N95 masks are currently at least $2 USD/mask on Home Depot's website, and they've never been cheaper than that when I've bought some. Who's your supplier for this budget PPE? Medical workers and the immuno-compromised would love to buy from them.
Manufacturers aren't stupid and don't do impulse response. If they can tell the price shock is likely transient - that the demand will evaporate before they'll manage to ramp up production - then they won't even bother.
If they knew that every decade or so, they might temporarily be able to sell at 5x the normal price for 3 months, they’d likely run their outbound supply chain slightly less just-in-time.
Ironically, this might make things less likely to get to the point where the market price was 5x normal.
They run them less just-in-time that you think, e.g. 3M were able to double production in a couple of months [1]. I'd say that's pretty impressive, but what do I know. Regardless, preparing for these events is the government's job, including stockpiling the required PPE. In fact, in a bunch of countries the stockpiles were scaled down or simply never replenished because it was deemed an unnecessary expense (France, Belgium, Canada).
High prices also discourage some frivolous wasteful panic buying. People are going to miss out no matter what, but at least with price gouging, there's some sorting related to need, even if it's imperfect.
Probably good if you chose a project you personally/professiobally use and thus know it from an end user perspective, eat your own dog food etc. Good also if you're been interested in the area longer so you're sure you want to work with it long term.
Popper's idea was that people need to be free to discuss and debate different perspectives. When most people don't feel free to voice their opinions I think it's safe to say the culture and institutions we have don't support that goal.
There's a difference between "not allowing racists/bigots to shout whatever insult they happen to come up with", and "banning research into biological underpinnings of cognition, intelligence, etc".
Most people are not scholars, at best pundits, but even if they are, most of their thoughts are still not careful and nuanced constructive arguments.
And maybe, just maybe, putting some brakes on the global cyber hate wave machines, where anyone can share/amplify the most damaging shit with one click is not a bad idea.
That said, partisanship bias, fairness, justice are all related problems when it comes to how to apply those brakes.
And yes, the institutions are shit, both old and new. Academia, FB/Tw, MSM, parties/congress, religions. But they are not without advantages, not unsalvageable.
I'd be interested as well. I work for a Californian tech company and I would mostly describe it as "hard left". We have mandatory trainings quarterly where we have to do exams where we say "as long as 50% of tech workers aren't female and black, we 've got a discrimination issue." I've got coworkers who've told me over a beer that they work here exactly so they wouldn't have to work with people who have "other values" and they feel its good those sort of people are outed.
So in essence, feels like a textbook example of what the article was talking about, with leftists having consider able freedom to talk about politics and everyone else marginalized.
That's incorrect. The level of skill and automation potential aren't related. For instance healthcare is a hugely growing market with a lot of low skilled opportunities requiring human interaction.
In my country, except janitors and people working cafeteria, pretty much any job in healthcare requires some kind of degree (exception is taking care of old folks in private homes, but even those require a substancial amount of staff with some kind of schooling in it)
Theatre support worker would be one example of a healthcare role that doesn't require a degree. This is in the context of the UK NHS. I'm unsure if an equivalent role is common within the healthcare systems of other countries.
> The level of skill and automation potential aren't related.
I never claimed they were? I said that when a job is automated away, any that replace it inevitably require a higher skill level. Thus the skill floor rises over time.
> requiring human interaction
That's the key. That's a specific task that we can't (yet) automate.
Well one guarantee is - according to scientific consensus - that this exact same process has been working for the last 200 years, and previously people have always gotten better jobs and a higher standard of living. You think the people working farm jobs or sweatshops had better opportunities at the time their jobs were automated away?
The difference is that 200 years ago, most work was physically challenging but intellectually simple. When some of those jobs were replaced by jobs that were easier physically but more challenging intellectually, we got different opportunities for different people.
Today would be analogical if we had a population of people with average IQ 150, locked in jobs that require IQ 100. By automating those jobs away, we would open new opportunities that would fit people better.
But instead, we have a world where the average IQ is 100, and the standard advice for people who lose their jobs is "learn to code". So we get the situation where some people are unable to find a job, and other people are pushed to work overtime... and we cannot balance it by hiring the former into job positions of the latter.
(Also, historically speaking, many people starved to death when their farms were taken away. The new jobs appeared later, but it took some time.)
Dealing with types is boring so if I'm going to spend time on this, it should have enough benefits. In my humble opinion the rust typing system is more interesting than what typescript can offer.
The main advantage for me is the monad. Sure you could use monads in typescript or even vanilla javascript but in Rust, everything uses monads.
The vast javascript ecosystem is available to rust in the browser too. Server side it's not as big and I agree javascript has a point there. But now, if you look at the ecosystem of libraries with proper and up-to-date typescript definitions, well it's not that great.
