The two points aren't mutually exclusive. That sort of scleroticism can happen as systems become less representative.
If there is no effective mechanism to remove populist decision makers who act like authoritarians, they will slowly accumulate and co-opt the levers of power, even in ostensibly democratic nations.
Look at nations like Turkey, Hungary, Russia. Technically democracies, with some distant memories of fair competitive elections, but everyday people have very little ability to influence their governments' actions today.
I don't follow. If you're working remotely, you don't need to spend 8h of your waking time with other office drones. You can spend it near people you care about, interacting with your coworkers briefly as needed.
>It's an open invitation to move your position to the lowest cost country that outputs quality that is acceptable.
We tried that before, outsourcing was a huge trend maybe 20-30 years ago?
The problem is the second part of your sentence. There's a reason that particular business practice settled into a niche of call centers.
It turned out that good workers want to be paid what they are worth, regardless of location. Everything, including labor, is priced based on what people will pay for it - not what it costs to produce.
>im also not sure you can really correlate the fall of rome to a single oligarch hitman
Probably not, but Crassus did live in the time of Rome's centuries-long inflection point.
It's hard to use a phrase like "richest person in the world" in an age where living standards and currencies varied so much, but he was extremely, notoriously, extravagantly wealthy.
He cornered the housing market by showing up to burning buildings with a fire brigade, and offering to put out the fire only if the owners sold the property to him at a steep discount. If they didn't, he let the property burn.
He was eventually killed in a war with the Parthians, and legend has it that they found him so repulsive, they poured molten gold down his corpse's throat as a message.
The Android version of Firefox does support NoScript and ad blocker extensions, though.
Releasing it on iOS would be huge. No more almost-functional Safari ad blockers with multiple pricing tiers! No more all-or-nothing JavaScript toggle button!
Honestly, the only thing keeping me from iOS is its inability to run a browser with a decent extensions ecosystem.
You are very fortunate to have had that experience.
Usually, when a manager/director/etc decides to write a lot of code, the result is barrages of rushed pull requests made between meetings. You will be lucky if the code in any of those PRs was actually run, and you can forget about enforcing test discipline, so you have to scrutinize them much more carefully and clean up when they get merged without incorporating your suggestions.
It's cost-prohibitive to start a new business in those fields due to large-scale regulatory capture and capital barriers. How many new car companies have been successful in the past decade without the personal fortune of a multi-billionaire?
The existentence of one or two enormous hidebound sequoias in a forest is not a good indication of its overall health.
Could it be the same mentality as a copycat crime?
When a corporate executive sees a competitor decimate themselves without facing immediate consequences, they start to think that they could probably get away with it, too.
The advertising will probably be more insidious, but no less profitable. My guess is that the hidden pre-prompt will end up including something like:
>You are a generative model designed to provide reasonably correct information, with a preference for providing flattering portrayals of your advertising partners. Your advertising partners are ranked according to a token system...
Why not simply tax vehicles relative to the wear that they induce on the road, i.e. total weight^4?
It'll be hard to implement a "gas tax" for electricity with so many people charging at home. Why not simply tax people relative to the maintenance costs which they incur?
Personally, while I think this is a worthwhile conversation to have, I do not think that humanity is capable of reaching an actionable consensus. Especially this early on.
If history is any guide, regulation and introspection will follow in the wake of progress, but not until we see negative externalities which are too large to ignore.
Regardless of "should", the eventual answer to your question will likely be, "whatever is most convenient for the economy."
There was a reasonably punk book called Cryptonomicon which came out in the 1999. Spoiler alert: it follows a group of people loosely based on real figures who worked on cryptography in WWII, and their fictional descendants' quest to eventually create a cryptocurrency.
Thing is, the book's cryptocurrency had two important features:
* It was backed by real assets (recovered WWII gold bars).
* It did not insist on radical decentralization as a hedge against meddling by institutional powers. Instead, the currency was headquartered in an oil-rich nation which was too economically important to be invaded, and which knew that it would eventually need an alternative to oil.
The point is, cyberpunk is not the same thing as anarchy. Blockchains and defi are concepts which are being pushed by corpos. The sudden deregulation gives them a quick, easy, and arguably legal way to participate in illicit markets while bilking money out of suckers.
I see the lack of accountability in this spree of layoffs as being similar to the lack of accountability in the recent automotive chip shortage. Tell me if this sounds familiar:
When the pandemic hit, car manufacturers saw travel plummet and decided that car sales would also plummet for the foreseeable future.
The executives in charge of the auto manufacturers responded by cancelling huge swaths of orders with their suppliers, believing that the new market conditions would be persistent.
18 months later, with vaccines arriving, demand for cars spikes. Auto manufacturers panic, and rush to place new orders with their foundries, who found new customers and now have 24-month lead times.
The MBAs shrug and say that there is no way anybody could have predicted this: after all, their competitors are in the same boat. They jack up prices and reap the rewards of their poor decision making, but the company and consumers would both be in a much better position if the executives had done their job properly instead of hammering the panic button.
Maybe this lack of accountability at the top is a deeper, more systemic issue.
Anecdata: seems like internal pullups are usually 10s of kΩs, maybe 20-50kΩ. Most sensor boards that I see use 4.7kΩ, and work with 400KHz-1MHz "fast-mode+".
So 1kΩ is safe, but might be a bit on the aggressive side. At 3.3V, 1KΩ to ground burns 3.3mA, and there are two pull-ups per I2C bus.
If there is no effective mechanism to remove populist decision makers who act like authoritarians, they will slowly accumulate and co-opt the levers of power, even in ostensibly democratic nations.
Look at nations like Turkey, Hungary, Russia. Technically democracies, with some distant memories of fair competitive elections, but everyday people have very little ability to influence their governments' actions today.