It's a controversial observation, but it is very true. I work with AI models and have to read recently published research to work with the latest developments in the field.
Do a quick keyword search on papers related to the subject. So much of it is completely useless. It is clearly written to keep people busy, earn credentials, boost credibility. Papers on the most superfluous and tangential subjects just to have a paper to publish.
Very little of it is actually working with the meat of the matter: The core logic and mathematics. It is trend following and busywork. Your sentiment is controversial because people are religiously loyal to the intellectual authorities of these credentialed systems, but a lot of published research does not push any boundaries or discover anything new. This paper seems to be an exception.
I would argue that a lot of the research published in the social sciences also falls under this category. It is there so that someone has a job. I'm not discrediting social sciences in general, am just pointing out that there is a lot of ways to creatively take advantage of academia to secure a paycheck and this is certainly exploited. The kneejerk reaction to reasonable criticism just proves this point even further.
Popular "debate" in the news cycle, scientific authority based on crude subjective judgment, interests of capital.
This sort of viral bad science is something you would expect from reddit but not from hackernews. I suspect this site is becoming more like the former.
To be clear, I'm not making claims on whether or not remote work is more or less creative.
Just highlighting the point that bad science that fits a certain popular trend in online media gets clicks and engagement.
Comments like yours get little to no engagement because it actually addresses the article and is not an empty anecdotal debate for entertainment.
What makes this site intellectually engaging is that it is text-focused and doesn't host porn. It is much better at being what reddit wanted to be, but I think it it is "crossing the chasm" which is a term I learned here.
I think it is time to log off for good and get back to work. This sort of thing enough of a reason. Do not want to waste life scrolling.
The final stage of gentrification is the buying up of homes as pure investment properties by corporate and financial entities.
This is why housing is unafforable in LA, greedy landlords, especially the corporate variety. It's why the streets are filled with homeless in the largest cities of California.
First, it's white collar workers replacing blue collar workers. Then, it's vast numbers of empty homes and homeless people side-by-side.
This is what happens when the wealth gap grows without ceasing, the financial industry is the largest in the world.
It is not wholly bad to see my home state of Texas ascend as a tech hub, but California is still a part of the USA.
In many countries, corporate investment of residential homes is illegal. I still care about California, and if you guys want to keep it from steering towards a dystopian technocratic nightmare, you need to reign in corporate real estate investing and monopolistic practices from tech employers.
What is the point of a high SF tech salary if living expenses just do not make logical sense? What about the blue collar workers who make the city run? It's materialistic and self-cannabilizing. Billionaires among record-breaking homeless populations.
Don't think the liberal party is that different from the conservative party, both are beholden to the wealthy class. No matter the ruling party, it takes everyday people working together to make a real change. Real communities working together to solve problems.
People solve problems, politicians are just puppets for corporate interest. We are the people. Stand up for your rights and challenge authority, or it will just keep going this direction.
Are we seeing the same "homeless" people? The ones I see filling up the sidewalks and public spaces of big cities like LA and SF seem to be here for the cheap drugs, public services, and other nice things that "red states" are less likely to allow/provide.
Unfortunately, the "homeless issue" in big cities is a conflict of excess. High priced apartments (LA & SF used to have a decent amount of affordable living options when people didn't want to live in cities) clashing with "free"/public services.
We were fed a theory posed as fact (i.e. that providing services for drug addicts, like needle exchanges, and lowered/non-existent legal repercussions) is what is missing from our society. That is increasingly showing itself to be a lie.
The public needs to ask itself, do we want cities that are tolerant (and filled with drugs/crime), or do we want to accept intolerance?
I don't see the current political climate allowing intolerance, which is leading to a brewing political/civil schism.
It's not just Stanford, Harvard and Yale did the same.
Schools like NYU and MIT stood out for not doing this sort of thing, and it goes back for hundreds of years to Europe.
I have worked in finance for years, people don't know that the largest banking giants like JP Morgan also refused to hire Jewish people.
I'm a faithful Christian, and discrimination is discrimination. You can be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, you can be any race or religion, and this should not impede your opportunity to succeed in America.
It's not only hateful, it's just dumb. You are limiting yourself. This good ol boys club can hold a monopoly on say liberal arts or business, but MIT is the leading research institution on the planet. You know, hard science that has the most immediate and effective impact.
It's like a process of natural selection where prejudiced people build structures not on merit, but on the exclusive privilege of prejudice, meaning they naturally fall behind unless they force themselves to adapt like in this case.
The future belongs to people who understand that a bright mind is a bright mind, no matter what prejudices people have. Asian students are now being treated in this way by the same institutions, but it's not helping anyone.
Maybe if the exclusive club of ultra-wealthy elite WASPs can't compete with the changing world, then it doesn't deserve to cling onto power. I see nothing threatening about succeeding alongside people of all walks of life, because I choose to succeed on my merit and not on the circumstances of my birth. I respect success, and I don't need a special privilege to reach it myself.
In my eyes and in the eyes of the people who dream of a better world, the future looks bright. In the eyes of the wealthy elite and their racist imperial structure, we are a threat to their treasured status quo. I see no issue with this, and I am excited to see what the future holds.
I am a writer and I love books, but I just don't want to work with Amazon or give them money for reasons that go beyond the scope of this post.
This is exactly the kind of tool I need to fill my shelves with great books without having to deal with Amazon. Very clean and efficient software that serves a useful purpose, it is deserving of success.
If you look at the 2-10 year spread US treasury bond rates, there is a massive yield curve inversion. Historically, this inversion has been a very consistent metric for predicting incoming recessions.
The current inversion hasn't been since the early 2000s and ensuing recession, which was characterized by the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the attacks of September 11th.
The dotcom bubble is attributed to venture capital funding, and the crash took out a lot of companies and hit others like Amazon pretty hard. Economic crisis is inevitable, it's built into the business cycle.
Following this logic, the next companies on the chopping block would be tech once again. This time, likely the "unicorns" that are the darlings of VC investors. Additionally, it's kind of an open secret that FAANG stock valuations are a bit disconnected from reality.
When you are on the edge of consumer tech, a lot of stock investors don't even understand how your business model functions and what gives it such a high valuation, and they don't really care as long as the price goes up. It's a darker side of the culture, as the trend is to splurge with VC millions and cash out at the zenith then move on to the next thing. History shows it's not sustainable.
I'm just old enough to remember the dot com bubble. Very few companies back then had much revenue, let alone any profit. Public tech companies in 2022 have enormous revenue and profit streams. Alphabet/Google is trading around 20 times earnings and Meta/Facebook is around 10 times earnings. The S&P 500 overall is in the high teens. I'm not sure I'd call that disconnected from reality.
Within the startup ecosystem there are embryonic products that if nurtured can develop into existential threats to most of the current Fortune 500 companies. Incumbents eventually have to pay up to survive, eg. Adobe acquiring Figma. This dynamic supports startup valuations broadly. Startups represent the future and the future is usually priced at a premium.
> Public tech companies in 2022 have enormous revenue and profit streams. Alphabet/Google is trading around 20 times earnings and Meta/Facebook is around 10 times earnings.
While this is true for the largest of ad companies like Google and FB, the same isn't true for the vast majority of recent tech IPOs like Robinhood, Duolingo, Couchbase, Monday not to mention literally all of the ridesharing and food delivery companies to name just a few.
In a way, excessive acquisition valuations are likely also a side-effect of too much money floating around that might change radically with increasing interest rates.
Ad spending is one of the first things to get chopped come a recession. So expect these numbers to go down.
So then the question becomes what's the profit margins? Can they absorb, say, a halving of revenue short term?
If they can't then they're going to start layoffs, and the first to go will be the ones that don't generate revenue, so the experience gets worse for users, and the pipeline of new products dwindles, and you've released a bunch of potential competitors that know your business into the labour pool.
This also removes the price support for those existing startups.
One problem is that in 2022, most of these companies have very fragile revenue in a contracting or even a steady-state broader economy.
In a time of genuine hardship, particularly of the energy/food constraint kind, there are a million consumer priorities before a new iphone (Apple), consumer electronics (Amazon), fast fashion, vacation travel, and the enormous adtech ecosystem (Google, Facebook) that is supported by such business, as well as the toolmakers (Adobe) for them.
I suspect there is a lot of heavy sarcasm in this thread, but just in case people following along can't read it ... the 9/11 attacks probably didn't have any particular economic effect at all. The already-going-to-happen economic impacts were blamed on 9/11 and the US government's unhinged overreaction to 9/11 was possibly motivated in part by the signalling in the bond market.
The 12-month inflation rate was already 8% prior to the invasion in Ukraine. Gas prices nearly doubled between March 2020 and February 2022. Blaming inflation on the war in Ukraine only makes sense if you ignore the previous two years.
> Gas prices nearly doubled between March 2020 and February 2022.
The months you selected are pretty much peak lockdown vs peak recovery, and are a reflection of demand for gas, not an oracle of some deep economic truth. Franky, I'm surprised the gas price difference is so small, considering the US economy shut down in March of 2020.
I am not in the US, but I was very much at home in March 2020, homeschooling kids, and very much out and about in Feb 2022, taking them to birthday parties. I am in the "lockdown king" country of Australia, maybe only second to New Zealand in the zealousness of lockdowns.
If I buy a house with a mortgage, that's a risk. If interest rates shoot up to 10%, 20%, or I get made redundant, I lose my house and the risk hasn't paid off.
Yes you could point to the fact that I bought the house as the reason why I am now bankrupt and homeless, but I don't think that tells the whole story.
There's always risks that could turn into something worse, quite often they don't though. I think it's reasonable to point to 9/11 as a cause of the following recession because if that hadn't have happened we wouldn't have had the recession (if you accept that assumption).
The joke here is that the bond traders could not foresee 9/11 and did not predict the response to 9/11. They were forecasting the recession based on predictable indicators.
And 9/11 itself couldn't possibly have caused a recession. 2 buildings just isn't enough damage to be measured in a system as large and complex as the US economy. If you want to argue that the Afghanistan invasion contributed to the recession I am sympathetic to that idea, but the general consensus seems to be that war is helpful for the economy (which I don't hesitate to argue is a stupid consensus - but it is what it is).
Bin Ladin might have traded before the attack, it's possible. But that has nothing to do with the yield curve inversion as indicator of approchong economic downturn.
How do we know there's a casual connection?
Sure, the yield cure was inverted, but if you asked an economist about that in late 2019 they could have given you plenty of reasons for that, but Covid would not have been one of them.
Mesopotamian history is fascinating and deserves a lot more attention. It is the oldest root of human civilization itself and gives us insight into the most fundamental aspects of what civilization is today.
War is not the only means of conquest. Vietnam was manufacturing and drinking Coca-Cola in the 1960s, and as mentioned here, Germanic religion was interwoven with Christian culture during the Roman conquest of Europe.
One interesting and obscure connection is the origin of the words "hell" and "hall", as "hall" means "covered place" and "valhalla" means "hall of the dead" from Old Norse.
However, the original Hebrew and Greek is often "גֵּיהִנּוֹם" or "γέεννα" meaning "the valley of Hinnom." This is a physical place near Jerusalem where bodies denied a proper burial were burned, and some suggest it was even a region where human sacrifices took place.
You may be very surprised at what you find when you look into the origins of things that are taken for granted. Everything has some sort of origin, and historical roots can run very deep. Without looking at things on a deeper level, you are at the mercy of the surface-level understanding from your surrounding culture.
> One interesting and obscure connection is the origin of the words "hell" and "hall", as "hall" means "covered place" and "valhalla" means "hall of the dead" from Old Norse.
It's not clear what connection you have in mind. You could make the case that "hell" and "hall" are connected to each other through their ancient ancestry, but "hell" is no more closely related to "valhalla" than it is to "hall". "Valhalla" is just a word that includes "hall".
Valhǫll in Old Norse comes from valr and hǫll -- literally "hall of dead warriors". Hǫll is reconstructed in Proto-Germanic as hallō, itself from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱel, meaning "to cover".
Consider the Norse Hel (both the underworld and the name of the deity ruling over it). Compare with Old English hell, from Proto-Germanic haljō, from Proto-Indo-European ḱelnó, "room", in turn from the root ḱel -- "to cover".
That's interesting! My personal folk-etymological conjecture had long been that "val" had had a proto-germanic sense of "big", leading to to other modern words like Walroß or Walfisch.
Your comment sent me on a brief etymological excursion and the words sadly are indeed utterly unrelated.
I still can't tell what point you want to make. English hell and Norse Hel are the same thing. But Norse Hel and Norse Valhalla aren't, unless you want to trace them back to proto-Indo-European *kel. There's not a connection between hell and Valhalla.
Consider that languages don't develop in isolation, and both the pre-conquest inhabitatns of the Isles and the Saxons had regular interactions with the Norse, where its religious/spiritual connotations could very easily have just become a cognate.
That have any relation to the word Armageddon as well?
Yes ancient cultures are fascinating and should be more relevant in the zeitgeist; especially in respect to their knowledge and sophistication in thinking.
Armageddon comes from "Har Megiddo," an actual place of strategic importance and hence the site of many battles named before the name took on apocalyptic connotations.
to add to wl's comment, armageddon took on the meaning of an apocolyptic battle because it was mentioned in the Book of Revelations as the site of the final battle.
"Apocalypse" is also a great word. It means literally "the lifting of the veil" or removing the covering, so you can see what is underneath.
True story: I was once on vacation in Greece, and saw a strip club called Apocalypse. Based on the signage, they meant that in the sense of revealing hidden pleasures rather than some final battle, but I could also see some ways that visiting that club could lead to a nasty showdown.
It's exactly the same as "revelation". That word also comes from re-, "to strip back", and "veil". The strip club being called "revelation" also has the same double entendre.
A strip club being called "αποκάλυψη" would bring to mind, literally a revelation of something.
Here in the Southeastern United States, we have the world's largest biodiversity of freshwater fish and a vast amount of wetlands and unpolluted fresh water systems.
The region has been growing economically and companies like 3M have poisoned a major river with industrial pollution. Corporations like HP, Oracle, and other SV giants have moved to the South due to lower taxes, cost of living, fewer regulations, and looser labor laws.
Better environmental regulation is necessary to protect our lands and waters, all across the country and even the planet. Water is far more vital than money, and arable land feeds the world.
If the whole world is developing, environmental protections have to evolve alongside it. Big business will always push at the limit, and even sometimes cross the line with the consequence being a large fine and firing a few scapegoats.
It really is a struggle between the will of the people and corporate greed at its core. Short-term profits vs long-term survival of the human race. Declining fish populations upset ecosystems, communities, and food supply. These large entities are more focused on driving quarter-over-quarter revenue growth.
If you look at what's happening in Guam, it is has even become a matter of national security recognized by the military. Issues like these, as mentioned here elsewhere, are more important than saber rattling with China. These things get set on the backburner if fear and greed push us into another global war.
> It really is a struggle between the will of the people and corporate greed at its core.
I always find it weird that people try to put these two things against each other when they are often one and the same. Nobody makes people in Alabama buy Ford F-150s, and people in California complain about high gas prices. New Yorkers want their iPhones shipped to their door from China overnight, and midwesterners want to go to the mountains and coasts quickly.
How corporations conduct themselves is similar to how governments conduct themselves. They’re beholding to the will of the people. The people demand their trucks and TVs and cheap steaks. Focusing on the services providing the goods and not those demanding said goods is a losing endeavor with respect to the environment. It’s not the greed of the corporations. It’s the greed of the people.
Corporations aren't democracies, they are government-regulated entities designed to turn a profit. Historically, working people have fought and even died en masse against corporate power in order secure the basic rights that we take for granted today.
If you can't see the struggle of power between working people, their communities, and their environments with corporate greed, I suggest reading up on the history of labor struggles or major criminal suits surrounding environmental regulation.
I used to work in marketing, corporations tell people what they want and they are very effective at it. If you think people are greedy for wanting things like a home they can afford or to not have their farmland and groundwater poisoned by fracking, then there is a serious disconnect with humanity as a whole.
That is really the defining characteristic of the ideology of the wealthy ruling class, total disconnect from the needs and realities of the everyday person in exchange for a desire to seek profit. Even worse is trying to shift the blame onto the victims of said irresponsible profit-seeking behavior.
Unless you are a member of that class, defending them or their ideology won't win you any brownie points. You can succeed in business without crossing these lines, but many people want more than just success and are willing to cross all the lines.
Things like child labor, regime changes, massive global tax evasion schemes, war profiteering, and destruction of natural resources are really indefensible, no matter how you try to twist it. If the government can't prevent these things on behalf of the people, then it has failed and needs replacing. That's my last word on the matter.
> If you think people are greedy for wanting things like a home they can afford or to not have their farmland and groundwater poisoned by fracking, then
No I don’t think that. But then when their gas and heating bills go up now because we don’t have alternative infrastructure and these same people vote to have cheap gas due to fracking… I’m not really buying “wow these companies sure are screwing everyone”. In this case they’re simply giving people what they want which is what I expect in a functioning democratic market economy. Blaming the company undermines the issue.
Look at the outrage over paper straws or when grocery stores stop handing out plastic bags. Again, nobody is making anyone buy a huge truck to drive back and forth to an office job in.
Failing to also blame people who demand these things takes away their agency and leaves us with suboptimal solutions to environmental problems that we face. You’re confusing things like labor rights with consumerism here.
> How corporations conduct themselves is similar to how governments conduct themselves. They’re beholding to the will of the people.
sort of... i think there is a part of the blame to be put on advertising/marketing departments as well... its not 100% one-way but more of a bad feedback loop kind of thing imo
(govts/companies wanna stay in power, find something that responds from the public, push it more, public responds with increased demand, repeat ad-infinitum)
The relationship is FAR more symbiotic, bordering on parasitic, than what you've described and I'm sure you know it. The job of the company is to fulfill a need (what you've described) OR, failing that, to CREATE a need and THEN fulfill it.
The job of the company is to maximize profit, if that entails serving a need, it will do that, but it's not strictly necessary.
Often times it will also push to or past legal limits without any regard to the human cost, in this drive to maximize profit. Monopolies, child labour, environmental catastrophe, suppressing of worker rights and power.
To say that we deserve the treatment we get because we're greedy is pretty messed up. I don't know anyone who would choose to poison entire communities so we can have a cooking pan made of Teflon. Hell, Exxon put an anti knock additive (that was banned in the US) into Canadian gas for decades, knowing full well that it caused cancer.
Consumer greed doesn't account for the vast majority of the real evil done by large corporations, and I think that's a hell of a redirection of blame that the OP made.
> Consumer greed doesn't account for the vast majority of the real evil done by large corporations, and I think that's a hell of a redirection of blame that the OP made.
It depends on what you mean by "real evil" here. But the mistake that's being made here is focusing on something like worker rights suppression when those same workers are buying F-150s for their day-to-day commute. I criticize both, however. I see many here who only criticize the former. That's a problem because we can't get to a full solution and we are also taking away agency from people to make choices.
At the end of the day the responsibility always rests on the people because corporations and the government exist and operate at the behest of the people. That doesn't absolve either entity of wrongdoing, of course, but so long as people continue to demand the lifestyle we all currently live businesses will naturally continue to create and sell the demanded products. Thinking that this wouldn't or shouldn't be the case in a market economy is too ideological and doesn't help us address pragmatic needs. Will you pay $25 for a pint of blueberries, travel by bus if you want to visit California from Florida, and only own one car per household? The vast majority of Americans at least would outright reject this, yet that's the reality we must face.
In some cases corporations actually lead the way as well. Paper straws and no longer providing plastic bags are areas where corporations have taken action in spite of consumer demand for plastic straws and plastic bags. I don't know how "real evil done by large corporations" is more impactful than tens of millions of Americans demanding our current lifestyle. There is certainly gray area here, but the discussion window is far, far too close to only talking about corporations.
It's often in retrospect as well. It can take time for the impact of certain innovations to unfold, and it often begins with a small group of people. The breadth of human innovation is now so wide that a scientist/engineer from the 1950s simply doesn't have the same scope of problems and areas of study to work on.
That's why people like Leonardo da Vinci could exist, the scope of human understanding was much smaller and so their work was much more wide-reaching and foundational. Today, you can dedicate your life's work to some hyper-specific problem in a very specific field. Tomorrow, this work might seem fundamentally primitive or foundational in the way that previous generations are perceived.
Pure mathematics doesn't always have an immediately known use, but it has historically been at the core of science. In the words of Carl Friedrich Gauss:
"Mathematics is the queen of the sciences."
While there are often cash prizes and prestige for solving great mathematical problems, it is also studied simply for the beauty of mathematics and for the desire to make new discoveries.
For example, algorithms eventually found their way into computers, number theory became essential to cryptography, set theory gave us fields and therefore quantum mechanics and modern electronics. Mathematicians create theories and proofs just for the sake of mathematics.
Pythagoras might have been seen as strange by his ancient contemporaries for spending his time calculating the area of squares along the sides of right triangles, but his theorems have proven essential to the progress of humanity
Strangely enough, soap bubble geometry has been a subject of interest in analog computing. Some suggest that soap films are more efficient than computers in some cases for finding proofs about surface systems. Topology has wide-reaching application from computing and electronics to physics and game theory.
Do a quick keyword search on papers related to the subject. So much of it is completely useless. It is clearly written to keep people busy, earn credentials, boost credibility. Papers on the most superfluous and tangential subjects just to have a paper to publish.
Very little of it is actually working with the meat of the matter: The core logic and mathematics. It is trend following and busywork. Your sentiment is controversial because people are religiously loyal to the intellectual authorities of these credentialed systems, but a lot of published research does not push any boundaries or discover anything new. This paper seems to be an exception.
I would argue that a lot of the research published in the social sciences also falls under this category. It is there so that someone has a job. I'm not discrediting social sciences in general, am just pointing out that there is a lot of ways to creatively take advantage of academia to secure a paycheck and this is certainly exploited. The kneejerk reaction to reasonable criticism just proves this point even further.