brigadier132

Apparently communism can only function with trade with free market capitalists?

Standing? Their population has declined by 20% in 2 years. I'd describe that more as crawling on the ground and starving.

> Just a question of the degree of nastiness?

Just a question of degree of nastiness? Yes, competitions involving life and death are qualitatively different from competitions involving money. Something interesting to think about is that we do have ultra graphic action movies and horror movies. Are those also net negative?

> Personally, I think human behaviour is massively influenced by culture and that we have an individual moral responsibility to take actions that work in favour of having a healthy culture.

There is no human culture that I know of that was not fascinated by things like money and fame.

> I see arguments often made that amount to justifying amoral, or even actively immoral

I don't think Mr Beast is immoral and not for the reasons you state. I think you have in your mind some very judgemental ideas of what is right and wrong.

I think shows like Mr Beast and all celebrity culture is dumb. I think sports are dumb too. I don't think they are evil and I know that humanity will find a way to create variants of these things no matter what kind of insane rules society tried to put in place.

This type of criticism reads to me as a general hatred of what humanity actually is. Mr Beast exists because humans like to watch it. By blaming Mr Beast, you are putting the effect before the cause. There is no enlightened society that is only watching MIT linear algebra lectures for fun, it doesn't exist.

> You could provide a bespoke error type for every single function that returns an error, but that's a ton of boilerplate

If we had more typescript-like discriminated union semantics a lot of the boilerplate would go away. Throw in automatic implementation of From traits for enums composed of other enums / types and it could be pretty close to perfect.

I can't find the source for the stat I mentioned originally but the data I did find doesn't paint the rosy picture of a getting college degree with debt being an unambiguously +EV decision.

We can disagree on it being overblown or not but I think it would be enormously useful to be able to look at a function signature and know exactly how it can fail.

Here is a source I found and repayment rates tanked after 2009

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/t...

> I get why it is that way, but it feels icky.

There is no reason it has to be so boilerplate heavy, a lot of it can be fixed but someone has to put in the work. The only technical reason that could hold it back is compile times.

I heard an interesting fact a couple of days ago,

The median student that graduated from college starting in 2009 had more debt than what they started with after 12 years and it's only gotten worse.

So your belief that it will cover the most egregious is not true for the median student. Given that, I'm also interested in how those lifetime earnings increases are distributed across degrees.

It's far from perfect.

One of the biggest problems with Rust error handling is that if you want to have explicit error return types encoded in the type system you need to create ad hoc enums for each method that returns an error. If you only use a single error type for all functions you will inevitably have functions returning Results that contain error variants that the function will never actually return but still need to be handled.

Without enum variants being explicit types and the ability to easily create anonymous enums using union and intersection operators Rust enums require a ton of boilerplate.

If your opinion were correct the degrees would pay for themselves and we wouldn't be having these discussions. We have people paying $160k a year to study in fields that are increasingly having their fundamental research completely debunked and exposed as fraudulent (see Political Science and Pyschology).

There is also absolutely 0 reason these degrees should cost so much. If we want to keep a guaranteed student loan program it should be restricted in the amount that can be borrowed and it should only be usable at local community colleges that cost under $5k a year. Nothing about education necessitates spending more than that.

The vast majority of universities are not for profit. As we clearly observe with all government guaranteed demand subsidies, prices sky rocket.

In your 4 step process where do you blame the not for profit schools for raising tuition by completely absurd and unsustainable amounts?

If we are going to forgive student loans, tax payers should not be on the hook. The loan originators and most importantly the schools should pay since they are both the primary beneficiaries of this disastrous policy.

> The idea of the public university is to bring a traditionally aristocratic practice - the devotion of several years of one’s young life to not-necessarily-practical intellectual pursuits - to the middle class

The entire idea that spending 4 years learning useless knowledge is somehow valuable is completely mistaken bullshit.

Aristocrats could get away with it because they were rich but there is 0 evidence this practice brought fundamental value to them or society other than serving as an expensive status signal.

> I love a good market as much as anyone but there really are problems markets will never solve

The problem with student loans is that they are not driven by markets. If they were, absolutely nobody would give a loan to an 18 yo to spend 4 years and $160k to study psychology.

Yes, profit incentive is generally a good thing.

I want them to make the point explicit so I can explain why they are a greedy leech. If they keep the point ambiguous by asking a rhetorical question they can move goalposts.

That's literally what eve already is.

Because they want to allow for transactions between players but don't want to become a bank.

No, not necessarily.

Trivially, in a monopoly, raising prices infinitely for a product does not maximize profit.

SpaceX has effectively had a monopoly on commercial space launch since it was first able to actually use reusable rockets. Because the innovation of reusing rockets has brought the marginal cost of launching so far down prices will continue to go down.

Right now SpaceX is supply constrained, not demand constrained. All of their launches are booked. As SpaceX's supply increases they will be able to bring launch costs down even further until they hit an equilibrium of monopoly pricing that does maximize profit.

Will become more expensive? Are you willfully ignoring the actual data?

Instead of asking a question why don't you just make your point?

This is a pointless statistic. I assume you mean market capitalization by net worth and if they were fined that much every month their market cap would immediately drop by 90% because their costs in paying fines would take away 90% of their profit.

He says he doesn't care about the integrity but I think he's wrong and he's misidentified the lesson from this.

Because you are absolutely right, doing things that are inefficient and stupid for the sake of it is absolutely dumb.

> I worried about the mindset of the server whose job it would be to parade a stunt chicken around the dining room. I was terrified of our culture stagnating.

This is where it makes sense. He does care about integrity. If you foster a culture of faking little things like this it can eventually grow into a culture of faking the big things that actually do matter.

> It most certainly is enough to make a major lifestyle improvement when someone is living paycheck to paycheck

This is not what the recent universal basic income study showed.

> Driven people will work hard regardless

This is empirically not true.

He doesn't understand stock buybacks.

> And what supports those individuals? Society

You are missing my point which is that you will not get individuals to act against their own self interest. So all this talk about what businesses "should" do is beside the point.

The classic example of this is price controls, the government mandates that food can only be sold for $X but it costs $X+1 to produce it and get it on shelves. People stop producing food because it's stupid to work for negative money and then you get food shortages and starvation.

Here's another funny one, I'm starting a business and when I was in the ideation phase I decided against building an education or healthcare related business despite having some pretty interesting ideas in those spaces and I'm instead building a company in the entertainment space. Why? Because people ironically are more happy to spend money on entertainment than healthcare or education and there are fewer regulations in place.

Yeah, don't put words in my mouth and create a strawman please.