admiralteal

This technology existing would essentially be the end of all knowledge-sector jobs, instantly. It eliminates the value of your time, which means the labor market would almost definitely use it to pay wages VASTLY below minimum wage-per-perceived hour. People would take that bargain. You only have to work ONE day a week and we pay you a million dollars a year! ...that one day a week will be time chambered up to 15 years, though.

Why pay one ace coder a bigshot salary when you can pay a whole village in the developing world to spend as much time as the problem could possibly need the same price and they'll still finish by Thursday?

The economic ramifications are just beyond my fathoming, but I know it cannot possibly work in a society which has any kind of resource scarcity.

Sounds like a compelling argument for why we need better safety standards for cars and traffic engineering.

The argument for drive-by-wire in personal automobiles is basically that it's safe enough for airplanes, so it should be safe enough for cars.

I mostly buy that. But there's a glaring omission in the reasoning.

In airplanes, there's a full incident investigation for EVERYTHING that goes wrong. Even near misses. It's an industry that (mostly lol boeing) has a history of prioritizing safety. Even at its worst, the safety standards the airline industry and air transportation engineering are orders magnitude more strict than those of the automotive industry and road engineering.

In real terms, automobile incidents should be taken just as seriously. Even near misses should have reporting and analysis. Crashes should absolutely have full investigations. Nearly all automobile deaths are completely avoidable through better engineering of the road systems and cars, but there is mostly no serious culture of safety among automobiles. We chose carnage and have been so immured by it that we don't even think it's weird. We don't think it's weird that essentially everyone, at least in the US, knows someone who died or was seriously injured in a car accident.

So yeah, we should have drive-by-wire. But it should also include other aspects of that safety culture as part of the deal. "Black box" equivalents, for example, and the accompanying post-accident review process that comes with it. A process that focuses not on establishing liability, but preventing future incidents, because establishing liability is mostly a thought-killer when it comes to safety.

...of course, if we actually took road safety that seriously it'd be devastation to the entire car industrial complex. Because much of that industry is focused on design patterns that, in fact, cannot be done safely or sustainably.

Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?

Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.

And what might be the most important part cannot be elided over: market capitalism is HIGHLY efficient at solving optimization problems, but it only responds to incentives.

So if you can create the right incentives to reward the result you want and punish results you don't want, a market solution is going to do a marvelous job. It's great at, say, price discovery. But if the incentives do not align with the desired result, it's going to grind you under heel.

The incentives the insurance companies are responding to, frankly, are the ones you have outlined and essentially no others. Collect more premiums, make fewer payouts. There's no "breaking point" here because they have an absolutely vast customer base that has no choice to opt out of the system for a variety of reasons (ranging from the ACA individual mandate to the fact that it is not possible for an individual to make fully-informed financial decisions about their health even WITH advanced knowledge and training that nearly no one has).

Health insurance is pretty much a textbook example of the kind of service that shouldn't be on private markets.

So over time, market capitalism is going to make them collect endlessly-increasing premiums and pay out less and less. It is going to continue to get worse because the incentives of the system have defined 'worse' as being the optimal result. Period. It will eventually get nationalized. Period. All the argument in the meantime is just over how long we want to continue to let people be sick and broke before we apply the only fix.

Particularly goofy because ChatGPT is hardly the only bot and you can use the free version of e.g., Claude and get those better results now, for free.

Or any of the nearly-unavoidable-because-it's-a-monopoly evil big corpos like Amazon. Chase handles their credit card and definitely significant other financial parts for them.

Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.

They don't get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren't doing it. But control matters more to them than support.

I really don't think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.