Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
I'll add to this by saying that globalization works as well as it does because the average person would suffer dramatically from a major war and the resulting breakdown of global supply chains. People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
As a corollary: people who, because of geography, are unlikely to suffer any traditional or novel military consequences of a war in country <X> (e.g. Americans w.r.t a war in the middle east) are only going to have moral reasons for avoiding such a war, other than the risk to members of their family and friends. This makes the risks from such countries significantly worse than those who are militarily at risk should they choose to attack another.
Of course, none of that stops terroristic responses to war, but those by themselves affect relatively small numbers of people (or have done so far; obviously terroristic use of nuclear weapons would change that).
We can see all of this in the voices of the segment of the American population that is "all in" for the war in Iran, safe in their belief that they will suffer no militaristic consequences from it.
> People who are wealthy enough to move anywhere in the world (including to a military-grade bunker somewhere remote like New Zealand) if their current domicile is negatively affected don't have as strong of an incentive to maintain peace.
Eh, if you’re a billionaire factory owner and landlord, the kind of war that would send you to a military grade bunker in New Zealand will be bad for your factories, properties, workers and tenants.
Also, a man can only go to the opera if the singers and orchestra aren’t busy scavenging for food or fighting mutant wolves. And the same is true of most other entertainment, fine dining, fashion and suchlike.
Sane wealthy people gain nothing from a world scale war, and in fact would face a big loss in quality of life.
As I understand it, the idea was that there would be winners and losers from globalization but overall the benefit would be more global and outweigh localized drawbacks. This means that you can tax the global benefit and compensate the losers while still having everyone come out ahead! Sounds fantastic right, but in reality there were winners and losers and no one gave a shit about the losers. Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.
>Detroit and Toledo did not gracefully transition from being industrial centers to centers of art and culture, they rusted and rotted and were denigrated by the coastal elite who benefited from their place in the world as finance and service hubs.
For people who give such lip service to sustainability you'd think their political policy would have taken longer to run such a course.
One of the reasons for this is that the financial system - which is supposed to serve as a mechanism for representing value in a fungible way - does not assign value to many forms of structured, engineered creation. For instance, a high-performing team within an organization has value, held in the agreements and trusts between the people; organizations will destroy this in a second if it suits them because there is no quantitative record of the value of that group. Similarly, at scale, there is intense value in having all of the necessary tooling in one city to manufacture something as complicated as a car, to use your Detroit example. We can see the shadow of the qualitative value by looking at the losses incurred by all the ancillary industries affected when a major company like GM moves manufacturing out of town and everything downstream of that shuts down; and we can see the long tail of the loss in terms of the socioeconomic outcomes of the average working class person living there.
In a sense, these corporate (and on the next scale up, governmental) decisions have a large scale social cost that is externalized when it should probably have to be borne by the company. A generation of men that should have grown up to take their father's place building cars instead are relegated to either leaving their city or accepting one of the lesser jobs that they're forced to fight for; meanwhile the shareholders of the company profit from lower labour cost somewhere else.
Capitalism offers no means of dealing with this problem; creating this problem is incentivized. Many of the problems capitalism does solve, it does so through quantization of value; perhaps we need to find a better way to map social value as a second or third order system out beyond raw currency so that we don't destroy it.
Capitalism offers a means of dealing with the problem. Workers are free to start their own companies. People can just do things and don't need permission. Henry Ford himself started from nothing.
Your "just" there is doing a lot of work. Don't trivialize the difficulty of starting a company. Most people who start companies and are successful either have some financial backing or reserves already, or they have very little in the way of other responsibilities (like a spouse, children, or elderly family members) to cause them to think twice about living on ramen for years.
Yes, there are exceptions, as with everything, but this isn't a path to be taken lightly. Your average worker who lost their job due to globalization ends up scrambling to find a job, any job, immediately, or else risk their family living on the street.
Relatively speaking, it would seem Ford was well enough off.
Born in 1863, given a pocket watch at 12 (1875), starting a company at age 40 after some years pottering about as an apprentice machinist before working on steam engines and other "advanced machines".
This is well above "having nothing" for those times - some decades earlier a pocket watch was an extremely high end highly valued prestige item - not so much so when Ford was given one at 12, but absolutely a signifier of "better than nothing"
Working on machines at that time was also a fairly prestige career path, well paid, in demand, not at all like being "just an auto mechanic" might be seen in the 1950s.
“Wilt thou call again thy peoples, wilt thou craze anew thy Kings?
“Lo! my lightnings pass before thee, and their whistling servant brings,
“Ere the drowsy street hath stirred—
“Every masked and midnight word,
“And the nations break their fast upon these things.
“So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space.
“The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place,
“Where the anxious traders know
“Each is surety for his foe,
“And none may thrive without his fellows’ grace.
“Now this is all my subtlety and this is all my wit,
“God give thee good enlightenment, My Master in the Pit.
“But behold all Earth is laid
“In the Peace which I have made,
“And behold I wait on thee to trouble it!”
The problem in my view is, once dirt poor countries that work for nothing in horrible sweatshops to make cheap trinkets skill finally up and entire region moves from horribly poor to just poorish, the not en-vogue parts of the rich world will suffer some decline if they dont adapt and refocus on whats needed now and in near future.
Sounds like it matches those 2 regions although I am not that familiar with Toledo story. Also, from poor countries perspective it certainly looks like first world 'problems' they wish they had.
If we lift whole world from poverty then our western wages wont buy us much. You can see this in more egalitarian societies like nordics or Switzerland, there are no dirt poor, big middle class but you pay a lot for stuff and services and dont hoard tons of wealth. State picks up the tab for healthcare and whole education though. Thats the price for well functioning modern society (nothing to do with socialism), it has benefits but this is the cost and it cant be avoided.
I personally like living and raising kids in such system a lot, way more than US one for example.
I agree with your comment regarding fairer distribution, but I think when we look at globalisation's impact on war, I'm not sure this is really playing out.
Iran has not benefitted hugely from globalisation (unless I'm missing something), however because of globalisation and their ability to impact the global economy, they have an outsized hand to play relative to their GDP.
This is ignoring the concept of "cultures" entirely. Other cultures are not the same as mine. They do not hold the same values, morals, beliefs or language. These are all important for societies to function.
Societies that are split along these lines are doomed to fail. Take a simple example of a new neighbor moving next door to you. If they don't speak the same language, do you think you'll form much of a relationship? Possible, yes, but more likely no. Now add religion, tradition, etc into the mix.
That was a very interesting read. I appreciate when anyone tries to dig into the actual why of culture instead of just leaving it at face value. I get the impression this is more of a working theory than factual on the sociological side, because I do think there's a lot of counter-arguments to be made about strong kinship networks that are otherwise wealthy and prosperous.
And there's a pretty obvious parallel in wealthy nations: the lavish wedding. There are many examples of otherwise modest to low income couples, even with support of their families, putting on weddings they can't really afford but they do it anyway because of social mores. Maybe there's a clear connection between those examples and strong kinship networks. Or maybe its back to peer pressure and keeping up with the joneses.
Social pressure to do stuff like this is enormous in some families. It's not necessarily about the subjects (deceased person or the newly wedded couple) but about re-affirming the status of their relatives. Arguably the dead don't really care. But their nearest relatives definitely do care how they are perceived to be dealing with the death of the deceased. It underlines their importance and status. People come to "pay their respects". There's a whole etiquette around that.
In many cultures it used to be (or still is) quite common to treat brides as property. It's more like a financial transaction than a romantic thing. The groom's family "buys" the wife for the husband. Money changes hands sometimes. An elaborate party seals the deal. A lot of royal houses actually have a rich and colorful history with arranged marriages. And inbreeding because they jealously guarded their power by marrying cousins and managing how wealth and power is distributed via inheritance.
Of course grief and empathy with the mourning relatives is also very real and genuine and is mixed through this. Same with happiness for a newly wed couple.
And some of that empathy translates into people making sure they are there for the mourning family. So, they travel from far. And if everybody is coming, you need to make sure you don't forget to invite everybody else. People will want to be there. And that creates a need for a social gathering. And that in turn results in it becoming a big event. Which then that creates an obligation to make sure that all these people are welcomed properly. They need to be fed, entertained, etc. Or it would look bad on the family.
In short, it's all very explainable. But also a bit irrational to put yourself in debt because you are getting married or because somebody you care about passed away. Some people flip this with not wanting to impose on others with either their marriage or deaths. I'm not married and I don't believe in an after life. I've told my relatives to do what pleases them and works for them with my remains when the time comes but that I otherwise don't really care.
> In many cultures it used to be (or still is) quite common to treat brides as property.
Property is not the right word for this. Responsibility is the right word.
When a bride price is paid, you give money (or goods) to the family. In return the responsibility of the care of the woman is passed down.
This is not a traditional monetary style transaction in the way it appears.
In practice, a lot of families that accept a bride price end up returning the value in different ways. But the responsibility is passed down from parents to partner and that's why divorce is so frowned upon.
You can replace bride with dog and nothing changes.
We can sugarcoat it all the way we want, but in biblical times, when parents are under economic stress, female newborns are laid in the sun for post-natal abortion. Female offspring is a financial liability, they do not provide the same 'value' as males do. So when a father raises a women, the father gets compensated.
In all seriousness, shouldn't Anthropic be heavily dogfooding this sort of use case? I'm also not a huge fan of Amazon's support system, but they at least seem to be using their AI tools a lot for support responses (which has its own issues, but credit where its due).
Every conference talk on this stuff seems to suggest that we're all way behind the curve on AI implementation, but I suspect its mostly smoke and mirrors and mechanical turks. My company invests heavily in automated IVR and chat responses and we still optimize for getting the customer to a real agent. Those agents are largely overseas BPOs, but at least that's better than an AI loop that gets you nowhere.
The truth is that it has nothing to do with AI. Many tech companies learned from Google that the most cost-optimized thing to do is provide zero recourse to customers.
Companies that operate this way figure their customers are either so entrenched they’ll never leave or that it’s cheaper to get a new customer than expend a human’s time fixing a customer’s issue.
I hope OP either files a chargeback with their card or files a small claims court suit. Either way, they should take their money elsewhere.
But they probably won’t, because Claude is the best coding agent. Just like Google is the best search engine/free email/etc.
You might be right, but that's an awfully risky bet for such a new company in a tight race with their competitors. I'm sure a modestly staffed support team could get to these requests, especially if they put some AI resources into helping.
I'm also disappointed by the decision, but I get the argument made from the business perspective. I'm required to dispose my waste properly and its reflected in my prices, my competitor is not doing these practices and they should be compelled to follow the same regulations. I'm just disappointed that their court sided with the business since a better resolution would've been "your company can do this too if you just do the legwork".
The joke is that all of the engineers that came before AI were also just following established patterns, right down to everyone wearing the same outfit to work despite our tech workplaces usually being very business casual. Implication that taste was not something these engineers had either.
A past company I worked for made SaaS and On-prem and we supported Oracle with the on-prem. The simple act of supporting and testing that option was enormous for our company, but the customers we had that needed it were highly lucrative.
Totally agreed looking at them from a development and cutting-edge viewpoint. They own what was once very competitive platforms and languages, which they still support. They have largely transitioned into rent seekers.
From the investment standpoint they still have a lot of value to siphon from, but its all rent seeking behavior, its not producing new ecosystems like them or Sun did in the past. Long-term blue chip play.
Though all the Paramount stuff is loosely coupled to them now, so tough to say if its a good long-term play anymore.
Boards aren't exactly dummies either. If they can see their exec isn't necessary I think they'd make moves to eliminate the positions. But that's in a world where reality meets the hype, and I don't think we're there yet. It gets weirder to think that then anyone with access to the tools and some capital could reasonably make their own company to battle it out with the big guys, but that future is a lot hazier.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
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