This is an angle of the uneven distribution of wealth that you seldom hear about. As long as there are rich and poor people, a rich person can hire a poor person to do basically anything.
Overriding legality, decency, safety. Because the poor person just needs the money that bad.
So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children. Crazy horrible stuff that no sane person would do. Because they need the money.
And the rich guy is untouched.
So, to a significant degree, as long as there is rich and poor, there is no law or morality. It reduces society to a dog-pit.
> Over the years, the type system of TypeScript has grown from basic type annotations to a large and complex programming language.
Give someone (particularly a developer) the opportunity to build something complicated and undoubtedly they will. So now you have two problems, the complicated program that actually does some hopefully useful work, and another complicated program on top of it that fills your head and slows you down when trying to fix the first complicated program. You may say 'ah yes, but the second complicated program validates the first!'. Not really, it just makes things more complicated. Almost all bugs are logic bugs or inconsistent state bugs (thanks OOP!), almost none are type bugs.
However, static analysis of existing code (in Javascript), without having to write a single extra character, may well have great value in indicating correctness.
Edit:
> TypeScript's type system is a full-fledged programming language in itself!
Run! Run as fast as you can! Note that this 'full-fledged programming language' doesn't actually do anything (to their credit they admit this later on)
Edit2:
> [...] is a type-level unit test. It won't type-check until you find the correct solution.
> I sometimes use @ts-expect-error comments when I want to check that an invalid input is rejected by the type-checker. @ts-expect-error only type-checks if the next line does not!
What new level of hell are we exploring now??
I am genuinely afraid and I'm only halfway through this thing. What's next? A meta type level language to check that our type checking checks??
The surveillance for higher status workers is more about always having a reason to manage out a worker more than actually optimizing anything, like they do with lower status workers.
We have this problem in the US armed forces rather acutely. Everyone is breaking many rules and regulations daily but the chain of command does nothing about the vast majority of infractions. Reserving enforcement for when they feel like it, for reasons having nothing to do with the actual rules.
This is anarcho-tyranny.
As a people manager in software I fight this kind of stuff, and I feel like only the most morally compromised managers push it.
It’s never an honest attempt to optimize the work. It’s a way to force you to provide evidence for your dismissal.
I die inside when I hear people talk about "productivity" in the economic sense.
At least in the US, everything is already over-optimized for human beings. I have to pay extra to interact with a human being to book a flight or do banking. Every nontrivial business I interact with tries like hell to keep me from talking to a human, not trusting me to figure out when I can resolve my problem with their web site (yes I f-ing know about companyname.com, now let me talk to a representative, I called for a reason).
Companies love their metrics, and do shitty things to humans to make their metrics just a little better. Ever have a CS rep hang up on you (accidentally "disconnected")? Maybe you asked one too many questions and were bumping up their average call time for that shift, putting them at risk of disciplinary action.
Or, your company is a "meritocracy" and you have to spend hours and hours writing a review doc in a system desperately trying to objectively measure humans but failing down to the subjective- how hard is your manager willing to fight for you? Also, nobody except legal and HR care about the review doc anyway because the stack rank meeting happened three weeks ago. Even legal and HR only care to the extent that they can use it to cover their asses. And, you're screwed because your teammate is buddies with your manager and takes him boating or water skiing every weekend. You know who's getting the "exceeds" review, and btw there's only room for one because "bell curve". Only a few stock awards for you this time.
Or, your job just went away because paying western native English speakers is way more expensive than outsourcing your job. By the way, would you please train your replacement before you go? Don't forget your non-compete and assignment of inventions, and sign this exit agreement that you won't write or say anything bad about the company or we'll sue you for your severance!
But don't worry, we've driven down the cost of trinkets built overseas by slave labor, so you can watch a nice TV while you're unemployed.
F--- optimization. F--- productivity.
I love technology, and I love capitalism, but "optimization" and "productivity" are euphemisms/excuses that companies hide behind when they're going to do shady shit so that the share price will go up and the executives will get a bigger bonus.
The term "end stage capitalism" (or the more palatable "late capitalism") I've heard a lot recently and things like this really make me wonder.
The voracious and insatiable appetite for profit has led to some really disgusting practices for example:
- Goldman Sachs driving up food prices, which quite literally kills people, for profit [1]
- Hedge funds buying up trailer parks and jacking up the rates [2]
- Medical price gouging (eg epipens, insulin) [3];
- Abbott shutting down a baby formula plant that was poisoning infants to essentially end-run a possible investigation [4] where ultimately the government begged (paid?) them to reopen it; and
- Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a massive boon to the US military-industrial complex, a sector that might otherwise have found hard times thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ending.
If you look at these you see regulatory failure at pretty much every level thanks to the revolving door and resulting regulatory capture by these industries.
Compare this to China, who executed two people found responsible for a tainted milk scandal [5].
It's hard not to see just how much rent-seeking and monopoly-creating goes on in the modern economy. When is it enough?
Maybe slightly off-topic, but I think this is a part of a larger trend of a declining empire - its inability to solve problems that have already become non-issues in other societies. From big issues like healthcare to small stuff like getting rid of pennies, I'm amazed at how the US is beholden to special interest groups under the guise of democracy and freedom, as well as its exceptionalism.
One can see this in dysfunctional companies, from its inability to acknowledge the root of the problem (e.g. trying to solve product problems with re-branding), bloated bureaucracy and rent-seeking behavours (e.g. we'll just raise the price!).
I really do hope things get better because the outcome is very scary but I also don't have much hope.
IMO, economics as a science is all about making up theories to 'scientifically' (but actually, just academically) justify whatever the ruling powers want to do.
In a larger sense, academia and a big chunk of contemporary western "culture" is all about coming up with stories, narratives, explanations, mindsets (frameworks) to ignore the exploitation of humans as a resource for the sake of ill-defined (by design) notions of "the group" or "us all" when in fact the end result is a big hierarchical pyramid with little room at the top which requires lots and lots of desperate people at the bottom (by this point, the bottom is entire countries).
Modern Western sociology has been an experiment in the deconstruction of community since the industrial revolution, and significantly moreso since the 2nd WW. The 'tribe' has been considered an evil to be eradicated (rather than seeing othering outsiders as a thing to be fixed). The village has been deconstructed with folk pushed into isolated family islands, and in the last 30 years those family islands have been actively broken down by our quest for individualism and personal identity.
This is NOT how most of the world functions outside of the west, strong community bonds have underpinned the fabric of society and what you're experiencing having been shunted off your family island is the missing safety net provided by robust community.
The advice you're going to receive here will be proffered by folk in the same deconstructed system of individualism focusing on you as an individual.. but what you're experiencing is a need to belong to something greater than yourself that cares for your emotional and social needs, AKA: community. There are groups within the west who are fundamentally aware of these problems and strive to create community, communes, religious groups, eco villages.. find groups that are focused on community (and supporting each-other, being a 'tribe') and get involved in whatever they are doing.
Ps: 'untrusting of women' is an alarm bell that makes me think you see women as a class rather than humans, this should be an alarm bell for you too to realise that generalisations about groups of people are always a bad idea.
Unfortunately, Russia knows very, very well how to deal with this.
1. all citizens in the conquered territories will need a new id card. That card will be required everywhere. You want to send your kids to school, you need the card. You want to take a subway, you need the card. You want to buy groceries, use the ATM machine, the internet, pay your bills, make a phone call, you need your card.
2. the card will need to be re-validated periodically. At the time you need to make an attestation that you don't know the location of any hidden weapon, or any resistance fighter, or foreign agent, etc. The penalty for lying would be jail.
3. set up a system of informants. The rewards for information don't even have to be monetary, it could be: if you want your brother out of jail, you need to tell us 3 useful pieces of information. We decide what we consider to be useful.
How do I know Russia can do all these things? Because Russia (Soviet Union at the time) conquered my Eastern European country right after WW2, and the resistance was minimal. A country with millions of weapons (WW2 just ended), with forests, mountains, lots of places to hide. Well, guerilla warfare still requires you to eat. You can hide in a forest, but from time to time you need to go down to the village. If one person informs, you're finished.
You think Russia doesn't know how to do what the Soviet Union did in '45-'48? They lost the institutional memory? You haven't been paying attention. Putin is ex-KGB. As we speak, he's putting children (!!) in jail for going to a protest with their parents.
Why didn't this work in Afghanistan ? Because Afghanistan is quite different. People don't live in apartment buildings (well, some do, but most not). They know each other. Internet, subways, grocery stores, are nice, but not essential for many, many people. Informants work both ways. The reprisals from the resistance can be worse than those from the occupiers. Etc, etc. This is not racism. Afghani people are absolutely the same as Ukrainian people, or like me and you. They bleed just as much when you put a bullet in them, and dislike that just as much. But the bullet can come from more places. If the Ukrainian resistance were to have an iota of a chance of success, the resistance fighters should be willing to shoot their compatriots who inform on them. The Taliban were willing to do just that.
I like Raised by Wolves. A lot of it is "here's another unrealistic coincidence" and "that character has a lot of plot armor", but I'm hoping it's because the overarching mystery story makes it that way. I'll be disappointed if this turns out to be sloppy writing.
Certainly a chunk of the writing so far is cliche. I'm pretty sure I saw parts of this show a dozen times in various 90s shows and 50s/60s/70s books. Anybody remember Earth 2?
Although the child actors are quite bad at acting, the adults largely make up for it.
The environment does feel like a Star Trek jungle set, where it's hard to suspend disbelief that it's not just a few hundred square meter outdoor stage in South Africa. But we've been suspending disbelief on low res sci fi shows for years, so long as the story is good, and even when the writing is bad.
For instance Babylon 5 is one of my all time favorites and the writing is bad and the acting is worse. A couple actors elevate and save it (Peter Jurasik, Andreas Katsulas, Ed Wasser, Walter Koenig). But what really saves it is story: not effects, not dialog, not delivery, just compelling world-building story.
I'm hoping Raised by Wolves turns into something great, but so far as it's at least good, I'm along for the ride.
The thing that really grinds my gears about all of this as a roboticist, is that as a community we had a pretty good culture of taking safety seriously. In 2014, the idea of unleashing onto the public admittedly beta-quality autonomous car software, on a platform that eschews industry best practices was unfathomable.
Then came Autopilot and later FSD, and Tesla threw the concept of safety was thrown out the window. An autonomous Tesla decapitated a man in 2016, and Tesla continued unabated! What actionable steps did Tesla take as a result of that incident to make sure it never happens again. Even today in 2022 you can find videos of Teslas on public roads just completely failing to detect and colliding with stationary objects. The culture at Tesla seems to not care this is happening, as it continues to happen.
It used to be that when your robot did a single thing wrong or caused the most minor of injuries, let alone it killed someone, then you engineered the hell out of it and implemented safety protocols to make sure that failure mode would never happen again. Not at Tesla, apparently.
I get the utilitarian argument that maybe self driving cars could reduce traffic accidents in the future by being better than humans on average. But safety doesn’t happen unless you really work at it, with intention. Using your customers to beta test your 2 ton robots on public roads is not a safety-focused mindset. Tesla is not a company that values safety first when it comes to their autonomous car project.
Cutting corners is how these so called "tech companies" disrupt markets. They remove all the bloat; the bloat being safeguards and processes created through years of experience and evolution. And we flock to them, praising them for "showing the traditional companies how it's done". But sooner or later the cracks start to form. The random driver picking you up from that app turns out to be a rapist. That house you found at that other app turns out to be falling apart and you die. That shiny new car turns out to have had zero quality control and is dangerous to drive.
So they have to make changes. They have to introduce the same safeguards that have been standard in their respective industries for decades. They have to raise prices. And before you know it, the only thing that separates them from the traditional companies is that stupid app.
Minitel was probably subject to substantial government regulation, unlike the "tech" companies that dominate the web and overinfluence the internet. Minitel was probably funded at least in part through taxation.
Certainly, Minitel was not a secretive Silicon Valley-styled company with dual class shares or other entrenching governance structures, that allow for concentration of voting power in the hands of company insiders, through disproportionate allocation of voting rights among shareholders.
It seems the French do not have the same hatred of telecom that Amercians do.
Regardless of the public opinion toward telecom, it has historically been subject to far more regulation than so-called "tech" companies operating websites. Sadly, some of today's telecom companies try to emulate or piggyback on the privacy violating behaviour of "Big Tech".
Centralisation/decentralisation is an interesting debate, but if the issue is privacy then, IMO, one also needs to consider the question of regulation/deregulation.
Perhaps Minitel was an example of a regulated, government-supported public computer networking service that worked very well.
Silicon Valley and its charlatan ideology is a privacy disaster. It is probably a threat to the survival of democratic societies as we know them.
> are you serious? what do you think the tactical gear is - anything with a pattern?
I am referencing militia groups like the Oath Keepers, who dressed in fatigues, vests, helmets, gas masks, eye protection, gloves, boots, bore insignia, moved in formation, communicated over radios... they were prepared and organized.
> ah yes. the true sign of domestic terrorists executing a coup planned for months - intentionally not bringing your guns.
Oath keepers did in fact bring guns [1].
There are many other instances of guns and other weapons being found. Anyway, I'm not sure what the fixation is on guns because a mob without guns is more effective at doing exactly what was needed -- to get into the Capitol and delay the certification of the vote. An unarmed mob will not be met with lethal force by police for some reason in America, no matter how violent it is. The summer BLM protests proved that. So really if your objective is to get into the capitol, the worst idea in the world would be to shoot your way in; if you attempt this, the police will automatically go straight to lethal force. It's true that the mob outnumbered police, but police outnumbered militia members, and they would have lost that fight. I think if bodies started hitting the floor and bullets started flying, the regular rubes that comprised 99% of the mob that day would have scattered into the streets of DC.
> to temporarily delay a vote that could be done over video conference
Well that's just the thing... once you delay the vote there's no guarantee that the session would ever be reconvened. I already explained the plan in another post, but it's clearly laid out in the Eastman memos [2]. The point is that Pence on the morning of January 6 finalized his position that he would not decertify the election. That was their last hope at preventing Joe Biden from being president because it's essentially irreversible.
I believe not even the Supreme Court could overturn a bicameral certification of the election results. What authority would they use? There's nothing in the Constitution that would give them the power to review such a solemn power granted exclusively to the legislative branch. So if Trump had any hope of remaining as POTUS, it rested on preventing that certification from going forward at any cost. Hence the mob.
> ...what? theres no rule that if the certification gets delayed, the election is suddenly invalid. what is this, the 5-minute rule?
US Code Title 3 Chapter 1 Section 15 lays out exactly what happens on Jan 6. It does not have anything to say about what happens if Jan 6 is delayed. There is no process enshrined in law to handle that outcome. Evidently, the authors of the law did not anticipate a violent mob incited by the the loser of the election would attempt to delay the process.
It was extremely important to delay that certification as long as possible, because it allowed this behind-the-scenes pressure campaign to continue, and it prevented the transition of power from commencing.
On January 6, Rudy Giuliani articulated in a voicemail exactly why they needed a delay in certification so badly [3]:
the only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous states and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow.
And why did they need that delay? Giuliani continues:
I know we would delay you a lot, but it would give us the opportunity to get the legislators who are very, very close to pulling their vote, particularly after what McConnell did today. It angered them, because they have written letters asking that you guys adjourn and send them back the questionable ones and they'll fix them up.
This was about an hour before the joint session reconvened after insurrectionists were cleared from the building. Giuliani was urging to delay the proceedings at least 20 hours, probably more, during which he would continue his pressure campaign against state legislatures to decertify their election results. Because at this point, Pence had already said he would not do it, and he followed through. But it would be a completely different scenario if states like WI, PA, AZ, MI, or GA turned around and claimed that they had indeed sent fraudulent certificates of the vote, and instead submitted votes for Trump, which ironically would be fraudulent certificates of the sort they decried.
Here's my bottom line:
The Constitution and law prescribed that Joe Biden was to hold the title of President Elect on Jan 7. If the former President had launched an assault on the Capitol that would have delayed the certification past that date, he would have successfully halted the transition of power. The transmutation from mere candidate to President Elect represents the beginning of the transition of power, which is a process and not a moment. But it begins in earnest on Jan 7, and if it hadn't, that would have meant the United States was under extraconstitutional order. I can't tell you what would have happened, because there's no precedent for that. But I think this is a scenario where a the slope could be exceedingly slippery. First it's one day, then a week, then a month.... the longer you step outside of the constitutional order, the harder it is to get back. I believe this is why Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence were so insistent on completing the certification that very night. Once it was done, it was essentially impossible to undo, and they knew that.
Let me disagree politely from a similar background, though from another side of the globe. I rarely write on HN, but I think this is important for others who may read it.
As someone who grew up lower-middle class, who read HN for ~10 years and became slightly-upper-middle class, I think working hard is an unattractive proposition, and becomes ever less so as the timer ticks. I have seen people burn out like candles, to no avail.
My advice continues to be: "Do not ever work hard, unless you find yourself in a good strategic position where working hard benefits you". I cannot say that such positions of strategic advantage are non-existent for a normal software developer, but these became rare. Other HNers note, and I agree with them, that for someone to be raised in hierarchy for hard work is a rare occasion, especially if we talk about a real raise (say, above senior developer or a team lead). It takes a rare company and a departing higher-up to make working hard ROI > 0.
To expand on it:
* Realistically, the era of PG essays' applicability and easy startups is over, and has been over for several years. We are entering a new socio-economic regime which could be called "new guilded age/neo-feudalism". I may sound leftist saying this, but bear with me, I'm actually not leftist at all, it's just the truth of our situation. Lords became lords, the rest remain the rest.
* In this regime the low-hanging fruit is all but taken, the value has been captured, and the tech economy enters maturity, which is a polite euphemism for "MBA phase" of value extraction. It's not just me decrying this, Elon Musk has recently said the same: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-decries-m-b-a-ization... . Expect disappearance of small businesses (so, don't invest in tech skills used by small businesses). Expect more rat racing at work, more subscriptions and dark patterns in digital products. Also maybe expect slow merge of BigTech and US government in the next couple of decades, effectively giving us a BigTechGov with all that entails.
How does a generic middle class software developer rationally cope with the reality of this brave new world ? Here is my version of it, if someone knows how to enhance this advice, please do so in the comments:
1) Work as little as possible, to earn as much money as possible (basically minmax the professional game, choose high-paying moderate barrier to entry programming niches). Take breaks, fly to pretty islands with sunny beaches as much as you can. Never bear with bad workplaces if you have opportunity to switch, you have no obligations to this system, the age of corporate IBM pensions is over. For top management we are but replaceable parts, and our loyalty is neither required nor expected.
2) If you have what it takes (intelligence and neuroplasticity, basically), leetcode for FAANG while doing 1. This allows you to reach endgame - early retirement - more quickly.
3) If you do not have what it takes, do not leetcode or study algorithms (it's a waste of time without applicability to faang), go for tier-2/3 silicon valley unicorns. If you can, get a raise, become a manager as quickly as you can, because programmers have a short shelf life, while managers have much simpler day to day responsibilities, and long shelf life. I know what I'm talking about, because I have been a manager. Basically, working your life away in a position of individual contributor is a sad fate I wish everyone avoided.
4) Live frugally, do not overspend. Invest as much money as possible in a mix of index funds, bitcoin, gold, property. Again, do not "invest" money buying tech products and various products sold to you by MBAs - these money will be wasted.
5) Slow down your ageing as much as you can - take metformin if you tolerate it, use whatever interventions necessary to avoid metabolic syndrome, monitor your biomarkers, do aerobic exercise once in two days (I prefer biking for example). Monitor your spine health, avoid deterioration with any means necessary. With serious approach it is possible to feel/look 10 years younger than you are.
6) Find a loving partner, make at least three children. Children are good for everyone, and for you in your 50s-60s. Don't bother with college education for your children, you either won't be able to afford it, or it will be free by that time. The best gifts you can give your children are high IQ and good health, both of these are highly heritable (though could be ruined by environment), so look for these in your partner as well. If you have questions regarding IQ and how not to ruin it, mail me.
7) Retire as early as possible, focus on low-capital-expense high-satisfaction activities, e.g. spending time with your kids, studying abstract subjects, sports.
Jonathan Blow's talk 'Preventing the Collapse of Civilization' goes into detail about how technology can regress, with the Mechanism being one example. This kind of thing is far more common than we think, most would be surprised to learn that Ancient Greece had writing for about 600 years before forgetting it. There was no writing in Greece for over 400 years, until they adopted the Phoenician alphabet around 730 BC.
He compares this situation to the state of software development today. It's a sobering watch.
The article makes you believe that the 11% benefit from using masks in the Bangladesh study was for the whole population (100%) using the mask (experimental group) vs the control group (0%) not using masks. However, the 11% benefit for an experimental group of only 42% of the them using masks vs 13% using masks in the control group. There was only a 29% point difference between groups (not 100%). And compliance was not 100% perfect (as usual).
Assuming that the study was correctly performed, maybe 100% usage difference between groups (all using masks in experimental groups vs nobody using them in control group) could have shown a much higher benefit. But that remains to be tested.
This article is, as an expert in the topic of agnotololy explains, an effort to "…spread doubt in the guise of balanced debate".
I've already stated this many times, I'll state it again.
Get your shit out of YouTube and any other Google product.
Google is a dumb, faceless, fully automated company only interested in extracting as much data as possible from its users, force them to swallow as many ads as possible, all without caring about listening to them (both consumers and creators), under the faulty assumption that they're too big for users and consumers to live without them. They simply don't deserve anybody using their shitty products anymore.
The error in this case is quite obvious. YouTube's scanner incorrectly identified the teacher's recording of Moonlight Sonata as a copyrighted reinterpretation of the same piece of music originally written by a guy who actually died 200 years ago. And I can't completely put the blame on Google's AI: the notes are technically the same, the beat might also be the same, if you calculate an FFT of the audio you'll probably also come up with similar spectral signatures. But a human listener will IMMEDIATELY notice that was played by the teacher IS NOT the the same as the copyrighted piece of music.
The problem is: who is accountable for these mistakes? Who shall I reach out to if Google's foggy algorithms make a mistake? And, in the case of educators and creators who actually do that for a job, who will compensate them for the revenue they have lost because of algorithmic errors?
Until Google can provide an answer to these questions, I repeat: keep your ass away from anything that has their name on it. They are not reliable, the risk of losing your data, your account or your followers because of random automated decision is very high, and the probability of getting a real human to assist you is very low.
Speaking for myself: the biggest consequence for me, in terms of mental health, has been the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others. It was a choice I made years ago; I wanted to be the sort of person that believed those things, even when there was occasional evidence to the contrary.
But 2020 brought a trifecta of social stress that laid bare some festering social diseases. Both national and global politics, the response to Black Lives Matter, and the pandemic, all in the same year.
I don't know quite how to describe it. It's the loss of an ideal? I don't know. But, I feel it, viscerally. Whereas depression is more of an internally-focused feeling, this is externally-focused.
In the before times, I loved road trips, especially through smaller towns. It was a part of my identity. I've traveled through most of what's west of the Mississippi. I always knew that I had political differences with many of the people in the places I visited, but it rarely mattered. It wouldn't come up in casual conversation. Everyone was friendly. I won't ever be able to see people in those places the same way again.
I happily spent money in small towns as I went. Gas, food, lodging, services, the occasional trinket. I can't do that anymore, either.
I've been fortunate throughout the last 12 months in a lot of ways, and it's still left a big long-term impact on me.
I highly recommend the book "Six Frigates" by Ian Toll that talks about this time period. It's a highly readable and interesting story of the US' at the time tiny navy, that actually did very well for itself in the war of 1812 against the dominant naval power of the day. His other books are well-written and informative as well.
Learn about modelling. Database is more than just storing data. Drink less koolaid of NoSQL, any NoSQL. It is trading initial result with future development time. SQL has been battlefield tested. No amount of "convenience" is more convenient than learning the fundamentals.
So basically they modified a 35MHP street sign to make it look like a 85MPH.
I looked at it from a distance, and it was hard to tell between 35 and 85.
So if it is hard for a human, then it seems obvious that a tesla would also fail to recognize a 35.
Maybe the difference is that a human might not be certain and slow down just in case, whereas a deep neural network might be certain in its errors.
It was this essay, along with a choice quote from Epictetus, that induced me to finally leave my day job to go back to University to study CS. I graduated a month ago and began my first full-time SWE position last Monday.
I spent my twenties on auto-pilot, allowing external circumstances to effectively decide my life for me. Seneca and the Stoics reminded me of the immense agency I still possessed, despite the obscenity that was the recession and the cost of American Higher Education. I still had some say over my life, or at least over my choices, and if I didn't exercise my agency, life would slip through my fingers and hurtle to me a deathbed filled with regret and disappointment.
The quote from Epictetus:
"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. This is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be Socrates."
Calling what's happening with modern society "loneliness epidemic" is like saying that people in a building set on fire are "suffering from heat exposure and air pollution". A lot of social processes/constructions that make our society stable have been hijacked for profit or deliberately sabotaged for political gains. In both cases it's usually a product of extremely short-term thinking or highest forms of cynicism. Feeling disconnected is nothing more than an illusory side-effect of a whole host of other things.
Overriding legality, decency, safety. Because the poor person just needs the money that bad.
So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children. Crazy horrible stuff that no sane person would do. Because they need the money.
And the rich guy is untouched.
So, to a significant degree, as long as there is rich and poor, there is no law or morality. It reduces society to a dog-pit.