Very well put. I am working on tooling that will likely increase developer productivity by a large factor; and will most likely be used to lay off more developers as their labor is no longer required.
I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.
It’s the fact that all the gains are being collected by the already uber-wealthy that’s wrong.
> I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.
So if I'm reading your comment right, you think it would be ethical under normal circumstances, but also believe we don't live under those normal circumstances? In that case i think the answer you're looking for is: it is not ethical to develop these tools under the current circumstances.
The problem isn't the benefits per se, it's that the downsides are shouldered by everyone else while the benefits accrue to 0.1%. At which point it's just stealing from the commons.
Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
* Faust I
* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum
* Antigone
* Die Verwandlung
* Bahnwärter Thiel
* Der Sandmann
* Die Räuber
* Hamlet
* Der Besuch der alten Dame
* Im Westen nichts Neues
* Unterm Rad
* Woyzeck
Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.
I graduated high school less than a decade ago and I had to read about 90% of those books. And those are just the German ones, there were at least half as many English and French ones too. I have younger cousins who are in the school system now and I am fairly certain that it is still the same. Actually I think it is probably mandated by the curriculum.
There's still plenty of mandatory reading. It's not unusual for high schoolers to have to read at least two books per semester.
Here's the problem though: It's just too easy to... you know... not do it. Teachers have no way of reliably telling the difference between those students who complete their reading assignments honestly and those who make due with summaries and AI assistance. Don't ask me how I know ;-)
I will only do things from memory, you can use Google yourself.
* Die Vorstadtkrokodile
"The suburb crocodiles", which is also how the youth gang in the book is called. Boy wants to be part of the gang, which has idiotic tests of courage. Plot twist is that the guy who refused to do this idiotic tests ends up being the tough guy. I don't remember if this was the main character or not. Ends up saving some other boy in a wheelchair, I think while they play in a collapsing old industrial building.
* Faust I
Maybe the most famous German book from v.Goethe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust,_Part_One Old professor Faust makes a deal with the devil that he can take his soul, if he is able to provide him with true joy. Professor gets young again, parties, seduces a flawless faithful girl, makes her kill her mother, she ends up in prison being pregnant, devil proposes to save here if she ditches god, she refuses. Faust flees, huge cliff hanger until v.Goethe gets to write Faust II at the end of his live.
"The visit of the old Lady" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit_(play) The old (now rich) lady visits her home town, which has seen better times and demands the death of her youth lover for a huge amount of money for the town. In the beginning all swear loyalty to the guy, in the end all demand his death, inviting the international press. In between the slow transition is described being framed by the protagonists as the most ethical thing ever.
Soldier Woyzeck gets exploited by both his superior and his doctor. The doctor puts him on a only beans diet, he becomes crazy. The doctor comments his mental struggles with "Very interesting, very good, should also try this ..." Ends up killing his spouse due to jealousy and later maybe himself. Never got completed by the original author, and the order of the acts is disputed, which makes for a quite different ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woyzeck
I see this all the time in real life though. Right-wing „influencers“ with the worst takes you could imagine are getting funded somehow, while even the best scientists are getting deplatformed left and right.
They are getting funded because people are tapping into the zeitgeist, so the message is popular and presented in ways people find interesting and compelling. Money abounds whenever people are listening.
> the best scientists are getting deplatformed
Because they are not tapping into public mood or in a lot of cases simply unable to communicate effectively to the populace in a way that attracts platforming and financial interests. The sensible or realistic apocalypse stories just aren’t as sexy as the magical and supernatural ones.
It’s more likely than you think. In fact, this was true for almost the entirety of human history. The last 100 years, where the common person is NOT in destitute poverty, is the exception to the rule.
I use bazzite. I am a software developer at day, working on Unix exclusively. Let me try to give my reason.
I don’t WANT to fiddle around with some random bullshit when all I have in the evening are 1-2 hours. I want to boot the system and just get cracking with a game. Even the 1-2 hours of installation time are already a hard sell to me. It’s ~20% of my weekly gaming time.
And it’s never usually just „a minor amount of configuration“, is it? Depending on what game you are playing, what hardware you have, you can easily spend hours getting a game to work properly, and that’s with bazzite.
I want something that just works, I don’t want to spend hours figuring out magic incantations.
Though admittedly, with AI it’s gotten easier to figure out magic incantations.
Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY. That just immediately follows from inflation.
Almost every year in almost every country will have:
- record GDP
- record government spending
- record total wages
- record stock market prices
- record asset prices
- record government debt
You need to put these values in relation to something, otherwise they don’t mean anything.
For the UK, take for instance the public sector net wealth (Ie. Everything the UK public collectively owns). It collapsed drastically, from 220bn in 2006 to -900 bn in 2025.
Absolutely off the charts. As a result of this, the government can’t provide health care and basic support for its citizens anymore.
Question: who has all this wealth now, who is the UK indebted to?
> > tax revenues are higher than ever, government spending is higher than ever, social programs and social spending is higher than ever
> Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY
It's not just nominal. You can see on the Institute for Fiscal Studies website that, as proportion of GDP, public spending has not been notably higher than since the second world war:
Curious to see that no one mentions the drastically rising inequality in western society as the root cause of the housing crises.
What we are seeing to date is a transfer of wealth from the working class, the middle class, and the government to rich people at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. The rich are getting richer at an extremely high rate, and barely any country taxes wealth.
So what you get is multimillionaires and billionaires who get passive income of several million dollars per month. What are they going to do with that money? There is a rule that you should let your money work for you, and so rich people buy: assets, stock, shares.
That’s why the prices of all of these things go up despite living standards falling and falling for ordinary people. We have an asset price inflation, due to the enormous amount of money given to the ultra rich.
Housing prices will never go down unless you tax the rich. Regardless of zoning laws or what not.
This is the most worrying aspect of it to me. It is hard to imagine an economy or society in general to continue functioning indefinitely with such an extreme difference in outcomes between different groups. As far as I know there is no historical example of a society that allowed inequality to grow at the level ours is that did not ultimately face massive socio-political upheaval. Needless to say it would not be pleasant to live through those times
Seems to me that capitalism, especially when unregulated as has been in the US since the late 70's/early 80's ultimately results in wealth concentrated somewhat in the top 10%, but especially the top 1%, while the bottom 90% sees their share of national wealth drop every lower.
It feels like we are entering a second guilded age, just like the late 1800's. Maybe a few world wars and a global depression will reset the board and we can start again.
Because rising in equality is not the root cause of the housing crises. Middle class people who ban new housing from being constructed are the root cause. When housing can be freely built housing prices dont increase faster than inflation.
Of course nothing is that simple, but end of the day it actually is that simple here. There is demand for X number of houses but because of NIMBYS we can only have some number lower than X. Without NIMBYs we can satisfy all the demand. Wealth inequality could be the cause of a housing crisis, it just isnt here. If the reason we cant have X homes was something other than unjust laws created by the middle class Id be much more willing to blame inequality.
Regardless of what you think, inequality is a major component of the current housing inequality.
Yiu also have to step back and consider why people feel like the need to bundle up in the cities - if that a General lack of opportunity elsewhere due to inequality?
You are seeing a wound and saying: yep, that happened because the skin got damaged.
You know, exactly that span of time that everyone agrees on being really prosperous.