity doesn't determine fitness for purpose - PHP is more widely used than Rust or Zig, but that doesn't make it "better" for systems programming.
I can agree, Markdown is adequate for relatively small documents like README files, but it's nowhere close to even try to compete with Org-mode in so many different aspects far beyond just the markdown format structure.
That’s awesome. Clearly, you are an Org format rockstar.
But be that as it may, if Markdown is inadequate for a variety of tasks, why do people use it for a variety of tasks? Your rebuttal is just “Here’s a task or two that I do that I think Org format is better for.” Fine. I don’t have an opinion about your tasks. I believe you that Org is better for those for you. But neither do those cases rebut the fact that MANY MORE people use Markdown quite successfully on a daily basis than Org for a wide variety of tasks (blogging, documentation, personal information management, etc.). Can Org also do those things? Yes, surely. Can Org do more than those things? Surely. But so can Markdown. So, if you want to say “Org format is better for ME and I can do more with it because it’s more feature full,” then I’d reply, “I’m sure you’re right.” But if you’re saying “Org is better for everyone,” well, then, the data just doesn’t support that.
And for the record I did not say that “Markdown is better.” You are putting words in my mouth. I said it was adequate for a wide variety of tasks. It works. It is sufficient. My proof for that is that it’s widely used for a variety of tasks. That’s it. Q.E.D.
> Can Org do more than those things? Surely. But so can Markdown.
It just cannot, because THAT'S THE POINT - it is by design. You guys with little or no exposure to Org-mode keep arguing that Markdown somehow can be replacement or be a "better" version of Org-mode. Well, IT CANNOT. Period!
That is because they have different design goals, different applications and different use-cases. I would love to use Markdown if it was clearly sufficient for the things I do - well, it is not! Do I then curse and abandon Markdown? No, of course - I would not. It still useful for certain tasks. Just because it's used for a variety of tasks, it doesn't mean it can replace Org-mode anytime soon. Just like MS Word format can't and never would replace LaTeX or PDF.
If you mean org mode as it exists within the software emacs then yeah it's no contest. No markdown editor even comes close.
But if you mean just the file format as it's used by say like Github to render README files then yeah markdown is perfectly adequate and org mode doesn't really bring a whole lot to the party.
I suspect you’re replying to a different poster, but I agree with the premise of the article. I’m saying the elemental features of Org syntax are much better.
I think you're wildly confused about both of these thing. Your objection assumes standards are about serialization format (how to write things down). But org-mode isn't primarily competing on that. It's competing on semantics - what the structure means to the system.
Markdown solves a problem of presentation - how to write text that converts to HTML or PDF. It's intentionally minimal because its job is: "make readable text that also renders nicely". Org-mode solves a problem of computation and workflow. It's a syntax for meaning - how to encode structure that a program can act on.
Markdown doesn't have task states, Markdown doesn't execute code, Markdown doesn't have metadata.
You could theoretically write org content in markdown syntax, but then you'd lose:
- Task state tracking
- Code execution
- Agenda queries
- Time-based organization
- Dynamic folding based on TODO status, and many more things
These aren't "nice-to-haves" - they're the point. Org-mode exists because markdown deliberately chose not to have these. They're orthogonal solutions.
When you say "we don't need another competing standard", the real issue is intermediate layers - CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, Pandoc's extended markdown, GitHub Flavored Markdown - these perhaps are redundant and fragmenting. But org-mode isn't trying to be a markdown variant. It's trying to be an execution environment that happens to be text-based.
This is the entire problem. This is possibly the single problem in the modern world. When social media first appeared, "feeds" were based on explicit subscription by the users and ordered chronologically. Later "likes" were added, but this was still based on deliberate user behavior and simple deterministic sorting while the ability to "repost" greatly expanded the reach of individual posts, later algorithms were introduced then the number of signals expanded beyond explicit user input to implicit engagement measures. Each step along this path has taken agency away from individuals.
I read articles and comments about people who were fired or suffered other consequences for something they said online, and the responses are righteous indignation--they ought to have known better than to post these things online! How did we get into this fucked up state of affairs? Social media started off as a way to talk to your friends, and over time your friends have been replaced with strangers, what they can say and who gets to say what controlled by centralized authorities, while individuals have been taught to self-censor.
It is not only the US companies or Russian bots, every government in the world is itching to get their thumb on the scale here to have a say in what the people are allowed to see, to hear, and to say.
People are always looking for an outside villain in this story. Over the years it's been "Chinese buyers", AirBnBs, private equity, or "the rich" generally, but the thing is that the system is working exactly as it is supposed to. Middle class homeowners demand that their homes go up in value every year and they get what they want. Homes are explicitly called investments my every mainstream organization with any stake in the game. The ones responsible are indeed your neighbors, but not just the ones with investment properties. Talk to these people and between complaints about the price of eggs going up a buck or two you'll hear them mention "property values" frequently in casual conversation and beam with pride as they show you their Zillow Zestimate. Your government is happy for the increase in tax revenue (even as they carve out exemptions for their voter base). The ever increasing prices are all going to be paid by future generations, so there is no need to worry.
If Black Rock is guilty of anything here above all else, it's taking advantage of a situation deliberately created for someone else. If government policy wasn't already going balls to the wall trying to constantly pump up property values, there'd be no investment returns to be had.
Give me the levers of federal, state, and local government and I promise you I can completely tank property values in 48 hours or less.
You're overthinking this. These are just stupid people. Think of the dumbest uncle you have ranting online over some ridiculous story. These are the people making these decisions, and they're putting about the same amount of planning into them.
This is not true, not at all, it dipped as China grew initially, but looking at the past few years this trend had reversed and the US was again growing as a percentage of the global economy, going from a low of about 21% in 2011 to nearly 27% today. It seems certain now that Trump has put a bullet in this growth, but it was hardly inevitable. In 2024 the US was in an incredibly strong position relative to the rest of the world.
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