schmidtleonard

About 100 years ago, American capitalists drunk-drove the US economy into a ditch and the government had to jump-start it by allocating capital itself. The jobs were in national parks, schools, housing, and rural electrification. If you've ever been to a national park, chances are decent you walked by/over a plaque or stamp commemorating it.

It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.

Yes, they can print, but they can also tax capital. It's not actually impossible. We already do it a tiny bit, we've done it more in the past, and contrary to the dogma blasted from the billionaire-owned media outlets and drilled in billionaire-think-tank-approved Econ 101 curricula the universe will not actually explode if we do it again.

Can we stop with pushing all of the taxes into the work-consume economy and out of the invest-return economy? The latter is eating the world, would it really hurt it to help clean up its own messes for once?

Not if the gaggle of shell companies was difficult to invest into or had enough rights to make it a strategic threat. But sure, wave those infomercial-hands some more and maybe you'll convince me that I can't use a screwdriver.

And I'm sure these two goobers would call me a luddite for alleging that OpenAI had agency in allowing the terminator to get out and should therefore be held accountable. Is it some kind of mental block?

No, LLMs would be overkill for arguing with you.

Progressive corporate taxation could make it happen for reasons other than dodging the ghosts of chemical sins past!

Progressive corporate taxation would give the market an incentive to do spinoffs and undo the merger wave.

Or we could just roll antitrust policy back to what it was before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installed the Consumer Welfare Standard, the idea that companies must be allowed to merge if they can scribble a tall tale with crayons on butcher paper about how the merger will benefit consumers, for sure, pinky promise. This is obviously mega-rigged, it comes from the Robber Baron era, it was defeated before (look up Louis Brandeis) and it can be defeated again (look up Lina Khan). They didn't even change the talking points (dontcha know, the Standard Oil monopoly reduced the price of Kerosene by 70%?!) -- time is a flat circle when it comes to anti-trust policy. Let's spin it back to the part of the circle where we win.

No, the people with assets are the adjudicators. They investigate themselves and find nothing wrong. An honest process with an honest conclusion, if ever I saw one.

I agree with your point, just not with your numbers.

Even your new numbers: $10M NW, half of it goes to luxury housing, the rest gives you $500k/yr of passive income and that's pretty damn nice by any standard that doesn't involve employing others. I get that this is HN where many of us aspire to such things, but surely that's beyond the point where one should feel wealthy?

Quite the opposite. Whatever they did to earn the income with which they originally bought those assets was 100 times more honest than the relentlessly self-serving politics through which they pumped those assets by creating a living hell for their compatriots.

$10M at 10% returns is $1M/yr passive. That'll pay for an expensive apartment before you consider working.

In fact, that's sort of the problem: the massive "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are" cash flows run away exponentially from the "poor people get paid for working" cash flows, inflating the price of any inelastic good beyond their reach. The economy stops being about work and starts being about wealth. Which might be fine if most people were wealthy enough to not work, but that's overwhelmingly not the case so it's overwhelmingly not fine.

It annoys the heck out of many Americans as well.

Once you realize that 10% of households are getting $200k+/yr of unearned income and 1% of households are getting 1.3M+/yr of unearned income by virtue of owning lots of assets in an economic system geared to pump assets at the expense of literally everything else, it becomes very clear why the social contract experienced by the rest is undergoing rapid deterioration yet still has legions of influential staunch defenders that come out of the woodwork any time someone proposes even modestly pushing back on the worst of it.

Oops, did I say "unearned income"? Forgive me, I meant unrealized gains -- I didn't mean to imply that any taxes were due on those massive passive flows of money. Perish the thought!

He is the living, breathing stereotype of what I would expect from an "economics professor for almost 30 years":

"I got in early to the ponzi and life is good can't see what the ungrateful young'uns are whining about!"

Yep, in mid Febuary. The incident kicked off early July.

Not faked. Intentionally reckless, in (probably correct) anticipation that the recklessness would be rewarded rather than punished as it ought to be.

The timeline is mighty suspicious. 4-5 months after moltbook and they cook up a plausibly deniable but extra hype "moltbook at home."

The rapid advances in model capability lead to constraints that could have caused this coincidence organically, but it sure could also have been caused by the atrocious incentives we create by piling handsome rewards on the party most responsible for the "fuckup." I am not jumping to cut myself on Hanlon's Razor for this one.

No, that's not the usual response, because people in this situation have evaluated those alternatives and will be easily able to articulate what is wrong with them (pay). Also, the 4% figure treats doordash as employment. In a parallel universe where the pay was decent, that could be reasonable. In this universe, not so much.

These are boomer-tier talking points and if you bring them up to a kid stuck in this position you will get dunked on and you will deserve it. Unless you found a shy kid, in which case: congratulations on your new title as undefeated shadowboxing champion.

Can all the king's agents and all the king's men stop Teams from frequent silent failures to deliver a short message in Year of the Lord 2026?

Yeah, but the "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are" parts of the economy do tend to exponentially run away until a big enough shitshow incinerates enough capital to reset the clock.

Pool's closed.

As opposed to posting on HN complaining about reddit, which is where the real money's at? Nah, this shit was dank enough to make it into popular culture. We have:

1. The shamelessness absurdity of using "market is up" to deflect from a pedo scandal

2. The fact that the market said "nope" and tanked immediately after Bondi tried to lean on it

I've heard a few traders refer to it as "The Bondi Top" -- she really top-ticked it to perfection. We all wish she hadn't.

This is a story of other careers having salaries pushed down relative to inflating essentials and the resulting economic surplus being squeezed into asset portfolios. It's a story of rich people getting paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are and soaking up more than 100% of economic growth for the last 50 years. Not a story of software engineers working for a living and getting what would have been a blue-collar salary for it.

> arguments against mercantilism

It has been funny to watch the rise of "China is beating us" rhetoric against the steady backdrop of "mercantilism is obsolete/bad" dogma, because the elephant in the room is that China has been running a textbook mercantilist playbook.

Overinflated relative to the wet dreams of the ownership class.

The open source tooling got quantization support 3 years ago! It was a lesser type of quantization, but more than enough to prove that the savings just go to bigger models.

Hey, that's not fair! It's also used for degenerate gambling.

> more nuance

Not enough to diffuse liability. 15 years ago when recommender algorithms were the new hotness, I saw every single group of students introduced to the idea immediately grasp the implication that the endgame would involve pandering to base instincts. If someone didn't understand this, it's because

> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair

Also, if I was a corporate simp conspiring to destroy Linux, this is exactly the type of stupid hill I would try to bait the open source community into dying on. If they add a stupid compliance feature that everyone bypasses in practice, there isn't much I can do, but if they insist on openly flaunting the law I can go to war.