Imagine if the US’s left argued for no air conditioning: they would be called Stalinists communists and be excommunicated from polite society. Yet the policy is not completely unreasonable (albeit one I wouldn’t want personally, especially since I am skeptical to even the best degrowth policies). It is certainly an opinion which should be allowed within a country’s Overton window.
To make the point further, the article states France’s right wing party advocated for installing air conditioning in schools and hospitals. Again, if a US politician did such a thing, they would be considered a Stalinist communist.
The article shows how US’s Overton window is completely disjoint from France’s. I don’t want to make a false equivalence between these two countries as I think France’s two extremes in this article both seem reasonable and the US’s right wing extreme of “we are going to cancel wind mill construction because they’re ugly” is not.
Some lawyers MSG banned from the stadium tried to sue the venue. these lawyers argued that because MSG was not fully “open to the public” as their liquor licensed required, their liquor licensed should be revoked.
The appellate court ultimately decided that a ticket is a “revocable license” and that while MSG needs to be “open to the public,” they don’t need to provide unrestricted access. Essentially, since night clubs can disallow/allow entrance based on arbitrary (non-protected) reasons — such as dress code, status, celebrity etc — yet night clubs have precedent of being allowed to keep their liquor licenses, using similar reasoning MSG’s bans are permissible. This decision seems reasonable to me; however, I hope the NYC political apparatus does political maneuvering to make MSG implement less Orwellian policies. I do not hold my breath but have residues of hope.
Hard pivot and a hot take in the US of A, but since MSG is arguably a natural monopoly, it would be reasonable for NYC to “nationalize” MSG. NYC already has the expertise managing large and multifaceted infrastructure. The operation’s surplus value going back to NYC residents rather than unlikeable (and rent-seeking) James Dolan seems a politically defensible and attention-grabby position: the latter of which is increasingly important in our low-attention-span world. Lastly, James Dolan could be portrayed as a security threat to NYC constituents due to this facial recognition software: Americans and American economists tend to be more willing to nationalize things for the sake of national security.
I look forward to seeing myself on MSG’s next leaked ministry of truth list (;
Options (a) and (b) add more bloat to the model’s context window and option (c) seem to reduce to having similar functions that already existed. There is also the option to trick the LLM that it’s using the old function exactly as-is, while the harness abstracts away a completely different methodology. Cursor often does exactly this: they use an internally built vectorized search when the model calls the default “find” bash command. The LLM is none the wiser that the function’s implementation is completely different.
Regardless, in any of these cases, the implementation for any of these above options may be vastly superior to the “naive” implementation for agents — but then the parent comment here is right that an engineer would need to justify their implementation to users, not just make a loud conjecture. It’s a non-trivial claim to say that a bespoke solution not present in tool-use training and accounting for context-rot would result in a better performing model. Moreover, justifying an agent-specific efficiency gain that humans wouldn’t benefit from makes the claim even more non-trivial. Using Sagan’s razor, it’s then reasonable for people to ask for a comparably non-trivial amount of evidence.
There are many more economic distortions that happen from having massive wealth inequality — too many to list in one comment — but the biggest one is that democracy isn’t possible with a certain level of wealth inequality.
In such models where individuals in a market system can influence public/private institutions for their own interest (news organizations, private think tanks, lobbyists, public/private colleges, corporations, charities, nonprofits etc etc) will be able to reroute those institutional resources to gaming elections — which is unavoidable result over the market’s long run, similar to it being impossible to defend one’s currency against speculators over the long run — thus selection pressures force politicians and political institutions to either cater to these wealthy people’s whims and the institutions they control, or to somehow (and very unlikely) bare the selection pressures that are pushing them out of office.
Given the law of large numbers, you’d presume at any point the average legislator would be captured more by these maladaptive selection pressures rather than somehow existing in spite of them.
As democracy is eaten away, we will maintain a slow decay to a Russia-like sultan oligarchic system and the comforts the majority currently maintain will slowly go with them.
I mean, this is measurable with the gini coefficient, yes. But if you generally handwave "people with lots of money", you don't have a story to tell, and then you don't convince nearly enough people of any one thing to accomplish it.
You have to pick a problem. Right now, quality of life basically keeps going up, so it's pretty hard to act on anything you might care about here.
Conjecturing standards of living is going up is overly reductive. Essential costs — housing, groceries, education, etc — have been going up for most people and hit everyday people the hardest.
This argument you make is the same one Osama bin Laden uses in his 2004 “Letter to the American People”: he argues that because the American people re-elected George W. Bush, the populace was complicit in the policy consequences, self-rationalizing 2001.
Congratulations for using a heuristic that resulted in 9/11! Osama’s rationalization at least had a more accurate premise that the American people continued to be able to vote — unlike in Palestine. So congrats on having either a worse moral compass or worse reasoning skills than Bin Laden!
There is a spectrum between an employer’s monopoly/oligopoly over labor that Marx’s narrative presupposes and a perfectly competitive labor market your narrative presupposes.
Reality varies between these two extremes in different labor markets. In some labor markets, the employer has so much leverage they’re essentially a local monopolist; in other markets, employees have enough leverage that the respective labor market is close to perfectly efficient.
Thusly, both yours and Marx’s narratives about the labor markets are typically wrong, but serve good extremes on a spectrum. These extremes help you calibrate the respective spectrum and as you turn the dial between the amount of power the employee vs employer has in a respective market, you can induce how well employees get treated.
Moreover, if there exists a mismatch between employee treatment and their respective leverage, there essentially exists an arbitrage opportunity to exploit. For example, in 2022 Musk (especially when he bought Twitter and laid of 80% of the workforce) and other tech oligarchs conjectured that tech workers were being overcompensated and that employers had enough leverage to start treating them worse. Largely this bet paid off whether or not it was justified during the time. On the other hand, RenTech saw that highly skilled people were being under compensated and was able to get top tier talent without having to compete with others firms that much since they were undervaluing this labor.
I think right now tech labor is being undervalued by the market and that there is an arbitrage opportunity to get highly skilled people since the cut-throat competition for these workers is much less than it was in 2021. That is my conjecture. Regardless if my conjecture is true, I hope I sufficiently illustrated why this spectrum mental model is more useful than presupposing a monopoly labor market or a perfectly efficient labor market: both of these are unlikely to be true and are just meant to be oversimplified mental models with strong assumptions that can be loosened later. From these strong assumptions, we can loosen them to build more robust mental models as I describe above.
But in a perfectly efficient market, the good would be traded at its marginal price. And the marginal price of labour is the sustenance wage, not the marginal product of labor as neoclassical economists seem to believe.
A perfectly efficient market doesn’t necessarily mean that a good is traded at its marginal price. You’re instead describing a perfectly competitive market. An economy is Pareto efficient (aka perfectly efficient) when resources are allocated such that no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
Even if I give into your premise — which I don’t — marginal price would differ for different careers, such as doctors who had to take on more education costs and opportunity cost and thus have a higher marginal price above bare sustenance.
I’ve started picking up a new language with the help of LLMs (not the only source, but it helps me make flashcards using Leipzig Glossings) and it’s helped me read through math textbooks on my free time much faster/more thoroughly (ambiguous concepts/proofs that used to require a TA or professor for help now I can sort through on my own without having to laboriously cross reference two other textbooks). I also created a prototype app that creates flashcards automatically for a distributed systems book I am currently working through, making concepts stick longer through active recall. I’ll also use LLMs to learn more about the tangental figures in the history books I am reading that I couldn’t have just learned from the book itself and would have been too much of a hassle to look online or in other books.
These are just a few examples of how I use LLMs to learn faster.
LLMs are a tool and I have seen massive gains from them personally
Manhattan is filled with consultant-brained professionals and trust fund babies: I’m not surprised the business selection pressure is thusly catering to the lowest common denominator.
Hopefully Flushing — NYC’s real Chinatown — is far enough away and has enough immigrant clustering to keep its charm.
To make the point further, the article states France’s right wing party advocated for installing air conditioning in schools and hospitals. Again, if a US politician did such a thing, they would be considered a Stalinist communist.
The article shows how US’s Overton window is completely disjoint from France’s. I don’t want to make a false equivalence between these two countries as I think France’s two extremes in this article both seem reasonable and the US’s right wing extreme of “we are going to cancel wind mill construction because they’re ugly” is not.
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