PSA: learn to cook. savings skyrocket. no apps required.
289 karma · joined September 15, 2023
So that kind of confuses everyone including the experts.
Network growth, trade growth, capital growth, info growth all are happening faster than expert growth.
There are more than 50 countries right now standing with begging bowls outside the IMF cause their economies have no hope of growing without help. As long as that list has no hope of shrinking, people who live there and recognize that reality, are going to find ways to get out by hook or crook.
Immigration is a symptom of growing global inequality. Without inequality reducing no rules or walls are going to stop the incoming waves.
Cycle goes something like this. Factories in parts of the city shut down after it get cheaper to run them outside. Those spaces lay empty, rents drop, decay begins. Poor Artists move in. Area starts getting interesting. Yuppies move in cuz of the 'cool' factor. Property developers notice. They start buying everything up. Rents jump. Artists get kicked out. And you end up with boring rich people living in a formally cool area.
Tech makes it easy to build things quick. Some things gets popular more by accident than design. Zuck didn't build insta, or whatsapp or tiktok. The reasons for popularity and what is working is generally discovered post facto.
Popularity attracted funding. Things scale up (scale is the only thing tech brings to the table). That attracts financial engineers of Wall St. They take over and control how firms are managed. Cuz most creatives, engineers and scientists have no training in finance or business. And that sets up where the story goes.
The financial engineers aren't programmed to design goods or improve quality of life. They are programmed to capture market, as quickly as possible and collect rent from as much of the market as possible, getting the cheapest rates on interest/labor/forex/tax etc.
Market capture tactics increasing rely not on product, or quality of product, but on arbitrage capability, taking out competition AND outspending the competition in Marketing/Advertising/PR (ie Demand Engineering). Demand engineering works cause people have finite Attention bandwidth. As long you get your signalling and messaging into that finite bandwidth you win over the people who cant.
The technologist, the financial engineer, the demand engineer are all furiously optimizing what they are individually good at.
When they come together we end up with a very efficient corporate machine. When a whole herd of these machines, all copying each others behavior, run around the individual human being has less and less control over their own environment.
The machine herd will capture your kids in some other way if you get them off smartphones and social media. The only solution is to change the behavior of the machine and the herd.
The UN report on the Attention Economy quotes a study that says 0.5% of content generated is consumed by people. And that number was from 2015 and keeps falling.
As networks grow, more connections happen, and as tools of content generation/distribution/broadcast gets cheaper or free, Info keeps exploding. But Attention available does not grow.
So this creates a problem for 2 groups - those who want the Attention of others (eg corporations/politicians/influencors etc) and those who are having a hard time working out what info to pay attention too.
The global attention allocation system is designed for the first cause they are willing to pay to capture finite available global attention.
The second group is mostly left to fend for themselves against extremely sophisticated systems designed to capture, buy and sell their attention or sometimes even steal it.
Herbert Simon in 1971 - In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the Attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of Attention and a need to allocate that Attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
The current global attention allocation system is biased towards the biggest attentions craving characters on the planet And those who can buy the most ads.
Sure there are mindless greedy parasites in any environment that extract more than they input into the system, but you can easily find a whole bunch of execs in American corporate wonderland who are not greedy. And there are a whole lot of well known mechanism to handle parasites.
Yet these outcomes are very common. Main reason being economic and business theories that have been taught and followed for decades are hitting their limitations. Especially around fictionalization.
You don't need an Einstein to work out how to profit taking advantage of cross border differences in labor costs, interest rates, tax rates, govt subsidies, forex, real estate costs etc. Because you don't have to be Einstein, everyone blindly follows what they have been taught.
All these are financial engineering methods of showing a profit happen without actually depending on what you produce, its quality, or demand/supply in the market. If Everyone plays financial engineering games, cause its become easy, doesn't require much imagination or creativity (only access to capital or credit) then what happens?
Without new theories about making this system sustainable, its like watching European theories of colonization and empire that once everyone believed in running their course.
Few years back they were furiously crying about afghan girls. We can see how many care about those girls today. Its cause their priorities changed.
They are competing against large roving armies of pure scum at Microsoft, who land up at the door of whichever large corp or govt org that decide to switch, with unmatchable discounts, freebies, bribes, lies and threats to ensure their rent collecting empire is defended at all cost.
The reason Microsoft wins much more than tech is related to tactics used in sales, financial engineering, demand engineering(PR/marketing/advertising) etc.
The EU looked like it was going to do something about the Desktop Market by targeting Microsoft Desktop domination specifically with the Digital Markets Act but what they ended up with some weakass shit about allowing people to uninstall some of the preinstalled apps Microsoft ships.
If Big Tech has to be disintermediated the first step is to understand there is lot more going on outside the realm of Tech that needs to be disintermediated. And a pure one dimensional technology based approach has no chance of making a dent.
The US is a FIRE economy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_economy
The marketing mega machine then uses the Scale to pretend its not half baked shit - "hey man just look at how many people are using it".
The current system outsources this thinking to b-schools and has become to dependent on unsustainable financial engineering dogma that flows out of there.
From time to time, you have to think about what your Needs are (cause they change with time). Money/Status/Job etc begins to have meaning when its in service of those Needs.
People who haven't spent time thinking about what matters to them, end up trying to meet the Needs of whatever others throw in their lap.
Give a loan to the poor African country in dollars. Expect the loan to be repaid in dollars. Where is the poor African country going to get dollars? Here is the (simplified) road map-
1. "Educate" bright Africans on Wall St.
2. Send them over to tell the "uneducated" how to generate dollars by selling national assets - land, mining rights, oil fields, ports, spectrum, bank savings, pension funds, insurance funds etc etc back to Wall St approved firms in the West.
3. Teach them how to use the loans to buy goods and services from Wall St approved firms in the West, instead of building up local manufacturing or agricultural capacity. Goal being dependency not independence.
4. Provide free "training" for local military/intelligence. Make them dependent on Western MIL complex for everything. When locals start organizing and resisting - use them to topple and protect masters assets.
5. Buy and use media to repaint the whole story
6. Use Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class to trap as many important locals in "golden cage" lifestyles so their brains rot focusing on leisure/endless consumption/luxury/celebs/sports/entertainment.
This cycle is not sustainable naturally. And keeps breaking down in various ways. The hope is with each iteration more people recognize how to break out of it faster and create better alternatives.
All Problems are not created the same. And therefore what learning and doing happens depends on the Kind of Problem. Exploring an unknown jungle for gold is a very different problem than Exploiting an existing goldmine. One problem is more biased towards learning, while the other is biased towards doing.
The managers and teams you end up producing for each type of problem is very different. The distribution of skills/knowledge/experience/creativity/curiosity etc at the end of solving an explore problem is very different from what you end up with solving an exploit problem.
Issues arise when you take a team thats good at Explore and make them work on Exploit. Or vice versa. In our current chaotic ever changing environment most problems have elements of both that keep changing.
The Fed already offers banking services to banks. That infra can be reused by everyone not just the banks. But why isn't it?
Its an old question that the banks get very jittery about. But it came back to the fore when a couple banks collapsed last year and the Fed had to step in and save everyone's deposits. The entire amount. Even though its not even obligated too. Everytime this happens, people start asking more and more loudly, with the tech infra we have today, why can't those of us who want to, just bank directly with the Fed?
Big banks will oppose furiously so attempts will be made to do it in ways that don't appear to be a threat to them. Hey man we just interested in the banking unbanked poor people. But obviously once postal infra can be reused to open a bank account with fed then Anyone can start using it...
Has he checked how popular Chess is in 2024?