To be precise, the investors who are left holding at the end of the cycle get punished. The early investors who got out make out like robbers.
This system incentivizes pump-and-dump.
We could allocate resources to productive assets by fiscal spending, but that is prevented by politics. Only when "the market" gets its cut can any infrastructure be built in the US. That's also true for much of the medical establishment and pension/retirement systems. If the market was efficient, we wouldn't be complaining about it. Unfortunately, a "free market" and an efficient market (and you could argue whether infrastructure or medicine or income insurance even make sense as markets) are not the same. Most markets that have many individual consumers require regulation to be even close to efficient. Like political and financial enforcement they are too easy to manipulate and the consequences of malfeasance are substantially less than the profits to be made.
So you need a smart balance. And you need competent, honest people in both business AND government.
I don’t think that government necessarily is inefficient. The DMV could be a very efficient place. The fact that it isn’t should cause at least some pause for those advocating more government spending (such as myself).
And the same is true for business. Comcast is terrible. But it doesn’t HAVE to be. Rent-seeking and anti-competitive behavior makes it terrible.
The problem with the above is it weakens democratic institutions by removing the exercise of power from the people the population select to lead.
Inefficiency to me can not possibly be more clearly demonstrated than by ape pictures losing hundreds of thousands of dollars for their purchasers. But we also have examples like Uber spending cash on hand to drive competitors under without having a plan to maintain their own services without heavy subsidy.
I sold a car of mine to Carvana in October. I returned the license plate to the DMV immediately, which is how they're notified that you no longer own the vehicle, waited 7 days, then cancelled my insurance policy on that car. A month later, I got a letter from the DMV that it is a crime to not carry insurance on my vehicle and I will have to reinstate the insurance and pay a $70 fine for letting it lapse. On the car I no longer own, that was now titled in another state and resold by Carvana already.
It took 2 more months and 3 different forms to get the DMV to accept that I no longer owned the car and to stop pursuing me for this "crime".
Sounds like your state has a big problem.
In my state (New York), appointments are generally available within a week and walk-ins are welcome, but those with appointments get priority.
I've never spent more than 30 minutes or so at a NY DMV location and most transactions are available online, including replacement of lost/stolen licenses.
In fact, I decided on Wednesday (11 May 2022) that I wanted to trade in my license for an "Enhanced Driver's License"[0] (EDL) which, among other things, will be required for domestic air travel[1] in a year or so.
That's one of the few transactions that must be done in person. I went online to book an appointment and was presented with a whole bunch of appointment times next week. I chose Thursday (19 May 2022) as it worked best with my schedule, but I could have gone on the 16th if I'd wanted.
So, no. Not all DMVs are a pain or inefficient. Want to make that better in your state? Elect people who will work for you. Just a crazy thought.
Yep. Which is why I said:
...I wanted to trade in my license for an "Enhanced
Driver's License"[0] (EDL) which, *among other things*,
will be required for domestic air travel[1] in a year or
so.
I suppose I could have clarified that the EDL provides RealID and additional functionality as you describe, but I figured that "among other things" and links describing both RealID and EDL, folks could find out for themselves what "among other things" meant.
Perhaps that overestimates the reading comprehension of some folks, but I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume they're morons.
Perhaps that's a mistake, but if so, it isn't my first and won't be my last.
I thank you for clarifying and I'm sure the morons out there will thank you for your pedantry as well.
I'd further point out that this was just a real-life example of a service which must be provided in person and not online and my experience with scheduling an appointment. It could just as easily have been any of several different services which require actually going to the DMV, but that's the one that is relevant to my life at the moment.
As such, even if I'd claimed that an EDL gets me free blowjobs at Federal buildings, I still made the point I was attempting to make.
Edit: Clarified my prose.
The license plate should follow the car and ownership should be changed online as part of the transaction. It sounds incredibly wasteful that every time a car changes ownership the seller must hand over the plates in person to the DMV. And is there no national registry of cars or data sharing between states? Strange that a car can be registered twice.
If your drivers license is stolen you should be able to just order a new one online and have it delivered in the mail. I have been inside the building of our DMV equivalent two times. One time when I did theoretical exam to be allowed a practical driving test, and once for the driving test. I got a temporary license when I passed and the proper license in the mail the next week. This was 20 years ago.
You can do a lot of stuff electronically in my state, transferring a title isn't one of them.
Additional fun thing is that the buyer is supposed to go do that and it can cause the seller headaches if they don't.
It's not sabotage, it's the fact that the government wants a leash on you. I had an experience in the past with the CA DMV where simply forgetting to "de-register" a broken, non-functional motorcycle resulted in the state levying my bank account for hundreds of dollars in registration fees. The FTB had the money debited right out of my account, no different than if someone committed wire fraud.
If a license is stolen, You need to go into the DMV because they'll have to take a new photo. There was a temporary exception due to COVID, but I think that's no longer available since I had to go into the office when my license expired.
There's too many personalized plates and other exceptions in the US to make that viable.
We bought our last family car from enterprise and one day this family walked by while my mom was waiting for me in the store parking lot. The kid recognized our car as a rental they had on a road trip once and got excited about it. Awkward. xD
Custom plates are weird. You can either give them to the new owner or transfer them to another vehicle or return them to the DMV.
This whole "turn in the plates or we'll go after you for not having insurance" seems completely insane. I've never turned in plates and no one's cared.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/vehicle-industry-regi...
Some plates have retention fees, some don't. YMMV.
Now I do chose the office to visit with some care, and also (as an "elite WFH software engineer") time it so that the lines are likely to be shorter, so YMMV.
Rather, there's an online form for notifying them of a sale.
If they have a better mousetrap, good for them. If they don’t and are just overpaying for cars, well, good for me.
In California the DMV experience was greatly improved by having appointments, and for walk in, you get a number and at least have an idea when you'll be called, so you can sit in a waiting area, not have to stand for hours.
COVID has reduced staffing so that makes appointments harder to get.
Also, imagining that corporate offices are models of efficiency is an error.
Absolutely!
I used to work for a Fortune 50 company (that shall remain nameless here) and was moving various groups (mostly marketing and research) away from mainframe batch processing (this was the mid 1990s) toward distributed (Unix) systems.
The inefficiency and waste were just unbelievable. The corporation had tried to move their customer service reps off IBM 3270[0] terminals which were locked in to a single application (with significant retraining required for different apps) with X terminals (what they used to call thin clients) that scraped database queries and stored them in a local database and had a unified UI across all apps.
The app was complete, the roll out team purchased ~USD$300,000,000 worth of systems and infrastructure, and then realized that it would cost USD$150,000,000/year to support/maintain the environment.
So the project was canceled, with hundreds of millions of dollars in Unix boxen and related hardware sitting in warehouses, now without a clear purpose.
When moving folks off of the mainframe, we always pushed them to use the hardware already purchased (a sunk cost). All a group needed to to was put the capital depreciation for whatever equipment they used on their budget lines.
The vendor (again who will remain nameless) priced out equipment (on purpose, I'm sure) so it was cheaper (on the budget line) than the depreciation on the equipment the corporation already owned. In every single case, these groups chose to spend real money buying new equipment rather than taking on the depreciation of the equipment already purchased.
What's more, when evangelizing these changes, I was strongly cautioned to never use the phrase "increased productivity," as that (apparently) made the heads of these groups concerned about losing head count.
tl;dr: The corporation was so fractured and inefficient that group heads would waste corporate dollars in the millions just to maintain their budget and headcount.
I'd love to hear about something like that happening at the DMV or other government office. But I won't, because if folks in the public sector pulled shit like that, they'd be hounded out of their departments.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270
Edit: Added the missing link.
That’s a single program. Forget it, Jack. It’s China Town.
On a per-project percentage basis, the parent's story wasted ~100% of the project's budget. The same number for California's unemployment fraud is less than 2% (the program totaled about $110B).
$300M was wasted in an organization that serves (completely spitballing here) maybe ~500k people among all its customer organizations? The California government serves ~40M California residents.
In any case, government waste is likely orders of magnitude more easily uncovered than even public companies' waste. And when we find out, we can lobby for change and vote for policies that adjust the process to hopefully result in less waste.
But when Coca-Cola overpays 10x for some highly-connected contracting firm to build them some shoddy CRUD software for an internal process we'll probably never heard about it due to a combination of lack of transparency and lack of reporting interest. If we do hear about it, there is no real avenue for lobbying for the change of Coca-Cola policy.
That's not even mentioning that Coca-Cola's entire existence could be (rightfully, in my mind) considered corporate waste because their products actively harm the world, which is a claim much more difficult to apply to the DMV or the California government as a whole.
That's more or less the business model for some consulting companies.
Eventually it was sorted out but at considerable human cost. As of Jan 1 2021 something like 1.5 million claimants had their benefits stopped until they had shown proof of identity. It took months to get it all straightened out, especially for people who didn't have drivers licenses, for example.
At the end of the year the department's surplus went to a general fund (and I think this was also a factor in deciding future budget allocations for the department).
So everyone in his department was incentivized to buy equipment they didn't actually need so that they didn't "lose" their money.
The old, perfectly working, hardware would be put out into hallways and get thrown away in the trash.
Granted a public university is a lot different from an actual government department.
It's totally baffling to me when there's 'the DMV' in US films/tv, because that's just not a place (nor anything equivalent) we have to go to, whether it's 'only fifteen minutes' or more.
(Sure, when my driving licence expires in 10y, or I change address, I'll need to spend a minute or so on an online form.)
I've had other interactions with state/local government services over the past couple years, and they've all been pretty bad. It's like anything else: there are helpful, compassionate people you occasionally speak with, but it's easy to get buried in the complexity and ridiculous inefficacy.
Federal (and state for that matter) tax returns are a good example. Something that every citizen of working age technically has to deal with are incredibly complex.
Things have not improved, to say the least.
Move to New York. I recommend NYC, as the food is fabulous.
Looking forward to having you as a neighbor!
For that reason, I suspect it's good idea to leave interpretive space for the possibility that a given bureaucracy has been intentionally hamstrung, or is Kafkaesque by design.
I suspect calling Comcast is miserable because the process is designed to exhaust and manipulate you out of quitting, for example.
I suspect it's possible to build systems that enable you to ensure an ER visit will cost $500 instead of $10000--but our insurance companies may feel like the uncertainty deters people from seeking care.
Some systems are more resilient to dishonesty and incompetence than others. I suspect a mixed system is the most resilient. But we CAN change the behavior by choosing to reward competence and honesty by who we elect, who we hire, and who we do business with.
You can do most things online with a much better UX than most commercial websites. No crappy ads or pop-ups. Plus when you do need to go in, you book a time slot at a DMV center online.
Recently I had to bring my daughter for a driving license to the one in Brockton, MA. When you go in, they give you a token number. The currently processing token number is shown on a huge LED display on the wall. Hundreds of customers are in there, many of them don't speak much English, etc., but things move pretty smoothly and fast. Very efficient.
If I had to deal with customers at the DMV, I think I'd be grouchy too.
Another reason to try and get as much of it online as possible, which I think is most of it nowadays.
One of my requirements of a retirement destination is municipal broadband. No BS, just a fair price for a service that's actually treated like a utility.
The idle rich who can't find anywhere worthwhile to play with their nearly-free money (until recently ZIRPish) are a bug in the system. Oh, but lets pretend we are captains of industry by saturating the world with sure-failures. "I wEnT tO GsB!"
And government is absolutely inefficient, which is a good thing actually. Despite the efforts of conservatives, government still has to account for many many corner cases and special needs. Ask any Agile TDD aficionado how this affects velocity.
I am fine with people who are realistic about government being inefficient, but I insist that they nonetheless try their very best to improve that efficiency (fully considered efficiency, not just making life worse for government workers or people seeking government services). The problem is when you elect people who have an interest in making sure the government is inefficient because then they can use that as justification to enact their ideological goals of cutting government services.
When you buy/sell crypto - money changes hands. That money wasn't really "allocated" to crypto, beyond miner fees, just redistributed. That cash still exists.
The resources being allocated are graphics cards, human time, and electricity AFAICT.
The power usage of crypto is relatively small compared to other active human endeavors. It's power usage doesn't approach other arbitrary value stores like gold and government backed fiat markets. Could it go somewhere else? Yeah - but could we reasonably produce enough to offset it in a positive sum game - definitely. As long as renewables are cost efficient (read: truly competitive with non-renewables) and are net-zero on emissions this misallocation of resources would be allocated to renewable power production in an efficient market.
Graphics cards being misallocated... I'm not sure saying markets are inefficient because a financial market is outbidding video gamers is a compelling argument. Scientific use of graphics cards seems like a small part of the market, but I may be mistaken here.5
Gold is a requirement for industrial purposes, for jewellry, for chemical processes for medication.
Visa/Mastercard perform many hundred of thousand transactions per second.
BTC is limited to 350k per day, and consumes the equivalent CO2 impact as Austria. It can't and won't ever scale, which leaves it open to market manipulation and centralization as transactions move off-chain.
It's not a small amount of energy wasted, and there are significantly more valuable uses for that energy, such as aluminum production or water desalination.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
That might be true but 46.64% of gold demand is for "investment", and a further 8.58% is for "central banks". In other words, most gold produced is hoarded and not used for anything productive. If you're against bitcoin because you think it's a non-productive use of energy, you should also be against investment/central bank use of gold.
Bitcoin is intentionally wasteful, and I say this as a technical admirer. Its genius is the extremely simple idea of making writes to a distributed database so unimaginably harder than reads, so that untrusted network peers behave themselves and don't invalidate the state of the shared ledger. The network literally just asks you to spend your time counting to N at the top of your lungs so you don't cheat, if that's not waste then I don't know what is waste.
This 'waste' is necessary when you don't trust your peers, you're buying trust with it, cold hard trust, as rock solid as P != NP. But look at the sheer hype crypto has amassed since 2017 and tell me with a straight face that all those "applications" need trustless distributed peers. NFTs literally store the actual data of the token on centralized servers that can go down or go wild with your data at any moment they goddamn please, the NFT on the blockchain is merely a thin reference.
The ideal path for distributed trustless blockchains would have been as a small niche, an "elite shock trooper" technique when distributed trust among trustless peers is absolutely necessary. Ideally, miners would understand the simple fact that it's of no use to keep bringing better and better silicon to the arena, as the network swallows all in its big mouth anyway, and the network would then grow naturally so that it's approximately the power of NETWORK_SIZE * CURRENT_PC_POWER at any current year, instead of a never ending race to the bottom of sacrificing more and more silicon to the God Of The Hash.
Alas, from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
Silicon and other electronic parts also get dumped into this market, when the capacity used to build those devices could be used for other things.
That is an unbelievable statement just on the face of it.
But if we say: "What is the energy use per transaction?" what then?
The inefficiency of crypto currency is legendary.
"likely"? What do you mean?
And that illustrates how incredibly inefficient crypto is
Gold mining and bitcoin are currently roughly on-par. But gold's energy usage isn't just mining. It's the entire supply chain from Cash 4 Gold stores, long term storage, smelting/recycling, etc. I don't have a good reference for the total cost of gold.
However, the point still stands. Datacenters in the US use total energy less than 2 bitcoins. How many of those datacenters are moving fiat around? Way less than half?
Things like brewing tea and heating houses take a ton of energy. Moving money around doesn't!
Crypto is a huge waste, and that site does not suggest otherwise.
That is not true from what I see (modulo contract enforcement and policing of anti-social elements). There are many examples of smoothly functioning markets. With my economics geek hat on the things required for a market include:
* All participants must have choice, be able to enter and leave in the medium term.
* There must be clear information available about the properties of the goods and/or services
* There must be clear information about the prices.
The first condition (choice) can be rough on suppliers. The "choice" for a coffee shop is closing or bankruptcy. But for the supplier of electricity from a hydroelectric dam the choice is different. There are no clear boundaries.
For the consumer they can substitute potatoes for kumera but there is no substitute for food. Everybody must eat.
So: Reticulated water and electricity are bad things for markets. Vegetables (except during famine) and entertainment services are good
The government has heavy handed regulations distorting the market and spent the last years creating money out of thin air and killing small businesses.
The government propping the market up during the pandemic kept alive the myth that the market is always growing but also caused a terrible inflation.
Now that the market is going back to reality the government can't just print more money again - or inflation will kill the entire country.
The incoming crash will hopefully pop some of the bubbles the government created in the last 20 years. But it will be painful.
I'm trying to follow this but not understanding it. What do you mean by " Only when "the market" gets its cut". A you referring to public/private partnerships here or pork barrel politics? Something else entirely?
Probably should start putting some energy into getting ready for pre-industrial age living again.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
Too many people just want too much shit. 7 billion people are really not that many - but 7 billion people who wants to live like Westerners that's a big problem.
All the while we are still living in the age of exploitation. We can build marvelous things now but our recycling is still stuck somewhere in the medieval ages...
This whole party can only last if the recycling of an iPhone becomes as financially sexy as building one...
Every single one of those industries uses multiple CRUD apps in the course of their business operations. The database is one of the most important technologies of our civilization.
Snark aside, it is bit disheartening to see all this capital being thrown into handwave-y Web3 verticals.
I used to enjoy MMOs too. I stopped playing and took up gardening of all things :). I'm still not sure what the economic value of web2 is yet, but if you find out I'll attend your showHN.