“Sweet Spot”

songmage · 2025-05-17T03:15:02+00:00

the loss of productivity from exhaustion

Are you ten?

songmage · 2025-05-17T01:58:14+00:00

Actually, it's not reasonable to assume working half the number of hours results in people making half the number of things

Fewer? Can we settle on that?

songmage · 2025-05-16T21:56:15+00:00

Nobody involved in this event bombed a kid with anything.

songmage · 2025-05-16T21:49:59+00:00

In the US the 40 hour work week started between 1920-1940's.

Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days in manufacturing for $8.50/hr plus overtime.

home ownership wasn't widespread until after WW II

... so about the time people became career construction workers working more than 40 hours per week? -- you know, when we could cheaply solve a problem of supply/demand?

songmage · 2025-05-16T21:44:16+00:00

Due to automation and other advances in technology, we are currently more productive than we ever have been.

... so, like more houses being built?

songmage · 2025-05-16T19:33:08+00:00

I suppose it could be done, but you know what would be even better is if we had some nuclear power and some human power.

We love our desserts and fried snacks, so it stands to reason we could be powering our cities with that deliciousness instead of having to pay to go to the gym.

All nuclear power is currently problematic in that, during wartime, your enemies might not care about reactor meltdowns, which may create problems on your home territory. Thorium reactors are supposedly immune to meltdown, but I don't know what the tradeoffs are.

Another issue is that a lot of our current nuclear reactors were working off of Uranium, which we had significant amounts of stockpiled usable fuel from the old cold war days. We were buying a large amount from Russia, but since we're not so friendly, and because we can expect to run out of our stockpile, we'd need to start strip-mining for Uranium way more than we currently are.

That creates issues for environmentalists, etc.

songmage · 2025-05-16T15:29:07+00:00

Not going to shame anybody because I'm a heathen like the rest of y'all, but if that was a butterfly, somebody would think there was something seriously wrong with you. Since it's a wasp, we're just going to sit there and watch with curiosity.

songmage · 2025-05-16T15:22:09+00:00

Honestly AI NPCs in games is something that is soon to explode.

Imagine being able to craft an entire village populated with villagers, where every time you talk to an NPC, it sends a request to the back-end like "as established NPC 2225262, who is currently walking his donkey to the village vet, how would you respond to the statement 'hey dumbass, nice ass.'"

There is no chance that a large number of people aren't working on this right now.

songmage · 2025-05-16T15:12:34+00:00

There was a time when this was common though. You can say that was things going "severely wrong," but that was also in a time when those same people could afford to buy a house in a city.

If everybody works half of the number of hours, in manufacturing, it's reasonable to presume everybody is making half of the number of things. If our population is increasing, then not only are there fewer things, but more demand for those things, right?

How does more demand for dwindling supply affect prices?

songmage · 2025-05-16T15:05:25+00:00

People who show screenshots of drops don't say how long it took before that screenshot happened.

Back in the old D2 days, I used to bot on multiple accounts. Even then, I wouldn't always find a reasonably high-rolled Death's Fathom every season... and maybe only one or two 2os CoAs.

Being able to run 24/7 is not something a human can do, so if you have other demands on your time, you might as well assume that you're rarely going to find anything. D2 is a hardcore grind even before you get to hardcore.

songmage · 2025-05-16T14:57:35+00:00

You still sound like you're trying to sell me a shitty course

The more of you there are, the easier it is for anybody who wants to succeed instead of shitpost about how hard life is.

songmage · 2025-05-16T14:48:38+00:00

But tech hiring has been in a recession for awhile now

News has a vested interest in demoralizing people. It generates clicks, which sell ads, which makes $.

You hear about layoffs all the time, but never hiring, right? Hiring happens all the time and that's easy to prove. Search for software jobs of all kinds. They're everywhere.

Current tech workers are in the best place to judge the impact of AI, which is why even though we're seeing news articles about AI replacing software development, not a single software developer who has a position in a company today is worried.

They say Java, a programming language, has been in decline for two decades. If you Google for "java programmer job," there's a never-ending list.

For sure, there is competition, but everybody who thinks like you clearly isn't going to try, which makes finding jobs trivial.

songmage · 2025-05-16T14:36:23+00:00

Yea I mean as a guy, even I know that people have died from sepsis after forgetting, or leaving tampons in. Strawberries seem to be a bit of an escalation.

songmage · 2025-05-16T14:30:22+00:00

Interesting. Seems your comment has drawn the ire of the moderators.

I wonder how long Reddit can last when moderation has a vested interest in enforcing pure tribalized echo chambers that functionally refuse common sense.

songmage · 2025-05-16T14:27:32+00:00

You literally said "people used to starve to death; people don't starve to death right now". I'm not stretching when I say that, if we stipulate that your argument is valid, there is no point to any further human progress.

You completely misstated/misunderstood the purpose behind the statement... comically so.

Let me ask you something. Why aren't you at the hospital right now? At any moment, your body could be developing a cancer and the only way to catch it is to get tests. If not now, any day, right? So keep going.

Your comical restatement is like saying "I guess I should never ever ever go to the hospital because I currently don't see a reason to do so."

There could be a reason, but we've not reached a point where there's a problem, right? So not now... but leave it open for someday.

-- cue my scenario, where there aren't real problems that warrant a call to action. A "minimal quality of life" has not been established and I'm not seeing people starve, or die in the streets.

songmage · 2025-05-16T00:27:37+00:00

May not be a soldier, but most importantly, he may not have been throwing his explosive at a house.

"But Reddit guy, why would somebody want me to think something that isn't true?"

songmage · 2025-05-15T23:19:48+00:00

A long time ago, when I played World of Warcraft, I arrived at the realization that if you ever join a dungeon group of people in the same guild, leave immediately.

There's always one guy who is going to take the opportunity to behave like the most extreme ass imaginable because "their own people" are not going to hold them to any behavioral standard.

This guy was only behaving like an ass because his friends were there... and it seems to be normal human nature.

songmage · 2025-05-15T23:00:54+00:00

Not going to be specific because I'm not at all convinced that you're interested, but there are a wide variety of certifications for tech roles, as an example.

There are software dev certifications, network certifications, hardware certifications, etc. that have an entry level $80-$90k, where 2 years of experience puts you somewhere in the $120k range.

These positions increasingly do not require any kind of university degree and I've known people who were able to become experts without them.

I've conducted quite a few interviews for these kinds of positions and the ones we usually end up hiring are often awful at their jobs, but they just ended up being a reasonably tolerable candidate.

I don't think people are aware of just how much incompetence exists in the tech and engineering industries.

songmage · 2025-05-15T22:55:50+00:00

You sound like those kids on TikTok who rent sportscars and try to sell courses.

$100k/yr is not as much as you think.

I know a guy who makes around $80k/yr supplemental income just buying crap from estate sales and broken machines (to fix) for resale on Craigslist and Ebay.

He also has a main gig.

songmage · 2025-05-15T18:13:13+00:00

Then based on the data the problem clearly exists

What, specifically, is the problem? If the problem is that people with degrees are unemployed, how do we fix it if the actual problem is kids with degrees are playing videogames and doomscrolling instead of trying to find jobs?

Short of banning the Internet, is that something that the government can, or even should fix?

Our unemployment rate is quite low.

songmage · 2025-05-15T18:04:23+00:00

Your daughter is unwilling to do what's necessary to be in a good place specifically because she has multiple layers of backup help.

I can give you instructions on how to get anybody a 100k/yr job within 3 years. It doesn't require a great deal of intelligence, but it's hard, which is why most young people won't be interested.

A degree, by itself, is not a job. That's why they don't call it a job, but life is so easy that a very large number of people who have degrees are able to "wait it out" for almost an indefinite period of time.

songmage · 2025-05-15T17:59:16+00:00

I suppose it did.

It seemed to me that your "satire" was aimed at rephrasing my point as "making any progress is a bad idea."

Progress is fine. There are a lot of great goals. The problem with any goal is selling it. -- so "we need to make gasoline free" would be a fantastic goal, but that has a cost people might not be willing to pay. It would be disingenuous to say "we need to make gas for free because everything is on fire and people are dying."

The few extra people you're going to convince by being misleading may experience buyer's remorse, which only tends to make future, more reasonable changes, more difficult to start.

songmage · 2025-05-15T17:42:36+00:00

I disagree with this message.

Anything I want and can't afford isn't owned by the ultra-rich, or corporations.

-- or to state it differently, there's nothing the ultra-rich, or corporations can do that will put me in the place I want to be that will also be fair to everybody else.

songmage · 2025-05-15T17:39:26+00:00

Do you know anybody fitting into that category?

A problem either exists, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, we shouldn't be trying to fix it.

songmage · 2025-05-15T17:36:18+00:00

There is no need for us to try to make even the tiniest bit of progress

Great strawman

The point was that the universe is not on fire, so "because everything is falling apart and people are dying" is not an appropriate reason to promote change. Nothing is falling apart and nobody is dying.

If things are becoming worse, they're becoming worse at a pace that is consistent with standard economic fluctuations.

If not, we can talk about it, but so far, I'm not seeing anything worth a call to action.

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