buildstatements

Yeh the central line is AWFUL. I used to travel out of my way to avoid it.

There are many tasks for which speed is not an absolute requirement.

I bet there are lots of places that parallelisation makes more computers within the ballpark of acceptable performance perfectly cromulent to keep around.

Heck, my 2015 mac is a perfectly serviceable media player when I watch sport.

Yeh try TinySeed - the help is likely more valuable than the money, which in itself likely helps a great deal.

You have to be willfully ignorant to believe a proposition that no one cares, and willfully naive to believe everyone will.

Look at https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth and take 5 minutes to look at the data on the rest of the site and you will understand how much life has improved not just in raw numbers (there are more people living above the poverty line than existed 100 years ago), but more importantly in percentage terms - a far smaller fraction of people live in poverty today than in 1880.

In fact, the number last time I ran it was that less people live in abject poverty in 2019 than did so in 1880 - despite a 7-8 fold increase in population.

> though I will be waiting for an FDA-approved vaccine myself.

If it was July, and this post popped up, heck even November pre-US election when we were told the vaccine was months away, would that change the equation?

I feel like there are two questions here:

1. is this safe? If so, how safe?

2. Is it worth trying?

Question 1 is quantitative and verifiable, whereas question 2 is one of risk preference.

Homebrew seems unfair: https://radvac.org/a-homepage-section/

Trying it is IMHO a risk calculation once you've jumped the "is this credible" bar.

I only saw part of the Lex interview, and in the part I watched Loeb was saying if we had seen it on the way TOO Earth, we could have sent a rocket to investigate.

If we aren't looking, and a chance arises, we'll miss it, and if we do spot something like it early, what are the chances we are ready with a rocket to go look?

Would be nice if humanity could pre-plan. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/be... is a less controversial example.

Step 1: Define in such a way I am right.

Step 2: I am right.

When aggregating at the country level, data skews massively. China and the US are more like the EU than Norway or England.

Compare China (1,300 million) and Norway (5.5 million), or the US (350 million) and Singapore (5.6) and the data gets weird. Compare Connecticut (3.5) and Norway, Liechtenstein (0.038 mil) and The District of Columbia (0.6 mil), Beijing (25) and Australia (25), Guangxi (48) and Uganda (45), and the comparison is more reasonable.

NB The District of Columbia has the highest GDP PPP Per capita in the world - higher than tiny, I-can't-believe-its-not-money-laundering Liechtenstein and with ~20 times the population.

> The key policy question, one that drives so many others, is whether the city should prioritize full-time drivers over part-time and casual drivers.

I wish EVERY policy decision was structured this way. Tell me the groups, tell me the trade offs, then say why you've chosen X perspective as paramount, and explain what policy helps most from that perspective, and the costs to other groups.

I am fully aware that is never going to happen, but it would be lovely if it did.

> not just the enterprises that employ low/no skill labor or their consumers.

Why would any company ever employ anyone in the close-to-minimum-wage bracket? Amazon gets flack for employment, and Google gets none. Only one of those two has made room for any significant number of close-to-minimum-wage workers.

This is a massively perverse incentive that prioritises how rich people feel about themselves over how people without much actually live. IMHO, that's about as close to a working definition of evil as I can muster.

Semi-related: this is also why basic income will never work. Basic income will be seen, inevitably, as subsidising rich companies, which will lead to it being killed off.

+1 from me.

I think it is the opposite - it is a consequence of which system has better long term surviveability.

Companies survive because they don't die. That seems trite, I know. The consequences of it are important, as the equation is one where no matter how well you do, avoiding death is what matters.

SHL at Gumroad is a great example. SHL was encouraged to quit by the VCs when Gumroad was not a clear unicorn[1]. SHL chose not to let Gumroad die, and Gumroad lives.

The problem with all the ideas like the one Yanis Varoufakis proposes, is that they will almost certainly do well in good times, but companies survive because they don't die, and any system like the one you mention will lead to more dead companies.

That's a big claim I know, but imagine a situation where a company has 20 people - 4 sales and 8 support (secretaries, returns, admin) in the office and 8 people who work in fulfillment - a warehouse and lets say deliveries. Times get tough, and they are forced to have a vote on who needs to be sacked - how do they vote? 12 of the 20 work together, do you really think they will vote to have their friends in the office sacked?

And would they even get to that point? Why would anyone ever vote to lose their job? And what about pay rises? How do you negotiate pay rises when everyone votes? In a multi-division company, lets say 3 divisions, would everyone vote to take a lower pay than people in a more productive division? Would hiring be run along profitability lines, with one division growing large, or prestige/some other political goal like maintaining voting block power?

Capital has clearly aligned goals that round to "don't die". Capital will be assigned in productive areas, pay rates will be higher in more valuable divisions (AWS vs Amazon Warehouse workers) and kill off products that aren't working (See Google).

At the meta, system level, there is also alignment. Capital can be reassigned to different companies, aligning the individual players with the system overall. That is why Blackberry was valued below its cash on hand at one point - capital was reassigned as Blackberry was more likely to blow through the cash than grow. A system where shares can not be reassigned has no system level optimisation which saves the system, even as individual companies die.

The same is not self evidently obvious or clear in collectivist systems, and always needs a series of extra steps to overcome self interest to be possible, none of which are convincing over longer timeframes.

Any collectivist system would only need a very small bias towards something other than optimising profitability to have long term terrible consequences. Homo Sapiens had a tiny advantage over Neanderthals and other Hominids, and we are here and they are not. The casino advantage in most games is < 3% and think how much money they make.

Collectivist business ideas will have all the same problems of politics, combined with the ability to die completely, which Governments do not suffer outside of war, as they have a taxation monopoly.

[1] https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting - "Some of my investors wanted me to shut down the business. They tried to convince me that my time was worth more than trying to keep a small business like Gumroad afloat, and I should try to build another billion-dollar company armed with all of my learnings — and their money."

The problem with this view is that it is hopelessly uncomprehensive. When you start on the politics stuff, where do you stop?

Should Coinbase have a political opinion on native rights in South Australia? What about the status and social standing of Burakumin in Japan? What about the Indigenous goups in Taiwan: the Ami, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Puyuma, Rukai, Tsou, Saisiyat, Tao (Yami), Thao, Kavalan, Taroko (also Truku), and Sakizaya?

I think Coinbase should have said "we are a deeply political company concentrated on a single issue to the exclusion of all else. If you want to work where there is more than a single political focus, we are not a good fit".

You can't optimise in all directions, and being clear about what is in scope and out of scope is vital, not just in tech but in life.