kiliantics

take a look at how their pensions work and and what it costs you and you might reconsider (basically, it's a similar deal to the police pension mafia)

There are a lot of baked in assumptions here. For instance, as an extreme example, betting on nuclear war or climate collapse happening and then "winning" doesn't really provide you anything of much use in the society you will be living in after such events.

While the idea in the post is an interesting one, the analogy to planing is terrible. The difference in results from a power planer and a hand plane (even with a pretty basic blade) is night and day. Wood planed with high quality and sharp steel has a finish that doesn't even need oil or varnish.

People talk about how non-AI code will become an artisanal craft and I think it's a bit of a stretch. The one exception might be when code has an intrinsic aesthetic quality in itself, rather than just the functional output, something like the obfuscated C code competition entries. Hand-worked wood might be crappy too, like a school woodwork birdhouse project made by a beginner, but a truly artisanally crafted piece of furniture or cabinetry has a very tangibly superior output to an IKEA bookshelf or other industrial stuff.

On the point of doing work for the sake of doing work and not for the sake of the value of the output, this is nothing new, as suggested in the blog post. But the more apt analogy would be all the "bullshit jobs" that have existed for decades in modern corporations. People who expand their teams to justify more budget to hire more people to create more work to expand their teams to get bigger budgets, etc. All the while producing nothing of real value in the company. The thing that AI seems to have done is accelerated and exaggerated this tendency, maybe since it was already the natural tendency within the logic of our corporate work culture.

I took a boat ride in Maine on a lobster boat once that was owned and operated by a man in his 90s. Someone else in the town told me that he was being pressured to stop working by his family because he had recently fallen out of the boat while lobstering alone and broken a rib. He still managed to climb back into the boat with his injury and get home. It's a different America up there.

The phrasing in the article shows very strong bias towards Israel in general

It's about how the taxes are spent too. If the government cuts welfare and gives handouts and subsidies to special interests, that is not an effective redistribution.

I'm a European living in the US and my sense is that perceptions towards AI are generally more positive here than in Europe if anything (I do work in tech though which skews things a good bit).

This article almost feels like some kind of psychological manipulation: "Jeez Americans, can't you just get on board like the rest of the world?"

Check out forum.woodenboat.com to read from a lot of amateurs taking on the project, just be warned that the rabbit hole is alluring and very deep.

It's typically not recommended to self-design, the physics gets technical and there are a lot of free working plans out there including by famous naval architects.

Most people start out with simpler designs using plywood and fiberglass but, due to my aforementioned disdain for a lot of modern approaches, I personally went with a traditional oak frame, cedar plank, copper rivet construction. It is very time consuming but I'm enjoying the journey. I chose a flat-bottomed sail boat design (dory) to make it a little easier on myself.

There are endless variations on the concept of a "wooden vessel that can be propelled through water" idea so it really depends on your interests and tastes. It's a "form follows function" situation too, so you also need to consider your use case -- engine, oar, sail; ocean, river, lake; etc.

Same, specifically boat-building for me because it just draws me in.

But more generally, I would like to commit my time to making the built world more beautiful and sustainable. I despise the obsolescent plastic slop that we all are forced to use, wear, live in, and just see and be around all the time. I find it such a degradation in our society -- the shift in taste and values away from an appreciation of well-made, durable, and well-designed physical objects.

Taxes used to be based only on property rather than labour, maybe we should go back to that. Of course this won't happen as it is a force of wealth-deconcentration.

Most left wing movements and organisations in the West drew strength from the existence of strong socialist states, both materially and ideologically. These kinds of groups were a balancing force against the right wing/capitalist direction, which is inherently undemocratic, having as its logical endpoint the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

I think the true decline begun earlier though, around the Thatcher-Reagan era, with the erosion of all kinds of state ownership and control of our economy and broad attacks on organised labour.

Wouldn't really be to my taste either but this whole story just reminded me of how much more interestingly the wealthy used to spend their money.

What legacies of high craftsmanship will be left by Musk and Bezos and their ilk? The rich seem to have collectively decided to no longer value good taste.

And I believe this has downstream effects on the aesthetics of everyday things for the average person too. It seems the average person will never again enjoy public works projects that are aesthetically beautiful, like say the Brooklyn Bridge or New York Public Library. All the craftsmen required to build such things no longer exist because the wealthy do not employ them.