It's part of a larger economic con centered on the financial industry and the financialization of American industry. If you want this stuff to stop, you have to be hoping (or even working toward) a correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade.
It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - the same as how they've gotten to choose the winners and losers for the past two decades.
The author argues that this con has been caused by three relatively simple levers: Low dividend yields, legalization of stock buybacks, and executive compensation packages that generate lots of wealth under short pump-and-dump timelines.
If those are the causes, then simple regulatory changes to make stock buybacks illegal again, limit the kinds of executive compensation contracts that are valid, and incentivize higher dividend yields/penalize sales yields should return the market to the previous long-term-optimized behavior.
I doubt that you could convince the politicians and financiers who are currently pulling value out of a fragile and inefficient economy under the current system to make those changes, and if the changes were made I doubt they could last or be enforced given the massive incentives to revert to our broken system. I think you're right that it will take a huge disaster that the wealthy and powerful are unable to dodge and unable to blame on anything but their own actions, I just don't know what that event might look like.
> correction that wipes out the incumbents who absolutely are working to maintain the masqerade
You need to also have a robust alternative that grows quickly in the cleared space. In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents, but the ensuing decade of policy choices basically just allowed the thing to re-grow in a new form.
I thought we pretty explicitly bailed out most of the incumbents. A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. 2008's "correction" should have seen the end of most of our investment banks and auto manufacturers. Say what you want to about them (and I have no particular love for either), but Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch. There should have been more, and Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.
> A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy.
Yeah that's a more accurate framing, basically just saying that in '08 we put out the fire and rehabbed the old growth rather than seeding the fresh ground.
> Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch
I disagree, I think they're artifacts of the rehab environment (the ZIRP policy sphere). I think in a world where we fully ate the loss of '08 and started in a new direction you might get Tesla, but definitely not TSLA, and the version we got is really (Tesla+TSLA) IMO. Bitcoin to me is even less of a break with the pre-08 world; blockchain is cool tech but Bitcoin looks very much "Financial Derivatives, Online". I think an honest correction to '08 would have been far more of a focus on "hard tech and value finance", rather than inventing new financial instruments even further distanced from the value-generation chain.
> Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.
Looking forward to the OpenAI (and Anthropic) IPOs. It’s funny to me that this info is being “leaked” - they are sussing out the demand. If they wait too long, they won’t be able to pull off the caper (at these valuations). And we will get to see who has staying power.
It’s obvious to me that all of OpenAIs announcements about partnerships and spending is gearing up for this. But I do wonder how Altman retains the momentum through to next year. What’s the next big thing? A rocket company?
Problem with "it will hurt" is that it will actually hurt middle class by completely wiping it out, and maybe slightly inconvenience the rich. More like annoy the rich, really.
How do you guarantee your accelerationism produces the right results after the collapse? If the same systems of regulation and power are still in place then it would produce the same result afterwards
Yeah, it started with the whole Wall Street, with all the depression and wars that it brought, and it hasn't stopped, at each cycle the curve has to go up, with exponential expectations of growth, until it explodes taking the world economy to the ground.
This is important to point out. All the talk about AI companies underpricing is mistaken. The costs to consumers have just been externalized; the AI venture as a whole is so large that it simply distorts other markets in order to keep its economic reality intact. See also: the people whose electric bills have jumped due to increased demand from data centers.
Americans are subsidizing ai by paying more for their electricity for the rest of the world to use chatgpt (I'm not counting the data centers of Chinese models and a few European ones though)
The Chinese national entrance exam (gaokao?) is notoriously grueling, but doing well pretty much guarantees you a spot in a top university. Would have been useful to me, having grabbed a middle-of-the-road SAT score for Ivies but having failed to apply to one. There's definitely a multi-pronged strategy for ensuring exclusivity.
Bank could lend out money to students, with the future college degree as security. After graduation, the student either gets a job that requires that degree, or licenses that degree to another person or to an institution which collects degrees and licenses them on one or several degree licensing marketplaces. Most would use these third-party re-licensers to simplify the paperwork. For example when a company needs to license a degree for a temporary project of just a few months, or when a degree holder takes leave from their own job for let's say three months. Then she can have some income from renting out her degree during that time.
I'm sure you've already thought about the problem of students who have mortgaged their future degree, but do not graduate for some reason. What happens to the money the bank has invested? This problem is mitigated and solved by packing these degree mortgages into Credit default swaps to hedge the risk. Since most students will graduate and be a return on the investment, we will pack all degree mortgages into investment funds, and offer them on the international financial markets, with sophisticated leverage tools. So, investors will not feel the pain if 1 out of 10 students do not finish their degrees, that will be very much offset by those who do - especially when leverage is used.
This is how we solve social and environmental issues, make education affordable to everybody, create a great investment boom, and make the younger generations stakeholders in the economy. Smart parents would take advantage of degree mortgages for very low monthly rates if they sign them for their child already during pregnancy, meaning they could even be paid off before graduation. That's a good start in life!
I was going to say, "furry porn," but then I realized that you're essentially just looking at the modern version of a pagan animal worship cult (of personality?) with some of those artists. You'd be surprised what gooners would do to appease their favorite werewolf coitus provider.
...PBS? Sesame Street has only ever been a boon to the common kid.
Not to come down on either side, but I am begging commenters to refrain from using a Eurocentric lens when discussing a technology that wasn't even invented in Europe.
I don't know the history. That would be the source of my discontent. Every time things like this come up, the hyperfocus on Western experience erases whatever insight could have been gained by looking at the topic in its totality. My guess is that whatever dynamic the history of the printing press in the East might have lent to this conversation wasn't even considered until I brought it up. That was my contribution.
You should look in a mirror (and proofread). Everything you're accusing me of applies to you. It's an overwrought reaction which indicates that I hit a nerve. You'd better soothe that ego bruise with a bit of curiosity, than with the tantrum you've been throwing.
You've got it flipped. He was working from a false premise; his conclusions were a net negative to the conversation. I brought it back to zero by pointing out the flaw. And now you want to paint me as the bad guy, probably because I dashed the egotism at the core of his mistake, which you drew some amount of esteem from. The same deal as the people who persecuted Galileo for upending the geocentric model of the universe. Just because he couldn't extrapolate all of the ramifications of a heliocentric model doesn't mean he "wasn't contributing" by pointing out its significance.
But I suppose this analogy reveals that your tack is fundamentally European. So, at least you're consistent. What would be better is if you'd have some humility. Say it with me now: "We forgot to consider prior art because it originated from a part of the world that we tend to fail to acknowledge. This failure adulterated our analysis with an inferior premise. Thank you for pointing this out. We will now make a more appropriate analysis using research on the subject that was previously in our blindspot."
Pointing out a problem without providing a solution is still better than pretending that the problem doesn't exist and suffering the consequences of a flawed mental model.
Pointing out a problem is one thing, I don't think anyone here would object to that especially given normal nerd dynamics, but you did also beg everyone to refrain from speaking of things they're most likely to actually know anything about.
>Like I mean who in their right mind would have left the basic oasis of Africa to go freeze their ass off and struggle just to live in the inhospitable areas up north?
I don't know that this is the correct characterization of how out-of-Africa migrations progressed. Youth (and people with the influence to shield themselves from danger) are expeditious, families and societies head where living looks to be easier and away from where living looks to be hard, whatever the pressure may be.
I read a description of this somewhere. Just moving a few km per generation, while being able to maintain direct links to your previous home, would push humans to the extents of the globe over tens of thousands of years.
The generations of microwave after the first few were fantastic. They did what they were supposed to and lasted decades. Once that reputation was solidified, manufacturers began cutting corners, leaving us with the junk of today.
The same thing happened with web search and social media. Now, those selfsame companies are trying to get us to adopt AI. Even if it somehow manages to fulfill its promise, it will only be for a time. Cost-cutting will degrade the service.
It will hurt, and they'll scare us with the idea that it will hurt, but the secret is that we get to choose where it hurts - the same as how they've gotten to choose the winners and losers for the past two decades.
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