Typing this out made me realize a distinction I failed to bring up. People do like to learn, but people HATE to UN-learn ideas. The person in your example wanted to learn something new, but did not want to unlearn the iphone walled garden.

This is an excellent point. You’re right, we do agree, sorry my comment came off aggressive.

Answering a question with a question is pretty shitty.

They made a statement. You responded with leading questions that implied the statement is factually incorrect. The premise of your questions was also incorrect - the previous administration opposed the protests, but they did not send federal agents after protesters for arrests or deportations. Unlike the current administration.

Rather than answer (mis)leading questions, OP responded with questions to force you to explicitly answer whether their original statement is incorrect. Did Harris do this? Would Harris have done this? They’re fair questions. But I guess only you get to ask questions around here.

Flashbacks to hours writing macros, mods, and scripts so that you could spend less time doing the things you paid a company to let you do for “fun”

I’ve just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous. (Edit: leaving this comment unchanged for the sake of clarity, but apologies for the aggression)

Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.

Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.

There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn’t easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don’t do that nearly as much, even though they could.

Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They’ve just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There’s just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.

Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they’re being deceived into thinking they’re learning at all.

Eh, like almost everything else in human experience it initially started because of daylight and agriculture. Hunters and gatherers had fluid schedules, but farms had strict requirements. Without electricity and with a life built around plants and animals, everyone just has to work when the suns up. With most of the population involved in agriculture and not much else, you’re right - you either woke up or you died.

Then candles, gas lamps, and eventually electric lights opened up the darkness for meaningful work, while agricultural technology slowly pushed workers out to other fields (heh).

But out of necessity the hours for schools and markets were originally built around the hours of the fields, and it just stuck.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I think morning people are playing a hand in perpetuating this issue. They probably get to keep deciding the rules because they keep showing up before us, all energized and efficient and judging us for showing up late or tired. Or something.

But I would be curious to see if any studies have checked if there’s a correlation between sociopathy/narcissism and sleep phases, I’ll take a look. Or maybe they’re just signalling that they’re early risers as a way of feeling superior to the rest of us.

Just interesting because even non tech people want this when you sell it to them properly. They don’t actually want a walled garden ecosystem that is “simple”.

Nobody actually wants a walled garden, they just get entrapped in them (“it’s just where my friends/music/content creators are”)

They then become convinced that they want it, and its reinforced by the walled gardeners (looking at you, iMessage videos and bubbles)

I know a person who built their own PC (Windows, but still) from scratch for the first time as an adult. Had the money and the opportunity to buy a prebuilt rig in two clicks, but instead researched the market, ordered parts and tools, exchanged a part that didn’t fit the case, learned how to assemble it all by hand, and exclaimed that it was a great experience and would do it all over again.

And yet at every opportunity still buys an iphone despite the cost because it’s “simple” and they “don’t want to learn” something new. That’s not the actual reason - that’s just stockholm syndrome.

It’s genuinely insane how many people keep thinking and saying this nonsense. Identity politics are a reason Republicans won but they are NOT the reason Democrats lost.

If anything they lose every battle on identity politics because they keep ceding ground to the right wing. If they bit BACK - if they called a spade a spade, if they called out bigotry and actually supported and amplified minority voices - they would get more support. Not less.

It’s becoming mainstream again to be outright homophobic and that’s only possible because democrats insist on civility, “focusing elsewhere” and allowing right-wing assholes to run the conversation.

Don’t get me wrong - economics is ultimately the true make-or-break for the country and the world - but abandoning allies and friends is a losing strategy. The less empathetic and open-minded the populace, the less likely they are to support any meaningful economic progress.

I don’t know if you know how education works, but it takes time lol. But more importantly, they’re beating countries that do invest much more heavily in education. They’re beating everyone.

Like, sure. Yes. We agree. We should invest more in education for a lot of reasons… but guess what? Chip fabrication on their level isn’t a college course, it’s cutting edge institutional knowledge. They are the best of the best in chip fabrication right now. And if you want to provide Americans with the best education, you bring over the best of the best in the field, no?

Lmfao what is this conversation? Seriously, what is this with calling me a eugenicist? You really need to go actually learn about the topic at hand. The “chance and circumstance” isn’t birth or genetics lol it’s, like, the chance of Einstein being bored at the patent office.

Chip fabrication is literally the place where global market forces are actively working to cut corners on the fundamental structure of reality. These people shave off nanometers between semiconductors while stopping electrons from hopping the gap between one atom to another. You can’t just “hard work” past them. They’re not like “naturally” better, they’re just currently winning a very challenging race, and it will take time for anyone else to catch up.

Eugenics themed? Lmfao what?

I’m not saying they’re naturally smarter than other people lol. It has nothing to do with genetics. The answer to “why are they winning the race” isn’t simple, and the answer to “how can the US surpass them” could fill a novel and still not provide a clear answer. They’re beating everyone, not just America, and a lot of it comes down to chance and circumstance.

For the same reason the world believes it - because its true. They are the cutting edge. Other engineers can take over in the same way that other scientists could have taken over the Apollo program. It’s possible, but it takes time, money, effort, and luck, and in the meantime the other nation(s) will land on the moon first.

All of the other companies are actively trying to beat TSMC and losing. Computer chips are the rocket engines of the digital age.

Nah. I get it, but no.

We have people here who can do this work

This is the one thing you keep missing. We don’t have people here who can do the work. Straight up. All the big players send their engineers to learn from TSMC for a reason. Of all the labor, of all the capital, these people are the exceptions to every rule.

Capitalists went to extreme lengths to win the nuclear arms race. They will go to the same lengths to keep winning the digital arms race too. These engineers will never be billionaires on their brains alone - because you’re right, they do not own the capital - but they do have a significantly higher value than any other laborers in the eyes of capitalists and therefore will never be deported to a rival.

Lol again, they’re not labor. They don’t have anything to do with the traditional capitalist-labor relationships. I am well aware of the reality you describe and I can still tell you, it doesn’t apply here. Cutting edge chipmakers are the golden goose of the digital age. For best reference, see anything about the US’ extreme efforts in collecting rocket scientists after world war 2. Capitalists know a golden goose when they see one.

… You really do not understand the nature of the game that’s being played here, and that’s okay. Feel free to keep thinking of world-class scientists as nothing more than indentured servants. Again, extremely xenophobic to dismiss their intelligence and personal volition, as if they’re just slaves waiting for america to import them.

So many issues here. I’m sorry but you deeply misunderstand a lot of things about chip manufacturing.

These really, really, really are not laborers. They have nothing to do with labor. These engineers are effectively the same level of cutting edge as the scientists the US picked up after WW2. They are literally national resources - valuable pieces on the international game board.

No, they don’t get deported to economic rivals. Ever. They are not cheap labor. They are line-item assets in the military-industrial complex.

H1B recipients are horribly abused, true. But that’s because they’re used the way capitalism uses everyone it considers replaceable - grind them down and move onto the next. Doesn’t apply to - again - the literally best-on-the-planet engineers. They’re not coding for Xitter, they can walk at any time and find employment and visas elsewhere.

cheap indentured labor from Taiwan

The extremely well-paid and literally best-on-the-planet chip manufacturers? The highly skilled engineers with years of education and expertise, who continuously outpace the achievements of much larger companies and nations? The ones who work in a narrow field that doesn’t actually matter for jobs reports, because they’re such a small group of experts and the real gain in jobs for the economy would be the labor involved in building the fabs for them?

Calling them “cheap indentured labor” is just casual xenophobia.

The buck doesn’t start and stop inside the treasury. Most of this money was going somewhere, and people can fact check things like the actual terms of government contracts, past expenditures, congressional budgets, etc.

The real problem - as is always the case in this Age of Disinformation - is that the process of verifying facts takes time, while the process of producing lies is instant and constant.

They also intentionally frame a really bad thing as a “good” thing. The situation here is not that the “rich” run the economy - it’s that everyone else is being priced out of the economy by wage stagnation and rising costs of living.

The alternate headline here is “wealth inequality surges, 90% of Americans now account for only 50% of consumer spending”

Or

“1 in 10 Americans spending as much as the other 9 combined, while 3 of them live paycheck to paycheck”

People earning 6 digits a year are still one bad accident or diagnosis away from losing their jobs and living in poverty. They’re not the root problem or the solution to the economy, and this article is trying to paint them as both.

Instead we need to acknowledge that the people “earning” 8-10 digits per year are extracting and hoarding that money away from the 90% of Americans who would otherwise be spending it in ways that would actually improve the economy.

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