I understand Spanish being from Latin America but for a long time I couldn't understand a single thing he said because of the Spaniard accent and crazy laughter, and I enjoyed the memes just fine. But then few years ago I watched it with the real subtitles and something clicked in my brain so now when I watch it I mostly understand him fine. But now the memes are ruined because it's hard to hear and read two speeches at the same time. Just an annecdote about our weird brains.
Just to add here that this guy doesn't have a "standard" Spanish accent. He was from Andalucía (I don't remember where exactly), a region rather known for its accent being difficult for even native speakers to understand.
Anyway after I moved to Andalucía I now can understand the story he tells, but I have to pay close attention!
In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?
Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.
Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.
What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.
> I suspect society will find some way of working this out
Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.
Again, this is really not the point I'm trying to make! If your prediction is that we'd end up in some apocalyptic dystopia, I'll concede the possibility.
But there still wouldn't be any jobs cleaning toilets, because the people who still had toilets to clean would have robots to do it.
I cannot get it to return anything more than 10 results. Might be a design choice. Possibly for mobile. It’s certainly cleaner than the American options that way.
As someone with a different chronic ailment I've come around more toward fuck the doctors than the forum posters. The only relief I've ever gotten after seeing literally dozens of doctors over the last 10 years has come from tips from forum posts and more recently LLM chats. Doctors tend to stick with whatever standards their insurance or the FDA has come up with and then just throw up their hands if that doesn't work. You do have to be careful of all the quack influencers and hucksters out there. But in my experience you have to become your own expert, read all the science papers, follow every lead, and force your will around the healthcare bureaucracy. I'm currently importing quality of life altering meds from Indian pharmacies that my doctor refuses to prescribe because it's off label. YMMV.
> We don’t know where this technology advance will lead or settle
Things are not settling, it's only acceleration from here on out. In fact things have never settled, technology has been on an exponential since humans tamed fire. The difference is we notice change faster. It used to take several human lifetimes to notice change. In the 20th century it was noticeable within a lifetime. Since the internet there has been a great revolution about every decade: web, smartphone, social media. But now great changes are noticeable within a year. It's not enough time for society to digest and adapt.
> we need less people and that’s why population is declining
This is the scary part. The Elon and Zuckerberg types that control the new powerful machines have proven they are not moral people. In America's highly billionaire-deferential culture there is no stopping them, at some point they'll be out of reach of democratic or even military control once they control private robot armies. They could decide to accelerate the decline of the undesirable useless population. Amazingly humanity's salvation could end up being China's communist system.
Apologies in advance if English isn’t your native language, but expecting or suggesting that others should use AI to resolve your sloppy syntax/grammar seems like a rather poor practice in general. I think you have a good point to make here, and a little more diligence could make an appreciable difference to your level of discourse.
No English isn't my native language, it's the third actually.
I think degrading and dismissing someone's point because of a stupid grammatical mistake is much worse in practice. If you can only engage in conversations where everyone uses perfect grammar, then maybe you should just use an LLM to rewrite people's comments. It seemed like a good suggestion to me.
Isn't it better for society if retirees downsize to a retirement community and allow young families to move in to the neighborhood with schools and amenities?
If we're going for a "better for society" angle, I have so many other things that are far more impactful for society and less damaging to the individuals that we will never get around to messing with evicting pensioners so younger families can use their spot to get to school.
While that may be useful, there should never be a necessity to move out of a house you’ve paid off, and quite well may have built up to support your own aging in place. Some people want a “forever home”, and that’s okay.
In some countries and cultures the good of the many comes before the good of the individual, no matter the sacrifices required to get there. The US (and to a slightly lesser degree, Canada) generally does not subscribe to such a cultural mantra.
Edit to add: for the cases where the societal good really does outweigh the personal good, we have a tool for that: eminent domain, which is how we build train lines and so forth.
>While that may be useful, there should never be a necessity to move out of a house you’ve paid off
This line of logic doesn't follow. There's plenty of old people who need to move out for non-financial reasons (e.g. can't live independently anymore), and it doesn't really make sense to me that having to move out because you can't afford your mortgage is okay while not being able to afford your taxes isn't. In any case, we can have our cake and eat it too by building more housing. Homes become affordable for young people if supply increases and the tax base broadens enough that taxes go down for established homeowners.
At least in the US, mortgages are typically fixed cost (I know this is not the case in many other countries, like the UK). You know when you sign the contract what your monthly cost will be, for the life of the loan. ARM loans are an exception to this, but ARM loans are nearly universally considered a terrible idea unless interest rates are egregiously high at signing time, or some other edge case applies to you.
Thus, you can budget around the mortgage payment in a predictable way, and if you have to move out because you can no longer afford it, that's a very different thing than if your property taxes magically change because a theoretical buyer may theoretically be willing to pay some astronomically higher cost for your house than you paid for it.
So, respectfully, I disagree with the framing that we have to take both or neither. They are separate budgeting concerns, and separate policy concerns.
A point against: if someone was an early adopter in a community that urbanized over 30 years, in effect the increased value means their future ownership at present rates requires the collective subsidy of their neighbors. Young families subsidizing the elderly in this way is a huge issue in tax burden disparity where I live.
How so? e.g. anywhere I've looked, schools are a huge part of the budget. Special education alone is over 10% of the county budget where I live. Schools in total are over half of city+county. The elderly wouldn't be contributing to service demand there. They're likely also not going on tons of crime sprees necessitating police, generally another large budget item.
Like another poster said, things like pensions and medicare might overall drain the entire economy, so the end result is the same, but that seems more diffuse than local tax bases, and wouldn't properly appear in local government budgets.
People make the best decisions for them and they have the freedom to do so. Who am I to decide that their 2 bedroom bungalo needs to be torn-down for a massive 5 bedroom infill for example.
reply