Um. Google has already integrated Gemini into Chrome. I'm not sure what you mean by "OpenAI has plenty of time to have a Chrome moment". If you're just referring to the browser wars, the original wars were fought (furiously) between Microsoft, Mozilla, (and to a lesser extent Apple). Microsoft thought they had won, and then Chrome came out.
> The person you are replying to mentioned their personal experience. Have you seen this work in person? It might help to talk about those facts.
The meat of their comment wasn't the personal anecdote, it was actually on government policy:
>>> You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.
>>> This is why you outsource to other countries and let them do it, because you simply do not care about them living in a polluted environment. Poison Outsourcing.
This is 100% about globalization: if some countries let their rivers catch on fire, the externality lets them out-compete anyone who tries to do the process cleanly. So if you let their externality-fueled products into your country, you just can't build similar things, because they wouldn't be price-competitive.
If labor and environmental standards were strong and global, or countries with high standards refused to trade with countries with low standards, we wouldn't have this situation. There would be an economic motivation to develop and implement cleaner processes.
Of course it would be great if a level field would be created by making sure other competing regions follow the same environmental standards.
But what will be the result? The product now has equal cost to be produced, but the market is gone.
People consume cheap stuff because it is cheap. If it is no longer cheap, they will not consume.
US americans just need to make up their minds. Do they want keep getting more and more and more cheap stuff? Fine. Then go on exploiting other regions of the planet. Or do you have enough cheap stuff now? Ok, then nobody needs another factory.
Many on HN are living in a society where it is normal to use a TELEPHONE for only two years before throwing it away.
What would happen if you instead used it for 5 years? No more factories needed. Problem solved. You don't have to compete, as there is no competition.
The result of charging the true cost of T-Shirt to the consumer is not that everybody now has 100 Fair-Traded-Ecofriendly T-Shirts at home that they don't wear. They will notice that 10 T-Shirts are more than enough if you wash your clothes once per week.
What I am trying to say is: The demand is only there due to the option of exploitation. Take away the part of ruining other peoples lives to get cheap stuff, then it's no longer interesting and will just stop.
So of course you can take the detour, try to re-industrialize, and then find out that your people do not actually like this kind of work, and that they for sure also aren't willing to buy your stuff at the price you are asking.
There is a reason nobody would be so stupid to produce "Make America Great Again" merch in America. Your target audience would not buy it if it was made in America.
It is pragmatic to simply skip this step and end up with the same result: You'll just consume less.
Another thing is that the us and European countries build their wealth where they had los standards now other countries want to do the same but would be limited by us and European countries. It's very tricky
> Another thing is that the us and European countries build their wealth where they had los standards now other countries want to do the same but would be limited by us and European countries. It's very tricky
No, why would you say that? When America and Europe built their wealth, they were mainly (though not exclusively) producing and selling manufactured goods for themselves. This whole idea of a poor country developing by building polluting factories to make items for rich countries is a more recent and different thing.
Europe and America insisting on certain labor and environmental standards as a condition of trade wouldn't mean poor countries can't build factories for themselves. At worst, you just split the current one big market into two smaller markets: an expensive and clean one, and a dirty and cheap one.
In my experience, it’s the conflict of the ‘in theory’ vs
‘In practice’.
Practically, ‘in theory’ might actually be doable - if there was a single, overarching regulatory environment. That was enforced.
Chances are, that would defacto make a bunch of people starve in poorer countries, and blow a lot of stuff up, so would also likely be worse than ‘the disease’. At least right now.
It’s probably a thing, especially with loan-words (eg.: “avant garde”), and there are probably much better examples… But the examples in the article make no sense to me.
The difference between phrases and "words with spaces" is addressed.
The confusion might be that this seems to be a spectrum rather than a binary phenomon.
We have single words at one extreme, ordinary sentences at the other, and in the middle we have idiomatic assemblies of words that span a range of substitutability.
"Hot dog" and "Saturday night" are arguably great examples, because they exist at the opposite extremes of the spectrum. Saturday night can retain some of the original meaning following substitution, whereas hot dog almost deserves a hyphen.
I disagree that "saturday night" ever means anything other than the literal meaning of the nighttime of the day of saturday.
You can argue that there's a connotative association with the phrase. Sure. Just like "beach weather", or "blizzard conditions". But that doesn't make "saturday night" special in any way.
I wonder if the connotative association is exactly what we are trying to capture here though, and if those other phrases also fit in at the "separate words but slightly special" end of the spectrum.
There is meaning being communicated in all of those phrases that would be obvious to most or all people who are embedded in the language and culture where they are used, and which transcends the definitions of the individual words themselves.
It seems that there are several axis here -- how explicit is meaning, how atomic, how literal, how substitutable are the individual words -- and all vary continuously.
That might all seem needlessly pedantic for the question of "should it warrant a dictionary entry", but if you are trying to extract all information encoded in a verbal exchange, they might be useful concepts.
It's an evocative phrase. It definitely means different things to different people though. Teenager vs adult, single vs married, employed vs not.
Or how about "Sunday morning"? It's evocative for sure. But very differently for different groups.
Or "island breeze". Stirs up images and feelings. But the definition is literal and the connotations are somewhat personal.
I'd argue that none of these phrases belong in a dictionary. Possibly explicitly because the "missing" meanings are the associative connotations, but those vary for different people, so what's the canonical definition?
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