partial_accumen

This is how I learn the news. I think Tim would have been okay with that.

Decades ago when I was in my 20s, I saw so many of my peers get buried in CC debt. I avoided CCs for quite awhile, but eventually realized I needed to know how to use them responsibly.

Like, always use auto pay, but when you want to spend, go pay a bill early. Whenever you feel consumerery, whip out the app, and pay the bill to zero.

When I was in my 20s there was no app to pay a CC, but I accomplished the same thing by mailing in a payment the same day as I made the purchase, and did that for every purchase. This made that mental connection for me that spending on CC means immediate consumption from my bank account, and that if I didn’t have the amount of money to pay for the purchase from my CC, I didn’t allow myself to buy it.

With the exception of a few months when a major repair bill hit and I had to shoulder it on debt, this allowed me to never get into CC debt. I’m still using CCs heavily decades later, but always paying off the statement balance 100% ever month and never paying interest. I credit my behavior when I was younger to accomplishing this.

I have been on Amtrak trains. They’re fine.

I’ve been on Amtrak too and have firsthand experience with them also. The goalpost wasn’t if they were “fine” or not. I was quite happy to use it, but was not in a hurry to get to my destination. Your ascertain was they are fast. For longhaul travel (which is what the flight replaces), Amtrak is not fast.

Why do they have an airport but no train station? Trains really seem like the way to go. This is a bizzaire state of affairs to defend.

Because of lots of the infrastructure, rail capacity, rolling stock availability that makes a passenger rail line isn’t viable to be self sustaining for that small a population without subsidies, and you’re already given them the finger on anything that costs you something.

I probably don’t eat anything from there, and I paid for it if I did. Those vile chuds did not compensate me for the ecological damage of their bizzaire transportation decisions.

This is a strange level of hate for people you’ve never met just trying to live their lives. Brother, you need some socialism in your life and empathy for your fellow man. We’re in this together.

I’m vegan and mostly eat fruit recently BTW.

Ahh, okay. Thank you for this critical information. I have a MUCH better understanding of your positions now. Thank your for conversing up to now. Have a great day.

my air and weather shouldn’t have to suffer so you can keep your “small town lifestyle”, fuck your luxury bullshit founded on the externality of my life.

I have no idea what image you have of these smaller airports supporting smaller cities and their surrounding rural populous, but I assure you most are far away from “luxury”. Lets take one small city in the middle of Kansas called Salina. Its a city of 47,000 people. The median income is $61,783 and the per capita income of Salina is $34,886 and has a 13% poverty rate. The next closest airport to Salina is 80 miles away. They’re not living there just to keep their “small town lifestyle”. Its where they grow the food we both eat.

It has a total of 4 small plane flights a day into its airport:

source

Salina is also a major agricultural hub supporting 650 farms for total of over 360,000 acres growing grains and livestock.

I don’t mind green energy powered trains. That’s cheap, it doesn’t intrude on my life any, and gets you where you’re going fast clean safe. I’m just against flying them out on a jet.

Fast rail service versus flying? Have you ever been on a long haul Amtrak passenger rail train? Amtrak is not fast. Salina doesn’t have an Amtrak station. The closest one is 90 miles away in Newton Kansas. An Amtrak train trip form Newton Kansas to Chicago takes 12 to 14 hours and the service can experience delays making it even longer. A flight (1 of only 4 flights they have) from Selina to Chicago takes 2 hours and 5 minutes.

I’m sorry but I’m sick of subsidizing these obscenely decadent parasites who would probably kill me and mount my blue stained scalp on their wall.

I bet the people of Salina would laugh their asses off at you considering them decadent parasites. You’re happy to eat the food they produce, but you’d put their their 4 flights a day into their city at risk so you personally could save $50 on a ticket to Chicago by skiplagging?

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more subtle or concise way to say “fuck you” to all of smaller city America simultaneously.

The article states pretty explicitly that RCS is not what they did “a more structured alternative to RCS”

Hmm. If thats the form of the answer you’re looking for, I’m confused why you asked the question. My apologies, I thought you were trying to understand a new topic you didn’t have context for. I withdraw my long winded answer. Let me try again for you to your original two questions:

Article doesn’t say what they actually computed

“a more structured alternative to RCS”

or what the complexity would be for a normal computer

Your statement is factual. That information is not contained in the article.

I get being naturally suspicious especially if we’re talking about messaging that may match some from large companies, but don’t let language that sounds that way turn off your brain to critical thinking. If you interact in a system (such as buying a ticket as an airline passenger) you can have an affect on the system. Understand your actions to personally enrich yourself may have consequences on other people just trying to fly somewhere. Don’t be blinded by big business hate to justify screwing other passengers using the airlines.

perhaps it would be more accurate for me to say that capitalism in the pure platonic sense doesn’t really exist,

I agree with this without any reservations.

and tends always towards crony or state capitalism where the power of the state is used to funnel money and power towards the holders of capital rather than to provide a free and fair playing field for economic actors.

I take exception with “always”. In the USA for example, there have been many notable exceptions where state capitalism implemented protections from abuses that pure laissez-faire capitalism would have allowed. The National Labor Relations Act was a state action that allowed for collective bargaining of workers. More recently the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau acted as an agent against uncheck capitalist forcing a fair playing field.

I’d probably agree if you changed your word to “frequently” though.

Yes it is - capitalism demands that in fact. You’re thinking of free-markets. Capitalism inevitably destroys free markets.

Lets see if we can agree on some definitions.

What you’re describing as “free-markets” I know as laissez-faire capitalism. This definition came from, unsurprisingly, the French in the 18th century and was used heavily by Adam Smith in the book The Wealth of Nations. I think we all agree there are very few, if any, true large scale laissez-faire capitalism in operation today.

What have in most places is regulated capitalism where there are government rules that change the outcome to a different outcome (sometimes better/sometimes worse) that would have occurred under laissez-faire capitalism.

Are we in agreement with these definitions or do we still have discussion needed to arrive at the same place?

Article doesn’t say what they actually computed

It does: “Random circuit sampling (RCS)”. This is a mathematical exercise.

…but that isn’t the important part. The important part is knowing if the answer it computed is right. How do you know if its right? This goes to your next question…

or what the complexity would be for a normal computer

The answer (not in this article but I’ve seen elsewhere) is essentially a million years of a regular computer.

So you see the challenge. We have an answer from the quantum computer, and a way to verify its actually right by using the slow method that we know would give is the right answer for sure, but its so far out of reach we can’t use the slow method in a feasible human lifetime.

So the breakthrough the article is calling out is what the researchers did instead. They built a way to have the quantum computer produce accurate answers (which quantum computers didn’t do reliably before because of the limits of science) on lots and lots of smaller shorter problems that we can compute on regular computers where we can verify the answers. Thats what the article is saying here:

“Encoding the circuit reduced the effective logical error rate to one tenth of the physical error rate, allowing the computation to maintain high fidelity despite the large number of operations.”

Here’s an analogy of how I understood what the researchers did:

Lets say you have 5 friends that love car road trips to places they’ve never been: Adam, Bill, Charlie, Dave, and Ethan. All of them refuse to use maps or a GPS. As you can imagine if any one of them gets in a car alone and just relies on their gut and signs they’ll likely not get to their destination. So instead the researchers put all 5 in one car.

Adam is in the driver’s seat and after the first hour has made every correct direction choice. Suddenly Adam is about to make a wrong turn Bill, Charlie, and Dave quickly tell Adam to make the right choice, while Ethan tells Adam to make a 3rd entire choice (which is also wrong). Adam goes by majority rule and chooses the suggested path from Bill, Charlie, and Dave. The car is still headed in the right direction. Ten minutes later Bill tells Adam to alter course, Adam, Charlie, Dave and Ethan contradict this, so the car still stays going the right direction. Another 20 minutes later Charlie and Dave tell Adam to take a turn. Adam, Bill and Ethan disagree and they car stays on the right path.

Eventually the car actually arrives at the destination a long way away from where they started. If any one of them were driving by themselves (or even with just one or two other drivers) the likelihood of a successful trip would drop to zero.

The researchers used a bunch of qubits (“drivers”) so even if there were bad directions given by some at any given moment, the overall result was successful. So the researchers can say even though we only had Adam, Bill, Charlie, Dave, and Ethan drive successfully from New York to Chicago, you can see how they work to stay on track and we they’d make it all the way to Los Angeles if asked. So just because we’ve never had Adam, Bill, Charlie, Dave, and Ethan drive from NYC to Los Angeles, you can trust that they could if we asked. So when we tell you we had them drive all the way from NYC to Anchorage Alaska, you can trust we’re telling you the truth and accept they got their successfully even if you didn’t do the slow walk all the way to Anchorage Alaska see them arrive with your own eyes.

I thought I read years ago that airlines responded to Skiplagged by penalizing people who didn’t complete every leg of the trip they booked. I’m not sure why they would care.

They care because the real cost of air travel is not equaled everywhere on each mile flown. If the actual costs of flying to many small regional locations was reflected in the cost of the ticket, the ticket would be so absurdly high no one would every flight to that location, and the location would lose critical flight services for the community.

The solution many of those airlines used was to consolidate the majority of the flight into a hub using larger planes which are cheaper to operate per-passenger, and then use much smaller planes from the hub to the remote location charging the passenger the equivalent of a reasonable cost of a ticket for all hops along the way.

What Skiplagging as doing was essentially using the subsidized discount rate provided for the small regional destinations, but consumed by those not going to those places that needed subsidies on their flights going to major hubs. So not only was the airline losing money for each passenger not paying the normal fare to the hub airport, but also showing lower passenger volume to the small regional destinations increasing the cost of flying passengers that wanted to go their even more.

TLDR; Skiplagging screws small cities with low passenger volume risking their ability to maintain flight service at all to their towns.

Fair enough. I admit, as someone who can’t drive IRL, I like things like Slow Roads too, or other driving sims that are generally not fantasy - just ‘cozy’ experiences.

When I was forming my original question, I did consider an audience this might appeal to for those that couldn’t drive (for whatever reason). I appreciate you sharing your POV on this.

I always considered Rideshare driving as the opposite of relaxing because of the physical dangers to drivers as well as the stress the drivers have from trying to make their money against rising fuel costs, insurance costs, and competion from platforms forcing down fare rates. Perhaps the Rideshare game masks all of these elements of the actual rideshare business and simply presents it as a task/goal game with a social aspect which would be far more appealing.

Crazy Taxi (and Simpsons: Road Rage") were largely about driving poorly, crashing into things, and performing automobile jumps that would be considered suicidal if done for real. It was a fantasy driving game with the taxi business as the thinnest excuse to be driving. Unless I’ve drastically mistaken what Rideshare Simulator is, I don’t think Crazy Taxi example is applicable.

Fifteen years before Crazy Taxi, we had Space Taxi for the Commodore 64:

I’d say Space Taxi and Crazy Taxi had equal amounts of relevance to the taxi industry in the sense that they were an excuse to fly/drive in fantasy settings instead of an actual business simulator.

I read the article just to confirm this wasn’t a The Onion article. I understand there are games that simulate work like farming and even powerwashing. Even though I don’t play those, I can mildly see the appeal as you’re creating something (farming) or making something better than it was before (powerwashing). However, I see zero appeal for a game that simulates gig work like ridesharing. Can someone explain it to me, or have I reach a pivotal “too old” moment in my life?

We do lots of things wrong here, but our power bill is based on usage. If you only use this much, this is your rate and the more you use the higher your rate goes.

At the residential level that can exist too in the USA, but its not nearly that simple here in the USA, and I doubt its entirely that simple in your country either. Electricity isn’t like a tank of fuel that is drawn down and refilled. Besides maintaining the infrastructure for generation and delivery, electrical capacity at any given moment has to be built into the system, not just pure total consumption over time. So simply paying for electricity consumed doesn’t capture all of those costs in the system to make that electricity consumption possible to the consumer.

Commercial/Industrial customers in the USA don’t just pay for “amount consumed” but also “demand charges” which means “at any given point how much electricity will you be pulling from the grid?”. Its not uncommon that the demand charges for businesses can be larger than the charges for amount of electricity consumed. Additionally, some European governments give large breaks in electricity rates to incentivize certain industries. Germany for example gives 50% discounts on electricity for chemical production, glass producers, or semiconductor producers if those companies invest in decarbonization efforts.

Many European commercial/industrial electricity consumers have variations on what I described above in addition to wholesale electricity purchases for a given period which also breaks away from your described “pay for what you use with higher rates for more consumption”.

Can I ask you what country you’re in (or another country that you know uses your country’s same system)?

No I wasn’t suggested it be forced or companies be nationalized.

My mistake then. So in your proposed system private companies would continue to exist.

I was saying governments could provide incentives and support for workers to form worker owned companies.

If that’s the case, I’ll go back to my first statement then. Tech workers will likely choose the higher risk but higher reward private company rather than one that my only have a modest return. If the private companies exist along side the co-ops, the boom and bust cycles will still exist except the co-ops won’t be the beneficiary, but will certainly be on the losing side of cycles.

In order to transition to worker owned companies, it would be difficult as you mention, but governments could provide financial to help to get worker owned companies started.

Hang on. You’re proposing seizure of existing private companies and forcing the creation of the worker co-ops? Thats a very different thing. Should I assume your system would ban future private companies then?

I wouldn’t agree either of those approaches. Choice is important. Forcing people into co-ops because you think its better for them isn’t a system I’m interested in being inside.

Tech work can be highly volatile in the business environment. Maybe its different for new tech workers entering the work force, but for a worker owned company, this can mean large losses of revenue for months. I don’t know many tech workers that are willing to take a massive pay cut to continue to stay and commit to a worker owned company if they personally can find better paying work elsewhere.

From the article:

"The playful atmosphere of tech offices flush with investment, enjoying luxe catered lunches to attract programming talent, has been replaced by a looming fear that layoffs are just around the corner "

This boom-and-bust cycle of tech growth and devastation has happened three times during my IT career. Its even more frequent in specific IT niche industries.

“We’re like a family here, in the sense that you’ll wear my mark literally on your skin for the rest of your life even long after I’m dead. We also do a pizza party in the office ever other Friday. So that’s fun!”

There are better targets for the anger for not paying enough taxes:

Alphabet (Google parent company) earned $132.17 billion in profits in 2025 and paid $26.656 billion in US taxes for an effective tax rate of 20.1%. Sure this could be, and historically was, higher before trump cut the corporate tax rate from 35% in 2017.

Tesla, on the other hand at the same time in 2025, paid $0 in US taxes in 2025 on profits of $3.794 billion for an effective tax rate of 0%.