Live data from Hacker News

Capital Is No Longer Scarce

continuations.com

121–123 of 123 posts

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see a discussion like this a HFT-supporter, like yourself, will usually come along and say that any links which are made to suggest HFT is bad are terrible (often the book flash boys is mentioned), but I never see any evidence of this terribleness, or alternative information sources. Do you have any?

Actually yes, Chris Stucchio's posts on the subject are pretty in depth starting with https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_apology.html You could also look at the book, Flash Boy's Not So Fast, which takes apart, page by page, all the arguments in the book, Flash Boys http://www.amazon.in/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High-Fr...

Sorry to piggyback on your point and rip off Matt Levine a little bit, but most of the cage rattling seems to ultimately come from people who are mad that it's harder to slip in their huge orders without having a price impact like it should.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#122

Misallocation is a massive problem. I think a significant amount of money is going into advertising, pointless startups, entertainment and social media. Basically, we are spending huge amounts of money getting numbed out of our minds instead of solving real fundamental problems. In general, I think it reveals a deeper problem about capitalism; none of us understand value anymore (we have more junk in our lives than w…

Advertising, startups, entertainment, and social media (ie thinly-veiled consumer research) all produce material of value directly or indirectly.

Their value is generally high because the output of a small number of individuals has an impact on a very large number of people. In addition to the services they provide directly, they usually create secondary benefits for society such as releasing new technologies into the open source community.

If you want to tackle waste, you'd be better off by looking into non-profits. How many funnel a significant portion of their funding into 'administrative costs'? How many exist to dodge corporate taxes in the name of 'good will'? How many are thinly-veiled advertising agencies for political special interest groups? How many aim to provide value to the greater populace rather than a very small subset of the population?

What about religion? Not banging on people who follow any specific religion, but nobody ever asks just how much value they're capable of extracting from their followers. How much of that funding goes to providing non-religious services such as entertainment, or backdooring funding to political special interests that support their own worldview.

How about subsidizing post-secondary education that abuses pricing as an entry barrier to exclusivity? Why have degrees become a default requirement for most/all middle class jobs? Why the hell does it still follow a strict 4-year rule for undergrad degrees? Why does everybody still waste the first 2 years learning arbitrary 'core requirements' unrelated to their specialty? How can we realistically subscribe to a fire-and-forget model that assumes everything can be taught up front prior to a lifetime of work. The 'waterfall' model has been proven ineffective in technology, why is it still overwhelmingly supported in education?

I live in San Diego, a hub for biotech research companies. From what I've seen talking to people who work in the field, funding isn't the issue. If anything, there's already too much capital floating around and the larger companies are swallowing the smaller companies en masse to eliminate competition.

I personally knew a guy who works in bleeding-edge cancer research. New advances won't come in the form of a pill or operation. The next generation of treatments hack biology in a way that makes cancer visible to the host's immune system. In addition, cancer is a blanket term to label a class of diseases so one treatment will only treat one/few forms of cancer. Throwing more money at the problem is like trying to hasten software development by throwing more developers at a project.

ROI for healthcare is huge, especially now that insurance is mandatory and basically charged as a 'tax for being alive'. The cost for Snapchat is minimal/nothing whereas healthcare via insurance + medicare/medicate costs make up a significant percentage of individual income.

Re: Capital Is No Longer Scarce

#123
Capitalism has 2 fundamental weaknesses that people universally ignore.

1. A corporation is a living organism (ie in the abstract, not biological sense) that needs to be fed to survive.

In a system where resources are scarce (ie there's a hard limit on how much that can be extracted from the market), dominated by organisms that are expected to grow indefinitely or die; eventually one of three things are going to happen.

First, the market becomes completely saturated, the organism quits growing, capital is devalued, and the organism suffers a slow/painful death at great cost to the stakeholders.

Second, the organism diversifies and grows in size/power beyond the limits of the market so it starts consuming other organisms and/or artificially raises prices to extract more value at the current expense. Ie asset inflation which acts as a hidden tax on the entire ecosystem.

Third, the organization buys back the its shares, converts to a private company, and adjusts operations in a manner that emphasizes long-term sustainability over growth. This almost never happens 'in the wild' and never happens in the interest of 'sustainability'. Offering to buy off the existing stakeholders without uncontested majority voting rights is the same as handing them a blank check. A realistic 'best case' is that the value-producing stakeholders fork off and create a new private company.

People seem to be shocked that large companies act in an amoral manner. I'd be shocked to see a corporation continue to act in a moral manner after growing to sufficient size. Just try to see the corporation as a living organism. In terms of life-or-death decisions, survival is paramount to morality every time.

What's worse, when an organization grows sufficiently large enough to challenge/undermine the authority of governments. They can stimulate changes in government policy via corruption, park/move capital/operations to locations lacking restrictions, purchase large quantities of government debt and profit from the shortfall of the system that they've been actively starving of resources.

Capitalism is an amazingly successful model for fast-paced growth but self-defeating in terms of long-term (read multi-generation) sustainability.

2. In pure capitalistic terms, people are assets.

What happens when a market becomes diluted with more assets than demand can justify? The value of those assets goes down.

By virtue of competitiveness, companies will always strive for efficiency. To produce more value with less. It's a basic fact that with increases advances in technology, it requires fewer people to maintain and/or increase the current standard of living.

High-earning capitalists perceive themselves as winners of the race, and rightly so. Unfortunately, the greater their ratio of success the greater that success taxes the sustainability of the wider ecosystem.

In an ecosystem of scarcity we can either have fewer people with a higher median standard of living operating at a higher level of efficiency, a greater population living at a lower median standard of living, or a mix of the two where efficient producers are incentivized with special privilege to subsidize the non-contributing existence of the rest.

Either way, we're approaching an upper limit to the quantity of useless shit we can realistically expect people to willingly consume. Capital is being concentrated at an ever-increasing rate and it's being used to purchase assets at artificially inflated values and charge high rates for access.

In California specifically. Capital is being parked in 'investment properties', in many cases by foreign investors. Ever increasing rent rates are being leveraged to extract more from the working class. The people responsible for purchasing the most goods/services have less to spend. Even people who make double the national median income struggle to afford rent and have zero prospects of purchasing in the near and long term. Companies that produce goods suffer as their consumer base is starved. The cycle of capital concentration continues.

Post reply on HN