fallingfrog

Here’s an interesting thought experiment: let’s say you work hard your whole life, you pile up a million dollars in cash, which you hope to retire on.

However, tragedy strikes and your pile of cash catches fire and it all burns.

But, your government is very accommodating, and they don’t worry- we know you really saved it, we’ll just print you some more.

But in that case, why store it at all? Why not save the money you spent storing it, burn it now and get some printed later?

What if the whole economy does that? What is the actual value of stored wealth? And does it make any sense for the government to have a “social security trust fund”? (No! It’s meaningless. Might as well just print the money later)

Well, you hope to exchange it for goods and services.

Goods and services performed and created by your children. So you’re laying claim to their labor.

But what if there aren’t enough of them or they don’t really like this deal? What happens then?

Well, we know really- the answer is inflation. Too many dollars chasing too little labor power. That’s why blaming inflation on Biden is absurdly silly. It’s a demographic effect that we’ve known was coming for decades. It’s not a surprise.

Yeah it’s very odd to me that people are so shocked that there’s a labor shortage when the whole boomer generation is retiring at the same time. I did a high school report on it in 1998; this is not a surprise. We all knew it was coming (or should have known.) Too much money chasing too little labor production equals inflation.

One thing to bear in mind is that we may have a partial or total cure for aging within a couple decades, and that’s going to change the calculus here significantly.

Scaring people is a great way to get them to stop asking awkward questions.

Because china doesn’t have direct power over me, and so there’s not much they can do with the data that affects me.

You are attempting to link Russia invading Ukraine with TikTok? I’d love to see the chain of reasoning here.

Ok but even if I accept all that, what does it have to do with TikTok specifically?

I feel like all these arguments just come down to “China bad, therefore anything that annoys China is good” which is silly and juvenile reasoning

Separating the world into “good guys” and “bad guys” does not constitute “values”. That is the thinking of a child.

Word salad. There isn’t really any coherent thought there for me to respond to.

Susceptible? 90% of our public discourse is manufactured, and this whole TikTok thing is a prime example.

This whole thing is baffling to me. What are you talking about? What enemy? I would rather someone in China has my information than my own government. China has no power over me; my own government does. I don’t care if china knows whether I like cheesecake better than blueberry pie. They’re interested in monitoring their own citizens, im sure- for the same reasons our own government agencies and corporate behemoths monitor ours. But I don’t see what use china could have for data about Americans.

Look: the Cold War is over. And communism is a red herring. The world has changed. For some reason Americas elites view TikTok as a threat, probably because they don’t have the kind of total access to their servers that they’re accustomed to with American firms. But that has little to do with regular Americans. And there’s no argument other than decades old red baiting tropes they can think of to try to get us to care.

This doesn’t match my personal experience at all. I hardly liked any of the music I heard on the radio as a teenager. (That would be the 90’s). Later on, I found that I liked the current music better- and there are still songs from my 20’s that I come back to. But each decade I discover new artists, I stay with those records for a while, then they start sounding dated and I move on. I do put deliberate effort into discovering new artists though. And, I’m a musician myself so maybe that’s part of it. I really listen to almost nothing from my teenage years though. There is such an incredible amount of new music coming out every day that it’s hard to keep up with it! Right now I’m listening to 100 gecs a lot, childish gambino, narrow head, ohtis, thee oh sees, fazerdaze, and wimps.

Anybody who really just gets stuck on music from their teens is missing out on so much I can’t even express it.

It’s fascinating to me how if elites care about something, it happens immediately, whereas if regular people care about it, it is difficult if not impossible to get done.

I feel like this is the kind of thing that works great when employees care about the business and feel like it is theirs to some degree. But if they see themselves as just hired mercenaries or cogs in a machine that cares nothing about them, that’s when you need excessive management.

Why? Helping kids develop study skills would help with adhd, helping kids deal with bullying would help with lgbtq issues. I can’t see how that would be harmful.

The lack of self awareness from a 1%er who thinks it would be easy to work overnight shifts inserting catheters and dealing with emergencies is quite amusing. My sister is a nurse; a respiratory specialist. One of her job duties is to be the person who has to turn off the ventilator when someone can no longer be saved. Try doing that over and over again with the family watching.

Well if it’s so overpaid why aren’t you doing it? Have you ever talked to a nurse? The stress they go through is absurd.

I’m so curious about this. It’s only ever happened to me when I woke up in the middle of a vivid dream, and lasted 10 or 15 seconds. It also happened when I was on oxycodone after a surgery. Do you feel like you are in a dreamlike state or slightly high all the time? Have you ever experienced depression?

That is pretty surprising to me. I’ve only experienced that when waking up in the middle of a very vivid dream, and sometimes will see geometric shapes with my eyes closed for 10 or 20 seconds. Then it goes away. I chalked it up to the brain being flooded with weird chemicals during sleep. I’ve also seen this while on oxycodone after a surgery. Personally, I kinda envy you, you must live in a very exciting world if your brain is loaded with those chemicals all the time! Serotonin, maybe?

I mean, that’s what religious ultra conservative fundamentalism does. It posits a static, eternal, knowable world, where everyone has a specific place and there is no need for change. And new ideas are mostly seen as a threat to that stability. Why would that society produce science? Our own ultra conservatives are too few to get such a permanent headlock on society.

They know that we want smaller, cheaper vehicles, they just don’t care. They can throttle down supply and make it so you have no choice but to buy something big and expensive. They advertise small vehicles on the website but they make sure that your local dealership doesn’t have any on the lot- classic bait and switch. They know exactly what they’re doing.

Regression to the mean is a real thing though. The reason why is this: every gene in your body is also in the bodies of millions of other people. Your genes are not unique. It’s the combination that’s unique. And the combination is diluted 50% with each generation. So Einstein was a prodigy and a genius, but his great grandchildren are pretty ordinary. That’s just the way it goes.

I would hypothesize that SES probably correlates very heavily with grades at the very bottom where you have things like abuse, abject poverty, children supporting their own parents, lack of access to quality nutrition, violence inside and outside the home, etc and even a genius would be swimming against the current. But middle class and above, I would expect the curve to flatten out. In my experience super wealthy people are more lucky than clever- it doesn’t take much brains to make more money when you’re already rich.

So, the goal here should be to identify smart kids in terrible situations, while not allowing rich kids who aren’t actually that talented to game the system. That’s the goal. And of course there will also be genuinely talented middle class kids and you don’t want to ignore them either.

For me, I got much, much better SAT scores than my grades would suggest, because my grades were depressed significantly due to ADHD, (forgetfulness, never remembering when tests were going to happen, going off on tangents when studying) even though I actually knew the material. So the standardized tests were a chance to prove that I wasn’t a total dummy.

And you know, I think that’s kind of the point of a standardized test- grades definitely vary based on how involved your parents are, the particular teachers you have, whether you have adhd, and yes socioeconomic status- tests in principal are blind to all that stuff.

I should say, to get the real effect of what it looks like, keep your eyes pointed at the center of the screen (the shimmers are often in your peripheral vision and you can’t look directly at them)

Yeah this happens to me fairly often, you get the rainbow zigzags with a hole in reality in the center.

The really weird migraines are the ones where you get aphasia, now that’s scary.

https://youtu.be/IG7NuH5QTdE?si=L_h1SVbjMoowvo0A

Oh ok, maybe I need to spell it out then.

If goods and capital are free to move across borders, it doesn’t matter whether people are coming to your country or staying where they were, because you’re competing against them either way.

And, capital can move way, way faster than populations. We are competing against the entire nation of China. There are over a billion of them. Have a billion people moved to the United States in the last 20 years?

Right wing media is counting on you to not be paying attention.

There a fewer factory jobs now than there were 30 years ago. Did Mexicans come and move into those factories? Or did the factories move to Mexico?

Pay attention.

I feel like you’re confusing free movement of goods/capital with free movement of people.

The two can have different policies applied to them. It’s a bit silly to use “globalization” to mean both.

Paradoxically, too much blind faith in the free market sometimes leads to bad decision making. You don’t want your prophets to believe too deeply in their own divinity. You want a bit of cynicism at the top, a bit of understanding that there really isn’t any perfect system. I think that explains why leftist leaders (such as Obrador) sometimes make the best stewards of capitalist economies. (Bolivia under morales might be another example)

I wonder how this relates to Erik Verlinde’s entropic gravity?

https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02269

It seems like this theory is proposing some entropic term on top of classical general relativity whereas Verlinde came up with a completely entropic theory of gravity. They both claim to explain dark matter.