Printing Money | Hacker News Reader

Printing Money

neal.fun

52 pointssaadalem16 comments

This is fun, but Amazon and Walmart's revenue are sort of misleading, since they obviously don't get to keep most of it.

Owning technology and infrastructure is not liquid, is that what you are saying? Or are you talking about operating costs?

I believe they are talking about the cost of the goods that Amazon and Walmart sells, and suggesting that instead of showing revenue numbers the site should show profit numbers (which are much lower)

One could argue that personal income is also a kind of "revenue", since much of it is spent on taxes, cost of living, etc. I think the two are analogous.

Say I was a freelance salesman. I buy and sell expensive things that I can't afford. I line up the deal and make it happen. This month it's a cruise ship. It costs $500 million from the manufacturer in Amsterdam, but I can get a client in Dubai to pay $504 million delivered. I get a short term-loan which costs me $200k, plus short-term insurance for $400k. I buy the boat where it is for asking price, and pay $2.7mil to deliver it to the customer.

I made $700k on the deal, not bad. I moved more than half a billion. The _revenue_ number is huge but mostly irrelevant from my personal perspective. Almost all of it was money that was never mine, that I never made.

Yeah, your example stretches my analogy far past its breaking point. You’re right, revenue can be a pretty meaningless number. But where costs are relatively fixed, it can be helpful.

In the case of companies, it can also show how much of the market a company has captured (when revenue == sales).

This is really cool! Can you explain how you factored the velocity and also how the backend works here?

The velocity is the actual speed you're earning money.

The time it takes to earn one dollar at that wage is the time it takes for one dollar to scroll off the screen.

$7.25 an hour means you earn a dollar every 8 minutes, so it takes about 8 mintues for one dollar on the top row to disappear off the side.

If you look at the code for the site, it's not obfuscated, so you can see all the math:

    speed={this.perHour(7.25)}
    ....
    perHour(amount) {
        return amount / 60 / 60;
    }
    ....
    let offset = (1/dollarsPerRow * dollarWidth * speed * Date.now()/1000) % dollarWidth;

Those are the key bits.

Also, there is no backend. It's all written in frontend react. Again, it's not obfuscated, you can poke around easily enough.

So fun when it’s all our there to learn from.

I can’t wait for the web to be an archive of torrented Git-versioned repositories à la Ceptr.org.

“ …today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.

Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions.”

- Prof. Guy Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay

Slightly unrelated, but the scrolling effects remind me of https://www.testufo.com/ (motion tests)

Any change we can get the source of it?

I'm interested in how you did the animations

The US deficit is growing at an insane rate. So does military spending.

What’s gonna happen if this is left unchecked for another few election cycles ?

Like how fucked are we?

Well, we'll have a lot of debt that we mostly owe to ourselves.

Honestly, I don’t believe the current systems can deal with the complexity. Like, it’s an unsolvable shitshow until we start using better tools.

https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/the-future-of-govern...

This depends a lot on how the rest of the world is doing in comparison and how viable inflating our way out of it is.

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