Comment by vishnugupta

No, the process has impeded even higher standard of living, because it misallocates resources from value generation to value appropriation. It's the extreme short term profit maximization that makes the economy a zero sum game. Otherwise it is not.

I would argue that profit maximization has had very many effects.

On the one side, it has succeeded at reducing costs, which has indeed given rich societies unprecedented access to consumer goods.

On the other, it has outsourced from us both jobs and knowledge, which has resulted in higher unemployment and dissatisfaction, with as consequences the political dominoes we see falling internationally. That and the shoddy US health system (which the rest of the world seems to have decided to follow, for some reason).

And there is the small fact that we're in the process of optimizing the planet to death, and that not-so-rich countries (as well as formerly-rich ones) have starved to death for this high standard of living.

So, let's appreciate our standard of living, but not assume that it's necessarily a good thing in the grand scheme of things.

"Profit maximization" on its own would have left most people working 12+ hours a day 6 days a week, like it was very common in the 19th century. Luckily, it's never been the only force shaping our societies.

I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes... so far.

There is no guarantee it will keep working for the majority of us going forward; as is becoming very clear all around the world, it also has downsides especially without checks and balances (which was predicted and observed in the past, which is why other processes were conceptualized in the first place!)

As a trivial example, profit maximization is directly responsible for the enshittification we're seeing everywhere, which definitely is negatively impacting our standard of living.

The parents are talking about things in-the-large, negative societal trends, while you are talking your anecdotal experience and perhaps survival bias striking it so lucky with your employer. The world offers unimaginable riches, but at what cost really? Who benefits most? Where does it lead? Big picture.

>Apple, Google, Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Anthropic, Toyota, and a hundred other companies all offer me incredible value for so cheap.

Try to find something with Google these days. Try to use an Apple product past it's planned obsolescence. They crowd out innovation with their monopolistic rent seeking.

Really?

Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student.

Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

> there isn't any slack in the workforce, and qualified worker shortages are being reported in every trade across the board

Labor force participation is ~62%, far lower than historical peaks. I don't buy it.

I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.

> Did anything come out from those billions?

Per wikipedia:

  IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards,
  20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology,
  five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018,
  the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

Toshiba, IBM and Siemens had a DRAM joint development program 1993-1998. Several generations of DRAM was developed there. Also, while IBM exited the DRAM business, the knowledge survived in Rambus to an extent.

Can you expound on what makes it a mistake?

> Desktop Linux has gotten better

This is on me for being a bit too snarky.

So yes, Desktop Linux has "gotten better". What it hasn't done is solved any of the systemic problems.

The Open Source development quirks that created the shitshow of the 1999 is still here. Gnome is better but still suffers massively from mainstream features being declared stupid by the maintainers. (A power button that turns off the machine? Heretical.)

Valve's recent successes are pretty illustrative here. They used their money to directly hijack the projects their products rely on.

For what it pertains the comparison, Windows is not without this "slow" improvement either. 95 and 98 are lightyears behind contemporary Windows in so many ways. Until quite recently it still made about as much sense to use Linux as it did back then; Not much.

Take your Linux Laptop example. Sure, Linux finally kind of worked on some specific models that were tested for it. Meanwhile, Windows had moved from "it'll work with some mucking about with drivers" to "It works universally, on practically all hardware". Really, by the mid 2010s Windows would finally be quite tolerant of you changing the hardware.

Hence my original point; Desktop Linux hasn't really caught up with Windows in any meaningful sense. Windows is just nose-diving into the ground in the last few years.

For some reference back in Ubuntu 6 days around 2005 I switched. It took me 2 weeks to get X Org to run with my nvidia card at the time. 2 weeks of messing with config files. I only persisted because I was so sick of windows.

Wrong on the first point, right on the second. Institutional knowledge can't be easily regained. To build up the knowledge to, say, make a transistor, you need a bunch of people experimenting with a bunch of things. Published scientific papers and patents will get you part of the way there, but the final stretch is still up to you, including things like which equipment to buy, purity of supplies (and where to get them!), how long the chip needs to be bombarded by each kind of particles, how much air the cleanroom needs to move. All the tiny details. You have to discover them by trial and error. Actual chip manufacturing companies have found themselves unable to get good yield until they copied the floor plan of another working fabrication plant, and they still have no idea why that mattered, but that's an extreme case. Maybe nobody expected miniscule air contamination from one process step was affecting another nearby process step, and in the original plan they were farther apart.

Yes if you want to wire a neighborhood for internet you can skip DSL and go straight to fiber. That's not the problem. The problem is that nobody in your company knows how deep to put the fiber to minimize problems, how much redundancy is needed, how strong the mechanical armor around the fiber needs to be, how many fibers per cable to meet future capacity needs without excessive costs, which landlords are friendly to you, nobody has the right connections to city hall to get digging permits approved expediently, and so on.

10 year warranty on appliances instead of 1 would show the manufacturer was serious about quality !

> It can be quickly regained

I'm not sure what you mean with this?

Sure, hypothetically e.g. any western car manufacturer could poach a bunch of BYD employees. But it's not really practical for most businesses.

> The actual problem is, there is no market to go up to anymore.

This is the "Market for Lemons" problem, yes.

It's less of a problem than you might think. Convincing the entire wider world that you're legitimate is a problem. One made infinitely worse by store marketplaces like Amazon preferring to push "aqekj;bgrsabhghwjbgawrjwsraG" brand garbage.

So you just don't. The trick is to start small. The smallest you can sustain. (This doesn't work for cars, or anything that's sufficiently complex. You won't be taking on Salesforce.)

But so long as you can find a market niche where there's demand for quality, you can carve out a living, and from there, scale up.

The problem with that is twofold: Venture Capital has supplanted other forms of investment and "small business generating single digit millions in revenue" is utterly unappealing to VCs, even though the investment required is downsized accordingly.

And problem #2: The cost of starting a business is too high right now. Real estate and cost of living just make it unaffordable to even try. + Healthcare if you're in the US.

So, is that a market failure, or is that the market functioning as intended?

You know, I think you're right. I set up Void Linux on my desktop a couple of years ago, using the plainest base image. I chose that path because ZFS is important to me, and systemd is ugly to me.

I determined that this minimal start was the right confluence of those two preferences with the howto documentation available at the time, so that's what I did.

So I'm going along in rolling releases for years, and even playing games fine (except GTA:V online). Things are fine until there's some weird flickering-window bug that rolls down the pipe and apparently only affects nVidia users who use xfce4. It's an awful and particularly jarring bug.

The workaround is to disable vsync in xfce4, which solves that problem but always causes tearing for me. Even in YouTube videos. (Who knew how reliant we'd become on rote frame synchronization? Why, it seems like just yesterday when I was streaming potato-quality RealVideo episodes of South Park over dialup on a K6-2 box while marveling that any of it worked at all.)

I don't know which party is responsible for that problem, but nVidia has supposedly fixed it on their end in recent weeks. Which is cool, but this distro isn't shipping that version yet. And I'm reluctant to go off-script -- I loathe the idea of letting the nVidia installer do whatever it wants, and I'm not too keen on building my own package for xbps to handle (hopefully with better grace), either.

It was time to fix it anyway.

And I wanted to give Wayland a shot because there's a limitation with SDL that causes the clipboard method used by Factorio to fail to work with large blueprints under X11, so change was already in the air.

And so it began.

KDE Plasma: I couldn't get it to work. With both X11 and Wayland, parts of it would just die without leaving any traces I could find. It was unusable. I spent hours troubleshooting it and only a few minutes of actually using it, which is a terrible ratio. It had to go.

Gnome: It actually worked OK with Wayland. But when I say "worked OK", I mean that it acted like a touchscreen interface -- for toddlers. It didn't crash in mysterious and buried ways, which is good, but it I found it to be an affront to my sensibilities in ways that I simply could not tolerate. I won't apologize for hating it or for feeling insulted by it. That iteration of Gnome is dead to me.

So working down the list of non-ancient desktop environments: Cinnamon? It works. It's alright. It took some kicking to get sound to work because the mixer it comes with makes it impossible to set up default outputs in a way that behaves here and it reverts the system to its own broken ideas every time it runs, but it responded to my kicks without much of a fight and it works. The xfce4 volume mixer is on the taskbar instead, and I removed all traces of the Cinnamon mixer like it was a cancerous tumor, but with that done: Sound works. Regular X stuff works. It's good enough.

I haven't tried it with Wayland yet to see I can work around the SDL+Factorio SNAFU, but it's been behaving itself with X11 for a week or more.

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Now, that may sound awful. And to be clear, it wasn't fun at all. But at least it's not like my Windows laptop. I've got stories about that, for sure.

One of things that sticks out right now is when that laptop would deplete its battery just sitting in my bag in the car. That was weird, but it became more urgent to fix it when I got the machine out of the bag and it was hot.

The cause for that was an HP printer driver (for a rather old color printer that I don't even own -- I do use it sometimes, but it's 25 miles away) that was periodically waking the machine from hibernation to check that printer's supply status, so it could try to sell me more stuff.

This task was so completely buried in Windows that it took hours to find it, and it was configured by its installer to wake the machine from hibernation -- including, specifically, while on battery. Because that's obviously what every user of any printer needs: Computers that turn themselves on using battery power to sell toner cartridges while hidden unseen inside of a bag in the back of a car.

It didn't have to be that way, but it was this way anyway. I consider that kind of thing to be deliberate in a fashion that extends beyond mere maliciousness: It is instead simply fucking evil.

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So yeah, Linux is a great desktop.

I'd like to propose a new slogan: "Linux. At least it's not deliberately evil. Usually."

Are you saying we need more tariffs to have quality?

The stock market has been going up for a couple hundred years. When do you expect the pervasive short term thinking will crater the economy?

If you could sell it for more next week, that means the next week buyers are expecting higher profits.