vannevar

5,746 karmajoined 17 лет назад

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9 часов назадdiscuss

This is a specific example of a more general problem: the ability of capital to manufacture demand and not merely satisfy it. An implicit assumption about supply and demand is that they are largely independent market forces, that demand is an organic and emergent phenomenon arising from the desires and ambitions of free individuals, and that supply reacts to demand. But first mass marketing and now hyper-targeted marketing turn that assumption on its head, and given sufficient capital, you can manipulate consumers into buying something that, left to their own devices, they otherwise would not. The harm that this can cause is most easily seen in the addictive context, but it appears throughout the market as a lost opportunity cost: to what more beneficial use would they have put that money had they not been subject to the manipulation?

3 дня назадdiscuss

From Article III: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

For example, if Russia met the definition of an enemy, and if the President compromised the interests on the country in favor of Russian interests (presumably for his own personal benefit), that would probably count. The compromise would have to be knowing, though, mere incompetence is not enough. So if the issue ever arose, Trump has a pretty good defense.

5 дней назадdiscuss

Given that the President is a convicted felon who maintains that what he did was fine, and that he has pardoned thousands of unrepentant criminals, and that the vast majority of his party enthusiastically endorsed all this, I would say "pro-crime" is an understatement.

7 дней назадdiscuss

>Commoditization means there's price competition. From a consumer perspective, that's good. You want it to be a low-margin, high volume, competitive business.

You and I may want it to be a low-margin, high-volume business. But the valuations of OpenAI, Anthropic, and much of the rest of the AI industry are not based on that assumption. They are based on the assumption that there will be a couple of winners, like in the smartphone wars, and that those winners will be able to maintain good margins.

7 дней назадdiscuss

Two issues with this. One, it's profitable assuming you just keep serving the same model forever, which is not realistic in this market. A given model has a shelf-life, which these days is measured in months, not years. Which means that trying to separate the cost of training the model from the cost of serving it doesn't make much business sense. And two, for providers that provide inference only via open weight models, the margins quickly move to commoditization. The "someday" when frontier model providers can enjoy their current high inference margins without the burden of significant training costs is never going to arrive.

9 дней назадdiscuss

You are making the common mistake of confusing two different things: the absolute capacity for an individual to improve their income over their lifetime, and the relative capacity to improve based on their current decile. If progress depended solely on merit, you would expect economic growth to be more or less evenly distributed across the percentiles---the "rising tide raises all boats" idea. That this doesn't happen suggests that people in higher deciles not only have more wealth, but are more likely to acquire additional wealth. Many wealthy people---and even some poorer ones---maintain that this is because the wealthy must be more industrious. But the vast majority of wealthy people started life in the upper deciles. And it's clear that having wealth makes it easier to make more wealth.

If you doubt this, consider the following thought experiment: imagine two strangers, identical in ability. One wins a million dollars in the lottery, the other is poor. If you were forced to wager your net worth on which twin is likely to make the most money over the next 12 months, who would you bet on? Now think about what kind of qualities would it take to get you to change your bet. How much smarter and harder working would the man with nothing have to be to overcome the advantage of a million dollars? Or even $100,000? You might say, yes, maybe in one year money would have the advantage---but surely an advantage in industriousness would win out in the long run? The mathematical answer is no, because the lottery winner will have a bigger advantage at the beginning of year 2 than he did at the start. If you bet on him in year 1, the bet is even surer in year 2. The reality is that he will continue to pull away. And that's what we see in the real world distribution of wealth: the gap between the wealthiest decile and the next poorest continues to expand, creating increasing social and political strain, as we can plainly see today.

10 дней назадdiscuss

>They didn't make the rising tide analogy, I read it as how much could be captured by labor if we increased leverage.

Fair point, though it's not completely clear from the comment.

>Wages have historically been a lagging indicator.

Of course, companies don't know in advance that they're going to have GDP-assisted growth. My point was that growth on the back of GDP growth is a collective windfall, and you'd expect it to be evenly distributed. But it clearly isn't.

10 дней назадdiscuss

>And employees are working at companies that provide robots, etc.

Just as are the top executives. And the shareholders that have put money into companies that provide "robots, etc.". All these people, including labor, are stakeholders. If there was 5% GDP growth that got reflected as 5% growth in net earnings for the company, one would expect that all the stakeholders would see roughly a 5% increase in their personal earnings from the company. The dollar amount would be higher for higher earners (5% of $1M is greater than 5% of $50k), but the percentage increase would be roughly in line. The real world results are not even close to this "rising tide lifts all boats" ideal.

11 дней назадdiscuss

This is consistent with the observation that the top 10% have captured a disproportionate share of GDP growth over the past few decades.

https://equitablegrowth.org/new-data-reveal-how-u-s-economic...

"The past three economic expansions have largely benefitted the top 10 percent. In each, the top decile received between 47 percent and 59 percent of all income growth in the expansion."

13 дней назадdiscuss

If the program actually does create jobs, it doesn't much matter whether or not the politician benefits, because it still serves the public interest.

13 дней назадdiscuss

Pretty easy to check on. And I'm not sure how the company would profit from giving away money to thousands of people who didn't work. And even if for some reason they did, we've seen that it actually stimulates the economy, which is the whole point.

13 дней назадdiscuss

>There doesn’t seem to be any lesson-learning happening...

Which would indicate that creating jobs was not the actual reason for the grants. Given how trivially easy it would be fix the problem (simply make the grant contingent on the creation of jobs, otherwise it converts to a loan), the real purpose is probably a matter of generating headlines and raking in campaign contributions (with occasional full-on kickbacks probably happening as well). All of which it apparently does well enough that politicians continue to do it.

19 дней назадdiscuss

The question raised by the article isn't why people don't pay their rent; it is why the number of people not paying their rent has increased. Occam's Razor suggests that the most likely reason is also the simplest one: that prices have risen much faster than wages, making even fixed rents less affordable.

19 дней назадdiscuss

While that is certainly true, it's a very narrow view disconnected from the reasons for the policies. The most likely explanation for more people not paying their rent is that even fixed rents have become increasingly unaffordable because other costs have risen faster than wages. So yes, people are "choosing" not to pay rent because the consequences of not paying the rent lag substantially behind the consequences of not eating or buying gas. But it's an absolutely rational decision. FTA:

>...plenty of economic indicators suggest worsening financial duress for people already struggling. Costs are going up faster than wages, and inflation that took hold after the pandemic has proven painfully persistent.

21 день назадdiscuss

While it's tempting to just say we're going to cap wealth, it's not actually that easy to do. For one thing, most billionaires are not people, they are corporations. But the same concerns apply to concentration of wealth in corporate hands as they do in personal hands. The better strategy is to fix the various laws and policies that reward wealth for the sake of wealth. There is a lot of potential leverage in corporate governance and ownership, which underpins not only corporate wealth but often personal wealth as well. Real estate is another high leverage point. By setting appropriate boundaries in these two key areas, we could make it much more difficult for someone to accumulate wealth simply because they have wealth. And that's really the root of the problem. At some level, people add less and less value for the wealth they accumulate. Contrary to popular belief, they're not cheating the system, but simply taking advantage of what the system allows them to do.

27 дней назадdiscuss

>1. Growing at a rapid rate over long periods of time is hard, doable and rewarding

and depends on factors outside your control.

This last is a critical caveat, and really the crux of the argument. It's not about cheating, but the limits of predictability in complex dynamic systems.

27 дней назадdiscuss

The plot on page 39 certainly looks like the St Paul market turned somewhere around July of 2020, over a year before the rent control, and the downward trend accelerated over the next couple of years. I'm skeptical of the authors' ability to tease out the contribution of rent control to a process that had already begun well before the alleged causal event.

27 дней назадdiscuss

>...which is measured in days and weeks, not months.

There are multiple issues that will force a lag of at least a couple of months. First, the issue of the mines that have been reported. Second, the tanker owners will want to be quite sure hostilities aren't going to erupt again. Third, while tankers that are trapped will leave, there will be a major lag while tankers that have been moved to other parts of the world get redirected back to the Strait to fill up. It will indeed be months before there is enough oil flowing to start retaining reserves again. It isn't like the state of shipping was frozen the day the war started and will unfreeze as soon as the ink is dry on the new cease-fire deal.

28 дней назадdiscuss

Another article from the other day contains this:

And even more importantly, China has slashed its crude imports, turning instead to massive stockpiles. (https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/09/business/oil-strait-of-hormuz...)

Sounds like they're burning through their reserves as well. But since China's economy is more centrally controlled, it's likely they keep bigger reserves.

28 дней назадdiscuss

Once Iran closed the Strait, Trump's surrender became inevitable. The rest has been a combination of him slowly coming to terms with the inevitability of that outcome, and buying time to come up with a way to spin the catastrophe as a success.