Rephrasing a common quote - talk is cheap, that’s why I talk a lot.

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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Ye-es, we’ll see a good test of humanity’s ability to adapt. Either it delivers, or it ends right in the following decades, because its survival is based on a much subtler process than people controlling these technologies can conceive. It’s all the time of evolution and its volume of entropy spent on optimization versus like 40 years of computer programmers deciding they know how it all should be done, just have to pass through the resistance. The latter is a drop in the sea. It can’t realistically be anything but a threat.




  • I wonder what things would look like today if the government had taken some portion of control over all the auto manufacturers, airlines, banks, etc it has bailed out over the years instead of just giving them unsecured loans

    Would look like normal capitalism of the early XIX century, give or take. Bad, but not atrocious. Bailouts definitely wouldn’t be abused as much, because, eh, they wouldn’t be free.

    And the old argument that public sector management is inefficient - well, it’s not always a bad thing. It would then make sense for the government to re-privatize some of those shares, and use others for a source of income and a lever. And the companies bailed out this way would sink in power (which is good for competition), but not completely (which is good for their employees and economical stability). And, of course, I’ll repeat about source of income. Perhaps there will be no more raising taxes with such a system in place. Perhaps even some taxes it’ll be possible to simplify - any complex tax system works in favor of those who can afford to apply expertise, so those richer, and not poorer.

    Also partial or full nationalization may sometimes work to good outcomes, while nationalized companies are less efficient, they also tend to retain institutional knowledge better, have more people working long on the same positions, follow labor regulations. For the telephone company or the train company or the central heating company or the public bus company it makes sense to be nationalized.



  • That’s why free market is how we call a market where anti-monopoly laws exist, work and are enforced in full.

    While what you are talking about isn’t called market, it’s called jungle.

    Self-correction in a market is an illusion crafted people either desperate to salvage a broken system, or those who seek to exploit them.

    Self-correction exists when anti-monopoly laws exist, work and are enforced in full. It doesn’t exist when they don’t, because self-correction relies upon competition providing a choice and the consumer using it.

    Also trade unions and customer associations are part of what we call free market. Both are voluntary, in public interest, and work when they exist. No coercion involved, thus no violation of market laws.

    Also on large enough scale of the market and small enough scale of all businesses it may sometimes seem, that anti-monopoly laws are not needed. Especially since when anti-monopoly laws work, the market appears such.









  • They are open enough about thinking some kind of late USSR, fixed against its deadlocks and broken feedback, would be the best system for them. I mean, having a one party system is very attractive, LOL.

    And yeah, that crowd is about seizing whatever they want to build their idea of a better nation, with re-industrializing and so on. There are pits on the road, though.

    And, honestly, never in history were many US politicians willing for the USSR to die as it did. They would, of course, ridicule the broken system and ideology, but the whole idea seemed more understandable than most European nations. And flattering.

    It was never, ever even once about states rights. It was never about fighting communism. It’s all racism, always has been.

    It’s honestly funny, so - in Eastern Europe, when comparing ourselves to the USA, it’s very easy to get sympathetic to these points. Also to color blindness and being against affirmative action, and such.

    Because information travels non-linearly. From here many people really think that the racism problem is solved in the US, and it’s just lazy Blacks not willing to work honestly, and that last point is racist, but if you say that American racists still think it’s wrong for a white person to marry a black person, those same people won’t believe you, it’s not part of their own kind of racism, or that American racists actually exist in huge enough numbers, they think it’s like calling others fascists here, something devalued by common usage. They’d be livid.

    So - what I’m thinking is that USSR’s dead hand was, in fact, not its nuclear shield, but its ideology and state architecture, and some people want to break their own bad, but functional system in favor of their imaginary picture of USSR. Which is just as detached from reality. USSR’s checks and balances had a downside of stalling development and conserving the balance of power, nothing big got actually done. It would seem that they might actually come to the same result with far less blood, jump to 1960s USSR without a passing through 1920s-1950s, but wasting a few decades on that with a pretty clear end result would seem a bad idea.

    That’s about political systems, arguing against my imagination on what they think. With re-industrialization I agree completely. In general, oursourcing labor is directly opposed to labor rights, and labor rights are what guarantees political rights.



  • That’s not true, but this kind of devices has been subject to extensive thought experiments in science fiction and philosophy and found lacking actual use.

    It’s like a watch implant. You need to know time, looking at tower clocks and wall clocks isn’t too convenient. Wrist watches and in general portable watches were a thing of beauty, but also quite useful for military commanders, sailors and pilots. But this progression doesn’t lead you to implanting a watch into your hand, so that you’d always have it.

    Similarly, this progression doesn’t lead humanity to needing such devices, or honestly much of modern computing. It’s just a personal computer. Even smartphones are honestly a less than convenient form factor, approaching minimal usable size.

    All this is just a way to spend resources in some other way than actually building a unified humanity with access to good medicine, education, connectivity, food, political and labor rights. That’s not even because those powerful people are evil, - I think it’s more because doing anything real with such implications can get you killed. Even a supposed rich psychopath isn’t usually evil, doing a good thing weighs about as much as doing a bad thing with the same amount of resources for them. We live in a time when those resources are actually present in the world, - 100 years ago this wasn’t yet true. Which makes improving anything for real a dangerous endeavor, because every such improvement destroys someone else’s base.

    A bit like a capitalist version of late USSR’s deadlocks.



  • But not all of them, just those who started the whole thing.

    It’s a working mechanism of cleaning the field of potential competition once a decade or two.

    Let’s admit it, normies investing don’t have to know it’s a bubble or a scam. They have right to expect to not be scammed, honestly. The scammers are those responsible for the scam. And the majority of those jumping on the hype train are scammed normies. They could be decent participants of the market were this hype shot down earlier. Instead they’ll burn. And the big fish to be bailed out is actually interested in this happening - so that they were still around, but their competition were not. So those making the bubble will remain. A negative selection.

    It honestly seems like a very slow power takeover, done by economic means. To concentrate such amounts of power, that when it becomes open, nobody can do anything. Then it’ll be a game with different rules, for which those people might not be prepared well enough, let’s hope Digital Heaven: Global Starvation, a sequel to the esteemed Khmer Rouge: Rice Fields Bitch, this time with smartphones, is not how it will happen.