Back in the day, my father worked as a researcher for a large, old dairy company. He was tasked with finding out what was environmentally friendly for packaging milk; whether they should start offering milk in washable glass bottles instead of their current cartons, for environmental reasons.
He found that the environmental impact created by the washing of the glass bottles was worse than the impact of the entire production and disposal cycle for the cartons. If you added in the production of the glass, the recycling of glass when it broke, and the extra impact from transport (less space due to not being able to pack as well, heavier) there was no competition at all - glass was way, way worse.
Plastic was a bit better than glass, and carton was the best available option. So they stayed with carton.
This was ~30 years ago, mind, so the equation may have changed. But I still find it important to check before deciding "Let's go glass" is the right option.
> A huge company is using unpaid artist's labour to create tools that will reduce the potential for these and all future artists to get any paid work at all in the future.
"Will" is a strong claim. If the Jevons Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox) applies in this case - and it may well do so - the new technology will lower costs, and the increased productivity will increase demand. If so, it will require artists to work in a different way but they'll earn more.
While I've not played with k8, I did run stuff in Google's Borg for a very long while, and that has a similar architecture. My team was petabyte scale and we were far from the team with the largest footprint. So it is clearly possible to handle large scale data in this type of architecture.
> So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way.
"The public" isn't one person. Denmark has progressive taxes; getting rid of subsidies so prices of food increases changes who among the public pays.
> Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
> So, this is just number rearranging. The public pays either way.
"The public" isn't one person. Denmark has progressive taxes; getting rid of subsidies so prices of food increases changes who among the public pays.
> Or do you just want to ignore this externality until we pay it all at once?
I'm in favor of the carbon tax. I also think that it has complicated side effects and we should try to understand those effects, and see if we need to change something else to compensate for them.
> programs are written much less frequently than they are run, so surely developer keystrokes are laughably unimportant compared to runtime performance and other user-facing concerns.
Taking this to its logical conclusion all programs should be written in assembly.
The reality is that there's a tradeoff: Programmer time vs performance, and which parts of performance matter. I've worked using anything with performance from assembly to shell scripts (including C, C++ and Java). It is all tradeoffs. Do users want more features, or more speed? Are we running at a scale or situation where ultimate usage of hardware matters, or not?
Saying we should do ultimate amounts of investment in performance when there's three users and one programmer doesn't make sense. They'd typically rather have more features and adequate performance.
If we can, and it works out to less harm vs benefit than otherwise: Yes. But it turns out we can't for alcohol and cigarettes (except regulation). We fairly much can for workaholics - Norway has laws that stop working overtime except in certain situations, and they actually work fairly well. I don't know if we can for social media, though I see California is trying to stop some of the addictive forms of social media.
There's at least one bit that's missing here, even if the claim is entirely accurate:
Both the total pie and the total number of creators has increased. Hollywood feature film production is [estimated](hhttps://www.quora.com/How-many-people-work-in-the-film-indus...) to be 3000-7000 people. There are [approximately 61.1 *million* YouTube creators](https://explodingtopics.com/blog/youtube-creator-stats), or approximately 10,000 times more. There could easily be 100x more money flowing to the total visual entertainment creator community and the old guard film creators could still get less than they used to.
I don't know exactly what to search for to get similar numbers for music production, but I suspect it is similar: There's a lot more creators and they get less each even though it's more in total, and this is especially hitting "old timers" that used to get the bulk of the old total and get less with the new setup.
> I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that racist caricatures are bad.
I'm pretty sure most people are in agreement that wiping out history and culture is bad.
The question is what is the appropriate tradeoff. Should new editions of these books be published, targeted to children? Probably not. Should they be effectively banned from being sold (used)? At least not without due consideration to the alternatives, like marking them.