But it does imply at some level attempting to achieve them. At every stage of the war the US has taken (and continues to take) action that is more likely to close the strait than open it. To the point where people were pointing it out how this would game out years before the war actually happened.
It is possible that the US military is so incompetent that they can't plan or that Trump has lost touch with reality. But then their goals would just be incoherent and incomprehensible. Assuming they have coherent goals and some capacity to work towards them it is clear that an open strait is at best a very low priority one.
It is a bit surprising, I'd have guessed the same. Although in hindsight I could believe that type systems aren't particularly strong as an anti-bug layer. They help. They're a big boon for coordinating large numbers of mid- and low- skill programmers though because it forces them to go further in documenting their function signatures and makes it much more obvious where the problems are when refactoring spaghetti code because things break loudly.
Refactoring spaghetti has become easier in the LLM era because it can just read all the code, and there is now a skill floor on the programmers that kicks in somewhere relatively high. The benefits of type systems might have suffered because of that.
What is the alternative here other than acceptance exactly? It seems the options are either accept a toll or accept that the strait is closed.
The toll seems pretty reasonable. Trump doesn't look like he's actually going to compensate them for the sneak attack and all the bombing runs; they have to make the money up somehow as all that destruction looks expensive. And they need a source of funds ASAP to arm up before the US comes back.
> If you're measuring it as "how many people own superyachts" that's probably different from how most people want to measure "how well is the planet being run".
A disturbing number of people are financially incapable to the point where they struggle with concepts like spending less money than they earn. There is a significant tension between what they want to measure and what economic optimal looks like. The economy is there to maximise peace and prosperity, the people who think otherwise should be kept well away from the levers of power.
> Why? This seems like an odd statement. Why is a singer more efficient at doing this than a team of analysts?
I assume she's got a team of analysts working on it. I doubt she manages her own money directly. They're probably pretty good.
> You think that
> 1. We should be pushing for more superyachts, as an immediate measure of efficient allocation of resources
I think that a world where one person has a superyacht is better than a world where nobody does. In much the same way that a world in the 60s someone probably owned a really expensive mainframe and there'd be people moaning about how outrageous it was that someone could spend so much money on a big calculator. The market doesn't seem to want to give everyone a superyacht, and I doubt it would be efficient to jump right in to it. For obvious reasons
Points 2 to 4 though seem like an accurate restatement. With the caveat that my knowledge of Swift is patchy and distant.
It can't be, because if that was the goal they'd just stop attacking. The strait was open until they sneak attacked Iran. Everyone seems to be in agreement that as part of a ceasefire the strait will open. Iran has shown no particular interest in closing the strait except as a war tactic. The US clearly does not have the power to control or open the strait militarily, its been months now. They appear to be outclassed.
If the goal was opening the strait, then Trump would direct the US military to stop attacking and then the strait would open up. Peace is the only path they have to open the strait and there is every reason to think negotiation would succeed in having the strait open in a matter of days.
By process of elimination, the war goal either seems to be some sort of relatively indirect attack on China's energy security or simple support of Israel in Lebanon by keeping the Iranians out of it. Or maybe Trump has also reached the tipping point into senility; a scenario which seems increasingly likely.
While I have no objection to long ranty posts - I write enough of them myself - as a matter of practicality I'm going to ignore most of it and stick to the questions to keep the walls of text under control.
> You can look at that and say "this is optimal" but I am very unsure as to what you're then measuring.
Well, we started back in ~1,000AD with 0 people who own such a boat. Now in ~2,000AD we have >1 person with such a boat. Ideally we'd like to be as close as possible to a world where everyone has such a boat. So 1 person isn't ideal but, y'know it is a start and we're going to need to have 1 person before we get to 2. Probably it is about as good as we can manage right now. Bezos is a good candidate for the 1st person, he's done some pretty amazing things.
> Why would anyone go hungry and uneducated if Taylor Swift is angry? What is the process by which you see that happening?
She might not donate the money. She's choosing to give money away because it won't impact her lifestyle, so if you take money from her on the theory that it doesn't impact her lifestyle maybe she stops. And she's probably more efficient in spending it than the practical alternatives.
> Let's take TS as an example. What is it she is being rewarded for, is it efficient allocation of capital? Is that why people buy her songs? Is that what's made her so incredibly wealthy? Do you think that if she was rewarded somewhat less, that she'd stop making music? Stop touring? In fact, imagine she never got more money. Do you think she's making music because she's saving up for something she cannot currently afford? Does she have a lifestyle that's unsustainable without earning even more money?
Yes to all of the above. I assume. I don't know much about Taylor Swift except she's got a lot of money and she sings.
> As in Quantitative Easing? I confess I don't understand it as well as I probably should, but I think it's cyclical? and inequality is increasing even when it is not happening?
QE, inflation policy and the fairly regular bailouts. And probably funnelling money away from markets and towards golf buddies through the government.
It's continuous [0]. The US money supply went from something like 16 trillion to 23 trillion since COVID. In percentages, that means nominal wages and expenses should probably have gone up by around 40% all else equal. Typically though, most of the gains are in asset prices first then flow into the broader market second - so I see things like US wages are up around 20% [1], so I'd expect asset prices to be up >40%. And people with political connections probably do better again.
> What policies would you suggest to achieve that meaningfully (obviously inflation doesn't count)?
Me personally? I'd start by targeting stable prices before technological improvements (stable as in they tend not to change, not the weirdness where people are supposed to use 'stable' to describe exponential increases). Let badly run companies go bankrupt. Tax people directly instead of trying to pay for government policies through inflation. Then once a clearer picture emerges of where the real resources are coming from and going to, start talking about whether there is an actual problem to solve in real terms.
I'm still a bit lost on what the point of difference is. You seem to be saying that you've seen evidence that makes this "strawman argument" convincing to you, but you don't seem to accept that I've generally argued with people who believe it. If you think there is evidence and it is convincing evidence then the obvious interpretation of what I said seems to be that I'm just being logical and straightforward. I don't see the strawman.
I mean I might not know what a strawman is, but I thought it was claiming people were making an argument that in fact they were not.
> Would you say we had a free market in the 1970s, when the chart I linked showed the top .01% by wealth's share of taxes exceeded their share of wealth? That's essentially what I'd like to go back to, perhaps by a wealth tax. I would say we had a free market then, showing progressive taxation and free markets are absolutely compatible. This isn't Soviet-style central planning.
I mean, sure. I've long argued that the US strategy of printing money and giving it to asset owners is bad. I doubt a wealth tax would help, IMO the real issue is the welfare for wealthy people. Seems kinda dumb and the people claiming that the economy would collapse without it appear to be making up their principles as they go along. But we should all want to encourage wealth. It makes people wealthy.
> If wealth getting concentrated is so good, why not only allow one person to have everything? See how odd that seems?
Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues. Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome, but there isn't an issue with the idea in principle.
Besides, the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away. That is the most practical aspect of wealth control and there is still a small number of people controlling it.
> Sure. So we could ask, say, can we compare educating 500 children for 12 years vs Taylor Swifts net worth going from $2.1B to $2B? How much would she be hurt and how much would other benefit? What would be the impact if she was slightly less wealthy?
Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated, she donates quite a lot of money. $26m going out some time soonish according to a recent heaadline. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jul/02/taylor-swift-t.... She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids. It turns out to be nontrivial coming up with good examples in practice.
> Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me...
Wouldn't that make it not a straw man argument? It isn't an argument as pointing out an assumption that voting or committee can be better at allocating resources than a free market. It isn't a very well grounded one and it looks wrong when presented on its own but there isn't much I can do about that. It is popular and people find it convincing.
Although the argument does look fundamentally reasonable, I think its biggest weakness is it doesn't make an attempt to prioritise - yes taxes always make someone better off. So does wealth. A decision has to be made. Which is more valuable? We've got a highly reliable and effective system for working that out (aka the free market economy) and no alternative in 2nd place that doesn't typically lead to mass starvation because someone underestimated how much food was needed. They people benefiting from the taxes are going to be making very different allocations to the places that the capital is being drained from.
The people behind wealth taxes generally handwave explaining how their system will be better at allocating than the people who make a living of allocating wealth effectively because it is all just obvious that it doesn't need to be justified. Poor people will get more money if rich people have less, duh, QED. So far no compelling cases where they've turned out to be right. If they could do a better job, why even allow private wealth at all?
> Even if the money is used on war—a net destruction of value and lives—there are some people selling missiles better off a result.
Case in point, there is a topical example of Trump going in to Iran like a maniac. Yes there are some people who are better off as a result who wouldn't have been. And yet we can be pretty confident that not forcing US citizens to fund the debacle would have been a better allocation of capital.
The major crime of media is misframing as opposed to being wrong.
> The Economist was convinced by the false claim that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction
The issue here is not whether or not the Iraqis had any weapons of any type, the issue is whether the US has a basic right to travel to the opposite side of the globe and invade random countries. One of the issues the anti-Trump crowd has right now coming down on his crazy and unprovoked attacks on Iran has been that it is absolutely an established pattern of US behaviour and he's well within normal practice. Trump is even claiming it is because of WMDs! Again! Eventually at least, after he tried a few other excuses first. "He's lying" doesn't cut much ice because that is pretty normal when the US goes to war and it usually isn't particularly subtle. The only difference from the Economist's perspective is how enthusiastically the reporters want to pretend they believe the obvious mistruths.
Anyway, that rant aside, the issue is more that the Economist is pretending that the unknowable is knowable rather than that they get it wrong more often or not than anyone else. It doesn't seem theoretically possible to predict the price of things more than "up", "down" and "assume it does what it always does". Mapping out the supply/demand curve and confidently forecasting how it could shift in the short term requires knowledge of all actors, their preferences, options and operational constraints. Even for a relatively superficial forecast. Who's got that sort of modelling firepower?
Yes but ... knowing the answer to general knowledge questions isn't really an appropriate test of that. General knowledge sounds like it would be, by definition, things known to people of ordinary intelligence. So it could easily be that very intelligent people aren't up to speed about general knowledge topics because they spend their time on topics of interest to people of high intelligence. That is actually something of a trope.
The nature of the questions and why they are expected to know the answers matters a lot here.
Well, no I think something subtly different. I think if you look at the quality of life in Czechia before and after Aero Vodochody went bankrupt it probably rose, all else equal. And the quality of the corporate governance would have been better than in an alternative. It'd be interesting to check the price and quality of the aircraft that were available for use; those two things probably moved in a helpful direction. That last move isn't guaranteed by basic economics, but it seems quite likely in this case.
> The free market fundamentally doesn't have a good response to this problem, excess capital is taken out of these companies during good times and then they run to governments seeking bailouts during bad times but governments don't know how to mandate good corporate governance.
Sounds like the free market hasn't been tried, a key plank of the free market on the supply side is that incompetent managers have to go bankrupt and lose their capital or otherwise get squeezed out. If the government is going to bail people out then obviously the companies will take adopt a ridiculously risky management strategy because they get the upside and dodge the downside, so they just have to maximise the potential upside at any cost. No surprise if after getting a bailout people do exactly what they did that led to the bailout until they need another bailout. Why change?
The trick to "mandating" of good corporate governance is not to bail them out. Then at least the corporations will be governed in a way that they aren't likely to go bankrupt. Maybe even make things people want and sell them at a profit.
> here's a few industries where structurally, companies can only exit the market but it's almost impossible for a new company to enter. Airframes, jet engines, CPU manufacturing, lithography etc.
Is there actual evidence for this, or are the companies involved just doing a good enough job that the market doesn't see a need for new entrants? Because it actually seems a bit implausible that these technologies could just disappear or even become less available under a free market. What we actually see is the likes of NVidia or ASML, where other players can't catch up because the market leader is just pushing the cutting edge forward too quickly (spare a thought for Intel, who was the unbeatable colossus once).
It is getting to the point where I wouldn't trust experienced developers to merge code without AI review. The latest generation of models are getting pretty good.
> If it were about truth alone, the person who is right could be content with being right...
So... how would someone know if they're right? For starters, if we're going to be serious there are a lot of matters where there isn't even such a thing as "right" because the question is how to decide what to optimise for. But more importantly, if you rely on the inside of your own head to try and arrive at the truth the most likely outcome is slop. One of the best parts of being argumentative is finding out what the holes in a view are really quickly.
There seem to be views in the comments and original article that arguments are to be won rather than undertaken and reviewed. They're a man-vs-self story, not man-vs-man one.
Is that relevant? The economics of nuclear plants doesn't have anything to do with efficiency as far as I'm aware, the fuel costs are relatively negligible. They can afford to be horribly inefficient if they can get economies of scale producing the plant. So you can use inefficient turbines and have bad neutron economy and it wouldn't change the economics by anything in particular.
You'd also probably find similar issues with diesel generators, but small diesel generators do roaring trade and have great commercial applications.
Large scale production of commodity goods is generally more efficient. Which is why microreactors don't seem to have any inherent disadvantages. The efficiencies tend to kick in with the raw number of items produced.
It is possible that the US military is so incompetent that they can't plan or that Trump has lost touch with reality. But then their goals would just be incoherent and incomprehensible. Assuming they have coherent goals and some capacity to work towards them it is clear that an open strait is at best a very low priority one.