strangely, that is exactly how the system works.

They are (subtly) saying cyber criminals are all from / in other countries.

It is very basic maths as well (that evades most small time landlords).

100% occupancy at 90% of the market price with high quality tenants makes you more money than 80% occupancy + agent advertising / finding fees at full market price with bad tenants.

> everything bubble except gold , oil, and other commodities

and wages for everyday working joes

but Nvidia tho

i answered your question at some length on the other thread in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39469828

i think you will find the answer extremely informative; it should change your picture of the world significantly. i'm interested to hear what you think

The rules are clear. There is one set for them and one set for us, we are afterall The Good Guys (tm)

I think you are seeing things from a bubble.

Most people in the country dont give a shit about historical injustices and are worried about how they are going to pay their rent or put food on the table today.

A lot of people have the capacity for both

I gave some evidence that being socially progressive / "woke" is broadly popular. Advertisers are not activists, they're following what people like

> What is it specifically that company management is worried about?

As with all hype techs, even the most talented management are barely literate in the product. When talking about their new trillion $ product they must take their talking points from the established literature and "fake it till they make it".

If the other big players say "billions of parameters" you chuck in as many as you can. If the buzz words are "tokens" you say we have lots of tokens. If the buzz words are "safety" you say we are super safe. You say them all and hope against hope that nobody asks a simple question you are not equipped to answer that will show you dont actually know what you are talking about.

> Plastic is the foundation of so many aspects of modern life

I genuinely can not think of a single product that only exists thanks to plastic.

That's what I'm talking about :)

There are a bunch of answers to your question the way you asked it (eg electrical components, or chemical processes that can only be contained in certain polymers) but let's skip them.

The scale of human society requires -a lot of stuff-, and plastics make that possible. Building materials, clothing, tools, storage, etc.

It costs an order of magnitude more to manufacture something out of wood or metal or glass than to make it out of plastic. And then the thing would often be more fragile or cumbersome.

Plastics do such a good job here that we get caught up in the problems their overabundance creates. But without them, costs of living globally would be drastically higher and way more people would be suffering from dire want.

i'm interested to hear which electrical components and chemical processes you're thinking of?

I don't think it's so much that things wouldn't exist if plastic didn't exist. Rather it's that they would be so much different that they would almost be different products.

There's tons of things like automobiles, firearms, and appliances that are dramatically lighter due to plastics.

The non-plastic alternatives for clothing that protects from rain and cold are much more limited. Generally only wool and plastic clothing insulates while wet. In terms of actual rain jackets you'd have to go back to rubber, waxed cotton, or oilcloth.

rubber is a plastic, in the sense that it's a thermoset hydrocarbon polymer that's synthetically crosslinked and commonly shaped by molding, if we're talking about vulcanized natural latex. all the other kinds of rubber are even more obviously plastic: silicone, buna-n, polyurethane, etc.

I can think of plenty of products that would only be available to as many people as they are because of plastic. We should still do something about plastic waste, though.

you can't think of a single product that only exists thanks to plastic? barring trivial examples like 'plastic bottles', 'synthetic fibers', and 'plastic pipes', which are just plastic versions of products that could be produced otherwise, i can think of a few:

· condoms that prevent disease (sheepskin condoms are okay as contraceptives but are not considered safe against hiv)

· transparent flexible medical feeding tubes

· disposable scalpels

· disposable pipette tips, crucial for biology work

· catheters (one company does make them from a bioplastic but it's still a plastic)

· i was going to say 'printed circuit boards' but it turns out that some of them are made out of sapphire instead. so i guess i'm limited to 'impact-resistant printed circuit boards'

· communications satellites (they'd've weighed too much to launch without much larger rockets, and they'd also break during launch)

· cell phones

· playground slides that don't cause burns when it's sunny

· spray foam insulation

· permanent markers (the ink is a plastic)

· bulletproof vests (plastics are the only materials with the necessary combination of strength and lightness)

· landfill liners

· magnetic tape

· photographic film, as opposed to glass plates, and therefore pocket cameras and motion pictures

· pneumatic tires, and therefore bicycles and automobiles that can go faster than a walking pace

· insulating panels for houses

· garbage bags

· breast implants

· adhesive tapes, including duct tape, scotch tape, packing tape, and masking tape (pressure-sensitive adhesives are plastics)

· band-aids

· lcds (the liquid crystals are a plastic, just one that's molten at room temperature; the polarizing filters are also a plastic, a solid one, although conceivably you could find a way to use wollaston prisms for this instead)

· ion-selective electrolysis membranes (nafion, etc.)

· phonograph records. if you're unwilling to consider shellac a 'plastic', even though it's a moldable thermoplastic organic polymer, this can be restricted to 33rpm and 45rpm phonograph records

· compact discs, probably. although you could surely micro-etch a surface to store digital data without plastic, the stamping process crucially depends on plastic's ability to mold to submicron precision as a way to mass-produce the resulting shape

· hologram stickers, similarly

· baby bottles. the nipples are plastic (rubber, a plastic, is the only natural material that will work) and if you make the bottle itself out of glass, the baby will break it

· flexible electrical wires that don't short out if they get wet, I think. you can't insulate flexible wires with glass or porcelain. certainly insulating wires with cloth (silk for small wires) was commonplace in the early 20th century, and although you can get wires insulated with an layer of ceramic so thin it's flexible, i don't think it's flexible enough or abrasion-resistant enough for household use

those are things you can't make at all without plastics. in most other cases, you could make do: by molding things out of beeswax or glass, stamping them out of steel, carving them out of wood, machining them out of brass or mykroy/mycalex (if you don't consider that a 'plastic'), molding them out of plaster, using decay-prone natural fibers instead of stable plastic ones, painting cotton cloth with linseed oil, oxidatively cross-linking linseed oil or urushi as a binder for other uses, sintering sapphire, or bolting together pieces of porcelain or granite that had been ground to shape

that would work for clothing, camping, rock climbing, sailing, electronic components, paints, electrical equipment, automobiles, and most industrial processes. but not for the bullet list above

however, even in those cases, the resulting products would in most cases be orders of magnitude more expensive, so the aspect of modern life that would be missing would be that non-wealthy people have access to them. they would also be much shorter-lived in most cases because they would rot and break more easily

· menstrual cups

· zip ties

· disposable diapers

· transparent blast shields

· bulletproof glass

· more generally, safety glass other than tempered glass—tempered glass shatters into tiny pieces that won't slash open your arteries, but sometimes safety actually requires the broken glass to remain intact, as in car windshields

· transparent riot shields

· safety glasses and visors (glass glasses increase the risk of eye injury from projectiles in the right size range, rather than decreasing it)

· plywood, particleboard, and osb (though perhaps in theory you could make them with binders that aren't plastic, plastic resins are for some reason the only things actually being used, so i consider it unproved that you could make them with something like hide glue)

· glue strong enough to reconnect the broken stem of a wine glass

· superglue (superglue is a plastic)

· hot glue guns

· o-rings and other gaskets that don't leak. historically these used to be made of leather, but leather is of course porous. as a result

· virtually anything that hermetically seals around a rotating shaft

· the monterey bay aquarium

· photolithography resists, such as used for making integrated circuits; all the photoresists used for photolithography are plastics. so without plastics you'd have to find a different way to make integrated circuits

· laminators, the kind that sandwiches paper between two sheets of transparent plastic

· aluminum soft drink cans, which depend on a thin coating of plastic to protect the aluminum from the acid

· mechanically stabilized earth walls, which are used for most cuts into the earth for highways and underpasses (often mistakenly believed to be concrete, because concrete plates are hung on their faces). these depend on layering the earth with geotextiles to keep it from slumping over time, and the only natural material that could be used for the geotextiles would be asbestos, which is unacceptable due to the resulting health hazards. natural organic materials would rot and metals would oxidize. conceivably glass fiber could work, but it might be unacceptably hazardous as well

· nomex firefighting suits; no natural material combines the light weight, heat resistance (370°), thermal insulation, and flexibility that aluminized plastics do

· the most common types of 3-d printers (fdm, sla)

· scratch-and-sniff

· pencil erasers (natural rubber, again)

· car batteries; only plastics have the necessary combination of acid resistance, impact resistance, electrical insulation, and waterproofness for this application

· hepa filters

· n95 masks

· carbon fiber (made by carbonizing fibers made from a thermoset plastic)

· silicon carbide fiber such as tyranno (made by carbonizing fibers made from a thermoset silicone plastic)

· asbestos-free brakes (nomex/kevlar again)

· fire poi (kevlar with fiberglass or cotton)

· ping-pong balls

· knife-resistant gloves for meatpackers and cooks (kevlar again)

· shrinky dinks

· breathable waterproof fabric (gore-tex)

· xerox machines and laser printers (the toner is a plastic with pigment in it)

· ion-exchange membranes and therefore deionized water

· waterproof oven mitts (silicone)

· rtv high-temperature sealant (also silicone, filled with iron oxide)

· waterproof examination gloves (latex, nitrile, vinyl, etc.)

· garden hoses

· sneakers

Such a Life of Brian "What have the Romans done for us" vibe to all this. :)

heh

well, some of them are pretty trivial (life without shrinky-dinks is just life) but others are pretty major. when i started out writing this i didn't realize that plastics were essential to literally every way to record motion picture or audio data until the invention of hard disks

Resists for photolithography (without which, no integrated circuits).

i did mention that, but probably there is some alternative. for example, you could directly selectively etch away a vacuum-coated metal layer with lasers or electron beams, perhaps even using a shadow mask. so i suspect that's more a question of how expensive the products would be rather than whether they would be feasible at all

From the original "experiment" https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/24/worlds-biggest-4-day-workwee...

The experiment uses a 100-80-100 model: workers get 100% of the pay for working 80% of the time in exchange for delivering 100% of their usual output.

Would only be assuming, however, given the success it would appear that it was achieved.

fwiw I do not think that I have encountered a "knowledge worker" who couldnt do 100% of their job in 80% of the time with minimal effort. Manual jobs / service jobs obviously different of course.

So it's as simple as "We've been telling people to work 2 extra days and now we're not and everything is fine?" let's try 4 days a week. :) Then 2. Then they just pay us without doing any work.

I'm ok, I self identify as a black woman.