It's nice to hear tradespeople getting paid well with lots of work. I'm happy for them :-)

Yes, that's good. It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor. Projects I work on have seen prices soar. I don't consider building the things everyone hates because they promise concentration of wealth and an attack on labor at the expense of building literally anything else to be somehow a big W for labor because a few people get a slightly higher temporary paycheck. Ask the Wagyu cows how they feel about the hand they are dealt.

"It also prices out a lot of other better uses for their labor...."

"Projects I work on..."

Considering we are in a gigantic housing shortage, it would be great if a house didn't have to compete for talent with a data center.

The housing shortage has nothing to do with a lack of electrical engineers or plumbers. It’s entirely self inflicted and cheaper electricians will not change that.

More directly: I doubt there will be a meaningful increase in housing in states that have banned construction of new data centers (NY, Maine) than those where data centers are allowed to be built.

You don't work in construction do you?

Lack of skilled tradesmen is a widespread problem and a major source of project delay (on top of massively higher housing production costs).

I assume next comes the zoning-causes-all-shortages and if only we could fix zoning then we'd solve housing – a thesis for which there's zero evidence.

That "lack" of labor is the norm because construction is a boom-bust business and nobody wants to pay to retain talent and skills they aren't actively profiting off. And very few want to spend time training new people when they are currently earning 3x their normal rate working a boom cycle.

If the AI boom crashes, how many of these people will get laid off and unable to find comparable paying work for years afterward? Even if it picks up again 5 years later, many of those people have moved on to new careers. And the only way to get them back, even temporarily, is pay them way more than their current career to pay for their losses and hardships of quiting their current career path. So ultimately boils down to "pay people more" because you aren't just incentivizing people to work for you specifically during a boom cycle, you are also trying to poach workers out of other industries for a job they know is temporary.

Yes, the labor supply for skilled tradesmen is very inelastic. Which is one reason it sucks to have so much of it drawn into a probably-speculative boom.

> and the pay sucks.

This is baffling to me from the homeowner's perspective.

I just checked the last invoice I had for electrical work - $300 for something that took <30 minutes and <$20 of supplies.

(And like, he did good work and I'd hire him again... but at those rates it's worth me doing anything I can myself even if it takes me 5x longer.)

I said the pay sucks, not the profit. Owning a residential electrical company is lucrative because they pay their electricians substandard wages.

It’s not possible for the standard wage to be substandard.

Fine, non-union residential contractors pay lower wages than union contractors.

Are you including travel time in the 30 minutes? Time to travel and provide free estimates? Sick/vacation time?

> Sick/vacation time?

Don't forget health insurance for when they have to use that sick time to get treatment - so they can get back to work ASAP. Plus, during a bust if they get laid off, we don't have universal health insurance, so they have to factor that in as well.

I mean, obviously not. (Though no travel for free estimates, estimates are just done by phone.)

Obviously my electrician isn't making anywhere close to $30040 hours52 weeks = $600k+/year - and I don't begrudge my electrician making a good living.

But from my perspective as a homeowner, skilled trades are punishingly expensive, and my response was to a post specifically claiming that the pay sucks.

> But from my perspective as a homeowner, skilled trades are punishingly expensive, and my response was to a post specifically claiming that the pay sucks.

My post is a response to yours, showing that the provider’s pay can suck even if you find a service punishingly expensive.

Volatility of pay, body wear and tear, hours per day and flexibility of schedule, extensive travel greatly increasing morbidity/mortality risk, and other components go into whether or not pay sucks or not.

What do those residential electricians do then? Become baristas?

tbf, I don't think Wagyu cows were that thrilled about their lot in life before Wagyu became a thing, either.

You may have a unique perspective on that, though...

> Projects I work on have seen prices soar.

Could you be more specific? Things are still competitive in the large commercial electrical market I am bidding in, if you’re bidding to make more than 10-15% you’ll get underbid by someone willing to accept a lower profit margin.

The employment is temporary, what follows a net negative, is the idea.

And "AI" as a concept has has no agency. This is all about humans who seek to further concentrate wealth.

>Meaning a big impact on homes – you know, the things people and families live in, in order to survive.

Maybe those people should pay their tradespeople better then. Everybody's all "workers should be paid more" until they're the one paying the worker.

"Those people" who? Homebuilders? You're saying you think the cost of homebuilding should be much higher? When I listen to some of you guys it's not hard for me to see why these DCs are so unpopular

That small bathroom job is literally the worst case scenario for a tradesman. They have to work nearly as hard to line that up as better paying longer term commercial work.

The residential buyer is the source of much less repeat work, is harder to deal with, more price conscious and harder to collect from than the commercial buyer they could be working for.

Anyone that can competently market, manage, and execute that small job can do the same for better customers.

The residential buyer has one advantage though: they do not demand as much from those working. You can start this business today, and likely find enough friends and family willing to take a chance on you that you can get started and from there you have references. Commercial projects tend to be big enough that you cannot get into them without experience (which in turn you cannot get).

The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.

>The crew that can build a driveway cannot build a parking lot, and they will never be able to break into that market because it requires experience that a driveway cannot give. From a parking lot there is then road building - the previous companies cannot break into them. Again there are just not enough projects of the size that sits in between to build experience.

This is not true at all! Parking lots are not particularly complicated, with the main obstacle being machinery and logistics. I know folks that started off residential and moved to commercial once they accumulated enough capital to buy the necessary machines to take on bigger commercial work.

>You can start this business today, and likely find enough friends and family willing to take a chance on you that you can get started and from there you have references.

Highly questionable premise. I bet very few people are going to gamble their most valuable asset on a newbie trying to learn the ropes. I’ll pay someone experienced multiples more for my once in a decade or two capital projects on my home.

And even in residential, building million-dollar houses is easier (or at least not harder) and more profitable than building "affordable" starter homes.

> While we're at it, how much should small bathroom, 2 week renovation cost? $100,000 in labour?

Obviously much more than 2 weeks worth of work at a commercial job, since that's the worst possible kind of work you could ever offer any tradesman. Maybe 8x the hourly rate would be fair since it's intermittent work with generally horrible customers?

It's been interesting to watch the IT/engineering classes all of a sudden pretend to care about labor costs and outsourcing/job loss. As an industry they have been by far the most impactful in reducing wages, enabling outsourcing, and "gaining efficiency" via automation while as a class being paid top-tier wages for doing so. There is not another industry more directly culpable for blue collar job loss except perhaps finance and banking.

Only now when the shoe is on the other foot do such folks seem to care at all.

Learn to code indeed.

For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating. At least this time around the bubble is sharing a bit of that tech wealth.

> For any electricians/plumbers/etc. out there? Go get yours. When the shoe was on the other foot you were mocked and told to switch careers, lowballed on horrible residential projects, told to skill up and get better if you wanted to get paid more, there was no future in the trades, etc. Make hay while the sun shines and ignore the bleating.

yeah instead they did the smart thing and they got together and passed protectionist policy to artificially inflate the value of their labor. Let's see how union tough you are when the administration changes and you have to compete with a global labor pool again.

>compete with a global labor pool again

I don't really think electricians have to worry about that. There may be the some shops that employ immigrants as helpers, but most electricians have spent at least several years getting their hours, building their kit and learning the NEC + local codes. It's hard to picture companies importing labor and training them for so long.

That's a nice story and barely a reply to my comment, not engaging at all.

Good luck with robots traing to lay up bricks, or doing plumbing in a home.

Making a brick laying robot is easy. I'm happy to do that if you want to fund my mid-life crisis... Note that I did not promise my brick laying robot can effectively compete with human break layers on cost. I fully expect my robot to be at least double the cost of humans doing the same work, and it will be less flexible than humans as well (meaning you need a different robot for different buildings)

How would it be double the cost if it can work day and night and on holidays and during bad weather and not have strikes?

Double is probably a low estimate. There is a lot of engineering required in the robot. Much of the effort is setup, someone still needs to bring it to the site, and feed the blueprints in. Cleanup is also a lot of the cost. Not to mention mortar is made of sand which is abrasive and will wear it out fast meaning lots of maintenance work.

Working day and night isn't helpful as the limit to speed is waiting for the mortar to cure before doing the next row. (Generally you do about 5 rows and then wait a day)

could the robots not do more than one site? 5 rows, move to other side, a house if rectangle does have four sides, and a subdivison has multiple houses?

Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen. What will happen is moving to higher and higher code representations. A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.

People are already doing it to some extent, especially the sort of technical non-programmer crowd. A member of my family was even having a (now pretty out of date) version of chatGPT spit out VBA macros for them with precisely no idea what they were doing, but the result worked well enough for them. Now I know lots of programmers will scoff at that but when you see what the big models can do today in terms of breaking down a fairly large task and executing on all the steps with minimal need to stop it, including going to existing docs/web pages etc. to gather info, correcting itself, even troubleshooting issues and correcting them, it strikes me as hard to see a future where programming skill as such remains considered scarce in the market.

> Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen

Hate to break it to you but it is happening, increasingly at the business stakeholder interface later.

> A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.

Most of the value in the software engineering process isn't in the compiler, it's in deducing the requirements and weighing tradeoffs for various solution paths. LLMs have now automated the next step: translating human language requirements and specifications to code.

The compiler is just the last deterministic step, which while essential, is entirely commoditized in the value chain. When was the last time you paid for a compiler?

I am a UX Researcher, UX Design and Developer by trade since 2009. I don't know iphone development, python, any back end stuff and or in depth JS stuff.

But, Codex does and just by typing I just published a startup in python in two weeks using Codex and it's iPhone app will be available soon.

How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen with Codex and have it guide you via voice? I just feed screenshot after screenshot to Codex to understand what I need to do next. Look forward to being able to share my screen and have it guide me via a voice conversation.

> How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen with Codex and have it guide you via voice?

Extrapolate that to any other engineering or even medical discipline and you will understand that your conclusion has some flaws.

Well i guess there are two sides of table / arguement. Im on the side of believing the hype of the AI overlords who promote UBI not cause I don't want to work because I personally experience and see it slowly playing out now.

Careful with UBI. What they are thinking is reshuffling/re-branding Medicaid/Food Stamps/Housing voucher, etc, into one lump sum that just like the current welfare, will barely be enough to keep you alive.

What is you opinion of U.I "designed" by someone without UX experience, thru prompting. Most likely you cringe at how bad they are, as do the reset of us.

Similarly, programmers have a name for code generated without a coder guiding and reviewing, A.I slop.

Getting an idea out there quickly and cheaply is definitely a good use for AI. In the context of the original op, this is not putting any developers out of work. Quite the contrary, if the idea takes off then you will probably want to make a proper implementation with a carefully thought out UX.

The UI/UX Gemini made is less is more and follows how I have designed for years. The idea is musicians/bands find local venues to play out. Which is an easy UI/UX .. a logo ... sign up button, header that says "Bands find local venues to play out," and a search bar below for them to search local spots. Ive done these sites for forever so I know how to describe a startup idea quickly to humans and an LLM. That's a unique skill yet can be taught quickly like stop going on and on about your idea i dont care give it to me in 15 to 30 seconds.

That's pretty disingenuous.

The people losing jobs to AI can't just pivot into the trades. When you think about it, companies announcing they're pivoting into some other area where they have no prior background is usually a bit of a desperation move, aided by the fact that companies don't need to be licensed in any way to offer particular services, other than maybe in the military/national security sector.

As for the second point, it's true that this is just old-fashioned supply and demand. I predict the outcome is that there's a rush into the construction/contracting sector followed by a bust due to either the tech bubble popping and construction slowing way down, or the replacement of construction workers by humanoid robots, or perhaps some better form factor like robot spiders that can squeeze into small places - all the benefits of child labor but with double the appendages and double the productivity!

However, I'm not worried about the possibility of a robot takeover. The American people's final safeguard against a robot uprising is the irrationality of imperial weights and measures. Robots are digitals and can't do fractions like us higher beings. That's why I'm building my data centers measuring everything in cubits.

As an engineer in the US - we already do all the math in metric units. There are conversion functions in the UI layer to transform our units to whatever you want to see. (they also convert metric units if you don't like the units were are using internally)

Well let me know when US stores stop selling everything in imperial units and framing is done in metric.

That's correct! AI is a negative for society no matter how you look at it. That's the entire idea!

I don't think that ANY project employs electricians and carpenters for long, because they are there to build something that will ideally last decades or more...

I'm not even sure it's as simple as "stuff people don't like." Many of the anti-AI crowd use ChatGPT which kind of complicates the question of "do they REALLY dislike it?"

I guess you could complain that robots will replace electricians and carpenters, but it's still going to be a decade before anyone trusts an LLM to wire a house.

>I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful. The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.

I don't think there's really a contradiction there. You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.

If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.

Datacenters are fine. They're better than most kinds of industrial buildings, by and large they don't illegally set up fields of gas turbines, and their water usage is really not that bad compared to other large users. They make for a few nice, high-paying jobs. Sure, they're ugly and large, but this is America and we have no shortage of ugly, large buildings.

>If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.

No, one does not follow from the other. I might campaign against the building of a road because I believe the funds could be better spent on something else. If the road is built, am I a hypocrite for using it? No. The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.

Something can be positive under a narrow lens, and a negative under a broader one. There's no hypocrisy in acknowledging both realities.

>Datacenters are fine.

Datacenters and AI are distinct things. Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction.

> Someone can be in favor of one and not the other, with no contradiction

Sure, great, but the two seem to be treated as one issue and opinions are rarely stated in clear and falsifiable terms. They stay vague because there really aren't that many good reasons to oppose them, and IMO sane discussion on the subject leads to "building these really doesn't change that much" or "AI slop is really not that different from any other kind of slop."

> The road is already there. Whether I use it or not, the funds are already spent. I may as well use it.

If you then hear about someone building a new road and you go "I hate roads and I resent these guys for building a new road" and then you go and use the new road too, I'm gonna be suspicious of your motivations because clearly you don't hate roads that much. If you said "I think we should build fewer roads because adding more lanes doesn't really work that well to reduce traffic" then that would be different; you wouldn't be a hypocrite for saying that.

See my above statement. Opponents of AI and/or datacenters rarely seem to say what it is about them that they actually dislike. Yes, I suppose they could be thinking clearly on the topic and have internally consistent takes, but then why the hell can't they articulate complaints that make sense?

>Sure, great, but the two seem to be treated as one issue

I don't care. I'm responding on the topic of AI. I won't let you treat them as interchangeable just because you perceive them as treated that way.

>If you then hear about someone building a new road and you go "I hate roads and I resent these guys for building a new road" and then you go and use the new road too, I'm gonna be suspicious of your motivations because clearly you don't hate roads that much.

Cool, but you've specifically constructed a person that fits your narrative. What you said originally what the sheer number of users of AI means that some of them must be anti-AI. You went from a deduced existence of a broad kind of person to an asserted existence of a specific one, with no justification. I'm not sure your opponents are the only ones guilty of not thinking clearly.

>Yes, I suppose they could be thinking clearly on the topic and have internally consistent takes, but then why the hell can't they articulate complaints that make sense?

I don't know. Can't they? I don't even know who you're talking about because you're treating complaints about datacenters and about AI as equivalent. Myself, I don't think I've seen anyone be just anti-AI in the sense you said, of despising the existence and development of generative models, wholly and completely. Some people are concerned about the business practices of the AI industry; some resent the effect of AI on the hardware market; some are concerned about the labor market (even if they don't think they're in danger of being replaced); some look at it from the more physical aspect of it, as you've said the construction and operation of datacenters. If you treat these swaths of people as just one person, it's small wonder you'll think they flip-flop from one position to another.

> If people are using it presumably they're getting some value out of it which means that most objections to datacenters are NIMBYism and not some kind of principled stance.

Something can have a great deal of utility to everyone while simultaneously causing damage to a subset of people. Electricity is universally useful, but anyone downwind of a coal plant is hurt by air pollution even if they benefit from electricity. It's not contradictory for those people to ask for stricter controls on pollutant emissions.

Likewise with LLMs, they can provide a lot of utility to enterprises and individuals, while simultaneously causing damage to those individuals.

Hordes of now-fragile white collar workers are currently trying to use AI to figure out how not to be rendered obsolete by AI.

People who live near proposed datacenter sites are using LLMs, while also facing spiking utility costs due to the AI datacenters, and maybe significant quality of life regressions.

Everyone is trying to figure out how to maximize their own benefit from LLMs while simultaneously trying to put the costs of this technological revolution on others, and everyone has different positioning in that race, depending on their skills, adaptability, and privilege. This situation will test all individuals, institutions, and societies.

>You can recognize the utility of something while acknowledging that, on the whole, it'd be better if it didn't exist.

There's a word for that: hypocrisy.

That's when you say others shouldn't use it while you use it.

I don't like the parts of the city that are full of concrete and (edit: lacking) trees. I still walk or drive through there instead of making a huge detour, I still use them because that's what's there, currently. I know processed food sucks, sometimes it's easiest to grab something that's quick to make or can be eaten instantly because the supermarket is full of them.

And even assuming it means hypocrisy, so? You think you'd withstand examination? Face the arguments, instead of using some abstract fantasies about some average AI critic that doesn't exist as an excuse. At least they're only hypocritical like everyone else including you, instead of acting like a 3 yo, "yeah but you're stupid, so".

No. That's not what the word means.

> I'm not even talking about at work, I'm saying that a large majority of Americans are using AI of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful.

Where is your data to back up such an assertion? I'm not even sure how you could determine "of their own free will in situations where it's not required but is genuinely useful," except maybe in a yes/no survey question, which is suspect.

It's also worth noting that AI is getting shoved down peoples throats. Want to do a Google Search? Congratulations, you're now using AI of your own "free will"!

> The sheer number of people means that a lot of them must also say they're anti-AI, and my point is that whether or not they say they like it they're undeniably choosing to use it.

Usually when people like you make points like that, they're trying to undermine the "anti" argument by implying hypocrisy. My point is "choice" can't actually reveal that, because the environment of that choice is too complex. The observation is a meaningless factoid.

But that's true of most carpentry and electrical jobs. In-house carpenters and electricians are a minority.

I was responding to the implied symmetry in the GP: the "employs" does not balance out the "unemploys", because the unemployment is likely permanent and the employment temporary.

And then there's the fucked up resource allocation: throwing around insane amounts of money, driving up the prices of things the people actually want, to build hated things for investors and billionaires, which is a separate issue.

The unemployment of electricians and carpenters is permanent? On a long-enough timescale, where we have much more advanced robotics, probably. Not in the near or medium-term.

The fucked up resource allocation is itself an indicator of wealth inequality. A generation ago growing companies had to go public to access funding. Now they can find all the capital they need in private markets.

wouldn't the analogy be Wagyu farmers?

resi has been drained pretty hard in the last 10 years, this just adds more fuel to the fire.

If Meta decided to pivot to a brothel and meth lab building spree would you consider that to be a worse, equal, or better use of their capital and the labour in the regions where they are building out this infrastructure? Why?

I mean, at least some of us would consider it better with meth and hookers than them ruining the internet with their panopticon shit.

Yeah, I'm okay with that.

Uhm, aren't we all allowed to have an opinion on what's best for mankind?

FWIW I am a high voltage test engineer.

I used to be an electrician.

I would prefer to build the substations that power machines for the benefit of all mankind, rather than data centers that feed the already wealthy.

For example, keep the lights on for schools.

You have a warped view of the world if you believe anything should be allowed to be built just because someone has the capital to build it.

These sort of moral grandstanding arguments are annoying.

There is no "moral grandstanding". I wish to live in a functional society.

You're framing it so you can't lose by making the argument seem like a moral choice between "have data centres" or "live in a functional society".

That's a fallacy, and it is moral grandstanding. It's a useful way to win internet arguments (and internet points), but it is just a debate ending strategy.

No, I’m fine with data centers, I’ve built one myself and I’ve maintained multiple.

I argued against “if you have capital, you can do what the fuck you want”.

> Who on Earth are you to decide what is the "better" use for labor?

> In capitalism, people get to decide for themselves what they work on

Feels like there are some mixed signals here.

just don't forget these are temporary, eventually there will be "enough" data centers, and none of these jobs will exist, so if you are planning a 20 year + career, don't count on this being the norm.

Nah. If USA returns to its senses we are going to need tons of tradespeople to build all the stuff we need for the billion Americans.

It seems unlikely there will be a billion Americans. Population growth is 0.3% and will likely decline further as native FTR declines.

> If USA returns to its senses we are going to need tons of tradespeople to build all the stuff we need for the billion Americans

You're missing the /s?

The only thing that has been keeping the US population from declining is immigration, and the US isn't exactly the most welcoming country anymore.

Fairly sure last year was the first year of US population decline in a long time.

Yes. Because until now it was propped up by immigration — and mostly legal immigration — which has dropped precipitously.

> There is no reason a fully qualified, even residential electrician cannot make 200k a year

Where?

BLS Data

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electric...

"The median annual wage for electricians was $62,350 in May 2024. The median wage is the wage at which half the workers in an occupation earned more than that amount and half earned less. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $39,430, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $106,030."

Seems like there is overwhelming reason for one to not make $200k/year.

> Tradespeople have always been getting paid well with lots of work. > Most electricians will make more than the average sysadmin, senior developer or network engineer here.

Where are you getting this? The median plumber in the US makes just under $63k, which is below the ~$65k median pay for all jobs in the US. The median sysadmin makes over $96k - a more than 50% higher median. The top 10% bracket for sysadmins is also 50% higher than plumbers. Why are people claiming that plumbers and tradespeople are raking it in when they’re clearly not?

> The amount of people getting into trades over the past decade has dropped drastically

The BLS projections for the next decade have plumbers at 4% growth and sysadmins at -4% - in decline.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers...

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

Allegedly many an American 'believes' that Jesus will be back some time right about now. They are serious about this belief, however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have.

But now I see the light. Jesus was a carpenter, right?

I am imagining that Jesus, with his carpentry skills, is driving right now in his Chevy truck to the job site, to help erect that data centre for one of our billionaire overlords.

Just saying, it could happen, and is probably needed to happen, if this data centre build out is to get anywhere near completion.

>however, it is never explained as to how he waves a magic wand and fixes the many, many entirely man-made problems we have.

It's explained in the Book of Revelations - Jesus comes back and kills everyone who isn't Christian (and actually most Christians too) with plagues and fire and violence and burns the world down to ashes. And then (something something multi-headed dragon something something Whore of Babylon) a giant cube-shaped crystal city drops down from space lit by God's radiance and all of the dead Christians come back wearing white robes to live there and eat and drink and praise Jesus forever and never leave because why would you?

And belief in this is legitimately a big part of why we will never take climate change seriously.

An overwhelming number of Christians do not believe this and do not interpret Revelation in this way. The belief that "Jesus will come back and solve everything instantly" is only held by a minority of small 2nd Great Awakening groups and a few outspoken Evangelical groups, and is unique to theological traditions that arose in the United States. The official teachings of the Catholic Church, Orthodox Churches, Anglican and Episcopal communions, Presbyterian denominations, etc and other mainline Christians don't believe this. Before you blame a group for ruining the world or rejecting climate change please actually talk to a representative sample of real people in the group you are making claims about.

Due to the southern strategy that has been cemented into 1/2 of the available political parties for the better part of the last 50 years, outspoken evangelical groups hold an outsized influence on policy at large. Evangelicals are also the largest donors to AIPAC, which heavily influences our society.

It doesn't matter that most Christians don't believe it. Most Muslims don't do violent attacks on civilians, yet they all seem to pay the price either in their home countries or in the US.

It seems world-wide, a hard-right extremist subset of religious believers are ruining things for everyone else.

> An overwhelming number of Christians do not believe this and do not interpret Revelation in this way.

It's actually not that particularly relevant what Christians believe exactly (and they do believe that the world will be destroyed as-is), what's relevant is what the actual crazy book says.

And if you believe the book that says crazy things, or perhaps you cherry pick and interpret the crazy things to your liking and convenience - his point stands.

And the crazy book days say that the non Christians will burn (for eternity?) in flames of hell and that great many Christians won't be able to get through the narrow gate (and also be tortured to death in hot lava).

An overwhelming number of Christians with relevant political and economic power believe this. Orthodox, Anglicans, Episcopalians etc. might as well be a rounding error compared to the influence of American Evangelical and Conservative Christians. Might as well bring up the Amish while you're at it.

You might have a point about Catholics in terms of sheer numbers, but... the only people still listening to Catholics are right wing chuds and Warhammer fans - and even the former aren't listening anymore because the Pope is too "woke" for them. The days when the Pope's word mattered are long, long gone. What happened when he gave his encyclical on AI? It made headlines for a day or two then the world proceeded to ignore the silly hat man as usual.

So I stand by my point. The Christians who matter as far as climate change policy is concerned don't care because as far as they're concerned this world just exists for God to burn anyway.

>Jesus comes back and kills everyone who isn't Christian (and actually most Christians too)

I don't recall this part what's the reference

Are you under the impression that after the seven seals and seven trumpets and four horsemen and oceans turning to blood and earthquakes and famines and everything leading to a new Heaven and new Earth that most people will survive unscathed?

The entire thesis of Christian eschatology is that everyone who isn't Christian burns in hell. And Matthew says regarding the end times "Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."

Maybe you should read your Bible again, it's pretty clear that Heaven is meant to be a very exclusive club that even most Christians won't get into.

>"Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity."

It's in the context of describing false prophets? It makes sense.

>Heaven is meant to be a very exclusive club that even most Christians won't get into

This is just false. At least be accurate if you have a major problem with the bible? I'm not really sure this is a great context to discuss further.

I was just looking for your reference about Jesus coming back to kill all the christians. Unfair to spout these types of things without some sort of basis right?

>It's in the context of describing false prophets? It makes sense.

I see no evidence from the text that false prophets are being described. False prophets don't cast out demons and do miracles. I know the prior verse talks about false prophets (and do please give me a definition for that which doesn't encompass most Christians) but it's just an assumption on your part that this verse is exclusively talking about false prophets. False prophets don't tend to do miracles, cast out demons, and witness. These are people who seem to put in more effort than most, and are sincere in their belief.

>I was just looking for your reference about Jesus coming back to kill all the christians. Unfair to spout these types of things without some sort of basis right?

I never said Jesus was coming back to kill all the Christians, I said Jesus was coming back to kill most Christians and all of everyone else.

And that is simply and unambiguously the canon. The only point that can be argued is how many Christians are a part of the body count. It certainly isn't zero.

> These are people who seem to put in more effort than most, and are sincere in their belief.

No, check this out:

"have WE not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?"

They are not sincere in their belief. Real Christians believe and rely in Christ and His work alone. The people this verse refers to are to the end clinging to their own merit and trying to earn their salvation through their own works rather than rely on Christ's perfect work on the cross.

Saved by Grace alone through Faith alone.

> Real Christians believe and rely in Christ and His work alone. The people this verse refers to are to the end *clinging to their own merit and trying to earn their salvation through their own works* rather than rely on Christ's perfect work on the cross.

Man, this is bloody convenient innit.

"Yo, amma big piece of shit, but lets be real here, ain't gonna self correct that shit by my own merit and by doing good work!

Hell nah!

All I have to do is nothing, uh, i mean, believe in Santa for he died on the cross. That's all!"

I understand the point you're making, but the criticism underlying this childish caricature of the Christian faith is discussed extensively in the Bible in books such as Romans and James.

As someone else mentioned, you can read the book of Romans or the epistle of James to find out by yourself why this idea is absurd.

But simplified, say you have a spouse who you dearly love. And say you found out that said spouse would forgive and get over any nasty thing you did to them.

Would that mean that you'd start being evil to them just because you can?

Or would that be yet another reason to try to live up to what such a spouse deserves?

edit: Actually, I think I misunderstood your issue with what I said. To clarify, a Christian will strive to do good and be better, but knowing that we'd never be able to be good enough, and that we can only be/do good through Christ, so we never deserve or earn our salvation (hence Grace), but we put our hope in Christ (hence Faith).

Yes, yes, Christians will "strive" to do better, but never really have try that hard, because you know, it's never gonna be "good enough" anyway, therefore accept that you will do "sometimes-woops" fucked up things, and then just ask for forgiveness (but never actually do anything).

The incentive structure is set up to produce bad people.

Kind of reminds of the sight where MMA fighters brutally mash some dudes head in, and then afterwards starts praising the Lord and that only through Lord he has gotten where he is. Weirdest shit ever, and yet it's not uncommon to see it.

Imagine you have two neighboors - neighboor A and neighboor B. As they walk past you, they say hello and smile. But other than that they don't leave their house very much.

One of the neighboors prays for the humanity and wishes the best to everyone all the time.

The other neighboor fantasizes about torturing people and animals.

Now tell me, which one is neighboor A and which one is neighboor B?

That's right, you can't tell, because from any observable thing in the world, they are virtually equivalent, A is as good and as bad as B. Their inaction in the real world are virtually equivalent.

The only way you can tell who's "good" and "bad" is only and only through actions and results of their actions. Not their thoughts, best intentions or prayers. Only through their actions and results of said actions.

If they represent themselves through inaction, they are virtually equivalent - equally as bad.

Like if somebody steals your bike? Do you want (a) their forgiveness ("i wont steal again I promise") or (b) your bike back + due compensation for caused distress?

Thus - if you do and have done bad things - and you don't make up for them via direct sustained remedial action, but mere prayer and "asking for forgiveness", you're a piece of shit that deserves to burn in the deepest depths of hell.

For better or worse, this applies to so many so called "Christians".

You're right in plenty of what you're saying, that's why I'd recommend you reading Romans and James in the Bible.

But stuff like "but never really have try that hard" and "(but never actually do anything)" are your own assumptions and silly ones at that, you're putting too many people in the same bucket.

> If they represent themselves through inaction, they are virtually equivalent - equally as bad.

In regards to Neighbours A nd B, you're also right, but that's a bad scenario. Christians should thrive to lead a life that reflects the goodness of God and the grace they have received.

Some are rubbish at it, some are better and do amazing things. Same for non-Christian people, mind you.

But ultimately it comes down to: Christ died on the cross to pay for your sins. Are you going to accept that, repent, and follow Him? or are you going to disregard it?

The first option, if done from the heart, WILL bear good fruit.

> Same for non-Christian people, mind you.

Yes, but with Christians there's always some sort of thick-layer of self-serving dishonesty on top of it all.

Imagine a person goes out of his way and really helps you out in a tough situation, would you rather have it:

1. Be a person who does it out of his own volition - out of his own will and mind decided to do that - because that's the right thing to do!

2. Be a person who did it, because a book told him to do so - under a threat of violence no less (being tortured in hot lava!)

I'd always take (1) over somebody who's operating held at gunpoint (2) - threatened with torture for misbehaving.

> But ultimately it comes down to: Christ died on the cross to pay for your sins. Are you going to accept that, repent, and follow Him? or are you going to disregard it?

This is not a free choice! This is thinly veiled threat of violence!

And what happens if I "disregard it" (It being what exactly? Also - what sins?)?

Ah, yes, you get tortured in lake of fire!

The whole thing is just layers and layers of manipulative dishonesty stacked on top of each other.

> Yes, but with Christians there's always some sort of thick-layer of self-serving dishonesty on top of it all.

At this point you're just rooted in absurd prejudice, this conversation is getting nowhere.

> because that's the right thing to do!

Quick question, how do you know what's right and what's wrong? Who says helping others and doing good to others is the right thing to do? Where does that come from?

Anyway, if you think Christians operate under/from fear, you understand nothing about Christianity.

Peace.

> Quick question, how do you know what's right and what's wrong?

So, wait a minute, you've got no idea what's right or wrong - and you're incapable deriving and figuring it out on your own?

Thus, without delegating your thinking to somebody else or some book telling you what to do - you'd have no clue what's good and what's bad?

Imagine if instead of The Bible you happened to run upon a different book that says different things, like how killing the nonbelievers is right and blowing yourself up along with bunch of nonbelievers will guarantee you 10 beautiful virgins in heaven.

I mean, you don't know what's right or wrong on your own right, so you'd go ahead and do it?

See - if you can't figure out whats right or wrong on your own - without somebody else telling you (and threatening noncompliance with being burned alive or being promised immortality and goodies) - you are fundamentally incapable of being a good person, if only by accident - as running onto one book over another would completely changes your perception of "right and wrong".

It's pretty crazy if you ask me!

> this conversation is getting nowhere.

This conversation is going somewhere, it's just not going where you want it to go at all. Sorry about that!

You're making my point with your rebuttal. A lot of people think different about right and wrong, good and evil, than I or you do, and that's because they look towards different sources.

I'll assume you think cutting the hands off someone who stole something from you is wrong. But some other people think it's the right thing to do.

What? Are you simply morally superior to them? Or is it that you've received from other sources than them?

Long ago slavery was globally mainstream and accepted until 'some weirdos' pointed to the Bible and said 'Hey, maybe slavery is wrong, according to this we're all created equal under God so we should not hold slaves'.

But no, I guess If you'd been born a thousand years ago you'd just simply have the moral clarity of condemning slavery, honor killings, and other things the rest of the world was happy doing?

> So, wait a minute, you've got no idea what's right or wrong - and you're incapable deriving and figuring it out on your own?

Would this mean that good and evil as absolutes exist?

edit: By they way, you never actually answered my question. Again, how do YOU know what's right and what's wrong?

> Long ago slavery was globally mainstream and accepted until 'some weirdos' pointed to the Bible and said 'Hey, maybe slavery is wrong, according to this we're all created equal under God so we should not hold slaves'.

Bible does NOT directly condemn slavery. Kind of worse than that, in the Old Testament it accepts it and puts out rules on how slaves are to be treated. The statement that Christianity is directly responsible for - or has anything to do with abolishment of slavery is absolutely baseless.

As far as Bible is concerned, it's “pro-status quo” as far as slavery is concerned.

> I'll assume you think cutting the hands off someone who stole something from you is wrong. But some other people think it's the right thing to do.

What's right or wrong doesn't change one bit depending on what other people think or what some random book says.

The goal here is to prevent theft, recidivism and to wholly compensate damages, right?

So, if you can achieve that goal causing less damage and suffering than chopping someones hands off, then that is objectively the morally superior thing to do.

You know there's this thing called a human brain, and if you can't use it and on your own derive some sort of Negative Utilitarianism or alike as your moral framework, then you're way too stupid to be a good person.

A person who can stop doing bad only via threats of most gruesome torture and promise of immortaltity and blissful after life, and wouldn't have no clue otherwise - fundamentally can't be a good person.

Imagine you're a God and you want to create freethinking beings that have free will, but you (for some reason, huh) can't create all of them "very good" to begin with, but it's more like random process - and large amounts of people created are inadvertently "bad". (seems pretty incompetent if you ask me)

So you have no other choice, but spawn them lots of them and let them "do their thing" and then at the end of it pick out the ones act well and DO the most good, and do the least bad.

Now, if you told them that doing good will let them into "heaven" and the "bad ones" will be tortured and burned alive, you're literally incentivizing (some of the most gullible of) bad people to merely "act good" under threat of gruesome torture.

You've created fakes and pretend do goodies - the self-serving dishonest kind of so called Christians (ie. vast majority of them)

The ones that don't do bad things on their own volition and do good, because it's the right thing to do, but merely because somebody is threatening them with violence, and promise of eternal bliss.

Purely on societal level - if you can manipulate bad and stupid people to do less crime and less bad things - using nothing, but make believe threats of gruesome torture and such, that's a great brainwashing tool to have. That however doesn't turn them into "good people" that can be trusted.

> The statement that Christianity is directly responsible for - or has anything to do with abolishment of slavery is absolutely baseless.

I politely invite you to do your own research, so you don't have to take my word for it.

> What's right or wrong doesn't change one bit depending on what other people think or what some random book says.

So you do acknowledge an absolute of good and evil, right and wrong. Good. We got somewhere.

In regards to the rest, you're drastically limited by your ignorance and misunderstanding of basic Christian concepts, most probably conditioned by your radical prejudices and already formed opinions.

This conversation has become absurd in the sense that you're trying to convince me, a Christian, about what motivates me, or moves me, or about my understanding of reality and absolutes.

Keep your prejudices, you're free to decide, and you're responsible of your decisions.

You still haven't directly answered my question.

Have a good one.

> You still haven't directly answered my question.

I did actually!

> So you do acknowledge an absolute of good and evil, right and wrong. Good. We got somewhere.

It's not an absolute. "Right and wrong" exists only within framing of living beings or atleast the humans with a functional brain.

And humans who don't believe Santa and alike will derive their moral framework from simple axioms (such as pain and suffering is bad) that are universal across living beings on Earth arriving at something along the lines of Negative Utilitarianism.

> This conversation has become absurd in the sense that you're trying to convince me, a Christian, about what motivates me, or moves me, or about my understanding of reality and absolutes.

The absurd part is that you think this conversation is about you.

Not everything revolves around you. Ground breaking thought, I know.

> In regards to the rest, you're drastically limited by your ignorance and misunderstanding of basic Christian concepts, most probably conditioned by your radical prejudices and already formed opinions.

So you're attacking me instead of refuting my argument or providing a well reasoned counterpoint.

Not that I expected more from a Christian. Sigh

As one miracle is solved, another is opened.

I had the guy rocking up in his truck to spend a day doing carpentry for our AI overlords, and could not see the magic wand.

So now we have him solving the world's problems by killing everyone, apart from a few good people, so have we moved on from a magic wand to a magic wonder weapon?

We should be scared of this man coming back, not waiting patiently for thousands of years. Honestly, I try my hardest to understand it, but I see a greater chance of vast AI data centers in space due to a shortage of resources on earth.It is not going to happen.

supply side jesus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Jesus

What passes for "AI" these days hasn't successfully replaced workers doing even the most menial jobs. Several efforts have been made by massive corporations to get "AI" to take fast food orders at the drive thru and so far they've failed. While I think there are still some trials out there, "AI" hasn't managed to take humans out of that workforce and that job is so simple that literal children often do it successfully.

I don't think we have to worry about "AI" being capable of replacing electricians and carpenters any time soon and that's ignoring all the unsolved problems with the robotics.

It's nice to have sci-fi fantasies and everything, but in the real world tradespeople are going to be around for a very very long time. They won't be building data centers for that long though. This is a short term hike in demand that just isn't going to last.

Doubt we'll see electricians, plumbers or carpenters being replaced anytime soon.

Factory workers maybe but all processes have to be redesigned with design for robotic automation in mind. That will displace a lot of people and they will naturally go into the trades since the skills translate more easily so while I agree they wont be replaced there may be downward pricing pressure.

I hear China is doing a lot of this already to stave off their upcoming demographic collapse. I haven't seen raw details or videos though other than demonstration stuff (anyone have anything to share?)

“Every time you ask for another dollar in wages, a thousand more robots start looking more practical.” -Roger B. Smith (GM CEO in the 1980s).

Factories have been automating for decades. Last factory tour I took they said in 1950 this plant had over 2000 employees working, now (2019) about 200. Then he pointed to the laser cutter which alone replaced 150 workers with just 2. This factory is not considered very automated by modern standards either.

Yes I am very familiar with auto automation. They are amazing. Tesla went so overboard that maybe the ROI isn't even there for some processes (installing wheels on a car by industrial robot? They repeated the mistakes GM made in the 70s and 80s with being too early and robots being ripped out and left in the parking lots.

Already products are designed for robotic automation: reduce fasteners, make a single piece do more, make sure a blind one armed dumb person can put the thing together(thats basically the industrial single arm robots you have in factories today).

Still maybe this time is different...but to be fair I put the caveat that you must design the product from the ground up for this new kind of potential automation. (I was talking about the new bipedal vision robots not the old school industrial robot arms) What that looks like? Well the Chinese are probably cooking something up for sure and hopefully somewhere in the US its happening as well.

I think you'll be surprised about that. I'm not in the robotics field (though perhaps I should be) but at an earlier stage in life I spent several years on remodelling and building houses - as in swinging a hammer, not singing deeds and checks.

Repair/remodeling is challenging because you need (approximate) knowledge of construction techniques from across a 150 year timespan, buildings settle and change shape over time, and generally owners don't usually want the building completely gutted and rebuilt from scratch. But it's not that hard. New construction is relatively straightforward. The biggest challenges for construction robots will be handling dust/debris (25% of construction work is cleaning things up) and maintaining health and safety (of the robots themselves; self-preservation is a skill that has to be learned).

That said I don't think you'll see this with the current generation of humanoid robots. A lot of the design assumptions seem almost comically wrong to me.

Knowledge is irrelevant. Idk why you'd think dust would be a problem too, that's also comparatively trivial. Health and safety is also a good one, lol.

It all comes down to robots being unable to hold and operate anything in 3d space, much less precision tooling in arbitrary environments, which is basically what construction is. Everything in construction needs extensive planning, then to be done in the exact right order, with almost perfect precision.

The idea that you could tell a robot how you want a house remodeled and that it'd be able to go from there to actually do it is frankly asinine.

We don't have robots at all, much less humanoid ones, not even doing comparatively trivial, fixed tasks like laundry or the dishes, and you think we're going to have them manage the infinitely complex task of remodeling a house? Your mental model of robotics is completely wrong.

It's better than your reading comprehension.

Sounds like Elon months, that means a decade of safe employment at least..

More like 6 years than 6 months.

We kinda ended up with terminals connected to mainframes anyway. The terminal being the web browser, and the mainframe being SaS. So it wasn't that far off.

the network is the computer

I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. An LLM is not a human brain, and does not try to emulate one. It should not be a surprise that an LLM does not behave like a human brain. So we can not infer things either way. The best we can say is that an LLM appears to exhibit very similar behavior to a human brain, under certain constraints. So maybe we can infer that the human brain has something in it that operates in a similar way to an LLM (like the human "unconscious", or "intuition" maybe). It seems obvious to me that a human brain and an LLM are not comparable things, for many reasons. So we can not make inferrences one way or the other.

> An LLM is not a human brain,

true

> and does not try to emulate one

citation please.

something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator

I think you're right in that it has the shape but I think it's missing a pretty key piece. We still haven't been able to solve catastrophic forgetting, yet everything with a brain has. Basically LLMs seem good at approximating intelligence on a moment-to-moment basis, but feel quite far away when you chat with one over time.

Like at some level, yes, transformers are trying to emulate a human brain but the second you ask folks if they do a good job of it, I think most rationale people would say no.

> something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator

That says nothing about emulating a human brain.

is human cognition not an algorithm? is it just woo? or vibes?

But what is the shape of the algorithm of the human brain? It has a complex physical structure. We know the folds on the surface are important, but why is that shape specifically important? The brain is made up of two hemispheres - why, what does that do? There are different "types" of brain inside the human skull. There are physical areas that perform specific tasks. There are different types of neurons. Then there chemicals that interact with the brain, changing how it function depending on things happening to the body. All that stuff and more is the "algorithm" of the human brain. It's not the same algorithm as an LLM.

Why use shedlock and select-for-update-skip-locked? Shedlock stops things running in parallel (sort-of), but the other thing makes parallel processing possible.

I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return. With Amazon obviously the risk of that is low. But for many new companies the risk is very high. Therefore the payoffs are also high, to attract people to take the risk. Where I sympathize with your view is that sometimes an investment risk is taken, and the payout far exceeds the risk by any reasonable and sane margin. So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures, on the hope that the one successful one is so successful that it pays the losses of the failed ones. But yea, this system is not really working for the vast majority of people and that is a tragedy.

> you get a regular paycheck

No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.

Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.

And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.

---

The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.

1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.

2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.

In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.

They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.

> As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.

Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.

Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!

> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures

The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.

I have been an employee for 30 years across 10 jobs - one of which was Amazon from 2020-2023. I never once considered my “main source of income” my current job. My main source of income was my ability to get a job. I always stayed ready to look for a job at a moments notice and it has never taken me more than a month to get a job when I was looking.

In fact, ten days after getting my “take severance package and leave immediately or try to work through a PIP (and fail)” meeting, I had three full time offers. I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.

Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.

And equity in startups are statistically worthless and illiquid - unlike the RSUs you get in public companies that you can sell as soon as they vest.

As far as an “annuity”, you should be taking advantage that excess cash you get and saving it. But why would you want an “annuity” based on the performance of a specific company? I set my preference to “sell immediately” when my RSUs in AMZN vested and diversified.

Fortunately after the ACA, you can get insurance on the private market regardless of preexisting condition (I lost my job once before the ACA. It was a nightmare) or pay for COBRA. Remember that savings I said everyone should have?

> I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.

This is extremely unusual in general, not at all typical.

Here, on Hacker News, we have an unusually high proportion of high earners, and I'd guess a lot of FIRE people like me (and I infer, you), but the median US person has $8k, about 3 months, of savings: https://www.fool.com/money/research/average-savings-account-...

I could not guess either the income nor the savings distribution of those 14k Amazon departures. Also, reports suggest most of these people will have a chance to find a different role within Amazon.

As a former Amazon employee who lurked in the “anonymous” internal #pay-equity and the #pay-equity-discussion Slack channels, I can tell you that the typical return offer for an L4 who was a former intern was around $150K - $165K cash and stock and the average L5 was around $230K - $260K+ cash and stock per year (check my numbers on levels.fyi I might be off that was a couple of years ago).

But I have that amount in liquid cash because I’m an empty nest boomer with my wife who had a house built in 2016 in the burbs of Atlanta that I sold for twice the amount I paid for it in 2024 and downsized to a condo in Florida.

Before 2020, my only security was my ability to get a job fast.

But honestly anyone who expected loyalty from Amazon was like the old woman who took care of the snake. They should have been saving.

And I’m not at all FIRE, I’ll be realistically working until 65. Don’t cry for me. I work remotely and my wife and I travel all of the time including doing the digital nomad thing off an on where we are gone for months at a time.

Yes and when my employers - including Amazon - decided they wanted to stop putting money into my account, I didn’t stress.

I told my wife as soon as I had the meeting with my manager at Amazon back in 2023 about my “take $40K severance and leave immediately or try (and fail) to work through the PIP”. She asked me what were going to do? I said I’m going to take the $40K and we are going to the US Tennis Open as planned in three weeks. I called an old manager who didn’t have a job for me. But he threw a contract my way for a quick AWS implementation while I was still interviewing.

I doubt very seriously if my job fell out from under me tomorrow, someone wouldn’t at least offer me a short term contract quickly.

> Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.

For now, expect that to be clawed back severely over the next few years.

It’s already happening. The pay I am seeing offered now in second tier tech cities like Atlanta where I use to live are the same as they were in 2016 and haven’t kept up with inflation.

I’m having to continuously move up and closer to the “stakeholders”.

> I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:

- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.

- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA

- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools

- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.

In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.

Everything you said is true, but the relevant risk in the equation is objective risk, not relative risk.

I suppose. But in a world where upset people then act irrationally up to and including doing some murder I wonder if we start mapping burnt out individuals to a higher "cost" than their lost spending. What for example is the objective cost of Samuel Cassidy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_San_Jose_shooting#Perpetr...

yea I did not want to assume but my take here is very biased upon my locale.

Spare us your sympathy. When it's harder to terminate employees then employers are more reluctant to hire in the first place, leading to higher unemployment rates and overall slower economic growth. As a US based employee who has been laid off before (multiple times) I prefer our approach.

Oh no, not the slower economic growth!

If the choice is between propping up the economy which is built atop a delicate house of cards and is about to implode on us anyways thanks to the AI bros, or knowing that the psychotic C-suite can't fire me because he needs an extra 0.2% of profit margin to look good to investors, I'll take the latter.

Having experienced both worlds here, it's about roughly the same difficulty getting hired, except over here in NL at the end of my 1 month in which they can fire me for any reason, I get a nice little ironclad contract that provides me rights as a worker. Anyone claiming getting laid off unceremoniously is better is just coping

Also doesn’t Amazon and many other tech companies give out RSUs as part of compensation for corporate employees? Obviously not all, but the OP’s complaint is, in my view, not entirely fair to levy at Amazon specifically.

What does the R stand for?

This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.

Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.

---

In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.

You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.

Still wouldn't be close to the level of inequality we have today: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guarante...

> What does the R stand for?

Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point).

> In a society which claims that everyone is equal

No, you are making this up. Society doesn’t claim that everyone is equal. We claim you should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, which by the way our poor performance here is a criticism that I think is very valid.

Yes, Martin. All men (and women) are created equal. The purpose of that document and in that phrase is that all are created equal under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal". Those are completely different things and as you mentioned, it's a very popular (and stupid) meme which is why I responded specifically to what you wrote there.

> Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).

This sounds reasonable, as all bad ideas usually do (and good ones sometimes) but the complexity is in the implementation. If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).

Well, what do you do when your company hires over a million people? And, what do you actually distribute to the employees? Is it the market value of the company divided amongst employees? If they work for 6 months how much value do they get? How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?

There aren't easy answers to these questions. We are in fact not great as a society (and I'm not sure we should even strive to be) at assessing who did what work. And, how do you handle people who are less skilled because they were born that way? Some people just aren't capable or competent and that's a genetic fact of life. Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay? How does that work?

Your simple idea opens up a pretty nasty can of worms here without clear answers. But there is one solution - if you (or others) think that giving ownership proportional to the amount of work done is the best way to run a company, the free market is right there waiting for you to give it a go.

> under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal".

Well, gods don't exist but many people substitute them with some kind of moral system so it's not only under the eyes of the law. The second part touches upon the core of the issue IMO - whether we want equal opportunities or equal outcomes.

Equal outcomes are obviously unjust because some people put in more work, have more skill or are better in some way at some things (whether that's work or morality) and equal outcomes can only be achieved by taking from them.

Equal opportunities are much more reasonable but they too have issues - specifically what counts as an opportunity and when does it start?

- If at birth, then the society must forbid any kind of inheritance, otherwise some people are obviously massively advantaged by being born to rich parents. Even that is not enough because rich parents can afford the child a much better education and contacts. You'd literally have to take children away from parents and assign them to random families, which would probably be somewhat unpopular.

- At the beginning of a particular school enrollment or job sounds more reasonable but then people who were advantaged or disadvantaged earlier have a much better change of getting into the school or getting the job so it just adds up.

- Not to mention people who are sufficiently rich through inheritance fundamentally don't have to work, they just invest. Assuming all people need roughly the same amount of money to survive and the rest can be invested, the rich will get richer faster than the poor.

These are hard problems with no easy solutions. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to solve them, even if that means trying out ideas that can turn out bad. The alternative is increasing inequality until a collapse, a revolution or until we're back to slavery.

> the complexity is in the implementation

No shit. I didn't say it was easy. But we can start by talking about an idealized world with perfect information and what justice/fairness would look like and then make changes according to real-world constraints such as imperfect information. This has already happened to criminal law - in an ideal world, you know ow much suffering an offender has caused, how severy punishment he deserves for it, how severe punishment prevents how much crime, whether somebody is actually rehabilitated or if they'll re-offend, etc. But in the real world, there are rules about what level of proof is necessary, about what evidence is admissible, whether you can assign punishments based on risk of re-offending, etc.

With compensation, the first step would be to negotiate based on equal information (not withholding information about compensation of other employees - in the name of privacy, it could be median and variance for each position). The second step is negotiating not money-per-unit-of-work but skill level relative to other employees.

> If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).

Not necessarily. If you started it alone and worked on it for some time, that time should count towards your share. Similarly, if you invested money into it, that should also count.

> How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?

The exact details can be negotiated and various schemes should probably be experimented with at both the company and societal levels.

The point is that there should be no class divide between workers who get paid per uni of work and owners who take a cut from the income and/or can sell the company.

> Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay?

The company is still built on top of your work, your share just keeps decreasing relative to others as other people put in more and more work. This is actually something that protects founders - if you start as 1 man in a garage, then leave the company but it turns into something hugely profitable, you still keep getting a cut, just a small one.

A lot of people criticize my opinions based on risk (but incorrectly, given employees risk much more than owners - see other comments) but this actually spreads the risk around a lot. If you work for multiple companies in your life, you still have some income, unless all of them go bankrupt.

Oh and this solves the issue with privilege from inheritance to some degree - the children of workers didn't build the company, so they have no claim to a share in it.

>As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company

Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?

Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?

This drives me nuts. You move to another city, risk your livelihood on a new job that you don’t know if is gonna work out for you. Your kids go to a new school, your partner has to either move to find a new job, or make it work long distance for a while… Your whole life changes on what is essentially a bet, you have no security whatsoever. And people say the risk is not yours.

Also - and I think this is the main thing - you have NO SAY in any of it after you sign that contract. An owner DECIDES to close shop. To fire people. You risk being fired for whatever reason comes to the mind of your boss, manager, director, owner.

But yeah, no risk. No risk at all.

Then don’t do that? In 2020, when I had the “opportunity” to work at Amazon in a role that would eventually require relocating after COVID, there was no way in hell I was going to uproot my life to work for Amazon and that was after my youngest had graduated. I instead interviewed for a “permanently remote role” [sic]. If that hadn’t been available, I would have kept working local jobs for less money.

Anyone with any familiarity about tech knew or should have known what kind of shitty company Amazon was. At 46, I went in with my eyes wide open. I made my money in stock and cash and severance and kept it moving when Amazon Amazoned me. It was just my 8th job out of now 10 in 30 years.

If your a billionaire and you invest in index funds, the risk of becoming homeless is really low, sure. The system works in such a way that the more money you have the easier it is to make more money. So if your stuck at the bottom, your really stuck.

And I believe there is a huge shift of wealth going on, to a very small number of insanely rich people. And that is a very big problem.

I don't think the billionare is at risk of becoming homeless even if they invest all $10m in a single company and it goes belly up.

If being a founder/VC was truly more risky than being an employee - you'd see more homeless VC's and founders than employees, not just more millionaires - ie a spread either side.

Sure sometimes founders and angel investors take big risks - however often the money invested is other people's money!

So if you have a VC funded start up - the VC has persuaded other people to give them money they will invest on their behalf, and while there is a strong alignment with upside and VC renumeration - they still charge management fees come win or lose - and risk is spread across the fund.

Founders stock options are often aligned with VC's such that often they win with certain exit scenarios when the rank and file with ordinary options do not.

Under those scenarios I'm not sure either the VC's or the founders are really taking much more risk than the employees - as I'm not sure you see that many homeless VC's.

The real point here is that people who take the initiative ( to set up a company for example ) set the rules, and also often configure the rules to favour themselves - it's as simple as that. Isn't pretending otherwise window dressing/self-justification from people taking advantage of other people's passiveness?

Same argument applies to investors.

Isn't it the same as the house in roulette - sure each spin the house is taking risk - but if the game is structured so the odds are in your favour - you are taking less risk than the customer.

It comes down to who is setting the rules of the game.

> But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

Do such risks truly exist for modern mega corps? Do we even still think the underlying stocks of these companies trend with performance only?

Your sentiment comes from a wholly different investment era, where investing was primarily done by professionals and ETFs did not exist.

>Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes.

Sounds like company towns, which were derided for other reasons.

If there is water ice there, as suspected, it is the most realistic path to a self sustaining space economy. If you can earn money in space, there is a reason for people to work in space, and you can extend the economy into space.

I think the conversation needs to change from "can't run software of our choice" to "can't participate in society without an apple or google account". I have been living with a de-googled android phone for a number of years, and it is getting harder and harder, while at the same time operating without certain "apps" is becoming more difficult.

For example, by bank (abn amro) still allows online banking on desktop via a physical auth device, but they are actively pushing for login only via their app. I called their support line for a lost card, and had to go through to second level support because I didn't have the app. If they get their way, eventually an apple or google account will be mandatory to have a bank account with them.

My kid goes to a school that outsourced all communication via an app. They have a web version, but it's barely usable. The app doesn't run without certain google libs installed. Again, to participate in school communication about my kid effectively requires an apple or google account.

I feel like the conversation we should be having is that we are sleepwalking into a world where to participate in society you must have an account with either apple or google. If you decide you don't want a relationship with either of those companies you will be extremely disadvantaged.

> If you decide you don't want a relationship with either of those companies you will be extremely disadvantaged.

Even more worrying is the inverse of this - if Google and/or Apple decide for whatever reason they don't want a relationship with you (aka they ban you for no reason) - you are completely screwed

Even if they ban you for a reason, you're screwed. Granted, the ban may have been warranted, but you're essentially put into a societal prison with no due process or recourse.

That is a great analogy. There are countries where a police can throw you into a lifetime jail with zero option for justice unless you are a famous person from a well known western country.

Those countries are North Korea, Iran, Russia, Google and Apple.

Well the US can do it with CBP/ICE, but not for life. I was placed in a jail without being arrested or being accused of a crime and they were very clear at all times I was not even arrested, nor did a federal criminal history search show any record of arrest. No access to lawyer either.

US Citizen. Contacted lawyers, all informed me they'd given up trying to sue for these things because it's hopeless.

You should contact IJ. They recently took up a case like this.

https://ij.org/press-release/us-citizen-and-army-veteran-sub...

Looks like the statute of limitations has ran out.

I typed up a ~100 page document with very thorough records of the retroactive warrant, what happened, and medical records to try and hold at least the "medical care providers" accountable but the board determined that the medical care providers were performing a (warrantless) law enforcement search and not medical care so their license wasn't in jeapordy. Not sure how they determined this since they were in no way deputized nor were they employed by the government, and in fact I was personally being billed for it.

The CBP argued the opposite, that medical care was rendered and not a search so CBP was not liable for extending the ~12 hours during which they "detained" me with no evidence. CBP argued they held me for my own safety because I could die of non-existent drugs.

The challenges to this have all failed (see Ashley Cervantes, basically identical legal facts) so it seems the courts are pretty satisfied with the catch-22 of any challenges of the criminal aspect to be ruled as medical care (thus unchallengables) and then any challenge of the medical care to be ruled as a detainment for a criminal search (thus unchallengable).

Assuming what you're saying is true, this is the kind of thing 2A was written for. I don't mean for you personally, but for society it's really the last line of defense against a rogue government. But, even if your story is totally made up it's completely believable. Scary times.

2A might have been written hundreds of years ago but it is now an instrument to sell guns. no amount of guns you buy will help you against rogue government

Hard disagree. Guerilla resistance has proven itself surprisingly effective against modern militaries. Multiply that by a military which would be going to war against its own citizens and you have a very uncertain situation.

Yes, if the military was targeting you individually you'd almost certainly be fucked. But a guerilla resistance spread out over a continent would be very difficult to eradicate. Just look at Afghanistan.

I think there are enough stories of armed religious groups raided by three letter agencies to prove otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

Apples and elephants. I'm talking about a double digit percentage of the population fighting a guerilla resistance against a rogue state and you link me to like 50 guys in a house that's surrounded.

the only thing you might get double digit percentage of population to do is like a picture on insta :)

lol, rebuttal https://youtu.be/WOSqCjMRXWA

> Just look at Afghanistan.

Not if the supreme court wouldn't enforce it!

The Supreme Court does not enforce laws.

how long were you in jail? How did you get out?

~12 hours in jail, a few hours shackled in prisoner transport vans, and then ~12 hours in cuffs at a couple different hospitals hospital (where I was touched by health care professionals without my consent and without a warrant) while they waited for signs of non-existent "drugs." Shortly before I was released they served me retroactive search warrant, signed by a judge after it happened, using made-up PC that did not even state the name of the person or animal they claim prompted it.

I was released after an HSI guy showed up, took a quick look at me, decided I wasn't a terrorist or whatever, served me the retroactive warrant, and then I was sent on a prisoner transport van to be dumped at the border with my all my shit (including my shoelaces) in a plastic bag.

For the hospital part I was sent a ~$1k bill, which is still in collections.

The 100 miles "border zone" is where all this can occur. It's a very contentious issue (considering 2/3rds of the pouplation and cities are within the zone).

The ACLU is very interested in this issue on 4th Amendment grounds but they have not had much luck with it in the last decade. Lots of cases but it's still not a settled issue.

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone

>to be dumped at the border

does this mean you were originally on your way into the US and that's where they nabbed you, and then when they finished with you they took you back to where they picked you up?

i'm not here to debate or defend in either direction, i don't know enough about any of it, but i believe that i have heard from a lawyer podcast that whether you are a US citizen who is entitled to enter or not, the rules (including your bill of rights status) are different "at the border" because you are not in the US yet

US citizen, re-read the previous post. But great that we're now assuming "well they must have good reason for violating due process."

But that's the whole damn reason for due process. This shot.

The press did an almost identical story for Ashley Cervantes, who had almost the same thing happen, except she was digitally (finger) raped by doctors as part of the process and was a young barely adult ~poor woman vulnerable minority so way way more public sympathy for her vs me (I'm a middle class white native English speaking boring white boy with a hick accent so basically at the bottom of the interest at ACLU, they do occasionally feature some people that have had it happen if they have sympathetic backgrounds).

Nothing changed. Same port of entry, same hospital network, same everything (I don't think she was jailed like me though). Lawsuit failed and public press did nothing. Later the ACLU won some kind of suit that forced all involved parties to be warned, which they promptly ignored, and that was the end of it.

https://www.southernborder.org/woman-suing-border-patrol-ove...

https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/woman-sues-cbp-over-bo...

> I'm a middle class white native English speaking boring white boy with a hick accent so basically at the bottom of the interest at ACLU

This in itself should be shocking to us

I looked at the final motion to dismiss document and boy did she get bad legal advice. The lawyer tried a Bivens case against the hospital... which any lawyer will tell you is an impossibility. Bivens cases are just about impossible to win under any circumstances, but trying to do a Bivens against a non-federal officer is a guaranteed loss.

To have won this case against the agents would have required piercing qualified immunity which is very tough (you have to prove intentional misconduct... just being incompetent isn't enough in most cases).

She would have been better off pursuing a medical malpractice case against the hospital and/or doctor to be able to get any kind of relief.

> I'm a middle class white native English speaking boring white boy with a hick accent so basically at the bottom of the interest at ACLU

I would assume they would be jumping at a few of these cases too, as a) it may be easier to bypass any ingrained bias in the system if you aren't necessarily matching people there may be bias against, and b) establishing case law is important for changing ambiguous legal situations.

Are you assuming they wouldn't be interested or did they communicate that they weren't interested?

Very similar stuff has been in the press often this year. Everyone mostly forgets each case after a couple of weeks (did that end up being a real gang tattoo or not?, etc.).

I think my case might have gotten picked up by someone if it happened under Trump or close enough it would have still been under the statute of limitations. There wasn't much interest in immigration law under Biden, lately IJ and others have become interested in defending CBP/ICE overreach.

Try abrego garcia. Illegally detained. Now he's got a whole criminal conspiracy built around him with no independently verifiable evidence.

First of all - add Israel. If you're a Gazan than this goes without saying, but even if you're a citizen, then - the General Security Service can and does people into custody without a warrant; often does not publicly disclose or admit said custody; and has "secret" detention facilities to hold such people (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_1391)

I also wonder about the US: What about the secret imprisonment mechanisms it set up after the 2001 attacks on the twin towers (9/11)? Were those ever dis-established?

The US has done just that to Abrego Garcia, and is now giving him the choice between confessing to a crime that he hasn't been convicted of (and likely didn't commit) and deportation to a country he has never been in.

Abrego Garcia has attorneys working his case through the US justice system. That is a key factor that the other entities lack.

He has already been illegally disappeared to El Salvador, despite theoretically having access to a lawyer. It took a national story for him to be brought back, only to get threatened by the exact same thing.

Lawyers only matter if the people with the guns think they should be bound by the law.

Very true. They are effectively a new type of non-territorial state with absolutely no separation of powers or rule of law or principle of proportionality.

What makes this difficult though is that they are under constant attack from highly organised and automated criminal operations that create and exploit accounts en masse.

Any solution to the tyrannical state of affairs we are subjected to (even more so as developers) needs to balance better protections for real people (including as you say for people who have committed some transgressions) with fighting organised crime.

It's also used by the actual territorial state to project power through corporations, by influencing them to project their policies. I'm reminded of the story of the guy that had his google account shut down for "CSAM" because they took explicit medical pictures of their child at the directions of physicians, that were only privately shared solely for the purpose of aiding diagnosis. Apparently google works with the government to create these systems to scan your cloud images in the background.

Yes, I think governments love centralisation of control in very few hands. It gives them far greater powers than they would otherwise have, both technically and legally.

"Harmful" content has significant overlap with freedom of speech, so governments find it hard to ban directly. But when there's a big corporation facilitating access to that content, then it becomes a clear case of "evil capitalist profiting from harmful content - corporations need to take responsibility!".

When a government doesn't like end-to-end encrypted photos and cloud drives, all they have to do is issue a secret order telling Apple to disable it.

And when people find workarounds for intrusive and insecure age verification methods, what's better than a total sideloading ban to regain control?

> governments love centralisation of control in very few hands

Honestly, that was one of the things that shocked me about the Digital Markets Act in the EU. It gives them less power over their citizens, not more. (Of course, they also passed the Digital Services Act around the same time, and now they're looking at age verification and breaking E2EE, so I guess they figured they had to balance things out...)

I think these are separate initiatives by different parts of EU agencies and national governments. The markets and competition crowd does not coordinate at all with the law enforcement and security people.

I don't mind this being a bit chaotic. At least it shows that there are trade-offs.

Yes, I am feeling like technology is being used as a authoritarian trap.

Always has been... pertinent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

IBM in Nazi Germany was no different from other German owned companies in being conscripted to do what the Third Reich ordered them to; the headquarters in the US obviously had no control over them during WW2.

Plus it's ridiculous to apply collective guilt in any form by blaming later IBM management, given that anyone involved with 1940s German IBM is long dead by now.

The original post is about technology being used for authoritarian purposes. I used Dehomag (IBMs German subsidiary) as an example of how technology has been used to support that supposition as a historical example (I could have picked many).

Your post does not repudiate the parent post, nor my post.

Can you explain a bit more? As far as I was aware, Alex Jones was found guilty by a court of law.

I didn't really follow his case or anything about him though. Did he get banned from Google/Apple for no reason?

He was a high profile case of social media coordinated banning. Not just one platform but many and it wasn't about court orders at the time but simply the vague "policy" which we know gets applied selectively.

The particularly interesting thing was that the sentiment of unpersoning someone online and "one service banning you" being a good reason for others to do so, was used by politicians later on to suggest more proactive unpersoning of different government critics which, they obviously called conspiracy theorists. Obviously different politicians call for the ban of people from opposing political parties, so it's not something about a specific party or political compass quadrant, as much as people want it to be.

This was sometime after Trump's election, when the "all out war" on the US political landscape was happening.

You could probably find numerous less extreme and easier to defend cases, where people get banned from one or many linked services, with no recourse but the Jones one was one of or maybe the first high profile one across several sites.

It's very easy to think that these powers will only be used at someone we dislike or find politically abhorrent but it will always point back to us, the moment we are the nuisance, no matter if it's because we are against the new freedom (TM) war or "save the children" civil encroachment.

I would argue that social media banning is much different than Google/Apple banning. If I got banned from Facebook or reddit or even HN then I'm not really missing out on much. Of course, for people who actually do business on these platforms, like Jones, then it sucks to lose a platform, but I don't think anyone has a fundamental right to post whatever they want on these platforms.

If I got banned from Google, then almost 20 years of emails, 1TB of files on Google Drive, are gone. Many of the services I use that use email as a second factor, I'd be locked out of. (And before you ask, yes, I use an authenticator whenever I can, but for some reason some services decide to still only let me use email as a second factor). If I forgot my password at any site, can't reset it. Not to mention that I can't use my Android phone out of the box without installing custom de-Googled firmware.

I suppose the same argument could be made that I don't have a fundamental right to use Gmails mail servers, but as I pointed out above, it is more than just an inconvenience, it could actively be harmful to my digital life, because Google has its hands on almost all things digital.

I don't understand : in my experience it's still much easier to set up another email account than to deal with authenticator requirements, where you might be forced to use Google's Authenticator ?

If Gmail blocks me from making an account, I could use Yahoo mail or whatever, for email. But Gmail is more than just email. It's an entire identity. I can't use an android phone out of the box without a Google account. I ~bought~ licensed some movies from YouTube and those would just go poof. All the sites I used Sign in With Google would essentially be lost to me since I can't use that Google account.

The logical answer might be to just not use Sign in with Google but some services don't even let you use username/PW, it's sign in with Google/apple/Github etc.

Well yes, but that's partially on you − I might understand your average person not being wary about these issues, but we're on Hacker News here, these issues have been discussed for decades.

The sites also shouldn't be 'lost', don't they have a way to register another kind of login from the same one ? And you can always make a new, platform-free account − better do that sooner than later !

Please name and shame the websites (like Advent of Code and Rebble) that only allow a login through platforms. And services that only allow Google Authenticator.

You're missing the point. You get banned in coordination.

> I don't think anyone has a fundamental right to post whatever they want on these platforms.

You don't have a right to anything if you fall for the bullshit of "they are private companies".

These private companies exert tremendous power and are also an arm of the government when the government wants it. The government uses them to censor things and hides the hand. It was very obvious before different US elections and during covid policies authoritianismathon.

> I suppose the same argument could be made that I don't have a fundamental right to use Gmails mail servers, but as I pointed out above, it is more than just an inconvenience, it could actively be harmful to my digital life, because Google has its hands on almost all things digital.

So you get my point but want to hiper focus on your exact circumstances. There's no need. Think of the worst case scenario and fight to protect yourself and others from that. Don't support it when it's "the bad guy getting the stick".

"Alex Jones"

Lol.

This happens already in dating apps. https://www.vice.com/en/article/banned-from-dating-apps/

Date didn't go as well as the other person was hoping? They can report you to the app, some tired and overworked support person in an emerging market bans you, they keep whatever cash you already spent on bonus likes and your multi-month subscription, no refunds.

And you can never sign up from the same Google/Apple account, the same phone, and with the same face, because of course now you have to verify your biometric information with some of these apps (Bumble is introducing submitting your id or taking verification photos).

Or their AI misfires and deems you as having said something inappropriate, again, off you go. You have no recourse, hope you know someone who works at that company who can flip the bit in their database.

Want to know the reason why they banned you? Sorry, that's sensitive information, you will never know, only that you "violated the terms of service". Which one? Sorry, we can't tell you, goodbye.

Oh, now 60% of society meets through datings apps? Too bad, you don't get to anymore, shouldn't have violated our terms of service. Oh, and most of these apps are run by the same company, so you get banned on one, you likely get banned from all on them at once. Have fun.

I was insta shadowbanned on Tinder after I went through the registration on my network which exits via VPN and blocks spyware domains via adguard.

I think this is the thing we need to change most. These big companies effectively have as much power as courts to break your life, but no transparency, oversight, appeals process or even a clear process in some cases. They can destroy a person or a small business without even noticing.

And just think, how people could stop using so many of their services. Say, not use GMail mailboxes and go for other providers. It's like most of us are actively putting ourselves in their prisons every day.

> Even more worrying

This is untrue.

It's a case of A leads to B and B requires A.

The most common antidote to anti-consumer behavior like this, is for the established parties to pull a dumb stunt and for competitor to eat their lunch.

If you can't bank without Google or Apple, all competition is dead on arrival.

If we have to politik the deplatforming rules of companies because they've taken complete control of the gates, we're doing the wrong politiking at the wrong place.

The only solution I see is some decentralized way of governing. And even if this gains mass support, I still forsee some centralized way of how rules are enforced that can also cut off your relationship as well. Efficiency v.s privacy tradeoff I guess.

from an incredibly trivial perspective I was thinking about this recently when I discovered all games operate as saas products now, if for whatever reason you're banned then you can no longer play the product you purchased, what happened to third party mplayer servers?

Not all games. The options are ridiculously more diverse there than for smartphone OSes or even for social media.

I have to unlock my apple id on a daily basis "To continue to use facetime"

It's esentially boolean social scoring, just think about it.

Say, if you're blacklisted by a fascist government, for example. Tim Cook's pledge of loyalty was disturbing on many levels.