I believe the point was more that Germany can accept lots of immigrants being a large country, and freedom of movement will allow them inside all countries, which can lead to backlash.
> Berlin can basically dictate EU immigration single handedly
That's what I was responding to.
Note the UK left the EU and accepted more immigrants than before. We didn't force them. Hungary and Poland never accepted Syrian immigrants either and they weren't forced to accept them iirc.
The cleaning lady at SpaceX doesn't do a better job than that at Walmart. So why should she be paid more?
You think she's doing the heavy lifting there? Creating the billions? While the underperformer at VideoBuster / Radio Shack is responsible for tanking the business? That's just not true.
If you think they were commenting on physical labor your reading comprehension is poor. The example job could have been a “non physical” job, say the hallway CCTV monitor, and made the same point.
Their point is that labor they consider low impact or menial doesn’t drive returns, and therefore shouldn’t share in the returns. You’re right that the labor being physical is incidental, really they’re just classist/elitist and any job they consider beneath them would fit this model, while others wouldn’t. There’s a reason they chose a cleaner (and a woman!) instead of a product manager or CPA, though the quality is also unlikely to differ between spaceX and Walmart there.
Speaking of reading comprehension, they didn’t address the core argument of the person they were responding to, which is that labor that falls “beneath the fold” of this class line is not able to negotiate aggressively due to the inelastic costs of food, shelter, and basic necessities. It doesn’t matter how “high impact” you are, if you’re negotiating and need to eat you’ll accept any amount that lets you eat.
In fact, having impact or driving revenue is never the most important factor to reaping the rewards. Anyone who’s worked for a few years with their eyes open should reach this conclusion unless they have some strong motivation not to.
> which is that labor that falls “beneath the fold” of this class line is not able to negotiate aggressively due to the inelastic costs of food, shelter, and basic necessities.
Not to mention the U.S. encourages organization of the capitalist class while breaking up (often by force) organization of the working class, so any attempt at the working class gaining leverage in this negotiation is artificially limited.
Elon Musk easily earned the billions for SpaceX. It's providing space internet to Ukraine, an innocent democracy that's under attack. The technological feats of rocket reuse and the vision of Mars don't even matter, insofar as they're just tools to attract the capital. Any other method that supports Ukraine just as well would have also been worth a billion.
Patriot interceptors cost many millions, so 100-200 are already worth a billion! Is SpaceX internet worth 200 Patriot missiles? Easily.
I think politicians restrict "earning" to "wage income", which is kind of an arbitrary line in the sand, and would also be untrue. SpaceX/Tesla would also have paid Musk billions in cash if stock wasn't allowed.
It instructs me to rotate my phone. The pasture doesn't get any bigger, but now the top bar blocks half the screen. The tooltip about rotating stays in the middle of the screen. Unplayable. There's a music note indicating sound, but I never heard the dog bark.
It's exactly the kind of unpolished slop I expected it to be.
If we're speaking realistically and not idealistically, then the primary point of a degree is as an investment in a job market. You go deep in debt with the aim of getting many times what you invest in return. But in the case of a bad job market, you're investing serious money (especially in modern times) for what may not ultimately pay off. And even if LLMs don't reach their viable potential, they're still likely going to significantly depress wages/employment for many forms of knowledge work, making a degree even less valuable.
I went to a top 10 university, but won't be encouraging my children to go to university at all, nor will I strongly discourage them. But I will make it clear that it is a choice with pros and cons, and in modern times I personally think that the cons outweigh the pros. Of course if they want to do some form of engineering then it will probably be necessary, but there's lots of wild careers like underwater welding that make big $$$, are fun/physical, highly skilled, and you get paid to learn instead of going 6 figures in debt before you even enter the job market. And it's something that will always be needed, everywhere, and isn't going anywhere.
And the reality of life is, like the article says - where you start is not where you end. Once you get your foot in the door pretty much anywhere, your formal title often quickly becomes much less relevant than the skills you have.
Only around 1% or less of graduates from top schools (the Ivy League, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc) end up with 6 figures of debt. In the Ivy League about 80% graduate with no debt. At top non-Ivy League schools average debt ranges from about $13k (MIT) to around $30k (CMU).
Even when you expand to include all schools instead of just top schools, 6 figure debt is rare. Average is about $27k for public universities, $34k for private non-profit universities, and $40k for private for-profit schools.
If someone has 6 figure debt from school they odds are overwhelming that it is from law school or medical school.
I wonder how many excellent students from non-rich families who could easily get into a top school for low cost or even free don't even bother applying because they have heard that myth of widespread 6 figure debt?
Those numbers are wrong. Here [1] are the latest data from the government. The average debt is $40k across all borrowers for Federal loans. Federal loans are about 90% of all loans, so you can easily bump that up to $45-$50k after also factoring in private loans. And most of that lending is done at predatory rates, even from the government, with the average well above 6% for undergraduate loans, and significantly higher for loans beyond that. So you're looking at $45k debt with compounding interest at 6%+ rates in the average case. And the average case is obviously not people going to higher end and more desirable institutions, where the degree is going to be much more valuable, but the debt is going to be much higher.
The reason debt is low at the most elite institutions is in part because the student body comes from disproportionately wealthy families and in part because most/all of these schools offer tuition free learning and other non-loan assistance for students from "low-income" families. At MIT "low-income" is defined as less than $200k. Any student who's viably able to be accepted to such institutions would be well aware of such things, but 99% aren't - so it's largely just as irrelevant as their debt figures.
Not if the baseline assumption is that the value of a degree continues to go down and you could've climbed the ranks of plumbing instead of getting a white collar degree.
Imagine sanctions killing a million civilians due to insufficient medical care. Imagine firebombing Tokyo. Imagine dropping a nuclear bomb on a city full of civilians. Imagine genociding Palestinians. Imagine bombing a girl's school, killing hundreds.
Who's responsible, AI or a human? That misses the point that noone seems to be responsible at all, even in democracies.
What I love about operator overloading is that now you can't use operators without looking at their definition, in which case.. you could have done numpy.equals(a, b) anyway.
Does a == b true, if all elements are the same? Does it return an array of booleans? It's anyone's guess!
The function call approach can be a lot less readable.
Consider using Shamir secret sharing to share a secret, D, among several people with two people required to recover the secret. D is a positive integer, such as a randomly generated 128 bit AES key you are using to encrypt your launch codes or credit card database.
For anyone not familiar with Shamir secret sharing what you do is pick a prime number, p, that is larger than D and another random positive integer A, that is less than p. Then give each person a pair of numbers, (i, (Ai + D) % p), where each person gets a different i (which should be a positive integer less than p...it is OK to simply use 1, 2, 3, ...). Let's let Di = (Ai + D) % p.
(This is for the case where you want any two people to be able to launch your missiles or decrypt your database. If you wanted 3 required instead of giving out (i, (Ai + D) % p) you would give out (i, (Bi^2 + Ai + D) % p) where B is a randomly chosen positive integer less than p. For 4 required add on a Ci^3 term, and so on).
Given (i, Di) and (j, Dj) and p it is possible to recover A and D.
Here's what that looks like in a language where the big int library uses an accumulator style, i.e., operations are of the form X = X op Y, where the ops are methods on the big int objects. Assume Bi and Bj are big int objects initialized from i and j, and Di and Dj are already big into objects, as is p. This particular example is using Perl. (This is very old code. Since 2002 you can add a "use bigint" pragma to Perl code and then it would look a lot more like the second Python example below).
my $A = $Dj->copy()->bsub($Di); # Dj-Di
$Di->bmul($Bj); # j*Di
$Dj->bmul($Bi); # i*Dj
$Di->bsub($Dj); # j*Di-i*Dj
$Bj->bsub($Bi); # j-i
$Bj->bmodinv($p); # (j-i)'
$Di->bmul($Bj); # (j*Di-i*Dj)*(j-i)'
$Di->bmod($p); # (j*Di-i*Dj)*(j-i)' mod p
$A->bmul($Bj); # (Dj-Di)*(j-i)'
$A->bmod($P); # (Dj-Di)*(j-i)' mod p
At this point, the recovered A is in $A and the recovered D is in $Di
Here's what it looks like in a language with the ops as function calls taking the big int objects as arguments. This example is Python without using operator overloading.
import operator as op
def recover(i, j, Di, Dj, p):
j_i_inv = pow(op.sub(j, i), -1, p)
A = op.mod(op.mul(op.sub(Dj, Di), j_i_inv), p)
D = op.mod(op.mul(op.sub(mul(j, Di), op.mul(i, Dj)), j_i_inv), p)
return A, D
Probably more readable than accumulator style. Here it is in Python using its built-in operator overloading for big ints:
def recover(i, j, Di, Dj, p):
j_i_inv = pow(j-i, -1, p)
A = ((Dj - Di) * j-i_inv ) % p
D = ((j*Di - i*Dj) * j_i_inv) % p
return A, D
I'd sure rather come across that than either of the earlier examples.
OT: this reminds me of something I started to do once but never finished. I was going to write for each language we used at work that had a big int library but that did not support operator overloading a class that implemented a big int RPN calculator. Java, for example. Then recover would look something like this:
calc = new BigRPNCalc();
calc.do(j, i, "-", p, "modinv dup");
calc.do(Dj, Di, "- *", p, "mod swap");
calc.do(j, Di, "*", i, Dj. "* - *", p, "mod");
D = calc.pop();
A = calc.pop();
But I never ended up needing big ints in any of those languages so never really got past some initial design work.
Five different type-checkers and even type-checking projects think adding multiple "ignores" is sound code. Typescript would allow overloads without ignores, for example.
You get bonus points for commuting across the German border and utilizing our cheap prices. Don't forget to get the value-added tax refunded!
reply