But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy. There needs to be a path towards doing things other than foisting them on people who are out of sight.
Texans seem more than happy to host these industries. Let them, they have no public land left to protect anyway. The environment is arguably California’s most valuable asset. May as well preserve it so people continue to want to actually live here.
Texans often try to regulate these industries at the local level. The state government has tried to put a stop to most of that by passing the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act which took away the ability of local communities to protect themselves. The state has ruled that Texans will be exploited by industry in order to protect profits and the citizens aren't allowed to vote to save themselves.
All we have is the weather? California is the largest agricultural producer of any state, and it's not even close. Plants like growing here for the same reason people do.
You act as though California is no longer one of the largest populations or one of the largest economies.
The “snowball fallacy” is a fallacy because there is no reason California s can’t swing the regulatory pendulum back the other direction if there is too much economy / freedom impacted.
When I took a machining course, the instructor sat in the corner and showed us YouTube videos in Mandarin with English subtitles to teach us the equipment.
You are making lots of projections from a single anecdote and conflating a state’s policies/economy with that of a country of 25x the population.
Detroit was once one of the US’s largest population cities, at nearly 2.5 million residents in the late 1960s, falling to less than 1 million by the 2010s. On this scale, California is still in the peak days of the 1960s, but we aren’t showing any current signs of shrinking. Maybe AI will be the catalyst for massive job losses, but that’s for the future to unfold.
Machining is a low value part of the economic supply chain, like sweat shop clothing. While I don’t want to lose it, it’s being dominated by countries (China, Taiwan) which are willing to throw MASSIVE money at the industry. TSMC was literally a whole-of-country effort to centralize the entire world’s supply chain of cutting edge semiconductors on one island. China is winning because they have cut-throat competition between companies and they don’t slow down for legal concerns such as regulation or intellectual property. That is only going to last for a certain amount of time before people will demand better living environments (which is partly why they have such a terrible fertility rate).
China probably caught up the same way starting 40 years ago. Watching VHS tapes in English (or German, Japanese, or French) with Mandarin subtitles*. Clearly "never" is untrue because it's been done once already.
IMO this is all cyclical.
* This is metaphorical. Obviously there were also textbooks and research papers and technical manuals and everything else. The point is much of it came from abroad and they learned it all to the point that they're the experts today.
Maps of California are dotted with SuperFund sites where these companies left the taxpayers with the bill to clean up their toxic messes. We don’t “foist” these externalities on other people; they choose to hold lower value on a clean environment than regions which regulate pollutants and other negative externalities.
Most of the complaints from this website aren't about things being outright banned. It's mostly stuff where the regulation is so strict that's it's "nearly impossible". But the regulation seems fair to me wrt what's actually required to keep TCE, asbestos, Freon, chloroform, etc out of our soil and water.
Companies that are complaining are complaining that they can't treat the environment as an economic externality anymore in California. Therefore the price of all of these goods are being subsidized with our health and our ecosystems' health.
I hope more of the world follows California's lead and we eventually have a price of these goods that represents what it actually takes to manufacture them in a fair way
But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy
This is kind of disingenuous.
I mean, not everything used in California, needs to be manufactured in California. Why not manufacture it in New Mexico? Or Arkansas for that matter?
What you're implying, is that Wisconsin, Nebraska, Maine, Florida, etc, etc, etc, should all build out the manufacturing base to manufacture things that are used in those states. That's not really how a healthy economy should work.
I guess what I'm pointing out is that, we don't need to manufacture smartphones in South Dakota. It's perfectly acceptable to manufacture them in, say, New Jersey, and then ship them to South Dakota. Similarly, we don't need to manufacture everything in California.
Sure. Everything's built overseas. We all already know that.
Why can't things be be built here, in a state other than California?
What is the fixation with California? Tennessee or Nebraska would love to build smart phones, or even just the chips for smart phones. What is the reasoning for not building these things in other states?
I agree but I fail to see how bad water infrastructure that allows poop to get into the water supply in Mexico has anything to do with this topic. Nobody is arguing that you should be able to spew cancer causing chemicals into the air. It is possible to do all these industrial processes responsibly. It just costs more to do it. So either you can allow businesses to do these things with reasonable amounts of regulation locally or you can prevent those businesses (what CA does) and import these products made somewhere where they won't follow your regulations. And since pollution notoriously doesn't honor borders, perhaps its best not to use simplistic scarecrow arguments and instead have a nuanced understanding of the topic. But don't let me stop your partisan hackery, I'm sure you enjoy it.
> But you also want smart phones, electric cars, and a navy.
I would like far less of all of these to exist than we currently produce (I use a 5 year old phone, an 11 year old car, and think the US Navy could function just fine with a lot less budget and warships).
I don't, because I care about security updates, and I don't want to have to choose between a highly degraded battery and giving up waterproofing.
> an 11 year old car
Crash safety has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. I suspect you're more likely to be killed in a car accident that you wouldn't be in a new car, than to be killed by one of the industries that California bans.
> think the US Navy could function just fine with a lot less budget and warships
If a powerful adversary goes to war with us, then we'd want a lot more, and only increasing then would be too late, because we'd lose the war first.
I'm not from California but this to me seems like a great case to move to California. Why not ship your externality creating activities elsewhere? Its not like they pay more for the iPhone.
As someone who moved out of California a few years ago I assure you that it is exceedingly easy to move to a different state, assuming you have the money to move at all.
Sure. A state where housing is dirt cheap and no taxes is great, but if something happens to you, good luck finding a hospital or municipal services. Job prospects are also something to consider.
Just because houses cost more and there's a state tax, doesn't mean it's _bad_.
This is easily demonstrated to be wrong. California isn't in the top 5 highest. The top 5 being:
1. Louisiana 10.11%
2. Tennessee 9.61%
3. Washington 9.51%
4. Arkansas 9.46%
5. Alabama 9.46%
Crazy how we never hear pithy drops about sales tax in Louisiana. I wonder why that is literally never a talking point in these discussions? Probably a very similarly motivated reason as to why people rant about murder in Chicago but never Memphis.
You're combining state and local sales tax. State sales tax in Louisiana is 4.45%. Some municipalities add nothing on top of that, some add more. I said California's state sales tax is the highest and that's true.
Can’t help but feel like you’re overestimating the competency of the average voter in these effected areas; a breath after yours—though not necessarily your own—may condemn these people for being undereducated, out of touch with culture or subject to corporate grifters.
Well, I find it a bit hypocritical: if those things are so bad, why to forbid manufacturing and not consumption? Otherwise you just pollute a place where people that have no say live.
Some of these items actually net improve clean air and clean water, but you’re instead happy to export those pollutants to another country to feel better yourself
It's always hilarious when a bunch of people in Texas who hate government and government regulations get screwed so hard by the corporations that move in that they start incorporating to form governments so that they can pass government regulation to stop those corporations. See for example Webberville or the efforts to create Mitchell Bend in Hood County. Some people have to learn the hard way. Some never do.
Texas got so sick of Texans trying to protect themselves by creating regulations that they created the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act. It took away the ability of local communities to protect themselves and instead protected the profits of some the state's biggest industry buddies.
If somebody else values their health less - let them have pollution in their own back yard. If enough communities worldwide care about their health, then polluters will have to clean up their processes. But it's not for the residents of California to decide what happens in other jurisdictions.
The reason those countries take the "burden" on is because the USA became a global superpower by developing more industrial capacity than literally every other country in the decades prior to the World Wars.
They want to duplicate this success and displace the West, similar to how the USA displaced Europe during and after World War 2.
Do you not think it’s possible that there are many places where people do care about their health, but they are forced to allow pollution because the alternative is grinding poverty and eventual starvation?
Do you think the ship breakers in Bangladesh do it for fun?
This outsourcing of misery is the absolute worst feature of Western neoliberalism. You get a two for one, dumping misery on other countries because it’s cheaper, while outsourcing strategic concerns because they are “too dirty.” It’s NIMBYism taken to its logical conclusion.
> they are forced to allow pollution because the alternative is grinding poverty and eventual starvation
If these people decide that pollution is preferable to starvation, why shouldn't we let them make that decision? Why should we force them into starvation?
The answer is to spread out all forms of production globally, so nations don’t lose their smaller local industries that may be less efficient than foreign alternatives. Foreign trade should fill gaps in local production, not kill local industry.
The mechanisms by which this can be accomplished are antitrust and careful application of trade barriers. The obsession with “free trade” has done damage to countries all across the world in order to benefit a small class connected to multinational industry. The short lived benefits came at a huge cost and countries are only just now seeing this.
Free trade/open borders libertarians have lost influence to nationalists because the former position is antithetical to maintaining a functional society. It’s possible to build “libertarianism in one country,” and the sooner that people wake up to that, the better. The alternative is some form of left or right despotism.
It's true, but do you really trust the AI generated + Nurse Review output more than Organic Nurse generated?
In my experience, management types use the fact that AI generated + Nurse Review is faster to push a higher quota of forms generated per hour.
Eventually, from fatigue or boredom, the human in the loop just ends up being a rubber stamper. Would you trust this with your own or your children's life?
The human in the loop becomes a lot less useful when it's pressured to process a certain quota against an AI that's basically stochastic "most probable next token", aka professional bullshitter, literally trained to generate plasuible outputs with no responsibility to accurate outputs.
It works because we are in a health care crisis and the nurse doesn't have anything close to enough time to do a good job.
It is really one of the few great examples that LLMs are good for in an economic sense.
In a different industry, such inefficiency would have been put out of business.
It is a unique economic condition that makes LLMs valuable. It makes complete sense.
To the wider economy though, it is hard to ignore the unreasonable uselessness of LLMs. The unreasonable uselessness points to some kind of fundamental problems with the models that are unlikely to be solved by scaling.
We need HAL to solve our problems but instead we have probabilistic language models that somehow have to grow into HAL.
These same questions could be asked about self driving cars, but they've been shown to be consistently safer drivers than humans. If this guy is getting consistently better results from ai+human than it is from just humans, what would it matter if the former results in errors given the latter results in more and costs more?
If the cars weren't considerably safer drivers than humans they wouldn't be allowed on the road. There isn't as much regulation blocking deploying this healthcare solution... until those errors actually start costing hospitals money from malpractice lawsuits (or not), we don't know whether it will be allowed to remain in use.
You can't compare an LLM output with a self driven car. That's the flaw of using the term AI for everything, it brings two completely different technologies to an artificial level ground.
TFA's while point is that there is no easy way to tell if LLM output is correct or not. Driving mistakes provide instant feedback if the output of whatever AI is driving is correct or not. Bad comparison.
Many of the things that LLMs will output can be validated in a feedback loop, e.g., programming. It's easy to validate the generated code with a compiler, unit tests, etc. LLMs will excel in processes that can provide a validating feedback loop.
I love how everyone thinks software is easy to validate now. Like seriously, do you have any awareness at all about how much is invested in testing software by the likes of Microsoft, the game studios, and any other serious producers of software? It's a lot, and they still release buggy code.
I trust it alot, in our tests the times a human nurse picked up on something the AI missed are pretty rare. The times the AI found something the nurse missed are common, almost the majority.
That might not be relevant to OPs use case. A lot of nurses get tied up doing things like reviewing claims denials. There’s good use cases on the administrative side of healthcare that currently require nurse involvement.
I know some people like that: the insane nest egg and that security _is_ their quality of life and the blanket they sleep well under. Their current consumption doesn't matter too much to them.
In the post war boom, most of those entry level jobs that could support an entire family were limited to white (itself a heavily restricted term back then) men with a union membership.
Heck, unions themselves were heavily racialized back then.
On top of that, housing was segregated either overtly via race restrictions or covertly by overwhelmingly denying loans or sellers colluding to not sell to "that" family.
You'll hear plenty of these stories from older Black, Italian, Greek, Armenian, Chinese, and Hispanic Americans.
That’s true enough, but at that time whites were 90% of the US population, so there was arguably enough wealth then, definitely enough wealth these days, to extend entry-level jobs to the remaining 10%. When 40% or more of your population is descended from post-1965 immigrants, the competition for good jobs goes up a lot in most industries, unless enough economic growth makes up for it - and even with growth, housing scarcity is almost always an issue.
Wages from a single entry level job absolutely did not support a family of 4 or more in the 1950s and 1960s, let alone as comfortably as you are probably imagining.
These delusions need to stop, because it makes it impossible to have meaningful conversations about the many actual issues that do exist. I would expect people here to be better informed, but that seems to be less and less true over the last couple years.
And yes, the wealth distribution is more uneven now than it was in those days, but not to the point that you are claiming.
Maybe. But last I checked the trades pay horrible and destroy your body by 40.
Every story of the trades pay well is just "be a trades business owner" well okay, but basically every alternative "be a X business owner" pays better.
If you own your own business and can ensure enough clients you can make good money. But this isn't exactly a default situation. And it comes with all of the associated overhead for owning your own business. If you are a one-person show you'll also need to be available at weird times for emergencies or will lose clients because you aren't available on a weekend to deal with some issue.
Plenty of people working in the trades are making modest salaries working for some builder or some company that serves industrial clients.
Until you slip a disc around C6, or your back or knees give out.
While "dirty hands == clean money", the problem is that it often ends in sacrifice in health and/or body that leads to involuntary early retirement.
My dad had an A/C and electrical automotive specialty shop until 1985 when that took him out in his mid 30's. He also had Agent Orange exposure in the military and exposure to various carcinogens with a culture of PPE avoidance in the automotive industry of the 70's and 80's.
I think your dad's experience is in the minority. You could usually do that kind of work until at least your 50s. What people in his position often do is take office jobs in adjacent fields. For example, if you were a mechanic but can't work that anymore, you could work in customer service or sales since you know something about the business. If you really stick it out till your 40s and beyond, management or entrepreneurship might be more appropriate. But that isn't for everyone.
When Silicon Valley was cheap enough to live in that people could casually start a company in their garage... Then people didn't have to relentlessly optimize for short term comp.
Today you have to work at FANG to afford a garage in the Bay area.
Give in 2-3 generations the kids will be doing art history stuff.