The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.
I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.
Disputable. One could argue that artificial nature of US cities (i.e. lack of centuries of accumulated decisions) were bigger driver of this than cars themselves.
They very much want to have manufacturing, since it’s a requirement for war. They just don’t realize it. Plus, it is a conflict between all the extra money to spend and long term state welfare.
It's not advantage, it makes for artificial demand for your currency, which completely screws up all the relevant metrics and makes you unable to actually inflate the currency when getting less competitive.
Under normal conditions, when your economy becomes less competitive, your currency gets depreciated, increasing competitiveness.
Unless of course everybody is forced to buy your currency to get an essential resource. This causes:
- the currency to maintain value better
- puts you in position of other countries having to maintain a trade surplus with you so they can actually purchase said resource
- the oil producers end up with great amounts of your currency, which they have to spend, getting a political foothold in your country.
Petrodollar almost certainly was devastating to US economy. And like most resource curses, it's like a drug - you need to stop taking it to get better, but it will hurt as hell.
This is particularly funny if you consider petrodollar to be a bad deal for US, not a good one. Ironically, if yuan becomes new petroleum currency, it might hurt Chinese long term.
How about not starting a war? Especially as a sudden attack during negotiations? With a country that has been historically bending backwards to find some kind of diplomatic solution?
And since when murdering the leaders repeatedly is a valid war strategy?
Not even mentioning that Chamenei was killed together with a daughter, son in law and a grandson. But who cares about accidental casualties, right? Just one more kid.
The main issue IMHO is the monopolization of the industry, especially in the US. Once the giants do layoffs, the rest of the market can't absorb the people effectively, which leads to oversaturated job market.
We can of course discuss how many people got into industry during COVID heyday and whether they should have, but mostly I think it's about those behemoths having disproportionately high impact on the entire labour market.
It's certainly helpful, but has a tendency to go for very non idiomatic patterns (like using exceptions for control flow).
Plus, it has issues which I assume are the effect of reinforcement learning - it struggles with letting things crash and tends to silence things that should never fail silently.
The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful.
I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.