gsatic

Dont remind them why banks collapsed and why interest rates arent dropping any time soon. Focus on China, Russia, Elons cage match etc.

Read "the theory of the leisure class".

Its the right move to counter big techs runaway mindlessness.

Scaling anything (including addictive stuff) only makes sense if there well defined Purpose before you deploy. The current tech CEO buffoon class, has been trained to scale things, and post facto pretend whatever good happens is planned, while whatever bad is someone elses problem.

In the age of easy scaling this mentality has to be under tight control. And the Chinese seem much more capable of what needs to be done when things go offtrack, than the US.

The docile confused response in the US to the exploitation of kids, enables epstein or larry nasser or school shootings or pedo priests or the propping up of the kardasian empire on the clicks of 14 yr olds or riots that start over a free luxury good console or smartphone.

There needs to be much stronger signalling about where the line is and what happens when you cross it. If the govt cant enforce the line ppl need to do it themselves.

Also Chinese food is just way better.

As long as you can avoid people/projects that are primarily about "scaling" things, you will be fine.

Scale is what reveals the limitions of our 3 inch chimp brains.

Lots of things allow quick scale up these days, but issues scale up too. And our chimp brains dont scale fast enough to solve them. Tools and sytems have gotten sophisticated and complex. But the chimps will stay chimps.

Find small companies doing simple things.

"China does seem to portray itself as very anti-Western, anti-American"

Anti-American and the anti-Western feeling exists all over. Just have to the scratch the surface to see it. The west is not worth emulating anymore unless you want to be the kardashians or something. China is expressing it more openly, cuz they arent as dependent on the west as much as the result of the world is.

The National Realtors Association spent more than any other lobbying group in America by a factor of 3 last year. Why?

Its fixable.

Govts needs to print cash to fund the basics - edu, health, housing, pensions.

Banks and Wall St should be banned from profiting from these sectors.

To force the issue everyone in the country needs to stop paying their credit card bills for about 2-3 months.

Think of a teenager done with their growth spurt. Beyond that point, people stop measuring growth everyday.

The main prob is info overload.

Even the spammers will say they have to up their spam volumes every day to get fewer and fewer clicks. But the good news for them is cost to constantly broadast has fallen to near 0. Youtube , Insta, FB (or even HN) wont tell you less than 1-5% of content generated is actually consummed. That stat comes from economists studying the effeciency of the info economy.

If you hand everyone a radio station and dont restrict spectrum use and everyone starts broadcasting 24*7 what happens? Thanks to that probpem we get Claude Shannon and rules of Spectrum use.

But we havent found a Shannon's theory of information yet or spectrum sharing rules, when it comes to internet broadcasting.

So we see the same issues people had when the age of wireless broadcasting began. They too responded by providing solutions to evrything under the sun other than info overload. Without Shannon & Co showing up god knows how long it would havd taken to solve the issue.

Social media has made Attention a Currency (a store/signal of value, tradable for other stuff etc). People who can Capture Attention, are going to think its the greatest thing in the world, totally essential to their existense. But the bar is quite low. Even cats can capture attention. Which makes it a very unusual currency, with many bizzare properties, and effects on the people who use it and need it.

But the good news is, its not the only currency. So anyone who has ways to accumulate any of the other currencies will do just fine. Like the cats.

Some strange things are happening to it though.

As info explodes ( only .5% of content created is consumed as per UN Economist Network) how does cost of Advertising/return on advertising grow?

The advertisors and marketing theorists have no great answer to that other than to pay fuckerberg more.

They probably do have teams to retrieve crashed aircraft/drones/missiles etc being tested. Its not like they are going to broadcast to everyone what is crashing and how often, just cuz random people see things they cant explain.

> I fear that the views of a generation of engineers in Silicon Valley have meaningfully drifted from the center of gravity of American public opinion

This is not new. See the emergence of the Technocracy Movement as a reaction to runaway capitalism/great depression. I wish that history was taught in engineering/science schools.

There was a recognition of the constant tension between the waste minimizing/innovation chasing Engineer and the Profit maximizing Manager/Capitalist.

The movement was seen to offer more realistic solutions than communism (which expected the masses to rule - the masses always just end up emulating the exploiters they replace).

It didnt gain traction cuz the tools available back then, to the tecnical class, to take on and reshape exploitative/wasteful power strutures, were rudimentary. Today its a very different story.

The technical class is much more powerful (lots of people in power have to dance to their tunes out of a dependency) yet the technical class is still totally unorganized and lacking any common vision on the future of society.

The moment that changes the choices wont be limited to miltech/fintech/adtech but something much larger.

But to imagine what that is, the technical class needs to step back from choices other places in front of them.

Thats the fundamental reason we end up with an Attention Economy - People have limited Attention to pay to everything, But unlimited capacity/need to receive Attention (via Michael Goldhaber).

This plants the seed for the info explosion (those 200 bikeshedding comments or those 6 billion videos on how to boil an egg).

To counter it we have rankings of comments and links and news feeds from google to fb to hn. But its just another layer of bullshit cause most of the pool of what is being ranked is bullshit.

We are yet to design Information systems that take into account what Goldhaber said about Attention 3-4 decades ago.

TV and movies are already suffering from over supply too. Scrolling through Netflix feels like the toothpaste aisle - https://metropolismag.com/programs/the-toothpaste-aisle/

Hopefully someone comes up with radical UI changes, that throws infinite scroll in the dustbin.

The thing is their tools are totally useless if traditional networks go down. And the prob with surveillance, in the age of the info tsunami, is not having enough people to go break down doors. There is no use if the dumb tool is flagging 20000 posts a minute and you have 1 poor jackass staring at the flood trying to work out who to pick on.

That's why however great their tools are they seem totally incapable of Controlling the protests.

AI will. Once we get past the hype and scam phase.

People have forgotten the alternative to capitalism and communism proposed by Veblen and others was the technocracy.

Back then there were no computers which is why the movement failed. But there already existed a tension between the Engineer and the manager/luxury/leisure class.

Veblen said the natural instinct of the Engineer is to reduce waste (ie corruption). While the natural instinct of the leisure class is to signal power and status through how much they can waste and get away with.

This tension is very much alive and is what produces Snowden. With AI do not underestimate what the next bunch of Snowdens will attempt as a natural reaction to the injustices they see.

Useful data but what does the "roughly 3% of all submitted posts" reaching the front page, Actually represent?

Entertainment value? Novelty? Attention Capture? Biz intelligence? Rumor quality? What?

Analysing that 3% (and there is decay rate to that 3% as more ppl find HN and start submitting links) makes sense only if what it means, is well defined.

And as 3% drops to .3% or 0.03% is it even worth submitting links or wondering what gets to the front page? As the info tsunami wave increases in size the arbit fishing net HN throws out might be just catching randomness.

He is an example of runaway mindless ambition. Mindless cuz the ship doesn't seem to have anywhere to go.

The total number of eyeballs available on the planet is fixed. So Consumption is capped.

Production on the other hand is in runaway overdrive(thx to the low interest age), the tools are free, everyone is broadcasting for free, everyone has limited attention to give anything but unlimited capacity to receive it.

When you add it all up there is such a big imbalance between Production and Consumption. So now platforms are increasing prices of all their "free" tools. Who is going to pay when there such a glut of content?

Weird part about the attention economy, where leaders emerge quite fast out of the blue and are capable of pulling huge attention to issues, is they all end up following the same playbook after getting popular.

There is a better way to think about it esp for the tech/engineering class that hangs out over here.

Govts/corporations are full of ppl. People are programmed not just for Consumption but Conspicuous Consumption.

Social status is directly tied to what Luxuries you can afford. No one wants to work for a simple boss, but for the dude who lives on a super yatch.

The most ambitious ppl know this and take full advantage of it to trap ppl who work for them in golden cages. The greatest anxiety of a beauracrat/corporate exec is exiting the cage.

Luxuries are a gigantic WASTE. And the largest companies in the world sell Luxury cause the most ambitious of the elite use luxury to signal status and trap/control everyone.

Technical minded ppl spend most of their day trying to reduce waste. So they are the group that can come up with ways that can interfere with these cycles everyone feels they are trapped in.

That's cuz Theory of Bounded Rationality applies.

When we are passed the point where ppl with their 3 inch brains can actually come up with answers to complex problems, you don't spend time asking them questions.

When you sell to Rich Arabs the rule is to follow the yatch salesman playbook. The main goal is to get an arms race going among them. An nytimes article (usually framed and displayed prominently) seeds the process.

#scalebots

Broadcast transmissions have always been regulated world over, not cuz the Regulators are great or act fast or are trusted, but cuz the Cost to Mass Broadcast, whatever shit occurs to a 3 inch chimp brain, is much greater than 0.

The cost to multiply has always been the real barrier to prevent cancer from spreading faster than the immune system can react.

Whether it is setting up a printing press and distributing newspapers/books or radio/tv station, movie studio broadcasts, it used to cost a lot. Even with chat/email/phone/sms there is a high cost. The email list of everyone on the planet is easy to assemble these days. But try emailing everyone on the list every few minutes.

The whole story breaks down when Youtube/Facebook/TikTok made Cost to Broadcast 0 for everyone.

People don't get what info pollution has already happened.

Estimate is only 0.5% of content produced is consumed https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...

Naturally platforms don't tell content creators that.

Why is info pollution happening -

1. Everyone is given broadcast capability. Cost to broadcast is 0. Cost to spam is 0. Cost to waste everyone's else's time is 0. A mindless achievement of the platform.

2. Biggest attention craving ppl in society capture the largest chunk of the reward pool. Attention is finite. People have limited attention to give to anything, but many have unlimited capacity to receive it. Such people are the biggest beneficiaries.

3. To combat the pollution that enriches them, the platforms sell a story, that what gets to the top of Search result pages, News feeds, trending pages is the highest Quality content. It's not. Attention capture does not equal quality. And incentive to game the rankings to pseudo signal Quality keeps growing.

Whats the solution? Read the UN report linked above.

> These policies only work if small and medium banks have depositors so that's why everyone has a different local bank, etc

Ofcourse. But this should be a choice. Depositors should be allowed to choose between a fed deposit account or a local bank deposit.

Fed is moving so slowly compared to China or India. Going to be left in the dust soon.

They need to open settlements up to everyone not just "financial institutions". Fed deposit accounts for everyone or Interest bearing CBDCs should be rolled out to every one. The fucking banks need to be disintermediated from all transaction involving Depositors. Convert them to pure lenders.

If the goal is to "improve settlement efficiency without introducing liquidity or credit risks" then provide a path to get the dumb sender and receiver banks out of the loop in every dumb transaction.

If I want to send my grandma cash, why do 2 banks have to be sitting in the middle? It's 2023 get those fuckers out of the loop. So when the next bank collapses due to "credit and liquidity risks" they haven't thought about why should grandma worry about her savings?

All this has been used historically to justify empire, monopolies and nation states. Yet empires, monopolies and nation states die out all the times. Cities on the other hand regularly outlive them all. Rome still stands. Thats an example of scale serving and not serving purpose.

To understand that circle back to the original article. People have only recently got their hands on scaling tools (reserved for the upper classes in the past). And now everyone is waking up to the consequence of using the tools, without purpose. Defining purpose as groups get larger and larger, gets more and more complex as Needs diverge drastically. Yet it happens and happens naturally, when and where there is history of members helping each other out.