Sure but theres a level of uncertainty being expressed for a paid service that you don't see elsewhere.
Imagine if every time you booked an uber it was like "your drive may crash the car". Or whenever you ate at a restaurant, the waiter said "there is a chance the chef will poison you". Or your bank statement said something like "these numbers may be wrong".
Each side gets the smooth brains they crave because for ~50% of the population it's become a team sport / religion situation. A majority of people have not thought through 1/10th of the policy positions they automatically support/reject based on the team hat color.
There's a quote I will mangle and I forget the source of that's something like "If you agree with all the positions of your chosen political party, either you have thought through every option and came to the same conclusions on dozens of topics, or you haven't thought through anything".
> 2. VCs subsidized rides to destroy taxi companies by driving the customer cost to well below provider cost.
Not sure about other regions but in NYC this is 100% the case. Ubers used to be nicer cleaner newer cars, better drivers.. for less than a taxi. Now they are about 4x what they cost in the 2010s, with cars about as dirty as a taxi and equally surly drivers.
> The technologists who create it believe they should control it
I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk. They truly think society will be re-ordered by this technology... and they should be in control of that re-ordering rather than democratically elected governments.
Democratically elected governments can't reorder a cookie right now.
We even had one out tariffs on steel, thinkinf this would be good for jobs here. If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
Democracies don’t necessarily pick the best leaders but they give a veto to the people such that the worst leaders don’t last long.
A technocracy can build high speed rail in a decade but it can also institute multi decade one child policy, multi year zero-covid, barricade people into their own homes and ban entire industries at the whim of a single leader. There is less course correction.
I would rather society not be reordered at all, if the only parties capable or willing to do a reordering are big tech companies, especially of the kind run by people like Sam Altman.
Sorry for being salty, a bit hyperbole perhaps in the 2:1 numbers.
I draft and write some code for construction companies and personally saw layoffs and not taking work due to increased material costs. The structural companies we worked with similarly did a few layoffs. The average pay of these jobs was 60k+.
Manufacturing of steel is very competitive and I haven't seen the American steel drop in price. I can't personally imagine it adding more than a few thousand jobs since it's so competitive (thin margins) and you would have to add a ton of production to add one job.
Meanwhile, the profitability of building a building is a direct feed into whether buildings get built. A building not being built directly led to laying off about 100 field guys for us.
That sounds like some reductionist hackernews question that tries to hint at some clever insight but I'll assume no snark and answer with as much insight as I can.
You just make less of them. Some buildings are discretionary, like your big apartment buildings you probably want (these were the two that got cancelled).
Person funding can make x profit over building per year. Person loaning loans x for y sum. Building costing more than interest amortized profit means it doesn't get built.
And I just had a doctor's office fitout cancelled mid project (drafted it personally :) ). so apparently those are, too.
Public projects like schools rarely get cancelled. Factories I personally don't draft so I really can't tell you.
Healthcare absolutely has a ton of discretion for their buildouts.
What's the alternative to steel? You just make less if it's not profitable to make.
Funny that you're accusation of snark was not without snark itself.
I'll take your word on it for the level of discretion on some public building, though I would have thought/hoped that whimsy would play no more role than a rinsing error. Especially in the current economy.
Maybe it's good there is less superfluous building going on?
Sorry, the question seemed like one of those low effort "have you thought about just not building buildings, hmmmmm?" that requires more effort to address than it took to ask. That "combatative-without-seeming-combatitive-for-the-purpose-of-seeming-like-the-good-faith-one" hackernews pretend good faith socratic argument is what it read to me. Apologize if it wasn't the angle you were going for.
If the stated goal is jobs, the tariffs aren't doing it from what I can tell.
It seems to be hands have been put on the scales, and to call cancelling the building that would have otherwise been built due to market forces good needs some testing. If it were doctors offices in already served areas, sure, but these were not subsidized but lower end apartment buildings in NYC. I'm hoping the guys who were laid off moved to some other company rather than exiting the trade.
The alternative is usually more-crowded schools, fewer factories, and more expensive dental care (due to higher real estate costs). If the people in charge of these decisions can't justify the expense of building more, then the things that would have happened in those buildings just don't happen, and the existing infrastructure has to strain to keep up.
Not GP, but what all economists have been saying is that tariffing industrial raw materials - industrial inputs like steel, aluminum, lumber, is idiotic because the companies that make machines, cars, houses, makes a lot more money per ton of metal that is made than the mining, steel, lumber companies (etc) made making the raw materials. So, that tariff makes a winner of a very few small employers, while massively screwing way more and larger companies who employ orders of magnitude more people here (and those jobs are better jobs too).
And we are very competitive in machines, already set up to win.
It’s also fantasy that even 4 years of tariffs will convince anyone to build brand-new smelting operations, as they’re very large, capital intensive, take a while to build. And again, mostly worse jobs.
This is the part everyone seems to forget. Any "new" jobs would be shitty low paying jobs, and it would mostly instead need to be automation.
Tariffs transfer wealth to the 1% and leave shit jobs that pollute the environment, which also happen to raise the cost of all goods, for everyone else.
> If there was 0.1 seconds of thought they'd realize any manufacturing job you make from a steel tariff cuts 2 more well paid trade jobs
They knew that was the case. They don't care. The maga crowd isn't acting in good faith. Nobody other than the cult members and people who aren't paying attention thought that would actually bring manufacturing back to the US. The point of the tariffs is to devalue USD (something Trump wants to do since circa the 80s) and to strengthen Trump power/influence. He wants everybody in the world to be forced to come and negotiate directly with him so he can see them bend their knees. The whole thing is a power play
I do think they believed and believe it, though the reasoning is less economic than that. Manufacturing "belongs" in the US due to our inherent superiority, and has gone elsewhere only because of ill-conceived notions of niceness.
By increasing tariffs they will have to pay their proper obeisance for their inferiority, and be inspired to actually work hard like us Americans.
Mr Tariff is probably slightly better to keep those around than not, but ideally I'd rather the government curate experts they employ to advise them.
I guess I kinda walked right into handing technocrats power, but I really just want the government to understand the tech they regulate. We'd rather have populist zingers on TV though.
Technoauthoritarians writing pretentious manifestos disavowing democracy explicitly don't want the government to understand the tech they regulate though, never mind curating experts, which is why they're so keen on the likes of Mr Tariff.
Mr. Tariff was trying to replace the income tax with tariffs with a bonus of having personal power over other countries economies by whatever tariff he decree'd. The "more jobs" was a smokescreen, and I'm sure you're aware of that
Trade policy should be as holistic as possible (tariffs, taxes, subsidies, etc), with the goal of aiding a robust domestic economy.
The 70's neoliberalism took Smith's comparative advantage argument and stripped it of context — optimizing for quarterly returns and capital mobility while ignoring the industrial ecosystem those returns depend on. You can't offshore your entire manufacturing base and expect to retain the innovation, workforce capacity, and supply chain resilience that made those profits possible in the first place.
Contrast this with "For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country."
That era was not without its issues as well, but there was a sense that "we're all in it together" vs the "greed is good" crowd.
> I think it goes deeper than this when you listen to them talk.
This needs to be shouted from the rooftops!
All the Web3 edgelords talk about how democracy is inefficient and how their magic blockchains will fix things but don't actually back up their claims with anything.
Sure, it could be applied and might work, but the only thing blockchain brings is a distributed immutable ledger -- but all the trust actions happen outside that ledger. And that's not what slows us down, it's the people, ideas, power and process that makes it inefficient.
The interview with Thiel where Douthat asks him “You would prefer the human race to endure right?” And his response is 30 seconds of hemming&hawwing “well…” says it all about the VC bro class.
> The result, in my case, is that I code more than I have in years. Three years ago I coded maybe once a fortnight, mostly throwaway PoCs to demonstrate concepts. Now I code most days of the week, in between other work.
This kind of senior engineering role really depends on the type/size of an org.
I've had jobs like this on & off and generally don't stick around for long. There have always been high-impact hands-on-keyboard senior roles that involve coding most/every day..
> The other thing that gave way was thinking time. There's very little of it in my working day now. The productivity gains from AI got captured by output volume rather than output quality.
I actually see this externally from b2b vendors I am a client of. Companies that used to churn out X new products/month are now pushing 4X products but they all suck. The quantity over quality market is going to produce new opportunities for others.
> Three years ago [...], the process was familiar: write a proposal, get feedback, iterate, build a small PoC to demonstrate value, get a team assigned to take it to MVP, ship something fully featured and integrated with the rest of the platform six to twelve months later.
This to me smells of large, slow, very political organisation where actual work gets done at glacial pace. The increase in speed is probably not due to LLMs, rather to the fact that this person now has an excuse to present working products while before, by their own admission, they were mostly dedicated to producing corporate slop.
It’s not corporate slop, its risk avoidance. Now leaders are so enchanted with productivity they are willing to lower the risk avoidance bar. “Move fast and break things” is meta now. It was before too, but AI is giving it a fresh breath.
Yeah, and it could have been (and in many place has been) like this all the time, LLMs or not. That was my point. The change is not due to the (albeit very real) help given by LLMs, it's due to a change of attitude in management. Magically this person who used to write code once every two weeks now has time to fully focus on coding, again.
Ya. And strangely for me it’s the opposite. I went from 50% coding to 10% because coding is so much faster and it’s easier to delegate to more junior engineers. Seems like a codebases needs to be VERY technically deep to justify spending a senior+ engineers time coding all day, as opposites to problem solving and design.
there's no anti-ai hype train. It doesn't exist. There'll merely be more and more bots crowding into every space that the only people left will not care.
not yet. but given the growing backlash my bet is that at some point linkedin monkeys will eventually all begin posting about the importance of “human centric design” or whatever.
at that point there’ll be some money to be made for the supposedly “replaceable” software engineers they’ve been shitting on this whole time.
i’m hoping my bet pays off, cos i would like nothing more than to rinse these people for everything they’ve got. it’ll be payback time baby.
I agree a lot of these things end in a bang at some point.
Western rich world boomers have gotten a great deal - unusually stable & high growth economies, relative housing abundance, and peace during their peak working life during which all sorts of retirement related benefits were introduced.
Unfortunately many of those benefits only work in a higher population growth, higher economic growth, lower retired lifespans world that no longer exists.
Imagine if every time you booked an uber it was like "your drive may crash the car". Or whenever you ate at a restaurant, the waiter said "there is a chance the chef will poison you". Or your bank statement said something like "these numbers may be wrong".
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