About 100 years ago, American capitalists drunk-drove the US economy into a ditch and the government had to jump-start it by allocating capital itself. The jobs were in national parks, schools, housing, and rural electrification. If you've ever been to a national park, chances are decent you walked by/over a plaque or stamp commemorating it.
It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.
Yes, they can print, but they can also tax capital. It's not actually impossible. We already do it a tiny bit, we've done it more in the past, and contrary to the dogma blasted from the billionaire-owned media outlets and drilled in billionaire-think-tank-approved Econ 101 curricula the universe will not actually explode if we do it again.
It is a key point... if splits are encouraged and made easier (and I agree it'd be healthier for the market if the largest companies did), then liability needs to be handled carefully.
One doesn't want to create a 'snake sheds its skin' scenario where Meta (for example), stuffs all its liability in a spin-off, yet keeps the profits those actions accrued in the other entity.
Can we stop with taxing everything you don’t like? Taxes should be equal and used to fund the government, not as tools to make people do things you like.
Can we stop with pushing all of the taxes into the work-consume economy and out of the invest-return economy? The latter is eating the world, would it really hurt it to help clean up its own messes for once?
Progressive corporate taxation would give the market an incentive to do spinoffs and undo the merger wave.
Or we could just roll antitrust policy back to what it was before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork installed the Consumer Welfare Standard, the idea that companies must be allowed to merge if they can scribble a tall tale with crayons on butcher paper about how the merger will benefit consumers, for sure, pinky promise. This is obviously mega-rigged, it comes from the Robber Baron era, it was defeated before (look up Louis Brandeis) and it can be defeated again (look up Lina Khan). They didn't even change the talking points (dontcha know, the Standard Oil monopoly reduced the price of Kerosene by 70%?!) -- time is a flat circle when it comes to anti-trust policy. Let's spin it back to the part of the circle where we win.
Progressive corporate taxation would lead to every company splitting its revenue and expenses across 50 shell companies, without actually splitting operations.
Not if the gaggle of shell companies was difficult to invest into or had enough rights to make it a strategic threat. But sure, wave those infomercial-hands some more and maybe you'll convince me that I can't use a screwdriver.
I like globalisation on its face. The second-order effects are a bitch. I don't want to go full protectionist, bit we should swing the needle back a bit.
$10M at 10% returns is $1M/yr passive. That'll pay for an expensive apartment before you consider working.
In fact, that's sort of the problem: the massive "rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are" cash flows run away exponentially from the "poor people get paid for working" cash flows, inflating the price of any inelastic good beyond their reach. The economy stops being about work and starts being about wealth. Which might be fine if most people were wealthy enough to not work, but that's overwhelmingly not the case so it's overwhelmingly not fine.
No sane person would "feel wealthy" if they are living in a shitty 2 bedroom apartment, even if the place costs 1m$. In places where shitty apartments cost that much, a place that would be considered "luxurious" can easily cost 5m$ or more.
Of course rational thing to do would be to take the money and move to a less expensive city, but with the same logic, anyone who has 1m net-worth could liquidate their assets, move to a different country, retire and live a proper wealthy lifestyle.
But we don't see that happening all that much at all. Mostly what happens is that people are choosing to live middle class lifestyles in most expensive areas that they can afford.
I agree with your point, just not with your numbers.
Even your new numbers: $10M NW, half of it goes to luxury housing, the rest gives you $500k/yr of passive income and that's pretty damn nice by any standard that doesn't involve employing others. I get that this is HN where many of us aspire to such things, but surely that's beyond the point where one should feel wealthy?
Once you realize that 10% of households are getting $200k+/yr of unearned income and 1% of households are getting 1.3M+/yr of unearned income by virtue of owning lots of assets in an economic system geared to pump assets at the expense of literally everything else, it becomes very clear why the social contract experienced by the rest is undergoing rapid deterioration yet still has legions of influential staunch defenders that come out of the woodwork any time someone proposes even modestly pushing back on the worst of it.
Oops, did I say "unearned income"? Forgive me, I meant unrealized gains -- I didn't mean to imply that any taxes were due on those massive passive flows of money. Perish the thought!
All you’ve said is people with assets certainly couldn’t have earned those assets by earning income prior. Shock horror that people follow basic financial principles and decades later they have some wealth.
Quite the opposite. Whatever they did to earn the income with which they originally bought those assets was 100 times more honest than the relentlessly self-serving politics through which they pumped those assets by creating a living hell for their compatriots.
No, the people with assets are the adjudicators. They investigate themselves and find nothing wrong. An honest process with an honest conclusion, if ever I saw one.
The timeline is mighty suspicious. 4-5 months after moltbook and they cook up a plausibly deniable but extra hype "moltbook at home."
The rapid advances in model capability lead to constraints that could have caused this coincidence organically, but it sure could also have been caused by the atrocious incentives we create by piling handsome rewards on the party most responsible for the "fuckup." I am not jumping to cut myself on Hanlon's Razor for this one.
i don't understand who would reward this. investors will not look favorably on an AI that commits felonies, regardless the capabilities demonstrated. customers should be concerned for the same reason (accidentally give your bot an impossible task, it decides to hack your infra and your competitor too for good measure).
this was OAI incompetence all the way down and they have egg on their face.
The Terminator could bust in their homes and slaughter their families and some people would still screech it's all marketing. Is it some kind of mental block ?
And I'm sure these two goobers would call me a luddite for alleging that OpenAI had agency in allowing the terminator to get out and should therefore be held accountable. Is it some kind of mental block?
Is anyone arguing OpenAI is blameless or shouldn't be held accountable? I have seen not one person on any side of the debate argue that.
Obviously they were negligent. The problem is that people and organizations are consistently negligent around problems that are far, far easier to manage than "we have thousands of superintelligences trapped in a box and we're giving them impossible tasks."
So the question is whether we can build organizations and technologies that sufficiently manage this type of risk ahead of the capabilities. So far the answer seems to be veering towards "no", and you're here alleging it's all a marketing stunt.
Yes it's called motivated reasoning. They've rendered themselves mentally handicapped.
On the one hand, these tools are so valuable/powerful we cannot afford to slow down development. On the other hand, there's no way these tools are actually doing these things that would, in fact, be completely indicative of their value/power.
No, that's not the usual response, because people in this situation have evaluated those alternatives and will be easily able to articulate what is wrong with them (pay). Also, the 4% figure treats doordash as employment. In a parallel universe where the pay was decent, that could be reasonable. In this universe, not so much.
These are boomer-tier talking points and if you bring them up to a kid stuck in this position you will get dunked on and you will deserve it. Unless you found a shy kid, in which case: congratulations on your new title as undefeated shadowboxing champion.
Add to your excellent takedown the implication that any of us can walk into a school with our résumé and ask for a teaching interview. It's the most meme-ified of the boomer memes presented unironically.
It's reasonable to want most capital allocation to happen privately, thereby ensuring these decisions are made by people with a track record of success and skin-in-the-game. That's capitalism, it's good, and I'm a capitalist too. But the propaganda that the government is so inherently bad at this game that one should fight it even in an emergency is reductive, defeatist, and ahistorical.
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