112 karma · joined May 17, 2024
A long time ago I read someone saying "Lisp is the only language where I spend more time thinking than typing". Recently, when I was telling ChatGPT what logic I wanted written on what data structures, I realized the same was true about having an LLM write any other language.
But there is reason to expect the trajectory to change. Currently the expectation is that, even if most people died out, there are very fecund (and very religious) groups that would repopulate the world. So the pro-natalism movement isn't needed to save humanity, just to save the 'normal' people.
No, the pronatalist movement is premised on the belief that humans should not go extinct. If the entire world had the Korean birthrate (and it does seem to be moving that way), extinction would happen in 25 generations.
But the point of PE buying a company is so that the company can help PE's mission, not PE helping the company's.
In Canada, there are 'Labour Sponsored Venture Capital Corporations' with union overseers to do this and special tax deductions for investing money through these.
They are, of course, a giant failure that neither provides easier access to capital for entrepreneurs nor generates any notable return for investors.
If you believe all that then it sounds like you should invest 100% of your assets in systemically important bank stocks. If they have literally zero risk due to unending bailouts then your risk-adjusted returns will be amazing.
Whether or not they did, it's still a necessary part of the discussion.
It reminded me of Naval Ravikant idea, except Ravikant was talking about money and Chiang wasn't:
"In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky. We want to factor luck out of it." (https://nav.al/rich)
There's something to be said for providing real physical input to a real physical HID.
I think things will get better, the effects of the above will lessen with a rate cut and probably a repeal, but the golden era is past.