astuary's comments

I'm working on a tool for generating a webapp from an OpenAPI (swagger) spec describing your REST API. https://spireui.com/

> The economy is a circular river system.

The economy is the collective action of people producing the goods and services that you and I consume - food, haircuts, medicine, video games. Money is a claim on some portion of that stuff that has been or will be produced. Redistributing money is not going to suddenly make us productive again when most people are only leaving their house once a week to stock up on groceries.

Just because an expressive static type system is available, doesn't mean you have to use all of its expressive power. There's nothing stopping you from writing your system using little more than String, Int, lists, IO etc. Of course, you probably have a higher chance of bugs, but that might be the right tradeoff for your usecase.

I agree that haskellers have a tendency to disregard the cost of using sophisticated type machinery. Which is unfortunate because haskell's greatest strength (IMO) is its ability to opt in to strong static verification for the 10% of code where it provides the most value.

I'm continually surprised at how quickly non-technical problems come to dominate my time on a software project. E.g. my code doesn't work because two business stakeholders have slightly different, irreconcilable notions of what a "customer" is and it has to satisfy both.

I think its important to point out that at least some of the value realized from cheap labor in the form of gig contractors is transferred to consumers. We get goods and services for cheaper than would otherwise be possible.

Uber et al make convenient villains (and for I don't by any means think they are innocent), but we should also recognize the consequences of our collective choices.

Disregarding the misaligned incentives of for-profit enterprises delivering the kinds of services that are traditionally handled by governments, what evidence is there that technology can materially improve many of these services?

Many of the needs listed in the post (housing, education, food security, etc) are largely challenges of resource allocation. I'm skeptical that a web app can somehow make landowners willing to encourage increasing the housing stock in a city.

The scrutiny of Google is warranted, but misdirected. Remember that advertisers are are Google's customers, not individual search users. If drawing an analogy between Standard Oil and Google, the question to answer is: are advertisers being harmed as a result of a Google-Facebook duopoly? I don't have the expertise to investigate this question, but I'd love to hear from someone who does.

(disclaimer: ex-googler)