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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

The modern world has such a ridiculous disconnect. The people fleeing to remote places because of instability are the very same people causing these issues in the first place. Hedge fund managers selling toxic assets bemoaning the uncertainty of the financial world? And what will your island paradise look like with no one to trade with or if the world economy collapses? NZ doesn't have much of an economy in itself, what are you going to do, go back to farming?

It's even more hilarious because the reason NZ is a desirable place to live is because there is little money in politics and there are few class distinctions. How will that change when all the billionaires move there and want to get their way (and are used to the world conforming to the bank account)? Just another place for the wealthy elite of the world to slowly ruin, maybe the next step is the moon?

The system is rapidly growing out of control and no one seems to be able to stop or halt the insanity. It's like we're all marching towards oblivion and everyone knows it but no one has the will to turn the ship around because the system incentivizes short term greed.

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> The modern world has such a ridiculous disconnect.

Agreed. This, to me, is the essence of cyberpunk. To Gibson, 'The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed'

> Just another place for the wealthy elite of the world to slowly ruin, maybe the next step is the moon?

Mars, haven't you heard?

> The system is rapidly growing out of control and no one seems to be able to stop or halt the insanity.

Worse, they are complicit in it. This entire situation amounts to a local minimum, because everyone is working towards their own short term interests. I don't see how we break that cycle, however. The trends are global. I'll admit I'm certainly not doing my part: I'm leaving academia and taking my signing bonus, RSUs, etc. and joining a mega-corp.

You know, everyone blames the mega rich. I blame everyone else. If you're completely honest and you assume that shits going to hit the fan, would you care more about the happiness of 1 billion random people you've never met or the happiness of 100 that you know? On paper you'll say 1 billion, but in reality if someone shoots your mother you cry, if someone shoots someone in Syria you most likely won't ever notice.

But here's a list of things partly responsible:

1. The mere idea that justice is something that will be served at some point is ludicrous. There's no universal concept of morality to begin with. The more money you have, the less like you are to be indicted or pay penalties for virtually anything. Why would you give that might away?

2. That disgusting cult of happiness that is more prevalent in San Francisco than anywhere else in the world is the very foundation of forcing people to be happy with what they have. Institutions like Landmark Forum that are actually requirements for certain management positions make sure that people don't actually critique or change things that are messed up.

3. Everyone knows that we're eating up our resources and dump the rest into the seas all the while doing so. The result is that a lot of things available today will be luxury super rich items in the not too distant future. Tuna and Cocoa amongst them(just wait and see). If I had money I'd invest in huge warehouses to make money with those things in 20-30 years. That's exactly what superwealthy do. There have been more than one buyouts in bankrupt countries in the last couple of years. Buying resources while everyone is hoping for the utopia where we can create something from nothing.

4. The only way this stuff could possibly change we pull the handbreak right now. But it's absurd to think that that's a possibility. Nobody even so much dares to talk about the consequences of a full stop change. If you do, you're the pessimist. People don't want a change of course, they want the illusion of change so that can stay happy until they crash in the cement wall at 200mp/h.

At the very least I have enough Schadenfreude in me to always enjoy these arguably predictable changes like the refugee "crisis" in europe

Everyone knows that we're eating up our resources and dump the rest into the seas all the while doing so. The result is that a lot of things available today will be luxury super rich items in the not too distant future.

Not sure how old you are, i.e. did you live through the '70s "Limits to Growth" Zeitgeist era? If not try, say, watching the 1973 movie Soylent Green, where the two protagonists just marvel at a jar of strawberry preserves they found in the dwelling of a rich person, and then go to your favorite grocery store's jams and jellies section....

Maybe someday we'll see that future you envision, but having already lived through at least one cycle of this, not to mention the ongoing global cooling -> global warming -> climate change one, I don't worry quite so much (and by now have a lot more than just these surface level observations to base that on).

ADDED: And this was a major theme of Heinlein in his '50s juveniles, most directly his 4th, published in 1950, Farmer in the Sky, but also see his last really good book, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966, where it was plot significant that the moon colony (or was it colonies?) grew wheat and shot it back to the Earth using a mass driver.

I'm probably one of the people you hate. Global warming is real and is accelerated by humans. I still don't give a damn. I will throw all my waste in the trash and drive gasoline vehicles. I'll let someone else fix it.

I'll care about the Earth when I can feel like I can actually own a piece of it. I have no skin in the game, really, other than some vague dread of total environmental collapse.

Ted Turner, now, he has a great reason to be an environmentalist. Let the burden of environmental protection fall primarily on those who claim the most ownership of it. If Ted wants me to separate my recyclables and watch TBS on a TV constructed from recycled material and powered solely by renewables, he can damn well pay me something to do all that.

You don't ask the team that loses by 50 points every game to start playing with their shoelaces tied together. And you don't ask the poor to sacrifice for the benefit of the rich. Developing nations are going to burn coal, and non-rich people are going to eat from disposable paper plates and then not recycle them. Environmentalism is a luxury, and only those who already have a sense of economic security will buy in to it.

But as long as I have an "at will" job and no more attachment to the land than a one-year lease, I'm not going to feel all that motivated.

Well some might consider their children as "skin in the game" but still. As far as I am concerned having children is also a luxury. At least it should be considered so, from my moral perspective.

Kids are not inextricably attached to any particular part of this planet. And many parents have no piece of it to give to them after they die, anyway. If I have kids, they would be in roughly the same situation I am in.

The situation is roughly analogous to the entire world being a city block filled with apartment buildings. A few people own all the buildings. Most people rent apartments from them. The buildings are not extraordinary. They need maintenance and repair, or they will deteriorate. But for whatever reason, the building owners are not responding to maintenance requests in a timely fashion. (But woe to you if your rent check is even half a day late!)

Some tenants, alarmed by the state of their surroundings, spend their own time and money, over and above their monthly rent, to do repairs. But none of the tenants can address all the problems on their own. At most, they can patch up a cracked window, re-wrap the ductwork with better insulation, tighten plumbing connections. No one has the resources to both pay the rent and also pay extra for all the repairs they might want.

Some tenants do nothing, because it is the landlords' responsibility to maintain the properties. Also, they don't have enough money to spend on it, anyway. If the landlords want to be slumlords, then surely it would be possible to move to a better-kept building when things get too bad. Except--whoops!--the landlords that do invest more in maintenance are not accepting new tenants. The properties for sale are too expensive for any slum-renter to buy.

In analogy form, the solution seems obvious, does it not?

And you have at most a 110 year lease on the matter of your body.

I'm going to try to leave this place better than it was given to me. Even if it is a small corner.

This is a prevalent theme of Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything" (https://thischangeseverything.org/)

That the current system as it stands is not built to let us combat climate change, and we need to change the system too.

the tragedy of the commons

Have you considered the possibility that those scary predictions were only wrong about the timeline rather than the eventual outcome? Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time.

That might be reasonable to consider if we didn't keep getting better at making the resources we need and making them accessible. For something like 14 of the past 15 decades food production per capita has gone up worldwide despite a preposterous increase in population.

Some things are losing out, like the rainforests and it sucks. But them being cut down is not an existential threat to humanity. If can encourage even more globalization and event better trade maybe we can feed those still starving before they cut down all the rainforests for subsistence farming.

Sadly we have to trust that we can come up with some difficult but possible technical solutions to big problems. How are we going to capture CO2. If we can do that we can mitigate wars caused by droughts caused by climate change.

Yes, I both can and do do math, "Humans are very bad at reasoning about things that happen at earth scale and over long periods of time" is not a true let alone useful statement. Although I'll grant it's demonstrably true of the doomsayers who made and continue to make such confident predictions while not accounting for many things, most especially human ingenuity (look at Paul Ehrlich for example).

They tend to have little or no grasp of the market mechanism ... well, they tend to be central controller types, without realizing the information theoretic limitations of that approach. For example, when faced with externalities, they invariably go high without even considering low (one example I remember reading was some European country requiring plant water intakes being downstream of outflows, and that's about as simple as you can get).

Anyway, one of my points there is that the demonstrated inability of those guys to predict the future should not be extrapolated to the rest of us ^_^.

Plus we haven't tapped the tiniest fraction of the the Solar System's resources, and much of the Earth's remain their for the picking, at some cost in money, and as of late in the West, to the fashion sense of our elites (although I grant you coal is nasty stuff).

Yeah, some day we'll run out of resources in the Solar System, but that's so so far in the future, we probably have to worry more about the Singularity, or too many nuclear wars ... see The Moat In God's Eye for a look at that, which has one co-author who thought well and deeply of the '70s Limits to Growth garbage. (And even took advantage of it to be able to write more realistic SF, if you freeze most scientific developments....)

How does anthropogenic climate change fit into your understanding of events and how our future on this planet is developing?

This apocalyptic view of climate change isn't based on reality. What is the big danger to the human kind?

Warming? Cooling? It won't make the earth inhabitable. Humans live in a wide range of temperature.

Permanent flooding? It won't happen overnight but over centuries. Humans move.

Drought? We're making huge progress on solar desalination (thanks to Israelis efforts). Humans are ingenuous.

And this is without taking into account Alaska and Siberia, two gigantic regions that would become more and more hospitable.

Fear-mongering is a useful persuasion weapon, until it backfires.

Ethically speaking, what should developed nations do to assist people living in, for example, sub-Saharan Africa, who have no resources with which to relocate, and are already suffering the consequences of climate change? I consider it a catastrophic situation, even though I'm personally not among the sick, dying, or refugees. I don't think it's fear-mongering to acknowledge the massive harm industrial nations are causing to real human beings, and to demand solutions of policy-makers, even if those solutions are costly.

"There's no universal concept of morality to begin with."

There is universal morality, the one embedded in genes of most people. We are social creatures, and we understand concepts like tit-for-tat.

For a contrary opinion, I turn to the character of Lord Vetinari, written by Terry Pratchett:

> [...] "I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy.

> One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

If there is evil in this world, it lies in the heart of mankind.

-Edward Morrison

The fact that we have morality (on average) doesn't imply it's always pretty. Nor does it imply that it scales well to modern society with billions of people.

> universal ... most

wut

>Institutions like Landmark Forum that are actually requirements for certain management positions

Can you elaborate on that? I always thought of them as some occultish clowns.

Landmark forum is scary. I know a few people who are members. Most are deeply in need of mental health treatment.

There's nothing stopping you from buying cocoa futures and rolling them over indefinitely for the next twenty years. In fact, in an efficient market the cost of doing so is equal to the cost of maintaining your own warehouse.

Why "crisis"? The situation is not bad enough to warrant the term crisis, in your opinion?

Hedge fund managers are usually not causing collapses, they just see the reasons why a collapse is likely and pile in before everyone else knows what's going on. Black Wednesday 1992 is a very good example of what I mean.

It's too easy to blame and hate hedge fund managers as a group, but personally the only ones I detest are the lawbreakers. Apart from them, these guys have virtues and vices just like everyone else.

I think your comment is missing the point here: their actions themselves have consequence for the market. Indeed, their existence and their practices have an effect on the market even if they don't act. Their existence and expectations do that alone. 'If I don't do it, somebody else will', which is a poor selfish excuse for sociopathic values.

Hedge funcs, i.e. betting against the herd, has a moderating influence, not a destabilizing one.

If they actually did bet against the herd. "Hedge fund" used to mean a fund that actually hedged their bets, but there's no law that says they have to, and a number of them just bet.

What seems to happen is that during boom times, a lot of unskilled and unaware of it money managers get into the market, and they tend to bet with the crowd. We get a big bubble as a result, the bubble pops, and all the shitty fund managers get flushed out of the market. Then we get several years of stability as the prudent money managers who thought for themselves rule the show, until their performance attracts new entrants who don't know what they're doing, and the cycle repeats.

I actually think that we're in one of those prudent periods right now - most securities seem fairly valued, at least now that the unicorn bubble is deflating. But in 05-08? I worked in financial software then, and a number of my peers (straight out of college!) were hedge fund managers. There were some good ones, but many of them had no business being near anyone's retirement fund.

On the contrary, I think you don't know what the point is in the first place.

Like it or not, if there is a difference between the value of something and the price at which it can trade, eventually someone will come along and trade it until either the price moves back in line, or the value changes.

Hedge fund managers, the ones who abide by the law at least, spend a lot of time trying to find these inefficiencies. That's the nature of the job. Nothing sociopathic about it. In fact, there are many benefits to having a liquid market where (often universally discoverable) pricing reflects the current state of the world.

How do you think airlines hedge their fuel cost and get a sense for the future cost of fuel? How do pension funds determine when they should buy protection for their investments due to high expectations of volatility? They look at the market.

There are institutional traders and investors who manipulate stocks and trade on insider information, sure. They are lawbreakers and their counterparties often report them to the relevant authorities. But even the market manipulators generally have to be somewhat correct, because if not then there is always someone with equal or greater capital willing to take the opposite, better side of the trade. And the further a security's price is impacted, the juicier the opposite side's payday if the first guy gets it wrong.

No offense but I sense that you have a small amount of exposure to the function of the market as a whole, who the participants are, and how they do business. You can't just run around with a label maker that only prints the word "sociopathic" and expect to understand everything.

This entire comment is dismissible because it operates under the naive delusion that the majority of Hedge Fund managers abide by the law.

If you have evidence that it's not the case, especially for the majority, in other words, you have enough evidence to accuse thousands of people of crime, why are you not in touch with the police yet?

Obviously I don't have evidence, but it's just common sense. They have huge incentives to cheat, very few incentives to play it safe. And it's very hard to get evidence and prove guilt.

Do you really think people gambling with billions of dollars are doing so without an edge?

Think about it.

If I saw countless examples of cheaters getting caught, losing everything, and going to jail, I would be pretty disinclined to cheat.

>The people fleeing to remote places because of instability are the very same people causing these issues in the first place.

Are they the same? How do you know? The finance world is a big place. In Canada alone it employs over 1 million people, which is one quarter the population of New Zealand.

Crappy software and models also contributed to the crisis (and other crises). Do you build either? Do you accept blame for your profession?

Great points. We are a profession that would rather use Python instead of more principled choices such as OCaml/Haskell, because it is superficially easier. I chose Python as an example here as that is what Knights Capital were using. I'm sure even the folk behind Python would admit it may have problems scaling to large complex algorithmic trading systems.

KC blew up because someone copied the wrong software to their deployment servers. If Haskell's typesystem has solved that problem then I'm sure it would have a lot more takers.

On the flip side, if Jane Street were to screw up I hope no-one would blame OCaml as it would more likely be someone making a mistake.

Programming languages can be poor or geat but you need to wield them wisely.

I thought it was more the result of an accumulation of mistakes, for example dead code and repurposing boolean flags (we can do better with types).

ben elton's "stark" is a great if heavily satirical novel on these themes: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242242.Stark

> And what will your island paradise look like with no one to trade with or if your financial firm collapses? NZ doesn't have much of an economy in itself, what are you going to do, go back to farming?

these locations aren't just for vacations. they are stocked with supplies and probably guns and ammo. if the SHTF, they'll be on the first (private jet) flight out of london, hk, zurich, or new york. why do you think they chose a place so remote? there are nicer places a lot closer. they just don't have the infrastructure that new zealand has, and the natural oceanic protection.

as a bonus, they also have a military that is closely tied to the commonwealth crown. how convenient.

it used to be normal to prepare for disaster. in california they taught us how to do it in elementary school in the 90s, for earthquakes. now people think it's crazy. it's not. normal people do this too. who do you think is buying up all the ammo before elections? i know people who have boats, trucks, etc. for the purposes of preparedness.

one thing a fund manager or CEO knows how to do is hedge against risks.

>normal people do this too. who do you think is buying up all the ammo before elections?

The people behind the prepping industry are just affiliate marketers for the most part.

Errr, it's a lot more complicated than that. People in the US have been buying up ammo at > 10 billion (thousand million) rounds/year rates for more than a decade now (US civilian production is > 12 billion/year, which doesn't count imports and not, I think, surplus and seconds from Lake City production), and I haven't noticed big movements before elections (after, for sure).

"as a bonus, they also have a military that is closely tied to the commonwealth crown. how convenient." ... well seeming NZ is a commonwealth country it's not some convenience, it's history.

And it sounds like you think NZ has some huge military power. I think we have like one jet plane, so stock all the guns you want, I imagine in the case all the allies die and Russia invades we'd probably just give them a welcome ceremony.

> Russia invades

Unless they are using one of those world maps...

i didn't mean 'how convenient' in any sarcastic way, i was literally saying.. it's convenient that your getaway island also has a military. most don't.

and nobody said any of it was rational. it's just what people do. i live in earthquake country so i have water and canned food and a means of defense. some people have taken this mindset to an extreme, including buying large homes on remote island countries and a private jet for trips there.

they also have a military that is closely tied to the commonwealth crown

They have unit that is world-class in the NZSAS, which trains with the original SAS, but the entire NZ Army would be considered a mere brigade anywhere else. Their Air Force has zero fighters. They were booted out of a mutual defence pact with the US when they refused to allow nuclear-powered vessels to dock.

Basically anyone with a blue-water navy and a Marine Corps could roll them in a day. Counting on the NZ military to protect you in the event of an apocalypse is likely to be unwise.

> the system incentivizes short term greed

This is the alpha and the omega of the whole thing.

Opportunistic vs Equilibrium :https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

It's amazing how the narrative of paradise, sin, and the need to repent before the world goes to hell is so hard wired into the human psyche. Almost everyone seems to believe it in some form or another.

So much acerbic criticism of the mega wealthy. Odds are good there are a billion people that would consider you crazy rich. Yet, I bet you have not peed on a tree today - and will also dismiss the idea as not any kind of means to "turn the ship around."

But you should totally go pee on a tree instead of pointing fingers while doing nothing to turn the ship around yourself.

http://peeonatree.blogspot.com/

Which way do we turn the ship and how do we convince everyone or even just enough of everyone?

That is an honest no snark question.

The fact is that there are people with will and interest and they are working hard every single day, but they're all pulling in disparate even opposite directions.

> The people fleeing to remote places because of instability are the very same people causing these issues in the first place.

Do you have any evidence for this, or are you just spouting generic edgy anti-capitalist tag lines?

The vast majority of crime in first-world nations is associated with generic poverty-related activity like gang violence, not imaginary cabals of evil hedge fund managers.

This. Also a lot of debt issues are government caused like the crippling and non-dischargable student loans the USG gives teenagers to the tune of six figures. Or all the incentives and propaganda for those who can't afford to buy homes or other large purchases. Or government waste and corruption and war. Or out of control entitlement programs and other welfare abuse. And anti-investment, anti-prosperity, high tax, and high regulatory environments that guarantee places like the south side of Chicago will never, ever recover.

The blame pie for economic issues and social issues is pretty big and 'hedge fund managers' are going to be a very tiny piece. The institutions you may hold dear may be the ones with the largest piece. That should be sobering realization on top of the realization that we tried not-capitalism in the early to late 20th century in some countries and it was responsible for nearly causing WWIII, 100m+ dead, and a legacy of human right abuses that humanity has not seen since or before. Be careful what you wish fore. The society hanging investment managers, business owners, and guys trying to make a few bucks so their kids can goto disneyworld is not a compassionate society leading to utopia, in fact, its the opposite. History has proven this over and over.

> what are you going to do, go back to farming?

Oh no! How will we make money so we can buy food to eat!?....oh wait

What exactly are you concerned about here, ruin? Insanity?

It is written like a generic rail against capitalism but seems to be more concerned about assets trading at a tenth of today's prices

It'll be alright

>The system is rapidly growing out of control and no one seems to be able to stop or halt the insanity. It's like we're all marching towards oblivion and everyone knows it but no one has the will to turn the ship around because the system incentivizes short term greed.

Except for those of us shoving all the rest of you towards safety and being called crazy for our troubles, yeah.

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