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Whenever I want to get really angry, I convert the funding the latest Uber But For Pets On The Blockchain Using LLMs into "R01s" - the standard $1.250 million dollar NIH grants that are considered career making in the biological sciences.

You could change the world with the amount of money he's been given to...do whatever it is he can't even articulate.

Yeah, but you can change the world, and it doesn't necessarily mean you'll make a lot of money, and that's all anyone cares about, so what are you gonna do?

I think one of the problems is there are ludicrous amounts of money to be made changing the world, enough to make whatever's happening for 99% of most hype-fueld ventures today look like drops in an ocean. So if what I'm saying is to be believed then why doesn't the market optimize for it? Like, if there's so much money to make why doesn't it happen?

I think the answer is in two parts. One, there is a political environment that is very much interested in preserving itself regardless of whatever so-called benefits could come from actually changing the world, and two the market isn't really some kind of god like oracle that always does the "right" thing.

I'll give you an example to better explain what I mean to say.

The Roman Empire had a lot of good things going for it. They had many of the necessary ingredients for an Industrial Revolution to take place more than a thousand years earlier. So why didn't it? Clearly there was a lot of money to be made in hindsight, but in their political environment it was never going to happen.

Rome, as impressive as it was, had a small political class of movers and shakers who owned most of the wealth, and to those people if given more money they'd just buy more farmland. That's it. Literally, to them, the Roman political elite, the only way to invest money was buy farms.

I think in today's day and age we're in a similar conundrum. Obviously it's more nuanced and sophisticated than where the Romans were at, but most of the people who have power today can't understand or imagine the benefit of improving the world. The market isn't magically selecting for those things because they are a large part of the market.

The market favors the market. Capital begets capital.

Humans are at best an afterthought.

Humans are the ones who own and deploy capital. It's ordinary people's savings and pensions. But people like to invent boogymen so that they don't have to take responsibility for their action, so they blame wall street and conveniently forget that its their own money that wall street is managing.

Why does there have to be anyone held responsible at all? Couldn’t it be possible that given the present day’s circumstances everybody just does the best they can, and, nonetheless, it leads to regrettable results?

My example of Rome earlier want meant to point to their political elite as a Boogeyman. I meant it more like despite their best efforts an Industrial Revolution was virtually impossible in that environment.

Funny enough having slaves and oligarchy was exactly the kind of thing that held Rome back. I mean only to imply that in todays day and age, we have our version of that same situation, and similarly there is untold prosperity forever waiting to happen until the status quo changes.

> Why does there have to be anyone held responsible at all?

Because they were granted power, and responsibility was the other half of that equation.

Someone's having a "Are we the baddies?" moment :-)

Ordinary people don’t have savings and pensions, at least not in the US.

Almost 50% of Americans directly or indirectly benefit from the stock market. You don't think they're ordinary?

> Humans are the ones who own and deploy capital.

This is a silly argument, Hitler was human too.

> It's ordinary people's savings and pensions

Exactly, so my pention is being used to reward unrpoductive businesses that just do damage to society.

Note that by "capital" meant material, not financial (although the latter reflects the former). Corporations are growing in power at a rate faster than people are. B2B grows faster than B2C.

Even then, private pension funds are a scourge indeed. State-managed PAYGO systems are far less destructive.

Beside, the distribution of economic power is heavily lopsided. Most people have close to none.

Those who have the brunt of it are setting up the system for their own benefit. Under the guise of FreeMarket™ we end up with an economy planned by the wealthy so that they can grow their fortune.

State managed pension systems are a pyramid scheme. Government shouldn't be involved in things that society can manage on it's own.

*can manage on its own well. The market manages - explicitly or through regulatory capture and toadies - a hell of a lot of things that the state probably should, like the Texas power grid. Markets are rarely efficient except in the very short term and very small scale.

The market is the best solution when the optimum is a maximum. Growth is absurd in many fields.

- Food => A steady state is optimal. Growth seeking directly leads to the obesity crisis

- Health => the sector should be working on planning its own obsolescence, not on growing.

- Housing => Ever increasing humanity's footprint is destructive and should be limited.

etc...

> - Health => the sector should be working on planning its own obsolescence, not on growing.

That's what it was before government intervention, at least in UK and US. Worker's organisations had employed their own doctors and managed very good, driving medical professionals wages down. Doctors associations asked governments to intervene, license their profession and used this licensing to punish doctors who would work for such organisations.

And now people see broken systems and think that even more intervention would improve things.

That sounds like an argument that someone with an unusual amount of wealth and power might make to downplay the unusual amount of responsibility that wealth and power confers on them.

In today's economy power and wealth are not even close to evenly distributed.

Claiming that responsibility should be evenly distributed is therefore a highly disingenuous argument.

Technology itself has an emergent will that is independent of humans who create and operate it. A global technological system is not subject to rational human control.

Please see the book Technological Slavery by Dr. David Skrbina and the books of Jacques Ellul on this matter.

The book Technological Slavery is not "by" David Skrbina. It is by Theodore Kaczynski. Skrbina just wrote the "afterward" in that book.

Right, I thought the attribution was to him, since afaik he compiled Ted's writings.

No, Kaczynski compiled his own writings. He also wrote a second book, Anti-Tech Revolution. In Kacynski's latest edition of Technological Slavery Skrbina's introduction doesn't even appear. It was a shitty introduction anyway.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

No snowflake blames itself for the Moloch avalanche it creates.

Ps I just want to be clear that I don’t use the word “political” in its normal, toxic and conspiratorial way. I just meant to say the present combination of policies and their incentives for the various stakeholders.

Indeed. The investors and boards care not about total amount od wealth a venture could generate, but about the amount they can capture. A $100B benefit to the world, of which the people involved can capture only $1K is useless, compared to $10M world benefit of which they can capture $9M (and the preferred one is the one which earns them $100M while giving the world negative $1B).

With the amount of money I spent on my car (which is not a lot compared to what most people spend) I could have saved several people by donating to givewell, at a comparatively trivial inconvinience of having to bicycle/take the bus to work.

But I didn't, because the money is mine to do with as I please. Just like the billionairs money is theirs to do with as they please.

Technically correct, but can be applied to a lot of things that were technically correct:

- Land was the Lord's to do with as they pleased

- Slaves were the owner's to do with as they pleased

etc.. if the wealth is gathered through exploitation, I think it is appropriate to criticize how that wealth is being used. Hell, it's appropriate to just criticize the wealth, I think.

But these things are shades of gray and rarely as clear-cut as slavery. For example, let's say you're the only job in XYZ town. People aren't forced to work there, but they kinda gotta. Things are not so simple in most cases.

>...he is trying to build after running we work to the ground...

I do not disagree with your thesis, but Adam Neumann got paid close to $1 billion to leave WeWork. Sounds like he ran it in the most personally profitable way possible. Although, still well short of his trillionaire goal.

This makes the main point stronger, not weaker. The main point was that no rational person would ever found his business.

The overarching point is that the way market capitalism is structured today increasingly incentivizes these kinds of decisions.

That is not to say that Softbank completely dropped the ball on monitoring and oversight. Under no circumstances should Neumann have been allowed to self-deal by purchasing buildings with WeWork share collateral and leasing them back to the company.

I think it's because he seems like that God,-like man who is going to lead you to the promised land! He's like a TV preacher, he's got that charisma and you went to follow him! And give him a billion dollars.

To paraphrase Matt Levine: the fact that you lost a billion dollars means someone else trusted you with a billion dollars, and that’s reason enough for financiers to trust you with yet another billion, thinking surely you’ll get it right this time.

Yup, you see this pattern elsewhere whenever it comes to credentials.

Oh they went to __ school, they must be good. Oh they worked at __ co, they must be good. Oh they worked under __ [team/manager], they must be good. Oh they launched a [fund/startup] before, they must be good.

Once you get the foot in the door once, it's easier to get your foot in the next 10 doors.

This is true, but it's a two-edged sword. If you don't continually open new doors it becomes, "Oh, they haven't done anything new in N years, they must be bad."

That would perfectly explain why such people pursue short-term gains over everything else and once things start to look bad, take the golden parachute and start another initiative to repeat all of it again while being lauded as "serial entrepreneur".

Reminds me of the story about not firing the programmer who just caused a million dollar bug in production. Why would I fire him? I just spent a million dollars training him.

You really do learn a lot with these big mistakes though. I mean you can read all the books you want, until you’ve actually lived through a major outage on a high traffic system I think there’s certain things that are just really hard to understand.

programming dies not have the element of chance that incesting does. Its a bit like conoaring exact science and gambling

That's the public-facing reason.

The real reason is that dropping him after the first big losses would make it clear that you f'd up by backing him in the first place.

The article says basically the same thing (though I suppose messiah is a bit of a demotion from god).

> because he has the resemblance of the kind of messianic white guy that is able to take a product and sell it

Well from the article he gets the money from A16Z. I will say both of them are in the same boat on using other people money.

Oh man thank you for that. Just the other day I was thinking about this stuff, I mean you can literally make no mistakes for years, but it only takes one weak moment and your life can be ruined. For example I am currently unemployed and teaching myself programming after a few bad years I turned my life around, but last year I had a weak moment and I bought some stuff that I couldn't really afford and also don't really needed (it was a Nintendo Switch, so I could relax a little after learning all day), it was something around 1000 Euro. Was it my fault that I bought it?, of course, but man, resisting is so hard when you can buy this stuff everywhere, even when you're sitting on the toilet you can buy it, I mean that's crazy. Like I said, it only takes one weak moment.

Did buying a Switch ruin your life??

How do you propose to regulate what investors can and cannot do? That seems to be at the core of it.

> Banks can shut down and the executives can keep their millions in bonuses, while you who put your money in, should’ve known better about FDIC insurance limits.

Man you just made this up. They do lose their equity and nobody lost their bank accounts.

It helps to remember that there are apparently $120B in “stablecoins” that are used by real people to trade memecoins like SHIB.

All is well with capitalism /s

At least, we can be confident that no one put anything like 120B into those stablecoins. Sadly, the real underlying amount is probably greater than 10% and even THAT'S a very depressing number

No, no, you don’t understand, it was all those darned gays ruining everything!

Sounds like a farce but Fox really did try to blame “woke banking” for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.

Those grifters at Fox are geniuses. They know their audience very well and how to take an uninformed mind down any path they wish.

I strongly dislike this kind of take. They believe what they are saying themselves. Try talking with a person you deem as a right wing nutcase.

They absolutely don't believe what they're saying, they know it's political kayfabe. That was one of the findings during the deposition phase of the Dominion Voting Systems legal case.

Okay, maybe their bullshit doesn’t make sense even to them, but I believe fully in my ideology which you’d deem the most backwards and right-wing of them all: Islam. Sorry, my mistake to generalize my experience to American conservatives. Still I’d say a great percentage of them believe in what they are saying, maybe not Fox but their audience.

What does that have to do with anything? This was a court case brought on by repeated lying from Fox News anchors about the validity of election machines and thereby the 2020 election itself. Islam is nowhere is the picture.

Fox News doesn't care about other flavours of right-wing politics unless it directly helps their preferred candidates get elected.

Islam is related because I see people all the time not believing that the believers actually believe. This was what I objected to in top comment.

Can't agree more.