But the downside is that flying would be for rich people, just like it was pre-reforms. The poors would have to take trains or drive. Is that a good trade-off?

And to top it off, if you want to pay for a premium flying experience today, you can! For similar prices (to pre-reform flights, in real terms) you can book a "luxury flight".

Like I said, rose colored glasses.

People who argue otherwise simply cannot escape their zero-sum worldview.

Spurious correlation. Few experts (economists) think old regulations caused economic growth.

If we really want to recreate post-war growth, we should destroy half our infastructure and fight a world war. Then, in the years following the end of that war, we can experience catch-up growth.

The classic example is airline deregulation which happened under Carter. The real cost of flights is way, way down since then. But this doesn't stop people from complaining about how "flying is a worse experience now" and wishing for a return to inane regulations.

Slavery is bad economics. If you want your economy to grow, paying workers is not bad. Economic growth isn't zero sum.

It doesn't seem to me that ride share drivers should be paid while idling or repositioning. Nor am I in favor of California forcing a minimum wage on ride share drivers. In general, I don't understand how this qualifies as "rent seeking".

I think a lot of people just don't like big tech companies. They're entitled to their opinions but I think they're wrong.

Second, the idea that we should formalize "being a valuable employee" i.e. "learn X skill and get Y raise" is just a bad idea. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". If you pay people more for using more programming languages, you'll end up with frankenstein projects written in dozens of languages.

> As opposed to now, where many people work in offices under terrible conditions?

Ah yes those horrific air-conditioned offices.

No, it's just a scam, and anyone should be able to see that. It's like saying I get 2 days pay if I have to write go in addition to typescript. And 3 days pay if I have to write java.

> There are literally thousands of unions just in the US. I agree that some are dysfunctional, but making a claim like "with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad" needs a lot more evidence. My counter-evidence is simple: historically, there's a direct correlation with the strength of unions and the existence of a strong middle class.

Unions had a good reason to exist post industrialization when many people worked in factories under terrible conditions. But today, in the West, that's no longer the case. Today, unions are mostly bad.

> For instance, if an engineer drives a diesel train at the start of a shift but is asked to switch to an electric train in the same day, the M.T.A. must compensate that worker with two days’ pay. If, on the same day, the engineer is also asked to switch from driving passengers to driving a train back to a yard for maintenance or storage, that worker is entitled to a third day’s pay.

Take from that what you will.

My view is that -- with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad, and worth fighting.

And the idea that Hannah Arendt needs "defenders" because she had an affair with Heidegger is just bizarre.

According to the blog post linked in the OP, the LLM-generated results were read, understood, and confirmed by the mathematician whose work they built on.

I notice a dichotomy here between people who care about results and people who care about process. The former group wants to use LLMs insofar as they can contribute to getting results. The latter group is wary of LLMs because they're more interested in the process and less interested in the results themselves. Needless to say, I think the former group is right, and I'm happy to see that mathematicians (or some of them) agree.

It's natural that things are less equal now that we're not farmers or hunter-gatherers. Economies of scale will massively enrich those who take build them.

Sometimes it is claimed that inequality is a problem because the rich will control politics. But populism is surging and the rich seem to have a harder time controlling politics than ever, largely due to the disintegration of the print/tv media.

Non-mentally I'll homeless people are rarely "street people". They live in a car or with friends or in a shelter. Plenty of them have jobs.

LLMs obviously would pass a Turing test if they were designed to. But they aren't, they don't hide the fact that they're LLMs.

In my view, the best LLMs clearly pass the bar for intelligence. I highly doubt they have consciousness. So the revelation of LLMs is that consciousness is not necessary for intelligence.