TLDR:
Nature can’t simply select out consciousness because it emerges from hardware that is useful in other ways. The brain doesn’t waste energy on consciousness, it uses energy for computation, which is useful in a myriad ways.

The usefulness of consciousness from an evolutionary fitness perspective is a tricky question to answer in general terms. An easy intuition might be to look at the utility of pain for the survival of an individual.

I personally think that, ultimately, consciousness is a byproduct of a complex brain. The evolutionary advantage is mainly given by other features enabled by said complexity (generally more sophisticated and adaptable behavior, social interactions, memory, communication, intentional environment manipulation, etc.) and consciousness basically gets a free ride on that already-useful brain.
Species with more complex brains have an easier time adapting to changes in their environment because their brains allow them to change their behavior much faster than random genetic mutations would. This opens up many new ecological niches that simpler organisms wouldn’t be able to fill.

I don’t think nature selects out waste. As long as a species is able to proliferate its genes, it can be as wasteful as it “wants”. It only has to be fit enough, not as fit as possible. E.g. if there’s enough energy available to sustain a complex brain, there’s no pressure to make it more economical by simplifying its function. (And there are many pressures that can be reacted to without mutation when you have a complex brain, so I would guess that, on the whole, evolution in the direction of simpler brains requires stronger pressures than other adaptations)

I want to preface this with the mention that understanding other people’s code and being able to modify it in a way that gets it to do what you want is a big part of real world coding and not a small feat.
The rest of my comment may come across as “you’re learning wrong”. It is meant to. I don’t know how you’ve been learning and I have no proof that doing it differently will help, but I’m optimistic that it can. The main takeaway is this: be patient with yourself. Solving problems and building things is hard. It’s ok to progress slowly. Don’t try to skip ahead, especially early on.
(also this comment isn’t directed at you specifically, but at anyone who shares your frustration)

I was gonna write an entire rant opposing the meme, but thought better of it as it seems most people here agree with me.
BUT I think that once you’ve got some basics down, there really is no better way to improve than to do. The key is to start at the appropriate level of complexity for your level of experience.
Obviously I don’t know what that is for you specifically, but I think in general it’s a good idea to start simple. Don’t try to engineer an entire application as your first programming activity.

Find an easy (and simple! as in - a single function with well defined inputs and outputs and no side effects) problem; either think of something yourself, or pick an easy problem from an online platform like leetcode or codechef. And try to solve the problem yourself. There’s no need to get stuck for ages, but give it an honest try.
I think a decent heuristic for determining if you have a useful problem is whether you feel like you’ve made significant progress towards a solution after an hour or two. If not, readjust and pick a different problem. There’s no point in spending days on a problem that’s not clicking for you.

If you weren’t able to solve the problem, look at solutions. Pick one that seems most straight forward to you and try to understand it. When you think you do, give the original problem a little twist and try to solve that. While referencing the solution to the original if you need to.
If you’re struggling with this kind of constrained problem, keep doing them. Seriously. Perhaps dial down the difficulty of the problems themselves until you can follow and understand the solutions. But keep struggling with trying to solve little problems from scratch. Because that’s the essence of programming: you want the computer to do something and you need to figure out how to achieve that.
It’s not automatic, intuitive, inspired creation. It’s not magic. It’s a difficult and uncertain process of exploration. I’m fairly confident that for most people, coding just isn’t how their brain works, initially. And I’m also sure that for some it “clicks” much easier than for others. But fundamentally, the skill to code is like a muscle: it must be trained to be useful. You can listen to a hundred talks on the mechanics of bike riding, and be an expert on the physics. If you don’t put in the hours on the pedals, you’ll never be biking from A to B.
I think this period at the beginning is the most challenging and frustrating, because you’re working so hard and seemingly progress so slowly. But the two are connected. You’re not breezing through because it is hard. You’re learning a new way of thinking. Everything else builds on this.

Once you’re more comfortable with solving isolated problems like that, consider making a simple application. For example: read an input text file, replace all occurrences of one string with another string, write the resulting text to a new text file. Don’t focus on perfection or best practices at first. Simply solve the problem the way you know how. Perhaps start with hard-coded values for the replacement, then make them configurable (e.g. by passing them as arguments to your application).

When you have a few small applications under your belt you can start to dream big. As in, start solving “real” problems. Like some automation that would help you or someone you know. Or tasks at work for a software company. Or that cool app you’ve always wanted to build. Working on real applications will give you more confidence and open the door to more learning. You’ll run into lots of problems and learn how not to do things. So many ways not to do things.

TLDR: If it’s not clicking, you need to, as a general rule, do less learning (in the conventional sense of absorbing and integrating information) and more doing. A lot of doing.

deleted by creator

That number is like 20 years old.

Today it’s around 60 billion.

El psy kongroo

We’re talking past each other a bit I think. I’ve been trying to convince you that having billionaires is bad and we should have a world where they don’t exist. I’m not sure that I have, but now you seem mostly concerned about how we get there.

When I said the money goes to the government, I meant profits past a certain net worth. I concede that this is more complicated for unrealized gains. So here’s a tentative solution: if you have unrealized gains that are worth more than the threshold, you’re forced to realize the amount you’re over at the current market price and your profit gets taxed. This would be the process when we’re already in the new system, without billionaires.

If we’re talking about the process of getting rid of billionaires: are you a billionaire? No? Do you have enough shares of Apple where you, perhaps with the cooperation of 5 other shareholders, outvote all other shareholders? Or can exercise strong pressure on the board/CEO? No? Then I don’t think anyone should be coming for your shares.
But if the answer to one of those questions is yes, all your shares past the threshold are divided among the workers employed by Apple. If you’re worried your remaining shares will go down in value in the future, just sell them now. Maybe you’re even allowed to sell a certain percentage before your shares are redistributed.

For discussion’s sake, my own idea of a decent threshold would be in the tens of millions. Perhaps $80M. It’s arbitrary and I’m not particularly committed to that number. But you best believe I’m nowhere near worth that. And neither are 99.9% of people. It would of course be kept in line with inflation.

If we’re still talking about the initial asset seizure with the sneakers. If I own 10% of a $1T company, I have a net worth of $100B. I’m not taxed 90% of that, $99_920_000_000 (99.92% in this case) worth of the stock is divided among the employees of that company. If I want, I can sell $80M worth of stock before that, but anything that brings my net worth (excluding my remaining stock) over $80M gets taxed at 100%.
If the stock doesn’t appreciate in price and my net worth didn’t increase in some other way, I’m not getting taxed again next year on my stock. This “getting taxed to 0” concept is a misdirection to try to confuse workers about progressive taxes. You get taxed until you’re at the threshold (which is still much more than most people will ever have). You’re not ending up poor, or even middle class.

I agree with your last paragraph. But both the corruptors and the corrupted have a strong incentive to keep the status quo. They always will, in capitalism.
And besides that, being extremely wealthy doesn’t just give you political power through bribes. You probably have powerful friends, many of them probably owe you a favor or two. If you control a big company, you can even push governments around out in the open: if your state doesn’t write/keep laws that make me more money, I’m going to close up shop in your state and leave 10% of your workforce unemployed over night. Unelected people simply shouldn’t have that much power.

Yes, there are always incentives for corruption. But capitalism ads to and intensifies those incentives. People with unfathomable amounts of wealth have power over others. And they’re not elected, you can’t vote them out. They can fuck your life and there’s really not much you can do about it.

Maybe the richest people don’t “make anything” until the asset is sold, but their incredible net worth still gives them power. That’s the issue at the end of the day.
Many critics of anti-capitalists seem to think workers are envious of the money that the ultra-wealthy have. I don’t think this is the case.
It would perhaps make sense to be envious of millionaires who can afford anything their heart desires and don’t have to work at a job they hate in order to be financially secure. I think for most people, that second part would already be more than enough. But to be envious of billionaires? I think this is not the norm. What billionaires have over millionaires is power. Most people don’t want power, they just want a happy, meaningful life.
The problem with capitalism is that it facilitates and encourages those few that do want power. For most of them it would be more beneficial for society if they didn’t get it.

The rich are already hiding their wealth. Trillions in offshore accounts suggests they don’t need to be taxed aggressively in order to try to hoard their money like dragons.

Again, I was suggesting we don’t let it get that far. What’s the billion dollar asset you can’t make liquid? A company? If it’s that valuable you should simply not be allowed to own/control it alone. Really, if it’s that big it should be broken up in the first place.
Where does the money go? To the government, same as it does now.
I’m not really sure I understand the hand greasing fear: the government gets the money anyway, it’s in the law. What’s the scenario here? Rich guy bribes IRS bureaucrat to not take his money? That will be a lot harder when the rich guy doesn’t have billions and the IRS bureaucrat has enough money (and good enough social support) for a comfortable life.

I also think speculation isn’t good and we should get rid of it. I really don’t care about your $600 sneakers and neither should the government. But at a scale that matters (not hundreds but hundreds of thousands - if you’re buying 1000 sneakers you’re also not in the clear) you should not be allowed to buy things for the purpose of re-selling them, except if you’re actually providing a service (like a supermarket, for example) - and even then I think there should be limits on how much you’re allowed to mark up the products vs. what you paid for them. I think in general there should be a cap on margins. You shouldn’t be able to ask for 10x what it cost you to make a product, especially if you make millions of them.

Agreed. But capitalism provides both the incentives and the means for corruption.

Why do you think it is that punishments are minor and sporadically enforced? Could it have something to do with people who have so much money that they can influence laws?
Do you think it’s unreasonable to say, as a way to combat monopolies and corruption: “You can’t have that much money. There’s clearly no other use for such sums than gaining undue power. Past [insert specific net worth maximum], 100% of what you make will be taxed and/or distributed to your workers”?.

I think conflating capitalism with trade is wrong. Trade (and markets) existed long before modern capitalism. So did the concept of money.

I agree that the way you described it, it sounds very natural (not that that really is an argument, but whatever).
But the reality of capitalism is that the Y I’m buying from my profits is not some other commodity (as your example implies).
Y is someone else’s business that also sells X. Or some completely unrelated business that sells Z. Or Y is a bribe to the mayor so that the city buys all its X from me, even though I don’t have the best quality or price. Or it’s a “donation” to the new mayor’s campaign, leading him to remove the rule that one person can not own more than 3 homes in the city, so I can buy more houses and rent them out and make more profit.
It’s capital I use to open X businesses in other cities. Maybe someone already sells X there and the local citizens quite like their service. They don’t care for my X. But I have enough capital to start aggressively underselling, at a loss to myself. Now it doesn’t matter that my service is worse, or that the people had some loyalty to the local X seller. I’m selling at half the price, it’s a no-brainer to buy from me. I wait a few months and the local X seller is now out of business. I can raise my prices back up, nice. This works quite well, I’ll repeat it in other cities. If someone catches on and complains, I’ll just bribe the mayor to look the other way. Or I’ll buy the local newspaper and have them paint me in a positive light.

I agree that blindly throwing money at a problem is not a good solution. Unfortunately this basic insight is often abused into an argument that spending on social programs shouldn’t be increased at all, or worse should be decreased.
Well targeted social spending is actually profitable for the government. Healthy, housed, educated citizens produce a lot of value.

I was curious too so I did a quick search. Here’s what I found:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aaron-Buchko/publication/229592641_The_effects_of_employee_ownership_on_employee_attitudes_An_integrated_causal_model_and_path_analysis/links/5fc6ea9245851568d132333d/The-effects-of-employee-ownership-on-employee-attitudes-An-integrated-causal-model-and-path-analysis.pdf.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w5277/w5277.pdf

A cursory read suggests that ownership increases job satisfaction and commitment, though the correlation with job satisfaction is less strong. Overall a positive, perhaps mild effect on employee happiness and potentially positive effect on firm performance.

So your suspicion that ownership doesn’t have a strong effect on employee happiness seems to bear out.

My main argument wasn’t about individual employee satisfaction though. The point was that worker ownership of organizations gets rid of the owning class (effectively: if everyone is an owner, the class conflict dissolves) while keeping markets and competition, making central planning less relevant.

I was trying to suggest approaches that are neither radical nor utopian, and like you pointed out yourself, that we already employ effectively. The main proposed difference is scale: past a certain size, all companies would be worker owned.
I don’t think markets are bad. Uncontrolled concentration of wealth is.

I’m skeptical of the claim that well-regulated capitalism is the best option, but depending on just how well-regulated it is, I agree that it can be a good option.
Though one might argue at that point whether you’re really still talking about capitalism. For instance, the main characteristic I have an issue with is capital accumulation. If we regulate that one out I think we’re going to get much better outcomes. Would the result still be considered capitalism?

The problem with just regulating capitalism while keeping the core mechanisms is that if wealth accumulation is still allowed to happen, resources will tend to concentrate in the hands of a few. This is not only inequitable and wasteful but more importantly it gives them power, which they will inevitably try to use to chip away at the regulations.

I mostly agree with your points on housing. On health I’ll say that many of the issues you mention are either the result of or at least exacerbated by the influence of capital on government.

I want to first point out that the government being corruptible is not a problem that capitalism just solves. Almost all countries today are capitalist, and that doesn’t prevent their governments from being totalitarian or corrupt or mismanaging their resources (Russia as an example).
The government still has all the power. But now there’s a small group of people who can influence that power (let’s not kid ourselves - mainly through corruption) to the detriment of everyone else.

A centrally managed economy is not the only alternative.
Workers of an organization can be the owners of that organization, rather than a few wealthy elites or the government. That way, they see the fruits of their labor rather than it being syphoned off. They have a say in how the organization is run, they can vote on who manages it and replace them when the way it’s managed is bad for the workers.
Let’s say ownership of a company automatically goes from its founders to all workers (this might well include the founders) when it reaches a certain size.
What would incentivize anyone to try to start a company in such an environment? Why not guarantee the founders a certain percentage of the profits even if they decide to stop working when the company changes ownership? Where does the capital come from to build a company in the first place? Government - hear me out. Taxes still exist, and continue to pay for things like infrastructure and healthcare and education and housing (these things are probably better managed by government than markets). And part of the tax revenue goes into an investment fund that is managed locally (think city, and/or county level). Citizens have direct voting power over what projects get financed with their taxes.

More pragmatically, a first (I would say reasonable) step would be to limit the amount of power an individual can get. Nobody needs a billion dollars to live, much less hundreds. Change the incentives: implement aggressive progressive taxes.
Heavily tax vacant houses and invest in affordable housing. Stop subsidizing the aviation industry and the fossil fuel industry and the meat industry and instead invest in healthcare and education and public transport and farmers.

Capitalism is a nightmare without regulation. Simply start by adding more (good) regulation and enforcing it consistently.

You’re missing the point.

The “villain” in this situation is a system that allows a minority of people to attain huge amounts of wealth and power and incentivizes them to keep increasing both as much as possible without regards for others. It’s not the people that follow the incentives.
Unfortunately one of the incentives when you’re part of the owning class is wanting to perpetuate the system: it’s working pretty well for you.

Individual members of the owning class can be great people. But as the original comment stated: most people will usually put their own interests above yours. The problem isn’t that they do so, the problem is that their interests are in opposition to yours.

The analysis isn’t (as you seem to think) at the level of “you’re part of the owning class, therefore you’re evil and we hate you”, but “there should be no owning class, its existence leads to needless conflict and suffering”.

Let’s not get it twisted though: while the real villain is capitalism, it’s always one class that does all the stealing, and the lying, and the gaslighting, and the manipulating, and the cheating.
Power corrupts.

“They have all the guns” is a metaphor in the context of class warfare.

I mean that they have the means to employ force (usually through police, but not exclusively) in their interest as well as having the entire power of the state behind them (disproportionate wealth means they have disproportionate political influence which means they can lobby for laws to be adjusted in their favor. Even when the law seems just, it is rarely applied in the same way to wealthy people in practice).

Not to mention that they can and do buy influence over the media apparatus, controlling narratives and tricking the working class into acting against their own interests.

Within the framework of class conflict, those are the “guns”.

It’s almost like their class interests changed and class interests influence behavior.

Almost like it’s proving their point. Capitalist critique is not about individual “bad” people but about a system with perverse and harmful incentives.

(granting your claim for sake of argument - feel free to support it with data)

That’s true. However.

The owning class has interests directly opposed to the working class, which makes that “natural” trait toxic to the working class. In addition, the owning class has a lot more power.

Your landlord wants to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. (fair enough right?) The problem is that for that to happen

• demand needs to stay high or go higher which means that
• supply needs to stay low which means that (at the level of class interests, not personal belief)
  Your landlord doesn’t want new affordable housing to be built in your area. They want you to never own a house, never have any cheaper rent options. They don’t want to have to keep renting to you at the price you are paying now.
  They don’t want to have to invest money in making your apartment/house safe or comfortable.

The problem is not that people will put their own wellbeing above yours, it’s that their wellbeing is in conflict with yours. A conflict of interests between classes… class conflict… class warfare. And they have all the guns.
It doesn’t have to be this way.

I can’t for the life of me figure out how your proposed method helps in the described scenario.

Maybe I misunderstood it, can you elaborate?

Yup.

Spaces? Tabs? Don’t care, works regardless.
Copied some code from somewhere else? No problem, 9/10 times it just works. Bonus: a smart IDE will let you quick-format the entire code to whatever style you configured at the click of a button even if it was a complete mess to begin with, as long as all the curly braces are correct.

Also, in any decent IDE you will very rarely need to actually count curly braces, it finds the pair for you, and even lets you easily navigate between them.

The inconsistent way that whitespace is handled across applications makes interacting with code outside your own code files incredibly finicky when your language cares so much about the layout.

There’s an argument to be made for the simplicity of python-style indentation and for its aesthetic merits, but IMO that’s outweighed by the practical inconvenience it brings.

As always, the dose makes the poison.
A common scenario is people picking the wrong species and then not just eating a small bite, but cooking an entire meal and eating that.

A small bite may not kill you, but just one mushroom (50g) can be enough to do it.

There are some toxic mfs out there and they can be mistaken for edible lookalikes by inexperienced foragers.

It’s not even the same if you strictly consider ‘the time I spend in this line’, which I would assume is to most people the time that actually matters.

Everyone behind her doesn’t just lose the feeling of progress, they lose actual time (granted it’s probably just a few seconds). And she loses that time also.

The actual justification here seems to be that she’s busy doing something on her phone and doesn’t want to be distracted every 30 seconds, which in her mind trumps the handful of seconds she and everyone behind her would gain.
Which imo would be fair enough, if you didn’t have to also add the annoyance of the people behind her to the equation.
Many people standing in such queues are tired, stressed about catching their flight, or otherwise impaired and someone holding up the queue for no obvious reason can become aggravating fast.

A perfectly rational agent should choose behavior that works when other agents apply the same behavior.

If everyone uses her strategy, the queue can only get shorter if there’s exactly one person left in the queue, but it gets longer each time someone joins it.

In an idealized world where everyone can instantly teleport, this doesn’t technically reduce the throughput of the queue, however it does still increase its size unnecessarily. (and in the real world it also decreases throughput, potentially by a significant amount if the queue is physically long enough)
 

Even granting that she doesn’t care about anyone else, the strategy is still slower for her even if she’s the only one using it.

Judging from the picture, she will lose at least a few seconds when the person in front of her leaves the queue and she still has to walk the remaining distance to the front of the queue.

For a more extreme example, imagine the queue is a kilometer long. Assuming everyone before her shuffled along like the average queue enjoyer, she would now be one person-width away from the goal had she shuffled along with them.
If she used her “perfectly rational” strategy instead, she would now have to walk a full kilometer which, being very generous to her, would cost her an additional 12 minutes.

Perfectly rational behavior, if your only objective is to annoy others.
 

(there is perhaps an argument in favor of some variant of her strategy, if there is a high time/effort/opportunity cost associated with starting and/or stopping, but I think realistically this will rarely if ever be the case in an airport security queue)