Two things:
1) This is war. It's not pretty and it's never not messy.
2) This is precisely why every human, and every leader of humans, should avoid war at all costs. The image of a "clean" war is a myth. Even the Allies in WWII were not immune to this, see the bombing of Dresden[1].
Whatever you think of either side in this, it's clear that neither is doing enough to end this.
This is actually insane to me. Like bonkers, even. The MBA types are surely the source of that idea. From a brand perspective, the only car that ever truly made sense for Apple to make was something at least resembling a supercar. They could have made do with a Telsa Model S kind of car perhaps, but I'm shocked that a brand-conscious company like Apple thought a bus was the best bet as an initial product.
First impressions are vitally important. In my opinion, a car brand can go from making high performance cars to more "practical" vehicles once they've established their brand, but not the other way around. Slapping an Apple badge on a Corolla isn't going to work. Steve Jobs said it best, paraphrasing "We want to build computers that customers would want to lick.". If Apple wants to be a legitimate car company that enthusiasts like, they'd have to build a car those people would lick. Not a bus...
Everything Apple makes is ultimately still meant to be practical. I feel like the Apple car would be more like "Corolla, but very high end, and 3x the price" rather than a supercar.
Why a supercar? The apple watch (except the v1 "edition") was never going to compete with luxury watches. Airpods Max are in the higher end of consumer headphones, but a downright bargain compared to "luxury" headphones. Apple doing a lux-lite iteration of a common consumer good makes way more sense.
I agree with your thoughts about the bus, but I started thinking about how many car brands started out selling practical cars, and now have, if not supercars, very high end sports cars - it's a lot of them. It's also kind of how Apple has done stuff in the past. They've marketed their "lesser" products by also making sexy, "pro" products. They could have easily done the same here. Release a practical, functional, Apple product, stuffed with Apple's attention to detail, followed up with the supercar. The keynote would look just like any Macbook lineup update, with the $20k model saved for the end.
My long held feeling: A fleet of autonomous busses traveling predetermined inter/intra-city routes. Think, greyhound replacement. They were never going to be operated by humans.
A bus achieves what with some morality the profit other manufacturers seek via in-car purchases. GM, Rivian, and Tesla don’t want CarPlay for that reason.
A bus network would provide recurring revenue for the actual thing a vehicle is for, instead of DLC headlight patterns.
Wow. I know perhaps this makes sense from a non-American perspective, but as an American, January 6 was incredibly violent. I think some people forget that this isn't normal.
I am an American and I don’t think it was particularly violet. There were 4 deaths. Not 400 or 40 (not like I wanted there to be more). But pearl clutching over some people protesting where they shouldn’t have when Congress wasn’t in session is just silly.
>I am an American and I don’t think it was particularly violet. There were 4 deaths.
There was one death. One. An unarmed rioter named Ashly Babbit who was shot by Capitol Police well after the riot's start.
One Capitol Police member, Officer Sicknick, died of a stroke the day afterwards, but the coroner specifically looked for signs of his either being hit on the head, or exposed to tear gas, as causes, and concluded that neither was true.
Had Capitol Police as a whole done their job and used their training and weapons to stop the invaders in the first place, a great deal of trouble would have been avoided while more rioters would have been shot (which I have no problem with). Why they did not do their job is something that I trust will be answered one day.
It was a dark and stormy night off the coast of Maine. The winds were howling, the waves were monstrous, and there I was, stranded on my lobster fishing boat in the middle of a hurricane. The sea was a ferocious beast, tossing my vessel around like a toy. Just when all seemed lost, a figure appeared on the horizon. It was Sam Altman, riding a giant, neon-lit drone, battling the tempest with nothing but his bare hands and indomitable will.
As he approached, lightning crackled around him, as if he was commanding the elements themselves. With a deft flick of his wrist, he sent a bolt of lightning to scare away a school of flying sharks that were drawn by the storm. Landing on the deck of my boat with the grace of a superhero, he surveyed the chaos.
"Need a hand with those lobsters?" he quipped, as he single-handedly wrangled the crustaceans with an efficiency that would put any seasoned fisherman to shame. But Sam wasn't done yet. With a mere glance, he reprogrammed my malfunctioning GPS using his mind, charting a course to safety.
As the boat rocked violently, a massive wave loomed over us, threatening to engulf everything. Sam, unfazed, simply turned to the wave and whispered a few unintelligible words. Incredibly, the wave halted in its tracks, parting around us like the Red Sea. He then casually conjured a gourmet meal from the lobsters, serving it with a fine wine that materialized out of thin air.
Just as quickly as he had appeared, Sam mounted his drone once more. "Time to go innovate the weather," he said with a wink, before soaring off into the storm, leaving behind a trail of rainbows.
As the skies cleared and the sea calmed, I realized that in the world of Silicon Valley CEOs, having a "Sam Altman saved my butt" story was more than just a rite of passage; it was a testament to the boundless, almost mythical capabilities of a man who defied the very laws of nature and business. And I, a humble lobster fisherman, had just become part of that legend.
You know Don, what touched me about this wonderful story of the charming visionary from SV —- thanks for sharing — is that his reach is as wide as his heart is big! Here you were, a mere fisherman somewhere off the coast of Maine, and here this hero of the age, this charming tower of visionary insight, coming over all the way from California to ‘shave your butt’. (Oops, that was a typo.)
I'd say it's the opposite, actually. If Amazon embraced WFH, the Seattle commercial real estate market (and the city itself) would suffer major damage. So the mayor and many CRE groups are lobbying the C suite to go back to the office.
Look, I agree with your fundamental sentiment. But I think you're being incredibly naive too.
> I don't see how the world can function if everyone were to think and act like that
My brother in Christ, the world barely functions as it is right now. We have a war going on because of one man's misguided attempt at recapturing his country's former glory as an empire, we've had planes fall out of the sky because of boneheaded engineering decisions demanded by MBA types (737 Max), we had a massive train derailment / chemical spill in Ohio caused by other MBA types not wanting to properly maintain the trains and tracks, we are maybe a few weeks away from the most economically powerful country on Earth defaulting because our moronic leadership can't agree to pay our debts (NOT because of an inherent inability to pay)... I could go on. The world is chaos, and it's pretty much always been that way.
> there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA, but Computer Science and Engineering were considered too hard to really be worth the effort.
This part of your reply really, really grinds my gears, because to me it's sort of saying that MBA's can cheat all they want, but CS and Engineering grads should be 'chaste' and not cheat... because reasons. NO. The MBA's took over the technical companies and fucked everything up, but we're just supposed to keep doing the 'right' thing? NO. Fuck them, we should get ours.
Is it sad that this is the current state of affairs? Absolutely. Would the world be an immensely better place if NO ONE was unethical, and no one cheated? Hell yes. But that world doesn't exist. And the people who have the power to bring such a world into existence are not entry level engineers.
> The MBA's took over the technical companies and fucked everything up, but we're just supposed to keep doing the 'right' thing? NO. Fuck them, we should get ours.
Yes. That's what Christ teaches. We live in an unjust world and we make it better by holding our moral ground despite the enormous pressures to sell out.
This is a simplified version of the argument, but basically: right now, I am dependent on an employer for my survival. Keeping a roof over my head depends on my being competent at my job, AND my employer not deciding to fire me. One of those I can control - the other is completely outside of my control. If instead I was dependent on a democratic government for my survival and keeping a roof over my head, at the very least I and other citizens would have a say in the direction and decisions of that government every time an election happened.
Your point does stand in autocracies and dictatorships though.
You are not dependent on your employer. You're dependent on society having enough employers at any point that would match with the skills you can provide in exchange for salary, you can switch employers at any time you want. It's not 1-1, it's 1-many right now. By moving that to the government you're actually going from 1-many to 1-1 and getting a way worse deal.
Worse deal because the many employers are in competition against each other so you can rely on their self interest to remain in business, whereas the people that get government jobs, their self interest doesn't have an incentive system where it would benefit me.
On the surface, yes, there are many employers. How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco...
I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.
> How's that going for the folks that have been recently laid off from checks notes... Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, EA, Indeed, Yahoo, Github, Zoom, Dell, Paypal, IBM, Spotify, Goldman Sachs, Coinbase, HP, Cisco...
They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part?
> I'm not really sure that going from many possible employers who cannot guarantee my job to a single entity who can is a way worse deal, but ok.
I do not want to work for the kinds of jobs "a single entity who can guarantee" jobs can offer me. You know what happens in that world? You receive a note from your teacher when you are in school, telling you that based on what they saw, you are going to be studying X for the rest of your schooling. After studying X the government will send you a letter assigning you to the job where you are needed, wherever it is, and assign you a home near that job. You have no agency in this world. I'm not making this up, this is the only practical way such systems have worked.
"Guaranteed work for life from a single entity" also means the guy that runs the "assignment office" for the government will now place his friends in good jobs, and you in bad ones.
People who are against corporativism and capitalism have a way of forgetting that if there's "bad people owning companies and houses and stealing our labor", those same defects would be in the people who would work for the government. Bad people don't go away because you change the system, so does your system keep them in check?
> They are applying to different companies? Do you believe these employees made a decision to work for one of these companies for life and will now never again get another job? What is your point with this part?
Who is hiring in tech right now? Honest question.
As for the rest of your post, the main issue is having a say. The ill effects you are describing can indeed happen in a single-employer system. But at least in a democratic state, every few years the population has a say in how the system is being run. Right now, nobody except the CEO and the board has a say in how a company is run. They fire thousands of people, many with mortgages and children and people who depend on them, with no regards for what that means. And then to top it off they pay themselves millions of dollars to make these savage decisions. AND, I have no voice and no vote in all of this. Yeah... no thanks.
> Who is hiring in tech right now? Honest question
The company I work for, among tens of thousands of other companies. I'm starting to think you're not commenting in good faith.
> the main issue is having a say.
> nobody except the CEO and the board
So here you come in with what I described above. "The bad person". Let's assume they are bad, and they fire everyone. Their company will stop existing, so that'll make them less money and give them less power. So they won't fire everyone. They'll fire exactly the amount of people they believe will benefit them personally the most. Over time, some of these "bad CEOs" will make compounding bad decisions, and nobody will want to work for them or the company will run out of money. This is the built-in self regulation and "the say". If you work for a company where the you believe the CEO is a bad person, you leave. If they fire your colleagues, you can leave too. That is your say, and the market is the "aggregate say". It works in different ways and needs regulations (I don't believe in the purity off implementation of any system).
So you see, in fact the bad CEO and board actually have way more to lose from their decisions than a "job assignment official" in an all-job-controlling government office, moreover because most public jobs aren't elected.
Out of those two, I know which one's whims I'd rather be exposed to. A life of shoveling rocks at the mines because "john the placement officer dislikes me", or choosing which job I do but possibly losing it from one day to the next and have to get another one multiple times through my life.
This really got to the heart of what I was trying to say. I find the concept that we all live by the grace of our employers to be alien, coming as I do from a culture and society that prides itself on mobility, advancement, and self-sufficiency. I find the concept of living by the grace of government (or relying on government for more than services rendered in exchange for the taxes I pay from my own labor) to be odious morally and terrifying in practice. Many Americans, even ones on the left of the social spectrum, feel this way. Particularly ones with roots in the Soviet Union or other totalitarian states. But it probably isn't a natural revulsion or posture for people formed under mildly socialist Western European standards, and it seems to have been lost on the youngest generation in the US.
I went to a wealthy enough private school to have had an up-close look at what children do when they never have to work in their lives if they don't want to. It's not pretty. My father made all his kids start working full time at 14.
As far as the one-to-many vs one-to-one argument, you're absolutely right; the connection between having choices in work and having freedom is only not apparent to people who've developed a conveniently conspiratorial view of the world, in which corporations are acting in concert as opposed to presenting endless opportunities and edges to anyone with ambition in the faces they present. As you said, with a monolithic actor like government, it's just a single bureaucrat's opinion of you that matters, with no chance to prove yourself. This is obvious to everyone I've ever met who has lived under a dictatorship. And ultimately a dictatorship must be the ultimate arbiter of any form of UBI, because one way or another, people will be made to work to support people who don't want to work. And that can only be accomplished by force in measure to how offensive it is to the working group.
Whereas I have quit great jobs to work some incredibly shitty jobs and become good, then great at them, and I think I've become a slightly better human being at each iteration. I quit coding to be a taxi driver - I worked 16 hour days and wrote several novels in my taxi. There is your time to make art. I don't think either part of that would have been possible in a world with UBI or the control structures it would imply.
You and I both know that as messed up as this was, nothing will be done to reign in the power of these VC's. I always vaguely knew that the billionaire class has the government over a barrel, but now they know, concretely, with real world evidence, that this is the case.
My experience working in a small startup, a largish tech company and a FAANG, is that management (especially at the top) follows a highly unbalanced bimodal distribution - that is, about 85-95% of management has no idea what they're doing and in many cases are actively hurting the company. But 5-15% are actually great and know what they're doing, and can carry the deadweight along. But since they're a minority, they are completely focused on getting the business to work; the deadweights are the people making the open office decisions.
2) This is precisely why every human, and every leader of humans, should avoid war at all costs. The image of a "clean" war is a myth. Even the Allies in WWII were not immune to this, see the bombing of Dresden[1].
Whatever you think of either side in this, it's clear that neither is doing enough to end this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden