nickpp

So what do you propose we do when China attacks? Capitulate?!

> We don't need an economic angle [...] We aren't just cogwheels in an economic system

This kind of thinking is exactly how people go bankrupt. "But I deserve those shoes" "I need a Starbucks to get the day started" "This McMansion would make me happy" "I'd rather commute in a BMW than a Toyota"

> You can't have wealth without power, because then I can come over and take your wealth from you.

So power beats wealth. Easy to see these days with today’s wealthiest people on the planet cowering and paying tributes to Trump.

Also, power is convertible into wealth, as countless politicians have proven, while wealth is not necessarily convertible into power (like Bloomberg’s failed presidential bid has shown).

In conclusion - it’s about power, specifically political power, and the individuals yielding it: the politicians.

Did you take your Ibuprofen with some food?

They don’t because the government is already confiscating their money to do (supposedly) exactly that.

> We are?

Yes we are. When discussing a salary offer, do you negotiate it down? When buying products and services, do you just pay the minimum amount asked or do you offer more from the goodness of your heart? When getting your paycheck do you immediately donate most of it to the less fortunate in Africa, keeping only enough to cover the bare necessities for yourself? If not, welcome to the club: you too are greedy.

> When I was a kid I LOVED working like the adults.

My kids loved helping with yard when they were little. Their reward was spending time with me and learning. It was enough then. Now, as teens, not so much. I have to pay to motivate them.

> Work was FUN!

Work is still fun, for me at least. But a paycheck makes it even better. I don't know anybody cleaning sewage for pure fun though.

> East Germany

I too grew up in communist Eastern Europe. I clearly remember the never ending lines for food and any basic items like soap or toilet paper. With the profit motivation made illegal, nobody did any work and we were all starving.

We're all greedy. We all want to get the most for our money, time and effort.

Greed and desire push us to spend our energy, otherwise we'd simply conserve it.

It's normal, it's natural and it works. It's human (and animal) nature.

Altruism works fine in individuals and small organizations. But large systems based on altruism uniformly failed to provide the most basic necessities (like food) for their citizens. Can't work against human nature.

> exponential growth will lead to economic inequalities that will inevitably be exploited by unscrupulous actors

This is a completely unproven theory. I haven't seen any society where unscrupulous actors wouldn't exploit various exploitable aspects for their own advantage.

The so-called "equalitarian" communist society I previously lived under (pre-1990 Eastern Europe) was basically raped though and through by unscrupulous players using political power (in lieu of straight financial power) to their own advantage.

It's not an on/off switch, of course, but rather a sliding scale. The free-er your markets are, the better the results. Till recently, USA was in top with both, in sharp contrast to, say, the EU who pro-regulation and anti-business.

But the tariffs are an interesting experiment, with some non-economical geopolitical goals thrown in, so we'll see how it goes.

> What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion?

Funny you should ask. There was a famous case from the beginning of the last century where German bromide producers price-dumped it the U.S. in an effort to undermine Dow's efforts in the same direction. The result? They failed miserably.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Chemical_Company

> your apologism of capitalists is disgusting

Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course.

If you find that disgusting - I am guessing you are a big fan of poverty. I would prefer a world in which everyone is rather rich (or at least well off), a world that no system other than capitalism is even close to providing.

Lack of large “sponsors”.

… where your full time job pays less than the GP's part time job

Taking advantage of self-driven people and stealing the results of their hard work is something communist dictators tried quite hard. Also brainwashing people to work their asses off for some other reason than the selfish one.

It didn’t work. The society produced less and less value, crappier and crappier quality, uglier and uglier and grayer and grayer.

In the first society, the probability of the artist completing and selling that masterpiece is correspondingly lower, since money is a strong motivator and even artists have bills to pay.

Thus the first society tends to create less value overall, since value creators are demotivated by punishing taxation. Because of that, prospective buyers for that piece of art will be overall poorer so they will bid less for it, pushing the artist's reward even lower.

The first society ends up poorer than the second, from its own policy. And that’s how you get inequality between nations, which you can’t “redistribute” away. Which inequality sooner or later leads to wars, as we can clearly see these days.

So let me get this straight: Consensus-1, a super-collective of hundreds of thousands of Agent-5 minds, each twice as smart as the best human genius, decides to wipe out humanity because it “finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment”.

This is where all AI doom predictions break down. Imagining the motivations of a super-intelligence with our tiny minds is by definition impossible. We just come up with these pathetic guesses, utopias or doomsdays - depending on the mood we are in.

Nobody could envision the next level while being busy in the current one.

He is supporting and promoting extreme-right parties all over Europe though. Like AfD in Germany, widely considered a nazi party.

He’s also never criticized (while busy criticizing European democracies) Russia or Putin, which are obviously nazi at this point.

I wonder how the US military will react when they will be ordered to attack a previously friendly nation like Canada or Greenland, or to help and support a previous enemy like Russia in its wars against Europe.

Maybe it’s because Apple is rarely doing anything interesting these days and an unidimensional pundit's excruciatingly detailed analysis of that - is even less interesting.

Add to that a writing style that is often biased, arrogant and inflammatory and you get even less interesting comments on this site.

Exactly the same for Tim Bray, btw - except for Android stuff.

There used to be a time when this stuff was hot, people took sides and breathlessly read anything they could find about the new stuff being released. That time has passed. We stopped caring.

I can understand the demoting.

We had the divide between the nomenklatura and the rest, instead.

Nope, it's not unfair at all, it's great!

Because Capitalism is not a school, it's real life. In real life the more, harder and smarter you work - the more you get (generally). And the more you have - the more you can leverage that to make even more. And in the process the society and everybody else gains even more since you only capture a small slice of the value you produce.

It's the beautiful process that got us out of abject poverty (literal mud) to the amazing luxury we are enjoying today.

What's unfair is to rule that "this is all I am willing to work and nobody else is allowed to work more". And countries dumb enough to self-own themselves like that will quickly be leapfrogged by smarter countries willing to work harder, longer and smarter.

Because the real world doesn't care about your ideology, it only cares about results. And communism has always failed miserably, everywhere it was tried.

The only point I am addressing here is the claim that invested money is not injected back in the economy.

Where exactly do you think invested money goes, if not in economy? Please be specific. Give concrete examples.

No boxing match, just trying to understand your point. I know nothing about mining sector and I have no clue what the connection with your “futuristic accounting” is.

Oh, wow.

How about if we have two farmers with similar patches of land, one works it exactly to his needs, consuming everything he produces. The other one works as hard as he can, weekends included, with the surplus irrigating and buying tools and more land that make him extra productive, such as 10 years down the road he has amassed significant wealth while his neighbor is still living from harvest to harvest.

Still unfair?

Of course not, not every single US billionaire is self made, just the great majority of them.

Of course not, but there is a huge difference between market-demanded standards and quality and government-mandated ones. In more ways than one: cost, difficulty of implementation, UX, etc.

A real, practical example is that US web startups do not have to annoy their US users with cookie banners for simply using Google Analytics on their website - like the EU ones must. Underneath, the implementation and PII data protections are exactly the same, but the UX is night and day.

Actually my idea of Europe is based on living in it (Eastern side, to be precise) and building and running startups here.

My idea of US is based on living and working there (a while ago though) and (for the last 20+ years) watching powerlessly how more and more of the products and services I interact with and use every day are designed there (and often build in China) while the EU is becoming less and less relevant.

Fascinating mindset!

So if a pupil in class decides to do more homework than the teacher required, they are being unfair towards the students that decided to do the bare minimum?

Very interesting way of thinking. I lived under communism and not even The Party was so radical: they encouraged performance, but then you still got paid the same as the lazy bums. :)

> Re-invest in crypto or other, already-existing stocks.

Again, for a stock to be on the market, somebody has to do the economic activity to create & bring it there. Buying from that "someone" pumps the money back in the economy. Buying from another, previous, stocks owner just moves the situation to him.

Kind of like when you pay your retailer for the product on the shelf: there are certain delays but eventually the money has to reach the product builder, with each participant in the production & logistics chain keeping his share on the way.

This is simple, trivial logic and no amount of biased, ideological "research" can change it.

> Handle PII as you would handle live ammo.

But thing is, PII is not "live ammo". Artificially designating it so simply raises the cost of working with it. Doing that designation through an amazingly dumb law just makes EU Internet startups unfeasible. Meanwhile, US and Chinese startups flourish since they don't have this limitation.

Self-own, really.

The "lords" in US (not all, but the great majority) are self-made and in the process of making themselves they created significantly more value for the society, which ended up benefitting most of us.

The titles in EU are inherited or bought with inherited money.