1993 was before the west entered the last stage of capitalism. It was a time when companies still competed on products rather than using monopolistic force to squeeze ever more revenue out of the same people by turning every life necessity into a subscription. Similarly, it was a time when you could mail-order a house and build it yourself. Rental prices were low because there was no regulatory capture on housing construction yet.
Where I disagree with you is video streaming. In my opinion, YouTube and the commercialisation of holiday memories (which later became Instagram influencers) were the beginning of widespread depression. Seemingly regular people sharing their exceptional life somehow forces everyone else to compare themselves to the dreams presented on YouTube and most people will come up short and then most people will feel insufficient. I believe that’s why early YouTube ads were so powerful. Your ad for exotic goods would play immediately after the viewer became painfully aware of how boring they are, when measured against the top 0.1% on a global scale.
I never understand why people want to label such eras of capitalism as “late” or the last era of capitalism. The late stage was late only to its own death. This isn’t the last stage either. Plenty more to grow. Capitalism is more akin to an indestructible and rapidly mutating organism than an ideology.
If all the AI revenue projections were correct, then 1% of worldwide GDP would end up at AI companies. Or said differently: you buy a sandwich for $5 and somehow AI gets $0.05 out of that transaction.
This is basically what happens with the advertising/social media giants (Facebook, Google, etc) because everyone needs msrketing, and mobile companies (Apple, Google) because they handle payments.
I think TSMC laughed them out of the room when they announced the original numbers. So maybe there’s no reaction now because everyone already knew not to trust OpenAI’s promises.
I once lived in Singapore for a while and we were all sure that nobody would steal anything anyway, so we just never bothered to lock the doors. (That was also very helpful if you wanted to stop for a quick coffee with a date in the middle of the night.) You could see the MacBooks from the street, but nothing ever went missing. I don’t know what exactly it was, but Singapore felt incredibly safe and crime-free.
I used to accumulate a pile of change on my desk from buying coffees.
Never got touched across about a hundred different offices around Australia (I’m a consultant).
Except once: the pile was replaced by a $50 note and a hand written apology saying the guilty party needed change for the parking lot machine. I had less than $30 there in coins so… profit!
I had mine stolen from my desk, way back when i had a job at a state company. I used to keep it inside a small metal can (i guess i just enjoyed the rattling sound it made). Thing is, I also kept a desk drawer key inside the can, so the thief also got my key.
There was video.
I had to have the desk drawer changed (which made for quite a spectacle in an open plan office).
It's not actually the extreme punishments, it's the consistent small punishments. It's that you'll actually, seriously get a ticket for littering, even if it's a relatively small ticket. The "Fine City" enforces it's vision in a ubiquitous way, so people just don't break the rules.
This seems like the most effective solution. Imagine if you knew that if you littered, there is a 100% chance you would get a $10 fine immediately. Almost no one would litter ever again, even though the fine is much smaller than the fine is in most countries.
Problem is it just takes a lot of resources to police, more than the fine revenue. But with CCTV and computer vision it's getting increasingly cheap.
Unfortunately, the US and many other countries have chosen the other path (sporadic enforcement with severe punishment) largely because it's easier to implement. There's a lot of momentum to change this but it's politically difficult at least in America.
I think that barrier may be weakening. I reckon that the people most concerned about crime are willing to sacrifice their privacy and defer to their government to prevent crime.
But I think the shenanigans of ICE are making people more aware of the importance of privacy. Look at the backlash Ring (lost dog superbowl ad) and Discord (age verification) and Nest (Guthrie case) received just this year.
The people I have in mind are the rich, poor and those who fantasize becoming wealthy and fear going broke. I’m uncertain how much these demographics account for the US population and empirically speaking I’m unsure of the gravity of the PR stirs you named. I really don’t know if privacy is the foremost concern when the types of people I’m thinking of consider ICE either.
It really seems to boil down to whether these types of people can be effectively sold on the virtue of tearing down the barriers of privacy and government. If they aren’t already implicitly sold to that then all it takes is for the powers that be to do a better job at marketing their initiative.
My city semi-recently introduced a citywide parking system. They have hired plenty of inspectors and there is like 95% chance you will get a ticket if you don't pay for the parking.
> It's not actually the extreme punishments, it's the consistent small punishments.
Not just the consistent small punishments, but the painful punishments. Pain is an extremely good, human motivator. Why destroy someones life and spend valuable taxpayer money with a 10 year imprisonment, when a rigorous caning session will be 10x more effective ? Many criminals will loudly thump their chest if punishment is merely jail but will dance on eggs to avoid buttock-pain.
Singapore recently introduced 24 strokes for scamming and fraud.
Even Masochists have a limit to Pain Tolerance. Unless you are talking about 1-in-a-billion "Ironman" guy with dead nerves or someone totally drugged, the overwhelming majority of human beings cannot last beyond the 10th stroke at the maximum without begging for mercy.
Singapore's judicial caning officers (jokingly called "commandos") are trained to deliver strokes in a way that inflicts MAXIMUM pain while staying within strict procedural limits to avoid permanent injury.
Officers undergo specific training on posture, swing technique, accurate aiming, and using full body weight to generate high force and speed, up to around 160 km/h at impact, with forces exceeding 800–900 Newtons.
"Strokes are precisely placed to avoid criss-crossing (creating a neat "ladder" pattern) and to ensure consistency and full effect rather than randomness."
The explicit goal of the technique is to maximize pain per stroke: they are trained to induce as much pain as possible with each blow.
There are several examples of criminals who had multiple arrests and jail sentences, but after their first and last caning session quit criminal life and turned over a new leaf.
Caning is really extreme. I watch a documentary on it. Punished person would avoid going to toilet (#2) for days because of how painful it is. They would not eat anything to prevent #2.
I spent a few days in Singapore, long ago. I felt slightly anxious, but mostly because I wasn't familiar with the rules. I'm confident that, if I spent a year or two there, I would quickly become far less anxious than in other places--because the rules are so clear and consistently enforced. The less of a judgement call is involved, the less there is to be uncertain about.
Think about it: Is it better to have a posted speed limit of 65mph and a real speed limit of 75mph, and you just have to learn from experience where the real limit is? Or is it better to post 75mph and fine any driver as soon as they exceed it?
The point of poster a lower speed limit than what is applied is because both the sensors used by the police and in your card are inaccurate and it's unreasonable to constantly fine people who thought (and perhaps even were) within the limit.
And this applies to most other laws too - we can't expect everyone to know all the edge cases so some leniency for honest mistakes is needed.
The residents of Singapore I've known seemed at ease in public. The rules really aren't that unreasonable. How much littering do you do annually? I would guess the annual litter count of my friends averages around zero.
Press freedom is limited in Singapore and that is a significant problem for its democracy. As a tourist this is unlikely to impact you. Otherwise, rule of law is paramount in Singapore.
Surely the entirety of the law is encapsulated in your comment. Certainly you won't get in trouble for carrying something as innocuous as an empty vape cartridge. You won't get fined for crossing the road in the wrong place, absolutely.
Singapore is just an example. Its more invasive big brother can be found just north of it.
Yes, but it's a difficult equilibrium to reach. It's easy to ticket 100% of littering if not many people are doing it.
There is another side to this, which is that the police need to not hassle people who are not committing crime. Which is why you'd struggle to adopt this anywhere in America.
So what are the failings? A quick skim through the Wikipedia article found plenty of criticism, but all the evidence I could find in my quick skim was in support of the theory. It's very likely I missed something in my skim; could you point to a specific section of the article where the evidence against the theory is presented?
I would be surprised if we ever got evidence against the broken windows theory, simply due to crime in general being a (wicked problem)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem].
I think social norms have a lot to do with it. It's like the actual social costs of being the one who broke the social trust is so high it dissuades people.
It worked for me on a lower level. Everyone cut queues and will grab an empty seat if it looks available at a packed restaurant here so I do it too but I never did that when I lived in Singapore because I knew that's not how things work there and people would genuinely be mad at me for doing it.
It's like a self-fulfilling, self-improving environment. Same with Japan and cleanliness.
State provided housing for most and a booming economy with low unemployment must help too.
> The extreme punishments for breaking the law might have something to do with it.
Historically speaking, this is almost never true. People constantly think the solution is crueler punishments and we have hundreds of years of records of what happens.
People who commit crimes generally do not think they will be caught and therefore the punishment is of no concern to them. The better way to deter crime[1] is to convince more of the public that people who commit crimes are usually caught. Preferably by actually catching people who commit crimes.
1. aside from the obviously effective but difficult to implement deterrent of meeting everyone's physical needs
A lot of crimes are also committed by people who genuinely don't think about the consequences when they are acting. It doesn't matter how bad or how certain the consequence is, because they aren't thinking about it at all.
But apparently there are far fewer such people in Singapore. How would you explain this?
I think the explanation is that growing up in an environment where even small infringements are consistently punished makes people think about the consequences more.
This is exactly right. People who get away with some rule-breaking, whether it's large or small, once will start to think maybe they can get away with it a second time. Get away with it a dozen times and you start to think you can get away with it every time, leading to the "people who genuinely don't think about the consequences when they are acting" that cortesoft mentioned. That sort of behavior isn't just a facet of personality, it's trained (or it might be more accurate to say, it wasn't trained out of them — all children act on impulse, it's the nature of children, but if their parents consistently punish them for sneaking cookies out of the cookie jar and they never get away with it, they eventually learn not to do it in the first place and to think about the consequences before they act).
So when a lot of people grow up in an environment where small rulebreakings are consistently caught and punished (the former is more important, can't punish what isn't detected), they learn from an early age that rulebreaking carries consequences nearly every time, and you end up with far fewer people willing to break the rules.
This is just... wildly vague. People break rules for all sorts of reasons, ignorance, desperation, mental impairment, sometimes just plain maliciousness or greed.
It's one thing to discuss something like a school campus with a small cohort of relatively similar wants and needs and a relatively small set of rules, it becomes much more complicated when dealing with the entire society's interaction with laws.
I don't think that is a significant proportion of crime, though it certainly exists. Most crime is organized (theft, pickpocketing, robbery, kidnappings, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, racketeering), or it exists in an atmosphere of impunity, where there is a baseline assumption of no consequences (Epstein files, rape culture in certain industries).
> People who commit crimes generally do not think they will be caught and therefore the punishment is of no concern to them.
The mere possibility of severe butt-pain keeps all the would-be criminals in line.
I can definitely get away with it, but just in case I cannot - it's not a mere jail holiday that I face as consequence - I wont be able to even sit down without screaming like a baby -> The foolish criminal becomes wise and the hardened criminal becomes enlightened with this fundamental realization.
The Possibility of Pulverizing Pain via the Holy Cane is the Divine Motivation to Obey the Law.
"Hundreds of years of records" sounds like a big exaggeration. I don't think we can reliable talk about more than 150 years, and even that would be sparse, covering only some lucky countries. And this data is hard to evaluate as adjusting it to culture shifts, economy changes, and even to what constitutes "cruel" in different periods isn't easy.
I think, it's reasonable to suspect that demonstrative cruelty in crime punishment may have bad side-effects in the long run, but there are just a few cases in recent history where at least short-term outcomes seem to support the claim that it may reduce crime levels.
As someone who's lived there, it's definitely more about the consistency. Generally speaking, if you make a police report, it will be investigated. This includes for smaller issues like lost items too. From what I understand, their courts also give fairly consistent sentences.
Combine this with the fact that Singapore is small and full of security cameras, and it create a situation where breaking the law carries a decent risk of getting caught as police will have the willingness and resources to investigate.
On top of this, a massive proportion of the population are there on work visas. For these people, any sort of crime or bad behaviour would mean deportation and loss of their job.
I would say it's the carrot and stick play, they're really good at it. Outsiders/foreigners only hear the things about fines and caning and the death sentence and no chewing gum. But they don't see the carrot part. For example they give conscripts something like a 401k top up and some other benefits to attend their reservist trainings. Of course if you don't turn up it's probably jail or some shit. They also pay them to keep in shape through PT exams, and they also reimburse your salary for the time taken. Conversely if you don't turn up there's a fine or some tedious make up sessions.
The Airbus A320neo can already takeoff, ascend, cruise, descend, and land all by autopilot. It can even download your flight plan from the airline's servers.
But you still need the pilots because the system can only handle the happy path. As soon as there's any blockade or strong weather change, the autopilot will just turn off. And then you need the pilots.
I would say software engineering with AI is similar: The AI can handle CRUD just fine. But once things get messy, you need someone who can actually think.
Scathophagidae are flies that really like eating shit. We know how to cheaply produce massive amounts of shit.
But that doesn't mean we solved world hunger. In the same way, AIs churning out millions of lines of code doesn't mean we have solved software engineering.
Actually, I would argue that high LOCs are a liability, not an asset. We have found a very fast way of turning money into slop, which will then need maintenance and delay every future release. Unless, of course, you have an expert code reviewer who checks the AI output. But in that case, the productivity gains will be max 10%. Because thoroughly reviewing code is almost the same amount of work as writing it.
This website offers a very venture capital take on ideas. They present it as if the single determining factor if an idea was great is the valuation at which it was sold. I don’t really understand why they think that should nullify valid criticism about the early beta versions of software that turned out popular later.
Also, just because a company has a lot of revenue that doesn’t automatically make it a successful company. Economics crashed and burned while still growing revenue day over day. And the jury is still out if OpenAI will ever be able to pay back the billions it borrowed.
I think it proves that you could have valid criticisms about the viability of the product but markets are often irrational. Bitcoin is probably the most blatant example, a product which has close to zero utility but is currently has a market cap of 1 point something trillion.
Where I disagree with you is video streaming. In my opinion, YouTube and the commercialisation of holiday memories (which later became Instagram influencers) were the beginning of widespread depression. Seemingly regular people sharing their exceptional life somehow forces everyone else to compare themselves to the dreams presented on YouTube and most people will come up short and then most people will feel insufficient. I believe that’s why early YouTube ads were so powerful. Your ad for exotic goods would play immediately after the viewer became painfully aware of how boring they are, when measured against the top 0.1% on a global scale.
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