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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      Now, in our late industrial mode, with hyperspecialization, the world is not super resistant to high death rates. Which means even small death rates can do a lot of damage. Especially in clustered breakouts which might take out key civilizational widgets.

      4 replies 2 retweets 66 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      If everybody is either a farmer or warrior in a 9:1 ratio say, the world can tolerate a lot higher death rate than when there are a few dozen artisan trades. And when you get 10s of 1000s of literate roles doing highly specialized things... even small uptick in death is very bad.

      2 replies 4 retweets 52 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      I think this could be computed to allow normalized comparisons across history. Like maybe 1 random extra death today is as damaging as 10 random extra deaths in 1918 and 100 random extra deaths in 1348?

      1 reply 1 retweet 29 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      Though sheer larger population could have confounding effects

      1 reply 0 retweets 16 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      Note, it’s not death rate itself that causes a problem. It’s death rate and backfill delay. The higher the skill level, the longer it takes to backfill. Another confounding variable is the residual high-r jobs under the api. And whaddya know, they are the ones risked the most.

      4 replies 2 retweets 41 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      But there’s also high K roles under high risk, like specialized doctors. Sol this hypothesis has a lot of details to be worked out. It’s not a simple, elegant theory. It’s a messy heuristic for mapping system survivability in terms of soecuslization/redundancy/r/backfill

      2 replies 0 retweets 23 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      Note that severe labor shortage was one of the effects of the Black Death. Already by them society was specialized enough it couldn’t tolerate the death rate. Society collapsed quite deeply.

      4 replies 0 retweets 36 likes
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    8. christina d'ache‏ @scrivenix Jul 11
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      Replying to @vgr

      i have not seen unemployment stat's that were clear + not distorted by reporting conventions, but my sense is that low-wage workers are basically disposable to capital (not endorsing this ofc) + there are mostly other workers lined up behind them to take jobs if someone falls out

      1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes
    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 11
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      Replying to @scrivenix

      I suspect it is nonlinear in death rate. Fungibility at an annual 30% turnover rate does not mean fungibility at monthly 10% for eg. The training costs and time alone for even a simple job start to mount and drag

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    10. christina d'ache‏ @scrivenix Jul 11
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      Replying to @vgr

      yeah. & severe illness/deaths are so unevenly distributed. i can't imagine we won't see consumer-level effects of horror of agricultural supply chain, e.g. ?? this is also why strikes if coordinated cd be effective: even if workers are lined up, just A LOT of ppl in these jobs

      2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Jul 12
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      Replying to @scrivenix

      Yeah that’s why there’s serious coercive pressure being applied on labor to return to work in meat industry for eg. They couldn’t handle serious absenteeism. Takes time to automate or backfill and meanwhile animals are still piling up as a slaughter backlog.

      12:00 AM - 12 Jul 2020
      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. christina d'ache‏ @scrivenix Jul 12
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          Replying to @vgr

          christina d'ache Retweeted

          y the meat industry is one of the most revealing + absurd parts of all this. this thread is super interesting: https://twitter.com/gnrosenberg/status/1254156882551472135 …

          christina d'ache added,

          This Tweet is unavailable.
          1 reply 1 retweet 8 likes
        3. christina d'ache‏ @scrivenix Jul 12
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          Replying to @scrivenix @vgr

          whoops i pasted link from the middle, go to beginning if you're interested. there's labor all over the supply chain, not just the meatpacking plants ofc

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
        4. End of conversation

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