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- Hacker News
- Post WW1, the US was a world hegemon, lent money and set low interest rates and for the past 100 years the countries of the Western EU, fattened from their ancient trade and slavery profits were engaged in a lot of delulu thinking (we could even note franco-prussian war for this).
Effectively there is no job / value creation since at least the 90s, coupled with uncontrolled mass immigration, and what is going on is stagnation and eventually fall. Lento, then adagio, then allegro, then presto as nn taleb says.
We can see this mindset in this summers AC discourse, doing less than Pakistan on the Hormuz situation et c., et c.
by barrenko - Reads like capitalist romanticization to me.
The point about concentric circles (of care) is true e.g. for workers. If you have ownership. Not corporate-speak ownership like you feel like you are invested in outcomes but real, legal ownership.
Maybe these are capitalist cooperative enterprises. Then you really have concentric circles.
by keybored - Wood bending is way older than the nr 14. Plenty of that stuff in 18th c. Europe but apparently it was a common technique in lots of cultures before they had any contact with europeans too, going way back.by topaz0
- I was enjoying this until this signature sentence by Claude:
>>Slowly but surely, it did, once again becoming a world-renowned brand, now separate from that of Thonet. The same town, the same factory, the same people—just a different name
The moment I see this, the piece loses all of its credibility. I cannot take any of the factual informations I was enjoying as implicitly correct now, I just can’t. Authors should edit LLM help in a much stricter way. As a writer, LLMs should only be research helpers and used to check for typos and syntax mistakes. Authors, please, do better
- You do know em dashes are a normal part of formal prose right? If you go through pre GPT New Yorker and the Atlantic articles, there are plenty of em dashes too.by HawtAds
- I think it's more likely model creators will up their game. I've been generating some copy for our company website. I'll be honest, not all of it is great and there are clear AI slop signs. However, you can use guard rails to limit this kind of thing somewhat. I've been doing that. But the good news is that there are pretty easy to spot patterns. And LLMs are actually really good at identifying those already. It seems spotting the patterns is a lot easier for LLMs than addressing them.
> As a writer, LLMs should only be research helpers and used to check for typos and syntax mistakes. Authors, please, do better
I know professional writers that are definitely no longer just limiting themselves like that. I think that ship has sailed.
- Sometimes I'm taken aback by the visceral reaction some people have when their spider sense detects LLM impurities in the writing.
I read that same sentence (and the whole article, which I loved) and it didn't trigger anything in me.
It reminds me a bit of the OMG GMOs! craze people used to have a while back (and might still have?).
- don’t be too quick to judge, putting the text through pangram indicates it’s 100% human written. It didn’t strike me as too AI because it wasn’t superfluous; it literally was what happened. AI is using this phrase more as a stylistic device than an a factual statementby biowaffeln
- the article was a bit long for me to read, but when i hear "mittelstand", i think "inherited wealth", regulatory capture leading to gatekeepting of access to the trades and crafts, and employees that are getting paid less than they would in larger industries in exchange for lofty blah blah about family friendliness (sitting in a weird contrast with crazy levels of bean counting when it comes to, e.g., flexible working time and vacation entitlements).by gyulai
- Lol.by grebc
- > Advancing the precedent set by Alfred, generations of Krupps would continue to develop the region through various private and public works, for almost a century into the 1920s. > > With their basic needs addressed and the workforce inculcated with the “Kruppianer spirit,” the firm crossed the fifth ring. They forged an empire that, by the late 1950s,
<insert Goose meme> “What did Krupp make in the 1930s?”
This was kind of an interesting article but could have been a great deal shorter and wasn’t particularly insightful.
by jonstewart - Thanks for the meme chuckle. For the uninitiated: https://i.imgflip.com/ayibmd.jpgby rbinv
- re: the crisis of the Mittelstand in competing VS China, I'm reminded of this tweet. It's a fictitious illustrative case not a serious study but I think it describes some of the root challenges of western industrial culture when it comes to competing against Chinaby lz400
- I don't think the fundamental premise is much of an issue - it's what a (mostly) free market is meant to do. Someone sells a chair for $100, someone else believes they can sell it for $80, so they do. There are two main complicating factors (outside of brand reputation and possibly some others?)
1) quality - someone accepts the $80 chair which is a little bit more wonky
2) the $100 company spent a few years developing the technology to steam and bend timber to make the chair so they're marking up based on R&D and ip. The $80 chair company just copied the other tech
There is absolutely a lot of profiteering (charge what we can, not what we need to) happening, but honestly I believe that happens everywhere, including China (trivial case - wild price swings on aliexpress - they're maximising profits).
by Incipient - This is why the West is getting its ass kicked in non-legacy industries.
Our MBAs have internalized the idea that you "win at capitalism" by buying out your competitors, making products shitty and expensive, and making shareholders filthy rich. Their MBAs believe that it means selling the best product possible at razor-thin margins, killing your competitors by being the better choice.
Everyone is always complaining about Chinese companies "stealing IP", "getting state subsidies", and "dumping products". No, they are just being better at capitalism! We bootstrapped their industry with outsourcing, and then killed our own subsidy system by retooling it to give free money to large shareholders. No wonder our companies aren't able to compete - we reward incompetence...
by crote - I guess it depends on where you would draw the line with respect to what still constitutes "Mittelstand", but in the small-town circles where my family operated our company, outsourcing wasn't really a thing. Most of the companies were around 30 to 3000 employees, and mostly operated B2B for the automotive industry. There was exactly one company which got overly ambitious and started to emit shares. It was a big deal back in the 90s, SHARES! From our hometown! Like, you could watch it in the Ticker in the evening news if you waited long enough! But they quickly faltered when the golden 90s turned into the permanent state of crisis beginning in the 2000s. Most of the others were still family-owned, including our own (electroplating, ~130 employees), and stuck it out much longer. But we've since had to close doors, too, as have most of the others. It's a combination of things. Regulations have you in a chokehold, you can't get decent employees, and every process input from energy to equipment to real estate related costs and whatnot just cost an arm and a leg and slowly bleed you dry. Nobody here ever flew business class (except maybe these flashy idiots with their shares). The families always re-invested.by avhception