It is usually a case of "the lady doth protest too much". They project their own emotionality onto others while professing to follow logic and restraint. I'm not a trained psychologist by any means but is the modern cultural obsession with image a kind of widespread narcissism? I see these self-professions of rationalism as just another flavor of the same thing "look at me, I'm special, I'm very logical". Furthermore I speculate if the modern world with the gray dullness of equality, democracy, and mass culture drives people to find ways to differentiate from the rest. I'm interested on what's your take as I too have seen religious thought in the loudest atheists.
One interesting essay on the history of some philosophies and worldviews you might like is Eric Vogelin's Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1968). Here he traces a lot of modern thought back to the early Gnostic religion. The lack of self-reflection and particularly the righteousness I see today makes me think his point is very accurate.
>I'm not a trained psychologist by any means but is the modern cultural obsession with image a kind of widespread narcissism?
I agree to the point where I'd rather hold my tongue than risk creating an echo chamber :P
I will say one thing, though. I grew up in the US and spent about a decade in Europe, and one thing that seems apparent to me (though I can't quite articulate it) is that our short view of history produces a shallow view of culture, and that this in turn inhibits the development of a truly meaningful form of conservatism from emerging. Conserve what, exactly? There are obviously good answers to that question, but nobody seems know them, here. All we have is a narrow, shallow and intellectually stunted slogan of "America was founded on Christian values!". It certainly was, and much of that is worth preserving. So why is it that nobody seems to have a deep understanding of (1) what these values are, (2) their philosophical, theological, historical and political origins, and (3) their absolute singularity? And why isn't anyone talking about these things (except, arguably, someone like Jordan Peterson)? With such a soft target in its sights, it's no surprise that progressives have fallen to the same level of hollow, saccharin discourse. Calling Christianity a fairy tale is a good counter-point when arguing with fundamentalists, but it's literally no smarter than that. It ignores that fairy-tales are informative, universal, and incredibly resilient to the the passing of time. They're actually useful.
I don't know how to fix this. I don't even know how to properly express it. My point seems to be devolving into a ramble, but hopefully you kind of see what I mean.
Reading recommendations are welcome. :)
>One interesting essay on the history of some philosophies and worldviews you might like is Eric Vogelin's Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1968).
Even if the FPGA design were fully public, you won't necessarily find the required fab around the corner, so what's there to gain from the FPGA design? If you're seeking trust, you'd need to establish trust in the whole chain: design, mask production, chip fab, transport... that's a tall order.
The argument here usually is: with a fixed silicon chip, vendor can hide the backdoor in various locations and be it triggered by various events (e.g. a particular sequence of incoming ICMP packets would overwrite the first byte of response with content of some register). With FPGA, the vendor can't really know where a particular register is located, or where incoming packets are processed, as it is highly dependent on the synthesised CPU design and can even be non-deterministic.
This does not mean that there is no way vendor can backdoor the chip you are getting, but it does narrow the possibilities significantly.
The usual thing the military worries about is a "kill switch" (a very unlikely sequence of bits) which disables the hardware completely. The idea is that at the beginning of a war, the kill signal is broadcast by the enemy by every means possible which brings all your electronics to a halt.
This can be hidden in an FPGA - for example attached to the input pins or SERDES - without needing to know anything about the application.
Triggering a malfunction is incredibly easy compared to a proper backdoor. A kill signal could also be injected through side channels e.g. a power line, and the kill mechanism could be implemented in many other semiconductors than an FPGA.
Depends on how you measure it. The government keeps shifting the goalposts and the current measurement is little related to what a consumer faces. Inflation is measured differently today from the 90s and both different from 80s IIRC.
Not maybe, it is supply and demand. IF the supply of remote labor does increase then the share of economic profit going to capital also increases. (i.e. Employers keep more of the profits as opposed to sharing)
This is true both ways though. If you're getting paid 140k, but your rent is 5k a month, you're only capturing 80k of wages, and the landlords are capturing 60k in rent.
If you're working remotely for 100k, and paying 1.7k a month in rent, you're capturing ~80k as well. That means more capital is going to the employers(who saves 40k) at the expense of the landlords (who lose out on that 40k).
I honestly think I'd rather have the capital go to the employers because a) it improves my value in relation to them (I now can argue that I should get paid more, because I bring in 40k a year more value than I did in SV) AND I have a financial interest in the company doing well (with options/RSUs/bonuses/etc).
The money going to the landlords starts to become very literally "rent seeking" where they will capture the capital without providing any productivity gains in return. You could argue that their value in "provide a location for people to live so they can collaborate more effectively" is decreasing with remote work, and they will have to charge less because the value they provide is decreasing.
The formula is different if you are a home owner, at least it was when there was more appreciation. You don't mind paying a higher mortgage as much if you are capturing a huge chunk of your current salary in home equity each year. Bay area home ownership is where a lot of people made their money.
The bay area is one of the worse places to have rental properties in the country though in terms of ratio of rental income to mortgage costs. If it wasn't for appreciation most would sell instead of try to rent out homes. Landlords aren't making their money from the rents, they are making it from the appreciation.
If a landowner is having trouble making a profit on rent due to high mortgage costs, that just means that the wealth was captured by the previous owner via a high sale price. So the point still stands that a disproportionate amount of wealth is flowing to land instead of capital or labor.
It most certainly is, if at the same time you're hanging out at city council meetings protesting construction and housing development. The cost of housing in SFBA isn't really the cost of land - its the cost of regulation. It's the marginal cost of building new housing.
Yes, in a competitive market, rent is your cash flow. It pays recurring property taxes, maintenance, and interest. It's a cliche but you really have two opportunities to make money in rental property: when you buy, and when you sell.
That's in an academically perfect economic system, and labor is not that. People have been able to get cheap engineering labor from India for decades and wages have still been climbing. Businesses choose who they hire for a variety of reasons and price is only a single factor.
Additionally, labor has a say in what they're paid as well and knowledge of what the average pay is for a given job in their country, region, or city. They can also talk to their fellow employees when they're hired and then push for a hire wage when they find out they're making less then everyone else doing the same job. Just because someone lives in Wisconsin doesn't mean they just accept any offer at a discount simply because HR has a bar chart says they should be paid 35% less then someone else.
