abusoufiyan's comments

Then why would he say things like:

>What you see is two cultures separated by an almost unimaginable amount of time, distance, and history. The clash that occurred would have been hard to prevent whenever it happened.

Because surely there was more they had in common than that made them different.

>Personally, I think trade policy needs to be intimately connected to human rights and environmental and labor conditions.

It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now.

I also want to point out that, yes, in a globally competitive world wages become globally competitive. If a Chinese worker with an infirm grandmother is surviving on a lower wage than an American was making without an infirm grandmother, then that American needs to find better work, do better quality work, or take a pay cut. We would never force consumers to buy products produced only by ethical means or only by human-rights approved conditions (if that were the case, no more chocolate!). Why would we do that to multinational companies?

There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals and all the goods skyrocketed in price leading to another Great Depression.

> We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.

You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities. I'm not saying everyone should be enslaved. But if consumers have the right to purchase such ill-made goods, then companies have the right to offshore their labor forces to such places too.

>I don't see AI/ML following the same pattern.

AI/ML which can mine through sports footage to create highlight reels and funny clip collections, etc will create tons of consumer goods (videos) which can all be monetized on Youtube. Just one example.

How about Netflix? They use AI/ML quite a bit. It seems to have driven quite a lot more people to watch movies and tv than before.

Amazon uses AI/ML in its Echo, which was quite a high-selling consumer good last holiday season.

So, does that mean that cultures currently engaged in war are less civilized than cultures currently disengaged from war?

>The Americas went from 50-100 million people to fewer than 5 million natives because of disease.

Disease which was quite forcefully spread by Europeans as an act of warfare....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

>As Montaigne pointed out, early modern Europeans were at least as cruel toward enemies and captives, they just expressed it in different ways: i.e. via public executions of witches and heretics, or the tortures of the Inquisition and secular courts.

Yes, this was my instant thought. What a naive Eurocentric way to think of history to insinuate that everyone except the Europeans were just barbaric savages who killed and devalued life. As if the Europeans weren't fresh off their own multi-year killing sprees for this and that reason that equally would have baffled Native Americans.

I agree with everything except one minor detail. Not sure if outsourcing and offshoring are such bad things. I mean, if someone will work for less than you, you either need to do better work, do cheaper work, or find different work.

I worry that attempts to smooth it out can actually cause worse disruption.

Like, let's say we know factory workers will be laid off, so we need to allocate resources to retrain them.

Very likely the resources will not be enough for all the workers. So who gets them and who doesn't will become a political battle, with the left-out group resenting everyone in society and society ignoring their needs because it reminds them that they left them behind.

And then you build a society where one group's triumph is based on another's suppression, and you can see where this is going...

End game is to move back home and bring back the share of the first world which was stolen from my home and planted there.

Exactly.

Lots of people don't want to play in the Eastern European basketball league. They specifically want to play in the NBA. It's not about basketball, it's about the perks.

Sidenote: Other than the height, the absurd athleticism and skill at shooting ball are grown over a long period of hard work. Nanotechnology cannot substitute for hard work and years of learning the strategies and techniques of playing the game...

Okay, I'm not a scholar on European history, so you're probably right. It was just an example. Still there have been automations in the past. We're all still here.

I don't see why it matters. In the end, there won't be massive job loss to automation.

Automation right now can eliminate most farm laborers. So why are there still so many farm laborers in the world? Because

a) human wages in most of the world are cheaper than expensive machinery

b) There isn't a profit motive to automate away jobs that pay so little

c) structure of society is such that many technologies take decades upon decades to trickle out to most people in the world (talking the whole world here, not just Euromerica).

In addition, the service economy won't be automated away for a long time because human contact is valued by lots of people in that field. Service economy scales with the purchasing power of communities and AI is going to create a consolidation of purchasing power wherever it is introduced.

If that's what increasing productivity is, then AI will surely increase productivity.

I think the shift will probably be towards internet-based jobs. Content creation / software development / content curation (think social media managers) / customer service, the things that it's hard for AI to get right.

It will probably take longer and definitely leave some malcontents but, so did the stocking frame.

>The Dunedin Study, which began as a study of childhood development, has become one of humanity’s richest treasure troves of data on what makes us who we are.

Maybe I'm quaint and silly but this kind of overhyped byline makes me doubt that there will be any kind of insight here which thousands of years of recorded human thought hasn't already captured.

It's the parent comment to mine that mentioned bigoted racism, I was just showing that the false equivalence between that and "SJWs" is a bit ridiculous. Just in case you didn't read the parent comment to mine, here's the relevant part:

>I've noted the eerie similarity between them and the bigoted people who used to racially bash me and my sister when we were children.

If any of those people are like Steven Pinker, I'll pass. It's silly science-worshipping nonsense. Science/rationalism is good but it isn't the magical solution to all of the ills which plague humanity (as they like to make it seem).

>also choosing careers based on what they feel is fun/satisfying for themselves.

I don't think this is ever going to change in human society. If a job is fun to a large group of people, then it will pay poorly because many people will want to do it. And poor pay decreases the satisfaction one gets from such a job.

The only people who win here are those who find a job fun / satisfying that most other people cannot handle.

There's a reason professions like doctory, investment banking, and consulting pay so much, they involve lots of sacrifice and/or job unhappiness that you have to pay people a lot to get them to commit to the job.

>The difference I see is that historically automation was used to increase productivity.

Is this true? The stocking frame (and the reactionary group of Luddites that it incited) didn't really increase productivity. It just did work humans were doing for less money than a human salary.

I guess I also just don't see much difference. All that will happen will be again a shift away from many kinds of jobs (the easily automatible ones) to different kinds.

I mean, there are all kinds of jobs now that didn't exist 50 years ago (software engineer, social media manager, influencer, etc. etc.)

The less legit it is for a website to mine crypto, the easier it is for adblockers and security to block all such scripts without inconveniencing the user (less tradeoff of usability for security).

But when some sites use it and others doesn't, it makes security complicated and hacks are able to slip through easier.

Also, the more users get used to sites mining on their browsers, the less likely they will be perturbed by and reporting CPU usage spikes (which are used to determine which sites have been hacked by cryptojackers) because they are used to seeing legitimate such spikes from sites they frequent.

Why make that assumption and leave users without blockers out to dry?

Why not just halt all payouts to the old software and only pay out to versions which are using the Authedmine.com version?

Why not do KYC on people who have a very high likelihood of using your software to violate the law?

Salon is the kind of magazine which will call (justly) for corporate responsibility in all sorts of industries, but when it comes to software makers just totally not doing the basic, easy things when it comes to respecting web security, they'll pay them.

So people who don't run adblockers should just suck it up and get gut-punched because CoinHive doesn't want to lose money? CoinHive has the ability to just not pay out any versions of the software which aren't authmine. Again, what a bad look to partner with such a crap team of people. There are surely other providers of the exact same service.