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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • At first i didn’t believe it when my coworker told me “lots of businesses have a natural lifetime of 20 years. After that, they enshittify.” I thought he was making it up.

    Now, however, i believe it. Seeing how Google has started massively enshittifying its products around 2020, roughly 20 years after its inception, after providing good service for sth like 20 years (think 2012 Youtube), and Musk starting to be a rampant asshole, after having put out tweets such as this one:

    as recently as in 2018.



  • A lot of people have observed in the past that there’s always a new field of work, whenever an old one gets automated/replaced by some cheaper method of doing it.

    That growth has driven demand for human labor ever since, and higher demand for labor means higher wages (since the labor market is a free market - supply and demand). Now that growth seems to be slowing down, and that makes the demand for human labor slow down, and that depresses wages. That is what people are observing now.

    People are surprised because they wrongly assumed that growth would continue to be an exponential curve forever. It is not, however, it is probably closer to being a sigmoid curve.


  • Yeah what you’re describing, in computerized maths, is called a “local minimum”.

    When you’re seeking out a global minimum of a function, such as in this example:

    You might be tempted to think “well, i start somewhere, then i take one small step after another, always going downhill, until i am at the lowest point”. But what happens in practice, is that you get stuck in so called “local minimums”. For a visualization:

    That is the fundamental problem with being short-sighted (i.e., taking one small step after another, always going downhill). If you really want to find the global minimum, you have to think globally. You have to apply analysis to the whole function, not just local parts of it, to find the best spot.


  • I think you fundamentally misunderstand how companies are thinking.

    They are thinking “well, if i pay my workers 10% less, surely they have 10% less money to spend, and that means they buy fewer products, and that hurts revenue, but they probably buy some other company’s products anyway, so that’s other company’s loss, not mine.”

    companies aren’t so much an organized hivemind as people seem to be thinking. A lot of them are literally competing against one another, and they don’t care whether other businesses struggle because they pay their employees less.

    I mean, they often dom’t even care if their own employees struggle as long as they continue working for the company. Why would they care about other companies, or even the greater economy in total? They don’t. Who should care, though, is the government. The US has an incredibly weak government that does not protect its citizens and give them appropriate subsidies. That’s why people are having economic hardships.