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Moore's Law for Everything

moores.samaltman.com

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Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#521

Post by nickpp »

sudosysgen wrote: post #519
nickpp wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I know that is true. I was unlucky enough to grow up behind the iron curtain. I know the situation directly from the choices faced by my parents and their friends and after its fall I watched the best of my teachers slowly but surely emigrate to Canada or the Western Europe. You can't really understand how it was unless you lived it. First of all, patriotism ceased to exist, except for propaganda. Struggle and f…

I don't doubt the experience. The issue is, you're just someone on the internet. The real people I know disagree with you, and so do statistics, so while I completely empathize with you, I can't agree.

Use your logic then. Ask yourself who was defecting where. Ask yourself who had a the better level of life and who had the gulags. Ask yourself why so many countries and their hundred of millions of inhabitants violently overthrew the communist regime at the end of the '80s.

Better yet, go ahead and pay a visit to the communist success stories of N Korea, Cuba or Venezuela. They are still around. Maybe they will convince you.

Then finally look around at the very tools you are using. The car you are driving, the furnace heating your house, the computer you write on. They are all success stories of capitalism. Ask yourself where are the success stories of communism. What things it built, what hard, concrete, useful stuff it created. Believe the proof presented to you by the real world - and reject the propaganda.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#522

Post by jodrellblank »

birdsbirdsbirds wrote: post #518
jodrellblank wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't; one can only drive one car at a time, one can only be in one room at a time, one can only eat one stomach full of food in a given period, one can only read/watch/experience at most 24 hours of media in a day. Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to tr…

Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition. DenisM mentions status in his comment. Status will demand Versailles bigger than can be passed at light speed during a life, just to impress. There will be galaxies full of combat drones, just to keep the balance in fighting power.

I already have everything in the Universe outside your lightcone as my personal Versailles most remote wings, and you can't prove otherwise. My robots are on their way back and information about them will arrive with you approximately a second after you die, whenever that is.

See what a pointless status grab it is? If it's outside all possible knowledge, it may as well be lies (it's not though). You can play Elite: Dangerous if you want a galaxy full of combat, and it's happening right now and better than the rest of the Milky Way there are actual players and ships and things and not silent void. The main lesson I took away from Elite Dangerous is that the Galactic PowerPlay between all the major factions can never end. If it ends, if one side can dominate and win, there is no way for another faction to recover from that without a reset and restart, like all games - play, end, restart.

> "Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition"

Competition doesn't need ever increasing resource use and hedonism, it's not the resource use which captivates people (but it can make a spectacle); competition is fine with animals running, with kickball, with Chess - 32 pieces on 64 squares creates world champions, millionaires, tournaments, audiences, lifelong obsessed people, gambling opportunities, it doesn't need galaxy spanning resource use. The thing about competition is that you can't be Usain Bolt or Magnus Carlsen or John Carmack just by throwing more resources at it. At the point where you can say "I have a Versailles on every planet in the Milky Way" and someone else says "so what, everyone has", there's no competition there. If you claim you can win the Tour de France on a bike in a small region of Earth, people will sit up and take notice.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#523

Post by spoonjim »

simonh wrote: post #503
TheTrotters wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that same logic Jeff Bezos is just a tool I use to get some obscure math textbook written in English shipped to my apartment in Eastern Europe overnight.

The point is that a horse can only do a dramatically narrow functions. It's basically a big walking engine. Conversely Jeff Bezos can tend a garden, build a house, create art, write documents, package goods, negotiate contracts, recruit employees, organise a company, care for children, drive a car, take out the trash, cook diner, etc, etc. Comparing people and horses in terms of jobs they can do, and their ability to…

Automation hasn’t put humanity out of work yet because humanity has been better at knowledge work. What happens when they’re not?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#524

Post by OrbitRock »

scatters wrote: post #496
thyrsus wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In western economies, Piketty showed that equality peaked approximately in the 1950's, and has been dropping since. (Almost) no one recommends we have another world war to decrease the assets owned by the rich, but Piketty, like the original article, also recommends a wealth tax (this article includes the significant refinement that the tax be on corporations and not individuals; Piketty does not go into details for…

Western economies? What about the rest of the world? Citation: World Bank. "Poverty and Prosperity 2016 / Taking on Inequality"[1]. 1. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/2...

That’s largely an effect of bringing more regions of the world into the industrialized paradigm, whereas what the other commenter said describes what happens to people in industrialized countries.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#525

Post by zz865 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #256
pgsimp wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think building costs are the main issue with availability of housing. You need the land to build on - and not just any land, but land in desired locations. How are the artificial mega cities in China doing? Didn't they build several cities from scratch that are supposed to house several million people each?

That's why the ability to work from home is important. Sure there will still be expensive cities, but living on cheap rural land will be much easier.

sure but why would you want to live somewhere rural?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#526

Post by mdorazio »

yifanl wrote: post #334
mdorazio wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your property value doubles and you lose your job, why wouldn't you sell your property for a massive gain, take that money and buy a new house somewhere cheaper, thereby avoiding the tax issue entirely? Seems like a situation where you want to have your cake and eat it, too.

A property's value doubling isn't a one-off event, it'd be widespread and continuous. That cheaper place's value will rise proportionally, and now they've the same problem, except with an overall lower quality of life now that they're living in a worse property.

This is demonstrably false if you look at property price trends across the US rather than just at the top cities.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#527

Post by pgsimp »

BirdieNZ wrote: post #253
pgsimp wrote: post #240

I live in a city with high rents. What would it look like if everybody had a shot at fulfilling their economic dreams? Let's say their dream is to live in the center of the city, in one of those flats that now cost 2 million dollars. So society is obliged to give everybody a shot at that 2 million dollar flat, no matter what their line of work or their qualifications are. How is that supposed to work? Some things sti…

I don't know if this completely answers your question, but it won't be high rent if a land value tax is implemented correctly.

How is that supposed to work? I would expect the tax to be factored into the rent?

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#528

Post by pgsimp »

neilparikh wrote: post #287
pgsimp wrote: post #240

I live in a city with high rents. What would it look like if everybody had a shot at fulfilling their economic dreams? Let's say their dream is to live in the center of the city, in one of those flats that now cost 2 million dollars. So society is obliged to give everybody a shot at that 2 million dollar flat, no matter what their line of work or their qualifications are. How is that supposed to work? Some things sti…

A land value tax doesn't really change the market dynamics of housing. That is to say, living in desirable locations will still cost more, and will still be allocated via a market to those who can pay the most. The key thing is that the rent you pay for locations will go to the commons, rather than private landowners, which makes sense, since locations are valuable because of all of society. So some people will still…

"living in desirable locations will still cost more, and will still be allocated via a market to those who can pay the most."

But then the demand of "giving everybody a shot at what they want" is not fulfilled. The people with not a lot of money don't have a shot.

"since locations are valuable because of all of society."

I saw that argument in the article, but I don't really think it holds up. I would say the people making a place high value already benefit from that place, they don't need extra taxes to benefit (for example if a place is great because of nice neighbors, those neighbors already live there and therefore already benefit from the place. If shops make a place great, those shops already benefit from the people shopping there. And so on). And sometimes people make a place worse, should the tax then punish them somehow?

"Effectively, those who can afford to live in the desirable locations will pay some of their rent to those who can't (indirectly)."

But then not because those "others" make the place so great, so in the end, what is the rationale? Also, isn't there a ground tax already? There is in my country?

I can agree that since property is a product of guns and more specifically police, and the government provides the police, some money can be asked for the service.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#529

Post by drdeca »

mrkramer wrote: post #480
drdeca wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will admit up front that my understanding of what causes inflation is, extremely limited, but it is not clear to me why. Isn't one story of how some currencies get their start, that some monarch or someone wants their troops fed, and so they require (on threat of force) that their subjects pay a tax in coins that the monarch has printed, and distributes to their troops? If they did this continuously over time, say…

Money supply and money circulation depend on market activity, you can't keep amount of money constant because there is no perfect competition in which demand and supply are equal. There is nothing wrong with subsidizing citizens and/or companies but there should be limit because you can end up with inflation where you for example over subsidy citizens and therefore excess of money and demand drives prices of goods an…

> you can't keep amount of money constant because there is no perfect competition in which demand and supply are equal.

I don't understand what you mean.

What are the supply and demand in question? supply of and demand for money? I've generally been confused by what people mean when they talk about the demand for money, especially when they talk about whether it is equal to the supply. The supply of money is a particular quantity of money (like, M0 or M1 or M2 or whatever), and so, if the question "is the demand for money equal to the supply of money?" to not have a type error, then the demand for money would have to also be a particular quantity of money. But, I don't understand what this quantity could mean. I understand that for each desirable item, there is a "how many [the type of item] would you be willing to forgo for [quantity of money]" which relates how much someone values money, their demand for it, in terms of each of the types of items, but I see no way to take these together to produce a single quantity with units of money. Maybe add up how much someone would accept as payment in terms of each of their possessions individually? idgi.

__

I appreciate that chart and the info about Roman Empire coins. I of course recognize that increasing the amount of money the state spends, making it easier for people to obtain money, tends to make the money less valuable, but I think this would be largely counteracted by increasing the amount of money that the state requires that people return to it?

Though, there is of course a limit to how much you can pay for this way. If you were a sovereign and wanted to, idk, produce as many chicken eggs as you could, by increasing spending on chicken eggs while also increasing the amount of taxes you attempt to extract, you will eventually run up to a limit on how many chicken eggs you can get each year, and trying to buy more chicken eggs, would just result in either the price of chicken eggs increasing without increasing how many you get, or would just result in more people being unable to pay their tax obligations and being punished. Probably also a lot of people starving and such, because this would be forcing as much of the economy as you can towards producing chicken eggs? Kind of a horrifying situation actually. Would probably produce decreasing numbers of chicken eggs at some point. Well, much before this point, there would be a coup/coop. haha.

But, yeah, there's clearly a limit, and I suppose that this probably suggests a flaw in the way I initially thought of the idea, but I'm not where. Ok, yes, it does show that increasing how much you spend, even if you claw all of it back through taxes, will eventually buy smaller quantities of the thing you are spending on, per unit. In the chicken egg situation, how would the price of the cheapest sufficiently nutritious meal change? This isn't clear to me.

Re: Moore's Law for Everything

#530

Post by pgsimp »

wait_a_minute wrote: post #325
pgsimp wrote: post #240

I live in a city with high rents. What would it look like if everybody had a shot at fulfilling their economic dreams? Let's say their dream is to live in the center of the city, in one of those flats that now cost 2 million dollars. So society is obliged to give everybody a shot at that 2 million dollar flat, no matter what their line of work or their qualifications are. How is that supposed to work? Some things sti…

Build more 2 million dollar flats. How high can we build these days? 2 million dollar flats are nice flats. Have robots and AI build as many nice flats as people want.

The thing is that many places that are nice stop being nice when they are filled with lots of people.

I like to talk about living by the sea, near a nice beach. That's a limited resource.

Of course you can build skyscapers by the beach, like in this photo: https://f.vividscreen.info/soft/9eba11ee5bc029cbef496435a40f...

It's just not the type of beach everybody wants.

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