The poors had refrigeration, in the form of ice boxes. Not refridgerators, just basically eskies that the ice man came and shoved a big block of ice into once a week. So basically you could only make ice cream (etc) on the day the ice man came, if you were poor.
...so people just made their ice cream on that day. It required a little planning, is all.
My grandfather rode to school on a horse, saw the last of the nomadic native peoples traveling Iowa, watched polio ruin lives and bring fear, then watched science conquer polio. Watched humans conquer the sky and land on the moon, fought mechanised island warfare as a sent in Marine in the pacific on the side of half the world fighting against the other half of the world. Personally saw the damage of nuclear war in occupied Japan, then watched the world build a 15 minute system for mutually assured nuclear destruction (MAD). Went from mail to shared rural 'party' phone lines, and ended his life with a world connected with a global knowledge network to every home and free video calls to anywhere in the world. He went from canned zucchini/beats in the winter to access to whatever fresh produce (and more importantly ice cream) he wanted all year long.
Unless we make some major breakthroughs, I don't think there will ever be another generation of change like that one.
OP's point was more 'How would you measure unvaccinated people that lived because vaccinated people weren't filling the ER, so there were beds/staff to spare'?
That unvaxed outcome would need to go in the 'vaxed lives saved' column somehow, or else it looks like 'outcomes were the same either way' because the lives saved from vaccination spill over into the non-vaxed group because the vaccine prevented the healthcare system from melting down.
That was 80s Reagan/conservative American. Those folks weren't as greedy as modern day companies and they cared about their product/experience, whereas nowadays caring about that is outsourced (see the Mad Men mess) and greed is king.
It's wild to long for the day of 'caring', 'sane', Reagan era corporate 'governance'.
Look up "corporate raiders" if you think business people weren't greedy in the 80s, or the dissolution of Ma Bell, that used to rent you your phone. In fact, the 80s era cable TV also started the box rental racket. You could not choose to buy, you had to rent.
Regan's politics are completely orthogonal to IP content today.
Ah yes, today where they optimized out the recommendation algo to the point I haven't found something recommended to be watch worthy in years. The only thing worse than the video streaming recommendations is what's become of Amazon/Audible's book recommendations (though Spotify is trying hard to enshitify their algos to catch up).
Sad that we can't have nice things, but capitalism must be fed and I guess good, targeted recommendation algorithms are anti-capital.
Back then (even in Reagan's 1980s) the Michael Douglas character types were despised by society. Now they are emulated and mainstreamed. We are set to have more private equity than McDonalds. American Capitalism is all about capital extraction now, not value creation.
But don't you know, 60 years later, after WW2, the labor market worked out. After a few minor details happened in between. So things turned out fine for the buggy drivers and you are freaking out just because you are the new buggy driver (things did not in fact work out for buggy drivers, but that's just a small detail glossed over because things worked out for people after WW2, we have no idea how buggy driver's lives turned out in our example of everything working out for buggy drivers).
Things will be fine (it might take another 60 years and a few minor details, but it will all magically work out, like it did then. Not for the buggy drivers though. They were fucked, broken people living on skid row grew so huge it was a popular trope in children's cartoons).
Video scoring people are feeling it. I think a world with Hanz Zimmer soundtracks, with Tron 2 with a Daft Punk soundtrack, is a richer world than one where soundtracks are machine generated.
Creative people actually do feel this way. There are huge discussions about it going on by actual creative people. Why are you hand waving that away and saying if they are discussing it they must not be adding any value, therefore their discussion is discarded? It's definitely a convenient position for you to take, but it doesn't seem like a real position when objectively great talent are taking the position you say only poor talent would take?
No movie studio would choose AI slop when people like John Williams or Hans Zimmer exist. That’s a ridiculous argument. It’s such a simple way to differentiate and compete. Whatever Williams cost, Lucas made it back 100x.
If AI gets good enough to replace them, then we can have a different discussion - but I don’t think you get truly great art without the full spectrum of human emotion and experience - that is, full AGI. In that case, all jobs are toast and we don’t need to have this discussion.
> No movie studio would choose AI slop when people like John Williams or Hans Zimmer exist.
I wouldn't be so sure. During the writers strike I heard the producers where hoping to replace a lot of their work with AI.
> but I don’t think you get truly great art without the full spectrum of human emotion and experience
The movie industry is in the business of selling tickets, and the TV industry is in the business of getting people to look at ads. Creating "truly great art" is not the priority, but sometimes happens because people are still involved.
Our choices as consumers are constrained. If they all get compromised at the same time, because the producers are following similar incentives, the market won't punish them.
Not at all. This technology could be deployed in many ways. We have written about benefiting ways it could be deployed to help society for 80 years. It is Capitalism that has decided to deploy it in the worst ways thought up.
'Because something happened in the past when we were fairly undeveloped, when almost nothing in society had been approached systematically, that same thing will happen in the future where we have systematically optimized everything we can. And we should bet civilization on that. Somehow, magically, everything will work out. And if you don't agree with magic, don't want to bet society on hopes of some magic solution appearing, you are the one denying reality and fighting progress'.
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