Finally found a cached version of the site without a paywall
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:u4UoSf...
Is Inequality Inevitable?
541–550 of 628 posts
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you defining a "calorie"? The number printed on the package? Because that number is basically meaningless.
That number happens to be remarkably accurate. More accurate than required by law in fact. It also happens to accurately predict changes in a person's weight if you know everything they're eating.
While it certainly differs from country to country, FDA allows a discrepancy of 20%. That's significant. There have been studies that showed the labels to be off by 25%.
And even if the numbers were accurate, they're still rule-of-thumbish, because human metabolism doesn't simply ingest all energy available in a food. For instance you'd absorb roughly 40% more calories from peanut butter than from actual peanuts (of the same calorical value).
There are more reasons why counting calories isn't nearly as accurate a method as people tend to assume, but these two are really sufficient.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
They really aren’t. We have no way to meaningfully increase the surface area of the earth, it’s fixed. Even if we were to drain the oceans entirely, you’re just kicking the can down the road (ignoring the fact we’d likely all die). Increasing our effectiveness removing natural resources doesn’t increase the amount on earth, so again, fixed. We will eventually run out. Desalination assumes that the ocean is clean wate…
You're moving the goalposts on land area. We can increase available land area (in your extreme scenario) by 200% without leaving the planet, and we're a lot closer to colonizing Mars than doing this. We're so far off using anywhere near all of even the easily available natural resources on Earth that considering it as a limited quantity is fatuous. By the time we legitimately run out of materials on Earth we'll be ab…
By the time we legitimately run out of materials on Earth
That's missing the point completely. No one is going to argue that a Helium, or Cadmium, or Carbon shortage will be the death of us all, and reducing this planet's natural resources to just its constituent chemical elements is depressingly naive.
When people talk about natural resources, they mean the functional elements of our planet's ecosystem that keeps this planet habitable for us. They mean forests, that regulate temperature and humidity. They mean insects, that pollinate our crops for us. They mean the glaciers, that create an abundant supply of fresh water.
We're nowhere near the level of engineering that we can replace the natural systems we're destroying with artificial machines. Not at scale, at least.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Since virtually all human traits follow a Gaussian distribution, it seems like whatever the wealth-building factor is, it would also follow a Gaussian distribution. But wealth follows more of a power law distribution. You never encounter anyone 1000 times taller than average, but there are many people 1000 times wealthier than average. This is nonsense. Lets take an easy example, books, people don't want to waste t…
This is itself nonsense. It presumes several obviously false things: - That people who are bad at writing books are either equally bad at everything, or derive most of their income from writing books. "Don't quit your day job" is a meme for a reason. - That writing quality (by some metric), as opposed to marketing, is the primary driver of book sales. Sales of Twilight demonstrate otherwise. It's even more clear in m…
The first two of your three points only mean GP needs to replace "authors" with "marketers". Also worth noting that it's not the authors (or musicians) that get rich, but primarily the people facilitating the marketing and distribution.
I feel marketing itself could be enough to recreate power law - ceteris paribus, even a little edge in marketing lets you get more money quicker, which you can then reinvest in marketing; rinse, repeat.
And marketing is not the only way you can reinvest money to make more money. All those ways turn making money into a form of: dmoney/dt ~ money, to which solution is an exponent.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
A _lot_ of US public policy changes and economic structural changes which favour the rich have happened since 1971. The problem with trying to pin everything on inflation is that inflation has been more stable and lower in recent years than much of the Bretton Woods era...
> inflation has been more stable and lower in recent years than much of the Bretton Woods era... That depends how you measure inflation. The government-published inflation rates use all kinds of creative accounting to make the number seem artificially low. It's in the government's interest to make it seem like that's the case. The reality is that housing prices (and rents) are increasing at a very high rate, and this…
The crazy part about inflation isn't that the governments are focusing on a narrow definition of inflation. The crazy part is the idea that inflation is global. If you pump in money into the financial sector it will immediately propagate to consumer prices. The outcome is obvious.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#546Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apologies, I'll try again. At both ends of the human spectrum you have people who are so basic human life means nothing to them. In both respects these people want power over others. I suggest the least intelligent are the serial killer types but the most dangerous are the rich and powerful. Wiki commodities brokers.
Fair enough. I think people are people and good and evil are probably normally distributed between the poor and the wealthy more or less. There are certainly bad people at both ends. I'm familiar with what commodities brokers are and don't see anything wrong with it. I'm quite happy for the existence of modern financial markets.
These are the public versions, I promise it's much worse; A little light reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Rich , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glencore ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafigura . Claude died.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue not to include SS benefits as savings purely because SS payments are a tax levied upon the rest of society rather than any sort of fund, trust, etc. that actually has money allotted to someone. It's basically just an IOU from Uncle Sam that they will tax other people to pay you. Therefore, that is subject to change at the whim of those in charge of changing the laws. Sure, it's politically ugly to reduc…
Yes and no. There actually is a trust fund with actual money in it. That money is invested in Treasury bonds. Individuals don't have "accounts", exactly, but they do have benefits allotted to them. Yes, it's a tax (though they don't call it that). No, it's not a savings account. And yet...
True, but that general fund/account is routinely raided by congress periodically to pay for things so it being separated is purely for show and is totally meaningless since they take money from it from time to time.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#548Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is itself nonsense. It presumes several obviously false things: - That people who are bad at writing books are either equally bad at everything, or derive most of their income from writing books. "Don't quit your day job" is a meme for a reason. - That writing quality (by some metric), as opposed to marketing, is the primary driver of book sales. Sales of Twilight demonstrate otherwise. It's even more clear in m…
The first two of your three points only mean GP needs to replace "authors" with "marketers". Also worth noting that it's not the authors (or musicians) that get rich, but primarily the people facilitating the marketing and distribution. I feel marketing itself could be enough to recreate power law - ceteris paribus, even a little edge in marketing lets you get more money quicker, which you can then reinvest in market…
> The first two of your three points only mean GP needs to replace "authors" with "marketers".
Granted, but if you do that, it's no longer making the point that GGP seems to be trying to make.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
But in those times, relatively rich Americans were selling to extremely poor Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Inequality overall has gotten better, just the geography has shifted substantially so that previously homogeneously equitable places now have a more representative share of world inequality.
So increased inequality on a local level is good as long as the global average goes down? I thought the idea was to make _everyone's_ lives better.
Well yes decreased inequality globally does make life better, it's just that those who've gained the most (the ones that used to be poorer than the American poor) arent part of your in group
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#550I find the creation of physics-inspired sociological models distasteful. It's often a way of manufacturing certainty and authority through mathematical obsfucation. It always runs the same way. First, you think of some political opinion you want to support. Then you come up with a mathematically trivial toy model that throws away 99% of the structure of the problem, whose few dynamical rules are artificially chosen s…
Would you rather sociological models not contain any physics or math? What do you propose?