At least those things felt like a sincere attempt to move HCI forward. Perhaps not very well tested to understand how all the parts work together, but at least sincere. MS' Copilot brand is a broken solution in search of a problem.
It's almost like the kind of trap a lot of solo devs get into where they build a thing that is interesting to them but then can't find anyone else interested. But at least the solo devs built something that worked for themselves. I can't imagine anyone at MS eating their own dog food on this stuff.
At a company like MS, that shouldn't happen. They're supposed to have the resources to understand what their customers want. But we've seen this trend for the last 15 years. Companies like MS, Meta, Google, don't want to engage and collaborate with the customer. They want to push ideas down and be celebrated for their design brilliance. They don't even really A/B test this stuff anymore. The inmates are running the asylum.
It wasn't even ten years ago when I was participating in user studies as a developer at MS. And it was the real deal: we had a bunch of people, specifically selected to give a diverse cross-cut of the user base (so varying backgrounds, experience level etc), sit down and try to do some simple tasks with our product, while devs and PMs watched over a camera. And, crucially, you couldn't ask questions or provide guidance during that time - only after they were done. That was incredibly informative, much more so than any telemetry I've seen before or after, and I wish that was the norm in all companies; but, in any case, Microsoft definitely had both the resources and the inclination to do that.
The problem is that no amount of studies or A/B testing is going to change a political decision inside the company. And with AI, I'm convinced that for all the big players it is political at this point simply because all the execs have bet so much money on it. If they can't make it work, we're talking about literally billions of dollars of responsibility. Hence these desperate attempts to shove it everywhere in hopes that something somewhere would work well enough, if not to recoup the investment, then at least to postpone the moment it all comes crashing down.
The big problem I see now is that, when this bubble pops, there won't be any blood in the streets for the executive class. We truly live in a two class system where people like Nadela, Musk, Theil, and Altman and the slew of their enablers will never see any personal consequences for the havoc they have worked.
It's also not very good at any of those things, if you ask it to generate something far enough outside of the mainstream, or something particular, or something consistent, or-
But, yeah, the insistence that we deprecate every other even remotely-connected resource (including other people) in order to supplicate ourselves to corporate desires is aggravating. You got a lot of the same pushback with VR. VR is really, really cool. Having your reality mediated by large corporations with a history of user-hostile behavior is not. Them not taking no for an answer feels violating.
>We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.
Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:
"Cook controversially dines with Saudi Crown Prince at White House"
Now, I'm no Saudi Crown Prince stan, but would the word 'controversially' have been used if Cook dined with Biden - who funded and supported a genocide, in which hundreds of journalists were killed? Why was the word 'controversially' not used to refer to also being at the table with Trump there?
Yes, it's controversial that Cook had dinner with the Saudi Crown Prince. In my view it's even more controversial to be having dinner with Trump.
This is just the most recent headline I can give as an example. But there are many like this.
I think you misunderstood. I was pointing out that, in the country which came into being (twice) through a war fought principally to preserve rich, slave-holding landowners' right to hold or gain further land and slaves, it's going to be difficult to find a period in which corrupt dealings and amoral excesses weren't present. George Washington was Bill Gates with some martial chutzpah, and he sent thousands of men to bloody deaths over stated, explicit ideals that he purposely refused to fully execute on because it would have devalued his estate.
We can be better than that, it's just no surprise when we're not, because we historically have not been.
In this job market, in this political environment, with Luigi Mangione a Bonnie-and-Clyde-tier folk hero, the bit you quoted was perhaps a clue to the lack of wisdom in humblebragging that you spend a family's annual food budget on 5 pounds of spun sheep keratin.
I imagine that I will be the bad guy for pointing this out. (Perhaps even to myself, considering that there's certainly utility in rich people yapping incautiously about the reasons others might want to turn on an Enes Yilmazer video and figure out where the panic room is.)
I don’t make nearly that kind of money, but I don’t think people who do should keep it a secret like you’re trying to enforce some norm of secrecy on him
Luigi wouldn't have been famous if he offed a guy for wearing tailored pants and a rolex, he's famous because the CEO was a scapegoat of everything wrong with health insurance.
>> there's certainly utility in rich people yapping incautiously about the reasons others might want to turn on an Enes Yilmazer video and figure out where the panic room is.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I hope I'm misunderstanding it.
Let me remind you that this is a forum operated by a VC fund looking for people to give lots of money to so they can build billion dollar businesses. Those who succeed are routinely celebrated here, but actually discussing that money being spent rapidly becomes judgmental.
Hard to reconcile it being super cool to build an unicorn (a cute term we’ve come up with to describe billion dollar startups which have made their founders tremendously wealthy), but somewhat disgusting to actually have or spend that money.
News.ycombinator.com seems like the wrong place to complain about capitalism.
FWIW I don’t even get a Silicon Valley salary, am not in any way extraordinary, but have spent 10+ years building 100+ small online businesses out of which none have been particularly successful (but in total the little streams add up)
Sorry for jumping on this off-topic but I'm a junior engineer hoping to build out some of those small online businesses but I've been a bit unsure of how to go about it. When you say small online businesses do you mean like micro-SaaS kind of things? Or like tangible items? Sorry, just curious :)
Micro-SaaS and digital products. Just figure out a good stack to work with for billing and try to crank out one little thing a week that will be useful to someone.
One of my best projects just sells some pdf files you can submit to the government to achieve a thing you would usually unnecessarily hire a lawyer for.
Another in a similar vein simply offers an easy-to-fill PDF version of a government form that does not exist online, and a nice HTML interface that will help you mostly automatically fill it.
Most of these took less than a day to build and take next to no maintenance. Both of the above earn more than $100k annually.
Just make sure your customers can get in touch with you very easily so you don’t end up with broken websites running on autopilot charging customers for broken stuff, I made that mistake once and ended up having to call a bunch of people to apologise when I discovered what had been happening.
It's not reddit leaking, it's normal people leaking into your weird millionaire world. I say weird because 99.9% of people in the world would consider it on a range of weird all the way to unethical that you spend tens of thousands on pants. I'm not going to sit here and preach and make you bored, but consider what good you could do with that money, if only your ass and thighs were slightly more uncomfortable than they are today. Especially now when people around the world are dealing with 2x the food costs of a year or a few ago.
Also, HN is a fine place to complain about capitalism, maybe a few of you capitalists will have it click in your brains that other people are struggling and you can do something about it other than sitting on a cloud.
I donate approximately 47.5% of everything I earn to the French government, is that not enough? (And yes, taxes are a voluntary donation in my case. I could move less than a mile across the border to Monaco and incorporate elsewhere if I wanted to pay ~0%)
Of course, when I spend 10000 euros in the Loro Piana boutique or anywhere really, 20% of that goes to the government too.
Could I afford give more? Sure! To whom? How much? Figuring that out seems like another full time job, and the track record of the effective altruism folks doesn’t seem all that great.
>the track record of the effective altruism folks doesn’t seem all that great.
I've been donating 5-10% of my income to GiveWell[1] and their top charities like GiveDirectly[2] and the Against Malaria Foundation[3] for nearly a decade at this point and I think their track record has been fantastic. Effect altruism only gets shady when longtermists get involved and start speculating on the moral worth of lives in some distant future. If you focus on human beings alive today, effective altruists (and development economists) have done a great job identifying how to make your charitable donations go the farthest in reducing suffering.
> I donate approximately 47.5% of everything I earn to the French government, is that not enough?
It's better to think of pretax money as just not existing. The effect of /everyone/ paying taxes is different from the effect of only you paying taxes, since your buying power is somewhat determined by how much you have relative to everyone else.
Well not really, I do my grocery shopping a few minutes away in Monaco where nobody pays taxes. I could move less than a kilometre and save loads of money, despite the outrageous real estate costs.
I just kind of like where I am now so don’t care enough to do that, and at least try to assume that the government does a relatively good job of directing my donation to good causes.
Everybody seems to have an opinion on what someone more wealthy than they are should spend their money on.
Unfortunately we don't get to look at what the commenter earns or spend...
A normal car weekly payment in the US is ridiculously wasteful. If you live in the US its almost a given that you are ridiculously wealthy in comparison to many in the world.
A normal overseas trip is ridiculously wasteful.
It's hard to consider what an average person in the world would think is wasteful, because with our common developed country expenses we don't feel like millionaires.
We couldn't even ask a person with an average world income to comment, since do they even have the free time to waste? (edits)
Whataboutism isn’t going to solve the problem of inequality. Compare me to many others and you can say the same things as I said to GP, however there’s a clear difference that isn’t very subtle between me buying a compact car and GP buying a few pairs of those pants for the same cost.
There’s this argument that people make that goes something like, “the wealthy give their fair share why sour they pay more than a lot income person and get called out for not giving more?” I don’t believe that’s their fair share, is why I ask them to give way more. Do you think a person who starts 100 businesses is working harder than a single mom with a few kids? Why did they deserve the lions share of the profits over their employees? These are some of the questions I have they could be relevant.
Like I said, I don’t want to bore anyone, it’s not like the wealthy have ever been in touch with the common man, for millennia. I’m certainly not going to convince anyone, I’m no good at arguing and my arguments tend to be rough and full of holes, but at least I’m not a millionaire claiming I couldn’t or shouldn’t do more because I’m a special hard worker who deserves every penny.
I’m definitely not working particularly hard, but for what it’s worth my work has saved and will continue to save vast amounts of time for ordinary people. I’m not sure that how hard a person works is the right metric to use.
> it’s not like the wealthy have ever been in touch with the common man, for millennia
A few years ago I used to live in hostels, sometimes hoping that my (then few) websites would get one or two payments to cover my expenses for the next day so I wouldn’t have to go without food. I’d like to think that I’m not suddenly particularly out of touch.
>my work has saved and will continue to save vast amounts of time for ordinary people.
I have my doubts.
>A few years ago I used to live in hostels, sometimes hoping that my (then few) websites would get one or two payments to cover my expenses for the next day so I wouldn’t have to go without food. I’d like to think that I’m not suddenly particularly out of touch.
Consider that living in hostels and going hungry while maintaining multiple web services is maybe outside of the common man's experience. The priorities of someone stuck in the former situation, and the resources generally available to someone in the latter, usually don't overlap. Grocery shopping in Monaco and calling your taxes "donations" doesn't help matters.
I say this as someone who is, by many measures, out-of-touch himself: weird know weird. A measure of self-consciousness is healthy.
Finally, for efficiency's sake:
>Hard to reconcile it being super cool to build an unicorn (a cute term we’ve come up with to describe billion dollar startups which have made their founders tremendously wealthy), but somewhat disgusting to actually have or spend that money.
You probably misunderstand my perspective on the matter.
>Could I afford give more? Sure! To whom? How much?
Oh, the possibilities are endless (even if the ability to vet is not; so, don't).
Talk to people, find out their pain points, make their day.
OR
Your employees (or the people who automation has saved from being your employee).
OR
Invest in that neighborhood people tell you not to go to.
Just starter suggestions. Note that they're not merely aimed at making you feel good for being a good little philanthropist; in the long run, they make it safer to run your mouth off however you like.
gifting sums of money to someone to solve their problems can significantly complicate relationships, have you tried it? Unless theyre a close intimate that is genuinely able to accept a gift you'll end up with someone who feels indebted to you or the opposite, sees you as a bank account or a fallback for next time they're in need. I've seen it between parents and children, between friends, between strangers, debt complicates things. That's what I like about money, it's used to settle debt so you don't owe anything to anyone.
And people hate it when somebody buys a run down building in a poor neighborhood and "invests" in it because now you're making it unaffordable
Edit: I'll give you "pay your employees more", that's a fairly uncomplicated way to distribute windfall wealth, but now you've just passed the buck to them! ;)
>gifting sums of money to someone to solve their problems can significantly complicate relationships
Maybe. If you have a relationship. I was thinking more along the lines of listening to someone's story and them finding a check from a mysterious benefactor in the mail sometime later.
>And people hate it when somebody buys a run down building in a poor neighborhood and "invests" in it because now you're making it unaffordable
So don't do that. There are other ways to invest in communities. "Upgrading" housing is couched as the primary way to do so really only because it's a good way to make money (and influence what some people would view as desirable demographic changes).
Most people react poorly to the word hypocrite so ChatGPT found[1] some other choice phrases for people that are well off that complain about the better off.
> Why did they deserve the lions share of the profits over their employees?
You appear to live in the US. Ask yourself why those in the US deserve the lions share of world wealth? You seem to be complaining about others while not looking at yourself.
Disclosure: I'm well off for a New Zealander but I'm earning less than the median wage my cohort receives in NYC. Taxes total around 45% of my income.
Edit: 1/3 of US households earn over $150k. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/09/17/one-third-of... - It isn't that uncommon in the US but that amount is rather uncommon in most of the rest of the world. I've just been to New Orleans so I saw one poorer part of the US recently so I have some point of comparison.
Do something about it then. Start by learning to make arguments that aren't so poor you yourself think they're rough and full of holes. Get involved in politics, activism, or campaigning. Vote. Convince others to vote in the same manner you do.
This is such a broken take. Jealousy is so ugly. It's like you expect those doing better than you to Harrison Bergeron themselves for your sake.
I'm sorry you're unhappy with your lot in life. Maybe work hard and do better, rather than expecting others to pretend like they're not doing well to appease your feelings.
I’m doing fine, others aren’t doing as well, I guess you see it as jealousy and in fact I’m just disgusted by my fellow man that they can hoard while others starve.
> I’m just disgusted by my fellow man that they can hoard while others starve.
Despite popular belief the economy is not a zero sum game where every dollar someone makes comes at anothers expense. In reality, every dollar a wealthy person spends becomes some other person's livelihood.
It is only unproductive idle capital that should be considered "hoarding", and that IS a bit of a sin in my book. As is wealth invested in rent seeking rather than productive activity.
> I say weird because 99.9% of people in the world would consider it on a range of weird all the way to unethical that you spend tens of thousands on pants.
TIL it's unethical to spend a lot of money on clothes. It's not like the sub-thread's OP was spending $10k on a pair of <Insert crazy designer brand name> pants that actually have more form than function. It's a $500 pair of pants. God forbid people spend money on their own preference for their own comfort.
Pragmatically, capitalism brought in more good than bad. Are we arguing that we would've been better off if the world had gone the way of the soviet/pre-80s China way of life?
The irony is the majority of people on here are the ones screaming "tax the rich" at Mamdani's acceptance speech, but then are the same ones upvoting this guy, his 10M net worth and defending him being rich.
To make it even more confusing I’m a rich guy cheering for people like Mamdani.
I pay lots of taxes, probably in top 0.1% of the world on a % basis. I don’t have to, I’m not a US or French citizen so I could easily just choose to relocate a couple of minutes away and pay essentially no taxes.
If I did choose to stop paying taxes, I’d do so in order to donate a similar amount of my income to some charity. I’m just not sold on that being so much more efficient to be worth the hassle. OTOH, it’d definitely greatly improve my philanthropy credentials which would very much be worth it to some for purely selfish personal reasons.
> at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial
this is probably just regular bragging, right?
now, discussing how donating $100 versus $10k to a cause or community being negligible to their economic security would at least front-load some humility, but capitalists gon' capitalist. oops!
thank god this is Hacker News though, and not some safe-haven for boring rich people!
"I buy more $10,000 cardigans than you buy Hanes undershirts" is kinda the definition of bragging. What a weird ass corner of the internet where it's just assumed everybody earns $millions. Like, lol, no outside SV, London, and NYC, that's truly exceptional. Like, the average CEO in the US doesn't even clear $1 million (according to Google's AI search results).
You can construct a philosophical argument that value is all relative without having to casually drop anecdata demonstrating that you personally spend many hundreds of times more on an everyday object than is typical without consideration.
Can you describe a way of communicating that same point without it being bragging in your eyes? I guess I could’ve engaged in the gymnastics of saying SWIM like they used to do on some drug forums :)
"I have spent more than $500 dollars on pants before, because I'm lucky to be in a position where for me these things are a matter of taste and whim, rather than budget, and don't really affect my finances too much whether I do or don't buy them."
I don't think I have to explain to you how the gap between what you said, and what I wrote above, is what is causing offense here. You likely deserve 100% of your success, but its just common sense to obscure the specifics of it if you are way out of band in relative terms.
Its like saying: "You know, I never really get ill" at the cancer ward. Sure, its true, but read the room.
Well, after all it’s HN and this is the kind of content that attracts much of the users. I’d certainly be more careful with that wording on a website that caters to a very different audience, but it’s not long ago when indiehackers posts of people “bragging” about their successes were consistently at the top of the front page.
Not convinced I misread the room, especially considering the upvotes.
> don't really affect my finances too much whether I do or don't buy them
Isn't this the same brag as before?
I can't tell how this is different than throwing some numbers in the mix, the person relating their personal experience expresses they have fuck-it-bucks either way
Not naming numbers is precisely the point, because you obfuscate the reality of the size of the gap, which in the end is what everything is about. The gap creates the offense. Everybody knows there's rich people, but being confronted by exactly how rich, to the detail of a number, is the offensive part (if done by that rich person without any clear reason).
I'm not sure why people keep piling up to pretend this is such a normal thing, this is literally why people don't discuss salaries despite it technically being in their own interest: specifics ground the fuzzy notion of inequality into reality like nothing else.
The offensive post inflates the perceived inequality from "500$ pants is too much for pants" to "10k means nothing to me" while my version leaves the specifics outside of the conversation. In my version, the person could put the level of "too expensive for pants" at 1k, still an order of magnitude lower than the offensive post.
Finally, I acknowledge that this is a privileged position to be in explicitly, because that signals that you are aware that this is an exceptional situation to be in (which I'm not sure the offensive post author is aware of, even now).
You could have omitted "but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial." and come across more matter-of-fact than brag. IMO.
No it doesn't. He's establishing the fact that he can afford very expensive clothes and why, from personal experience, he believes them to be worth it if you can afford it. If you omit the entire sentence the whole meaning of the post changes. I think you may just be upset because he's wealthier than you.
Also later tried to briefly establish the fact that had I been offered such products a couple of years ago, I too would’ve found the pricing completely ridiculous.
I've had a similar journey to yours, albeit on a smaller scale. I used to think that buying jeans that cost over $40 was outrageous, but more recently I learned the value of buying nice raw denim jeans that can cost upwards of $300-400. They last way longer and look so cool after years of wear. With a little maintenance they can be permanent additions to your wardrobe.
> I think you may just be upset because he's wealthier than you.
Aw, Mark; that's not it, pal. His last paragraph about tailored clothing captures the thought well without throwing around dollar amounts or brand names. But thanks for trying to defend your capitalist masters like a good little right-winger!
Sumo wrestlers generally don't develop metabolic disease until after they retire, which comes with the cessation of their grueling, multi-hour daily training regimens. I wish I could find the NHK report on a group of scientists that were researching how metabolically-undesirable substances build up in muscles after as little as 20 minutes of inactivity.
This is the one thing that makes me so angry about the state of AR/VR/XR. Human bodies are made to move when we work - not strenuously, not non-stop, but consistently and with some amount of vigor. Spatial software design represents an AMAZING opportunity to re-tune digital work processes to be movement-oriented, while still productive and efficient. Compare digital sculpting in ZBrush and Media Molecule's Dreams.
It's maybe harder to envision a similar transformation for people dealing with data or communication for a living, but is it out of the realm of possibility? It shouldn't be, for anyone who who might compare common GUIs to interfaces like VIM and Emacs. The former are the unhappy compromise between the latter and the as-yet-to-be-created spatial interfaces that would be coming if the Bigs would stop trying to outmaneuver each other, and just create them.
I am tired of trying to manage my photo library on a small laptop screen or monitor, with a single pointer. Let me summon them to my physical space and manipulate, stack, sort them, and more, with split controllers or my actual hands. I promise that my brain and body and your wallet will be much, much happier.
I like the reenvisioning thoughts here. We're well overdue a Minority Report style upgrade to our I/O peripherals, with keyboard and mouse being relegated to backup use.
We have/had a few things which could help (Leap Motion controller, Kinect, etc), but it's really hard to imagine how to generalize interfaces for these new device forms so they're at least on par with the old from a productivity perspective. Otherwise, people outside of research and maybe gaming won't really be sold on it.
I feel super happy for the 5 people and 20 cows who will benefit. (This is intended less a jab at Montana specifically and more at state and national politicians who only seem to have political gumption when it concerns the needs of less-populated states with particular demographics.)
If there's any justice, a good number of comments will focus on the ethical nightmare MTurk turned out to be. Apologies to the people who worked on it, but it's fair and appropriate for observers to point out when someone has spent their time and energy creating something that is a net negative for the state of society. That's probably the case here.
If mturk workers had better opportunities, they'd take them. mturk is competing with local economies in low opportunity locales. It is rational to work in a cybercafe doing rote web tasks for 8 hours if you'd receive the same amount of money performing manual labor.
I have no idea what the situation was for people doing the work on mturk, but how far would your logic extend? Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk? If not, there has to be some ethical relationship between how desperate a worker is and how much you pay them. My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work. I don't get the feeling that was the situation.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is available to anyone with internet access, though jobs have dried up in recent years. Some jobs are region locked while others are available to all locales. I'll discuss mturk for the time period of its heyday.
> My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work.
Average pay appeared to be far below minimum wage for mturk workers in the United States. My expectation is workers in developing countries have far higher purchasing power for doing the same work. I would also expect an inverse relationship between high local pay and number of workers on mturk, with considerations for languages and other region-specific .
> Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk?
Because mturk is made available internationally and signup is trivial, I do not agree with your analogy of coercive refugee camp labor. Though Amazon is well known for harsh and unsafe working conditions in its US warehouses, I cannot consider safety considerations for a web-based anonymized gig economy service to be comparable. Using mturk to make money is voluntary.
I personally hope for refugees and residents of developing countries to have the necessities of life and opportunities to achieve success comparable to OECD nations' residents. I think that targeted foreign aid is an important part of helping people in developing countries. Access to credit and global markets has brought the largest amount of people out of poverty in history. Our governments and importers should work to ensure people in emerging markets have safe working conditions while also giving them access to our developed countries' markets.
It's basically a way for people to externalize tasks that require a human but pay fractions of what it would cost to actually employ those humans.
Mechanical Turk was one of the early entrants into "how can we rebrand outsourcing low skill labor to impoverished people and pay them the absolute bare minimum as the gig economy".
Much of the low skill labor were things like writing transcripts and turning receipts into plaintext. It was at a point where OCR wasn't reliable. There were a few specialist tasks.
The gig economy was very much a net positive here. Some people used it to quit factory work and make twice the income; some used it as negotiation terms against the more tyrannical factories. Factories were sometimes a closed ecosystem here - factory workers would live in hostels, eat the free factory food or the cheap street food that cropped up near the area. They'd meet and marry other factory workers, have kids, who'd also work there. They were a modern little serfdom. Same goes for plantations.
Things like gig work and mturk were an exit from that. Not always leaving an unhappy or dangerous life, but making their own life.
If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.
> If it paid badly, just don't work there. These things push wages down for this kind of work, but this work probably shouldn't be done in service economies anyway.
This paragraph is so tantalizingly close to putting its finger on the issue. The fact that a company found someone willing to do a job for what they want to pay does not mean that it's ethical or moral for them to do so.
In this case (as in many others), one of the predicates was finding groups of people whose existing options, financial literacy, living conditions, or some combination of the three were already so bad that becoming digital serfs was a minor step up.
I got paid $11 an hour to enter handwritten applications into a database, as a temp job back in the early 2010s. It was "low-skill" inasmuch as, "Locking in and moving efficiently through entire filing cabinets of forms, often written by people whose first script was not Latin, for 6-7 hours straight, every weekday, for 2 months, with no prior training," is "low-skill" (and I apparently did it much faster than my supervisors expected). $11/hr was less than it should have paid, and yet I have to commend the company I was working with, because they sourced local labor and paid still multiple times what the job would have commanded through outsourcing via Mturk.
The conditions you're describing were caused by the systemic globalist status quo that Mturk is a part of; Mturk did not fix that, it perpetuated it.
It's not a fraction of what it would cost to actually employ those humans, since there were humans who clearly chose to do that work when presented with the opportunity.
I think this is a very first-world oriented take. It efficiently distributed low-value workloads to people who were willing to do it for the pay provided. The market was efficient, and the wages were clearly on par with those who were doing the work found economical to do, considering they did (and still do) the work for the wages provided.
These are extraordinary claims (yea?). I'm sure there are great stories of opportunity creation and destruction - how could we even measure the net effect?
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