14 ms·

In a way, it's similar to the connection between "boredom" and creativity. When you don't have much to do, you can do anything, including novel and awesome thin

by nine_k 2y ago

In a way, it's similar to the connection between "boredom" and creativity. When you don't have much to do, you can do anything, including novel and awesome things. It, of course, takes the right kind of person, or a right group of persons. Give such people a way to not think about the daily bread, and allow them to build what they want to build, study what they want to study, think about what they want to think about. It feels anti-efficient. It looks wasteful. It requires faith in the power of reason and the creative spirit. All these things are hard to pull off in a public corporation, unless it's swimming in excess cash, like AT&T and Google did back in the day. Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said. Truth be told, not all of them advanced sciences and arts though. OTOH the rational, orderly living, when every minute is filled with some predefined meaning, pre-assigned task, allows very little room for creativity, and gives relatively little incentive to invent new things. Some see it as a noble ideal, and, understandably, a fiscal ideal, too. Maybe a society needs excess sometimes, needs to burn billions on weird stuff, because it gives a chance to to something genuinely new and revolutionary to be born and grow to a viable stage. In a funny way, the same monopolies that gouge prices for the common person also collect the resources necessary for such advances, that benefit that same common person (but not necessarily that same monopoly). It's an unsetllting thought to have.

conception 2y ago
This is what I think the biggest benefit to having a significant UBI. Sure, lots of folks who currently are in “bullshit jobs” would sit around and watch one screen or another but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. Often that something would be amazing. But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.
- mjevans 2y ago
  UBI isn't going to get us there. Give everyone more cash and the rent-seeking _WILL_ suck harder. Same problem with blindly raising the minimum wage and not instead addressing the root issue. Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford. Bell Labs, generally think tanks, they work by paying _enough_ to raise someone to the capitalist society equivalent of a Noble. Want to fix the problem for everyone in society, not just an 'intellectual elite'? Gotta regulate the market, put enough supply into it that the price is forced to drop and the average __PURCHASE POWER__ raises even without otherwise raising wages.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    This has been tried, very honestly, and it mostly sucked, then crashed. The calculation argument [1] kills it. The optimization problem which the market solves in a chaotic and decentralized way through price discovery and trading is intractable otherwise, not with all the computing power of the planet. It also requires prediction of people's needs (ignoring desires), and it's a problem more ill-posed than prediction of weather. The market of course needs regulation, or, rather, stewardship: from protection of property rights all the way to limiting monopolies, dumping, etc. The market must remain free and varied in order to do its economic work for the benefit of the society. No better mechanism has been invented for last few millennia. Redistribution to provide a safety net to those in trouble is usually a good thing to have, but it does not require to dismantle the market. It mostly requires an agreement in the society. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
    - Retric 2y ago
      That’s the advantage to UBI. A revenue neutral UBI check at some subsistence level and killing all other government assistance including lower tax brackets would in the short term significantly lower the standard of living for many low income Americans and boost others. However people would try and maximize their lifestyle and for most people that would be through working. Others would opt out and try and make being really poor work for them. Essentially you remove central planning around poverty and as the government stops requiring rent stabilized apartments etc. Which in the short term pushes a lot of poor people out of major cities but simultaneously puts upward pressure on wages to retain those workers and pushes down rents via those suddenly available apartments. It doesn’t actually create or destroy wealth directly, you just get a more efficient allocation of resources.
      - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
        We should still keep the progressive income tax. UBI can even be implemented as NIT Adding a land tax too, now that would be, that would really, that would fix some things
- billy99k 2y ago
  UBI might work in the short-term, but as more and more people are having kids (and learning from parents on UBI, to also get UBI), we would run out of people actually working and paying the taxes to support it.
  - conception 2y ago
    This assumes that most people would be satisfied with UBI and not attempt to make more money.
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    Which is exactly the thing they tested multiple times and found to be wrong. People get bored doing nothing, and enjoy contributing to their community. No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots. But they are going to go and do something useful, because that's what people do. The anti-UBI trope that "given basic income, everyone will just sit around on their arses watching TikTok videos" has been proven wrong in every study that measured it.
    - porridgeraisin 2y ago
      > No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots. Nonsense. There are tens of millions of jobs that cannot be automated in the near future, which people would certainly never do if they had UBI. America just outsources them to poorer countries, so you're clueless.
      - p_v_doom 2y ago
        The key to universal basic income is that it is basic. There are many jobs that cannot be automated but with the right incentive even under UBI people will do them.
        porridgeraisin 2y ago
- godelski 2y ago
  > but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. I'm of the same belief. We're too antsy of creatures. I know in any long vacation I'll spend the first week, maybe even two (!), vegging out doing nothing. But after that I'm itching to do work. I spent 3 months unemployed before heading to college (laid off from work) and in that time taught myself programming, Linux, and other things that are critical to my career today. This seems like a fairly universal experience too! Maybe not the exact tasks, but people needing time to recover and then want to do things. I'm not sure why we think everyone would just veg out WALL-E style and why the idea is so pervasive. Everyone says "well I wouldn't, but /they/ would". I think there's strong evidence that people would do things too. You only have to look at people who retire or the billionaire class. If the people with the greatest ability to check out and do nothing don't, why do we think so many would? People are people after all. And if there's a secret to why some still work, maybe we should really figure that out. Especially as we're now envisioning a future where robots do all the labor.
  - BoxOfRain 2y ago
    Music is always something that comes to mind for me; in the UK there's a long history of excellent music with strong working class roots, but as the economy becomes more precarious in the UK (housing costs are insane here) music has increasingly turned into the province of people who are more well-off because they have to worry less about their daily bread. As a result a lot of it gets a bit homogenised and predictable in my opinion. I think people are drawn to labour but not drudgery, and a lot of jobs don't really do much to differentiate between the two. I reckon if less people had to worry about putting bread on the table what we'd see is a massive cultural revival, a shot in the arm to music and the arts.
    - razakel 2y ago
      >Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through. Also, being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run. If you are already a musician stop playing your instrument. Even better, sell the junk. It will become clearer later on but just take our word for it for the time being. - The Manual, by the KLF
r14c 2y ago
I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but isn't the idea of socialism that you make a unitary democratic government fill the role of Huge Monopoly Foundation so you can do stuff like fund research labs and be accountable to the public?
- greyw 2y ago
  Hardly. Socialism is about workers/communities owning the means of production. Research labs these days are mostly funded by the public. That's just about allocation of government resources.
- nine_k 2y ago
  It's the statist idea. Socialism in practice usually involves regulating the market heavily, or into oblivion altogether, and giving the State a huge redistribution power. See my comment nearby on why such a setup fails to work. A socialism where the only way to work is to own a part of an enterprise (so no "exploitation"is possible) would likely work much better, and not even require a huge state. It would be rather inflexible though, or mutate back into capitalism as some workers would accumulate larger shares of enterprises.
  - r14c 2y ago
    Having some kind of default steward for market developments that get so competitive and fundamental that they reach full market saturation is helpful. Under a market system, at that scale, the need for growth starts to motivate companies to cut corners or squeeze their customer base to keep the numbers going up. You either end up pricing everyone out (fixed supply case) or the profit margins get so slim that only a massive conglomerate can break even (insatiable demand case). This is why making fundamental needs and infrastructure into market commodities doesn't work either. The problem with social democracy is that it still gives capitalists a seat at the table and doesn't address the fundamental issues of empowering market radicalism. Some balance would be nice, but I don't really see that happening.
    - sien 2y ago
godelski 2y ago
This is what I wished academia would be. I'm finishing my PhD and despite loving teaching and research (I've been told I'd make a good professor, including from students) I just don't see the system doing what it should. Truthfully, I'm not aware of any such environment other than maybe a handful of small groups (both in academia and industry). I think we've become overly metricized. In an effort to reduce waste we created more. Some things are incredibly hard to measure and I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that one of those things is research. Especially low level research. You're pushing the bounds of human knowledge. Creating things that did not previously exist! Not only are there lots of "failures", but how do you measure something that doesn't exist? I write "failure" in quotes because I don't see it that way, and feel like the common framing of failure is even anti scientific. In science we don't often (or ever) directly prove some result but instead disprove other things and narrow down our options. In the same way every unsuccessful result decreases your search space for understanding where the truth is. But the problem is that the solution space is so large and in such a high dimension that you can't effectively measure this. You're exactly right, it looks like waste. But in an effort to "save money" we created a publish or perish paradigm, which has obviously led to many perverse incentives. I think the biggest crime is that it severely limits creativity. You can't take on risky or even unpopular ideas because you need to publish and that means passing "peer review". This process is relatively new to science though. It didn't exist in the days of old scientists you reference[0]. The peer review process has always been the open conversation about publications, not the publications themselves nor a few random people reading it who have no interest and every reason to dismiss. Those are just a means to communicate, something that is trivial with today's technologies. We should obviously reject works with plagiarism and obvious factual errors, but there's no reason to not publish the rest. Theres no reason we shouldn't be more open than ever[1]. But we can't do this in a world where we're in competition with another. It only works in a world where we're united by the shared pursuit of more knowledge. Otherwise you "lose credit" or some "edge". And we're really bad at figuring out what's impactful. Critically, the system makes it hard to make paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift requires a significant rethinking of the current process. It's hard to challenge what we know. It's even harder to convince others. Every major shift we've seen first receives major pushback and that makes it extremely difficult to publish in the current environment. I've heard many times "good luck publishing, even if you can prove it". I've also seen many ideas be put on the infinite back burner because despite being confident in the idea and confident in impact it's known that in the time it'd take to get the necessary results you could have several other works published, which matters far more to your career. Ironically, I think removing these systems will save more money and create more efficient work (you're exactly right!). We have people dedicating their lives to studying certain topics in depth. The truth is that their curiosity highly aligns with what are critical problems. Sometimes you just know and can't articulate it well until you get a bit more into the problem. I'm sure this is something a lot of people here have experienced when writing programs or elsewhere. There's many things that no one gets why you'd do until after it's done, and frequently many will say it's so obvious after seeing it. I can tell you that I (and a large number of people) would take massive pay cuts if I could just be paid to do unconditional research. I don't care about money, I care about learning more and solving these hard puzzles. I'd also make a large wager that this would generate a lot of wealth for a company big enough to do such a program and a lot of value to the world if academia supported this. (I also do not think the core ideas here are unique to academia. I think we've done similar things in industry. But given the specific topic it makes more sense to discuss the academic side) [0] I know someone is going to google oldest journal and find an example. The thing is that this was not the normal procedure. Many journals, even in the 20th century, would publish anything void of obvious error. [1] put on open review. Include code, data, and anything else. Make comments public. Show revisions. Don't let those that plagiarize just silently get rejected and try their luck elsewhere (a surprisingly common problem)
90s_dev 2y ago
It's not about excess. Look at some of the most famous success stories in comedy, art, music, theatre, film, etc. A good number of them did their best work when they were poor. "Community" is a great example. Best show ever made, hands down. Yet they were all relatively broke and overworked during the whole thing. It's because they believed in the vision.
- brightball 2y ago
  That was a great show. The best show ever made, hands down though…is “Chuck”
  - 90s_dev 2y ago
    Of all shows I might dare concede to, Chuck is not in the top 50.
    - phinnaeus 2y ago
      West Wing, Chernobyl, Westworld Season 1, Breaking Bad
      - 90s_dev 2y ago
        I wonder why "best show ever made" always has contenders made in the last 30 years. You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx was such a fascinating show, and had some of the most intriguing, raw conversations with ordinary people, ever. Not to mention Groucho's natural instinct for wordplay that just never failed him.
    - brightball 2y ago
      Easily #1. Fun, funny, action, romance, character development and fully immersed in geek history. Also immensely rewatchable. It’s virtually impossible to watch an episode of Chuck and be in a worse mood than when you started. Even has Community cameos.
      - 2y ago
analog31 2y ago
To some extent, the NSF did that. My graduate education was funded by the NSF, and my research didn't have an obvious practical purpose, except to enable further research. Today, I'm in a corporate research role, and I'm still given a lot of freedom. I'm also genuinely interested in practical applications and I like developing things that people want to buy, but my ability to do those things owes a lot to the relatively freewheeling days of NSF funding 30+ years ago.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said. I heard a recent interview with John Carmack (of DOOM fame) who described his current style of work as "citizen scientist", where he has enough money, but wants to do independent research on AI/ML. I am always surprised that we don't see more former/retired hackers (whom many got rich from a DotCom), decide to "return to the cave" to do something exciting with open source software. Good counterexamples: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto and his Ghostty, (2) Philip Hazel and his PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) library. When I retire (early -- if all things go well), the only way to that I can possibly stave off a certain, early death from intellectual inactivity would be something similar. (Laughably: I don't have 1% of the talents that John Carmack has... but a person can try!)

by nine_k 2y ago

conception 2y ago

This is what I think the biggest benefit to having a significant UBI. Sure, lots of folks who currently are in “bullshit jobs” would sit around and watch one screen or another but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. Often that something would be amazing. But lizard brains gotta keep folks under their thumb and horde resources. Alas.

mjevans 2y ago
UBI isn't going to get us there. Give everyone more cash and the rent-seeking _WILL_ suck harder. Same problem with blindly raising the minimum wage and not instead addressing the root issue. Basic econ 101: inelastic demand means supply can be as expensive as the limited number who are lucky enough to get it are able to afford. Bell Labs, generally think tanks, they work by paying _enough_ to raise someone to the capitalist society equivalent of a Noble. Want to fix the problem for everyone in society, not just an 'intellectual elite'? Gotta regulate the market, put enough supply into it that the price is forced to drop and the average __PURCHASE POWER__ raises even without otherwise raising wages.
- nine_k 2y ago
  This has been tried, very honestly, and it mostly sucked, then crashed. The calculation argument [1] kills it. The optimization problem which the market solves in a chaotic and decentralized way through price discovery and trading is intractable otherwise, not with all the computing power of the planet. It also requires prediction of people's needs (ignoring desires), and it's a problem more ill-posed than prediction of weather. The market of course needs regulation, or, rather, stewardship: from protection of property rights all the way to limiting monopolies, dumping, etc. The market must remain free and varied in order to do its economic work for the benefit of the society. No better mechanism has been invented for last few millennia. Redistribution to provide a safety net to those in trouble is usually a good thing to have, but it does not require to dismantle the market. It mostly requires an agreement in the society. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
  - Retric 2y ago
    That’s the advantage to UBI. A revenue neutral UBI check at some subsistence level and killing all other government assistance including lower tax brackets would in the short term significantly lower the standard of living for many low income Americans and boost others. However people would try and maximize their lifestyle and for most people that would be through working. Others would opt out and try and make being really poor work for them. Essentially you remove central planning around poverty and as the government stops requiring rent stabilized apartments etc. Which in the short term pushes a lot of poor people out of major cities but simultaneously puts upward pressure on wages to retain those workers and pushes down rents via those suddenly available apartments. It doesn’t actually create or destroy wealth directly, you just get a more efficient allocation of resources.
    - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      We should still keep the progressive income tax. UBI can even be implemented as NIT Adding a land tax too, now that would be, that would really, that would fix some things
billy99k 2y ago
UBI might work in the short-term, but as more and more people are having kids (and learning from parents on UBI, to also get UBI), we would run out of people actually working and paying the taxes to support it.
- conception 2y ago
  This assumes that most people would be satisfied with UBI and not attempt to make more money.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  Which is exactly the thing they tested multiple times and found to be wrong. People get bored doing nothing, and enjoy contributing to their community. No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots. But they are going to go and do something useful, because that's what people do. The anti-UBI trope that "given basic income, everyone will just sit around on their arses watching TikTok videos" has been proven wrong in every study that measured it.
  - porridgeraisin 2y ago
    > No, they're not going to go get shitty factory jobs. But that's OK, because all those jobs are now automated and done by robots. Nonsense. There are tens of millions of jobs that cannot be automated in the near future, which people would certainly never do if they had UBI. America just outsources them to poorer countries, so you're clueless.
    - p_v_doom 2y ago
      The key to universal basic income is that it is basic. There are many jobs that cannot be automated but with the right incentive even under UBI people will do them.
      - porridgeraisin 2y ago
godelski 2y ago
> but! A lot, probably more than we imagine, would get bored and… do something. I'm of the same belief. We're too antsy of creatures. I know in any long vacation I'll spend the first week, maybe even two (!), vegging out doing nothing. But after that I'm itching to do work. I spent 3 months unemployed before heading to college (laid off from work) and in that time taught myself programming, Linux, and other things that are critical to my career today. This seems like a fairly universal experience too! Maybe not the exact tasks, but people needing time to recover and then want to do things. I'm not sure why we think everyone would just veg out WALL-E style and why the idea is so pervasive. Everyone says "well I wouldn't, but /they/ would". I think there's strong evidence that people would do things too. You only have to look at people who retire or the billionaire class. If the people with the greatest ability to check out and do nothing don't, why do we think so many would? People are people after all. And if there's a secret to why some still work, maybe we should really figure that out. Especially as we're now envisioning a future where robots do all the labor.
- BoxOfRain 2y ago
  Music is always something that comes to mind for me; in the UK there's a long history of excellent music with strong working class roots, but as the economy becomes more precarious in the UK (housing costs are insane here) music has increasingly turned into the province of people who are more well-off because they have to worry less about their daily bread. As a result a lot of it gets a bit homogenised and predictable in my opinion. I think people are drawn to labour but not drudgery, and a lot of jobs don't really do much to differentiate between the two. I reckon if less people had to worry about putting bread on the table what we'd see is a massive cultural revival, a shot in the arm to music and the arts.
  - razakel 2y ago
    >Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through. Also, being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run. If you are already a musician stop playing your instrument. Even better, sell the junk. It will become clearer later on but just take our word for it for the time being. - The Manual, by the KLF

r14c 2y ago

I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but isn't the idea of socialism that you make a unitary democratic government fill the role of Huge Monopoly Foundation so you can do stuff like fund research labs and be accountable to the public?

greyw 2y ago
Hardly. Socialism is about workers/communities owning the means of production. Research labs these days are mostly funded by the public. That's just about allocation of government resources.
nine_k 2y ago
It's the statist idea. Socialism in practice usually involves regulating the market heavily, or into oblivion altogether, and giving the State a huge redistribution power. See my comment nearby on why such a setup fails to work. A socialism where the only way to work is to own a part of an enterprise (so no "exploitation"is possible) would likely work much better, and not even require a huge state. It would be rather inflexible though, or mutate back into capitalism as some workers would accumulate larger shares of enterprises.
- r14c 2y ago
  Having some kind of default steward for market developments that get so competitive and fundamental that they reach full market saturation is helpful. Under a market system, at that scale, the need for growth starts to motivate companies to cut corners or squeeze their customer base to keep the numbers going up. You either end up pricing everyone out (fixed supply case) or the profit margins get so slim that only a massive conglomerate can break even (insatiable demand case). This is why making fundamental needs and infrastructure into market commodities doesn't work either. The problem with social democracy is that it still gives capitalists a seat at the table and doesn't address the fundamental issues of empowering market radicalism. Some balance would be nice, but I don't really see that happening.
  - sien 2y ago

godelski 2y ago

This is what I wished academia would be. I'm finishing my PhD and despite loving teaching and research (I've been told I'd make a good professor, including from students) I just don't see the system doing what it should. Truthfully, I'm not aware of any such environment other than maybe a handful of small groups (both in academia and industry). I think we've become overly metricized. In an effort to reduce waste we created more. Some things are incredibly hard to measure and I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised that one of those things is research. Especially low level research. You're pushing the bounds of human knowledge. Creating things that did not previously exist! Not only are there lots of "failures", but how do you measure something that doesn't exist? I write "failure" in quotes because I don't see it that way, and feel like the common framing of failure is even anti scientific. In science we don't often (or ever) directly prove some result but instead disprove other things and narrow down our options. In the same way every unsuccessful result decreases your search space for understanding where the truth is. But the problem is that the solution space is so large and in such a high dimension that you can't effectively measure this. You're exactly right, it looks like waste. But in an effort to "save money" we created a publish or perish paradigm, which has obviously led to many perverse incentives. I think the biggest crime is that it severely limits creativity. You can't take on risky or even unpopular ideas because you need to publish and that means passing "peer review". This process is relatively new to science though. It didn't exist in the days of old scientists you reference[0]. The peer review process has always been the open conversation about publications, not the publications themselves nor a few random people reading it who have no interest and every reason to dismiss. Those are just a means to communicate, something that is trivial with today's technologies. We should obviously reject works with plagiarism and obvious factual errors, but there's no reason to not publish the rest. Theres no reason we shouldn't be more open than ever[1]. But we can't do this in a world where we're in competition with another. It only works in a world where we're united by the shared pursuit of more knowledge. Otherwise you "lose credit" or some "edge". And we're really bad at figuring out what's impactful. Critically, the system makes it hard to make paradigm shifts. A paradigm shift requires a significant rethinking of the current process. It's hard to challenge what we know. It's even harder to convince others. Every major shift we've seen first receives major pushback and that makes it extremely difficult to publish in the current environment. I've heard many times "good luck publishing, even if you can prove it". I've also seen many ideas be put on the infinite back burner because despite being confident in the idea and confident in impact it's known that in the time it'd take to get the necessary results you could have several other works published, which matters far more to your career. Ironically, I think removing these systems will save more money and create more efficient work (you're exactly right!). We have people dedicating their lives to studying certain topics in depth. The truth is that their curiosity highly aligns with what are critical problems. Sometimes you just know and can't articulate it well until you get a bit more into the problem. I'm sure this is something a lot of people here have experienced when writing programs or elsewhere. There's many things that no one gets why you'd do until after it's done, and frequently many will say it's so obvious after seeing it. I can tell you that I (and a large number of people) would take massive pay cuts if I could just be paid to do unconditional research. I don't care about money, I care about learning more and solving these hard puzzles. I'd also make a large wager that this would generate a lot of wealth for a company big enough to do such a program and a lot of value to the world if academia supported this. (I also do not think the core ideas here are unique to academia. I think we've done similar things in industry. But given the specific topic it makes more sense to discuss the academic side) [0] I know someone is going to google oldest journal and find an example. The thing is that this was not the normal procedure. Many journals, even in the 20th century, would publish anything void of obvious error. [1] put on open review. Include code, data, and anything else. Make comments public. Show revisions. Don't let those that plagiarize just silently get rejected and try their luck elsewhere (a surprisingly common problem)

90s_dev 2y ago

It's not about excess. Look at some of the most famous success stories in comedy, art, music, theatre, film, etc. A good number of them did their best work when they were poor. "Community" is a great example. Best show ever made, hands down. Yet they were all relatively broke and overworked during the whole thing. It's because they believed in the vision.

brightball 2y ago
That was a great show. The best show ever made, hands down though…is “Chuck”
- 90s_dev 2y ago
  Of all shows I might dare concede to, Chuck is not in the top 50.
  - phinnaeus 2y ago
    West Wing, Chernobyl, Westworld Season 1, Breaking Bad
    - 90s_dev 2y ago
      I wonder why "best show ever made" always has contenders made in the last 30 years. You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx was such a fascinating show, and had some of the most intriguing, raw conversations with ordinary people, ever. Not to mention Groucho's natural instinct for wordplay that just never failed him.
  - brightball 2y ago
    Easily #1. Fun, funny, action, romance, character development and fully immersed in geek history. Also immensely rewatchable. It’s virtually impossible to watch an episode of Chuck and be in a worse mood than when you started. Even has Community cameos.
    - 2y ago

analog31 2y ago

To some extent, the NSF did that. My graduate education was funded by the NSF, and my research didn't have an obvious practical purpose, except to enable further research. Today, I'm in a corporate research role, and I'm still given a lot of freedom. I'm also genuinely interested in practical applications and I like developing things that people want to buy, but my ability to do those things owes a lot to the relatively freewheeling days of NSF funding 30+ years ago.

throwaway2037 2y ago

> Notably, a lot of European science in 16-19 centuries was advanced by well-off people who did not need to earn their upkeep, the useless, idle class, as some said. I heard a recent interview with John Carmack (of DOOM fame) who described his current style of work as "citizen scientist", where he has enough money, but wants to do independent research on AI/ML. I am always surprised that we don't see more former/retired hackers (whom many got rich from a DotCom), decide to "return to the cave" to do something exciting with open source software. Good counterexamples: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto and his Ghostty, (2) Philip Hazel and his PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) library. When I retire (early -- if all things go well), the only way to that I can possibly stave off a certain, early death from intellectual inactivity would be something similar. (Laughably: I don't have 1% of the talents that John Carmack has... but a person can try!)