131–140 of 453 posts
Having worked front line tech support, I have to disagree. People are inherently dumb, and choose to stay that way in many cases.
Reminded of this timeless Carl Sagan quote: "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
Asimov’s Foundation series is an excellent commentary on this very phenomenon. One of the antagonists is a galactic empire that is technologically advanced, but has been stagnating and decaying slowly as those in power start viewing scientists with disdain and distrust. Over time the empire loses the ability to develop new technology, and ends up with those who can only maintain/repair existing technology (which even…
All of which makes you wonder: on actual Earth, is there a class of tech-company Morlocks keeping the disposable-income Eloi dependent with their endless supply of disposable gadgets?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think economists agree with the concept of Big Government. Here's an entertaining back and forth between Thaler and Gene Fama about the efficient market theory [1]: > Q: So policy makers should use bubbles as a way to step in? > Thaler: Yes, but very gently. It’s not like I think policy makers know what’s going to happen, but if they see what looks disturbing, they can lean against the wind a little bit. That…
Economists rarely have a good solution to societal problems. They have good solutions for facilitating trade but offer nothing with respect to social norms, nationalistic sentiment, etc. We all agree that economists are good at maximizing resource allocation. Sysops are good at maximizing hardware allocation but we should let them dictate national policy :) Politics is about taking all of the science and all of the h…
> There was an economist once early in my career who said to me, “You know, if you’re right, what am I supposed to do? What I know how to do is solve optimization problems.”
A career economist not wanting to change their ways because they have spent a career doing things when presented with a possible outcome that maybe those things didn't matter as much. Also:
> If you think of companies that have come and gone, like Kodak, which invented the digital camera, but they had an almost-monopoly in film, and didn’t really think this digital thing would go anywhere. Blockbuster Video, which came along and put tens of thousands of mom-and-pop video stores out of business, only to be put out of business by Netflix.
These are human behaviors to recognize - sunk cost. It can sink a company. Something to be wary of as a startup grows past adolescence and into adulthood.
This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday life, it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. There is always the issue of an overreaching government, and that's where the left/right party split comes in. Each party either creates more regulation and protection or take some awa…
sometimes some people purposely create hard systems for others for their own benefit.
-John Kenneth Galbraith, Money: Whence it came, where it went (1975)
This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday life, it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. There is always the issue of an overreaching government, and that's where the left/right party split comes in. Each party either creates more regulation and protection or take some awa…
The article talks about institutional inertia. The advantage of a market economy is your Blockbusters get replaced by Netflix. Imagine if film renting were a public agency. It would be much harder to disrupt. Governments are, by design, immortal. A crucial design decision is choosing what, in our society, we want to be immortal and what we want to be replaceable.
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Even if we're all watching each other, we still all have our own incentives and not so obvious irrationalities.
Then the problem becomes identifying and accounting for these incentives and irrationalities.
Having worked front line tech support, I have to disagree. People are inherently dumb, and choose to stay that way in many cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Libertarians are the new advocates for small government. Libertarians = Arch Linux (lean, mean, minimal) Everybody else = Windows or Mac (i.e. huge operating system that tries to protect users from everything under the sun)
This is what happens when engineers receive very little formal liberal arts education. Cringe.