This is the problem, we don't agree on the solution. You said

> e hostile policy positions towards social safety nets and foundational services (e.g. education, healthcare, childcare??).

Except the USA spends more on education than most other countries.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

That would argue the issue is not about spending, at least for education, it's something else (not sure what)

I agree though on the general idea that something has to change. Housing in unaffordable.

I said "hostile policies", not "lack of spending"; you jumped to your own partisan conclusion.

Policy and spend have to align to make progress. Spend alone is useless as is policy without spend.

So the mom-and-pop donut shop on the corner always optimizes for profits? The local donut shop?

Most companies do not actually optimize for profit. If they did they'd stop whatever it is they are currently doing and switch to whatever industry makes the most profit. They don't though, they keep making/doing whatever it is they start with generally. That means they aren't actually optimizing for profit.

No, that's absurd for so many different reasons:

* if everyone who sold donuts suddenly went into AI there'd be a huge profit opportunity in donuts - optimizing for profits would be to wait for the other donut sellers to switch into AI and rake in the cash.

* the cost of retooling constantly based on the latest profit fad would just make the toolmakers the main profit center, and the toolmakers would just use their own gear to take all the profits in abandoned markets.

* the constant shift of areas of business would be sub-optimal because most people entering it would know nothing of how to succeed in that field, it's not optimal for your company to be incompetent in an area with much competition.

* labor costs in the "only profitable field" would be through the roof as everyone scrambled to hire competent people - not an optimal way to maximize profit in a crowded industry (also, this compounds with the above point).

In fact this idea is so bad (and yet weirdly beleived by many) that every boom there's memes and jokes about how absurd it is that random companies from completely different industries are getting involved... as if they have a chance to compete against the established players. And even more jokes about how they predictably go out of business.

Not all work is equal. Value is derived from having an edge over the competition. If you are a good baker then baking may be optimizing for profit. Also if everyone just switched to X it wouldn't be the best option anymore.

That is optimising for profit. One of the problems with any comparative advantage argument is that capital is destroyed during any pivot.

That cost has to be factored into the return from pivoting.

Profitability is important to any size business. Profit growth is what many large business C-levels obsess over because they get to eat a slice of the expanding pie.

Its almost like if they want a piece of the expanding pie hell be damned, they should recieve actual liabillity criminal and civil for the trouble and take away any profit incentive that drove them in the first place

Any business will optimize for profit > 0, otherwise it’s a loss making business and will shut down sooner or later. Not all businesses optimize for maximum possible profit.

There are time and probability elements which can only be reduced down to NPV (net present value) my making assumptions and analysis.

Umm… continuing the donut example, the owners are likely maximising their return given their skill sets, knowledge, time, etc. But return is pretty nuanced too bc it probably is not just be profits, but family time etc. in any event, I think you’re right that businesses don’t just focus on profits. But the example doesn’t prove the point.

So for example, my action builds on 4 different platforms (win-64, linux-amd64, mac-intel, mac-arm), it does this in parallel then gets the artifacts for all for and bundles them into a single package.

How would you suggest I do this following your advice?

I can't remember the last time I needed enums. Usually they fall out of the code in one way or another

    // in some util.ts or helpers.ts
    export function keysOf<T extends string>(obj: { [k in T]: unknown }): readonly T[] {
       return Object.keys(obj) as unknown[] as T[];
    }

    //---

    const kOperationsFunctions = {
       add(a: number, b: number) { return a + b; },
       subtract(a: number, b: number) { return a - b; },
       multiply(a: number, b: number) { return a * b; },
       divide(a: number, b: number) { return a / b; },
    };
    const kOperations = keysOf(kOperationsFunctions);
    type Operation = (typeof kOperations)[number];

I don't want to declare an enum here. That would just be a waste of typing and an opportunity for things to get out of sync.

why repeat the names?

    // put this in some util.ts or enum.ts file
    function makeEnum<T extends readonly string[]>(keys: T) {
        return Object.fromEntries(keys.map((x) => [x, x])) as {
            [K in (typeof keys)[number]]: K
        };
    }

    const SMS_TYPES = makeEnum(['bulk', 'marketing', 'pin', 'signup', 'transaction', 'test'] as const);
    type SMS_TYPE = keyof typeof SMS_TYPES;

It's interesting to me that there's no screenshot on the front page (they're buried on other pages). Not only is there no screenshot, the main image on the front page is an image of code.

Not a complaint, just an observation. I'd expect a DJ software site to show DJs the interface as the very first thing.

As examples, all of these have an image of their UI as centerpiece

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/traktor/dj-so...

https://rekordbox.com/en/

https://www.ableton.com/en/live/

I do not want to use "sanitized models". Let me install my own models. I don't want some SV people deciding what is "right think" and what is forbidden.

Is the free thing really an issue? TV and Radio were free for decades and both still are. TV switched to cable, through broadcast still exists, but radio is still free. I'm not convinced advertising is insidious. Maybe because I grew up with it. I used to pay for ads. Magazines in the 80s and 90s had ads and we bought them not just for the article but to see what new products were being announced. You can go look through them on the archive. They're 70% ads and yet we loved them.

https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing

https://archive.org/details/BYTE_Vol_09-10_1984-09_Computer_...

It's frustrating to read the average person has (1-2) intimate friends and 15 people they stay in touch with contacting them at least once a month. I'm at 0 intimate friends right now and maybe 3 people I contact once a month where "contact" equals sending 1 or 2 sentences in a text message and getting 1 or 2 sentences back once or twice a month.

I don't consider myself an incel since I know several people who would be with me if I asked but I also know "we" aren't a match so I don't go there.

I also don't really know what to do it fix this issue. I look at meetup.com and I don't really see anything I want to participate in. A large portion of the activities there are limited to younger people, or specific demographics of which I'm not one. The few that are left don't seem inviting or interesting.

What are other good sources of activities?

It doesn't help that I moved 4 years ago away from friends and back semi-near family at their request. The truth is I'm just not that close to them, we've all been apart for 30+ years. At the same time, my friends back where I moved from, while still there, I'm not sure are enough to get me to move back. There's more to it. I'm old and it's another country. Getting a visa to move back would be hard. Getting a job even harder. And, even if I moved back, while it would arguably be better than my current situation, it wouldn't rise to the average listed in the article.

WFH has also made things worse. These last 5 years (including one at home during COVID) have been the worst years of my life in terms of people. I've gone many months seeing around 1 person a month.

There's this post from SLC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-roman...

Which I found interesting in that if loneliness is a health issue, then why doesn't may insurance cover it? Why doesn't my doctor suggest solutions? I suppose this used to be where churches come in but that's no longer a thing for most people.

> WFH has also made things worse. These last 5 years (including one at home during COVID) have been the worst years of my life in terms of people.

I felt way more anxiety and restlessness in my off hours when I was forced to be 10hrs a day in a room with 13 other people. The magnitude of the benefit WFH has given me is so wide that sometimes people I have not met in a while state I have changed and look better.

Your story is not others'.