demorro

I would be interested to hear of any in my nation that would have me, seems like quite an ask to allow a stranger to join your community when they bring little of value. That's not to mention whether it's legal or not, which I suspect it is not, planning laws are rather strict.

I do not believe I could move to another nation without employment or family relations legally.

We cannot pull together because even pooling all our resources, we could not afford to purchase the land nor the means of survival for ourselves and our families.

> These days, anyone can get a free K-12 education, and then loans for college. Generational wealth is not required.

Our system is based around competition, where advantage compounds. How do you square this circle? In the case of two identical people, one burdened with student loans and one not, the one without the burden will win in the market due to being able to allocate more capital.

Amortized over a large population, this creates a systemic effect where those privileged with generational wealth will tend to be over-represented in the set of "winners" the system produces. This seems irrefutable to me. Obviously there will be anecdotes of exceptions, as there will be in any amortized system.

Because she believes that the economy is closer to zero sum than you do. One person having a lot means another person has less, not just in terms of material distribution either, but also the distribution of power.

It is rather strange to have a system where the problem is lots of people don't have access to material goods and power, and you see a few people with huge amounts of those things, and not think that maybe those few people should have less so the majority can have more. You may disagree based on economic analysis, but surely that follows intuitively?

> (b) most people could simply opt out, own nothing, and go live in the woods if they wanted to, but would strongly prefer not to.

Almost every single person I know would rather do this, including myself, and can't. The woods are all private property, and unless we managed to hide somewhere, we would be removed by force.

Historically, (at least in my country, Scotland), people have been forced via economic and military coercion to migrate to the cities and adopt a lifestyle of employment and consumption, there's very little free choice going on.

These comparisons are tricky, because software in particular has always been a bit weird about what it means by "engineer". The article gestures at this, the majority of the people with the title are not actually engineers at all, although I couldn't prove it, because we don't have a definition.

The best I have is that engineering is the real-world, practical application of the scientific method deployed in service of human values. (The human values bit is important to my mind, as I don't believe experimentation over disconnected, stochastically generated hypothesis counts as science.)

By this definition, vibe-coding does introduce a wrinkle because it becomes more difficult to experimentally verify hypothesis as you have reduced how much you are observing, but it's not a hard impossibility or anything like that.

If you make a "Are we X yet?" website, surely the answer must be yes or no, or at least something equally terse. That's the joke right, reducing something complicated to a simple yes/no question?

"The roots aren't deep but the seeds are planted" makes me cringe.

> one that doesn't just boil down to "a billion is really really a lot of money".

Why? That's the point. It's too much damn money for one person to realistically earn. We all know how long a day is and how fast a human being can think, move, how much suffering they can tolerate, etc. It is an intuitive truth.

There is no conceivable formulation of physical and mental actions a human could perform, regardless of outcome, that could possibly justify that level of wealth relative to the average levels of compensation for other workers in society.

> To be fair, reality is a special case

Thank you, you made me laugh in earnest. This is one of the funniest things I've read today.

Winnings.

Surely you can see that not trusting mainstream economics shouldn't be as controversial as the hard sciences. Mainstream economics consistently fails to make correct or replicatable predictions.

> If it was unfair, they would presumably reject the offer outright.

My word do people actually believe this. What theoretical econ 101 textbook are you living in?

Which was not contradictory, as they were saying they wanted to quit. I also want to quit all social media, including hackernews, in the same way I want to quit eating Mcdonalds and getting high all the time.

Dead on. If we could wave our magic wands and ban "harmful social media" without negative externalities we'd probably do it, but we can't.

Sometimes I think legislators think laws are these magic documents which just directly mutate reality.

I'm really torn on this. On the one hand I agree with you 100%, whilst on the other I have little faith that our government will implement in a non-damaging way. However, I'd almost be willing to trade some amount of civil-liberty in order to protect us from the rot of social media. If I could ban everyone from "harmful social media" I would, I just understand that's impossible to define and implement without massive unintended externalities.

I'm not naive to how much of a slippery slope that is, and I don't think the government is pursuing this in good faith. Nonetheless, here we are.

It surprises me when people think engineering, software or no, isn't about the physical world of humans, psychological, imaginative, aesthetic or otherwise. Everything I do uses "human stuff" as a base foundation of value. Engineering effort is malformed and invalid without such a thing, and I spend a lot of my time as a technical leader pushing back on people trying to "perform engineering" without connecting to these things.