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The Refragmentation

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Refragmentation

#311

Post by analog31 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #223
curun1r wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that. The thing that I worry about is whether this feature is destroying the conditions that allowed it to become a feature in the first place. He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM, which I see as illustrative in another way. Would personal computing devices have become popular in a h…

>He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM, And on that, as on so much else, he's more than a little wrong. Apple and Microsoft simply couldn't have happened without the mega-corps - not least HP, but also IBM, and Fairchild and its spin-offs - which only existed because of post-war military and civilian "socialist" state support for technology. By the mid-70s that support had been influencing economic policy for mor…

Interesting perspective. Thanks.

Companies like Apple do not happen in a pure deregulated neoliberal market paradise because markets don't have the kind of strategic intelligence that can fund projects like Whirlwind, TX-0, and the original Arpanet - all of which are essential steps on the road to making an Apple or a Google.

Going even further, corporations themselves do not happen in the absence of regulation, and I think that the granddaddy of entitlements -- liability limitation -- is necessary in order to gather enough capital to form great ventures like chip manufacturing.

Re: The Refragmentation

#312

Post by nemothekid »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #276
yummyfajitas wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in your ideal world, Paul Krugman is banned from writing editorials? John Stewart can no longer discuss contemporary politics? And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it?

> And if a citizen notices that all the politicians are lying, he needs to just shut up about it? Honestly, does it even matter? Everybody knows all politicians are liars. It's common knowledge; it's beyond being a trope and basically a synonym. But then somehow a large part of the population still cares about what politicians have to say. They know that the politician they oppose is full of shit, and yet they feel o…

>Honestly, does it even matter?

It matters because, if Trump says he wants to deport all Muslims, I should be able to say thats a terrible idea without fear of reproach.

Despite the fact that all politicians may be lairs (although I personally believe thats horseshit), there are people who take the word of them very seriously.

>The amount of denial and cognitive dissonance going on in general population's interaction with politics is so great you could fuel a power plant with it.

Bull fucking shit. Just because Obama didn't end up closing Guantanamo, doesn't mean its all a farce. Political groups have a real effect, or we wouldn't be talking about this. Were the people who fought for gay rights for the past 20-odd years, living in denial? Are those pushing for marijuana reform, living in denial? Are the lobbyist pumping billions of dollars into the system living in denial?

Despite the fact that the system moves a snails pace (which may or may not be the intended goal of the system), the system does have very real effects that are caused by the tiniest nudges in certain directions.

Re: The Refragmentation

#313

Post by rsync »

golergka wrote: post #36
rsync wrote: post #3

"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups." If you live in San Francisco (or are visiting) you can visit the USS Pampanito - a retired WWII submarine.[1] One thing I think you will notice is the manufacturers plaques attached to every little piece of equipment in the submarine ... every one of them the plaque of some tiny little supplier that you have never heard of . Some l…

That seems to be just small businesseses, not startups. Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.

"Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale."

I started rsync.net with the intention of staying stable at small scale.

It's worked out so far.

Re: The Refragmentation

#314

Post by tammer »

Some interesting theories - at first appears quite reductionist but I think succeeds in highlighting something very symbolic.

Odd, though, that pg can write an entire essay about identity politics without naming it.

Re: The Refragmentation

#315

Post by lightcatcher »

jusben1369 wrote: post #60

The thing to me is Silicon Valley is the place in the US that still looks like that post WWII America. Large monopolies like Google, Apple and FB utilizing fantastic profits and paying amazing perks to employees. Everyone working in and on the same mission acting as a social fabric tying people together. Glass Door and the Internet in general replacing trade unions by helping balance a knowledge imbalance so that wor…

You are only mentioning the tech industry in Silicon Valley, which I admit is pretty utopian. This description excludes everyone else in Silicon Valley. You can't talk about income inequality while only looking at those with high income (everyone in the tech industry), and forgetting about those with lower income is a huge reason why income inequality is problematic.

Re: The Refragmentation

#317

Post by lightcatcher »

leot wrote: post #92

"A physicist who chose physics over Wall Street in 1990 was making a sacrifice that a physicist in 1960 wasn't." The trouble is the proportion of those who have the highest technological leverage and are engaged in rent-seeking rather than wealth creation. The 1960s physicist was creating wealth they couldn't capture, while the 1990s physicist was capturing wealth they didn't create. If physicists (and other Ivey gra…

> If physicists (and other Ivey grads) all only chose wealth-creation, we'd see far less inequality (at least outside the Bay Area).

Choosing wealth-creation rather than rent-seeking has nothing to do with distribution of wealth as far as I see it. The hugely wealth-creating SF bay area is one of the most unequal places in the world.

I think redistribution of wealth is absolutely necessary to reduce poverty and increase average quality of life. Sadly, I don't have much faith in this happening due to the argument that selfishly motivated wealth-creators or rent-seekers will flock to wherever taxes them the least.

Re: The Refragmentation

#318

Post by Apocryphon »

lightcatcher wrote: post #315
jusben1369 wrote: post #60

The thing to me is Silicon Valley is the place in the US that still looks like that post WWII America. Large monopolies like Google, Apple and FB utilizing fantastic profits and paying amazing perks to employees. Everyone working in and on the same mission acting as a social fabric tying people together. Glass Door and the Internet in general replacing trade unions by helping balance a knowledge imbalance so that wor…

You are only mentioning the tech industry in Silicon Valley, which I admit is pretty utopian. This description excludes everyone else in Silicon Valley. You can't talk about income inequality while only looking at those with high income (everyone in the tech industry), and forgetting about those with lower income is a huge reason why income inequality is problematic.

That's very true. And quite frankly, the housing rents, the overstuffed infrastructure, the student suicide rate in Palo Alto, and so forth make SV look pretty dystopian, even for most tech industry workers. The only thing tech has is what Michael O. Church so eloquently said: "Software engineers aren't a privileged set. They're just less fucked than the rest of the U.S. Former Middle Class."

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-software-engineers-make-so-much...

Re: The Refragmentation

#319

Post by 2232 »

lisper wrote: post #183
13thLetter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery." Unfortunately it's not that simple. The immediate question at hand in Citizens United was about a group of private citizens being prevented from releasing a movie criticizing a Presidential candidate during an election. A movie costs money to produce and requires a…

That's a fair question, and not one that can be easily answered in am HN comment. Personally, I would have had no problem with CU if it had remained the narrow decision that John Roberts originally wanted it to be. Clearly, if the First Amendment protects Michael Moore's right to make and show a politically charged film close to an election then it protects Citizens United's right to do the same thing. The problem ca…

Media are all corporations, and so is ycombinator.

If you want "truth" commissions, go right ahead with removing CU, but unless that, this was a great decision.

Re: The Refragmentation

#320

Post by wutbrodo »

sce wrote: post #99
wutbrodo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ergo, walmart employees are, at the moment, practically, a conduit of welfare from the state to the waltons This doesn't make any sense (though you have paraphrased Sanders accurately). While technically true for some definition of "conduit of welfare", the same is true of almost everybody in society. Welfare recipients are integrated into the economy enough that "if X didn't get welfare, person Y wouldn't be as ri…

> To give an example in microcosm: if you buy a used car on Craigslist from someone, the fact that the seller is a welfare recipient doesn't mean that you're a beneficiary of welfare because you're not paying him enough to live off of. I think the difference here is that it's not a matter of a single transaction, it's an employment, so what the employer is basically paying for is the employees time (and time is finit…

> I think the difference here is that it's not a matter of a single transaction, it's an employment, so what the employer is basically paying for is the employees time (and time is finite).

I think the distinction you're making here is more than trivial, and considered mentioning it but decided that it's still not relevant. My point was that Sanders definition (esp as paraphrased by you) is silly to the point of being meaningless, since it consisted of "X isn't paying enough for Y to get off welfare, thus X is receiving welfare". This applies to my example writ small. Your painter example isn't much difficult from the Craigslist example: the person spends his time doing multiple things that add up to less than enough salary to live off of. That doesn't make any of the purchaser's of his services responsible for the shortfall. To the extent that anyone else is responsible, it's all of society.

> Why can't those that need their house painted pay what it actually costs to get the job done? Because if the full time painter needs welfare, they're in reality paying him too little.

You're defining "what it costs to get the job done" very bizarrely here. If the painter takes odd jobs but his wife is employed too such that the two of them are somewhat comfortable (at least above the poverty/welfare line), by your definition it would suddenly "cost less to get the job done" (since the shortfall to a reasonable income has now diminished/disappeared)? This is of course an absurdity.

The problem again is that you're picking a way to place responsibility for subsidies that makes no sense from either an efficiency or an ethical standpoint. Assuming a need to take care of the poor, we all share that responsibility. The only reason we've "decided" that the burden should fall on arbitrary industries and their employees/customers/owners[1] is because that way we can pretend that we don't believe in taking care of the poor and the robust welfare system that it would entail. All we're doing is creating a shitty, roundabout version of welfare.

Note that I have a tendency to consider complete systems when it comes to policy. In the current political climate, it's no doubt more feasible to implementing higher minimum wages than, say, a basic income. So despite thinking that minimum wages are a terrible idea in a well-functioning system, I wouldn't necessarily vote against them in our less-than-optimal system. I just don't think there's any reason to delude ourselves into thinking that they're good policy per se.

[1] And in a weaker effect, that their effects should fall on arbitrary

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