I am not competitive. That's a deliberate stance, and one that I've held for decades.
It does contribute to the fact that I haven't achieved greatness, but I have no regrets, and haven't done badly, despite that. It's not weakness, as some folks have found out, over the years.
When I "win," then someone else "loses." I have a problem with that.
Why do you say that? What kinds of “greatness” are you thinking about? Does that mean money, or fame? Why does someone have to lose?
I’m also a bit allergic to competition, but I want to respectfully disagree with this idea that greatness is somehow zero-sum. There’s an enormous number of ways you can “win” without someone else losing anything, so much so that non-competitive “wins” are a regular part of speech. WinArmy on YouTube comes to mind as a stupid example. :P “Win” in that case can mean skilled or lucky.
Making a lot of friends is a win, one where everyone wins. Being a great artist or philosopher or anthropologist is a form of greatness that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Discovering the cure for a disease is greatness.
Even making money, if that’s considered greatness, doesn’t necessarily come at the cost of someone else. If you’re the person in a company who helps make a better product, better marketing, more sales, or any decisions that result in more money in the door, you can make more money for yourself and make more money for everyone around you too. It doesn’t need to come at a loss for the customers either, your product can be positive value for them after paying for it, and in some cases can earn them money. Even the economy isn’t zero-sum.
You do not have to compete with yourself, or anyone, to get better.
Getting better comes from collaborating:
- Being attentive to your practice (i.e. recording, going over your work, etc.)
- Asking, and taking the advice of other people in your field (i.e. find places where there are people older than you who have done the same tasks, and consult with them)
- Being exposed to diversity of thought (i.e. teams more diverse in culture, race, and gender, consistently come up with a better array of solutions — this directly benefits you, helps you think along alternative dimensions and perspectives, exposes errors you may have encoded)
- With art, taking on voluntary restrictions to inspire you — art prompts, game jams, etc.
Sure, some of these can be framed as competition — maybe you might frame being attentive to your practice as competing with your past self, and taking voluntary restrictions as competing with the others in the game jam or whatever — but I very, very much prefer to frame them as collaborating — in a solo practice session, you're collaborating with yourself to find the flaws and fix them, in a game jam session, you're collaborating with those around you to produce lots of interesting and good art.
In many cases, you literally cannot improve without depending on the advice of those around you — another perspective, a second pair of eyes, the well-worn advice of the 40yro burned out techies. Framing those as competition will actively just burn you out, in the end (or otherwise people will pick up on it and be less likely to help you, lol).
"Being attentive to your practice (i.e. recording, going over your work, etc.)"
If you practice the same thing over and over, you won't get better. If you fail, figure out what you did wrong, and improve, that's competition.
"Asking, and taking the advice of other people in your field"
I will agree with you here.
"teams more diverse in culture, race, and gender,
'diversity of thought' has nothing to do with race, gender, or culture. I've found that many companies will use inferior ideas just to say that they are 'diverse'.
You also have to be careful, because when you take too many ideas from people that lack experience/expertise, you have to tune out the noise.
I do agree you need to get a wide array of ideas, though, regardless of race, culture, or gender.
"in a game jam session, you're collaborating with those around you to produce lots of interesting and good art."
This isn't competition, and there is a place for it..but this isn't really what we are discussing.
"another perspective, a second pair of eyes, the well-worn advice of the 40yro burned out techies"
Most learning like this happens if you get stuck on something and don't want to spend lots of time on it (although failing until you succeed will allow you to learn 5X more).
However, to take what you learned and actually improve, takes competition.
> If you fail, figure out what you did wrong, and improve, that's competition.
I very much disagree, it's a collaboration between yourself now, yourself in the past, and yourself in the future. You aren't competing with your older self, you can only improve by setting up recording and measurements, and doing analysis — all of that requires cooperation and is fundamentally collaborative.
> 'diversity of thought' has nothing to do with race, gender, or culture.
It absolutely does. Each of those represent social and psychological constraints on what solutions you are able to find and broach based on your identification of each. Each of those represent how you are treated differently within society, which limits or defines your experiences, which is a part of shaping how you think, which in turn limits the solutions visible to you. There's nothing wrong with this, and it's perfectly normal, but it is important to get a broader sampling across these points in order to arrive at the best decision. If your circle consists of entirely cis, white men, then you're making the same sampling bias that has led to thousands of small university studies being rejected.
A very real example of this is the way we look at deer. For decades, it was assumed by the men that studied in the field, that deer groups have a leader that decides where they go, because when the "leader" sets off to a new location, they all look towards the leader and follow them. It took a woman entering the field as a scientist and doing more observations to realise that actually that leader was more or less just a deer chosen to tally the vote — they all look in the direction they want to go, but one deer is nominated by the group to tally the votes and acts on the consensus of the group. The hundred-odd men, probably more, that had done studies of deer before that point had been so hierarchically minded that they hadn't considered an alternative explanation, which made them blind to the actual behaviour of the deer.
It's a quaint example, but there are millions of examples just like this one, where taking a statistical sampling of people within one race, gender, or culture ultimately skews the possible result space. And that's important for keeping an open mind and being able to explore the total result space.
> This isn't competition, and there is a place for it..
Many people treat game jams as competitions! Ludum Dare (the OG game jam) was explicitly called a "competition" and had winners, and runner ups, and such; however, by approaching a game jam in that way you lose a lot of what makes them fun and worthwhile experiences — namely, collaboration!
> Most learning like this happens if you get stuck on something and don't want to spend lots of time on it (although failing until you succeed will allow you to learn 5X more).
I disagree with both of these points. Back when I was employed in tech in my mid-20s, I would regularly run ideas I'd had past a group of 30 - 60yro people who were (racially-diverse, gender-diverse) tech leads, programmers, etc. It was a huge, huge boon to my abilities, and allowed me to hone a sense of what was worthwhile to pursue, what was a dead-end, etc. along with honing my skills for being able to look at things from a new angle. That, along with pouring over the c2wiki as a teenager (and thus reading the OG discussions about technologies that are commonplace today, from the people who were major players in the invention and adoption of those technologies) were amazing for expanding and refining my perspective and "approach to problems" toolbox. I cannot recommend this enough, and at no point did it involve competition :)
React (and Tailwind for that matter) are great for hiring and getting hired. The chances of someone screwing it up or being lost in their first week/month when parachute into a project are pretty low.
It has very little to do with the right abstraction or the best technical solution to the problem.
The web has no default design pattern. It’s the Wild West for better and worse.
I made my peace with modern web stack once I understood this.
> crypto (via stablecoins) is easier/faster/better than the status quo ante.
It must be ignorance on my part or perhaps I’m just lucky with residency and clients, but I get paid through services like Wise frequently. Taxes are pretty reasonable and I receive the money instantly on my bank account from US, Europe or Latin America. I don’t really know much better it needs to get.
I can never understand what problem stablecoins are trying to solve.
Funny. I don’t need to work hard for that at all. It comes naturally to me. It obviously has its pros and cons, but to me, a shiny new tech has to prove itself first in order to deserve my attention.
There are, occasionally, the “wow, I got to have that” moments and those are great, but rare.
well if the marginal value of labor goes to zero, only those with capital will be able to survive. we may need to think about what kinds of redistribution are socially acceptable.
Minimum wage is barely (in many cases not even barely) enough to live on. Raising minimum wage is a herculean task that rarely succeeds. Federal minimum wage hasn't been raised in 16 years. But we'll have not only a livable UBI in 20 years, but one that's enough to "retire to a life of leisure"?
Minimum wage isn't directly comparable, because that's the government setting a rule on what two private parties can agree to. It's not the government but the employer who pays it.
UBI is distributed by the government directly, so it's basically a question of what gets taxed, how much inflation results, and whether that inflation and taxation proves more unpopular than the UBI is popular.
This is silly. To a first approximation, zero percent of the opposition to minimum wage increases comes from a principled stance of "I support taxation, even high taxation, but I am opposed to the government interfering in private labor market contracts"; 100% of it is from "they're taking my money!". There is no reason to expect any less opposition from the much, much larger amount of wealth redistribution which would be required by UBI.
What does minimum wage have to do with taxation? It's not the government paying those wages, it's McDonald's, and the opposition to it comes from people who say it will result in McDonalds closing stores or replacing cashiers with touchscreens rather than paying more for employees; ie, low-value labor simply becoming unemployable rather than getting a pay boost.
There are a lot of counterarguments to a high minimum wage, some even from UBI proponents, but none of them are "they're taking my money" because that doesn't make sense in the context of a minimum wage.
You can frame the opposition to a minimum wage that way, e.g. if you raise the minimum wage then the cost of a Big Mac goes up and you're the one paying it. Or, suppose you're a small business owner who employs three people and you pay them each $20,000, and then after paying them you're left with $50,000/year for your own salary. If you were required to pay them each $30,000 then you'd be left with $20,000 yourself, and that might make you pretty unhappy. More to the point, it might make you close the business and go get a job doing something else, and then those three people lose their jobs instead of getting a raise, which is precisely the argument against a minimum wage.
But that still doesn't apply to a UBI, because a UBI is universal. The person buying the Big Mac or running the small business gets it too, and the breakeven point would be around the average income, so you don't have the problem the minimum wage has where the people paying the cost are often the people who weren't making that much money to begin with.
There's plenty of reasons to doubt, but you could reframe it as "lower pension age to zero".
In optimistic scenarios, if AI can do so much that nobody's even getting paid to make robots, then AI are making robots that also makes the cost of living lower.
In practice, I think that the path from here to there is unstable.
We can't even get universal health care or a decent minimum wage through the opposition from our oligarchs, and those are much, much smaller asks than UBI. Why on earth would you expect UBI to be possible, never mind inevitable?
"Universal healthcare" is typically used as a euphemism for government-operated healthcare providers, which would wipe out both the health insurance industry and a lot of private healthcare providers. You get the strongest opposition to a policy when a specific group sees it as an existential threat, because that group will then organize to lobby vigorously against it.
Minimum wage is a price control. Price controls are trash economics and should not be used. They're a political issue in the US because a federal minimum wage is doubly counterproductive, since different states have a different cost of living. But because of that the states with a higher cost of living see a smaller deleterious effect from a higher minimum wage. Then representatives from those states can claim to want to raise the minimum wage so they can paint their opponents from the lower cost of living states as the villains when they fight against it. But nobody really wants to increase it because it's a bad policy, most of the proponents are from states whose constituents wouldn't even be affected because their state already has a minimum wage in excess of the federal one, the proponents just want to make their opponents vote it down again so they can cast aspersions over it.
A UBI is equivalent to a large universal tax credit. A slight majority of the population would receive more than they pay on net because the median income is slightly below the mean income, which creates a large base of support. If everyone voted purely in their own personal financial interest it would have simple majority support. Meanwhile most of the people who would end up paying on net would only be paying slightly (because they make slightly more than the average income), and in general the net payers are a very large diffuse group with no common interests or organizational ties to one another.
A UBI is a thereby easier to bring about than either of those other things.
Your argument pays no attention to how economic behavior changes due to existence of UBI, ie, how many people choose to work less and thus drop out of the pool of people paying in.
It doesn’t really make sense to me to live in a world where people are given money by the government while simultaneously expected to pay taxes. Its a high overhead when the same could be achieved by printing money and handing it out to everyone equally (which acts as a redistribution of wealth same as taxing the rich and paying credits to the poor, since it devalues the dollar as more supply is added)
I’m also unease about the open-source-but-not-really VSCode situation. I don’t know how useful an editor you can build from the available source, which is enough for me to not consider it seriously. I’ve been bitten before.
It’s a know phenomenon. A friend of mine had a reasonably important public office position. Always on the phone, constantly demanded, giving interviews, etc. The first few months after a change in administration were a great relief. A year after being let go and he was devastated. No one called, knew or cared who he was. There’s probably a name for this syndrome.
A kenyan politician once wrote about it. They even thought their phone had an issue because when they were in office they would receive an average of 30 phone calls an hour, once they left it was zero in a day till they though the phone had gotten spoilt
