Socialism only really works when government butts out, and lets industry self organise, and China is the glowing example.
> There is no correlation whatsoever between lax oversight of markets and robust economic growth, as most people tend to believe.
This is a complete firfy, and is arguing with a complete lack of understanding of what socialism is. "Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
In other words, we all decide together how to run things. Markets let people decide what they do themselves, e.g. self organising. The evidence self organisation works is vast and comprehensive. The evidence that no one group is smart enough to run an economy is vast as well, and success in managing an economy always rely on a significant portion being free markets.
That's a WHAT, not a why. You aren't wrong, just answered the wrong way around.
The why is because it is just too hard for any centralised group to know enough to plan a large economy adequately, for two main reasons (to keep an already long post short):
1. It is too much information for any group to consider and get any significant chunk of it correct.
2. Innovation is the opposite of planning. "Lets try this unproductive waste of time to connect college students and see what happens. Oh, we are worth billions" is not the way anyone would plan an economy, let alone the problem to assign smart people to. Innovation, unfortunately, can't really be planned.
Central planning fails for the same reason scaling in tech is so difficult. When you have one server, a monolith (planned, organised) is great. All the code is in one place, one database, super easy to reason with and manage, no need for cludgey hacks, perfect code etc etc.
But when you beyond that single server, another layer of complexity arises. How do we set up our infrastructure? How do we optimise long running tasks? How do we make sure everyone knows what everyone else is doing? Should we split code into smaller, harder to understand chunks?
Planned economies fail because what the planners are optimising for - as a reductio ad absurdum - is protecting their own skin, and that means avoiding failure much more than encouraging success, especially in innovation, where > 90% of new ideas ultimately fail.
Markets work because failure is a part of the puzzle, and markets optimise for success, not avoiding failure. As VC firms show, a lot of failure can be overcome with a tiny percentage of great successes, and these great success spur on growth.
Markets also succeed because the conditions on a micro-level - i.e. a street - vary wildly. King Street in Newtown Australia - https://www.google.com.au/maps?q=king+street&um=1&ie=UTF-8&s... - is a long, winding, inefficient mess of op-shops, restaurants and weirdness. No one would plan a street like that, but it works. However, the elements that make up King Street - what the actual shops sell - is different to what makes say the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco sells, or what is available in San Telmo in Argentina, despite all three being similar in what they represent in each city (an area for alternative types). The flipside to these three places is Brasília - the capital of Brazil and a planned disaster.
TL;DR markets optimise for success while accepting failure happens, whereas planned economies optimise to avoid failure above risky practices that may lead to success, and markets allow micro-optimisations, whereas planned economies end up one size-fits-all.
... which makes complete sense. The multiplier eventually falls to the P/E of a stock standard public company, which is what, 12? Lets just say 12. The investors need to give a solid X if they expect the value to grow, as the founders want to keep a high %. So 57X -> 25X is about the right track.
That discourages hiring poor workers. "Everyone under $100K per year (which makes CEO pay $16 Million) is now officially an employee of {INSERT OUTSOURCED COMPANY HERE}". Heck, just make them contractors.
I like all these ideas in principle, because I think the morality behind them is on track, however these ideas almost always rely on the the very antithesis of what they purport, e.g. that greedy CEOs would play by a different set of rules if we just made them.
I am not saying this is easy, or that the sentiment is wrong, just that this oft quoted remedy is deeply flawed, and likely to be bad in infinitely many ways that are not well thought through.
I'll have a stab. Value = what someone will pay. what someone will pay is X% less than what it will be worth in Y-Z years (where X is usually 50% and Y and Z are between 5 and 10).
So, what will Uber be worth?
The hyper-growth startup model is double revenue yearly, while adding 50% to costs. Lets do the maths using simplified numbers: Uber makes $7 billion per year, and loses $3B, for total costs of $10B.
So, if you assume a P/E ratio of 25, Uber would be worth $137.5 in 2 years. Would I pay $62B (if I had it) for a company worth $137B in two years? Imma go ahead and say yes!
Now, 100% growth on 50% cost increase may not hold, but as long as revenue growth > cost growth, Uber will inevitably be profitable. The question is by when, and profitable to what $ value, and at what multiplier? double revenue, 175% costs, and a 35 multiplier, and Uber is worth $200B in 4 years.
Antifa are anti-capitalist as well. https://www.facebook.com/pg/AntifaAustralia/about/ shows "Promote the workers struggle against capitalism and it's puppet, fascism." They might be called Antica or some similarly silly name, but there would still be a nutty leftist movement against capitalism. In many ways, and incredibly ironically, anti-facism is the most marketable calling card.
> I don't understand the need to equate the two sides
I assume it is because they are all violent loonies? Or maybe because of the looting at Stanford? I dunno if that is the reason, to be honest. Maybe it is just one of those "but your guys are bad too" things?
> that Antifa started any of the violence
I personally don't believe that the sum total of people who are actively members or even share much of an ideology in groups like Antifa or white supremacy or the alt-right or even ISIS is anything but a rounding error on 0% out of 330 million yanks - let alone the 1 billion in the collective west. I mean, does anyone think these groups COLLECTIVELY have anywhere near 3,300,000 people? These are just umbrella terms the media can use to give something more punch.
BTW, I tried to look into who antifa were, and https://www.google.com/search?q=antifa shows a bunch of people talking about Antifa, but not a lot of insider info/manifestos/articles. If I were to guess, they are mostly rich, angry college-aged kids who think it is cool to "fight the man" - which is pretty much what all those groups are, including ISIS.
I vote we stop talking about any of them, and simply call them X-nutters. "neo-nutters", "prog-nutters", "Islamist nutters" etc etc.
> what is the author suggesting about the abilities of women?
And we get to the heart of all this - the belief that a comment on preferences is questioning some group's ability. I find that deeply misguided, and I believe it places measurable, tangible elements THAT DO NOT MATTER (i.e. money and status) over important things that can't be measured (i.e. LOVE).
The rich man who is without love - and yes, I mean man, see Ebenezer Scrooge - is a meme in literature that is well worn. We are told time and again that money isn't everything, that there are more important things in life than money, status and achievement...
And it is true - there are more important things! Money is everything if you are starving, but once money is no longer the only issue in your life, and you are choosing between spending your time in the pursuit of more money and other things, there are many things better than more money to spend time on. Health is better than money. MENTAL health is better than money. Love and connections with others is FAR better than more money.
The general principle here is achievement and working more vs connection with fellow humans. The best illustration of this is would you rather work 16 hour days in a law firm making a million a year but have no social life, or have friends, family and a life, but a lower paid job making above the median wage? And the evidence is in aggregate, more men choose the former, and more women choose the later.
The idea women that women are lesser if they have different preferences and choose connection over money/achievement... well it is absolutely misguided. That is the preference that differs between men and women IN THE AGGREGATE, i.e. out of all people, there are more men choose achievement over connection than there are women that make that choice.
How does that make women anything other than smarter than men, in aggregate? How is a life full of connections with humans worse than one with achievement and money? I'm a man, and I have run a mile from long hours my entire life - because I want a life defined by more than just work and money. I accept that comes with reduced pay, as I am sure I could squeeze in an extra 10-20 hours of paid work a week - but that is a choice I make knowingly, consciously, and actively.
To assume that women make the WRONG choices, or that honest assessments of womens' choices on aggregates implies they are less capable is, IMHO, patronising to women who make much more nuanced decisions than men about life beyond "what will pay me the most".
> I think it is fair to say that the author's idea of what empathy feels like is completely different to what the rest of the world thinks
I think you misunderstand what he is getting at. Yale researcher Paul Bloom
wrote a whole book about this concept of empathy as a bad thing, and I think that is what the manifesto is getting at (I'd almost argue quoting): https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compass... TL;DR is this:
> We often think of our capacity to experience the suffering of others as the ultimate source of goodness. Many of our wisest policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it.
> Nothing could be further from the truth, argues Yale researcher Paul Bloom. In AGAINST EMPATHY, Bloom reveals empathy to be one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead upon a more distanced compassion.
This is how that manifesto is being so miscategorised. It says - DIRECT QUOTE - "relying on affective empathy — feeling another's pain — causes us to focus on anecdotes, favour individuals similar to us, and harbour other irrational and dangerous biases". Not empathy is not required. Not empathy is useless, but a specific, nuanced usage of empathy. It is understandable this miscategorisation given how most people see empathy, but it is still borderline strawmanning to impose a definition here that was not intended.
I hate the high end examples, because people want to argue them. The case is also true the other way - there are more men at the bottom of the IQ scale. Can someone come up with a reason why an IQ test would make men appear more often in the bottom of IQ distributions?
> The manifesto claims empathy for colleagues and customers is not required, but clearly it is.
Can you help me understand how you reached that conclusion? Here is the relevant section of the original:
> De-emphasise empathy.
> I've heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy — feeling another's pain — causes us to focus on anecdotes, favour individuals similar to us, and harbour other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.
I am constantly amazed that "society" means America. Also, that all the examples are always how white majority countries have white majority X. What about China? What about Indonesia? What about Malaysia, where there is a lot of racial diversity?
Americans think their country is the world. Trust me, you are definitely less than 5% of the world population-wise, even if you are ~25% of nominal world GDP.
It is really sad how insular Western culture has become, and weird in an industry and era where the biggest tech IPO was Chinese.
You are here trying to persuade me, at least I assume that is the goal, you could just be here trolling I guess. To try to persuade by claiming you are as bad as everyone else seems, unpersuasive?
You seem to think there are two sides: for or against. I have the ability to be against EVERYONE, don't I? Neither side can be convincing, or one side can. As it stands, you are just as unconvincing as the other side, which is hardly a great position!
So, seeing as you have a strong opinion, as evidenced by about 400,000,000,000 posts in this thread, do you have any evidence to support your ideas and refute what you seem to think is a bad piece? Or should I continue to be unpersuaded by both sides?
What's great is the next sentence: "But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else." So, you know it is false, completely, and that we should ignore it because it is false, but you are unqualified to provide any examples? Sigh.
So you have a study which refutes this? He's made a claim, you are just making an appeal to emotion! Show that there are no differences between men and women on these scales, or that the whole science behind the idea is sketchy (which I've seen arguments of) but please, pretty please, some evidence.
> If you truly believe people are equal and deserving of equal treatment then you must
The two don't follow, at all. Lets replace this statement, and make it about the NBA.
"If you truly believe people are equal and deserving of equal treatment then you must see a game where black men hold the vast majority of positions as a failure of the game".
If the NBA example should be laughed at, why shouldn't the opposite? Neanderthals don't exist anymore, but homo sapiens do, despite very little relative advantage to us. Small differences in averages between groups will lead to dramatically different results. For the best example of all, see casinos (advantage: 2-4%) versus gamblers.
Is the current user-base an asset or a liability? I guess I am asking is it a kind of technical debt?
I'm not sure, and Digg is obviously the cautionary tail here on the "don't tick off the user-base" side, but I'd wager that to continue to grow, they need a little more mass appeal.
Reddit as an anonymous FaceBook Feed might have some real value, as both a value prop for people, and as retargeting for Marketers. Reddit knows that you browse, say, /r/atheism as a Mormon, or /r/gonewildasian as a single guy, and those are not things FaceBook may know. There is a lot of value in anonymous, on both sides.
> Occasionally a guilty person will be acquitted, and it would really be best not to also punish an innocent as a result of that.
That's not how it works, is it? it is not a battle where someone has to be guilty - either the accused or the accuser. Someone can be acquitted without anyone lying, or making false statements, or anything else. Just a few examples: insufficient evidence to prosecute, contradictory timelines.
It is bizarre that anyone thinks that this could be the system - get a conviction or suffer a conviction yourself.
There is a spectrum between provable accusations and demonstrably false claims that includes uncertainty, doubt and poor evidence. It isn't like going all-in in poker!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prefecture-level_citie...
Socialism only really works when government butts out, and lets industry self organise, and China is the glowing example.
> There is no correlation whatsoever between lax oversight of markets and robust economic growth, as most people tend to believe.
This is a complete firfy, and is arguing with a complete lack of understanding of what socialism is. "Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
In other words, we all decide together how to run things. Markets let people decide what they do themselves, e.g. self organising. The evidence self organisation works is vast and comprehensive. The evidence that no one group is smart enough to run an economy is vast as well, and success in managing an economy always rely on a significant portion being free markets.