Comment by brokeAstronomer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brokeAstronomer | Hacker News Reader

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brokeAstronomer

>> There are far too many documented instances of it actually working to call it a fantasy.

Markets are a tool which can work extremely well if deployed carefully and within a sensible regulatory framework. Given that the world CO2 level keeps rising, we can't eat fish because of heavy metals and we all have forever microplastics in us, I think it's fair to question some of our assumptions.

>> Markets aren't expected to account for externalities. Externalities are the things you're supposed to tax.

Agreed - however taxing externalities doesn't seem to be working out in practice (in the US).

>> You're describing regulatory capture. This is why governments are supposed to have limited powers.

Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture. Government is not the source of all evil. Smaller govenrment would just lead to further concentration of wealth and power within the private sector. We need a balanced system, not blind devotion.

>> Markets are actually pretty good at providing all of those things... The real problem here is that some people can't afford those thing

So can the market provide those things or not? Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just the uber wealthy.

> Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture. Government is not the source of all evil. Smaller govenrment would just lead to further concentration of wealth and power within the private sector. We need a balanced system, not blind devotion.

But there's the problem: The person you're replying to clearly thinks there's too much government. You seem to think there's not enough.

If I had to pick a side of this to bet on, I would bet on it being "too much" rather than "too little" at this point, simply because in the trend has been for the US government to get larger over time, not smaller. The bigger it gets, the less likely it is that it's "not big enough". I understand that the responsibilities we've delegated to the government continue to increase in complexity, but complexity drives exponential growth, which I would also weigh against the "there's not enough government" argument.

Also I'm really not convinced by the argument that "smaller government would just lead to further concentration of wealth and power". I think we agree that wealth is becoming increasingly more concentrated--but so too is the size of the government. There's simply more direct evidence that wealth concentration grows as government complexity grows, at least in the US, because that's literally what appears to be happening!

I would wager that if I look into relative size of a country's government and its concentration on wealth, I'd find that they're not terribly correlated; or if they are, that the data indicates that increasingly government complexity drives increasingly wealth concentration. But I don't have a lot of confidence in that wager! But I also certainly don't buy the naive "markets fix everything" argument, either. People love to game markets, and if they're not controlled in some fashion, fraud tends to win out every time. Just look at crypto!

Too generic terms become an issue at some point. "Government" and "market" are not one thing that you can easily measure to "big" or "small" or "good" or "bad".

To make a technical parallel can we really say "C is good, Java is bad"?

I think focus should be much more on discussing actual policies and their impact - which can become quite complex - rather than stamp everything with "more/less government/market" and then use the predefined belief that one or the other is good. I personally favor various policies, and I can't put all of them at the same time in a box with a label of "more government" or "less government".

> Given that the world CO2 level keeps rising, we can't eat fish because of heavy metals and we all have forever microplastics in us, I think it's fair to question some of our assumptions.

"Idiots will dump mercury in the river if you let them" is one of the assumptions.

> Agreed - however taxing externalities doesn't seem to be working out in practice (in the US).

It doesn't work if you don't actually do it.

But notice the important distinction between "carbon tax which is fully refunded to the population as a divided" and "tax things that aren't carbon to subsidize cronies who waste money on questionable hydrogen cars and ineffective carbon capture nonsense."

> Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture.

It's mostly regulatory capture. The primary driver of wealth inequality is corporate entity size. The billionaires are the early shareholders in megacorps.

The main exception is corporations violating antitrust laws, but this is still a form of regulatory capture, i.e. capturing the government to enforce contracts in restraint of trade when the government ought not to be doing that.

> So can the market provide those things or not? Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just the uber wealthy.

You don't have to be uber-wealthy to afford school. Most of what pays for public schools is the taxes paid by the parents of the students. Where this doesn't work is for the poorest or orphans etc., and this was traditionally handled through charity and scholarships. Ironically things government policies have been decimating by propping up real estate costs so high people can't afford space to have private community organizations, taking the money they could have donated to charity as taxes and spending it on boondoggles and military adventurism and otherwise encouraging people to rely on national governments rather than local communities.

Wealth in a free market is not "concentrated", it is created.

The total wealth in a free market country rises, which can only be explained by wealth being created rather than shifted around.

> Clearly we want everyone to have an education not just the uber wealthy.

Educational materials abound in this country, even for free. For example, I took some MIT courses that were on youtube, for free. I found my college textbook "Special Relativity" at a book sale for $.50. SAT prep books are available free at the library, and are often at thrift stores for a couple bucks.

It's never been easier to get educated.

Speaking as someone who has been both a technical interviewer and an interviewee many times over the past 30 years, I find it a bit disingenuous to compare second hand bookstores to a formal primary or secondary education when it comes to their application in an active job market.

There's the Khan Academy, too. Apparently a lot of home schoolers rely on it, and it is used by students who need extra help.

It's true that what I wrote about is not formal education, but it is education nevertheless and freely available.

It is not only about learning material being available. It is also about live circumstances of people. Think about when you are doing your learning. When do you have opportunity to learn. Think about what other people might be doing at that time, that prevents them from learning. Think about the mental framework you have, that enables you to learn and that others might not have.

Many times when I see some idle shop keeper wasting their time at candy crush on their phone, I think something like:

"Oh my, stop wasting your time! You could read something interesting or even learn a whole new subject!"

But then I remind myself from what a position I am thinking these thoughts. From what kind of knowledge and background. Could people start using their time better? Sure. But it will be damn hard for them, in contrast to probably many people here, including yourself, and we should not forget that. What's more is, that even if those people learned a lot about some subject, let's say even computer programming, there is no accreditation for them. Where can they go, to claim certificates or whatever, for their new knowledge, to get any chance of employment?

My friend Eric Engstrom (yes, that guy) got a programming job at Microsoft despite having zero education beyond high school. He became a team leader for DirectX.

I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering, not software. Yet I got jobs as a software developer with zero certifications.

At the D Language Foundation, we have never asked any of our participants for there certifications. Some have PhDs, some have high school diplomas. We only care about what they can do.

You don't need to have any certifications whatsoever in order to start your own software business and do contract work.

You cannot buy an education. It's necessary to put in the work to learn it one way or another. I learned that the hard way in college. No work, no pass.

While what you say is true, I think it is a failure of generalization. A few special cases show it is possible, but what you don't mention is how extraordinary these cases are and at what time they happened and what background, including ideas, information, location, and motivation the people had.

You can very much buy an education in many places. Money from parents pays for the best universities, no, actually schools already, the best teachers, the best atmosphere/setting for learning. While some children work on a farm, rich people's children will already be learning, simply because the parents can afford it.

There are many places, where it doesn't work like in your extraordinary examples. Just because something is possible for a few, it doesn't mean, that it is generalizable and that it can be done for everyone.

"One of the important ways we make use of donations is in awarding scholarships to highly skilled students. Each $5 you donate contributes to approximately one hour of work by a talented graduate student" from the dlang website.

I think it's good that scholarships are awarded, some money goes to graduate students doing work (even if I think the amount per hour is low), etc.

But I can't square your implications that this type of education is equivalent to self-taught when your own foundation seems to put an emphasis on it. Or is it just marketing for an audience that might believe that they're not equivalent?

Why is there this focus on people from formal education backgrounds or supporting people through scholarships to get a formal education when describing what a donation would go to?

I want to re-iterate. It's not that I believe you can just go sit in a class without focusing and acquire an education. I also don't believe that someone can't learn outside of a formal setting or even that they can't get superior results!

But, it seems to me that there's definitely some sort of difference between equally motivated people in a formal setting and in a self taught setting. And it seems to me that even the dlang foundation acknowledges that implicitly. Obviously there are lots of free resources provided by the foundation as well, so I can't argue there's a strong preference. But, if they were equivalent the foundation could just support one of them. And if a choice was to be made wouldn't the freely available resources be a more efficient allocation of donations?

This post is a great example of how very smart people can fall victim to their own biases.

When you put the "all are welcome" sign on the door of your programming language organization, you're not sampling from "all" but just the people who are already interested in programming, and especially the design and construction of programming languages. These people are inherently motivated to learn and particularly self motivated.

You know as well as anyone that languages in particular, far and away from all other projects in the area of computing, scratch the deepest itches that good developers have. Languages are a siren song for devs who have a burning desire to get to the bottom of computing machines.

And so of course this breed of dev is going to be great whether they have a PhD or not. They are the github-history all green every day crowd. You're skimming the cream of the crop.

But you can't build an entire economy out of the cream. The other people have to do things too. They can't just go to the flea market and pick up a book on "Special Relativity" and learn it. Heck, I got an BS degree in physics and I can't even do that. I needed someone to explain it to me, and a lot of students do. They need the environment that is conducive to learning. I think COVID really proved that people can't just sit on YouTube all day and learn from a screen.

I completely agree and would add that different people have different social needs. I love learning by myself. I don't need an example, I do it for fun. In the universities I studied, I have seen LOTS of people that were learning because everybody was learning. And they were smart, and capable, they just needed an environment and some structure.

While I don't "get" their way of being, I have to acknowledge such people do exist, and it is wasteful to consider the people I "get". Otherwise the other "types" might gather around some stupid leaders that come with ideas like "science kills babies let's burn all scientists on a stake!" (exaggerating a bit, but similar things did happen)

Pointing to unusual people, then claiming that proves they exemplify what should be usual…

That isn’t an argument or solution for anything. That’s state some fact, then state your desired conclusion, without even an attempt at reasoning in between.

Show me any community that turns their success demographics around. Someone pointing at a few successful examples, and saying everyone should do that, won’t be how they did it.

People have suffered in disadvantaged demographics from the dawn of time. They are real. Nobody wants differences like that to exist, but they are pernicious. Context has a huge impact on people and bad contexts are often very self-reinforcing.

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