If you don’t consider the difference in kind between a human vulnerability and an automated vulnerability that derives from the essentially unlimited capacity of the latter to scale, your comment makes a lot of sense. If you do consider that, the argument becomes irrelevant and deeply misleading
Everything that matters, including how much money you have, but more importantly when you and the people you love become sick or die accidentally is governed by chance.
If you think money gets you a pass, maybe recheck your understanding of the issues and the stoic solution. The shallow packaged version produced by Ryan Holiday isn’t a good source
Given that the mean salary at google is probably driven by people making 7 or 8 figures, I’m going to suggest that laying off 10,000 people will not change that one bit
I think the fair comparison is: if you’re living someplace with any given level of economic opportunity (and the other things you mention) would you be happier if it was on the water than if it was not.
It seems for you the answer is no, but that’s not necessarily the typical response.
I suspect it’s because they have a near monopoly in high-quality, next-gen sequencing. They’re trying to grow the market for their machines rather than take business from a competitor.
What’s your evidence for massive interest in business markets? I use a quest for gaming, but find the idea of interacting with colleagues for corporate stuff to be just hideous.
The real difference is in scale. Automations can be coordinated to produce self-affirming bullshit at a scale that drives real discussion out of view. You already see this on twitter with troll farms and primitive bots. Now it will be a tidal wave
Only management should be able to impose their will on employees and should be able to do so without competition. On the job, and during their “free-time”.
More seriously, imagine where not everyone is required to be in the union and think about how easy it then becomes for management to manipulate the environment to the detriment of union employees until the union is wiped out.
I think your characterization of unions is a propaganda driven falsehood, and your argument ignores the fact that Most people see less and less of the fruits of their labor.
A less benevolent take is that VC money is primarily used to buy market share by selling below cost until other competitors exit and the company is left with a monopoly.