86 people died while waiting for a cataract operation, 17 people died while waiting for a knee operation... OMG, Canadian healthcare is deathly terrible!!!
Zuck has shown he's more interested in money/power than the well-being of other humans (the "dumb fucks"), he's cozied up to Xi Jinping and Donald Trump.
Donald Trump's co-opted the religious nuts that are anti-abortion and anti-LGBT, and Zuck is more than happy to please him rather than risk prosecution and losing his money or freedom. What a model of cowardice.
Well, I've called Trump a crook plenty enough times, including here, to qualify as having "Un-American thoughts", that I've excluded myself from being allowed to enter his fascist state.
I'm reminded of thumbing through a friend's copy of Lonely Planet Guide to USSR, and reading about needing to be careful when being questioned by the border guards...
I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill Africans, you're interpreting it wrong.
The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.
Sending all the useless horses to glue factories in that time was so prevalent it was a cartoon trope. The other trope being men living in flop houses, and towns having entire sections for unemployable people called skid row.
The AI people point to post 1950s style employment and say 'people recovered after industrial advance' and ignore the 1880s through the 1940s. We actually have zero idea if the buggy whip manufacturer ever recovered or just lasted a year in skid row before giving up completely, or lived through the 2 world wars spurred by mechanisation.
Horses were killed more often for meat that was used in dog food than for glue.
I did a deep research into the decline of horses and it was consistent with fewer births, not mass slaughter. The US Department of Agriculture has great records during this time, though they’re not fully digitized.
In this analogy, horses are jobs, not humans; you could argue there's not much of a difference between the two, because people without jobs will starve, etc., but still, they're not the same.
Why make the analogy at all if not for the implied slaughter. It is a visceral reminder of our own brutal history. Of what humans do given the right set of circumstances.
There is, at least, a way to avoid people without jobs starving. Whether or not we'll do it is anyone's guess. I think I'll live to see UBI but I am perphaps an optimist.
You'd have to time something like UBI with us actually being able to replace the workforce -- The current LLM parlor tricks are simply not what they're sold to be, and if we rely on them too early we (humanity) is very much screwed.
One would argue in a capitalist society like ours, fucking with someone's job at industrial scale isn't awfully dissimilar from threatening their life, it's just less direct. Plenty more people currently are feeling the effects of worsening job markets than have been involved in a hostage situation, but the negative end results are still the same.
One would argue also if you don't see this, it's because you'd prefer not to.
If we had at least a somewhat functioning safety net, or UBI, or both, you'd at least have an argument to be made, but we don't. AI and it's associated companies' business model is, if not killing people, certainly attempting to make lots of lives worse at scale. I wouldn't work for one for all the money in the world.
UBI will not save you from economic irrelevance. The only difference between you and someone starving in a 3rd world slum is economic opportunity and the means to exchange what you have for what someone else needs. UBI is inflation in a wig and dark glasses.
population projections they already predict that prosperity reduces population
and even if AI becomes good enough to replace most humans the economic surplus does not disappear
it's a coordination problem
in many places on Earth social safety nets are pretty robust, and if AI helps to reduce cost of providing basic services then it won't be a problem to expand those safety nets
...
there's already a pretty serious anti-inequality (or at least anti-billionaire) storm brewing, the question is can it motivate the necessary structural changes or just fuels yet another dumb populist movement
I think the concerns with UBI are (1) it takes away the leverage of a labor force to organize and strike for better benefits or economic conditions, and (2) following the block grant model, can be a trojan horse "benefit" that sets the stage for effectively deleting systems of welfare support that have been historically resilient due to institutional support and being strongly identified with specific constituencies. When the benefit is abstracted away from a constituency it's easier to chop over time.
I don't exactly know how I feel about those, but I respect those criticisms. I think the grand synthesis is that UBI exists on top of existing safety nets.
In practice there are a few strong local unions (NY teachers, ILA (eastern longshoremen)), but in general it doesn't help those who are no employed. (Also when was the last general strike that achieved something ... other than getting general strikes outlawed?)
... also, one pretty practical problem with UBI is that cost of living varies wildly. And if it depends on location then people would register in a high-CoL place and live in a low-CoL place. (Which is what remote work already should be doing, but many companies are resistant to change.)
In theory it makes sense to have easy to administer targeted interventions, because then there's a lot of data (and "touch points" - ie. interaction with the people who actually get some benefit), so it's possible to do proper cost-benefit analyses.
Of course this doesn't work because allocation is over-overpoliticized, people want all kinds of means-testing and other hoops for people to jump through. (Like the classic prove you still have a disability and people with Type I diabetes few years have to get a fucking paper.)
So when it comes to any kind of safety net it should be as automatic as possible, but at least as targeted as negative income tax. UBI might fit depending on one's definition.
Somebody should try a smart populist movement instead. My least favorite thing about my favored (or rather least disfavored) party is that we seem to believe “we must win without appealing to the populace too directly, that would simply be uncouth.”
One could argue that the quality of life per horse went up, even if the total number of horses went down. Lots more horses now get raised in farms and are trained to participate in events like dressage and other equestrian sports.
Someone said during the hype of "self-driving cars is the future!" that ICE/driver-driven cars will go the way of the horse: they'll be well-cared, kept in stables, and taken out in the weekends for recreation, on circuits but not on public roads..
When the Covid-truther geniuses "figured out" that "Bill Gates was behind Covid", they pulled out things like this as "proof" that his master plan is to reduce the world's population. Not to reduce the rate of increase, but to kill them (because of course these geniuses don't understand derivatives)...
Ah, got it. This sounds like more of a "repugnant conclusion" sort of problem where if you care about the well being of people who exist, then it is possible to have too large of a population.
We don't know what the author had in mind, but one has to really be tone deaf to let the weirdness of the discussion go unnoticed. Take a look at the last paragraphs in the text again:
> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.
> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.
> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.
While most of the text is written from cold economic(ish) standpoint it is really hard not to get bleak impression from it. And the last three sentences express that in vague way too. Some ambiguity is left on purpose so you can interpret the daunting impression your way.
The article presents you with crushing juxtaposition, implicates insane dangers, and leaves you with the feeling of inevitability. Then back to work, I guess.
> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.
> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.
Horses typically live between 25 to 30 years. I agree with OP that most likely those horses were not decimated (killed) but just died out and people stopped mass breeding them. Also as other noticed chart shows 'horses PER person in US'. Population between 1900 and 1950 increased from 1.5B to 2.5B (globally but probably similarly almost 70% increase in US).
I think depends what do you worry about:
1) `that human population decrease 50-80%`?
I don't worry about it even if that happen. 200 years ago human population was ~1 B today is ~8 B. At year 0 AD human population was ~0.250 B. Did we 200 years ago worry about it like "omg human population is only 1 B" ?
I doubt human population decrease 80% because of no demand for human as workforce but I don't see problem if it decrease by 50%. There will short transition period with surplus of retired people and work needed to keep the infrastructure but if robots can help with this then I don't see the problem.
2) `That we will not be needed and we will loose jobs?`
I don't see work like something in demand. Most people hate their jobs or do crappy jobs. What do people actually worry about that they will won't get any income. And actually not even about that - they worry that they will not be able to survive or be homeless. If there is improvement in production that food, shelter, transportation, healtcare is dirty cheap (all stuff from bottom maslov piramid) and fair distribution on social level then I also see a way this can be no problem.
3) `That we will all die because of AI`
This I find more plausable and maybe not even by AGI but earlier because of big social unrests during transition period.
As someone who raises horses and other animals, I can say with pretty high certainty that most of the horses were not allowed to "retire". Horses are expensive and time-consuming to care for, and with no practical use, most horses would have been sent not to the glue factory but (at that time) to the butcher and their non-meat parts used for fertilizer.
Yeah, I agree with what you said. It's not about the absolute number of people, but the social unrest. If you look at how poor we did our job at redistribution of wealth so far, I find it hard to believe that we will do well in the future. I am afraid of mass pauperisation and immiseration of societies followed by violence.
What's more important - "redistribution of wealth" or simply reducing the percentage of people living in abject poverty? And wouldn't you agree that by that measure, most of the world, including its largest countries, have done quite a good job?
From 1990 to 2014, the world made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty, with over one billion people moving out of that condition. The global poverty rate decreased by an average of 1.1 percentage points each year, from 37.8 percent to 11.2 percent in 2014.
I think the phrase "fair distribution on social level" is doing a lot of work in this comment. Do you consider this to be a common occurrence, or something our existing social structures do competently?
I see quite the opposite, and have very little hope that reduced reliance on labor will increase the equability of distribution of wealth.
Doesn't matter. The countries with most chaos and internal strife gets a lot of practice fighting wars (civil war). Then the winner of the civil war, who's used to grabbing resources by force, and the one that has perfected war skills due to survival of the fittest, goes round looking for other countries to invade.
Historically, advanced civilizations with better production capabilities don't necessarily do better in war if they lack "practice". Sad but true. Maybe not in 21st century, but who knows.
Yeah none of that fever dream is real. There's no "after" a civil war, conflicts persist for decades (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, Colombia, Sudan).
Check this out - https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. The US is increasingly a miserable place to live in, and the worse it gets the more their people double down on being shitty.
Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on your phone: Chinese dream.
Well, in this case corporations stop buying people and just fire them instead of letting them retire. Or an army of Tesla Optimi will send people to the glue factory.
That at least is the fantasy of these people. Fortunately. LLMs don't really work, Tesla cars are still built by KUKA robots (while KUKA has a fraction of Tesla's P/E) and data centers in space are a cocaine fueled dream.
There are hundreds of examples of crony capitalism in the world, current and past. Now you can study them and see what'll happen in the US in the next few years.
"It can't happen here", said the arrogant American...
Adjacently, every plane contains hundreds of social media account owners (ok I'm talking about 737s and larger, not a 4-seater plane). Which makes me wonder if there's a record from every minute of a flight somewhere on social media.
Which in turn makes me wonder if we consolidated all the social media storage, if there'd be a photo (or thousands) timestamped of every moment in time.
Speaking of records of flights, if this was the age of social media overhype (so 2010-2015) someone should've pitched uploading black box data to social media... hah!
Oh wait, it's not black box data, but flightradar24.com, etc, exists...
No. It's laziness and bad design. It's the most generic trash icon from the most generic icon set.
Same with "add row above/below" or the completely distinct action Create Filter/Filter by cell value.
They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought. Especially given the fact that these actions have been around in office software for literal decades, and more often than not with their own distinct icons.
I vaguely recall seeing some product with toolbar icons that attempted to depict a cell as part of a row, or column, with an "x" in the corner to indicate delete. I could never decipher them. It was all too small. Plus the "x" looked just like the "+" at a glance since it was so small. Even though every icon was distinct and meaningful, each icon was also ultimately a complicated jumble that took longer to decipher than just reading the label next to it.
So when you say "They can be trivially improved with about 1 millisecond of conscious thought," I completely disagree. It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to. And maybe don't be so insulting?
> It's actually really hard and there's a good reason they choose not to.
No. No, there's no good reason. Google is institutionally incapable of making good designs. Forget good, they can't make sensible designs.
So they whipped out the most generic icon set. Typed "delete" or "add" or "filter" and chose the first icon that popped up for all actions.
Top to bottom:
- Insert column before. left arrow, column (three stacked squares), green plus sign
- Insert row after: green plus sign (in the same position as previous item), row (three squares in a row), arrow down
- Insert cells. Doesn't need an icon, since it's already in the obvious insert group. Or: a single square, green plus sign
-------
- Delete column: column, red cross
- Delete row: row, red cross
- Delete cells: doesn't need an icon. Or: single square, red cross
--------
- Create a filter. Same filter icon with a green plus. This one is so obvious, that only a moron could think it's hard, or there's some reason they didn't do it.
- Filter by cell value. Same icon, or better still a square with filter because there are other filters elsewhere.
You don't need to use language like "moron". It doesn't help the conversation and it's not appropriate. Trying to convince people you are right because you think other people are less intelligent is generally not a strategy that works.
And yes, all of the icons you are describing and linked to can be drawn. I even described these types of combinations myself. The point you're missing is that they are nearly impossible to visually distinguish at a quick glance. When I look at your first link, I just see a ton of icons that look like variations on a grid. They're difficult to decipher. You have to stop and think about what they actually mean and hope you don't make a mistake.
I think you're missing the purpose of menu item icons. They are not too distinguish every single item. That's what the text is for. They are to help identify either the basic type of verb or the basic type of noun or adjective at a glance. Without having to think about it. Which is why it's a feature, not a bug, even when multiple many items share the same icon if they perform the same action. At a glance, you can see that all of the plus icons mean insert something and all of the trashcan icons mean to delete something, and then you look at the text to see what is being inserted or deleted. Trying to cram all of that information into a tiny icon is bad design because it makes it slower to figure out the right item, not faster.
Design is full of these kinds of trade-offs. These trade-offs are the kinds of things you learn when you study design, and a huge part of graphic design is getting the trade-offs right in a given context.
> I even described these types of combinations myself.
Not exactly. Re-read what I wrote
> When I look at your first link, I just see a ton of icons that look like variations on a grid.
1. It was just an example, out of potentially thousands of possible variations. And I described a much simpler one
2. You're complaining about "variations of a grid" and at the same time praise how Google uses literally the same icon for completely different actions
> I think you're missing the purpose of menu item icons. They are not too distinguish every single item. That's what the text is for.
So why does Google use an icon for every single item? It's enough to have just a single icon on the first item in the group, the rest will naturally be associated with it.
> They are to help identify either the basic type of verb or the basic type of noun or adjective at a glance. Without having to think about it... even when multiple many items share the same icon if they perform the same action.
Ah yes, you don't have to think about checks notes that "Create filter" and "Apply filter from cell value" are actually completely different actions with completely different modes of operation, that's why they get a single generic filter icon.
> At a glance, you can see that all of the plus icons mean insert something and all of the trashcan icons mean to delete something, and then you look at the text to see what is being inserted or deleted.
Oh, "read text between identical icons and hope you didn't misread the action you needed" is good, but "read text between similar icons if they are not distinct enough" is bad. Got you
> Trying to cram all of that information into a tiny icon
So don't cram it. I literally described the most minimal icons that don't cram much info.
Also, there's literally no "crammin of info" in, say, adding a plus sign to a filter icon to designate "create" and to differentiate it from "apply".
Just a few examples of minimal icons. They are from different packs, so their styles and approaches will be different, these are just to illustrate the idea. Also, as you said, not every menu item needs an icon:
Google "designers" literally took a generic icon set, searched for terms "insert", "delete", "filter" and chose the first ones that came up in search. That's it. That's the "hard decision" they had to make.
Which is ironic given that they went out of their way to create varied distinct icons for the top-level menu, but not for the context menu. Or that Google Docs (not Sheets) manages to do all that, and use slightly different icons than Sheets (e.g. for Paste Without Formatting)
> Design is full of these kinds of trade-offs.
What Google shows is not a trade-off. It's either incompetence or non-caring, and I don't know which is worse.
You seem pretty convinced that each menu item needs its own unique icon, and it doesn't seem like anything I say is going to lead you to understand why others would see that as overly complex and less helpful.
> You seem pretty convinced that each menu item needs its own unique icon
Tell me you didn't read what I wrote without telling me that.
Literal quote: "So why does Google use an icon for every single item? It's enough to have just a single icon on the first item in the group, the rest will naturally be associated with it."
The rest of my text is showing how your defense of "let's use a generic icon for completely different actions for every menu item" falls apart even with the tiniest of scrutinies
> it doesn't seem like anything I say is going to lead you to understand why others would see that as overly complex and less helpful.
Literally every menu in every Google Docs is full with unique icons for every menu item except this context menu BTW.
You'd know that if you weren't so hellbent on defending incompetence.
The website is of a "free market think tank", which other project is a video series called "Survivors of Socialism". Yeah.
I guess this is inducing a genetic fallacy, the number might be accurate anyway, but here's the salt.
Edit to add: OK, here's one sample report from their own FOI: https://secondstreet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/BC-%E2%8...
86 people died while waiting for a cataract operation, 17 people died while waiting for a knee operation... OMG, Canadian healthcare is deathly terrible!!!
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