alexgieg

Consider this simple example, taken from the Austrian school (their criticism of other economic schools is pretty good; their proposed solutions, not so much):

Suppose you have $3 in hand, and you want a printed issue of the NYT. You take your $3, give it to the newsstand owner, and he gives you a NYT issue.

Why did this exchange happen, rather than no exchange at all?

From your perspective, because you value having a printed issue of the NYT more than keeping your $3, otherwise you'd have kept the $3 and not bothered.

From the newsstand owner, because he values having $3 more than maintaining that copy of that NYT issue on the stand, otherwise he'd have refused your money.

So in the exchange both sides perceive it as increasing their respective satisfaction, so both profitted from it.

Hence, the question on which is worth more, the bills and coins amounting to $3, or the printed issue of the NYT, is meaningless without adding a necessary qualification or "for whom".

That very basic weirdness is inherent to all monetary exchanges, and it builds up from there when we move to aggregates.

PS: Adam Smith didn't say much of what's attributed to him. The "invisible hand" metaphor was something he remarked en passant as a side note, and it wasn't in any way a core part of this theory. In fact, if we read him we find a lot of criticism of the worst parts of Capitalism. His criticism of rent seeking, for example, is brutal, and he was a strong supporter of free public schooling paid for by the State, among many other things.

A very nice author, with good ideas amidst bad ones, unfortunately utterly distorted by his so-called "supporters" who didn't actually read his works.

Why?

If the man is old enough to benefit from this, he doesn't mind not having active sex anymore (passive is still an option for those so inclined), he wants to live absolutely as long as possible, he's of sound mind and able to make fully informed decisions, and it's fully voluntary with no coercion whatsoever involved, what, objectively, would be the problem?

Of course they do, but then, I license everything I write as CC-BY or, at the very worst, CC-BY-SA, including this comment, so I don't feel whatever it is such people feel that drives them to put Anubis, captchas and whatnot in front of their texts and images.

Economics cannot really use math well because monetary units don't have proper cardinality, carrying more of an unholy mix of cardinal and ordinal properties that also aren't fully consistent with themselves. The non-monetary inputs and outputs are more regular in how they function, but the in-between is utterly weird, and everything trying to make sense of it is valid only under very narrow conditions. Step outside those and the reasoning fails.

On politics, agreed!

I mostly agree with your points.

When it comes to the economic side of things, I believe the best approach right now is to learn all major schools: mainstream economics plus Keynesianism, Libertarianism, Marxism, Distributism and at least a handful of minor ones. That helps to untie one's mind from holding too strong beliefs in what still isn't a science but at some point maybe become one.

On the political one, I fully agree. In fact, I wish lottery was used extensively, including for executive roles. There's research showing it results in way better outcomes all around, as politics ends up somewhat close-ish to having traits similar to the average of a population, rather than lower than it, as in other models. Alas, getting there from here is almost impossible. Too bad.

Even more open than using Anubis is not using Anubis, nor any anti-scrapping mechanism.

IMHO, although Marxism has some good insights, it's a very limited analysis of reality due to the necessity of framing things within a Hegelian framework, while at the same time ignoring, for example, the most recent peer-reviewed, reproducible discoveries in psychology and neuropsychology. That lack of the later causes all manners of misalignment when real people, and the whole psychological spectrum they comprise, have to intersect with that framework and its implications.

There are some kinda-ish modern, more nuanced versions of Marxism that may be more successful than orthodox variants in that. The Frankfurt School had some quite interesting developments there, such as incorporating Freudian psychology through Lacan, but that is itself already very dated by decades. Also, its approach requires abandoning or inverting many premises of orthodox Marxism, such as, for example, by accepting that in many cases it's the superstructure that determines the infrastructure, not the other way around, so they exist in a tensional relation, which leads adepts of orthodox Marxism to call Frankfurtians revisionists and not to want to hear much more.

So I suppose a fully modernized Marxism incorporating everything modern human sciences has to offer could do reasonably well, but it'd be extremely different from both old school Marxism, as well as from the Frankfurtian revisions.

The reason is simple: ideological blindness.

If an agent has goal A, and they believe (strong believe) the way to reach A is via method P, and that any criticism of P is invalid no matter what, they will keep trying P until it arrives as A, since they know P eventually leads to A.

Reality doesn't care about strong beliefs though. If reiterating over P in reality leads to result B, that's what doing P will achieve, always and invariably.

This problem affects an immense number of things. In economics a prime example is Marxism. If you read the goals (A) of Marxism, they're pretty nice, all things considered. The problem is that Marxism (P) doesn't lead to those results, but to a very different set of outcomes (B). And since ideological purity requirements never allow P to be questioned, all it keeps resulting in is B, irrespective of how amazing A would be if P in fact led to A.

With American conservatives in general, and MAGA in particular, it's the same. A, B and P are different, but the dynamic is the same.

Voters' minds are made deliberately feeble. Check the kind of thing taught in private religious schools paid for by public money in the US in strongly red areas, and you'll see a significant chunk of what that is. Creationism and millenarist biblical literalism are thoroughly enforced at all curricular levels and across all disciplines.

From the perspective of the architects of his policies, The Heritage Foundation, things are roughly going as they want, and these losses are a price worth to pay to ensure what they want to happen, happens.

Their perspective is relatively simple. Unhinged, but simple.

They believe the US is strictly incapable of remaining as the sole global superpower, and that due to cultural this and that, risks falling into a middle power or worse. Hence, they want to resuscitate the pre-WW1 notion of imperial Spheres of Influence, in which the world is carved between Great Powers that dominate their surroundings, and to make sure the US stays as one for decades to centuries. The US Sphere would be the Americas plus a small piece of Europe.

For this to work, a few things are needed:

a) The middle powers, and the weak countries, must all learn their place, that they have no real agency, that they must submit to the Great Power that dominates the sphere they're inserted into, and that if they revolt they're going to experience all manners of pain, from economic warfare to actual hot war in their territories.

b) The other strong countries must agree with this project, so although they're enemies on the long run, they must unite in the process of carving the world into those Spheres, and not to interfere too much with the other powers doing their own carving. Any current potential interference (Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran etc.) is a piece in the table to be used in negotiating the future frontiers between their Spheres.

c) And, internally, a shared culture, where the majority becomes supportive of this via the indoctrination appropriate to each case for the long run.

That's the gist of it. Everything else, including the public face of the implementation, are details that can be replaced as long as the overall strategy keeps advancing.

Thanks!

Replying here so it's close to the top (sorry):

What do people recommend as truly good alternatives? Particularly non-American ones due to Snowden's revelations etc. etc.

I don't disagree with you. I'd say this fits what I alluded to in my second paragraph.

If there are massive protests, it's clear the reconciliation hasn't reconciled things properly, and a better reconciliation must be done, preferably one that doesn't result in more massive protests from either the same or other huge groups.

In fact, remarkable long-term lack of massive protests would be a very good metric for determining whether ongoing reconciliatory efforts are moving in the right direction. If such protests start happening, correct course sooner rather than later, and measure success by a newfound lack of further massive protests.

Presumably, because the people who want to change things do have in-system ways to do so: joining into a new Party, preaching their views, getting elected, growing, until they convince enough people to give them the power they need to change things.

In practice there may be many roadblocks in that, so this isn't absolute. But if that's the case, it's still on the people who notice the roadblocks to convince most everyone these are real. Without that any protest will lack widespread support and be suppressed regardless.

IM cannot be stopped. When a government broadcasts they will censor them, the very next step is for protesters to install something like Bitchat, which does Bluetooth-based, mesh/P2P IM-ing, and is specifically designed to resist even full-on Internet shutdowns.

The best way for governments to deal with protests is to have policies in place that fulfill what We The People want. Everything else is a band-aid atop an ulcer: it hides the problem for a little while, but the problem itself keeps growing regardless.

In principle crypto solves the first problem, but suffers from networking effects: creators won't list crypto for payment because most people don't use it; most people don't use it because there's nowhere it can be used.

As for a universal social media platform, that used to exist. It was called "webrings". Every website would link to other websites they vouched for, so you could browse around them, and sign up for those you liked by clicking a single button on your browser of choice, adding it to your RSS feeds, after which you'd be notified whenever a creator you subscribed to posted something new.

Most of that died when Google decided to oppose RSS as a public-facing feature, and pressured Firefox in doing the same. So nowadays it suffers from the same networking effects problem crypto does.

The whole thing is deliberately engineered to centralize decision-making in the hands of as few people as possible, aka elites, and, through that, to steer most of the masses in whatever direction most benefits those elites.

Well, you find it right because you like the fact that your vote is worth n times more than the vote of those you oppose. Were the situation reversed, you'd find that a pretty bad arrangement.

Do you know the traditional method of cutting a cake in two perfectly balanced parts? Person A gets to cut it in two however they want. Person B chooses which slice goes to whom. Is it any wonder Person A dislikes it, and would pretty much prefer to both cut it and select which slice goes to whom?

So far the last several Presidents of the USA have decided they don't want that.

If you equate what the Presidents of the USA want to what the USA itself wants, then the USA have decided they don't want that.

If not, then you'd need to organize a referendum and let the population itself decide on a one person, one vote basis.

And that prevents them from calling the company and ordering them to increase prices so that they can then use the extra income to pay those capital taxes... how?

There's still the problem of how, precisely, we're going to force the rich to pay those taxes out of their own wealth, rather than them simply offloading them in the form of increased prices for the products and services their companies provide, which increased prices are then paid for by the weakest chain in the link: private end consumers, aka the middle class.

There may be a way, but it isn't self evident what that way may be.

Long term the tendency is even lower salaries.

Right now AI still isn't autonomous enough to do all of the work itself, so it needs developers to carefully manage it to do what it must.

If things remained like this, then sure, there'd be a point when "AI-management for area X" would become a profession on its own, similar to how similar processes happened multiple times in the past, and that would result in a new balance.

But AI won't remain like that. The end-goal is that a high level executive coils type on, Claude v25 something like:

"Update all my legacy codebase to the most recent everything. Make sure it works perfectly and doesn't break compatibility with anything. Also, while you're at it, these DOCX our customers sent list new features they'd like, so implement it all while you're at it."

And come back in the morning with it all executed perfectly. Which definitely isn't a recipe for human developers to start earning any better.

Human earning ceiling will be how much it'll cost for AI to do it at the same quality and efficiency level. If you charge less than that you'll have work, but not otherwise.

Was it a Russian-style suicide? Did he shoot himself on the back five times, then jump from a window?

Or was it a more Western-style suicide, hanging himself at the exact same time all the cameras around him coincidently turned themselves off?

I guess it's time people start keeping a public people with powerful enemies start keeping some kind of "not, I'm not planning on suiciding today" canary of some kind.

The way bodies burn energy varies. Different diseases and genetic conditions regulate that. For some their bodies may burn most of the energy they take in, storing very little as fat in the process. For others their bodies store almost everything.

I provided some details about my specific case here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49942780

To sum it up: my DNA is trash when it comes to this. Everything my body could do wrong, it does.

That's common sense reasoning, which is to say, not based on anything scientific.

GLP-1 is produced by the body to regulate and balance food consumption. People whose bodies produce less than the correct amount eat more because they feel a lot more hunger than people whose bodies are normal. Taking in GLP-1 drugs, if following medical advice, brings their level back to what it should have been all along, in which case most wouldn't have become obese at all.

I'm such a case. Clinical exames never showed up any clear problem associated with weight gain, so for my entire life my obesity was linked by everyone, doctors included, to lack of willpower.

I only discovered what my issue was when I took a genetic test and discovered that my DNA came with these lovely traits:

* I feel more intense hunger than the average people, so I need to eat more than they do to feel satiated. If I eat the same amount a normal person does, I leave the table literally still hungry.

* My body accumulates more fat than the average person, so even if I eat the same amount they do and keep constantly hungry, I accumulate some fat.

* Caloric-reduction diets don't work for me. So the years and years I tried and tried them had little effect, and were mostly wasted effort.

* Fat-reduction diets also don't work for me. Good thing I didn't lose time with those since everyone recommended me the useless caloric-reduction ones.

* The only diet that has some effect for me is the Mediterranean one, which I didn't know about and no one had ever recommended.

* Physical exercise has little effect for me, as I gain less muscle mass from it than the average person. So the years of walking and the many attempts at going to the gym were also mostly wasted effort.

* And physical exercise causes more pain for me than it does for the average person, so all the time I was doing those, I was suffering more than most people while getting worse results then they do from it.

If your genetics is normal on all those fronts, then sure, a bit of willpower fixes that. With that combo though, and fully not knowing you have any of that? Not a chance.

There are three levels to this. One are individuals with bodies that gain weight regardless of what the person does.

The second is psychological, people whose bodies work normally and they do everything wrong on their own.

The third is structural. Countries in which a huge part of the population is obese while other similar countries don't have that problem, have systemic issues that cause that. In the US it's the fact policies all around favor food that cause obesity and make healthy food be extremely expensive, which is the opposite of what countries where obesity is uncommon do.

Fix this last issue, wait two to three generations, and you'll see obesity fall to normal levels, at which point, yes, bringing up the moral argument for some of the few remaining cases may even become valid.

I think the currently fastest is Hedera (HBAR), at 2 minutes per transaction or so, and that it's also the most decentralized, without that mechanism other crypto currencies have that the more you own, the stronger your power over the network. There's still some power at the nodes level though, in that if they all coordinate they can shutdown the network for whatever reason. I also read it's designed such that those metrics improve as the network grows.

But I'm not a specialist, I'm just interested in the technology and play with it a little, so take what I wrote with a grain of salt.

That's alright. I'm willing to pay $1 for a Big Mac. If the algorithm matches that willingness of mine, I may buy one. Maybe.

Some new cryptocurrencies designed for interbank communication can do 20k transactions per second now, and can scale above that. It's just a matter of choosing the appropriate stack for the task.

Cryptocurrencies in general are a good alternative. They're strictly unsanctionable and, depending on the currency selected, also untraceable, so secondary sanctions would be extremely difficult to apply with any kind of granularity. National-scale sanctions, evidently, would still be quite feasible.

Alas, that kind of anonymity runs counter to the very soul of the European bureaucratic ethos. They absolutely want to know in detail where every single cent goes, plus the power to block transactions at will, so they're looking into some magic solution that allows them full purview and full control while perfectly denying the US and its spy apparatus the possibility to also see into it, an impossible combination of requirements.

And I say all that as a fan of the EU. It's one of their many blind spots they need to overcome if they ever want to become a technological superpower.