Musk used to be seen as an engineer. He co-founded a payments company that merged with PayPal (not sure if he did engineering, though). I believe he is widely seen as being a knowledgeable rocketry engineer. I also think that he contributed to engineering of early Teslas. Now he is completely over-committed, and seems to me like he is burnt-out but does not realize it, and is doing all sorts of crazy things which act to sort of paper that over. Twenty years ago he was seen as a high-level engineer (I've heard that Marvel's Tony Stark was based on Musk [I mean, obviously it was based on the comic book character, but hopefully you know what I mean]).
He co-founded a payments company - he certainly wasn't an engineer. He was fired and given a golden parachute from Paypal for his incompetent insistence that they stop all software development at PayPal for a year so that they could move off Linux and move to fully hosting on Windows NT servers (!). He was a manager and money guy from the start, he never was a software engineer or any kind of engineer.
I guess based on all the phrases like “used to” and “seen as,” you’d agree that these perceptions were never really all that realistic, right? He had better PR in the past for sure, but it was always just a PR thing. That makes his behavior a bad example of something engineers do.
We’ve got plenty of smug actual engineers, we don’t need to take blame for some cosplayer’s bad behavior.
I think Jimmy John's does a good job making excellent bread. I'm not sure that it is bakery quality, but it is definitely noticeable. I've bought their day-old bread instead of grocery store baked bread. I think Subway's bread is pretty good, too, except they skimp on the flour.
The aroma of bread being baked is a glorious delight, yet somehow whenever a Subway is baking the smell gives me nausea and I can’t even go near the shop. Yes, it is edible and inoffensive once baked; I have no idea what they do to make the baking process smell so badly.
Now that women can work, ratcheting effects of dual-income households being able to spend more mean that generally two incomes are required to keep up the same standard of living, so now women must work. This does not seem like an improvement to me. Before, women who wanted to work could not, now women who want to stay at home with their kids can not.
I'd like to see that argument. Russia pre-WWII and Mao's China don't seem to me to have much capitalist pressure against them, yet Stalin and Mao killed millions. Stalin's purges were internal, against people who were on his bad side. Now, you could say that maybe Western spies agitated, but there's no way that Western agitation would account for millions of people. Furthermore, in 1930, the Communist system was widely seen as successful, since initial food production in the USSR was strongly up. Mao's deaths were incompetence (famine: killing sparrows, resulting in sparrows not eating insects the next year; famine: misallocation of resources, causing starvation in Sichuan when enough food existed elsewhere; Cultural Revolution: Mao's reaction to losing his grip on power). I think China was so poor that it realistically did not interact with the rest of the world, but in WWII, the US actually helped the Communists.
Every other Communist state that I am aware of also killed millions in internal purges: Cambodia and N. Korea, notably. I'm actually not sure what happened with Vietnam and Cuba. I'm not sure if contemporary Venezuela counts as Communist, but I am under the impression that there was killing or at least persecution of internal political enemies. I don't see how US sanctions have anything to do with how one treats political enemies.
I guess Eastern Europe might be an exception, but I think that is because Communist states were imposed with external force, not revolution from within, and the population mostly capitulated. However, I believe that political opposition was still likely to be deadly.
Since Communist states seem to be highly correlated with killing internal enemies, it seems like a feature of the system, not a response to external pressure, particularly since the largest two did not have serious external pressure at the time.
I don't think it has anything to do with Python. I had plenty of 'if' errors in C++ caused by indenting the second line and not putting braces around it prior to Python. They were always painful to debug. I finally just _always_ put a brace around an 'if' block, regardless of whether it is one line or many, and I've never had that problem again. I think the problem is that C lets you omit the brace for one line; it should always require a brace.
Python executes like it reads, which seems like a positive feature to me. Makes errors like C's two-line if block impossible.
It is true that manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing, but a) a lot that time weren't really career jobs, but women spending their time spinning and selling the results for a small amount to supplement what the household could not grow, and b) people willingly decamped for cities to work in the factories. (You can still see some of this process in China, with the migrant workers; they could continue subsistence farming, but they choose not to.) People materially got richer, as they moved up from subsistence farming. I think I spend a few hours a year to get the money to buy clothes, which I think is a good deal. (I spend longer looking for clothes I want, which I hate doing, but is quite the luxury historically.)
Many women did this as their full time job. Spinsters became a viable option for women without a family or land to be self sufficient. Most women used to multi task a drop spindle as they went about their day. A spinning wheel was a massive improvement per hour but the lack of portability made it an independent job. As specialists could now make way more thread which enabled the transport of large quantities of relatively high value goods to one location for economies of scale. Which could then benefit from a positive feedback loop.
> manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing
Anyway, my point was factories came late in the process. Automation of thread making occurred at several stages before there was enough supply excess supply for any kind of scale. Without that factories could only really automate less than 5% of the total labor for making clothing.
So sure, eventually automation came for those home spinners, but that happened after the natural benefits from economies of scale alongside huge shifts in the land devoted to cotton etc. This ties into all kinds of economic activity, southern plantations depended on a relative increase in the value and demand of cotton far above its historic level etc.
> Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?
It seems to do a bit of both. People do slightly more work with lots more automation to help them, and automation generates work as well (e.g. once upon a time you'd occasionally send a memo out; now anyone can email anyone else and it all needs archiving).
That assumes that the union never unfairly exploits the company. I think historical evidence shows that unions sometimes do exploit the company (and that union leaders sometimes exploit the members). Humans exploiting other humans is a flaw of all of us, not just corporate management.
Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
You're trying to minimize the power of the union by quoting dollar amounts, when the whole point of the union is to have power, and the whole point of unionization is to defeat superior dollar amounts by capturing the organizational memory that money cannot buy.
You cannot replace your entire gamedev team at once without destroying what makes your company, your company. You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking, either by aggressively union-busting or by negotiating with the union. That is the reason unions work at all.
It's not just about dollar amounts, it's about security and consequences. If a developer finds out that he got laid off his life is completely upended. If the CEO of microsoft finds out that the subsidiary of a subsidiary goes under, his life doesn't change. One of those two people is in a position of power so much greater than the other that they have absolutely nothing to fear from having to treat a small number of twice removed employees a little more fairly.
The whole point of the union is to have any power at all and to try to improve their working conditions, not to overpower the giants who rule over them. No one joins a union because they want to put themselves out of a job.
>You cannot respond to your entire gamedev team refusing to work other than by replacing them or by getting them to stop striking.
Funny thing. Pay people fairly and don't abuse them, and they don't strike. If they are striking, I have a lot more suspicion towards management than the workers.
That is as true as saying "work hard and produce good value and you wont get fired, if you are fired I have a lot more suspicion on the worker than the manager".
Sure most of the time people are fired for good reasons and most of the time people strike for good reasons, but not always.
Why would they be terrified of a handful of employees just for having the ability to influence the company? The point of a union is to improve working conditions and job security, not to murder your bosses and kill off the company. Funny thing about workers is that they like having jobs, especially ones where they have any influence at all. If a company is fearful that treating workers a little more fairly will sink them, the company deserves to go under.
What you say is true but it does not represent the spirit of what has happened historically. Historically the means of production exploit labor vastly more frequently and with greater degrees of extremity than the inverse.
This comment puts it in perspective:
>Yeah, I'm not sure Id Software, backed by their billion dollar parent company ZeniMax Media, who in turn is backed by their parent company Microsoft, has to live in fear of being exploited by the 165 employees who just signed onto a union.
Your comment is inane in the context of the reality of the situation.
The Union is a business too - and it's product is the labor of it's members.
Always follow the money - there's no free lunch. The Union negotiates incremental raises not because it is righteous and just - no, it negotiates incremental raises because the Union wants more revenue.
Sometimes the goals of a Union and it's members align - but often they do not.
Unions get a lot of free positive PR, but in modern times there seems to be more examples of bad-acting Unions than good-acting Unions. Unions have been responsible for businesses failing and massive job-loss, are the source of countless frivolous lawsuits, and in many ways suppress wages by standardizing across organizations and industries instead of allowing natural market-forces to act. Unions have been responsible for stunting the development of a generation of kids during COVID, keeping our ports non-automated and inefficient, driving product cost increases due to bloated staffing requirements, driving jobs overseas, and in some cases preventing people from gaining employment that don't want to be part of a Union.
Unions used to serve a great purpose. We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back. The Unions have to find a reason to exist, so propaganda.
Software Engineers are the very last class of workers that need Unions. On average a SE earns a very healthy income and has a very comfortable working environment.
If you believe a Union will substantively benefit your quality of life - you really should just find a new job. As fanciful is it might be, a Union isn't going to 180 your job and make everything great - and now they get a cut of the wages too.
> We used to have 12-16+ hour workdays, no days off, etc. None of that is true anymore - the great battles have been fought and won, and nobody is going back.
The 8 hour workday is not guaranteed to office workers anymore.
Heh, that reminds me of the BASIC games I used to write as a kid. I didn't know that variables could be more than one letter, so S would be score, but then if I needed speed and S was taken, I'd just use T. After a while I'd hit a bug that was difficult to reason about, or leave the codebase for a while and not have any clue what the variables meant. So I'd abandon it and start with the fresh, new idea.
I have a feeling she would have said that 10, 20, 30, and 40 years ago, too.
But she's probably not wrong. Over the course of her life, the US has gone from mostly farm communities which for good or bad have long-standing social networks, to mostly atomized people in cities. We've also gotten incredibly richer as a society, but we don't know each other. If you don't know each other, who can you rely on? I assume that something similar applies to Italy.
reply