Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is representative of a bigger problem within the developed world: the top problem on many people's mind is "Other people have money and I don't." This manifests in a lot of other areas as well: stock market speculation, people asking for government handouts, folks looking for get-rich-quick startup ideas, glorification of the "side hustle", etc.

And I think the root cause of that is that productivity growth in areas needed for basic survival - housing, health care, not getting screwed (legal) - hasn't grown nearly as fast as productivity in consumer goods. Combined with population growth and the entry of the developing world into the developed world, it means that more people are increasingly chasing the same limited pool of houses and doctors, and basically all disposable income goes to them. The focus on get-rich-quick schemes is a rational reaction to being stuck in a game of musical chairs where there are not enough chairs to go around.

Bitcoin's value is fundamentally monetary in nature. Bitcoin itself (less so the cryptocurrency space as a whole) is about financial sovereignty, stable monetary policy, robust uptime guarantees, and resistance to manipulation in the governance.

You are _supposed_ to buy and hold Bitcoin for a long time, because Bitcoin is most important where it gives you an alternative when government money is poor (or even just as a threat to governments that are making monetary decisions - they need to know that their population has a viable alternative if their currency doesn't add enough value).

That necessarily drives a big focus on price.

Also, it is finally a replacement for all the IOUs in the financial system. The financial system is currently IOUs all the way down. Caitlin Long talks about this on a recent Real Vision interview.

"The market structure is fundamentally built on layers of intermediaries and settlement of both securities and payments happen on a delayed net settlement basis. By contrast in crypto, the markets are decentralized, no layers of intermediaries, settlement happens on a real time gross settlement basis..."

This makes me wonder. What is the optimal size of the population for a given country/territory/planet?

That is, the size of the population at which the welfare/wealth of the median individual is maximized.

Given that, as you say, prime land, prime housing, prime infrastructure, prime tourist destinations don't easily scale, yet more people enable better technologies/more efficient production of other consumer goods and services.

Have too few people (in the extreme - a dozen), and you cannot have many nice things - not enough people to create nice art, build houses and cars and computers. Have too many (in the extreme - 100 billion), and there is too much competition for the same houses and tourist spots and what not.

Also depends on how you split it. I'd wager a lot of metropolitan areas are over already. Smaller cities are close to the maximum, but most people in the middle class or lower will feel it is way over already simply due to the cost of things.

There are quite a few fields you could at least slash in half overnight too. Bureaucracy is one: here (small European country) we have way too many managers and people that are only there to move boxes around and cause communication overhead to explode, offering practically no benefit whatsoever.

Right - also, the more people you have, the less attractive automation becomes, even if you already have or are close to achieving the technology.

That’s an elegant and insightful way to describe what’s going on in the developed world. Do you have a vision for a way out of the quagmire of speculation affluenza for the few and envy for the many without opportunity to you know.. make things again?

No, I believe the root cause is that there is so much more stuff to buy in today’s world, and advertising has grown so powerful and visibility of products has increased so much that people can’t resist urges to buy things. So we need more and more money.

I look back at things you could buy 30,40,50 years ago, much of it sucks and doesn’t compare to what you find today. Back then you didn’t need much money because there wasn’t much to buy. I look at the ads and they’re garbage, not engaging at all and doesn’t convince me to want the product. And because people weren’t posting pics of things they purchased to some social media, seeing something cool that I might want to buy usually only happened when going over to a friends house, or seeing a random passerby in the streets. And that meant those people were usually close to your own economic class, so the items weren’t out of your league.

I would say the problem is that there is a big gap between affordable consumer goods and unaffordable things like housing. That makes saving on little things like coffee shops seem pointless, as you are still not going to save nearly enough to make a difference when it comes to buying a house.

Yes it's musical chairs; through monetary policy, reserve banks keep pulling out chairs and thus inflating the value of remaining chairs... Then they'll claim that this is all to prevent global warming.

All this is actually starting to make me doubt global warming. The banks certainly never gave a damn about global warming before. Do I think that people in power suddenly became more altruistic over the past few years? No, from my experience, they became much more selfish! The whole timing with Greta Thunberg media hype followed by COVID19 then multi-trillion dollar bailouts followed by talks of 'green new deals' and the great reset (which is actually just a continuation of existing policies; not a reset by any definition of the word) is starting to all look a bit too convenient.

I've seen first hand how money can corrupt everything. So I'm wondering if it is the science which is attracting the money or the money which is attracting the 'science'. All the climate models are oversimplified and phony; it's pseudoscience... They have tens of thousands of different models and each year they cherry-pick the ones which guessed correctly... Then they keep switching to newer models which keeps proving them right claiming that they did so to keep up with technology (of course not because they were running out of correct old models to cherry pick from)... It's a joke.

I'm not sure I follow your logic here. You're saying that central banks are keeping interest rates low in order to prevent global warming? Generally speaking, I would assume low interest rates = higher economic activity = increased CO2 emissions; not the other way around.

They're using man-made global warming as story to justify their unjust inflationary policies which are in fact all about control and centralization of wealth and power. Global warming could just be rhetoric to convince those people who can see the injustice of what's happening to justify why it needs to happen in this unjust way.

It's a way to justify why we should all be playing the game of musical chairs instead of the game of 'make more chairs' or even 'make more chairs, but each person should only have one chair'.

It all stinks like corruption. If you really wanted to solve global warming, the best solution would be to limit population growth, you could just give people tax incentives to have fewer children. Could be implemented as UBI: You get less basic income if you have more children. That is a much simpler and fairer solution and doesn't require deceiving billions of people with an epic global monetary ponzi scheme. Also we could get rid of useless bureaucratic jobs which are making the lives of billions of people miserable.

„Don‘t ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity“ (stupidity and short term, well intentioned, but in the end egoistic thinking, I would add)

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice" - Grey's Law.

You just need a handful of people to independently see a few opportunities to profit from different activities (which are related in non-obvious ways) and together they can effect great malice without any single individual being aware of their collective malice.

The Upton Sinclair principle ensures that the perpetrators of malice are not aware of it: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Only the victims of malice can see it as such, the perpetrators are the last to see it.

Wow, really cool, thanks for the pointers!! I was always thinking in these terms but never explicitly looked for other people's takes

Very divisive territory you are getting into here :D

Just wanted to add that the track record of predictions about the environment doesn‘t shine a bright light on the (popular) science in the ways you mentioned. Just have a look at the club of rome report. When a part of science gets overly politicised you should get wary.

I think you are too harsh on money. Power corrupts people. Whether thats in the form of a Communist dicatorship, Capitalist dictatorship, winning the lottery (money is a form of power), being a town sheriff that doesn't pay a lot but lets you shoot people and throw them in jail. Power corrupts, it's not necessarily money.

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